Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/581

 great qualities which had formed a part of their moral inheritance as scions of the English stock. It was a life that allowed the individuality of each planter to expand without obstacle. It is not surprising that in a great crisis like the American Revolution, when sufficient time had passed for Virginia to produce a population racy of her own soil, and moulded by her own material conditions, there should have sprung up a body of men of exalted merit in those departments of human affairs in which her general system was most calculated to develop talent, the sphere of military action and the sphere of statesmanship. The large plantations, by giving birth to a class of great landowners, increased the importance of leaders in the community. It promoted the aristocratic spirit not the less strongly because there were no legally defined ranks in society. It created a rural gentry as proud as that of England.

The system of large estates was the result of the special conditions of tobacco culture alone. It did not spring from the existence of slavery, although that institution, by furnishing a cheaper laborer, gave a strong impulse to the expansion of the area included in the tract of each plantation. The plantation system of Virginia was founded upon a permanent basis many years before the number of slaves in the Colony had reached a thousand. That system would have flourished if not a single African had been introduced into Virginia. In its principal aspects indented service was a form of slavery; the servant was merely a slave for a fixed number of years instead of for life; he was for the time being absolutely at the disposal of his master, his physical powers being as persistently directed to the removal of the forest and the cultivation of the ground. The increasing substitution of new servants for old, whose terms had come to an end, gave, on each large