Notes on the State of Virginia

The following notes were written in Virginia in 1781 and somewhat corrected and enlarged in the winter of 1782. They answer questions proposed to the author by a distinguished foreigner then living among us. All the subjects are treated imperfectly; some are scarcely touched. To explain this by describing the circumstances of the time and place in which they were written would reopen wounds that have already bled enough. Some of their imperfections can truly be attributed to those circumstances; the greater part must be attributed to the writer’s lack of information and ability.

He had a few copies printed and gave them to his friends. A translation has recently been published in France, but with alterations required by that country’s press laws. The notes are now offered to the public in their original form and language.

February 27, 1787.

Question: What are the exact limits and boundaries of Virginia?

Virginia is bounded on the east by the Atlantic. On the north, its boundary begins with a line of latitude crossing the Eastern Shore through Watkins’s Point, at about 37° 57′ north. From there it runs in a straight line to Cinquac, near the mouth of the Potomac; then along the Potomac, which is shared by Virginia and Maryland, to the first source of its northern branch. It then follows a meridian through that source until it meets the east–west line at latitude 39° 43′ 42.4″, which divides Maryland from Pennsylvania and was marked by Mason and Dixon. It follows that line and its westward continuation until it reaches a point five degrees of longitude from Pennsylvania’s eastern boundary at the same latitude, then follows a meridian to the Ohio. On the west, Virginia is bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi down to latitude 36° 30′ north; on the south, by that same line of latitude.

Measurements along nearly all of the southern boundary, with the unmeasured portions supplied from good data, show the Atlantic and Mississippi to be 758 miles apart at that latitude. This equals 13° 38′ of longitude when a degree is reckoned as 55 miles and 3,144 feet. That is Virginia’s span in longitude. Its span in latitude, between the southern boundary and Mason and Dixon’s line, is 3° 13′ 42.4″, or 223.3 miles, if a degree of a great circle is taken as 69 miles and 864 feet, as Cassini computed it.

These boundaries enclose a roughly triangular area of 121,525 square miles. Of this, 79,650 square miles lie west of the Allegheny Mountains, and 57,034 lie west of the meridian through the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Virginia is therefore one-third larger than Great Britain and Ireland together, whose area is reckoned at 88,357 square miles.

These boundaries result from seven sources:

1. The ancient charters granted by the English crown.

2. The grant of Maryland to Lord Baltimore and the British court’s later decisions about its extent.

3. The grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn and an agreement between the general assemblies of Virginia and Pennsylvania about its extent.

4. The grant of Carolina and the placement of its northern boundary with the consent of both parties.

5. The Treaty of Paris of 1763.

6. The Virginia convention’s confirmation of the neighboring states’ charters when it established the commonwealth.

7. Virginia’s cession to Congress of all lands to which it held title north of the Ohio.

Question: What are Virginia’s rivers and smaller streams, and how far are they navigable?

A map of Virginia gives a better idea of the geography of its rivers than any written description. Their navigability can be described, though imperfectly.

The Roanoke, insofar as it lies within Virginia, is navigable only by canoes or light flatboats. Even they can travel only in disconnected stretches, so the inhabitants have been unable to use it at all.

James River and its waters offer the following navigation.

The whole of Elizabeth River, the lowest of the rivers flowing into the James, is a harbor with room for more than 300 ships. Its channel is 150 to 200 fathoms wide and has 18 feet of water at ordinary high tide as far as Norfolk. The Stratford, a 60-gun ship, reached Norfolk after lightening her load to cross the bar at Sowell’s Point. The Fier Rodrigue, built for 64 guns and carrying 50, reached it without lightening. Craney Island, at the river’s mouth, commands the channel fairly well.

Nansemond River is navigable to Sleepy Hole by vessels of 250 tons, to Suffolk by vessels of 100 tons, and to Milner’s by vessels of 25 tons.

Pagan Creek has eight or ten feet of water as far as Smithfield, which admits vessels of 20 tons.

At the mouth of the Chickahominy is a bar with only 12 feet of water at ordinary high tide. Vessels that pass it can go eight miles upstream; those drawing ten feet can go four miles farther, and vessels carrying six tons can go another 20 miles.

The Appomattox is navigable to Broadways by any vessel that has crossed Harrison’s Bar in James River. It has eight or nine feet of water for a mile or two farther, to Fisher’s Bar, and four feet over that bar and up to Petersburg, where navigation ends.

James River itself provides a harbor for vessels of any size in Hampton Roads, though it is unsafe throughout the winter. Such vessels can go as far as Mulberry Island. A 40-gun ship can reach Jamestown and, after lightening, can pass to Harrison’s Bar, where there are only 15 feet of water. Vessels of 250 tons can reach Warwick; those of 125 tons can reach Rocket’s, a mile below Richmond. From there to Richmond the depth is about seven feet, and near the center of town it is four and a half feet. There, falls interrupt navigation, descending about 80 feet over six miles.

Above the falls, canoes and flatboats can navigate safely and profitably to within ten miles of the Blue Ridge. A load of one ton has even been brought through the Blue Ridge. Compared with the benefit, the expense of opening tolerable navigation up Jackson’s River and Carpenter’s Creek to within 25 miles of Howard’s Creek on the Greenbrier would not be great. Howard’s Creek and the Greenbrier then have enough water to float vessels into the Great Kanawha. With a larger future population, I think the James’s navigation might also be connected with that of the Potomac and, through it, with the Ohio by a short portage.

Maps call the river James River only as far as its meeting with the Rivanna. From there to the Blue Ridge they call it the Fluvanna, and from the ridge to its source, Jackson’s River. In ordinary speech, it is called James River all the way to its source.

The Rivanna, a branch of the James, is navigable by canoes and flatboats for about 22 miles, to where it meets the Southwest Mountains. It could readily be opened through those mountains to its fork above Charlottesville.

York River at Yorktown offers the state’s best harbor for the largest vessels. There it narrows to a mile and lies between very high banks, close beneath which ships can anchor. At high tide it has four fathoms of water for 25 miles above Yorktown, to the mouth of Poropotank Creek. There the river is a mile and a half wide, but its channel is only 75 fathoms wide and passes beneath a high bank. At the meeting of the Pamunkey and Mattapony, its depth falls to three fathoms. That depth continues up the Pamunkey to Cumberland, where the river is 100 yards wide, and up the Mattapony to within two miles of Frazer’s Ferry. There the Mattapony becomes two and a half fathoms deep and remains so for about five miles. Loaded flatboats can then navigate the Pamunkey to Brockman’s Bridge, 50 miles above Hanover Town, and the Mattapony to Downer’s Bridge, 70 miles above its mouth.

The Piankatank, the small rivers flowing into Mobjack Bay, and those of the Eastern Shore admit only very small vessels, and these can do little more than enter them.

The Rappahannock has four fathoms of water to Hobb’s Hole and two fathoms from there to Fredericksburg.

The Potomac is seven and a half miles wide at its mouth, four and a half at Nomony Bay, three at Aquia, one and a half at Hallooing Point, and one and a quarter at Alexandria. Its depths are seven fathoms at the mouth, five at St. George’s Island, four and a half at Lower Matchodic, and three at Swan’s Point and from there to Alexandria. It then has ten feet of water to the falls, 13 miles above Alexandria. The falls extend for 15 miles and descend greatly. Above them, navigation by flatboats and canoes is so interrupted that it is little used. It is used to a small extent up the Cohongoronta branch to Fort Cumberland, which stood at the mouth of Wills’s Creek, and could be made quite practicable without great expense. The Shenandoah branch approaches James River near the Blue Ridge and might be opened in the future.

The Mississippi will be one of the chief routes of future commerce for the country west of the Alleghenies. From its mouth to the Ohio is 1,000 miles by water but only 500 by land through Chickasaw country. From the Ohio to the Missouri is 230 miles by water and 140 by land; from there to the Illinois is about 25 miles.

Below the Missouri, the Mississippi is always muddy and full of shifting sandbars. Nevertheless, it carries 15 feet of water to the Ohio. Up to that point it is between one and a half and two miles wide, and from there to Kaskaskia it is between one and one and a quarter miles wide. Its current is too rapid for a sailing vessel to ascend by wind alone. A vessel propelled by oars can ascend at any time and gain considerable help from the wind. A flatboat travels from the Ohio’s mouth to the Mississippi’s mouth in three weeks but takes two to three months to return.

During its periodic floods, like those of the Nile, the largest vessels can descend if they can be steered safely. The floods begin in April, and the river returns to its banks early in August. Floodwaters spread farther west than east, covering land in some places 50 miles from the western bank.

Above the Missouri, the Mississippi becomes much like the Ohio: clear, with a gentle current, though not quite as wide. Its floods come at nearly the same time but do not rise as high. The streets of Cohoes stand no more than ten feet above the river’s usual level, yet have never been flooded. The riverbed deepens every year. Within the memory of many living people, every flood made Cohoes an island. Its former eastern channel is now a lake nine miles long and one mile wide, which the river never enters today.

The Mississippi contains a distinctive kind of turtle, perch, trout, gar, pike, mullets, herrings, carp, spatula fish weighing 50 pounds, catfish weighing 100 pounds, buffalo fish, and sturgeon. Alligators or crocodiles have been seen as far upstream as the Arkansas. Herons, cranes, ducks, brant, geese, and swans also abound. A fort established by Virginia commands passage along the river five miles below the Ohio’s mouth and ten miles above the Carolina boundary.

Since the Treaty of Paris, the Missouri has no longer been within Virginia’s boundaries; since the cession to Congress, neither have the Illinois and the northern branches of the Ohio. They were formerly within those boundaries, however, and still provide routes of extensive communication with the western and northwestern country. I will therefore describe them in order.

The Missouri is in fact the principal river, adding more to their combined stream than the Mississippi does even after the Illinois joins it. It is remarkably cold, muddy, and rapid, and it floods considerably in June and July. Because its floods begin so much later than the Mississippi’s, one might suppose its sources lie farther north, unless cold increases again as the land rises westward from the Mississippi. The river’s rapid current proves that this rise is great.

Six miles above its mouth, the Missouri narrows to a quarter of a mile. Yet Spanish merchants at Pancore, or St. Louis, say they travel 2,000 miles up it. Its sources lie far west of the Rio Norte, or North River. In Kaskaskia, Cohoes, and St. Vincennes there is a considerable quantity of silverware said to have been taken by Indigenous people during the last war from churches and private homes in Santa Fé, on the North River, and brought to those villages for sale. The journey from the Ohio’s mouth to Santa Fé takes 40 days, or about 1,000 miles.

I have never learned the shortest distance between navigable waters of the Missouri and those of the North River, or how far the North River is navigable above Santa Fé. From Santa Fé to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico is about 1,200 miles. The road from New Orleans to the city of Mexico crosses it at the post of Rio Norte, 800 miles below Santa Fé. From that post to New Orleans is about 1,200 miles. Thus the distance from Santa Fé to New Orleans by the North River, Red River, and Mississippi is 2,000 miles, compared with 2,230 by the Missouri and Mississippi.

From the post of Rio Norte, the route past the mines of La Sierra and Laiguana, between the North River and the Salina, to Sartilla is 375 miles. From Sartilla past the mines of Charcas, Zaccatecas, and Potosi to the city of Mexico is another 375 miles. The total from Santa Fé to the city of Mexico is 1,550 miles. From New Orleans to the city of Mexico is about 1,950 miles. After leaving the Red River near Natchitoches, the roads generally run parallel to the coast and about 200 miles from it until they enter the city.

The Illinois is a fine river, clear and gentle, without rapids. Flatboats can navigate it to its source. From there a portage of only two miles leads to the Chickago, which permits flatboat travel for 16 miles to Lake Michigan. About ten miles above its mouth, the Illinois is 300 yards wide.

The Kaskaskia is 100 yards wide where it enters the Mississippi and remains that wide to the Buffalo Plains, 70 miles upstream. Loaded flatboats can navigate at least that far and perhaps much farther. Its current is not rapid.

The Ohio is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current is gentle, its water clear, and its surface smooth and free of rocks and rapids, with a single exception. Its width varies as follows:

Captain Hutchings measured the Ohio’s winding course from Fort Pitt in the following stages:

At ordinary winter and spring water levels, the Ohio has 15 feet of water to Louisville and ten feet to La Tarte’s Rapids, 40 miles above the Great Kanawha’s mouth. It always has enough for light flatboats and canoes to Fort Pitt. The rapids are at latitude 38° 8′. Floods begin about the end of March and subside in July. During them, a first-rate warship could travel from Louisville to New Orleans if the river’s sharp turns and strong current allowed safe steering.

The rapids at Louisville descend about 30 feet over a mile and a half. There the riverbed is solid rock, divided by an island into two branches. The southern branch, about 200 yards wide, is dry four months of the year. Constant water flow and the abrasion of carried pebbles have worn channels into the bed of the northern branch, making it passable by flatboats through most of the year. Yet the southern branch is thought easier to open for navigation at all times. Water rises no more than ten or 12 feet at these rapids. Part of the island is high enough never to have flooded and commands the settlement of Louisville opposite it. The fort, however, stands at the head of the falls. The ground on the south side rises very gradually.

The Tennessee, also called the Cherokee or Hogohege, is 600 yards wide at its mouth, a quarter of a mile wide at the mouth of the Holston, and 200 yards wide at Chotee, 20 miles above the Holston and 300 miles above the Tennessee’s mouth. It crosses Virginia’s southern boundary 58 miles from the Mississippi. Its current is moderate. Loaded boats of any capacity can navigate it to the Muscle Shoals, where it passes through the Cumberland Mountain. These shoals are six or eight miles long. Loaded canoes can descend them but cannot ascend unless the river is swollen. Above the shoals, loaded canoes and flatboats can continue to Long Island.

The Tennessee also floods. Above the Chickamogga towns is a whirlpool called the Sucking-pot. It draws in tree trunks or boats and throws them out half a mile below. Travelers avoid it by staying very close to the south bank. Only a few miles of portage separate a branch of the Tennessee from navigable waters of the Mobile River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Cumberland, or Shawanee River, crosses the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina 67 miles from the Mississippi and crosses it again 198 miles from that river, just above the mouth of Obey’s River. Its Clear Fork crosses the same boundary about 300 miles from the Mississippi. The Cumberland is a very gentle stream, navigable by loaded flatboats for 800 miles without interruption. Rapids then extend for 15 miles, after which navigation resumes for 70 miles, reaching within ten miles of the Cumberland Mountains. From the head of navigation to its mouth, the river is about 120 yards wide throughout.

The Wabash is a very beautiful river, 400 yards wide at its mouth and 300 at St. Vincennes, a post 100 miles above its mouth in a straight line. Two small rapids in that stretch offer little obstruction. From its mouth it is navigable for 30 leagues by canoes and small boats. Between the mouths of Maple and Eel Rivers, about 80 miles in a straight line, it remains navigable and is 100 to 200 yards wide. Eel River is 150 yards wide and always permits passage by large canoes to within 18 miles of the Miami of the lake.

From Eel River’s mouth to Little River, a straight-line distance of 50 miles, frequent rapids and shoals obstruct navigation on the Wabash except when it is swollen. At high water, Little River is navigable to within three miles of the Miami. The Miami then offers similar navigation into Lake Erie, 100 miles away in a straight line. The Wabash floods periodically with the Ohio and in some places spreads two leagues from its banks.

Green River is always navigable by loaded flatboats for 50 miles upstream. Impassable rapids interrupt it there, but good navigation resumes above them for another 30 or 40 miles to the mouth of Barren River.

The Kentucky River is 90 yards wide at its mouth and also at Boonsborough, 80 miles upstream. In winter high water, loaded flatboats can navigate it for 180 miles in a straight line.

The Great Miami of the Ohio is 200 yards wide at its mouth. At the Piccawee towns, 75 miles upstream, it narrows to 30 yards, yet loaded canoes can travel another 50 miles above the towns. The portage from its western branch to the Miami of Lake Erie is five miles; from its eastern branch to the Sandusky River, nine miles.

Salt River is always navigable by loaded flatboats for 70 or 80 miles. It is 80 yards wide at its mouth and remains that wide to its fork, 25 miles upstream.

The Little Miami of the Ohio is 60 or 70 yards wide at its mouth. It extends 60 miles to its source but offers no navigation.

The Scioto is 250 yards wide at its mouth, at latitude 38° 22′. At the Saltlick towns, 200 miles upstream, it is still 100 yards wide. Loaded flatboats can reach those towns, and its eastern branch is navigable almost to its source.

The Great Sandy is about 60 yards wide and navigable for 60 miles by loaded flatboats.

The Guiandot is about as wide as the Great Sandy but swifter. Canoes can navigate it for 60 miles.

The Great Kanawha is notable for the fertility of its lands and still more for leading toward the headwaters of James River. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether its many large rapids can be made navigable except at a cost that its inhabitants will need ages to afford. The chief obstacles begin at the Great Falls, 90 miles above its mouth. Below them are only five or six rapids, passable even at low water with some difficulty. It is 100 miles from the falls to the Greenbrier’s mouth and another 120 to the lead mines. At its mouth the Kanawha is 280 yards wide.

The Hockhocking is 80 yards wide at its mouth and navigable by loaded flatboats to the Press-place, 60 miles upstream.

The Little Kanawha is 150 yards wide at its mouth but navigable for only ten miles. Perhaps its northern branch, Junius’s Creek, which approaches the western branch of the Monongahela, may someday offer a shorter route from the Monongahela to the Ohio.

The Muskingum is 280 yards wide at its mouth and 200 yards at the lower Indigenous towns, 150 miles upstream. Small flatboats can navigate it to within a mile of a navigable stretch of the Cuyahoga, which flows into Lake Erie.

At Fort Pitt, the Ohio loses its name and divides into the Monongahela and Allegheny.

The Monongahela is 400 yards wide at its mouth. The mouth of the Youghiogheny is 12 or 15 miles upstream, where the Monongahela is 300 yards wide. From there to Redstone is 50 miles by water and 30 by land. From Redstone to the mouth of Cheat River is 40 miles by water and 28 by land; the width remains 300 yards, and boats can navigate well. For another 50 miles to the Western Fork, its width is about 200 yards. Rapids often interrupt navigation there, though a rise of two or three feet makes them readily passable by boats. Except in dry seasons, light boats can then travel another 65 miles to the head of Tygarts Valley. That stretch has only small rapids and falls of one or two feet, while the river narrows to 20 yards.

The Western Fork is navigable in winter for ten or 15 miles toward the Little Kanawha’s northern branch, which it could be joined to by a good wagon road. The Youghiogheny is the Monongahela’s principal branch. It passes through the Laurel Mountain about 30 miles from its mouth. Along that stretch it is between 300 and 150 yards wide, with rapids and shoals that greatly obstruct navigation in dry weather. As it passes through the mountain, it makes great falls, preventing navigation for ten miles to Turkey Foot. From there to the Great Crossing, about 20 miles, it is navigable again except in dry seasons and is 200 yards wide.

The Allegheny Mountain separates the Youghiogheny’s sources from those of the Potomac. From the falls where it crosses the Laurel Mountain to Fort Cumberland, at the head of navigation on the Potomac, is 40 miles of very mountainous road. Wills’s Creek, at whose mouth Fort Cumberland stood, is 30 or 40 yards wide but is not yet navigable. Cheat River, another considerable branch of the Monongahela, is 200 yards wide at its mouth and 100 at the Dunkard settlement, 50 miles upstream. Boats can navigate it except in dry seasons. The Virginia–Pennsylvania boundary crosses it about three or four miles above its mouth.

With a slight rise in its water, the Allegheny River permits light flatboats to reach Venango at the mouth of French Creek, where it is 200 yards wide. They are even taken to Le Boeuf, from which a 15-mile portage leads to Presque Isle on Lake Erie.

The country watered by the Mississippi and its eastern branches makes up five-eighths of the United States. The Ohio and its waters occupy two of those five-eighths. Streams flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, and St. Lawrence drain the remaining three-eighths.

Before leaving the western waters, we should consider their principal connections with the Atlantic: the Hudson, the Potomac, and the Mississippi itself. All heavy goods will travel down the Mississippi. But passage through the Gulf of Mexico is dangerous, and ascending the Mississippi is so difficult and slow that European merchandise will probably not return by that route. More likely, flour, timber, and other heavy goods will be floated on rafts that can be sold along with their cargoes. Their crews will return overland or in light flatboats.

The Hudson and Potomac will therefore compete for the remaining commerce of the country west of Lake Erie, including the waters of the lakes, the Ohio, and the upper Mississippi. For goods from the lakes and their waters to reach New York, they must first reach Lake Erie. Between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, the rapids of St. Mary permit boats but not larger vessels. Vessels drawing eight feet can travel from Lakes Huron and Michigan to Lake Erie. Goods from the Mississippi’s waters must cross a portage into the lakes’ waters. The portage from the Illinois to a waterway of Lake Michigan is only one mile; those from the Wabash, Miami, Muskingum, or Allegheny to waters of Lake Erie range from one to 15 miles.

After goods cross Lake Erie, Niagara Falls requires an eight-mile portage to Lake Ontario. Between Ontario and the Hudson are portages of a quarter mile at the falls of Onondago, just above Oswego; two miles from Wood Creek to the Mohawk; half a mile at the Mohawk’s Little Falls; and 16 miles from Schenectady to Albany. Repeated changes of transport increase expense. They also increase the risk of theft by placing the goods successively in more hands.

The Potomac offers another route. Once trade from the lakes and their waters west of Lake Erie reaches that lake, it must travel along the southern shore because its harbors are numerous and excellent. The shorter northern shore has few harbors, and they are unsafe. From the Cuyahoga, the route to New York is 825 miles with five portages. The route to Alexandria, the Potomac’s trading center, is only 425 miles by the Cuyahoga, Big Beaver, Ohio, Youghiogheny (or Monongalia and Cheat), and Potomac, with only two portages. The first, between the Cuyahoga and Beaver, might be eliminated by joining their sources, which are lakes near one another in level country. The second, from the Ohio’s waters to the Potomac’s, would be between 15 and 40 miles, depending on how much effort is made to bring the navigable waterways close together.

For trade originating on the Ohio, or entering it from its own tributaries or the Mississippi, Alexandria by the Potomac is 580 miles nearer than New York and requires only one portage. There is another difference. The lakes themselves never freeze, but their connecting passages do, and ice closes the Hudson for three months each year. The route to Chesapeake Bay leads directly into a warmer climate. Its southern parts very rarely freeze. When its northern parts do, they are so near the rivers’ sources that frequent floods promptly break the ice. Vessels can therefore pass throughout the winter, subject only to occasional short delays.

In a war with our Anglo-American or Indigenous neighbors, the New York route would become a frontier along almost its whole length, stopping all commerce through it at once. Yet the New York route is already in use. The upper waters of the Ohio and Potomac, and the Potomac’s Great Falls, still have fixed obstructions to be cleared. See Appendix 1, observation 1.

Question: What are Virginia’s best seaports, and how large are the vessels they can receive?

Since our only ports are on rivers and creeks, I answered this question in the preceding query.

Question: What are Virginia’s mountains?

For the particular geography of our mountains, I must refer readers to Fry and Jefferson’s map of Virginia. Evans’s analysis of his map of America offers a more systematic view of them than any other work. Our mountains do not stand alone or lie scattered irregularly across the country. They begin about 150 miles from the coast and form successive ridges running nearly parallel to it, though they approach it somewhat as they extend northeast.

Toward the southwest, as the land between the coast and the Mississippi narrows, the mountains converge into one ridge. Near the Gulf of Mexico, that ridge subsides into plain country and gives rise to some waters flowing into the Gulf, particularly the Apalachicola. That river was probably named for the Apalachies, an Indigenous nation formerly living beside it. The mountains from which it rises, and which can be seen from various parts of the river, were therefore called the Appalachian Mountains. They are in fact only the end of the great ridges crossing the continent.

European geographers extended the Appalachian name northward as far as the mountains themselves. After the mountains separated into ridges, some geographers applied the name to the Blue Ridge, others to the North Mountain, the Allegheny, or the Laurel Ridge, as their maps show. But I believe none of these ridges was known by that name to either Indigenous or immigrant inhabitants until they saw it on European maps.

The veins of limestone, coal, and other minerals discovered so far generally follow the same direction, as do the falls of our great rivers. The rivers themselves run at right angles to the ridges. The James and Potomac cut through all the mountain ridges east of the Allegheny, but no watercourse breaks through the Allegheny. It is the spine of the country, dividing waters that flow to the Atlantic from those that flow to the Mississippi and St. Lawrence.

The Potomac’s passage through the Blue Ridge is perhaps one of nature’s most tremendous scenes. Stand on a very high point of land. To your right comes the Shenandoah, which has followed the mountain’s foot for a hundred miles seeking an outlet. To your left comes the Potomac, also seeking a passage. Where they meet, they rush against the mountain, split it apart, and flow toward the sea.

At first sight, the scene impels us to imagine that the earth was created in stages: the mountains formed first, and the rivers began flowing afterward. Here, it seems, the Blue Ridge dammed the rivers and formed an ocean filling the whole valley. As the waters continued to rise, they finally broke over at this point and tore the mountain from summit to base. The piles of rock on either side, especially beside the Shenandoah, show clear signs of having been torn from their beds by nature’s most powerful forces and reinforce that impression.

But nature has given the distant part of the scene a very different character. It contrasts with the foreground: calm and delightful where the foreground is wild and tremendous. Through the cleft in the mountain, a small stretch of smooth blue horizon appears far off in the plain country. It seems to invite you away from the tumult around you to pass through the breach and share the calm below. The eye finally comes to rest there, and the road happens to lead that way too. You cross the Potomac above the rivers’ junction and follow its side for three miles through the mountain’s base, with terrible broken cliffs hanging overhead. In about 20 miles you reach Frederic Town and the fine country around it.

This sight is worth a voyage across the Atlantic. Yet here, as near the Natural Bridge, some people have spent their lives within half a dozen miles without ever looking at these monuments to a war between rivers and mountains that must have shaken the earth to its center. See Appendix 1, observation 2.

The height of our mountains has not yet been measured with any accuracy. Because the Allegheny is the great ridge dividing the Atlantic’s waters from the Mississippi’s, its summit is doubtless higher above sea level than that of any other mountain. But measured from the land at its base, it is not as high as some others: the country rises behind the successive ridges like steps. The Blue Ridge mountains, especially the Peaks of Otter, are thought to rise farther above their bases than any others in our country, perhaps in North America.

On evidence sufficient for a reasonable conjecture, we suppose the highest peak rises about 4,000 feet from its base. That is less than one-fifth the height of the South American mountains and less than one-third the height that, at our latitude, would be needed to keep ice from melting in the open air throughout the year. The ridge beyond the Blue Ridge, which we call the North Mountain, extends the farthest. For that reason, Indigenous people named it the Endless Mountains.

A floating substance thought to be pumice has been found on the Mississippi, prompting a conjecture that a volcano stands somewhere among its headwaters. Most of those waters are known to their sources, except the Missouri. We would therefore look toward the mountains dividing the Gulf of Mexico’s waters from those of the South Sea to test the conjecture. But since no volcano has yet been known so far from the sea, we should instead suppose that the floating substance was mistakenly identified as pumice.

Question: What cascades and caverns does Virginia have?

The only remarkable cascade in this country is Falling Spring in Augusta. It feeds James River where that river is called Jackson’s River. It rises in the Warm Spring Mountains, about 20 miles southwest of the Warm Spring, and flows into that valley. About three-quarters of a mile from its source, it falls 200 feet over a rock into the valley below. The rock divides the sheet of water in two or three places across its width, but nowhere interrupts its fall. At the bottom, one can walk dry between the falling water and the rock.

The amount of water cannot compare with Niagara’s: the sheet is only 12 or 15 feet wide above and spreads somewhat farther below. But the fall is half again as high as Niagara, whose height is only 156 feet according to a measurement ordered by Governor Vaudreuil of Canada, and 130 feet according to a more recent account.

In the limestone country, many caverns extend a considerable distance. The best known is Madison’s Cave, on the north side of the Blue Ridge near where the Rockingham–Augusta county line meets the South Fork of the Shenandoah’s southern river. It lies in a hill about 200 feet high. One side rises so steeply that a biscuit tossed from the summit could land in the river washing its base. The cave’s entrance is on that side, about two-thirds of the way up.

The cave extends about 300 feet into the earth and branches into smaller caverns. These sometimes ascend a little but more often descend. At two different places they end in pools whose extent is unknown and which, I judge, lie nearly level with the river. I do not think they are formed by water flowing back from it: they are never muddy, do not rise and fall with the river in flood or drought, and are always cool. They are probably part of the many underground reservoirs thought to supply springs, distinguished from the others only by being accessible.

The cave’s vault is solid limestone, from 20 to 40 or 50 feet high, through which water continually seeps. Water trickling down the walls has coated them in forms resembling elegant drapery. Drops falling from the vault form conical stalactites on the ceiling and the floor below. Some have met and formed massive columns.

Another cave lies near the North Mountain in Frederick County, on Mr. Zane’s land. Its entrance is at the top of a long ridge. One descends 30 or 40 feet, as into a well, after which the cave extends nearly horizontally 400 feet into the earth. It remains 20 to 50 feet wide and five to 12 feet high. A few feet inside, the thermometer rose from 50° in the open air to 57° Fahrenheit, corresponding to 11° Réaumur, and stayed at that reading to the cave’s farthest reaches.

The cellars of the Paris observatory, 90 feet deep, and all deep underground cavities where no chemical agents are thought to produce artificial heat, have been found to maintain a steady temperature of 10° Réaumur, equal to 54½° Fahrenheit. This is so close to the temperature of Mr. Zane’s cave that the difference may be due to the instruments.

At Panther Gap, in the ridge dividing the waters of the Cowpasture and Calfpasture, is the Blowing Cave. It opens in a hillside, is about 100 feet across, and constantly emits air forcefully enough to flatten weeds 20 yards in front of it. The current is strongest in dry, frosty weather and weakest during long spells of rain.

Regular inhaling and exhaling of air through caverns and fissures can probably be explained by their connection with intermittent springs. As the springs’ reservoirs empty, they must draw in air; as they fill, they expel it. But a constant outward current, changing only in strength with the weather’s dryness or dampness, requires a new explanation. Another blowing cave lies in the Cumberland Mountain about a mile from where it crosses the Carolina line. All we know of it is that its airflow is not constant and that a spring flows from it.

The Natural Bridge, the most sublime of nature’s works, must be described even though it is neither a cascade nor a cavern. It stands on a hillside that seems to have been split along its length by some great upheaval. Measurements put the fissure’s depth at the bridge at either 270 or only 205 feet. It is about 45 feet wide at the bottom and 90 at the top; these widths determine the bridge’s span and its height above the water. The bridge is about 60 feet wide at its middle and wider at its ends. At the arch’s summit, its mass is about 40 feet thick. Part of that thickness is earth supporting many large trees. The rest, together with the hill on both sides, is a single mass of limestone.

The arch is nearly semi-elliptical, but the ellipse’s longer axis, which would form the arch’s chord, is many times longer than its shorter axis. In places, fixed rocks form a parapet along the bridge’s sides. Even so, few people can bring themselves to walk to the edge and look into the abyss. You instinctively drop to your hands and knees, crawl to the parapet, and peer over it. Looking down for about a minute gave me a violent headache.

If the view from above is painful and almost unbearable, the view from below is delightful to the same degree. The emotions stirred by the sublime could scarcely be felt more strongly than here. The arch is so beautiful, high, and light, seeming to spring toward heaven, that the spectator’s rapture is beyond description! For a considerable distance above and below the bridge, the fissure remains narrow, deep, and straight. It opens short but pleasing views of the North Mountain on one side and the Blue Ridge on the other, each about five miles away.

The bridge is in Rockbridge County, to which it gave its name. It provides a convenient public crossing over a valley that cannot be crossed elsewhere for a considerable distance. Cedar Creek flows beneath it. The creek feeds James River and has enough water even in the driest seasons to turn a gristmill, though its source is no more than two miles upstream.

Don Ulloa describes a similar break in the province of Angaraez in South America. It is 16 to 22 feet wide, 111 feet deep, and 1.3 miles long in English measures. Its width at the top is not noticeably greater than at the bottom. One feature is remarkable and may help us conjecture how Virginia’s Natural Bridge originated. Ulloa writes: “This channel is cut through solid rock with such precision that the recesses on one side correspond to the projections on the other, as though the height had been opened expressly, with all its bends and turns, to give the waters passage between the two rock walls. They match so closely that, if brought together, the sides would interlock without leaving a gap.”

