Legends of Loudoun Part 3

At a meeting on the 3rd October, 1737, the Vestry appropriated "To Francis Aubrey gent. for finding books for the Chappell 200 pounds tobacco." Also

"Whereas the Rev. Charles Green hath this day agreed with the Vestry to take the tobacco levied to purchase books for the Chappell above Goose Creek and ornaments for the Churches, at the rate of eleven s.h.i.+llings current money per hundred. He by the said agreement obliging himself to find and provide the said books and ornaments, being allowed fifty per cent. upon the first cost in accounting with the Church-Wardens. It is ordered that the collector pay to the said Green the sum of 8000 pounds of tobacco, it being the quant.i.ty this day levied for the purpose aforesaid."

At a Vestry meeting held on the 15th April, 1745, it was ordered that Messrs. John West, Ellsey and French view what necessary repairs were wanting at Goose Creek Chapel and agree with workmen therefor.

That seems to be the extent of the Truro Parish records concerning the "Chappell." It is believed to have been in use until about 1812 and thereafter utterly disappeared.[22] In 1742 Fairfax County was created, consisting of the Parish of Truro. In October, 1748, the a.s.sembly pa.s.sed an act dividing Truro Parish at Difficult Run and the upper part became Cameron Parish, in delicate compliment to the Lord Proprietor's Barony; but most unfortunately the Vestry book of Cameron, which would be invaluable source material for the Loudoun student seeking information for the period from 1748 until after the Revolution, seems to have wholly disappeared or been destroyed.[23] The Chapel had from its beginning until it became a part of Cameron Parish, that is from 1733 to 1748, these Clerks and Lay Readers:

Joseph Johnson, new or Falls Church and Goose Creek 1733-1735 Samuel Hull, Goose Creek, 1736-1740 John Richardson, 1741-1745 John Alden, 1745-1746 John Moxley, 1747 Thomas Evans, 1748

[22] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, 304.

[23] Chapter X post.

Aubrey is believed to have been the son of John Aubrey or Awbrey of Westmoreland, was an ally and close friend of Thomas Lee and, from his appearance in what is now Loudoun until his death in 1741, was of such dominant importance that he has been called its then "first citizen."

When the county of Prince William was set off from Stafford in 1731, he became a member of its first Court and, in 1732, "the inspector of the Pohick warehouse and a member of the Truro Vestry." Two years before his death he became the Sheriff of Prince William County and, at about the same time, established the ferry at the Point of Rocks.[24]

[24] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, 148 and 155.

But before Francis Aubrey settled at Big Spring, Philip Noland in 1724 had purchased land at the mouth of Broad Run. He married Aubrey's daughter Elizabeth and later removed to lands on the Potomac above the mouth of the Monocacy which his wife had inherited from her father. As early as 1758 and probably before, Noland operated a ferry across the Potomac from his new plantation to the Maryland side; thus joining the Maryland and Virginia sections of the Carolina Road, from the earliest days of local history a main artery of travel between north and south.[25] It was in this immediate vicinity that he built the mansion he was destined never to finish and which still stands incomplete, a most interesting example of one of the earliest of the more pretentious homes of Loudoun.

[25] Chapter VI post.

CHAPTER V

THE MELTING POT

Thus far we have been noting the arrival of Virginians from Tidewater.

Rich or poor, great landowners or squatters, gentlemen of position and influence or the mere riff-raff of the settlements, with all the varying gradation between those extremes, they had at least in common their English blood and traditions and being the product of Virginia life, either through birth or years of residence. It is now time to consider other and wholly dissimilar strains which, during this period of early settlement, were coming into the newly opened country and which were to have such a lasting influence on its population.

