age seems to have been between seventeen and
twenty-three. The reasons for this are obvious. Not only were young men
and women more adaptable to changed conditions, more capable of
resisting the Virginia climate, stronger and more vigorous, but they
proved more tractable and entered upon the adventure more eagerly.[3-9]
These conclusions are fully borne out by an examination of the lists of
servants given in Hotten's _Emigrants to America_. Of the first 159
servants here entered whose ages are attached, the average is
twenty-three years.[3-10] And as many of these persons were brought over
as skilled artisans to take part in the industrial life which the
Company had planned for the colony, it is probable that they were much
older than the average servant of later days who came as an agricultural
laborer. There is every reason to believe, then, that the average
servant was still in his prime when he completed his term, perhaps not
more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, with many years of usefulness and
vigor before him.

It must also be remembered that the freedman, by a display of energy and
capability, might acquire property, marry and rear a family. While the
number of indentured servants was strictly limited to those who were
brought in from the outside, the class of poor freemen might and did
enjoy a natural increase within itself. Thus it was inevitable that with
the passing of the years the servants were more and more outnumbered by
the growing group of freemen. In 1649, when the population was but
15,000,[3-11] 6,000 servants might well have performed most of the
manual labor of the tobacco fields, but in 1670, when the inhabitants
numbered 40,000,[3-12] or in 1697 when they were 70,000,[3-13] they
would form a comparatively small proportion of the people, so small in
fact that most of the work of necessity had to be done by freemen. In
other words the picture so often presented, even by historians of
established reputation, of a Seventeenth century Virginia in which the
land was divided into large plantations owned by rich proprietors and
tilled chiefly by indentured servants is entirely erroneous. Such a
state of affairs was made impossible by the very nature of the system of
indentures itself.

It becomes a matter of prime interest, then, to determine what became of
the mass of freedmen, what role they played in the social and economic
life of the colony. Because the servant who had completed his term was
fre