Ulloa favors the view that running water wore the channel away, rather than that an upheaval broke the mountain open. But if water wore it away, would the rocks forming its sides not have been worn smooth? If harder veins left projections on one side, would they not sometimes, perhaps generally, have left projections on the other as well? Yet Ulloa says there are always corresponding hollows on the opposite side, fitting the projections so exactly that the sides would meet without a gap. This does not seem to me the work of running water. It looks more as though the sides had parted.

The sides of the break beneath Virginia’s Natural Bridge consist of veined rock that yields to time. Any original correspondence between their projections and recesses, if there ever was any, has now disappeared. But Virginia’s break surpasses Ulloa’s in its finest feature: part of the rock remained joined while the rest separated, forming a bridge over the abyss.

What mines and other underground riches does Virginia have? What trees, plants, and fruits does it have?

Minerals

Gold. I know of one instance of gold found in this state. Small specks were scattered through a lump of ore weighing about four pounds. It yielded seventeen pennyweights of extraordinarily ductile gold. The ore was found on the north side of the Rappahannock, about four miles below the falls. I have never heard of another indication of gold nearby.

Lead. There are lead mines on the Great Kanawha, opposite the mouth of Cripple Creek, about twenty-five miles from our southern boundary in Montgomery County. The metal is mixed sometimes with earth and sometimes with rock that requires gunpowder to break open. It contains some silver, but too little to be worth separating by any process yet tried there. One hundred pounds of washed ore yield from 50 to 80 pounds of pure metal, most commonly 60 pounds. The veins sometimes look very promising; at other times they disappear suddenly and completely. They enter the hillside and run horizontally.

Two veins are now worked by the public. The better one extends 100 yards under the hill. They could profitably employ about 50 laborers, but we generally have no more than 30, who also grow their own corn. The mines have produced 60 tons of lead in a year, though the usual annual quantity is 20 to 25 tons.

The present furnace stands a mile from the ore bank, across the river. The ore is first carried by wagon a quarter of a mile to the river, then loaded into canoes and taken across the water, which is about 200 yards wide there. It is loaded into wagons again and carried to the furnace. This arrangement was originally chosen to take advantage of a good creek site for a pounding mill. But the furnace and mill could easily be placed on the same side of the river, with water supplied, without a dam, by a canal about half a mile long.

From the furnace, the lead travels 130 miles along a good road through the Peaks of Otter to Lynch’s Ferry, or Winston’s, on the James River. It then travels about the same distance by water to Westham. The land journey could be greatly shortened by delivering the lead to the James above the Blue Ridge, from which point a ton has been brought on two canoes.

The Great Kanawha has considerable falls near the mines. About seven miles below them are three falls, each dropping three or four feet vertically. Three miles above is a rapid extending three miles, whose descent has been compared with the great fall of the James. Even so, it is thought that these obstructions could be opened to useful navigation, greatly reducing the portage between the Kanawha and the James.

A valuable lead mine is said to have been discovered recently in Cumberland, below the mouth of the Red River. The largest known lead mines in the western country, however, are on the Mississippi, extending 150 miles upstream from the mouth of the Rock River. They are not worked. The lead used in that country comes from the banks on the Spanish side of the Mississippi, opposite Kaskaskia.

Copper. A copper mine was once opened in Amherst County, on the north side of the James River, and another across the James River, on its south side. They were abandoned, whether because of poor management or poor veins. We are told of a rich mine of native copper on the Wabash, below the Upper Wiaw.

Iron. The iron mines now worked are Callaway’s, Ross’s, and Ballendine’s on the south side of the James River; Old’s on the north side in Albemarle; Miller’s in Augusta; and Zane’s in Frederick. The last two lie in the valley between the Blue Ridge and North Mountain. Callaway’s, Ross’s, Miller’s, and Zane’s each produce about 150 tons of bar iron a year. Ross’s also produces about 1,600 tons of pig iron annually; Ballendine’s, 1,000; and Callaway’s, Miller’s, and Zane’s, about 600 each.

Mr. Hunter’s forge at Fredericksburg makes about 300 tons of bar iron a year from pig iron imported from Maryland. Taylor’s forge on Neapsco Creek of the Potomac works in the same way, though I do not know how much it produces. Signs of iron elsewhere are numerous and scattered throughout the middle country.

The toughness of the cast iron from Ross’s and Zane’s furnaces is remarkable. Pots and other utensils cast thinner than usual from this iron can safely be thrown into or out of the wagons that carry them. Salt pans made from it, when no longer needed for that purpose, cannot be broken up for remelting unless they are first drilled in many places.

In the western country, we are told of iron mines between the Muskingum and the Ohio; on the Kentucky; between the Cumberland and Barren rivers; between the Cumberland and Tennessee; on Reedy Creek near Long Island; and on Chestnut Creek, a branch of the Great Kanawha, near where it crosses the Carolina line. A knowledgeable judge believes that the places called the iron banks on the Mississippi contain no iron. In general, from what is known so far, the western country seems to lack iron.

Black lead. Considerable quantities of black lead are occasionally taken for use from Winterham in Amelia County. I cannot give a detailed account of the mine. No operation has been established there; those who need the material go and obtain it for themselves.

Coal. The country along the James River, from 15 to 20 miles above Richmond and for several miles to the north and south, is full of mineral coal of excellent quality. Many people own portions of it, and pits had been opened and worked to meet demand before our commerce was interrupted.

Coal is known in so many places in the western country that some believe the whole tract between Laurel Mountain, the Mississippi, and the Ohio contains it. It is also known at many places north of the Ohio. The coal at Pittsburgh is of very high quality. A bed there has been burning since 1765. Another coal hill on Pike Run of the Monongahela has been burning for ten years, yet only about twenty yards of it have burned away.

Precious stones. I have known one emerald to be found in this country. Amethysts have been found frequently, and crystals are common, but none occur in numbers worth seeking.

Marble. Very good marble occurs in great abundance on the James River at the mouth of the Rockfish. Some samples I have seen were as pure a white as one might expect to find on the surface of the earth, but most were variegated with red, blue, and purple. None has ever been worked. It forms a very large cliff over a navigable part of the river. Marble is also said to occur in Kentucky.

Limestone. Only one vein of limestone is known below the Blue Ridge. It first appears in our country in Prince William, two miles below the Pignut Ridge. From there it runs nearly parallel to the ridge and crosses the Rivanna about five miles below the ridge, where the limestone vein is called the Southwest Ridge. It then crosses Hardware above the mouth of Hudson’s Creek and the James River at the mouth of the Rockfish, where the marble quarry already mentioned lies. It probably continues up the James to Ross’s ironworks, where it appears again, before running southwest by Flat Creek of the Otter River. It is never more than one hundred yards wide.

West of the Blue Ridge, the whole country seems to rest on limestone, with immense quantities of it also lying loose or fixed on the surface. The rock forms beds running southwest to northeast, like the mountains and seacoast. The layers in each bed slope downward from the horizon toward a position parallel to the earth’s axis. Struck by this observation, I used a quadrant to measure their angles of inclination many times. They ranged from 22° to 60°, but the average of all my trials was within one-third of a degree of the elevation of the pole, or the latitude of the place. By far the greater part of the individual measurements were also close to it. The layers therefore appear, in general, to be parallel to the earth’s axis.

In a few instances I found the layers perpendicular or even leaning the other way. These cases were extremely rare and were always accompanied by signs of upheaval or other unusual circumstances that allowed for the possibility that the layers had moved from their original positions. I made these measurements between Madison’s Cave and the Potomac. We hear of limestone along the Mississippi and Ohio and throughout the mountainous country between the eastern and western waters. There it lies in the valleys between the mountains, rather than on the mountains themselves.

Near the eastern foot of North Mountain are immense bodies of schist bearing impressions of shells in many forms. I have received petrified shells of very different kinds from the uppermost sources of the Kentucky River. They resemble none I have seen along the tidal waters. Shells are said to be found in the Andes of South America, fifteen thousand feet above sea level. Many people, learned and unlearned, regard this as proof of a universal flood. The following consideration may be added to the many arguments against that view.

The atmosphere and everything it contains, whether water, air, or other matter, gravitate toward the earth; in other words, they have weight. Experience tells us that their combined weight never exceeds that of a column of mercury 31 inches high, equivalent to a column of rainwater 35 feet high. If everything in the atmosphere were water, it would cover the globe to a depth of only 35 feet. But as that water fell, it would run into the seas. Because the area of the seas is twice that of the dry land, the seas would rise only 52½ feet above their present level and overflow land only to that height. In Virginia, this would cover only a very small part even of the level country, since the banks of our tidal waters are frequently, if not generally, higher than that.

Floods reaching farther, to North Mountain or Kentucky, for example, therefore seem outside the laws of nature. Within that limit, floods may have occurred to a greater or lesser degree, according to whatever combination of natural causes produced them. History makes some partial floods around the Mediterranean Sea probable. Buffon has supposed, plausibly, that this sea was once a lake. If it was, suppose that an extraordinary accumulation of atmospheric water from other parts of the globe was discharged over the lake and the lands draining into it. Or, without supposing that it was a lake, suppose both such an extraordinary discharge and an influx from the Atlantic driven by prolonged western winds.

The lake or sea might then have risen enough to flood the adjacent lowlands: Egypt and Armenia, which Egyptian and Hebrew tradition says were flooded about 2,300 years before the Christian era; Attica, said to have been flooded in the time of Ogyges about 500 years later; and Thessaly, in the time of Deucalion another 300 years later. But floods of this kind cannot account for shells found on higher lands.

A second explanation holds that, before any records of history or tradition, some great upheaval raised the bed of the ocean, where shelled creatures principally live, to the heights at which we now find shells and other marine remains. Those who favor this view are wise to place the event beyond all recorded eras, since certainly no such event is found within them. We may go further: nothing in our own time or in the thousands of years recorded by history proves the existence of any natural force, within the earth or outside it, powerful enough to raise masses such as the Andes to a height of 15,000 feet. The force required for that would so greatly exceed the force that rearranged parts of Calabria in our own day that the existence of the latter does not justify inferring the former.

Voltaire has suggested a third solution. He cites a place in Touraine where, over eighty years, a particular piece of earth twice turned into soft stone that hardened when used in building. Shells of various kinds were produced in this stone, at first visible only through a microscope but afterward growing with it. I suppose he would have us infer that, besides the usual production of shells by the working of earth and water within animal vessels, nature may produce the same result by passing those materials through the pores of calcareous earth and stone. We see calcareous deposits form every day as water percolates through limestone, and new marble form in quarries from which old marble has been removed. One might ask whether it is more difficult for nature to form calcareous fluid into a shell than to form other fluids into crystals, plants, or animals, according to the structure of the vessels through which they pass.

There is a wonder somewhere. Is it greater in this explanation, in the explanation that assumes a power for which we have no evidence in any other case, or in the first explanation, which requires us to believe that a body of water was created and then annihilated? Establishing Voltaire’s example of shells growing without animal bodies would have established his theory. But he has not established it. He has not even left it on grounds strong enough to make it an object of inquiry among scholars in his own country. Setting that example aside, all three hypotheses are equally unsatisfactory. We must be content to acknowledge that this great phenomenon remains unexplained. Ignorance is preferable to error; a person who believes nothing is closer to the truth than one who believes what is wrong.

Stone. Stone is abundant, especially near the mountains: white, blue, brown, and other kinds suitable for carving. There is good millstone, stone that withstands fire, and slate. We are told of flint suitable for gunflints on the Meherrin in Brunswick, on the Mississippi between the mouths of the Ohio and Kaskaskia, and on other western waters. Isinglass, or mica, occurs in several places. Lodestone and asbestos with a woody texture are also sometimes found.

Earths. Marl is generally abundant. Clay like that at Sturbridge in England, from which bricks are made that long withstand intense fire, has been found on Tuckahoe Creek of the James River and will doubtless be found elsewhere. Chalk is said to occur in Botetourt and Bedford. Some earth in Bedford is believed to contain gypsum. Ochres occur in various places.

Niter. The limestone country has many caves whose earthen floors are impregnated with niter. A very large cave lies on Rich Creek, a branch of the Great Kanawha about 60 miles below the lead mines. It is about 20 yards wide and enters a hill for a quarter or half a mile. Its rock ceiling stands from 9 to 15 or 20 feet above the floor.

Mr. Lynch, who gave me this account, undertook to extract the niter. Besides a coating of salt that had formed on the ceiling and floor, he found the earth heavily impregnated to a depth of seven feet in some places and generally three feet. Each bushel yielded an average of three pounds of niter. After making about 1,000 pounds of the salt, Mr. Lynch handed the cave over to others, who have since made 10,000 pounds. They have done so by following the cave into the hill. They have never tried earth a second time after exhausting it, to discover whether or how soon it becomes impregnated again. At least fifty such caves are worked on the Greenbrier, and many are known on the Cumberland River.

Salt. The country west of the Allegheny Mountains has abundant common salt springs. The most remarkable we have heard of are at Bullitt’s Lick, Big Bone, the Blue Licks, and the North Fork of the Holston. Bullitt’s Lick covers many acres. When the earth is dug to a depth of three feet, water begins to bubble up. The deeper one digs and the drier the weather, the stronger the brine. A thousand gallons of the water yield from one to one and a half bushels of salt, or about one pound of salt from 80 pounds of water. By comparison, 25 pounds of seawater yield one pound of salt, so seawater is more than three times as strong as the water from these springs.

A salt spring has recently been discovered at Turkey Foot on the Youghiogheny, whose waters cover it except when the river is very low. Its quality is not yet known. Duning’s Lick is also untried, but is thought to be the best on this side of the Ohio. Salt springs along Onondaga Lake are said to give the lake water a salty taste.

Medicinal springs. There are several medicinal springs. Some are undoubtedly effective, while others seem to owe their reputation as much to imagination and changes of air and regimen as to their actual properties. None has been chemically analyzed by a skilled person, and observations have not gone far enough to classify the disorders each relieves. I can therefore do little more than list them.

The most effective are two springs in Augusta near the headwaters of the James River, where it is called Jackson’s River. They rise near the foot of a ridge generally called Warm Spring Mountain, though maps call it Jackson’s Mountains. One is the Warm Spring and the other the Hot Spring. The Warm Spring flows strongly enough to work a gristmill and to keep its basin, 30 feet in diameter, at body temperature, or 96° Fahrenheit. The substance with which its water is combined is very volatile. Its smell suggests sulfur, as does its effect of turning silver black. The water relieves rheumatism. It has also removed or lessened other complaints of very different kinds. It rains here four or five days in every week.

The Hot Spring, about six miles from the Warm Spring, is much smaller and has been hot enough to boil an egg. Some believe it has become cooler. It raises a Fahrenheit thermometer to 112°, which is fever heat. It sometimes brings relief when the Warm Spring fails. A fountain of ordinary water emerges within a few inches of its edge, giving it an unusual appearance. The Hot Spring is much cooler than the springs of Kamchatka described by Krachininnikow, which raise the thermometer to 200°, within 12° of boiling water. People visit these springs in great numbers despite the complete lack of accommodations for the sick. Their waters are strongest in the hottest months, so visitors come principally in July and August.

The Sweet Springs are in Botetourt County, at the eastern foot of the Allegheny Mountains, about 42 miles from the Warm Springs. They are even less well known. Because they have relieved cases in which the other springs failed, their composition is probably different. Their temperature is different too: they are as cold as ordinary water, though that is not offered as proof that they contain different minerals. They lie among the uppermost sources of the James River.

On the Potomac River in Berkeley County, above North Mountain, are medicinal springs visited much more often than those in Augusta. Their effects, however, are weaker: the water contains fewer minerals and is scarcely warm. They receive more visitors because they are in a fertile, well supplied, populous country, with better accommodations, always safe from attacks by Indians, and nearer the more populous states.

In Louisa County, on the headwaters of the South Anna branch of the York River, are springs with some medicinal properties, though they are little used. There is a weak iron-bearing spring at Richmond. Many others in various parts of the country are too little valued or too little known to list after those already mentioned. We are told of a sulfur spring on Howard’s Creek of the Greenbrier and another at Boonesborough on the Kentucky.

Burning springs. In the lowlands of the Great Kanawha, seven miles above the mouth of the Elk River and 67 miles above the mouth of the Kanawha itself, is a hole in the earth holding 30 or 40 gallons. A bituminous vapor constantly issues from it in a current strong enough to move the sand around its opening as sand moves in a boiling spring. Bring a lighted candle or torch within 18 inches, and the vapor flames up in a column 18 inches wide and four or five feet high. The flame sometimes goes out within 20 minutes. At other times it has continued for three days and was left still burning.

The flame is unsteady, has the density of burning spirits, and smells like burning coal. Water sometimes collects in the basin. It is remarkably cold and is kept bubbling by the vapor passing through it. If the vapor is lit while the basin holds water, the water soon becomes too warm to bear one’s hand and evaporates completely in a short time. The spring and the surrounding land belong to General Washington and General Lewis.

A similar spring lies on the Sandy River. Its flame forms a column about 12 inches wide and three feet high. General Clarke, who told me about it, lit the vapor, stayed about an hour, and left it burning.

Siphon fountains. The mention of unusual springs leads me to siphon fountains. One is near the intersection of Lord Fairfax’s boundary with North Mountain, not far from Brock’s Gap. Its stream powers a gristmill that grinds two bushels of grain at every flood of the spring. Another is near the Cowpasture River, a mile and a half below its meeting with the Bullpasture River and 16 or 17 miles from the Hot Springs. It flows intermittently once every twelve hours. There is also one near the mouth of the North Fork of the Holston.

After these may be mentioned the Natural Well on Mr. Lewis’s land in Frederick County. It is somewhat larger than an ordinary well. Its water rises as near the surface as the water in neighboring artificial wells, and its depth is still unknown. A perceptible downward current is said to flow in it. If that is true, the well probably feeds a spring for which it is the natural reservoir, differing from others, such as the reservoir in Madison’s Cave, by being accessible. It is used like an ordinary well, with a bucket and windlass.

Plants

A complete catalogue of the trees, plants, fruits, and other vegetation is probably not wanted. I will sketch those most likely to attract notice because they are medicinal, edible, ornamental, or useful for making things. I add the Linnaean names to the common names, since the latter might not give a foreign reader precise information. I confine myself to native plants.

1. Medicinal

Senna. Cassia ligustrina.

Arsmart. Polygonum Sagittatum.

Clivers, or goose grass. Galium spurium.

Several species of Lobelia.

Palma Christi. Ricinus.

Jamestown weed. Datura Stramonium. See Appendix 1, observation 3.

Mallow. Malva rotundifolia.

Syrian mallow. Hibiscus moschentos; Hibiscus virginicus.

Indian mallow. Sida rhombifolia; Sida abutilon.

Virginia marshmallow. Napæa hermaphrodita; Napæa dioica.

Indian physic. Spiræa trifoliata.

Euphorbia Ipecacuanhæ.

Pleurisy root. Asclepias decumbens.

Virginia snake root. Aristolochia serpentaria.

Black snake root. Actæa racemosa.

Seneca rattlesnake root. Polygala Senega.

Valerian. Valeriana locusta radiata.

Gentiana: Saponaria, Villosa, and Centaurium.

Ginseng. Panax quinquefolium.

Angelica. Angelica sylvestris.

Cassava. Jatropha urens.

2. Edible

Tuckahoe. Lycoperdon tuber.

Jerusalem artichoke. Helianthus tuberosus.

Long potatoes. Convolvulas batatas.

Granadillas, maycocks, or maracocks. Passiflora incarnata.

Panic. Many species of Panicum.

Indian millet. Holcus laxus; Holcus striosus.

Wild oat. Zizania aquatica.

Wild pea. Clayton’s Dolichos.

Lupine. Lupinus perennis.

Wild hop. Humulus lupulus.

Wild cherry. Prunus Virginiana.

Cherokee plum. Prunus sylvestris fructû majori.

Wild plum. Prunus sylvestris fructu minori.

Clayton is the authority for both the Cherokee plum and the wild plum.

Wild crabapple. Pyrus coronaria.

Red mulberry. Morus rubra.

Persimmon. Diospyros Virginiana.

Sugar maple. Acer saccharinum.

Scaly bark hickory. Juglans alba cortice squamoso. Clayton.

Common hickory. Juglans alba, fructu minore rancido. Clayton.

Paccan, or Illinois nut. It is not described by Linnaeus, Millar, or Clayton. If I ventured to describe it, speaking from memory of the fruit and from two year old plants of the leaf, I would specify it as Juglans alba, with lance shaped, pointed, serrated, downy leaflets; a smaller, oval, compressed fruit, scarcely marked, with a sweet kernel and a very thin shell. It grows on the Illinois, Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi. Don Ulloa speaks of it under the name Pacanos in his Noticias Americanas.

Black walnut. Juglans nigra.

White walnut. Juglans alba.

Chestnut. Fagus castanea.

Chinquapin. Fagus pumila.

Hazelnut. Corylus avellana.

Grapes. Vitis. Various kinds, though Clayton describes only three.

Scarlet strawberries. Fragaria Virginiana of Millar.

Whortleberries. Vaccinium uliginosum?

Wild gooseberries. Ribes grossularia.

Cranberries. Vaccinium oxycoccos.

Black raspberries. Rubus occidentalis.

Blackberries. Rubus fruticosus.

Dewberries. Rubus cæsius.

Cloudberries. Rubus chamæmorus.

3. Ornamental

Plane tree. Platanus occidentalis.

Poplar. Liriodendron tulipifera; Populus heterophylla.

Black poplar. Populus nigra.

Aspen. Populus tremula.

Linden, or lime. Tilia Americana.

Red flowering maple. Acer rubrum.

Horse chestnut, or buckeye. Æsculus pavia.

Catalpa. Bignonia catalpa.

Umbrella. Magnolia tripetala.

Swamp laurel. Magnolia glauca.

Cucumber tree. Magnolia acuminata.

Portugal bay. Laurus indica.

Red bay. Laurus borbonia.

Dwarf rosebay. Rhododendron maximum.

Laurel of the western country. Species uncertain.

Wild pimento. Laurus benzoin.

Sassafras. Laurus sassafras.

Locust. Robinia pseudo-acacia.

Honey locust. Gleditsia. 1. ϐ [meaning uncertain].

Dogwood. Cornus florida.

Fringe or snowdrop tree. Chionanthus Virginica.

Barberry. Berberis vulgaris.

Redbud, or Judas tree. Cercis Canadensis.

Holly. Ilex aquifolium.

Cockspur hawthorn. Cratægus coccinea.

Spindle tree. Euonymus Europæus.

Evergreen spindle tree. Euonymus Americanus.

Itea Virginica.

Elder. Sambucus nigra.

Papaw. Annona triloba.

Candleberry myrtle. Myrica cerifera.

Dwarf laurel. Kalmia angustifolia; Kalmia latifolia. Both are called ivy here.

Ivy. Hedera quinquefolia.

Trumpet honeysuckle. Lonicera sempervirens.

Upright honeysuckle. Azalea nudiflora.

Yellow jasmine. Bignonia sempervirens.

Calycanthus floridus.

American aloe. Agave Virginica.

Sumac. Rhus. Species uncertain.

Poke. Phytolacca decandra.

Long moss. Tillandsia Usneoides.

4. Useful for making things

Reed. Arundo phragmitis.

Virginia hemp. Acnida cannabina.

Flax. Linum Virginianum.

Black, or pitch, pine. Pinus tæda.

White pine. Pinus strobus.

Yellow pine. Pinus Virginica.

Spruce pine. Pinus foliis singularibus. Clayton.

Hemlock spruce fir. Pinus Canadensis.

Arbor vitae. Thuya occidentalis.

Juniper. Juniperus virginica, called cedar here.

Cypress. Cupressus disticha.

White cedar. Cupressus Thyoides.

Black oak. Quercus nigra.

White oak. Quercus alba.

Red oak. Quercus rubra.

Willow oak. Quercus phellos.

Chestnut oak. Quercus prinus.

Blackjack oak. Quercus aquatica. Clayton’s identification is uncertain.

Ground oak. Quercus pumila. Clayton.

Live oak. Quercus Virginiana. Millar.

Black birch. Betula nigra.

White birch. Betula alba.

Beech. Fagus sylvatica.

Ash. Fraxinus Americana; Fraxinus Novæ Angliæ, the latter according to Millar.

Elm. Ulmus Americana.

Willow. Salix. Species uncertain.

Sweet gum. Liquidambar styraciflua.

The following were found in Virginia when the English first visited it, but it is not said whether they grew spontaneously or only through cultivation. Most probably they were native to more southern climates and were passed along the continent from one Indigenous nation to another.

Tobacco. Nicotiana.

Maize. Zea mays.

Round potatoes. Solanum tuberosum.

Pumpkins. Cucurbita pepo.

Cymlings. Cucurbita verrucosa.

Squashes. Cucurbita melopepo.

There are countless other plants and flowers. For their enumeration and scientific description, I must refer to the Flora Virginica of our great botanist Dr. Clayton, published by Gronovius at Leiden in 1762. This accurate observer was born and lived in this state. He spent a long life exploring and describing its plants and is thought to have enlarged the botanical catalogue as much as almost any man who has lived.

Besides these native plants, our farms produce wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, broomcorn, and Indian corn. The climate suits rice well enough wherever the land does. Tobacco, hemp, flax, and cotton are staple commodities. Indigo yields two cuttings. The silkworm is native, and the mulberry suited to feeding it grows readily. We also cultivate both long and round potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips, pumpkins, and groundnuts (Arachis). Our grasses are lucerne, sainfoin, burnet, timothy, ray grass, and orchard grass; red, white, and yellow clover; green sward, bluegrass, and crabgrass.

The gardens yield muskmelons, watermelons, tomatoes, okra, pomegranates, figs, and the edible plants of Europe.

The orchards produce apples, pears, cherries, quinces, peaches, nectarines, apricots, almonds, and plums.

Animals

Our quadrupeds have mostly been described by Linnaeus and Buffon. Of these, the mammoth, or “big buffalo” as the Indians call it, must certainly have been the largest. Their tradition says that it was carnivorous and still exists in the northern parts of America.

During the present revolution, a delegation of Delaware warriors visited the governor of Virginia on business. After the council had discussed and settled that business, the governor asked them about their country, including what they knew or had heard of the animal whose bones were found at the salt licks on the Ohio. Their chief speaker immediately assumed an orator’s posture and, with a grandeur suited to what he considered the importance of his subject, related a tradition handed down from their fathers:

“That in ancient times a herd of these tremendous animals came to the Big Bone Licks and began a universal destruction of the bears, deer, elk, buffaloes, and other animals that had been created for the use of the Indians; that the Great Man above, looking down and seeing this, was so enraged that he seized his lightning, descended to the earth, seated himself on a neighboring mountain, on a rock where his seat and the prints of his feet may still be seen, and hurled his bolts among them until all were slaughtered except the big bull. He presented his forehead to the shafts and shook them off as they fell. But at last one struck him in the side; whereupon he sprang around and bounded over the Ohio, the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally the great lakes, where he lives to this day.”

It is well known that tusks, grinding teeth, and skeletons of unparalleled size are found in great numbers on the Ohio and in many parts of America farther north. Some lie on the surface of the earth, and others a little below it. Mr. Stanley, who was taken prisoner by Indians near the mouth of the Tennessee, relates that, after being transferred from one tribe to another, he was eventually carried over the mountains west of the Missouri to a river flowing west. These bones abounded there, and the inhabitants described the animal to which they belonged as still living in the northern parts of their country. From their description, he judged it to be an elephant.

Bones of the same kind have lately been found several feet below the surface in saltworks opened on the North Holston, a branch of the Tennessee, at about 36½° north latitude. From the accounts published in Europe, I suppose it has been decided that these are of the same kind as those found in Siberia. Similar animal remains have been mentioned in the more southern climates of both hemispheres. But those accounts are either too vague to establish the fact, too inaccurate in their descriptions to justify classing the remains with the great northern bones, or so rare as to raise the suspicion that the bones were carried there as curiosities from more northern regions. On the whole, then, there seem to be no certain traces of this animal’s existence farther south than the saltworks just mentioned.

It is remarkable that European naturalists have assigned the tusks and skeletons to the elephant, while assigning the grinding teeth to the hippopotamus, or river horse. Yet they acknowledge that the tusks and skeletons are much larger than an elephant’s, and the grinding teeth many times larger than a hippopotamus’s and essentially different in form. Wherever these grinding teeth are found, we also find the tusks and skeleton, but no hippopotamus skeleton or elephant grinding teeth. It cannot be said that the hippopotamus and elephant always came to the same place, one to deposit its grinding teeth and the other its tusks and skeleton. What became of the parts they did not deposit there?

We must agree, then, that these remains belong together and come from one animal. It was not a hippopotamus, which has neither tusks nor such a frame, and whose grinding teeth differ in size and in the number and form of their points. I think equally decisive evidence establishes that it was not an elephant. I will not rely on the celebrated anatomist Hunter, who examined the form and structure of the tusks and declared them essentially different from an elephant’s, because the equally celebrated anatomist D’Aubenton examined them and declared them precisely the same. Between such authorities, I will treat this point as uncertain. But:

1. The skeleton of the mammoth, as this unknown animal has been called, indicates an animal five or six times the cubic volume of the elephant, as Buffon has admitted.

2. Its grinding teeth are five times as large and square, with four or five rows of blunt points on the grinding surface. An elephant’s are broad and thin, with a flat grinding surface.

3. I have never heard of an elephant’s grinding tooth being found in America, and I suppose none has been.

4. Given the elephant’s known nature and need for warmth, it could never have lived in the regions where mammoth remains have been found. The elephant is native only to the torrid zone and the regions near it. Warm rooms and clothing have kept elephants alive in Europe’s temperate climates, but only for a small part of their natural lifespan, and none has ever been known to reproduce there. Yet, as I have observed, mammoth bones have never been found farther south than the Holston saltworks, and they have been found as far north as the Arctic Circle.

Those who believe the elephant and mammoth are the same must therefore believe one of three things: (1) that the elephant known to us can live and reproduce in the frozen zone; (2) that an internal fire once warmed those regions and has since left them, though the globe shows no clear signs of this; or (3) that the ecliptic’s angle was once so great that it placed every region where these bones are found within the tropics, which, as observed above, are the natural limits of the elephant’s habitat.

Even if we accept a decrease in that angle and use the highest rate of decrease yet claimed, one minute per century, moving the northern tropic to the Arctic Circle would place these supposed elephants 250,000 years in the past. That is far beyond the time we can imagine animal bones surviving in the open air, as many of these have done. Moreover, although those regions would then have been within the tropics, their winters would have been too severe for the elephant. They would also have had only one day and one night each year, a condition to which we have no reason to suppose the elephant is suited. It has, however, been demonstrated that if the ecliptic’s angle varies at all, the variation is oscillating and never exceeds nine degrees, too little to bring these bones within the tropics. One of these hypotheses, or another equally arbitrary and unacceptable to cautious philosophy, must be adopted to maintain that these are elephant bones.

For my part, I find it easier to believe that an animal may have resembled the elephant in its tusks and general anatomy while having a very different nature in other respects. The limits nature has set for the existence and reproduction of the elephant known to us extend approximately from 30° south latitude to 30° north. Proceeding north from there to 36½°, we enter the region assigned to the mammoth. The farther north we go, the more numerous its traces become, as far as the earth has been explored in that direction. It is at least as likely as not that this increase continues to the pole itself, if land extends that far.

The center of the frozen zone may therefore be where the mammoth reaches its greatest vigor, just as the center of the torrid zone is for the elephant. Nature thus seems to have drawn a separating belt between these two tremendous animals. Its breadth is not precisely known, though at present we may suppose it to be about 6½° of latitude. She seems to have assigned the regions south of it to the elephant and those north of it to the mammoth, forming the nature of one for extreme heat and that of the other for extreme cold. When the Creator has separated their natures as far as this planet’s range of animal life permits, it seems perverse to declare them the same because their tusks and bones partly resemble one another.

Whatever animal these remains belonged to, it is certain that such an animal existed in America and was the largest of all land animals. That alone should have rescued the earth it inhabited and the air it breathed from the charge that they could not conceive and nourish animal life on a large scale. It should have stopped at birth the opinion of Buffon, among the most learned writers on animal history, that in the New World “living nature is much less active, much less vigorous.” He claims that nature is less active and energetic on one side of the globe than on the other. As if both sides were not warmed by the same life-giving sun; as if soil of the same chemical composition were less capable of producing animal nourishment; as if the fruits and grains grown by that soil and sun yielded less nourishing food for the body, allowed its solids and fluids less expansion, or sooner produced in its cartilages, membranes, and fibers the rigidity that restrains further expansion and ends animal growth.

