ONE of the great storehouses of information in regard to the early settlement of this country, and the customs, habits and laws which prevailed, and the changes, vicissitudes, gradual expansion and development of an infant colony into a great and powerful commonwealth, is found in Hening's Statutes at Large of the State of Virginia. This storehouse, which has been so industriously ransacked and explored by the historian, the novelist and the jurist, still remains unexhausted, and teems with matters of the greatest interest.

Almost everything that has been written concerning the early settlements along the Atlantic, and especially of the adventurers who first took up their abode in Virginia, consists of a mere generalization, a chronicle of events in their order, but omits the thrilling incidents which a personal narrative would supply; which, if extended to the details of the plantation and embraced its laws, customs, habits, struggles and privations, would furnish a story the most marvelous and touching in the annals of the human race, a story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is pathetic and animating.

Bancroft, Robertson, Hildreth, Bryant, and all other historians, have given us distant but general views of the countries and States of which they treat, but it requires a microscope to bring out the whole truth.

"History has its foreground and its background, and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another. Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished, the great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon, and a general idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight sketches."

The more incongruous the facts, the more they interest us in searching for their connection. We turn over the leaves of some old volumes of laws and find that statutes were passed about supplying ammunition. to protect the community against hostile savages, against planting seeds in spring and gathering crops in autumn, about establishing a church. and founding a college, about punishing crimes and misdemeanors, and we smile at the minutia indulged in and the quaint language employed, and we fall to wondering at the wisdom and necessity of those laws; but we

see in these things the development of a State. We read between the lines and fill out the narrative for ourselves. It is like an outline scrawled with a pen which seizes the marked features of a countenance and gives us a stronger idea of it than a bad painting in oils. Hening's statutes are outlines scrawled with a pen, but they exhibit the real facts in regard to the early settlement of Virginia in a much more striking manner than either Bancroft or any other historian has ever done.

Commencing with the first charter or letters patent which James I. issued to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and others in 1606, for two several colonies and plantations, to be made in Virginia and other parts and territories of America, and which was followed in 1609 by the organization of the Great London Company with the right, power and control over a vast and unknown region extending four hundred miles along the coast, two hundred miles north and two hundred miles south, reckoning from the starting point, extending three hundred leagues to sea, and thence westward to the Pacific Ocean; and coming down to the time within the memory of men still living, there will be found rich treasures of information, "relative to the state of society among the first settlers, their religious intolerance, the rise, progress and establishment of our civil institutions; and generally such political events as afford a lesson to posterity, of some

thing worthy to be imitated and something to be shunned.”

Thomas Jefferson was, at a very early period in life, struck with the importance of collecting all the char-" ters and laws of Virginia relating to the early settlement of that plantation, and used all of his influence to have them collected, printed and published in consecutive order for the use of subsequent generations. He himself made a collection of all the early laws, which he arranged and indexed with his own hand, and in 1807, when he became President, turned them all over to W. W. Hening, who was authorized to publish all the charters and laws on the plan proposed by him years before. Mr. Hening, in giving an account of how the early laws came to be published, and of Jefferson's connection with the same, among other things, says: With men of liberal and large minds, it had long been a subject of serious regret that no legislative means were adopted for the preservation of our ancient laws. so very essential to a correct view of our history, and on which so much property depended. The evil began to be so sensibly felt, as it respected. questions of property, that the legislature, at the session of 1795, passed an act directing that all the laws and classes of laws, whether public or private, relating to lands, tenements or hereditaments within this commonwealth, at any time passed since the first settlement of Virginia, should be collected, and an edition of one thou

sand copies published. A committee consisting of George Wythe, John Brown, John Marshall, Bushrod Washington and John Wickham, was appointed, who, or any three of whom, were requested to carry the intention of the legislature into effect.

Thomas Jefferson had long before this time made a most complete collection of all the laws that had ever been passed, and on the appointment of this committee, Judge Wythe addressed him a letter upon the subject, and he immediately placed all of the printed statutes which were in his possession at the disposal of the committee, and soon after, in a letter addressed to Mr. Wythe, dated Monticello, January 16th, 1795, explained how he came to make the collection, and his motives for so doing, which is so interesting in its character that we have copied it entire, and is as follows:

Monticello, Jan. 16, 1795.

In my letter which accompanied the box containing my collection of printed laws, I promised to send you by post a statement of the contents of that box.

On taking up the subject, I found it better to take a more general review of the whole of the laws I possess, as well manuscript as printed, as also of those which I do not possess, and suppose to be no longer extant. This general view you will have in the inclosed paper, whereof the articles stated to be printed constitute the contents of the box I sent you.

