New England to the South, are in New England only from fifty to eighty miles from the coast, while in the south they are two hundred and fifty miles from the ocean. Physical conditions, therefore, made the Englishman who settled in Massachusetts cling close to the coast and did not affect his territorial ideas. The Englishman who went to Virginia had a much larger area in which to work, and soon acquired that desire for expansion which later became a part of the early American character. In New England, which had long lain under a heavy glacial deposit, much and arduous work was required before the land could be broken with the plough; in Virginia the land “produceth, with very great increase, whatsoever is committed into the Bowells of it," writes an enthusiastic anonymous pamphleteer, in 1649,' and he regrets that those industrious New Englanders had not planted themselves in Virginia, for in New England so sterile was the soil that "except a herring be put into the hole that you set the corn or maize in, it will not come up"; while in Virginia is "a fat rich soile everywhere watered with many fine springs, small rivulets, and wholesome waters." It was a very delightful land to which these people had been led. The winters were keen, but the summers were long and warm, which invited the free, outdoor life so dear to the heart of the Englishman, who thinks in brick and mortar, but loves nature. The great

1 "A Perfect Description of Virginia," Force, vol. ii, p. 8.

woods, the long stretches of greensward, the rivers teeming with life, the abundance of game, the fertility of the soil, made a strong appeal to him, and induced him soon to expand beyond the limits of the original settlement, and inclination had a powerful stimulus in necessity.

The cultivation of tobacco requires a virgin soil. As soon as the land was cleared it was planted in tobacco, and as artificial fertilization was then unknown and the scientific rotation of crops had not been learned, in from three to eight years the land was exhausted and worthless for tobacco planting. When the plantations could no longer be worked with profit they were abandoned, the forest was again invaded and the frontier of the settlement still further pushed into the wilderness. In 1685, "although the population of Virginia did not exceed the number of inhabitants in the single parish of Stepney, London, nevertheless they had acquired ownership in plantations that spread over the same area as England itself." Under this state of affairs there naturally grew up a class of great landed proprietors. Conditions, it would seem, should have created a class of metayer tenants, or peasant proprietors, from whom would have sprung the yeomanry of America as their forbears had been the yeomanry of England. The causes that arrested this social condition are obscure, and there is little in contemporary writings or in the researches of

1

1 Semple: American History and its Geographic Conditions, p. 44.

later investigators to throw much light on the subject. It is possible that in the early days of the colony there was no intermediate class between the landowners, the proprietors or the representatives of the proprietors of the London Company, and the sweepings of the jail and the slums, the indentured servants or the victims of the kidnappers who in effect had been sold into slavery. Between the servants of the company and their masters there existed a wide gulf not lightly to be bridged in a day when class distinctions were so firmly established, and there was nothing in the political or social organization of the colony that would bring men together or make them forget class in the perils of a common danger. "In none of the other colonies were class distinctions so clearly marked and so thoroughly believed in. After the negroes came the indented servants and poor whites, with a distinct position from which few of them arose; then the middle class of small proprietors, who were distinct but constantly rising into the class of the great landlords who were the rulers of the province, the creators of opinion, and always the most typical and representative men of Virginia. There was a constant effort to maintain position or to acquire it." 1

In New England the life was that of a community bound together by every consideration of necessity and always fearing a relentless and treacherous foe,

1 Fisher: Men, Women, and Manners in Colonial Times, vol. i, p. 70.

but in Virginia this ever-present menace of an Indian massacre did not exist. Many of the indentured servants eventually worked out their period of bondage and as free men, "redemptioners," as they then were, ought to have become peasantry to feed the yeomanry, as the yeomanry has always fed and revitalized the aristocracy. But when that time came it was too late, for Virginia was then a colony of great landed proprietors, and there was no place for the yeoman with his small holdings. Doyle's conclusion, I think, is correct that “just as in earlier English history the free socage tenant often surrendered that position and voluntarily took a dependent place in the feudal chain, so we may believe that in Virginia the small holder would find his position untenable, and seek security and society where it alone could be had, on the plantation of his richer neighbor." With the continued increase in the growth and wealth of the colony and an insistent demand for cheap agricultural labor, which placed no premium on intelligence but was only valued according to its strength and docility, the opportunity to create a white peasantry had been lost and slavery, later to become the greatest social and political issue in America, was an economic fact.

The year 1619 is memorable to the student of American development. It forged the shackles of American slavery and broke the first link that 1 Doyle: English Colonies in America, vol. i, p. 188.

bound these feeble colonists to the mother country. It sowed slavery and reaped freedom. It deprived men of their liberty and made them creatures at the whim of their masters, and it taught men that to be masters of themselves they must be their own rulers. Had the Puritan been able to stand outside himself and see life as from a high mountain, he might well have believed that he was witnessing in the flesh that eternal conflict between the forces of good and evil which was a fundamental article of his creed.

In that year, on the thirteenth of July, the first assembly of Burgesses met in Jamestown, the first experiment of constitutional government in the New World. Heretofore Virginia had been "little better than a penal settlement, ruled by martial law," now it was given some of the rights of self-government; rights which Englishmen have never surrendered once they have been granted or won. These Virginians, but Englishmen first, were not to prove recreant to their traditions. And in this same year slavery was introduced into Virginia, when a Dutch vessel dropped anchor in the James and its master sold his cargo of twenty blacks. From that time there were always enslaved negroes in Virginia, but it was not until the last quarter of the seventeenth century that there was a heavy accession of the slave population. In 1670 the colony comprised, according to Governor Berkeley's estimate, 40,000 people, of whom 32,000 were free whites, 6000 were