kidnapping "spirits" and borne to sea before they knew their destination and their fate. Others were convicts deported because English judges wanted to get rid of them. Thousands were simply knocked down on the streets of English cities and dragged away by brutal bands which made a regular business of that nefarious traffic. To these bond servants were soon added Negro slaves, the first of whom were brought to Virginia by a Dutch vessel in 1619, but this new class did not become very numerous until the lapse of half a century. For fifty years, indentured white servants from England furnished most of the labor for the fields.
A special impetus was given to the economic life of Virginia by the discovery of a single staple that could be grown easily in large quantities and exchanged readily for cash and goods, namely, "the obnoxious weed," tobacco. Very early the settlers learned that little money was to be made by raising corn or making iron and glass; therefore, they turned almost as one man to the cultivation of tobacco, planting it even in the streets of Jamestown. Great fortunes, equivalent in a few instances to $75,000 a year in present currency, were taken from tobacco crops and the head of every adventurer seems to have been turned by the prospect of sudden riches. One who was on the ground in the early days exclaimed that "tobacco onely was the business and for ought that I could hear every man madded upon that and little thought or looked for anything else."
In addition to bringing quick prosperity, tobacco gave a decided bent to the course of social development in the South; it determined that the land, especially on the seaboard, should be tilled primarily, not by small freeholders such as settled in New England, but rather by servile labor directed by the lords of great estates, with all the implications, legal, moral, and intellectual, thereunto appertaining. So the tobacco plant unfolding its broad leaves in the moist air and hot sun of Virginia gave a direction to economy that was big with fate.
