As a reminder, these history episodes are provided ad-free to paid subscribers. If you would like to watch it in full without subscribing, you can listen on YouTube or Spotify! If you would like to read it, the (rough) transcript, with timestamps, is provided below the paywall.

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Popular mythology long romanticized colonial Virginia as a land of effortless feudal baronies populated by chivalric English Cavaliers. In reality, the “First Families of Virginia” were built by hard-headed English merchants, ship captains, and ambitious entrepreneurs who utilized the headright system and transatlantic trade to consolidate vast riverfront estates across the Tidewater and Northern Neck. From the symmetrical Georgian lines of Stratford Hall and Westover to the all-pervading cultivation of the tobacco leaf, these grand plantations functioned as physical fortresses of landed authority, projecting an image of immovable order, rank, and permanence over the Chesapeake wilderness.

In this episode, we explore how the daily governance of Old Virginia gave rise to the revolutionary generation. We trace the gentry’s power through a tripod of institutional authority—the private plantation, the parish vestry, and the county court—where young grandees received a hands-on apprenticeship in the art of governing long before taking their seats in Colonial Williamsburg or Philadelphia. We also show how that combined with a culture of hospitality, high-stakes equestrian gambling, courtly dancing, and classical scholarship, the planter class cultivated a fierce ideology of “hegemonic liberty.” We further describe how luxury spending and a crushing web of transatlantic debt eventually pitted these Tidewater patriarchs against British merchants, propelling men like Washington, Jefferson, Mason, and Richard Henry Lee to lead the assault against the British Empire.

Chapters

0:00 The Myth of Old Virginia and the Virginia Gentleman

4:42 The Origin and Formation of the Virginia Gentry

15:47 Tobacco Culture in Virginia

21:07 The Great Plantation Mansions of Virginia

33:50 The Virginia Plantations

39:58 Political Training in the Parish Vestry and County Court

47:53 Religion in Colonial Virginia

52:52 Leisure and Fun with the Virginia Gentry

59:09 Virginia Hospitality: Dance, Music, and Conviviality

1:02:42 Libraries and Learning

1:05:42 Hegemonic Liberty

1:08:01 The Merchant Factors and Credit Trap

1:15:22 The Gentlemen Who Led the American Revolution

Sources Referenced in this Episode:

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

Billings, Warren M., Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, https://amzn.to/4c9LrER

Breen, T. H., Tobacco Culture, https://amzn.to/4wNrigt

Bridenbaugh, Carl, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South, https://amzn.to/4wybkqi

Bridenbaugh, Carl, Seat of Empire:, https://amzn.to/45q3nr4

Bruce, Philip Alexander, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, https://amzn.to/4pLWjOM

Bruce, Philip Alexander, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, https://amzn.to/4pIGUPj

Bruce, Philip Alexander, Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, https://amzn.to/4wF4LlJ

Burt, Nathaniel, First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy, https://amzn.to/44LGdLF

Carson, Jane, Colonial Virginians at Play

Evans, Emory G., A Topping People, https://amzn.to/4xaSQfj

Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed, https://amzn.to/4xaSKUZ

Isaac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, https://amzn.to/4ftuyr2

Hendrick, Burton J., The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4pFM2Ut

Rasmussen, William M. S., Old Virginia, https://amzn.to/4bne0yu

Sydnor, Charles S., Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, https://amzn.to/45nNe5o

Wright, Louis B., The First Gentlemen of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4vXmOlU

Transcript

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I would recommend watching that show, if you are interested in accelerationism and the problems with it. I think it was an interesting discussion, and it seems to have been well received by his audience. What I want to discuss here is a related matter: how the process of “South Africanization” is continuing to impact our lives, and why surveillance technology like Flock cameras will probably exacerbate rather than fix it.

Become a paid subscriber to listen to the audio version of this article here:

What Is South Africanization?

I’ve written some about this before, but for those who have joined us since, South Africanization is the process by which a state is hollowed out by a mixture of declining state capacity, anarchotyranny, and race communism.

Declining state capacity means the inability of the state or closely related regulated entities to provide governmental services, such as police forces, or other amenities of civilized life, such as clean drinking water, reliable electricity, and the like.

Anarchotyranny, a term coined by Sam Francis, is a system in which the state ruthlessly regulates, taxes, and punishes generally law-abiding and normal people for minor or imaginary transgressions against the state at the same time as it utterly fails to—whether as a result of low state capacity or outright refusal—perform its main duty of stopping violent crime, theft, and public disorder, which generally means that criminals go free and face no significant punishment when caught.

Finally, race communism is the blending of general communist attitudes regarding the expropriation of property, common ownership, and hatred of the most able with an anti-white racialist lens. Importantly, the focus is not on making life better for those who are supposedly oppressed by the able. It is instead on punishing and inflicting gratuitous economic and perhaps physical pain on those able people because they are more competent than average, and that competence is deemed a transgression against equality.

Zimbabwe under Mugabe is the clearest distillation of this: expropriated land generally went fallow and nearly everyone starved while suffering hyper-inflation, and this was deemed a good thing because the whites suffered seeing their family farms destroyed and had to generally flee the country.

Sometimes those things take place independently, but they are closely related. South Africanization is the process by which all three are combined into one country-destroying force. This process is typically characterized by the state punishing success or excellence exhibited by the “oppressors”, letting infrastructure fall apart, crime raging out of control and going unchecked, and those who pay all the taxes receiving next to nothing in terms of state services in exchange for them.

