Prosperity
In spite of the many drawbacks of the unworthy governors and their frequent quarrels with the assembly and people, Virginia continued to prosper, and by the end of the seventeenth century the population numbered a hundred thousand. The people up to this time were almost wholly English, but in 1700 several hundred Huguenots made their home in the colony. About 1730, the Scots-Irish began to settle in large numbers in the Shenandoah Valley, and soon after these came the Germans. The frontier was moved gradually westward from the tide-water counties until it had crossed the summit of the Alleghanies. The coming of these peoples infused new modes of life, new religious customs, new democratic ideas into Virginian society; and in the course of the next half century many vital changes were brought about, as the abolition of primogeniture and entail, the separation of Church and State, and religious toleration.18 Thus the various nationalities, blending slowly into one people, spent the remainder of the colonial period hewing away the forests and laying the foundations of a great state.(19)
Read more about this topic: Virginia Cavaliers (historical)
Famous quotes containing the word prosperity:
“The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“What has ever threatened our liberty and prosperity save and except this institution of Slavery?”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“... anything so delightful as Washington I have never seen elsewhere. There were a mingled simplicity and grandeur, a mingled state and quiet intimacy, a brilliancy of conversation—the proud prominence of intellect over material prosperity which does not exist in any other city of the Union.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)