nd lived well, performing their
sacred duties in a perfunctory and not always in a decent manner.

The clergy, however, formed the stepping-stone socially between
the farmers, traders, and small planters, and the highest and most
important class in Virginian society. The great planters were the
men who owned, ruled, and guided Virginia. Their vast estates were
scattered along the rivers from the seacoast to the mountains. Each
plantation was in itself a small village, with the owner's house in
the centre, surrounded by outbuildings and negro cabins, and the
pastures, meadows, and fields of tobacco stretching away on all sides.
The rare traveler, pursuing his devious way on horseback or in a boat,
would catch sight of these noble estates opening up from the road or
the river, and then the forest would close in around him for several
miles, until through the thinning trees he would see again the white
cabins and the cleared fields of the next plantation.

In such places dwelt the Virginian planters, surrounded by their
families and slaves, and in a solitude broken only by the infrequent
and eagerly welcomed stranger, by their duties as vestrymen and
magistrates, or by the annual pilgrimage to Williamsburg in search of
society, or to sit in the House of Burgesses. They were occupied by
the care of their plantations, which involved a good deal of riding in
the open air, but which was at best an easy and indolent pursuit made
light by slave labor and trained overseers. As a result the planters
had an abundance of spare time, which they devoted to cock-fighting,
horse-racing, fishing, shooting, and fox-hunting,--all, save the
first, wholesome and manly sports, but which did not demand any undue
mental strain. There is, indeed, no indication that the Virginians
had any great love for intellectual exertion. When the amiable
attorney-general of Charles II. said to the Virginian commissioners,
pleading the cause of learning and religion, "Damn your souls! grow
tobacco!" he uttered a precept which the mass of the planters seem to
have laid to heart. For fifty years there were no schools, and down to
the Revolution even the apologies bearing that honored name were
few, and the college was small and struggling. In some of the great
families, the eldest sons would be sent to England and to the great
universities: they would make the grand tour, play a part in the
fashionable society of London, and come back to their plantations fine