The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790

THE SETTING AND THE ACTION

The people who lived beside it, deriving sustenance, called it Chesapeok—the mother of waters. They fished and they hunted, thinning the forest with the fires that drove the game toward the waiting line of men. The women cleared garden patches to plant corn, beans, and various gourd crops. All lived in small bands, often fiercely at war with one another—their lives and forms of self-esteem very closely bound up with readiness for such warfare.

Then came the navigators who called themselves English. With the aid of charts, they brought their ships over in what by their calendar was the year of the Lord 1607. They made Chesapeake into a bay upon a map of a land they had called Virginia. They claimed to possess it all in the name of their king. The waters of Powhatan and Pamaunk became the rivers James and York. Rappahannock and Potomac kept ancient names, but they too became entries upon the map.

The English lodged among the earlier inhabitants and kept themselves alive only with the help of those peoples—until they discovered that they could grow rich, as they accounted wealth, by planting and harvesting a drug plant, the sot-weed, tobacco. Then commenced more than two centuries of conscripting labor to make the crop. The marking of maps upon the ground soon began in earnest as surveys divided the land into properties.

At first the English huddled together in wattle-and-daub huts behind tall palisades, but as the original inhabitants were driven back by the newcomers and killed off by imported diseases, strong liquors, and broken hearts, the invaders boldly set up homes in the midst of the territories they had staked out. They brought nails across the seas, and making use of an abundance of timber unknown for centuries in the island from which they had come, they learned to frame, wall, and roof Virginia houses of beams and boards. Boundaries enclosed boundaries, according to notions of the fitness of things that they had also brought with them. Thus counties and parishes were laid out. Courthouses and churches arose, put together at first from materials hewn from the forest.

Some of the English, being owners of land and lords of labor, consolidated an eminence above the rest. When, after a time, they found there was a shortage of their own island people who were willing to enter into bondage for a term of years in order to be carried to a continent of supposed opportunity, the would-be masters supplied themselves with captives from Africa instead. Thus another people came to live and work on the Chesapeake shores.

The wealth produced by African slaves for life, whose children too were defined as slaves, further enhanced the mastery of the great men among the English. Such masters began to have big brick mansions built as monuments for the lineages they sought to perpetuate.

They had also established a new seat of government called Williamsburg, for a liberator king. This place was endowed with a college, where youths might learn to be English Christian gentlemen. Other edifices enhanced the new center of authority: a dignified house of

worship, a governor’s palace, and a capitol for the making of laws and the doing of justice. In the counties and in the parishes also the great men began setting up fine brick courthouses and churches as emblems of the rule they sought to exercise and of the divinity legitimating that rule. Yet the order that imposing buildings began to proclaim after a century of planting tobacco did not long remain unquestioned. Within half a century of its apparent consolidation the system would be overturned.

First, from the North came stern-faced men who fostered ideas of divinity that were not expressed in elegant, ornamented churches where the greater presided over the lesser members—and where even the furnishings expressed a downward flow of governance. If the new sense of ultimate meaning was embodied in buildings at all, it was in rough meetinghouses that were stark without, and within revealed a denial of all worldly pretension. The forms of action associated with such meetinghouses were as rich as the settings were simple. Africans and their offspring, as well as the descendants of the English, were drawn to them in growing numbers.

At about the same time patriot leaders came forward and questioned the dominion of the rulers of England. This dominion had been accepted in principle, if not always in practice, from the time of the first seaborne settlement on the Chesapeake shore. Disturbing questions then arose as to who the descendants of the English now were, and in what way they should be governed by the customs of their forefathers. At courthouse meetings the patriots rallied the owners of the land, and striking at trade with England, they urged resolutions that all should make do without the supplies of manufactured goods that had lately been ordered in quantities exceeding the value of the crops exported.

Within a decade the patriots rose up in arms to defend their own redefinition of the nature of the connection with the parent island—to defend it against another redefinition that confronted them from across the ocean. Defiantly they discarded the style of dress worn by soldiers of their king and donned hunting shirts in the fashion of the ancient inhabitants whom they had displaced. After more than a year of fighting they declared the bonds of ancestral loyalty severed.

