Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/534



CHAPTER XX

THE TOWN

the account which I have given so far of the economic condition of the people of Virginia in the seventeenth century, it will have been seen that the general system of colonial life rested upon the plantation as the centre, and not, as in New England, upon the township. A just conception of its whole economic framework may be acquired by an investigation of the character of a single large plantation, whether that plantation was situated on the Potomac or the York, the Rappahannock or the James. Each component part of the community, that is, each plantation, was in itself a complete reflection of the entire community, whether bounded by the lines of one neighborhood or the whole Colony. The community was a series of plantations which were only locally distinguished from each other. In all essential particulars, they were practically the same. The plantation is of the first and highest importance in the study of the general system. As tobacco culture tended irresistibly to promote the constant expansion of the area of each plantation, by compelling the appropriation of virgin lands either by patent or purchase, the economic dependence of plantation on plantation was always growing weaker until, as the logical conclusion of the process, the owners were finally able to rely exclusively on the supplies, natural and manufactured, furnished by their own land, or by the foreign merchant. This local