Part 2 (2/2)

Twelve negro slaves responded to his nod; he had a large corps of bounded apprentices and dependant laborers. His mansion looked down on twenty acres of wheat and twenty of corn; and as for his horses and cattle they were the envy of the country. In his last year thirty horses were his, fourteen oxen, sixty steers, forty-eight cows and two bulls.[26] He lived high, drank, swore, cheated--and administered justice.

One of the best and most intimate descriptions of a somewhat contemporaneous landed magnate in the South is that given of Robert Carter, a Virginia planter, by Philip Vickers Fithian,[27] a tutor in Carter's family. Carter came to his estate from his grandfather, whose land and other possessions were looked upon as so extensive that he was called ”King” Carter.

Robert Carter luxuriated in Nomini Hall, a great colonial mansion in Westmoreland County. It was built between 1725 and 1732 of brick covered with strong mortar, which imparted a perfectly white exterior, and was seventy-six feet long and forty wide. The interior was one of unusual splendor for the time, such as only the very rich could afford. There were eight large rooms, one of which was a ball-room thirty feet long.

Carter spent most of his leisure hours cultivating the study of law and of music; his library contained 1,500 volumes and he had a varied a.s.sortment of musical instruments. He was the owner of 60,000 acres of land spread over almost every county of Virginia, and he was the master of six hundred negro slaves. The greater part of a prosperous iron-works near Baltimore was owned by him, and near his mansion he built a flour mill equipped to turn out 25,000 bushels of wheat a year. Carter was not only one of the big planters but one of the big capitalists of the age; all that he had to do was to exercise a general supervision; his overseers saw to the running of his various industries. Like the other large landholders he was one of the active governing cla.s.s; as a member of the Provincial Council he had great influence in the making of laws.

He was a thorough gentleman, we are told, and took good care of his slaves and of his white laborers who were grouped in workhouses and little cottages within range of his mansion. Within his domain he exercised a sort of benevolent despotism. He was one of the first few to see that chattel slavery could not compete in efficiency with white labor, and he reckoned that more money could be made from the white laborer, for whom no responsibility of shelter, clothing, food and attendance had to be a.s.sumed than from the negro slave, whose sickness, disability or death entailed direct financial loss. Before his death he emanc.i.p.ated a number of his slaves. This, in brief, is the rather flattering depiction of one of the conspicuously rich planters of the South.

THE NASCENT TRADING CLa.s.s.

Land continued to be the chief source of the wealth of the rich until after the Revolution. The discriminative laws enacted by England had held down the progress of the trading cla.s.s; these laws overthrown, the traders rose rapidly from a subordinate position to the supreme cla.s.s in point of wealth.

No close research into pre-Revolutionary currents and movements is necessary to understand that the Revolution was brought about by the dissatisfied trading cla.s.s as the only means of securing absolute freedom of trade. Notwithstanding the view often presented that it was an altruistic movement for the freedom of man, it was essentially an economic struggle fathered by the trading cla.s.s and by a part of the landed interests. Admixed was a sincere aim to establish free political conditions. This, however, was not an aim for the benefit of all cla.s.ses, but merely one for the better interests of the propertied cla.s.s. The poverty-stricken soldiers who fought for their cause found after the war that the machinery of government was devised to shut out manhood suffrage and keep the power intact in the hands of the rich. Had it not been for radicals such as Jefferson, Paine and others it is doubtful whether such concessions as were made to the people would have been made. The long struggle in various States for manhood suffrage sufficiently attests the deliberate aim of the propertied interests to concentrate in their own hands, and in that of a following favorable to them, the voting power of the Government and of the States.

With the success of the Revolution, the trading cla.s.s bounded to the first rank. Entail and primogeniture were abolished and the great estates gradually melted away. For more than a century and a half the landed interests had dominated the social and political arena. As an acknowledged, continuous organization they ceased to exist. Great estates no longer pa.s.sed unimpaired from generation to generation, surviving as a distinct ent.i.ty throughout all changes. They perforce were part.i.tioned among all the children; and through the vicissitudes of subsequent years, pa.s.sed bit by bit into many hands. Altered laws caused a gradual disintegration in the case of individual holdings, but brought no change in instances of corporate owners.h.i.+p. The Trinity Corporation of New York City, for example, has held on to the vast estate which it was given before the Revolution except such parts as it voluntarily has sold.

DISINTEGRATION OF THE GREAT ESTATES.

The individual magnate, however, had no choice. He could no longer entail his estates. Thus, estates which were very large before the Revolution, and which were regarded with astonishment, ceased to exist.

The landed interests, however, remained paramount for several decades after the Revolution by reason of the acceleration which long possession and its profits had given them. Was.h.i.+ngton's fortune, amounting at his death, to $530,000, was one of the largest in the country and consisted mainly of land. He owned 9,744 acres, valued at $10 an acre, on the Ohio River in Virginia, 3,075 acres, worth $200,000, on the Great Kenawa, and also land elsewhere in Virginia and in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Kentucky, the City of Was.h.i.+ngton and other places.[28] About half a century later it was only by persistent gatherings of public contributions that his very home was saved to the nation, so had his estate become divided and run down. After a long career, Benjamin Franklin acquired what was considered a large fortune. But it did not come from manufacture or invention, which he did so much to encourage, but from land. His estate in 1788, two years before his death, was estimated to be worth $150,000, mostly in land.[29] By the opening decades of the nineteenth century few of the great estates in New York remained. One of the last of the patroons was Stephen Van Rensselaer, who died at the age of 75 on Jan. 26, 1839, leaving ten children. Up to this time the manor had devolved upon the eldest son. Although it had been diminished somewhat by various cessions, it was still of great extent. The property was divided among the ten children, and, according to Schuyler, ”In less than fifty years after his death, the seven hundred thousand acres originally in the manor were in the hands of strangers.”[30]

Long before old Van Rensselaer pa.s.sed away he had seen the rise and growth of the trading and manufacturing cla.s.s and a new form of landed aristocracy, and he observed with a haughty bitterness how in point of wealth and power they far overshadowed the well-nigh defunct old feudal aristocracy. A few hundred thousand dollars no longer was the summit of a great fortune; the age of the millionaire had come. The lordly, leisurely environment of the old landed cla.s.s had been supplanted by feverish trading and industrial activity which imposed upon society its own newer standards, doctrines and ideals and made them uppermost factors.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] ”Land Nationalization,”:122-125.

[10] Colonial Doc.u.ments, vii:654-655.

[11] Colonial Doc.u.ments, iv:673-674.

[12] ”A Short History of the English Colonies in America”:402.

[13] Yet, this fortune seeker, who had incurred the contempt of every n.o.ble English mind, is described by one of the cla.s.s of power-wors.h.i.+pping historians as follows: ”Fame and wealth, so often the idols of _Superior Intellect_, were the prominent objects of this aspiring man.”--Williamson's ”History of Maine,” 1:305.

[14] The Public Domain: Its History, etc.:38.

[15] Pennsylvania: Colony and Commonwealth:66, 84, etc. Their claim to inherit proprietary rights was bought at the time of the Revolutionary War by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 130,000 sterling or about $580,000.

[16] Colonial Doc.u.ments, iv:463.

[17] Ibid.:535.

[18] Ibid.:39.

[19] Colonial Doc.u.ments, iv:528. One of Bellomont's chief complaints was that the landgraves monopolized the timber supply. He recommended the pa.s.sage of a law vesting in the King the right to all trees such as were fit for masts of s.h.i.+ps or for other use in building s.h.i.+ps of war.

[20] ”Colonial New York,” 1:285-286.

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