miles, and twenty-five miles was a good average.

Under favor

able conditions travel by water was less arduous and as rapid, but with light winds two weeks might be consumed in such a voyage as that from New York to Albany.

The traveler journeying southward from New England found the character of country life gradually changing. In southeastern Pennsylvania he encountered the Germans on the most productive lands to be found anywhere in the colonies. Huge barns sheltered their stock and stored their grain, while smaller, simpler structures sufficed for the housing of the family. Negro servants were rare here, for the Germans despised the blacks and would not work beside them. Wife and daughters shared with husband and sons the labor of the fields, raising wheat for export and contenting themselves with Indian corn for their own sustenance. Dwelling in communities of their own kind and speaking a foreign tongue, the "Pennsylvania Dutch" formed an element which alarmed the English, as they seemed to be unassimilable.

Crossing the Potomac the traveler entered still another realm, where the roads became even more wretched, the inns more intolerable, and the population more diffuse. When Thomas Jefferson went to Williamsburg in 1760, at the age of seventeen, to enter William and Mary College, he had never seen a dozen houses grouped together. Williamsburg, the provincial capital, had about two hundred dwellings, and while Norfolk, the center of trade with the West Indies, was larger, Virginia - in fact, the South in general-was distinctly a region of country life. In most counties the courthouse and jail, although perhaps destined in later times to become the nucleus of a village, stood alone, unless flanked by a tavern or store.

In the absence of towns the country store, where almost everything could be bought, was becoming an important institution. Planters sometimes "kept store" in addition to their other activities, or set up their sons as storekeepers, as did Patrick Henry's father. But the plantation was the central feature of southern life. The house of the wealthy planter was of wood or brick, and, like the Washington home at Mt. Vernon, often stood upon elevated ground commanding a view of a river. The kitchen stood apart from the house, freeing it from odors and

heat. Well-kept grounds surrounded the mansion, ornamented with flowers and trees. In the rear was the vegetable garden, and still farther removed were tobacco-barns, granaries, stables, the dairy and poultry houses, and the quarters for the negro slaves. These last consisted of cabins of logs or rough planks, and each was furnished with a bed, chairs, and a few cooking utensils. The typical plantation consisted of four or five thousand acres, part of which was cultivated while part was woodland. The nearest neighbors were usually two or three miles distant. Many planters had much more land, and the population of their estates, mostly black, might run into the hundreds. A great planter, like a medieval lord, sought to make his establishment as nearly independent as possible, and trained his slaves as carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, tanners, shoemakers, spinners, and weavers, as well as house servants and field hands. Lumber, fuel, meat, grain, fruit, vegetables, wool, cotton, flax, rough furniture, shoes, flour, brandy, cloth, casks, all these were often produced on the estate. Articles for the "great house" and the personal use of its white occupants were generally brought from England, and the extravagance of the average planter (or his family) kept him in a chronic state of debt.

The planter who took his business seriously and was his own manager could not indulge in indolence. Yet a love of leisure was characteristic. There was much exchanging of hospitality, and entertainment was often on the grand scale. Idle hours were turned to good advantage by men of intellectual tastes. Some of the best private libraries in America were gathered in the homes of Virginia gentlemen. William Byrd II, who had been educated in England, possessed at his estate of "Westover," near Richmond, nearly three thousand volumes. He was a writer as well as a reader, and his History of the Dividing Line (the story of the survey of the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina) makes an effort, with some success, at literary grace.

The planter's children were taught by tutors who were inmates of the house, or by the parish clergyman, or they attended a "neighborhood school" maintained by subscription. If the young men went to college, they attended William and Mary like Jefferson, or Princeton, like Madison; or sometimes went

abroad, like Byrd. A substantial part of the education of many Virginians who attained prominence — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others was gained through careful reading in their own homes.

The rural population was much given to games and sports. Fox-hunting and horse-racing were favorite exercises of the aristocrats, and public gatherings often gave occasion for boxing and wrestling matches and other contests of skill and strength. Elections and court sittings brought together at the Court House men from all parts of the county to indulge in such sports, to listen to speeches by prominent men, and to drink the liquor which candidates for the assembly always provided in the greatest abundance at such times.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The eighteenth century was a time of rapid industrial development. New England, where the fisheries were from the beginning one of the chief occupations, enjoyed a great expansion of this pursuit. Under the stimulus of an increasing market in Europe the whale fisheries also developed from an intermittent longshore business into a well-conducted enterprise which sent Yankee vessels into every corner of the Atlantic. Ship-building was on the increase. The forests supplied an abundance of material, and Yankee shipwrights became so skillful that their product was readily salable in Europe and the other colonies. Ship-building was the chief New England manufacture in this epoch. Rum, distilled from West Indian molasses, was the other important manufacturing enterprise of this section.

