Migration-Political Culture, Colonial Policy System & Land Development–Pre Revolutionary War Virginia: Culture: Prime Driver of ED, Concepts, Importance and Implications:

Bernard Bailyn described four “circuits” (Virginia the third) or routes–waves of migration that carried distinctive groupings of people to a distinctive geography (destination in America) [99]. Bernard Bailyn, the Peopling of British North America (Vintage, 1986), Part III: a Doomsday Book for the Periphery, pp. 87-134 This was by far not the first of a myriad of research–a literature so vast, it defies summary–that outlines not simply the settlement of colonial America, but also how different value-systems–economic bases occupied separate geographies creating a regionalism so intense it is still of prime importance to Contemporary United States. That these distinctive value systems, economic bases and regional variations is central to American economic development policy and strategy is one of the weight-bearing pillars, a “driver” of this history.

Time, being what it is, redistributes the weight on our pillars, but time also in its own way hardens these differences often by forcing change into its distinctive patterns, value priorities, procedural mannerisms, and in so doing filters and finds a way to express change in its distinctive skeleton-like political and economic structures/institutions core to each state. Thus our values systems and political cultures are both timeless and timely. They are also so basic, like our DNA, that they remain obscured by the fog of history and submerged so deep into our procedures, institutions, and political structures they defy our ability to sense their presence. That–by the way (BTW) is the real importance of our bottoms=up approach to history. Values are felt most keenly in the streets and malls. grocery stores, city-halls–schools and EDOs– of the policy systems most close to the individuals who hold them.

Value differences, different configurations in economic bases, and the importance of regions emerge when we look up from the perspective of where we live. Viewed from the bottoms-up we can see how states differ, why Cincinnati is not Cleveland, Minneapolis is not St. Paul, St Louis is not East St. Louis, Dallas is not San Antonio, or even El El Paso, and Boston is not San Francisco–which is not Oakland. New York is almost unique among American cities–and has little in common with Los Angeles, except of course, the statistical correlations whose explanation imply a commonality encased in meaningless ideological distinctions stripped of people and historical legacies. I dare not even mentions suburban distinctions. Don’t get me started on SMSAs.

Our first chapter details our literal national birth, and the rise of the fragile ideology that linked our Founding Fathers (and Mothers, of course). The birth occurred in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, in the form of the Article of Confederation, which more or less was headquartered there. The Articles–and the Pennsylvania Constitution–more or less were themselves the mid-wives of the American Constitution and the Early Republic’s Constitution first national government, the Washington and Adams administration–that will be the subject of our next chapter. In this chapter, we take a step back–we have too–in order to describe how the thirteen states were already different from each other–even before the American Revolution–and how these differences came about, and suggest why and how they would continue to differ right down to the present day.

American state and local economic development may well be American, but it is not, and I suspect the distinctiveness of its being American is states, in a policy environment in which the federal government is remote and restrained in its agenda-setting, definition, formulation and implementation of its economic development programs, strategies and tools (eminent domain and tax abatement, for instance), evolve on their own terms and realities. Their policy outputs, while similar in several respects, are also different in significant respects also. Call it the same name, the implementation of economic development strategies/programs/tools vary from state to state, and even within a state vary among large cities, smaller cities/towns, suburbs across sub-regions. This history makes an attempt to explain why and put some order and understanding into our state and local policy-making. The first and most basic explanation for why we are so different rests on the political culture and its differential population migration across the various geographies of America. That is the core subject of this chapter.

Migration, Settlement, and Frontier Economy and Policy Systems

When people migrate, across our nation and from other nations, they do not pack their values, experiences, expectations and memories in their suitcases. They carry them in their hearts and minds–and pass them on as best they can to their offspring–and to the governments and businesses with which they deal. It would be a real frustration if such migrants were diffused randomly across geography and time periods–no single migrant would theoretically stand out, and all would be crushed in a deluge of humanity. Talk about alienation. Fortunately, that was not the usual case. Migrations in a particular period of time are seldom random–until and unless we put quotas of immigration and domestic internal migration. Migrants in a time period usually share much in common–and most importantly they whenever possible settle together in a common location. While the numbers are small compared to today’s standards, they are large in Early Republic terms, and it does not taken many to overwhelm an isolated wilderness geography.

Frequently, potential migrants hear or read about certain geographies, and as we shall discover private, and public entities, can stir the pot and launch a sizable movement–many of whom like lemmings essentially follow the herd. Infused with hopes and desperation, migration in the pre and post Early Republic is easily manipulated by speculators (legitimate or otherwise), but if mislead these migrants are not without their skepticism and for whatever reason are determine to take their chance and make the experiment work. In this period, migrants are literally putting their life, and the lives of their loved one, on the line–almost every geography in question is under the control of a Native American tribe or several. That matters because urbanization in a newly-settled Early Republic geography is an illusion. To think of places like Pittsburgh, Lexington, Nashville, and  and Louisville in the pre-1800 period as “cities” is frankly silly. In one module in Chapter 4, I refer to urbanization in Kentucky and Tennessee, the first trans-Appalachian states as similar to the “lost cities of Cibola”–a quest for the nonexistent.

“Urbanization” is diffused by the dominant economic base of that period, agriculture, which is either large-scale or plantation or household farm, yeoman or hardscrabble (subsistence)–both of which are dispersed in the hinterland miles from the settlement community. Policy system dynamics, voting for example, is hugely affected by this population diffusion–voting turnout is horrendous, but, of course, not as bad as today’s typical off-cycle school district election. In any case there is a reason voters at the poll booth were easily bribed by a beer or whiskey. Getting to a far-away state capital will play considerable havoc with legislative quorums, and create unstable voting patterns.

Geographies become saturated with migrants who share critical commonalities (ethnicity, religion, occupation-class status, risk-taking, sometimes even sex and age)–and succeeding migrants who share those commonalities whenever possible follow them. Migrations almost inherently involve momentum surges–and do lead to “busts”. Migrations swarm into particular geographies which either are endowed with expectations or already home to the like-minded. In post-American Revolution migrations, differential “waves” of migrants often occur over time–as migration can and usually does last for decades. This, as we shall discover, gives rise to what we call a land rush atmosphere which usually exerts strong effects on the fragile policy system (if one exists) and often plants the seeds for long-term side effects and disruption. The very first settlers–those who survive and stay that is–often are in a unique position to seize benefit from later migrants, and can form a core of the geographies later elite.

The foundations of an economic base slowly emerge, as do the tenuous political structures of what is often called the frontier policy system and economy. Not infrequently, the drive to statehood originates from these entities, and the elites of these are usually the writers of the first state constitution, and the chief policy-makers of their structures and institutions. Given the lack of established “site control” Indian-fighting and physical security are primary on the loosely structured policy agenda–and elites that emerge demonstrate skills essential to frontier survival. These skills may not always be suitable to later period of political and economic development. Again, lost in the fog of history, the impact of these personalistic dynamics strengthen the role of individuals in a very turbulent, poorly institutionalized, and free-flowing policy system. Individuals matter–they matter greatly–and they can leave a lasting heritage that is not much appreciated in the 21st century.

Ofttimes the initial state policy system, and its underlying constitution, is overwhelmed by succeeding migrants of different groups than those that set up the initial policy system. During this initial period, settlement-building occurs, and for the lucky few eventually city-building follows. Lacking both business and political institutions with capacity and experience, these geographies undergo a period in which “civilization” and its discontents sort of develop almost instinctively–leaving its legacy residue on the slow-congealing policy culture. Long-forgotten today, these Stone “ish” stories and legacies can exert very significant pressures on a young policy system for considerable periods of time–some of which harden sufficiently to become a long-term geographic characteristic.

Most of us have heard, I suspect–and hope– of Bill Bishop’s, the Big Sort, well, this chapter describes the First Big Sort, and will impress on the reader the existence of many, unappreciated Little Sorts. These sorts allow migrants to accumulate the mass that gives them the power and capacity to create political structures which express their values, hopes, experiences and priorities–with the explicit intention that these preferences will be carried forward into the future. In this history, I will focus on one such political structure–a critical one–the initial state constitution and demonstrate how they affect politics, policy-making and economic development policy/strategy. There are many other political structure, but the initial state constitution usually sets them up for the first time. These political structures are not value-neutral rational policy-making institutions and procedures; their DNA are the values, experiences, hopes and priorities of the folk that wrote and approved them. Like DNA they produced many an unexpected result as they take their course over time.

To place a speed bump in the reader’s mind–because I sense what many of you are already thinking–today’s 2019 Massachusetts state constitution was written in 1780, by no less than John Adams. Have patience and a little trust. I will in the chapters of this history provide what I hope is a credible case for how these original value-laden state constitutions have endured to the present.

Economic Development Policy-Marking: the First Strategies Embraced in the New World

In the beginning it began with land, and land was the first economic development strategy. In an age of kings, transitioning their power to the nobility and upper gentry, the initial primary ED strategy necessarily fell into the domain of what we call Mainstream Economic Development. Land “for the people” will soon make its appearance, and Community Development and the land strategy will in the future have its day–but it is not in the time period of this chapter. Technically, Virginia was not the first North American colony by a long-shot, but it was the first British colony, and the land strategy will take shape and evolve under different conditions and factors than, for example, Massachusetts. Virginia, however, as we have hinted, places a special role in the early, Early Republic, and through is state siblings will thoroughly dominate  American ED for most of the entire Early Republic period. Much of that dominance has to do with its version of the land strategy–much of its future failure can be attributed to its being unable to move beyond the land strategy into a second primary strategy: developmental transportation infrastructure–but that is a later, post 1800 tale of woe.

While the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (Massachusetts) occurred seventeen years after the 1607 Virginia Jamestown “landing”, the visual image of the Plymouth landing captures our first Land Strategy reality: how bleak and overwhelming were the dynamics of forging a settlement out of the North American wilderness. Can you picture what the wife of this man is thinking when he says, “OK let’s go and start a colony”?

Jamestown’s immediate reality, as we shall shortly discover, was that it was a death factory–and the Indians played a secondary role in that. But not to digress, the first example of the land strategy would be pitching a tent on the immediate coast, and calling it home until you could build a real one. That, BTW, was later called “squatting”. Squatting was what one did after first moving into the wilderness in advance of a county clerk of courts where you could file a legal claim to the land. The uncertainty, the obvious future vulnerability of your homestead in advance of a legal system is enormous. To “manage” that vulnerability is the first task of economic development–without which the population volume needed to settle and form a community will be all that more difficult. That is the job of the Land Developer, our first Economic Developer.

Almost all of the Virginia modules center of Migration-Political Culture, the development of a Policy System, and Land Development, the first economic development strategy in the American wilderness. This probably is not a great surprise to a MED economic developer, but more of question is why wilderness pre-1800 land development matter to a contemporary economic developer? Other readers fear that this will be treatise on filing land claims while under Native American attack. Wilderness Land Development (in advance of the rule of law) is its own unique ED strategy, to be sure, but the core of land development process still is relevant. Witold Rybczynski not too long ago wrote a wonderful book, Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town describing how “virgin land development” still exists, and matters greatly to economic and urban development; Land development is after all the first ED strategy for suburbanization and regional change.

Land development holds a very important and especially critical position in this history. The reader shall discover that I view land development as fledgling American elite’s first means of accumulating wealth for future investment, as the basic for the formation for America’s first political and economic elites, as the precondition for the formation of a state or local policy system, and the very first strategy pertinent to state and city-building. It also has a great deal to do with the installation of a community’s first economic base, it is the core dynamic and principal sector gazelle in a frontier economy–if not a newly rising city, and is the bottom-line of much of present day urban revitalization and yes, even neighborhood revitalization (i.e. gentrification)

That the rule of law has evolved to allow condo ownership, Privatopia, master-planned-communities, and development/governance by homeowners associations seems so magnificent and sophisticated, that I hate to break the bubble by suggesting variants of all these can be found in pre-1800 land development. Land development meant then, as it does now, that land must be assembled with title, subdivided, marketed, and sold/rented to the end-user.

Somewhere in that sequence a certain level of infrastructure, for access and living would be nice. That, however, is a unique attribute of Wilderness Land Development; infrastructure is a luxury at best. That you can sell someone some land, 500 miles from anywhere, offer no way to get there, and find its full of irate Native Americans trying really hard to kill you when they do get there–and then building a settlement that lasts hundreds of years is beyond our grasp today–that is one reason why political culture is so important, it helps explain why migrants were willing, indeed demanding, such a land strategy.

There is, however, one constant in land development: someone is trying to make money from it–either government or more likely a private individual–shades of Donald J. Trump.

Uneasy is the mind that grapples with the interrelationship of land and profit. Community development will take note, and fellows like Henry George (more on him two hundred years from this module) will set us straight, and community developers that follow in his tradition will keep us on the straight and narrow. But pre-1800 and long after, until really the 1840’s, private profit and public partnerships were linked so tightly there was no blur in the relationship. We have already seen how George Washington saw making a personal profit by creating a public good was a matter of personal integrity, not law, of appearances not inequality. In his day the character of a gentleman carried responsibilities and restraints. but in no way did it inhibit his ability to be an entrepreneur in the form of a Wilderness Land Developer.

Today’s reader in hindsight might take a tranquilizer to settle his/her conscience, and simply go along, wrenching in disgust and moral rage after having been sensitized to the core rottenness that is Mainstream ED. George Washington was a saint; wait until you meet William Blount–let’s not even think about Robert Morris, or Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. In any case, almost everybody pre-1800 with a dime in his pocket, actively engaged in land speculations, as it is called today–speculation, BTW, is a bad word in most current books, but not in this one.

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and all the saints that are our Founding Fathers, were to a man land speculators–even,o horrors of horrors, the immortal Alexander Hamilton, the Achilles of American economic development. That he slept in his tent with other women, and was the spawner of several land schemes that sent others to jail, we shall not dwell upon. Like Achilles he was never arrested, and died in battle. In this Virginia series, the reader shall meet unknown characters like Governors William Berkeley, Alexander Spotswood, Lord Beverley, frontiersmen Peter Jefferson and James Patton, and the greatest of all Virginia land developers, Thomas Lord Fairfax and his development ilk that included his protege and land surveyor, George Washington. In so doing the reader will hopefully understand and appreciate the Virginia-style of private land development–the style that settled the South and appalled those with a community development persuasion.

Let’s Move to Political Culture

I am not inclined to engage in a long theoretical discussion of what constitutes a political culture, a discussion which inevitably culminates in a formal definition of political culture–which is promptly tossed aside (thankfully) soon after. Let’s be content to ground ourselves with my amended adaptation of James Anderson’s description of political culture as “widely held values, beliefs, and attitudes on what governments [and economies, and society] should do, how they should operate, and [key] relationships between citizen and government [consumer and producer, and private and public]. Political culture is transmitted by one generation to another by socialization, a process in which the individual through many experiences with parents, friends, teachers, [religious and] political leaders … learns politically relevant values, beliefs and attitudes … [becoming] part of his or her psychological makeup [and value priorities] [99] James E. Anderson. Public Policy-Making (6th ED) (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), p.39. Every policy system, state, local or national, rests on a bed composed of political cultures. It is why we have the Red and Blue states today; it is why we had the Union and Confederacy. If there is a truth that really exists in reality, it might be that America as a nation never has enjoyed a single political culture–and to let the reader know where I stand–hopefully will never have such a single American culture.

This history rests on its assertion that each state possesses its version of a political culture(s) it inherited or configured from the original thirteen colonies and brought to that state by its first residents and taxpayers. In this module we begin the outline of Virginia’s settlement and the development of its distinctive political culture–a culture I take great pains to impress on the reader which impacted our nation, its politics and values. In short order we will encounter other such colonial-Early Republic political cultures such as Yankee, Midlands, Deep South, and Scots-Irish, Midwest and Heartlands, Left Coast, (and New Orleans-Louisiana), Texan Southwest, and Mountain political cultures. We will even make a wild stab at explaining a New York City’s  and San Francisco’s political culture. In later chapters we will explore Black American political culture, and open up the idea of Hispanic and immigrant cultures–but that is many chapters in the future. Each state and its local policy systems rests on its somewhat unique political culture and its ever-changing mix of new-comers exiting and entering their boundary confines. From this the reader might rightfully sense that my notion of state political culture does not imply the existence of a single monopolistic political culture, but an ever-volatile clash and cooperation of a mixture of political cultures that struggle to be heard in its policy systems.

In each state there may, or may not, be a dominant political culture–but there is a culture–or a compromise between cultures–that has been embedded into its constitution and political structures, institutions, and relationships that it creates. These initial institutions and practices have, of course, been amended–but not replaced; it is hard to replace a branch of government like a legislature or governor. Separation of powers, however, is quite another matter. Local governments, created by the state, are more volatile at least in theory. These initial structures, procedures and institutions were created for reasons and reflect preferences as to “the who “and “how” policy-making should be conducted. Practice and reality being what it is, the original intentions can be easily subverted and bypassed–and then then is the matter of rule of law and judicial review, not to ignore policy-relevant intrusions from the environment (like the federal government) which compel their input. All these factors and dynamics offer plenty of opportunity for creative and idiosyncratic adaptations which over time become cemented into a distinctive way to conduct state and local business and politics–and to make and implement policies such as economic development. While at some level we probably think “a state is a state” and “a city is a city”, in our heart of hearts we fully appreciate that states and cities differ hugely from each other. The formulation, definition, approval and implementation of policy, certainly economic and community development, can, despite being called by a common name, vary greatly across cities and states. A tax abatement in Maryland is not the same tax abatement one is likely to find in Missouri–except in a classroom or an academic work.

On top of this there is the mixture, the configuration, of multiple political cultures held by its policy-making elites. There is ,then, an elites political culture and also a larger set of political cultures held by non-elites. That distinction is important to economic development. One form of economic development, Mainstream Economic Development (MED), is closely associated with a closed, elite dominated pro-“capitalist” policy system. The other form of economic development, Community Development, works with non-elites, often seeing itself as the delegate of the distressed and dis-empowered who not unusually look askance at capitalism. We will discover the strength and the content of each economic development approach ultimately is derived from different sets of political cultures in a given state, city or county. That easily results in intra-state variation, between suburb and central city, different economic base configurations, and among the sub-regions of the state.

But equally important, one can sense that elites and “masses” benefit differently from various economic development policies, strategies and tools, and that policy-making in economic development can easily assume an elite-mass dimension. While economic developers, usually not community developers, often decry politics in their policy-making, preferring of course bureaucratic and professional expertise as criterion for policy, that too is a usually a chimera. Few policy systems at the state and local levels leave ED policy-making solely to the undisturbed preferences of its bureaucracies and professionals. That may be an important reason why community developers and economic developers are currently at war with each other. From this it is but a small step to talk of things like populism. Indeed, in Chapter 1 we have already discovered that elite-mass, Federalists and western populists were already at war in the Pennsylvania’s statehouse during the 1780’s. We have already introduced the notion that the American Revolution itself, started by populists, taken over by elites who became Federalists, were the architects of the Early Republic. We also learned that on day one these two forces fundamentally disagreed on the conduct and priorities to be followed by economic development.