Those in MSS. were not sent, because not supposed to have been within your view, and because some of them will not bear removal, being so rotten that on turning over a leaf it sometimes falls into powder. These I preserve by wrapping and sewing them up in oiled cloth, so that neither. air nor moisture can have access to them. Very early in the course of my researches into the laws of Virginia, I observed that many of them were already lost, and many more on the point of being lost, as existing only in single copies in the hands of careful or curious individuals, on whose death they would probably be used for waste paper. I set myself, therefore, to work to collect all which were then existing, in order that when the day should come in which the public should advert to the magnitude of their loss in these precious monuments of our prosperity and our history, a part of the regret might be spared by information that a portion has been saved from the wreck, which is worthy of their attention and preservation. In searching after these remains I spared neither time, trouble nor expense, and am of opinnion that scarcely any law escaped me which was in being as late as the year 1770, in the middle or southern part of the State. In the northern part, perhaps, something might still be found in the clerks' offices in the ancient counties, some of whose manuscript copies of the laws may possibly still exist which used to be

furnished at the public expense to every county before the use of the press was introduced; and in the same places and in the hands of ancient magistrates, or of their families, some of the fugitive sheets of the laws of separate sessions, which have been usually distributed since the practice commenced of printing them.

But recurring to what we actually possess, the question is, what means will be the most effectual for preserving these remains from future loss? All the care I can take of them will not preserve them from the worm, from the natural decay of the paper, from accidents of fire, or those of removal when it is necessary for any public purpose, as in the case of those now sent you. Our experience has proved to us that a single copy, or a few deposited in manuscript in the public offices, cannot be relied on for any length of time. The ravages of fire and of ferocious enemies have had but too much part in producing the loss we now deplore.

How many of the precious works of antiquity were lost while they existed only in manuscript? Has there ever been one lost since the art of printing has rendered it practicable to multiply and disperse copies? I think, therefore, that there should be printed, at public expense, an edition of all the laws ever passed by our legislatures that can now be found; that a copy should be deposited in every public library in America, in the principal public offices within the State,

and some, perhaps, in the most distinguished public libraries in Europe; that the rest should be sold to individuals toward reimbursing the expenses of the edition. Nor do I think that this would be a voluminous work. The MSS. would probably furnish matter for one printed volume in folio, and would comprehend all the laws from 1624 to 1701.

My collection of fugitive sheets forms, as we know, two volumes, and comprehends all the extant laws from 1734 to 1783, and the laws which can be gleaned up from the revisals to supply the chasm between 1710 and 1734, with those from 1783 to the close of the present century (by which term the work might be completed), would not be more than the matter of another volume, etc.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.

Mr. Jefferson took a very great interest in this matter, and afterward, when he became President, wrote a letter to Mr. Hening, who had undertaken to edit the collection of the early laws, dated at Washington, January 14th, 1807, as follows:

"The only object I had in making my collection of the laws of Virginia was to save all those for the public which were not then already lost, in the hope that at some future day they might be replenished. Whether this be by private or public enterprise, my end will be equally answered. The work divides itself into two very distinct parts, to-wit: the printed and unprinted laws. The former began

in 1662 (Purvis collection). My collection of these is in strong volumes, well bound, and therefore may safely be transported anywhere.

"Any of these volumes which you do not possess are at your service for the purpose of republication. But the unprinted laws are dispersed through many manuscript volumes, several of them so decayed that the leaf can never be opened but once without falling into powder.

"These can never bear removal farther than from their shelf to a table. They are, as well as I recollect, from 1622 downward. I formerly made such a digest of their order and the volumes where they are to be found, that under my own superintendence they could be copied with once handling; more they would not bear. Hence the impracticability of their being copied out at Monticello. But independent of them, the printed laws beginning in 1662, with all our former printed collections, will be a most valuable publication, and sufficiently distinct.

"I shall have no doubt of the exactness of your part of the work, but I hope you will take measures for having the typography and paper worthy of the work.

"THOMAS JEFFERSON."

It is creditable to the enlightened statesmen of that period and to the great State of Virginia that the General Assembly had the good sense to rescue from oblivion the records of the early settlement of that common

wealth, and has preserved them in enduring form in the shape of "Hening's Statutes at Large," in which not only the people of the United States have a great and abiding interest, but especially the people of the State of Illinois, who at one time were citizens of that State, and occupied the frontier county of that old dominion under the name and style of the County of Illinois.

Hening's Statutes are not alone a transcript of old musty records and State papers, but they contain many things which serve to throw light upon the events in England which transpired during the reign of James the First and Charles the First, the period of the Commonwealth, Charles the Second, down to the reign of George the Third, and the close of our own great revolution.

Hening, in speaking of this matter in the introduction to his first volume, says:

"The colony of Virginia having been planted long after the revival of letters in Europe, as well as the general introduction of the use of the press, it might have been expected that everything relating to our early history would have been carefully preserved.

"But it is a melancholy truth that though we have existed as a nation but little more than two hundred years, our public offices are destitute of official documents.

"It is to the pious care of individuals only that posterity will be indebted.