When the bitter, devastating war was over, both masters and slaves found themselves in a world subtly but decisively changed. The shores of the Chesapeake were now left behind by the hordes of people of all conditions who were moving or being moved westward to possess the lands beyond the mountains. Parish churches, no longer centers of whole communities, began to fall into disrepair. The new meetinghouses, with their strict rules and their recurrent mass gatherings for emotional release, symbolized a different kind of religious association—one that took in only a part of the people. The stem-faced preachers persuaded their followers to adopt stricter morals. Although

not all descendants of the English changed accordingly, their houses were generally less open places for convivial assembly and more frequently became closed domestic refuges for individual withdrawal. The descendants of the Africans, by contrast, took the new forms of worship and made them the core of a profoundly collective way of being. Meanwhile the courthouses were incorporated as the base of a new system of government under which the sons of free settlers all along the widening margin of the great continent agreed to rule themselves in a way they were assured was distinctively American.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF VIRGINIA

1740–1790

BY RHYS ISAAC

PUBLISHED FOR THE OMOHUNDRO INSTITUTE OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS CHAPEL HILL

The Omohundro Institute of

Early American History and Culture

is sponsored jointly by

The College of William and Mary and

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

© 1982 The University of North Carolina Press

Preface to New Paperback Edition © 1999

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Isaac, Rhys.

The transformation of Virginia.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Virginia—Social life and customs—Colonial period,

ca. 1600–1775. 2. Virginia—Civilization. 1. Title.

F229.18 975.5’02 81-10393

ISBN 0-8078-1489-X AACR2

ISBN 0-8078-4814-X (pbk.)

The cost of editorial work on this volume

was assisted by a grant from the Commonwealth

of Virginia Fund for Excellence.

04 03 02 01 00 14 13 12 11 10

First

for Colleen

who has so long allowed recalcitrant slaves,

proud men on horseback,

and gaunt prophets pointing skyward

to parade through her life

Then

for

Edwyn & Frances

Glynn & Alison

Meg & Lyn

who have been willing to argue with me always.

PREFACE TO THE NEW PAPERBACK EDITION

The Transformation of Virginia is a monument to a moment when early American history, having achieved economies and simplicities that new paradigms bring, met with an anthropologically minded little band of historians in Australia. A trio of us (now expanded to four and dubbed the Melbourne Group by Clifford Geertz) were free, ready, and encouraged to seek a new kind of history for the new curriculum in our brand-new La Trobe University.¹

I had come to this new start from my first research visit to the United States, where I had received from Gordon Wood both an exciting induction into historiography after Bailyn and an incitement to gate-crash the select conference called by Ken Lockridge and David Fischer at Brandeis in February 1970. That memorable gathering was called to celebrate the imminent appearance of the books—as the four New England demographies that really promised a viable everybody’s history were called in awed tones.²

So, it was an everybody’s history that I was already inspired to write, and I knew that I would do it not by demography but by close attention to people doing things—the forms of action by which all people everywhere and in all times make the most revealing statements of who they are and how they relate to the world. Greg Dening, with Harvard studies in anthropology added to his Melbourne historical training and his long intensives in philosophy and theology with the Jesuit Order, was the mentor of our trio; he gave the guidance in social theory and phenomenology that Inga Clendinnen and I craved and that I, writing then for Inga and Greg as first readers, turned into the central ethnographic narratives of The Transformation of Virginia.

My own ethnographic everybody’s history—of women and men, of blacks and whites, of gentry and common folk—has been overtaken by the fulfillment of the democratizing promise of the new history. The historiography of the 1990s is so much more committed to diverse gendered, ethnic, and racial points of view that researchers and students alike now contemplate a complex many-centeredness. The current multiplicity of would-be paradigms, however, leaves the field in a state of confusing fragmentation. So, I am confident that the force and clarity generated by that first conjunction out of which came The Transformation of Virginia assures it a continuing role in the furtherance of gender- and race-inclusive history.

The field of social-cultural history was the one into which I most determinedly entered. Since the time of my passionate 1970s and early 1980s writing of this book, that field has set many milestones. I shall name some of the works that would certainly influence my presentation if I were writing this book now; my short list will probably seem an odd combination of the obvious and the idiosyncratic.

