Tobacco Culture

 T.H. Breen. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985

Breen's classic work on the 'mental world of the great Tidewater planters the mid-eighteenth century Virginia" (p. xi) challenged the dichotomy which had evolved regarding the motivations of the Revolutionary elite. In previous generations, patriotic hagiographies about 'the Founders' were replaced by Progressive interpretations grounded in economics--that generation of historians looked at the massive personal debts that these planters had assumed, and rather cynically concluded that a desire to escape that debt lay at the very heart of their eventual drive for independence. Later historians would reject that argument, finding instead a clear-eyed commitment to Republican ideology. 

Breen argued that both sides had seen part of the mental world of the planters but missed the actual dynamic. And the reason they missed it, in his telling, was because they paid no mind to the lived realities these men experienced. They really were obsessed with debt, but what mattered less was a balance sheet-centered credits-and-debits reckoning, than their perception of debt and the ramifications of personal debt to their sense of self and their place in colonial Virginia society. At the same time, their adaptation of country-Whig ideology was not an abstract intellectual exercise; rather, their experience with the economics of being tobacco planters led them to an interpretive framework within which the extreme rhetoric of country Whig polemics (which was largely marginalized in the British society they were formulated in) resonated and made sense.

In threading this conceptual needle, Breen not only found a new way to understand the process that brought much of Virginia's planter elite to revolutionary activism; he also found a way to look at the relation between work and daily life to ideology and intellectual life. Breen notes that while historians of past generations presented the Virginia gentry as enlightened philosopher-Republicans, they were in fact agriculturalists who spent most of their waking hours attending to--and thinking about--their yearly tobacco crops. The work of being a planter was all-consuming, and scholars who ignore this have missed the context in which their political and ideological thinking occured.

Breen concludes that, while colonial discourse was moving into conflict with the British government even before the French and Indian War exacerbated previously untested areas of tension, it wasn't until 1772 that the Tidewater planters were fully brought to the conceptual point of overt conflict not just with the merchants they were indebted to, but Parliament and eventually the Crown. This shift in mentality was not a mindlessly materialist process, but the erosion of the traditional tobacco culture led the planters to uncomfortable conclusions which made it easier to consider breaking with the past. 

Old Dominion, New Commonwealth

 Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., William G. Shade. Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007.

For the 400th anniversary of the founding of Virginia, the University of Virginia Press brought forward a new narrative history of the Commonwealth for general readers as well as students. Written in collaboration by four historians (Heinemann assumed primary editorial duties as well, with assistance from Kolp), each of whom took a different chronological era, the book does a solid job of updating standard narrative accounts of Virginia social and political history, and was the first such general history of the state published since the 1970's.

The book is solidly written and the work and perspective of the four different historians rarely if ever seem in disagreement. Overall, the collective authorship focused on concisely telling a straightforward narrative centered on a handful of key themes, such as the ongoing conflict between progressive economic reforms and the deeply-rooted political and fiscal conservatism that has defined Virginia politics for generations. A work of synthesis, this volume is not only an excellent introduction for a reader completely unversed in Virginia's history, but would also be a useful corrective for older natives of the state who learned earlier narratives either through popular understanding, grade-school social studies, or outdated popular histories. All four authors at least make some effort to bring (then-) new scholarship into their accounts. 

But while solid and useful, the volume can also be a little unsatisfying. Partly that may be conceptual--the book is not merely a political history, but politics are centered rather firmly in this account, and while a case could be made that this is appropriate as the polity of Virginia is the sole parameter of this study, the authors could have been more explicit about this point of view. 

However, this shortcoming may ultimately be an endemic feature of textbooks. The broader the scope, the thinner the analysis. The book's shortcomings mostly come into focus when the authors move away from a narrow focus on politics and economic development; consideration of issues of race in particular, while well-intentioned and generally sound, can almost seem perfunctory and contextually removed from the main thrust of the narrative. There is no way to tell even the political history of Virginia without reference to race, but the occasional attempts to broaden the story only highlight how little space the book allows for aspects of social and cultural life outside the narrow field of politics. And given that the book still comes in at well over 300 pages, that may be unavoidable. Textbooks which try to cover a wide range of historiography as well as the subject matter can end up spreading themselves too thin.

All in all, this is a very readable introduction to the subject, and can form a good temporal framework for further reading.