Samuel Cornell, had one
each.[3-52]

In Elizabeth City of twenty-seven estates recorded during the years from
1684 to 1699 sixteen were without servants or slaves; of twenty-six
recorded in York during the period from 1694 to 1697 thirteen had no
servants or slaves; of twenty-three recorded in Henrico from 1677 to
1692 fourteen were without servants or slaves.[3-53] It is true that
these inventories and wills, since they would usually pertain to persons
of advanced age, perhaps do not furnish an absolutely accurate gauge of
the average number of servants held by each planter. On the other hand,
it is equally probable that a larger proportion of big estates than of
the small found their way into the records. At all events it is evident
that a goodly proportion of the landholders, perhaps sixty or sixty-five
per cent possessed no slaves or indentured servants, and trusted solely
to their own exertions for the cultivation of their plantations.

Thus vanishes the fabled picture of Seventeenth century Virginia. In its
place we see a colony filled with little farms a few hundred acres in
extent, owned and worked by a sturdy class of English farmers. Prior to
the slave invasion which marked the close of the Seventeenth century and
the opening of the Eighteenth, the most important factor in the life of
the Old Dominion was the white yeomanry.

_CHAPTER IV_

FREEMEN AND FREEDMEN

It is obvious that the small planter class had its origin partly in the
immigration of persons who paid their own passage, partly in the
graduation into freedmen of large numbers of indentured servants. But to
determine accurately the proportion of each is a matter of great
difficulty. Had all the records of Seventeenth century Virginia been
preserved, it would have been possible, by means of long and laborious
investigation, to arrive at strictly accurate conclusions. But with the
material in hand one has to be satisfied with an approximation of the
truth.

It must again be emphasized that the indentured servants were not
slaves, and that at the expiration of their terms there was no barrier,
legal, racial or social to their advancement. The Lords of Trade and
Plantations, in 1676, expressed their dissatisfaction at the word
"servitude" as applied to them, which they felt was a mark of bondage
and slavery, and thought it better "rather to use the word service,
since those servants are only apprentices for years."[4-1] "Malitious
tongues