Landscape I had lit upon as the great framing concept for my narrative of developments before, during, and after the long-run revolution in Virginia. I would show what a vivid theater the past could be for readers of history—if they were given the means to see the actions and ways of action of a bygone age in its reimagined landscapes. I called my approach dramaturgy; I wanted in that first passionate engagement to demonstrate, with a sense of audio-visual immediacy, how much could be learned by representing the vanished landscapes of colonial and revolutionary Virginia as a vast layout of varied stage sets. In this theater of society the scene shifts would be shown not by dimmings of lights and curtain-falls but by movement from one kind of place to another. Through the collation of revealing descriptive documents, I would enable the reader as attentive observer to look in on plantation houses great and small, on slave quarters, on churches, on courthouses and militia muster fields, studying there the characteristic performances at each. An action-revealed overview of society would thus be presented through careful attention to roles assigned by gender, class, and ethnicity.

From the outset, the Revolution was my subject, but then I found not one but two great overturns in process in Virginia, as in all early America: the democratic political revolution and the voluntarizing New Light Christian religious revolution. Assuredly underlying those, I saw also the transformation of material culture that has come to be called the consumer revolution.

A dramatic narrative of those revolutions is produced within the frame of landscapes and stage sets by showing two kinds of clear signs of transformation appearing in the traditional landscape from around 1740 onward. A sequence of episode chapters shows, first, how unprecedented new settings for new kinds of action were intruded into the old landscape and, second, how customary forms of action at continuing old centers were given transformed meanings.

Unprecedented were the great gatherings in the open for the awakening of sinners and the baptizing of believers; unprecedented were the rough wooden meetinghouses for the hearing of testimonies of conversion; and unprecedented—when they began to appear near the slave quarters—were the hush arbors for African American Christians’ praise-singing. Transformed at the old courthouses were the elections, which had ceased to be a means to secure humble advice for the royal sovereign and had become proud expressions of the sovereignty of the people. And, meanwhile, continuously at work preparing and sustaining the Revolution with more and more changes to domestic spaces was the individuating redesign of houses and furnishings, as the trend toward privacy intensified.

No historian I knew of before me had made landscape and architectural settings the organizing device of a narrative history—unless it were Femand Braudel, who deliberately avoided dramatic narrative in favor of a kind of satellite tracking of changing human ecology. Since The Transformation of Virginia, however, William Cronon and Simon Schama have discovered powerful dramas in landscape. So has Donna Merwick’s Possessing Albany, which is immensely important since its focus on the mercantile, city-republican Dutch illuminates the distinctive (but too much taken for granted) ways that the monarchist-territorialist English moved in on the North American continent.³

A mighty escalation of my dramaturgic landscape approach to Virginia came with Dell Upton’s superb Holy Things and Profane. It is truly laudable for its very close reading of church buildings and great mansion houses so as to show settings for a range of strikingly linked and reinterpreted action statements. And now, in 1998, Upton has dynamically elevated the landscape approach and linked it powerfully to story and myth in his masterly overview for the Oxford History of Art series, Architecture in the United States—a must-read for all American historians.⁴

Ways of understanding history have multiplied and intensified since this book was first published.

Dramaturgic and ethnographic approaches have in the last decade and a half been enriched immensely, and not only by the just-cited work of Dell Upton. My colleagues in the Melbourne Group, I am proud to say, have both extended the list of exemplary histories in this mode and reflections on the method. I think of everything by Inga Clendinnen and Greg Dening, though here I mention only Clendinnen’s Aztecs: An Interpretation and both Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language and Performances by Dening.⁵

Critiques of knowledge have also come a long way since this book was in the making. Feminist and postcolonialist perceptions of gendered, racial, and knowledge-based power would have been sharpened for me if I had been writing this book at a later date—and references to Joan Scott and Gayatry Spivak would have multiplied. But social authority is related to white-man’s patriarchy from the beginning of this book, and the revolutionary ideologies of power are already treated as highly gendered and racialized (see especially pages 183 and 245–260), so the treatment of the subject would not have to be radically changed if now undertaken afresh.⁶

A sense of historical documents themselves as performances was already with me when this book was in the making; but it has since been much further informed by continual exchanges with the devoted linguist of distant texts, Alton Becker, to whose collected essays, Beyond Translation, I refer readers. Closer to home for historians—even early Americanists—are Natalie Davis’s Fiction in the Archives and a great deal of the work of Robert Darnton.⁷

A work that has greatly influenced my further thinking came out almost simultaneously with this book. Jay Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims demonstrated vividly how much we need to know not just the philosophies of an age—certainly of a revolutionary age—but also the stories that age makes of its philosophies and vice versa. (Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word, published soon after, extended that demonstration.) A dramaturgic approach, and indeed any approach attentive to actors’ points of view, needs to be very concerned with the plotting of the dramas that, consciously or unconsciously, guide even unscripted actions. On this matter Patricia Spacks’s wonderful book on eighteenth-century plots should be high on the reading lists of historians of the Revolution.⁸

