THEWHITEINVADERS
style modeled on the patricians in the Netherlands; the common sailors
and soldiers, with nine guilders a month, led spartan lives. Among the
burghers, there was a small class of relatively wealthy traders and farmers,
some of whose daughters married senior officials.At the other extreme was
a growing class of poor Whites: landless people who were unwilling or
unable to do manual labor because of the presence of slaves.They included
a few army and navy deserters. In between were small traders and inn-
keepers in the town, farmers hard put to make ends meet, and farm over-
seers known as knechts.
As the population increased during the eighteenth century, the burghers
became increasingly stratified. At the end of the century, the town had
about 1,100 houses and there were a number of large burgher estates. In
18°3, a German employed by the Batavian (Dutch) Republic described the
home of Jacob Laubscher, who lived in the area of mixed arable and
pastoral farming about eighty miles north of the peninsula:
He maintained a sort of patriarchal household, of which some idea may be
formed by stating that the stock of the farm consisted of eighty horses, six
hundred and ninety head of horned cattle, two thousand four hundred and