The truth is that a pygmy and a Patagonian, a mouse and a mammoth, derive their dimensions from the same nourishing juices. What makes them grow to different sizes depends on circumstances beyond the reach of beings with our capacities. Every race of animals seems to have received from its Maker certain laws governing its growth when it was formed. Its organs for producing growth were formed to achieve that size, while appropriate obstacles prevented further growth. Animals cannot fall below or rise above these limits. Their position between them may depend on soil, climate, food, and careful selection of breeders. But all the manna of heaven would never raise a mouse to the size of a mammoth.

Buffon advances four opinions: (1) animals common to the Old and New Worlds are smaller in the latter; (2) animals peculiar to the New World are smaller in scale; (3) animals domesticated in both have degenerated in America; and (4) the New World has fewer species overall. He thinks the reason is that America has less heat, that nature has spread more water across its surface, and that people have drained away less of it. In other words, he considers heat favorable and moisture unfavorable to the production and growth of large quadrupeds.

I will not challenge this hypothesis on its first uncertain premise, whether America’s climate is comparatively more humid, because we lack sufficient observations to decide the question. Until it is decided, we are as free to deny the claim as others are to affirm it. But let us grant it for a moment. The hypothesis then makes a second assumption: that moisture is unfavorable to animal growth. We cannot discover whether this is true through reasoning alone. Nature has concealed how she acts. Our only appeal in such questions is to experience, and I think experience opposes the assumption.

With the help of heat and moisture, plants are formed from the elements of earth, air, water, and fire. Accordingly, we see more humid climates produce a greater quantity of plants. Plants are, directly or indirectly, the food of every animal; and as the quantity of food increases, we see animals increase in number and improve in size as far as the laws of their nature permit. Buffon himself agrees elsewhere: “In general, it appears that somewhat cold countries suit our cattle better than warm countries, and that they are larger and taller where the climate is more humid and pastures are more plentiful. The cattle of Denmark, Podolia, Ukraine, and the Tartary inhabited by the Kalmyks are the largest of all.” Here, then, a race of animals, and one of the largest, has grown bigger through cold and moisture. This directly opposes the hypothesis that those conditions reduce animal size while their opposites, heat and dryness, enlarge it.

But when we appeal to experience, we should not be satisfied with a single fact. Let us test the question more broadly. Take two regions of the earth, Europe and America, for example, large enough for general causes to operate. Let us consider the circumstances peculiar to each and observe their effects on animals. America, extending through both the torrid and temperate zones, has more heat overall than Europe. But Europe, according to the hypothesis, is drier. Each, then, is equally suited to producing animals, having one condition favorable to animal growth and one opposed to it.

If comparing Europe with the much larger America seems unfair, I answer that it is no less fair than comparing America with the whole world. Besides, the purpose is to test a hypothesis that makes animal size depend on a climate’s heat and moisture. We meet its reasonable conditions if we choose a region large enough to contain a noticeable difference in climate and large enough that local accidents or movement of animals across its borders cannot materially affect the size of those in its interior. The objection is weaker here because any movement of animals across the border between Europe and Asia benefits Europe in the comparison: Asia certainly produces larger animals than Europe.

Let us compare the quadrupeds of Europe and America in three tables: the first lists those found in both; the second, those found in only one; and the third, those domesticated in both. To make comparison easier, the animals in each table are arranged, as far as their sizes can be estimated, from largest to smallest. The weights of large animals are given in English avoirdupois pounds and decimals of a pound; those of smaller animals are given in ounces and decimals of an ounce. An asterisk (*) marks the actual weight of a particular animal considered among the largest of its species. A dagger (†) marks an estimate supplied by someone well acquainted with the species of what the largest individual that person had seen probably weighed. The other weights come from Buffon and D’Aubenton and are those of animals that happened to come into their hands for dissection. This distinction must be remembered when their weights are compared with mine. I give the latter weights to justify withholding judgment until we are better informed, and meanwhile to raise a suspicion that there is no consistent difference favoring either continent. That is all I claim.

A Comparative View of the Quadrupeds of Europe and America

1. Native to Both

2. Native to Only One Continent

The European and American lists are independent sequences; animals on the same line are not presented as corresponding species.

3. Domesticated in Both

I have not included the Phoca or the leather-winged bat in the first table. The former lives half the year in water, and the latter is winged, so individuals of either species may visit both continents. The Phoca is said to be seldom seen more than 30 miles from shore or beyond the 56th degree of latitude. The islands between Asia and America allow it to pass from one continent to the other without exceeding those bounds. Travelers tell us that these islands are among its principal resorts, especially when it bears its young.

Of the animals in the first table, Buffon himself tells us that the beaver, otter, and shrew mouse, though of the same species in both countries, are larger in America than in Europe. This should have qualified his general assertion that animals common to the two countries are considerably smaller in America, “and without any exception.” He also tells us that, on examining an American bear, he observed no difference “in the form of this American bear compared with that of Europe.” Yet he adds, from Bartram’s journal, that an American bear weighed 400 English pounds, equal to 367 French pounds, while the European bear examined by D’Aubenton weighed only 141 French pounds.

Kalm, a naturalist sent to America expressly to study natural history, tells us that the palmated elk is larger here than in Europe. Pennant agrees. Kalm also says that the black moose, or American renne, is as tall as a tall horse; Catesby says it is about the size of a medium-sized ox. Many people who have seen them have given me the same account. D’Aubenton, however, says that the European renne is only about the size of a red deer. The weasel is larger in America than in Europe, as a comparison of D’Aubenton’s and Kalm’s measurements shows.

Kalm says that the lynx, badger, red fox, and flying squirrel are the same in America as in Europe. I take him to mean the same in every material respect, size included; if they were smaller, they would differ from their European counterparts. According to Catesby, our gray fox differs little in size and shape from the European fox. I presume he means the European red fox, as Kalm does when he says of our gray foxes that “they do not quite come up to our foxes.” Turning next to the American red fox, Kalm says that “they are entirely the same with the European sort.” He therefore had only one European sort in view, the red fox. Their testimony amounts to this: the American gray fox is somewhat smaller than the European red fox. The same is true of the European gray fox, as Buffon’s and D’Aubenton’s measurements show.

The American white bear is as large as the European one. Mammoth bones found in America are as large as those found in the Old World. Why, it may be asked, do I include the mammoth as though it still existed? I ask in return why I should omit it as though it did not. No instance can be produced of nature permitting a race of animals to become extinct, or forming a link in her great work so weak that it could be broken. Beside this, the traditional testimony of the Indians that the mammoth still exists in northern and western America would add only a candle’s light to the midday sun. Those regions remain in their original state, unexplored and undisturbed by us or by others on our behalf. The mammoth may still exist there as well as it once existed where its bones are now found. If it is carnivorous, as some anatomists have conjectured and the Indians affirm, its early retreat may be explained by the destruction of wild game. That destruction begins as soon as the Indians establish trade with us and hunt for skins with which to buy matchcoats, hatchets, and firearms.

There remain the buffalo, red deer, fallow deer, wolf, roe, glutton, wild cat, monax, vison, hedgehog, marten, and water rat. We lack sufficient evidence to compare their sizes. Buffon and D’Aubenton do not appear to have measured, weighed, or seen the American animals. Some travelers say that some of them are smaller than their European counterparts. But who were these travelers? Were they like the people who have made the other three quarters of the world known to us? Was natural history the object of their travels? Did they measure or weigh the animals, or judge by sight, perhaps even by report alone? Did they know the animals of their own country with which they undertook to compare them? Have they not often mistaken one species for another? Honest answers would probably diminish their authority too much for it to support a hypothesis.

Buffon’s own work shows how unready we are for an accurate comparison. What his first accounts would have led us to believe about the sizes of some animals differs greatly from what his later information shows. His candor deserves the highest praise. One sentence of his book will do him lasting honor: “I value a person who corrects an error of mine as much as one who teaches me a truth, because a corrected error is, in fact, a truth.” He seems at first to have thought that the Cabiai he examined was nearly grown: “It was not yet quite adult.” It weighed only 46½ pounds. He later found that these animals, when fully grown, weigh 100 pounds. From a jaguar said to be two years old and weighing only 16 pounds 12 ounces, he had supposed that, when fully grown, it would be no larger than a medium-sized dog. A later account puts its weight at 200 pounds. Further information will doubtless bring further corrections. The wonder is how little, rather than how much, remains to be corrected in so great a work.

The result is that, of 26 quadrupeds common to the two countries, seven are said to be larger in America, seven equal in size, and 12 insufficiently examined. The first table therefore challenges the first part of the assertion that American animals common to both countries are the smaller ones, “and without any exception.” The assertion cannot stand in the full breadth in which its author made it, and probably not strongly enough to establish a distinction between the two countries.

The second table arranges animals found in only one of the two countries. Buffon observes that the tapir, the elephant of America, is only the size of a small cow. To continue the comparison, I add that the wild boar, the elephant of Europe, is little more than half that size. I have listed the elk with round or cylindrical horns as an animal peculiar to America. I have seen many of these elk and still more of their antlers. On the best information, I can say that they were once plentiful in Virginia and still exist here in smaller numbers. I have never learned that the palmated kind has been seen here at all. I suppose it is confined to more northern latitudes.[1]

I have listed our hare or rabbit as peculiar to America because I believe it differs from both European animals bearing those names. I therefore call it by its Algonquin name, Whabus, to distinguish it from them. Kalm agrees. I have listed the squirrels according to our own knowledge, gained from seeing them daily, because I cannot reconcile that knowledge with the European names and descriptions. I have heard of other species, but have never seen them myself. These, I think, are the only ways in which I have departed from Buffon in constructing the table. I use his work as my foundation because I consider him the best informed naturalist who has written.

The result is that 18 quadrupeds are peculiar to Europe and more than four times as many, namely 74, are peculiar to America. The first of these 74, the tapir, weighs more than one animal from every European species in the column combined. Buffon says the tapir is the size of a zebu or small cow. He measured a zebu at 5 feet 7 inches from muzzle to root of tail and 5 feet 1 inch around the body behind the forelegs. A bull measured in the same way was 6 feet 9 inches long and 5 feet 2 inches around, and weighed 600 pounds. The zebu, and therefore the tapir, would weigh about 500 pounds. One animal from every species peculiar to Europe would probably weigh less than 400 pounds in total. These measurements and weights are French. The second table thus disproves the second part of the assertion, that animals peculiar to the New World are on a smaller scale, insofar as European animals were offered in support of it. It also directly opposes the theory that an animal’s size depends on heat and moisture.

The third table includes only quadrupeds domesticated in both countries. Some of these animals have indeed become smaller than their original stock in parts of America, for an obvious reason. In a sparsely populated country, forests and unused fields provide enough food to keep a farmer’s domestic animals in passable condition, with little help from him even in the hardest and scarcest season. It is more convenient for him to accept them in that condition than to maintain their size through costly labor and feeding. If this poor diet makes them smaller, it does no more than the poor soil or poor owners do in parts of Europe where animals receive equally scant food. The same cause has the same effect on either side of the globe. We would therefore violate the philosophical rule of assigning like effects to like causes if we attributed their smaller size in America to weakness or inconsistency in nature’s operations.

Where necessity or curiosity has led Americans to give animals as much care and nourishment as they receive in Europe, horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs grow as large on one continent as on the other. There are well-attested instances of people here importing good breeding animals from England and, with care, increasing their size over several years. A fair comparison cannot rely on animals judged to be of average size, since an error in judging that average would alter the result. D’Aubenton, for example, considers a horse 4 feet 5 inches high and weighing 400 French pounds, equal to 4 feet 8.6 inches and 436 English pounds, a medium-sized horse. In America it would be considered small. We must therefore look to the extremes. The same anatomist dissected a horse 5 feet 9 inches high in French measure, equal to 6 feet 1.7 inches in English measure. This is nearly six inches taller than any horse I have seen. If I had seen the largest horses in America, we would have to conclude either that ours had diminished or that we had bred them from a smaller stock.

In Connecticut and Rhode Island, where the climate favors grass, bullocks have been slaughtered with net weights of 2,500, 2,200, and 2,100 pounds; bullocks weighing 1,800 pounds have been common. In Williamsburg in April 1769, I saw a hog weigh 1,050 pounds after its blood, bowels, and hair had been removed. Before it was killed, an attempt was made to weigh it with steelyards graduated to 1,200 pounds, but it weighed more. Yet it was probably fewer than 50 generations removed from European stock. I have reliable information about another hog that weighed 1,100 pounds gross.

Asses have received even less care than any other domestic animal in America. They are neither fed nor housed even in the harshest season, yet they are larger than those D’Aubenton measured at 3 feet 7¼ inches, 3 feet 4 inches, and 3 feet 2½ inches, the last weighing only 215.8 pounds. I suppose the same neglect in Europe produced these sizes, just as it has diminished asses here. Where they have been cared for in Europe, they have grown nearly as large as horses, through good food and shelter rather than the heat and dryness of the climate.

Goats, too, have received little care in America. Yet they breed readily here, bearing young two or three times a year and producing from one to five kids at a birth. Buffon recognized that America has the advantage in this respect. I cannot say what their greatest weights are. A large sheep here weighs 100 pounds; D’Aubenton calls a ram weighing 62 pounds medium-sized. No one person has enough information to state the greatest sizes attained by these and the other domestic animals of America. The known weights given in the preceding third table nevertheless provide probable grounds for concluding that, with equal food and care, the American climate will preserve domestic breeds as large as the European stock from which they came. Buffon’s third assertion, that domestic animals degenerate because of the American climate, is thus probably as wrong as his first two assertions certainly are.

The final part of his assertion, that America has comparatively few species of quadrupeds, is shown to be wrong by the tables taken together. They show 100 species native to America. Buffon supposes that about twice that number exist throughout the world. Europe, Asia, and Africa furnish, say, 126 species: the 26 common to Europe and America, plus about 100 not found in America at all. American species therefore stand to those of the rest of the earth as 100 to 126, or 4 to 5. Since the rest of the earth is twice the extent of America, the proportion by area would have been only 4 to 8.

So far I have considered this hypothesis only as it applies to animals other than humans, and have not extended it to the people of America, whether Indigenous or transplanted. Buffon believes the former are no exception. He writes:

“Although the native of the New World is nearly the same height as the man of our world, that is not enough to make him an exception to the general diminishment of living nature throughout that continent. He is weak and small in the organs of generation; he has neither body hair nor beard, and no ardor for his female. Though lighter on his feet than the European because he is more accustomed to running, he is much less strong in body. He is also far less sensitive, yet more fearful and more cowardly. He has no liveliness or activity of mind. His bodily activity is less an exercise or voluntary movement than a necessity caused by need. Take away hunger and thirst, and you destroy the active principle of all his movements: he will remain stupidly at rest, standing or lying down, for days at a time.

“We need look no further for the cause of the scattered lives of these people and their distance from society. The most precious spark of nature’s fire has been denied them. They lack ardor for their females and, consequently, love for their fellows. Knowing none of the strongest and tenderest attachment, their other feelings of this kind are cold and languid. They love their parents and children weakly. The closest society of all, that of a single family, therefore has only weak ties among them; society between one family and another has none at all. Thus there is no union, no republic, no social state. The physical character of love determines their morals and customs: their hearts are frozen, their society cold, and their rule harsh.

“They regard their women only as laboring servants or beasts of burden, loading them without restraint with the spoils of the hunt and forcing them, without pity or gratitude, to do work often beyond their strength. They have few children and take little care of them. Everything bears the mark of their first defect. They are indifferent because they have little sexual power, and this indifference toward the opposite sex is the original blemish that blights nature, prevents it from flourishing and, by destroying the seeds of life, cuts off the root of society. Man, then, is no exception here. By denying him the powers of love, nature has treated him worse and diminished him more than any animal.”

An afflicting picture indeed, and one that, for the honor of human nature, I am glad to believe has no original. I know nothing of the Indigenous people of South America, for I would not call what I have learned from the fables published about them knowledge. I believe those accounts are as true as Aesop’s fables. I base this belief on what I have seen of people, white, Indigenous and Black, and on what has been written about them by enlightened authors writing among enlightened people.

The Indigenous people of North America are nearer to us. I can speak of them partly from my own knowledge, but more from the accounts of others better acquainted with them, whose truthfulness and judgment I trust. On that basis I can say, contrary to Buffon’s account, that an Indigenous man is neither less ardent nor less capable with a woman than a white man living on the same diet and taking the same exercise. He is brave when an undertaking calls for bravery. His education makes honor consist in destroying an enemy by strategy while keeping himself unharmed; or perhaps nature teaches him this, while education teaches us to honor force more than finesse. Ariosto’s lines express the latter preference:

Rodomonte alone scorns to come
Except where the way is least secure.

He will defend himself against a host of enemies, always choosing death rather than surrender, even to whites whom he knows would treat him well.[2] In other circumstances too, he meets death with more deliberation and endures torture with a firmness scarcely known even to religious enthusiasm among us. He is affectionate toward his children, attentive to them and indulgent in the extreme. His affections embrace his other relations, weakening from circle to circle as they move farther from the center, just as ours do. His friendships are strong and faithful to the utmost extremity.[3] His feelings are keen: even warriors weep most bitterly at the loss of their children, though they generally try to appear above human events. His mind is as lively and active as ours in the same circumstances, as his eagerness for hunting and games of chance shows.

The women are subjected to unjust drudgery. I believe this happens among every people in a state of barbarism. Among such people, force is law, and the stronger sex therefore imposes on the weaker. Civilization alone restores women to the enjoyment of their natural equality. It first teaches us to subdue selfish passions and to respect in others the rights we value in ourselves. If we lived in equal barbarism, our women would be equally burdened. Indigenous men are less strong than ours, but their women are stronger than ours, for the same evident reason: our men and their women are accustomed to labor and shaped by it. In both peoples, the sex allowed the most ease is the least athletic. An Indigenous man has a small hand and wrist for the same reason that a sailor has large, strong arms and shoulders, and a porter large, strong legs and thighs.

They raise fewer children than we do. The causes lie in circumstances, not in a difference of nature. Women frequently accompany the men on hunting and war parties, where childbearing becomes extremely inconvenient. It is therefore said that they have learned to procure abortions with a plant, which can even prevent conception for a considerable time afterward. On these expeditions they face many dangers, excessive exertion and extreme hunger. Even at home, for part of every year the nation depends on what it can gather from the forest for food; in other words, it experiences a famine every year. Among all animals, if the female is badly fed or has no food, her young perish. If male and female alike lack food, reproduction becomes less active and less productive. Want and danger are obstacles nature places in the way of wild animals multiplying beyond certain bounds. For Indigenous people, labor and voluntary abortion are added to them. It is no wonder, then, that their numbers increase less than ours. Where food is supplied regularly, a single farm will show more cattle than a whole country of forests can show buffalo.

The same Indigenous women, when married to white traders who feed them and their children plentifully and regularly, spare them excessive drudgery, and keep them settled and out of danger, bear and raise as many children as white women. Some in these circumstances have raised a dozen children. The inhuman practice of enslaving Indigenous people once prevailed in this country. It is well known here that Indigenous women held in slavery bore and raised families as numerous as those of the white and Black people among whom they lived.

It has been said that Indigenous people have less hair than whites except on their heads, but reliable proof of this is scarcely possible. They consider body hair disgraceful, saying it makes them resemble hogs, and pluck it out as soon as it appears. Traders who marry Indigenous women and persuade them to stop doing this say that nature has given them as much hair as white women. Even if the claim about body hair is true, the conclusion drawn from it does not necessarily follow. Black people have distinctly less hair than whites, yet they are more ardent.

If cold and moisture are nature’s means of diminishing animal species, how does she suddenly suspend their action on the body of the man of the New World, whom Buffon acknowledges to be “nearly the same height as the man of our world,” while allowing them to affect his mental faculties? How has this “combination of the elements and other physical causes, so contrary to the enlargement of animal nature in this New World, these obstacles to the development and formation of great germs” been arrested long enough for the human body to reach its proper size? By what inconceivable process has its action been directed at the mind alone?

To judge whether this is true and fairly estimate Indigenous people’s genius and mental powers, we need more facts. We must also make substantial allowance for circumstances that call forth only particular talents. Once we do, we will probably find that their minds, like their bodies, are formed on the same pattern as Homo sapiens Europaeus. Because the principles of their society forbid compulsion, people must be led to duty and enterprise through personal influence and persuasion. Eloquence in council, and bravery and skill in war, thus become the foundations of standing among them. They direct all their faculties toward acquiring these abilities. We have abundant proof of their bravery and skill in war because we have been the people against whom they exercised them. We have fewer examples of their excellence in oratory because it is displayed chiefly in their own councils. Some examples, however, are of outstanding brilliance.

I challenge the speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero and any greater orator Europe may have produced to yield a single passage superior to the speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore when he was governor of Virginia. I offer it as evidence of Indigenous talent in oratory, first explaining what happened so that it may be understood.

In the spring of 1774, two Shawnee men robbed and murdered an inhabitant of the Virginia frontier. The neighboring whites, as was their custom, undertook to punish the outrage themselves. Colonel Cresap, a man infamous for the many murders he had committed against those much-injured people, gathered a party and went down the Kanawha in search of vengeance. A canoe carrying women and children, with only one man, happened to approach from the opposite shore. Its occupants were unarmed and did not expect a hostile attack from whites. Cresap and his party hid on the riverbank. The moment the canoe reached shore, they chose their targets and killed every person in it with a single volley. They were Logan’s family. He had long been known as a friend of the whites, but this unworthy return provoked him to vengeance. He distinguished himself in the war that followed.

That autumn, the assembled Shawnees, Mingoes and Delawares fought a decisive battle against a detachment of Virginia militia at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. The Indigenous forces were defeated and sought peace. Logan, however, refused to appear among those asking for it. Lest his absence make the proposed treaty seem insincere, he sent the following speech by messenger to Lord Dunmore:

“I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan’s cabin hungry and Logan did not give him meat; if ever he came cold and naked and Logan did not clothe him. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites that my countrymen pointed as they passed and said, ‘Logan is the friend of white men.’ I had even thought of living with you, but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. Not a drop of my blood runs in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it; I have killed many; I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”

Before we condemn the Indigenous people of this continent as lacking genius, we must consider that writing has not yet been introduced among them. It would be unfair to compare them as they are now with Europeans north of the Alps when Roman armies and arts first crossed those mountains. Those parts of Europe were then teeming with people; numbers produce emulation and multiply opportunities for improvement, and one improvement leads to another. Yet how many good poets, able mathematicians, or great inventors in the arts or sciences had northern Europe produced by then? Sixteen more centuries passed before a Newton could emerge.

I do not mean to deny that there are varieties among human beings, distinguished by powers of both body and mind. I believe there are, as I observe among other animals. I mean only to raise a doubt: do the size and abilities of animals depend on which side of the Atlantic grows their food or supplies the elements composing their bodies? Has nature taken the side of one shore against the other? I suspect that support for this theory has displayed more eloquence than sound reasoning, and that a glowing pen has seduced judgment. I give every tribute of honor and esteem to the celebrated zoologist who has added, and continues to add, so many valuable things to science. Yet I must ask whether, in this instance, he has also nurtured an error by lending it, for a moment, his vivid imagination and bewitching language. See Appendix 1, observation 4.

Buffon has carried this new theory of nature’s tendency to diminish her productions on this side of the Atlantic as far as Indigenous people. The Abbé Raynal extended it to whites transplanted from Europe. “One must be astonished,” he says, “that America has not yet produced a good poet, an able mathematician, or a person of genius in even one art or science.”

“America has not yet produced a good poet.” When we have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before producing Homer, the Romans before Virgil, the French before Racine and Voltaire, or the English before Shakespeare and Milton, we can inquire, if this reproach still holds, what unfavorable causes have kept the other European countries and other parts of the world from placing any names on the roll of poets. Indeed, has the world yet produced more than two poets acknowledged as such by all nations? Only an English reader delights in Milton, an Italian in Tasso, a French reader in La Henriade, or a Portuguese reader in Camouens. Homer and Virgil, however, have delighted every age and nation. Those who can read their originals do so with enthusiasm; those who cannot read them in translation.

But Raynal also says America has produced neither “an able mathematician” nor “a person of genius in even one art or science.” In war we have produced Washington, whose memory will be revered as long as liberty has supporters. His name will outlast time and take its rightful place among the world’s most celebrated figures long after that wretched philosophy is forgotten which would have counted him among nature’s degeneracies. In physics we have produced Franklin. No one living has made more important discoveries or contributed more numerous or ingenious explanations of natural phenomena. We have considered Rittenhouse second to no living astronomer, and first in genius because he taught himself. As a maker of instruments, he has given as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has seen. He has not made a world, but through imitation he has come nearer its Maker than any man who has lived since creation. There are various ways of keeping truth out of sight: Rittenhouse’s model of the planetary system has been given the borrowed name “orrery,” while the quadrant invented by Godfrey, another American, and used by European nations to navigate the globe, is called Hadley’s quadrant.

As in physics and war, so in government, oratory, painting and sculpture, we could show that America, though only a child of yesterday, has already given hopeful signs of genius. They appear both in the higher arts, which arouse humanity’s best feelings, call people to action, establish their freedom and lead them to happiness, and in the lesser arts, which serve only to amuse. We therefore believe the reproach is as unjust as it is unkind, and that America contributes its full share of the geniuses of the present age.

Compare America with countries where genius is most cultivated, where artists find the best models and where there is the most support for learning, such as France and England. The United States have three million inhabitants, France twenty million and the British Isles ten million. We produce a Washington, a Franklin and a Rittenhouse. France should therefore have about six people equally eminent in each of these fields, and Great Britain about three. France may well have them. We are only beginning to know her, and what we have learned gives us a high opinion of her people’s genius. To single out Voltaire, Buffon, the group of Encyclopedists or Raynal himself would slight too many others. We have reason to believe, therefore, that France can produce her full share of genius.

The present war has cut off communication with Great Britain for so long that we cannot fairly assess the state of science there. The spirit in which she wages war is the only example before us, and it does not seem a true offspring of either science or civilization. The sun of her glory is rapidly setting. Her philosophy has crossed the Channel and her freedom the Atlantic; she herself seems to be approaching a fearful dissolution whose outcome no human foresight can discern.[4]

Having sketched our minerals, plants, and quadrupeds, I was led by a proud theory to compare the last with those of Europe and to extend the comparison to the people of America, both Indigenous and immigrant. I will now turn to the remaining subjects of this query.

Catesby has described between ninety and a hundred of our birds. His drawings show their form and posture better than their coloring, which is generally too strong. They are as follows.

Birds of Virginia

Besides these, we have the following birds:

There are doubtless many others that have not yet been described and classified.

To this catalogue of our native animals I will add a brief account of an anomaly of nature sometimes occurring among Black people brought from Africa. Though themselves Black, they have in rare instances had white children, called albinos. I have known four myself and have reliable accounts of three others. All seven have a pallid, deathly white complexion, without red coloring or colored spots or streaks. Their hair is the same white, short, coarse, and curled like that of other Black people. All are well formed, strong, healthy, and sound in their senses except for sight. They were born to parents who had no white ancestry.

Three of these albinos were sisters and had two other full sisters who were Black. The youngest of the three was killed by lightning at twelve. The eldest died at about twenty-seven, in childbirth with her second child. The middle sister is now alive and healthy. She and the eldest each had children by a Black man, and those children were Black. The sisters are unusually shrewd, quick to understand and to reply. Their eyes are in constant trembling motion, are very weak, and are greatly affected by the sun; but they see better at night than we do. They are the property of Colonel Skipwith of Cumberland.

The fourth is a Black woman whose parents came from Guinea and had three other children of their own color. She has freckles, and her eyesight is so weak that she must wear a bonnet in summer; but she sees better at night than by day. She had an albino child by a Black man. The child died after a few weeks. They were the property of Colonel Carter of Albemarle.

A sixth instance is a woman who is the property of a Mr. Butler near Petersburg. She is stout and robust and has a jet-black daughter by a Black man. I have no information about her eyesight. The seventh is a man belonging to a Mr. Lee of Cumberland. His eyes tremble and are weak. He is tall and now advanced in years. He is the only male albino of whom I have learned.

Whatever causes the condition of the skin or its coloring matter that produces this change, it seems more common in females than males. I may also mention a Black man I know who was born Black to Black parents. A white spot appeared on his chin when he was a boy. It continued to grow until, by the time he was a man, it covered his chin, lips, one cheek, the lower jaw, and the neck on that side. It is the white of an albino, without any red, and has remained unchanged for several years. He is robust and healthy, and the change in color was accompanied by no perceptible illness, either general or local.

Nothing approaching a full description or collection of our fish and insects has been made. Catesby describes more of them than any other writer. Many also appear in Sir Hans Sloane’s account of Jamaica, being common to that country and ours.

The honeybee is not native to our continent. Marcgrave does mention a species of honeybee in Brazil, but it has no sting and is therefore different from ours, which closely resembles the European bee. The Indigenous people share our tradition that it was brought from Europe, though we do not know when or by whom. Bees have generally spread into the country a little ahead of white settlers. Indigenous people therefore call them the white man’s fly and regard their approach as a sign that white settlements are approaching.

This raises a question: How far north have these insects been found? I infer that they are unknown in Lapland from Scheffer’s report that Laplanders eat pine bark, prepared in a certain way, in place of foods sweetened with sugar: “They eat this instead of things sweetened with sugar.” Certainly, if they had honey, it would be a better substitute for sugar than any preparation of pine bark. Kalm tells us that the honeybee cannot survive the winter in Canada. Bees thus provide further proof of the remarkable fact first observed by the Count de Buffon, which has shed so much light on natural history: no animals are found on both continents except those able to withstand the cold of the regions where the continents probably join.

Jefferson’s Notes

1. The Elk

The descriptions by Theodat, Denys, and La Hontan cited by Buffon support the supposition that the flat-horned elk lives in northern America. It has not, however, extended to our latitudes. Conversely, I have never learned that the round-horned elk has been seen farther north than the Hudson River. In its general character it resembles the flat-horned elk. Compared with a deer, it is much larger; its ears are proportionately longer, broader, and thicker; its hair is much longer; and its neck and tail are shorter. It has a dewlap before the breast (caruncula gutturalis Linnæi) and often, if not always, a white spot about a foot across on the hindquarters around the tail. It trots, and its hooves rattle as it moves. Its decisive distinction is that its antlers are round and pointed, rather than palmated. This is the animal Catesby described as Cervus major Americanus, the stag of America. But it differs from the deer as completely as the palmated elk differs from the fallow deer. It seems to stand in the same relation to the palmated elk as the red deer does to the fallow deer. It has been plentiful in Virginia. To my knowledge it was seen east of the Blue Ridge after 1765; it is now common beyond those mountains. It has often been brought to us and tamed, and many people possess its antlers. I would designate it Alces Americanus cornibus teretibus. Naturalists acquainted with the European renne and elk who visit northern America should carefully examine the animals called gray and black moose, caribou, orignal, and elk. Buffon has done what his available materials allowed to clear up the confusion caused by applying these names loosely. He reduces the animals to the renne and the flat-horned elk. From all the information I have collected, I strongly suspect that the names cover three, if not four, distinct species. I have seen skins of a moose and a caribou. They differ from each other, and from the skin of the round-horned elk, more than any two skins of different individuals of a wild species that I have seen. They differ in the color, length, and coarseness of the hair and in the size, texture, and markings of the skin. Perhaps there are (1) the moose, black and gray, the former said to be the male and the latter the female; (2) the caribou or renne; (3) the flat-horned elk or orignal; and (4) the round-horned elk. Even if the last, despite its close resemblance to the elk, proves to be the same as the Cerf d’Ardennes or the German Brandhirtz, the first three species will remain.

2. Ulloa’s Account of Indigenous Peoples

In a writer as judicious as Don Ulloa, to whom we owe our most precise information about South America, I did not expect to find assertions such as these: “The conquered Indigenous people are the most cowardly and fainthearted one can see. They make themselves appear innocent, humble themselves to the point of contempt, excuse their rash attack, and by their pleas and entreaties give certain proof of their faintheartedness. Either the histories of the Conquest describe their great deeds figuratively, or the character of these people is no longer what it was then. What is certain, however, is that the nations of the northern region remain as free as they always have been. No foreign prince has subjugated them, and they live under the same government and customs they have always had, with no reason to change their character. Yet among them we see the same thing as among the people of Peru and all South America, whether brought under rule or never subjected to it.” Ulloa acknowledges that authors who described the Indigenous people of South America before their enslavement portrayed them as brave. He therefore seems to have suspected that the cowardice he observed among their descendants might result from subjugation. But, supposing the Indigenous people of North America cowardly too, he concludes that the ancestors of South America’s Indigenous people were likewise cowardly, and that the earlier authors gave fiction for truth. He probably did not know the people of North America himself and formed his opinion by hearsay. Many French, English and American people know them well. Had he asked any of them, they would have told him that no Indigenous person has been known to beg for his life when captured by enemies. On the contrary, he courts death with every possible insult and provocation. Ulloa’s reasoning would then have been reversed: “Since the Indigenous people of North America are now brave, and authors tell us that the ancestors of South America’s Indigenous people were brave too, the cowardice of their descendants must be the effect of subjugation and ill treatment.” Ulloa himself observes that “the workshops destroy them through the inhumanity with which they are treated.”