What is particularly deleterious about South Africanization is the way in which the various issues combine to form a situation much closer to a predicament than a problem.2

If you are interested in reading about this in more detail, here are two in-depth works on it:

South Africanization in America

In America, we have seen this to varying degrees, particularly in relatively non-prosperous, “diverse” cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and so on, but it is present across the country. Generally, it takes the form of degraded infrastructure,3 high taxes4 that are used to pay for various Dewayne Geld racial wealth redistribution schemes from which net taxpayers gain next to no benefit, war zone-tier murder rates and generally high property crime in urban zones, a heavy dose of anti-white policies targeting companies and schools for particularly intensive disparate impact-style regulation, and a generally inept bureaucratic regime.

In short, the state is either incapable or unwilling to do much other than find various ways of squeezing the increasingly small base of net taxpayers for the benefit of the welfare-dependent underclass.

Things have gotten somewhat better in that regard since Trump’s election, but the basic problem of an anti-white attitude intersecting with an inept bureaucratic state and generally anarchic conditions in urban zones remains.

Take, for example, the case of Shiloh Hendrix: a Somali kid was stealing from her, so she used a mean word, which an adult Somali caught on tape.5 In a case of anti-white bureaucratic tyranny seemingly out of Britain,6 she was just found guilty of “disorderly conduct” for being upset about being harassed and stolen from by invaders from Africa. Such a situation could only occur in a South Africanizing world; imagine telling George Washington that the law provided he had to let Gambians steal from him whenever they wanted, that insulting them was illegal, and that the whole system would go along with such a law and verdict!

Similarly, there is the problem of crime. A few select jurisdictions like Memphis and DC have been cleaned up because Trump deployed the National Guard to keep a lid on out-of-control crime. But that solution is only temporary; crime will return as soon as the Guard departs, as the criminals are being suppressed rather than hanged.

Meanwhile, everywhere else the problem remains: criminals are emboldened to do as they please, blue cities are actively encouraging them by enacting policies such as no cash bail or decriminalizing property offenses like theft, and the police are punished rather than praised for dealing effectively with criminals. The result is that large swathes of cities remain effective no-go zones for normal, law-abiding Americans, much to our detriment.7

Even as the crime problem remains out of control, much of the bureaucratic structure used to enforce race communism remains intact. California, for example, is trying to punish AI companies for producing programs that produce disparate impact answers,8 which is to say that it is punishing reality for not being anti-white.

This leads us to Flock cameras.

Flock Cameras and South Africanization

Though they’ve been used around the country since 2018, Flock cameras—license plate readers—have recently become a subject of intense online discussion, particularly as a way of discussing the general AI-enabled panopticon that seems to be rising around us. What we say online (and probably what we think) is tracked by Big Tech and the government/NGO partners with whom it works, where we go is tracked by Flock cameras, what we do is intensively regulated by the bureaucratic state…on and on it goes. As Flock cameras are a particularly visible symbol of that panopticon and create a sense of visceral disgust in many, they’ve become a shorthand way of discussing it.

On one hand, many call for them to be banned because they record and catalog vehicle movements—including license plates, make, model, bumper stickers, and travel times—into a searchable database, doing so without a warrant or cause. That’s the sort of outdoor prison9 of a society the Soviets or Red Chinese would build, not America! Or so we like to think. Yet the cameras rise regardless. That Flock is hiding the cameras10 just makes them seem even more nefarious.

Some on the right have taken to justify the cameras by arguing that they make fighting crime easy. They can be used to track “teens” who have stolen vehicles,11 or even track Antifa and aid the police in cracking down on that awful organization!12 They will catch bad people, or so we are told, and so we ought to support putting them up everywhere.13 Fewer cars will be stolen, fewer violent crimes will go unpunished, etc.

To argue as much completely misses the point of why crime is a problem in America. It is not that we don’t know who the criminals are. We do, often by name. There are 1000 people in Atlanta who commit 40 percent of the crime in the city.14 The police know them by name, and know what crimes they commit.

They are out of jail, free to commit more crimes because of the South Africanization of America, particularly the “anarcho” part of anarchotyranny.

That Daquaivius Washington is free to commit his twelvethousandth property offense on MARTA is not because Atlanta needs Flock cameras, but because every member of the ruling regime supports letting him steal, particularly if he’s stealing from (overtaxed) white residents of Buckhead. The Mayor, DA, police leadership, NGOs, and voters all want him to be able to “get his” at the cost of those nasty “oppressors” who need to be punished for slavery, and so he is free to do so, again and again. That he generally preys on other blacks rather than whites is of no real concern to those in charge; the fact that he’s making life worse by inflicting anarchy and its costs upon the city is all that really matters.

The same state of things is true in pretty much every city. It was not that Decarlos Brown Jr. was on the run from a motivated police force when he stabbed Iryna Zarutska in the neck in Charlotte, and would have been stopped if only another hundred license plate readers had been put up on street corners. No, he was out on the streets after his fourteenth arrest because the anti-white, pro-crime political system wanted him to commit more crimes. He upheld his end of that bargain, and now the system is trying to help him get away with it by declaring him unfit for trial.

