This unfortunate period was but temporary. With the conclusion of peace English tobacco was dumped upon the European market at a figure so low as to defy competition. And when once the hogsheads began to move, the reaction on Virginia and Maryland was rapid and pronounced. Soon prices rose again to the old levels, and the colony entered upon a period, for the larger planters at least, of unprecedented prosperity.[8-36] But the eight years of hardship and poverty made a lasting imprint upon the poorest class of whites. Coming as they did upon the heels of the first great wave of negro immigration, they accelerated the movement of the disrupting forces already at work. It was not by accident that the largest migration of whites to other settlements occurred just at this time and that the inquiries as to its cause are most frequent. The little planter class never fully recovered from the blow dealt it by the temporary loss of the larger part of the European tobacco trade. The small freeholders who possessed neither servants nor slaves did not disappear entirely, but they gradually declined in numbers and sank into abject poverty. During the period of Spotswood's administration they still constituted a large part of the population. The tax list for 1716 in Lancaster, one of the older counties, shows that of 314 persons listed as tithables, 202 paid for themselves only.[8-37] Making ample deductions for persons not owning land it would appear that more than half the planters at this date still tilled their fields only with their own labor. At the time of the American Revolution, however, the situation had changed materially, and a decided dwindling of the poor farmer class is noticeable. In Gloucester county the tax lists for 1782-83 show 490 white families, of which 320 were in possession of slaves. Of the 170 heads of families who possessed no negroes, since no doubt some were overseers, some artisans, some professional men, it is probable that not more than eighty or ninety were proprietors.[8-38] In Spotsylvania county similar conditions are noted. Of 704 tithable whites listed in 1783 all save 199 possessed slaves.[8-39] In Dinwiddie county, in the year 1782, of 843 tithable whites, 210 only were not slave holders.[8-40] Apparently the Virginia yeoman, the sturdy, independent farmer of the Seventeenth century, who tilled his little holding with his own hands, had become an insignificant factor in the life of the colony. The glorious promises which the country had held out to him in the first fifty years of its existence had been belied. The Virginia which had formerly been so largely the land of the little farmer, had become the land of masters and slaves. For aught else there was no room.