As early as 1725 there was, it is said, a group of Irish immigrants which had established itself on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, opposite the mouth of the Monocacy. This particular cl.u.s.ter had come from Maryland having, perhaps, been attracted to the large grant between the Monocacy and the Point of Rocks which, before 1700, had been acquired by the first Charles Carroll, founder of his family in Maryland who, when he acquired the land on the Monocacy, was acting as Agent for Maryland's Proprietor, Lord Baltimore. Later his grandson, another Charles Carroll, inherited the grant, added greatly thereto, bestowed upon it the name of Carrollton Manor and in signing the _Declaration of Independence_ as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, gave it and himself immortality. The Carrolls were Irish and Roman Catholics; perhaps they had encouraged these newcomers to go out to their great holdings on the Monocacy where life could be begun anew and there was less danger of interference with their religion than in the strongly Protestant east.

However, whether encouraged or not, our particular covey of Irish seem eventually to have crossed to the Virginia sh.o.r.e and there planted themselves with small formality and no t.i.tle. All was wilderness on both sides of the Potomac. The matter of a legal t.i.tle was probably the least of our adventurers' troubles.

In the first half-century following the founding of Jamestown, few Irish were to be encountered in Virginia. The Colony was overwhelmingly English with, it is true, occasional Welsh, Irish and Scotch here and there; but these were accidental and the basic and dominating race of the settlers was so wholly Anglo-Saxon that the few others were submerged and lost in the English flood. But between 1653 and 1660, hundreds of unfortunate Irish, resisting Cromwell, were s.h.i.+pped as political prisoners and little better than white slaves to Virginia and the other Colonies. Again, after the defeat in 1690 of James II and his Irish supporters by William III at the Battle of the Boyne and the resultant Treaty of Limerick the next year, great numbers of the Irish were banished or condemned to transportation and of these many were sent to Maryland and Virginia where as servants or labourers on the land, their services were in demand. While the majority thus transported were ignorant peasants, feudal va.s.sals of their lords, the "Kerns and gallowgla.s.ses" of Macaulay, numbers of the n.o.bility and gentry were exiled as well, of which we have already recorded a prominent example in Daniel McCarty. Inasmuch as those transported were so treated as punishment for their uprising in favour of James and against the de facto English government of William, they were stigmatized as criminals, although, as shown, their offense was purely political. But Irish offenders against the penal laws other than political were also from time to time condemned to transportation and as the demand for labourers by wealthier planters in Virginia grew and until negro slaves later were generally available to them, there was also much kidnapping of wholly innocent Irish who, too, were taken to the Colonies and sold into servitude. Among this heterogeneous ma.s.s of unfortunates there were undoubtedly many who were disorderly, depraved and vicious and who, we know, subsequently gave great trouble to the Virginians; but to cla.s.sify all the Irish forcibly transported as criminals or lawless would be as unjust as it would be untrue. It well may be borne in mind that to most of the English, they were a strange, impulsive and foreign people and equally or even more d.a.m.ning, Romanists in an intensely anti-Roman community. As such, we may well believe, they seldom enjoyed the benefit of a doubt of their inherent depravity.

The town of Waterford was, according to tradition, founded by an Irishman, one Asa Moore, who is reputed to have built his, the first house there in 1732, naming the new settlement for the place of his nativity. Later it received many English, Scotch-Irish, Germans and, particularly, Quakers to whom it largely owed the prosperity and progress it was then to enjoy.

