#2. Revolution, Constitution & New Nation, 1750-1824

This page looks at the best of scholarly books on the American Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation relating to Virginia. In a general way, the years 1750 to 1824 are after the colonial period and before the 19th century Antebellum period.

Larger sepia-font titles are found in Virginia survey histories used in university graduate history courses:

Virginius Dabney, Virginia: The New Dominion, a history from 1607 to the present (1983)
Peter Wallenstein, Cradle of America: A history of Virginia (2008)
Ronald L. Heinemann, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A history of Virginia, 1607-2007 (2008)
Brent Tarter, Virginians and their histories (available 2020)

Smaller black-font titles are taken from reviews by scholarly journals, both geographically focused and history-period focused:

We make Virginia history accessible: top reviews read, best links to buy. The Virginia Historian may earn a small commission for a link to any Amazon products or services from this website. Your purchase of a book via TVH contributes on average $1.30 to help support this platform.

Political and Economic Virginia, 1750-1824

Virginia’s political history emphasizes decision making for the common life of the community, including legislative, executive, judicial, economic and military elements.

This section is under construction. For reviews currently available, see the webpage for this topic, or Survey Histories of Virginia for general, political and ethnic histories.

Revolution and Constitution Policy, 1750-1789

Founding of a Nation

The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763-1776 was originally written by Merrill Jensen in 1968 and its latest edition is reprinted in 2004. By Jensen’s account, it was as John Adams said, the Revolution was in the minds of the people in the fifteen years 1760-1775 before the first shot was fired. Here we have a description of how politics and economy worked, and how the Americans saw them working in their internal colonial life. Although he admits the Americans had a common political tradition of constitutional theory, Jensen describes an organizational triumph, a political process extending through fourteen distinct faction-ridden political societies including Britain’s. The story is a varied and contradictory account of imperial function and dysfunction. It resulted in Britain being obligated to accept the American’s decision for their independence, out of a vision for a “bright future” as the aspirationally named “United States” of America. Learn more to buy “Founding of a Nation” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Revolution in Virginia

The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 was written by John E. Selby in 1988. He emphasizes the political, administrative and military developments in Virginia. Major revolutionary ideas were pronounced and gained currency while the social order was disturbed perhaps least of all among the new states. The oldest, largest and most populous British North American colony was riven by factional rivalries and personal jealousies when it came to mounting a defense against Britain. The autonomous County courts made for a kind of a federal system of governance in Virginia, even as intellectually in revolutionary republican terms there comes to be a written Constitution, a Declaration of Rights, disestablishment of the Anglican Church, and abolition of entail estates. While Virginia was a mainstay for both northern and southern campaigns, the military events in Virginia are well described, both major and minor, at land and at sea, in the Tidewater and on the sometimes savage frontier. Learn more to buy “Revolution in Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Revolutionary America

Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History was written by Francis D. Cogliano in 2000 and reprinted in 2009. His narrative portraying the political and ideological struggle of the American Revolution spans the period from the colonial societies at the conclusion of the Seven Year’s War, through the Revolution, creation of the Constitution, Federalist era, to the successful defense of the new republic in the War of 1812. It brings to light much of the recent historiography interpreting the American Revolution, and places diplomatic developments with Britain in context with challenges from the French and Spanish of the period as well. The factional infighting among the Americans were hardly a consensus, and divergent elements are explored including a secession movement and the entrenchment of slavery. Though the new regime was manifestly primarily of white males, two final chapters focus on the participation of and the accommodation to women and blacks, slave and free. Learn more to buy “Revolutionary America” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Articles of Confederation

The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774-1781 was written by Merrill Jensen in 1940, and reprinted in 1959. It is currently available in paperback, still cited in 21^st century Virginia histories. Jensen looks at the revolutionary movement in the individual colonies amidst their social and economic forces to explain the struggle between those who enjoyed political privilege under British colonialism and those who did not. The concrete issues faced in American politics in 1776 included attempts to write democratic and republican ideals of government into the newly formed state governments. The conservatives put forth the Dickenson Draft in 1776, but it was challenged and revised in the Continental Congresses until the formal adoption of the Articles in 1781. The conflict among the states with western claims and the “landless” states is described as an all-important element of the Articles settlement, which was adopted in the subsequent Constitution. Learn more to buy “Articles of Confederation” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Creation of the American Republic

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 was written by Gordon S. Wood in 1969, reprinted in 1998. Wood begins with his intellectual history describing how the American conception of politics removed from a classical and medieval world of discussion into a recognizably modern democratic centered one within republican frames. Wood spends the first sixty percent of his book laying the groundwork, accounting for the early American state and federal constitutions, how they were created and the development of their political ideology. It was both dynamic in each moment of evolution and cumulative in character, one of the “great utopian moments” of self-sacrifice in American history. In the last half, Wood shows the emergence of the new Constitution, justified by a new political theory developed during the ratification debates. While the Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic excesses of the states, the new national government cut through the state governments to allow itself to rest on a more democratic foundation with wider popular participation than some of the state governments. Learn more to buy “Creation of the American Republic” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.

Remembering the Revolution

Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War was edited in 2013 by Michael A. McDonnell and a team of international scholars of the Revolution and literary scholars. Seventeen essays in three sections trace the variable memory of the Revolution across time and space of American history. As a tool of nation building, the “Revolutionary Generation” developed a consensus recollection of what to remember and what to forget to galvanize the citizenry and solidify the nation. While keenly aware they were not measuring up, the “transmitting memories” of the antebellum generation justified the second war with England at the War of 1812, the industrialization of the North, the slave economy in the South and the westward territorial expansion for the “Empire of Liberty”.

American Scripture

American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence was written by Pauline Maier in 1998. Nearly ninety local pronouncements of independence are made in counties and towns, among interest groups and legislatures including Virginia’s prior to the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress. Initially, the first sentence establishing a new constitutional regime was the emphasis, it became necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that had connected them with another. Only later did a preoccupation follow with the philosophical statement that “all men are created equal”. The Declaration was not a “solo performance” by Jefferson, but an expression of widely held political views including the indictments against King George. The Congress rewrote or cut fully one-forth of Jefferson’s draft submission. Learn more to buy “American Scripture” here for your bookshelf.

Inventing America

Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was written by Garry Wills in 1978 and reprinted in 2002. Wills posits three distinct “Declarations”. One is the Lockean contract of post mid-19^th century and modern interpretations, another was the political document of the Continental Congress to further the war effort, and the third was Jefferson’s draft. Wills argues that the most important intellectual influences on Jefferson’s draft Declaration came from the Scottish enlightenment and an emphasis on the sociability of man. Sections of the book are dedicated to the scientific paper of nature and society, the moral paper of discriminating ethical sense, and the sentimental paper stressing feelings over reason. Thus with David Hume, Adam Smith and especially Francis Hutcheson, Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” was not vague or private, but measurable public safety and prosperity which is the test of every government. Learn more to buy “Inventing America” here for your bookshelf.

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: Portrait of an American Revolutionary was written by J. Kent McGaughy in 2004. Lee is presented as a conservative, pragmatic agent in many of the events of the American Revolution and early American republic. Opposing the interests of well-connected planters surrounding Speaker Randolph, Lee sought an independent path of personal financial independence in Northern Neck tobacco cultivation and western lands investments. Lee’s radical political alliances among New Englanders against the Pennsylvanians and among Virginia’s Piedmont farmers against the Tidewater planters often hinged on securing legislative assistance against his economic competitors. Learn more to buy “Richard Henry Lee of Virginia” here for your bookshelf.

Tory Insurgents

Tory Insurgents: The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays was written by Robert M. Calhoon and Timothy M. Barnes in 2010. Eleven of these sixteen articles were published earlier in a 1989 volume, but here there are updates on modern historiography since then and re-evaluations of the work in light of it. The “principled” Tory based his opposition on the legal precedents of British empire. The “accommodationist” Tory sought to compromise with Parliament and the King. The “doctrinaire” Tory objected to any rebellion or resistance to British rule at all. These included wealthy merchants, many larger planters, Anglican clergymen, critics of land speculation, and ethnic minorities. Calhoon and Barnes divide the essays into three sections based on Tory ideas, Tory practice among printers, letter writers and soldiers-in-arms, and Tory practice in Patriot-controlled areas and in the post-Revolutionary era. Learn more to buy “Tory Insurgents” here for your bookshelf.

Loyalism in Revolutionary Virginia

Loyalism in Revolutionary Virginia: The Norfolk Area and the Eastern Shore was written by Adele Hast in 1982. Here she makes a case study of the two centers of Tory loyalism, Norfolk borough, the economic center of the colony, and the two Virginia counties of the Eastern Shore, mad up of small landowners and tenant farmers. Norfolk’s population was early on divided between native-born Virginians and un-Americanized Scottish merchants who made up the bulk of those Tories emigrating out of Virginia during the Revolution. The Eastern Shore Tories both engaged less in overtly hostile actions, but also shared Whig ideology. Unlike other Southern colonies, the dissident Tories in Virginia were given mild treatment, perhaps because they were so many in these locales. Often the convicting authorities joined in petitions for Governor leniency. Learn more to buy “Loyalism in Revolutionary Virginia” here for your bookshelf.

