t to
traditional English restraints, then, in a period of rapid expansion,
losing their cohesiveness and their values under the impact of the
American experience and their own natures. Their political expression
soon passed from a passive to an active mode. The law became something
they made, not something someone else applied to them. Land was
similarly not something bestowed on them by generous parents, but
something one took from Nature, or Nature's surrogate, the Indian. Labor
was no longer a privilege allowed the individual by the community, but a
precious gift contributed by the individual to the community. In sum,
the ordinary people who had removed themselves to the New World soon
discovered that they were no longer humble servants of great lords, but
were themselves lords of the American earth. If they had the power why
not exercise it? The process by which the rulers of the people were
forced to become the "servants" of their "subjects" thereupon began. The
culmination of this rearrangement of the political atoms of society was
the War for Independence of 1776. Whether the swing from authority to
liberty was for good or for evil is not for the historian to say.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Another booklet in this series contains a selected bibliography of works
on seventeenth-century Virginia. The interested student should consult
that booklet for a more detailed listing of works used in preparing this
account of Virginia in the period 1625-1660.

The best secondary account of Virginia in the period covered by this
booklet is Wesley Frank Craven, _The Southern Colonies in the
Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689_ (Baton Rouge, 1949). Craven skilfully
combines research in Virginia local history with a broad understanding
of developments in England and in other colonies. He points out the
social and political significance of many hitherto ignored aspects of
Virginia history. Other important works include Charles McLean Andrews,
_The Colonial Period of American History_, I (New Haven, 1934), Thomas
Jefferson Wertenbaker, _Virginia under the Stuarts_ (Princeton, 1914),
Herbert L. Osgood, _The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century_, 3
vols. (New York, 1904-1907), and Edward D. Neill, _Virginia Carolorum:
The Colony under the Rule of Charles the First and Second, A.D.
1625-A.D. 1685_ (Albany, 1886).

Any study of colonial Virginia must begin with a perusal of Philip
Alexander Bruce, _Economic History of Virginia in t