We are a nation composed of a federation-coalition of cultures who work to fashion a shared vision. Without a majority-consensus the system is tiled to non-action. But the perhaps controversial starting point of this history, as suggested by Colin Woodard, is that “Americans have been deeply divided since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth. The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions … each with their own religious, political and ethnographic characteristics … All of these centuries-old cultures are still with us today, and have spread their people, ideas and influence across … the continent. There isn’t and never has been one America, but several Americas. ..(O)ur divisions stem from this fact: the United States is a federation comprise of the whole or part of … regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another. … Few have shown any indication that they are melting into some sort of unified American culture. On the contrary since 1960 the fault lines between these nations have been growing wider, fueling culture wars, constitutional struggles, and ever more frequent pleas for unity“. [99] Colin Woodard American Nations (Viking Press, 2011), p. 2-3.

The history will first concentrate on several of the larger, hugely critical migrations that settled the trans-Appalachian interior, straight to the Mississippi River. Accordingly, the New York/upper Midwest Diaspora Yankee Diaspora, the Deep South Rise of the Cotton Belt, and the two migrations that settled the states bordering on the Mason-Dixon line–a migration composed mostly of Tidewater and Pennsylvania Midlands groupings. In later chapters we will also deal with the unspoken black slave migration, the settlement of Texas, and the Far West. Left for its own special treatment is New York City–and by implication New Jersey. Each of these migrations is of sufficient volume that its migration into new wilderness states noticeably impacted the formation of that state’s political culture. Virginia being the first, arguably the single most impactful in the first half-century of the Early Republic, and among the most complicated, we will also introduce key concepts useful in applying to the other migrations.

All told, between 1607 and 1775 little more than 700,000 Europeans, and 300,000 African slaves immigrated into the thirteen colonies. The first Early Republic census in 1790 uncovered 3.9 million plus citizens, 3.1 million whites and 750,000 blacks. Nobody counted Native Americans [99] Roger Daniels, Coming To America (2nd ED) (Harper, 1991 and 2002), pp..30-1. One implication from those numbers is that “chain” migration, immigrants and their natural (organic)-born offspring, were quite mobile, and having spent some indeterminate time in a port city, moved on to hinterland and points elsewhere. Daniel Boone, for example, was born in Pennsylvania, his father and mother English-born Quaker immigrants, who later moved to Maryland and Virginia. Boone considered himself Virginian, moved to North Carolina, and founded Boonesborough in Virginia’s Kentucky county with the intention of founding a brand new state. Despite his notoriety, he was not all that atypical.

So in Chapter 2 we introduce the reader to the development of political cultures starting with their beginning in the migrations of colonial North America. The introduction has two main elements the outline of the key migrations that populated the original colonies, and the initial depiction of the shared values and ED-relevant cultural beliefs that will impact our history. In the Chapter we will start out with Virginia, move onto to Pennsylvania, and finish up with Massachusetts. The final section will develop our notion of how political cultures can become elements in a larger populist movement–how elite–mass divergence can reach levels that prompt the formation of an informal coalition of political cultures.

An Assessment of the Impact of the Virginia the Colonial Policy System and its Impact on Migration

For all practical purposes the Virginia colonial policy system that governed until the American Revolution was established just previous, during, and the two generations after the William Berkeley period. Governor Berkeley imposed on the ill-institutionalized, isolated, and semi-anarchistic Jamestown colony strong gubernatorial direction with a series of policy strategies that institutionalized the fundamentals of the Virginia colonial government and economy. But more importantly , Berkeley through a two-pronged people attraction strategy that imported English royalist refugees, the second sons of English aristocracy, and entrepreneurial English gentry created a royalist elite class that would come to dominate its policy process and transform the colony’s multi-level policy system into an oligopolistic plantation hegemony. Berkeley did this by awarding these elite immigrants with land grants, many of which originated from the infamous Northern Neck land grant. Berkeley also rewarded key members of his administration, such as Richard Lee, and William Byrd with huge land grants as part of this process. Throughout the core regions of the coastal lowland Tidewater, he installed what I liken to an English manor economic and political system based on plantations and family-clan networks. Whether one calls this policy system a oligopolistic dictatorship or managed democracy depends, I suspect, on where one sits on the equality/inequality continuum.

With minimal separation of public and private interests, Berkeley laid the foundations of a Tidewater public-private policy process that made little distinction between public good and private profit and self-interest. Through narrowing of the electoral franchise to property owners, Berkeley ensured the lower house of the legislature, the House of Burgesses was safely under the influence of the royalist elite empowered by him with large acreage and through that was able to dominate the counties and parishes that constituted Virginia local government. The upper house of the legislature functioned as the Governor’s cabinet and accordingly was appointed by the Governor from these new propertied elites. The power of this Royal Council, and its centrality to policy-making and administration marginalized the impact of the House of Burgesses, in the not especially common event its majorities deviated on a major policy initiative. While our current textbooks tilt toward seeing the House of Burgesses as one of the first examples of a budding future American democracy, a skepticism of its influence when compared to the Royal Council, the narrowness of its electoral franchise, and the restrictions exercise on those who sought office open it up to a class-based attack. The crushing dominance over isolated counties and parishes by a social, economic and political royalist plantation elite strongly hints that Virginia’s colonial policy system is at best democracy at its very earliest stages.

The imported royalist elite established plantations and adopted slave-based, export tobacco plantation agriculture. Agriculture, not commerce, trade, or artisan manufacturing, dominated this economy from its birth. The huge sums of investment capital, and land subsidies from somewhere, required to sustain a tobacco export plantation economy were poured into plantation agriculture as its very first priority–inhibiting Virginia’s economic diversification, and making a pittance of discretionary investment capital available to other sectors. In the beginning, the plantation was worked by a huge imported mass of indentured servants, but that changed after Berkeley was removed from office in 1676. By the first decade of the eighteenth century black slavery had taken hold. Across the coastal Tidewater lowlands,controlling the colony-level policy structures, and dominating by sheer wealth and restricted electoral franchise, the Plantation royalist elite dominated, if not controlled, elections and affairs at the local level.

The Virginia Tidewater coastal regions had essentially transported and installed late medieval manors similar to those in decline in Great Britain. These wealthy royalist families intermarried, developed coalitions and rivalries, and through primogeniture established a network of powerful family clans that, after the removal of Berkeley, solidified their dominance over the Royal Council, effectively stripped from the Royal Governor. Virginia was not unique in its importing of manor-agriculture, but the New York and Pennsylvania manors in particular, were of a very different ilk. In no other colony did medieval-style manors dominated the policy system nor its economic base so totally (the possible exception being South Carolina, but which also developed one of the few major North American urban ports).

With the Royal Council and House of Burgesses, not only a mere check on the Governor, was a very real rival, which stood in principle for the colony’s administration be conducted by Virginia’s domestic oligarchy. That powerful rival removed several competent royal governors over the following decades. Over time, one can see evidence the governor realizing the futility of dominating the policy system, joined with the royalist oligarchy, or groupings of it–completing the decentralizing (downward) thrust of policy-making at the expense of a comprehensive colony-wide interest and development. Submerged in all of this were the bulk of Virginia’s residents, one scarce call them citizens as they remained outside the election franchise, most being renters and/or low-wage drifters. Those who could, or would, “escaped to the peripheries and typically engaged in the most hardscrabble of farming known on the continent at that time. A policy system characterized by extreme inequality, the interests of the downtrodden protected only by the “gentleman’s responsibility and its so-called nobilise oblige. That situation would only grow worse after 1720 when Germans, Scots-Irish (and others) migrated into the Blue Ridge Shenandoah Valley. Amazingly, the medieval Tidewater nexus of values/beliefs, and the policy system that reflected them, was largely in place by 1710–as was the tobacco export, slave-based agricultural economic base.

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Tobacco, a crop that rapidly exhausts the soil’s nutrients, combined with the normal succession of generations/cohorts, combined to compel these plantation elites to find virgin land to form new manors. The family-clans responded (in the early 1700’s) by completing the settlement of the coastal Tidewater, then crossing into Virginia’s interior over the Appalachian Fall Line into the Piedmont plateau. While Berkeley started the initial movement himself, at Petersburg/Fort Henry, it was the plantation elites that followed up after his removal. The Piedmont, including Fort Henry, settled by the more aggressive clan leaders such as William Byrd, the Randolphs, and a newcomer, Lord Thomas Fairfax who inherited single-handedly the huge Northern Neck grant. Major and minor clans and families ventured into these new lands, set up new plantations, now worked by black slaves, and expanded the Tidewater policy system to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Appalachian Mountains. Inspired by the expedition of a new Governor Spotswood, who continued the tradition of blurring the public and private interests into policy, the potential of replicating the settlement of the Piedmont in the bountiful Shenandoah Valley in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains. By the 1720’s a third round of internal settlement again led by the families of the Tidewater royalist elite, was gathering momentum. The migration of the Shenandoah during the 1730 did occur, but its nature was significantly different from the Piedmont.

Land-wise at least, Fairfax and his Northern Neck dominated the complex of royalist clans and families. He incorporated several into his network; others became his rivals. The complex of family-clan networks, always criss-crossing with its ambitions, lineages, and personalities, was on many issues fragmented  by the newcomer. Arriving on the scene at precisely that time when the German and (first hints) Scots-Irish migrations began, he moved more aggressively into the Blue Ridge Shenandoah Valley. Fairfax’s rival certainly noticed and they initiated a legal challenge to Fairfax’s inheritance, a challenge that not only brought Fairfax himself to live in Virginia, but a legal morass of competing maps and surveys ensued for the next decade and half–not resolved until 1746. Fairfax mostly won. By that time, the German/Scots-Irish onslaught was in full tilt and the Shenandoah was the land of opportunity–as was for that matter more distant territories in today’s West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio–so great was the migration surge. True, small matters such as Native Americans and French lay in the way, but by the mid-1740’s the royalist elite plantation owners lustily looked at the prospects of an land development strategy, bringing with them, they hoped, a castrated Royal Governor and the colony’s governmental institutions for good measure. The ground was prepared for a late-medieval public private partnership in the pursuit of an economic development and colony defense strategy that offered serious profits, and maybe new land for the plantation economy,

Two factors made the Shenandoah different. The Fairfax dominated the complex of royalist clans and families. He incorporated several into his network, and others became his rivals. Arriving on the scene at precisely that time when the German and (first hints) Scots-Irish migrations began, he moved more aggressively into the Blue Ridge Shenandoah Valley.first was that its soil and climate was not especially suitable for tobacco, and by that time tobacco was showing definitive strains and stresses, and its export competitive position was increasingly challenged by other global geographies. The second factor was, however, the more important in this post-1730 period: the Shenandoah was endowed with a great natural highway, the Warrior’s Path, which in this period became the Great Wagon Road. Flowing mostly from North America’s largest port, Philadelphia, the Wagon Road proceeded through southern Pennsylvania, through Maryland, into Virginia (which included West Virginia), and into the Carolinas and northern Georgia. Several hordes of immigrants, Germans and Scots-Irish, the former being earlier, proceeded in droves down the Wagon Road and by the late 1720’s had reached the northern boundaries (the Northern Neck) of Virginia. In the following decades an even larger migration of Scots-Irish was to follow. Unplanned and not asked for, a huge mass of settlers had arrived at the Tidewater elite’s western door steps.

Tidewater Virginia: Migration and Political Cultures

V. O. Key’s opening lines to his treatment of Virginia in his classic work of political behavior/opinion and southern regionalism with the statement: “Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most through control by an oligarchy. Political power has been closely held by a small group of leaders, who themselves and their predecessors, have subverted democratic institutions, and deprived most Virginians of a voice in their government” [99] V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (1984 (originally published 1949), p.19. . This is the state, that pound for pound, generated more of our Founding Fathers, the Father of our Country, the Father of our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Victor in War of 1812, and whose oligarchs constituted five of the first six American Presidents–ruling uninterrupted from 1800 to 1824.

In a history of our Early Republic (1789 to 1865), this Virginia Dynasty in addition to the first five, produced three more Presidents (Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor) and as the mother-state to offspring such as Kentucky and Tennessee, it elected three more (Jackson, Polk, and Andrew Johnson). We ought not ignore the unappreciated contribution of Lincoln and Jefferson Davis–opposing Presidents in the Civil War–both of whom were born in Kentucky only a generation after its independence from Virginia. We should also include the single most powerful individual of the Early Republic, Senator, Speaker of the House and five time presidential candidate, Kentucky’s Henry Clay. Nor do we mention Virginia’s John Marshall, the Founding Father of the American Supreme Court. Somehow all these national leaders eluded the dialogue and songs of the Broadway play Hamilton, and frankly, it falls within the cracks of nearly all our current textbooks. Virginia’s role as a state who shaped the national destiny in its Early Republic years is not even an asterisk. We talk of Washington, Madison and Jefferson as Founding Fathers, but not as “sons of the Old Dominion”. Yes, all were slaveholders–even Lincoln (albeit indirectly). BTW, Virginia ended the importation of slaves in 1778–before Massachusetts (1783).

Our Central Thrust–What may be most intriguing is how the founders of our American democracy, and the American Revolution, came from a state whose policy system and political traditions/values possessed more than a tinge of anti-democracy. How did these slave-holding aristocrats draft a bill of rights such as was included in our Constitution. The original “draft” of the bill of rights was composed by slaveholding George Mason from Virginia, a life-long anti-slavery advocate, who stood on the edge of being a southern style abolitionist–but never ever freed his slaves even upon his death. He was not unique in this regard; consider Jefferson, and Patrick Henry or Monroe and Madison who lived and acted similarly to Mason. Henry and Jefferson were the state’s first two governors–the former for five terms.

Yet as governor neither could break through the closed oligarchic policy system that was Virginia state government. They could write and approve a state bill of rights, end the state’s importation of black slaves, and led the nation in separating church from state and installing a system of religious toleration in politics–yet their state policy systems were mostly closed, and run by an elite oligopoly. How could a revolutionary, whose words “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” started the American Revolution, not lead Virginia into a great surge of democratic populism? Why? How? The explanation provided will be key in understanding how other states that imitated Virginia’s approach and implemented key provisions of its constitution and governance in their state could potentially be affected? What is truly remarkable is this structural manifestation was passed on to other states (Kentucky the most obvious), and over the next two generations a Virginia Tidewater policy system included an oligopolistic county level policy system.

Our principal conclusion was that the “steel beam” which supported a Virginia oligarchy that runs through its history from 1776 to V.O. Key’s Byrd Machine was its county government. The influence of counties on the consensus and dynamics of Virginia’s state legislature/governor deeply affected its policy outputs–or the lack of them (non-decisions). That as we shall discover is a distinguishing characteristic of Virginia Tidewater economic development. So pervasive was (is) the county that its major municipalities (incorporated cities) are in fact counties. Many states have historically relied on county government, but Virginia’s county policy system has as V.O. Key asserts been dominated by an oligopolistic elite–a closed policy system. Virginia Tidewater policy systems were decentralized; their leadership and policy parameters reflected those of representatives who thought in terms and value priorities that preserved the way of life and social-economic-political system from whence they were elected–the county. Lacking a driving vision and ambition for a state-wide policy agenda, a hallmark of the Virginia Tidewater policy system–and its economic development–they deferred to local rivalries, jealousies, and refused to challenge an informal system of local oligopolies from which they came, and to which they would someday return.

The colonial political culture and policy systems during the American Revolution had to transition over from a “colonial semi-democracy” to a “revolutionary democracy”. In the case of Virginia, that transition meant the inclusion of several political cultures which had been marginalized in the colonial policy system. The amazing inertia of historical political structures and practices manifested itself in this transition, as old political structures were grafted onto a revolutionary democracy–which itself was reflective more of the spirit associated with a war of independence, than the realities of creating a policy system capable of moving into a modern world.

The Virginia policy system, and the political culture(s) that supported it during the first fifty years of our American Republic is a very interesting and intriguing policy system. Plagued with internal tensions and conflicting array of clashing but ofttimes compatible political cultures, the policy outputs produced by such a system were very distinctive, almost unique. In looking under the hood of Early Republic’s Virginia policy system we can see how political culture entered into policy-making, empowering both the Federalist Washington and the Democratic-Republican Jefferson, a Patrick Henry (a populist revolutionary who died a Federalist), a James Madison (and his protege James Monroe), and a Federalist John Marshall. Is it no wonder that such a policy system fifty years later would elevate an populist Democrat Andrew Jackson, and the founder of the Whig (pre-Republican) Party, Henry Clay? From what primeval policy soup could such stark opposites survive and prosper? My answer to that question will start with this module.

Virginia’s Colonial Migrations

If the reader is already aware of the Tidewater political culture, she is probably familiar with labels like “cavalier“, royalist supporters of Charles I, who lost his head in the 1640’s English Civil War. That is the starting point for Woodard, who ascribes the formative element of the Tidewater political culture to “the younger sons of southern English gentry who aimed to reproduce the semi-feudal manorial society of the English countryside, where economic, political and social affairs were run by landed aristocrats … self-identified “Cavaliers“. The cumulative effect on Virginia from their migration was to create “a fundamentally conservative region, with a high value placed on respect for authority and tradition [conversely deference to the landed elites] and very little on equality or participation in politics”[99] Colin Woodward, American Nations, p. 7.

The problem with this summary is that the 1776 Virginia Constitution, the prominence and impact of revolutionary–even populist–political leaders such as Henry, Washington Mason, (Richard Henry) Lee, and Jefferson–and the thrust of Virginia’s Early Republic policy system–include considerable doses of an opposite set of beliefs and value priorities. The Virginia Tidewater system included, as we shall discover, several other major cultural elements which greatly impacted its state-level culture, while amazingly leaving the county level to the so-called Cavaliers. This curious bi-modal distribution of cultural “power and influence” is a central pillar of our Tidewater political culture. It can only be explained by including other migrations, with their own distinctive cultures, into our discussion. It is also necessary that we include English–or Royal–Colonial governance exercised through the King’s appointment of the colony’s “governor”. As we shall find, except for a spectacular period under royalist Governor William Berkeley who arrived in Virginia in 1642 and stayed around through 1677, local Virginia royalist cavaliers had to contend with a Governor appointed by, and mostly loyal to, the wishes of the English King.  A strong royal-loyal governor dominated that state-level policy system. He ruled through his Royal Cabinet, which was both the upper house of the legislature, the state supreme court, and his administrative departments.

Accordingly, the reader will now hear about the other migrations. They include the Jamestown affair, the indentured servants, the non-Royalist gentry (Scots, Welsh–which included Jefferson) the Germans (migrating from Pennsylvania), and last but far from least, the Scots-Irish, arriving very late and also flowing down from Pennsylvania (mostly). There are others (Scots Highlanders, and Huguenots), but their influence was limited to particular geographies and charismatic leaders. Not-so-gently stirred these are the ingredients of the Virginia Tidewater political culture.

The first European migration into Virginia was to Jamestown in 1607 (I ignore Roanoke). It was a horrible debacle in almost every respect, despite the heroic efforts of Pocahontas, John Smith and John Rolfe. The commercial venture which opened up the Tidewater lasted until 1624, when the English Crown took over the colony’s governance–revoking the charter of the City-founding corporation. It is estimated that joint stock, royally-chartered corporation lost 200,000 pounds, a considerable sum. About 3,750 settlers were sent in the interim, 3,000 died, and in 1624 about 1,200 Virginians remained [99]Roger Daniels, Coming To America (2nd ED) (Harper, 1991 and 2002), pp..30-1. The legacy of the joint stock corporation, however,  hugely impacted Virginia’s economic base, society, and politics–an impact that arguably was fundamental to any understanding of the state. The before collapsing, the corporation imposed an economy devoted almost exclusively to the production and London-export of tobacco. It was the corporation’s attempt at a business model that hopefully would yield profits. Tobacco was a European gazelle, but it required mass-scale agricultural production based on low or no-wage labor. It was they that set Project 1619 into motion, a project that led to the importation of black slaves to work the plantations of Virginia. Its first slaves, however, were predominately Native American. In any case, while the corporation failed, new immigrants bought into the plantation and tobacco as their cash crop. Virginia, very early on (1625), committed itself to an export-based agriculture. Immigration slowly filtered into the coastal Tidewater areas, and by 1635 about 5,000 lived in Virginia; in 1642 about 8,000. The wild and woolly, opportunistic, almost thuggish character of its Jamestown period policy-making, was not drawn from a mature political culture. but from the serendipity of the kinds of people attracted into a remote and dangerous wilderness 3000 nautical miles from European civilization..

