e to follow his own bent, we have no right to assume that he sought
at once to establish himself as an independent proprietor. He might seek
service with the large planters as a hired laborer, he might become a
tenant. In either case the population would have been divided into two
classes--the wealthy landowner and those who served him.

We know that at all periods of Virginia history there were a certain
number of persons employed as wage earners. The colonial laws and the
county records contain many references to them. Payment of wages was not
unusual even under the Company, and we are told by George Sandys that
hired laborers received one pound of tobacco a day in addition to their
food.[3-14] In later years we have from time to time references to wage
rates, and in some cases copies of contracts entered into between
employer and wage earner. But such cases are comparatively rare, and it
is evident that the use of hired labor throughout the colonial period
was the exception rather than the rule. In fact it would seem that few
save servants newly freed and lacking in the funds necessary for
purchasing and equipping little farms of their own ever sought
employment upon the large plantations. And even in such cases the
contracts were for comparatively short periods, since it often required
but a year or two of labor for the freedman to save enough from his
wages to make a beginning as an independent proprietor.

When once established, there was no reason, in the days prior to the
introduction of slavery, why he should not hold his own in competition
with his wealthy neighbor. In the production of tobacco the large
plantation, so long as it was cultivated only by expensive white labor,
offered no marked advantage over the small. With the cost of land very
low, with the means of earning the purchase price so readily in hand,
with the conditions for an independent career all so favorable, it was
not to be expected that the freedman should content himself permanently
with the status of a hired laborer.

Nor was there any reason why he should become a tenant. Had all the
fertile land been preempted, as was the case on the banks of the Hudson,
the poor man might have been compelled to lease the soil upon which he
expended his efforts or do without entirely. But such was not the case.
It is true that at the end of the Seventeenth century certain wealthy
men got possession of large tracts of unsettled land, but their monopoly