An extremely important recent overview narrative, within which the revolutions described in The Transformation of Virginia must now be seen to take their place, is John Gillis’s 1996 work, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values. It traces the imagined family—the idealized expectations against which reality was measured—across the centuries of changing Western systems of social organization, religion, and cosmology. There is an implicit debate between Gillis’s book and mine, in that Gillis gives little attention to the eighteenth century and identifies many of the shifts I have attributed to that time as belonging to the nineteenth century. I believe, however, that the disagreement is more apparent than real, and that Gillis’s intent was heuristic. He is less concerned to find beginnings and more concerned to show the distinctive forms of the family ideal that can be documented from the more mature, urban, commercial-industrial society of the Victorian era; from there he traces the further intensification of those idealizations in our twentieth-century world.⁹

The large field of early American history has seen the publication of some important studies that now frame the Virginia picture I delineated, and they would call for some—but not, I think, radical—adjustments within my story were I to be writing it in 1998. Bernard Bailyn’s Peopling of America volumes set a crucial aspect of the history of the continent in an appropriately large setting. Sidney Mintz opens a similarly big picture of what has been called the South Atlantic system, centered on sugar production and the tragic linking of the slave trade and increasing European appetites for addictive commodities—with tobacco an important adjunct. This understanding has been further globalized by James Henretta and Gregory Nobles. Also important is Jack P. Greene’s Pursuits of Happiness, including a chapter that gives a more pragmatic and less religion- and culture-oriented interpretation of Virginia than is to be found in this book.¹⁰

In eighteenth-century Virginia historiography, much continuing work has enlarged our understandings since The Transformation of Virginia first appeared. I think in particular of Jan Lewis’s study of family values, of Mechal Sobel’s cross-cultural, between-the-races overview, of Kathleen Brown’s intense gendering of the colonial Virginia narrative, of Kenneth Lockridge’s exploration of masculine anxieties and phobias, of the close documentations of emergent African American society and culture by both Lorena Walsh and Philip Morgan, and of the forward strides in the history of material culture and architecture that Camille Wells, Barbara and Cary Carson, and others of the Colonial Williamsburg team have made, supplying a strong elaboration of the largely schematic version of the individuation of domestic space that was available when this book was in preparation.¹¹

I believe, however, that most of this detailed work has confirmed rather than overturned the narrative I presented of how things were at midcentury, how changes and anxieties mounted thereafter, and how rebellion turned into revolution, as well as the analysis I offered of the emergent forms of the remade world that had begun to appear by 1790. Although my work and my ethnographic approach had taken me to other places and different points of view, it was wonderful to see the understandings of the ferment of the later eighteenth century that Gordon Wood had shared with me so generously in the seedtime of 1969–70 at last eloquently elaborated and rendered in monumental book form when his Radicalism of the American Revolution was published in 1992.¹²

If I were rewriting now, though, I would surely change the story in one place: the spring and summer of 1775. I had not read with Woody Holton’s discerning eye the indications of alarm about a threatened slave revolt that was involved in Lord Dunmore’s seizure of gunpowder in April 1775. And Michael McDonnell’s article has now alerted me to how the volunteer military enthusiasm of the spring was squelched in the summer by an anxious old establishment. My account (pages 255–260) had relied on brave-talking newspaper propaganda; I had not studied—as McDonnell has—the recruitment figures and the petitions to the legislative bodies that reveal what actually happened to the people armed as they moved from a first storm of protest to a more sustained war effort. McDonnell’s documentation of social conflicts has also sharpened my perceptions of the political divisions and the emergence of a new political culture in the war years.¹³

There have not been great controversies among early Americanists over my ethnographic interpretation of the American Revolution in Virginia. The main challenge to rethink it has come rather from a critical-theory position within the larger field of American Studies.