Dunmore’s New World

James Corbett David wrote Dunmore’s New World: The Extraordinary Life of a Royal Governor in Revolutionary America, with Jacobites, Counterfeiters, Land Schemes, Shipwrecks, Scalping, Indian Politics, Runaway Slaves, and Two Illegal Royal Weddings in 2013. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. This is a study of a ambitious Scottish peer who sought advancement in his the mid 1700s government posts of British New York, Virginia and Bahamas. His most famous mark in history is “Dunmore’s War” against the Shawnee on Virginia’s northwestern frontier, followed by his proclamation as the last royal Virginia governor freeing slaves at the onset of the Revolution if they would but join the Loyalist cause. His efforts were of mixed motives and questionable outcomes. Dunmore repeatedly asserted expansive policies that extended further than he was authorized amidst inconsistent royal restrictions, conflicting and contradictory native treaties. Overlapping British colonial claims from Pennsylvania were no barrier to his unrelenting determination to advance land-hungry ambitions of the Virginian gentry and himself beyond the Ohio River. Learn more to buy “Dunmore’s New World” at Amazon.com.

Accommodating Revolutions

Albert H. Tillson, Jr. wrote Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia’s Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760–1810 in 2010. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press and online new and used. Tillson writes predominantly a social history, extending the understanding of the Northern Neck gentry residing between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. He incorporates elements of the political, economic and religious. Evangelicals at first challenged the social order in the Spirit of 1776. Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists challenged race privilege by including slaves in their religious communities. While they eventually made peace with the landed gentry and their slavery, class resentment continued to fester among both tenants and overseers long after the Revolution ended, and plantation slaves sometimes resisted with sabotage and threats of insurrection. The interloping Scottish traders who encumbered the gentry with debilitating debt provoked an intellectual tradition of non-capitalist Southern economy famously elaborated by George Fitzhugh. The pre-revolutionary landed gentry maintained their political and cultural control of the peninsula. By and large, the earlier social order had been founded more on accommodation and consensus than coercion and conflict, resulting in a society marked by greater continuity from 1760 to 1810 than experienced elsewhere in Pennsylvania, for instance. Learn more to buy “Accommodating Revolutions” at Amazon.com.

New Nation Policy, 1789-1824

Creation of the American Republic

Forging of the Union

The Forging of the Union, 1781-1789 was written by Richard B. Morris in 1987. He emphasizes the transitional nature of the period, noting changes in Congress before and after the Articles, constitutional changes in the states, social reform, economic depression, and the political reform that became the Constitution with Amendments. While the Articles were created by the states, the Constitution was created by the national people “collectively”, though established in a society far from egalitarian, it was supported by many of the “forgotten people” such as the urban working classes and disenfranchised frontiersmen. The Constitution was not an abandonment of the principles of 1776, but a return to them with an emphasis on nationalism over states to broaden participatory democracy. Learn more to buy “Forging of the Union” here for your bookshelf.

Ratification: The People Debate

Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 was written by Pauline Maier in 2011. She recreates the debates over the Constitution not only in Convention but out-of-doors before and during conventions by pamphleteers, delegates to state conventions and letters to newspaper editors. Even with New Hampshire as the ninth state ratifying, unresolved Virginia and New York both cut the prospective United States in two. After the Virginia showdown between James Madison and Patrick Henry, the anti-ratification New York convention changed course to join the new United States. Americans were not merely Federalists and Anti-Federalists, they were divided among those who wanted amendments before ratification, those who wanted amendments after ratification, and those who wanted ratification with no amendments. Learn more to buy “Ratification: The People Debate” here for your bookshelf.

Original Meanings

Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution was written by Jack N. Rakove in 1997. It distinguishes between the fifty-five authors of the Constitution as proposed without amendments, the two thousand ratifiers in state conventions, and the tens of thousands casting ballots to select the convention delegates. Anti-federalists forced Federalists to clarify and make new arguments for adoption that were unanticipated by the drafters. Following an essay on originalist studies, Rakove uses five chapters to describe the background, making and ratification of the Constitution. The final chapters study representation, federalism, the presidency, fundamental rights, and the “origins of originalism”. Learn more to buy “Original Meanings” here for your bookshelf.

Founding Friendship

Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic was written by Stuart Leibiger in 2001. The relationship Leibiger describes pivots on political twists and turns over fifty years of coincidental interests such as canal building until the period 1784-1792. The friendship moves into greater intimacy as seen in their correspondence, then later to wane as Madison supports “self created” democratic-republican societies and breaks with Madison’s opposition to the Jay Treaty. Madison’s greatest contribution in the relationship was in persuading Washington to throw his influence into the Constitutional Convention, then serving as its first president for two terms. Washington’s notable contribution was elevating Madison as his House floor leader, importantly for the passage of the Bill of Rights. Both men were concerned with promoting a strong, efficient and republican central government, and neither were very far apart as Madison was never among the most hostile anti-government Republicans and Washington was never aligned with the most extreme nationalist Federalists. Learn more to buy “Founding Friendship” here for your bookshelf.

Struggle for the Bill of Rights

James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights was written by Richard Labunski in 2006. Labunski argues that Madison both believed that a bill of rights protecting individuals from the federal government was an improvement and he recognized the political expedience of narrowly defining the protections from the federal governments. He failed to gain legislation to protect individual rights from state government infringement; that would have to wait until the 20^th century. The book traces dramatic events of the period including the close of the Federal Convention and the Constitution’s transmittal to the states, Madison’s election to Virginia’s ratification convention and his debates with Patrick Henry, Madison’s hard fought election to Congress in a gerrymandered district, and the legislative history of amendments producing the Bill of Rights. Learn more to buy “James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights” here for your bookshelf.

The Presidency of George Washington

The Presidency of George Washington was written by Forrest McDonald in 1974, and is currently in print as a paperback. For McDonald, Washington was an indispensable figure of national unity. The book not only describes national issues, but also how they related to and interacted with state politics, especially in the development of the Democratic-Republican societies and the popular response to the Jay Treaty. Centering on the economic basis of politics, McDonald illuminates the tensions between Washington cabinet, especially between Hamilton and Jefferson. He gives particular attention to the interaction of political and economic motivations in how the Washington administration met national problems and how it developed the presidential office during the two terms. Learn more to buy “Presidency of George Washington” here for your bookshelf.

The First Presidential Contest

The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy was written by Jeffrey L. Pasley in 2013. It tells the story of “history from the middle out”, how the popular press sought a replacement for George Washington for president, and in the process created a national presidential election in the Electoral College. Pasley focuses on the political images of Adams and Jefferson as forged by supporters and detractors among editors, government officials, congressmen and elector candidates. The Election of 1796 was transitional, where elite-dominated politics began to give way to a democracy ideologically divided by liberalism and conservatism. Mid-level actors included Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora and Leven Powell, Federalist elector candidate from Loudoun County, Virginia. Republicans favored public policy resulting from vigorous, rational public debate. Federalists believed that elections conferred decision making upon the chosen elite leaders. Learn more to buy “First Presidential Contest” here for your bookshelf.

American Revolution of 1800

The American Revolution of 1800 was written by Daniel Sisson in 1974 and reprinted in 2014 with Thom Hartman as a contributor. Instead of a focus on political party development, Sisson looks at the revolutionary extension of politics by Jefferson’s Republicans to incorporate an activated electorate based on the ideas and principles of individual liberty and opposition to monarchy in any form. These innovations included activating state governments in opposition to the national government in legislative Resolves against the Alien and Sedition Acts, development of Democratic-Republican Societies in mass meetings, and the anti-Federalist administration Congressional Caucus. Personal factions in the states among Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Charles C. Pinckney, and Burr were reflected in Congressional delegations and were determinative in the House selection of Jefferson over Burr. Learn more to buy “American Revolution of 1800” here for your bookshelf.

Adams vs. Jefferson

Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John Ferling in 2004 reprinted in 2005. The Presidential Election of 1800 was the first national electoral crisis with the Electoral College vote thrown into the House of Representatives with each of the sixteen states casting one vote. Ferling begins with political biographies of the principle candidates, John Adams running for re-election, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, New Yorker Aaron Burr and Georgian Charles C. Pinckney. He then describes the rise of national parties and their long campaigns for the 1800 election in the several states, the tie in the Electoral College and the 36 ballots to elect in the House of Representatives. Both parties activated expanded electoral bases and though turnouts were increased, the margins were still relatively small. While the three-fifths rule tipped the aggregate Electoral College numbers in favor of the South, more importantly in states like Virginia, the vote was aggregated by a unit rule general ballot giving the state-wide winner all its elector votes. Learn more to buy “Adams vs. Jefferson” here for your bookshelf.

Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic

The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic was edited by Peter S. Onuf and Jan Ellen Taylor in 2002. The essays are divided into three parts to examine how “revolutionary” was the presidential Revolution of 1800. The first part discusses political history, the second addresses social and cultural views, the third looks at international context. Changes were non-violent due to American attachment to their new Constitution and the Union. Earlier developments in political parties were extended during Jefferson’s political presidency, but changes in newspaper politics and voter participation led to a qualitative difference in an expansion of the “psychology of democracy” for white males. Federalist reaction to Jeffersonian Deism led to Jefferson upholding Christianity, while women and blacks were explicitly excluded from Revolutionary Era roles. While Jeffersonians continued developing the Federalist nation state built around administering a growing empire in the west in relations with foreign governments, Indians and the frontier, Jefferson supported democratic rebels neither in Canada nor in Haiti. Learn more to buy “Revolution of 1800: Democracy and Race” here for your bookshelf.

The Old Dominion and the New Nation

The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788-1801 was written by Richard R. Beeman in 1972 and reprinted in 2014. This is an examination of early political party growth in Virginia. The divisions do not seem based so much economic or sectional, but relate to how national politics and local interests played on one another amidst continuing elitist styles of political oligarchy and voter apathy. The majority party of Republicans was made up of persisting Antifederalists and discontented Federalists alienated by Hamilton’s economic programs. Some democratization in Virginia’s political system was evident while there was a competitive Federalist party, but the 1800 Republican victory slowed the trend and strengthened the ruling elite. Despite the obvious national roles of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Marshall, each were bedeviled by county level concerns in their home base. Virginian’s were preoccupied with state sovereignty and local county provincialism. Learn more to buy “The Old Dominion and the New Nation” here for your bookshelf.

Chesapeake Politics

Chesapeake Politics, 1781-1800 was written by Norman K. Risjord in 1978. Here Risjord takes a regional vantage point based on the economic imperatives of tobacco, the largest export not only of the region but of the United States until 1802. The parochial divisions which arose before Constitution and New Nation were rooted in differences between creditors and debtors and they persisted throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Comparatively inactive majorities of two-to-one led by Patrick Henry in Virginia were outgunned in Assembly coalitions fostered by Madison using county committees, newspaper circulation and petition campaigns. The study focuses on the state legislatures of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina where Risjord notes a statistical party coherence at 70-80% bloc voting. Absenteeism among factions were sometimes a determining factor, and in the 1790s the new parties grew away from parochial roots due to new men in the legislators and new divisions related to internal improvements and education. Debates began to emphasize national and international issues. Learn more to buy “Chesapeake Politics” here for your bookshelf.

Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia

Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia was written by Daniel P. Jordan in 1983. It is out of print, but may be found in libraries. It draws a composite portrait of ninety-eight members of Virginia’s Congressional delegations, while Virginia’s was first or second largest in Congress during the Virginia Dynasty of presidents from 1801-1825. The book begins with a survey of the state’s geography, demographics, economy and political system. Virginia’s political establishment was a continuation of pre-Revolutionary elites in a once stable and homogenous society. Though the Dynasty politicians adopted new electioneering strategies such as printed circulars and hustings oratory with personal appeals to voters, the cash crop economy anachronisms of tobacco slave-holders resisted internal improvements and commercial development in ways that led to their inevitable decline in national influence. Learn more to buy “Political Leadership” here for your bookshelf.

Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers

Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680-1800 was written by A. G. Roeber in 1981 and reprinted in 2011. In Virginia throughout the colonial period, county courts exceeded both the jurisdiction and the prestige of their English counterparts. They adhered to the “country” party rule of English local law in the face of reform efforts by “court” party reformers seeking to enable legislation of Common Law reforms. In the face of “court” lawyer reforms of the American Revolution the county courts in Virginia faced a relative decline with the rise of trade that had begun in 1748 amidst complaints of class favoritism towards the larger landed slave-holders. Over time, county courts allowed fewer jury trials to maintain county judge authority over local affairs. District Courts were created to further weaken the county courts in 1787, but the “country” parochial ideology gained a rebirth among the Jeffersonian Republicans under the leadership of John Randolph of Roanoke. Learn more to buy “Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers” here for your bookshelf.

Juries and Judges versus the Law

Juries and Judges versus the Law: Virginia’s Provincial Legal Perspective, 1783-1828 was written by F. Thornton Miller in 1994. It features the sustained conflict between Virginia’s legal perspectives of rural agrarianism and the efforts of the newly created U.S. Supreme Court to establish a universal common law promoting commerce. There were both ideological and economic components to the resistance in Virginia’s courts. Conservatives drew on the English Country ideology in the name of public virtue and individual liberty. Economically, the juries sided with their debtor neighbors. The two sides were personified in two Virginians, Spencer Roane on the Virginia Supreme Court, and John Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court. Learn more to buy “Judges and Juries versus the Law” here for your bookshelf.

Jefferson’s America

Jefferson’s America, 1760-1815 was written by Norman K. Risjord in 1991 and reprinted in 2009 third edition. It provides a synthesis of fifty years of American political history from the eve of the American Revolution to the end of the War of 1812, when American nationalism was firmly established. The social history of pre-revolutionary America is conveyed through the eyes of traveller diaries. The changing roles of women and blacks through the Revolutionary era, the role of the West and its encounters with Native Americans, and state and national experiments in republican government along with their liberal democratic reforms are all addressed. In Risjord’s view, Jefferson “either instigated or wholeheartedly participated in the major forces of the age”. Learn more to buy “Jefferson’s America” here for your bookshelf.

Failure of the Founding Fathers

The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy was written by Bruce Ackerman in 2005. While the Founders gave the U.S. an Enlightenment machine of government that was fatally flawed on several counts, Ackerman illuminates the self interest and statesmanship that crafted a Constitution of “experience”. The New Nation result was Thomas Jefferson’s popular plebiscite presidency and John Marshall’s judicial review. In Stuart v. Laird in 1803, the Court acquiesced in the Republicans taking control of the lower federal courts. In Burr’s trial of 1807, Jefferson acquiesced in the rule of law dictated by the letter of the Constitution as interpreted by Marshall. The outcomes of partisan struggles unanticipated by the Founders were a new kind of presidency and a new kind of court. The persisting legacy is an inevitable tension between the “will of the people” as expressed in fundamental Constitutional law, and the “voice of the nation” as made by the sovereign people at the ballot box electing their representatives. Learn more to buy “Failure of the Founding Fathers” here for your bookshelf.

Jefferson’s Empire

Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood was written by Peter S. Onuf in 2000. It interprets Jefferson’s political ideology as being grounded in nationhood as the expression of the people’s will and in a commitment to national self-determination. His “Empire of Liberty” was to be a hierarchy of legitimate hierarchies based on the people, ascending from the village or county ward, to an all-inclusive union of state-republics. The establishment would rely on independence, mutual respect, consensus and equality among its constituent parts. Onuf addresses three persistent problems in the American experiment confronting Jefferson: the peril of sectionalism, the emergence of political parties, and slavery. Jefferson’s solution to slavery was national self-determination for blacks in Haiti, Africa or the American far West. In the wake of the Missouri crisis of 1820, Jefferson dispaired. Learn more to buy “Jefferson’s Empire” here for your bookshelf.

What Kind of Nation

What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States was written by James F. Simon in 2002. It is an analysis of the clash of two perspectives of government. Marshall, appointed Chief Justice by John Adams, saw a federal government fortified by effective executive and judiciary branches of government. Jefferson saw a national government of consensual consensus among co-equal federal and state governments. Marshall developed the judiciary into an independent, co-equal branch of government with unanimous, nonpartisan decisions. Jefferson viewed his progress as dealing blow after blow to the state sovereignty ratified in the Constitution. Jefferson denied the Supreme Court as the final arbiter between branches of the federal government or between states and national government. Both Marshall and Jefferson were moderates within their respective parties who were often closer on issues than they admitted, and they both avoided a showdown between executive and judicial branches. Both were in their own way nationalists devoted to a United States. Learn more to buy “What Kind of Nation” here for your bookshelf.

Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause

Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery and the Louisiana Purchase was written by Roger G. Kennedy in 2003. Here Jefferson’s “lost cause” is the ideal of an agrarian republic of independent yeomen as the cornerstone of American nationhood and its expanding empire. Kennedy maps three moments of his personal failure: Virginia reform during the Revolution, the southern trans-Appalachian west in the mid 1780s, and the lower Mississippi region at the Louisiana Purchase. Kennedy makes connections among several important interests in the New Nation: American political elites, British mercantile and industrial cotton interests, enslaved African-Americans and the diverse Native American peoples of the southeastern forests. The entire enterprise was contingent from the beginning, dependent as it was on American diplomats disobeying their instructions and the Congress overlooking the absence of any explicit authority in the Constitution to purchase additional lands. Jefferson is the central character, supported by Creek chief Alexander McGillivray, the Indian trader William Panton and the American diplomat Fulwar Skipwith. Learn more to buy “Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause” here for your bookshelf.

Jefferson’s Freeholders

Christopher Michael Curtis wrote Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion in 2012. It is now available on Kindle and online new in paperback. The right to be a political person in Virginia, whether for holding office or to vote, evolved significantly from the 1750s to the 1850s. Before the Revolution, the freehold of landowners entitled them to hold appointive offices and to vote in every town and county where they owned 100 acres of unimproved land. At the Revolution, land ownership as “alluvial” rights remained a qualification for voting, and as of 1785, owning slaves conveyed the same alluvial rights as owning land. In the Virginia Constitution of 1830, the franchise was expanded to lease-holders, so property in land or slaves still being a qualification for voting rights until the Constitution of 1850. Learn more to buy “Jefferson’s Freeholders” at Amazon.com.

