Above the slaves, little better than they in condition, but separated from them by the wide gulf of race and color, were the indented white servants, some convicts, some redemptioners.  They, too, have their story told when we have catalogued them.  We cross another gulf and come to the farmers, to the men who grew wheat as well as tobacco on their own land, sometimes working alone, sometimes the owners of a few slaves.  Some of these men were of the class well known since as the “poor whites” of the South, the weaker brothers who could not resist the poison of slavery, but sank under it into ignorance and poverty.  They were contented because their skins were white, and because they were thereby part of an aristocracy to whom labor was a badge of serfdom.  The larger portion of this middle class, however, were thrifty and industrious enough.  Including as they did in their ranks the hunters and pioneers, the traders and merchants, all the freemen in fact who toiled and worked, they formed the mass of the white population, and furnished the bone and sinew and some of the intellectual power of Virginia.  The only professional men were the clergy, for the lawyers were few, and growing to importance only as the Revolution began; while the physicians were still fewer, and as a class of no importance at all.  The clergy were a picturesque element in the social landscape, but they were as a body very poor representatives of learning, religion, and morality.  They ranged from hedge parsons and Fleet chaplains, who had slunk away from England to find a desirable obscurity in the new world, to divines of real learning and genuine piety, who were the supporters of the college, and who would have been a credit to any society.  These last, however, were lamentably few in number.  The mass of the clergy were men who worked their own lands, sold tobacco, were the boon companions of the planters, hunted, shot, drank hard, and lived well, performing their sacred duties in a perfunctory and not always in a decent manner.

The clergy, however, formed the stepping-stone socially between the farmers, traders, and small planters, and the highest and most important class in Virginian society.  The great planters were the men who owned, ruled, and guided Virginia.  Their vast estates were scattered along the rivers from the seacoast to the mountains.  Each plantation was in itself a small village, with the owner’s house in the centre, surrounded by outbuildings and negro cabins, and the pastures, meadows, and fields of tobacco stretching away on all sides.  The rare traveler, pursuing his devious way on horseback or in a boat, would catch sight of these noble estates opening up from the road or the river, and then the forest would close in around him for several miles, until through the thinning trees he would see again the white cabins and the cleared fields of the next plantation.