In the great American narrative, the settlers of seventeenth-century Virginia have never achieved full rank. They exist merely as foils to more important actors: seventeenth-century New England Puritans, who, it is argued, shaped the future American mind; eighteenth-century Virginians, who led America to independence; and nineteenth-century Southern planters, who drove the nation into civil war. Yet these Englishmen profoundly shaped the course of American history. They developed an extensive staple economy built around forced labor out of which emerged both heroes and villains. The posterity of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, each succeeding generation pushing further and further to the south and west, played as great a role in shaping the American character as the sons of Massachusetts Bay. Surely to understand the history of the United States, one must understand these first Anglo-Americans.
It is a difficult task, however. From the earliest promotional literature to the latest historiographical debates, no matter where one turns in a quest to come to grips with these Virginian Englishmen, one cannot escape the myths of the past. As Carl Van Doren remarked on reading Jay B. Hubbell’s dissertation in 1919, “the remote Virginia past was buried under as many layers of legend as the numerous strata which Heinrich Schliemann found overlying Homer’s Troy.”[ref]Jay B. Hubbell, Southern Life in Fiction (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1960) 37.[/ref] In part this reflects, as Richard Hofstadter well noted, the loss to the American imagination of the entire pre-Revolutionary era, leaving only “an episodic mythology.”[ref]Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968) 5.[/ref] But the colonial era does not suffer alone. The ghosts of the English and American civil wars continue to haunt all interpretations of the American past. The very categories commonly used to conceptualize the mind and behavior of these earliest Americans–Puritans and Yankees, Rogues and Cavaliers, Yeomen and Po’ White Trash–reflect the polemical war of words waged by seventeenth-century Englishmen on the one hand and antebellum Americans on the other.
The problem in conceptualization, however, goes deeper than stereotypical labels for modern historians are mired in their own polemical war of words. When discussing colonial Virginia, historians do not pit one hypothesis against another, but one historian’s truth against another’s myth. Furthermore, oblivious to their own historiography, these historians do not even realize they have been mired in the same debate since the 1910s and have gotten no closer to agreement. But, as later chapters will show, the sterility of modern historiography reflects a problem far deeper than the simple lack of historiographical perspective.
Modernist Approach
All historians acknowledge that New World cultures arose out of the combined influence of cultural inheritance, the selective nature of migration, the selective transference of Old World institutions, particular New World geography and climate, contact with other cultures, and continuing contact with the mother country. Yet studies have varied greatly in the weight given to each factor, ignoring some completely, giving lip service to others, all the while highlighting one or the other as “the central theme” of American development.
For the most part, differing interpretations of the mindset of the seventeenth-century Virginian and hence the nature of early Virginia society have stressed cultural baggage, selective migration, and physical environment to the exclusion of all other factors. Historians generally assume all white Virginians were Anglo-Saxon, ignoring the small groups of Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Hugenots. Similarly, they ignore cultural contact with these minor immigrant streams, as well as the larger numbers of African and West Indian slaves and native Americans (apart from the exceptional and isolated work of Mechal Sobel and a handful of ethnohistorians).[ref]Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987).[/ref] While earlier studies of seventeenth-century Virginia usually recognized the civilizing effect of continued commercial contact with England in the first years, modern studies all but ignore such contact.[ref]See, e.g., John Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbours, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1902) 2: 315-6, 388-9.[/ref] Furthermore, almost all historians of early Virginia, whether they emphasize continuity or change, treat institutional transfer as a dependent rather than an independent variable.[ref]Some historians in contrasting colonial New England and Virginia do seem to give a fairly independent role to institutional transfer, stressing the lack of some New England institution (e.g., corporate community, Puritan ministers) that gave much freer play to environmental forces in Virginia. See, e.g., Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; New York: Holt, 1962) 65, 73-4, 125, 347; Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1965) 22, 279; Page Smith, As A City Upon A Hill: The Town in American History (Cambridge: MIT P, 1966) 12-3; Darrett B. Rutman, American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970) 47-51.[/ref]
Yet historians differ fundamentally and vociferously on whether cultural baggage, selective migration, or the physical environment proved the dominant factor in shaping colonial Virginia, divisions following closely intradisciplinary boundaries. In general, “cultural” and “intellectual” historians have worked within a “traditionalist” framework emphasizing the transfer of traditional English culture dominated by the gentry ethic to the New World and only slightly modified by the New World environment.[ref]Here, as elsewhere, I plead guilty to the charge of “lumping” with all its inherent flaws. In this case, while increased splitting might be fairer to individual historians, I do not believe it would change my basic conclusions. See J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979) 241-2.[/ref] On the other hand, “social” historians have developed a “modernist” approach stressing alternatively the selective transference of English culture dominated by a bourgeois ethic and the special nature of the New World environment that transformed traditional Englishmen into modern Americans.
Most modernist interpretations of early America do not argue any intent on the part of the immigrants to create a modern world, but rather the divergence from traditional ideals as a result of the different physical environment.[ref]See, e.g., Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, The Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1910; New York: Russell, 1958) 107; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia, The Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1922; New York: Russell, 1958) 28; Arthur Meier Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922) 33; Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (1952; New York: Atheneum, 1966) 5; Rutman, American Puritanism 48-9; Darrett B. Rutman, The Morning of America, 1603‑1789 (Boston: Houghton, 1971) 42; Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982) 256, 260.[/ref] Although historians have emphasized various environmental factors that significantly impacted seventeenth-century Virginia society (such as warm climate, abundant land, Indian clearings, Tidewater riverine system, isolation from England), the general emphasis in most environmentalist interpretations of seventeenth-century Virginia can be summed up by one word: frontier. All of the great “frontier” historians of nineteenth-century America from Turner to Ray Allen Billington have recognized (at least implicitly) seventeenth-century Virginia as the earliest frontier, although usually downplaying its significance to the great American narrative by labeling the Tidewater a “European” frontier or “a frontier without frontiersmen.”[ref]Turner, Frontier 4, 9, 67, 70, 206; Schlesinger, New Viewpoints 33-4; Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929; Boston: Little, 1946) 27; Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers (University, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1940) 1-28; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1941) 4; Fulmer Mood, “Studies in the History of American Settled Areas and Frontier Lines: Settled Areas and Frontier Lines, 1625-1790,” Agricultural History 26 (1952): 16-24; Thomas Perkins Abernethy, “The Southern Frontier, an Interpretation,” The Frontier in Perspective, ed. Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1957): 129-32; Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersmen (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1957) 50; Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974) 50-64.[/ref] Historians and historical archaeologists of the colonial Chesapeake have regularly highlighted the frontier concept.