So, Flock cameras would not end the anarcho part of anarchotyranny. The cameras have been put up since 2018, after all, and crime only got worse over that period. Meanwhile, we all know they would make the tyranny part far worse. The cameras are already being misused by police, after all.15

For what will all those spiteful bureaucrats use the data harvested by them? To inflict more race-communism-motivated pain and suffering upon normal, generally law-abiding white people, after all! And just wait till they add microphones to them, and that recording informs some spiteful bureaucrat in a windowless cubicle that you uttered hate speech…then there’ll be more hell to pay! That’s how anarcho-tyranny works. As put it16:

They’re meant to stop crime, but everyone knows what they’re going to be actually used for: catching people for going a few miles over the speed limit and other petty offenses.

Tons of cities have made it a burden to drive as cameras send tickets for every petty traffic offense. People are sick of it. That’s why Flock cameras represent to many the nagging nanny state rather than a force for public safety.

If we lived in a sane country, Flock cameras would probably be a fine tool when temporarily erected in certain places, namely “high crime neighborhoods” in need of pacification. Still, if we simply refused to tolerate crime and hanged criminals as our ancestors did, they would be mostly unnecessary.

It is not that we don’t know who the criminals are. We do know. The supermajority of them have been caught before. It is that we don’t punish them, for reasons of national temperament and ideology; subways are unsafe for the same Civil Rights reason houses in “nice neighborhoods” with “good schools” are extortionately expensive. It is not, as one Atlanta legislator claimed, that we need to ban guns from public transport.17 It’s that we let criminals live, and inflict themselves upon us. Flock cameras will do nothing to fix that.

The Importance of Being Honest

It’s important to be honest about what is happening. That America has a crime problem is to say that America is drowning in a puddle. Yes, it might prove existential; drowning in a puddle is no different than drowning in the Pacific, in the end. But we could also just stand up, shake off the yoke of race communism, anarchotyranny, and all the rest. The problem is easily fixable, and requires nothing more than the will to reintroduce the criminal underclass to the consequences of its actions.

We need not build a vast surveillance state to do that. We ought not build a vast surveillance state to do that, in fact. The digital panopticon would only make our lives worse. Even if it is used to catch teens stealing cars, after all, that won’t matter: they’ll simply be released as soon as possible by the pro-crime authorities, as is the case with every other crime.

The way to end crime is to stop tolerating it. Our ancestors fixed crime centuries ago by simply hanging criminals. They did so without a bureaucracy, without a surveillance state, while expanding rather than contracting liberty, and without any real downsides. The solution, and the way to effect it, is neither in doubt nor particularly difficult to achieve.

But to get there, we must first shake off the burden of South Africanization. We must stop drowning in the puddle. The anti-white bureaucracy, the race communist policies, the rampant anarchy, the omnipresent tyranny directed at law-abiding citizens…all of it must be done away with, turned to ash. Once that is done, we’ll find the cameras were never necessary. Until it is done, we’ll find they did nothing to fix crime, and much to make our lives worse.

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has a good article on this:

EXIT Newsletter

Imagine a sanctuary city, but different

When he took power in the late 1970s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping recognized that Maoism had left the country is in a state of economic paralysis…

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2 years ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · Bennett's Phylactery

9

Matthew’s Substack

Call them OPCs, not Flock Cameras

I’m trying to retitle these infernal devices which, for now, have the pleasant name of Flock cameras, like a happy flock of birds flying above you in the blue sky. In reality, they are Outdoor Prison Cameras, or OPCs, for controlling the population in the open-air prison they are turning America into…

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4 days ago · 143 likes · 49 comments · Matt Bracken

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As a reminder, these history episodes are provided ad-free to paid subscribers. If you would like to watch it in full without subscribing, you can listen on YouTube or Spotify! If you would like to read it, the (rough) transcript, with timestamps, is provided below the paywall.

Subscribe now

Born at Stratford Hall, educated in Classical virtue at home, and later settled on frontier land in Loudoun County, he entered politics through the House of Burgesses, married Rebecca Plater Tayloe, and built a private life at Menokin while continuing public service.

A reluctant patriot who participated in politics out of duty rather than dreams of self-aggrandizement, Francis Lightfoot Lee was trusted and chosen by Virginia to represent the state in Congress. So, in 1775, he journeyed to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, where he worked on wartime administration, the Board of War, and the Articles of Confederation, and on August 2, 1776, he signed the Declaration of Independence.

As a quiet figure in the Continental Congress, Francis Lightfoot Lee was known by everyone from his beloved brothers to John Adams and Dr. Benjamin Rush for judgment, steadiness, and commitment to steady and important committee work rather than flowery speeches, along with his deep and abiding commitment to his brothers, as shown by his protest resignation during an attack on Richard Henry Lee, and his effective adoption of his brother William’s two orphaned daughters after his eventual retirement from politics in 1779, followed by his death in 1797 shortly after his beloved wife Becky’s.

