man of God. In New England, of course, no such indignity could be heaped on the head of the preacher. There he had the choice of the ladies and he could play the rôle of a pope to powerful merchants; but in Massachusetts during the later colonial decades his power so waned that he did not venture to interfere with the serious business of whaling, trafficking, and slaving.
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Next in order under the dominant families were the farmers—yeomen, as they were called in England—owners of small freeholds as distinguished from the gentry of large estates. They formed the bulk of the population in New England and the middle colonies and they peopled the back country of the Southern provinces. In the North they furnished most of the versatile Yankees, jacks of all trades, who sailed ships and carried notions to the four quarters of the world, when they were not working with their wives and children in the field, at the loom, or in the dye house. On the Southern seaboard, as we have seen, they founded many of the landed families who in later days boasted of Cavalier ancestors. Toward the frontier, especially from Virginia downward, the yeomanry was recruited to some extent from the ranks of the more fortunate indentured servants who found it possible to rise in a land of such opportunities when their term of service was over.
However diverse its origin, this large body of freeholders was composed of industrious and ambitious men and women. They were often illiterate, often housed in wretched huts, and often spurned by the upper classes but all through the colonial years they continued to fight their way upward from poverty in a determined quest for comfort, security, and influence. Aided by abundant natural resources, they rose higher and faster in the New World than in the Old, by that process preparing the way for the revolution in America.
