It was these last who represented
the colony and made the laws. They may be described as English country
squires transplanted to a warm climate and turned slave-masters. They
sustained their position by entails, and constantly undermined it by the
reckless profusion which ruined them at last. Many of them were well
born, with an immense pride of descent, increased by the habit of
domination. Indolent and energetic by turns; rich in natural gifts and
often poor in book-learning, though some, in the lack of good teaching
at home, had been bred in the English universities; high-spirited,
generous to a fault; keeping open house in their capacious mansions,
among vast tobacco-fields and toiling negroes, and living in a rude pomp
where the fashions of St. James were somewhat oddly grafted on the
roughness of the plantation,--what they wanted in schooling was supplied
by an education which books alone would have been impotent to give, the
education which came with the possession and exercise of political
power, and the sense of a position to maintain, joined to a bold spirit
of independence and a patriotic attachment to the Old Dominion. They
were few in number; they raced, gambled, drank, and swore; they did
everything that in Puritan eyes was most reprehensible; and in the day
of need they gave the United Colonies a body of statesmen and orators
which had no equal on the continent. A vigorous aristocracy favors the
growth of personal eminence, even in those who are not of it, but only
near it.
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