century negro slavery was well established as the chief labor system of the plantation. Besides the planters and servile whites there were many small landholders who came at their own expense and received fifty acres for each member of their families, including sometimes a servant or two. Some of the more energetic indented servants also became landowners when freed. From these two sources there arose a sturdy yeomanry. The more shiftless of the servants, many of whom had been transported in punishment for petty crimes, upon attaining their freedom formed the class known as the "poor whites." The planters sought the bottom lands along the navigable streams. The most productive soils were found there, and they wished to load their tobacco upon ocean-going vessels at their own wharves. From England they received in payment not cash but whatever goods they needed. There was little place for the retail merchant or the free handicraftsman. The lack of these classes and the dispersion of the population delayed the growth of towns until late in the eighteenth century. In the development of Virginia there was no such activity of groups of men as has been described in New England. Grants of land were made directly to individuals. The diffuse population required a large territorial unit for purposes of local government, and nothing like the New England town was possible. In 1634 the assembly divided the colony into eight counties, modeled after the shires of England. These replaced the earlier boroughs. New counties were created from time to time as settlement spread. In each the free adult white males annually voted for two burgesses to represent them in the assembly. With this act the average man's participation in government began and ended. There was no county meeting with functions like those of the town meeting in the North. The duties of local administration were performed by officials appointed by the governor and council. The chief of these were the sheriff, the lieutenant (commander of the militia), and the justices of the court. Usually, if not always, the elected burgesses as well as the appointed officers were wealthy planters. It has often been said that Virginia was aristocratic and that Massachusetts was democratic. But the statement is hardly true. The range of the voter's activity was narrower in the southern colony, but for a long time the franchise was less restricted. The Virginia system developed a keen sense of responsibility on the part of the governing class, and trained men for leadership as few other plans have ever done. It was no accident that so many statesmen of the first rank in the early days of independence hailed from the Old Dominion. EXPANSION, 1650-1676 Tidewater Virginia is almost as large as England, and afforded ample room for expansion during the seventeenth century. By the middle of the century immigrants were crossing the Potomac from the Maryland side and taking lands in the "northern neck." Among them were the ancestors of George Washington, John Marshall, and other great men of later times. The newcomers from the North, reaching the banks of the Rappahannock, met other pioneers coming from the old settlements on the James and York. The plantations continued to hug the river banks, and the quest for good lands pushed the frontier to the fall line along the streams while great spaces between them remained almost unbroken wilderness, traversed only by bridle paths. During Indian disturbances in the forties, military posts were erected at the falls of the chief streams, and by 1650 interest was awaking in the more remote interior. Within the next generation exploring expeditions to the West and Southwest reached the Carolina Piedmont and the upper waters of the Tennessee and Great Kanawha rivers beyond the Appalachian watershed — the first visits of Englishmen to the "western waters." These expeditions opened the fur trade with distant tribes, and tempted some of the planters at the fall line to divide their attention between tobacco-growing and the Indian trade. To and from these westmost plantations the traders came and went, and their ways of life began to show the characteristics of the typical American frontier. The agricultural advance towards the West halted at the fall line until a decade or two of the eighteenth century had passed. However, ascending some of the streams which fall into the James from the south, the whites found themselves in touch with other streams which led them to the Roanoke, and soon after the middle of the century they began settlements on Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. Few great planters were to be found on the frontier. It was the small landowners, as a rule, who were pushed by social and economic forces towards the outer rim of settlement. Rich planters who had acquired large tracts of the best lands in the river valleys had little reason to seek new homes, while indented servants who had served their time, or yeomen immigrants, could hardly get land at all except in the newer parts of the colony. As time passed jealousies and suspicions arose between the planters and the small landowners. The planters became fearful that the poorer element might gain control of the assembly, and to preserve their power Governor William Berkeley withheld writs for the election of burgesses during the whole period from 1660 to 1676. In 1670 the assembly thus irregularly prolonged imposed a property qualification upon the voters. While the common people were still angry over this reactionary law the Indians of the Piedmont began to give trouble. The governor was so slow in taking steps for the defense of the frontier that the people in the danger zone believed he was trying to avoid hostilities in order to save his profits in the fur trade. Exasperated at last beyond endurance by a man who "bought and sold their blood," the frontiersmen took matters in their own hands, and chose one of the fall-line planters, Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., to lead them against the savages. The governor, enraged in his turn, refused to give Bacon a commission, and his followers turned their arms against the administration. Gaining the upper hand for a time, the insurgents called an assembly which restored manhood suffrage; but Bacon died during the turmoil, his discouraged followers submitted, and their work was undone. "Bacon's Rebellion" (1676), so called, shows how decidedly the frontier tended to foster an independent and democratic spirit. New England's expanding population spread along the valley of the Connecticut River, which contained the only considerable body of good land, but its course led settlement northward instead of westward. The earliest river town in Massachusetts was Springfield, which was founded soon after Hartford and its neighbors of the Connecticut colony. By 1676 the valley was occupied as far as Deerfield, although the strip of settled land along the coast was as yet hardly thirty miles wide. Just when the Indian war broke out in Virginia, the expansion of New England was checked by King Philip's War, in which the tribes made a united effort to resist the white advance. Using their favorite tactics of surprise, the natives fell upon the exposed towns with savage fury. Beginning in the summer of 1675 the |