[Footnote 16:  Ibid., 540.]

[Footnote 17:  T Hening, II, 26.]

[Footnote 18:  Ibid., 170.]

In the first decade or two after the London Company’s end the plantation and farm clearings broke the Virginian wilderness only in a narrow line on either bank of the James River from its mouth to near the present site of Richmond, and in a small district on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake.  Virtually all the settlers were then raising tobacco, all dwelt at the edge of navigable water, and all were neighbors to the Indians.  As further decades passed the similar shores of the parallel rivers to the northward, the York, then the Rappahannock and the Potomac, were occupied in a similar way, though with an increasing predominance of large landholdings.  This broadened the colony and gave it a shape conducive to more easy frontier defence.  It also led the way to an eventual segregation of industrial pursuits, for the tidewater peninsulas were gradually occupied more or less completely by the planters; while the farmers of less estate, weaned from tobacco by its fall in price, tended to move west and south to new areas on the mainland, where they dwelt in self-sufficing democratic neighborhoods, and formed incidentally a buffer between the plantations on the seaboard and the Indians round about.

With the lapse of years the number of planters increased, partly through the division of estates, partly through the immigration of propertied Englishmen, and partly through the rise of exceptional yeomen to the planting estate.  The farmers increased with still greater speed; for the planters in recruiting their gangs of indented laborers were serving constantly as immigration agents and as constantly the redemptioners upon completing their terms were becoming yeomen, marrying and multiplying.  Meanwhile the expansion of Maryland was extending an identical regime of planters and farmers from the northern bank of the Potomac round the head of the Chesapeake all the way to the eastern shore settlements of Virginia.

In Maryland the personal proprietorship of Lord Baltimore and his desire to found a Catholic haven had no lasting effect upon the industrial and social development.  The geographical conditions were so like those in Virginia and the adoption of her system so obviously the road to success that no other plans were long considered.  Even the few variations attempted assimilated themselves more or less promptly to the regime of the older colony.  The career of the manor system is typical.  The introduction of that medieval regime was authorized by the charter for Maryland and was provided for in turn by the Lord Proprietor’s instructions to the governor.  Every grant of one thousand, later two thousand acres, was to be made a manor, with its appropriate court to settle differences between lord and tenant, to adjudge civil cases between tenants where the issues involved did not exceed the value of two pounds sterling, and to have cognizance of misdemeanors committed on the manor.  The fines and other profits were to go to the manorial lord.