Produced by Mark C. Orton, Jeannie Howse and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Research has indicated the copyright on this book was | | not renewed. | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | This e-book contains archaic spelling. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia * * * * * Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia OR THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL CLASSES OF THE OLD DOMINION By THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER _New York_ RUSSELL & RUSSELL COPYRIGHT 1910, 1958, 1959 BY THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 59-11227 PRINTED IN U.S.A. Dedicated to H.R.W. _PREFACE_ Forty-seven years have passed since this volume was first published; in that time a mass of source material has been made available to the historian and numerous books on early Virginia history have been published. But I believe that its main theses have not been shaken. The old belief that the Virginia aristocracy had its origin in a migration of Cavaliers after the defeat of the royalists in the British Civil War has been relegated to the sphere of myths. It is widely recognized that the leading Virginia families--the Carters, the Ludwells, the Burwells, the Custises, the Lees, the Washingtons--were shaped chiefly by conditions within the colony and by renewed contact with Great Britain. That the Virginia aristocracy was not part of the English aristocracy transplanted in the colony is supported by contemporaneous evidence. When Nathaniel Bacon, the rebel, the son of an English squire, expressed surprise when Governor Berkeley appointed him to the Council of State, Sir William replied: "When I had the first knowledge of you I intended you and do now again all the services that are in my power to serve, for gentlemen of your quality come very rarely into the country, and therefore when they do come were used by me with all respect."