form, under the direction of the master and the mistress, or the trusted overseer, either in the household and its surroundings or in the fields. Each of these home communities had its own mechanics, or trades people of nearly every kind, from the carders, spinners, weavers, knitters, seamstresses and trained servants of the household and its attached flower and vegetable gardens, to the shoemakers, blacksmiths, wagonmakers, and other craftsmen of the home shops, and the wagon and cart drivers, plowmen, cattle and sheep herders, and others who conducted all the different labors of the large plantations. Especially were there large numbers of highly-skilled laborers on the great tobacco plantations, who, under but light supervision, pitched, cared for, cut and cured the large crops of tobacco, for the quantity and quality of which Virginia was famous in all parts of the world. One need not hesitate to say, that a better trained, better ordered, better cared for, happier and more contented laboring population nowhere existed within the limits of the Union.

The occupations of the people of Virginia were greatly varied in consequence of the great variety of the surface features of the State and their adaptations. Her oceanic waters abounded in shell and scale fish, and gave employment to large numbers of oystermen and fishermen. The large plantations of Tidewater were devoted to the production of wheat and corn, and those south of the James to peanuts and cotton; the cultivation of sweet potatoes was a specialty in the more easterly regions. Eastern and Central Midland raised large crops of wheat, from which a superior quality of flour was manufactured, especially at Richmond, for the South American trade. Western Midland, then as now, added the production of large quantities of tobacco. The Piedmont country in its northeastern portion, within the limits of the growth of natural grasses, was devoted to the production of cereals and the rearing of cattle and horses, while the large plantations of the central and southwestern parts not only produced corn and wheat, but great quantities of what is known as heavy shipping tobacco. The elevated pasture lands of the Blue ridge were mainly given up to grazing and dairying. The Great Valley, from the Potomac to the Tennessee line, the paradise of the farmer, the grazer and the dairyman, produced bountiful crops of all the cereals, especially wheat and corn; large numbers of

cattle and horses were reared, and much attention was given to dairying as well as to general husbandry.

It should be borne in mind that in 1860 there was no seaboard connection in Virginia with the great prairie States. The Baltimore & Ohio railroad had but just opened communication by rail with that region. None other of the railways of Virginia had then crossed the Appalachians, consequently there was none of that destructive competition which has now made farming unprofitable in the Atlantic States. The wheat from Virginia, much of it ground into flour by local mills, especially in the Valley and in Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Richmond and Petersburg, found good markets, notably in Baltimore and Richmond, for the West Indies and South America, or the grocery trade of the United States, which then had its best entrepots at Norfolk and Baltimore.

The people in the valleys of the Appalachian country and on the sloping uplands of Trans-Appalachia, were mainly engaged in the rearing of cattle, hogs, horses and other animals, which were driven eastward, either as young cattle to be sold to the farmers of the Valley and Piedmont for fattening from their ample corn-fields, or were driven direct, as fat cattle, to the eastern cities, sometimes as far northward as New York. There were also many dwellers in cabins, surrounded by a few acres of cleared land, within these mountain regions, who had little or no occupation beyond fishing and hunting. But these were the breeding places of hardy folk, who were constantly drifting westward as they grew to maturity, to form a considerable element in the great populations of newer States. Virginia, peopled with land-hungry Anglo-Saxons, made the great mistake, from the earliest days of her history, of parceling out her magnificent domain into great patents, some of them including a half million acres, and many of them from 50,000 to 100,000 acres, at the nominal price of but a few cents an acre. This policy prevailed, as population advanced westward, from the Atlantic to the Ohio, until these patents, often overlapping and loosely located, covered a large area of all the Appalachian and Trans-Appalachian country, left no land to be divided into parcels of moderate size for the use of the home-builder, and introduced uncertainty of land titles, all greatly detrimental to the peopling of that very desirable and intrinsically rich region,

across which and from which, largely because of this uncertainty of title and of the tempting parceling out of the great prairie States into sections and fractions of sections of land, the population of Virginia, from the seaboard to the mountains, drifted westward, leaving only stranded fragments of good stock along the way which ignorant writers describe as "poor whites" of a different origin from the main sturdy stock of the Virginia people. The northwesterly portion of the Trans-Appalachian country and the broad bottom lands of the Ohio and its tributaries, early attracted from the eastward a thrifty and intelligent class of people, who made that a highlyproductive grazing and agricultural region, which found markets for its products on the hoof eastward, or in flatboats westward on the flood tides of its numerous rivers. The manufacture of salt at various localities, especially on the Great Kanawha, was one of the leading industries of that section, supplying much of the Mississippi valley with its prime necessity of human life. Coal mining was also becoming an important industry on the Kanawha, the Monongahela and along the Ohio, the product of the mines finding markets in Cincinnati, Louisville, and even New Orleans. The distilling of petroleum, from cannel coal, had assumed very considerable proportions, especially along the Kanawha, when the discovery of natural petroleum, near 1860, by the boring of wells on the waters of the Little Kanawha, marked the beginning of the trade in petroleum, which has become one of the largest and most profitable in the whole world.