3. Colonel Byrd and Silouee

A remarkable example was the case of the late Colonel Byrd, who was sent to conduct business with the Cherokee nation. Some unruly people on our side had just killed one or two Cherokees. Their council therefore proposed putting Byrd to death in revenge. A chief named Silouee had become acquainted and friendly with Byrd on an earlier occasion. Every night he came to Byrd’s tent and told him not to be afraid: they would not kill him. After many days of deliberation, however, the council decided, contrary to Silouee’s expectation, that Byrd should die, and sent warriors to carry out the sentence. Silouee accompanied them. When they entered the tent, he placed himself between them and Byrd and said, “This man is my friend. Before you reach him, you must kill me.” The warriors returned, and the council respected his principle enough to reverse its decision.

4. Raynal’s Revised Judgment of America

In a later edition of his work, Raynal withdrew his criticism of the part of the New World inhabited by the Federal Americans but left it in place for the other parts. North America has always been more accessible to strangers than South America. If he was mistaken about the former, he may also be mistaken about the latter. The faint reports that reach us from South America show only that its inhabitants live under the combined weight of slavery, superstition and ignorance. Whenever they can rise under that weight and show themselves to the rest of the world, they will probably show that they are like the rest of the world. We do not yet have sufficient evidence that South America has more lakes and fogs than other parts of the earth. Nor do we know what effect these would have on the human mind. Spaniards and Portuguese have visited that country chiefly, and almost exclusively. Coming from a part of the Old World whose soil and climate are remarkably dry, they imagined there were more lakes and fogs in South America than in Europe. An inhabitant of Ireland, Sweden or Finland would have formed the opposite opinion. Had South America been discovered and settled by people from a marshy country, it would probably have been described as much drier than the Old World. Patiently pursuing facts, then cautiously combining and comparing them, is the labor the Maker has assigned to anyone who wishes to gain sure knowledge.

What can be reported that may advance human knowledge?

Within the scope of this question, I presume it will be useful to offer some data for estimating Virginia’s climate. Journals recording rainfall and temperature are lengthy, confusing, and too detailed to give a clear general picture. I have therefore taken five years of observations, from 1772 to 1777, made in Williamsburg and its neighborhood. I have reduced them to monthly averages in the following tables and added an analysis of the winds observed during the same period.

For each month, I added its rainfall measurements over the whole period and calculated an average. For each day, I separately added the coolest and warmest readings from the years observed, forming averages for that day’s greatest cold and heat. I then used the daily averages to form a general average for the month. Wind direction was observed two or three times a day. In January, for example, there were 337 such observations over the whole period: 73 winds came from the north, 47 from the northeast, and so on. The tables thus show the usual proportion of each wind by month. Over the whole year there were 3,698 observations, of which 611 recorded a north wind and 558 a northeast wind, and so on.

The tables give us an annual average of 47 inches of rain, considerably more than usually falls in Europe. Yet the information I have gathered leads me to suppose that we have a much greater proportion of sunshine. Perhaps the middle parts of Europe have twice as many cloudy days as the United States. I specify the middle parts because my information does not extend to Europe’s northern or southern regions.

A large country cannot be expected to have the same climate everywhere. Remarkably, traveling west along the same latitude brings colder weather, much as traveling north does. This continues up to the summit of the Alleghenies, the highest land between the ocean and the Mississippi. Descending from there toward the Mississippi at the same latitude, the change reverses. If travelers are to be believed, the climate becomes warmer than it is at the same latitude by the sea. Their account is supported by plants and animals that live and multiply there naturally but do not do so on our coast. Catalpas grow wild along the Mississippi as far north as latitude 37°, and reeds as far as 38°. Parakeets even spend the winter on the Scioto at latitude 39°. In the summer of 1779, the thermometer stood at 90° at Monticello and 96° at Williamsburg, but at 110° at Kaskaskia. Perhaps reflection from the mountain overlooking that village on the north contributed somewhat to this heat.

The temperature difference between the coast or Chesapeake Bay and the Alleghenies has not been determined. Contemporary observations at Williamsburg or nearby and at Monticello offer some basis for estimating it. Monticello stands where the Rivanna cuts through the easternmost mountain ridge, called the Southwest Mountains. These observations put the average difference between Williamsburg and those nearest mountains at 6⅛ degrees Fahrenheit. Some allowance must be made for their difference in latitude: Monticello is at 38° 8′ 17″, or 52′ 22″ north of Williamsburg. Contemporary observations made over five to six weeks found that the barometer’s mercury stood, on average and with almost no change in the difference, .784 inch lower at Monticello. The atmosphere there was lighter by that amount, about 1/37 of its whole weight. Monticello’s hill, however, rises 500 feet vertically above the river at its base. Its nearly central position between our northern and southern boundaries, and between the bay and the Alleghenies, may make it the best indication of our climate’s average temperature. Williamsburg is much too close to the southeastern corner to give a fair idea of our general temperature.

The prevailing winds show a more striking difference. The next table compares Williamsburg with Monticello. I reduced nine months of observations at Monticello to four principal directions: northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. These directions run across or along our coast, mountains, and rivers. I similarly reduced a proportionate selection of 421 Williamsburg observations from each direction in the preceding table.

Southwest winds prevail about equally at both places. On the coast the northeast wind comes next, while in the mountains the northwest wind predominates. These two winds feel very different and are different in fact. The northeast wind carries so much vapor that salt makers find their crystals will not form while it blows. It brings a distressing chill and feels heavy and oppressive to the spirits. The northwest wind is dry, cooling, elastic, and invigorating. Eastern and southeastern breezes generally arrive in the afternoon. Within living memory they have advanced noticeably inland. Formerly they did not reach far beyond Williamsburg; now they are frequent at Richmond and occasionally reach the mountains. They deposit most of their moisture before getting that far. As more land is cleared, they will probably extend farther west.

In the temperate and warm months, we often encounter bodies of warm air outdoors. They pass in two or three seconds, too quickly for even the most sensitive thermometer to register their temperature. Judging only by how they feel, I think their heat approaches that of the human body; some may be a little hotter. They are about 20 or 30 feet across horizontally. We have no experience of their height, but they are probably rounded masses carried or rolled along by the wind. Where do they come from, and how are they formed? They cannot be attributed to volcanoes, for we have none. They do not occur in winter, when farmers light large fires to clear their land. Nor are they confined to spring, when fires cross entire counties and consume fallen leaves. They are too frequent and widespread to be attributed to accidental fires. I am persuaded that their cause lies in the atmosphere itself. The only constant circumstances I know that might help us investigate it are dry air, a temperature at least as warm as spring or autumn, and a moderate wind. These bodies of warm air occur most often around sunset and rarely in the middle of the day. I do not recall ever encountering one in the morning.

The variation in our atmosphere’s weight, as shown by the barometer, is less than two inches of mercury. During twelve months of observation at Williamsburg, the extremes were 29 and 30.86 inches, a difference of 1.86 inches. During nine months at Monticello they were 28.48 and 29.69 inches, a variation of 1.21 inches. A gentleman who has observed his barometer for many years assures me it has never varied by two inches. Contemporary observations at Monticello and Williamsburg showed that changes in air pressure occurred together and corresponded at the two places.

Our changes from heat to cold and back again are sudden and great. The mercury in a Fahrenheit thermometer has been known to fall from 92° to 47° in thirteen hours. The earlier table of average temperatures should not mislead on this point: it records each month’s ordinary heat and cold, not extraordinary extremes. At Williamsburg in August 1766, the Fahrenheit thermometer reached 98°, corresponding to 29⅓° Réaumur. In January 1780, at the same place, it fell to 6° Fahrenheit, corresponding to 11½° below zero Réaumur. I believe these are nearly the extremes of heat and cold in that part of the country. By comparison, at Paris the Réaumur thermometer reached 30½° above zero in 1753 and 16° below zero in 1776. Paris’s extremes are therefore greater than those of Williamsburg, which is in Virginia’s hottest part.

The Williamsburg cold reading may certainly be considered an extreme. At that time the York River froze over at Yorktown, and people walked across it. This proves it was colder there than during the winter of 1740–1741, usually called the cold winter, when the river did not freeze over at that place. In the same season of 1780, Chesapeake Bay was solid from its head to the mouth of the Potomac. At Annapolis, where the nearest points of land are 5¼ miles apart, ice five to seven inches thick extended all the way across, and loaded carriages traveled over it. Our extremes of 6° and 98° Fahrenheit were distressing and were thought to test the limits of human endurance considerably. A Siberian, however, would have regarded them as scarcely a perceptible variation. We are told that at Jenniseitz in Siberia, latitude 58° 27′, the cold in 1735 brought the Fahrenheit thermometer to 126° below zero. Inhabitants of the same country spend two hours, two or three times a week, in stove rooms whose atmosphere raises the mercury to 135° above zero. Recent experiments show that a human body can exist in rooms heated to 140° Réaumur, equal to 347° Fahrenheit and 135° above boiling water. The hottest time of day is about four in the afternoon; dawn is the coldest.

The arrival of frost in autumn and its departure in spring do not seem to depend simply on the degree of cold, much less on the air reaching the freezing point. White frosts frequently occur when the thermometer stands at 47°. They have killed young corn plants at 48° and have been observed at 54°. Black frost and even ice have occurred at 38½°, which is 6½ degrees above freezing. Other circumstances must combine with cold to produce frost. On the higher parts of mountains, where it is colder than on the plains below, frosts appear considerably later in autumn and end sooner in spring. I have known frosts severe enough to kill hickory trees around Monticello without harming tender fruit blossoms then blooming on the mountain’s summit and upper slopes. In the 40 years since it was settled, there have been only two general losses of fruit there. In the surrounding country, fruit has escaped frost only twice in the last seven years. Tobacco plants growing from roots cut back in summer are often still green here at Christmas.

This protection from frost is undoubtedly connected with the absence of dew on the mountains. Twelve years of observation allow me to say with certainty that dew is very rare on their higher parts: throughout those summers, I have scarcely seen unequivocal evidence of it there. Severe winter frosts show that the region of dew then extends above the mountaintops. In summer, however, the vapors have certainly become too thin by the time they reach that height to settle as dew after sunset.

The weevil has not yet climbed the high mountains.

Some may form a more satisfactory estimate of our climate from the plants that grow here, though our severest cold can kill them. These include the fig, pomegranate, artichoke, and European walnut. Lettuce and endive need no shelter in mild winters, though they generally require a light covering. I do not know whether the absence of long moss, reed, myrtle, swamp laurel, holly, and cypress from the upper country is caused by greater cold, or whether any degree of cold has ever killed them in the lower country. An aloe survived outdoors at Williamsburg through the severe winter of 1779–1780.

Our climate is nevertheless changing perceptibly. Both heat and cold have become much more moderate within the memory of middle-aged people. Snow falls less often and less deeply. Below the mountains it seldom remains for more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely for a week. People remember when snow was frequent, deep, and long-lasting. Older people tell me the ground used to be snow-covered for about three months each year. Rivers that then seldom failed to freeze during winter scarcely ever freeze now. This change has brought an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold in spring, often fatal to fruit. From 1741 to 1769, a period of 28 years, frost never killed the fruit near Monticello. Steady snow kept the buds closed during intense cold until spring sunshine had gained enough strength both to melt the accumulated snow and to protect the developing buds against a return of cold. When all the winter snow melted together in spring, it produced the river floods common then and rare now.

Monticello’s position also affords a view of a phenomenon rare on land but frequent at sea. Sailors call it looming. Philosophy still trails the sailors: it has neither explained the phenomenon nor given it a name. Its chief effect is to make distant objects look larger, contrary to the general rule of vision under which they look smaller. At Yorktown, where the view across the water to the east has no visible end, I knew of a distant canoe carrying three men being mistaken for a three-masted ship. I know little of how looming appears at sea, but it is familiar at Monticello.

A solitary mountain about 40 miles to the south normally appears from Monticello as a regular cone. Through looming, it sometimes sinks almost entirely into the horizon. At other times it rises sharper and higher, becomes hemispherical, or appears with vertical sides and a flat top as broad as its base. It takes on the strangest shapes, perhaps all in a single morning. The Blue Ridge comes into view about 100 miles to the northeast, approaches in a direct line to within 20 miles, and continues southwest. Looming begins to appear on those mountains at a distance of about 50 miles and continues beyond that for as far as they can be seen. I have noticed no particular atmospheric pressure, moisture, or temperature necessary to produce it. The only constant circumstances are that it appears in the morning and affects objects at least 40 or 50 miles away. In the latter respect, if not in both, it differs from looming on water. Refraction cannot explain this transformation. Refraction changes the proportions of length and breadth, or base and height, while preserving the general outline. It may make a circle look elliptical or raise or lower a cone. But no law of refraction yet developed can make a circle look square or a cone look like a sphere.

How many inhabitants does Virginia have?

The following table records people brought to establish our colony in its infancy and censuses taken at different times. I have drawn these figures from historians and public records as fully as opportunity and time have allowed. Successive lines under one year represent successive times within that year. The two census columns distinguish counts of all inhabitants from counts of tithables alone. Here, tithables include free males over 16 and enslaved people of both sexes over 16. A fuller examination of our records would improve this history of our population by supplying more intermediate counts.

These figures permit us to calculate our rate of increase with considerable precision. When the colony was small, wars, arrivals from abroad, and other chance circumstances made its growth irregular. By 1654, however, growth had become fairly uniform. Arrivals had largely ceased after the company’s dissolution, and the population had become too numerous for wars with Indigenous peoples to affect it appreciably. From 1654 to 1772, our tithables grew from 7,209 to 153,000. Over those 118 years, they doubled once every 27¼ years. The intermediate counts of 1700, 1748, and 1759 support the regularity of that growth. If the rate continues, we shall have between six and seven million inhabitants within 95 years. Suppose our country is eventually bounded by the meridian at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Within that boundary I have already estimated 64,491 square miles. There would then be 100 inhabitants per square mile, nearly the population density of the British Isles.

Here I ask leave to raise a doubt. Americans now wish to increase population rapidly by bringing in as many foreigners as possible. Is this sound policy? The proposed benefit is greater numbers. Suppose, only as an example, that Virginia could double its population in one year through arrivals from abroad, an increase greater than even the most hopeful advocate of immigration can reasonably expect. Starting with twice as many people would bring us to any given population only 27 years and 3 months sooner than starting with our present number. If we set four and a half million as a sufficient population for this state, reaching it would take 54½ years with an immediate doubling, but 81¾ years through natural increase, as the following table shows.

The first column gives intervals of 27¼ years. The second gives the population at each interval if we continue from our actual number; the third shows what it would be at the same times if we began with twice that number. I chose four and a half million only for illustration. Yet I am persuaded this exceeds the number that the country in question, with so much land that cannot be plowed, could clothe and feed without a substantial change in the quality of its inhabitants’ diet.

Should we not weigh possible disadvantages against the expected gain in numbers from bringing in foreigners? People joined in a society are happier when they agree as far as possible on matters they must handle together. Civil government is the sole reason for forming societies, and its administration must rest on common consent. Each form of government has its own principles. Ours are perhaps more distinctive than any other’s: they combine the freest principles of the English constitution with principles drawn from natural right and reason. Nothing is more opposed to them than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet we expect most newcomers to come from such monarchies. They will bring principles absorbed in childhood from the governments they leave. If they cast those principles off, they will replace them with unbounded license, passing as people often do from one extreme to the other. It would be a miracle if they stopped precisely at temperate liberty.

They will pass these principles and their languages to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share legislative power with us. They will put their spirit into our laws, bend their direction, and make them a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted whole. I might appeal to experience during our present conflict as support for these conjectures. Even if these outcomes are not certain, are they not possible and probable? Would it not be safer to wait patiently another 27 years and 3 months to reach whatever population we seek or expect? Might our government then be more united, peaceful, and durable? Suppose 20 million republican Americans were suddenly placed in France. What would become of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, and less strong, we may believe that adding half a million foreigners to our present population would have a similar effect here.

If foreigners come on their own, they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship. I question only the wisdom of attracting them with extraordinary inducements. My doubts do not extend to bringing in skilled craftspeople. That policy rests on different considerations. Spare no expense to obtain them. Eventually they will take up the plow and hoe, but meanwhile they will teach us something we do not know. Agriculture is different. Its indifferent state here is not due merely to a lack of knowledge: we have so much land that we can afford to waste it. In Europe, where labor is abundant, the aim is to get the most from the land. Here, where land is abundant, it is to get the most from labor.

I should explain how I arrived at the figure for 1782, since it came from an incomplete census. The explanation will also show the proportions of free and enslaved inhabitants. The following taxable items were reported that year:

No returns came from eight counties: Lincoln, Jefferson, Fayette, Monongalia, Yohogania, Ohio, Northampton, and York. To find the number of enslaved people who should have been reported in place of the 23,766 tithables, I rely on observations from an earlier census suggesting that those above and below age 16 were equal in number. Doubling 23,766 gives 47,532. Adding that to 211,698 gives 259,230 enslaved people of all ages and both sexes.

To estimate the free population, we again assume nearly equal numbers above and below 16. But the figure of 53,289 free males over 21 omits males between 16 and 21, so we must estimate them. An earlier examination showed that about one-third of our militia, comprising males between 16 and 50, were unmarried. Given how early people marry here, it will not be far wrong to suppose that the unmarried militiamen are those between 16 and 21. As many marry before 21 as remain unmarried beyond it. Men over 50, however, were not in the militia. We shall therefore suppose that the unmarried men, or those between 16 and 21, make up one-fourth of all males over 16. This gives the following calculation:

In the eight counties without returns, the militia numbered 3,161 in 1779 and 1780. We may therefore estimate their free inhabitants as follows:

For the enslaved population of those counties, the calculation is: as 284,208 is to 259,230, so 12,644 is to 11,532. Adding the third number to the first and the fourth to the second gives:

The 296,852 free inhabitants stand to the 270,762 enslaved people in a ratio of nearly 11 to 10. Under the mild treatment our enslaved people receive and their wholesome, though coarse, food, this blot on our country increases as fast as, or faster than, the white population. Under royal government we once obtained a law imposing a duty on the importation of enslaved people that nearly amounted to a prohibition. One inconsiderate assembly, acting under unusual circumstances, repealed it. The sovereign gladly approved that repeal. Later assemblies seldom met without trying some means of renewing the duty, but none could obtain royal assent. At the first session under republican government, the assembly passed a law permanently prohibiting the importation of enslaved people. This will in some measure check the growth of this great political and moral evil while our citizens’ minds may be maturing toward the complete emancipation of human nature.

What are the numbers and condition of the militia and regular troops, and what are they paid?

The following account of the militia comes from returns made in 1780 and 1781, except for counties marked with an asterisk, whose returns are somewhat older. The regional totals and the statewide total are those printed with the returns. The middle digit of Hampshire’s figure is uncertain.

On the tidewaters and in the same latitude: total 19,012

Whole militia of the state: 49,971.

Every able-bodied free man between 16 and 50 is enrolled in the militia. Each county’s militiamen form companies, and the companies form one or more battalions according to their number. Colonels and subordinate officers command them as in the regular service. Every county has a county lieutenant who commands its entire militia but holds only a colonel’s rank in the field. We have no standing general officers. Generals are appointed when an invasion or insurrection occurs, and their commissions end with that occasion. The governor heads both the military and civil authorities.

The law requires each militiaman to supply himself with the arms used by regular troops. Compliance has always been poor. The arms militiamen did possess have so often been requisitioned for the regular troops that the militia in the lower country is entirely disarmed. In the middle country, perhaps a fourth or fifth have the firearms they obtained to kill animals harmful to their farms. West of the Blue Ridge, they are generally armed with rifles.

Our militia and regular troops receive the same pay as Continental regulars. Our regular forces consist only of Continental troops and part of a battalion of state troops. Their condition changes so constantly that an account given today would be out of date a month from now. It is much the same as the condition of the other Continental troops, which is sufficiently well known.

What naval forces does Virginia have?

Before the present British invasion of this state under General Phillips, we had three vessels carrying 16 guns each, one carrying 14 guns, five small galleys, and two or three armed boats. Their crews were generally so inadequate that the vessels were seldom fit for service. Since the enemy took full possession of our rivers, I believe we have only a single armed boat left.

A description of the Indigenous peoples established in Virginia?

When the first lasting settlement of our colony was made in 1607, more than forty Indigenous tribes occupied the country from the coast to the mountains, and from the Patowmac to the southernmost waters of the James River. The Powhatans, Mannahoacs, and Monacans were the most powerful. The tribes between the coast and the falls of the rivers were friendly with one another and joined to the Powhatans as their common bond. Those between the falls and the mountains formed two confederacies. The tribes at the headwaters of the Patowmac and Rappahanoc joined the Mannahoacs; those on the upper James joined the Monacans. The Monacans and their allies were friendly with the Mannahoacs and theirs, and together they waged continual war against the Powhatans.

We are told that the Powhatans, Mannahoacs, and Monacans spoke languages so different that they needed interpreters to conduct business. We may therefore conjecture that this was not true of every tribe within each confederacy, and that each tribe probably spoke the language of the nation it had joined. We know this was so in many particular cases. Possibly there were once three distinct stocks. Over a long time, each multiplied and separated into many small societies.

This tendency to form small societies follows from their never having submitted to laws, coercive power, or even the shadow of government. Their only restraints are their customs and the moral sense of right and wrong that belongs to every person’s nature, like the senses of taste and touch. An offense against these is punished by contempt or exclusion from society; in a serious case such as murder, it is punished by the people concerned. Imperfect as this kind of restraint may seem, crimes are very rare among them. If one asked whether the absence of law among uncivilized Americans or the excess of law among civilized Europeans exposes people to the greater evil, someone who had seen both conditions would choose the latter. Sheep, left to themselves, are happier than sheep in the care of wolves. It will be said that large societies cannot exist without government. The uncivilized peoples therefore divide their societies into small ones.

South of the Patowmac, the Powhatan confederacy’s territory comprised about 8,000 square miles, 30 tribes, and 2,400 warriors. Captain Smith tells us that within 60 miles of Jamestown there were 5,000 people, including 1,500 warriors. The warriors therefore made up three-tenths of the population. On that basis, the Powhatan confederacy would have had about 8,000 inhabitants, or one person per square mile. That was about one-twentieth of the present population of the same territory and one-hundredth of the population of the British Isles.

Besides these peoples were the Nottoways on the Nottoway River, and the Meherrins and Tuteloes on the Meherrin River. They were connected with the peoples of Carolina, probably with the Chowanocs.

Foldout orientation: North at the top, south at the bottom, west at the left, and east at the right.

Mannahoacs

Monacans

The 30 is printed beside Monacans. The unruled 1669 column continues through the Monacan and Eastern Shore portion of the foldout; it supplies no further individual figures.

Powhatans

One printed 1669 figure, 60, is joined by a brace to the King George Cuttatawomans and the Pissasecs. It is not assigned separately to either. A distinct, taller brace beside the Patówomekes through Onaumànients area carries this collective annotation, whose individual correspondences are uncertain: “By the name of Matchotics. U. Matchodic. Nanzaticos. Nanzatico. Appamatox Matox.” The foldout also prints Nottoways, Meherrics, and Tuteloes in a separate right-hand compartment, with the figures 90 and 50 under 1669. It does not securely associate either figure with an individual tribe. The accents in several tribal names are visible but their precise forms remain uncertain.

The preceding table sets out these tribes by confederacy and location, with their numbers when we first became acquainted with them wherever those numbers are known. It gives later numbers for some tribes as they stood in 1669, when the assembly attempted to count them. That count was probably incomplete and partly conjectural; a fuller search of the records would likely supply more particulars. Still, the count suggests a melancholy sequel to their history: in 62 years, the tribes it enumerated had fallen to about one-third of their former numbers. Spirits, smallpox, war, and the loss of territory had caused terrible destruction among a people who lived chiefly on what nature produced without cultivation. Under the obstacles they faced, new generations were unlikely to make good those losses.

It is less generally true than supposed that this country’s lands were taken from them by conquest. In our historians and records I find repeated evidence of purchases covering a considerable part of the lower country, and further searching would doubtless find more. We know that the upper country was acquired entirely through purchases made in the most proper form.

West of all these tribes, beyond the mountains and extending to the Great Lakes, lived the Massawomecs. This powerful confederacy continually harassed the Powhatans and Mannahoacs. They were probably the ancestors of the tribes now known as the Six Nations.

Very little can now be learned of the later history of these tribes individually. The Chickahominies moved to the Mattapony River about 1661. Their chief, together with a chief from each of the Pamunkies and Mattaponies, attended the treaty at Albany in 1685. This seems to have been the last recorded chapter of their history. They nevertheless kept their separate name as late as 1705. Eventually they merged with the Pamunkies and Mattaponies and now exist only under those names.

Only three or four Mattapony men remain, and they have more African than Indigenous ancestry. They have lost their language. Through voluntary sales they have reduced their land to about 50 acres beside the river bearing their name. From time to time they have joined the Pamunkies, who live only 10 miles away. The Pamunkies have been reduced to about 10 or 12 men, with relatively little ancestry from people of other colors. The older people retain a little of their language, the last known traces on earth of the Powhatan language. They have about 300 acres of very fertile land on the Pamunkey River, so surrounded by water that one gate encloses it all.

No Nottoway man remains. A few women constitute what remains of that tribe. They live on very fertile land along the Nottoway River in Southampton County. At an early period, certain lands were set apart for these tribes and protected from encroachment by law. Trustees have usually been appointed to watch over their interests and guard them against insult and injury.

The Monacans and their allies, later better known as Tuscaroras, were probably connected with the Massawomecs, or Five Nations. Smith tells us their languages were different enough to require interpreters. Evans also tells us that the Erigas, formerly living on the Ohio, came from the same original stock as the Five Nations and shared the Tuscarora language. Long separation might have made their dialects mutually unintelligible. We know that in 1712 the Five Nations admitted the Tuscaroras to their confederacy, making them the Sixth Nation. They also took the Meherrins and Tuteloes under their protection. Most probably, the remnants of many other tribes for which we have no particular account moved west in the same way and joined one or another western tribe. See Appendix 1, observation 5.

I know of nothing existing that I would call an Indigenous monument. I would not give that name to arrow points, stone hatchets, stone pipes, or roughly shaped images. As for works on a large scale, I think none survives that compares in importance even with an ordinary drainage ditch, unless it is the burial mounds, of which many occur throughout this country. Some are made of earth and some of loose stones, and they vary in size. Everyone has recognized them as places for the dead, but the particular occasion for building them was in doubt. Some thought they covered people killed in battles fought where they were buried. Others attributed them to a reported custom of periodically gathering the bones of all the dead, wherever their bodies had first been placed. Still others supposed they were common burial places for towns once situated on or near the sites. The fertile land in which they are found supported this last opinion: earth mounds generally stand in the softest, most fertile riverside meadows.

That opinion was also supported by a tradition said to have come from the original Indigenous inhabitants. According to it, when people settled a town, they placed the first person who died upright and heaped earth around the body to cover and support it. When another person died, they dug a narrow passage to the first, leaned the second body against it, and replaced the earth, continuing in that way.

Because one such mound stood in my neighborhood, I wanted to determine whether any of these explanations was right. I resolved to open and examine it thoroughly. It stood on low ground beside the Rivanna, about two miles above its principal fork, opposite hills where an Indigenous town had stood. It was roughly spheroidal, about 40 feet across at its base. It had once been about 12 feet high, though about a dozen years of cultivation had reduced it by plowing to seven and a half feet. Before cultivation, trees a foot in diameter had covered it. Around its base was an excavation five feet deep and five feet wide, from which the earth used to make the mound had been taken.

I first dug shallowly in several places and found collections of human bones from six inches to three feet below the surface. They lay in the greatest confusion: some upright, some slanting, some horizontal, pointing in every direction and held in clusters by the earth. Bones from distant parts of the body lay together. Small foot bones, for example, were found inside a skull. Several skulls sometimes touched one another, lying face down, sideways, backward, upright, or upside down. Overall, the bones looked as if they had been emptied indiscriminately from a bag or basket and covered with earth without regard to order.

The bones found in greatest numbers were skulls, jaws, teeth, and bones of the arms, thighs, legs, feet, and hands. A few ribs remained, as did some neck and spine vertebrae without their projections. I found only one sacrum, the bone forming the base of the spinal column. The skulls were so fragile that they usually broke apart when touched; the other bones were stronger. Some teeth appeared smaller than an adult’s. One skull seemed at first glance to be an infant’s, but it broke apart when lifted, preventing a satisfactory examination. There was a rib and a piece of lower jaw from a half-grown person, another rib from an infant, and part of the jaw of a child whose teeth had not yet emerged.

Because this last piece provided the clearest proof that children were buried here, I examined it particularly carefully. It was the right half of a lower jaw. The projections joining it to the temporal bones were intact, and the bone remained firm up to the break, which seemed to me to be near the canine tooth. Its upper edge, where tooth sockets would have been, was perfectly smooth. With the back projections of this jaw and an adult jaw placed together for comparison, the broken end reached the adult’s next-to-last molar. This bone was white; all the others were sand-colored. Infant bones are soft and probably decay sooner, which might explain why so few were found.

I then cut straight down through the mound to examine its inner structure. The cut passed about three feet from its center, reached the original ground surface, and was wide enough for someone to walk through and inspect its sides. At the bottom, level with the surrounding plain, I found bones. Above them lay a few stones brought from a cliff a quarter of a mile away and from the river an eighth of a mile away. Then came a broad layer of earth, then a layer of bones, and so on. Four distinct layers of bones appeared at one end of the cut and three at the other; layers on one side did not align with those on the other. Bones nearest the surface were least decayed. None had holes resembling wounds made by bullets, arrows, or other weapons. I conjectured that the mound might contain a thousand skeletons. These observations weigh against both the idea that it held only people killed in battle and the tradition of a town burial place containing upright bodies touching one another.

The evidence strongly suggests that the mound began and grew through the customary collection and joint burial of bones. The first collection was placed on the natural ground, covered with a few stones and then earth. A second collection was placed above it, covering more or less area according to the number of bones, and was also covered with earth. The process continued. Six circumstances support this account: 1. the number of bones; 2. their confused positions; 3. their occurrence in separate layers; 4. the failure of layers on one side to match those on the other; 5. the different degrees of decay in the layers, suggesting burial at different times; and 6. the presence of infant bones.

Whatever the occasion for making these mounds, Indigenous people knew them well. About thirty years ago, a party traveling through the district of this mound left the main road, walked roughly six miles through the woods directly to it without asking directions, and stayed for a while, making expressions interpreted as sorrowful. They then returned to the road and continued their journey. Another similar mound stands on the low ground of the South Branch of the Shenandoah, where the road from Rockfish Gap to Staunton crosses it. Both mounds have been cleared of trees and cultivated within the last dozen years. Plowing has reduced their height and spread them outward, and they will probably disappear in time. Another mound stands on a hill in the Blue Ridge a few miles north of Wood’s Gap. It consists of small stones piled together; when opened, it too was found to contain human bones. Many more occur elsewhere in the country.

The origin of America’s first inhabitants has prompted much debate. Discoveries made long ago were enough to show that passage from Europe to America was always possible, even with the limited navigation of ancient times. On the route from Norway to Iceland, Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Labrador, the first crossing is the widest. Since people have made that first crossing from the earliest times recorded for that region, it is easy to suppose that they sometimes made the later ones too.

Captain Cook’s recent discoveries along the coast from Kamchatka to California have also shown that, if Asia and America are separated at all, only a narrow strait divides them. People may therefore have entered America from that direction as well. The resemblance between America’s Indigenous peoples and eastern Asians suggests that the former descend from the latter, or the latter from the former. The Eskimaux are an exception: their resemblance to Greenlanders and the identity of their languages indicate that they must descend from Greenlanders, who probably came from northern parts of the Old World.

Knowledge of these peoples’ languages would provide the surest possible evidence of their origins. Language is, in fact, the best evidence we can use to establish kinship between nations. How many ages have passed since the English, Dutch, Germans, Swiss, Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes separated from a common stock? Yet how many more must pass before the evidence of their common origin preserved in their languages disappears? It is therefore deeply regrettable that we have allowed so many Indigenous tribes to disappear without first collecting and preserving in literature at least the basic elements of their languages.

If vocabularies were made for every language spoken in North and South America, they could record the names of the most common natural things, things every nation encounters whether called barbarous or civilized. They could also record noun and verb inflections and the principles governing grammatical relationships and agreement. Deposited in every public library, these materials would allow scholars of Old World languages, now or in the future, to compare those languages with American ones and assemble the best evidence for the ancestry of this part of the human race.