Chapters

0:00 Francis Lightfoot Lee: The Hidden Patriot

3:59 Classical Education and Loudoun County: Francis Lee’s Early Life

10:18 Entering Revolutionary Politics

13:15 Menokin and Marriage

15:44 Duty Calls Lee to Congress

21:04 How Francis Lightfoot Lee Saved Washington’s Army at Valley Forge

22:55 The Lee Brothers Who Signed Independence

29:11 Francis’s Federalist Break With Richard Henry

31:02 Retirement From Public Life, and Final Days at Menokin

35:36 A Quiet Revolutionary Legacy

Sources Referenced in this Episode:

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

Semsch, Suzanne Hadfield, The Lees of Menokin: An Early American Love Story, https://amzn.to/4bMhBpP

Bridenbaugh, Carl, Seat of Empire:, https://amzn.to/45q3nr4

Bruce, Philip Alexander, The Virginia Plutarch, https://amzn.to/4fVURWR

Burt, Nathaniel, First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy, https://amzn.to/44LGdLF

Chitwood, Oliver Perry, Richard Henry Lee: Statesman of the Revolution, https://amzn.to/4x2DY2q

Hendrick, Burton J., The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4pFM2Ut

Lee, Cazenove Gardner, Jr., Lee Chronicle: Studies of the Early Generations of the Lees, https://amzn.to/3TcZ2VB

McGaughy, Kent J., Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American, https://amzn.to/4fGtjnj

Middlekauff, Robert, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, https://amzn.to/4fzRTWy

Nagel, Paul C., The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family, https://amzn.to/4yHwQua

Selby, John E., The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783, https://amzn.to/45oTOZu

Sydnor, Charles S., Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, https://amzn.to/45nNe5o

Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, https://amzn.to/4x46Pnd

Transcript

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An era is defined by its architecture, as the architecture represents its spirit—the highest aspirations, inclinations, and beliefs of its people.

The spirit of Classical Greece, as Adrian Goldsworthy observed in his fabulous Athens and Sparta, could be seen in the Parthenon of Athens. It was a showing of the excellence of its architects, the excellence and wealth of the city that built it, the premier status of that city’s empire, and the restless sense of competition that undergirded that civilization.1

When the British state rose beyond the feuding of the late Medieval through Stuart years, it celebrated with a burst of Baroque country house building that reflected the triumphant nature of the Whiggish Aristocracy in control and the newfound wealth that came with peace.2

Both Blenheim and Chatsworth, two of Britain’s most famous country seats, and both of which are gargantuan Baroque palaces, were built in this period. The splendor, the expense, the immense craftsmanship—all of it represented the vital energy, sudden affluence, and solidity of those who ruled after the Glorious Revolution. Yet further, they reflected the fact that the ruling aristocracy was proud, capable, and still jealous of its privileges and authority:3 only he of ancient blood and windfall wealth could build something like Blenheim or Castle Howard.

As the years wore on and the empire became both less newfangled and more solid, the styles changed. Georgian architecture is beautiful, tasteful, and restrained. So too is the closely related Palladian and Neo-Classical architecture, probably the most famous of the country house styles.

In public and private architecture alike, the solid and stable built world of the Tories was more restrained, in better taste, and meant to portray patrician self-confidence, contentedness, and rootedness rather than show off new wealth or enhanced position.4 Theirs was a world built by gentlemen, and the restrained yet glorious taste of it reflected that.

This is true of empires as well as states. As Andrew Lambert notes in his Seapower States, sea-based empires used the visual propaganda and spirit building of complexes and structures so splendorous and monumental as to be “maritime temples” to encourage a “consciously crafted identity” that supported the unique type of civilization required for a maritime empire.5

From the circular harbor of Carthage to the Dam Square of Amsterdam,6 seapower states were intentional about how they turned the riches of seaborne empires and the trade that accompanied them into monumental visual reminders of that success. The form reflected not just the reality—wealth—but the spirit and its unique attributes as well.

The Architecture of American Decline

For many centuries, particularly in the plantation house-based world of the Southeast and old Anglo-Dutch world of New York, America followed a similar trajectory. When Virginia’s Golden Age came, planters built great homes like Westover and Stratford Hall to display their immense riches and remind observers that they were here to stay.

As King Cotton plucked his crown out of the Deep South’s dirt, he too raised monumental palaces hidden behind screens of live oaks and the Spanish moss that dangled from them.

When War came and those houses burned at the hands of Sherman and Sheridan, it was the industrial North’s turn to set the architectural tone. The Livingstons and their peers in the essentially feudal Hudson River Valley constructed vast complexes lining the river, gazing down from overwrought and generally tasteless splendor at the mere mortals on the river below; the money soon left their hands, as did their homes.7

The Valley faded as even those who survived turned to The City rather to their rent rolls to maintain the lifestyles they so enjoyed.8 Joining them in the City were all those who revelled in the new wealth, speculative greed, and piled-up riches of the post-bellum years.

The Carnegie partners, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and dozens of others—400 all told, famously—wanted to put on a show, and so lavished fortunes upon townhomes as the Whig oligarchy of Britain had once lavished it upon country homes. These were perhaps in poor taste—older, Anglophile families like the Morgans certainly thought so9—but the palaces of the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and their contemporaries reflected the booming prosperity of the Gilded Age in which they lived.

Wealth was being built at a feverish pace, and its accumulators spent it in a similarly feverish fashion, with much of that spending poured into architecture that reflected the times in ways good and bad. The American public—generally apt to see itself as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” rather than a proletariat10—vicariously revelled in the splendor, riches, and extravagence of the age.

