the ones best suited to the temper and purposes of
the colonial aristocracies, and understood by them with reservations the
most characteristically English, were those employed by Locke to justify
the natural right of Englishmen to become free while remaining unequal.
The colonials of substantial estates, long occupied in their assemblies
in resisting the governor's authority, thought of themselves often
enough as but rehearsing the traditional conflict between Crown and
Parliament. Like their prototypes they identified the rights of property
with natural right, and translated political liberty in terms of
prescriptive privilege. The rights of man and the rights of Englishmen
were thus thought to be synonymous terms: a happy confusion by which it
was possible for them to defend liberty against the encroachments of
their equals in England, without sharing it with their inferiors in the
colonies.

II

"My ancestors," says Devereaux Jarrett, who was born on a small
plantation in New Kent County, Virginia, about 1733, "had the character
of honesty and industry, by which they lived in credit among their
neighbors, free from real want, and above the frowns of the world. This
was also the habit in which my parents were. They always had plenty of
plain food and raiment, suitable to their humble station. We made no
use of tea or coffee; meat, bread, and milk was the ordinary food of all
my acquaintance. I suppose the richer sort might make use of those and
other luxuries, but to such people we had no access. We were accustomed
to look upon what were called _gentle folks_ as beings of a superior
order. For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble
distance. A periwig in those days, was a distinguishing badge of gentle
folk. Such ideas of the difference between gentle and simple, were, I
believe, universal among all my rank and age."

The distinction between gentle and simple was doubtless less absolute
than the disillusioned Jarrett represents it to have been. Even in the
South there were many gradations of wealth, and it was no uncommon thing
for a man to rise, as Jarrett did himself, from mean birth to a
considerable eminence. Yet in none of the colonies was the distinction
altogether unreal. The mass of the voters,--small freehold farmers in
the country and "freemen" in some of the towns,--holding themselves
superior to the unfranchised, yet not claiming equality with the favored
few; the tenant farmer o