In 1990, Jean-Christophe Agnew published a retrospect on my work, seeing in it a key instance of the way Clifford Geertz was beguiling historians from their traditional responsibilities. Agnew’s proposition, baldly summed up, was that a Geertzian meaning-oriented approach cannot explain what happened historically, because it is unable to account for the operations in history of terrifying power—power such as was manifested in the institution of slavery that was fundamental to colonial, Revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary southern society.¹⁴

I have no inclination to dispute Agnew’s position insofar as he argues that accounts of the Revolution and of society in the emergent United States are seriously deficient if they do not dwell on the operations of terrifying power in its gendered, racial, and class forms. But I have resolutely defended the ethnographic-dramaturgic approach in this regard. Let me here renew the assertion that effective power is sustainable only by systems that communicate meanings. Those who continuously exercise power must always construct theaters for their enactments . We shall understand neither the positive transformations nor the tragic limitations of the American Revolution—nor yet the glories and the torments of the nation that it called into being—unless we attend closely to all these domestic, local, regional, and national theaters.

I consider histories to be not just packages of factual knowledge but primarily moral acts that must help present and future generations by advancing the ethical understandings of the world into which they are published. It is in that spirit that I recommit this history now, on the eve of the next millennium.

Williamsburg, Virginia

November 6, 1998

NOTES

1. Clifford Geertz, History and Anthropology, New Literary History, XXI (1989–90), 321–335.

2. John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years—Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970); Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1970).

3. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995); Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experiences (New York, 1990).

4. Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (New York, 1998).

5. Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (New York, 1991); Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (New York, 1992); Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago, 1996). See also Inga Clendinnen, ‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico, Representations, XXXIII (1991), 65–100; and Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch: A History’s Anthropology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1995).

6. See, for example, Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); and Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, 1987).

7. Alton L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays Towards a Modern Philosophy (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995); Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, Calif., 1987); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984); Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990).

8. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (New York, 1982); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986); Patricia Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago, 1990).

9. John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996).

10. Bernard Baiyln, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986); Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage on the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); James A. Henretta and Gregory H. Nobles, Evolution and Revolution: American Society, 1600–1820 (Lexington, Mass., 1987); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988). This is the place to renew my former expressions of gratitude to Professor Greene; see the Acknowledgements, page 359, below.

11. Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York, 1983); Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, 1987); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992); Lorena Seebach Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville, Va., 1997); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Camile Wells, ed., Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture II (1986); Barbara Carson, Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (Washington, D.C., 1990); Cary Carson, The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America: Why Demand?, in Of Consuming Interest: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 483–697; Edward A. Chappell, Housing a Nation: The Transformation of Living Standards in Early America, in ibid., 167–232; Mark Wenger, Gender and the Eighteenth-Century Meal, in A Taste of the Past: Early Foodways of the Albemarle Region, ed. Barbara E. Taylor (Elizabeth City, N.C., 1991), 26–35, 60–61.

12. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992).

13. Woody Holton, ‘Rebel against Rebel’: Enslaved Virginians and the Coming of the American Revolution, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, CV (1997), 157–192; Michael McDonnell, Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below, Journal of American History, LXXV (December 1998). Forthcoming books by these two historians will have a further remarkable impact on our understanding of the Revolution in Virginia: Woody Holton’s Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia will be published in 1999, and Michael A. McDonnell’s, Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia will appear soon thereafter.

14. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, History and Anthropology: Scenes from a Marriage, Yale Journal of Criticism, III (1990), 29–50; and the reply, Rhys Isaac, On Explanation, Text, and Terrifying Power in Ethnographic History, ibid., VI (1993), 217–236.

