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families, more than a hundred and fifty years. However, these
manor lords and plantation chiefs were not protocol aristocrats.
Although many of them were distant relatives of British
noblemen, there were hundred of less known gentlefolk whose success limited the pretentions
of the first families. There were many eminent members of legislatures
and leaders of county courts whose fathers (or even themselves) had been
indentured servants. The old manor ideal was greatly modified, and men
like the Wormeleys, the Masons and the Rhetts worked with their hands and associated freely,
if not on terms of equality, with small farmers and struggling frontiersmen. No man gives a 
better example of this than George Washington himself. There was then in all the old southern communities
a social order which had taken definite form before Negro slavery became important
 
 
                             V.                             
 
Once again utside influences operated to modify American institutions. The British Government
forbade - about 1665 - the selling of English unemployed as indentured servants. The poor were needed