"I've been in Virginia before.

They don't care much about commerce, but you'll find that a lot of the men who own the great plantations are hard and good thinkers." Robert soon discovered that in Virginia a town was rather a meeting place for the landed aristocracy than a commercial center.

The arrival of the British troops and of Americans from other colonies brought much life into the little capital.

The people began to pour in from the country houses, and the single street was thronged with the best horses and the best carriages Virginia could show, their owners, attended by swarms of black men and black women whose mouths were invariably stretched in happy grins, their splendid white teeth glittering.
There was much splendor, a great mingling of the fine and the tawdry, as was inevitable in a society that maintained slavery on a large scale.

Nearly all the carriages had been brought from London, and they were of the best.