Myths of Origin, Origins of Myth (Spring 1995)

[This essay is Chapter 1 in my PhD dissertation dealing with the myths of seventeenth-century Virginians. For my philosophical approach to dealing with myths, see my essay “Stepping Out of Myths and Into the Gray” which was the preface to my dissertation.]

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.” ¹ 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.” ² 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). ³ 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. ⁴ Fur­ther­more, almost all historians of early Virginia, whether they emphasize continuity or change, treat institutional transfer as a dependent rather than an independent vari­able. ⁵

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. ⁶ 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. ⁷ 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.” ⁸ 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. ⁹ 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. ¹⁰ 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. ¹¹ 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.” ¹² 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. ¹³

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. ¹⁴ 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. ¹⁵ 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. ¹⁶

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. ¹⁷ 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. ¹⁸

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.” ¹⁹ 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. ²⁰

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.” ²¹ “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.” ²² Even acquisitiveness and luxury reflected the desire for the appropriate accoutrements of one’s sta­tion. ²³ 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. ²⁴

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. ²⁵ 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. ²⁶

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. ²⁷ 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.” ²⁸ 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. ²⁹

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. ³⁰ But traditionalists and modernists agree, regardless of the ultimate goal of the Virginians, that gentility was an unrealistic goal on the seventeenth-century frontier. ³¹

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. ³²

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. ³³

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. ³⁴ 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. ³⁵ 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. ³⁶ The two processes of creolization and Anglicization intertwined in a complex manner, giving rise to the complex society of eighteenth-century Virginia. ³⁷

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”; ³⁸ 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. ³⁹ 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. ⁴⁰

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. ⁴¹

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. ⁴²

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. ⁴³

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. ⁴⁴ 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. ⁴⁵

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. ⁴⁶ Even Fiske would write that most planters descend­ed from “either country squires or prosperous yeomen, or craftsmen from the numerous urban guilds.” ⁴⁷ 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. ⁴⁸

A genuine consensus quickly grew around Bruce’s more balanced presentation emphasizing the mercantile background of most of the planter elite. ⁴⁹ 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. ⁵⁰ 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. ⁵¹

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.” ⁵² 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. ⁵³

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. ⁵⁴

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.” ⁵⁵ 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. ⁵⁶ 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.” ⁵⁷

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.” ⁵⁸ 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. ⁵⁹ 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.” ⁶⁰ 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. ⁶¹ 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. ⁶²

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. ⁶³ 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. ⁶⁴ 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. ⁶⁵

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. ⁶⁶ 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. ⁶⁷ 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. ⁶⁸

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. ⁶⁹ 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. ⁷⁰

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. ⁷¹

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.” ⁷²

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.” ⁷³ 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. ⁷⁴ 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. ⁷⁵ 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.” ⁷⁶ 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. ⁷⁷ 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.