Humbolt and Jefferson

Sandra Rebok wrote Humboldt and Jefferson: A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment in 2014. It is available from University of Virginia Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Humbolt and Jefferson” on Amazon here. Alexander Humbolt, a Prussian explorer and naturalist, was a renowned scientific thinker of Thomas Jefferson’s time. Following his 1804 expedition to Latin America, Humbolt took a side trip to the United States to meet President Jefferson, whom he admired for an interest in science and “democratically advancing the interests of his people”. Over the course of the twenty-year relationship that followed, Jefferson contributed to Enlightenment scientific thought, and explored ways to expand international cooperation in the sciences. Humboldt admired America’s democratic republic, but rejected its materialism, territorial expansion and slavery; Jefferson admired the Old World’s cultural riches, but rejected its entrenched corruption. In light of Humbolt’s idealistic support of the Haitian Revolution, the two did not mention the subject in their correspondence. Jefferson found in Humboldt an ally in promoting scientific observation to counter the pre-conceived notion among earlier European naturalists that nature’s flora and fauna, and even humanity, all degenerated in the Americas. Both men actively sought to influence the European literary salons, communicating to friends, scientific societies, economists, scholars and revolutionaries.

Buy “Humbolt and Jefferson” on Amazon here. See also R. B. Bernstein Thomas Jefferson (2003), and his The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (2009).

Social History in Virginia, 1750-1824

Virginia’s social history emphasizes the structures of community as a state, county or family, including gender, ethnic and religious elements.

A Topping People

A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790 was written by Emory G. Evans in 2009. He follows the emergence of twenty-one families prominently dominating the royal governor’s Council of State, then charts their decline due to “improvidence and incompetence” through the Revolutionary period, bringing about a new set of economic and political leadership. Using Governor William Berkeley’s appointive powers in the mid-1600s to garner additional mercantile and county posts that allowed them to control Virginia society and economy. They extended to themselves large landholdings and used primogeniture, entail and intermarriage to ensure continued special treatment. The families that once gained most of their wealth in commerce increasingly yielded economic control to Scottish factors trading with the expanding Virginia interior, and by the 1730s had become extravagant planters. Governor William Gooch and House of Burgesses Speaker John Randolph shifted power to the lower house under smaller planter control. The families of the Topping People could not sustain their dominance with western land speculation, and these led the Revolution. Learn more to buy “A Topping People” here for your bookshelf.

Bound Away

Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement was written by David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly in 2000. It examines three centuries of Virginia migration, into the colony, diversification within the Old Dominion, and out-migration from Virginia to the western frontier, mainly to Kentucky and Ohio. The changes wrought by migrations show how Virginia’s hierarchical society was formed with a small ruling elite, a small middling class and two “degraded proletarians” of white and black. Placing migrations of both free and enslaved in common perspective accounts for about a million free and a half million slaves “westering” from Virginia between the Revolution and the Civil War, diminishing population, political clout and economic importance. While Virginia exported more people, institutions and traditions west than any other state, it was unable to sustain its economy relative to the expansive growth in other regions. Learn more to buy “Bound Away” here for your bookshelf.

Jefferson and the Indians

Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans was written by Anthony F. C. Wallace in 1999 and reprinted in 2001. It focuses on Jefferson as Enlightenment philosopher admiring of Native Americans, and Jefferson as President of a United States with evolving Indian policies. Jefferson’s transparent intent was for peaceful relations with native warriors, he sought their adoption of family farming practices, and encouraged the end of their communal society for a European one based on the individual. When they refused to engage in a cultural transformation and made war on the United States, Jefferson sought their destruction and surrender of tribal lands, with thirty treaties among a dozen tribal groups and the surrender of some 200,000 square miles of territory in nine states. Learn more to buy “Jefferson and the Indians” here for your bookshelf.

Brothers of a Vow

Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch wrote Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia in 2010. It is now available from University of Georgia Press and online new and used. Southern white men found an identity apart from property ownership and slaveholding in fraternal orders where membership was openly known, but rituals were secret. Organizations such as the Freemasons, Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sons of Temperance were based on a concept of manhood rooted in self-discipline, moral character and the reward of a good day’s work. The emergence of a market-driven economy divided working class men from emerging professionals, merchants and businessmen. Most fraternal membership was drawn from the middling group of artisans and workingmen who were growing in numbers amidst Virginia’s early industrialization and agricultural diversification. Excluding women and blacks, the white fraternal organizations assumed a significant role in providing assistance to those in need thus displacing women from their earlier public sphere. The fraternal orders agitated for public education and made substantial appearances in public meetings even before their attainment of the vote. Learn more to buy “Brothers of a Vow” at Amazon.com.

Richmond Theater Fire

Meredith Henne Baker wrote The Richmond Theater Fire: Early America’s First Great Disaster in 2011. It is now available at the Louisiana State University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. In the first disaster with large-scale civilian losses, seventy-two Virginians died in the Richmond Theater fire in December 1811. Attendees to see a popular touring company included the governor and other socially prominent Virginians, visitors from out of state and Europeans, as well as free and enslaved workers. The fire tragedy transformed Richmond, inspiring a spiritual awakening. Monumental Church was built on the theater’s foundations and other churches among several denominations were established. Numerous survivors of the fire are noted in the book. Louis Hue Girardin, a veteran of the French Revolution lost his wife and closed his popular academy. Caroline Homassel, a local belle in society became a committed evangelical. Newspaper editor Thomas Ritchie insisted on scientific explanations for the tragedy. Governor George William Smith re-entered the burning building to help and lost his life. Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith assisted other’s escape from the flames, later purchased his freedom, migrated to Liberia then returned to Richmond. Learn more to buy “Richmond Theater Fire” at Amazon.com.

In the Looking Glass

Rebecca K. Shrum wrote In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America in 2017. Reviewed in theJournal of Southern History. It is available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “In the Looking Glass” on Amazon here.

Material objects shaped colonial identity, perhaps none so strikingly as the mirror. Across the 1600s and 1700s, mirror technology improved in the Atlantic world trading exchanges. Rather than use mirrors for magic or ritual, European men in the 1600s and 1700s used the mirror to establish their modernity of enlightenment and rationality.

Shrum traces how mirrors were acquired and by whom, then examines the uses of those mirrors by European men and women, as well as contemporary Native Americans and African Americans. She describes the mirror as important to forming a white racial identity among the Europeans, especially men. Yet she documents several variant meanings found in mirror use among colonial women, Native Americans and African Americans.

Buy “In the Looking Glass” on Amazon here.

Gender in Virginia

Revolutionary Mothers

Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle of America’s Independence was written by Carol Berkin in 2005. In a synthesis of women’s scholarship over the last twenty years, she introduces major concepts framing current research on early American women by examining the lives of women in the American Revolution across class and cultural divides. The narrative traces the transformation of expectations from the “ideal woman of the farmhouse” to the “ideal woman of the eighteenth century parlor”, where republican mothers would nurture republican children. Women participated in every aspect of the Revolution, from protests and boycotts, to the shifting worlds of battlefield and home front, to exploits of female spies and saboteurs. Patriots, loyalist exiles, Native Americans and African-American women all receive their due. Learn more to buy “Revolutionary Mothers” here for your bookshelf.

Women of the Republic

Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America was written by Linda K. Kerber in 1980. In an exploration of the origins and consequences of the American Revolution, Kerber addresses the intersection of ideology, intellect, politics, law and women’s lives in their political roles. Her subjects are primarily white, literate and middle class. She first describes how women contributed to the war effort in boycotts, home production, and support of troops in the field. She then turns to women’s issues of marital status, divorce, education and women’s reading. The “Spirit of Academy making” exploded nationwide to prepare women for their new service to the republic. Although the study of history was encouraged, women continued to seek out imaginative literature. While the exercise of law and governance remained a male sphere, civil society in a republic was said to depend on an educated citizenry, and that relied on educated women as the wives and mothers of citizens, “Republican Motherhood”. These roles extended to greater formal education, home financial management, and associations of reformers in a new participation in public affairs. Learn more to buy “Women of the Republic” here for your bookshelf.

Liberty’s Daughters

Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 was written by Mary Beth Norton in 1980. It is a social history stressing the domestic sphere of women as wives, mothers and household managers. The Revolution brought about a transformation from subservient and deferential help mates of husbands to a world requiring them to act on their own, whether they wanted to or not. A commons saying was that “A soldier made is a farmer lost”, and women found that wartime brought about demands of self-assertion and independence in a sort of mass initiation that was found before only in widowhood. The ideology of republicanism insisted on voluntary consent which upset gender relationships, and women began to think better of themselves. Norton describes the experience of women who were black and white, slave and free, rich upper class and poor illiterate, Northerners and Southerners, urban merchants and rural farmers. Learn more to buy “Liberty’s Daughters” here for your bookshelf.

