Читать книгу Legends of Loudoun - Harrison Williams - Страница 15

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Thus far we have been noting the arrival of Virginians from Tidewater. Rich or poor, great landowners or squatters, gentlemen of position and influence or the mere riff-raff of the settlements, with all the varying gradation between those extremes, they had at least in common their English blood and traditions and being the product of Virginia life, either through birth or years of residence. It is now time to consider other and wholly dissimilar strains which, during this period of early settlement, were coming into the newly opened country and which were to have such a lasting influence on its population.

As early as 1725 there was, it is said, a group of Irish immigrants which had established itself on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, opposite the mouth of the Monocacy. This particular cluster had come from Maryland having, perhaps, been attracted to the large grant between the Monocacy and the Point of Rocks which, before 1700, had been acquired by the first Charles Carroll, founder of his family in Maryland who, when he acquired the land on the Monocacy, was acting as Agent for Maryland's Proprietor, Lord Baltimore. Later his grandson, another Charles Carroll, inherited the grant, added greatly thereto, bestowed upon it the name of Carrollton Manor and in signing the Declaration of Independence as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, gave it and himself immortality. The Carrolls were Irish and Roman Catholics; perhaps they had encouraged these newcomers to go out to their great holdings on the Monocacy where life could be begun anew and there was less danger of interference with their religion than in the strongly Protestant east. However, whether encouraged or not, our particular covey of Irish seem eventually to have crossed to the Virginia shore and there planted themselves with small formality and no title. All was wilderness on both sides of the Potomac. The matter of a legal title was probably the least of our adventurers' troubles.

In the first half-century following the founding of Jamestown, few Irish were to be encountered in Virginia. The Colony was overwhelmingly English with, it is true, occasional Welsh, Irish and Scotch here and there; but these were accidental and the basic and dominating race of the settlers was so wholly Anglo-Saxon that the few others were submerged and lost in the English flood. But between 1653 and 1660, hundreds of unfortunate Irish, resisting Cromwell, were shipped as political prisoners and little better than white slaves to Virginia and the other Colonies. Again, after the defeat in 1690 of James II and his Irish supporters by William III at the Battle of the Boyne and the resultant Treaty of Limerick the next year, great numbers of the Irish were banished or condemned to transportation and of these many were sent to Maryland and Virginia where as servants or labourers on the land, their services were in demand. While the majority thus transported were ignorant peasants, feudal vassals of their lords, the "Kerns and gallowglasses" of Macaulay, numbers of the nobility and gentry were exiled as well, of which we have already recorded a prominent example in Daniel McCarty. Inasmuch as those transported were so treated as punishment for their uprising in favour of James and against the de facto English government of William, they were stigmatized as criminals, although, as shown, their offense was purely political. But Irish offenders against the penal laws other than political were also from time to time condemned to transportation and as the demand for labourers by wealthier planters in Virginia grew and until negro slaves later were generally available to them, there was also much kidnapping of wholly innocent Irish who, too, were taken to the Colonies and sold into servitude. Among this heterogeneous mass of unfortunates there were undoubtedly many who were disorderly, depraved and vicious and who, we know, subsequently gave great trouble to the Virginians; but to classify all the Irish forcibly transported as criminals or lawless would be as unjust as it would be untrue. It well may be borne in mind that to most of the English, they were a strange, impulsive and foreign people and equally or even more damning, Romanists in an intensely anti-Roman community. As such, we may well believe, they seldom enjoyed the benefit of a doubt of their inherent depravity.

The town of Waterford was, according to tradition, founded by an Irishman, one Asa Moore, who is reputed to have built his, the first house there in 1732, naming the new settlement for the place of his nativity. Later it received many English, Scotch-Irish, Germans and, particularly, Quakers to whom it largely owed the prosperity and progress it was then to enjoy.