This emphasis on the frontier obviously reflects the dominance of Frederick Jackson Turner in twentieth-century American historiography. Unfortunately, just what one means by frontier remains as ambiguous with regard to seventeenth-century Virginia as to the nineteenth-century West. Turner, in his various writings on the frontier, presented various definitions. Indeed, the power of his thesis rests fundamentally on that very ambiguity of definition, drawing as much on myth and metaphor as on late nineteenth-century evolutionary science.[ref]Avery Craven, “Frederick Jackson Turner,” The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography, ed. William T. Hutchinson (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1937) 255-6; George Wilson Pierson, “The Frontier and Frontiersmen of Turner’s Essays: A Scrutiny of the Foundations of the Middle Western Tradition,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 64 (1940): 449-78; George Wilson Pierson, “The Frontier and American Institutions: A Criticism of the Turner Theory,” New England Quarterly 15 (1942): 227-30; Hofstadter, Progressive Historians 84-6.[/ref] In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the frontier has both a dark and a bright side, alternately a howling wilderness ruled by demons and wild beasts and a “Lockean” state of nature ruled by the hand of God that God’s chosen people transform into the Promised Land. In America, via its links with Puritanism and Jeffersonianism, this Judeo-Christian tradition came to play a central role in American mythology.[ref]Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3 vols. (1927; Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987) 1: 140-7; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1950); Alan Heimert, “Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier,” New England Quarterly 26 (1953): 361-82; Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955) 11-45; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956) 1-15; Harvey Wish, The American Historian: A Social-Intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (New York: Oxford UP, 1960) 3-6, 71, 85; Rush Welter, “The Frontier West as Image of American Society: Conservative Attitudes before the Civil War,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (1960): 593-614; Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1961); George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University (New York: Harper, 1962); Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York: Knopf, 1963); Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “Space, Time, Culture and the New Frontier,” Agricultural History 38 (1964): 21-30; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1964); Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture: The Formative Years (New York: Viking, 1964) 1-70; David W. Noble, Historians against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1965); William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966) 182-5, 270, 364; Mircea Eliade, “Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology,” Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston: Beacon, 1967) 260-80; Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968); Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier 1629-1700 (New York: Columbia UP, 1969) 1-16, 50-86; Hofstadter, Progressive Historians 147-8; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973) 1-43; Sacvan Berkovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978); Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979) 43-58; Merle Curti, Human Nature in American Thought: A History (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1980) 409; Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1981) 1-10; Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopianism in Colonial America,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 483-522; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985) 33-47.[/ref] Other more pagan Western traditions equate the frontier with the original state of nature: a “Hobbesian” war of man against man in a struggle for survival, status, power, and wealth; a peaceful and non-materialistic communitarian utopia; or an idle and carefree Lubberland existence. The power and longevity of the Turner thesis lies in the combination of the Manifest Destiny of the Judeo-Christian and Jeffersonian traditions with the Hobbesian-cum-Darwinian scientific tradition.[ref]Gene M. Gressley, “The Turner Thesis–a Problem in Historiography,” Agricultural History 32 (1958): 230; William Coleman, “Science and Symbol in the Turner Frontier Hypothesis,” American Historical Review 72 (1966): 47. On the Hobbesian emphasis in the twentieth-century frontier myth, see Turner, Frontier 30, 32, 37, 77-8, 107, 153-5, 203, 209-13, 258-65, 270-3, 279-81, 302-9, 318-21, 348-9; Schlesinger, New Viewpoints 33-4; Henry A. Wallace, New Frontiers (New York: Reynal, 1934) 269-87; J. A. Burkhart, “The Turner Thesis: A Historian’s Controversy,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 31 (1947): 79-80; Warren I. Susman, “The Useless Past: American Intellectuals and the Frontier Thesis: 1910-1930,” Bucknell Review 11 (1963): 1-20; Steven Kesselman, “The Frontier Thesis and the Great Depression,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968): 253-68; Hofstadter, Progressive Historians 87-9, 141-2, 144, 473; Billington, Land of Savagery 10; David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1993) 78-85, 98-111, 127-42.[/ref] But attempts to extend the Judeo-Christian part of the myth to seventeenth-century Virginia, for whatever reason, have never really captured the historical imagination, leaving the field ripe for a Hobbesian interpretation.
The Hobbesian frontier acts on humans in three ways. First, the abundance of resources and free land on the frontier creates infinite opportunity for material acquisition and spurs hope of social and economic mobility. Second, the removal of traditional constraints frees individuals to compete with each other for those resources without regard for the consequences to others in the present or future. Third, the ruggedness of the frontier makes actual survival and the survival of one’s offspring ultimately dependent on success in that competition. In the language of Social Darwinism, following Charles Darwin himself, the whole westward movement, beginning with the trans-Atlantic voyage, becomes “a ‘process’ wherein the survival value of men and institutions was tested,” an arena in which heredity and environment, “eugenics and euthenics,” worked in harmony within “the framework prescribed by race.”[ref]Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species…and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Modern Library, n.d.) 501-11; Edward N. Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants 1875-1925 (1948; New York: Russell, 1965) 90-7; David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1954); Jerome O. Steffen, The Tragedy of Abundance (Niwot, CO: UP of Colorado, 1993).[/ref] Scholars recognize that all these effects do not occur on every frontier and the effects occur in non-frontier contexts as well (such as in the opportunity and hope generated in times of prosperity, and the removal of constraints and threat to survival in times of societal breakdown). Furthermore, there is no consensus on the exact outcome of any individual effect or combination of effects on a particular society. But in the context of the seventeenth-century Virginia frontier, modernists like Carl L. Becker, Wilbur J. Cash, Perry Miller, Sigmund Diamond, David Bertelson, Edmund S. Morgan, T. H. Breen, Richard D. Brown, Darrett B. Rutman, and Jack P. Greene agree that the three effects converged to unleash a “buccaneering capitalism” as all men fiercely competed for the factors of production in pursuit of the “main chance,” which in seventeenth-century Virginia generally meant maximizing tobacco production.[ref]Carl Lotus Becker, Beginnings of the American People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915) 70, 79, 166-7; Cash 8; P. Miller, Errand 4-9, 127-8, 139-40; David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford UP, 1967); Sigmund Diamond, “Values as Obstacles to Economic Growth: The American Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 27 (1967): 561-75; Edmund S. Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 28 (1971): 169-98; Morgan, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 595-611; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South: The Regimentation of Populations (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1975) 223-5, 276; Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life 1600‑1865 (New York: Hill, 1976) 40-4; T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistance in Early America (New York: Oxford UP, 1980); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 10-5; Martin H. Quitt, “Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 45 (1988) 638-9; Darrett B. Rutman, Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600-1850 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994) xiii.[/ref]
