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. 

Democratizing the Old Dominion

William G. Shade. Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861. Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 1996.

This history of the rise and fall of the Second Party System in Virginia is also a history of antebellum Virginia's dynamic market economy, and the different geographic, ethnic, sectarian, and class divisions (and coalitions) in the Commonwealth. Shade argues that while national issues were the initial motivating factor which led to the creation of new electoral coalitions which eventually became the Democratic and Whig parties, the Second Party System grew out of both a dynamic market economy and an increase in democratization which largely predated the 1851 state constitution which formally (and belatedly) expanded the electorate to nearly all white men.

The latter was a development which happened earlier in most states, but the delay did not indicate a passive political society. Virginia's first state constitution had been adopted in 1776, and from the beginning there was concern about suffrage restriction and the basis for representation. As the white population grew more diversified in occupation the old property basis for representation (slaves, of course, being the most valuable property in question) the continued dominance by eastern slave owners became more glaring. As the white population continued to move west of the Blue Ridge Mountains--a region where slavery was relatively rare and the population was under-represented in the legislature--calls for reform continued for decades. The eastern conservative elite held off reform as long as they could, but in 1829 they were forced to accede to a convention.

The result of that convention was a state constitution which, unlike so many other state constitutions of the same era, did not fully establish the white male Herrenvolk democracy that was a hallmark of the Jacksonian era soon to come. The conservatives were able to stave off all but the most superficial of compromises and maintain the imbalance of power in favor of the older, slave-holding East.

Yet, this was not the end of the story. Shade argues that the economy of Jacksonian and antebellum Virginia was much healthier and more dynamic than later "old South" mythologizing allowed for; the economy grew along with demands for increased responsiveness from elected officials, who responded in kind.

The two new parties both became well-established, with regular party apparatus such as newspapers, committees, networks of influential supporters, and politicians committed to advancing the policies and priorities of their respective party. Much divided Democrats from Whigs, but the issue of slavery wasn't a fault line for much of this period.

Neither was geography, for while each party had areas of strength both had a presence in their opponent's strongholds. And while the Democrats were the majority party statewide, their advantage was never overwhelming. The Whigs could only occasionally gain control of the state government but they could never be completely shut out of power, either.

It was the east versus west division which ultimately broke the system; the issue over secession versus Union turned the white-majority, non-slaveholding West against the East during the second and final vote on secession in April of 1861. The Second Two Party System died, and with its demise was lost an alternate story of Virginia during the antebellum era which later generations of state leaders aggressively sought to obscure. Shade's account was one of many which forced a reconsideration of the "declining Old Dominion" thesis which dominated for so long.

A House Dividing

John Majewski. A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000

In order to examine the role that slavery played in retarding the economic development in the antebellum South, Majewski has written a work of comparative history contrasting Albemarle County, Virginia, and Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Both counties were somewhat inland but directly connected to the Atlantic economy, and both were settled in the colonial era. Furthermore, Virginia and Pennsylvania shared certain characteristics that the latter wouldn't share with a Deep South state--they were both former colonies, and both had a trans-Allegheny hinterland which proved a challenge for early transportation improvements to surmount. In fact, Pennsylvania's efforts were expensive and not always successful in that endeavor, and Virginia's were complete failures.

Both states utilized "developmental corporations", with both private and public (State) financing, to build turnpikes and canals originally. However, issues with canals--which were much more expensive than turnpikes per mile--put a high strain on local financing. Getting statewide political support for transportation initiatives which would favor one county, town, or region over another proved very difficult. In the end, Pennsylvania was able to get the Mainline Canal (which also included rail sections) built largely because of the critical mass of interested investment capital in Philadelphia and also Pittsburgh.

Virginia, on the other hand, did not have any cities anywhere near as big in absolute or relative (to the rest of the state population) as Philadelphia. While Majewski cites geography as part of the reason, he argues that slavery was the root cause. The plantation economy encouraged low population density growth, and the minimal processing needs of the tobacco industry discouraged the development of central places and towns. Rather than a Boston or a Philadelphia or a New York City--or even a Charleston, SC or New Orleans--Virgina had several relatively small urban centers along the fall line from north to south, none of which had as diverse a manufacturing economy as Philadelphia did.

Every step of the way, Virginia's structural weaknesses compounded the issue, as a lack of development led to lagging growth, which could not fund further needed development, and so on. Majewski makes a strong case but further examination into the developmental possibilities and limitations of slave labor would strengthen his argument.

The Rhetoric of Conservatism

Bruce D. Dickson. The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1982.

The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 was the culmination of decades of reformist agitation against the 1776 Constitution. By 1829, the largely Eastern conservative elite recognized that further resistance would only stoke ever-more radical backlash, and the reformers of the West got their opportunity.