During the interminable wars of the seventeenth century—in ghastly refutation as they were of those blissful dreams of the solidarity of Europe and that international brotherhood of peace and culture so fondly entertained by the Erasmian school only a few generations before—few parts of that same Europe had suffered more hideously than the land known as the Palatinate along the Rhine. The so-called Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648, brought devastation particularly to its lower portion. In 1688 its whole territory was invaded again by the French of Louis XIV—an invasion which, for sheer savage brutality to the people there and the inconceivable atrocities perpetrated on them, is difficult to parallel in the annals of civilized nations but which, with its certain legacies of distrust and hatred, is somewhat conveniently forgotten by the professional French patriot of today. The land was reduced to little more than a desert and such of its inhabitants as survived, to the utmost want and privation. For nine years, until the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), the French scourging of the land ground it to dust. A few years of quiet followed, in which the poor Palatines sought to restore their ruined towns and farms but fate seemed resolved on their annihilation. In 1703 another war, that of the Spanish Succession, broke out and raged until 1713 and the Palatinate again and again was overrun by hostile armies. It was during these years and after, that those left with the breath of life in their bodies appeared to give up hope of ever again occupying their homeland in peace. A great emigration began, ten thousand fugitives first going to England where they were received kindly by Queen Anne and her people and given much aid; but, in an England where work was none too plentiful, the Germans soon became an economic and social problem. About 3,800 were sent to Ireland where, in Munster, their descendants are still to be found; but many more were sent to America, some to New York but the greater number to Pennsylvania. In the latter Colony they were so well received that they sent back word encouraging others to follow them; and soon the harassed Germans began to arrive in such swarms that between 40,000 and 50,000 are believed to have come to Pennsylvania between 1702 and 1727, wholly changing its complexion. The Colony's Governor, George Thomas, writing to the Bishop of Exeter in 1747 stated his belief that the Germans then comprised three-fifths of the population of that Province. But of the early arrivals many of the most impoverished worked out toward the cheaper and still wild lands on the then frontier and thence south through the strong and fertile regions of western Maryland.

Meanwhile Virginia had been encouraging settlements of refugee Europeans on her frontiers in an effort to form buffer groups between the inimical French and Indians to the north and the seated parts of her domain. In 1730 a grant of 10,000 acres on the Shenandoah River was made to one Stover for settlement by Germans who began to pour south from Pennsylvania and Maryland and soon the Valley was taking on that perceptible Teutonic colour with which it is still dyed.

In 1731 there came to the present Loudoun the first colony of Germans from the Valley. Of all the early settling it is doubtful if any was more intelligently planned or more reasonably could anticipate success. Instead of a few individuals pioneering in haphazard fashion, there was a compact and homogeneous group of about sixty families, the men almost without exception artisans of various trades or peasants skilled in thrifty farming; and their lot had heretofore been so harsh and their fortune so adverse that the hardships inseparable from making a new home in the wilderness were, by comparison, a kindly dispensation of a hitherto hostile fate. On crossing the Blue Ridge they and those following them settled the land between the Catoctin Mountains and the Short Hills, north of the present Morrisonville, which from that time on has been known as the German Settlement and than which no part of Loudoun has been more industriously and providently farmed. Little those early Teutons spent on luxury or even comfort; a sound and certain living was their objective and the land and its increase, rather than ornate dwellings, received their uttermost effort. Even as late as 1853, Yardley Taylor was moved to record that their "farms are generally small and well cultivated and the land rates high. This class of population seldom goes to much expense in building houses ... many old log houses that are barely tolerable are in use by persons abundantly able to build better ones." But if their houses were primitive, the occupants were generally prosperous and free from debt and in later years comfortable and commodious farmhouses have taken the place of the earlier cabins. These earliest Germans, having neither speech nor habits in common with their neighbours, developed a self-sustained and independent community wholly different and set off from those of others around them and to this day their locality measurably carries on its distinctive life.

Following so closely upon the advent of the Germans that there has arisen some dispute as to which actually entered first, we find the arrival of the Quakers. "In 1733 Amos Janney left his residence at the Falls of the Delaware in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and migrating to Virginia with his family, established himself at Waterford"[26] and many other Quakers soon joined him. Local tradition places, even earlier than Janney, David Potts (another Pennsylvania Quaker) as a pioneer in the northern part of the present county but no record confirms his presence before the 16th November, 1746, when he leased 866 acres on "Kittockton Run" from Catesby Cocke for five shillings in hand paid with right of purchase. Legend may or may not be correct; the earliest settlers, as we have seen, often seated themselves without title. Both Janney and Potts were founders of well known families in the county where their descendants still worthily bear their names. It is definitely known, however, that soon the Quakers became very numerous; and as ever since they have been such a conspicuous element in the diversified population of the county, a brief narration of their story and migration is of interest.