Many of these modernists implicitly or explicitly presume the traditional nature of the cultural baggage imported by the English, thus highlighting the nature of the Turnerian transformation. However, with the increasing disfavor of strict economic and geographic determinism in the other social sciences, complexities in extending the Turnerian thesis to non-American frontiers and non-English immigrants, and critiques of American isolationism, historians after World War II began emphasizing the bourgeois nature of the English immigrants.[ref]Richard H. Shryock, “British versus German Traditions in Colonial Agriculture,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 26 (1939): 39-54; James C. Malin, “Space and History: Reflections on the Closed-Space Doctrines of Turner and Mackinder and the Challenge of Those Ideas by the Air Age,” Agricultural History 18 (1944): 67; Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The American Frontier–Frontier of What?,” American Historical Review 51 (1946): 199-216; H. Smith, Virgin Land 260; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955) 50; Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, eds., The Frontier in Perspective (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1957); Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1585‑1763, 3 vols. (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1978) 2: 938-4; David W. Noble, The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880-1980 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985).[/ref] Scholars like Carl Bridenbaugh, Stanley M. Elkins, Robert F. Berkhofer, and Rutman highlighted the “pre-selective” nature of migration, with America attracting only the most ambitious, individualistic, and acquisitive men and women, all the while continuing to accent the greater free play of the New World environment.[ref]Schlesinger, New Viewpoints 33, 37; Bridenbaugh 12-13; Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3rd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976) 43-4; Berkhofer, “Space” 26-7, 29-30; Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston 43, 47, 52, 248-9; Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966) 53-4; Rutman, Morning 42; Carole Shammas, “English‑Born and Creole Elites in Turn‑of‑the‑Century Virginia,” The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo‑American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979) 278-80; Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr, The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985) 33‑58; Quitt 630-1, 642-5. Cf. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, 1955) 52.[/ref] In the latest development, historians like Rutman, Brown, and Greene have begun to stress even more the transitional nature of English society, undergoing its own (albeit more gradual) modernization as the commercial revolution of the late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century affected all classes.[ref]Morris Talpalar, The Sociology of Colonial Virginia (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960) 60; Rutman, Morning 2-8; R. Brown, Modernization 26-36; Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1980) 40-3, 51; Greene, Pursuits 34-6.[/ref]
These modernists, although they disagree vehemently amongst themselves over things like planter attitudes toward risk and the nature of opportunities and constraints, regularly assume that planters, great and small, were to all intents and purposes modern American farmers who sought nothing more than to maximize capital accumulation.[ref]Clemens, Atlantic Economy 222; Main, Tobacco Colony 7-8, 71, 253; Charles Wetherell, “‘Boom and Bust’ in the Colonial Chesapeake,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (1984): 209; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York: Norton, 1984) 42-3, 75, 183-4; Anita H. Rutman, “Still Planting the Seeds of Hope: The Recent Literature of the Early Chesapeake Region,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95 (1987): 3-24.[/ref] Indeed, John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard and several other historians have gone so far over to an “economic man” interpretation as to blur any distinction between historians and neoclassical economists, equating the planters of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake with twentieth-century industrial firms.[ref]Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (1933; New York: Peter Smith, 1958); Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Behavior in a Planting Society: The Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” Journal of Southern History 33 (1967): 469-85; Irene W.D. Hecht, “The Virginia Colony, 1607‑1640: A Study in Frontier Growth,” diss., U of Washington, 1969, 183-5; David Klingaman, “The Significance of Grain in the Development of the Tobacco Colonies,” Journal of Economic History 29 (1969): 276; Terry L. Anderson and Robert Paul Thomas, “Economic Growth in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” Explorations in Economic History 15 (1978): 374; Allan Kulikoff, “The Colonial Chesapeake: Seedbed of Antebellum Southern Culture?,” Journal of Southern History 45 (1979): 525; David W. Galenson and Russell R. Menard, “Approaches to the Analysis of Economic Growth in Colonial British America,” Historical Methods 13 (1980): 6-10; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985).[/ref]
Traditionalist Approach
The modernist approach did not go unchallenged. After World War II, intellectual and cultural historians led by Louis B. Wright, Merle Curti, Peter Laslett, Daniel Boorstin, Carl N. Degler, Richard Beale Davis, and most recently Bertram Wyatt-Brown and David Hackett Fischer, have countered that continuity, the transplantation of the rural gentry ideal–or what Fischer calls the “Cavalier ethic”–played the greatest role in shaping colonial Virginia society. “As social‑climbing citizens at home [in England] sought to imitate the landed gentry,” wrote Wright, “so Virginia colonists who had the opportunity of acquiring land and accumulating wealth” sought to become “country gentlemen in the English manner, and country gentlemen, for better or worse, they became.”[ref]Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940) 37, 2. See Wright, First Gentlemen 2-5, 37, 63; Peter Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent in 1640,” Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1948): 160-3; Peter Laslett, “Sir Robert Filmer: The Man versus the Whig Myth,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 5 (1948): 531; Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1951) 28-32; Louis B. Wright, The British Tradition in America (Birmingham: Trustees of the Rushton Lectures, 1954) 9-10; Wright, Culture 21-2; Talpalar 208-9; Hubbell, Southern Life 41, 44-5; Pierre Marambaud, William Byrd of Westover 1674-1744 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1971) 5; Virginia Bernhard, “Poverty and the Social Order in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85 (1977): 141-55; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 1: xxix; 2: 937-9; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982) vii-viii, 65-6, 74-5; Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 11, 14-5, 292n50; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Real and Mythical Souths,” Southern Review 24 (1988): 230-1; David Hackett Fischer, “Albion and the Critics: Further Evidence and Reflection,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 48 (1991): 287-8.[/ref] Moreover, continuing in the tradition of nineteenth-century New England historians, traditionalists tend to set off the Southern experience from mainstream American experience, tracing the American character and institutions to Northern roots and the Southern character to English gentry roots. When Degler wrote in 1959 that “Capitalism Came in the First Ships” to America, he did not mean the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery.[ref]Philip Alexander Bruce, Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Lynchburg, VA: Bell, 1927) 24-5; James Truslow Adams, Provincial Society 1690‑1763 (New York: Macmillan, 1927) 210; Wright, First Gentlemen 7, 46; Wright, Culture 15-34; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Random, 1958) 99, 103, 105, 108, 140; Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1970) 1, 6, 15n.[/ref]
In contrast to the materialist objectives stressed by the modernist approach, traditionalists emphasize the idealist pursuit of gentility, the “honor of a gentleman” which comprised “that quality which was the very mainspring of his actions.”[ref]Wright, First Gentlemen 9. See also Wright, First Gentlemen 4-5, 35, 77, 92, 130, 178; Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers 17-8; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor xiii, 32-3.[/ref] “The pattern of life which the ruling class of Virginia planters sought to follow was an ancient heritage dependent upon the possession of land, with sufficient income to maintain one’s position with dignity and honor.”[ref]Wright, First Gentlemen 4-5.[/ref] Even acquisitiveness and luxury reflected the desire for the appropriate accoutrements of one’s station.[ref]Bruce, Social Life 160; Wright, First Gentlemen 4‑7.[/ref] In addition, the ideal comprised such elements as the Renaissance spirit of adventure, religiosity, hedonism, a desire for material security, and an overall emphasis on the Aristotelian golden mean‑-a balance or equilibrium among all these diverse elements not allowing any single aspect to obliterate other aspects of a genteel life.[ref]Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1895; New York: Peter Smith, 1935) 2: 131-241; Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1910; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964) 1: 3-289; Social Life 12-6, 255-8; Mary N. Stanard, Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1917); Wright, First Gentlemen 9, 35, 60, 66-9, 72-81, 92, 176; Clifford Dowdey, The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of “King” Carter and the Golden Age (Boston: Little, 1969) 14; Richard Beale Davis, Literature and Society in Early Virginia, 1608-1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973) xiii-xxiv; Davis, Intellectual Life 1: xxix-xxi, xxxi; 2: 13, 3: 1313, 1576; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 232-6, 332-40.[/ref]
Like the modernists, traditionalists recognize both that the character of the immigrants did not change simply in the course of making a trans-Atlantic voyage and that the end product of Virginia society resulted from the evolutionary interaction of the intended goal with the environment.[ref]Louis B. Wright, The Atlantic Frontier: Colonial American Civilization [1607‑1763] (New York: Knopf, 1947) 6; Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers 1-28; Clifford Dowdey, The Great Plantation: A Profile of Berkeley Hundred and Plantation Virginia from Jamestown to Appomattox (New York: Bonanza, 1957) 8-10; Dowdey, Virginia Dynasties 9; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 252.[/ref] Indeed, while modernists note that the frontier engendered the Yankee spirit, traditionalists typically find that the mild climate and fertile soil allowed the Cavalier ethic to flourish in Virginia.[ref]Maud Wilder Goodwin, The Colonial Cavalier or Southern Life Before the Revolution (New York, 1894) 7, 39-41; J. Clarence Stonebraker, The Puritan and the Cavalier (Hagerstown, MD: privately printed, 1915) 7-9; Frederick Jackson Turner, The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1938) 78-9; Davis, Intellectual Life 2: 962.[/ref]
