ern Virginia we have wandered and counted the
epitaphs of as princely men and women as ever trod this continent.
Yonder is the island, floating on the crystal Rappahannock, which,
instead of, as now, masking the guns which aim at Freedom's heart,
once bore witness to the noble Spottswood's effort to realize for the
working-man a Utopia in the New World. Yonder is the house, on the same
river, frowning now with the cannon which defend the slave-shamble, (for
the Richmond railroad passes on its verge,) where Washington was reared
to love justice and honor; and over to the right its porch commands
a marble shaft on which is written, "Here lies Mary, the Mother of
Washington." A little lower is the spot where John Smith gave the right
hand to the ambassadors of King Powhatan. In that old court-house the
voice of Patrick Henry thundered for Liberty and Union. Time was when
the brave men on whose hearts rested the destinies of the New World made
this the centre of activity and rule upon the continent; they lived and
acted here as Anglo-Saxon blood should live and act, wherever it bears
its rightful sceptre; but now one walks here as through the splendid
ruins of some buried Nineveh, and emerges to find the very sunlight sad,
as it reveals those who garnish the sepulchres of their ancestors with
one hand, whilst with the other they stone and destroy the freedom and
institutions which their fathers lived to build and died to defend.

And this, alas! is the first black line in the sketch of Virginia as
it now is. The true preface to the present edition of Virginia, which,
unhappily, has been for many years stereotyped, may be found in a single
entry of Captain John Smith's journal:--

"August, 1619. A Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the
settlers twenty negroes, the first that have ever touched the soil of
Virginia."

They have scarcely made it "sacred soil." A little entry it is, of what
seemed then, perhaps, an unimportant event,--but how pregnant with
evil!

The very year in which that Dutch ship arrived with its freight of
slaves at Jamestown, the Mayflower sailed with its freight of freemen
for Plymouth.

Let us pause a moment and consider the prospects and opportunities which
opened before the two bands of pilgrim. How hard and bleak were the
shores that received the Mayflower pilgrims! Winter seemed the only
season of the land to which they had come; when the snow disappeared, it
was only to reveal a land