Of the 297,354 of Virginia's white population reported as engaged, in 1860, in gainful occupations, 108,958 were farmers and 30,518 were farm laborers; showing that a very large proportion of her people were engaged in farming or planting. Of the so-called professional classes, there were 3,441 lawyers, 2,467 physicians and 1,437 clergymen. Her population was mainly rural in habitation; she had no cities of large size. Richmond contained but 37,910 inhabitants; Petersburg, 18, 266, and Norfolk and Portsmouth but 24, 116; Wheeling, the metropolis of northwestern Virginia, contained but 14,083. The manufacturers of all kinds were comparatively few in number; they were mostly the blacksmiths, bricklayers, carpenters, shoemakers and wheel

wrights of the towns and villages throughout the commonwealth.

Her military population, the white men of the State between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, was 196,587; a striking contrast to the 1,099,855 at that time within the limits of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, States to the west of her borders that had, by her own action, been cut from her territory, and a very large percentage of whose population was of Virginian origin; and yet her fighting population was considerably larger than that of any other Southern State except Missouri. The available number of Virginia's arms-bearing population in 1860 was so decreased by the Union element and the secession from the State by West Virginia that she had not more than 150,000 fighting men to respond to her call for troops after the secession from the Union in 1861.

Prior to the first census Virginia had 10 representatives in the United States Congress; the first census, that of 1790, gave her 19, the second 22, the third 23, the fourth 22, the fifth 21, the sixth 15, the seventh 13, and the eighth, that of 1860, 11. The center of population of the United States at each of the five decades, from 1810 to 1850, was within her borders. Her density of population in 1860 was about 25 to the square mile.

From the historical standpoint, Virginia occupied an enviable position. From the threshold of 1860 she looked back upon an heroic and glorious past. Her Capt. John Smith-leader, diplomat, fighter, explorer, geographer, historian and adventurer-would have been a notable figure in any age. In 1619, before the establishing of any other English colony in America, she assembled an elected house of burgesses and entered upon a representative career which, from that time forward, stoutly maintained the rights of her people to govern themselves; and even in submitting to the Cromwellian parliament in 1652, she secured a continuance of her representative law-making privileges. Proud of her loyalty in the restoration of 1660, she hesitated not to rebel, in 1676, against the usurping authority of the royal parliament, and against that of the royal governor who failed to obey her orders and protect the colony against Indian outrages, and endeavored to rule without consent of the people. Her Governor Spotswood, who came in 1710, was by far the most prominent figure of his time in the American col

onies. In 1714 he established the first blast-furnace for the manufacture of iron, on the bank of the Rappahannock, within the afterward famous battlefield of Chancellorsville. He was the first, in 1716, to lead an expedition across the Blue ridge into the famous Shenandoah valley, and in 1730 became the deputy postmaster-general of all the colonies.

When the French and Indian war of 1750 began, and France claimed the territory drained by the Ohio, Virginia had a young Washington to send on a diplomatic errand to the French, at the head of that river; to lead her citizen soldiery, in 1754, in the unequal combat of the Great Meadows, and in 1755 to save from complete disaster the British regulars under Braddock. When England attempted taxation without representation, in 1765, her Patrick Henry fired the colonies to resistance. In 1769 she called a revolutionary convention, which denounced the acts of the British parliament. In 1774 she sent representatives to the first Continental Congress, in the persons of Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Richard Bland and Edmund Pendleton, all men of mark, who helped, then and there, to lay the foundations for a Federal union. In 1774 her brave and hardy men of the Great Valley and the mountains beyond, the fighting Scotch-Irishmen under the leadership of Lewis, met the combined Indian power of the Northwest, in a fierce struggle at the mouth of the Kanawha on the bank of the Ohio, and not only established Virginia's claim to the Northwest, but broke up the combination that, by Indian invasions in the rear, would have defeated the contention of the colonies with the mother country, if it had succeeded.

In 1775 the elected delegates of her people assembled in convention in Richmond, and resolved to put the colony in a state of defense against the aggressions of the crown, and followed these resolutions by ordering the enlisting and drilling in companies of soldiers throughout the commonwealth. A troop of these from Hanover, led by Patrick Henry, compelled the royal governor to pay for the powder of the colony that he had unlawfully removed from Williamsburg to shipboard. When the second Continental Congress met, in 1775, Peyton Randolph, of Virginia, was again chosen to preside over it;