Traditionalists like Wright, Boorstin, and Davis believe that the realities of colonial life forced all planters, great and small, to engage in a wide range of economic activities to attain a desired standard of living. And, indeed, the planter worked hard and engaged in almost any activity or investment for his capital that might yield a profit, from tobacco production to land speculation to commercial trade to political office.[ref]Bruce, Social Life 120n; Wright, First Gentlemen 51-2; Dowdey, Great Plantation 8; Dowdey, Virginia Dynasties 9, 13, 15; Boorstin 99, 103, 105-9; Marambaud 7, 147, 155-7; Davis, Intellectual Life 1: 102; 3: 1586.[/ref] But traditionalists emphasized that, despite the reality of environmental constraints, the ultimate goal was not the maximization of wealth. “Honor,” Wyatt-Brown notes, “had always required wealth but only as a means to an end. It was not the end itself…possessions for the mere sake of having and enjoying them was secular accumulation, amoral and self-indulgent, as churchmen as well as men of honor never tired of stressing.”[ref]Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor 21.[/ref] Despite their labors, planters always found time for a cultured life. To these would-be gentlemen, the wilderness represented a temporary obstacle in the path to gentility and civilization.[ref]J. Adams, Provincial Society 210; Wright, First Gentlemen 59, 160, 185; Wright, Culture 11-30.[/ref]
Behavioral Consensus
Despite the vast gulf between traditionalists and modernists at the level of cultural analysis highlighted above, at the behavioral level that gulf shrinks to almost nothing. Cultural and intellectual historians following Wright have acceded to almost the entire modernist argument below the level of the “ultimate” goal or psychology of the seventeenth-century Virginia planter. The two approaches differ little on short-term goals, actual behavior, or the behavioral transformation of colonial Virginia society from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, the only question being whether these are manifestations of human nature, traditional English values constrained by insufficient wealth and the frontier environment, or bourgeois behavior of a modern kind. Both sides agree that the difference between pursuits of gentility, status, wealth, or capital might matter in the eighteenth century but not in the seventeenth century when wealth was the basis for achieving every goal. Acknowledging that wealth was essential to the pursuit of honor and gentility on the seventeenth-century Chesapeake frontier, traditionalists conclude that the immediate goal was to maximize capital accumulation in order to buy servants and land with the hope and expectation of achieving a future gentility.[ref]Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1935) 185; Wright, First Gentlemen 43-7, 51, 63-4, 71, 95; Wright, Culture 43; Dowdey, Great Plantation 75; Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1959) 94-5; Bernhard 141-55; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor 73-4.[/ref] But traditionalists and modernists agree, regardless of the ultimate goal of the Virginians, that gentility was an unrealistic goal on the seventeenth-century frontier.[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 91-106; J. Adams, Provincial Society 210; Bridenbaugh 5; Bailyn, “Politics” 95; Eaton, History 52-3, 69; Shammas, “English-Born” 278-80; Quitt 642-5.[/ref]
Reflecting the consensus on immigrant origins, both approaches apply the same motivational model to all seventeenth-century immigrants. Regardless of origins, all Englishmen, like immigrants in any age, sought to better their condition, to acquire a freehold, and to accumulate wealth in the land of opportunity. Thus they flocked to Virginia, pulled to it by abundant land, high wages, and the spirit of adventure, and pushed from England by declining real wages, civil war, social upheaval, and bad harvests.[ref]Bruce, Economic History 1:576‑84; Wertenbaker, Patrician 150, 161-3; Schlesinger, New Viewpoints 3; Wertenbaker, Planters 34-6; Bruce, Social Life 12-6, 102-3, 255-8; J. Adams, Provincial Society 198-9; Phillips, Life and Labor 22; Wright, First Gentlemen 4, 43‑4; Wright, Culture 21; Morton, Colonial Virginia 1: 195; Dowdey, Virginia Dynasties 13‑4; Rutman, Morning 75-6; Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1971) 1; Main, Tobacco Colony 10-11; Clemens, Atlantic Economy 48.[/ref]
Similarly, both schools stress a model of transformation rather than continuity for colonial Virginia, where seventeenth-century frontiersmen changed themselves into an eighteenth-century aristocracy with the development of their own hedonistic “Tuckahoe” culture built around leisure, luxury, sport, horses, sociability, and chivalry, while retaining their earlier commercially-oriented, hard-working spirit. Martin H. Quitt aptly characterizes this “transformation” as the shift from seventeenth-century “merchant-planters” to eighteenth-century “planter-merchants.” Richard D. Brown labels the process “traditionalization,” from a modern buccaneering to a more traditional capitalism.[ref]On Tuckahoe culture, see William E. Dodd, Statesmen of the Old South, or From Radicalism to Conservative Revolt (1911; New York: Book League of America, 1929) 15-6; Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918; New York: D. Appleton, 1928): 324-7, 359-401; Phillips, Life and Labor 35, 40-1, 354-7, 365; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Old South: The Founding of American Civilization (1942; New York: Cooper Square, 1963) 164‑219; Eaton, History 48-9; Cash 4-8; Thompson 225. On the commercial orientation and industriousness of the Virginia aristocracy, see Wertenbaker, First Americans 259-60; Wright, First Gentlemen 57-9,156n2,157; Hartz 52; Bridenbaugh 13-7; Wright, Atlantic Frontier 70, 93; Wright, Culture 20; Jacob M. Price, “The French Farmers‑General in the Chesapeake: The Mackercher-Huber Mission of 1737‑1738,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 14 (1957): 152; Bailyn, “Politics” 107; Fishwick 32; Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth 1607‑1861 (New York: Harper, 1965) 40-1; Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Behavior in a Planting Society: The Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” Journal of Southern History 33 (1967): 469-85; Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 24 (1967): 3-43; Marambaud 7; R. Brown, Modernization 8-9; D. D. Bruce, Jr., “Play, Work, and Ethics in the Old South,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 40 (1977): 34, 46; Michael Greenberg, “William Byrd II and the World of the Market,” Southern Studies 16 (1977): 429-56; Joyce Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 68 (1982): 833-49; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982) 22-30; Main, Tobacco Colony 79; Michael Zuckerman, “Fate, Flux, and Good Fellowship: An Early Virginia Design for the Dilemma of American Business,” Business and Its Environment: Essays for Thomas C. Cochran, ed. Harold Issadore Sharlin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983) 161-84; R. Gray 12-3; R. Watson, Cavalier 46; Greene, Pursuits 98-9; Quitt 631, 648-55.[/ref]
Although traditionalists stress far greater continuity in ultimate goals and accent much more the role of cultural baggage, both approaches acknowledge the major shift in short-term goals and behavior as the frontier stage ended. As Virginia society stabilized at the end of the seventeenth century by virtue of the growth of a native population, a more equal sex ratio, and possibly a general decline in mortality, social conditions made possible for the first time the development of patriarchal, nuclear households. But both traditionalists and modernists emphasize above all the transition to slavery after 1680 with its detrimental impact on the buccaneering, capitalistic behavior of rich and poor whites alike.[ref]D. R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860; New York: Arno, 1973) 91‑100, 109‑303; Fiske 219; Phillips, American Negro Slavery 397‑8; Wertenbaker, Planters 154‑5; Wright, First Gentlemen 45-6; Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia 1705-1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1964) 43-4, 64; C. Vann Woodward, “The Southern Ethic in a Puritan World,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 360; R. Gray, Writing 12; A. Rutman, “Still Planting” 15-6.[/ref] With the shift to slavery, great planters finally accumulated sufficient wealth to permit themselves the material symbols of their status and the leisure to pursue the genteel life. Conspicuous consumption and aversion to manual labor spread across all classes.[ref]Wright, First Gentlemen 51, 63, 71; Wright, Atlantic Frontier 70, 93; J. Adams, Provincial Society 210-2; Main, Tobacco Colony 78-9; Stuart Bruchey, “Economy and Society in an Earlier America,” Journal of Economic History 47 (1987): 304-5; Greene, Pursuits 93, 97; Quitt 631, 648-55.[/ref] Furthermore, both approaches acknowledge the influence of eighteenth-century cultural contacts with England in the refinement of the new creole elite. Increasingly sensitive to criticism and ridicule over their provincialism, Virginia planters turned to the English gentry for guidance in matters of status and gentility and emulated the changing European fashions.[ref]J. Adams, Provincial Society 211-2; Cash 8; Hartz 52; Wright, Culture 43; Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, 1959) 3-22; Hugh F. Rankin, “The Colonial South,” Writing Southern History: Essays in Historiography in Honor of Fletcher M. Green, eds. Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 1965) 6; Bruchey, Roots 38-9; Eaton, Growth 1-3; Ronald L. Davis, “Culture on the Frontier,” Southwest Review 53 (1968): 387-91; Jack P. Greene, “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America,” Journal of Social History 3 (1970): 189-224; Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York, ed. Richard M. Jellison (New York: Norton, 1976): 42; Shammas, “English-Born” 285-9; A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680-1810 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1981) 24-34; Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982) 17-21; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor 88; R. Gray, Writing 11-7; T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986) 496-9; Greene, Pursuits 85; Quitt 643; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 359‑60.[/ref] The two processes of creolization and Anglicization intertwined in a complex manner, giving rise to the complex society of eighteenth-century Virginia.[ref]Rutman, Morning 82, 92-3; R. Brown, Modernization 62-5, 70, 142-8; Greene, Pursuits; Quitt 631, 648-55.[/ref]
