ar assemblies; a great sense of the rights
of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical,
easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church
penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this,
the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The
suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good
neighborliness--class distinctions and republican ideas.

The "towns" were of the fewest and rudest--little more than small
palisaded hamlets, built of frame or log, poised near the water of the
river James. The genius of the land was for the plantation rather than
the town. The fair and large brick or frame planter's house of a later
time had not yet risen, but the system was well inaugurated that set a
main or "big" house upon some fair site, with cabins clustered near it,
and all surrounded, save on the river front, with far-flung acres, some
planted with grain and the rest with tobacco. Up and down the river
these estates were strung together by the rudest roads, mere tracks
through field and wood. The cart was as yet the sole wheeled vehicle.
But the Virginia planter--a horseman in England--brought over horses,
bred horses, and early placed horsemanship in the catalogue of the
necessary colonial virtues. At this point, however, in a land of great
and lesser rivers, with a network of creeks, the boat provided the chief
means of communication. Behind all, enveloping all, still spread the
illimitable forest, the haunt of Indians and innumerable game.

Virginians were already preparing for an expansion to the north. There
was a man in Virginia named William Claiborne. This individual--able,
determined, self-reliant, energetic--had come in as a young man, with
the title of surveyor-general for the Company, in the ship that brought
Sir Francis Wyatt, just before the massacre of 1622. He had prospered
and was now Secretary of the Province. He held lands, and was endowed
with a bold, adventurous temper and a genius for business. In a few
years he had established widespread trading relations with the Indians.
He and the men whom he employed penetrated to the upper shores of
Chesapeake, into the forest bordering Potomac and Susquehanna: Knives
and hatchets, beads, trinkets, and colored cloth were changed for rich
furs and various articles that the Indians could furnish. The skins thus
gathered Claiborne shipped to London merchants, and was