To Be Useful in the World

To Be Useful in the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790 was written by Joan R. Gundersen in 1996. In a synthesis of women’s roles over the course of fifty years and three generations, Gundersen clarifies the common elements that are similar but not identical for four principles. They are Elizabeth Dutoy Porter of Virginia and her slave Peg, Deborah Read Franklin of Philadelphia and Margaret Brant of the Mohawk tribe in New York. The topical approach adopted in the book looks at women and their mobility, marriage and the family, work, servitude and slavery, and education, religion and crime. Over the course of this study as the market economy developed, Gundersen sees increasing separation between private and public realms of social relations, with middle and upper class women restricted to the home, despite the temporary Revolutionary wartime involvement in political and military affairs. Learn more to buy “To Be Useful in the World” here for your bookshelf.

Beyond the Household

Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835 was written by Cynthia A. Kierner in 2000. She treats the public sphere of Virginian and Carolina women in the Colonial, Revolutionary and Early Nation periods of American history. In each of these eras, Kierner finds that women exploited the difference between politics where they were excluded, and public life which they were permitted to enter as long as they justified it in terms of defending the home and family. The book, which focuses on upper class Southerners, begins with the assertion that colonial gentlemen achieved a refinement by encouraging their wives to pursue an education for use in political connections at home entertaining and balls. The Revolutionary period marked the high point and then decline of women’s participation in public political activity. The rationale for female education changed from a social requirement that a gentle lady had to be well read, to the nurturing requirement that a wife and mother was required to teach republican values. But into the 19^th century, Southern women did not organize in public associations against threats to family such as demon rum as New England women did. Learn more to buy “Beyond the Household” here for your bookshelf.

Religious Virginia, 1750-1824

The Founders on God and Government

The Founders on God and Government was edited by Daniel Dreisbach, Mark D. Hall and Jeffry H. Morrison in 2004. It is a collection of essays on eight Founders and how their religious beliefs influenced their views of the new republican nation. Four are Virginians: Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Mason. The others are Signers John Adams of Massachusetts, Witherspoon of New Jersey, along with Pennsylvanians Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson. Here essayists argue that the Founders were religious men, though of varied beliefs, and their Protestant belief system motivated them in their actions constructing the Constitution and establishing the nation. Other influences derived from the political theories of the radical Whigs and Enlightenment were influenced by religion as well. Learn more to buy “The Founders on God and Government” here for your bookshelf.

The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion

The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America was written by Frank Lambert in 2005. It assesses the transformation of colonial variations in Christian commonwealth to adoption of secular republican government where as Adam Smith envisioned in his Wealth of Nations, competition among multiple sects produces the purest religion without any sect gaining legal preference. In the first chapters, Lambert examines church and state in Elizabethan England, then looks at the failures of the early Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania establishments. He then turns to the church-state arrangements on the eve of the American Revolution where growing interdenominational pluralism grew up from religiously diverse immigration and the Great Awakening. Enlightenment ideals and interests of dissenting evangelicals converged to build a consensus in the revolutionary and early nation period that promoted religion as a natural right and a private, voluntary pursuit. The Founders agreed that religion played a useful role in fostering republican virtue, but the appropriate place of religion in governance remained in dispute. Learn more to buy “Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion” here for your bookshelf.

The Faiths of the Founding Fathers

The Faiths of the Founding Fathers was written by David L. Holmes in 2006. The introduction provides colony by colony overview of the great variety among religious sects in colonial British North America and their various church-state arrangements. Holmes then describes several strains of Deism, a belief system neither atheistic nor Christian. Six chapters delve into the faiths of four Virginians, Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, along with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. In general they were respectful of Christianity and religion’s beneficial role in society, admiring of Jesus’ ethics, and open to divine intervention in worldly affairs. Three orthodox Christians are examined, Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot and John Jay. A separate chapter is devoted to the more orthodox beliefs of six women who were wives and daughters of Founding Fathers, including five Virginians, Martha Washington, Eleanor Custis Lewis, the two Jefferson daughters Martha and Maria, Dolly Madison along with Abigail Adams. Learn more to buy “Faiths of the Founding Fathers” here for your bookshelf.

Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation

Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State was written by Daniel L. Dreisbach in 2002. The book inspects the Revolutionary and New Nation historical context for Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” between church and state as formulated in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1802. Dreisbach describes Jefferson concerted efforts to protect individuals from unwarranted trespasses by church or state. But there was no radical divide meant between society and government as found in Justice Hugo L. Black amounting to a “spite fence”. The purpose of Jefferson’s caution was to ensure an institutional separation and procedural safeguards for individual conscience in the private sphere. Jefferson’s contemporaries forcefully defended the agency of religion in society to promote civic responsibility and ethical behavior. Jefferson was neither at the making of the Constitution nor of the Bill of Rights; scholarship parsing Jefferson alone limits conclusions historians can draw. Learn more to buy “Jefferson and the Wall of Separation” here for your bookshelf.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History was edited by Merrill Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan in 1988. Both religious continuities and discontinuities are emphasized in different essays among this collection, along with consideration of the political and constitutional effects of the statute. Various Founders held conflicting assumptions about the requisite virtues in a republican civic culture, from Enlightenment Deists, to “polite evangelical” Presbyterians to righteously angry Baptists. The quest was for amicable relations between church and state so as to avoid the sectarian strife and violence of European history. In Virginia, the gentry sought to protect themselves against both dogmatic priesthoods of establishment and the revolutionary spiritualism of the evangelical Christian sects. As masters of the words of printed reason the great landowners as lawmakers would retain control of both Virginia, and by the same process, the United States. Learn more to buy “The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” here for your bookshelf.

Establishing Religious Freedom

Thomas E. Buckley, SJ wrote Establishing Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Statute in Virginia in 2013. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. While dissenting Quakers, Presbyterians and Baptists tried to use Britain’s 1689 Toleration Act to establish niche churches in colonial Virginia, it was not until nearly one hundred years later that freedom of conscience was guaranteed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786 in Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom passed by the floor leadership of James Madison some years after Jefferson’s governorship. The disposition of the confiscated parish glebes provided grounds for contention among churches, courts and legislatures for decades. While evangelicals benefited from the dis-establishment of the Church of England and its successor the Episcopal Church, they did not adopt Jefferson’s rationalist, Unitarian beliefs. By the mid 1800s, the Protestant Christianity of the dissenters had assumed a functional establishment, with state support for approved faiths and endorsement of religion in general as essential to the public virtue required for a sustainable republic. Learn more to buy “Establishing Religious Freedom” at Amazon.com.

Richmond Theater Fire

Bodies of Belief

Janet Moore Lindman wrote Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America in 2008. It is now available at the University of Pennsylvania Press online new and used. Lindman focuses on Virginia and Pennsylvania in her survey of changes among several Baptist churches over the course of a century. She emphasizes how conversion, ritual and religious discipline shaped each community, exploring the varied experience of white men, white women and enslaved persons. In addition to church founding, growth, theological divisions and conflict over clergy, Lindman explains the movement of the Baptist faith from marginal to mainstream, within a social history of race and gender. Baptists embodied the evangelical paradox, they were both radically egalitarian and socially conservative. Physicality of religious practice was leveling, yet white male hierarchy was invoked, while Baptist men rejected gentry values to develop an alternative form of masculinity. Learn more to buy “Bodies of Belief” at Amazon.com.

Wellspring of Liberty

John A. Ragosta wrote Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty in 2010. It is now available on Kindle and online new in hardcover. Unlike North Carolina’s backcountry dissenters who turned to the Crown to protect their religious practice, Virginia’s Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians adopted Whig principles to support the Revolution and mobilized militarily. Virginia’s establishment accommodated by loosening religious restrictions and abolishing Anglican Church tithes. In colonial times, Virginia was vigorous in protecting its established church and actively persecuted dissenters. But following the Revolution, through a sustained petition campaign and support of Jefferson and Madison, the dissenters gained the Statute for Religious Freedom, the template for the First Amendment. Learn more to buy “Wellspring of Liberty” at Amazon.com. *Buckley, Thomas E., SJ. Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776–1787 (1977). It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia” at Amazon.com.

Virginians Reborn

Jewel L. Spangler wrote Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century in 2008. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used. Researching Fauquier, Lunenburg and Southampton Counties, Spangler documents the Anglican establishment and several of its weakness in Virginia, especially the poor supply of ministers. Presbyterians established competing churches that introduced the colony to dissenting faith. Likewise, early Baptist churches were successful by providing religious services where the established Anglican church had limited reach. Baptists both affirmed and challenged Virginia’s gentry patriarchy. Baptist men insisted on uncontested governance of their own households. But during the conversion ritual social hierarchies were suspended among the priesthood of all believers, and elite white men were required to submit to church discipline in their personal conduct. This is a story of the birth, development and eventual leadership of Virginia’s Baptists. Learn more to buy “Virginians Reborn” at Amazon.com.

African American Virginia, 1750-1824

Slavery and Freedom

Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution was written by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman in 1986. It is a collection of essays accenting the ambiguous effects on African American slave and free families resulting from the American Revolution. The impacts varied among three distinctive slave systems in colonial America: northern seaport cities, the Chesapeake, and the South Carolina-Georgia low country and the frontier Southwest. Family behaviors between whites and blacks were remarkably different, yet alike in their resident households and tight kinship ties. Forced emigration to the old Southwest Gulf states was initially disruptive of slave family life, but they quickly reformed among newly established black communities. The Revolution was a watershed of race relations. Slave-holders developed an explicit legal and social argument of racial inferiority to justify their failure to emancipate “all men created equal”, but at the same time the Great Awakening among black preachers effected religious autonomy among black evangelicals. Learn more to buy “Slavery and Freedom” here for your bookshelf.

