count for one and none
for more than one. The rigid maintenance of class distinctions, even in
New England, where students in Harvard College were seated according to
social rank and John Adams was but fourteenth in a class of twenty-four,
made it presumptuous for the ordinary man to dispute the opinion of his
betters or contest their right to leadership: to look up to his
superiors and take his cue from them was regarded as the sufficient
exercise of political liberty. The times were thought to be out of joint
when effective control of colonial politics rested not with a few men
who, through wealth or social standing, through official position,
through well-considered marriage connections, had built up the rival or
consolidated "interests" which played, each on its little stage, the
part of Bedford or Pelham or Yorke in Old England.

The foundation of this miniature aristocracy was wealth; wealth acquired
in the South mainly from the great plantations, in the North mainly from
commerce. In South Carolina the unhealthful swamp lands, driving the
planters to the coast during most of the year, made Charleston one of
the first commercial centers of America. Three hundred and sixty vessels
cleared from that port in 1764. Manigault and Mazyck, Laurens and
Rutledge, were therefore merchants of note as well as planters,
exporting provisions to the West Indies, the staples rice and indigo to
England or to the Continent south of Finisterre, and bringing back
slaves and English manufactures. In Virginia and Maryland, where there
were no cities of importance, the planters turned all their profits
into slaves and land. The second William Byrd, inheriting 26,000 acres,
left to his son 179,000 acres of the best land in Virginia, and the
right to represent his county in the assembly. All the great planters,
Ludlow and Carter, Randolph, Fairfax and Blair, lived on their estates,
and from their private wharves exported the tobacco which English
commission merchants sold in London, and for which they sent in return
such English commodities of all kinds as the planter might order. The
great estates along the Hudson, owned by men like Van Rensselaer, a
descendant of the old Dutch patroon, or Phillipse and Courtland and
Livingston, who had profited by the lavish grants of early English
governors, rivaled in extent the plantations of Virginia; and like the
planters of South Carolina their owners were often engaged in commerce,
and were conn