CHAPTER I

THE OLD DOMINION


To know George Washington, we must first of all understand the society
in which he was born and brought up. As certain lilies draw their
colors from the subtle qualities of the soil hidden beneath the water
upon which they float, so are men profoundly affected by the obscure
and insensible influences which surround their childhood and youth.
The art of the chemist may discover perhaps the secret agent which
tints the white flower with blue or pink, but very often the elements,
which analysis detects, nature alone can combine. The analogy is
not strained or fanciful when we apply it to a past society. We can
separate, and classify, and label the various elements, but to combine
them in such a way as to form a vivid picture is a work of surpassing
difficulty. This is especially true of such a land as Virginia in the
middle of the last century. Virginian society, as it existed at that
period, is utterly extinct. John Randolph said it had departed before
the year 1800. Since then another century, with all its manifold
changes, has wellnigh come and gone. Most important of all, the last
surviving institution of colonial Virginia has been swept away in the
crash of civil war, which has opened a gulf between past and present
wider and deeper than any that time alone could make.

Life and society as they existed in the Virginia of the eighteenth
century seem, moreover, to have been sharply broken and ended. We
cannot trace our steps backward, as is possible in most cases, over
the road by which the world has traveled since those days. We are