Water from the Rock

Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age was written by Sylvia Frey in 1992. The book is divided into two parts. The first explores the roles of slaves in the Revolutionary War, both military and social. The war was triangular, among Patriots, British and an activist slave population. About 30,000 ran to the British, with a total of 80-100,000 leaving their owners. These formed maroon colonies, disappeared in the free black communities of Baltimore or Charleston, or joined with the British, who could treat the boldest of slaves with harshness in menial labor. The British impulse to disrupt the gentry slave holding South had the effect of unifying whites as patriotic Rebels. Part two of the book looks at the aftermath of the Revolution for American enslaved populations and the largest group of loyalist exiles, the British African Americans. The former republican rebel idealists turned to a more racist justification for enslavement, while Baptists and Presbyterians developed a doctrine of mutual obligations in a kind of paternalism. But black churches seized upon that paternalism to develop a racially distinct value system that resisted white cultural domination. Learn more to buy “Water from the Rock” here for your bookshelf.

The Internal Enemy

Alan Taylor wrote The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 in 2013. It is now available in a second edition on Kindle and online new in paperback. The American Revolution and the War of 1812 gave opportunity for Virginia slaves to choose freedom, and in both cases, hundreds did choose freedom. Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 plot to hold Richmond hostage to gain Virginian emancipation reminded the Virginia gentry that they lived surrounded by enslaved blacks who might take action to secure freedom of their own accord. Nat Turner’s 1831 Rebellion in Southampton County only served to confirm their worst fears. Taylor describes the shift from Revolutionary nationalism to states rights ideology. The national government did not assist in Virginia’s defense of the British Chesapeake Bay raids in either the Revolution or the War of 1812. The agency shown by Prosser and Turner was magnified by sustained rumors of slave revolt amidst cases of arson and assaults on overseers. In choosing a sectionalist stance, Virginia leaders aligned themselves with those of other slave states in the emerging cotton belt to the south and west. Learn more to buy “The Internal Enemy” at Amazon.com.

Forced Founders

Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia was written by Woody Holton in 1999. The thesis of the book is that the American Revolution as led by the gentry in Virginia was less “a display of confidence than an act of desperation”. The gentry were confronted by challenges from British imperial rule and merchant allies with taxes and indebtedness, Native American from the Cherokees to the south to the Ohio Valley tribes resisting westward expansion, and many white smallholders refusing to pay rents and requiring more republican military units and representation in the House of Burgesses, and finally slaves were not only sources of labor, but authors of resistance in their own right. Each of these groups exercised their own agency to undercut the gentry’s command of home rule by bringing into question who would rule at home. Learn more to buy “Forced Founders” here for your bookshelf.

Slavery and the Founders

Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson was written by Paul Finkelman in 1996 and reprinted in 2001 and 2014. It is a volume of six essays. They explore Finkelman’s structural analysis of the Constitutional Convention and the pro-slavery purposes subsequent Courts and Congresses put various clauses that may have been neutral at the start of the New Nation. Slavery is also considered in light of the Northwest Ordinance and the persistence of slavery in that region, as well as the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. The final two essays address the “character issue” of Thomas Jefferson and Finkelman’s disappointment in Jefferson’s performance on slavery. Learn more to buy “Slavery and the Founders” here for your bookshelf.

Plowshares into Swords

Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810 was written by James Sidbury in 1997. It develops perspectives on 1800s Gabriel’s Rebellion and Richmond’s black community in the post-revolutionary era. There was a transformation from “blacks in Virginia” to “Black Virginians” with an opposition culture. After 1750, there arose a racial consciousness among the creole plantation and urban generations of African Americans, influenced both by evangelical Christianity of Methodists, Baptists and the Great Awakening, and by revolutionary ideology of the American and Haitian Revolutions. Black Virginians turned the culture of the Virginia elite upside down, appropriating some of its symbols for revolutionary purposes to end slavery. Social practice in Richmond included hiring systems and greater personal opportunity as well as bi-racial contacts unavailable on plantations, but “crosscutting” identities based on gender, race and labor led to a complicated picture of post-Gabriel Richmond. Learn more to buy “Plowshares into Swords” here for your bookshelf.

Whispers of Rebellion

Michael L. Nicholls wrote Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy in 2012. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Nichols gives voice to black conspirators in Gabriel Prossor’s Conspiracy for slave rebellion in 1800. The goal was liberty for slaves, whether attested to by a veteran of the siege of Yorktown, a witness to the slave rebellion in St. Domingue, or by slave Sam’s testimony in court. The Richmonder “Frenchmen” co-conspirators reported to slave recruits may have been figments to enhance credibility. Unlike Douglas R. Egerton’s Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (reviewed at TheVirginiaHistorian.com) that focused on Gabriel’s artisan-republican identity and urban connections, Nicholls explains that while the plot did not originate with Gabriel, as he assumed military leadership, recruitment emanated from “the Brook” in Henrico County as a rural uprising of slaves seeking freedom. The network extended to several Tidewater and Piedmont counties. Planning included surveillance of the state capitol that served as the armory for the state militia. Governor James Monroe knew his response would impact the presidential campaign of Thomas Jefferson. Learn more to buy “Whispers of Rebellion” on Amazon.com.

The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood

Patrick H. Breen wrote The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt in 2015. It is now available at the Oxford University Press, on Kindle and online new in hardcover and paperback. Breen writes a new account of America’s most famous slave rebellion of August 1831 in which nearly sixty white men, women and children lost their lives. The rebellion was put down within forty-eight hours, but the effects in Virginia, the South and throughout the United States were profound, including calls for emancipation by non-slaveholders and at the same time redoubling slave patrols. Local courts sought just punishment amidst white fear and rage, slave defiance and evasion, and the aftermath of local grief. While white lawyer Thomas R. Gray promulgated Nat Turner’s own autobiography in The Confessions of Nat Turner, the overarching public narrative served to reassert white mastery and control while saving relatives of the conspirators from reprisal, thus protecting local slaveholders’ property interest. Learn more to buy “The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood” on Amazon.com.

Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia

Randolph Ferguson Scully wrote Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 in 2008. It is now available online new in hardcover. Scully writes a social and cultural history from investigation of the records of early Baptist churches in Isle of Wight, Southampton and Sussex Counties in Virginia from mid-1700s to the 1830s. He seeks to understand biracial evangelical religion in the Revolutionary and Early National periods of American history. General, Regular and Particular Baptists united in 1787. Congregational debates over slavery resulted in a steady stream of slave manumissions from antislavery activists. But during the 1810s and 1820s, white efforts to marginalize black congregants by changing voting practices and preaching rights had the unforeseen result of increasing the independence of black Baptists rather than extending white control. Post-Revolutionary blacks clung to the Separatist wing of radical theology from the Great Awakening. Black spiritual and political equality could not be both celebrated and suppressed. At the Nat Turner Rebellion that used Baptist language and traditions, the bold attempt to create a biracial religious movement ended. Learn more to buy “Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia” on Amazon.com.

Slavery on Trial

James M. Campbell wrote Slavery on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia in 2007. It is now available online new and used. Campbell’s investigation of Richmond court records from 1830 to 1860 confirms that slavery and mastery had a major influence on the application of the law during the antebellum period. However marginalized persons such as free blacks, slaves and poor whites frequently could find some relief and even some agency in light of court accommodations to industrialization, immigration and slavery. Industrialization in Richmond allowed free African Americans and hired slaves many freedoms that were not available in traditional slave societies. Slaves could secure independent lodging alongside free blacks and poor whites. Crossing and mixing racial lines among free blacks, immigrants, slaves and poor whites became a major issue in Richmond politics resulting in the ascendancy of Mayor Joseph Mayo in 1853. Richmond court cases became more conflicted, and free black communities sometimes turned to local black church courts for justice. Learn more to buy “Slavery on Trial” on Amazon.com.

Origins of Proslavery Christianity

Charles F. Irons wrote The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia in 2008. It is now available on Kindle and new in paperback. Irons examines the interactions between black and white evangelicals primarily in antebellum Virginia leading up to the Civil War. White missions among slaves allowed for African American choices and influence in their proselytizing resulting in a generation of black religious leaders and some independent black churches. Biracial churches with a spiritually vibrant black membership persisted because slaves chose to remain in them. White evangelicals spoke of mutual responsibility between master and slaves with Anglican slaveholders. At turning point came with the 1830 Nat Turner Rebellion, with white evangelicals redoubling missionary efforts along with teaching a proslavery theology. They reflected concerns about racial security over spiritual fellowship, and Virginians used slave mission success in their arguments against abolitionists. Still there was occasionally segregated worship led by black leaders in a continuing mutual negotiation between black and white evangelicals. Learn more to buy “Origins of Proslavery Christianity” on Amazon.com.