The second migration–if the Jamestown period can be considered a migration–began with the arrival of a new royal governor, William Berkeley. Among other facets, in Berkeley we shall discover the primacy of his principal ED strategies: people-attraction an early attempt at cluster development, and geographic expansion secured through establishing site control free for attack by Native Americans.

Berkeley was a true “cavalier”, a junior member of the British aristocracy, with a heritage that extended to the time of William the Conqueror. He assumed the governorship in the same year as the commencement of the English Civil War. Until the final defeat, and subsequent execution of Charles I in 1649, Berkeley was a royalist in the true sense of the word, loyal to Charles I and his son Charles II. After the King’s defeat and death, Berkeley ruled autocratically, suspending House of Burgesses’ elections; his “Long Assembly”, elected first in 1662 a creature of the English Restoration, Berkeley, continued to function without any election until 1676.During this time the carried on his various ED strategies–the last of which (site control from Indians) did as much to inspire a rebellion, as possibly all other frustrations combined. Berkeley was nearly overthrown in Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion–but he was able to survive the insurrection. Bacon died midstream in 1776 from dysentery (which nearly killed Berkeley as well), and the timely arrival of a British frigate with marines crushed the Rebellion. Berkeley’s subsequent cruel repression of the movement prompted Charles II to recall him in dishonor in 1677. Still he “ruled” for thirty-five years.

William Berkeley is one of the Virginia’s most controversial figures, arguably Virginia’s earliest founder (excepting John Smith) he possessed a real economic development agenda, and a sometimes arrogant and in his later years cruel despot, implemented it over decades. It was Berkeley who not only encouraged, but actively supported through incentives and governmental policy, the immigration into Virginia of displaced royalist families, and facilitated their efforts to recreate in Virginia the lost late medieval system from which they had been displaced. It was he that  “pacified the resident Indian tribes after their 1644 Holy Thursday attack, bringing them to bay with a treaty in 1646. In 1644 the House of Burgesses granted a corporate charter to a group of what later will be called land speculators to open up this land, found a settlement that could develop mines. The corporation received an abatement from any land sales profits, but was required to pay “the royal fifth” on the profits from the mines. This was Virginia’s first major venture into economic development–it did not fare well for the corporate entrepreneurs–they were all killed, to a man, by Indians. The state-chartered corporation, Virginia’s first economic development organization (EDO), however, was off and running (not fast enough for its first use), and would be the standard structural vehicle for public-private partnerships through to the American Revolution. George Washington’s Patowmack Company was a 1784 version.

Berkeley appointed Richard Lee, a chief lieutenant of the former governor, as his second-in-command (Attorney-General). During his tenure under Berkeley Lee accumulated about 13,000 Tidewater acres from which he planted tobacco, was a huge importer of indentured servants who worked his plantations, traded slaves and furs, and upon his  death in 1664 was reputed to be Virginia’s richest man. After his death several of his parcels were sold, including what became Washington’s Mount Vernon. His grandson, Thomas Lee melded a political dynasty through marriage, land and is executive management of Lord Fairfax’s Northern Neck grant. He was the principal founder and first president of the Ohio Land Company (Lawrence Washington, the President’s older half-brother, succeeded him). He held during the course of his career just about every political office, including House of Burgesses and Royal Council. His children included several sons that featured heavily in the Revolution and the Articles of Confederation, the most notable being Richard Henry Lee, signer of the Declaration of Independent, President of the Articles, and Virginia’s first Federalist Senator to the Early Republic–consider as a Founding Father and great-grandfather of Robert E. Lee.

Berkeley’s aggressive recruitment of royalist English Civil War elites and refugees imported a new population that carried with it the core values which today are considered “cornerstone” to the Tidewater political culture. The aristocratic and high gentry families included the former “holder of the keys to London Tower, to a son of a Puritan-displaced don at Oxford College (John Washington).  Succinctly summarized by Hackett-Fischer, Berkeley “encouraged the cavaliers to come over in large numbers. When they arrived he promoted them to high office, granted them large estates, and created the ruling oligopoly that ran the colony for many generations” [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 212. Hackett-Fischer based his assertion on the demographic and biographical history of Phillip A. Bruce Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 1907). Most arrived in the decade following 1655. As these royalist refugees arrived Berkeley would set them up in western areas of the Tidewater, stabilized by a series of forts (Petersburg/Fort Henry 1645-6, for example) that ran along rivers at the Fall Line.

Entrusting that task to Colonel Abraham Wood, a former indentured servant, he established a trading relationship with the Tribes, and a series of expeditions into Virginia’s interior. “The commanders of Berkeley’s forts were favored with land grants so large they were measure not by the acre, but by the mile. William Byrd I inherited three square miles from [Fort Henry] … he took command of the fort and agreed to recruit 250 settlers [most of which will be indentured servants]. For his trouble Byrd as given [an additional] eleven square miles. … [Byrd] referred to himself as a ‘forester’ … [and] maintained their manners as a gentleman. They were as much at home in a London salon as in the American wilderness” [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 81-2. From Byrd, of course, will evolve Virginia’s famous 19th and 20th century Byrd dynasty-machine.

In addition to refugee recruitment, in earlier years Berkeley also actively promoted a “younger sons immigration” through publishing pamphlets which he mailed directly to the younger sons of English nobles. In an English system which centered on primogeniture, such a campaign was attractive and successful. Berkeley, himself a younger son, knew his audience. In that both campaigns Berkeley primarily attracted English lower noble, or gentry, rather than highly-ranked aristocratic families, one can sense the aspirational backdrop of the attraction campaign. The latter had a more intense attraction to the traditions of nobility, and used it in an equally intense manner to provide legitimacy to their influence and status to their social standings. It might be noted that I have not discussed Thomas Jefferson. He claimed a Welsh background, others have claimed a lower nobility-gentry ancestry from Suffolk County in eastern England. In either case, his family subsequently immigrated to St Kitts in the Barbados, and a generation later from Barbados to Henrico County Virginia sometime during the 1670’s. Whatever were his fraternal ancestry, his maternal ancestry were the Randolph’s, indisputably royalist [99] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/jeffersons-ancestry. His father was Peter Jefferson, a frontiersmen-plantation owner who shall be mentioned several times in our discussion of colonial Virginia’s economic development policy system.

This importation of royalist elites and the concomitant installation of a tobacco-export plantation economy bases on indentured servants, imported criminals, and captured Native Americans was hugely successful. His expansion into the Piedmont, extended Virginia’s territorial footprint to the Fall Line, and made Virginia the largest, most powerful, British colony in America. To provide context for the above assertion, Massachusetts’ estimated population in 1640, just previous to Berkeley’s arrival, was about 14,000, Virginia’s around 7,650. Toward the end of Berkeley’s administration, 1670, Massachusetts held about 30,000 and Virginia 40,000 [99] https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/colonialbostonpops.pdf. In 1640, Massachusetts and Virginia constituted in excess of three-quarters of the entire population in British North America. In 1670, the two states, still the largest, constituted slightly in excess of 60 percent. In that year, Tidewater Maryland was 15,000, and Connecticut held 10,000 and New York 9,000. Penn’s Pennsylvania, had not yet commenced settlement until later that decade. State boundaries do not precisely compare to contemporary boundaries]. The thirty-five year Jamestown period had not been kind to Virginia development, albeit it did lay the structural and economic foundations of colonial Virginia.

These noble and gentry immigrants, once ensconced in America, “continued to intermarry on both sides of the Atlantic, and moved freely back and forth across the ocean. the result was tightly integrated colonial elite which literally became a single cousinage by the beginning of the eighteenth century.  The families, originally based in Northampton, Kent, Bristol and Gloucestershire and Somerset carried over to Virginia. The overlap with the names of Virginia counties during this period is significant (Albion Seed, p. 238) [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 217-22. In this manner family networks developed, one of which, the Byrd’s’, would in later times, evolve into a political dynastic machine that dominated late 19th to middle 20th century Virginia. George Washington benefited from the Isham family network which included the Randolphs’ (his U.S. Attorney General), Culpepers’, Spencers, and Fairfaxs’, and were closely linked to the dominant Filmer-Byrd, Culpeper, Berkeley grouping.

But we are not yet done with Virginia’s Second Migration!

As the astute reader might wonder–just how many such noble/gentry elites flooded into Virginia during this period? Could they have possibly accounted for the dramatic volume of immigrants during these years? No they didn’t. “The great mass of Virginia’s immigrants [during this period] were humble people of lower rank. More than 75 percent came as indentured servants [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 227, and Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black: the Seventeenth Century Virginian (Charlottesville, 1971, p. 5.

While some were essentially kidnapped, most, lacking resources to pay for passage, signed on to indenture themselves to individual planters or to “employment” companies, for a period between four to seven years. In return for passage and indenture, these folk were guaranteed freedom at end of indent period, and in many cases received specified amounts of acreage, tools, and clothes. In terms of conventional English apprenticeship and the wholesale flood of emigrants who fled into cities during this period, the “american indenture” was not in itself a bad bargain. What was seldom taken into account was the high mortality rate associated with passage, the harsh period of indenture, and Virginia’s extremely unhealthful environment. Many died before achieving whatever rights they possessed. The free acreage, it would turn out, mostly was available in the incredibly hostile interior of Virginia–and effectively controlled by very discontented Native Americans. In any case indentured servants went to all portions of the British Empire, and were not particular to Virginia.

Probably most were from yeoman farmer households, at least originally. Overwhelmingly male (3 of 4), and teenage, young men, and even children.  Some were criminals, which was a low bar to achieve in English criminal justice; In 1611 Virginia’s governor Thomas Dale requested he be sent “all offenders of the [jails] condemned to die” –but that was Jamestown First Migration. Hackett-Fischer believes many did not originate from the poorest segments of English society–but rather a step or two above (p. 228). In contrast to the Royal Council, former indentured servants were elected to the lower House of Burgesses as early as 1629 [99] Roger Daniels, Coming to America (2nd Ed) (Harper, 1991), p. 35-6. It is not unlikely most became tenant farmers, often employed by their former owner.

Before the end of Governor Berkeley’s administration [tenant farming/sharecropping} was well-established in tidewater Virginia … As late as 1724, the word ‘farming’ in Virginia still meant tenant farming in the English sense–a meaning it had already lost in Massachusetts. … this … system produced a degraded caste of poor whites [as well as] an exploited black [slave] proletariat. There were large numbers of desperately poor farm workers in seventeenth-century Virginia. Some were indentured servants, others were tenants, a few ere free laborers who wandered from job to job. The condition of the working poor in the Chesapeake David Hackett-Fischer, was as harrowing as it had been in England. [99] David Hackett-Fischer,Albion’s Seed, pp. 379-80

By the time these folk became  legal free residents of Virginia, the franchise had been restricted to those who owned property, and so likely most never were able to vote. They became an agricultural lumpen-proletariat, and while anecdotal evidence is bountiful no firm statistical description of their post-indenture is available. But one must remember, these are large volumes of people, relative to the population size. Likely they were mobile, especially prone to migration as a young generational cohort. We are going to see these folk in our discussion of trans-Piedmont and Appalachian migrations. We will certainly see them in the first manifestation, the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion. Left unmentioned to this point is these are the agricultural workers of the tobacco plantations granted to royalists by William Berkeley. One of the incentives he awarded to plantation owners was per capita additional acreage (a grant of crown land or headright) for each indentured servant brought to Virginia [99] Roger Daniels, Coming to America, p. 34.

Edmund S. Morgan concluded: Virginia’s freemen were  ‘an unruly and discontented lot’, and he suggests the problems, actual and anticipated with this growing and dangerous class, were one of the reasons, that Virginian [plantation owners] switched from using unfree European immigrants to using unfree Africans toward the end of the [seventeenth] century [99] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (Virginia, 1975). Hackett-Fischer observes that Virginia second migration immigrants  were vastly different from those of Massachusetts with Virginia’s being “highly stratified [i.e. dependent on higher classes] more male-dominant, more rural, more agrarian, less highly skilled, and less literate. Many came from the south and west of England; few from East Anglia… These patterns did not develop from chance. Virginia’s great migration was the product of policy and social planning. [Through it] the royalist elite succeeded in shaping the social history of an American region by regulating the process of migration [99] pp 231-2. Through these indentured servants the royalist plantation owners were able to manage their economic system, and most importantly set in place an extremely hierarchical society–from which non elites were effectively disqualified. In this Virginia colonial policy system, the political culture of only one sector of the population had serious and meaningful access into policy-making.

Post Berkeley Settlement of Tidewater and Piedmont

Following the Berkeley period, hardened over the decades that followed until the arrival of Governor Alexander Spotswood, was the founding of the Tidewater. Encompassing the Northern Neck land grant, the original areas inhabited during the Jamestown period along the coast and byways of the many small rivers, channels along the Chesapeake, and the territories opened up by Berkeley (Norfolk area, and an entry into the eastern Petersburg Piedmont), the colony was governed formally by its royally appointed governor, but dominated by a Royal Council/upper legislature and a lower House of Burgesses–both of which quickly and easily became dominated by the new royalist family elites. The clear preference of the latter two legislative bodies was for decentralized, private initiatives, usually driven almost exclusively by one or another of the royalist family groupings and their allies. “Virginia’s planting elite owned not merely a large proportion of arable farmland in the tidewater, but also much of what little urban real estate was in the colony.  … The great tidewater families also controlled much undeveloped land on the western frontier of Virginia. … [As a consequence] the frontier [in Virginia] never functioned as an engine of equality; its effect on {Virginia] wealth distribution was to reinforce [the tidewater royalist elite] [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 378. The young elites established their families, and developed alliances, intermarriage, and networks, and it was several of these families that led the opening up of the central plains of Virginia, the Piedmont.

The Piedmont, above the Fall Line extended to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Appalachian Mountains, nested within which was the Shenandoah Valley. The Piedmont, much healthier than the Tidewater coast, was well-suited for tobacco plantations, and therefore fit nicely into the dominant tobacco-export economic base, and seemed almost a natural extension of it as replacement land for exhausted coastal fields. The post-Berkeley settlement of the Piedmont was led by the more aggressive and entrepreneurial of the families. William Byrd II, eclectic in his geographies, settled in the “Southside Region” which evolved into plantation and hardscrabble-indentured servant economy, with extremes of inequality. Advancing from his Petersburg base, he settled Richmond and developed extensive trading-commercial relationships with the Indians. Beyond the James River falls, the moved the Randolph clan who concentrated around Appomattox and the James Rivers. They were followed by other gentry families, like Thomas Jefferson great-grandfather of the President. The two families had intermarried by the second generation–as did the Meriwethers and Lewises (Lewis and Clark expedition). The area they settled is today’s Albemarle and adjoining counties.

The movement into the western Piedmont activated the old and persistent problem of Native American resistance to white incursion, however. But more than that was the fear of the French who were especially active in the areas south of the Ohio River–and, of course after mid-century, into eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. The Nine Years War had just ended in 1697, and the War of Spanish Succession was about to erupt in 1702, when the Burgesses passed an act “For Better Strengthening the Frontiers and Discovering the Approaches of the Enemy” in 1701. Little noted, this act changed the character of Virginia’s land development and settlement of its western frontiers. The act thought in terms of organized settlement by land development companies, not individual homesteaders. The act permitted land grants from ten to thirty thousand acres, with twenty year tax abatement, to companies only, provisional they would quickly settle these areas with new residents. The idea was to stock these frontier areas with suitable militia soldiers able to resist incursion “by the enemy” and required construction of a fort in the center of the land grant. As a side-thought, in 1705 it was amended to include fifty free acres to settlement of the “upcountry” (Shenandoah) [99] John R Van Atta, Securing the Land: Politics, Public Lands and the Fate of the Republic (Johns Hopkins Press, 2014), p. 28; James G. Leyburn, the Scots-Irish (University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 201.

In view of the subsequent evolution of Virginia Western settlement, this act underscores the policy mentality of the Virginia government, and exposes the central link of western land development and defense of the State of Virginia. Little came from either piece of legislation; the western territories were still unexplored, seriously dangerous, and war with the French and Indians soon erupted–and really never let up until 1764. I suspect part of the reason Virginia did not “discover” the potential of its west, as opposed to Penn’s Pennsylvania, for the inward-looking nexus that was plantation economics and Tidewater politics–centered on families, rivals, and forever using as its reference point, English-homeland-court relations and relationships. When population pressures and the realities of tobacco agriculture pushed them westward, they sensed more of a greater need to protect the Tidewater bastion than to profit from any development or exploitation of the interior. That would change–with a new generation of Tidewater elites and an onset of two great unasked for migrations from Pennsylvania.

It was the upper Rappahannock Valley, however, that warrants a special treatment; it was founded as a hybrid economic development–personal wealth-creating land development strategy of one man, Governor Alexander Spotswood. Spotswood, arriving in 1710 as (Lieutenant) Governor deserves two separate discussions: the first, here, describes his impact on the settlement of Virginia, and the second outlines his varied economic development initiatives–and his ouster from the governorship by the domestic Tidewater royalist families. Unable, in large measure due to his economic development and Indian relations Spotswood as unable to establish any relationship with Berkeley’s home grown royalist Tidewater elites. A rising, non-aristocratic star, whose occupational vehicle was the military, Spotswood became a  “protege” of Marlborough, fought with him at Blenheim, and in turn was awarded the lieutenant governorship. His intention from the start was to acquire wealth, and enter the ranks of the lesser nobility-gentry and in his distinctive style develop a manor that reflected his priorities. It was apparent that in Virginia, the way to do this was through land development. He owned slaves and established plantations, fifty-seven of them. Eventually he acquired 83,000 acres in the western Piedmont, and, as we shall see, the Shenandoah Valley.

Spotswood’s innovation was to diversify the Virginia economic base–and plantation ownership–by including mixed uses. Taking advantage of newly-found iron deposits in the upper Rappahannock he arranged land grants to his subordinates, who promptly flipped it to him, he built and settled a post he called Germanna, into which he imported, from Germany, German miners

In any event, also in 1714 was a second prong of Spotswood’s ED strategy was importing from England German (from Rhine-Palatinate) immigrant miners to Germanna Va to work iron mines that he had recently discovered. Germanna was named after German-born Queen Anne as well as the ethnic composition of its newly arrived inhabitants. In 1717, Spotswood imported seventy indentured Germans intended to develop and diversify Virginia’s economic base by producing ironware products. Hopeful the area could accommodate new migrants, In all three distinct Germanna import initiatives (all from German Rhineland were conducted before Spotswood left office in 1722. The settlement of the Shenandoah Valley is credited to Governor Alexander Spotswood. (1714) Spotswood saw opportunity in “them there hills” and believing a carrot was better than a stick, caused the approval of his Virginia Indian Act. The Act set up a state-chartered corporation, the Virginia Indian Company, which was entrusted with a monopoly in the conduct of trade with Native Americans and whose secondary mission was to educate and Christianize Native Americans.

