ALBEMARLE LN REVOLUTIONARY DAYS 
279 
rapid pursuit of Cornwallis, who had begun his retreat down tiie 
James. The boy-general soon drove his adversary to the end of 
the Yorktown peninsula, where Cornwallis hoped to get helj) 
from the British fleet. What happened there between tlie 30th 
of July and the 9th of October it is needless for me to relate. 
Before closing, I must refer to some of tlie historic personages 
whose lives were passed in the region which surrounds us. It 
is to be regretted that Monticello is hut a “ little mountain ” in 
fact as well as in name. If it were 1,500 feet higlier and we were 
all provided with telescopes I could show you many things of 
interest. 
Here and there along the banks of the James I might point 
out the homes of six of the seven Virginians who signed the 
Declaration of independence. We might see the old court- 
house in Hanover, twenty miles to the east, where Patrick Heniy, 
pleading in tlie famous Parsons cause in 1763, declared that the 
hurge.sses in Virginia were the only authority who could give 
force to the laws for the government of the colony. I could 
show }mu still closer, in Louisa, the home of Dabney Carr, who 
proposed in the House of Burgesses, in 1773, the plan for com- 
mittees of correspondence (to be organized for mutual ]>rotec- 
tion in tbe several colonies), which were so useful in the earliest 
days of the Revolution. We could also see old St. John’s church 
in Richmond, where, in 1775, at the meeting of the House of 
Burgesses, Heniy defied the British crown, ciying, ‘‘ Give me 
libert}’’ or give me death,” and the spot where he died, at “ Red 
Hill,” just beyond Willis mountain, to the southeast. We could 
see what we have already seen once toda}'’ fifty miles to the north- 
ward, the region of Culpeper, whence the Minutemen marched 
in 1775 with their rattlesnake flag and the motto “ Liberty or 
Death ” upon their hunting shirts, to the defeat of Lord Dun- 
more at Great bridge, with John Marshall, afterward Chief Justice 
of the United States, in their ranks. In this quarter we could 
also see tbe ancestral home of ^ladison, the cham|)ion of tbe 
Constitution. Looking to the northwest, beyond tbe Blue Ridge, 
we might see the region of the lower Shenandoah, wbencc 
marched two regiments of buckskin-clad riflemen to Poston at 
the alarm of Lexington, and the passes tbrougb which Wash- 
ington journeyed in bis early expedition to tbe westward. Over 
the Blue Ridge, not many miles away, we might s<‘ek out tbe 
birthplace of General Arthur Campbell, the hero ol' Kings Moun- 
tain, and that of John Sevier, the founder of the state of Frank- 