Boston, Salem, and Newport were the centers of New England's commerce. Hundreds of native-built ships cleared yearly from these ports laden with lumber, the products of the fisheries, or rum. The Catholic countries of southern Europe were the chief buyers of fish, the poorer grades going to the West Indies to feed slaves. Lumber was sold in the same markets, while most of the rum was exchanged on the Guinea coast for gold, or negroes to supply the slave market of the Spanish colonies. From the West Indies came in this round of trade goods of European manufacture, sugar and molasses, and cash in the form of Spanish

silver coins. Little of the export trade was with the mother country. New England paid for English manufactures with the coin derived from the West Indian trade.

The middle colonies grew even faster than New England. By 1750 Pennsylvania, although founded so much later, took rank with Massachusetts and Virginia as one of the three most populous colonies. The merchants of Philadelphia supplied much of the capital for the fur-trading ventures of the ScotchIrish and bought for export the surplus produce of the German farmers. From New York and Philadelphia the furs, grain, and flour of the middle colonies, like the fish and lumber of New England, went to the markets of southern Europe, the West Indies, and the Carolinas. Manufacturing here took the form of flour-milling. Among the non-English inhabitants were many mechanics who set up small manufacturing plants to supply their neighborhoods with a variety of articles, such as stoves and other iron products, glass, paper, and cloth. Such small-scale manufactures were carried further in the middle colonies than anywhere else in North America.

In the South, North Carolina soon adopted the plantation of the Virginia type, with slave labor. Tobacco was the chief crop, while in South Carolina indigo and rice, grown in the swamp lands along the coast, were the important staples. Negro slavery was especially necessary on the plantations in the marsh region, which was unwholesome for whites. The planters tended to congregate in Charleston, leaving their estates to be managed by overseers, and the result was a harsher type of slavery than that in Virginia, because it lacked the sympathy which sprang from frequent contact between owner and slave. The growth of chattel slavery was stimulated by the slave traders. In the Treaty of Utrecht (see page 106) England exacted from Spain the privilege of supplying her colonies with slaves (the Asiento contract). To exploit this concession the British Royal African Company was organized, but independent traders, some of them New Englanders, claimed a share of the profits, and not content with the Spanish markets, developed that of the English colonies to the utmost. By the middle of the century negroes composed nearly half of the inhabitants of Virginia, while in South Carolina they were far more numerous than the whites.

In contrast with the commerce of the northern and middle colonies, the chief trade of the southern provinces was with England. British or Yankee ships carried the plantation products to London, where some merchant acted as agent for the planter, selling his crop and purchasing the goods desired in return. The people of the back settlements at first lived as self-sufficing family units, existing by hunting and the most primitive agriculture. Gradually the inland counties became farming communities, producing grain and stock, even in the Piedmont portions of the Carolinas and Virginia. A few men of wealth penetrated to the back settlements and took large tracts of land which they tried to cultivate with slave labor, but most of the settlers were poor men who disliked slavery and cultivated their small farms with their own hands. It was not until after the colonial period that the plantation reached the Piedmont and displaced the small-farm economy (see page 348). By the end of the colonial era the back settlements were producing an agricultural surplus which found a market in the tidewater for consumption or export. This productivity relieved Charleston and tidewater South Carolina, for example, of dependence upon Pennsylvania for foodstuffs, and created a demand for roads and other improved means of transportation to bring the output of the interior farms to the coast.

RELATIONS OF FRONTIER AND COAST

The wealth and culture of provincial America were to be found in the coastal regions and were little in evidence among the fur-traders and farmers who were pushing westward. By the time the frontier had reached the mountains there was a sharp contrast between the society of the coast lands and that of the back country.

The settlement of the new regions was welcomed by the people of the coast as a protection against the Indians, but in every colony those in possession of political control took care to prevent it from passing out of their hands. Even when the population of the new districts exceeded that of the old, the system of government was such as to keep the interior communities i. subordination to the minority on the seaboard.