Colonial Governments
93
Despite the hardships of the early years, Virginia became increasingly
attractive to Englishmen at home because of the opportunities it presented for private ownership of land. Corporate ownership gave way to
individual ownerships in the colony after 1618, when the London Company began paying dividends and increasing incentives by giving away
land to its stockholders, to colonists who had served the company, and
to individuals who would pay for an immigrant’s fare across the Atlantic. Even the poverty-stricken immigrants, who often came as indentured
servants, had a powerful incentive to come to Virginia. An indentured
servant was a person who signed an indenture, or contract, by which he
agreed to sell his services in the colony for three to five years as a way of
paying for the voyage from Europe. Having satisfied the terms of the
agreement, he was then free to strike out on his own and become an independent landowner himself.
During the years 1634–1704, about 1,500 to 2,000 indentured servants
arrived annually. Governor William Berkeley reported in 1671 that there
were some 13,000 in the colony, about thirteen percent of the population.
Many became great landholders and leaders in Virginia government.
Seven of the forty-four members of the colonial legislature in 1629 had
been indentured servants just five years earlier. To a great extent, the aristocracy of colonial Virginia was composed of self-made men. Thomas
Jefferson would later boast that Virginia had a ‘‘natural’’ aristocracy, which
he viewed as superior to an aristocracy based on hereditary entitlement
and special privilege. But Virginia denied no Englishman the opportunity
to acquire property—and with it a substantial degree of individual freedom. In sharp contrast to Great Britain, landowners constituted the large
majority of Virginia’s colonial population—eighty percent or more.
The first Negroes—about twenty in number—came to Virginia in 1619
aboard a Dutch warship. They had been captured in a raid in the West Indies and were traded to the Virginians in exchange for supplies. They
came not as slaves, however, but as indentured servants. By 1650, there
were only 300 Negroes in Virginia, and most of these were freemen who
had completed their periods of indentured service. One of the first to
gain his freedom was Anthony Johnson, who ironically also became the
first man in the colony to own slaves. It was not unusual, even as late as
1865, for free Negroes in Virginia to own Negro slaves, employing them