Imperfect as our knowledge of American languages is, it reveals a remarkable fact. If we group them by the root languages to which they can clearly be traced, and do the same for the languages of the peoples of Asia called red men, America will probably have twenty root languages for every one in Asia. They are called root languages because, if any were once the same, they have lost all resemblance to one another. Dialects may separate in only a few ages. For two dialects to diverge until no trace of common origin remains must take an immense time, perhaps as long as many people assign to the age of the earth. The greater number of such fundamental language changes in America proves that its peoples are of greater antiquity than those of Asia.

I will now list the Indigenous nations that still exist in substantial and independent communities, with their numbers. Their undefined boundaries make it difficult to identify only those within any fixed limits. A broader account may also be useful. I therefore include in this catalogue all those within and around the United States whose names and numbers have come to my attention. The figures come from four lists. George Croghan, deputy agent for Indigenous affairs under Sir William Johnson, gave the first to General Stanwix in 1759. A prominent French trader who had lived among Indigenous peoples for many years prepared the second; it was appended to Colonel Bouquet’s printed account of his 1764 expedition. Captain Hutchins, sent to learn the tribes’ numbers, visited most of them and prepared the third in 1768. The fourth was prepared by the trader John Dodge in 1779, except that his figures marked with an asterisk came from other information.

In the catalogue, a single dash and a pair of dashes retain the distinct marks printed in the source. Blank cells remain blank. Figures that the printing joins across rows are given once with their scope stated below each table; the surrounding row entries remain as printed.

North and west of the United States

For Connasedagoes and Cohunnewagoes together, Hutchins prints one figure, 300, and the residence “Near Montreal.” Bouquet prints the upper pair of dashes and the lower 200 beside a brace spanning both rows. Whether the 200 applies to Cohunnewagoes alone or to the pair is uncertain.

The three Sioux rows share one Croghan figure of 10,000, one Hutchins figure of 10,000, and one residence: “At the headwaters of the Mississippi and west of that river.” The Bouquet figures and dash remain separate as shown.

Within the United States

Bouquet prints one figure, 1550, for the six rows from Mohocks through Sènecas; the five pairs of dashes shown are separately printed. Dodge prints one figure, 400, for Onèidas and Tuscaròras together. In N[à/á]nticocs the accent’s direction is uncertain. The marked letters in Uts[?]nango and Chag[?]net cannot be read securely; the latter sequence appears to be “ht.”

Dodge prints one *500 spanning the two Delaware rows. Croghan prints one 300 spanning the two Wyandots rows; Dodge prints one 180 spanning that same pair. Hutchins prints one 300 beside a brace spanning Mohicons, Cohun[n?]ewagos, and the first Wyandots row. Neither Wyandots residence nor the “Near Sandusky” residence is securely established as exclusive to its adjacent row. The second “n” in Cohun[n?]ewagos is uncertain.

The following single printed figures span the named rows: Bouquet 600 for Kaskaskias and Illinois; Croghan 2000 for Poute[ò/ô]tamies through Shakies; Bouquet 5900 for Ottàwas through the Chippawas near Puans Bay; Hutchins 200 for the Chippawas and Ottawas at Saguinam Bay; Dodge 5450 for Ottàwas through the Chippawas near Puans Bay; and Hutchins 550 for the Chippawas near Puans Bay, Shakies, and Mynònàmies. The individually positioned entries, including *300 for Ottàwas, remain as printed. The relation between shared and individual figures is not explained in the source. The accent in Poute[ò/ô]tamies is uncertain.

Hutchins prints one 4000 for the six rows from Kickapous through Musquakies. All six share the residence “On Lake Michigan and between it and the Mississippi.” Dodge’s two 250 entries stand at the first and last of those rows, with four individual dashes between them. The brace joining the six rows establishes their shared residence, but does not settle whether those endpoint figures have any further collective meaning.

At this point the printing replaces the Hutchins heading with Galpin, 1768 for the following southern entries. Croghan, Bouquet, and Dodge retain their existing headings.

Galpin prints one 3000 for Upper and Lower Creeks together. One Dodge dash and the residence “Western parts of Georgia” also span those two rows. Bouquet’s dash for Upper Creeks and 1180 for Lower Creeks are separate entries. Natchez has no printed residence.

The following tribes are also mentioned:

Because these may be other names for tribes already listed, I have kept them out of the main catalogue and set them apart for further inquiry. Differences in the reported numbers of the same tribe may arise either from incomplete information or from including more or fewer settlements under one name. See Appendix 1, observation 7.

What are the counties, cities, townships, and villages?

The counties were enumerated under Query 9. They number 74 and vary greatly in size and population. Of these, 35 are on the tidal waters or in that region; 23 are in the Midlands, between the tidal waters and the Blue Ridge; eight are between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies; and eight are west of the Alleghenies.

The state is also divided into parishes, many of which have the same boundaries as counties. Sometimes, however, a county contains more than one parish, and sometimes a parish extends into more than one county. This division was connected with the state’s religion: an Anglican minister with a fixed salary had formerly been established in each parish. Care of the poor was another purpose of the parish division.

We have no townships. Navigable waters intersect much of our country and generally bring trade to our doors, instead of requiring us to seek it out. This has probably been one reason we have no towns of consequence. Williamsburg, the seat of our government until 1780, never had more than 1,800 inhabitants; Norfolk, the most populous town we have ever had, had only 6,000. Our towns, or more properly our villages and hamlets, are these:

On James River and its waters: Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton, Suffolk, Smithfield, Williamsburg, Petersburg, Richmond (the seat of our government), Manchester, Charlottesville, and New London.

On York River and its waters: York, Newcastle, and Hanover.

On the Rappahannock: Urbanna, Port Royal, Fredericksburg, and Falmouth.

On the Potomac and its waters: Dumfries, Colchester, Alexandria, Winchester, and Staunton.

On the Ohio: Louisville.

There are other places where, as with some of those listed, the laws have said there shall be towns, but nature has said there shall not. They remain unworthy of enumeration. Norfolk will probably become the center of trade for the whole Chesapeake Bay and its waters. A canal of eight or ten miles will bring it the trade of Albemarle Sound and its waters as well. Next in importance are the towns at the heads of the tidal waters: Petersburg on the Appomattox, Richmond on the James, Newcastle on the York, Alexandria on the Potomac, and Baltimore on the Patapsco. From these towns, goods will be distributed to smaller places in the country. Accidental circumstances, however, may override what nature seems to indicate, and they do so nowhere more often than in the rise and fall of towns.

What is the constitution of the state, and what are its several charters?

By letters patent dated March 25, 1584, Queen Elizabeth licensed Sir Walter Raleigh to seek remote heathen lands not inhabited by Christian people. She granted him, in fee simple, all the land within 200 leagues of the places where his people should settle within six years. She reserved for herself and her successors only their allegiance and one fifth of all the gold and silver ore they obtained.

Sir Walter immediately sent two ships, which visited Wococon Island in North Carolina. The next year he sent seven ships with 107 men, who settled on Roanoke Island at about latitude 35° 50′. There Okisko, king of the Weopomeiocs, is said to have acknowledged himself, before a full council of his people, as owing homage to the Queen of England and, after her, to Sir Walter Raleigh. A further 50 men were sent in 1586 and 150 in 1587. With the last group Sir Walter sent a governor, appointed twelve assistants to him, gave them a charter of incorporation, and instructed them to settle on Chesapeake Bay. They landed instead at Hatorask.

In 1588, when a fleet was ready to sail with another supply of colonists and necessities, the Queen detained it to assist against the Spanish Armada. Sir Walter had by then spent £40,000 on these ventures, which the crown had sometimes obstructed, without receiving a shilling of aid from it. He had to enlist others to invest their money. By a deed dated March 7, 1589, he therefore granted Thomas Smith and others liberty to trade with his new country for seven years without customs or taxes, except for the fifth part of any gold and silver ore obtained. In the deed he called himself Sir Walter Raleigh, Chief Governor of Assamàcomòc (probably Acomàc), also called Wingadacoia or Virginia. In return for the sums they invested, he also agreed with them and the other assistants then in Virginia to confirm the deed of incorporation he had given in 1587, with all the prerogatives, jurisdictions, royal rights, and privileges the Queen had granted him.

Sir Walter sent five more expeditions here at various times, the last in 1602. In 1603 he was declared guilty of treason and closely imprisoned, ending his care of his young colony. The particular fate of the colonists he had previously sent and settled has never been known: whether they were murdered or incorporated with the Indigenous peoples.

Some gentlemen and merchants supposed that Sir Walter Raleigh’s conviction had forfeited his grant. Without carefully asking whether the judgment of an English court could affect land outside that court’s jurisdiction, they petitioned King James for a new grant of Virginia. He granted it to Sir Thomas Gates and others by deed dated March 9, 1607. Under that grant, a settlement was established at Jamestown that same year and maintained thereafter.

The grant itself needs no further description because it was superseded by letters patent issued by the same king on May 23, 1609. These incorporated the Earl of Salisbury and others as “the Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia.” The grant gave them and their successors all the land in Virginia along the coast for 200 miles north and 200 miles south of Point Comfort, and all the land west and northwest of that coastal tract from sea to sea. It also included islands within 100 miles, together with all the commodities, jurisdictions, royal rights, privileges, franchises, and other advantages belonging to the territory by sea or land, as fully as any earlier grant to an adventurer.

They were to hold the land from the king and his successors in common socage, owing one fifth of the gold and silver ore found there in satisfaction of all services. The charter established a council in England to direct the enterprise. A majority of the company and adventurers could choose and remove its members; the council could appoint and remove the governors, officers, and ministers it considered necessary for the colony. It could establish laws and forms of government and magistracy binding both within the colony and at sea on voyages to and from it.

The charter authorized the company to take to Virginia anyone who consented to go. It permanently freed goods and merchandise imported into or exported from the colony from taxes and duties, except for the five percent customs duty on goods imported into the British dominions under the ancient practice of merchants. Once that five percent was paid, the goods could be reexported abroad within thirteen months without further customs, tax, or duty to the king or his officers or deputies. The company could wage war against those who troubled it. The colony’s inhabitants received all the rights of natural subjects, as though born and living in England. The charter directed that any doubtful provision be interpreted in the grantees’ favor.

By further letters patent of March 12, 1612, the king added all islands in any part of the ocean between the thirtieth and forty-first degrees of latitude and within 300 leagues of any territory previously granted to the Treasurer and Company. The addition excluded islands possessed or inhabited by another Christian prince or state and those within the limits of the northern colony.

Using the authority these charters gave it, especially the power under the 1609 charter to establish a form of government, the company issued a charter under its common seal on July 24, 1621. It declared that Virginia would thereafter have two supreme councils. The first, the council of state, would assist and advise the governor; the treasurer, council in England, and company could appoint and remove its members from time to time. The second, the general assembly, would be convened by the governor at least once a year. It would consist of the council of state and two burgesses from every town, hundred, or plantation, chosen by their respective inhabitants.

A majority of the votes present would decide all matters in the assembly, though the governor retained a veto. The assembly could consider and decide matters arising for the public welfare and make laws for the colony’s benefit and government, following the laws and policy of England as closely as possible. Its laws would have no force until ratified by a general quarterly court of the company in England and returned under the company’s common seal. The charter also declared that, once the colony’s government was well formed and settled, no order of the council in England would bind it unless ratified by its general assembly.

The king and company quarreled. By a mixture of law and force, the company was deprived of all its rights without compensation, after spending £100,000 to establish the colony without the smallest aid from government. King James suspended its powers by proclamation on July 15, 1624, and Charles I took the government into his own hands.

Both sides had supporters in the colony, but its people generally thought the dispute concerned them little. Three parties had interests in the charters, and they believed that what passed between the king and the company could not affect the third party, the people. If the king seized the company’s powers, those powers merely changed hands without growing or shrinking, while the people’s rights remained as before.

Their rights did not remain so for long. The northern parts of their country were granted to the Lords Baltimore and Fairfax; Baltimore also obtained separate jurisdiction and government. In 1650 Parliament, considering itself to stand in place of the deposed king and to have succeeded to all his powers both inside and outside the realm, began to assume authority over the colonies. It passed an act prohibiting their trade with foreign nations. Parliament’s succession to the exercise of royal authority gave the first appearance of justification for its interference with the colonies. It created a fatal precedent that Parliament continued to follow after it had, in other respects, returned to its proper functions.

The colony still opposed Cromwell and Parliament. Before it was induced to lay down its arms in 1651, it secured what it considered its most essential rights by a solemn agreement. I have never seen this agreement in print, so I reproduce it here from the records.

Articles Agreed at James City in Virginia for the Surrender and Settlement of That Plantation Under the Obedience and Government of the Commonwealth of England, by the Commissioners of the Council of State, Under Authority of the Parliament of England, and by the Grand Assembly of the Governor, Council, and Burgesses of That Country

1. It is agreed and consented that the plantation of Virginia and all its inhabitants shall remain in due obedience and subjection to the Commonwealth of England according to its established laws. This submission and signing shall be acknowledged as a voluntary act, neither forced nor compelled by conquest of the country. They shall have and enjoy the freedoms and privileges belonging to the freeborn people of England, and the former government by commissions and instructions shall be void.

2. The Grand Assembly shall meet as before and conduct Virginia’s affairs. It shall do nothing contrary to the government of the Commonwealth of England or its established laws.

3. There shall be a full and complete pardon and indemnity for all acts, words, or writings done or spoken against the Parliament of England in relation to it.

4. Virginia shall have and enjoy the ancient bounds and limits granted by the charters of the former kings. We shall seek a new charter from Parliament for that purpose against anyone who has encroached on Virginia’s rights.

5. All patents for land granted under the colony’s seal by any preceding governor shall remain in full force.

6. The previously granted privilege of receiving fifty acres of land for every person transported into the colony shall continue.

7. The people of Virginia shall have the same freedom of trade enjoyed by the people of England, with all places and nations, according to the laws of the Commonwealth. Virginia shall enjoy privileges equal to those of any English plantation in America.

8. Virginia shall be free from all taxes, customs, and duties whatsoever, and none shall be imposed without the consent of the Grand Assembly. Neither forts nor castles shall be erected, nor garrisons maintained, without its consent.

9. No charge shall be required of this country on account of the present fleet.

10. To settle the country in its due obedience in the future, the Engagement shall be offered to all inhabitants according to the act of Parliament made for that purpose. Anyone refusing to subscribe it shall, if they wish, have a year to remove themselves and their property from Virginia. During that year they shall receive equal justice as before.

11. Use of the Book of Common Prayer shall be permitted for the coming year, subject to the consent of the majority of the parishes, provided that its provisions relating to kingship or that form of government are not used publicly. Ministers shall continue in their positions if they do not misconduct themselves. Payment of their customary dues and the agreements made with them shall remain as they now stand during the coming year.

12. No man’s cattle shall be claimed as the company’s, except in the case of those who have been entrusted with them or have disposed of them without authorization.

13. All ammunition, powder, and arms other than those for private use shall be handed over, with security given that payment will be made for them.

14. All goods already brought here by the Dutch or others and now ashore shall be free from seizure.

15. The quit rents granted to us by the late king for seven years shall be confirmed.

16. The parliamentary commissioners signing these articles pledge themselves and Parliament’s honor to their full performance. The present governor, council, and burgesses likewise sign and pledge the whole colony on its part.

Richard Bennett, seal. William Claiborne, seal. Edmond Curtis, seal.

“These articles were signed and sealed by the commissioners of the Council of State for the Commonwealth of England on March 12, 1651.”

Next come the articles stipulated by the governor and council, which concern only their own persons and property, followed by this instrument:

An Act of Indemnity Made at the Surrender of the Country

“By authority of the Parliament of England, we commissioners appointed and authorized by the Council of State brought a fleet and force before James City in Virginia to bring that colony under the obedience of the Commonwealth of England. We found that the governor and country had raised a force to oppose the fleet, creating an evident danger of ruin and destruction to the plantation. To prevent this, the burgesses of all the several plantations were called to advise and assist. After long and serious debate, and in sorrowful contemplation of the great misery and certain destruction so near to the whole country, we commissioners have thought fit to agree to sign and confirm, under our hands, seals, and oaths, the articles bearing the same date as this act.

“We further declare that, by the authority of Parliament and the Commonwealth of England given to us as their commissioners, and in accordance with the articles generally, we have granted all inhabitants of this colony an act of indemnity and oblivion for all words, actions, or writings spoken, done, or written against Parliament, the Commonwealth, or any other person from the beginning of the world to this day. We have done this so that all inhabitants of the colony may live quietly and securely under the Commonwealth of England. We promise that Parliament and the Commonwealth of England shall confirm and uphold all these actions of ours. Witness our hands and seals, March 12, 1651. Richard Bennett, seal. William Claiborne, seal. Edmond Curtis, seal.”

The colony supposed that this solemn agreement, made while its people were still armed, had secured their country’s ancient boundaries under Article 4; its freedom of trade under Article 7; its exemption from taxation without the consent of its own assembly under Article 8; and the exclusion of military forces without that consent, also under Article 8. Yet subsequent kings and parliaments violated the agreement on every one of these points and committed other, equally dangerous violations of the colony’s constitution.

The General Assembly had consisted of the council of state and burgesses sitting together and deciding by a majority of votes. It was divided into two houses, giving the council a separate veto over laws. Appeals from the colony’s supreme court, which by law had been placed in the General Assembly, were arbitrarily transferred to England for hearing before the king and council. Its 400 miles of coastline were reduced to about 100 within thirty years. Its foreign trade was entirely suppressed, while trade carried to Great Britain was burdened with duties.

There is no need to gather every injury scattered through American and British history. In the first fifteen years after the present king’s accession, examples of them all were aggravated, multiplied, and crowded together, showing a settled design to treat our natural, agreed, and chartered rights as nothing. The colonies were taxed internally and externally. Their essential interests were sacrificed to individuals in Great Britain. Their legislatures were suspended and their charters annulled. Jury trials were taken away; people were made subject to transport across the Atlantic and trial before courts outside their country. Their petitions for redress were considered unworthy of an answer. They were described as cowards in the councils of their mother country and in European courts. Armed troops were sent among them to enforce submission to these acts of violence, and open hostilities began.

The only alternatives were resistance and unconditional submission. There could be no hesitation between them. The colonies appealed to arms, declared themselves independent states, and confederated as one great republic, securing to each state the benefit of their united strength. Each state separately established a new form of government. These are the outlines of ours.

Executive power rests with a governor elected annually, who may serve no more than three years in any seven. A council of eight assists him. Judicial power is divided among several courts, as I will explain later. Legislative power is exercised by two houses. The House of Delegates consists of two members from each county, elected annually by citizens who hold a lifetime estate in 100 acres of uninhabited land, or 25 acres with a house, or a house or lot in a town. The Senate has 24 members, elected every four years by the same voters, who are divided into 24 districts for that purpose. Both houses must agree to pass a law. Together they appoint the governor and council, judges of the superior courts, auditors, attorney general, treasurer, register of the land office, and delegates to Congress.

Because the separation of territory from the state had never been confirmed and had instead always been protested and complained of, the grants to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the two Carolinas were ratified. This was done so that we could never raise doubts about them ourselves or disturb the harmony of our new confederacy.

This constitution was formed when we were new to the science of government. It was also the first formed in the United States. It is no wonder that time and experience have revealed very serious defects in it.

1. Most men have no representation. Most of the men in the state who pay and fight for its support are unrepresented in the legislature. The list of freeholders entitled to vote generally includes fewer than half the men on the militia and tax rolls.

2. Representation is unequal even among those who share it. Warwick County has only 100 fighting men but the same representation as Loudoun County, which has 1,746. Each man in Warwick therefore has as much influence in government as 17 men in Loudoun. Perhaps it will be thought that small counties are so evenly interspersed among large ones throughout the state that no particular region is in danger of injury. To examine that possibility, we can divide the state into districts and compare their land, fighting men, and representation.

Of the 11,205 square miles between the seacoast and the falls, 542 are on the Eastern Shore. Of the 79,650 square miles between the Alleghenies and the Ohio, 22,616 are east of the meridian of the mouth of the Great Kanawha.

The table speaks for itself. About 19,000 men living below the falls of the rivers hold half the Senate seats and lack only four members for a majority in the House of Delegates. Their proximity to the seat of government more than makes up for that shortfall, because their members can and will attend the legislature more conveniently and regularly. These 19,000 fighting men in one part of the country therefore make laws for more than 30,000 fighting men in another and appoint all their chief executive and judicial officers. Their different situations and circumstances will often give them different interests.

3. The Senate resembles the House of Delegates too closely. The same voters choose both houses at the same time from the same population, so they naturally choose men of the same kind. Separate legislative houses are meant to bring different interests or principles into government. It is said that Great Britain relies on the Commons for honesty and the Lords for wisdom. That would be reasonable if honesty could be bought with money and wisdom were inherited. In some American states, delegates are chosen to represent persons and senators to represent property. In ours, wealth and wisdom have an equal chance of entering either house. We therefore gain none of the benefits that a sound combination of differing principles could produce, the only benefits that could compensate for the harm caused by disagreement between the houses.

4. The legislature holds all three powers. Legislative, executive, and judicial powers all ultimately rest with the legislative body. Concentrating them in the same hands is the very definition of despotic government. It is no comfort that many hands rather than one will exercise them: 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Anyone who doubts this may look at the Republic of Venice. Nor does it help that we elect them ourselves. We did not fight for an elective despotism. We fought for a government founded on free principles, with its powers so divided and balanced among several bodies that none could exceed its legal limits without being checked and restrained by the others.

For this reason, the convention that passed the ordinance of government began with the principle that the legislative, executive, and judicial departments should be separate and distinct, so that no person would exercise powers belonging to more than one at the same time. But it provided no barrier between them. Members of the executive and judiciary depend on the legislature for support while in office, and some also depend on it to remain in office. If the legislature assumes executive and judicial powers, opposition is therefore unlikely. Even if someone objects, the objection cannot be effective: the legislature can put its proceedings into the form of an act of assembly, making them binding on the other branches.

The legislature has accordingly decided rights that should have been resolved in judicial proceedings, and direction of the executive throughout its sessions is becoming habitual. This is done without bad intent. The present members’ aims are perfectly upright. Others’ maneuvering and their own inadvertence lead them outside their proper sphere, and this will probably remain true for some time. But it will not remain true for very long. People soon learn to use for their own interests every power they possess or can assume. Public money and public liberty were intended to be entrusted to three branches of government. Once those entrusted with them discover that both are in the hands of just one branch, they will find in them sources of wealth and dominion. The temptation is greater because money and power are at once the means and the objects of acquisition. “With money we will get men,” said Caesar, “and with men we will get money.”

Our assembly must not infer from the integrity of its own purposes that these unlimited powers will never be abused because its present members do not wish to abuse them. It should look ahead to a time, not far off, when corruption will seize the heads of government here as it did in the country from which we came, and spread through them to the people. Those leaders will buy the people’s votes and make the people pay for the purchase. Human nature is the same on both sides of the Atlantic and responds to the same causes. We must guard against corruption and tyranny before they take hold. Better to keep the wolf out of the fold than to trust that we can pull its teeth and claws after it enters.

One further consideration makes this warning more pressing.

5. The ordinary legislature may alter the constitution itself. When the old assemblies ceased to meet, another body was needed to carry on the ordinary business of government and call out the state’s power for resistance to Great Britain. Conventions were introduced for this purpose. Like the former House of Burgesses, which they replaced, they consisted of two delegates from each county meeting as one house. At first, delegates were chosen anew for each session. In March 1775 the conventions recommended that the people choose a convention to serve a year. The people did so in April 1775. That convention passed an ordinance the following July providing for annual elections of delegates in April.

It is well known that in July 1775 no one had yet contemplated separation from Great Britain and the establishment of republican government. A convention chosen under that ordinance cannot have been chosen for purposes that were not in the minds of those who passed it. At the annual election in April 1776, the people chose a convention for the year. Even then, independence and a new form of government were not the aims of the people at large. An extract from Common Sense had appeared in Virginia newspapers in February, and a few people had copies of the pamphlet. But the idea had not been presented to the people generally by April, much less accepted by them.

The voters in April 1776, like the legislators in July 1775, were not thinking of independence and a permanent republic. They therefore could not have intended to give these delegates power to establish either, or any authority beyond that of an ordinary legislature. The convention’s temporary organization of government was valid insofar as it was needed to make our resistance effective. But the delegates received no powers beyond those given to every legislature before and since. They could not pass an act exceeding the power of other legislatures. If the present assembly passed an act and declared that later assemblies could never revoke it, that declaration would be void and the act could be repealed like any other.

With authority extending that far and no further, the convention organized the government by an ordinance entitled A Constitution or Form of Government. The instrument claims no higher authority than its other ordinances from the same session. It does not say it is perpetual, unalterable by later legislatures, or beyond the power of those whom its makers knew would have equal authority. Its silence shows that they considered it alterable. So does their conduct. That same convention met as the House of Delegates in the General Assembly with the new Senate in the autumn of 1776 and passed acts contrary to its ordinance of government. Every assembly since has done likewise. I conclude that the ordinary legislature can alter the constitution itself.

Some people maintain the opposite opinion, although I think my conclusion follows from common sense. They offer three arguments.

(1) The conventions had every power needed for effective resistance. So they say. But to complete the argument, they must also claim that resistance could not be effective without establishing a government perpetual and unalterable by the legislature. That is untrue. Resistance that would eventually end did not require a perpetual institution. A government that could be amended as its faults appeared was as capable of effective resistance as one permanently fixed in error. Besides, the assemblies had as much power as the conventions to do what resistance required. If that power let conventions shape the government, it also let assemblies do so. Assemblies, too, may therefore alter the ordinance of government.

(2) The convention called the instrument a constitution. They argue that, if the convention had intended it to be alterable like its other ordinances, it would have called it an ordinance. Instead it called it a constitution, a term they say means “an act above the power of the ordinary legislature.” I answer that the Latin terms constitutio, constitutum, statutum, and lex can be used for the same thing. A legal dictionary defines constitutio as a law established by a ruler, constitutum as a provision issued or established by emperors, and statutum as the same thing as lex, or law. Constitution and statute were originally terms of civil law and were introduced from it into English law by church lawyers. Indeed, the statute 25 Henry VIII, chapter 19, section 1, uses “constitutions” and “ordinances” synonymously. In older English legislative language, bid and set likewise meant to enact.

The word constitution has other meanings in natural science and politics. In law, however, when applied to an act of the legislature, it always means a statute, law, or ordinance, as it does here. Its title therefore establishes no difference. We might instead conclude that, by choosing a word synonymous with ordinance or statute, the convention intended the instrument to be one. But why should its intention matter if it lacked the power? Intending to do more than it could did not give it greater authority. An act’s binding force comes from the authority behind it, not its name.

Lord Coke says that a provision in the statute 11 Richard II, chapter 5, forbidding anyone to attempt to revoke an ordinance then made “is repealed, for such a restraint is against the jurisdiction and power of Parliament.” He also says, “Though various parliaments have attempted to restrain subsequent parliaments, yet they could never effect it; for the latter parliament has ever power to abrogate, suspend, qualify, explain, or make void the former in the whole or in any part thereof, notwithstanding any words of restraint, prohibition, or penalty in the former.” He adds the maxim in the laws of Parliament that later laws repeal earlier contrary laws.

To remove the supposed magic from the word constitution, let us substitute the definition offered by those who think it beyond the power of ordinary law. Suppose the convention had said, instead of “We, the ordinary legislature, establish a constitution,” that “We, the ordinary legislature, establish an act above the power of the ordinary legislature.” Would that not expose the absurdity of the attempt?

(3) The people accepted it. Their acceptance, the argument goes, gave it authority above the laws. True, the people did not rebel against it. But was that a time for rebellion? Should prudent acceptance in a critical period confirm everything unlawful done during it? And why would they rebel? In their annual election, they had chosen delegates for the year to exercise ordinary legislative power and manage the great struggle. The delegates thought an organized government would help them manage it, so they passed an ordinance of government among their other measures. They did not presume to call it perpetual and unalterable. They knew they had no power to make it so. We had not elected them for that purpose, nor could we have had that purpose in mind at the time. Had an unalterable government been proposed, perhaps we would have chosen different people. The people had no reason to rebel.

But where would this argument lead? Did the colonies’ acceptance of the powers Great Britain exercised over them in their early years confirm those acts and give them the people’s authority, making them unalterable and our present resistance wrong? Whenever a legislature exercises power without authority, must the people rebel, or must their silence be taken as surrendering that power to the legislature? If so, we would already have had a rebellion after every assembly session.

Other states in the Union have concluded that, to make a form of government unalterable by ordinary assembly acts, the people must choose delegates with special powers. They have therefore elected special conventions to form and establish their governments. Those in this state who hold the contrary opinion should admit the possibility that they are wrong and the rest of America is right. Even if there is only a plausible doubt about the validity of our ordinance of government, should we not remove it by giving the constitution an authority no one will dispute? If they are right, meeting once in convention will cost us only unnecessary trouble. If they are wrong, they risk leaving us with no fundamental rights at all.

This is no time to deliberate about forms of government. While an enemy is within our country, our first object is to drive him out. But when peace comes and we have time to secure within sound forms the rights for which we have bled, no one should refuse the small further effort needed to place those rights beyond question. One more consideration may show why a convention should be called at the proper time to establish our form of government.

6. The assembly determines its own quorum. After adopting the new form of government, the assembly followed the rule that a majority must act for the whole, a principle grounded in common law as well as common right. It is the natural rule for an assembly whose required number is fixed by no other law. For some time, the presence of a majority of all its members was required to pass an act. But the British Parliament fixes its own quorum, as our former assemblies did, and one precedent favoring power carries more weight than a hundred against it.

On June 4, 1781, the House of Delegates voted that, during the present dangerous invasion, forty members would constitute a house able to conduct business. Its members feared they could not otherwise assemble a house. That danger could not authorize them to call a gathering a house when it was not one. If they may set the quorum at one number, they may choose another until the body loses its essential character as a representative body. Because the vote expires with the present invasion, the old rule will probably be allowed to return; no harm is intended now. But the assembly has asserted the power to fix its quorum and established a precedent. Forty may become four, and four may become one: a house may become a committee, a committee a chairman or speaker, and an oligarchy or monarchy may be introduced under apparently regular forms.

As the ancient warning puts it, “All bad precedents began as good ones; but when power passes to the ignorant or less worthy, a new precedent is carried from worthy and capable hands to unworthy and incapable ones.” The assembly faces no legal barrier to assuming legislative, executive, and judicial power, and those powers may come into the hands of the smallest remnant of delegates. Surely the people will say, and their representatives, while they still have honest representatives, will advise them to say, that they will acknowledge as laws only acts considered and approved by a majority of their delegates.

In listing defects of the constitution, it would be wrong to include what is merely the error of particular people. In December 1776, when our circumstances were deeply troubled, a proposal was made in the House of Delegates to create a dictator. He would hold every legislative, executive, judicial, civil, and military power, including power over life and death, over our persons and property. The same proposal was made again amid hardship in June 1781 and fell only a few votes short of passing.

Consider a person who entered this struggle from love of liberty and a sense that his rights had been injured. He resolved to make every sacrifice and face every danger to restore those rights on a firm foundation. He did not intend to spend his blood and property merely to exchange one master for another. He sought to place government in several hands of his own choosing, so that no single person’s corrupt will could oppress him in the future. How bewildered and dismayed must he be to learn that a substantial portion of those chosen people had considered surrendering their powers to one man and handing him from a limited monarch to a despot! How badly would his efforts and sacrifices be defeated if a single vote could still lay him at one man’s feet!

In God’s name, where could the assembly have obtained this power? From our ancient laws? None can be produced. From any expressed or implied principle of our new constitution? Every feature of it opposes such a power. Its fundamental principle is government as a commonwealth. It establishes a republican organization and, by rejecting prerogative, forbids powers undefined by law. Our whole legal system rests on that basis. The constitution joins these principles so that they stand or fall together; it provides for no circumstance in which either can be suspended, even for a moment.

Our ancient laws expressly say that delegates cannot pass on to others powers whose exercise requires judgment and integrity. Did the proposal rest instead on a supposed right of its supporters to abandon their posts in distress? Those same laws forbid abandoning the post even in ordinary times, much less transferring its powers to others in another form without consulting the people. They never treat the people as sheep or cattle that can be passed from hand to hand without their consent.

