These, in return for their passage money, must serve Laban for a term of years, but then would receive Rachel, or at least Leah, in the shape of freedom and a small holding and provision with which to begin again their individual life.

If they were ambitious and energetic they might presently be able, in turn, to import labor for their own acres.

As yet, in Virginia, there were few African slaves--not more perhaps than a couple of hundred.

But whenever ships brought them they were readily purchased.
In Virginia, as everywhere in time of change, there arose anomalies.
Side by side persisted a romantic devotion to the King and a determination to have popular assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist.

Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year.