ware and Pennsylvania.

Though many thus fled before the stream of negroes which poured in from
Africa, others remained behind to fight for their little plantations.
Yet they waged a losing battle. Those who found it possible to purchase
slaves, even one or two, could ride upon the black tide, but the others
slowly sank beneath it.

During the first half of the Eighteenth century the poor whites sought
to offset the cheapness of slave made tobacco by producing themselves
only the highest grades. The traders who dealt in the finest Orinoco,
which brought the best prices, found it not upon the plantations of the
wealthy, but of those who tended their plants with their own hands. "I
must beg you to remember that the common people make the best," wrote
Governor Gooch to the Lords of Trade in 1731.[8-26]

In fact, the wealthy planter, with his newly acquired gangs of slaves,
found it difficult at this time to produce any save the lower grades of
tobacco. The African was yet too savage, too untutored in the ways of
civilization to be utilized for anything like intensive cultivation.
"Though they may plant more in quantity," wrote Gooch, "yet it
frequently proves very mean stuff, different from the Tobacco produced
from well improved and well tended Grounds." "Yet the rich Man's trash
will always damp the Market," he adds, "and spoil the poor Man's good
Tobacco which has been carefully managed."[8-27] Thus the small farmer
made one last desperate effort to save himself by pitting his superior
intelligence against the cheapness of slave labor.

But his case was hopeless. As slavery became more and more fixed upon
the colony, the negro gradually increased in efficiency. He learned to
speak his master's language, brokenly of course, but well enough for all
practical purposes. He was placed under the tutelage of overseers, who
taught him the details of his work and saw that he did it. He became a
civilized being, thoroughly drilled in the one task required of him, the
task of producing tobacco. Thus the rich planter soon found it possible
to cultivate successfully the higher grades, and so to drive from his
last rampart the white freeholder whose crop was tended by himself
alone.

Placed at so great a disadvantage, the poor man, at all times in very
difficult circumstances, found it almost impossible to exist whenever
conditions in Europe sent the price of tobacco down. In the years from
1706 to 1714, when the tobacco trade w