Was necessity the reason? A necessity that dissolves a government does not transfer its authority to an oligarchy or monarchy. It returns delegated powers to the people and leaves them, as individuals, to manage for themselves. A leader may offer himself to them but cannot impose himself or be imposed on them. Still less may their lives be put at his pleasure. A necessity causing such terrible effects would have to be plain and irresistible. In both instances when it was feared, or claimed, here, the outcome proved otherwise. So did the earlier experience of sister states that had endured greater difficulties without abandoning their governments.

When the first proposal was made, Massachusetts had found even government by committees sufficient through an invasion, while we faced no invasion at the time. By the second proposal, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had also shown that republican government could carry them through the severest trials. Was there so little virtue in this state alone that fear had to be planted in the people’s hearts and made both the motive for their efforts and the principle of their government? The very thought betrayed the people and mankind generally. It would fasten the chains that bend their necks by giving oppressors evidence they would proclaim everywhere: that republican government could not protect people in urgent danger.

Those who claim the right to hand over the reins of government must be sure that the people they deliver to a dictator’s punishment will submit when he orders it. If our assemblies expected such surrender from the people, I hope they misjudged them. In my view, instead of becoming stronger and more vigorous under difficulty, the government would have fallen back on the clumsy administration of county committees until a convention could meet and set it in regular motion again. What a cruel time it would have been to create that difficulty and test our countrymen’s attachment to republican government!

Among the proposal’s supporters, those who meant well were led astray by the example of an ancient republic with a fundamentally different constitution and circumstances. Most did mean well: I know them personally, have worked with them in our common cause, and have often seen the soundness of their principles. They found their precedent in the history of Rome, the only place it could be found, and there it eventually proved fatal. Rome was torn by bitter factions and tumults. Its government was an oppressive, unfeeling aristocracy over a fierce people made desperate by poverty and misery. In the worst circumstances, those tumults could be quieted only by the absolute power of one despot. Its constitution therefore allowed a temporary tyrant called a dictator. After a few examples, the temporary tyrant became permanent.

This precedent was wrongly applied to a people mild in disposition, patient under trial, united for public liberty, and attached to their leaders. Even if Rome’s constitution gave its Senate power to submit all its people’s rights to one man, does Virginia’s assembly have the same authority? What clause of our constitution adopts Rome’s as a reserve provision for cases our own does not cover? If the assembly may choose precedents at will from any other form of government, what oppression could fail to find a precedent in a world of war among all against all?

Searching for a foundation for the proposal, I find only the defect already described that gives it even an appearance of authority or reason. With no barrier between the legislative, executive, and judicial departments, the legislature may seize all three powers. Once it has done so, its claimed right to fix its own quorum may let it reduce the quorum to one person and call him a chairman, speaker, dictator, or anything else it pleases.

Our situation is dangerous. I hope my countrymen will recognize it and, at the proper time, apply the proper remedy: a convention to establish the constitution and amend its defects. It should bind the branches of government by definite laws, so that acts exceeding those laws become void. This would spare the people from having to appeal to their own power, that is, rebel, whenever their rights are violated, for fear that accepting a violation would be taken as surrendering those rights.

How is justice administered, and what are the laws?

The state is divided into counties. Each county has justices of the peace, usually eight to thirty or forty, according to its size. They are chosen from its most discreet and honest inhabitants. Their fellow justices nominate them, the governor commissions them, and they serve without pay.

These justices have both criminal and civil jurisdiction. When a question concerns law alone, they decide it themselves. A question of fact, or of fact and law together, must go to a jury. In a case involving both, jurors usually decide the facts and leave the law arising from them to the judges. But that division is the jurors’ choice. If a question concerns public liberty, or is one on which the judges might be suspected of bias, the jury decides both law and fact. A mistaken verdict, occurring only by chance, is less dangerous to the state and less painful to the losing party than an unjust decision that forms part of a regular, uniform system. In such a case, tossing a coin would be better than submitting to a judge whose mind is biased by any motive. The common sense of twelve honest men offers a better chance of a just decision than a coin toss.

The justices enforce their orders through the county sheriff or coroner, or through constables they appoint. If a free person commits an offense against the commonwealth below the level of felony, a justice requires that person to appear before the county court to answer an indictment or information. In a felony case, the person is jailed and a court of justices is called. If, after examination, they think the person guilty, they send that person to the jail of the general court. There a grand jury of twenty-four hears the case. If at least thirteen find against the accused, the case proceeds to trial before a jury of twelve men from the county where the offense occurred. Their unanimous verdict acquits or condemns, without appeal. If the accused is a slave, the county court’s trial is final. The governor may pardon in every case except high treason; in that case only the general assembly may grant a pardon.

In civil matters, the justices have jurisdiction over cases of any value outside admiralty. If the amount in dispute is less than 4⅙ dollars, one justice may try the case anywhere in the county at any time and order execution against the losing party’s goods. If the amount is 4⅙ dollars or more, the county court decides it. That court consists of at least four justices and meets at the county courthouse on a set day each month. A decision may be appealed to a superior court if the matter is worth ten pounds sterling or concerns the title or boundaries of land.

There are three superior courts: the high court of chancery, the general court, and the court of admiralty. The first two hear appeals from county courts and also have original jurisdiction over disputes worth ten pounds sterling or concerning land titles or boundaries. Admiralty jurisdiction is entirely original. Chancery has three judges, the general court five, and admiralty three. Chancery meets at Richmond twice a year. The general court meets there twice for civil and criminal business and twice more for criminal business alone. The admiralty court sits at Williamsburg whenever a dispute arises.

The supreme court, called the court of appeals, consists of the judges of all three superior courts. It meets at Richmond twice a year, hears civil appeals from each superior court, and decides them finally. It has no original jurisdiction.

A dispute between two foreigners from a nation allied with the United States is decided by that nation’s consul, unless both parties choose the ordinary courts. If only one party is such a foreigner, the country’s courts try the case. When proceedings begin in a county court, the foreigner may move them to the general court or chancery court. Those courts must decide the case at their first session, as they must when it begins before them. In a case involving life or death, such foreigners have a right to a jury composed half of foreigners and half of natives.

A three-member board of auditors, appointed by the general assembly, settles public accounts; any two members may act. An individual dissatisfied with its decision may take the case to the proper superior court.

The Laws

The general assembly was established, as already shown, by letters patent dated March 9, 1607, in the fourth year of James I’s reign. The settlers seem to have adopted English law by consent, something easily done while they were few and lived together. Their practice is our only evidence of that adoption until 1661, when an assembly act expressly adopted English law except where “a difference of condition” made it inapplicable. Under this adoption, our courts treated English common law and general statutes enacted before the fourth year of James I as binding here. Judges and other supporters of the crown said later statutes did not apply unless they named us; those who reflected freely said later statutes did not apply whether they named us or not. English publications already describe English law. Since its adoption here, it has been joined by assembly acts passed under the monarchy and by convention ordinances and assembly acts enacted since the republic was established. The following differences from the British model may be worth describing.

Debtors who cannot pay and faithfully surrender all their property are released from confinement. Their persons can never again be confined for those earlier debts, though property they later acquire remains subject to their creditors.

The poor who cannot support themselves are maintained by an assessment on the tithable persons of their parish. Twelve vestrymen in each parish levy and administer it. Householders originally chose them, but they later filled vacancies themselves. They are usually discreet farmers distributed across the parish so that one can keep an immediate eye on each part. They know the details and management of private life. Philanthropy, their neighbors’ approval, and the distinction it brings give them sufficient reason to perform their duty well.

Poor people without property, friends, or strength to work board with good farmers, who receive an agreed annual payment. Those able to help themselves a little, or receiving some help from friends but not enough for full support, receive additional aid and can live comfortably at home or with friends. People without visible property or an occupation who wander from place to place are put in workhouses, where they are clothed, fed, housed, and made to work.

Nearly the same provision for the poor exists throughout our states, and from Savannah to Portsmouth one seldom meets a beggar. Beggars sometimes appear in larger towns, but they are usually foreigners who have never gained a settlement in any parish. I have never seen a person born in this country begging in a street or on a highway. A livelihood is easily gained here. If misfortune makes people born here dependent on charity, their own country provides help so reliably and comfortably that they do not think of giving it up to wander as beggars.

When such a person is sick in a good farmer’s household, every family member tries to help. Neighbors visit, bring small delicacies the patient might want, and take turns watching at night when necessary. This is incomparably better than a general hospital, where sick, dying, and dead people are crowded into the same rooms, often the same beds. The disadvantages inseparable from general hospitals can never be offset by their orderly medicine and regimen. Nature and kind nursing save a much greater proportion by our simpler method, at less cost and with less abuse. We lack only one kind of hospital: a general institution for difficult surgical cases. The benefits of surgery are certain, but an able surgeon cannot be found in every parish. Such patients should have a place to go; no others should be admitted.

A marriage must be solemnized either under a special license from the county’s first magistrate, upon proof of a parent’s or guardian’s consent for either underage party, or after public notice on three separate Sundays at a place of worship in the parishes where the parties live. A minister of any Christian society may perform the ceremony if previously licensed for that purpose by the county court. Quakers and Mennonites are exempt from all these conditions; their own societies solemnize their marriages.

A foreigner from a nation not openly at war with us becomes naturalized by moving to the state to reside and taking an oath of fidelity. The person then acquires every right of a native citizen. Citizens may give up that status by declaring, in a formal deed or in open court, their intention to leave the country and cease to be citizens of this state.

A conveyance of land must be registered either in the court of the county where the land lies or in the general court. Otherwise it is void against creditors and later purchasers.

Enslaved people pass by inheritance and dower as land does. When the inheritance is from a parent, the heir must pay each brother and sister an equal share of their value in money. Enslaved people, like land, could be entailed under the monarchy. But an act of the first republican assembly gave present and future holders of entailed property complete ownership of it.

A protested bill of exchange carries ten percent interest from its date. In other cases, no one may charge more than five percent simple interest a year on a loan of money.

Gaming debts are void. Money actually paid to settle such a debt, if it exceeded forty shillings, may be recovered by the payer within three months, or by anyone else afterward.

Tobacco, flour, beef, pork, tar, pitch, and turpentine must be inspected by publicly appointed inspectors before export.

Privileges encourage ironworks and mills, with necessary precautions to keep their dams from obstructing navigable waterways. The general assembly has repeatedly wanted to open passage through the great falls of the James and Potomac Rivers, but neither project has yet been accomplished.

Laws also protect and improve breeds of useful animals, including horses, cattle, and deer; seek to eliminate animals considered harmful, including wolves, squirrels, crows, and blackbirds; and guard citizens against infectious disease. Suspect vessels entering the state must quarantine, and the conduct of infected people within the state is regulated.

In the earliest years of settlement, a person sought land by petitioning the general assembly. If Indigenous title had already been cleared and the petition seemed reasonable, the assembly voted to grant the land. If it had not been ceded, the petitioner first had to buy the Indigenous owners’ right. The assembly questioned those owners to verify that the purchase was real and fair, then considered whether the petition was reasonable and consistent with policy before granting or refusing it. The company also granted land independently of the assembly, though very rarely.

As the colony grew and individual petitions multiplied, it became too burdensome for the assembly to examine and execute each grant. It established general rules and left the governor to make grants under them. These land laws were amended as defects emerged. A person seeking unappropriated land had to have a public officer locate and survey it; its width had to bear a prescribed proportion to its length; the governor had to execute the grant; and the land had to be improved in a prescribed way within a set time.

These rules gave the state the sole power to acquire Indigenous rights to the soil, because an Indigenous conveyance alone gave an individual no right recognized by law. Thereafter the state or crown periodically made general purchases from Indigenous peoples, and the governor divided the land into grants conforming to the rules. Neither he nor the crown could waive those rules. Grants lacking the required legal conditions were regularly set aside by a writ requiring a showing why the grant should not be set aside or by a bill in chancery.

This system has changed little under our new government. A person seeking land no one else has appropriated pays the public treasurer an amount proportional to the quantity wanted. The person takes the receipt to the auditors of public accounts, who charge the treasurer with the amount and order the land office register to issue a warrant. With that warrant, the person goes to the surveyor of the county where the chosen land lies. The surveyor lays it out and gives an exact description in a certificate. On its return to the land office, a grant is drawn up and signed by the governor. This gives the grantee full ownership, transferable by deed or will, or passing to heirs if the grantee dies without a will.

The Proposed Revision of the Laws

Many laws enacted under the monarchy concerned only that form of government or taught principles inconsistent with republican government. The first assembly after the commonwealth was established therefore appointed a committee to revise the entire code, put it in suitable form and length, and report it to the assembly. Three men have completed and reported the work, though it probably will not be considered until peace gives the legislature time for it.

The revision takes English common law, meaning the part older than the oldest surviving statutes, as its basis. Reducing that law to a written text was thought dangerous, so it was left to be gathered from its customary records. Necessary changes to common law, along with the British statutes and assembly acts thought worth retaining, were arranged as 126 new acts. Their authors sought simplicity of style wherever it was safe. The following are the most notable proposed changes:

To divide the land of a person who dies without a will equally among all children, or among other representatives of the same degree.

To distribute enslaved people among the nearest relatives as other movable property is distributed.

To fund all public expenses, whether of the general treasury, parish, or county, through assessments on citizens in proportion to their property. These expenses include poor relief, bridges, courthouses, and similar needs.

To hire contractors to keep public roads repaired and compensate people whose land is crossed by new roads.

To define precisely how foreigners become citizens and citizens become foreigners.

To establish religious freedom on the broadest basis.

An additional proposal would emancipate every enslaved person born after the act’s passage. The revisors’ reported bill does not itself contain that provision. An amendment was prepared to offer when the legislature considers the bill. It would keep the children with their parents until a specified age, then educate them at public expense in farming, trades, or sciences according to their abilities until the girls reached eighteen and the boys twenty-one. They would then be settled in whatever place circumstances made most suitable. They would be sent with arms, household and trade implements, seeds, pairs of useful domestic animals, and other supplies. They would be declared a free and independent people, with our alliance and protection until they had gained strength. At the same time, ships would go to other parts of the world to bring an equal number of white inhabitants, offered suitable encouragement to migrate here.

It will probably be asked why we should not keep and incorporate Black people into the state, saving the expense of importing white settlers to fill the vacancies they would leave. Deep-rooted white prejudice, the ten thousand memories Black people have of injuries suffered, new provocations, the real distinctions nature has made, and many other circumstances would divide us into parties. The resulting convulsions would probably end only with the extermination of one race or the other. These are political objections; physical and moral objections may also be added.

The first visible difference is color. We do not know whether Black skin color lies in the membrane between the skin and its outer layer, in the outer layer itself, or in the color of the blood, bile, or another secretion. Yet the difference is fixed in nature and is as real as if we knew its location and cause. Is it of no importance? Does it not affect the relative beauty of the two races? In one, are not the fine blends of red and white and the changing flushes that express every passion preferable to the unchanging black veil over the other’s expressions? Add flowing hair and a more elegant bodily symmetry. Black people’s preference for white people also declares their own judgment in whites’ favor, as uniformly as the orangutan prefers Black women to females of its own species. We attend to superior beauty when breeding horses, dogs, and other domestic animals. Why not when reproducing human beings?

Besides color, figure, and hair, other physical distinctions prove a difference of race. Black people have less facial and body hair. They excrete less through the kidneys and more through the skin, producing a strong, disagreeable odor. This greater perspiration makes them more tolerant of heat and less tolerant of cold than white people. Perhaps a difference in the lungs also matters. Crawford, a recent experimentalist, has found the lungs to be the chief regulator of animal heat. Their structure might prevent Black people from drawing as much of that heat from the air while inhaling, or make them lose more while exhaling.

They seem to need less sleep. After hard labor all day, a Black person may stay up until midnight or later for the slightest amusement, knowing work will begin at dawn. They are at least as brave as white people, and more adventurous. This may come from lack of foresight, which keeps them from seeing danger until it is present. When it comes, they face it with no greater calm or steadiness than white people. They are more ardent toward women, but their love seems more eager desire than a delicate union of feeling and sensation. Their grief passes quickly. The countless afflictions that make us wonder whether heaven gave us life in mercy or wrath are less deeply felt and more quickly forgotten by them. In general, their existence appears to involve more sensation than reflection. This explains their inclination to sleep when neither occupied by amusement nor working: an animal whose body rests and whose mind does not reflect will naturally sleep.

Comparing memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that Black people equal white people in memory, are much inferior in reason, and are dull, without taste, and irregular in imagination. I think scarcely one could follow and understand Euclid’s investigations. It would be unfair to go to Africa to examine this question. We should consider them here, alongside white people, where the facts on which to judge are not doubtful. We must allow substantially for differences in condition, education, conversation, and social position.

Many millions of Black people have been brought to America or born here. Most have indeed been confined to farming, their homes, and one another’s society. Yet many have been placed where they could have learned from their masters’ conversation, and many have learned trades that kept them in association with white people. Some have received a liberal education. All have lived in countries where arts and sciences are considerably cultivated and have seen examples of the best work from abroad. Indigenous people without these advantages often carve pipe figures showing design and merit. They draw an animal, plant, or country in a way that shows a capacity needing only cultivation. Their sublime oratory shows strong reason and feeling and a vivid, elevated imagination.

Yet I have never found a Black person expressing a thought above plain narration, or seen even the beginnings of painting or sculpture. In music they more commonly have accurate ears for tune and time than white people, and they have shown they can invent a short musical phrase. Their characteristic instrument is the banjo, brought from Africa; it is the origin of the guitar, its four strings corresponding exactly to the guitar’s four lower strings. Whether Black people can compose an extended melody or complex harmony remains to be proved.

Misery often produces the most moving poetry. There is misery enough among Black people, God knows, but no poetry. Love especially inspires poets. Their love is ardent, but kindles the senses alone rather than the imagination. Religion has produced Phillis Wheatley, but could not make her a poet. The compositions published under her name are beneath criticism. Compared with her, the heroes of the Dunciad are like Hercules compared with the author of that poem.

Ignatius Sancho comes closer to literary merit, though his letters do more honor to his heart than his head. They express pure friendship and general love of humanity, and show that strong religious zeal can coexist with much of the latter. His compliments often take a happy turn, and his style is easy and familiar except when he imitates the invented words of Tristram Shandy. But his imagination is wild and extravagant, continually escaping the restraint of reason and taste. Its wandering leaves a train of thought as incoherent and erratic as a meteor’s path. His subjects should often have led to sober reasoning; instead he always substitutes sentiment for demonstration.

Overall, although we rank him first among Black writers who have presented themselves for public judgment, comparison with the writers of the race among whom he lived, especially letter writers, the class he chose, puts him at the bottom. This criticism assumes the letters published under his name are genuine and were not improved by another hand, points difficult to investigate. Everyone has observed improvement in body and mind in the first generation of mixed Black and white parentage; this proves that their inferiority is not due solely to conditions of life.

Among the Romans, especially around the age of Augustus, enslaved people were in a far worse condition than Black people on the American continent. Male and female slaves were housed separately because raising a child cost the master more than buying one. Cato allowed limited contact between them only for a fee. Plutarch reports in his life of Cato that he permitted male slaves to have intercourse with female slaves in return for a fixed payment. But enslaved people in this country increase as quickly as free inhabitants. Their circumstances and customs place almost no restraint on contact between the sexes.

For economy, Cato always sold slaves who were sick or too old to work. As a standing instruction to a master inspecting his farm, he says to sell old oxen, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sick slave, and anything else that has become useless. American slaves cannot count that practice among the injuries and insults they suffer. Suetonius records that on the island of Aesculapius in the Tiber, Romans commonly abandoned sick slaves whose cures seemed likely to take a long time. The emperor Claudius declared those who recovered free and first ruled that killing such a person instead of abandoning them was homicide. There has been no instance of such abandonment among us; if it caused death, it would be punished as a capital crime. We are told that Vedius Pollio, in Augustus’s presence, would have fed a slave to his fish for breaking a glass.

The Romans regularly took slaves’ testimony under torture. Here it has been thought better never to use their testimony. If a master was murdered, Roman law condemned every slave in the house or within hearing to death. Here only the guilty person is punished, on proof as precise as that required against a free person. Yet despite these and other discouragements, Roman slaves were often among their finest artists and excelled in science. They commonly tutored their masters’ children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus were slaves. But they were white. It is their nature, then, rather than their condition, that has produced the difference.

Whether further observation will confirm my conjecture that nature gave Black people less ability of mind, I believe she gave them justice in the qualities of the heart. The tendency to theft attributed to them must be ascribed to their circumstances, not a corrupt moral sense. A person for whose benefit no property laws exist probably feels less obliged to respect those made for others. When arguing our own case, we hold it fundamental that just laws must give rights in return. Without that reciprocity, they are arbitrary rules founded on force, not conscience. I leave the master to decide whether religious commands against violating property were made for him as well as for his slave, and whether the slave may just as justifiably take a little from the person who has taken everything from him as kill someone who would kill him.

A change in a person’s circumstances changing that person’s ideas of moral right and wrong is neither new nor peculiar to Black people. Homer described it 2,600 years ago:

Jove fix’d it certain, that whatever day
Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.

But Homer’s slaves were white. Despite the circumstances that must weaken enslaved people’s respect for property law, we find among them many examples of strict honesty and as many examples of kindness, gratitude, and steadfast loyalty as among their better-educated masters.

The opinion that Black people are inferior in reason and imagination must be ventured with great diffidence. A general conclusion demands many observations even when the subject can be examined with a dissecting knife, lenses, fire, or solvents. How much more caution is needed when we examine a faculty rather than a substance: something beyond the reach of the senses, existing under varied and combined conditions whose presence and absence have effects we cannot calculate. There is also this especially delicate consideration: our conclusion could lower a whole race of people from a rank their Creator may have given them.

We must acknowledge, to our reproach, that although Black and Indigenous peoples have been before our eyes for a century and a half, we have not studied them as subjects of natural history. I therefore offer only a suspicion that Black people, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to white people in bodily and mental endowments. Experience does not rule out different species of one genus, or varieties of one species, having different qualities. Will a student of natural history who examines differences among animal races philosophically excuse an attempt to keep human races as distinct as nature formed them?

This unfortunate difference in color, and perhaps in ability, is a powerful obstacle to emancipation. Many advocates of freedom also want to preserve human dignity and beauty. Some, troubled by the question of what is to be done with freed people afterward, join those who oppose emancipation solely from sordid greed. Among the Romans, emancipation required one step: a freed slave could mix with the master’s people without staining the master’s blood. With us, a second step, unknown to history, is necessary: once freed, the person must be removed beyond the reach of such mixture.

The revised code also proposes to proportion punishments to crimes. It attempts to do so on this scale.

Crimes Punishable by Death

Crimes Punishable by Injury to the Body

Crimes Punishable by Labor or Other Measures

The proposal would abolish pardons and benefit of clergy. If a verdict goes against a defendant, however, the court may allow a new trial at its discretion. No attainder would cause corruption of blood, barring inheritance through the convicted person, or forfeit a widow’s dower. Enslaved people convicted of offenses punishable by labor for others would be transported to Africa or elsewhere as circumstances allow and kept enslaved there. A strict regimen is proposed for those sentenced to labor.

The Proposed System of Education

Another aim of the revision is to spread knowledge more generally among the people. Its education bill would divide every county into districts five or six miles square, called hundreds, and establish in each a school teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. Each hundred would support its teacher. Everyone there could send their children free for three years and for longer if they paid.

An overseer of each school would annually choose the most promising boy among those whose parents could not afford further education and send him to a grammar school. Twenty grammar schools are proposed across the country to teach Greek, Latin, geography, and advanced arithmetic. Boys sent in a given year would be tested there for one or two years. The most promising would continue for six years; the rest would leave. In this way, twenty boys of the highest ability would annually be raked from the rubbish and educated at public expense through the grammar-school course.

At the end of six years, half would leave; these would probably supply future grammar-school teachers. The other half, selected for superior ability and disposition, would spend three years studying sciences of their choice at the College of William and Mary. Its course is proposed to be enlarged, as will be explained later, to include all useful sciences.

The complete scheme would teach every child in the state reading, writing, and ordinary arithmetic. Each year it would produce ten students of superior ability trained in Greek, Latin, geography, and advanced arithmetic, and ten of still greater ability who had also studied sciences suited to their talents. It would give wealthier people convenient schools where they could educate their children at their own expense. The law’s general purpose is to provide education suited to each person’s age, ability, and circumstances, and directed toward freedom and happiness. Specific details do not belong in the law; they must be settled by the overseers responsible for carrying it out.

The schools of the hundreds are the first stage, where most people will receive their education. The chief foundations of future public order must therefore be laid there. Rather than put the Bible and New Testament in children’s hands before their judgment is mature enough for religious questions, these schools can fill their memories with useful facts from Greek, Roman, European, and American history. They can also teach the first elements of morality. As children’s judgment strengthens, those elements can help them pursue their greatest happiness by showing that it does not depend on the position chance assigned them, but on a good conscience, good health, work, and freedom in every just pursuit.

Children destined for higher learning, whether through family wealth or support from the state, would next attend grammar schools to learn languages. I am told Greek and Latin are falling out of use in Europe. I do not know what European customs and occupations require, but we would be wrong to follow that example. Between about eight and fifteen or sixteen, the mind, like the body, is not yet strong enough for sustained, demanding work. Such work can exhaust it prematurely. A child may at first appear flatteringly mature, only to be reduced to childishness in adulthood. At that age memory is especially ready to receive and retain impressions. Since learning languages depends chiefly on memory, it suits that period, which is also long enough to learn the most useful ancient and modern languages.

I do not claim that language is science. It is a tool for acquiring science, and time spent preparing tools for later work is not wasted. Moreover, the books used to learn languages can also impress useful facts and sound principles on young minds. If this period passes in idleness, the mind grows sluggish and weak, as an unexercised body would. The close connection between body and mind as they grow, develop, and decline makes reasoning from one to the other safe enough here. When students are old enough, they are expected to proceed from grammar school to the university, our third and final stage, to study sciences suited to their aims.

By selecting gifted young people from poor families, we hope the state will benefit from talents that nature has distributed as freely among the poor as among the rich, but that perish unused unless discovered and cultivated. Most important and most legitimate of all the law’s aims is to make the people safe guardians of their own liberty, for they are its ultimate guardians. To that end, reading in the first stage, where most receive their entire education, would be chiefly historical. Knowledge of the past would help them judge the future, give them the experience of other times and nations, equip them to judge people’s actions and designs, and teach them to recognize ambition under every disguise and defeat it.

Every government contains some trace of human weakness, some seed of corruption and decline. Cunning discovers it, and wickedness gradually opens, cultivates, and enlarges it. Every government degenerates when entrusted to rulers alone. The people are its only safe guardians, and their minds must be improved if they are to guard it safely. Education is essential, though insufficient by itself. A constitutional amendment must help it by sharing influence over government among all the people. If every individual has a share in ultimate authority, government will be safe: corrupting everyone would exceed any private fortune, while public money for the purpose could be raised only by taxing those same people. Each person would then have to pay the price of their own corruption.

The government of Great Britain has been corrupted because only one man in ten may vote for members of Parliament. Those who sell the government therefore keep nine-tenths of the price without having to pay toward it themselves. Some have thought that limiting the vote to a wealthy few restrains corruption. Extending the vote to enough people to put them beyond its means would restrain it more effectively.

Finally, another bill in the revision proposes beginning a public library and gallery by spending a set amount each year on books, paintings, and statues.

What colleges and public establishments, roads, buildings, and other such works are there?

The College of William and Mary is the only public institution of higher learning in this state. It was founded in the reign of King William and Queen Mary, who granted it 20,000 acres of land and a duty of one penny per pound on certain tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland, a duty that had been levied under the statute of 25 Charles 2. By temporary laws, the assembly also granted it duties on imported liquor and exported skins and furs. From these sources it received more than £3,000 in an average year. Its brick buildings provide modest accommodations for perhaps a hundred students.

Under its charter, the college was governed by twenty visitors, who made its rules. It also had a president and six professors, who formed its incorporated body, and was allowed a representative in the general assembly. The charter initially supported professorships in Greek and Latin, mathematics, moral philosophy, and two branches of divinity. A substantial gift from Mr. Boyle of England was attached to the sixth professorship for the instruction of Indigenous people and their conversion to Christianity. It was called the Brafferton professorship after an English estate bought with the donated money.

Admitting students who were only beginning Latin and Greek filled the college with children. Young gentlemen ready to study the sciences found this disagreeable and beneath them, and were discouraged from attending. The schools of mathematics and moral philosophy, which might have been useful, consequently accomplished very little. The college’s revenues were also spent accommodating students who came only for elementary learning.

After the present revolution, the visitors could not change provisions fixed by the charter and therefore could not increase the number of professorships. They changed their subjects instead, removing the two divinity schools and the Greek and Latin school. The six professorships now stand as follows:

Law and Civil Government.

Anatomy and Medicine.

Natural Philosophy and Mathematics.

Moral Philosophy, the Law of Nature and Nations, and the Fine Arts.

Modern Languages.

The Brafferton professorship.

When the legislature has time to consider the subject, the visitors propose to seek authority to increase the number of professorships, both to divide those already established and to add others for further branches of science. In addition to subjects usually taught at European universities, a professorship in the ancient languages and literature of the North seems appropriate because of their connection with our language, laws, customs, and history.

The Brafferton institution would better fulfill its purpose by maintaining a permanent mission among Indigenous tribes. Besides teaching Christianity, as the founder required, the missionary should collect each tribe’s traditions, laws, customs, languages, and other information that might reveal its relation to other tribes or its descent from other nations. When that work was completed with one tribe, the missionary could move to another.

County courts govern the roads, subject to the general court’s control. They order new roads to be opened wherever they think them necessary. They divide each county’s inhabitants into districts and assign each district a suitable portion of the public roads to maintain. The inhabitants must build bridges that require no skilled craftsmen. Where a stream requires a bridge built by skilled workers, the court employs them at the expense of the whole county. If the undertaking is too large for the county, an application is made to the general assembly. The assembly may authorize individuals to build the bridge and collect a fixed toll from everyone who crosses, or approve another proposal it considers reasonable.

Ferries are permitted only at places designated by law, which also fixes their rates. Courts license taverns and set their rates from time to time.

Private buildings are very rarely made of stone or brick. Most have timber frames and boards plastered with lime. Nothing could be uglier or less comfortable, and fortunately these buildings are also less durable. Nearly every house in the state follows one of two or three plans, according to its size. The poorest people build cabins of horizontal logs, filling the gaps with mud. These are warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the more expensive houses made of timber and planks.

Wealthy people take care to grow vegetables but pay little attention to fruit. Poorer people grow neither and live chiefly on milk and animal food. This is all the less excusable because our climate makes ample vegetable food indispensable to health and comfort and is very favorable to growing fruit.

The only public buildings worth mentioning are the Capitol, the Palace, the College, and the Hospital for Lunatics, all in Williamsburg, formerly the seat of our government. The Capitol is light and airy, with a two-level portico in front. Its lower, Doric order has reasonably correct proportions and ornaments, except that the spaces between its columns are too wide. The upper, Ionic order is much too small for the lower one, and its ornaments are neither proper to that order nor well proportioned to one another. The pediment above them is too high for its width. Even so, the Capitol is our most pleasing piece of architecture.

The Palace is unattractive outside, but spacious and convenient within. It has a pleasant setting and, with its grounds, could become an elegant residence. The College and Hospital are rough, misshapen masses that would look like brick kilns if they had no roofs. Apart from these, the only public buildings are churches and courthouses, in which no effort is made toward elegance. Such an effort would be difficult: a worker capable of drawing an architectural order could scarcely be found here. Architecture seems to have laid a curse on this land.

Individuals often erect expensive buildings. Giving them symmetry and taste would not raise their cost. It would change only the arrangement of the materials and the form and combination of the parts, often for less than the cost of the crude ornaments sometimes heaped on these buildings. Yet the first principles of architecture are unknown here, and we have scarcely a model refined enough to show what they are. Architecture is one of the fine arts and, under the college’s new arrangement, falls within a professor’s field. Perhaps it will inspire some young people with natural taste and bring about a reform in this elegant and useful art.

Such work will produce no lasting improvement, however, while the unfortunate prejudice persists that brick or stone houses are less healthy than wooden ones. In rainy weather moisture often appears on brick or stone walls. The obvious explanation seems to be that rain has passed through them, but four observations show why that explanation is mistaken:

1. The moisture appears even without rain when the air is damp.

2. It appears on interior partition walls as well as exterior walls.

3. It also appears on brick or stone floors.

4. It is more abundant on thicker walls, whereas the opposite should occur if rain were penetrating them.

Pour cold water into a stone or glass vessel and moisture immediately forms on the outside; pour it into a wooden vessel and it does not. We do not suppose that water has passed through the glass. Rather, moisture suspended in the surrounding air collects on its surface. Similarly, moist vapor from an alembic’s boiler passes through its cooling chamber, where it collects on the chamber’s inner surface. Brick and stone walls act like that cooler surface. They are cold enough to condense moisture suspended in heavily damp indoor air; wooden walls are not.