According to the Act, trade would be conducted at a post established at Christanna, which Spotswood built personally. Built alongside, was a schoolhouse which quickly was populated by seventy Native Americans taught by an English instructor. In 1717, however, the King, hearing from a very dissatisfied House of Burgesses, brought the latter venture to a screaming halt. Spotswood’s Indian Act was an important element of his vision to open up Virginia to settlement and to develop economically this valuable, fertile and resource-rich geography. Equally important, in this initiative we see much of Washington-Alexander Knox’s approach to Native American-relevant policy in 1794 Tennessee (see Chapter 7). The apex of his Indian policy was Spotswood’s successful negotiation of a treaty with the Iroquois i in Albany, NY in 1722. Sadly, the treaty did  by no means resolve conflict with Iroquois, who annually would conduct a Shenandoah raid, and the matter was only finally resolved late in the 1730’s by Spotswood’s one of Spotswood’s successors, Governor, William Gooch.

Technically, a good deal of the Shenandoah was ceded to the whites by the 1722 Treaty. Finally, it was Spotswood who personally led a small expedition (or a large group on a hunting vacation) into the area in 1716. While he hunted and drank heavily during the trip, Spotswood very much intended the expedition as a colonial era economic development project–and a settlement barrier against further French incursions. The trip consumed about 438 miles, took four weeks, and each participant at the end received a golden horseshoe from the governor. From that point on the Shenandoah was in play for white settlement. It was the Germans who took the first advantage.

The Germans involved in Spotswood’s  “iron and Germanna”initiatives were  German Reformed Church (called Redemptionist), and were purchased (indentured) by Spotswood for an aggregate total of 150 pounds “for the lot”. There were nine families at the start, the first purchase was for 40 workers. They built a five-sided fort, and individual houses for each family, a corresponding sheds for the livestock. They brought a minister with them, and were “deeply religious”. A bit on the miserly side, they lived in near poverty. Dissatisfied with Spotswood, when their indenture expired in 1721 they packed up lock, stock, and hog and settled a new town, Germantown in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Spotswood replaced them with a second purchase, of seventy from the Palatinate [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 111-12.

A small group of Mennonites also emigrated into northern Shenandoah. Most Shenandoah Germans, however, were conventional Lutherans. Among the first of these was Adam Miller (Mueller), followed by Joist Hite and Jacob Stoever/Stovers (Dwight Eisenhower’s maternal family)  in 1727. German in-migration gathered considerable momentum during the 1730’s. Despite Virginia’s recognition of the Anglican Church as the official state religion, the reaction of the State to the German Protestants was minimal, almost imperceptible. In reality, there were no established Anglican parishes in the Shenandoah and the Anglican Church seemed content to restrict its concerns to the Tidewater and Piedmont.

Included in these royalist refugees are the founders of famous Virginia families such as Culpeper, Custis, Randolph, Mason, Madison, Monroe and John Washington (1657). Of the 152 Virginians who held top offices in Virginia governance during the 17th and 18th centuries, 77% were nobles or gentry whose families immigrated during the Berkeley administration. Only 12% could be considered as yeoman, artisan or descendants of indentured servants [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 213-17. No doubt, the reader has noted the massive overlap with Virginia’s delegations to the various Continental Congresses, and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Articles of Confederation, and the Early Republic’s Washington Administration. Moreover, if Woodard is correct, these Founding Fathers “were responsible for many of the aristocratic inflections in the Constitution, including the Electoral College, and the Senate {chosen by the state legislature not direct vote of the population] [99] Colin Woodard, American Nations, p. 7. In a rush to pile on, I am also tempted to include the Bill of Rights and the insistence that slavery could continue in the Early Republic. Berkeley’s people-attraction campaign person for person had to have exerted more impact on Virginia and our Early Republic than any other such campaign in our history.

Their successful termination of Spotswood, and the emergence of Thomas Lord Fairfax and his “Northern Neck” (discussed in our module on the Virginia colonial policy system) created a semi-oligopolistic Tidewater colonial policy system. That policy system carried great weight in the inter-American politics of the thirteen coastal colonies, that politics would take a decided turn after the French and Indian War (1763). No surprise, members of the Virginia elite were a core grouping in the drive to Revolution, the operation of the Articles of Confederation, the drive to the Constitutional Convention, the writing of the Bill of Rights, and the founding of the Early Republic. They also were core to the southern Federalist Party.

The Second Migration post-Berkeley after-effects included not only the solidification of royalist influence over the state and local policy systems, but also the extension of a tobacco-plantation culture into the Piedmont, a plateau between the coastal Tidewater lowlands, and the Appalachian mountains. In Virginia most will be familiar with the area beginning with Richmond and continuing through Albemarle County (Charlottesville). This royalist-driven settlement extended the tobacco plantation culture into what had been a hostile wilderness, and was led by hardy frontiersmen such as Peter Jefferson (guess who’s father). This and adjacent areas will be the home of three future presidents, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. We are no longer in the Tidewater coastal lowland basin, and although very sparsely settled, full of dispersed plantations like Monticello and Monroe Hall, the expansion pushed Virginia’s population boundaries to the foothills of the Appalachian Blue Ridge mountains–and the Shenandoah Valley, the upper limits of what is known as the Great Appalachian Valley.

The Third Migration, the Germans

The reader is advised in advance that she should keep in mind that the Third and Fourth Migrations are not those of Virginia alone, but also of the future West Virginia. West Virginia seceded from Virginia at the start of the Civil War. Until then it was part of Virginia, and in this chapter–and all others in our discussion of the Early Republic–West Virginia is Virginia’s most western counties.

First, there is a reason we call Virginia’s dominant political culture Tidewater. That culture saturated the coastal Tidewater and extended into the Piedmont plateau. In these regions, the traditional home counties of Virginia were the institutions of government, and where the plantation economy and the Anglican Church were dominant. But Virginia was a large state–it claimed land (the French disagreed) through to the Mississippi River. When Virginia Tidewater settlement reached the foothills of the Appalachian Blue Ridge mountains, with its Shenandoah Valley nestled in its midst, the Tidewater nexus halted (post-1700). This new land, replete with hostile Indian tribes and topography/climate not especially suited to tobacco offered both opportunity and a bit of disruption to their established way of doing things. Less interested in establishing plantations, the Tidewater elite turned to land development and sales of new migrants. To this end land development companies cascaded into prominence, each one representing the interests of a distinctive set of investors, who concentrated their interest on certain geographies. The fertile rolling hills of the Shenandoah Valley, not the mountains was the area of most interest.

The Valley was a part of the the Great Warriors Path, a Native-American highway, that ran north almost to Philadelphia, and south into Georgia. Excepting Tennessee, the Path was not permanently settled by Native Americans to any great extent, but one was sure to encounter them hunting the herds of buffalo found there. Between 1683, the first arrival of sizable numbers of Germans into America, and the 1775 Revolution, It is estimated about 100,000 Germans traveled  from Pennsylvania down the Great Wagon Road, the white man’s name for the Great Warriors Path [99] https://www.virginia.org/GermansinVirginia. Most came from Pennsylvania, and there was an initial burst starting in the 1730’s, continuing into the 1740’s. Despite the 1756-1763 French and Indian War, a steady, but considerably diminished, stream of German (and Scots-Irish) emigrants continued the in-migration. By the Revolution, Germans are estimated to have been about a third of Virginia’s total population.

The German and Scots-Irish migrations overlapped themselves, with the Germans getting a bit of a headstart. But both migrations overlapped the administration of one of Virginia’s most “effective”, and durable royal (Lieutenant) Governors: William Gooch (1727 to 1749). Gooch resuscitated Spotswood’s Tobacco Act and state regulation did result in a significant market demand for Virginia tobacco in Europe. Gooch embraced settlement of the Shenandoah, even if Virginia-based elites were of two minds. It is likely that part of his motivation for western settlement by new migrants was a forlorn hope to develop a “third force” to balance the power of royalists–but without doubt his was also a settlement made necessary to protect Virginia’s boundaries from French invasion or commercial intrusion (trade with the Native Americans). In the middle 1730’s Gooch successfully negotiated a sort of armistice with the Iroquois, one of the heaviest users of the Great Warrior’s Path. That armistice paved the way for the German migration, the earlier of the two, and opened to them a favorable environment for migration and settlement.

Gooch’s land grants, including a 1727 40,000 acre (three counties) grant to John and Issac Van Meter (from Pennsylvania) settled three counties in the Shenandoah and West Virginia. They in turn sold much acreage to Joist Hite/Stover. According to Professor Dabney, the first “official” German settler in the Valley, by virtue of a land grant, was Adam Miller (nee Mueller), in 1727. He was followed by Joist Hite and Jacob Stover [99] Virginius Dabney, the New Dominion, p. 98. Both Hite and Stoever received considerable-size land grants (Hite, 100,000 acres) which they resold to other Germans by Governor Gooch and it involved Fairfax owned lands. It was this grant that prompted the fifteen year legal hassle that brought Fairfax to America [99] James Leyburn, the Scotch Irish (University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 203. The net effect was to settle the northern Shenandoah and eastern west Virginia counties with lots of Germans, and some Quakers and a few Scots-Irish.

Frederick and Orange Counties thus were populated by farm-owing yeoman German farmers. Germans founded the town of Mecklenburg, now Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

A group of Lutherans and Calvinists settled in the Hebron Valley, communities of Dunkers and Mennonites settled in other areas. the heaviest concentration of Virginia Germans was in the northern Shenandoah Valley, between the towns of Winchester and Stanton …. Substantial German populations also settled in the Piedmont counties of Loudoun, Culpeper, Madison and Floyd and into Southwest Virginia (Smythe, Bland, Washington and Blythe). [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly,Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 113-14

The Germans were not the only early eighteenth century Virginia migrants; they were the largest who more or less permanently settled in Virginia, but there were many other ethnic and religious groups also moving in. To a very large extent, this is a consequence of the 1688 English Act of [Religious} Toleration that had been extended to the American colonies in 1699.

A new [1705 Virginia] naturalization act allowed Protestants from other European states to be admitted to rights of citizenship after seven years. Many of these immigrants settled on the frontier. Germans of varying sects began to arrive. North British borderers and Scots-Irish from north of Ireland settled in large numbers, French Huguenots founded their own settlements. The Quakers returned [after having been earlier expelled] in large numbers. The process was encouraged by some landowners [associated with the Ohio Land Company]. … as part of a campaign to attract German settlers to the land… Lawrence Washington wrote to [the newly appointed governor in 1751] observing ‘It has been my opinion, and I hope will ever be, that restraints on conscience are cruel in regard to those on whom they are imposed, and injurious to the country imposing them’… The population of Virginia grew to be more diverse, especially in the upper Piedmont and the Shenandoah [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement(University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 105.

The early Germans “benefited” from better lease terms by the principal landowner of the northern, Maryland borderland Shenandoah. Lord Fairfax. Fairfax issued occasional land grants to encourage the earliest of Germans. Others that followed simply squatted on Fairfax’s land, and there is no records that indicate Fairfax, still residing in England, took action against them. Fairfax’s dad had in 1702 retained Robert Carter as his land agent, but Carter during much of the seventeenth century’s second decade in politics, including a stint as temporary governor, only returned as agent in 1722. Carter’s main effort was to secure Shenandoah property for himself, his family, and associates, and incoming Germans were not his primary concern. In 1732 when Carter died, Lord Fairfax became aware of Carter’s land grab, and he also recognized if he was to seize advantage from his own property he would have to do it himself. By 1735 or so, Fairfax was resident in Virginia. By this time, the German migration was picking up considerable steam. By 1734, Peter Stoever, from one of the Stoever families that had moved into the Shenandoah, founded the Strasburg.

Fairfax, not interested in selling land outright, leased considerable acreage to an agent who then leased land to the Germans. The lease was for simple rent and annual payment of quitrents (taxes to Fairfax) which did not include a termination date–many ran for a half-century [99] https://www.loudounhistory.org/history/loudoun-german-settlers/. With a measure of security, and freedom from crop obligations paid to the the manor-lord, these settlers created true family homesteads, and yeoman husbandry in areas they settled. Some in time moved on, but a goodly number settled down in Virginia. In later years, their children would emigrated into Watauga North Carolina (eastern Tennessee) and Kentucky.The most obvious contribution of these early German settlers was their agricultural skills, which were considerable. Excellent homestead farmers, farmers who intended from the outset to develop a sustainable family homestead (often the famous log cabin), managed their soil and livestock, developed productive techniques and equipment, and most  are cruel in regard to those on whom they are imposed, and injurious to the country imposing them’ [99] David critically planted crops for their own use and domestic export. As such they were a viable alternative and stark contrast to the land hungry, and enormously wasteful tobacco plantation. Opposed to slavery, they stood as a added barrier to aggressive expansion of tobacco into the Blue Ridge.

As our initial introduction to”the Germans”, we ought to conclude by alerting the reader that “German” is a rather flexible ethnic category–especially if compared to what constitutes “Germans” in later periods of time. Germany was not a nation previous to 1870, and Germans included Scandinavians, sometimes Dutch, and certainly almost anybody who the lived in north and central Europe. As such it included Catholics, orthodox Protestants, Reform/Radical Protestants, Jews, Austrians, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and western-Rhine adjacent principalities (who after the 1688 Glorious Revolution ruled Great Britain itself (Hanover). In the early colonial period, German was often confused with Dutch–probably because of the close articulation of Deutsch (German) with Dutch.. To compound the definition issue, the Germans relevant to Virginia originated from Pennsylvania, previously imported into that colony through William Penn’s aggressive people-attraction program. They were often referred to as the Pennsylvania Dutch.As such these Virginia Germans were “chain migrants” who had earlier resided in Pennsylvania, and later moved on to Virginia, or whose children did so upon coming of age.

The Germans brought into Virginia its first major diversity in culture, government, economic base, and approach to life. Brady and Fischer assert that “Besides their distinctive language and publications [and] distinctive decorative arts [applied to furniture] … were attitudes toward family, gender, wealth and power. Gender roles were sharply defined, but in a manner different from English-speaking cultures. Both sexes labored at different tasks in the home and the field, and daughters inherited land along with sons. In general the German settlers were not comfortable with slavery, preferring to do their own labor. They also developed distinctive ideas of freedom … more personal and social, less political than the attitude of their English neighbors. They had a stronger sense of personal and familial responsibility, but a weaker sense of public responsibility … an intense hostility to taxes which in the long experience of German-speaking people had paid for government that repressed them. Liberty meant for them an autonomy for their churches and communities and families–an attitude at variance with their highly political English neighbors” [99 ] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 117-18. The churches and German-teaching schools were important to the sustainability of their culture over time. That late 19th century German immigrants seldom moved into Virginia, preferring other locations, the  early 18th century German Virginia settlers evolved in their own particular pattern.

The first large grouping of Germans to enter Pennsylvania and the Americas, Protestant radical reformers, often referred to as “pietistic” were essentially religious refugees seeking sanctuary in Penn’s religiously tolerant colony. Their beliefs were similar to New England Pilgrims, and to the Pennsylvania Quakers. They arrived in the early 1680’s. Quaker and Mennonites founded Germantown PA in 1683. Of these initial German settlers, the Swiss Mennonites (today’s Amish) received land grants near present-day Lancaster County PA. They were followed by the Anabaptist Dunkards, and in 1741, by Moravian’s (who founded present day Bethlehem and Nazareth Pennsylvania. The latter grouping spread out from there to found settlements in states ranging from New York to Iowa to North Carolina. These pietistic groups frequently receive the greatest attention in our present day histories, but they are not, for the most part, the Germans who migrated into Virginia. Most Germans who migrated to America, however, were not religious refugees, and in the late 17th and early 18th centuries were conventional Lutheran/Calvinist Protestants and Catholics. Some were war-torn economic refugees, the Rhine-based Palatines (from which my “Coan” or Kuhn originates). The Palatines entered the United States previous to 1710 (or so), and within a generation a wholesale immigration of mostly Rhineland Germans followed, a migration that persisted to the American Revolution–when the English army Hessians gave it a weak second wind. In short, German-Virginia immigrants are a mixed-bag, with different motivations for settling in America

That challenge was to be met by families not of the Tidewater persuasion. New migrations from the north were to settle the Shenandoah Valley in particular.These migrations, German and Scots-Irish came during the 18th century, and each brought their own political culture with them–they also brought their own economic base. In a nutshell, as Virginia expanded into the Shenandoah and beyond, new geographically-clustered political cultures, and economic bases developed alongside the dominant Tidewater nexus. Accordingly, as time passed, that dominant political culture had accommodate, fight or somehow adjust to these new cultures and economies. In his way, that was what Washington was attempting with his Potomac Canal. In any case, until the Revolution, the Virginia’s colonial government remained under the cultural and political thumb of the King, and secondly by the Tidewater royalist elite. That would change in 1776.

It is worth note that post-Civil War German immigration did not settle in large numbers in Virginia, and did not change the character of Virginia’s German population.

the Fourth Migration: Scots-Irish

Scots-Irish migration, began as early as 1715, and therefore overlapped with the 3rd German Migration. No one, however, invited them in. They came down the same Great Wagon Road, in volume, only after Germans had already settled in Virginia. Leyburn estimates that Scots-Irish formed its first “effective” settlements in Pennsylvania in 1717, and Virginia’s was 1732–the year Washington was born. He further posits the “steady flow” of Scots-Irish began in PA in 1718, and in Virginia 1736 [99] James Leyburn, the Scots-Irish, p. 186. It has been estimated the Scots-Irish immigrants to North America totaled in excess of 250,000, it is likely the figure is noticeably higher. The problem of isolating individual Scots-Irish immigration and subsequent chain migration results from their varying national origins, and their attributed and well-documented propensity for household mobility.

Overwhelmingly Presbyterian, almost all Protestant, they traveled from the borderland counties of Ireland, Scotland, England, and even Wales. The unifying element in the common culture was their borderlands experience–as detailed in Chapter One. While the common contemporary perspective of these people was they were literally dirt-poor, the eighteenth century reality was they came from all income levels, often in families, and not infrequently traveling together from a particular village or area. “Among these emigrants was a small elite who had been called the ‘ascendancy’ in norther Ireland. These leaders included the family of Patrick Henry, who was a cousin of the great Cumbrian Whig Lord Brougham, and the ancestors of Sam Houston, who were a family of border baronets. The forebears of [President] Zachary Taylor–[Virginians all] were of the border ascendancy in the north of England [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Brady, Bound Away, p. 121.

The Scots-Irish started about three decades after the first German immigrants first arrived in Pennsylvania, actively and aggressively recruited by William Penn. As we discovered in our discussion on the German Third Migration, Lord Fairfax’s agent Robert “King” Carter died in 1732, the entry counties of the Shenandoah were Fairfax territory when the Scots-Irish came in earnest.

