When once established, there was no reason, in the days prior to the introduction of slavery, why he should not hold his own in competition with his wealthy neighbor. In the production of tobacco the large plantation, so long as it was cultivated only by expensive white labor, offered no marked advantage over the small. With the cost of land very low, with the means of earning the purchase price so readily in hand, with the conditions for an independent career all so favorable, it was not to be expected that the freedman should content himself permanently with the status of a hired laborer.
Nor was there any reason why he should become a tenant. Had all the fertile land been preëmpted, as was the case on the banks of the Hudson, the poor man might have been compelled to lease the soil upon which he expended his efforts or do without entirely. But such was not the case. It is true that at the end of the Seventeenth century certain wealthy men got possession of large tracts of unsettled land, but their monopoly was so far from complete that they gladly sold off their holdings in little parcels to the first purchasers who presented themselves. Apparently they made no attempts to establish themselves in a position similar to that of the great landlords of England.
The records afford ample evidence that the leasing of property was by no means unknown in colonial Virginia, but the custom was comparatively rare. Hugh Jones, writing in 1721, declared that the tenant farmers constituted but a small fraction of the population, a fact which he explained by the unusual facilities for acquiring property in fee simple.[3-15] It would have been folly for the tobacco planter to expend his labor upon another man's property, perhaps erecting barns and fences and otherwise improving it, when he could for so small an outlay secure land of his own.
Thus we are led to the conclusion that the average Virginia plantation must have been comparatively small in extent. The development of large estates was narrowly limited by the various factors which made it impossible to secure an adequate labor supply--the restrictions upon the slave trade, the insufficient number of indentured servants and the shortness of their terms, the unwillingness of freedmen and others to work for wages. On the other hand, it would be expected that the servants upon securing their freedom would purchase land of their own, and cover all tidewater Virginia with little farms.