CONTENTS

The Setting and the Action

Preface to the New Paperback Edition

Introduction

PART I: TRADITIONAL WAYS OF LIFE

1. Prospects of Virginia: Overviews of the Landscape

2. Shapes in the Landscape: The Arrangement of Social Space

Possessing the Land

Fields and Seasons

Homeplaces: Quarters and Houses

The Common Planter’s Place

The Gentleman’s Seat

3. Figures in the Landscape: People and Environment

Body and Climate

Traveling through the Landscape

4. Church and Home: Celebrations of Life’s Meanings

Religion and Life Experiences

Rites of Passage

House, Host, and Hospitality

Ceremonial Space at the Great House

Humble Dwellings

Celebration: The Dance

5. Occasions: Court Days, Race Meetings, Militia Musters, and Elections

Court Day

The Ordinary

Horse Races

Cockpits

Muster Field

Election Day

6. Textures of Community: Mobility, Learning, Gentility, and Authority

Experience of Community

Social Mobility

Values and Religion

Literacy and Oral Culture

From Folk to Genteel Culture

The Authority of the Gentry

Virginia on the Eve of Revolutions

PART II: MOVEMENTS AND EVENTS

7. The Parson, the Squire—and the Upstart Dissenter

The Parsons’ Cause

Sources of Discord

Recriminations: A House Divided

8. Popular Upsurge: The Challenge of the Baptists

The Appearance of a Counterculture

Confrontations

9. Whither Virginia? Specters of Bishop and Sectary

The Episcopacy Controversy

Bishops and Fear of Tyranny

Ecclesiastical Discipline: A Perennial Problem

The Menace of the Anabaptists

Images of Authority and Social Order

Divided Counsels on Toleration

Epilogue

10. Transactions in the Steeple of Bruton: A Tableau of Cultural Provincialism

Town Fathers and Reverend Scholars

Divisive Controversies

Mr. Henley’s Quest for Patronage and Preferment

A Heresy Hearing and Its Sequel

Small World—Great Issues

11. Political Enthusiasm and Continuing Revivalism

Media and Messages of Anxiety

Dramatized Ideology

A People Armed

New Evangelical Stirring

Patriots and New Lights

Resonances

12. Revolutionary Settlement: Religion and the Forms of Community

Wartime Morale

Collapse of Establishment and Attempts at Renewal

Conflicting Symbols of the Social Order

Jefferson’s Bill: Assembly’s Act

PART III: AFTERVIEW

13. Changed Lives—Changed Landscapes

The World the New Lights Made

Domesticity and Private Space

The Quarter: Community Intensified

Slavery Becomes a Problem

A New Metaphor of Social Order

Westward Movement: The Individual in Pursuit of Gain

Community Diminished

The Courthouse

Change and Continuity

A Discourse on the Method: Action, Structure, and Meaning

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Illustrations

Index

THE TRANSFORMATION OF VIRGINIA

Virginia c. 1775. Adapted from the map of Virginia religious congregations in Lester J. Cappon et al., eds., Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era, 1760–1790 (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 39. Drawn by Richard J. Stinely.

INTRODUCTION

Anthropologists cross frontiers to explore communities other than their own. Social historians cross time spans to study earlier periods. Whether one moves away from oneself in cultural space or in historical time, one does not go far before one is in a world where the taken-for-granted must cease to be so. Translation then becomes necessary. Ways must be found of attaining an understanding of the meanings that the inhabitants of other worlds have given to their own everyday customs.

The chapters of this work are a series of linked studies of changing expressions of the meaning of life, traced through half a century of religious and political revolution in Virginia. No claim is made that hitherto unknown facts or sources have been discovered, although here the reader will find that the rich records of popular religious upsurge, previously left as the preserve of denominational historians, have been given the same importance as the records of the struggle for independence. The intention has been to review in social-cultural context the double revolution in religious and political thought and feeling that took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. If this work has a distinctive contribution to make, it lies in the results of a search for means of access to the alien mentalities of a past people. Considerable effort has gone into experimenting with strategies of presentation that would serve to explicate ways of life. Devices appropriated from both art and social science were found to afford the most serviceable mirrors of reality. The theater supplies a concept of dramaturgy, suggesting a way of looking at the important communications included in patterns of action. Social life, in its routines as well as in its convulsive processes of change, is viewed as a complex set of performances. Not only words but also settings, costumes, and gestures all carry their messages in the incessant exchanges of interaction. The authority system can be seen expressed in the assignment of roles. Crucial power struggles occur over the definitions of the situation—the scenes to be enacted, their meanings, and the forms of action appropriate to them.

This book is composite in character. Themes of religion and the roles assigned to an ecclesiastical establishment have provided the main thread of continuity. Yet the intention has been neither to write religious history nor to present the story of a church, but rather to decipher important beliefs, values, and aspirations in a society where the religious institutions that had provided a focus for authority in the community were challenged and ultimately overthrown. In subject matter this book ranges from the hoeing of hills for the planting of tobacco to niceties concerning the degree of orthodoxy requisite for election to the rectorship of the most desirable parish. In order of writing it includes a collection of essays published at different times, but with certain interpretations now radically revised.

