A History of American Literature

24 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

creaking lines from “News from Virginia” by Robert Rich (1587–1688), published

in 1610:

There is no fear of hunger here,

for Corne much store here grows,

Much fish the gallant Rivers yield,

in truth, without suppose.

Great stores of Fowle, of Venison,

of Grapes, and Mulberries,

Of Chestnuts, Walnuts, and such like

of fruits and Strawberries.

There is indeed no want at all ...

In this ideal atmosphere, observers, pamphleteers, and preachers like William

Symonds argued, Englishmen could once more flourish in the occupation of Adam,

“that most wholesome, profitable, and pleasant work of planting.” All they had to do –

and here it is Robert Rich speaking – was “but freely cast corn into the ground, and with

patience wait for a blessing.” The blessing would be as much spiritual as material.

For, working with a land that would “yield much more fruit to independent labours”

than the tired, cramped soil of their native land, English settlers would recover their

independence, the means and so the will to rely on nobody but themselves. Returned

to conditions where “he maie have ground for nothing more than he can manure,”

each settler would recover his ancient, Anglo-Saxon virtues – his pride, his thrift, his

generosity and hospitality. That was intimated or insisted on time and again, in

pamphlets like the ones from which the two comments just quoted are taken,

“A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia” (1615) by Ralph Hamor and

“Good Newes from Virginia” by Alexander Whitaker. What the New World was seen

or believed to promise was the newest and yet the oldest of societies, the recovery of

an ancient sense of community and sociability:

If any fall sick and cannot compass to follow his crop which if not followed, will soon

be lost, the adjoining neighbour will ... join together and work on it by spells ... and

that gratis. Let any travel, it is without charge, and at every house is entertainment as

in a hostelry, and with it a hearty welcome are stranger entertained.

This vision of a return, not just to Eden, but to antique English virtues was announced

by John Hammond (fl. 1655–1656) in “Leah and Rachel; or, The Two Fruitfull

Sisters, Virginia and Maryland,” in 1656. In another pamphlet, “Virginia Impartially

Examined” by William Bullock (1594–1650), published a year earlier, the vision was

accompanied by an elaborate social program. Following the utopian impulses com-

mon among so many writers of the time (Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was an

early example), Bullock devoted most of his attention to an elaborate plan for a

social, economic, and political system that had the good farmer at its center and the

restoration and perpetuation of self-reliance and self-subsistence as its ultimate aim.

The details of the plan, which Bullock seriously proposed for the English colonies in

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