Institutional Slavery

Jennifer Oast wrote Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860 in 2015. It is now available at Cambridge University press, on eTextbook and online new in hardcover. Oast portrays a Virginian slavery from colonial times to the Civil War that was entirely without the benefit of ameliorating paternalism that could be found in plantation slavery. These slaves were hired out in an annual lease often separating the hires from their family, and causing many to suffer at the hands of “too many masters” including leasing agents who had little concern for the long-term welfare of the hires. As long as industrial work could be done well and efficiently, an incentive culture allowed for piece-work rate compensation. In Virginia, this applied to coal mining, gold mining and tobacco manufacturing. Learn more to buy “Institutional Slavery” on Amazon.com.

The Quarters and the Fields

Damian Alan Pargas wrote The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South in 2010. It is now available at the University Press of Florida, on Kindle and online new and used. Pargas studies non-cotton economies in wheat growing Fairfax County, Virginia, sugar growing St. James Parish, Louisiana, and rice growing in Georgetown District, South Carolina. His conclusion is that when economic conditions were either booming or declining, slave family stability was threatened. When conditions were stable, economic conditions fostered family stability. Families in Fairfax County were more likely than the others to live apart from their families, be forcibly separated, and have fewer independent economic activities. The intent of enslaved people was to maximize time with their families, better their material conditions and protect their loved ones from sale away. But the Virginians studied were subject to long term hiring out and separation of partners and children by the domestic slave trade. Learn more to buy “The Quarters and the Fields” on Amazon.com.

American Dreams of John B. Prentis

Kari J. Winter wrote The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader in 2011. It is now available at the University of Georgia Press and online in paperback new and used. Although three generations are considered in the colonial to antebellum Prentis family, John Prentis, a domestic slave trader 1819-1848 is the focus of the book. The son of a wealthy Virginia judge and brother to a Suffolk attorney, John chose an artisan workingman’s life as an architect’s apprentice to an anti-slavery Philadelphia Quaker, then on his return to Virginia became a horse trader, jail keeper, and pirate chaser. On turning to slave trading, his wife Catherine assisted in the family business preparing meals, sewing clothing and nursing slaves to health before their sale. Though he was prosperous enough to periodically loan his brother money, he died in 1848 with a self-drafted will including a plea to be recognized as a gentleman. Winter concludes that the personal slaves he emancipated at his wife’s death were probably his own children. Learn more to buy “American Dreams of John B. Prentis” on Amazon.com.

Freedom has a Face

Kirt von Daacke wrote Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia in 2012. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. In Virginia’s Piedmont Albemarle County, free blacks were not hemmed in by restrictive racial barriers. Rather, color lines blurred in their antebellum world where white and black, free and slave habitually mingled and personally knew each other. Albemarle’s white residents did not insist on strict compliance with either the 1793 registration law for free blacks, or with the 1806 free black removal law. Albemarle courts protected free blacks. Whites signed individual petitions for free blacks to remain in Virginia. The county had a “culture of personalism” where known behavior and reputation transcended skin color. Virginia’s restrictive laws and its fearful slave rebellions were about blacks unknown to whites in Albemarle, and therefore the others were threatening, not the known free black neighbors. To purchase “Freedom has a Face” at Amazon, click here.

Race and Liberty

Eva Sheppard Wolf wrote Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 2006. It is now available from the LSU Press and online new and used. White Virginians actively debated emancipation following the Revolutionary War through Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1830. Wolf concludes that the anti-slavery faction was never ascendant. Whether based on enlightenment views of human equality or religious views of spiritual equality in the eyes of God, antislavery views played a prominent role in manumissions chiefly in the period from 1782 through the mid-1790s. After that time, few emancipators were openly hostile to slavery as an institution, rather they gave individuals freedom selectively as a pro-slavery means of racial control. In the period from 1806 to 1832 there were many fewer manumissions. While the slave population in plantation districts outstripped the white, there also arose a substantial black population of freemen who were neither white nor slave. A more aggressive proslavery ideology grew up in the east when Virginia’s western men began to demand white male suffrage and equitable representation based on population. For slave-owning Virginians, defense of slavery became a political priority. To purchase “Race and Liberty” at Amazon, click here.

Money over Mastery

Calvin Schermerhorn wrote Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South in 2011. It is now available on Kindle and new online in paperback. Schermerhorn studies entrepreneurial slaves in the antebellum Chesapeake and coastal North Carolina during a time of growing interstate slave trade that divided enslaved families. Watermen with maritime networks, urban slaves, industrial slaves processing tobacco and those hired out to railroads all used cash payments to free family from bondage. Slaveholders sought a market economy beyond the plantation by allowing wages, hiring slaves out to industries, or selling field hands South. These entrepreneurial slaves of the Upper South sought to preserve their families rather than to seek individual freedom for themselves. They developed networks through their commercial contacts, in biracial church and in the market to make arrangements to keep their families in tact. Sometimes they were successful, at other times whites betrayed their agreements and auctions of forced migration sent family members to the cotton frontier. To purchase “Money over Mastery” at Amazon, click here.

Wolf by the Ears

John C. Miller wrote Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery in 1980. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press and online new and used. Miller accounts for Jefferson’s political or philosophical outlook on slavery and race, slaves and mulattos. He emphasizes Jefferson’s oft-repeated condemnation of slavery as an institution in the American republic, yet notes his inconsistency by practicing slave-holding and racial discrimination in a slave-holding state. In Jefferson’s early career, he sought to lessen slavery in the United States, including an attempt at gradual emancipation in his design for the Virginia Constitution in 1776 and in his drafts for both the Old Northwest and Old Southwest Territories. But by the Missouri Crisis of 1820, he had retreated to believing the end of slavery should be left to future generations. After discussion of the Hemings family and its blood relationship with Martha Jefferson, Miller suggests Jefferson’s nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr fathered Sally Hemings’ children, an argument contradicting Fawn Brodie in her Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History of 1974, and subsequent scholarship. To buy “Wolf by the Ears” on Amazon click here.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

Annette Gordon-Reed wrote Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy in 1997. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Legal scholar Gordon-Reed writes both to marshal evidence concerning the fathering of Sally Heming’s children, and to examine alternative readings of the evidence by other historians. She does not assert that surviving evidence supports a definitive conclusion. What she does do is to consider the African American sources such as Madison Hemings that were previously ignored. The Sally Hemings branch of the slave Hemings family was most favored, with all four of Sally’s children emancipated near the age of twenty-one. Gordon-Reed also speculates about the relationship of the Jefferson-Hemings principles, its duration and its meaning to the two participants. To buy “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” on Amazon, click here.

Jefferson-Hemings Myth

Robert Coates Eyler edited The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty in 2001. It is now available online new and used. Following early responses to Jefferson and Hemings descendant DNA tests, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS) turned to several kinds of authorities to investigate facts related to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings without “politically correct” ideology. These included scholars Lance Banning, Robert H. Ferrell, Alf J. Mapp, Jr., David N. Mayer, Forrest McDonald and lastly, Paul Rahe who took exception to the conclusions of the other historians. The TJHS report found that among the twenty-five male relations of Thomas Jefferson, the most likely candidate to sire Sally Hemings son Eston was Thomas’ younger brother Randolph Jefferson who was known to “play the fiddle and dance” with slaves in their quarters. Suspicion is cast on the political attacks against Jefferson and transcripts related to Madison Hemings autobiography. Reasoning and evidence of those asserting Thomas Jefferson fathering Sally Hemings’ children are questioned. To buy “Jefferson-Hemings Myth” on Amazon, click here.

The Hemingses of Monticello

Annette Gordon-Reed wrote The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family in 2006. It is now available at W.W. Norton Publishers, on Kindle and online new and used. In this book, Gordon-Reed uses legal analysis and historical imagination to investigate three generations of the Hemings slave family, from Elizabeth Hemings of John Wales plantation, to Sally Hemings of John Wales and Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, to Hemings children on Jefferson’s plantation, freed or allowed to “stroll”. Most of the book is devoted to a most unusual planation complex of ownership and family relations among the kinship links between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Later historians grounded some of their argument for a chaste widower Jefferson on white supremacy arguments. But both Sally Hemings and her brother James chose to return to Virginia when they might have had their freedom guaranteed in Paris for the asking. Gordon-Reed settles on describing the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship as “concubinage” of consensual, if not equal partners. The family networks were extensive: on Jefferson’s return, he and Sally Hemings visited Eppington Plantation near Norfolk, home of Jefferson’s sister-in-law who was also Sally’s half-sister. To buy “The Hemingses of Monticello” on Amazon, click here.

Those Who Labor for My Happiness

Lucia Stanton wrote “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in 2012. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. This book is a collection of essays by a public historian at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. The focus is Jefferson as a human being and as a slaveholder. The first part examines Jefferson’s relationship to slavery, including personal philosophy and feelings, along with his rationales for plantation management and interactions with his slaves. The second and third sections examine the African American experience for those touching on Jefferson’s life. These concentrate primarily on the Hemingses, the Fossetts and the Trotters, all of whom enjoyed higher status with Jefferson and within the slave community. These essays view Jefferson “from the other end” of the plantation telescope. To buy “Those Who Labor” on Amazon, click here.

