This blog is on Late Colonial Virginia, 1712-1775, featuring twelve books from reviews in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2012-2014. There is one in “References: Maps and Mapping”, three in “Social History”, three in “Slavery and Captivity” and five in “Political History”.
Related titles linked and pictured are taken from books authored by the reviewers in journals at JSTOR, and others they reference in the subject area. reviewers in other journals at JSTOR, and authors mentioned in reviews as contributing to the subject area.
Current releases related to Virginia history in other eras from Spring 2018 journals can be found in previous Virginia History Blogs at Colonial Virginia – Spring 2018, Revolutionary Virginia – Spring 2018, and Civil War Virginia – Spring 2018, and New South and Modern Virginia – Spring 2018.
We begin Summer 2018 reviews with Colonial Virginia — Summer 2018, Colonial Virginia ii – Summer 2018, Revolution and New Nation – Summer 2018, Madison and Jefferson – Summer 2018, Antebellum Civil War – Summer 2018, New South and Modern Virginia – Summer 2018.
Fall 2018 reviews begin with Late Colonial Virginia – Fall 2018.
The TVH webpage for Early and Late Colonial Eras, 1600-1763, features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years: two that are widely used in Virginia college courses, and one to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019. The page has a Table of Contents for Powhatan Virginia, Early Colonial Policy, Late Colonial Policy, Social History of Virginia, Gender in Virginia, Religious Virginia, African American Virginia, and Wars in Virginia 1600-1763.
“More About Early Colonial Virginia” below provides additional resources.
Late Colonial Virginia Refs: Maps and Mapping
The True Geography of Our Country
Joel Kovarski wrote The True Geography of Our Country: Jefferson’s Cartographic Vision in 2014. It is available from University of Virginia Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “True Geography of Our Country” on Amazon here.
Geography and maps were central to many of Jefferson’s most treasured ambitions. These included locating the U.S. capital on the Potomac at Washington DC, to organizing official state and national surveys, and exploration of the American West. Jefferson was an early prophet of Manifest Destiny before the term was coined, insisting that Nature had traced “no geographical line” limiting an individual’s pursuit of happiness. Closer to home, they informed his Notes on the State of Virginia, decorating Monticello, and stocking his library shelves.
Jefferson came to mapping early on, the grandson and the son of the notable Peter Jefferson, both surveyors; first schooled by John Staples, a surveyor, and then attending both the Rev. James Maury’s Latin School and classes with William Small at William and Mary, both with instruction in elements of surveying. Even with a small format, the illustrations are of high quality, and the legends and notations on the maps included can be read with a magnifying glass.
Buy “True Geography of Our Country” on Amazon here. See also William C. Wooldridge Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Exploration to the Civil War (2012), and Vincent Virga and Emilee Hines Virginia: Mapping the Old Dominion State through History: Rare and Unusual Maps from the Library of Congress (2009), Margaret Beck Pritchard Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (2002), Donald Jackson Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello by Donald Dean Jackson (2002), and Guy Meriwether Benson Lewis and Clark: The Maps of Exploration, 1507-1814 (2002).
Late Colonial Virginia Social History
“Ulster to America”, “Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth”,
“We Have Raised All of You”
Ulster to America
Warren R. Hofstra wrote Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830 in 2011. It is available from University of Tennessee Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Ulster to America” on Amazon here.
This collection of essays of social history book-ends with general discussions of Scots-Irish in 1700s back country America. Articles focus on Scots-Irish communities, the immigrant networks of families, churches and schools, and th
eir economic and political connections with English Baptist, German, and Native American neighbors. They are distributed across time and space with Pennsylvania and Delaware in the 1720s, Virginia in the 1730-1760s, the North Carolina and Kentucky in the last quarter of the century.
Unlike some treatments attributing a strain of anti-authoritarianism in the Scots-Irish, they were characteristically “politically moderate” among their merchants, bookmen, and clergy. They sought to bridge diverse community divisions while aspiring to personal and economic independence.