During the interminable wars of the seventeenth century--in ghastly refutation as they were of those blissful dreams of the solidarity of Europe and that international brotherhood of peace and culture so fondly entertained by the Erasmian school only a few generations before--few parts of that same Europe had suffered more hideously than the land known as the Palatinate along the Rhine. The so-called Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648, brought devastation particularly to its lower portion. In 1688 its whole territory was invaded again by the French of Louis XIV--an invasion which, for sheer savage brutality to the people there and the inconceivable atrocities perpetrated on them, is difficult to parallel in the annals of civilized nations but which, with its certain legacies of distrust and hatred, is somewhat conveniently forgotten by the professional French patriot of today. The land was reduced to little more than a desert and such of its inhabitants as survived, to the utmost want and privation. For nine years, until the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), the French scourging of the land ground it to dust. A few years of quiet followed, in which the poor Palatines sought to restore their ruined towns and farms but fate seemed resolved on their annihilation. In 1703 another war, that of the Spanish Succession, broke out and raged until 1713 and the Palatinate again and again was overrun by hostile armies. It was during these years and after, that those left with the breath of life in their bodies appeared to give up hope of ever again occupying their homeland in peace. A great emigration began, ten thousand fugitives first going to England where they were received kindly by Queen Anne and her people and given much aid; but, in an England where work was none too plentiful, the Germans soon became an economic and social problem. About 3,800 were sent to Ireland where, in Munster, their descendants are still to be found; but many more were sent to America, some to New York but the greater number to Pennsylvania. In the latter Colony they were so well received that they sent back word encouraging others to follow them; and soon the hara.s.sed Germans began to arrive in such swarms that between 40,000 and 50,000 are believed to have come to Pennsylvania between 1702 and 1727, wholly changing its complexion. The Colony's Governor, George Thomas, writing to the Bishop of Exeter in 1747 stated his belief that the Germans then comprised three-fifths of the population of that Province. But of the early arrivals many of the most impoverished worked out toward the cheaper and still wild lands on the then frontier and thence south through the strong and fertile regions of western Maryland.

Meanwhile Virginia had been encouraging settlements of refugee Europeans on her frontiers in an effort to form buffer groups between the inimical French and Indians to the north and the seated parts of her domain. In 1730 a grant of 10,000 acres on the Shenandoah River was made to one Stover for settlement by Germans who began to pour south from Pennsylvania and Maryland and soon the Valley was taking on that perceptible Teutonic colour with which it is still dyed.

In 1731 there came to the present Loudoun the first colony of Germans from the Valley. Of all the early settling it is doubtful if any was more intelligently planned or more reasonably could antic.i.p.ate success.

Instead of a few individuals pioneering in haphazard fas.h.i.+on, there was a compact and h.o.m.ogeneous group of about sixty families, the men almost without exception artisans of various trades or peasants skilled in thrifty farming; and their lot had heretofore been so harsh and their fortune so adverse that the hards.h.i.+ps inseparable from making a new home in the wilderness were, by comparison, a kindly dispensation of a hitherto hostile fate. On crossing the Blue Ridge they and those following them settled the land between the Catoctin Mountains and the Short Hills, north of the present Morrisonville, which from that time on has been known as the German Settlement and than which no part of Loudoun has been more industriously and providently farmed. Little those early Teutons spent on luxury or even comfort; a sound and certain living was their objective and the land and its increase, rather than ornate dwellings, received their uttermost effort. Even as late as 1853, Yardley Taylor was moved to record that their "farms are generally small and well cultivated and the land rates high. This cla.s.s of population seldom goes to much expense in building houses ... many old log houses that are barely tolerable are in use by persons abundantly able to build better ones." But if their houses were primitive, the occupants were generally prosperous and free from debt and in later years comfortable and commodious farmhouses have taken the place of the earlier cabins.

These earliest Germans, having neither speech nor habits in common with their neighbours, developed a self-sustained and independent community wholly different and set off from those of others around them and to this day their locality measurably carries on its distinctive life.

Following so closely upon the advent of the Germans that there has arisen some dispute as to which actually entered first, we find the arrival of the Quakers. "In 1733 Amos Janney left his residence at the Falls of the Delaware in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and migrating to Virginia with his family, established himself at Waterford"[26] and many other Quakers soon joined him. Local tradition places, even earlier than Janney, David Potts (another Pennsylvania Quaker) as a pioneer in the northern part of the present county but no record confirms his presence before the 16th November, 1746, when he leased 866 acres on "Kittockton Run" from Catesby c.o.c.ke for five s.h.i.+llings in hand paid with right of purchase. Legend may or may not be correct; the earliest settlers, as we have seen, often seated themselves without t.i.tle. Both Janney and Potts were founders of well known families in the county where their descendants still worthily bear their names. It is definitely known, however, that soon the Quakers became very numerous; and as ever since they have been such a conspicuous element in the diversified population of the county, a brief narration of their story and migration is of interest.