This consensus periodizes the history of colonial Virginia into two phases, with some historians inserting a period of transition. Each phase had its representative planter: Samuel Mathews in the frontier phase of the first half of the seventeenth century, a period dominated by “tough, unsentimental, quick-tempered, crudely ambitious men concerned with profits and increased landholdings, not the grace of life”;[ref]Bailyn, “Politics” 95.[/ref] either William Byrd I or William Fitzhugh, merchant-planters in the transitional second half of the seventeenth century; and William Byrd II in the aristocratic phase of the first half of the eighteenth century.[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 44-6, 137-41; Becker 72-4; J. Adams, Provincial Society 210-2; Phillips, Life and Labor 27; Wright, First Gentlemen 39-43, 51, 63, 71, 185; Wright, Atlantic Frontier 70-1; Wright, Culture 22-6; Bailyn, “Politics” 90-115; Eaton, History 63; Quitt 650.[/ref] The Great American narrative, however, seeking a neat clean periodization, ignores any transitional phase and simply marks the transformation around 1700 from a seventeenth-century colonial society to an eighteenth-century provincial society.[ref]J. Adams, Provincial Society 210; Clarence L. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years 1607-1763 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 53; Greene, Pursuits 8-18, 81-100.[/ref]
Myth of Origins
Amazingly, historians in the 1990s have engaged in this rather weak debate and extensive consensus almost oblivious to its remarkable similarity to the 1920s when Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, slayer of “the Cavalier myth,” ruled the historiography of seventeenth-century Virginia. A review of this poorly understood historiographical triumph provides ample fuel for those who believe that in slaying one myth, historians do not move closer to objectivity but simply impose a countermyth. For in truth, what Wyatt-Brown calls the “Myth of the Bourgeois Planter” and Fischer disparagingly calls “the Wertenbaker thesis,” has dominated modern interpretations of seventeenth-century Virginia, although perhaps not for the reasons that Wyatt-Brown and Fischer suspect.[ref]Wyatt-Brown, “Real and Mythical Souths” 231-2; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) 225, 225n30; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Comments on David Fischer’s Albion’s Seed,” unpublished essay, 1989; Fischer, “Albion and the Critics” 286. Cf. Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers 17.[/ref]
The Cavalier myth undoubtedly had deep roots in attitudes developed during the colonial and revolutionary eras, but achieved the status of popular mythology only in the years leading up to the Civil War, aided by the popularity of the romantic fiction of Sir Walter Scott. As sectional tensions increased, Southerners and Northerners alike began to draw separate portraits of national origins for two distinct civilizations: a Puritan-Yankee North and a Cavalier South. Antebellum Americans, by mutual consent, believed Northerners and Southerners were not just possessed of different cultures in the modern sense, but were distinct races. Northerners traced their roots to original Anglo-Saxon blood surging through Puritan Roundheads while Southerners believed themselves the progeny of the Norman conquerors of medieval England through their descendants, the Royalist defenders of Charles I. With such different heritages, both sections set about creating distinct societies, each dominated by a different spirit: capitalistic in the North and aristocratic in the South.[ref]Fiske 2: 11; Francis P. Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (1924; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962) 23-4; Parrington 2: 28; Jay B. Hubbell, “Cavalier and Indentured Servant in Virginia Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 26 (1927) 25-7, 34-7; Cash ix; Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven: Yale UP, 1949); H. Smith, Virgin Land 123-54; Wright, First Gentlemen 43; Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (New York: New York UP, 1956) 109-13, 129-30; Marshall W. Fishwick, Virginia: A New Look at the Old Dominion (New York: Harper, 1959) 110-1; Wish 238-9; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Harper, 1961) 15-6; Eaton, Growth 2, 150; Jay B. Hubbell, South and Southwest: Literary Essays and Reminiscences (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1965) 228-39; Eaton, History 52; Bertelson 177-92; R. Brown, Modernization 146-8; Jan C. Dawson, “The Puritan and the Cavalier: The South’s Perception of Contrasting Traditions,” Journal of Southern History 44 (1978): 597-614; Singal, War Within 12-4; Jan C. Dawson, The Unusable Past: America’s Puritan Tradition, 1830 to 1930 (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1984) 61-75; R. Watson, Cavalier 7; James Tice Moore, “Of Cavaliers and Yankees: Frederick W. M. Halliday and the Sectional Crisis, 1845-1861,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99 (1991): 351-2. Cf. W. Craven, Legend 48, 70-1, 110-2.[/ref]
In the aftermath of Civil War and Reconstruction, the political war of words faded and custody of the myths of origin passed to historians as history fell increasingly under the domination of “professional” academics. Two trends, with obvious roots in the racism of the antebellum era, marked late nineteenth-century historiography: a backward-looking, localistic filiopietism and a forward-looking, nationalistic Social Darwinism. Although “amateur” historians inclined toward the former and “professional” historians toward the latter, both groups shared a desire to heal old sectional wounds by deemphasizing the antebellum emphasis on racial and class divisions between North and South.[ref]Saveth 15-42, 90-7, 201-2; Lee Benson, Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (New York: Free, 1960) 41-91; Wish 238; G. Edward White, “The Social Values of the Progressives: Some New Perspectives,” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 62-76; Raymond H. Pulley, Old Virginia Restored: An Interpretation of the Progressive Impulse 1870-1930 (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1968) 60; Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1983) 34n101; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 74-82; Randall M. Miller, “The Birth (and Life) of A Journal: A 100-Year Retrospective of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1992): 154.[/ref]
In the historiography of colonial Virginia, these trends revealed themselves most sharply in the work of John Esten Cooke and John Fiske, the key modern progenitors of the myth of the Cavalier exodus. Both stressed a great migration of Royalist supporters from England to Virginia after the execution of Charles I as the only feasible explanation for the significant rise in population in the colony between 1649 and 1671. Undoubtedly, for Cooke and his fellow Southerners, filiopietism played an important role in their promotion of the Cavalier myth as a reaction to New England dominance of national history.[ref]See, e.g., Thomas Nelson Page, The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners, The Novels, Stories, Sketches and Poems of Thomas Nelson Page, Vol, XIII (New York: Scribner’s, 1909) 372-3; Jay Broadus Hubbell, Virginia Life in Fiction (n.p, n.d) 26; Wish 236-7; Rankin 8-9; Novick 73; R. Miller, “Birth” 157-8.[/ref] Nevertheless, Cooke and Fiske primarily turned to the Cavalier myth within the spirit of a postbellum reconciliation espoused by many members of the literary community North and South. This compromise on American origins substituted a common Anglo-Saxon inheritance for the antebellum emphasis on North-South class and racial divisions. In turn, terms like Cavalier and Puritan reverted to their earlier connotation of strictly religious and political differences during the great exodus of political and religious refugees from seventeenth-century England that originally peopled America.[ref]John Esten Cooke, Virginia: A History of the People (1883; Boston: Houghton, 1903) 159-62, 182; Fiske 2: 13-7, 34-5, 216-8. Cf. Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South: Essays Social and Political (New York, 1892) 8-9; William Garrott Brown, The Lower South in American History (1902; New York: Greenwood, 1969) 5-6. See also Hubbell, Virginia Life 26-8; Harriet R. Holman, “The Literary Career of Thomas Nelson Page, 1884-1910,” diss., Duke U, 1947, 66-7; W. Craven, Legend 130, 149-50; Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature 1607-1900 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1954) 695-709; Wish 109-15; 238; Joyce Appleby, “Reconciliation and the Northern Novelist,” Civil War History 10 (1964): 117-29; Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970) 92, 170-81; Novick 74-8; R. Miller, “Birth” 155-6.[/ref]
