them. There was little thought of the clothing into which the fleeces could have been converted. The head covering of the Virginians was made of fur which had been sent to England from the Colony for working up, and then returned in the shape of hats to be sold or bartered at a great advance on the cost of the raw material. A large quantity of the hides which were a part of the annual production of every plantation were thrown on the ground to rot, or were used to protect goods from the rain dropping through the leaky roofs. Some of the hides, it is true, were manufactured into shoes, but the process was so carelessly and rudely performed that the planters bought English shoes in preference whenever the opportunity presented itself. Although the forests of Virginia furnished varieties of woods which in delicacy of grain and durability of fibre were peculiarly suitable for the manufacture of every kind of woodenware, nevertheless the inhabitants of the Colony persisted in obtaining from England their chairs, tables, stools, chests, boxes, cart-wheels, and even their bowls and birchen brooms.[1]
Regarded from a general point of view, these criticisms of Beverley were not unjust. Virginia in the seventeenth century was not, in the modern sense of the word, a seat of manufactures, but it would be grossly inaccurate to say that manufactures in the ruder forms were totally unknown. Such a condition of affairs would have been wholly inconsistent with the peculiar spirit of the plantation system, that system which tended to create in each estate its own source of supplies as far as a crude skill could create it. English manufactures began in the home; there were few dwelling-houses in the rural parts of England in the seventeenth century which did not con-
- ↑ Beverley’s History of Virginia, p. 239.
