arrow local bounds and runs in the line of exacting
routine, that life is yet varied and eventful in its way. The negro
stands so much apart to himself, in spite of all transforming
influences, that everything relating to him seems unique and almost
foreign. Even now, when emancipation has done so much to improve his
condition, his social and economic status still presents peculiar and
anomalous aspects; and in no part of the South is this more notably the
case than in the southern counties of Virginia, which, before the late
war, were the principal seat of slavery in the State, and where to-day
the blacks far outnumber the whites. This section has always been an
important tobacco-region; and this is the explanation of its teeming
negro population, for tobacco requires as much and as continuous work as
cotton. There were many hundreds of slaves on the large plantations, and
their descendants have bred with great rapidity and show little
inclination to emigrate from the neighborhoods where they were born.
Some few, by hoarding their wages, have been able to buy land; but for
the most part the soil is still held by its former owners, who
superintend the cultivation of it themselves or rent it out at low rates
to tenants. The negroes are still the chief laborers in the fields and
artisans in the workshops; and, excepting that they are no longer
chattels that can be sold at will, their lives move in the same grooves
as under the old order of things. Their occupations and amusements are
the same. As yet there has been no increase in the physical comforts of
their situation, and but little change in their general character; but
this is the first period of transformation, when it is difficult to
detect and to follow the modifications that are really taking place.

Every large tobacco-plantation is an important community in itself, and
the social and economic condition of the negro can be observed there as
freely and studied with as much thoroughness as if a wide area of
country were considered for a similar purpose. In the diversity of its
soils and crops and in the variety of its population and modes of life
it bears almost the same relation to the county in which it lies that
the county bears to its section. Indeed, no community could be more
complete in itself, or less dependent upon the outside world. In an
emergency, the inhabitants of one of these large plantations could
supply themselves by their own skill and ingenuity