[26] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, I., 267.

The "Friends" or "Quakers" as they were subsequently called, are a religious sect founded by George Fox in England in 1647 when he was but twenty-three years old. They owe their name of Quakers to their tendency, in their early religious meetings, to have become so wrought up in individual enthusiasm as to be seized with an emotional trembling or quaking and the earlier Friends "definitely a.s.serted that those who did not know quaking and trembling, were strangers to the experience of Moses, David and other Saints."[27] Their characteristic tenets included the doctrine of non-resistance and opposition to all formalism in religious services and as Fox began his activities at a time of intense religious fanaticism met by relentless persecution, it was not long before he and his followers were in open conflict with the const.i.tuted authorities. From proselyting in public and interrupting conventional religious services, the more extravagant of the zealots indulged in activities which can only be ascribed to religious mania and the authorities promptly met their challenge.[28] Merciless whippings, dragging at cart-tails, the pillory, branding with hot irons and even occasional execution were their fate; but in common with other religious persecution their growth in number seems to have been coincident with the most vigourous efforts made to suppress them. Fox, a man of humble birth, with no advantages of formal education, possessed tireless energy and great bodily vigour coupled with the a.s.surance of a natural and magnetic evangelist; and although equally detested by Churchmen and Puritans and in conflict with every other religious body, his following rapidly grew throughout England. Journeys by his proselytes to continental America, the West Indies, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy left converts where they preached and this was particularly so in the American Colonies where Fox himself came in 1672.

[27] _Encyclopedia Britannica_, _"Friends, Society of."_

[28] Fiske's _Beginnings of New England_.

The first of the Colonies to hear Quaker preaching was Ma.s.sachusetts in 1656, but Virginia was a close second; for in the following year Thomas Thurston and Josiah Cole of Bristol arrived in the Old Dominion and are said to have made a number of converts before they were promptly banished. The Quakers were as little welcome in either Ma.s.sachusetts or Virginia as in England itself and both Colonies pa.s.sed stringent laws for their repression. Virginia ordained that any s.h.i.+pmaster found guilty of smuggling in Quakers was to be fined 100 and upon the third return of a Quaker after banishment, he was to be treated as a felon. But even before the pa.s.sage of the English Toleration Act of 1689 the persecution had died down. By the end of the century they had so increased in number that they were a major element in Rhode Island, controlled New Jersey and Delaware and had, under William Penn in 1681, founded and were supreme in Pennsylvania. Penn declared for liberty of conscience in the Colony he termed his "experiment," with absolute religious freedom "for Papists, Protestants, Jews and Turks"--if not an absolutely unique, at least a sorely needed att.i.tude in the seventeenth century religious life. Thence forward Pennsylvania was to be a great centre of Quakerism and from it mainly but also from Maryland, New York and other Colonies, as well as directly from Great Britain, were recruited the Quakers of Loudoun. Undoubtedly the familiar combination of economic pressure, the cheaper and more fertile lands of the new settlement and the pioneering spirit inherent in the British race explains the migration. It is interesting to note that by 1694 a Quaker had become Governor of South Carolina and that from 1725 to 1775 there was a constant flow of Friends from Pennsylvania, New York, New England and Great Britain to that State. As a main north-and-south highway, the famous Carolina Road, pa.s.sed through the Loudoun to be, doubtless many came that way and we may believe that not a few of those emigrants joined their coreligionists who they found living in such comfort and prosperity in their fertile Virginia colony.