The question is which air is healthier: air in which that moisture remains suspended, or air from which it has been removed? In either case the remedy is simple. A small fire lit in a damp room prevents moisture from collecting on its walls. This practice is found healthy in the warmest as well as the coldest seasons, and is as necessary in a wooden house as in one of stone or brick.

I do not mean that rain never passes through brick walls. I have seen it happen. Here it happens only through a house’s northern and eastern walls after a northeasterly storm, the only kind that lasts long enough to drive rain through them. This occurs too rarely to justify calling such houses unhealthy. In a house with well-fired brick walls and good mortar, I have seen rain penetrate only twice in twelve or fifteen years.

Europeans, who live chiefly in stone or brick houses, are surely as healthy as Virginians. Their houses are also warmer in winter and cooler in summer than wooden ones, cheaper to build where lime is readily available, and far more durable. Durability makes it especially important to remove this prejudice from our countrymen’s minds. A country with wooden buildings can never advance its improvements very far. Fifty years is a generous estimate of their life. Every half century the country becomes a blank slate, and we must begin again as we did when we first settled it. Where buildings are made of durable materials, by contrast, every new structure is a permanent addition to the state, increasing its value as well as its beauty.

What measures have been taken concerning the estates and possessions of the rebels commonly called Tories?

A Tory has been properly defined as a traitor in thought but not in deed. The only category the laws used to reach such people was that of nonjurors, people who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the state. They were at one time taxed at twice the ordinary rate, at another at three times that rate, and finally were allowed compensation and placed on the same footing as other citizens. As evidence both of our government’s leniency and of the unity of its inhabitants, I may mention that although this war has lasted nearly seven years, not one execution for treason has occurred.

Under this question I will also describe the measures adopted concerning British property. Its owners stand on much stronger ground than the Tories. Under our laws, which agree with English law on this point, an alien cannot hold land, and an enemy alien cannot bring a legal action to recover money or other movable property. Land acquired or held by an alien is forfeited to the state. If an enemy alien brings an action for money or other movable property, the defendant may plead that the claimant is an enemy alien. This extinguishes the claimant’s right against the debtor or the person holding the property.

When we separated from Great Britain, British subjects became aliens and, because we were at war, enemy aliens. Their lands were therefore forfeited, and their debts could not be recovered through the courts. The assembly nevertheless passed laws at various times to preserve their property. First it placed their lands, enslaved people, and other property on their farms in the custody of commissioners, most of whom were trusted friends or agents of the owners. The commissioners were directed to pay the net profits into the treasury. The assembly also permitted people who owed money to British subjects to pay those debts into the treasury.

Money paid in this way was declared to remain the property of the British subject. If the state used it, the state was to repay it, unless improper conduct in Great Britain made its retention reasonable. At that time depreciation had begun to a small degree, although the Whigs had neither acknowledged nor noticed it. Debtors paid in large sums.

Later, adhering to the principle that an alien could not hold land in the state, the assembly ordered all British property to be sold. By then it had become aware of depreciation and of the losses that would follow unless precautions were taken. It therefore ordered the sale proceeds to be converted into their value at that time in tobacco, subject to the legislature’s future direction. This act has made the question of compensation more uncertain. Another act, passed in May 1780, withdrew permission to pay debts owed to British subjects into the public treasury.

What different religions are accepted in this state?

The first settlers here came from England and belonged to the Church of England. They arrived just when that church had won a complete victory over people of other religious persuasions. Once they acquired the powers to make, administer, and enforce laws, they showed as much intolerance here as their Presbyterian brethren who had emigrated to the northern colony.

Quakers were fleeing persecution in England and looked to these new countries as refuges of civil and religious freedom. They found freedom only for the dominant sect. Acts of the Virginia assembly in 1659, 1662, and 1693 made it punishable for parents to refuse baptism for their children and prohibited unlawful Quaker assemblies. They punished a ship’s master for bringing a Quaker into the state and ordered Quakers already here, and any who came later, imprisoned until they renounced the country. The acts provided milder punishment for a first and second return but death for a third. They also forbade people to permit Quaker meetings in or near their houses, to receive Quakers individually, or to distribute books supporting their beliefs. If no execution occurred here, as it did in New England, the reason was not moderation in the church or legislature, as the law itself shows. It lay in historical circumstances that have not been passed down to us.

Anglicans retained full control of the country for about a century. Other opinions then began to spread. The government’s great care in supporting its church had produced corresponding indolence among its clergy, and two thirds of the people had become dissenters by the start of the present revolution. The laws still oppressed them, but the established party had become more moderate, while the dissenters had grown determined enough to command respect.

Our laws on religion now stand as follows. In their Declaration of Rights, the convention of May 1776 declared free religious exercise a truth and a natural right. But when they framed the ordinance of government on that declaration, they did not give every declared principle the protection of law. They passed over religious rights, leaving them as they had found them. When members of the same convention met as the general assembly in October 1776, however, they repealed all acts of Parliament that made it criminal to maintain religious opinions, to refrain from attending church, or to practice any form of worship. They also suspended laws that paid salaries to the clergy; in October 1779 that suspension became permanent.

With those statutory religious oppressions removed, we remain subject only to those imposed by the common law or by our own assembly’s acts. Under the common law, heresy was a capital offense punished by burning. Ecclesiastical judges decided what counted as heresy and heard the cases until the statute of 1 Elizabeth, chapter 1, restricted its definition. That statute declared that nothing was heresy unless it had been so determined by the authority of canonical Scripture, by one of the first four general councils, or by another council relying on the express and plain words of Scripture.

Heresy as thus defined remains a common-law offense. Our assembly’s act of October 1777, chapter 17, gives the general court jurisdiction over it by granting that court general jurisdiction in common-law matters. The sentence is carried out by the writ De hæretico comburendo, for burning a heretic.

Our own assembly’s act of 1705, chapter 30, also provides that a person raised in Christianity who denies that God exists, denies the Trinity, asserts that there is more than one God, denies the truth of Christianity, or denies the divine authority of Scripture is, on a first offense, barred from any church, civil, or military office or employment. On a second offense, the person cannot sue, receive a gift or legacy, or serve as a guardian, executor, or administrator, and is imprisoned for three years without bail. A father’s legal right to custody of his children rests on his right of guardianship. Once that right is taken away, a court may separate the children from him and place them in more orthodox hands.

This is a brief account of the religious bondage under which a people have willingly remained while spending their lives and fortunes to establish their civil freedom. The mistaken belief seems not yet sufficiently removed that laws may control the mind’s operations as well as the body’s acts. Our rulers can have authority only over natural rights we have submitted to them. We never submitted the rights of conscience, nor could we. For those we answer to God. Government’s rightful power extends only to acts that injure others. My neighbor does me no injury by saying there are twenty gods or none. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

If someone says that such a neighbor’s testimony in court cannot be trusted, reject the testimony and let the stigma fall on him. Coercion may make him worse by making him a hypocrite; it will never make him more truthful. It may fix him stubbornly in his errors, but it will not cure them. Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give them freedom and they will support true religion by bringing every false one before their judgment and investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error alone.

Without the Roman government’s permission for free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Without free inquiry at the Reformation, Christianity’s corruptions could not have been purged. Restrict it now and present corruptions will be protected while new ones are encouraged. If government prescribed our medicine and diet, our bodies would be managed as our souls are now. In France, for example, an emetic was once forbidden as medicine and the potato as food.

Government is just as infallible when it settles questions of physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for saying that the earth was a sphere: the government had declared it as flat as a platter, and he was forced to renounce his error. Yet that error eventually prevailed; the earth became a globe, and Descartes declared that a vortex whirled it around its axis. The government under which he lived wisely recognized that this was no matter for civil jurisdiction. Otherwise, authority would have involved us all in vortices. Vortices have in fact been rejected, and Newton’s principle of gravitation now rests more firmly on reason than it would if government made it a required article of faith. Reason and experiment were allowed to work, and error fled before them. Error alone needs government’s support. Truth can stand on its own.

Subject opinion to coercion, and whom will you appoint as inquisitors? Fallible people, governed by bad passions and by private as well as public motives. Why coerce opinion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion any more desirable than uniformity of face or height? Bring in Procrustes’ bed, then. Since large people might beat small ones, make us all the same size by cutting down the former and stretching the latter.

Differences of religious opinion are beneficial. The sects act as moral censors of one another. Is uniformity even attainable? Since Christianity’s introduction, millions of innocent men, women, and children have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have made no progress toward it. Coercion has made half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. It has supported fraud and error throughout the earth.

Consider that the earth has a thousand million inhabitants, who probably profess a thousand different religious systems. Ours is only one of them. If there is only one right system, and ours is that one, we should wish to gather the other 999 wandering sects into the fold of truth. Against such a majority, however, force cannot accomplish this. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable means. They require free inquiry. How can we wish others to allow it while refusing it ourselves?

An inquisitor says that every state has established some religion. I answer that no two have established the same one. Does that prove establishments infallible? Pennsylvania and New York, our sister states, have long existed without any religious establishment. Their experiment was new and uncertain when they began it, but it has succeeded beyond expectation. They flourish greatly. Religion is well supported, in various forms, all sufficiently good to preserve peace and order. If a sect arises whose beliefs would undermine morals, good sense has free rein to reason and laugh it away without troubling the state. They hang no more criminals than we do and suffer no more religious conflict. Their harmony, on the contrary, is unmatched. It can be attributed only to their unlimited tolerance, since in no other respect do they differ from every nation on earth. They have made the happy discovery that the way to silence religious disputes is to take no official notice of them.

Let us also give this experiment a fair chance and rid ourselves of these tyrannical laws while we can. For now, the spirit of the times protects us from them. I doubt that the people here would permit an execution for heresy or three years’ imprisonment for failing to comprehend the mysteries of the Trinity. But can we rely permanently and without error on the people’s present spirit? Does that constitute government? Is that the protection we receive in exchange for the rights we give up?

The spirit of the times can change and will change. Our rulers will become corrupt and our people careless. One zealot may begin persecuting, and better people may become his victims. We cannot repeat too often that essential rights must be secured in law while our rulers are honest and we are united. After this war ends, we shall be going downhill. Rulers will no longer need to turn constantly to the people for support, so they will forget the people and disregard their rights. The people, concerned only with making money, will forget themselves and will not unite to secure respect for their rights. The restraints we fail to remove when the war ends will remain for a long time and grow heavier, until our rights revive or perish in a convulsion.

What particular customs and manners have become established in this state?

It is difficult to decide what standard, universal or particular, should be used to judge a nation’s manners. It is harder still for someone raised among those manners to judge them by that standard, because habit has made them familiar. Slavery among us must surely have an unhappy effect on our people’s manners. Every interaction between enslaver and enslaved person is a continual display of violent passions: relentless despotism on one side and degrading submission on the other.

Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for human beings are imitative. Imitation is the seed of all education; from cradle to grave, people learn to do what they see others do. Even if neither concern for others nor self-interest moved a parent to restrain his angry treatment of an enslaved person, the presence of his child should always be reason enough. Generally it is not. The parent rages; the child watches, copies the signs of anger, adopts the same bearing among smaller enslaved people, and gives free rein to his worst passions. Nurtured, educated, and exercised daily in tyranny, the child cannot help acquiring hateful traits. A person would have to be extraordinary to keep his manners and morals uncorrupted in such circumstances.

What condemnation is due to the statesman who permits one half of the citizens to trample on the rights of the other half, making the former despots and the latter enemies, destroying the morals of one group and the other’s love of country? If an enslaved person can have a country in this world, it must be any country other than the one where he is born to live and work for someone else. There he must suppress his natural abilities and either do what he can, as an individual, toward the disappearance of the human race or pass his miserable condition to endless generations of descendants.

The people’s industry is destroyed along with their morals. In a warm climate, no one who can compel another to work for him will work for himself. This is so true that very few enslavers are ever seen working. Can a nation’s liberties be secure when we have removed their only firm foundation: the people’s conviction that those liberties are a gift from God and cannot be violated without provoking his wrath?

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever. If we consider numbers, nature, and natural means alone, a reversal of fortune and an exchange of positions are possible. Supernatural intervention could make such an event probable. The Almighty has no attribute that can take our side in such a contest.

It is impossible to discuss this subject temperately while following all its implications for policy, morals, and natural and civil history. We must hope those considerations find their own way into every mind. I think a change has already become perceptible since the present revolution began. The enslaver’s spirit is weakening, the enslaved person’s is rising from the dust, and his condition is becoming less harsh. I hope that, under heaven’s guidance, the way is being prepared for complete emancipation and that events will bring it about with the enslavers’ consent rather than through their destruction.

What is the present state of manufacturing, commerce, and trade within and beyond the state?

We have never had significant trade within the state. Our overseas commerce has suffered greatly since the present conflict began. During that time, families have made their most necessary clothing themselves. Our cotton goods bear some comparison with European goods of the same kind, but those made of wool, flax, and hemp are coarse, unattractive, and uncomfortable. Our attachment to agriculture and preference for foreign manufactured goods are such that, wisely or not, our people will certainly return as soon as they can to raising raw materials and exchanging them for finer goods than they can make themselves.

European political economists have established a principle that every state should try to manufacture for itself. We transfer this principle, like many others, to America without considering how different circumstances may produce different results. In Europe, land is either cultivated or closed to those who would cultivate it. Manufacturing is therefore necessary, rather than a matter of choice, to support the excess population. We, however, have an immense amount of land inviting the farmer’s work. Is it better for all our citizens to improve that land, or for half to leave it and practice manufacturing and trades for the other half?

Those who work the earth are God’s chosen people, if he ever had a chosen people. In their hearts he has placed genuine and substantial virtue. Among them he keeps that sacred fire alive; otherwise it might disappear from the earth. No age or nation has offered an example of widespread moral corruption among cultivators. Corruption marks those who, unlike the farmer, do not look to heaven, their own land, and their own labor for a living, but depend instead on customers’ changing circumstances and whims. Dependence produces subservience and willingness to be bought, smothers the beginnings of virtue, and makes people suitable tools for the ambitious.

Accidental circumstances may sometimes have slowed this natural course and consequence of manufacturing and the trades. Generally, however, the ratio of all a state’s other classes to its farmers is the ratio of its unhealthy to its healthy parts, and serves well enough as a measure of its corruption. While we have land to cultivate, let us not wish to see our citizens at workbenches or spinning wheels. Farming needs carpenters, masons, and smiths. For manufacturing in general, though, let the workshops remain in Europe.

It is better to carry food and materials to workers there than to bring the workers here to the food and materials, along with their manners and principles. The cost of carrying goods across the Atlantic will be repaid in happiness and lasting government. Mobs in great cities support pure government about as much as sores strengthen a human body. A people’s manners and spirit preserve the strength of a republic. When they decay, the decay soon eats into the heart of its laws and constitution.

What products does the state sell, and what goods must its inhabitants obtain from Europe or elsewhere?

Before the present war, according to the best information I can obtain, our average annual exports were nearly as follows:

The total equals £850,000 in Virginia money, or 607,142 guineas.

In 1758 we exported 70,000 hogsheads of tobacco, the largest quantity this country ever produced in a single year. Its cultivation was already declining rapidly when the war began, while wheat was taking its place. When peace returns, tobacco cultivation must continue to decline. I suspect that a change in our climate’s temperature has become perceptible to the plant, which needs unusual heat to produce good tobacco. More indispensably, it needs exceptionally fertile soil, and its market price does not enable the planter to create such fertility with manure.

If Virginia and Maryland alone continued to supply tobacco, increasing difficulty in growing it would raise the price enough for planters to overcome those difficulties and live by the crop. But the western country along the Mississippi and the middle parts of Georgia have plentiful fresh, fertile land and a hotter sun. They will be able to sell tobacco more cheaply and force these two states to abandon it altogether. That will be a fortunate necessity. Tobacco cultivation causes immense suffering. The people employed in it must constantly exert themselves beyond what human nature can sustain. They raise little food of any kind, so people and animals on these farms are badly fed while the soil is rapidly impoverished.

Wheat cultivation has the opposite effects. It covers the ground with herbage and preserves fertility, feeds laborers plentifully, and asks only moderate labor except during harvest. It also raises many animals for food and work and spreads plenty and happiness. We find it easier to produce a hundred bushels of wheat than a thousand pounds of tobacco, and the wheat is worth more.

The weevil is, however, a serious obstacle to growing wheat here. Principles already known must lead to a remedy. The egg needs a certain heat to hatch, namely the ordinary temperature of summer air. If underground or other granaries can be kept below that temperature, cold will cure the problem. We also know that heat above the hatching temperature kills the egg, but in seeking such heat we can easily reach a temperature that causes putrefaction.

Putrefaction requires three things: heat, moisture, and outside air. Remove any one of them and the other two can safely remain. Heat is what we want, so we must exclude either moisture or outside air. Kilns have excluded moisture by exposing grain to fire, which heats and dries it at the same time. Outside air has been excluded by putting grain into hogsheads, coating them with lime, and sealing them. In that condition, the grain’s bulk generates enough heat to kill the egg. Moisture remains, but outside air cannot enter.

A more delicate method has also been tried: producing a temperature between the heat that kills the egg and the heat that causes putrefaction. Threshing grain as soon as it is cut and piling it in its chaff has come very close to this temperature, though neither perfectly nor consistently. The heap generates enough heat to kill most eggs, while the chaff usually prevents it from rising to the point of putrefaction. All these methods, however, limit too severely the amount a farmer can handle. Countries free of the insect can consequently sell wheat more cheaply. We still need a way for wheat to win decisively over tobacco here.

By increasing pasture, wheat cultivation will make the Arabian horse a very profitable animal. Experience has shown that our part of America is where it can be raised without degenerating. Farther south, the sun’s heat leaves too little pasture. Farther north, winters are too cold for this breed’s short, fine hair and sensitive constitution. Animals moved to unfavorable climates either change and develop new defenses against the difficulties they face, or reproduce poorly and die out.

We already have many horses of Arabian blood, and our people have an established, strong preference for them. This provides a good foundation for breeding them here. Their ability to bear heat without injury and their greater endurance make them better suited even to the hard work of plowing and pulling wagons here and farther south. In the north, only people of taste and wealth will seek them, for riding and light carriages; their speed and beauty will recommend them for those uses.

When tobacco cultivation ends, other valuable crops can take its place, including cotton in the state’s eastern parts and hemp and flax in its western parts.

It is hard to name any goods of necessity, comfort, or luxury that we cannot grow and therefore must import. Anything hardier than the olive, and anything as hardy as the fig, can grow here outdoors. Sugar, coffee, and tea are exceptions. Habit has made them necessities for our wealthier citizens, so as long as those habits last, we must obtain them from countries able to supply them.

What are the weights, measures, and currency of hard money? What are some details of exchange with Europe?

Our weights and measures are those fixed by acts of Parliament in England. I cannot say with certainty how the nominal value of coins came to differ here, and in the other American states, from their value in the country we left, or why it differs among the states. I find that in 1631 our House of Burgesses asked the Privy Council in England for a coin debased by twenty-five percent. In 1645 the burgesses forbade barter for tobacco and made the Spanish piece of eight, valued at six shillings, the standard of our currency. In 1655 they changed its value to five shillings sterling. In 1680 they addressed the king; in consequence, a proclamation of 1683 fixed French crowns, rixdollars, and pieces of eight at six shillings, and New England coin at one shilling. Further regulations were made in 1710, 1714, 1727, and 1762. A table presents them more clearly:

The 1727 dashes and the single 1762 rate are printed level with “Coined gold of the empire.” Their application to the preceding gold descriptions is uncertain. An empty cell records no separately printed entry; it does not establish that a rate did not apply.

The first sign that our present paper money was depreciating was the sale of silver dollars for six shillings, when they had previously been worth only five shillings and ninepence. The assembly then raised their value by law to six shillings. The dollar now seems likely to become America’s unit of money. It passes at that rate in some sister states, and that rate makes conversion between dollars and pounds and shillings easier in either direction. It therefore seems more convenient than its former valuation. But the dollar now stands above every other coin in the proportion of 133⅓ to 125, or 16 to 15. The others will therefore have to be raised in the same proportion.

What are the public income and expenses?

Because our paper money depreciates constantly and rapidly, the nominal amounts of income and expense change just as rapidly. It is impracticable to say what they are. Every attempt to collect a tax is frustrated by the depreciation between its declaration and its actual receipt. It will be more useful to consider what our income might be once we find a way to collect what the people can spare.

I would estimate the state’s entire taxable property at one hundred million dollars, or thirty million pounds in our money. Compared with anything we have yet paid, a tax of one percent on that property would be considered very heavy. Yet I think that people who manage well and practice reasonable economy could pay one and a half percent while maintaining their households comfortably, without selling any of their principal property. I think the people would willingly pay it to support the present contest. We may therefore say that we could, and ought to, raise between one million and one and a half million dollars annually, or between three hundred thousand and four hundred and fifty thousand pounds in Virginia money.

Our expenses are equally hard to state exactly, for the same reason. Most are stated in paper money. As its value continually changes, the legislature tries at every session to adjust the nominal amounts to the intended value. I will therefore state the expenses in actual coin at the level the legislature tries to maintain.

This is 250,000 dollars, or 53,571 guineas. The estimate excludes military expense, which varies with the force actually employed and will probably be little or nothing in peacetime. It also excludes public debts, which are growing as I write and cannot yet be fixed. It excludes maintenance of the poor, a matter of charity that cannot be counted as an expense of administering government.

If we also remove the 25,000 dollars for the clergy, we are left with 225,000 dollars, or 48,208 guineas, as the actual cost of our machinery of government. Clergy payments are no more a part of that administration than payments to physicians or lawyers. Being voluntary, they may be much or nothing, as each person chooses. Divided among the country’s actual inhabitants, the cost is about two-fifths of a dollar, 21 pence sterling, or 42 sols per person each year. That is the price each pays for protection of the rest of their property, their person, and the other advantages of free government. Great Britain’s public revenue, divided in the same way among its inhabitants, would be sixteen times greater. Even after deducting twice the governmental expenses just estimated from the one and a half million dollars we supposed could be paid annually without distress, this state could contribute one million dollars a year toward supporting the federal army, paying the federal debt, building a federal navy, opening roads, clearing rivers, making safe ports, and other useful works.

To this estimate of our means, let me add a word about their use if, after the present contest and its debts are behind us, we should measure our strength against a European power. Such events are earnestly to be avoided. We are young, with a country before us to fill with people and happiness. We should direct the whole generative force of nature toward that end, wasting none of it in mutual destruction. We should seek peace and friendship with every nation, even the one that has injured us most, once we have won our point against her. Our interest will be to open commerce fully and remove all its restraints, allowing everyone complete freedom to sell whatever they choose to bring into our ports and asking the same freedom in theirs.

No subject has attracted more false arithmetic than the claim that war serves a nation’s interest. Consider what has been spent in a long war to gain a small town or territory, a right to cut wood here or catch fish there. Spent instead on improving what nations already possess, making roads, opening rivers, building ports, improving the arts, and employing their idle poor, that money would make them much stronger, wealthier, and happier. I hope we shall be wise enough to act accordingly.

Perhaps, to remove as many occasions for war as possible, it would be better for us to abandon the ocean altogether. There we are most likely to collide with other nations. We could leave others to bring what we need and carry away what we can spare. With none of our property exposed to European capture, we would be invulnerable to Europe. Our citizens would all turn to cultivating the earth; and, I repeat, cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens. We could seek employment for them at sea when the land no longer offers it.

But our countrymen’s present habits attach them to commerce. They will conduct it for themselves. Wars must therefore sometimes be our lot. All that wise people can do is avoid the half produced by our own folly and injustice, and prepare as well as possible for the other half. What should those preparations be? A land army would be useless for attack and neither the best nor the safest means of defense. For either purpose, we should meet a European enemy at sea. We need some naval power. Trying to build a navy like those of Europe’s greater nations would foolishly and wickedly waste our countrymen’s energies. It would impose on us the military expense that sends the European laborer to bed without supper and makes him earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

We need only enough power to prevent insults from European nations that are weak at sea, because circumstances make even the stronger nations weak in relation to us. Providence has placed their richest and most defenseless possessions at our door, and their most valuable commerce passes almost before our eyes. To protect those possessions and that commerce, or to attack us, they will risk only a small part of their naval force across the Atlantic. They know the dangers the elements present here and the still greater danger at home if a general calamity were to involve their entire fleet. They can attack us only in detachments. We need enough force to equal whatever detachment they send. Even a smaller force could become equal or superior because we could quickly repair a setback, while they could not replace their losses until too late.

A small naval force is therefore sufficient, and a small one is necessary. I will not say exactly how large it should be. I will say only that it should by no means be as large as we are capable of making it. Suppose that Virginia put toward a navy the million dollars, or 300,000 pounds, it could spare annually without distress. One year’s contribution would build, equip, man, and send to sea a force carrying 300 guns. If the rest of the confederacy contributed in the same proportion, it would equip 1,500 more guns in the same time. A single year’s contributions would thus establish a navy of 1,800 guns.

British ships of the line average 76 guns and their frigates 38. A force of 1,800 guns would make a fleet of 30 ships, perhaps 18 ships of the line and 12 frigates. At eight men per gun, the British average, annual expenses for subsistence, clothing, pay, and ordinary repairs would be about 1,280 dollars per gun, or 2,304,000 dollars for the whole fleet. I offer this only as an example of what one year’s effort could accomplish, without deciding whether more or less than a year’s effort should be devoted to it.

The combined value of our lands and enslaved people doubles in about twenty years. This results from the increase in the number of enslaved people, the extension of cultivation, and greater demand for land. The amount that can be raised will therefore grow in the same proportion.

What histories of the state, memorials published in its name while it was a colony, and pamphlets concerning its internal or external affairs, past or present, are there?

Captain Smith, who after Sir Walter Raleigh may be considered the founder of our colony, wrote its history from the first ventures to 1624. He served on the council and later as president of the colony. Its survival against the opposition of the native peoples may be attributed principally to his efforts. He was honest, sensible, and well informed, but his style is rough and awkward. His history is nevertheless almost our only source of knowledge about the state’s infancy.

The Reverend William Stith, a Virginian and president of its college, also wrote a history of the same period, in a large, closely printed octavo volume. He was learned in the classics and very exact, but had no taste in style. His writing is inelegant, and his details are often too minute for even a native of the country to tolerate.

Beverley, also a native, went to the opposite extreme. He covered our history from Raleigh’s first proposals to 1700 in one-hundredth of the space Stith used for one-quarter of that period.

Sir William Keith began with the earliest period and continued through 1725. His style is agreeable enough, and he passes over events of little importance. His book is therefore short and would be preferred by a foreign reader.

Under royal government, a dispute arose over an illegal fee demanded by Governor Dinwiddie. There were doubtless other disputes that I do not now recall. I suppose these would not interest a foreign reader enough to warrant an account of them.

The Virginia council and burgesses’ petition to the king, their memorial to the Lords, and their remonstrance to the Commons in 1764 began the present contest. When these failed to prevent the Stamp Act, the House of Burgesses passed resolutions in 1765 declaring that, in matters of taxation, the people of Virginia were independent of the Parliament of Great Britain. From then until Congress declared independence in 1776, the burgesses’ journals were filled with assertions of public rights.

The pamphlets published in this state on the disputed question were:

Since the declaration of independence, this state has had no dispute with another state except Pennsylvania over their common boundary. The executive and legislative bodies of the two states exchanged papers on the subject, with the happy result that their rights were accommodated.

To this account of our historians, memorials, and pamphlets, I add a chronological catalogue of American state papers whose titles I have been able to collect. It is far from complete or correct. When I have seen only a title and not the paper itself, I cannot vouch for the exact date. Sometimes I have found no date, and sometimes I am not satisfied that the paper even exists. Mr. Hazard, fully qualified for the work, has for some time been preparing an extensive collection of such papers, which we may hope to receive before long. Meanwhile, accept this catalogue as the result of my work and the end of the long account you have unintentionally drawn from me.

I submitted the preceding pages to my friend Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress. He has given me the following observations, which have too much merit to leave out.

1. Routes Between Western Waters and the Atlantic, Query 2. Besides the three routes mentioned between the western waters and the Atlantic, Pennsylvanians are considering two others. One runs from Presque Isle on Lake Erie to Le Bœuf, down the Allegheny to the Kiskiminetas, then up that river and across a short portage to the Juniata, which flows into the Susquehanna. The other runs from Lake Ontario to the eastern branch of the Delaware, then down that river to Philadelphia. Both routes are said to be quite practicable. Given the enterprise of Pennsylvanians, particularly the merchants of Philadelphia, whose efforts are concentrated on promoting the commerce of one city, one or both routes may well be opened and improved.

2. The Potomac Passage Through the Blue Ridge, Query 4. When I saw the Potomac pass through the Blue Ridge, I thought the country must have suffered a violent upheaval and that its appearance must have changed from what it probably was centuries ago. The broken, ragged faces of the mountain on either side; the enormous rocks fixed at one end in the precipice and jutting out at the other, seemingly ready to fall; and the riverbed for several miles below, obstructed and filled with loose stones carried from the mountain: everything in sight evidently shows that the mountain was broken open. Before that happened, what is now a fruitful valley was a great lake. Its waters might have formed a mighty waterfall here, or reached the ocean by way of the Susquehanna, where the Blue Ridge seems to end.

Other parts of the country also bear apparent traces of such an upheaval. From the best accounts I have obtained, the Delaware did not originally flow through the Kittatinny Mountain, a continuation of what is called the North Ridge or Mountain. Instead, it passed through the place now called the Wind Gap, several miles farther west and more than a hundred feet above the river’s present bed. The gap is about a mile wide, and its stones look as though water had washed over them for ages. If this account is right, a large lake must have stood behind the mountain. An unusual rise of water or some upheaval of nature must then have opened a different passage through it. Meeting less resistance there, the river would have swept away the banks of earth that opposed it and flooded the country below with the immense body of water released by the new opening.

Countless signs of such a flood remain, and others are found daily, on both sides of the river below the hills above the falls of Trenton, where it reaches the level country. On the New Jersey side, which is flatter than the Pennsylvania side, all the country below Croswick Hills seems to have been flooded for ten to fifteen miles back from the river. It seems to have acquired new soil from the earth and clay carried down and mixed with its native sand. The site of Philadelphia, too, plainly appears to be ground formed by deposits. The different layers encountered when digging for water, and the acorns, leaves, and sometimes branches found more than twenty feet below the surface, all seem to show this.

I am told that the bank of the York River at Yorktown, Virginia, contains successive layers of shells and earth. These seem to indicate that the country there has changed several times: that the sea occupied what is now dry land for successive ages, and that the ground rose suddenly at different times. What a change would occur below Niagara if some accident split the mountains there and suddenly opened a passage to drain Lake Erie and the upper lakes!

While thinking about these things, I have often let my imagination carry me away. I have imagined that what is now the Gulf of Mexico was once level country; that a continuous mountain range extended from the cape of Florida through Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, and Trinidad to the American coast, forming a shore that held back the ocean and protected the country behind it. I have imagined that some upheaval or shock broke this barrier, allowing the sea to flood that vast plain as far as the foot of the Andes. There, piled up by trade winds blowing continually from one direction, the water found its way back, as it still does, through the gulf between Florida and Cuba. It carried with it the soil and sand it may have scooped from the flooded country, depositing some on the shores of North America and forming the banks of Newfoundland with the rest. But these are only visions of fancy.

3. Jamestown Weed, Query 6. A plant called Jamestown weed has a remarkable property. The late Dr. Bond told me of a young girl under his care who put its seeds into her eye. They dilated her pupil so much that she could see in the dark but was nearly blind in daylight. Its scientific description is Datura pericarpiis erectis ovatis, as given by Linnaeus. The effects of its leaves when eaten by a ship’s crew that arrived at Jamestown are well known. Beverley’s History of Virginia, book 2, chapter 4, describes an instance of temporary mental impairment caused by them.

4. Buffon’s Account of American Indians, Query 6. Buffon has indeed drawn a distressing picture of human nature in his description of the American Indian, but I am certain no picture was ever less like its subject. He acknowledges that the American Indian is as tall as the European. He might have added that the Iroquois were larger, and the Lenopi, or Delawares, taller, than Europeans generally. But he says their reproductive organs are smaller and weaker than those of Europeans. Is that a fact? I do not believe it; at least I have never heard such an observation before.

“They have no beard,” he says. If he had known the trouble men take to pull out the hair growing on their faces, he would have seen no such deficiency in nature. Every nation has its customs. I have seen a fashionable Indian man spend hours examining his face in a mirror and pulling out every hair he could find with a kind of tweezer made from fine brass wire twisted around a stick. He handled it skillfully.