The "Friends" or "Quakers" as they were subsequently called, are a religious sect founded by George Fox in England in 1647 when he was but twenty-three years old. They owe their name of Quakers to their tendency, in their early religious meetings, to have become so wrought up in individual enthusiasm as to be seized with an emotional trembling or quaking and the earlier Friends "definitely asserted that those who did not know quaking and trembling, were strangers to the experience of Moses, David and other Saints."[27] Their characteristic tenets included the doctrine of non-resistance and opposition to all formalism in religious services and as Fox began his activities at a time of intense religious fanaticism met by relentless persecution, it was not long before he and his followers were in open conflict with the constituted authorities. From proselyting in public and interrupting conventional religious services, the more extravagant of the zealots indulged in activities which can only be ascribed to religious mania and the authorities promptly met their challenge.[28] Merciless whippings, dragging at cart-tails, the pillory, branding with hot irons and even occasional execution were their fate; but in common with other religious persecution their growth in number seems to have been coincident with the most vigourous efforts made to suppress them. Fox, a man of humble birth, with no advantages of formal education, possessed tireless energy and great bodily vigour coupled with the assurance of a natural and magnetic evangelist; and although equally detested by Churchmen and Puritans and in conflict with every other religious body, his following rapidly grew throughout England. Journeys by his proselytes to continental America, the West Indies, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy left converts where they preached and this was particularly so in the American Colonies where Fox himself came in 1672.

The first of the Colonies to hear Quaker preaching was Massachusetts in 1656, but Virginia was a close second; for in the following year Thomas Thurston and Josiah Cole of Bristol arrived in the Old Dominion and are said to have made a number of converts before they were promptly banished. The Quakers were as little welcome in either Massachusetts or Virginia as in England itself and both Colonies passed stringent laws for their repression. Virginia ordained that any shipmaster found guilty of smuggling in Quakers was to be fined £100 and upon the third return of a Quaker after banishment, he was to be treated as a felon. But even before the passage of the English Toleration Act of 1689 the persecution had died down. By the end of the century they had so increased in number that they were a major element in Rhode Island, controlled New Jersey and Delaware and had, under William Penn in 1681, founded and were supreme in Pennsylvania. Penn declared for liberty of conscience in the Colony he termed his "experiment," with absolute religious freedom "for Papists, Protestants, Jews and Turks"—if not an absolutely unique, at least a sorely needed attitude in the seventeenth century religious life. Thence forward Pennsylvania was to be a great centre of Quakerism and from it mainly but also from Maryland, New York and other Colonies, as well as directly from Great Britain, were recruited the Quakers of Loudoun. Undoubtedly the familiar combination of economic pressure, the cheaper and more fertile lands of the new settlement and the pioneering spirit inherent in the British race explains the migration. It is interesting to note that by 1694 a Quaker had become Governor of South Carolina and that from 1725 to 1775 there was a constant flow of Friends from Pennsylvania, New York, New England and Great Britain to that State. As a main north-and-south highway, the famous Carolina Road, passed through the Loudoun to be, doubtless many came that way and we may believe that not a few of those emigrants joined their coreligionists who they found living in such comfort and prosperity in their fertile Virginia colony.

The Quakers of Loudoun had with characteristic shrewdness picked out for their settlement that part of the far-famed Loudoun Valley, between the Catoctin Hills and the Blue Ridge, that lies in the central part of the present county—perhaps the best and most fertile land the county boasts; and there the so-called "Quaker Settlement" continues to the present time. In common with their German neighbours to the north, they tended to form a more-or-less compact colony, segregated from the other pioneers. They were frugal, industrious, far better farmers than their Virginia neighbours; but between Germans and Quakers no love was lost and, though each was isolated from the Tidewater element, there was little or no intermingling. Nevertheless we find them occasionally making common cause against the slaveholding portion of the community and, in the next century in the War Between the States, both German and Quaker adhered to the Federal cause and were, at least for the time being, more than ever cut off from their then intensely Confederate neighbours. Time has softened and gradually worn down these old-time edges of difference and today, perhaps more than ever before, we find the descendants of these earlier opponents living in concord and mutual respect.

