George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

[189] beginning, had been modified in many counties by the

Chap XIV.}

custom of gavelkind.¹ Virginia could not imitate those great legislative reforms of the Long Parliament, because her happier soil was free from the burdens of forest laws and military tenures, courts of wards, and starchambers. The tendency towards a multiplication of religious sects began already to be perceptible, under the freedom of a popular government. In its care for a regular succession of representative assemblies, Virginia exceeded the jealous friends of republican liberty in England; there triennial parliaments had been established by law; the Virginians, imitating the terms of the bill, claimed the privilege of a biennial election of their legislators.² In addition to the strength derived from the natural character of the emigrants, from the absence of feudal institutions, from the entire absence of the excessive refinements of legal erudition, and from the constitution, legislation, and elective franchises of the colonists, a new and undefined increase was gained by the universal prevalence of the spirit of personal independence. An instinctive aversion to too much government was always a trait of southern character, expressed in the solitary manner of settling the country, in the absence of municipal governments, in the indisposition of the scattered inhabitants to engage in commerce, to collect in towns, or to associate in townships under corporate powers. As a consequence, there was little commercial industry; and, on the soil of Virginia, there were no vast accumulations of commercial wealth. The exchanges were made almost entirely—