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Nor was there neglect of culture ideals. William
and Mary helped the Virginians establish the first 
college in the Old South. A similar school was founded 
in Charles Town. Some young men went to Oxford and 
Cambridge and afterwards studied law under famous English 
masters. Young women lingered in London in the hope of 
being seen at Court and learning how to dress and behave 
like true gentlefolk. All the Southern assemblies 
permitted lawyers to function in local and general courts 
and make money in devious ways - a practice which had been 
forbidden and frowned upon in the earlier days.
During these years the planters fixed themselves,
built handsome brick houses on river promontories, 
surrounded them with dozens of one-room cabins for Negroes 
and beautiful gardens and lawns for their family recreations.
White servants who did not move to the free frontier lands 
became share-tenants or slowly degenerated into "poor whites"
whose descendants became more helpless and more numerous as the 
emerging aristoracy expanded westward and southward. The "great house"
of a Lee in Virginia or a Middleton in Carolina was during the