The Virginia planters were a landowning gentry; when Washington died he had more than sixty thousand acres.

The growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the time, with its half million people, was connected with the ownership of land.
On their great estates the planters lived remote, with a mail perhaps every fortnight.

There were no large towns, no great factories.

Nearly half of the population consisted of negro slaves.

It is one of the ironies of history that the chief leader in a war marked by a passion for liberty was a member of a society in which, as another of its members, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, said, there was on the one hand the most insulting despotism and on the other the most degrading submission.