================ Chapter on Scots Irish in PA

Their original port of entry was Philadelphia, and likely many at the start were indentured servants. The Scots-Irish brought to the United States a collection of beliefs, stories, value priorities and a proto-class “us vs. them” tilt. Whether from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or England (where most originated), they shared common values and an economic base of a people resident in their county’s bloody, volatile, and brutal borderlands. Mobility and a lack of a commitment to a permanent homestead are two such shared values–among many. It is primarily the Scots-Irish who will emigrated to the frontier borderlands, first to the those in the lower thirteen original colonies/states, and then across the Appalachians and the future Cotton Belt. It is the Scots-Irish who will fuel the Jefferson, anti-Federalist Democrat-Republican Party. It is they who will provide the activists that sparked the American Revolution. Their migration, Colonial America’s largest, and the its last, is the one to watch.

As we discovered in our Pennsylvania chapter, both Scots-Irish and Germans had their hearts set on being farmers; those that stayed in Philadelphia or their entry port were likely indentured servants required to do so. The goal was to get out to the frontier as soon as feasible–which accounts for their rapid mobility in search of their individual homestead. Not being the first to arrive in these frontier areas, the prime, reasonably safe and accessible land was mostly gone, and then tendency was to “leap-frog” settled frontier areas and move on down the road. Both Germans and Scots-Irish preferred not to settle individually in another’s ethnic cluster, so they looked for familiar faces, languages and dialects before settling down. Even in the same county, the two ethnic groups settled different parts of the county. Both were Protestant, but Scots-Irish were Presbyterian, not Lutheran, and their Protestantism was anything but German pietist which was lots closer to Quaker Protestantism than borderland Presbyterianism.

It may be correct to assume Scots-Irish were more prone to simple squatting then the Germans–and if so this did not make them popular with whoever owned the land, or with the government looking for land sales monies and quitrents. That and the application of “borderland” farming principles probably explains much of the Scots-Irish tendency to squat down, set up a homestead, and farm it until chased off, or exhausted by either burning and scorching its nutrients (to clear the land) or too intensive use. In any case, moving in fits and starts down the Susquehanna Valley and onto the Wagon Road toward Maryland and eventually Virginia consumed less than a generation, and any subsequent newcomers to Philadelphia would necessarily need to move further inland at a more rapid rate.

If impetuosity early proclaimed itself as a dominant trait among many Scots-Irish, so did their restlessness. In contrast to the Germans who once they found a home tended to remain fixed, the Scots-Irish seemed never satisfied. Needless to say many of the Ulstermen remained where they made their first homes; but thousands of others seemed to feel a real compulsion to move again and again …. It began to be said that no Scotch-Irish family felt comfortable until it had moved at least twice [99] James Leyburn, the Scots-Irish, p. 199.

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The primary wave of Scots-Irish began in 1740 and continued to the Revolution. That is not to say Scots-Irish arrived in Virginia until then, many traveled down the Wagon Road, picking up momentum in the 1730’s. As we have seen in our discussion of the German Migration, their earlier arrival benefited them greatly in the northern counties of the Shenandoah and in eastern west Virginia. These would be the counties with the heaviest concentration of Germans (and Quakers). So the Scots-Irish had to leapfrog past the German settlements, and hence moved on deeper into more unsettled parts of the southwest Shenandoah. Seemingly, like the Germans, the Scots-Irish were greeted at Virginia’s doorsteps by the generous Governor Gooch bearing land grants in his knapsack. These grants concentrated on land in the central and southern Shenandoah. Both of these grants were considerably larger than those given to Van Meter and Hite.

In 1736 Governor Gooch issued a land grant to the prominent and well-position tidewater royalist planter, William Beverley. Gooch wanted a buffer between the French and Indians and southern Piedmont Virginia. Called the “Beverley Mansion” or more popularly as the “Irish Tract” (119,000 acres), the land was open frontier in what is today’s Augusta County (Staunton and Waynesboro). The area has already been loosely settled by leap-frogging Scots-Irish, including the famous and fearsome John Lewis, who had settled there around 1731. The second grant Gooch made was to Benjamin Borden, from New Jersey–but an agent of Lord Fairfax. This grant encompassed nearly 500,000 acres along the strategic headwaters of the Shenandoah and James Rivers (mostly in today’s Rockbridge Count). The grant had clear requirements that the land must be quickly settled before title was conferred. No surprise the quota was achieved in two years and the title passed to Borden/Fairfax. Filled with deer, bison, presumably playing antelope, and Indians in search of deer, bison, and playing antelope, these areas were a Scots-Irish paradise.

Both Lord Beverley and Borden/Lord Fairfax (1) fearing for his ability to maintain their holdings against a hostile combination of Indians, squatters, and competing plantation royalist speculators, and (2) determined to comply with Gooch’s requirements they be quickly settled as a buffer against the French, generous terms were offered to new and past migrants. Rather than mess with the melange of squatters that saturated the geography, the agents for the grantee simply offered generous sale terms and encouraged responsible filing of the claims to prove settlement. Beverley, the son of a royalist Tidewater plantation owner, whose mother was “a Byrd”. A member of the Spotswood Golden Horseshoe Expedition (1616) (also Virginia’s first prominent historian), who upon inheriting his father’s estate in 1722 began a career in land speculation, living off tobacco income derived from his land tenants.

Upon acquiring his Shenandoah land grant, Beverley hired a former ship captain, Scots-Irish James Patton to recruit Scots-Irish into the Shenandoah: “I should be very glad for you to import families enough to take the whole off from our hands at a reasonable price, and tho the order mentions families from [Pennsylvania], yet families from Ireland will do as well”[99] Lois Mulkearn (ED) George Mercer Papers Relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954) and Jim Glanville and Ryan Mays, “William Beverley, James Patton,.and the Settling of the Shenandoah Valley”, Essex County (Virginia) Museum and Historical Society Bulletin, Vol 55, 2010). Patton, a former Royal Navy sailor, had somehow parlayed that into captaincy of his own ship. A privateer, he acquired some wealth and came into the employ of Lord Beverley, probably serving as an clandestine shipper of illegal or taxable goods from and into Virginia. Beverley hired him to transport Scots-Irish (actually whoever got on his boat) directly to Virginia where they were resettled in the Shenandoah.

Supposedly he made twenty-five such voyages, before Patton got the idea (in the early 1740’s) of being a land-lubber, land speculator for Beverley and occasionally Borden [99] James G. Leyburn, the Scots-Irish, p. 206 . He organized, occasionally incorporated several of the earliest Shenandoah and west land development companies, and evolved into one of the Shenandoah’s first charismatic leader and elite. Patton was enormously successful in this endeavor, recruiting and selling land, instrumental in the founding of several settlements during the high period of Scots-Irish migration into Virginia. In 1757 he founded a settlement (Drapers Meadow) near today’s Virginia Politechnic University. Five years later, in an Indian raid, Patton was killed, and the women and kids were taken captive. No doubt the reader suspects this is the multi-grandfather of our famous General Patton of WWII (and his other grandfather of Civil War) fame. He is.

Wrapping Up Scots-Irish Virginia Migration–Since the Scots-Irish migration never stopped until the British blockade and subsequent takeover of Philadelphia, the Scots-Irish kept on coming down the Wagon Road. For a time, Virginia swallowed them up and they pushed into the peripheries of Virginia’s western territory–which were considerable, including West Virginia and Kentucky, to the Mississippi. Before 1738 much of this territory was included in one County (Orange). As the population swelled simple administration of these new communities and management of the settlers required that Orange be split into Frederick County (Winchester), and Augusta County. Augusta County, while officially a county in 1738, however, had no appointed officials. Only in 1745 did Gooch appoint twenty-one justices of the peace, a sheriff, and several other officials. Only in 1750 was the county seat activated in Staunton. The distances from Williamsburg, the isolation and the dispersion of agricultural homesteads, and the informality of western-style local government necessarily meant these Shenandoah counties were what we later will label “frontier policy systems and economies”. One aspect of civilization the Scots-Irish were respectful of was religion. As soon as they arrived in sufficient numbers, Virginia settlers petitioned the Pennsylvania Presbytery to supply ministers to their communities. With the onslaught of the First Great Awakening (officially in 1740) their request was heeded, and Virginia’s Shenandoah received a flow of Presbyterian ministers thereafter. By the time of the Revolutionary War there were twenty-three Presbyterian congregations in Virginia [99] James G. Leyburn, the Scots-Irish, pp. 207-8.

Still “coming on down” Scots-Irish reached the boundaries of Virginia, spilled into the Carolinas, and then into Georgia. They were particular impactful in the Carolinas, and in time Tennessee–and to a lesser extent Kentucky.

The Composite Tidewater/Virginia Political Culture

Albion Seed plus As Two Ships, + Woodard et al

What accounts for the egalitarian and anti slavery positions of Virginia oligopoly–Wood, Maier, Class of 1758

the Ascendancy–Among these early 1730 Scots-Irish immigrants were two families who proved important to our Early Republic ED history: John Henry and John Houston–each is the father of either Patrick Henry, first and five time governor of the state of Virginia, and Sam Houston (future governor of Tennessee, president of the Republic of Texas, and founder and first governor of the state of Texas). Henry immigrated from Scotland border area, and Houston from the English side of the Scottish border. Henry eventually settled in Henry County(home of Henry Clay) after marrying into the the powerful royalist Tidewater family, the Symes’. Patrick Henry, “give me liberty or give me death” was arguably the bumper sticker quote that triggered the American Revolution. “That great revolutionist liked to appear as the tribune of the people, but by birth he was a high-born backcountry gentleman with connections to the English border gentry”[99] See David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 648. That this Scots-Irish border elite will dominate the first decade or more of the Virginia revolutionary state policy system will be more deeply discussed in a future chapter.

Houston descended from a family of border baronets (petty nobility). As such both are counter to the Scots-Irish popular image of dirt-poor rough and tumble border dwellers, but their early arrival allows us the opportunity to add some depth to our understanding of the Scots-Irish migration. In this case we are able to introduce by example the existence and arrival of the Scots-Irish Ascendancy–the upper crust of the Scots-Irish migration. In addition to these two fine folk, we will latter add such personages as President James K Polk, John C. Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson. There are others [99] See David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 642-650. In a Virginia policy system with a decided tilt toward elite oligopoly, the existence and rise of a Scots-Irish elite will be essential to our understanding of the Virginia Early Republic state policy system–not to ignore the Democrat-Republican Party as well.

The Calhouns, Polks, Jacksons, Henry’s Houstons, Bells, Grahams, and Bankheads were typical of the backcounty elite. The founders of these families in America had all been people of substance in North Britain. They tended to emigrate during the early eighteenth century … during the 1730’s. They moved quickly to the top of backcountry society, and preserved their eminence for many generations. These elite families firmly established their hegemony before the American War of Independence. … These border families, whether English, Scots, Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish, or even Anglo Welsh [Jefferson?], shared many values and beliefs in common. They intermarried among themselves … For two centuries the public life of this region has been dominated by names that first appeared in the backcountry during the middle decades of the eighteenth century [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 649-50

Royalist-Tidewater/Piedmont Political Culture

Colonial Virginia Policy System

The 1620-1640 period was the age of Yankee settlement of New England, the period in Virginia, under royal disfavor of James I, was characterized by horrible Indian wars, dysfunctional and uncoordinated government, and worst of all cesspit of killer diseases. Under Charles I British rule was more tolerant–in 1639 he granted permanent authorization for a locally-elected colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses. What little that was sustainable in the Jamestown period was during the latter’s reign.

Separation of branches in state and federal government would become the rage during the 1780’s, but colonial colony/state and local  government considerably blurred the branches. The legislature across most colonies (South Carolina being the most obvious) allowed local elections to a colony-level lower legislature. The domestic legislature was afforded a degree of autonomy usually not allowed to judiciary, the rudimentary bureaucracy (militia, for example) and often to the upper house of the legislature, if such existed. The de facto fusion of branches in local government given property requirements and a “deference political culture” and an agricultural economic base facilitated rule by the elites of a given locality. In one sense, in Virginia local governance was defused, however, because the colony did not separate church from state. The Anglican Church of England was the established religion of the colony–and would remain so until Jefferson’s Act of Tolerance in 1778. To conduct affairs Anglican parishes were created in the Tidewater/Piedmont, with ministers chosen by the parish members (vestries). By default, many day-to-day matters would fall into the parish defacto jurisdiction. Virginia’s Anglican religion, no bastion of democracy or inclusivity, reinforced order and conformity among the local populace, but if challenged the parish system could produce some opposition to the legislature or the governor. The Anglican Bishop after Berkeley was key to the removal of two governors.

This began a long-standing trend of governor and legislative bickering–usually the product of a stubborn, incompetent but willful governor. Governor Harvey, for example,literally bashed the teeth out of one legislator, using a cudgel–a colonial form of today’s executive order. In 1634, the governor who used the cudgel, established the local governance system, by demarcating eight counties (shires), each with a county “court” and commissioners called justices of the peace. In an age previous to formal separation branches of government, county courts were legislatures as well as legal officials and bureaucrats; commissioners were legislative representatives as well as implementer of the rule of law. “County days”, when the court met, were special occasions and over time prompted the development of a small settlement. County courts also were regulators of the local economy and infrastructure (ferries). Their “clerks” were our first bureaucrats. Readers are advised to be wary of falling into the trap of thinking these institutions as primarily legal in nature–and this warning applies to the Early Republic period as well.

In 1642 all this came to an end with the arrival of Governor William Berkeley. We described Berkeley’s huge impact on Virginia history in the discussion of the Second Migration–which he caused. Until Berkeley, the electoral franchise was open to all “freemen”, i.e. no property restrictions. He changed it in 1670, to include only “freeholders” males with property. It was changed back to freemen (1676) as a result of Bacon’s Rebellion, but with its defeat in the same year, it was again restricted to freeholders–continuing through to the American Revolution. [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion (University Press of Virginia, 1971), pp. 42-3. So Berkeley left behind in his wake, an oligopolistic policy system dominated, if not controlled by plantation owners, who were simultaneous able to dominate, suffocate is a better word, the economic and political viability of its local (county and parish) institutions/government. The outcroppings of this closed dynastic elite controlled the Royal Governor’s Royal Council from 1660 to the American Revolution.

This small body functioned as the Governor’s cabinet, the upper house of the [Virginia] legislature and the colony’s supreme court. It controlled the distribution of land, and the lion’s share went to twenty-five families who held two-thirds of the seats in that body from 1680 to 1775. The same families also controlled other offices of power and profit: secretary, treasurer, auditor-general, receiver-general, surveyor-general … and governors of William and Mary College [the only college south of the Mason-Dixon line in that period]. … This elite gained control of the Council during the mid-seventeenth century, and retained it through the Revolution. As early as 1660, every seat on the Council was filled by members of the five related [family-networks]. As late as 1775, every member of that august body was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660 [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 222.

The Royalist culture, able to isolate, displace and marginalize its Achilles heel, the mass of indentured servants and former Jamestown period migrants, would be able to maintain an almost unchecked ability to dominate the Royal Council, and send a reliable stream of delegates to the House of Burgesses. They key instruments in this was the property holding restriction on the general franchise, and the requirement that Burgesses delegates possess a certain wealth meant the horde of tenant farmers and day-laborers, and sharecroppers were politically marginalized. In addition, the proven ability of royalist elites to access their English family relations to reach into major London-based Royal decision-making  structures like the Privy Council, allowed them, in an era that one would think could ensure Royal Governor autonomy, to effective obstruct and indeed terminate the Royal Governor. Strong, capable royal governors found their agendas block, sabotaged, compromised, and ignored. The prevailing tendency to privatize economic development, for example, left it in the hands of the royalist elite. Land and land ownership was a strategy they controlled–not the governor.

Lest we romantically descend into thinking rule by sage elites characterized pre-second migration Virginia and the outputs of its initial fused government are a credit to the Old Dominion, historian Thomas Wertenbaker wrote “In their political capacity the leading men of the colony were frequently guilty of inexcusable and open fraud. Again and again they made use of their great influence and power to appropriate public funds to their private use, to escape the payment of taxes, and to obtain under false pretenses vast tracts of land … Such thievery were far less prevalent in Virginia during the late 17th century and during the late 18th century ‘when a high sense of honor became eventually on of the most pronounced characteristics of Virginians'” [99] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, the Shaping of Colonial Virginia (Russell & Russell, 1958), quoted in Dabney, the New Dominion, p. 51. David Hackett-Fischer reports a contemporary English description of pre-Berkeley Virginia “none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives went there” [99] David Hackett-Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 210.

By the mid-seventeenth century, with an electorate restricted to property holders, and an upper legislative bodies filled by gubernatorial appointments virtually exclusively from royalist families, the closest one came to “democratic” government befell to the House of Burgesses. One example suggests that as late as 1758, in a tidewater Burgesses election, a member of a royalist family and plantation owner was able to win an election without being present in the county. “His friends put on a successful campaign … [making] expenditures in his behalf for liquors of various types. This offering of alcoholic refreshments to the voters customary in that era, was described by one observer as ‘swilling the electors with bumbo’, and by another as plying them with ‘strong grogg and scorched pigs’‘. In any case, in that election, George Washington, off in western Pennsylvania on a mission against the French, was elected for the first time to the House of Burgesses [99] Virginius Dabney, the New Dominion, p. 103.

While the basic structural and governance institutions, not to mention an economic base that dominated Virginia well into the 19th century were established during the Jamestown period, it was the Second Migration that installed the royalist elite that was to be the hallmark of the Tidewater political culture–which was always more than just a system of ideas, but a near-monolithic economic base, whose owners dominated political life that sucked out the marrow of what could be found in the new land. A better class of population was necessary for these structures to work in a proper manner. It required a political culture that supported good governance.

The Alexander Spotswood case study

Spotswood, descended from an impoverished Scottish noble family, a veteran of the Battle of Blenheim, was appointed (Lieutenant) Governor of Virginia in 1710. We first met him in a previous module in which we discovered his impact on Virginia’s migratory patterns–and his impact on the the Tidewater’s royalist plantation oligopoly. In this section, I cull out his economic development-relevant initiatives and activities. Because many of these strategies and initiatives were deeply controversial, and harmful to the autonomy and power of the landed oligopoly, they led, perhaps inevitably, to Spotswood’s removal–caused by a sustained campaign waged in English and Royal decision-making bodies. Spotswood’s abrasive personality, his obvious competence and aggressiveness usurped the privileges and almost unrestricted hegemony of the by then implanted royalist plantation families. They fought him in almost every instance, a Never-Spotswood’ movement which resulted in his removal from the governorship. But in retirement Spotswood, since he couldn’t beat them, joined them as his own family with his network of plantation holdings–and his other sector assets. Pity the plight of the Royal governors that followed Spotswood.

First, his economic development initiatives.

His first efforts concentrated on securing a peace treaty favorable to both parties, and securing the Piedmont from Indian raids, rebuilding the Williamsburg capital, and approving the Tobacco Quality Act of 1713 which was intended to increase the price of Virginia-raised tobacco to improve its price on the international markets (Governor Gooch intensified this regulation in a second 1730 Act which proved more successful in increasing the market value of Virginia tobacco). Spotswood, from the start encountered headwinds from the Royal Council and the House of Burgesses–which were in a fine dither having effectively ruled the colony immediately previous to Spotswood’s arrival; they resisted his Tobacco Act. To facilitate passage of the Act, Spotswood appointed nearly half of the Burgesses delegates to positions as Tobacco inspectors. In the subsequent election, nearly all were defeated, sending in their stead an even more hostile House of Burgesses. All for naught, it turned out. English merchants in London were able to successfully petition  the Privy Council which, in 1717, overturned the Tobacco Act.

