xen, bulls, calves, twenty
thousand, large and good." When the traveller Welby came to America he
was surprised to "see no misery, no disgusting army of paupers, not even
beggars;" while Henry B. Fearson noted that laborers were "more erect in
their posture, less careworn in their countenances" than those of
Europe.

In Virginia, as in other colonies, it was the cheapness of land and the
dearness of labor which gave the newcomer his chance to rise. The rich
man might possess many thousands of acres, but they would profit him
nothing unless he could find the labor to put them under cultivation.
Indentured workers met his needs in part, but they were expensive, hard
to acquire, and served for only four years. If he hired freemen he
would have to pay wages which in England would have seemed fantastic.

Thus the so-called servants who had completed their terms and men who
had come over as freemen found it easy to earn enough to buy small
plantations of their own. That thousands did so is shown by the Rent
Roll which is published as an appendix to this book. One has only to
glance at it to see that the large plantations are vastly outnumbered by
the small farms of the yeomen. It proves that Virginia at the beginning
of the eighteenth century was not the land of huge estates, worked by
servants and slaves, but of a numerous, prosperous middle class.

Owning plantations of from fifty to five hundred acres, cultivating
their fields of tobacco, their patches of Indian corn and wheat, their
vegetable gardens and orchards with their own labor or the labor of
their sons, the yeomen enjoyed a sense of independence and dignity. It
was their votes which determined the character of the Assembly, it was
they who resisted most strongly all assaults upon the liberties of the
people.

As the small farmer, after the day's work was over, sat before his
cottage smoking his long clay pipe, he could reflect that for him the
country had fulfilled its promise. The land around him was his own; his
tobacco brought in enough for him to purchase clothes, farm implements,
and household goods.

But he frowned as he thought of the slave ship which had come into the
nearby river, and landed a group of Negroes who were all bought by his
wealthy neighbors. If Virginia were flooded with slaves, would it not
cheapen production and lower the price of tobacco? Could he and his
sons, when they hoed their fields with their own hands, compete with
slave lab