fability, and ease any set of men
I have yet fallen in with, either in the West Indies or on the
Continent, this, in some degree, may be owing to their being most of
them educated at home (England) but cannot be altogether the cause,
since there are amongst them many gentlemen, and almost all the
ladies, who have never been out of their own province, and yet are as
sensible, conversible, and accomplished as one would wish to meet
with."

In brief, the Virginia aristocracy was the product of three forces,
inheritance, continued contact with the mother country, and local
conditions. Coming largely from the middle class in England, though
with some connections with the squirearchy through younger sons, they
brought with them the English language, English political
institutions, the Anglican Church, English love of liberty. This
inheritance was buttressed by their political and cultural dependence
on the mother country. But it was profoundly affected, even reshaped,
by Virginia itself.

Dr. Samuel Johnson's charge that the Americans were a race of
convicts, if he meant it to be taken seriously, is of course absurd.
It is true that from time to time convicts were sent to the colonies.
This is proved by the protests of the Assemblies and by laws passed to
prohibit their importation. In Virginia there are records in some of
the county courthouses of the crimes committed by these jailbirds. But
they never entered in any appreciable numbers into the population of
the colony, not even of the lowest class. They were never numerous,
the planters considered it a risk to use them, some were forced to
serve as cannon fodder in the colonial wars, others were shunted off
to the frontiers.

The bulk of the immigrants to Virginia were poor men seeking to better
their condition in a new country. Many came as indentured workers, who
placed their signatures to contracts to work for four years in the
tobacco fields in return for their passage across the Atlantic; other
thousands paid their fare in advance and so entered the colony as
freemen. They were not essentially different from the millions who
came to the United States in the nineteenth century. Most of them,
indentured workers and freemen alike, sooner or later acquired small
plantations and became members of a yeoman class. A few acquired
wealth. Many went into the trades to become carpenters, or
bricklayers, or blacksmiths, or coopers, or saddlers, or wheelwrights.

Colonial Vi