BTW it was Spotswood who sent naval forces that ambushed and killed the famous pirate, Blackbeard.

The Indian Trade Act, described below, further inflamed his relations with Virginia’s royalist elite which he described as “a set of Representatives whom Heaven has not generally endowed with the Ordinary Qualifications requisite to Legislators” [99] https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/spotswood_alexander_1676-1740#its2.

Spotswood issued regulations regarding land transaction–his purpose being to ensure land plots suitable for household, non-plantation agriculture. That venture ran into serious resistance from his own Royal Council, chock full of Tidewater royalist land speculators. It didn’t help that Spotswood himself bought a huge acreage–and his investment in Germanna was personal as well. Between 1716-20 he oversaw construction of the Tubal Works, a cold-bast charcoal  blast furnace that produced pig iron from which a variety of instruments and tools were made for both domestic and export. He also encouraged the startup of gristmills.

In retirement Spotswood ‘s retirement home was in Germanna, present-day Orange County, When the Germans moved to Fauquier County, Spotswood replaced them with black slaves. He then took over the management of the mines and forges. His hoped-for goal was to jump-start a new cluster of ironworks that could produce instruments, axes, plows, kettles and the like. In 1732 at Massaponax, Spotswood probably built America’s first foundry. Finally it was Spotswood, who in retirement prevailed upon the King to appoint him Deputy Postmaster General of the Colonies. Serving in that post between 1730 and 1741 in his home in the Shenandoah, Spotswood appointed a certain Benjamin Franklin as Postmaster of Philadelphia.

Spotswood is one of Virginia’s few impressive royal governors, and his ouster by the domestic plantation oligopoly had long-lasting effects. While events and strong governors would occasionally have their day, over the next fifty years, the domestic oligopoly enjoyed considerable autonomy, almost absolute economic autonomy, and gave as good as they got in political contests with royal authority. But Spotswood’s fate, coupled with his Virginia retirement on his bountiful plantations, mines, and iron works, added a new dimension to the economic activities of the plantation elite: land development.

Spotswood and the grandees of Virginia created a distinctive culture in the Piedmont. They did not favor speculators or absentee landlords, and in 1713 they passed a law requiring property owners to cultivate three acres out of every fifty in their possession on the pain f forfeiture. The statute fostered rapid development, and forbade speculators  to hold large tracts of undeveloped land for long periods. Settlers in the new counties of the Piedmont were also exempted from taxes for ten years, another spur to swift occupation. By 1727 the line of settlement had nearly reached the Blue Ridge … many of the best lands went to well-connected gentry families in grants of 1,000 to 15,000 acres. The [Piedmont] expansion was not merely a replication of tidewater culture. The healthier climate of the Piedmont made for stronger families and tighter kinship nets. … . the proportion of slaves in the Piedmont was smaller than in the Tidewater–rising rapidly to 40 and 45 percent, but remaining in that range for many years. … By the mid eighteenth century the Piedmont had become the dominant region of Virginia [replacing ] the Tidewater as the leading hearth of Virginia’s hegemonic culture [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 100-1

By the time of Governor Gooch, it was clear the royal governor facilitated 3rd and 4th migration certainly to establish a buffer area against the French, but also to counter-balance Royalist opposition. He was frustrated, by the unrecognized effects of a policy process that underlay the formation of counties, the core unit of colonial local government. That process was to create a few geographically large colony, sparsely settled–and then only after a critical population mass had been achieved would allow them to split off smaller counties. Representation in the House of Burgess was based on counties, and the longer a few large counties could house a considerable brew of new comers, before splitting off a new county, meant the hold of the royalist dominated Tidewater and Piedmont could be maintained. The reality that both the 3rd and 4th migrations “little sorted” their migrants into separate counties, with some overlap, of course, meant a fragmentation of their representation as each reflected their cultural biases, and allowed a diversity of county-level clusters with distinct economic  bases.

Each of these factors are critical and important to understanding the constitutions and policy systems that will be established in the trans-Appalachian western states, as they came into the Union through 1820. The “transformative” aspects of these political structures and policy systems will only be apparent when compared to the Virginia colonial system. The same could be said for Virginia’s revolutionary war policy system–a policy system that persisted, slightly amended into the 1820’s.

Spotswood western initiatives expose what we will contend is a long-term characteristic of the Virginia Tidewater policy system–a characteristic which will continue into the Early Republic policy system as well–resistance by both houses of the Virginia legislature to any public state-driven, governor-led ED strategies. After a turbulent decade in power, Spotswood and the Burgesses reached an agreement in 1720, an agreement which seemingly centered on his becoming a permanent resident of Virginia–and in return for which the Burgesses awarded him a land grant for 86,000 acres. In this period of detente, unexpectedly a ship docked at Williamsburg, and off came a new Governor in early 1722. Unexpected or not it later became clear a number of petitions and an actual delegation demanding Spotswood’s termination had reached London and bombarded key decision-makers. Detente or not his tenuous relationship with the Royal Council and the House of Burgesses was not to London’s liking. Spotswood’s acceptance of the large land grant violated Crown policy which restricted private land grants to 1,000 acres. A final London delegation, composed of William Byrd from the Royal Council, and James Blair the leading Anglican minister in Virginia could have done the tipped the scales. If so, Spotswood was Blair’s third consecutive governor that he personally terminated from office [99] https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/spotswood_alexander_1676-1740#its2

Western Land Settlement, Fairfax’s Northern Neck, and the Nexus of Virginia’s Federalist Party.

Of greatest impact to settlement of Virginia’s western lands was who “controlled” them. The sword of Damocles that dangled over the head of Virginia land control was a 1649 land grant by Charles II to a number of his royalist supporters in the English Civil War (including Berkeley’s brother).

The grant totaled over 5.2 million acres, and was called the Northern Neck, it ran in a band from the Chesapeake Bay to the Allegheny–Blue Ridge-northern Shenandoah to the Potomac River in Maryland. It is a substantial portion of what today is Virginia and West Virginia.

Immense by anyone’s standards, the grant required taxes paid by its landowners/renters (quit-rents) paid to the recipients of the land grants–talk about tax abatement, this was delegating tax making., not the government but to the private sector. The Northern Neck grant’s practical effect was that much of Tidewater Virginia was given an economic autonomy from the state’s colonial government. It created a group of aristocratic/gentry elite that verged, if fully taken advantage of, on being a private empire. No wonder governors found it tough going in the Virginia colonial policy system

It was land grants derived from this Northern Neck that paid for Berkeley’s attraction of royalist elite recruitment program. It was land grants from this source that established the dominant families of Virginia’s politics and economy. The underlying coalition functioned reasonably well, allowing ample opportunity for Berkeley, and after him evolved  to the Royal Council. Land grantees were able to sell parcels and even estates at their discretion and an underlying consensus that land grants and sales were best handled through the Royal Council and the underlying purpose beyond wealth creation was to develop and institutionalize a way of life lost in England: the manor-plantation, with all that entailed.It was through the private decisions of these land owners that tobacco became institutionalized, and slave (white indentured servants primarily before 1680) became the dominant mode of production. It was the power base of the royalist plantation owners that took the scalp of Governor Spotswood.

By the late 1720’s, however, the vagaries of land inheritance caused title of the land to pass into the hands of the Culpeper family, and then to one man, Thomas Lord Fairfax (in 1719). That changed the status of the who control this massive real estate empire. The Northern Neck grant became one of Virginia’s chief political controversy during the 1730’s and 1740’s. With the Northern Neck in the hands of one individual,, the previous consensus eroded quickly, amid a fear of an England-resident outsider with sole discretion or both grants and proceeds. It mattered greatly that Fairfax’s grandfather had commanded a Puritan Army that overthrew Charles I. He was not a Royalist, but a Parliamentarian–a skeleton in the family closet that will matter greatly during the American Revolution–which BTW our Thomas Fairfax will live to see. In any event,

Fairfax who had never stepped foot in America, lived off the quitrents, hiring a Virginia plantation owner, Robert Carter to manage affairs in Virginia. Carter did so well, when he died (1732) he was reputed to own 1,000 slaves and was Virginia’s wealthiest man. Fairfax read is obit (I am not making this up), and realized what a gold mine this property was. He packed his bags, set off for Virginia between 1735-37. He was required to revisit London in the mid-1740’s to bring the legal dispute to a resolution; he finally secured his claim through the Privy Council. On his return in 1745, he constructed his new estate in Clark County, and in 1748 hired young George Washington to survey his Shenandoah holdings. Settling in, in the style that he had been accustomed, he set up estates/manors for himself and family members in several areas of his grant. He never married, and today is under attack for his possible relationships with Black slave women.

When German Shenandoah immigration gathered momentum, Lord Fairfax and his manager, Robert Carter, embraced it, offering (for its place and time) flexible leases that so long as quitrents were paid, left the lessor much autonomy over land use and lacking a term clause conveyed considerable security to the lessor as well, encouraging improvements made at lessor expense. In this way, German homestead, yeoman farming took root (sorry). Fairfax-Carter provided land grants to jump-start settlements, and on occasion land grants for community facilities. By the end of the decade, however, a massive legal struggle had developed among certain of the Royalist Families and the colony of Virginia–led can coordinated by the Byrd family.

Byrd petitioned the English Privy Council challenging Fairfax’s claim which included alerting the Council that the quit-rents from the Northern Neck “is about as much Land as at present pays Quit rents to his Majesty in all the rest of Virginia” [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 85-6. That commenced “the war of the maps” in which each party commissioned surveying and map making of the immense, hostile area, and submitted them to the judgment of the Privy Council. In any event, the settlement of Virginia’s western lands became a serious agenda item form policy-makers and private elites during the interlude. The House of Burgesses approved on its own, several land grants involving Fairfax lands as early as 1722. Fairfax (residing in England), fought back in 1929, launching a a formal complaint  which eventually fell to the British Board of Trade to arbitrate.

The matter was not resolved until 1746, in Fairfax’s favor–although the Burgesses-approved transactions were declared valid as well. Payment of taxes to Fairfax was, however, reconfirmed. Returning from England Fairfax hired his neighbor to formally survey his holdings, sixteen year old George Washington. Fairfax, in fact, was responsible for Washington’s training as a surveyor–and biographers suggest Fairfax became Washington’s surrogate father and certainly mentor-adviser. They would be business associates as well. To help resolve claim settlement and make land sales more secure, Governor Gooch in 1749 hired two surveyors, Joshua Fry and frontiersmen-plantation owner, Peter Jefferson to properly survey the western lands.

In the course of his long life [Fairfax]. a circle formed around him. Lord Fairfax’s drawing room became a school of manners for young gentlemen of the Northern Neck–among them many Washingtons, Lees, Marshalls (including John of Supreme Court fame, and his descendant, George of WWII distinction) and others who shared a distinctive set of beliefs. The Northern Neck [gave] the culture of Virginia a special meaning. On this frontier there was little of democracy and  none of equality, but a strong tradition of service character,right conduct, and the rule of law. …  A cultural tradition was planted by Lord Fairfax at Greenway Court [his estate[]. It took root in the fertile soil of the Northern Neck and flowered in the careers of George Washington in the Revolution … the Northern Neck was the cradle of their culture, and Lord Fairfaxs was its founding father [99]David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, pp. 86-7.

One wonders if George Washington’s and John Marshall’s distinctive and long-lasting affiliation with the post-Revolutionary Federalist Party–and in particular their willingness to embrace a strong national government and a national, not state perspective, may derive from this cultural tradition. Washington’s as a land develop did not disproportionately focus on his home state, but rather extended to its western lands–and lands in other states (Pennsylvania and New York). Washington (and Marshall’s) willingness to also not only embrace but take leadership in the building of developmental transportation infrastructure to access the western trans-Appalachian interior–which separated them from many Virginia Tidewater adherents–may also be traced to Fairfax’s influence? In any case, this arrangement with Fairfax endured unmolested until 1775 and Lord Fairfax, protected by George Washington among others (despite his Loyalist inclinations), retained to title to his land until the Virginia Act of 1779. The 88 year-old Fairfax died in 1781 at one of his estates.

Path to the Revolutionary War Policy System

Land Development Companies

Several royalist families formed land companies which invested in the Shenandoah (and other geographies. By this time, Scots-Irish had reached the Shenandoah, alongside the new established Germans. In 1748, Thomas Lee and Augustine Washington (George’s older half-brother, then owner of Mount Vernon) incorporated the Ohio Land Company whose purpose was to raise capital, and to develop opportunities in a loosely defined Ohio. On the threshold of the French-Indian War, the land company was also viewed as a barrier to French incursion and settlement, and to encourage private resistance to it. The Company petitioned King George for a land grant and in 1749 was granted 500,000 acres. We will more fully develop this topic in our future discussion on the settlement of Ohio. The investors in the Ohio Company included Governor Dinwiddie, the Ohio Company’s initial surveyor, Thomas Cresap, and George Mason was its Treasurer, a post he held to his death in 1792. The Ohio Company produced a quick rival, in the form of the Loyal Company, which under the ownership of John Lewis, a well-known pioneer of the Shenandoah, and three close associates, Thomas Walker, Joshua Fry, and a certain Peter Jefferson (the Meriweathers, of Lewis and Clark fame were also investors. The Loyal Company appealed to the House of Burgesses as early as 1748, and that body granted them 800,000 vaguely demarcated acres that ran from the Shenandoah into the unspecified boundaries of North Carolina. Neither of the Loyal nor Ohio Company  grants overlapped with Lord Fairfax’s “Northern Neck” claims.

In this module we trace the rather abrupt transition from colonial policy system to that of the Revolutionary War/Articles of Confederation Policy System. To painfully reiterate, like it or not, Part One of this book details the policy-making substance the Early Republic inherited from Colonial America. We never began as a blank slate, and the colonial past haunted the Early Republic as it does so today. Please keep in mind, policy systems are the central unit of our ED policy-making history. Policy systems define, formulate, approve, implement, and set goals for future ED/CD approaches, strategies, programs and tools. Behind each distinctive ED/CD output there is a policy system. In this module we shall see the extent to which Virginia’s Revolutionary War policy system breaks with the past colonial system–or whether it breaks with that system at all? The fundamental political structure of a new policy system is often a new or the first state constitution. That constitution sets up, defines, and empowers the critical political structures/institutions and relationships that shape ED/CD policy-making–including the key and bottom-line relationship of private and public sectors, and decentralization permissible to sub-state political actors. The constitution also is a very early indicator of the configuration of the state’s then current political culture, at least to the extent it can identify the issues and concerns of its adherents.

In the previous Pennsylvania chapter we introduced all this to the reader, and outlined happenings in Pennsylvania as it transitioned from colonial to revolutionary war policy system. As the capital city of the Articles, and the birthplace of American Revolution, democracy and the Early Republic, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, the largest urban center in North America at that time, and the second most populated state, Pennsylvania became a critical benchmark, and a beacon to the other twelve states of America’s most radical form of democracy. Philadelphia emerging revolutionary politics, led by artisans and fueled by indentured servants and a sizable subsistence working class developed on its own terms and interests from the hinterland yeoman agricultural majority. The Sons of Liberty mentality very quickly permeated into the already existing autonomous grouping. Balanced to this was a powerful, influential finance, trade and logistics/maritime elite with a mentality and global perspective and interests. The First and Second Continental Congresses added considerable fuel to the Philadelphia/Pennsylvania fires of resistance and revolution. Not so with a more isolated Virginia with a closed Tidewater plantation oligopolistic policy system.

Overview and Road Map

Virginia, on the other hand was the state that produced the most Founding Fathers, and five of the first six Early Republic Presidents (the Virginia Dynasty); the most populous state, Virginia’s colonial policy system (and economic base) was dramatically at variance with Pennsylvania’s.  Moreover, the initial burst of trans-Appalachian migration originated from Virginia (i.e. Kentucky and Tennessee) both of which inherited a great deal of Virginia’s Revolutionary War policy system and constitution. The Virginia constitution, emigration, and its policy system will affect Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri and even Kansas. Virginia’s revolutionary war constitution and policy system will be critical in understanding the flow of Early Republic political culture and ED policy-making. In many ways we are now outlining the “policy Gulf Stream” that will shape the patterns and politics of the first fifty years of the Early Republic.

The Virginia [Constitution] of 1776 was copied, almost word for word, by more states and territories than any other: Maryland (1776), the Northwest Territory (1795), Kentucky (1792), the District of Columbia (1801), Ohio (1806), he Indiana Territory (1807), the Missouri Territory (1816), the Arkansas Territory (1819), Illinois (1819) and Florida (1822) [99] David Hackett-Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, p.277.

Present-day Virginia has enjoyed six constitutions (the last 1971). The one discussed in this module, the revolutionary war constitution, was approved in 1776. Of note Virginia was the first of the new states to adopt a revolutionary constitution (April 1776) and Pennsylvania the second after the July 4th Continental Congress Declaration of Independence, in September 1776. Virginia’s Revolutionary policy system supplied muscle that rendered John Adams drive to independence more compelling. In any case, the Virginia Revolutionary War Policy System remained in effect through 1830–more than a half-century. It persisted through the entirety of the federal Virginia Dynasty, and the early Whig period. The Revolutionary War policy system was dramatically “reformed” by supporters of Andrew Jackson when he became President–inaugurating Virginia’s second Early Republic policy system.

In our view, Virginia’s Revolutionary War policy system started its evolution in 1763, with the defeat of the French and Indians–and the issuance by the British Crown of the 1763 Proclamation Line. (the Proclamation Line). The Proclamation Act affected Virginia and Pennsylvania the most–and given Virginia’s two decade old foray into trans-Appalachian land development through multiple land development companies, Virginia’s colonial government and its land development-oriented domestic elites took it very hard. George Washington, for example set out in this first steps of British resistance, destined to lead to the American Revolution. The next prod toward formation of Virginia’s Revolutionary War policy system was the 1765 Stamp Act and the formation of the Virginia Sons of Liberty, followed two years later by the Townsend Acts (Stamp and Townsend Acts). The Townsend Act added an economic development plank to the budding revolutionary partisan’s agenda. The latter act set in motion the dynamics that pitted domestic Virginia elites and “the Mob” against the Crown Royal Governor, Dunsmore–dynamics that finally led to Dunsmore closing down the House of Burgesses, not once but twice.

Closed for the second time in 1774, the House of Burgesses convened itself in Richmond beyond the authority of the Governor, commencing a two-year limbo of two competing governments. In that limbo, four “conventions” were held and conducted by a rump Patriot government that incrementally determined that American independence from Britain was imperative, that the Continental Congress in Philadelphia should be employed to do so and do so with substantial Virginia participation and resources, and by late 1775, that Virginia itself to separate from Britain and form its own sovereign “state” government–which it did after writing a state constitution in a Fifth Convention which, of all to that point, was more pan-Virginia and representative of the entire Virginia body politic (the Conventions). The last Convention resulted in the development of a constitution principally by George Mason, and its quick approval. That Constitution set up the formal Revolutionary War Policy System which persisted to 1830 (the Virginia Revolutionary War Constitutional Policy System)

the Proclamation Line

The French and Indian War itself frustrated the ambitions of many Virginian elites. But likely more important was (1) the removal of France (and their engagement with Native Americans) removed THE pillar which sustained American tolerance of the arbitrary and often incompetent and self-serving corruption–from an American perspective–colonial rule. Americans needed the British Army for their personal safety and that army was the only obstacle of importance to a French Catholic hegemony. (2) The removal of that threat not only made any personal frustrations worse, but with victory in the war, the nature of British colonial rule dramatically changed. Needing to ameliorate both French and Indians to integrate them into the new colony, and to pay for the enormous debt of the European world’s most costly war to that point, Britain’s approach to colonial administration necessarily pursued new goals and objectives, which when combined with British haughtiness and simple insensitivity radically and very quickly altered public opinion to British Parliament-led colonial administration.

