The country store.
The country store was an important institution in Old Virginia. Under some conditions it would have formed a nucleus around which a town would have been developed, but in Virginia the store seems to have been regarded as a kind of rival against which the town could not compete.[187] It furnished a number of petty centres which did away with the need for larger centres. The store was apt to be an appendage to a plantation, unless its size became such as to reverse the relationship, after the manner of Dundreary’s dog. It might be a room in a planter’s house, or it might be a detached barn like building on the estate. Mr. Bruce tells us that to enumerate its contents would be to mention pretty much every article for which Virginians had any use. For example, the inventory of the Hubbard store in York County, taken in 1667, “contained lockram, canvas, dowlas, Scotch cloth, blue linen, oznaburg, cotton, holland, serge, kersey, and flannel in bales, full suits for adults and youths, bodices, bonnets, and laces for women, shoes, ... gloves, hose, cloaks, cravats, handkerchiefs, hats, and other articles of dress, ... hammers, hatchets, chisels, augers, locks, staples, nails, sickles, bellows, froes,[188] saws, axes, files, bed-cords, dishes, knives, flesh-forks, porringers, sauce-pans, frying-pans, gridirons, tongs, shovels, hoes, iron posts, tables, physic, wool-cards, gimlets, compasses, needles, stirrups, looking-glasses, candlesticks, candles, funnels, 25 pounds of raisins, 100 gallons of brandy, 20 gallons of wine, and 10 gallons of aqua vitæ. The contents of the Hubbard store were valued at £614 sterling, a sum which represented about $15,000 in our present currency.”[189] One can imagine how dazzling to youthful eyes must have been the miscellaneous variety of desirable things. Not only were the manufactured articles pretty sure to have come from England, but everything else, to be salable, must be labelled English, “insomuch that fanciers used to sell the songsters unknown to England, if they sang particularly well, as English mocking-birds.”[190]
Roads
We have seen how the rivers and creeks were used as highways of traffic; for a long time they were the only highways, and the sloop or the canoe was the only kind of vehicle, public or private, in which it was possible to get about with ease and safety.[191] Until after the middle of the eighteenth century there were but few roads save bridle-paths, and such as there were became impassable in rainy weather. There were also but few bridges, and these were very likely to be unsound, while the ferry-boats were apt to be leaky. It was often necessary for the traveller to swim across the stream, with a fair chance of getting drowned, and more than a fair chance of losing his horse. The course of the bridle-path often became so obscure that it was necessary to blaze the trees. It was not uncommon for people to lose their way and find themselves obliged to stay overnight in the woods, perhaps with the howls of the wolf and panther sounding in their ears. The highway robber was even a more uncomfortable customer to meet than such beasts of prey; and in those days, when banking was in its infancy and travellers used to carry gold coins sewed under the lining of their waistcoats, the highwayman enjoyed opportunities which in this age of railways and check-books are denied him. Nevertheless crime was far less common than in England or France, and travelling was much safer than one might suppose. This was true of the whole colonial period. In 1777 a young Rhode Island merchant, Elkanah Watson, armed with a sabre and pair of pistols, journeyed from Providence to Charleston in South Carolina, with several hundred pounds sterling in gold quilted into his coat. In seventy days he accomplished the distance of 1,243 miles, partly on horseback and partly in a sulky, without encountering any more serious mishaps than being arrested for a British spy in Pennsylvania, and meeting a large bear in North Carolina; and he has left us a narrative of his journey, which is as full of instruction as of interest.[192]
Tobacco as currency.
The traveller in Old Virginia, however, was not likely to carry large sums of money concealed on his person, for he dealt in a circulating medium too bulky for that. In the course of this book we have had frequent occasions to observe that the Virginian’s current money was tobacco. The prices of all articles of merchandise were quoted in pounds of tobacco. In tobacco taxes were assessed and all wages and salaries were paid. This use of tobacco as a circulating medium and as a standard of values was begun in the earliest days of the colony, when coin was scarce, and the structure of society was simple enough to permit a temporary return toward the primitive practice of barter. Under such circumstances tobacco was obviously the article most sure to be used as money. It was exchangeable for whatever anybody wanted in the shape of service or merchandise, and it was easily procured from the bountiful earth. But as time went on this ease of attainment made it an extremely vicious currency. In the course of our narrative we have encountered some of the disastrous financial and social results that flowed from the use of so cheap a substitute for money. Many reasons have been alleged for the scarcity of coin throughout the whole colonial period in Virginia;[193] but assuredly the chief reason was the fact that tobacco was currency. The bad money drove away the good money, as it always does. There are indications that there was always a small stock of coin in the colony, but it was hoarded or sent to other colonies or to England in the settlement of trade balances. Yet it was not easy to demonetize tobacco without a radical revolution in the industrial system and in the commercial relations of the colony.
Effect upon crafts and trades.
The nature of the currency evidently had much to do with the ill success of the attempts to encourage manufactures. The carpenter or shoemaker, after doing his work, must wait for his pay until the year’s crop of tobacco was gathered and cured. Meanwhile he had nothing to live on unless he raised it for himself; he might either plant grain and rear cattle, or else grow tobacco wherewith to buy things. But the time consumed in these agricultural operations was time taken from his handicraft. The evil was attacked by legislation. “In 1633 brickmakers, carpenters, joiners, sawyers, and turners were expressly forbidden to take part in any form of tillage.” In 1662 tradesmen and artisans were exempted from all taxes except church-rates, on condition that they should abstain from all interest, direct or indirect, in the growing of tobacco. But the evil was not cured.[194]
Effect upon planters’ accounts.
Further disaster came from the fact that tobacco was a highly speculative crop. The fluctuations in its value were liable to be great and sudden, and they affected the price of every article that was bought and sold throughout the colony. No one could estimate from one year to another, with any approach to accuracy, what the purchasing power of his income was going to be. The inevitable results of this were extravagance in living and chronic debt. The planter was drawn into a situation from which it was almost impossible to extricate himself. “The system of keeping open accounts in London was calculated to encourage extravagance; and these accounts were habitually overdrawn. Many of the merchants even made it a rule to encourage this indebtedness, so as to assure the continuance of their customers. It gave them a certain advantage in all their dealings with the planters.”[195] They charged nearly twice as much for their goods sent to Norfolk or Williamsburg as for the same goods sent to New York.[196] In all this they were aided by the Navigation Act.