The antebellum and Cooke-Fiske versions of the Cavalier exodus started unraveling as more critical genealogists and historians began to examine the historical record. By the late nineteenth century, genealogists had revealed that few noblemen or even near relations of noblemen had immigrated to early Virginia, and leading journals like the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and the William and Mary Quarterly had grown increasingly hostile to the aristocratic myth.[ref][William G. Stanard], rev. of Barons of the Potomac and Rappahannock, by Moncure D. Conway, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1893): 215-9; W. Brown, Lower South 6-7; W. Craven, Legend 129n.[/ref] Even Fiske would write that most planters descended from “either country squires or prosperous yeomen, or craftsmen from the numerous urban guilds.”[ref]Fiske 2: 216‑8.[/ref] The detailed work of Philip Alexander Bruce finally put to rest both the literal antebellum and Cooke-Fiske myths. Although Bruce traced the origins of some of the higher planter class to English peers, knights, esquires, and “gentlemen,” he found that these immigrants were not concentrated in one great exodus but arrived throughout the seventeenth century; more to the point, Bruce found that the planters for the most part descended from the English squirearchy, professionals, military officers, and, especially, the merchant class. Further Bruce showed conclusively that servants comprised the great bulk of immigrants over the course of the seventeenth century.[ref]Bruce, Social Life 27-97.[/ref]
A genuine consensus quickly grew around Bruce’s more balanced presentation emphasizing the mercantile background of most of the planter elite.[ref]Frederick Jackson Turner, rev. of Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, by Philip Alexander Bruce, American Historical Review 13 (1907): 610; William E. Dodd, rev. of Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, by Thomas J. Wertenbaker, American Historical Review 16 (1910): 168-9; [Lyon G. Tyler], “Colonial History Debunked,” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 8 (1926): 2-5; Parrington 2: 6-7; Wright, First Gentlemen 39-43; Cash 3-4; Wright, British Tradition 9; Wright, Culture 21; Richard L. Morton, ed., The Present State of Virginia, by Hugh Jones (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1956) 180-2n60; Dowdey, Great Plantation 9-10; Boorstin 105-9; Bailyn, “Politics” 98; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1960) 1: 166-8; Darrett B. Rutman, “Philip Alexander Bruce: A Divided Mind of the South,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 68 (1960): 402-3; Rankin 15; Hubbell, South and Southwest 229; Eaton, History 52; Dowdey, Virginia Dynasties 13; Marambaud 259-61; Davis, Intellectual Life 3: 1519.[/ref] In the twentieth century, lingering references to the antebellum and Cooke-Fiske myths of a great Cavalier exodus can only be labelled straw-man arguments. Indeed, historians go to great lengths to eschew any association with the old myths.[ref]See, e.g., Wright, First Gentlemen 38-40; R. Gray, Writing.[/ref] Even Fischer, whose latest effort on occasion implies a reversion to the racial Cavalier myth of the antebellum era, when directly challenged claims nothing more than what Bruce claimed at the turn of the century.[ref]Fischer, Albion’s Seed 207-25; James Horn, “Cavalier Culture?: The Social Development of Colonial Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 48 (1991): 239-41; Fischer, “Albion and the Critics” 286-7.[/ref]
Origins of an Ethos: Cavalier versus Yankee
Consensus on the social origins of seventeenth-century Virginians has, however, led only to more intensified disagreements among historians over the nature of early Virginia society. The modern debate shifted from social origins to questions of the mindset of the immigrants and the relative weight of the competing influences of environment and culture. Far more than any other historians, Bruce and Wertenbaker set the groundwork for this debate.
Although Bruce did not accept the old Cavalier myth, he evinced such a nostalgia for the “spacious days of the old landed aristocracy,” that his portrait of seventeenth-century Virginia “could have jarred no one who remained dedicated to the idea that Virginia owed much of its essential character to its Cavalier settlers.”[ref]Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1953) 304; W. Craven, Legend 129‑30; Fishwick 274-5; Rutman, “Bruce” 387-407; Rankin 9; L. Moody Simms, “Philip Alexander Bruce: His Life and Works,” diss., U of Virginia, 1966, 192-4.[/ref] Although few aristocrats-in-blood immigrated, sufficient numbers of Cavaliers imbued with the “spirit” of the English landed gentry came to stamp a dominant Cavalier ethos on seventeenth-century Virginia society that would later shape an eighteenth-century Virginian aristocracy. While historians such as John Spencer Bassett would continue to emphasize the central role of an exodus of royalists during the Interregnum, most followed Bruce, either sidestepping the issue of timing or emphasizing a steady flow of aristocrats throughout the seventeenth century and thus accentuating the theme of historical continuity in Virginia’s first century.[ref]Page, Old South 5-10, 100-8; Page, Old Dominion 137; Goodwin 7-8; Bassett ix-xii; Robert M. Hughes, “Genesis of the F.F.V.,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 6 (1926): 230-2, 240; Tyler, “Colonial” 1-4; Bruce, Social Life 160; Wright, Atlantic Frontier 70-1; Morton, Present State 181n60; Morton, Colonial Virginia 1: 166-8; Hubbell, Southern Life 37; Rankin 15; Dowdey, Virginia Dynasties 16-8.[/ref]
For Bruce, the leading immigrants, whether from town or country, brought with them the ideals and customs of the English landed gentry: “In essentials the life which the Virginian led on his estate was the same as the life which the English gentleman led on his own.” In particular, Bruce stressed that the Virginia gentry carried over the very best of the English entrepreneurial spirit, reflected in their willingness to emigrate to America. Further, Bruce emphasized the historical continuity of Virginia society in every important detail from Jamestown to the eve of the Civil War, with refinements in outward appearances merely a function of the steady accumulation of wealth.[ref]Philip A. Bruce, The Social History of Virginia. An Address Delivered at the Final Commencement, 1881, of the Onancock Academy, Virginia (n.p.: Miller School Print, 1881); Bruce, Institutional History 2: 605-36; Bruce, Social Life 23, 109, 143, 160, 163; Bruce, rev. of The Planters of Colonial Virginia, by Thomas J. Wertenbaker, American Historical Review 28 (1923): 553. Cf. Page, Old South 5-8, 103-22, 138-9; Page, Old Dominion 137-40, 151-2.[/ref]
Wertenbaker differed little from Bruce on the myths of origin and many other details of seventeenth-century Virginia; indeed, he frequently cited Bruce as his sole authority. But Wertenbaker challenged the whole notion of a transplanted Cavalier ethos. Such remote lineages tracing to “distinguished families” as Bruce sought to establish meant little to the merchants’ sons intent on coming to Virginia. Wertenbaker regarded these earliest merchant-planters as a full-blown bourgeoisie that the New World environment transformed into Yankees: voracious devourers of labor, importing ever-increasing numbers of indentured servants at first and then slaves in a limitless search for ever greater profits from tobacco rather than the leisure of an English landed estate. In contrast to Bruce’s continuity model, Wertenbaker believed that a planter aristocracy did not arise until the eighteenth century, a home-grown product evolved out of local environmental conditions that transformed these merchant-planters from “practical business men” dominated by “the mercantile instinct” into “idealistic and chivalrous aristocrats.”[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 33.[/ref] In particular, Wertenbaker highlighted the role of tobacco culture, the entrenchment of African slavery, the subsequent demise of the Virginia yeomanry, the overseer system, the accumulation of wealth, and the rise of isolated plantations.[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 2-3, 9‑10, 16-8, 28-34, 39-60, 65-81, 90-1, 105, 132-5, 220; Wertenbaker, Old South 19-21; W. Craven, Legend 129; Fishwick 275; ver Steeg 83; Rankin 14-5; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 225n30, 256n12; Fischer, “Albion and the Critics” 286, 286n47.[/ref] Reflecting the strong influence of Social Darwinism, Wertenbaker also emphasized the transmuting impact of the New World environment on the Virginia middle class. Both the abundance and harshness of life on the seventeenth-century Virginia frontier–ruled, as it was, by “the law of the survival of the fittest”–established that success for early Virginians owed more to “rough qualities of manhood that fitted them for the life in the forests of the New World, than to education or culture.”[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 143, 155-6, 167; Wertenbaker, Old South 167.[/ref]
Twentieth-century commentators seeking to justify their own interpretation of seventeenth-century Virginia have frequently insinuated that the differing interpretations of Bruce and Wertenbaker reflected not ambiguity in the historical evidence but personal qualities: the difference between an amateur and a professional historian, an Old South romantic and a myth-busting scientific historian, an heir of a “First Family” and an anti-aristocratic “Teuton.”[ref]See, e.g., R. Miller, “Birth” 158.[/ref] None of these opinions goes very far toward explaining the differences, let alone the commonalities. The difference between these two equally proud native Virginians with strong ties to Mr. Jefferson’s University reflected more a generational shift, the difference in perspective between those who had experienced the Civil War directly and those who experienced it in absentia, from a late nineteenth-century Bourbon to an early twentieth-century Progressive.[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 238-9; Bruce, Virginia 5: 495-8; Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 500-1; John M. Murrin, “Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker,” DAB, Supplement 8, eds. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Scribner’s, 1988) 691-3.[/ref] But as numerous historians of the New South have noted, the Bourbon and Progressive remained strictly that–a generational shift–with similarities far outweighing differences.