The work is divided into three parts, each with a different intention. The first part attempts to characterize the ways of life that had taken shape in Virginia by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, focusing on religion, learning, and authority as topics of central concern. The second part consists of a series of closeup analyses of particular episodes, intended to reveal something of stress and change as they appeared in passages of action and exchanges of words. The studies most important for the development of the theme of this work (chapters 7, 8, 11, and 12) deal with popular movements, their impact, and their implications for systems of authority in society. Chapters 9 and 10 deal with the higher culture of the ruling gentry, reviewing disturbances manifested at that level in consequence of popular challenges to the traditional order. (Those who may not wish to involve themselves in the intricacies of disputed symbols for the legitimation of authority at a time of upheaval can pass over these chapters and yet stay with the main argument of the book.) Part II is followed by an Afterview that seeks glimpses of some of the differences in the ways the inhabitants of old Virginia experienced their world after the decades of religious and political upheaval. Part I and the Afterview, although as systematic as could be managed, are necessarily based on selections from selective research; the episode studies, on the other hand, more in accordance with the requirements of the historian’s craft, are closely bounded in time and place and are based as far as possible on a thorough reading of all directly related sources. Since the incorporation into the text of extended discussion of concept would distract attention from the past peoples whose ways of life this book seeks to reconstruct, A Discourse on the Method offers a fuller explication of the methodology employed. It is necessarily technical and can be omitted by readers not concerned with such theoretical issues.

In sum, my purpose is twofold. First, it has been to develop in myself, and to communicate in this book, an understanding of the generations of people of all races and religions who lived during the revolutionary decades in the distinct cultural region between the Chesapeake Bay and the Blue Ridge. My second purpose arose from the first. It has been to seek concepts and methods for gaining an understanding of past people and so to contribute a mite to humanistic historical social science.

Note: Since pictorial representations surviving from the past provide us with vital documents for reconstructing vanished ways of life, I have included notes About the Illustrations at the end of the volume (pages 415–421). These notes amplify the information given in the text and in the captions to the illustrations.

I

TRADITIONAL WAYS OF LIFE

FIGURE 1.

1

PROSPECTS OF VIRGINIA

Overviews of the Landscape

Water and trees—trees and water. These are the features that now dominate the impressions of a traveler in Tidewater Virginia. In some parts the woods are so dense that one can see but a few yards into them. Elsewhere they thin out, and standing water marks the edge of a swamp. The lay of the land is better revealed in those places where the road crosses or runs alongside one of the great rivers. There, oaks and pines stand thick along the banks, almost down to the high-water mark. From the air the terrain is even more fully revealed, and the eye can take in a total pattern of dense green or black forest, lighter-colored swamps, and the silver arms and fingers of the sea that reach far into the land spread out below. Moving to the west, in the region between the rocky falls and the heaving lines of the Blue Ridge, the land is a series of rolling hills, and the river inlets become fast-flowing streams. Journeying through this Piedmont region, one still finds dense woods, but as the roads top the crests, the eye enjoys views of lovely valleys and is carried across sweeps of pasture or cornfields.

The twentieth-century traveler sees these distinctive Chesapeake terrains and automatically assimilates them into that romantic set of landscape images that we all carry around with us. We are conventionally appalled by urban sprawl, charmed by unspoiled countryside, and enraptured by untamed wilderness. If the traveler is also a historian or an antiquity-minded tourist, he or she will be led to reflect—especially by the view from the air—upon the ways in which the forested, river-dissected terrain worked to shape the emergent Anglo- and Afro-Virginian society. Such travelers will also be moved by the landmarks of the past—an ancient family seat, an old church or meetinghouse, a courthouse village, a tavern where Lafayette is declared to have bivouacked his little army, or just a succession of magically evocative names. These are deeply satisfying journeys. Yet in order to recover the realities of a remote past and to appreciate its ethos, we have to transcend our romantic views of the terrain and strive to recover something of the sense of it that its possessors had, each in their own generation. For the purposes of this study, it is the meanings that the eighteenth-century inhabitants attached to their environment that are to be sought out.

