“You may easily guess,” says Dinwiddie to a London correspondent, “the great fatigue and trouble I have had, which is more than I ever went through in my life.”  He rested his hopes on the session of his Assembly, which was to take place in August; for he thought that the late disaster would move them to give him money for defending the colony.  These meetings of the burgesses were the great social as well as political event of the Old Dominion, and gave a gathering signal to the Virginian gentry scattered far and wide on their lonely plantations.  The capital of the province was Williamsburg, a village of about a thousand inhabitants, traversed by a straight and very wide street, and adorned with various public buildings, conspicuous among which was William and Mary College, a respectable structure, unjustly likened by Jefferson to a brick kiln with a roof.  The capitol, at the other end of the town, had been burned some years before, and had just risen from its ashes.  Not far distant was the so-called Governor’s Palace, where Dinwiddie with his wife and two daughters exercised such official hospitality as his moderate salary and Scottish thrift would permit.[162]

[Footnote 162:  For a contemporary account of Williamsburg, Burnaby, Travels in North America, 6.  Smyth, Tour in America, I. 17, describes it some years later.]

In these seasons of festivity the dull and quiet village was transfigured.  The broad, sandy street, scorching under a southern sun, was thronged with coaches and chariots brought over from London at heavy cost in tobacco, though soon to be bedimmed by Virginia roads and negro care; racing and hard-drinking planters; clergymen of the Establishment, not much more ascetic than their boon companions of the laity; ladies, with manners a little rusted by long seclusion; black coachmen and footmen, proud of their masters and their liveries; young cavaliers, booted and spurred, sitting their thoroughbreds with the careless grace of men whose home was the saddle.  It was a proud little provincial society, which might seem absurd in its lofty self-appreciation, had it not soon approved itself so prolific in ability and worth.[163]

[Footnote 163:  The English traveller Smyth, in his Tour, gives a curious and vivid picture of Virginian life.  For the social condition of this and other colonies before the Revolution, one cannot do better than to consult Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies.]

The burgesses met, and Dinwiddie made them an opening speech, inveighing against the aggressions of the French, their “contempt of treaties,” and “ambitious views for universal monarchy;” and he concluded:  “I could expatiate very largely on these affairs, but my heart burns with resentment at their insolence.  I think there is no room for many arguments to induce you to raise a considerable supply to enable me to defeat the designs of these troublesome people and enemies of mankind.”