Speculative bubbles are apt to pop, and the popping of the Gilded Age bubble brought with it hard times and hard feelings. Much of this was eventually fixed by President McKinley, but the architecture changed. No longer as exuberant or extravagant, the Neo-Classical, Federal, and even Art Nouveau (though this was primarily European) architecture that characterized the late Gilded Age was far more restrained, far more beautiful, and far more tasteful than that which preceded it. Much as in Britain almost two centuries earlier, a respite from garish opulence and tawdy extravagance led to a better society and architecture that reflected that improvement.

Similar changes came as the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era. Increased government involvement in the economy meant the business environment was more restrained, and the social environment was as well. The days of Astor’s 400 had passed, and been replaced with the steady financial responsibility of men like Andrew Mellon and John D. Rockefeller, the industrialist motivated by noblesse oblige like Henry Ford, and the budding managerial revolution.

This was to be an age of engineers abetted by capital, not capital abetted by engineers. Mellon’s Alcoa Aluminum, the great hydroelectric dams, Herbert Hoover’s rise to fame as a world-renowned engineer,11 and more all spoke to engineering excellence and its preferences, with the prosperous capitalists—many of them heirs—taking a backseat and often distracting themselves with leisure or speculation as the managers and engineers took over the companies.

The architecture changed as well, becoming a style that best represented America’s takeover by engineers: Art Deco, a style that glorified the Machine Age and attempted to turn its preferences and materials into architectural beauty that represented a new type of vitality, energy, and prosperity.

This era saw a mix of styles, as most do. The old guard, men like Andrew Mellon, attempted to use the wealth of the period to clothe America with marble as Augustus had done to Rome. Preferring Neo-Classical architecture, with its restraint and Classical beauty, Mellon tried to use his Federal Triangle project to turn DC into a grand capital city on the Roman pattern,12 updated for modernity. He partially succeeded, but was stymied by the pressures and poverty of the early Depression.

The new guard, meanwhile, built in the Art Deco style and did so in a grand way. Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building were all incredible undertakings and built in such a style. So too were the great buildings of the new industrial cities, places like Chicago and Detroit that had risen from dirt to prosperity because of the Machine Age.

Such was the trend in America. Things were changing, but following traditional patterns. As we became more prosperous and that prosperity stretched back into only foggily remembered times, opulence and exuberance faded into taste, restraint, and beauty. America had always been built in emulation of Rome, and Mellon’s Neo-Classical building would have done literally that in the seat of empire—DC—while our commercial cities remade themselves in a distinctly American style (Art Deco originated in France but was fully adopted and adapted in America) of any grandeur: Art Deco. It could have been a beautiful age.

Then came the Depression, and with it the horrors of FDR’s regime and his spiritual successors. Grand building projects rooted in taste and beauty faded away. As Cannadine notes in his Mellon, the Federal Triangle project was hurled into the dustbin and replaced with that which we know much of FDR-era DC as: gloomy and utilitarian buildings that sit glowering beneath the cityscape, reflecting the dismal bureaucracy they were built to serve.

Modernism and Brutalism, horrific styles designed to disconcert and depress in the name of “efficiency,” dominated the building projects of this era. Office complexes were raised to serve a vastly enlarged bureaucratic workforce, and the sullen nature of those concrete cubes were as much a reflection of that horrid bureaucracy as Blenheim had been of Marlborough.

Such continued for year after year. It was a bureaucratic age that lasted for decades, and whether Robert Moses paving over old buildings and replacing them with highways and concrete towers or Detroit being obliterated by white flight as prosperity was replaced with race communist anarchy, the beauty that had been flowering was crushed. Detroit obliterating Immaculate Conception Church after ethnically cleansing the Polish community from the area was reflective of this period.13

Paired with this bureaucracy was war upon the old forms and the men who built them. In Britain, beautiful country houses that had defined the zenith of Anglo civilization were seized and destroyed by a spiteful regime. In America, the city palaces of the Gilded Age families became white elephants thanks to similarly extortionate tax policies, and were mainly destroyed or sold off to become museums and hotels, fading relics of a different era.

By the 1980s, America was muddling out of the architectural malaise that had existed since FDR. But, with taste obliterated by two generations of predatory taxation, stifling bureaucratic tyranny, and prole drift (the gradual drift of everything, culturally, towards that which most appeals to the lowest common denominator)14, what once was remained firmly in the past. America didn’t pick back up with Neo-Classical and Art Deco; it picked back up with…the strip mall, McMansion, and glass tower.

All are essentially Corporate Memphis in architectural form. An attempt to offend no one, to state nothing, to represent nothing other than cosmopolitan homogeneity and its bland discontents while being as comfortable as possible.

Hence the general uniformity in “architectural anarchy” of McMansions everywhere from Houston to Atlanta, San Francisco to New York; rooted in nothing, they are a haphazard and internally disquiting mix of everything, boiled into one pungent soup. What attempts there were to transcend this cultural grey goo, as Tom Wolfe ruthlessly parodies in both Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, were all in poor taste.

Such was the state of things for many years, another generation or two of hubris and opulence made all the worse by their being utterly divorced from past traditions and their organic outgrowths; at least Alva Vanderbilt’s monstrosity was trying to represent something, gaudy as it was.

But then something shifted. Perhaps, as with the crashes of 1873, ‘84, and ‘93 reigning in excess and producing beautiful Neo-Classical architecture, it was the crackup of the supposed “masters of the universe” and titans of tech in the DotCom Crash and Great Financial Crisis. Perhaps it was just general disgust with the architecture of nothingness.

