Social Order
Historian Edmund Morgan (1975) argues that Virginians in the 1650s—and for the next two centuries—turned to slavery and a racial divide as an alternative to class conflict. "Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty." That is, white men became politically much more equal than was possible without a population of low-status slaves.
By 1700 the population reached 70,000 and continued to grow rapidly from a high birth rate, low death rate, importation of slaves from the Caribbean, and immigration from Britain and Germany, as well as from Pennsylvania. The climate was mild, the farm lands were cheap and fertile.
Historian Douglas Southall Freeman has explained the hierarchical social structure of the 1740s:
West of the fall line... the settlements fringed toward the frontier of the Blue Ridge and the Valley of the Shenandoah. Democracy was real where life was raw. In Tidewater, the flat country East of the fall line, there were no less than eight strata of society. The uppermost and the lowliest, the great proprietors and the Negro slaves, were supposed to be of immutable station. The others were small farmers, merchants, sailors, frontier folk, servants and convicts. Each of these constituted a distinct class at a given time, but individuals and families often shifted materially in station during a single generation. Titles hedged the ranks of the notables. Members of the Council of State were termed both "Colonel" and "Esquire." Large planters who did not bear arms almost always were given the courtesy title of "Gentlemen." So were Church Wardens, Vestrymen, Sheriffs and Trustees of towns. The full honors of a man of station were those of Vestryman, Justice and Burgess . Such an individual normally looked to England and especially to London and sought to live by the social standards of the mother country.
Read more about this topic: History Of Virginia, Royal Colony
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or order:
“I have more in common with a Mexican man than with a white woman.... This opinion ... chagrins women who sincerely believe our female physiology unequivocally binds all women throughout the world, despite the compounded social prejudices that daily affect us all in different ways. Although women everywhere experience life differently from men everywhere, white women are members of a race that has proclaimed itself globally superior for hundreds of years.”
—Ana Castillo (b. 1953)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)