That convention would largely disappoint those reformers, as conservatives and their moderate allies were able to defeat all but the most modest of reforms, and prevent the adoption of universal white male suffrage or white population apportionment. The first three chapters of this book detail how that happened.

The final three chapters, on the other hand, analyze the particular qualities of Virginia conservatism at this period, and the origins and nature of conservative rhetoric and its underlying ideology. At the time, Virginia conservatism was deeply anti-democratic, but not yet fully defined by the "positive good" defense of slavery which was just beginning to take shape in the 1830's. Although often buttressed by references to classic conservative arguments by Edmund Burke and others, their conservatism was heavily grounded in concrete experience and a suspicion of abstraction and idealism. Government should be predicated on what had worked and what already existed rather than idealized notions of what might improve society. And liberal notions of individual liberation were a threat to social harmony and mutual interests.

Slavery would eventually take a more prominent role in this conception, by way of concerns for the sanctity of property as a basis for political stability. At the same time, the increased focus on slavery as the basis for Virginia society led to a more racially-defined conception of citizenship; so that in the 1850's Virginia conservatives would end up ratifying the same universal white male suffrage they had resisted so successfully two decades prior.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs

Kathleen M. Brown. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996; published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA.

The role of racism and slavery in establishing the social order in colonial Virginia was already well understood at the time Brown published this provocative study, which argued that gender and race were actually "intertwined components of the social order" (1) which reinforced and informed each other in the construction of the white, patriarchal gentry class which came to dominate society.

Brown anchors her analysis in the English experience in Ireland and the first encounters with American Indians. Beginning with those early interactions with non-English "others", a dichotomy began to develop contrasting English "masculinity" with the less virile, less assertive, less powerful "femininity" of conquered peoples, whether the Catholic Irish or the "pagan" Indians. Gender, then, became the conceptual basis of legitimacy in that maleness was presumed to have a natural mastery over femaleness.

The ways in which this early formulation informed and shaped the development of colonial Virginia as the institution of slavery developed was complex; Brown traces this process through the seventeenth century, particularly focusing on Bacon's Rebellion which she regards as pivotal for many reasons, including because it hastened the identification between full citizenship and the ability and right to bear arms in defense of rights. This right would soon become restricted to white men; one of many steps along the path in which black men would be stripped of the prerogatives of maleness even as black women were denied the status of womanhood which was increasingly restricted to white women--and even then, not all white women. There was a class component at play, but in the end race and gender would triumph over any possibility of a repeat of the Bacon's Rebellion alliance between white indentured servants and African slaves.

The society which emerged would be ruled over by a confident, united gentry class which was at the peak of its powers between 1700 and 1750. It was a gentry in which marriage served to maintain ties and class unity at the top, as well as uniting family fortunes. Marriage was monitored and negotiated by parents and society in order to protect family positions in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, and gender roles were closely guarded in order to protect the interests of the planter class.

Dominion of Memories

Susan Dunn. Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, & the Decline of Virginia. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

In this short and readable volume, Dunn recounts the sad, and largely self-inflicted, decline of Virginia in the first several decades of American independence. This decline was multifaceted--economic, political, cultural, and demographic.

The largest and most powerful of the thirteen colonies, Virginia and Virginians naturally assumed a leadership role early in the American Revolution, and it would not cede that status for several decades. One Virginian would lead the Continental Army, and another would write the Declaration of Independence. Later, yet another Virginian would lead the effort to craft a new Constitution, and George Washington would return to public service as the first President of the Country once that Constitution was ratified--thus beginning a near-lock on the leadership of the new country. Most students of American history are familiar with the "Virginia dynasty" which ruled the White House for 32 of the first 36 years under the new government--even as yet another Virginian was defining the previously-vague status of the Supreme Court.

That is all fairly well-known to any casual student of American history. What is somewhat less well-known, and much less edifying, is the subsequent decline of Virginia in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The land, particularly in the older eastern regions, became depleted from over-farming, excessive tobacco cultivation, and inefficient agricultural practices. The relative population declined as other states grew in population faster, and as more and more Virginians fled their unproductive farmlands for opportunities to the west and to the south. The economy faltered as the continued reliance on agriculture bypassed the growing commercial and industrial possibilities of the dynamic economy.

Virginia's political leadership exacerbated the situation at nearly every turn; choosing to resist making the sort of structural changes which would have encouraged entrepreneurial development, and resisting any active governmental support for infrastructure or education. Ultimately, a limited public-private system for supporting internal improvements was adopted, but it was far too meager and suspect to political interests to be effective. And the resistance to funding public schools kept Virginians far less educated and literate than the citizens of the more dynamic, growing northern and western states which were supplanting her once-dominant role in national affairs.