Our melting-pot is slowly filling. In the Scotch-Irish it now takes another human ingredient as distinct from the Anglo-Saxon as were the Germans or Irish but destined to make a major contribution not only to the new population of the Piedmont but to that of Virginia generally and the other Colonies as well. They were splendid pioneering material with the persistent industry and frugality of the German and Quaker but, unlike them, mixing freely with the other settlers, planting themselves anywhere and everywhere they found conditions and lands to their liking and so soon and freely intermarrying with their Virginia neighbours that their blood today is found very generally mixed with the older Virginia strain. Concerning their origin and history there has been much misinformation and occasionally rather prejudiced and heated argument; but the main facts are not obscure.

In the sixth century one of the Irish tribes known as the Scotti or Scots, inhabiting the island then known as Scotia, but which we now call Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and made a mass descent on the west coast of ancient Caledonia; and driving before them the Picts they found occupying the land, they settled down in possession of their newly conquered territory, covering roughly the present Argyle. Five centuries later the descendants of these invaders, having waxed mightily in power and numbers and become one of the four tribal kingdoms of Caledonia, united with the others, the Picts, British and Angles, to make the Kingdom of Scotland to which they gave their name and of which their history thenceforth was a part. Thus apparently their future destiny was fixed for all time in Scotland; but Providence had not forgotten them and had other plans.

In all Ireland, never renowned for its meekness nor pacification, there was in Elizabethan days and before, probably no part more constantly and consistently embroiled than the Province of Ulster. More or less continuous fighting between its people and Elizabeth's soldiers gradually wore down the Irish and their final complete collapse came in 1607 when their native princes, the Earls of Tyrconnel and Tyrone, deserted them and fled to the Continent. Thereupon the first James of England, having succeeded Elizabeth, declared all the lands of the Province forfeited and escheated to the English Crown, thus providing a convenient and legal basis for dispossessing the native Irish of their holdings, which the King thereupon undertook to repopulate with English and Scotch. But the English did not view the King's inducements with enthusiasm. Inasmuch as, in comparison with the Scotch, they "were a great deal more tenderly bred at home in England, and entertained in better quarters than they could find in Ireland, they were unwilling to flock thither except to good land such as they had before at home, or to good cities where they might trade, both of which in those days were scarce enough" in Ulster.[29] But the Scotch, many of them from Argyle found Ulster, their old homeland, to their liking and James, Scotch himself, seems to have preferred them for his purpose. They came in great numbers, took root immediately and soon were creating a peace and prosperity in the Province unknown there for many a long day, their ranks being later heavily augmented by Covenanters fleeing from the persecution of Charles I. But between these Presbyterian newcomers and the native Irish Roman Catholics, their neighbours, there was friction and hostility from the beginning which has lasted unabated to the present day.

Had the English government the wit and policy to have let this new settlement alone all would have been well; but the England of those days had yet to learn, from the costly experience of the American Revolution, that art of governing colonies in which she is today without peer. After the final crushing of the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne, in which the new Ulster population was of no small assistance, the English merchants grew jealous of the trade, manufactures and aggressive competition of the Province and in 1698 succeeded in obtaining from Parliament restrictive laws which all but ruined her industries, particularly in linen and woolen then, as now, outstanding. And now to the ruin of their trades was to be added religious coercion. Although, as we have seen, a Toleration Act had been passed for England in 1689, it was not until nearly one hundred years later that in 1782 the Toleration Act for Ireland became law. From 1704 on there was a great effort to force the Presbyterians of Ulster, as well as those of Scotland, to conform to the English Church and those who refused were forbidden to keep schools, marriages performed by their ministers were declared invalid and other civil disabilities were imposed. By 1719 the people of Ulster had been made desperate by this senseless interference and persecution and they, too, began to flock to America. As with the others, the movement, once started, grew rapidly and in this instance reached such proportions that it became by far the greatest immigration that, until the later day of steam, was to come to America's shores. Again Philadelphia appears to have been the chief port to receive them, as many as six shiploads landing there in one week alone. Before the emigration was eased by the Toleration Act and a generally saner attitude in England, it is estimated that half a million of the Scotch-Irish had crossed the Atlantic, carrying with them a deep resentment toward England, for which she later was to pay a heavy price in the stubborn and valiant support these people and their descendants gave to the American side in the war of the Revolution.