d in our time scholars
have by research recovered many of the links that had been lost from
memory. The white people of Virginia were as purely English as those of
Connecticut or Massachusetts. But society in Virginia was very different
from society in New England. The wealth of Virginia consisted chiefly of
tobacco, which was raised by negro slaves. People lived far apart from
each other on great plantations, usually situated near the navigable
streams of which that country has so many. Most of the great planters
had easy access to private wharves, where their crops could be loaded on
ships and sent directly to England in exchange for all sorts of goods.
Accordingly it was but seldom that towns grew up as centres of trade.
Each plantation was a kind of little world in itself. There were no
town-meetings, as the smallest political division was the division into
counties; but there were county-meetings quite vigorous with
political life. Of the leading county families a great many were
descended from able and distinguished Cavaliers or King's-men who had
come over from England during the ascendency of Oliver Cromwell. Skill
in the management of public affairs was hereditary in such families, and
during our revolutionary period Virginia produced more great leaders
than any of the other colonies.

[Sidenote: New York and Delaware]

There were yet two other American commonwealths that in 1750 were more
than a hundred years old. These were New York and little Delaware, which
for some time was a kind of appendage, first to New York, afterward to
Pennsylvania. But there was one important respect in which these two
colonies were different alike from New England and from Virginia. Their
population was far from being purely English. Delaware had been first
settled by Swedes, New York by Dutchmen; and the latter colony had drawn
its settlers from almost every part of western and central Europe. A man
might travel from Penobscot bay to the Harlem river without hearing a
syllable in any other tongue than English; but in crossing Manhattan
island he could listen, if he chose, to more than a dozen languages.
There was almost as much diversity in opinions about religious and
political matters as there was in the languages in which they were
expressed. New York was an English community in so far as it had been
for more than eighty years under an English government, but hardly in
any other sense. Accordingly we shall find New York i