Historians have generally followed Rutman’s interpretation of Bruce as “a perfect example” of what C. Vann Woodward called “the divided mind” of the South, the Bourbon caught between conflicting beliefs in the “New South Creed” and “the myth of the Old South.”[ref]Rutman, “Bruce” 388, 404; Simms 1-2, 139; R. Miller, “Birth” 151-8.[/ref] But no Southern historian, and certainly neither Bruce nor Wertenbaker, escaped the pervasive turn-of-the-century Southern climate of opinion combining in varying degrees paradoxical elements of Old South filopietism, New South nationalism, Jeffersonian democracy, and Anglo-Saxon racism.[ref]Gaston New South Creed; Pulley viii-ix, 1-5, 17-21, 23-4, 58-63, 80, 118, 122-5; James Tice Moore, Two Paths to the New South: The Virginia Debt Controversy, 1870-1883 (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1974) 6-7, 37-45; George Brown Tindall, The Persistent Tradition in New South Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1975) 10-2, 20-3, 54, 61-2; Grantham xvi-xviii, 25-34, 65-74.[/ref] Fundamentally, both scholars accepted the Old South myth so gloriously sketched by Bruce’s brother-in-law, Thomas Nelson Page, the romantic novelist and historical essayist. Indeed Bruce’s and Wertenbaker’s interpretations in many respects reflect simply opposing running commentaries on how they believed the seventeenth-century Virginia gentry and society (as revealed in the historical evidence) measured up to this ideal type of antebellum Southern society. For Bruce, all the evidence suggested that the seventeenth-century Tidewater gentry were nothing less than the antebellum planter society in embryo, while Wertenbaker found the seventeenth-century planter oligarchy sadly lacking in all the antebellum graces. Indeed, Wertenbaker found the seventeenth-century merchant-planters, whom Bruce had already shown to have a strong mercantile inheritance and background, acting for all the world like unscrupulous Yankees.[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 31-2, 36.[/ref]
Wertenbaker and Bruce differed in the same way that the early twentieth-century Progressive historians in general differed from their immediate predecessors. While their predecessors stressed class consensus, the Progressives stressed class conflict. Wertenbaker in his first work, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (1910), which he subtitled The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion, emphasized the rise of a two-class society of aristocrats and middle-class yeomen in late seventeenth-century Virginia; Bruce, in his Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (1907), which he subtitled An Inquiry into the Origin of the Higher Planter Class, viewed the Old South as well as contemporary England as a “one-class society” a la Peter Laslett.[ref]Laslett, World 23-54.[/ref] Both Wertenbaker and Bruce celebrated Nathaniel Bacon as a key player in the rise of American democracy. Indeed, in 1958, Wertenbaker would draw on Bruce, writing in 1893, to state in a nutshell the former’s whole “torchbearer of the revolution” thesis.[ref][Philip Alexander Bruce], “Proclamations of Nathaniel Bacon,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1893): 55; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia Under the Stuarts 1607-1688, The Shaping of Colonial Virginia (1914; New York: Russell, 1958) iv-vi; Simms 199-203.[/ref] But while Bruce followed the conservative emphasis on Bacon’s traditional defense of the Englishman’s rights against the intrusion of Berkeley and the Crown, Wertenbaker highlighted the yeoman’s democratic challenge to the entrenched planter aristocracy.[ref]Bruce, Institutional History 2: 357, 494; Wertenbaker, Patrician 61-3, 203-4. Cf. Page, Old South 17-9, 158; Page, Old Dominion 136, 145-7; Turner, Frontier 69-70, 247, 250-1, 301-2.[/ref]
Where Bruce and pre-Progressive historians saw continuity, whether between England and America or between seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century Virginia, Wertenbaker and Progressive historians saw discontinuity.[ref]Novick 92-3; R. Miller, “Birth” 154.[/ref] Direct links are unclear, but Wertenbaker fits well within the pattern of certain other Southern Progressives like Walter Hines Page and William E. Dodd who harped back in turn to a preslavery, democratic South in the tradition of antebellum Jeffersonians like Hugh Blair Grigsby.[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 59-64; Dodd, Statesmen 1-23; Wertenbaker, Planters 38-9; Burton J. Hendrick, The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page 1855-1913 (Boston: Houghton, 1928) 109-18; Charles Grier Sellers, “Walter Hines Page and the Spirit of the New South,” North Carolina Historical Review 29 (1952): 481-99; Wendell Holmes Stephenson, The South Lives in History: Southern Historians and Their Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1955) 39, 45-6; Lowry Price Ware, “The Academic Career of William E. Dodd,” diss., U of South Carolina, 1956; Wish 257; Bruce L. Clayton, “Southern Critics of the New South 1890-1914,” diss., Duke U, 1966; Frederick Henry Weaver, “Walter H. Page and the Progressive Mood,” diss., Duke U, 1968, 2-3; Robert Dallek, Democrat and Diplomat: The Life of William E. Dodd (New York: Oxford UP, 1968) 39-41, 58-74; Gaston, New South Creed 165-7; Rollin G. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause 1865-1900 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1973) 114; Tindall, Persistent Tradition 50-3; John Milton Cooper, Jr., Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American 1855-1918 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1977) xx-xxii, 149-50; Grantham 27-33.[/ref] In the end, both Wertenbaker’s and Bruce’s antebellum Southern gentlemen shared strong similarities with their ideal of an early modern English gentry, but while Bruce saw this as a simple process of cultural inheritance with only slight environmental impact, Wertenbaker envisioned a complex double-transformation process of evolution combining Herbert Baxter Adam’s “germ” theory, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, and Edward Eggleston’s multi-factor “transit of civilization” all rolled into one.[ref]Page, Old South 5-6; Bruce Institutional History 2: 605-6, 614-6, 633-4; Wertenbaker, Patrician 65-7. Cf. Pierson 15-7.[/ref]
While both Bruce and Wertenbaker were interested in developing a more scientific history and both truly pioneered in the development of modern social historiography, Bruce reflected the late nineteenth-century ideal of a plodding Rankeian “inductive” history while Wertenbaker exuded the “New History’s” confidence in a rapier-like “deductive” history.[ref]Wertenbaker, Patrician 220; Bruce, rev. of Planters 552-3. See also Novick 90-2; R. Miller, “Birth” 155.[/ref] At the evidentiary level, the main point of contention between the two rested on whether any of their findings of divergence from an antebellum aristocratic society made seventeenth-century Virginia sufficiently different to fall outside the range of characteristics of seventeenth-century English society (of which neither Bruce nor Wertenbaker knew much beyond a cursory reading). Thus the resolution of their differences reduced to a problem in historical sociology beyond the scope of either historian, both in theory and evidence.[ref]Cf. Wertenbaker, Patrician vii; Bruce, rev. of Planters 552.[/ref]
Both Bruce and Wertenbaker recognized the influence of cultural and environmental factors in seventeenth-century Virginia society. However, on the exact balance between those cultural and environmental forces and the specific nature of those forces, the two diverged. Where Bruce emphasized cultural continuity and the triumph of culture over environment, Wertenbaker stressed cultural transformation and the triumph of environment over culture.[ref]Bruce, Social Life 255; Institutional History 605-6; Wertenbaker, vi, 33.[/ref]
Overall, one must conclude that, through their convergences and divergences, Bruce and Wertenbaker fundamentally framed the twentieth-century approach to the history of seventeenth-century Virginia. They converged on the Anglo-Saxon nature of immigration, drawn primarily from the middling and mercantile classes who sought to better their condition, acquire a freehold, and accumulate wealth in the land of opportunity. They agreed early Virginians were a hard-working, entrepreneurial, commercially-oriented lot. Both emphasized the importance of the settlement process, the slow accumulation of wealth, population growth, and the introduction of slavery as the fundamental forces in the economic evolution of Virginian society, rather than the changed character of immigrants or a mass Cavalier exodus. All of these ideas form the heart of the historical consensus on seventeenth-century Virginia.