Buy “Ulster to America” on Amazon here. See also James G. Leyburn The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (1989), Patrick Griffin The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World (2001), Barry Vann Rediscovering the South’s Celtic Heritage (2004), Daniel B. Thorp A Moravian Community in Colonial North Carolina: Pluralism on the Southern Frontier (1989), and Jim Webb Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (2005).
Quakers Living the Lion’s Mouth
A. Glenn Crothers wrote Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730-1865 in 2012. It is available from University Press of Florida, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Quakers Living the Lion’s Mouth” on Amazon here.
In this latest title from the University Press of Florida’s “Southern Dissent” series, Crothers traces the Quaker migration from Pennsylvania into Virginia beginning in the 1730s. There they thrived economically by employing a strategy of mixed-grain farming in the northern Valley, northern Virginia, and in the Dismal Swamp Tidewater. They became respectable in their prosperity, but their pacifism made them political outsiders compounded by continued connections to their northern-based denominations. Active state-led repression in the Revolution and in the War of 1812 was sparked by suspicions that Virginia’s Quakers aided runaway slaves and otherwise aided the British.
Following the Revolution, their numbers declined by out-migration to the free-soil Midwest and through doctrinal schisms. Those remaining such as Samuel Janney contributed to the growth of Virginia’s middle class, promoted infrastructure, schools, and agricultural improvements. They stressed the superiority of free labor over slave, and advocated a gradual acceptance of freed slaves.
Buy “Quakers Living the Lion’s Mouth” on Amazon here. See also William Freehling The South vs. The South (2001), Steve Longenecker Shenandoah Religion: Outsiders and the Mainstream, 1716-1865 (2002).
We Have Raised All of You
Katy Simpson Smith wrote We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835 in 2013. It is available from Louisiana State University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “We Have Raised All of You” on Amazon here.
In this study of motherhood and place, Smith notes that over this 85 year period, women among white, black and Native Americans in the early South found their most powerful self expression in motherhood. Women of all backgrounds found helpmates to assist in their child-rearing among a network of other women, including across ethnic lines, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes coerced.
They influenced their children, families, communities, and even nations, and yet were in some political and economic sense, powerless as well. All three Southern mothers fulfilled roles of “teachers” to their children and “sufferers” in their families and communities. Despite challenges to the women and the care of their children from husbands, neighbors and by law, Smith found Southern motherhood among all three races an active, strong, “potent” institution by women who were “instigators of change”.
Buy “We Have Raised All of You” on Amazon here. See also Charlene M. Boyer Lewis Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (2012), Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough, editors, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850 (2010), and Anthony E. Kaye Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (2009).
Early Colonial Virginia Slavery and Captivity
“Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company”,
“Slaves and Englishmen”, “Setting All the Captives Free”
Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company
William A. Pettigrew wrote Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 2013. It is available from University of North Carolina Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Freedom’s Debt” on Amazon here.
Prior to Britain’s Glorious Revolution in 1689 bringing William and Mary to the throne, a decade before, the Royal African Company had secured an exclusive charter to open slave trade in Africa to promote and protect a national interest in the face of competitive Dutch and Spanish enterprises. But following the new order, with the ascendency of Parliament there was greater national participation in debates about how the economic framework of empire would set out.
New interest groups arose, including prospective competitors to the stockholders of the Royal African Company, and their allied Chesapeake tobacco merchants who wanted more influence in the slave-trading marketplace. They sought an economic order that promoted free trade and competition, arguing that British freedom guaranteed property rights, and these included the ownership and free trade of slaves. When the old charter granted by monarchy required renewal in Parliament, the Royal African Company lost its monopoly, and succumbed to its rivals by 1752.
Buy “Freedom’s Debt” on Amazon here. See also Michael Guasco Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2014), and Hugh Thomas The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. 1440-1870 (1999).