The subtext to much of this reactionary stubbornness was slavery, the defense of which (in the opinion of the eastern slave-holding elite, who held disproportionate power under the undemocratic state Constitution) merited constant sacrifice of state expenditures on measures which might facilitate the rise of a capable middle class which could challenge for suffrage and more. Not to mention an increasingly state's rights position regarding the Federal government.

Much of this backwardness was inflicted on the state and its people by the second generation of Virginia politicians; men like John Randolf of Roanoke and Abel Upshur. However, Dunn is more interested in how the ultimately self-defeating justifications of these reactionary theorists for trapping Virginia in a static deference to an imagined idyllic past were grounded in some--not all, but some--of the writings and arguments of two of the Old Dominion's finest Founders; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Jefferson and Madison had their differences, even though they were allies for most of their public careers, but they shared a tendency to vacillate between being optimistic, forward-thinking nationalists, and pessimistic, backward-looking Virginia provincialism. The role the two men played in creating the Union that later states-rights politicians would try to destroy was often betrayed by their failure to reckon with the damaged and corrosive effects that their flirtations with nullification, limited government, and the protection of slavery would work on their beloved native state.
Dunn finishes the book with an epilogue bringing the story into contemporary times, arguing that it is not too late for Virginia--and America--to choose between the two conflicting visions Jefferson and Madison embodied and articulated.

The Internal Enemy

Alan Taylor. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Alan Taylor's last two books--The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, and The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, were both excellent examples of borderland history. Given that this book is set in Virginia, at the heart of the early American Republic, it may seem that his latest work has moved on from that emphasis. But the "Virginia" of the title is really, in many ways, the Chesapeake watershed, and the larger time frame of the title actually frames the much more condensed period when the core of this books' action takes place--the War of 1812. Taylor recounts the history of the British military policy of accepting--and eventually seeking out and encouraging--runaway slaves as military strategy. First tried on a limited scale towards the end of the Revolution, the policy was revived during the War of 1812. The policy had enormous repercussions both for enslaved people and for white Virginians far out of proportion to the actual number of slaves who did manage to escape. This is, in other words, a different kind of "borderland history"--one where the frontier was waterborne, but also where the zone of interaction involved not only competing sovereign entities but also conflicting notions of freedom.

Taylor makes clear the extent to which slaves in the Chesapeake region had intimate knowledge of the regional terrain, as well as nocturnal freedom of movement within their larger neighborhoods that their white owners and neighbors neither fully understood nor controlled. Slaves, forced to work under supervision and duress during the daytime, took advantage of nighttime darkness to carry out visits to neighboring farms and plantations to maintain family ties and other relationships, as well as to carry out social and religious functions and obtain extra foodstuffs and other supplies through theft, pilfering, and other covert means.

Because of this--as well as the fact that many slaves were employed as fishermen, pilots, and sailors--runaway slaves had real military value to the British forces patrolling the Chesapeake. The British sought not only to maintain a blockade, but also to engage in constant raiding in order to acquire needed supplies as well as demoralize and punish Virginian Republicans. Regarding the latter--the British commanders were able to obtain detailed information about the political loyalties of individual Americans, and therefore could choose to punish Republicans for presumably supporting the war effort while sparing Federalists who presumably opposed it. This divide-and-conquer strategy sought to pacify the local population, many of whom were distressed at the failure of the Federal government to provide protection, and thereby undermine American resolve.

This strategy heavily relied on the help of runaway slaves for information, scouting, and providing guidance through tangled waterways and hidden pathways through the countryside. But while the British initially only wanted a handful of individual slaves, particularly pilots, the slaves themselves had other ideas. Family ties were very important to slaves, and given that the declining economy in Virginia had hastened the breakup of slave families through sales of individual slaves further west and south, many slaves realized that if they did not rescue their family members right away, their families could be split apart for good.

So the impetus to escape as family units rather than as individuals was not only strong, it was urgent. The British eventually made a positive of the situation, embracing the idea that all runaways became free once they reached the 'sovereign territory' of a British warship as both a moral good and excellent propaganda to use against the hypocritical Americans, who claimed to fight for freedom while doing everything in their power to keep their slaves from achieving freedom for themselves.

Eventually, the British commanders in the area would create a special corps of marines from these runaways, a military unit which fought with great effectiveness and contributed greatly to British success in the region--culminating in the sack of Washington, DC.

The larger story Taylor tells is how these events fueled the pathological fears of slave revolts which were a constant subtext to Virginia's slave-holding culture, and which eventually doomed emancipation in the state and led more and more white Virginians to silence and abandon earlier qualms about the institution in favor of a more hardline pro-slavery stance, or at least a cynical accommodation to its continued necessity. Only a few thousand slaves managed to escape to the British during this time, but the psychological blow to white Virginians sense of security--as well as to the comforting myths of slaves as docile, content, and weak--was immense.

Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism

Douglas R. Egerton. Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

This is the only full-length biography of 19th century Virginia politician Charles Fenton Mercer. Born in 1778, Mercer was a younger generation Federalist-turned-Whig who represented Loudoun County in the House of Delegates and then a northern Virginia district including Loudoun and surrounding counties in the US House of Representatives from 1817 through 1839. He was an important political figure at the time, and Egerton notes that he had an impressive legislative record given that he spent most of his career as a member of a minority party who was usually at odds with majority sentiment in his home state.

Egerton argues that Mercer was an exemplary Whig, perhaps truer to the core principles of the party than more famous figures such as Henry Clay. This was partly due to his ideological and political integrity, and partly to the fact that he represented a "safe" district and could afford to go against the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian majority. His understanding of what would become the American System was nuanced and refined--he saw internal improvements, central banking, a protective tariff, public education, and the colonization of free African-Americans not as disparate economic or reform agendas but as complementary aspects of a comprehensive system.

This system, Egerton argues, was fundamentally conservative. He argues that the modern reinterpretation of the Whigs as optimistic proto-liberals is deeply flawed, and he uses this study of the life and career of this deeply pessimistic, even fatalistic, man to make that argument. Largely, he succeeds--Mercer's statist conservatism accommodated democracy and the "common man" in rhetoric but not in substance. Egerton notes that Mercer's interest in education was as a form of social control of the lower classes--Mercer sensed the social changes that industrialization would bring, and he feared them. Likewise, African colonization of free blacks was not in any way an exercise in nascent abolitionism (no matter what Mercer's often vicious Southern critics often charged), but rather an attempt to rather crudely purge the black "lower class" from American society.

Mercer's political career is noteworthy in Virginia history for his role in the creation of the Fund for Internal Improvements and the Board of Public Works, and nationally for the creation of the American Colonization Society. He fought many losing battles, and seemingly died feeling himself a failure, but in this book Egerton largely succeeds in extracting a larger story about the way in which American conservatism survived the collapse of Federalism and adjusted to the democratic realities of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Barbarous Years

Bernard Bailyn. The Barbarous Years. The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

This is a very readable synthetic history of the early colonial period in what became the United States of America. Bailyn is building on his work for the earlier "Voyagers to the West" which also examined the process of "peopling" British North America, but he also has another goal, which is implicit in the title. He wants to strip away some of the bucolic romance that later generations imposed on their memories of the first few decades of settlement along the Atlantic coast. This was, Bailyn wants the reader to understand, a bloody and violent period of conflict not only between settlers and American Indians--he refers to a "race war"--but also between different groups of settlers, between and within colonies, and between classes and races within colonies.

In order to make his case, Bailyn first begins with a chapter on "The Americans", which is not a general consideration of American Indians but rather the specific tribes living in the area under consideration--the Cheseapeake to New England. (The histories of Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and Georgia are outside the parameters of this study). Respectful without succumbing to idealization, this chapter considers both the general characteristics of American Indian culture in the region as well as the specific circumstances of the time and place. It is a tricky thing to simultaneously consider Indian cultural values of balance and reciprocity while at the same time acknowledging the particular circumstances of history and contingency, and Bailyn manages to do both nicely.

The bulk of the book is taken up by the middle section, which considers the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, New Amsterdam/New Sweden/New York, and New England (the different colonies within New England do receive particular treatment) in light of the circumstances of their development and the origins of the European settlers (it is worth noting that African-American slavery, while not unknown in this period, was a much smaller institution than it would be later in the colonial period). Bailyn has clearly done his research and his command of sources covering both sides of the Atlantic, and a willingness to dig into the details of Dutch politics, Puritan theological disputes, and numerous other conflicts on both sides of the Atlantic is impressive.

I'm not so sure the book adds up to much more than a survey, however. The theme of constant strife and "barbarism" gets stretched pretty far, as it's hard to consider tension in New York between the Dutch majority and the English ruling minority on the same level as armed conflict between Maryland and Virginia militias, or for that matter as being anywhere equivalent to the racial warfare between European settlers and Indian natives. And while the final section/chapter, "The British Americans" is an excellent summary of the changes wrought by and in the first handful of generations of colonists in British, at the end Bailyn somewhat abruptly shifts to an Atlantic point of view. This is not entirely unwarranted--as noted, Bailyn recognizes that in order to understand the earlier colonists we must consider where they came from--but other than providing a neat symmetry with the first section (even as the Eastern Indians were tied to a larger Native world to the south and west, the colonists were tied to a larger world across the Atlantic and in the Caribbean), the shift to this theme in a book which explicitly seeks to deal with the "barbarism" within that colonial world seems either tacked-on or underdeveloped.

However, this book is an excellent introduction to a wealth of research and literature on a era which is too often overlooked or considered piecemeal and out of context.