The perceptions a people has of its world are not usually formed or expressed by statistics, yet such information is invaluable to observers seeking to understand the conditions that shape experiences. In 1700 the colony of Virginia had a total population of about 60,000, distributed on the shores of the Chesapeake and the three necks, or peninsulas, between the great rivers that open off the bay itself (see figure IV). The Indians being almost gone, the population was sharply divided between the 85–90 percent who were free or servant Anglo-Virginians and the 10–15 percent who were Afro-Virginian slaves. The total population was growing at a rate of more than 20 percent each decade; it would reach 90,000 by 1720 and 230,000 by 1750. The white contribution to expansion came largely from a surplus of births over deaths. The blacks were increasing naturally also, but at a slower rate, so that their rising proportion in relation to the whole—more than 40 percent by 1750—derived in large part from the continued importation of slaves from Africa at a rate of approximately 1,000 per annum. The population growth was matched by an extension of settlement from the Tidewater into the Piedmont west of the Fall Line, where layers of hard rock create rapids that impede further navigation of ocean-going ships. The society expanded by replicating its basic units in the new areas. Scattered fields and households continued to be included within a network of parish and county lines. Parishes and counties were smaller and more densely settled in the Tidewater, larger and sparser in the west. In 1726 there were fifty-five parishes, ranging in size from ten miles square to thirty or more miles in length by ten in width. The twenty-eight counties varied in dimension but were mostly of a size to contain two parishes. Population density was from twenty to thirty per square mile, reducing as one looked farther to the west. By 1750 there would be seventy-one parishes and forty-five counties. Settlement had already advanced as far as the Blue Ridge, while immigrants from Pennsylvania were moving into the valley beyond.¹

So much for a demographic mapmaker’s view of Virginia. Landscape, however, is not merely measured physical terrain—it is that terrain interpreted by the eye, or one might say, experienced in life. A concept of social or experiential landscape provides the perspective used here to sketch a view of the society and way of life that had taken shape on the shores of the Chesapeake by the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

The development of a moderately secure Virginia identity and the emergence of an easy acceptance of the colony’s distinctive landscape can be traced in the contrast between the essays of two gentlemen—essays that were published twenty years apart during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1705 a book entitled The History and Present State of Virginia appeared in London. Its author was Robert Beverley, a first-generation native of the colony. For him, as for most of his predecessors in the nascent literary tradition of Virginia, the most striking aspect of the region was its natural endowment: "The Country is in a very happy Situation, between the extreams of Heat and Cold. . . . Certainly it must be a happy Climate, since it is very near of the same Latitude with the Land of Promise. Besides, As Judaea was full of Rivers . . . So is Virginia. Had that fertility of Soil? So has Virginia, equal to any land in the known World. Phrases like the extream fruitfulness of that Country recur in Beverley’s descriptions. He praised Virginia as a region where the clearness and brightness of the Sky, add new vigour, and where the inhabitants enjoy all the benefits of a warm Sun, and by their shady Groves, are protected from its Inconvenience. . . . Their Eyes are ravished with the Beauties of naked Nature. Their Ears are Serenaded with the perpetual murmur of Brooks. . . . Their Taste is regaled with the most delicious Fruits. . . . And then their smell is refreshed with an eternal fragrancy of Flowers."²

Beverley’s perception of the bounteousness of nature in Virginia was conditioned by a deep-seated identification, with two visionary landscape images that pervade his descriptive commentaries. One of these was drawn from Scripture, reinforced by Classical preoccupations with an arcadian Golden Age located in a timeless past. The other was based on an idealized picture of the English countryside that he longed to see replicated in Virginia but found to be in marked contrast with reality.³

Beverley evoked the past and timeless landscape in a set of recurrent allusions: "Almost all the Year round, the Levels and Vales are beautified with Flowers of one Kind or other, which make their Woods as fragrant as a Garden." "A Garden is no where sooner made than there, either for Fruits, or Flowers." Even the chapter Of the Recreations, and Pastimes used in Virginia begins with the observation that "for their Recreation, the Plantations, Orchards, and Gardens constantly afford ’em fragrant and delightful Walks. Beverley constantly interpreted the landscape by analogy to Eden, using human archetypes to give primary meaning to the scene. The dominant image of the Indians in the book is of a harmless people who have lived happy. . . in their simple State of Nature, and in their enjoyment of Plenty, without the Curse of Labour." Food gathering for them was diversion, and the bare planting of a little Corn, and Melons . . . took up only a few Days in the Summer. Furthermore, he stressed, they claim no property in Lands, [which] . . . are in Common to a whole Nation. Every one Hunts and Fishes. . . . Their labour in tending Corn, Pompions, Melons, &c. is not so great, that they need quarrel for room (see figure I).⁴

By 1705, however, the Indians were already a vanishing people in Virginia. Only their sorry remnants could be listed in Beverley’s book. The future of the land clearly lay with the invaders, whose occupation of the New World garden Beverley narrated dispassionately. He presented the triumph of his countrymen neither as an atrocity story nor as an epic of conquest. The author condemned not the violence of the intrusion but the failure of the settlers to take advantage of the Liberality of Nature to create an apotheosis of the English landscape in their new home. Because of the arrival of the Europeans,