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James River, Richmond, Virginia |
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In John White's pictures, which were sketched in the 1580s at Roanoke Island, the Indians of Virginia were often depicted as living in a simpler time. They are shown to enjoy a peaceful, bountiful existence. In The Indian Village of Secoton [Full view], we see not a simple clearing in a forest primeval, but a well-established, orderly hamlet, whose citizens had carefully laid out specific areas for dwelling, eating, and worship, and who clearly had developed proper agricultural methods long before the arrival of the English. Perhaps unwittingly, commentators often pointed to the fact that the cultures that the Europeans "discovered" in the New World were themselves of long duration. Thus, from the start Englishmen were ready to associate the word "old" with Virginia.
The "Contrary Character" of Early Virginia Virginia failed to become a treasure colony like those of Spain, nor did it develop a diversified economy that would supply the resources and goods wanted in the homeland. Instead, tobacco became the basis of its economic life. This crop permitted or even required individual settlers to establish far-flung plantations, which led to the creation of a distinctly un-English social landscape. Some early commentators tried to explain away the perceived failures of Virginia and pointed again to the immense potential of the colony. The paradox that Virginia seemed both the best and the worst of lands was addressed in 1697 by Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton in The Present State of Virginia, and the College: "As to the Natural Advantages of a Country, it is one of the best, but as to the Improved Ones, one of the worst of all the English Plantations." It was in answer to persistently negative assessments of its development that Virginia would be reinvented in the 18th century as a pastoral society. In this way Virginians could justify their agrarian lifestyle that had been so much maligned. The idea that the Virginia colony should be valued less for its natural resources than for its pattern of rural settlement that allowed the pursuit of virtuous living was rooted in Augustan England. There, pastoral bliss was celebrated by poets and painters, architects and landscape gardeners, and by those of the gentry who pursued an exalted lifestyle in the countryside. This ideal had originated in the ancient world and had been revived in Europe during the Renaissance. Classical and Renaissance Models of Pastoral Life The pastoral ideal, as it was transported to the New World, was based on models that had originated in the Europe of antiquity. This type of imagined utopia, which in its most basic form suggested the possibility for a life of simplicity and virtue in a rural, rustic setting, was extant among the ancient Greeks, with Theocritus its best-known exponent. The ideal came into full flower, however, through the writings of a number of Romans, particularly Virgil, Pliny the Younger, Horace, and Cato. Roman ideas were revived during the Italian and English Renaissance, and later during the Neo-Classical or Augustan period in Great Britain. The number of translations, borrowings from, and allusions to the great literary works of ancient Greece and Rome during the Augustan era makes clear that many of the most important British authors of the late-17th and early 18th centuries were enamored of the ancients. This same adulation guided contemporary architects, painters, and landscape gardeners. In this environment, noblemen who were obliged to come to London to deal with economic or political affairs would retire to their country seats to study the classics and otherwise seek diversion in the life of the mind. They established a lifestyle that the elite of the Virginia colony would emulate.
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