The Quakers of Loudoun had with characteristic shrewdness picked out for their settlement that part of the far-famed Loudoun Valley, between the Catoctin Hills and the Blue Ridge, that lies in the central part of the present county--perhaps the best and most fertile land the county boasts; and there the so-called "Quaker Settlement" continues to the present time. In common with their German neighbours to the north, they tended to form a more-or-less compact colony, segregated from the other pioneers. They were frugal, industrious, far better farmers than their Virginia neighbours; but between Germans and Quakers no love was lost and, though each was isolated from the Tidewater element, there was little or no intermingling. Nevertheless we find them occasionally making common cause against the slaveholding portion of the community and, in the next century in the War Between the States, both German and Quaker adhered to the Federal cause and were, at least for the time being, more than ever cut off from their then intensely Confederate neighbours. Time has softened and gradually worn down these old-time edges of difference and today, perhaps more than ever before, we find the descendants of these earlier opponents living in concord and mutual respect.

Our melting-pot is slowly filling. In the Scotch-Irish it now takes another human ingredient as distinct from the Anglo-Saxon as were the Germans or Irish but destined to make a major contribution not only to the new population of the Piedmont but to that of Virginia generally and the other Colonies as well. They were splendid pioneering material with the persistent industry and frugality of the German and Quaker but, unlike them, mixing freely with the other settlers, planting themselves anywhere and everywhere they found conditions and lands to their liking and so soon and freely intermarrying with their Virginia neighbours that their blood today is found very generally mixed with the older Virginia strain. Concerning their origin and history there has been much misinformation and occasionally rather prejudiced and heated argument; but the main facts are not obscure.

In the sixth century one of the Irish tribes known as the Scotti or Scots, inhabiting the island then known as Scotia, but which we now call Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and made a ma.s.s descent on the west coast of ancient Caledonia; and driving before them the Picts they found occupying the land, they settled down in possession of their newly conquered territory, covering roughly the present Argyle. Five centuries later the descendants of these invaders, having waxed mightily in power and numbers and become one of the four tribal kingdoms of Caledonia, united with the others, the Picts, British and Angles, to make the Kingdom of Scotland to which they gave their name and of which their history thenceforth was a part. Thus apparently their future destiny was fixed for all time in Scotland; but Providence had not forgotten them and had other plans.

In all Ireland, never renowned for its meekness nor pacification, there was in Elizabethan days and before, probably no part more constantly and consistently embroiled than the Province of Ulster. More or less continuous fighting between its people and Elizabeth's soldiers gradually wore down the Irish and their final complete collapse came in 1607 when their native princes, the Earls of Tyrconnel and Tyrone, deserted them and fled to the Continent. Thereupon the first James of England, having succeeded Elizabeth, declared all the lands of the Province forfeited and escheated to the English Crown, thus providing a convenient and legal basis for dispossessing the native Irish of their holdings, which the King thereupon undertook to repopulate with English and Scotch. But the English did not view the King's inducements with enthusiasm. Inasmuch as, in comparison with the Scotch, they "were a great deal more tenderly bred at home in England, and entertained in better quarters than they could find in Ireland, they were unwilling to flock thither except to good land such as they had before at home, or to good cities where they might trade, both of which in those days were scarce enough" in Ulster.[29] But the Scotch, many of them from Argyle found Ulster, their old homeland, to their liking and James, Scotch himself, seems to have preferred them for his purpose. They came in great numbers, took root immediately and soon were creating a peace and prosperity in the Province unknown there for many a long day, their ranks being later heavily augmented by Covenanters fleeing from the persecution of Charles I. But between these Presbyterian newcomers and the native Irish Roman Catholics, their neighbours, there was friction and hostility from the beginning which has lasted unabated to the present day.

[29] Testimony of a contemporary, the Rev. Andrew Stewart. _The Scotch-Irish Settlers in the Valley of Virginia_, by Bolivar Christian.