Master of the Mountain

Henry Winecek wrote Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and his Slaves in 2012. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Winecek aggressively paints a picture of a young Jefferson who knows slavery is wrong, but once he finds it personally profitable, abandons principle and fully endorses the institution of slavery, ensuring that it would “fit into America’s national enterprise”. The author takes calculations understood by Gordon-Reed to be about slave profitability in Virginia relative to English labor costs and argues that it was Jefferson’s personal epiphany to entrench slavery in the American republic. Much is made of 18^th century child labor practices in Jefferson’s nailery. Shortly after Jefferson’s election to the House of Burgesses in 1769, the young Piedmont Virginian sought to overturn the statute banning private manumissions, consistent with the anti-slavery teachings of his mentor George Wythe. A senior legislative colleague introduced the bill and was greeted with a hail of vocal condemnation and defeat. The shy Jefferson was warned in a personally embarrassing way not to get to far ahead of public sentiment. Much is made of Jefferson’s racial bias for a society of whites without resentful blacks angry at exploitive treatment during slavery. To buy “Master of the Mountain” on Amazon, click here.

Almost Free

Eva Sheppard Wolf wrote Almost Free: A Story and Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia in 2012. It is now available from the University of Georgia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. This story is of one African-descended family in central antebellum Virginia seeking to free themselves by manumission. The setting is Warrenton and Fauquier County Virginia where whites and people of color mixed, formed families and owned property. Beginning with Samuel Johnson’s manumission in 1812, Patty and Samuel Johnson sought first to achieve freedom for themselves and their two children, and then petitioned the Virginia General Assembly to remain in their homeland. While he was successful in gaining a General Assembly statute for himself, after freeing his wife and children, he was unable for a period of time to secure the same for his family. A well-known worker at the Norris Tavern in Warrenton, Johnson bought a house and land outside the town. His petition for daughter Lucy had 226 signatures including white women and two U.S. Congressmen. To purchase “Almost Free” at Amazon, click here.

Wars in Virginia, 1750-1824

Virginia’s history of wars includes not only chronologies of campaigns and their battles, but also the cultural contexts of soldiering and the impact of war on Virginian society.

American Revolution

Theaters of the American Revolution

Theaters of the American Revolution was written by James Kirby Martin and David Preston in 2017. Following an editor’s introduction to the war spanning 1775 to 1781, five essays look at the theaters of war charting how the Revolution’s events moved from region to region. Descriptions of the colonial terrain, settlement and cities set the scene for battles on land and sea, for control of the English colonial coast and the interior with its Native American allies. Early conflict in the Northern colonies and Canada transitioned into the desperate months in the Middle Colonies, then to the Southern colonies and victory at Yorktown. Learn more to buy “Theaters of the American Revolution” here for your bookshelf.

The Politics of War

The Politics of War: Race, Class and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia was written by Michael A. McDonnell in 2007 and reprinted in 2010. Here the focus is on explaining some democratization of state and county politics, slave resistance and the war experience at home, revealing a society at war with itself almost as much as with Britain. The landed electorate were divided among those with many slave who could hire substitutes, those with few slaves who had a felt need to supervise them, and those with no slaves who could not afford to leave their families and farms. Slaves resisted by joining the British. Wartime shortages alienating the public were compounded the almost annual call up of militias in the face of repeated British invasion; calls for Virginia troops yielded only a fraction of those wanted, and towards the end of the Revolution there were draft riots. Higher bounties and contests over longer enlistments were overlaid with questions of who would pay the taxes for a wartime military establishment. In the short run there was a democratization of state and county politics. More military service was required of middle-class Virginians and the wealthiest took on a greater share of wartime government funding. Following the conflict there was debtor relief that contributed to Madison and Marshall’s Federalist calls for a more centralized national government. Learn more to buy “The Politics of War” here for your bookshelf.

A Revolutionary People at War

A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 was written by Charles Royster in 1979 and reprinted in 1996. Royster examines American attitudes and conduct towards the principle of revolution as it related to military service and the military. In 1775 the American revolt began with a “rage militaire” driven by inflamed rhetoric, but the duration of the conflict and battle casualties led to lower morale in the public and in the army. Public attitudes changed according to military fortunes but morale stabilized to sustain the conflict. By the end of the war the public had increasingly depended upon the professionalism of the Continental Army. Dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war and corruptions brought mutual recriminations between elected officials and the army. Many in public life claimed credit for the population as a whole for support of the Revolution, but by the end the continental army regarded itself as a repository of civic virtue. The rank-and-file regular solider was faithful to the United States and despite their volunteer status, they persevered in their allegiance through wartime challenges including isolated mutinies. Learn more to buy “A Revolutionary People at War” here for your bookshelf.

Arms and Independence

Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution was written by Peter J. Albert and Ronald Hoffman in 1984. It explains that each side confined itself to orthodox warfare for the most part, avoiding irregular warfare except in the Carolinas after 1778. An important element of establishing national identity was the creation and development of the Continental Army, combining European military theory with a heritage derived from the contributing colonial militias. While during and after the Revolution, Patriots gained a sense of common nationality by emphasizing soldierly sacrifice, the militias also became vehicles of social protest, including mutinies. The British perspective is represented by considering Generals Gage, Howe, Clinton and Burgoyne. In the fight, rebellious Americans long term were forced to recognize two important elements of their resistance. The militias alone were inadequate to counter the regular British Army; the Continental Army was crucial. And economic independence would not automatically follow political independence. Learn more to buy “Arms and Independence” here for your bookshelf.

A Respectable Army

A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789 was written by James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender in 1982 and reprinted in 2015. Within its account of the campaigns and battles of the Revolution, it narrates social, political and intellectual developments shaping the Revolutionary military establishment from early rage militaire to a “new modeling” professionalism. Initially zealous citizen soldiers ended up hiring substitutes including vagrants, paroled Hessians, pardoned Tories and indentured German and Irish. Without demeaning the state line or their militias, Martin and Lender demonstrate that the Continental soldier bore the main burden, finally enlisting for three years or the duration of the war. The regular army was made up of men who often joined for want of better employment; the land bounties promising entry into the farming class sustained them as much as serving the glorious cause. The authors credit Washington for standing up for republican Revolutionary principles of civilian rule at the Newburgh crisis. Learn more to buy “A Respectable Army” here for your bookshelf.

War of 1812

War in the Chesapeake

Charles Patrick Niemeyer wrote War in the Chesapeake: The British Campaigns to Control the Bay, 1813-1814 in 2016. It is available at the U.S. Naval Institute Press, on Kindle and online new and used. The War of 1812 was America’s first war of choice; it brought the burning of the capital in Washington DC. On the other hand, the British suffered surprising reverses at Craney Island at Norfolk and Fort McHenry at Baltimore. Nevertheless, American privateers were neutralized, the U.S.S. Constitution was bottled up in Norfolk, and the British were able to score some striking victories in raids up and down the Chesapeake Bay. The humiliation at the defeat before Washington fed the anti-Madison administration war critics, but the Chesapeake Bay operations did not result in redeployment of any American forces away from the Canadian border. Over 4,000 Virginian slaves flocked to the British banner, providing scouts, guides, river-pilots, and manning the “Colonial Marines” landing forces to augment the British regulars. Learn more to buy “War in the Chesapeake” from Amazon.com.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Political and Economic Virginia, 1750-1824

Revolution and Constitution Policy, 1750-1789

Founding of a Nation

Revolution in Virginia

Revolutionary America

Articles of Confederation

Creation of the American Republic

Remembering the Revolution

American Scripture

Inventing America

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia

Tory Insurgents

Loyalism in Revolutionary Virginia

Dunmore’s New World

Accommodating Revolutions

New Nation Policy, 1789-1824

Creation of the American Republic

Forging of the Union

Ratification: The People Debate

Original Meanings

Founding Friendship

Struggle for the Bill of Rights

The Presidency of George Washington

The First Presidential Contest

American Revolution of 1800

Adams vs. Jefferson

Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic

The Old Dominion and the New Nation

Chesapeake Politics

Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia

Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers

Juries and Judges versus the Law

Jefferson’s America

Failure of the Founding Fathers

Jefferson’s Empire

What Kind of Nation

Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause

Jefferson’s Freeholders

Humbolt and Jefferson

Social History in Virginia, 1750-1824

A Topping People

Bound Away

Jefferson and the Indians

Brothers of a Vow

Richmond Theater Fire

In the Looking Glass

Gender in Virginia

Revolutionary Mothers

Women of the Republic

Liberty’s Daughters

To Be Useful in the World

Beyond the Household

Religious Virginia, 1750-1824

The Founders on God and Government

The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion

The Faiths of the Founding Fathers

Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Establishing Religious Freedom

Richmond Theater Fire

Bodies of Belief

Wellspring of Liberty

Virginians Reborn

African American Virginia, 1750-1824

Slavery and Freedom

Water from the Rock

The Internal Enemy

Forced Founders

Slavery and the Founders

Plowshares into Swords

Whispers of Rebellion

The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood

Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia

Slavery on Trial

Origins of Proslavery Christianity

Institutional Slavery

The Quarters and the Fields

American Dreams of John B. Prentis

Freedom has a Face