62 TRAVELS IN THE CONFEDERATION 



literary productions. Inquiring, I could hear only of a 

 Mr. Jefferson, + at this time a member of the Congress, 

 as the author of several excellent political brochures, 

 with the contents of which nobody seemed familiar. 

 The constitution of Virginia, indeed, mentions liberty 

 of the press as one of its cardinal principles ; but at the 

 beginning of the Revolution there was a law of the 

 state forbidding anything whatever to be said or writ- 

 ten against independence. However, if little is written 

 in Virginia, there is all the more of speaking, for the 

 Virginians are very conversable. They boast that 

 among all the American colonies the English language 

 is with them preserved purest and most complete, and 

 one cannot altogether deny them.* But here and there 

 a few negroisms have crept in, and the salmagundy of 

 the English language has here been enriched even by 

 words of African origin, and some of these are re- 

 garded as really meritorious additions, e. g., the negro 

 expression ' toat/ to carry something on the shoulder, 

 for which there is no word in the English. 



There is but one church at Richmond, one small 

 church, but spacious enough for all the pious souls of 

 the place and the region. If the Virginians themselves 

 did not freely and openly admit that zeal for religion, 

 and religion generally, is now very faint among them, 

 the fact might easily be divined from other circum- 

 stances. Considering the extent of the state, one sees 

 not only a smaller number of houses of worship than in 

 the other provinces, but what there are in a ruinous or 



* But in general the dialects of the English speech in the 

 several American colonies are not so sharply distinct as those 

 of the sundry districts and counties of England itself. 



