Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/254

 CHAPTER XIV

RELATIVE VALUE OF ESTATES

the different forms of property which were held by the Virginian planter in the seventeenth century have now been enumerated. They consisted, as has been seen, of land either inherited, purchased, or acquired by patent; of tobacco, Indian corn, and wheat; of horses, sheep, goats, hogs, and horned cattle; of agricultural implements, vehicles, and buildings; of white servants, both native and imported; of slaves born in the Colony or brought into it from Africa or the West Indies; of residences containing a large quantity of furniture, carpets, plate, and utensils; of clothing, both linen and woollen, coarse and fine; and lastly, of a great assortment of household supplies of foreign or domestic growth or manufacture. Fitzhugh described very accurately the condition of the planters, when he declared in a letter to his brother, towards the close of the century, that they were in possession of an abundance of everything except money, by which he meant coin. Where a very large proportion of the articles consumed or used by the family of the landowner were the products of his own soil, cultivated and gathered by his own laborers, there was but little need of a metallic medium of exchange as long as tobacco continued to have a value in the markets of the world so high as to induce shipowners and merchants to transport