Its cultivation caused the importation of a great number of servants, "divers of very good rank and quality,"[14] who, after a service of four or five years, became freemen.

In the assembly of 1638 several of the servants in the first emigration took their seats as burgesses.

As the demand for houses and casks for tobacco was great, a good many carpenters and coopers came out at their own expense and received shares of land by way of encouragement.
A state of society developed similar in many respects to that in Virginia.

Baltimore, accustomed to the type of life in England, expected the settlements in Maryland to grow into towns and cities; and, under this impression, in January, 1638, he erected the population on the south side of St.George's River into a "hundred," and afterwards created other hundreds in other parts of the colony.
But the wealth of watercourses and the cultivation of tobacco caused the population to scatter, and made society from the first distinctly agricultural and rural.

St.Mary's and St.George's Hundred, in Maryland, shared the fate of Jamestown and Bermuda Hundred, in Virginia, and no stimulus of legislation could make them grow.
The application of the powers of the palatinate intensified these conditions by creating an agricultural and landed aristocracy.