ABSTRACT
American colonial historians have always been more concerned with the American than with the colonial. In tracing the evolution of this colonial consciousness, the point at which English settlements became controlled by native-born inhabitants appears to be of some significance. Bernard Bailyn has described the actual immigrants who dominated Virginia in the Rebellion era. Frequently the younger sons of merchant families, they came to the colony in mid-century just at the time when the appallingly high mortality rate for Englishmen in the colony was probably beginning its decline. The low opinion of Virginia at "home" and the motives behind most planters' migration seemed to militate against the majority of the immigrant elite taking the colony's institutions, honors, or anything besides their own estates too seriously. The general attitude toward colonial offices is revealed in the terms these men used to refer to them: "public business," "profitable employments," and "share of the government."
