Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/101

 gentlemen in court dress or lawn sleeves jostling for favor, preferment, and place at a levee of George III. Nothing in their lives made them a part of the system of privilege and class rule that constituted the government of England in the eighteenth century. Nothing in their lives inclined them to look with friendly eyes upon the emissaries of that system—neither the English fur traders who resented every invasion of farmers into the haunts of game nor the English land speculators, often the favorites of royal governors, ever studying colonial maps for magnificent grants with which to enrich themselves and their families. The bonds that united the people of the interior to the English government were as light as gossamer and, when fear of the French and Spanish had been dissipated by war, they were shaken off like dew after the first crack of the rifle at Concord.

From the huge agricultural area already occupied in 1765 flowed annually an immense stream of produce. All the sections save New England raised more provisions than they could consume. The middle colonies sent to the port towns for shipment mountains of corn, flour, salt pork, flax, hemp, furs, and peas, as well as livestock, lumber, shingles, barrel staves, and houses all shaped for immediate erection. Maryland and Virginia furnished the great staple, tobacco, the mainstay of their economic life—an article for which the planters had a steady demand unhampered by competition. It was in tobacco that they paid for imported cloth, tea, coffee, furniture, silver, carpets, and tapestries, and met the bills of their sons studying in Oxford or in Cambridge. Since the crop was sure, those who produced it could easily obtain advances in goods and cash, so easily in fact that from year to year their credits mounted higher and higher until, by the eve of the Revolution, Southern gentlemen were owing English merchants thousands of pounds, the payment of which they were not unhappy to see stayed by the struggle for independence and finally discharged in large part by the government of the United