98 Singing Valleys 



Tobacco paid the taxes, the bills for presentations at court 

 and for educations at Oxford and Cambridge. But it was corn 

 which made tobacco possible. Even in their elegance the 

 southern planters did not forget this. They ate the hot corn- 

 breads which their black cooks learned to prepare, with frank 

 enjoyment of their flavor. The enjoyment was tinged with a 

 devout thankfulness similar to that of the earnest Hebrews in 

 eating their ceremonial, unleavened loaves. Both were truly 

 Passover breads. 



By the time the colonies were a century old, a new spirit 

 was moving the men and women who turned their faces to 

 America. These were no longer adventurers, with the gold 

 fever in their veins. Nor were they traders, seeking quick and 

 exorbitant profits. They no longer talked of America as a 

 wilderness, but as a continent of amazingly fertile land, land 

 on which to grow crops. A land in which no man who was 

 willing to work need go hungry. The First Supply to James- 

 town had numbered thirty-five "Gentlemen," a great number 

 of "Gentlemen's gentlemen," six tailors and a perfumer. Surely 

 a strangely assorted company to combat the wilderness. Now 

 the ships were bringing a different breed of Englishmen, 

 wearied of long-drawn quarrels between kings and parliament; 

 Germans and Moravians seeking civil and religious liberty; 

 Irish wild geese whose cause and property had been lost on 

 the Boyne Water; and Scotch partisans of the Stuarts. For 

 twenty-four years the armies of Great Britain, France, Austria, 

 Spain and the Netherlands had been marching across Europe 

 from Dunkerque to Vienna, from Gibraltar to Berlin. Marl- 

 borough's soldiers had trampled the vineyards along the Rhine 

 and the potato fields of Belgium; Europe's granary along the 

 Danube was ravaged. Men who loved the land were sickened 

 by this turning of it into a dreary battle ground. Standing in 

 their wrecked farms they looked across the Atlantic at a con- 

 tinent that promised peace and bread without scarceness. 



Young Philip Carteret, first Governor of New Jersey, walked 

 from the landing stage to the center of his "capital" city of 