Had the English government the wit and policy to have let this new settlement alone all would have been well; but the England of those days had yet to learn, from the costly experience of the American Revolution, that art of governing colonies in which she is today without peer. After the final crus.h.i.+ng of the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne, in which the new Ulster population was of no small a.s.sistance, the English merchants grew jealous of the trade, manufactures and aggressive compet.i.tion of the Province and in 1698 succeeded in obtaining from Parliament restrictive laws which all but ruined her industries, particularly in linen and woolen then, as now, outstanding. And now to the ruin of their trades was to be added religious coercion. Although, as we have seen, a Toleration Act had been pa.s.sed for England in 1689, it was not until nearly one hundred years later that in 1782 the Toleration Act for Ireland became law. From 1704 on there was a great effort to force the Presbyterians of Ulster, as well as those of Scotland, to conform to the English Church and those who refused were forbidden to keep schools, marriages performed by their ministers were declared invalid and other civil disabilities were imposed. By 1719 the people of Ulster had been made desperate by this senseless interference and persecution and they, too, began to flock to America. As with the others, the movement, once started, grew rapidly and in this instance reached such proportions that it became by far the greatest immigration that, until the later day of steam, was to come to America's sh.o.r.es. Again Philadelphia appears to have been the chief port to receive them, as many as six s.h.i.+ploads landing there in one week alone. Before the emigration was eased by the Toleration Act and a generally saner att.i.tude in England, it is estimated that half a million of the Scotch-Irish had crossed the Atlantic, carrying with them a deep resentment toward England, for which she later was to pay a heavy price in the stubborn and valiant support these people and their descendants gave to the American side in the war of the Revolution.

As most of these Scotch-Irish immigrants were very poor, many paid for their pa.s.sage by selling their services and labour for a term of years, becoming a part of that flood of "indentured servants" which we shall soon consider. Fairfax Harrison in his _Landmarks of Old Prince William_ vividly describes their advent and early distribution in the Northern Neck. As soon as the earlier arrivals had worked out their contracted years of servitude, Colonel Robert Carter, about 1723, began seating them around Brent Town and Elk Marsh. But as their numbers grew, they soon shewed a disinclination to become tenants, preferring to push further into the wilderness "where they could and did take up small holdings on the same terms that Colonel Carter took up his great ones and in that process they scattered."[30] Being too poor to purchase negro slaves and the supply of "redemptioners" or indentured servants by that time beginning to diminish, they bought the cheaper convicts for labourers and the Piedmont backwoods of the Proprietary acquired a reputation for turbulence and lawlessness to which both master and servant contributed his share. But they settled the land, planted tobacco and corn as persistently and relentlessly as did their more prosperous neighbours and in common with them laboured to develop the future Loudoun.

[30] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, I., 235.

To understand the status of the "indentured servants," who were so numerous in the Virginia Colony and were such a large and important factor in the population of the Northern Neck, it is well to first consider the meaning of the term. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word servant was not at all confined to one who was engaged in a menial task but broadly referred to anyone who, for compensation, rendered service to another and it was customary in all occupations, calling for especial training or instruction, to take on apprentices "bound to serve for a certain time in consideration of instruction in an art or trade"--the apprentice to be fed, lodged and clothed by the master during the term and to give his labour and services in compensation for his support and instruction. This custom obtained not only in the various crafts and trades but even in the professions as well, lawyers and doctors taking students on similar terms. In modern England the broader and older meaning of the word persists in the expression "civil servant" in reference to a government clerk or employe in what in America, too, is known as the Civil Service.