Whatever the case, it culminated in President Trump issuing an Executive Order on architecture in his first term.15 Under the EO, new federal buildings were to be built in beautiful, traditional styles. Namely Neo-Classical, Greek Revival, and Federal, along with regionally appropriate styles like Spanish Colonial and Georgian. None were to be built in the Brutalist or Modernist styles. As the order noted, Brutalism and Deconstructivism are “ugly and inconsistent” with American civic dignity. Predictably, this set off cries of “fascism” and the like. Only a fascist would dare surround himself with beauty rather than dismal squalor.

Biden, predictably, rescinded the order and demanded ugliness to fight fascism. “A dumpy pile of concrete will teach them to dare oppose technocratic, neo-liberal mass democracy,” one can imagine a McKinsey-trained, transgender Biden staffer shouting before wandering off to steal some traveller’s luggage.

Now the beauty orders are back, this time with his “MAKING FEDERAL ARCHITECTURE BEAUTIFUL AGAIN” EO.16 And it was passed early enough that we will get to see some results. In fact, the first one is already planned: the new federal courthouse in Chattanooga, TN, will be built in a variation of a style called Greco-Deco. Relatively new, particularly this variation of it, the style merges strict and symmetrical proportions of Classical Greek and Roman public buildings with the bold, geometric reliefs of Art Deco.

It fuses the two things that are greatest about Heritage America—our intentional classical roots, and our bold desire to always surge onwards and upwards. It mixes boldness with tradition, grandeur with taste, style with severity. Yet further, the square fluted columns—themselves an example of how Greco-Deco mixes severe Art Deco styles with Classical design elements—are crowned with custom capitals inspired by the iris, Tennessee’s state flower. Here’s a mockup of it:

This is the architectural style of American renewal. It is new, bold, severe, and dominating while also being beautiful and a way of tying us to tradition. It is powerful, and so CNN is already calling it fascistic;17 a slur we’ll have to get over to move forward.

If this century is to be ours, this is the style for it, much as Palladian architecture was the perfect form for its day in Britain, and the Georgian country seats of the Virginia gentry were perfect for their world.

This building, this new courthouse, located in a relatively conservative city in a deep red state, is a shot across the bow of the architectural regime that has existed since FDR. It is not just a return to beauty, but a symbol that the damning chains of equality and humility enforced at bayonet point that have so long held us are being broken and will not be reforged anew.

The striking grandeur, stone solidity, and seamless blend of old and new are complemented by little elements—such as the state flower—to tie it to a specific place rather than blend it into globalist cosmopolitanism’s desire for utter homogeneity in the name of offending none, and those elements combine to stand as a stone-built rebuke of the now-fading order.

They are a sign that renewal is upon us, if only we can build it, and that the upswing is here. The malaise is over. The anarchy is over. The disorder has been overcome by blocks of monumental stone, and ugliness vanquished by men with taste imposing their will on the world to make it a beautiful and ordered place.

Architecture always has meaning. It cannot be faked, for it is a reflection of the soul and its state. The meaning of this is that things are looking up for America, and greatness can be reforged if only we grasp the opportunity. Either Greco-Deco will grace the surface of Mars, or endless variations of the Obama Library will blight the Earth. The time to choose is here.

13

Covered well by here:

Postcards From Barsoom

White Ethnic Cleansing as Social Control

The author of today’s guest post is Alan Schmidt, who many of you are probably familiar with from the excellent Social Matter. Which, while so far as I know having no direct connection to the sadly departed Social Matter of NRx lore, is an erudite and eclectic blog in the best tradition of the old Social Matter, with recent entries including…

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2 years ago · 507 likes · 182 comments · Alan Schmidt and John Carter

14

Paul Fussell came up with this term in his magnificent book Class

has a great article on it:

Old South Repository

Prole Drift and Coping with Downward Social Mobility

“Prole drift seems an inevitable attendant of mass production, mass selling, mass communication, and mass education.” - Paul Fussell…

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10 months ago · 239 likes · 49 comments · John Slaughter

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As a reminder, these history episodes are provided ad-free to paid subscribers. If you would like to watch it in full without subscribing, you can listen on YouTube or Spotify! If you would like to read it, the (rough) transcript, with timestamps, is provided below the paywall.

In the middle decades of the 18th century, the Ohio River Valley became a major point of conflict between Great Britain and France. With the British fearing French expansion into the interior, and the future of the region hinged on the actions of Virginia planters led by Thomas Lee of Stratford Hall, patriarch of the Lee Family of Virginia.

After securing the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744 to win title to the Western frontier from the Iroquois, Thomas Lee collected some of the Virginia gentry’s grandest and most famous names to form the Ohio Company of Virginia and settle the West. The Ohio Company sought a grant of 500,000 acres, and planned to trade with Native Americans while settling Scots-Irish and German settlers to raise land values by colonizing the Ohio River Valley.

The scheme met resistance from the rival Loyal Land Company and Governor Gooch, but eventually was approved by the Board of Trade. After Thomas Lee’s death, leadership passed to Lawrence Washington, then to other directors. The company sent Christopher Gist to explore the Ohio country, built a fortified storehouse at Wills Creek, and cut a road from the Potomac to the Monongahela. Under Governor Robert Dinwiddie, these activities drew French opposition, leading George Washington to carry a warning to French commanders in 1753.