George Washington figured prominently in it, but at war’s end (1763) he was denied entry into the British officer corp. A member of a generation, Pauline Meier would label as “the Old Revolutionaries”, which in Virginia would also have included Edmund Pendleton,Patrick Henry, George Wylie and George Mason, the thirty-one year old Washington had emerged from the war, a well-connected war hero from a royalist Tidewater family, seemingly determined to pursue a career in both land development and plantation agriculture (in 1761, although he rented it from his half-sister since 1754), he inherited Mount Vernon from his brother). That made a great deal of sense, he had been hired by Lord Fairfax (and was closely associated with is Northern Neck nexus) to survey Fairfax’s vast land holdings, and his brothers were original investors in the Ohio Land Development Company, and while George was still too young for that, he was perceived by many as substantially wrapped up in its vision and hopes for western land development and settlement [99] Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith, Spoils of War (Public Affairs, 2016), pp. 28-42. Already a small scale land owner, he also was eligible for land grants promised by Governor Dinwiddie for veterans in the war.

The Proclamation ended all that–although as the Spoils of War observes it did not stop Washington from working through his close associates from further surveying and accumulating large tracts of land in violation of the Act. The Proclamation Line did, however, put several more nails in the Ohio Land Company’s coffin. Virginia’s colonial government could no longer publicly subsidize its activities across the Line, and the increased resistance of tribes to white settlement eventually drove Virginia’s Governor Dinwiddie to launch a temporarily successful military expedition into the Proclamation Line Netherlands. Within five years of the war’s end, an aggressive Pennsylvania land development company (whose British lobbyist was Benjamin Franklin) had entered into the competition–also in seeming violation of the Proclamation Act. None of this seems to have stopped Washington. During the pre-Revolutionary War period he personally (and also with hired close associates) explored, traveled, surveyed, purchased and patented (filed a claim) for considerable acreage, making him by the time of the Revolution one of America’s most wealthy individuals. Like most land developers of the period, he was land-rich and cash-poor, however; unlike many of Virginia’s elites, however, he managed expenses and stayed north of the bankruptcy line. If Bueno de Mesquita and Smith are correct, this period was one of Washington’s most ruthless and determined periods of pre-capitalist wealth accumulation.

Part of the reason was that Virginia tobacco agriculture was in serious disruption during these decades. Tobacco exhausted the soil in five years or so, and further acreage had to be acquired to replace it. Greater acreage meant more slaves had to be purchased, and that was a losing investment when tobacco prices fell during the war–and seemingly began a long multi-decade decline in Virginia tobacco plantation agriculture.

Planters practiced a primitive method of field rotation by which tobacco was grown on a plot for four years at most. Fields were then turned over to corn ‘as long as any will come’., and thereafter abandoned to an encroaching forest, from which they could be recalled after twenty years  and devoted once again to tobacco’ [99] Pauline Maier,the Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Sam Adams (W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 172.

If there is such a term as deindustrialization, than the corresponding phenomenon in the 1760’s Virginia was tobacco deagriculturalization. From my perspective the equivalent to sectors (or even cluster) in an industrial economic base, is products/crop type in an agricultural. From today’s terminology tobacco was a mature cluster, and had reached into he third, and threatened to proceed onto the fourth stage in the profit life cycle we employ in this history. That dynamic, however, was accelerated and especially crippled the ruling oligopoly when it combined with a cavalier lifestyle and attitude toward money that caused “some gentlemen  [to] borrow far more money than they could repay to sustain their lifestyle” [99] Pauline Maier,the Old Revolutionaries, pp. 171-2

Washington and many others responded by reducing tobacco production considerably, and raising wheat and producing wine/liquor; he was more successful than most Virginia planters in this regard, however. He also rapidly committed himself to diversify his income stream through land development. His membership in Lord Fairfax’s nexus/network, also deeply committed to land development, provided support, contacts, and investment partners. His early flirtation with canals and movement into the interior, early in the 1770’s–in the midst of the period of which we now are concerned–provides substantial support to his commitment to land development in the decade following the French and Indian War and his innovative vision into America’s first ED strategy-nexus. That this vision and his success was recognized by others is further testified to the political momentum he generated during this period, rising from a mere twenty-six year-old, first term Burgesses delegate in 1758 to representative to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and selection as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in 1775. By that time he was among the most wealthy of American families. He didn’t make that transition by merely growing wheat at Mount Vernon. George Washington’s meteoric rise was precisely during the period America drifted into Revolution.

After 1750, Virginia Tidewater planters were under severe financial strain, a life style and cavalier role model was expensive, and with many sons and daughters tobacco farming was more a drain on cash than a savings plan for their inheritance. As these children came of age, many would be raised in more hardship than one associates with the Tidewater planter heritage, land development was more than a mere hobby; western land development was critical to ameliorating Virginia tobacco deagriculturalization and providing for continuity through succession. The Proclamation Act hit harder at Virginia’s social and economic base than anywhere else in the thirteen colonies. It hit Virginia’s Tidewater planter class right in its jaw. When the North’s maritime and finance elites could regroup after 1763–not so Virginia’s struggling political oligopoly. “Tidewater Virginians … had seen their personal debts grow in the years after 1740. By the beginning of the revolutionary war, Virginians owed Great Britain more than two million pounds …. On the eve of the American Revolution, the economy of the Chesapeake was … in a state of transition, as wheat culture increasingly took the place of tobacco” [99] Pauline Maier,the Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Sam Adams (W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 171-2. In this context western land development proved a natural extension of a Tidewater economic base applied to internal hinterlands.

Tidewater planters foresaw increased competition from new and more fertile lands as the agricultural frontier pushed no longer northward … but west and south. To those like [Richard Henry} Lee whose home plantations were small and were unwilling to [personally] migrate, the prospect [of decline and eventual ruin] was threatening. [When combined with generational succession] the upper ranks of Virginia society … downward mobility increased where families were large with several male heirs, and where the patrimonial estate was divided unequally among the children. …[For example] The five Lee brothers active in the Revolution were all younger sons, and [their] economic circumstances was integral to their lives and politics [99] Pauline Maier,the Old Revolutionaries, pp. 173-4

As we shall shortly see, the royalist Tidewater/Piedmont elite/oligopoly as a economic/political/social class splintered into two groupings during this period with an active, perhaps majority group  not only leaning toward some level of political independence from Great Britain, but actively managing the reaction of other classes/social groupings aggressively pushing for independence. The Tidewater/Piedmont elite, compared to Boston and Philadelphia’s merchant elite (but not New York’s) was as a whole more restrained than our sense of the Virginia Tidewater elite’s drive to political independence. South Carolina’s agricultural elite also backed early forms of political independence as well. The reader should also appreciate that every “Patriot” grouping followed its own path and time sequence to making a complete break with Great Britain. The last two years, after 1773 accelerated the movement considerably.

Stamp and Townsend Acts

Essentially the Stamp Act levied a “tax-fee” on many critical and widespread human and business interactions. The reaction to it was so intense, it was substantially terminated within two years.

It was the match that triggered the explosion of popular opinion in support of political resistance and set in down the road to some form of political independence (a push for representation in Parliament or exclusively empowering colonial (state) legislatures with the power to levy taxes on each colony–the thrust of “no taxation without representation”–was the 1765 Stamp Act.  Without any doubt, that stamp “tax” mobilized across all thirteen colonies the non-elites, into a series of anomic demonstrations, followed by the formation of a organized resistance, the “Sons of Liberty” movement. The Sons were found in every major urban center in each colony, but also evidenced a strong hinterland activism as well. There is reasonable evidence that Scots-Irish, many of which were recent arrivals driven from Great Britain to American (Pennsylvania) shores, were heavily “invested” in the anomic demonstrations. Money, trade and propertied elites were conflicted, several ethnic groups (Scottish Highlanders in North Carolina for example) remained tolerant and prone to continued British rule, and a solid “Loyalist” counter coalition would also develop. With the emergence of a populist movement, one sees evidence of a bi-polarization of politics perhaps inevitably resulting. Events would necessarily have to take their course before resolution, such as it was, happened.

By this time, Scots-Irish were pouring into Virginia and North Carolina in heavy numbers–and it is no accident that a few short years later (1768) North Carolina would erupt in the “Regulators War”–the most significant anomic response to the British post-French and Indian War mechanizations. That “war” started, almost immediately in 1765 and continued until the Regulators (mostly Scots-Irish) were defeated in a pitched battle in 1771). In many ways one might compare the Regulators Movement to WWII’s Spanish Civil War. Had that movement erupted in Boston, the reader would already know about it and its leaders–now its off to Wikipedia to find out what I am talking about.

In any event, led by New York’s Issac Sears, the Sons organization became a clearinghouse of political resistance, and communicated the activities of its members across the entire Atlantic coast. Who participated in the initial Sons Movement is a matter of interest; mostly in the North, activist merchants and a professional middle class were in charge, and they made determined efforts to enlist (and “manage”) the anomic responses of the “Mob”, which in our terms are the pre-capitalist urban and hinterland lumpen-proletariat. The Sons-led resistance, rudimentary initially, expanded over the subsequent years to form a core activist resistance to unrestrained British colonial rule, an active opposition to the royal colonial governor, a a counter/rival to the county legislature. Seemingly, set back on its heels when Parliament rescinded most the the 1765 Act, new 1767 and following Acts fueled the Sons movement, which in turn infected city councils, and the the 1770’s colonial legislatures.

While the Sons’ formal organization mostly disbanded after the repeal of the Stamp Act, subsequent American resistance groups/organizations embraced their tradition, style of mobilization, inherited their leadership, and often referred to themselves as Sons of Liberty. That is what is most important about the Sons of Liberty Movement. Successful, the articulation of mass demands through social-political-economic mobilization organizations became an accepted form of organization–and it would be inherited and adopted by our future Community Development approach. Strained as it may seem, Sam Adams, certainly Thomas Young were colonial era community developers. The surprise may be in this module is that I do not include Patrick Henry. Nor do I include a Sons of Liberty organizer in Orange County Virginia, James Madison. Nor do I include two of Washington’s brothers who joined Sons Movement organization in 1765. I certainly do not include Richard Henry Lee who organized Virginia’s first Sons of Liberty event and organization.

Much of the Son’s efforts were made to retain some order and to channel the deep emotional reaction of non-elites to the Act and subsequent British initiatives. The Sons “formulated” the demands of the Movement, and  lobbying with Colonial Governors and (British MP Wilkes) Parliament. The Townsend Acts generated another organization, the Non-Importation Associations, which initiated a counter economic development strategy to resist: do not buy imported British goods–and instead Buy American if possible. Smuggling, as in Prohibition, was protected by an unwillingness and ineffectiveness of complying with the Act’s terms–and tarring and feathering made its implementation problematic at best. Instead of merely drinking at a speakeasy, one simply stripped the tax collector naked and tarred and feathered him.

The Son’s mobilization of groups, artisans in Philadelphia for example, political activists in Boston, and Tidewater agricultural/Burgesses’ elites in Virginia/South Carolina did not abate and these groups evolved into the core of each respective state’s initial Revolutionary War policy system. By 1773, radicalization had manifestly occurred, certainly in Boston and Philadelphia, but surprisingly as we shall see in the Virginia House of Burgesses. The 1774 British Intolerable Acts (set in place in response to the Boston Massacre and subsequent Tea Party), in my opinion, seemed the point of no return. State colonial legislatures and city councils formed “Committees of Correspondence”, and by mid-1774 the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia. From that point on more or less total independence from Great Britain became the cutting edge of Patriot demands. Lexington and Concord set it off.

As we suggested in our earlier Pennsylvania discussion, the Stamp Act created the first truly “populist”, as defined in my terms (multi-class, multi-ethnic, multi-political culture mass movement) coalition in “modern” America. That mass mobilization against rule by elites in British Parliament sustained the drive to independence and the war for independence over the next nearly twenty years. From that point on, rule by British elites incrementally but increasingly lost legitimacy in the hearts of probably a majority of Americans–and eventually provided soldiers for the Patriot cause, and organized military resistance from the most disaffected in the colonial western hinterlands.

This newly organized group, called the ‘Sons of Liberty’ rarely, if ever, went beyond trends … already apparent before it appeared. Yet by institutionalizing the colonists’ new commitment to resistance … and, by implementing it with a new type of organization, the Sons of Liberty durably established a pattern for future opposition to Britain. Equally important the Sons of Liberty demonstrated how limited in scope the agitation of 1765-6 was, how devoted even the most determined Stamp Act opponents were to the fabric of established government … how fundamentally the American assumptions and beliefs would have to change before resistance could become revolution [99] Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), pp. 77-8.

Virginia’s Reaction to the Stamp Act--The Sons first “organized” late in 1775, and mostly early 1766. Likely, northern city-ports were the first, and the South was not integrated into New York;s Issac Sears’  correspondence union. Possibly, the first southern Sons met for the first time in Leedstown Virginia (Westmoreland County) in the Northern Neck on February 27, 1766. Organized and led by planter-Burgesses member Richard Henry Lee, it created a Westmoreland County association composed of 125 signers, including two of Washington’s younger brothers and a host of the area’s most affluent, Tidewater planters and elites–and nearly all of the leading families. On March 31st, Norfolk Virginia  came together and formed a committee to establish links and communication with Sons of Liberty in other British colonies. Members of that grouping were current members of the local-county government as well as businessmen/artisans–and necessarily of some wealth and status [99] Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 298-301.

Of the two the entry of Richard Henry Lee proved most critical. A future delegate to the Continental Congress, signor of the Declaration of Independence, President of the Articles of Confederation Lee, and future U.S. Senator came from the oldest–Berkeley era royalist Cavalier family background. He died early in 1792, but is very much considered as a “Founding Father”. His prestigious leadership of Virginia’s first Son of Liberty-like organization is of great importance to our history. The commitment and leadership of a key royalist-Cavalier family in the Northern Neck in the first months of organized resistance to the Stamp Act is vivid testimony that Virginia elites not only came early into dynamics that led to the Revolution and political independence, but they led it–and extended their resistance to include non-elites. Anti-British resistance in Virginia from 1766 was led “and managed” by dominant elements of the old Dominion’s oligopoly and not driven in the main by anomic of autonomous groups motivated by their own goals and internal dynamics. Virginia’s pre-Revolutionary War path to independence and the Early Republic from its very start differed radically from the path followed by Pennsylvania–at least in terms of leadership and constituency. Whatever else Virginia was resisting, it was not to be the class dominance of the Tidewater plantation elites, and while it included non-elites, non-elites were not able to turn the revolution to attain their ends until 1776 when the slimmest of opportunities opened up.

Lee initiated the Westmoreland Association of 1766, an organization of 114 militant opponents of the Stamp Act, whose numbers included representatives of prominent families together with scores of obscure persons, each of whom pledged ‘to obtain as many signers of the Association as he possibly can’. Then on February 28, the day after the Association was formed, its members served as the nucleus of a 400-man crowd that forced Archibald Ritchie, a local Scottish merchant who had announced his willingness to clear vessels on stamped paper, to express remorse for his rash words, and renounce any intention to uphold the Stamp Act.. Lee and his closest political associates in the Northern Neck, including Richard Parker and Samuel [and John Augustine] Washington organized the affair [99] Pauline Maier,the Old Revolutionaries, p. 178

Virginia’s Reaction to the Townshend Act--Of interest to this history is the reaction to the Townsend Act injected economic development as a major element in the drive to independence and Revolution. It was that Act and the establishment of Non-Importation Associations across the thirteen colonies that sustained the drive to independence through 1773. As we shall later see, this raised the primacy of manufacturing as key to both economic development and the future American economic base–but it also stimulated the evolution of American shipping, whaling, fishing and trade sectors which were critical to the maritime economies of coastal port cities through the 1840’s.

The Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 was opposed because the new duties it levied on tea, lead, paper, and painters colors were also considered taxes and because the revenue raised in the act would be used to pay the salaries of provincial judges [and governors] and other royal officials who had previously been dependent upon provincial assemblies for their livelihoods. Writs of assistance were moreover sanctioned by the Townshend Act, and these were considered another violation of English liberty because they gave customs officials broad authority to search for contraband on mere suspicion of wrongdoing [99]Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, p. 113.

By levying a customs duty instead of a stamp tax which was paid by everyone at point of consumption, the Townshend Act hit merchants and shippers first, before it touched the consuming non elites. To physically clear a ship, the merchant had to first pay the duty–and if the merchant attempt to smuggle the taxable goods into the port, his ship and cargo could be seized, confiscated or even destroyed–and he could be arrested. If a merchant paid the duty, the goods were then available for domestic purchase and consumption–presumably with the duty cost embedded into the price. That is why six years later Boston “Indians” climbed on board three ships and tossed tea into Boston’s harbor before duty could be paid and tea sold by willing merchants. Importing of taxable goods was the action that involved the merchants first, divided them into those willing to pay and those unwilling, and then to resist the sale and consumption of taxable goods that made it into the domestic economy. Resistance to the Townshend Act soon acquired the moniker ‘non importation’ when the merchants formed Non-Importation Associations in response to the first ships that carried dutiable goods. Groups, often calling themselves Sons of Liberty formed to support the actions of the Non Importation Associations. The core idea was to stop merchants from paying the duty in the first place, and then to organize resistance to those merchants and vendors who sold goods that had paid duty. In effect this was an economic boycott of dutiable goods. Cesar Chavez would have understood this tactic very well. “The lists of goods proscribed for importation … varied from colony to colony, and in the South [non-importation] agreements tended to emphasize non consumption more than non importation” [99]Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, p. 115

Non importation had actually began in the last stages of resistance to the Stamp Act, but non-importation associations formed in particular response to the first arrival of dutiable goods especially in New England and New York, and became more aggressive and pervasive after it was clear in 1769 that Britain would not compromise or back away as they had with the Stamp Act. Accordingly, there was a regional distinction in who led and primarily composed the membership of the non importation association. In the North, merchants predominated–almost exclusively–while in the South–where commercial transactions were matters that were handled by individual plantation owners and their factors in London, not in a commercial port–plantation owners, many of whom were members of the House of Burgesses, and local public officials as well became members. Virginia’s first non importation association was formed on May 18 1769 in Williamsburg (the colony capitol) by merchants and members of the House of Burgesses. The House itself in November endorsed the organization and its actions–making Virginia the first state-wide non importation association.

the Conventions, the Politics of Virginia’s Path to Independence

The most important observation that follows from Virginia’s reaction to the Proclamation, Stamp and Townshend Acts were (1) from the outset, the elements of the Tidewater Royalist Aristocracy asserted and seized leadership in opposing the British acts, and simultaneously enlisted support from Virginia non-elites in their efforts; (2) the early involvement/leadership of the anti-British position almost certainly expressed the latent frustration of these elites to the Proclamation Act which was intended to limit, the ability of an economically strained Tidewater elite to expand thru land development initiatives into the western interior; and (3) although split into two factions (conservative-loyalist and radical-Patriot), this aggressive involvement of Tidewater elites dragged the House of Burgesses into their debate and initiatives–a distinctive Virginia development that inserted, intended or not, Virginia’s leadership into the inter-colony movement.

