An Introduction to American Institutional History Written for This Series

es, was seconded by two other influences of a local character: first, by Mr. Freeman's natural desire to visit his own son, who married in Baltimore and who now lives upon a plantation in Virginia ; secondly, by an ardent longing to see with his own eyes a New England Town Meeting, which, in the genealogy of local institutions, is a long-lost child of Old England and a grandchild of the Fatherland. The historian of " The English People in their Three Homes " regards the local institutions of the United States, North and South, as the historic offspring of England and Germany, as truly as his own name, once applied to all freemen of the English Colonies in America, is directly perpetuated by children and grandchildren in the Old Dominion, where he indulged what he pleasantly calls " oldfatherly emotions towards the last-born bairn's bairn," and where, true to historical impulses, he began a " Virginia Domesday " in the old forms : " Freeman tenet; Belt tenuit Ante Ouerram. Valebnt . . . dollarios; modo . . . Wastefuit." With the grim humor of William the Conqueror, who, when he fell to the earth upon landing at Pevensey, grasped the soil and thus took seizin of England, Mr. Freeman describes his son's territorial conquest upon the shore of the Rapidan, " Potuit ire quo voluit cum ista terra, for the soil of the Old Dominion sticketh to the boots and is carried about hither and thither! " This extract from a letter dated Somerleaze, Rapid Ann Depot, Cul- peper Co...