5. The Social Structure of Virginia: Planters and Farmers

But if the royal governor was the leading governing power, de facto he shared the rule over Virginia society with an oligarchy of very large tobacco planters, who, as we have seen, were granted large tracts of choice river land, and who were able to command and exploit the labor of slaves and indentured servants for their plantations. This ruling class of large planters permeated the officers of colonial government: they constituted the entire Council—the upper house of the Assembly and supreme judicial body—and a majority of the House of Burgesses. In addition, they were the major county officers—judges, colonels of the militia, and revenue officers. The large planters also made up the vestry that governed each parish, the smallest political unit. The next larger unit, the county, was ruled by several justices of the peace, appointed by the governor from among the planters. The justices of the peace held county court, administered roads and police, and assessed taxes. Orders of the county court were executed by the sheriff and the county lieutenant, commander of the local militia; both were appointed by the governor, with the advice of the county court.

The great bulk of the free populace were not large planters, but small farmers with holdings of fifty to a few hundred acres. These were independent yeomen who had acquired titles to the land they were to settle by headright grant, or at the end of their indentured term of service. A few small farmers had one or two indentured servants, but most had none, the labor being performed by the farmer and his family. Despite the rule of the royal governor and the preemption of choice land and the use of slaves by the large planters, the yeomen enjoyed a far freer, more mobile society than they had ever known. They were free, above all, from the hopelessness of the rigid feudalism and caste structure that they had left behind in England. Here they were, at last, owners of their own land and products. They were pioneers, hewing out their living from a new and untapped continent.

The bulk of Virginians in the colonial era made their living from the soil, and so the society and the economy were almost wholly agrarian. Even the few town dwellers were close to agrarian life and traded agrarian produce. Scattered thinly over a wide area, the agricultural population used the rivers as the primary method of transportation: roads by land were poor and travel difficult. Even merchants were scarce, and the planters depended on English ships for their merchandise. Far-off London and Bristol were virtually their nearest market towns; there they maintained factors as agents in trade. The poorer farmers were often served by neighboring planters, who would thus function intermittently as middlemen in lieu of specialized merchants nearby. The wealthy planters were able to trade in quantity, and to “break bulk” for the smaller farmers.

While the great export staple was tobacco, each of the large plantations functioned like the feudal manor: each was a nearly self-sufficient economic entity, producing its own food, clothing, and shelter, and importing large equipment and luxury items of consumption for the planters.

Tobacco production continued to grow spectacularly: American tobacco imported by England amounted to 203,000 pounds in 1624, reached over 17.5 million pounds by 1672, and 28 million pounds in 1688.* As tobacco production grew, its price naturally fell: from sixpence to a penny or less a pound. As a result, the lot of the small tobacco farmers became increasingly difficult, and they found it harder and harder to compete with the larger plantations, which were staffed with slave and bondservant labor. An increased use of slave labor after 1670 widened the gulf between the planters and the small farmers.

The ruling planters, naturally enough, aspired to the life of the English country nobility. As their prosperity improved, so did their culture and learning. In the colonial period there was little of that aura of “magnolia and roses,” or of the pampered idleness, often attributed to the Virginia aristocracy. As we have seen, they were often deep in trade, and the Virginia planters had none of the traditional aristocratic contempt for hard work or for trading. They were not securely wealthy enough to afford shirking the unremitting task of managing their estates.

They were, in short, not yet established enough in privilege to assume a European aristocratic attitude toward business. Even the large planters could not relax from their task of trying to make profits and avoid losses. Despite their privileges, a life of idle dandyism would have led to rapid bankruptcy. Neither did the pseudoheroics of song and story abound, and dueling was virtually unknown anywhere in the colonies.*

Increasingly, the planters cultivated learning: they amassed home libraries of the best knowledge of the time and they sent their sons to good schools in England. Culturally, spiritually, and economically, they felt themselves to be outposts of Europe rather than adjuncts to the wild interior of the American continent. Typical of the great Virginia planters was William Byrd II. Toward the end of the seventeenth century Byrd was sent by his father to school in England. There he had a legal training and later studied business methods in Holland, and then was apprenticed to a firm of merchants in London. While in London, he became a friend of such leading writers as William Congreve; Byrd himself wrote literary and scientific papers. Back in Virginia, he corresponded with various English noblemen, and amassed one of the best libraries in the colonies—over 3,600 volumes—and a handsome collection of paintings by English artists. Books in Byrd’s and other libraries included works of law, science, history, philosophy, the classics, theology, sermons, agriculture—indeed, virtually every branch of learning of the time. In addition to the Byrds, some of the other ruling planter families by the end of the seventeenth century were the Carters, the Fitzhughs, the Beverleys, the Lees, the Masons, and the Harrisons.

For those who could not afford schooling in England, the scattered peopling of Virginia made education difficult to come by. The planter would try to hire a tutor for his children, and often several neighboring planters would jointly hire tutors. Often the teachers were indentured servants bought from other masters for the purpose.

Early in the colony’s history, King James and the Virginia Company tried to found a school, but their efforts came to naught. The first successful school in Virginia was founded by the planter Benjamin Symmes, who in 1635 left 200 acres and eight cows for the education of children from Elizabeth City and Kecoughtan parishes. This school was soon established as the Symmes Free School. The Eaton Free School was established in 1659, in Elizabeth City, by Thomas Eaton, with a gift of 500 acres of land. These schools began a pattern of many private “free schools” founded by wealthy planters of Virginia (generally in their wills). The schools collected tuition from parents able to pay, and admitted poor children and orphans free. The schools generally taught the three Rs and a little Latin. Children on farms remote from the schools were taught, if at all, by their parents or by the local parson.

*The last two figures include imports from Maryland, a colony carved out of the original Virginia Company land grant, but the point is still made.

*Dueling was not a venerable tradition in America, but had to wait until the early nineteenth century: “That refinement of chivalry had to wait until our ancestors had steeped themselves in the tales of Sir Walter Scott” (Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies: 1607–1763 [New York: Harper & Row, Torchbooks, 1962], p. 6).