hbor and very good friend, the
original patentee. In like manner the colonel preempted 5644 acres of
land, which he held without improvement for ten years when it was
transferred to his son.

The aristocracy, of which Colonel Byrd was a shining light, nevertheless
held by a somewhat precarious tenure. The crude and primitive conditions
of the wilderness, restricting both the occupations and the diversions
of life within narrow limits, inevitably ran the thoughts of men in much
the same mould. The routine of work and pleasure was much the same on
the great plantation as on the small: clearing and planting, spinning
and weaving, dancing and horse-racing, neighborly hospitality which was
generous and sincere because the opportunity to exercise it was rare,
attendance at church or at the county court, at elections, at the annual
muster--it was a range of activities too limited to permit of any
deep-seated sense of difference between man and man.

And, indeed, the main basis of distinction in this new world was a
purely external one--the possession of wealth; and wealth was in no
unreal sense the bequest of nature to capacity. Initiative and industry,
rather than the dead hand of custom, marked a man for distinction and
preferment. It was the land of opportunity where the servant could
become the farmer, the farmer a planter, where the planter, acquiring by
skill or happy chance a great estate, thereby entered in with the
political and social grandees. There were classes but no castes; not
birth or title, but individual enterprise determined rank and influence.
And in an undeveloped country the possession of a great estate was not a
social grievance, but an evidence of success in the perennial contest
with nature, the measure of personal prowess and a test of civic virtue.
The enrichment of Colonel Byrd, even by ways that were devious, was
viewed with complacence by his neighbors so long as it harmed them not.
Yet the submission of the small to the great planter was a convenience
rather than a necessity. The wilderness, with the Indian as a part of
it, developed a crude and a ruthless spirit, but never a cringing or a
submissive one. The gentleman and the magistrate were deferred to, but
neither was regarded as sacrosanct; and when, in the regime of Berkeley,
special privilege in alliance with official corruption seemed to be
narrowing the chances of the common man, the insurgent spirit of
frontier democracy, denying the va