In their divergent opinions on the relative importance of historical continuity versus change, culture versus environment in their explication of the nature of colonial Virginia, Bruce and Wertenbaker tapped into basic conservative-liberal and idealist-materialist debates that continue to divide traditionalists and modernists. However, one should not make too much of such divergences since both early and late twentieth-century historians recognized it was not a question of either-or. Indeed, the difference between the two approaches “boils down,” as Hofstadter noted for most historical debates, “to questions of emphasis, to arguments about how much stress we want to put on this factor rather than that, when we all admit that both were at work.”[ref]Hofstadter, Progressive Historians xv-xvi.[/ref]
More fundamentally, though, Bruce and Wertenbaker took quite rigid stands on contrasting the dominance of two antithetical spirits‑-Cavalier and Yankee‑-that did not come down to “questions of emphasis.” Either one was a Yankee in spirit or one was a Cavalier in spirit, there was no in-between. More than anything else, this strict dichotomization gave Bruce and Wertenbaker a lasting presence in shaping the two major approaches to seventeenth-century Virginia historiography: the modernist approach following Wertenbaker and the traditionalist approach following Bruce.
However, despite the extensive work of the traditionalists, there really was no question which interpretation of seventeenth-century Virginia would win its place in the great American synthesis. Although Bruce’s books on the economic, institutional, and social history of seventeenth-century Virginia would continue to occupy a prominent place on the bookshelves of historians of colonial Chesapeake, by the 1920s Northern and Southern historians alike proclaimed Wertenbaker “the great revisionist of the day…exploding the myths perpetrated by Philip Alexander Bruce.”[ref]Wendell Holmes Stephenson, Southern History in the Making: Pioneer Historians of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1964) 223; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor vii-viii.[/ref] Wertenbaker’s class conflict and his transformational framework melded with the developing Progressive synthesis that dominated American historiography for most of the twentieth century. His interpretation hardly dented the traditional interpretations of the antebellum era, simply requiring the substitution of Southern agrarianism versus Northern industrialism for the traditional Cavalier versus Yankee antithesis.[ref]Rev. of The Planters of Colonial Virginia, by Thomas J. Wertenbaker, William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 3 (1923): 131-2; Harold Underwood Faulkner, “Colonial History Debunked: It’s a Wise Child that Knows its Own Forefathers,” Harper’s Magazine 152 (1925): 84-5; E. M. Coulter, rev. of The Planters of Colonial Virginia, by Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Georgia Historical Quarterly 11 (1927): 106; Hubbell, “Cavalier” 22-3; Parrington 2: 3-8; Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1930) 1: 127-8; 2: 54; Benjamin B. Kendrick and Alex M. Arnett, The South Looks at its Past (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1935) 13-22; Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York: Knopf, 1948) 233-7; W. Craven, Legend 129-30; Wertenbaker, Patrician i-ii; Wish 113; W. Taylor, Cavalier 15-6; Bonner, “Plantation” 155; Eaton, Growth 150-1; David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” The South and the Sectional Conflict, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1968) 72-3; Hofstadter, Progressive Historians 5; Thomas A. Bailey, Probing America’s Past: A Critical Examination of Major Myths and Misconceptions, 2 vols. (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1973) 1: 20-1; Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, “Reconstructing British-American Colonial History: An Introduction,” Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984) 3; Fischer, Albion’s Seed 225n30; Rowland Berthoff, rev. of Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer, Journal of Southern History 57 (1991): 479-81; Fischer, “Albion and the Critics” 286.[/ref] And while counter-Progressive historians, beginning in the 1950s, fundamentally challenged the traditional dichotomization of antebellum Southern planters and Northern capitalists, they had little to do in this regard in the colonial Chesapeake. Traditionalists following Louis B. Wright would indeed fully accept Wertenbaker’s frontier as a description of the environmental reality with its concomitant dismissal of gentility as a realistic goal in the seventeenth century. Similarly, the weakness of the counter-Progressive movement when it dealt with seventeenth-century Virginia historiography, despite the influence of Boorstin, Degler, and other “consensus historians” on American historiography in general, left little for neo-Progressives to challenge. Against this consensus, the countermythical charges of Wyatt-Brown and Fischer have had little impact.
Defunct Historians and Economists
In public, historians have sometimes noted the continuing influence of Bruce and Wertenbaker, although usually without making clear exactly what that influence was. In a review published in 1975, on the eve of the colonial Chesapeake renaissance, Warren M. Billings compared the impact of the work of these two on later research on the seventeenth-century Chesapeake to that of Charles A. Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner on American history in general, all part of an irrepressible Progressive synthesis of American history.[ref]Warren M. Billings, “Towards the Rewriting of Seventeenth‑Century Virginia History: A Review Article,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975): 184. See also Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1689 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1949) 427; Rutman, “Bruce” 402-3; Simms 204; Thad W. Tate, “The Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake and Its Modern Historians,” The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979) 6-13; Allan Kulikoff, “The Colonial Chesapeake: Seedbed of Antebellum Southern Culture?,” Journal of Southern History 45 (1979): 514; Kukla, Political Institutions xii-xiii.[/ref] In private, historians will even acknowledge that the dominant interpretation today shares an uncanny resemblance to Wertenbaker’s work, sans his blatant racism. But few actually cite Bruce and Wertenbaker for factual evidence and fewer still, if any, read them for their historical interpretations.
John Maynard Keynes once warned his fellow economists that those “practical economists, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from past intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”[ref]John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936; New York: Harcourt, 1964) 383.[/ref] Billings in 1975 echoed Keynes in his hope that the burgeoning new research on the Chesapeake would once and for all free the seventeenth-century from the dead weight of past polemics.[ref]Billings, “Towards the Rewriting” 184.[/ref] Of all the social sciences, however, history seems to be least concerned with its own past. Billings’s hopes were dashed. For even if seldom read and cited, Bruce and Wertenbaker–defunct historians–still set the terms of modern Chesapeake scholarship. What has been described in opening as a division between modernists and traditionalists turns out to be simply a recasting of Wertenbaker versus Bruce. And mired in this old debate we regularly add rich detail to our pool of knowledge about the region (A Place in Time and Robert Cole’s World come to mind) but knowledge cast in terms of old understandings. What follows attempts to sketch something new.
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