It was a peculiar society of which this prolific and virile family formed a part, and its surroundings were as strange as the society itself. Nearly all of Virginia at that time was wilderness,[64] if we look upon it with the eyes of to-day. The cultivated parts were given over almost entirely to the raising of tobacco, which soon drew from the soil its virgin strength; and the land thus exhausted usually was abandoned to the forest, which again soon covered it. No use was made of the commonest and most obvious fertilizing materials and methods; new spaces were simply cleared.[65] Thus came a happy-go-lucky improvidence of habits and character.
This shiftlessness was encouraged by the vast extent of unused and unoccupied domain. Land was so cheap that riches measured by that basis of all wealth had to be counted in terms of thousands and tens of thousands of acres.[66] Slavery was an even more powerful force making for a kind of lofty disdain of physical toil among the white people.[67] Black slaves were almost as numerous as white free men.[68] On the great plantations the negro quarters assumed the proportions of villages;[69] and the masters of these extensive holdings were by example the arbiters of habits and manners to the whole social and industrial life of the colony. While an occasional great planter was methodical and industrious,[70] careful and systematic methods were rare. Manual labor was, to most of these lords of circumstance, not only unnecessary but degrading. To do no physical work that could be avoided on the one hand, and on the other hand, to own as many slaves as possible, was, generally, the ideal of members of the first estate.[71] This spread to the classes below, until it became a common ambition of white men throughout the Old Dominion.
While contemporary travelers are unanimous upon this peculiar aspect of social and economic conditions in old Virginia, the vivid picture drawn by Thomas Jefferson is still more convincing. "The whole commerce between master and slave," writes Jefferson, "is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it.... Thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny ... the man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved.... With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him.... Of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour."[72]
Two years after he wrote his "Notes on Virginia" Jefferson emphasized his estimate of Virginia society. "I have thought them [Virginians] as you found them," he writes Chastellux, "aristocratical, pompous, clannish, indolent, hospitable ... careless of their interests, ... thoughtless in their expenses and in all their transactions of business." He again ascribes many of these characteristics to "that warmth of their climate which unnerves and unmans both body and mind."[73]
From this soil sprang a growth of habits as noxious as it was luxuriant. Amusements to break the monotony of unemployed daily existence took the form of horse-racing, cock-fighting, and gambling.[74] Drinking and all attendant dissipations were universal and extreme;[75] this, however, was the case in all the colonies.[76] Bishop Meade tells us that even the clergy indulged in the prevailing customs to the neglect of their sacred calling; and the church itself was all but abandoned in the disrepute which the conduct of its ministers brought upon the house of God.[77]
Yet the higher classes of colonial Virginians were keen for the education of their children, or at least of their male offspring.[78] The sons of the wealthiest planters often were sent to England or Scotland to be educated, and these, not infrequently, became graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.[79] Others of this class were instructed by private tutors.[80] Also a sort of scanty and fugitive public instruction was given in rude cabins, generally located in abandoned fields. These were called the Old Field Schools.[81]
More than forty per cent of the men who made deeds or served on juries could not sign their names, although they were of the land-owning and better educated classes;[82] the literacy of the masses, especially that of the women,[83] was, of course, much lower.
An eager desire, among the "quality," for reading brought a considerable number of books to the homes of those who could afford that luxury.[84] A few libraries were of respectable size and two or three were very large. Robert Carter had over fifteen hundred volumes,[85] many of which were in Latin and Greek, and some in French.[86] William Byrd collected at Westover more than four thousand books in half a dozen languages.[87] But the Carter and Byrd libraries were, of course, exceptions. Byrd's library was the greatest, not only in Virginia, but in all the colonies, except that of John Adams, which was equally extensive and varied.[88]
Doubtless the leisure and wealth of the gentry, created by the peculiar economic conditions of the Old Dominion, sharpened this appetite for literature and afforded to the wealthy time and material for the gratification of it. The passion for reading and discussion persisted, and became as notable a characteristic of Virginians as was their dislike for physical labor, their excessive drinking, and their love of strenuous sport and rough diversion.
There were three social orders or strata, all contemporary observers agree, into which Virginians were divided; but they merged into one another so that the exact dividing line was not clear.[89] First, of course, came the aristocracy of the immense plantations. While the social and political dominance of this class was based on wealth, yet some of its members were derived from the English gentry, with, perhaps, an occasional one from a noble family in the mother country.[90] Many, however, were English merchants or their sons.[91] It appears, also, that the boldest and thriftiest of the early Virginia settlers, whom the British Government exiled for political offenses, acquired extensive possessions, became large slave-owners, and men of importance and position. So did some who were indentured servants;[92] and, indeed, an occasional transported convict rose to prominence.[93]