By 1700, we should note, slaves comprised half the population of thesouthern portion of the Carolina colony, an imbalance that widened to 72percent by 1740. Beginning in 1714, a series of laws required that for everysix slaves an owner purchased, he had to acquire one white servant.Lamenting that the “white population do not proportionally multiply,”South Carolina lawmakers had one more reason to wish that a corps ofLeet-men and women had actually been formed. Encouraged to marry andmultiply, tied to the land, they might have provided a racial and class barrierbetween the slaves and the landed elites.13