Virginia's agriculture was based on the cultivation of tobacco and corn--both hand-hoed crops, with practically no use whatever of the plow. As land was plentiful and the plantations increased in size, the great and pressing need was always for labor--and more labor. This system of indentured service in Virginia began very early and opened a great supply of labor not otherwise available. There were many in England of the poorer cla.s.s and even of those once more affluent who had for one reason or another become the victims of misfortune and sought a fresh start in the colonies but were without the money to pay their pa.s.sage. No small number of those who had become bankrupt became indentured servants. The severe English laws against debtors forced many to fly from that country and Virginia was a safe escape; for in 1642 a law had been pa.s.sed in Virginia protecting these fugitives from their English creditors.[31] Little social stigma seems to have attached to the indentured servants as such. Frequently they lived with the family of their master, especially so when he was one of the smaller proprietors, and as they became proficient and earned their master's confidence they were often made overseers of their fellow workers.

Although by far the greater demand was always for workers on the land, not all of them were so employed; some were artisans, some of the better educated became teachers and it was not unusual for the wealthier planters to seek and purchase these latter for that purpose. George Was.h.i.+ngton is said to have thus received his earlier schooling. As a whole, they appear to have been well and humanely treated in Virginia, or at least after the earlier days of their introduction, with little or none of the shocking brutality they are known to have met with upon occasion in Maryland, such as called for that Colony's legislation of 1664, 1681, etc.[32]

[31] Hening, 256. Also _Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, T. J.

Wertenbaker_, p. 164.

[32] E. I. McCormac's _White Servitude in Maryland_, p. 67.

That there had been some earlier harshness, but more probably to convicts, is suggested by the effort made by Robert Beverley, in his _History of Virginia_, first published in 1705, to refute rumours of ill-treatment or undue hards.h.i.+p in the lives of these people which had been spread abroad in the England of his day. No doubt the writings of Defoe and other authors without personal knowledge of what they undertook to describe, had had their affect. "A white woman is rarely or never put to work on the ground, if she be good for anything else,"

Beverley declares and further on has this to say:

"Because I have heard how strangely cruel and severe the service of this country is represented in some parts of England, I can't forebear affirming, that the work of the servants and slaves is no other that what every common freeman does; neither is any servant required to do more in a day than his overseer; and I can a.s.sure you, with great truth, that generally their slaves are not worked so hard, nor so many hours in a day, as the husbandman and day labourer in England. An overseer is a man, that having served his time, has acquired the skill and character of an experienced planter, and is therefore entrusted with direction of the servants and slaves ... all masters are under the correction and censure of the County Courts to provide for their servants food and wholesome diet, clothing and lodging."

And again:

"If a master should be so cruel, as to use his servant ill, that is fallen sick or lame in his service, and thereby rendered unfit for labor, he must be removed by the churchwardens out of the way of such cruelty, and boarded in some good planters home till the time of his freedom, the charge of which must be laid before the next county court, which has power to levy the same, from time to time, upon the goods and chattels of the master, after which, the charge of such boarding is to come upon the parish in general.... No master of a servant can make a new bargain for service or other matter with his servant, without the privity and consent of the County Court, to prevent the masters over-reaching, or scaring such servant into an unreasonable compliance."

Moreover, when the servant had redeemed himself by working out his time, he received from his former master, as a.s.sistance to start out for himself "ten bushels of corn (which is sufficient for almost a year) two new suits of clothes, both linen and woolen, and a gun, twenty dollars value"; all of which were given to him as his due. He had the right to take up fifty acres of unpatented land and thereupon took his place, according to his merit and industry, in the free life of the Colony.

The system was necessary from the first; for if the servants had not been bound they promptly would have secured tracts of land to work for themselves, leaving those who had paid for their pa.s.sage in the lurch.

That it was advantageous to both master and servant is indicated by its growth. Its end in Virginia was caused by a cheaper labor supply having become available rather than from any lack of those seeking transportation. It has been estimated that, between the years 1635 and 1680, from 1,000 to 1,600 came annually to Virginia under its conditions and that from first to last not less than eighty thousand persons so arrived. But with the importation of negroes, beginning on a larger scale about 1680, the custom declined until by the middle of the eighteenth century, it seems to have practically ended in Virginia.