If the immigrant happened to be able to muster a sufficient sum he could, indeed, become an independent agriculturist in New Jersey and in parts of Pennsylvania and provide himself with the tools of trade. But many immigrants landed with empty pockets and became laborers dependent upon the favor of the landed proprietors. As for the artisans—the carpenters, masons, tailors, blacksmiths—they either kept to the cities and towns where their trade principally lay, or bonded themselves to the lords of the manors.
ATTEMPT AT CONFISCATION THWARTED.
Bellomont fully understood the serious evils which had been injected into the body politic and strongly applied himself to the task of confiscating the great estates. One of his first proposals was to urge upon the Lords of Trade the restriction of all governors throughout the colonies from granting more than a thousand acres to any man without leave from the king, and putting a quit rent of half a crown on every hundred acres, this sum to go to the royal treasury. This suggestion was not acted upon. He next attacked the assembly of New York and called upon it to annul the great grants. In doing this he found that the most powerful members of the assembly were themselves the great land owners and were putting obstacle after obstacle in his path. After great exertions he finally prevailed upon the assembly to vacate at least two of the grants, those to Evans and Bayard. The assembly did this probably as a sop to Bellomont and to public opinion, and because Evans and Bayard had lesser influence than the other landed functionaries. But the owners of the other estates tenaciously held them intact. The people regarded Bellomont as a sincere and ardent reformer, but the landed men and their following abused him as a meddler and destructionist. Despairing of getting a self-interested assembly to act, Bellomont appealed to the Lords of Trade:
"If your Lordships mean I shall go on to break the rest of the extravagant grants of land by Colonel Fletcher or other governors, by act of assembly, I shall stand in need of a peremptory order from the King so to do."[23] A month later he insisted to his superiors at home that if they intended that the corrupt and extravagant grants should be confiscated—"(which I will be bold to say by all the rules of reason and justice ought to be done) I believe it must be done by act of Parliament in England, for I am a little jealous I shall not have strength enough in the assembly of New York to break them." The majority of this body, he pointed out, were landed men, and when their own interest was touched, they declined to act contrary to it. Unless, added Bellomont, "the power of our Palatines, Smith, Livingston, the Phillips, father and son[24]—and six or seven more were reduced ... the country is ruined."[25]
Despite some occasional breaches in its intrenchments, the landocracy continued to rule everywhere with a high hand, its power, as a whole, unbroken.
HOW THE LORDS OF THE SOIL LIVED.
A glancing picture of one of these landed proprietors will show the manner in which they lived and what was then accounted their luxury. As one of the "foremost men of his day," in the colonies Colonel Smith lived in befitting style. This stern, bushy-eyed man who robbed the community of a vast tract of land and who, as chief justice, was inflexibly severe in dealing punishment to petty criminals and ever vigilant in upholding the rights of property, was lord of the Manor of St. George, Suffolk County. The finest silks and lace covered his judicial person. His embroidered belts, costing £110, at once attested his great wealth and high station. He had the extraordinary number of one hundred and four silver buttons to adorn his clothing. When he walked a heavy silver-headed cane supported him, and he rode on a fancy velvet saddle. His three swords were of the finest make; occasionally he affected a Turkish scimeter. Few watches in the colonies could compare with his massive silver watch. His table was embellished with heavy silver plate, valued at £150, on which his coat-of-arms was engraved. Twelve negro slaves responded to his nod; he had a large corps of bounded apprentices and dependant laborers. His mansion looked down on twenty acres of wheat and twenty of corn; and as for his horses and cattle they were the envy of the country. In his last year thirty horses were his, fourteen oxen, sixty steers, forty-eight cows and two bulls.[26] He lived high, drank, swore, cheated—and administered justice.
One of the best and most intimate descriptions of a somewhat contemporaneous landed magnate in the South is that given of Robert Carter, a Virginia planter, by Philip Vickers Fithian,[27] a tutor in Carter's family. Carter came to his estate from his grandfather, whose land and other possessions were looked upon as so extensive that he was called "King" Carter.
Robert Carter luxuriated in Nomini Hall, a great colonial mansion in Westmoreland County. It was built between 1725 and 1732 of brick covered with strong mortar, which imparted a perfectly white exterior, and was seventy-six feet long and forty wide. The interior was one of unusual splendor for the time, such as only the very rich could afford. There were eight large rooms, one of which was a ball-room thirty feet long. Carter spent most of his leisure hours cultivating the study of law and of music; his library contained 1,500 volumes and he had a varied assortment of musical instruments. He was the owner of 60,000 acres of land spread over almost every county of Virginia, and he was the master of six hundred negro slaves. The greater part of a prosperous iron-works near Baltimore was owned by him, and near his mansion he built a flour mill equipped to turn out 25,000 bushels of wheat a year. Carter was not only one of the big planters but one of the big capitalists of the age; all that he had to do was to exercise a general supervision; his overseers saw to the running of his various industries. Like the other large landholders he was one of the active governing class; as a member of the Provincial Council he had great influence in the making of laws. He was a thorough gentleman, we are told, and took good care of his slaves and of his white laborers who were grouped in workhouses and little cottages within range of his mansion. Within his domain he exercised a sort of benevolent despotism. He was one of the first few to see that chattel slavery could not compete in efficiency with white labor, and he reckoned that more money could be made from the white laborer, for whom no responsibility of shelter, clothing, food and attendance had to be assumed than from the negro slave, whose sickness, disability or death entailed direct financial loss. Before his death he emancipated a number of his slaves. This, in brief, is the rather flattering depiction of one of the conspicuously rich planters of the South.