was its high acreage value. But the price
ordinarily was low, and many acres were necessary for large net
returns. Besides, the soil was soon exhausted, so that the successful
planter found it necessary to be always acquiring new land in order to
let the old lie fallow. It thus happened that, in spite of the cost of
clearing and the danger from the Indians, Virginia was not settled, as
its founders had intended, in compact towns modeled upon the English
borough, but in widely separated plantation groups, stretching far up on
both sides of the James River. The average size of patents granted
before 1649 was about four hundred and fifty acres; in the period
between 1666 and 1679 the average had risen to nearly nine hundred,
while there were ten patents ranging from ten to twenty thousand acres
each. By 1685 a total population not exceeding that of the London parish
of Stepney had acquired title to an area as large as all England.

For clearing and planting so large an area much unskilled labor was
essential. In Virginia, and in all the Southern colonies with the
exception of North Carolina, there accordingly existed, side by side
with the landowning planter class, and sharply distinct from it, a
servile laboring class which formed a large part of the total
population. In 1619, we are told, "came a Dutch man of war with 20
negars." The ship was probably English rather than Dutch. In either case
the circumstance marks the beginning of African slavery in the English
continental colonies; but the importation of slaves was slight until the
close of the century, and the laborers who cleared the forests and
worked the fields were largely supplied by contract, and were known as
"servants." The servant was a person bound over for a term of years to
the planter who paid his transportation or purchased the contract right
from its original owner. The term of service varied from two to seven
years, at the expiration of which the servant became a freeman.
Ex-servants sometimes migrated to other colonies, notably to North
Carolina after the foundation of that colony, or in the next century to
the up-country beyond the "fall line"; but many became renters or
tenants on the estates of the large planters, or in time became planters
themselves. The servant class included some condemned criminals and
political offenders, and some educated and cultured people who had
fallen on evil times; but they came mostly from the jails, the
almshouses, o