French troops soon destroyed the company’s fort at the forks of the Ohio and built Fort Duquesne. Washington’s clash with a French detachment and surrender at Fort Necessity helped ignite the French and Indian War. After the war, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and then the Vandalia Scheme or Grand Ohio Company dispute blocked Virginia’s claims, and Richard Henry Lee and George Mason fought the loss of what they saw as Virginia’s charter rights.

In the Revolution’s aftermath, Virginia invalidated Hancock Lee’s Kentucky surveys, ending most of the company’s land ambitions, and thus the attempts of the Virginia gentry to buy up and settle the frontier.

Chapters

0:00 The British and French Empires Clash Over the American Frontier

4:43 Thomas Lee’s Western Vision

7:40 Thomas Lee’s Lancaster Treaty Triumph

10:23 How the Ohio Company of Virginia Was Founded

13:38 The Loyal Land Company Power Struggle Over Western Lands

18:59 The Ohio Company Gets Its Grant

24:24 Mapping the Frontier as The French Advance

31:25 The French and Indian War Erupts in Ohio, and the Ohio Company is Involved

33:03 The 1763 Proclamation that Blocked Virginia’s Expansion

34:10 Benjamin Franklin’s “Grand Ohio Company” Vandalia Threat Emerges, and Richard Henry Lee Fights Back

38:50 The Ohio Company’s Kentucky Gamble

42:42 The Ohio Company’s Legacy: A Western Dream Fulfilled

Sources Referenced in this Episode:

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

Andrews, Matthew Page, Virginia, the Old Dominion, https://amzn.to/3RnSGlG

Bruce, Philip Alexander, The Virginia Plutarch, https://amzn.to/4pAHmiI

Dabney, Virginius, Virginia: The New Dominion, https://amzn.to/4pIazbC

Evans, Emory G., A Topping People, https://amzn.to/4wjtuMo

Freeman, Douglas Southall, Washington, https://amzn.to/3Td5Qm1

Hendrick, Burton J., The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4fSZzDR

James, Alfred Procter, The Ohio Company: Its Inner History, https://amzn.to/45fXNYf

Lee, Cazenove Gardner, Jr., Lee Chronicle, https://amzn.to/4hphN1R

McGaughy, Kent J., Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4wW9Buw

Middlekauff, Robert, The Glorious Cause, https://amzn.to/4pJQx0f

Morton, Richard L., Colonial Virginia, https://amzn.to/4wicgin

Nagel, Paul C., The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/3TffhkW

Selby, John E., The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783, https://amzn.to/4wWd4Jw

Unger, Harlow Giles, First Founding Father, https://amzn.to/4b5xjw1

Willison, George F., Behold Virginia: The Fifth Crown, https://amzn.to/4wSaYdD

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The current view of property, generally, is that it exists so that those who own it can do with it as they please, free from all constraints regarding pro-social behavior. Particularly, there is no conception of any duty being attached to ownership of property other than the Dodge v. Ford Motors-created mandate1 that public companies maximize shareholder returns. That this case was sparked by Ford wanting to pay his employees better and hold cash in reserve for future expansion—something with which the Dodge brothers disagreed—shows its momentous import: the only “duty” as regards property in post-Managerial Revolution American life is that of short-termism and maximal extraction. This is un-American, in addition to being socially caustic, for it is the opposite of the view of the men who built America.

The ways in which this is socially caustic should be obvious.

“Libertarian Economics” and National Decline

For one, there’s offshoring, outsourcing, H-1B visas, and all the rest: left unprotected by tariffs, squeezed by communist-connected trade unions,2 and facing the depredations of a hostile government, business leaders started offshoring some industry in the mid-20th century. Even as regulations were loosened by Reagan and HW in the later decades, the trickle of offshoring turned into a flood with the opening of China and the rise of globalization. Entire communities saw the work on which they relied gradually wiped away, America lost much of her industrial base, and the idea that perhaps deindustrialization and the dispossession of the American worker ought be treated with some degree of seriousness and duty was waved away with scorn. Higher market returns, Big Business mouthpieces like the National Review insisted, were all that mattered.

This, broadly, is the libertarian view of property—“libertarian economics,” as the subscriber who asked me to write this article refers to it—in its most basic form: it exists to produce a return tomorrow, and that return is the highest god. Anything else is either irrelevant or damnable, or perhaps both. It is good for a factory owner to import Haitians to work in the factory rather than training the locals to do so, we are told by proponents of this argument, because the Haitians will work for lower wages and thus the factory’s profits will be higher.

Ignored is that the Haitians and their dependents rely on welfare, bring blight to those communities in which they live, and simply aren’t and won’t ever be Americans. All that matters is that the factory will be somewhat more profitable tomorrow; the owner of it is not seen, by proponents of this view of economics, as having any duties as to the community in which he built his industrial plant, the people in it, or his countrymen.

Capital is merely a number that ought earn the highest possible return, not a tool to assume the burden of duty and make the place in which one lives—at the local, state, or federal level—better. That view isn’t expressed in the work of von Mises, Hayek, or the others that libertarians cite. But as our country has gotten dumber and reads less, every concept involving the general public gets reduced to its most basic and imbecilic variant, and that is where we now are.

