Less clearly defined than the distinction between the free and the unfree was the distinction, which began to develop toward the middle of the century, and which was doubtless accentuated by the Cavalier migration from England during the Commonwealth period, between the small and the large landowner. The master of a great estate, enjoying a certain leisure and exercising a political and social influence denied to the average freeman, was set above the mass of the planters much as in England the titled nobility was set above the gentry. Of this small but important class, the first William Byrd was a notable example. Uniting in his ancestry the Cavalier and the Roundhead traditions, he inherited, before the age of twenty, 1800 acres of land and a recognized social position in the colony. Before his death he had built up an estate of 26,000 acres, which his son, in the next century, increased to 179,000 acres. He was at once planter, merchant, politician, and social leader. His caravans of from fifty to one hundred pack-horses penetrated regularly for many years to the Cherokee country beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. The furs which they brought back, together with the products of his plantation, were exported to England and elsewhere in payment for slaves, servants, or other commodities which were periodically landed at his private wharf to be used on his own estate or retailed from his general store to the small planters roundabout. Before he reached the age of thirty, Byrd became, and remained throughout his life, a leader in his own county and in the colony at large--a colonel of militia, a burgess in the assembly, and member of the governor's council.
From the middle of the century Virginia society thus began to take on the character which it retained throughout the colonial period. The colony was primarily a rural and an agricultural community, combining in curious fashion the democratic spirit of the frontier with the aristocratic temper of an older civilization. The unit of social organization was the plantation, which naturally tended to become, and in the case of the larger plantations often became in fact, relatively complete and self-sufficing--a little world in itself. The planter, surrounded by his family and his servants and cut off from intimate or frequent contact with his neighbors, producing, for the most part in abundance, all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, was master of his _entourage_ and but little dependent upon the outside world. Inevitably the conditions of plantation life developed the aristocratic spirit, the sense of mastery and independence which comes from directing inferiors in an isolated and self-sufficing enterprise.