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upon American institutions. Thousands of distressed 
Germans began to migrate as poor freemen or indentured 
servants to William Penn's Quaker democracy. And the increasing 
number of slaves in the plantation area diverted Scotch and 
Irish poor folk in the same direction. For fifty years the 
process continued, and the result was the more definite fixing 
of the slave system upon the South, the complete social control 
of the wealthier class and the gradual emergence of a unique 
leadership in American history. This planter element of the 
Old South which hardly amounted to more than twenty-five 
thousand souls in 1720, gave rise to more distinguished and 
long-lived families than any other five million people known 
to American history. And any student of public
life is amazed at the number of real statesmen which this 
privileged class gave the world in 1776 - leaders who,
like Washington, Mason and Jefferson, were always ready to free 
their scores of slaves and become relatively poor farmers for the 
good of their fellows.
The first American social order was thus a curious product of the 
arbitrary policy of the Earl of Clarendon, the democratic instincts 
of poor freemen and indentured servants and the long and bitter struggle
of five million Englishmen against twenty million Frenchmen trying to
dominate the continent of Europe.