The Virginia Historian introduces Late Colonial Virginia with six histories. The first is the political history of “Colonial Virginia” early and late periods, from 1607 to 1780; here the review describes the book’s Late Colonial narrative. The second is “Tobacco Coast”, a maritime history emphasizing 1660 to 1763, and extending into the Revolutionary era. “Gentlemen and Freeholders” describes the variety of political activity in colonial Virginia counties.
The “Transformation of Virginia” describes the rise of religious dissent among the yeomanry and its political consequences. “Tobacco Culture” investigates the mind set of great planters on the eve of the Revolution. “A Place in Time” charts the evolution of Middlesex County from indentured servant frontier, through the social disruption of the introduction of slavery, to a hierarchal planter led society.
Colonial Virginia
Colonial Virginia: A History (1986) by Warren M Billings, John E. Selby, Thad W. Tate covers both Early Colonial and Late Colonial periods, with an afterward assessment of the Revolution. While overall a political history, attention is also paid to Indians, women, servants, yeomen and slaves. The unifying theme is the emergence of Virginia’s planter elite, including complications. Billings describes most of the 17th century, Selby outlines the developments of the middle period to 1750.
Thad W. Tate analyses the Late Colonial period studied to 1780, with its decay of social deference and persistent instability of the tobacco economy. National American leaders arose from among the Virginians to challenge the loss of colonial prerogatives and English rights, calling on a commitment to liberty and equality that would eventually undermine slavery in the new country. Within a decade of the Revolution, Virginia lost its larger vision, the Tidewater economy collapsed and the state found itself in a cultural backwater. Learn more to buy “Colonial Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Tobacco Coast
Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (1984) by Arthur Pierce Middleton studies the middle colonial period emphasizing 1660 to 1763 to show how the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries shaped the development of Virginia and Maryland. Navigable streams and tobacco cultivation led to rapid increase of wealth and population, limiting impulse for commercial centers other than the shipbuilding port cities of Norfolk and Baltimore. Threats to shipping from activity by Spanish, Dutch, French and pirates were ineffectively countered by colonial privateers until the British navy convoy system was established in 1707, the dawning of Virginia’s colonial Golden Age.
Most of the British born commerce was for tobacco, amounting to half of continental American trade. American capital in colonial vessels traded mainly for grains destined for South European and foreign West Indies colonies was carried on by1,200 colonial mariners. Attention is paid to the British and African trade in European emigrants and slaves, as well as the two-fifths British export trade arriving in the Chesapeake. Learn more to buy “Tobacco Coast” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Gentlemen and Freeholders
Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (2000) by John Gilman Kolp is a political study of the most personal levels of colonial Virginia, the county, parish and neighborhood. The House of Burgesses was the only election with a direct voice for property holders qualifying for the franchise. Their numbers fluctuated from 75% of free white males in western Berkeley County to about 50% in Tidewater James City and Richmond Counties, to 25% in Fairfax. Their also turnout fluctuated based on local issues.
Kolp divides counties between categories of competitive elections, intermittently competitive, and noncompetitive electoral politics. He plays down social deference to elites to explain smaller freeholders voted more frequently that the elites. There were variations in nomination procedures, campaigning and polling methods among the counties. Disputes among competitive elections related to competing planter families, local issues such as establishing a new parish, and persistent factions among the yeomanry freeholders that showed elements of political protoparties.
While voter turnout increased during this period, contested elections declined, in part due to voter support of their Burgesses’ defiance of the British Crown from 1765 onward. Learn more to buy “Gentlemen and Freeholders” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
The Transformation of Virginia
The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1983) by Rys Isaac is an ethnographic and social history focusing on the gentry, a rebelling yeomanry yet including Afro-Americans in the religious revivals. There was a confluence in the Late Colonial period of colonial elite objecting to imperial rule, and a popular rise of religious dissent challenging the earlier colonial hierarchical order.
With the increase of evangelical congregations among Presbyterians (1740s), Methodists (1750s) and Baptists (1770s), the Anglican Church of England came under siege, undermining the previous deferential order. With that increasingly compromised pillar of hierarchal society, in a way Virginia elites were able to reassert their leadership in the American Revolution at the courthouse by challenging British dominion.
Part III, the “Afterview” of transformation, relates political and religious history, explaining the two competing communities of faith as evangelical yeomanry and aristocratic elites. Virginia’s response to the social disorder resulting in the eventual disestablishment of the Church of England. Learn more to buy “Transformation of Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Tobacco Culture
Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (1985, 2009) by T. H. Breen looks at planter and British tobacco consignment merchants correspondence, Including Landon Carter and Willand concludes there was “a major cultural crisis” among Virginia’s elites on the eve of the American Revolution.
All planters big and small operated by the same rules and assumptions, developing important social cohesion in Virginia society and politics. An important element was the extensive credit allowed by the big planters to the smaller. After 1750, recurring financial crises restricted the British credit allowed to the big planters, placing increased pressure on them because they would not call the small planters debt. Some large planters became “farmers” planting wheat for export and most adopted “Country idioms” which became anti-commercial, asserting local rights and independence, and blaming a conspiracy of the Crown’s ministers for economic conditions. Learn more to buy “Tobacco Culture” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
A Place in Time
A Place in time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (1984) by Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman reconstructs life in colonial Middlesex County, Virginia. Early on, frontier society gave modest opportunity to ex-servants. Then after the 1670s, those social structures were disrupted with the introduction of slavery to comprise the large scale planters’ tobacco labor force. And finally, a more hierarchal class society developed in the 1700s.
Early society was structured in concentric circles, providing for a dispersed population. Friends and relatives lived in neighborhoods, these centered about parishes, and parishes centered on county courts and administration. A half a century later as the 1700s began, counties began to be divided as tangential circles within each county, marked by class relationships and economic activity. Urban centers were set apart from circles of poor farmers and middling planters, who were in turn set apart from the slave populations centered on the great plantations of large planters. These had little interaction compared to earlier times. Learn more to buy “A Place in Time” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.