Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/507

 CHAPTER XIX

MONEY

history of Virginia in the seventeenth century furnishes perhaps the most interesting instance in modern times of a country established upon the footing of an organized and civilized community, with an ever-growing number of inhabitants and an ever-enlarging volume of trade, yet compelled to have recourse to a method of exchange which seems especially characteristic of peoples still lingering in the barbarous or semi-barbarous state. From 1607 to 1700, the period upon which I am dwelling, a period covering an interval of ninety-three years, in the course of which the small band of colonists who disembarked at Jamestown in the spring of 1607 increased from a few hundred persons to many thousands, a period in which the unbroken forest east of the falls in the rivers flowing into the Chesapeake Bay was in large part cut down and the soil dug up and planted in tobacco, wheat, and maize, the financial system of Virginia was in principal measure based upon exchange in its crudest and simplest form. An agricultural product was given for a manufactured, or a manufactured product for an agricultural. Coin, which is just as much of a commodity as an agricultural or manufactured article, circulated in Virginia only in small quantities, even after nine decades had passed since the foundation of the Colony. Tobacco was the standard of value at the very