Slaves and Englishmen
Michael Guasco wrote Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World in 2014. It is available from University of Pennsylvania Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Slaves and Englishmen” on Amazon here.
English thinking about Africans and slavery began in the century before the ir explorations and settlement of the 1660s, based on the Bible and classic texts. Englishmen in the 1500s were held in captivity as slaves by both Catholic and Muslim powers.
A mutual hatred of the Spanish grounded in contemporary conflicts led to alliances among English and Africans, and English pre-plantation slavery in the Americas included a mixed exploitation of Indians, Africans and deported Irish. Guasco traces evolving attitudes and beliefs about African slavery by investigating travel narratives, pulpit sermons, polemical works and colonial propaganda to develop various political, religious and intellectual points of view held in Elizabethan England.
Buy “Slaves and Englishmen” on Amazon here. See also Daina Ramey Berry The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017), Edward E. Andrews Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (2013), and Sowande M. Mustakeem Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (2016).
Setting All the Captives Free
Ian K. Steele wrote Setting All the Captives Free: Capture, Adjustments, and Recollection in Allegheny Country in 2013. It is available from McGill-Queen’s University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Setting All the Captives Free” on Amazon here.
In this study of captivity narratives among all sides during the Seven Years’ War, Steele accounts initial battles and skirmishes, the various terms and conditions of captivity, among Indian tribes, French and English soldiers, and various colonial militias. His description then extends to the diplomatic and cultural mechanics of attaining captives freedom, and the problematic readjustment among returnees.
Native groups and nations, and colonial troops all took hostages during the peacetime leading up to the imperial war for various local negotiations and exchanges. Once the French and Indian War began in earnest, Indian raids expanded on trails, forts, farms and traders. Captivity experiences were fraught with terror, but sometimes led to adoption, while escapes and forced returns could have several meanings. “Redemptions” among white returnees were sometimes another captivity forced on individuals whose identities had changed culturally to Native American.
Buy “Setting All the Captives Free” on Amazon here. See also Daniel Ingram Indians and British Outposts in Eighteenth-Century America (2012, 2014), Alan Taylor The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2007).
Early Colonial Virginia Political History
“William Parks”, “Patrick Henry”, “Where the Cherry Tree Grew”, Dunmore’s New World”, “Humbolt and Jefferson”
William Parks
A. Franklin Parks wrote William Parks: The Colonial Printer in the Transatlantic World of the Eighteenth Century in 2012. It is available from the Pennsylvania State University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “William Parks” on Amazon here.
In this book history-as-biography, A.F. Parks narrates the life and career of William Parks from apprenticeship in Worcestershire, Hereford, Reading and London, England, and his subsequent success as an official printer first in a proprietor colony at Annapolis, then in a royal colony at Williamsburg.
While influenced by political and religious pressure from his official patrons, he also promoted private advertising and encouraged literary culture in colonial society. Parks defended the freedom of the press, printed opposing political and economic views, and published the writings of deists and religious evangelicals alongside Church of England doctrine.
The colonial American entrepreneur combined official colonial job printing, book and pamphlet publishing, journalism and newspaper publishing of the Maryland Gazette and the Virginia Gazette. He imported books from Britain and Europe, and founded a Virginia paper mill.
Buy “William Parks” on Amazon here. See also Lawrence C. Wroth The Colonial Printer (1995), Isaiah Thomas History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers & an Account of Newspapers (1820,1988), Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, editors A History of the Book in America: volume 1: the Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (2009), and Dennis C. Landis European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493-1776 in six volumes (1980- ).
Patrick Henry
Thomas S. Kidd wrote Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots in 2011. It is available from Basic Books, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Patrick Henry” on Amazon here.
In this brief popular history, Kidd writes a detailed account of Patrick Henry’s personal and public life. He synthesizes previous scholarship, and draws conclusions similar to those of H
enry Mayer in his Son of Thunder (see below). Kidd expands the basic material somewhat by including several important primary documents from Henry’s correspondence, draft speeches, newspapers, and contemporaries including one from Daniel Boone usually unreported in Henry’s biographers.
