It is this fact which explains the decline in power and influence of the
Council in Virginia, which was so notable in the Eighteenth century.
This body had formerly been representative of a small clique of families
so distinct from the other planters and possessed of such power in the
government as to rival the nobility of England itself. Now, however, as
this distinction disappeared, the Council sank in prestige because it
represented nothing, while the House of Burgesses became the mouthpiece
of the entire slave holding class, and thus the real power in the
colonial Government.

Historians have often expressed surprise at the small number of Tories
in Virginia during the American Revolution. The aristocratic type of
society would naturally lead one to suppose that a large proportion of
the leading families would have remained loyal to the Crown. Yet with
very few exceptions all supported the cause of freedom and independence,
even though conscious of the fact that by so doing they were
jeopardizing not only the tobacco trade which was the basis of their
wealth, but the remnants of their social and political privileges in the
colony. When the British Ministry tried to wring from the hands of the
Assembly the all-important control over taxation which all knew to be
the very foundation of colonial self-government, every planter, the
largest as well as the smallest, felt himself aggrieved, for this body
was the depository of his power and the guardian of his interests. A
hundred years before, when the commons rose against the oppression and
tyranny of the Government, the wealthy men rallied to the support of Sir
William Berkeley and remained loyal to him throughout all his troubles.
In 1775 there was no such division of the people; the planters were
almost a unit in the defense of rights which all held in common.

It is obvious, then, that slavery worked a profound revolution in the
social, economic and political life of the colony. It practically
destroyed the Virginia yeomanry, the class of small planters who used
neither negroes nor servants in the cultivation of their fields, the
class which produced the bulk of the tobacco during the Seventeenth
century and constituted the chief strength of the colony. Some it drove
into exile, either to the remote frontiers or to other colonies; some it
reduced to extreme poverty; some it caused to purchase slaves and so at
one step to enter the exclusive class of those who had