“They have no ardor for their female,” Buffon says. They do not, it is true, indulge in the excesses or show the fondness customary in Europe. But this arises from manners, rather than a defect of nature. Their thoughts are bent on war, which wins them glory among men and admiration from women. They are trained for it from early youth. When they pursue game eagerly, endure the exertions of the chase, and patiently bear hunger and cold, they do so less for the game than to convince their parents and the national council that they deserve to become warriors. The women’s songs, the warriors’ dances, the chiefs’ wise counsel, the old people’s stories, the triumphant return of warriors from a successful battle, and the respect given to those distinguished in war and in overcoming enemies all inspire a desire for military fame.

If a young man showed fondness for women before going to war, men would despise him and women would scorn and ridicule him. If he had relations with a captive taken in war, he would incur lasting disgrace; he would incur still greater disgrace if he used violence to satisfy his desire. The men’s seeming lack of sexual ardor is therefore an effect of manners, not a defect of nature. Besides, women more often court a celebrated warrior than he needs to court them, and men regard this as a point of honor.

Cases resembling that of Ruth and Boaz are not uncommon among them. The account says: “When Boaz had eaten and drank, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and Ruth came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down” (Ruth 3:7). Although the women are modest and reserved, so bashful that they seldom raise their eyes and scarcely ever look a man fully in the face, they are also brought up in great subjection. Custom reconciles them to ways of acting that Europeans would consider inconsistent with female decorum.

I once saw a young widow whose warrior husband had died about eight days earlier trying to finish her mourning quickly. She tore her hair, beat her breast, and drank spirits to make herself weep abundantly, so that she could grieve intensely for a short time and marry another young warrior that evening. The men and women of her tribe stood around as silent, solemn spectators. Their indifference when they answered my questions about the scene convinced me it was no unusual custom. I have known older men whose wives were past childbearing to take young wives and have children, although polygamy is uncommon. Does this suggest a lack of sexual ardor?

Nor do they seem deficient in natural affection. I have seen fathers and mothers deeply distressed when their children were dangerously ill, though I believe affection is stronger from parents toward children than from children toward parents, and though custom forbids a father to grieve excessively for a son killed in battle.

There is also little reason to call them “timorous and cowardly.” Recall how the Iroquois met Monsieur —— when he marched into their country. Their old men scorned to flee or survive their town’s capture and faced death like the old Romans at the time of the Gauls. Soon afterward, the Iroquois took revenge by sacking and destroying Montreal. Above all, the unwavering fortitude with which captured people endure the most painful torture and death should exempt them from that charge.

Still less should they be described as lacking vitality, moved to action only by hunger and thirst. Their beloved dances, which would severely tax a European, contradict this, as do their exhausting marches and the labor they willingly and cheerfully undertake on military expeditions. It is true that, at home, the men do not work or cultivate the soil. But custom assigns that work to women.

It is also said that they dislike society and social life. How could this describe people who always live in towns or clans? How could they be said to have no republic when they conduct all their affairs in national councils, take pride in their national identity, treat an injury or insult from an outsider to one person as an injury to all, and respond accordingly? In short, this picture fits no nation of North American Indians I have known or heard of.

5. Nations and Tribes, Query 11. So far as I have been able to learn, the country from the seacoast to the Allegheny, and from the southernmost waters of the James River north to the Patuxent River in what is now Maryland, was occupied by three different Indian nations. They spoke different languages and had separate governments. I have not learned their original names with certainty. We distinguish them as the Powhatans, the Mannahoacs, and the Monacans, now commonly called Tuscaroras.

The Powhatans occupied the country from the seashore to the falls of the rivers. They were a powerful nation and seem to have consisted of seven tribes, five on the western shore and two on the eastern. Each tribe was divided into towns, families, or clans whose members lived together. All the Indian nations of North America lived by hunting and depended for food on game, fish, wild produce, and a grain planted and gathered by women that is now called Indian corn. They also used long potatoes, various pumpkins, and squashes. They had no flocks, herds, or domesticated animals of any kind.

Their government is a kind of patriarchal confederacy. Each town or family has a chief, distinguished by a particular title and commonly called a sachem. A chief presides over the towns or families composing a tribe, and another over the tribes composing a nation. Chiefs are generally older men distinguished by prudence and skill in council. The chief and leading men of a town settle its own concerns. Chiefs from the several towns meet to settle tribal concerns, including the appointment of leading warriors or captains and disputes among towns and families. Matters concerning the whole nation, such as war, peace, and alliances with neighboring nations, are deliberated and decided in a national council. This consists of the tribal chiefs, attended by leading warriors and several town chiefs who advise them.

Every town has a council house where its chief and older men meet when necessary. Each tribe has a fixed place where town chiefs consult on tribal affairs. Each nation has what its people call a central council house, or central council fire, where tribal chiefs and leading warriors gather to decide national affairs. When a matter is proposed in national council, the tribal chiefs commonly consult separately with their advisers. Once they agree, they deliver their tribe’s opinion to the national council. Because their government seems to rest entirely on persuasion, they seek unanimity through mutual concessions. This form of government still exists among the Indian nations bordering the United States.

Some historians think the office of sachem was hereditary, but this does not seem well founded. A tribal chief appears to be chosen by election. People from elsewhere who have been adopted into a tribe are sometimes raised to the office for their abilities. For example, when Captain Smith, the first founder of the Virginia colony, arrived, Opechancanough was chief of the Chickahominies, one of the Powhatan tribes. He is said to have come from another tribe, even another nation, so no certain account of his origin or descent could be obtained.

Leadership of the nation seems to have passed in rotation among the tribes. In 1609 Captain Smith asked Powhatan, the nation’s chief, whose personal name is said to have been Wahunsonacock, about the succession. The old chief told him that he was very old and had seen all his people die three times; none of those generations remained alive except himself. He would soon die, he said, and leadership would pass in turn to his brothers Opichapan, Opechancanough, and Catataugh, then to his two sisters and their two daughters. These names, however, designated tribes in the confederacy. Those named were not his actual brothers but the chiefs of different tribes.

Powhatan’s claim to have outlived three generations gives him one more than the poet gives Nestor in the Iliad (book 1, line 250). Pope’s four lines read:

Two generations now had past away,
Wise by his rules, and happy by his sway;
Two ages o’er his native realm he reigned,
And now th’ example of the third remained.

When Powhatan died in 1618, Opichapan succeeded him; after Opichapan’s death, Opechancanough became chief of the nation. Another instance shows that tribal chiefs claimed this kind of kinship with the nation’s head. In 1622 Raleigh Crashaw was with Japazaw, chief of the Potomacs. Opechancanough, then the second man in the nation and next in succession to Opichapan, had great power and influence. A bitter but secret enemy of the English, he wanted to draw his nation into war against them. He sent the Potomac chief two baskets of beads and asked him to kill the Englishman staying with him. Japazaw replied that the English were his friends and Opichapan his brother, so he would not cause blood to be shed between them.

When the English first arrived, they likewise heard chiefs speak repeatedly in their meetings of a brother whom they had to consult or to whom they referred the English. By this they meant either the nation’s chief or a chief of one of its confederated tribes. The Mannahoacs are said to have formed a confederacy of four tribes and to have allied with the Monacans in their war against the Powhatans.

North of them was another powerful nation. Its country extended from the head of Chesapeake Bay to the Kittatinny Mountain and eastward as far as the Connecticut River. It included the part of New York between the highlands and the ocean; all of New Jersey; the part of Pennsylvania below the Kittatinny range watered by streams flowing into the Delaware; and New Castle County in Delaware as far as Duck Creek. Indian nations distinguished their countries by natural boundaries, such as mountain ranges and streams. But river headwaters often meet or interlock. Because those living on a stream claim the land it waters, nations often encroached on each other, creating a constant source of war.

The nation occupying this territory called themselves Lenopi. French writers called them Loups, and the English now commonly call them Delawares. This nation or confederacy consisted of five tribes speaking one language:

(1) The Chihohocki lived west of the river now called the Delaware. The river took that name from Lord De la War, who entered it while traveling from Virginia in the year [year left blank in the source]. The Indians called it Chihohocki.

(2) The Wanami lived in the part of New Jersey from the Raritan to the sea.

(3) The Munsey lived on the upper streams of the Delaware, from the Kittatinny Mountains down to the Lehigh, or western branch of the Delaware.

(4) The Wabinga, sometimes called River Indians and sometimes Mohickanders, lived between the Delaware’s western branch and the Hudson River, from the Kittatinny ridge down to the Raritan.

(5) The Mahiccon, or Mahattan, occupied Staten Island, York Island, Long Island, and the part of New York and Connecticut between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers, from the highlands, a continuation of the Kittatinny ridge, down to the sound. York Island was formerly called Mahatton because it was their principal place of residence.

The Lenopi were closely allied with the Shawanese, who lived along the Susquehanna and west of it as far as the Allegheny Mountains. They fought a long war against another powerful nation or confederacy to their north, between the Kittatinny Mountains, or highlands, and Lake Ontario. Its people called themselves Mingos. French writers called them Iroquois, the English called them the Five Nations, and the Indians south of them, with whom they were at war, called them Massawomacs.

This war was at its height when Captain Smith first arrived in Virginia. Mingo warriors had come down the Susquehanna to its mouth. While traveling up the bay in 1608, Smith met six or seven of their canoes full of warriors who were coming to attack their enemies from behind. A few weeks earlier, on a journey up the Rappahannock, he had skirmished with some Mannahoacs and captured a brother of one of their chiefs. That captive first told him of the northern nation. Asked why his people attacked the English, he said they had heard the English came from beneath the world to take their world away. Asked how many worlds he knew, he said only one, under the sky above him, consisting of the Powhatans, the Manakins, and the Massawomacs. Asked about the last, he said they lived beside a great water to the north, had many boats, and had so many men that they fought all the rest of the world.

The Mingo confederacy then had five tribes. Three were called the elder tribes: the Senecas in the west, the Mohawks in the east, and the Onondagas between them. Two were called the younger tribes: the Cayugas and the Oneidas. All spoke one language and were closely united. Their country extended from the eastern end of Lake Erie to Lake Champlain, and from the Kittatinny Mountains and highlands to Lake Ontario and the Cadaraqui, or St. Lawrence, River.

Some time before, they had fought a nation beyond the lakes called the Adirondacs and had been defeated. After making peace through the intervention of the French, who were then settling Canada, they turned against the Lenopi. Because the ensuing war was long and its outcome uncertain, they used all their strength and every measure they thought could bring success. They moved down the Susquehanna, fighting the Indians along their route. At its mouth, the terror of their arms brought a nation living between Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, beside the Chihohocki, into an alliance with them. That nation is now known by the names Nanticocks, Conoys, and Tuteloes. The Mingos also allied with the Monacans and urged them to fight the Lenopi and their allies.

Meanwhile, the Mohawks fought fiercely down the Hudson against the Mohiccons and River Indians. They forced those peoples to buy a temporary and insecure peace by acknowledging Mohawk superiority and paying yearly tribute. Surrounded by enemies, under severe pressure, and having lost many warriors, the Lenopi finally sought peace. It was granted on condition that they place themselves under Mingo protection, restrict themselves to raising corn and hunting to feed their families, and give up the power to make war. This is what the Indians call making them women. The Lenopi were in this condition when William Penn arrived and began settling Pennsylvania in 1682.

6. Burial Customs, Query 11. Indian figurative language and the practice of peoples we still know show that gathering the bones of the dead and placing them in a particular location was, and remains, a regular custom. When making peace with a nation they have fought, after burying the hatchet they take up a belt of wampum and say, “We now gather up all the bones of those who have been slain, and bury them,” etc. Such language appears in peace treaties.

When someone dies far from home, people also commonly bury the person and later return to carry the bones home. At a treaty held at Lancaster with the Six Nations, one of their people died and was buried in woods a short distance from town. Some time later, a party came, took up the body, removed the flesh by boiling it and scraping the bones clean, and carried the bones to the burial places of their ancestors. The operation was so offensive that no one could come near while they performed it.

7. Additional Northern Tribes, Query 11. The Oswegatchies, Connosedagos, and Cohunnegagoes, commonly called Caghnewagos, belong to the Mingo or Six Nations. Through the influence of French missionaries, they separated from their nation and settled in the northern locations listed in Query 11.

I do not know which nation the Augquagahs belong to, but suspect they are a family of the Senecas.

The Nanticocks and Conoies formerly belonged to a nation at the head of Chesapeake Bay. In recent years they have been adopted into the Mingo or Iroquois confederacy and form a seventh nation; the Monacans, or Tuscaroras, who entered the confederacy in 1712, form the sixth.

The Saponies are families of the Wanamies who moved from New Jersey. Together with the Mohiccons, Munsies, and Delawares, they belong to the Lenopi nation. The Mingos are a war colony from the Six Nations, as are the Cohunnewagos.

I have never learned anything certain about the remaining northern tribes. All accounts, however, seem to agree that a very powerful nation lives around and on the waters flowing into the western lakes. Its people speak one language and extend from the waters of the Ohio to those flowing into Hudson Bay. They have many names derived from their towns or families but are commonly called Tawas or Outawas.

In the summer of 1783, it was expected that the Virginia Assembly would call a convention to establish a constitution. The following draft of a fundamental constitution for the Commonwealth of Virginia was prepared for presentation to that convention, had it taken place.

To the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and all others whom it may concern, the delegates for the Commonwealth, assembled in convention, send greetings.

You and the world know that the government of Great Britain, with which the American states were recently connected, assumed an unwarranted and oppressive authority over them and tried to enforce it by arms. The states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia considered resistance, with all its horrors, a lesser evil than abject submission, and joined in an appeal to arms. The Sovereign Disposer of all human events has given that appeal an outcome favorable to the rights of the states. He has enabled them to reject forever all dependence on a government that had shown itself so capable of abusing the trust placed in it, and to obtain from that government a solemn and explicit acknowledgment that they are free, sovereign, and independent states.

During the war through which we worked to establish our rights, Virginia’s legislature found it necessary to make a temporary organization of government. Its purposes were to prevent anarchy and direct our efforts toward two important objects: war against our invaders, and peace and happiness among ourselves. But this organization, like every other act of that legislature, could be changed by later legislatures with equal powers. It has therefore been thought advisable to make the amendments suggested by time and experience and to make the organization permanent through an authority superior to the ordinary legislature. Virginia’s General Assembly accordingly recommended that the people choose delegates to meet in a general convention, empowered to form a constitution of government for them and to declare the fundamental principles to which all our present and future laws must be subordinate. In accordance with that recommendation, the people have chosen us and invested us with those powers.

We, the delegates chosen by the people of this state for that purpose and now assembled in general convention, therefore exercise the authority invested in us to establish the following constitution and fundamental principles of government for Virginia.

The state shall forever hereafter be governed as a commonwealth.

The powers of government shall be divided among three distinct departments, each entrusted to a separate body of officials: legislative powers to one, judicial powers to another, and executive powers to another. No person or group belonging to one department shall exercise a power properly belonging to either of the others, except where this constitution expressly permits it.

1. Legislature

The legislature shall have two branches, called the House of Delegates and the Senate. Together they shall be called the General Assembly. A law shall require the agreement of both houses, expressed on three separate readings.

Election. Delegates to the General Assembly shall be chosen on the last Monday of November each year. If an election cannot be completed that day, it may be adjourned from day to day until it is completed.

Delegates. The number of delegates each county may send shall be proportional to its number of qualified voters. The total number of delegates for the state shall be proportional to the total number of qualified voters, but shall never exceed 300 or fall below 100. If the number goes outside those limits, the House of Delegates so constituted shall nevertheless continue for its legal term. During that term, it shall readjust the proportion so that the number at the next election falls within the stated limits. If a county’s number of qualified voters falls below the number required to send one delegate, it shall be joined to an adjoining county.

Senate. For the election of senators, the Senate shall from time to time group the counties into as many districts, arranged in whatever way, it finds best. When each county elects its delegates, it shall also choose senatorial electors who meet the same qualifications as those delegates. It shall choose four electors for each delegate the county is entitled to send. These electors shall meet and conduct themselves as the legislature directs, together with the senatorial electors from the other counties in their district. They shall then choose by ballot one senator for every six delegates their district is entitled to choose. The senatorial districts shall be divided into two classes. The terms of members elected for one class shall end at the next general election of delegates; those of the other class shall end at the following election. The classes shall alternate in this way forever.

Voters. The right to vote for a county’s delegates and for its district’s senatorial electors shall belong only to free male citizens who are of full age and sound mind and who, for the preceding year, have either resided in the county, held real property there worth [value left blank] throughout that year, or been enrolled in the militia throughout that year. They shall cast their votes personally and aloud.

Meeting and adjournment. The General Assembly shall meet, at the place to which it last adjourned, on the forty-second day after the election of delegates. It may then meet at other times or places according to its own adjournments until its term expires on the day before the next General Assembly is appointed to meet. If it adjourns for more than a year, the adjournment shall take effect as one for exactly a year. Neither house may adjourn for more than a week, or to a different place, without the agreement of the other. The governor, with the advice of the Council of State, may also call the Assembly at another time to the same place. He may call it to a different place if, since its last adjournment, that place has become dangerous because of an enemy or infection.

Quorum. A majority of either house shall constitute the quorum required to conduct business. A smaller proportion, as each house may from time to time consider appropriate, may call for and punish absent members and adjourn the house for no more than a week.

Members’ privileges and pay. While attending the General Assembly, and for the time needed to travel to and from it, members shall be protected from all restraint of their persons and from assault. They shall have no other privilege whatsoever. For the same period they shall receive daily wages in gold or silver equal to the value of two bushels of wheat. Until 1790, that value shall be reckoned at one dollar per bushel. In 1790, and every tenth year thereafter, the General Court shall, at its first session of the year, summon a special jury of the most respected merchants and farmers to declare the average value of wheat over the preceding ten years. That average shall determine the wages for the following ten years.

Exclusions. The following persons shall be ineligible for membership in the General Assembly: the treasurer, attorney general, and register; ministers of the gospel; officers of the regular armies of this state or of the United States; persons receiving salaries or benefits from any power foreign to our confederacy; persons who do not reside in the county for which they are chosen delegates or the district for which they are chosen senators; persons who do not qualify as voters; persons who have committed treason, felony, or another crime subjecting them to an infamous punishment; and persons convicted by due process of law of bribery or corruption in seeking election to the Assembly. All other persons who can vote and are not excluded elsewhere in this constitution may be elected.

A member who accepts a paid office under this state, the United States, or any of those states shall thereby vacate his seat, but may be elected again.

Vacancies. Voters shall fill vacancies caused by such disqualifications, by death, or otherwise, upon a writ issued by the speaker of the relevant house.

Limits on legislative power. The General Assembly shall have no power to infringe this constitution; to reduce anyone’s civil rights because of religious belief; to restrain a person from professing or supporting that belief; or to compel a person to contribute to the support of that or any other belief beyond what the person has personally agreed to contribute. It shall have no power to prescribe death for any crime except treason, murder, or military offenses; to pardon a person duly convicted of treason or felony, or to grant anyone else the power to pardon such a person, though it may instead provide for one or two new trials, and no more; to pass laws punishing acts done before those laws existed; to pass a bill declaring a person guilty of treason or felony; or to prescribe torture in any case whatsoever. Nor shall it have power to permit any more slaves to be brought into this state to reside here, or to permit slavery to continue beyond the generation living on December 31, 1800. All persons born after that day are hereby declared free.

The General Assembly shall have power to separate from this state all or part of its territory west of the Ohio River or west of the meridian passing through the mouth of the Great Kanawha. It may also cede to Congress 100 square miles of territory elsewhere in this state. That territory shall be exempt from this state’s jurisdiction and government for as long as Congress holds its sessions there or in adjacent territory ceded to it by another state.

The two houses shall have power to appoint their respective speakers, the treasurer, auditors, attorney general, register, all general officers of the military, and their own clerks and sergeants. They shall appoint no other officers except where another part of this constitution expressly gives them that appointment power.

2. Executive

Governor. Executive powers shall be exercised by a governor chosen by a joint ballot of both houses of the Assembly. Once chosen, he shall serve for five years and shall be ineligible to serve a second time. During his term he shall hold no other office or benefit under this state, any other state, or any other power whatsoever.

By executive powers we do not mean the powers the Crown exercised as royal prerogatives under our former government. Nor shall those powers serve as the standard for deciding what may rightly belong to the governor. We grant him only the powers necessary to execute the laws and administer the government that are neither legislative nor judicial in nature. Reason must guide the application of this principle.

We do, however, expressly deny him the prerogative powers to create courts, offices, boroughs, corporations, fairs, markets, ports, beacons, lighthouses, and sea marks; to impose embargoes; to establish precedence; to keep a citizen of this state within it or recall a citizen to it; and to grant a foreigner the status of a denizen. He may exercise any of those powers only to the extent the legislature authorizes him to do so from time to time.

We leave the powers to declare war and conclude peace, make alliances, issue letters of marque and reprisal, raise or bring in armed forces, build armed vessels, forts, or strongholds, coin money or regulate its value, and regulate weights and measures to be exercised under the authority of the Confederation. In matters concerning those powers that fall outside the Confederation, the governor shall exercise them under such laws as the legislature considers appropriate to pass.

The state’s entire military, both regular forces and militia, shall be subject to his directions. He shall leave the execution of those directions to the general officers appointed by the legislature.

The legislature shall fix his salary during the Assembly session in which it appoints him, before making the appointment. If it does not do so, he shall receive the salary to which his immediate predecessor was entitled. In either case, he may demand payment quarterly from any money in the public treasury. The legislature shall have no power to give him more or less, either while he remains in office or after he leaves it. Lands, houses, and other things assigned for the governor’s use shall remain available to him while he is in office.

Council of State. A Council of State shall be chosen by joint ballot of both houses of the Assembly. Its members shall serve seven years and shall be ineligible to serve a second time. While on the council, they shall hold no other office or benefit under this state, any other state, or any other power whatsoever.

Their duty shall be to attend and advise the governor when he calls on them. Their advice in any case shall serve as his authority for acting on it. They shall also have the power and duty to meet on their own initiative and offer advice without being asked by the governor whenever they think the public good calls for it. Their advice and proceedings shall be entered in books kept for that purpose. Members present shall sign to show whether they approve or disapprove. The books shall be laid before either house of the Assembly when it requests them.

For the present, the council shall have eight members. The legislature may increase or reduce its number whenever it thinks necessary, provided that a reduction takes effect only as appointments become vacant through death, resignation, disqualification, or regular removal. A quorum shall require a majority of the members actually in office, and no fewer. For the present, each member shall receive [annual amount left blank], payable quarterly from any money in the public treasury.

The legislature may increase or reduce the councilors’ salary from time to time, provided no change affects, either then or at any future time, anyone actually in office when the change is made. At the end of each quarter, a member’s salary shall be divided into equal portions according to the number of days in that quarter on which the council met or was required to meet by the governor or by its own adjournment. One portion shall be withheld for each such day on which the member failed to attend without a reason the council accepts, or left before adjournment without its permission. If the council did not meet during the quarter, there shall be no deduction.

President of the council. The members shall choose a president each year. He shall preside over the council when the governor is absent. If the governor’s office becomes vacant through death or otherwise, the president shall exercise all the governor’s functions until a new appointment is made. He shall do the same during any period in which the governor declares himself unable to perform the duties of his office.

3. Judiciary

Judicial powers shall be exercised by county courts and any other inferior courts the legislature thinks proper to retain or establish; by three superior courts, namely a Court of Admiralty, a General Court of Common Law, and a High Court of Chancery; and by one supreme court, called the Court of Appeals.

Each of the High Court of Chancery, General Court, and Court of Admiralty shall have four judges. They shall be appointed by joint ballot of both houses of the Assembly and shall hold office during good behavior. While serving as judges, they shall hold no other office or benefit under this state, any other state, or any other power whatsoever, except that they may serve as delegates to Congress without receiving an additional allowance.

Together, these judges shall constitute the Court of Appeals. It shall hear and decide appeals from the three superior courts but shall hear no case as an original matter except where this constitution expressly permits it.

A majority of the members of any one of these courts, and no fewer, shall constitute its quorum. In the Court of Appeals, however, nine members shall be required to conduct business. The legislature may authorize smaller numbers to adjourn their respective courts.

For the present, each judge shall receive [annual amount left blank], payable quarterly from any money in the public treasury. The legislature may increase or reduce judges’ salaries from time to time, provided no change affects, either then or at any future time, anyone actually in office when the change is made. At the end of each quarter, a judge’s salary shall be divided into equal portions according to the number of days in that quarter on which his court sat or should have sat. One portion shall be withheld for each such day on which he failed to attend without a reason his court accepts, or left before adjournment without its permission. If the court did not sit during the quarter, there shall be no deduction.

There shall also be a Court of Impeachments. It shall consist of three members of the Council of State; one judge from each of the superior Courts of Chancery, Common Law, and Admiralty; two members of the House of Delegates; and one member of the Senate. Each of these bodies shall choose its own members of the court.

Before this court, the governor or any member of the council, either legislative house, or any superior court may be impeached for misconduct in office sufficient to justify removal. An impeachment may be brought by the governor, the council, either legislative house, or any of those courts, and by no one else. The court’s only authorized sentence shall be removal and permanent ineligibility for office. Seven members shall be required to form the court, and two thirds of those present must agree to the sentence. No other court shall hear offenses within this court’s jurisdiction. This court shall decide both the facts and the law.

Justices or judges of inferior courts, whether already established or established later, shall be appointed by the governor on the advice of the Council of State. They shall hold office during good behavior or for as long as their court exists. For a breach of good behavior, they shall be tried according to the laws of the land before the Court of Appeals, which shall decide both the facts and the law. Its only authorized sentence shall be removal and permanent ineligibility for office, requiring the agreement of two thirds of the members present.

All courts shall appoint their own clerks, who shall hold office during good behavior or for as long as their court exists. They shall also appoint all their other attending officers, who shall serve at their pleasure. Clerks appointed by the supreme or superior courts may be removed by their respective courts. Before appointment, clerks of other courts must have been examined and certified as qualified by two members of the General Court. Only the Court of Appeals may remove them for a breach of good behavior; it shall decide both the facts and the law, and two thirds of the members present must agree to the sentence.

Justices or judges of inferior courts may be members of the legislature.

No judgment of an inferior court shall be final in a civil case worth more than 50 bushels of wheat, valued according to the most recent rate set by the General Court for the allowance paid to members of the General Assembly. Nor shall such a judgment be final in a case of treason, felony, or another crime subjecting the party to an infamous punishment.

In every case before a court other than the Courts of Impeachments, the Court of Appeals, or military courts, disputed facts shall be tried by a jury. In every court, witnesses shall testify aloud in open court wherever their attendance can be obtained. All parties shall be allowed counsel and compulsory process to secure their witnesses.

Where the law leaves fines, amercements, or terms of imprisonment unspecified, other than for contempt of court, the jury trying the offense shall fix them.

4. Council of Revision

The governor, two members of the Council of State, and one judge from each of the superior Courts of Chancery, Common Law, and Admiralty shall form a council to review every bill passed by both houses of the Assembly. The governor shall preside when present.

Every bill shall be presented to this council before becoming law. The council may advise its rejection, returning it with written advice and reasons to the house in which it originated. That house shall reconsider it. If, after reconsideration, two thirds of that house believe it should finally pass, they shall pass it and send it to the other house with the Council of Revision’s advice and written reasons. If two thirds of the other house also believe it should finally pass, it shall become law. Otherwise it shall not.

If the council does not, within one week of receiving a bill, excluding the day of presentation, return it with its advice of rejection and reasons to the house in which it originated, it shall become law when the week expires. If that house has adjourned beyond the end of the week, the council may return the bill to its clerk instead. When the bill becomes law, the clerk of the House of Delegates may demand it for filing in his office.

Bills the council approves shall become law upon approval. They shall then be returned to, or may be demanded by, the clerk of the House of Delegates for filing in his office.

A bill rejected on the council’s advice may be proposed again during the same Assembly session if altered to conform to that advice.

The members of the Council of Revision shall be appointed from time to time by the council or court to which each belongs. Two executive members and two judicial members shall be required to conduct business. To prevent nonattendance, the Council of State and the courts may at any time name all or any number of their members in the order in which they want attendance duty to pass from one to the next when a preceding member fails to attend. Members shall receive, in addition to their other pay, the same allowance for service on this council as members of the Assembly receive.

General Provisions

Confederation. The Confederation is made part of this constitution, subject to future changes agreed to by this state’s legislature and all the other confederating states.

Delegates to Congress. There shall be five delegates to Congress. Any three, but no fewer, may constitute a representation. They shall be appointed by joint ballot of both houses of the Assembly for a term of no more than one year, and may be recalled during that term by a joint vote of both houses. They may also belong to the legislative or judicial departments, but not the executive department.

Habeas corpus. The legislature shall extend the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus to every person within this state, without a fee. It shall make the writ so readily available that no person may remain in prison more than ten days after demanding it and being refused by the judge appointed by law, or, if none has been appointed, by any judge of a superior court. Nor may a person remain imprisoned more than ten days after the writ has been served on the person detaining him without an order, following due examination, either remanding him to custody or discharging him.

Military. The military shall be subordinate to civil authority.

Printing. Printing presses shall be subject to no restraint except the possibility of legal prosecution for false facts printed and published.

Convention. If any two of the three branches of government agree that a convention is needed to alter this constitution or correct breaches of it, and two thirds of the entire existing membership of each of those branches vote in favor, they may issue writs to every county for the election of the same number of delegates it is entitled to send to the General Assembly. The elections shall be held and the writs returned as the laws provide for Assembly delegate elections, with the necessary changes. Three months after the date of the writs, the delegates shall meet at the usual place where assemblies are held. They shall be acknowledged to have powers equal to those of this convention. Every member approving the writs shall sign them.

To introduce this government, the following special and temporary provision is made.

This convention is authorized only to amend the laws that established the form of government. It cannot therefore be supposed to have dissolved the entire system of laws. All laws in force when this convention meets that are consistent with this constitution shall remain fully in force, subject to change by the ordinary legislature.

The present General Assembly shall continue until the forty-second day after the last Monday of November in this present year. On that last Monday of November, each county shall elect delegates through voters qualified under this constitution. For this first election, each county shall elect one delegate for every [number left blank] members of its militia, according to the latest returns held by the governor. It shall also choose a proportional number of senatorial electors. On the fourteenth day after their election, those electors shall meet at the courthouse of the county in their present district whose name comes first alphabetically among the district’s counties. They shall choose senators in the proportion fixed by this constitution.

In every respect not specifically provided for here, the elections and returns shall be conducted by the same people and according to the same procedures that present law prescribes for elections of Assembly senators and delegates. The senators and delegates so chosen shall form the first General Assembly under the new government. They shall devote particular attention to obtaining an exact return of the number of qualified voters in every county and to determining the number of delegates to be elected to the following General Assembly.

The present governor shall remain in office until the end of the term for which he was elected.

All other officers of every kind shall remain in office as they would have if appointed under this constitution. Where this constitution calls for new officers, the authority to which it assigns their appointment shall appoint them. At the Assembly’s first meeting, both houses shall, by joint ballot, transfer one of the present judges of the General Court to the High Court of Chancery, provided he consents.

Passed in the Virginia General Assembly at the beginning of 1786.

Well aware that Almighty God has created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacities, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and depart from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who, being Lord of both body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercion on either, though it was in his Almighty power to do so;

that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves only fallible and uninspired people, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and seeking to impose them on others, has established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and throughout time;

that to compel a person to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical; that even forcing him to support one teacher or another of his own religious persuasion deprives him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and withdraws from the ministry those temporal rewards which, proceeding from approval of their personal conduct, are an additional incentive to earnest and unremitting labors for the instruction of mankind;

that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore proscribing any citizen as unworthy of public confidence by making him ineligible for offices of trust and emolument unless he professes or renounces one religious opinion or another unjustly deprives him of privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it also tends to corrupt the principles of the very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments those who will outwardly profess and conform to it; that although those who do not withstand such temptation are culpable, neither are those innocent who place the bait in their way;

that to allow the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and restrain the profession or propagation of principles on the supposition of their harmful tendency is a dangerous fallacy that at once destroys all religious liberty, because he, being the judge of that tendency, will make his own opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they agree with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;

and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless, by human intervention, she is disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors cease to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly that no person shall be compelled to attend or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor be forced, restrained, harassed, or burdened in body or goods, nor otherwise suffer on account of religious opinions or belief; but that all people shall be free to profess and, by argument, maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that those opinions shall in no way diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

And although we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, has no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore declaring this act irrevocable would have no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights asserted here are among the natural rights of mankind, and that any later act repealing this one or narrowing its operation will infringe a natural right.