That later observation was less the 1766 Westmoreland County Association as a Virginia Sons of Liberty than the initial reaction of the House of Burgesses when it first became aware of the Stamp Act itself, in late 1765. Toward the conclusion of its 1765 session the House debated, approved, and rejected a series of resolutions proposed by a new first-term Burgesses member who physically arrived at the session only eight days before the ship arrived from Britain carrying news and copies of the Stamp Act. That young and inexperienced but opportunistic and radical member needs at this point to be introduced.

Patrick Henry a rising, Scotch-Irish Ascendancy star had just sat in his Burgesses seat for the first time and was outraged at the Stamp Act and that outrage was congruent to his previous career as a lawyer, common folk agitator, and opponent of causes that disrupted the existing establishment. In launching his opposition to the Stamp Act, he in effect took his anti-establishment stand and transformed it to an anti-colonial assertion the Act, without approval from any colonial legislature was invalid, if not illegal. Late in the session when most Burgesses delegates had already left Williamsburg, he proposed five resolutions, the last of which asserted that “the General Assembly (House of Burgesses) of this Colony have the only, and sole exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony, and that every attempt to vest such Power in any Persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly … has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom. [Responding to shouts of Treason from the few remaining Burgesses delegates, Henry retorted] Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus, Charles the First had his Cromwell, and George the Third … [implying assassination, delegates interrupted with more cries of Treason–to which Henry continued]  may profit by their example. If this be treason make the most of it” [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion (University Press of Virginia, 1983), pp. 113-4

While it is not clear if the Fifth Resolution was approved, Governor Fauquier rescinded it and refused to publish it. Newspapers in both the United States and Britain got ahold of the resolutions, however, and published them. In an instant Patrick Henry and the House of Burgesses became household names in the anti-Stamp Act debate. From that point on, the eventual five-term Virginia post Revolutionary War governor, delegate to the First and Second Continental Congress began his political career. From that point on, both the Tidewater oligopoly and the House of Burgesses battled the Stamp Act–and the succession of British Royal Governors that subsequently followed. It did not take long. When the actual stamps arrived for sale in Virginia, His Majesty’s stamp distributor, protected by Governor Fauquier, was met at the pier by “gentlemen of property in the colony” who convinced him to stop distribution of the stamps “and do nothing contrary to the wishes of the General Assembly“.  When the Stamp Act was repealed and replaced by the Townshend Act in 1767, the “Virginia Assembly, following the example set by Massachusetts, sent formal protests to the King and Parliament” [99] Virginius Dabney, Virginia: the New Dominion, pp. 117-18.

Upon the death of Fauquier, the new Governor Botetourt (1767) confronted a House of Burgesses that refused to concede that it alone possessed the right to tax colony residents thus continuing to contest the administration of the Townshend Act. Botetourt in turn terminated the Burgesses term–in response to which many Burgesses, much as the French Parliament did years later, proceeded immediately to the next-door Raleigh Tavern, elected Peyton Reynolds as its moderator, and formulated and wrote a formal “non-importation, non-consumption agreement” which unenforceable as it was committed Virginia to resist the Act. Unfortunately, for the Rump Burgesses, many did not follow its lead, and stamps were sold to many merchants and plantation owners–the latter being mostly loyalist Scots, such as Richard Henry Lee accosted in his Westmoreland County incident.

Eventually in 1770, after Botetourt had died, and been replaced by Governor Dunsmore (1771), the Townshend Act was repealed, leaving in place only a tax on tea–which to no one’s surprise did little to stop the non-importation and consumption of tea. In the same year, 1770, the Boston Massacre occurred which stoked tensions still further. In 1792 a British Customs schooner (in the act of chasing a tea smuggling Rhode Island ship) ran aground and was subsequently burned by a Patriot raiding party, one of whose leaders was the Sons of Liberty, a founder of Brandeis College and the Providence Bank, a noted slave trader John Brown–uncle of the Civil War John Brown. The defendants were threatened with trial in England for treason (which did not materialize), and the colonies, including Virginia joined together to form the Committees of Correspondence–the clearinghouse for Patriot colonies and their legislatures to resist British further colonial taxation. The Tea Party of 1773 followed, in reaction to which Parliament issued a series of Acts, collectively called the Intolerable Acts (including the Quebec Act). The Intolerable Acts ultimately proved the trigger that generated the First Continental Congress in 1774–a meeting in which the Virginia Rump Burgesses played a major role in organizing.

That, needless to say, prompted an irate Governor Dunsmore to once again adjourn the House of Burgesses, which equally predictably proceeded across the street to the Raleigh Tavern, and transformed itself into the First Virginia Convention. elected Peyton Randolph once again, and passed a resolution to be sent through its Committee on Correspondence to the other twelve Patriot provincial (colonies)  to convene for the first time in Philadelphia as a Continental Congress. Accepted by the other twelve colonies, the First Continental Congress met in September 1774–it elected Peyton Randolph as its Moderate (he moderate the Second as well). Those Burgesses members participating in the Rump First Convention also approved resolutions which left no doubt that for them the line had been crossed and that the united colonies should directly enter into negotiations with Parliament whose end was to secure the rights of colonial assemblies to tax and other key matters–autonomy of the colonies vis a vis Parliament. They elected the delegates they sent to the Continental Congress (which included Washington, Reynolds, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison (father of a future President), and Richard Bland). They further commissioned Thomas Jefferson to draft “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” as a guide to the delegates. In a last act, the First Convention selected the delegates for a Second Convention.

It was at the Second Convention, held in March 1775 at Richmond where the Governor could not shut them down, that Patrick Henry made his historic speech and spoke his famous quote “As for me, give me Liberty or Give me Death”. By this time the Convention was a parallel Patriot government to that controlled by the Royal Governor. During 1775, as the “nation” became a nation and moved down the road to independence and war, two further Conventions raised troops, appointed military and political leadership and sent resources to the Patriot Continental Army commanded by General George Washington, and instructed further its delegates to the Second Continental Congress–instructions that required the delegates to vote for and sign what is today is called “the Declaration of Independence”.

Fought tooth and nail by Governor Dunsmore, the rudimentary “Convention” government effectively seized control over much of Virginia, chasing the Governor onto a ship which ran the colony off the coast of Newport. Dunsmore, attempting to reestablish his authority on land, invaded and burned down Newport, almost totally, but in the end he return to his ship, harassed by Patriot forces. At the end of its Third Convention, June 20, 1775, the delegates set a date for a Fourth Convention in December, and formally declared the end of the House of Burgesses which was then replaced by the Convention. The Fourth Convention (December 1775) among other decisions, called for a Fifth Convention elected by delegates from the counties of Virginia whose purpose was to formally create a new Patriot government. The Fifth Convention (July 1776) met with the latter formally declaring Virginia as an independent “State” (actually a Commonwealth), drafted and approved a Constitution (see below), adopted Jefferson’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, and elected as the Commonwealth’s first Governor, Patrick Henry.

The Fifth Convention, therefore, was the body that formally created the first Virginia Revolutionary War Policy System. The next section reviews that Convention and outlines the policy system it created. It should be noted the first four Conventions were in fact “rump”, not elected nor representative of the various factions and parties resident in Virginia at the time. Like the House of Burgesses it represented, if anybody, that element of the Tidewater oligopoly committed to independence and war, with a scattering of “western” delegates like Henry, it was preponderantly dominated by many who today are called Founding Fathers. Loyalists, of course, would not consider this body legitimate, and its contact with the general populace was sporadic, loose and informal–attracting exclusively those attracted to the Patriot cause. These conventions enjoyed less legitimacy than the Estates General that led France into the French Revolution, and were arguably more coup-like closer to that of Lenin’s October Revolution in 1917.

Revolutionary War Policy System

The point of the previous ten modules was to outline the inheritance of the colonial period in the formation of Virginia’s first Revolutionary War/Early Republic Policy System.The initial system did not spring out from nowhere, and it persisted for over a half-century until 1830. It is worth further note that many critical deficiencies mentioned in this module, including most of those listed by Thomas Jefferson, were also ignored in 1831–and were not in fact rectified until another constitution in 1851. The system produced at the Fifth Convention, as will be apparent, different noticeably from that produced a few months later in Pennsylvania. Virginia’s being the first commonwealth/state among the thirteen, it was the pioneer–and also was the most populated and oldest of the colonies. A leader equal to Massachusetts in the drive to independence and war, Virginia was not lacking in revolutionary spirit.

But the politics of its Fifth Convention, the groupings and dynamic evident in its decision-making, produced an output whose core decision-making structures/institutions, including oligopolistic policy system, slavery, basic unit of local governance (county), economic base, and relationships between (1) branches, (2) levels of government, and (3) public/private sectors, electoral system drew from the aggregated inheritance of Virginia’s colonial past and experience. Surprisingly or not, the past Tidewater colonial policy system–stripped of its royal governor–found its way into the new revolutionary war policy system. For example, the Constitution adopted by the First Convention, again which continued for the next fifty-five years, made no mention of slavery whatever. It was incorporated into the revolutionary war policy system without comment, reference or statute–the word itself cannot be found. Likewise, of course, for women. Virginia during the colonial period did not have a written constitution. Rather than incorporate sections of a non-written constitution, the Fifth Convention simply”assumed” by default what already existed and injected it, often unmentioned or merely referenced into the new policy system–usually without substantial debate. One might not forget these constitutions were written in the middle of the chaos of a war of independence–and a threat of actual invasion by a British army or bombardment of its coastal cities by the British fleet. Both applied to Virginia in 1775-6–as they did to Pennsylvania..

Long Live the Oligopolistic Colonial Policy System

What was truly outstanding was ability of the Tidewater Royalist Oligopoly–excuse me Virginia Founding Fathers–to seize early control over the forces and dynamics of Virginia, during revolutionary drive to independence and war “managed” the transition from the colonial royalist policy system by creating its own parallel government–a rump offshoot of the House of Burgesses. This rump and self-designated derivative from the House of Burgess broke away when the Governor adjourned the House. Meeting at Raleigh Tavern it simply asserted it was the leader of the colony’s (at that point) loyal opposition. From there it charted its own path, a path, the Four Conventions, that led to a desire for Virginia’s autonomy, working in conjunction with like-minded colonial movements in the other colonies, and finally to the assertion of actual independence from Great Britain, an independence that could only be won in a war. As such the rump-Burgesses entity was a parallel government to the formerly sovereign royal colonial policy system. By the mid-1776, with the royal colonial system evicted from most of its physical presence in the colony, a Fifth Convention, with expanded membership to mirror that of the still-adjourned House of Burgesses, was tasked with the decisions to create the independent “Commonwealth” (state government) a new sovereign government for Virginia.

The method of selected delegates for the Fifth Convention replicated Virginia’s past reliance on equal representation (two delegates) from each county in existence at the time. Counties contained widely disparate numbers of residents (including slaves and women above the age of eligibility), citizens–freeholders but each county sent two delegates to the Convention. As such the legislature of Virginia was not be be based on population, but on counties as the basic unit of governance. Today we would call Virginia malapportioned, possessing nothing like one man, one-vote. In a later critique of the actions of the Fifth Convention, Thomas Jefferson calculated that “nineteen thousand men, living below the falls [Fall Line]  … possess half the Senate and want four members only of possessing the house of delegates”  Between the Blue Ridge and the far reaches of what would be Kentucky and West Virginia (then of course part of the state of Virginia) 32 delegates were elected out of 149, and 4 senators out of 24. The Tidewater sea coastal regions (this excludes the Piedmont) elected  71 delegates and 12 senators of 145 and 24 respectively [99] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the Virginia Constitution in Thomas R. Morris and Larry J. Sabato, Virginia Government and Politics (University of Virginia, 1998), pp. 11-12.

Counties, BTW, determined who was deemed a freeman, i.e. owned land and paid taxes for the required residency period, and the County Sheriff conducted the election. Sheriffs presided over the ballot box in a public building or Anglican Church, and determined when voting was officially over. The Sheriff counted the votes and sent the results to the Legislature for its verification and formal approval. Voting itself was by “voice”, not by ballot, and the voice vote was recorded by a clerk. The “voice” vote as open to all who were present. Property ownership by residents varied by county, of course, but in coastal Tidewater counties, a majority of all counties, plantation owners dominated the election franchise, if not directly than indirectly. Less true of Piedmont, only the few “western” Blue Ridge and Shenandoah counties then in existence did freeman include large numbers of yeoman households and property-holding middle class. Because the colonial method of forming new counties entailed an application from an existing county to “split off” a new colony from itself, a new county had to receive support from the older county if its request to form a new county was to be approved by the state legislature. Western counties were in 1776 quite large, and in that year a number of new county requests were in process, but suspended, of course, because the House of Burgesses was adjourned. The Fifth Convention therefore used the existing larger western counties as the unit of its representation–hugely depreciating the one-man, one-vote link.

Counties which had experienced intensive in-migration over the last few decades were in 1776 disproportionately concentrated in its few large western counties. Accordingly new ethnic groups such as the Germans and Scots-Irish were almost gerrymandered–concentrated in a relatively few counties, and numerically dominated by representatives from the Tidewater, southeast coast, and Piedmont. There were 132 delegates, and only 18 were from the Shenandoah, West Virginia and Kentucky geography, where with a few exceptions (Patrick Henry for one) voters reflected values, beliefs and expectations different from the Tidewater/Piedmont royalist plantation owners. The revolutionary war policy system therefore reflected much of the past oligopolistic colonial policy processes, relationships, and institutions.

Accordingly, as we move on to describe the more specific features of the revolutionary war policy system created by the 1776 Fifth Convention, the reader ought to sense the argument advanced in the preceding paragraphs: the core, stripped of the executive power of the governor, of the colonial policy systems (economic base, prevailing institutions, and economic activity), and the de facto control over its local governance by a core of Tidewater royalist plantation aristocrats was replicated, simply incorporated, or built upon–and extended into the Early Republic revolutionary war policy system. That initial policy system was not meaningfully altered until 1851–seventy-five years later. Obviously, it was not made “modern” until the Reconstruction period. If as we suggested earlier, a number of Early Republic “new” trans-Appalachian states model their policy systems after elements of Virginia’s, then this system we are describing assumed an importance that must be appreciated. That North Carolina would replicate key elements of its neighbor, as did Maryland, we can better understand how the “Tidewater” political culture and policy system represented a distinct approach to democracy, governance, and policy-making through the Early Republic period.

This is Virginia-style Early Republic democracy; and in Patrick Henry’s immortal words, if this be democracy make the most of it.

Down with the King; Long Live the People’s Will

We have already discussed Pennsylvania’s revolutionary war policy system–created by a constitution approved three months after Virginia’s. We discovered in that discussion that Pennsylvania created something we described as a “super-legislature”. We could have described it as a policy system based on “legislative supremacy”. This requires an new way of thinking for most of us. We tend to categorize state (or federal) history by gubernatorial (presidential) administrations, but in Early Republic revolutionary war policy systems, the single most important leader was the Speaker of the Lower House. Strong governors and gubernatorial administrations, however, are a 20th century theme that we insert to render our discussion digestible to the reader but it does involve a level of distortion that the reader might expect more leadership from the governor than the constitutional office could support. In 1776, one placed an individual in that office in whom “the people” could trust not to replicate the tyranny of King George. One definitely did not place in that office a person that would dominate the policy system, or assert primacy over the legislature. Few governors, for example, will be given the power of veto.

The Legislature was considered as being the representative expression of the “will of the sovereign people” on which the revolutionary policy system rested.  Revolutionary War state policy system typically created an extremely weak governor, chosen by the Legislature. In that all state revolutionary war constitutions were created during a period of struggle against English royal authority (tyranny they called it), the Governor’s office was the scapegoat and was the institution most feared as capable of replicating the tyranny of the King in state policy-making. In that a court system did not exist without legislative action, and judges were appointed only by the legislature, and it was unclear as to what elements of the English law would be transferred into the new revolutionary war policy system, we can see how the three branches of government were somewhat fused in the Pennsylvania state constitution, and lacking such checks and balances, the Legislature was the place in which policy-making was confined. Super legislatures therefore (1) were the branch with the clearest tie to the sovereign people; (2) were dominant of the three branches; (3) were empowered with most policy-making functions and powers; and (4) were checked only through elections.

Virginia, three months before Pennsylvania, had also created its super-legislature. The Legislature created/approved by the Fifth Convention was divided into a Lower House of Delegates, and an “upper” house, the Senate. The House of Delegates was the body closest to the basic unit of Virginia governance–the counties. Each county sent two delegates to the Lower House, and it alone of all the other political structures were directly elected by the “freeholders” in each county annually. The Senate on the other hand was composed of 24 senators each elected from a “district” formed by within and between counties for four years (after a rotation system to ensure replacement of one-fourth of the Senate annually was in place. Jefferson in his critique of the Constitution made reference to the reality that despite enlarged election districts the same electorate elected both Delegate and Senate in the same election: “the Senate is by its constitution, too homogeneous with the house of delegates” [[99] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the Virginia Constitution in Thomas R. Morris and Larry J. Sabato, Virginia Government and Politics (University of Virginia, 1998), p.12. In both instances, the Sheriffs of the counties will conduct the elections as described earlier. The Constitution then requires ALL legislation must originate in the Lower House, to be approved or rejected by the Senate. The governor was not given a veto. “Money” bills (appropriations), however, could not be amended by the Senate–just approved or rejected. The two houses shall by joint ballot appoint judges to the courts of Virginia–which judges shall hold office for life or good behavior, as determined by the Legislature. The Governor could nominate an individual to the Legislature, but subsequent approval still was retained by the Legislature. The Legislature alone possessed the power to amend the Constitution.

The Governor, unlike the Lower House, is checked on all sides. He is chosen by a joint vote of Legislature for one year, can be elected without interruption for four years, before being “termed out” for at least one year. The Legislature determined an “adequate but moderate salary” for him. With the advice of a Council of State (see below) he could “exercise the executive powers” of the state “and shall not under any pretense exercise any power or prerogative by virtue of any law, statute, or custom of England“. The Council of State, also called the Privy Council consists of eight who are elected by the Legislature, and may consist of members of the Legislature as well as others, except ministers of a church. The Council shall elect its own President who shall act as Lieutenant Governor. The Council has its own clerk, can set its annual salary, and is bound by an oath of secrecy. An annual rotation of two members is required.

The Governor with the advice of the Council can appoint county “justices of the peace” as they become vacant. in 1776 current justices of county courts were simply “incorporated into office” and remained until the next election. County clerks one appointed held the position for life or good behavior. County Courts appointed the Sheriff and the Constables. Once in office, a justice of the county court and the clerks of the court continue for life/resignation or good behavior. Sheriffs owe their continuity to the County Court. As such the Virginia county government enjoys considerable autonomy, and its power underlies the election of members to the House of Delegates and Senate. The opportunity for a state-wide downward shift of policy leadership to local county courts is evident–especially if the latter is institutionalized over time by a compliant electoral franchise. The power of the county courts over the militia–very important in this age–is checked minimally by the governor, until they are “mobilized” when they are directed by the mobilizing authority–subject to advice of the Council of State.

the Virginia Revolutionary War Constitutional Policy System and Hegemonic Liberty (Albion Seed, p. 410)

Post Revolutionary War Economic Base– see p 356Doerflinger —Rise of Baltimore, decline of Norfolk–differences with PA