As yet, in Virginia, there were few African slaves -- not more perhaps than a
couple of hundred. But whenever ships brought them they were readily
purchased.
In Virginia, as everywhere in time of change, there arose anomalies. Side
by side persisted a romantic devotion to the King and a determination to
have popular assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white
individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair
naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist,
Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that
was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to
foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness -- class distinctions
and republican ideas.
The "towns" were of the fewest and rudest -- little more than small palisaded
hamlets, built of frame or log, poised near the water of the river James.
The genius of the land was for the plantation rather than the town. The
fair and large brick or frame planter's house of a later time had not yet
risen, but the system was well inaugurated that set a main or "big" house
upon some fair site, with cabins clustered near it, and all surrounded,
save on the river front, with far-flung acres, some planted with grain and
the rest with tobacco. Up and down the river these estates were strung
together by the rudest roads, mere tracks through field and wood. The cart
was as yet the sole wheeled vehicle. But the Virginia planter -- a horseman
in England -- brought over horses, bred horses, and early placed horsemanship
in the catalogue of the necessary colonial virtues.
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