The author seeks to reconcile Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech at the 1775 Virginia Convention with his opposition to the proposed U.S. Constitution of 1788. Kidd’s explanation is that Henry held a sustained conviction that governance through the local community in the evangelical Protestant church and in the county’s neighborhood jury was a better guarantee of citizen liberty than remote sovereigns at a distance.
Buy “Patrick Henry” on Amazon here. See also Henry Mayer A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic (1986, 2018), Kevin J. Hayes The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas (2008), Saul Cornell The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (1999), Robert Douthat Meade Patrick Henry in the Making (1957), and Eric R. Schlereth An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (2018).
Where the Cherry Tree Grew
Philip Levy wrote Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home in 2013. It is available from St. Martin’s Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Where the Cherry Tree Grew” on Amazon here.
This book is a comprehensive history of the Ferry Farm of Washington’s childhood at the Fall Line of the Rappahannock River. In it, Levy examines the physical and ideological roots of the colonial surveyor, Continental commander, and national Founder. With a profound sense of place that was uniquely colonial Tidewater Virginia, Levy, an archeological historian, focuses on the place rather than the man following a decade’s long excavation at Washington’s boyhood home. The author interprets the value of the 500,000 artifacts uncovered using extensive documentary research.
The romanticism of Parson Weem’s cherry tree is briefly addressed, then a more serious examination of American memory, history construction, and celebratory commemoration follows for most of the book, exploring the twentieth century’s interest in everything that Washington visited, touched, or slept in.
Buy “Where the Cherry Tree Grew” on Amazon here. See also Katherine Egner, and Philip Levy George Washington Written Upon the Land: Nature, Memory, Myth, and Landscape (2015), and Edward G. Lengel Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder, in Myth and Memory (2011).
Dunmore’s New World
James Corbett 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 available from University of Virginia Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Dunmore’s New World” on Amazon here.
Governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, is best known as the author of Virginia’s Lord Dunmore’s War with the Shawnee in 1774, and slave emancipation at the outbreak of the Revolution. But his career spans important imperial developments throughout the mid-1700s as the English Governor of New York, Virginia, and the Bahamas.
In this first biography of Dunmore in seventy years, Corbett describes the career of a of a landless Scots family with divided royal loyalties, a sometime army officer and Member of Parliament, a “man of average ability and extraordinary confidence”. The Earl of Dunmore had no entitled income, yet in an English kingdom allocating power by heredity, had repeated posts as Governor to important colonies. His flaws led him to be known by contemporaries as selfish, incompetent, unscrupulous, and a drunkard and womanizer.
In each of his New World posts, Dunmore’s terms were marked by aggressive initiatives to develop local power bases at odds with the imperial ministry in London. In Virginia he sought to amass landholdings for himself, Governor’s Council members and frontier settlers by leveraging inconsistent royal restrictions, conflicting treaties with Native Americans, and rivalries with colonies holding overlapping charters. On his return to England, Dunmore could not validate the two illegal weddings of his daughter to the son of George III, nor could he legitimatize their two children.
Buy “Dunmore’s New World” on Amazon here. See also Marry Ferrari, Colin G. Calloway The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (2018), Reuben Gold Thwaites Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774 (2015), and Bendan McConville The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2014).
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).
More about Early Colonial Virginia
Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Early and Late Colonial Eras, 1600-1763. Titles are organized by topics related to Powhatan Virginia, Political and Economic Virginia, Social, Gender, Religious, African American and Wars in Virginia.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the geographically related Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.
For titles by historical period related to Virginia history, these reviews rely on the William and Mary Quarterly (1600-1776), the Journal of the Early Republic (1776 – 1861), the Journal of the Civil War Era (1820-1880), and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1865 – 1920).