In any case, such an attitude toward capital and society is excoriated by JD Vance in his Hillbilly Elegy: the American worker was left to rot, and treated as an outmoded piece of equipment rather than a fellow citizen worthy of some consideration. The problem has gotten worse with its extension to the tech sector through the H-1B visa. Now Americans are being displaced by imported foreign labor that works for peanuts, and are told that is a good thing because of some vague concept of efficiency and the Dodge-demanded quest for higher returns. The problem will get worse as AI wipes away yet more middle-class work.

But it leads to much more than poor industrial and labor policy. “Die with Nothing”, a horrific concept my friend has done much to combat,3 is an outgrowth of this idea: it is a horrendously nihilistic belief that could only stem from the belief that this is all there is, and thus that extraction and hedonism ought be prized above all else. Build a great fortune, so that it can be spent on cruises and donated to some NGO that hates your progeny, if you had any. There is no sense of stewardship or greatness to such an idea, just the hedonism that grows from thinking of life and property as separate.

Then there is the general refusal of our “business leaders” to actually be leaders. Britain’s landed elite suffered a 20% death rate in the Great War, one comparable to the worst periods of the Middle Ages, such as the War of the Roses. America’s oligarchic families all had college degrees to obtain, or heel spurs and asthma, when their time came in the 20th century. A few exceptions abound; Teddy Roosevelt’s son died like a lion and earned the Medal of Honor. But those exceptions stand out because they are the exception that proves the rule. It’s impossible to imagine Sam Altman answering the call of duty, or even to think of the average successful businessman uttering an unpopular opinion in public. Complain as they might in private about crime or floods of cheap Chinese goods, they have no conception that they ought be the ones—successful and secure as they are—to try to alter politics for the better. That might impede further “wealth creation”! Disconnected from duty, they instead focus on maximum returns.

All of those outgrowths of the same general perspective boil down to the same basic problem: whereas once we were governed by gentlemen with a shared sense of duty and purpose, now we are ruled by a conceited collection of bureaucrats and plutocrats whose basic conception of life is that “get yours” is the highest good. Left uneducated about the traditional American alternative, those who could and should do better and push back against such a view instead just generally shrug and try to get theirs. Perhaps they donate a few dollars to a candidate or NGO about whom they know nothing, but that is it. Wealth has been severed from church and state, much to our detriment.

The American Alternative in Which Our Founders Believed

There is an alternative to this, and it is the sort of duty-centered mindset that built Virginia. As Virginia produced the majority of the crop of men who led the Revolution and the Early Republic, understanding how those men viewed the world, particularly the interaction between duty and property, is of critical importance. Their belief stands as a sterling rebuke of “libertarian economics”.

The Cavalier View of the World

To understand the American system that developed in Virginia, it is necessary to understand what created it: the Cavalier conception of society as a triune whole composed of property, church, and state. This is the idea that sits at the center of Morris Talpalar’s superb The Sociology of Colonial Virginia. As he recognized, under the Cavalier view, property, church, and state are not tripartite but triune, and in a properly ordered society are organized toward the cultivation of a flourishing and traditional society. As Talpalar puts it:

The supporters of the feudal society, called Cavaliers, were dedicated to three basic principles: no country without a king, no church without a bishop, no land without a lord which established a union of state, church and property.

Yet further, the organization of this society was to be such that those at the center of it—landed gentlemen, trained in virtue and duty by the Church and the Classics—were to be ever-watchful for both tyranny and social disorder. The duty of a landed gentleman was to protect his people from the tyranny of a centralized state in addition to the society-shredding chaos of an anarchic world.4 For this reason, the Cavaliers would not and could not isolate church, state, and property. Their society required that religious authority, political governance, and land ownership be permanently interwoven to sustain the hierarchical world governed by gentlemen.

Indeed, the way in which those three pillars of their civilization were interwoven ensured that they complemented each other. The autarkic landed unit enabled the lord of it to lead resistance to a would-be tyrant, as shown at Runnymede when Magna Carta was forced upon King John by landed lords and their landed gentry retainers.5 The Established church kept social subversion—both of the moral and egalitarian6 varieties—at bay. The king (or state generally, as time went on) ensured order within his dominions, and relied upon his lords to handle the administrative burden at the local level while also standing ready to resist foreign threats.7 As land was the basis of the system, primogeniture and entail were used by Property to pass it on, and this was not just respected but protected by the state. Each party of the system complemented the others.

This philosophy rejected the idea of separating social institutions, and instead forged a powerful union between the state, the Anglican Church, and real estate to create and preserve a ruling landed elite.

Such is why, for example, the Virginia gentry worked with Gov. Sir William Berkeley (with the governor and his Council effectively serving as the king in the colony) to expel the Quakers and Puritans.8 They were seen as disorder-bringing subversives9 who would weaken the Established Church and thus the ordered, traditional, and moral society that it anchored. In wanting to sever property, church, and state, they were seen as inviting disorder of a sort that would bring tyranny and social harm.

Given that the Quakers steadfastly refused to help defend the colony from murderous savages,10 the authorities were obviously correct in wanting them removed and replaced with those who would be valuable and participatory members of society. That the Quakers could be “remorselessly erased”11 as they were was because church, state, and property were organized around the same general view of societal flourishing and how to establish it; such a society did not allow the shirking of duty from any of its members, high or low.

To the Cavaliers who arrived in, leavened, and built Virginia under Berkeley—a mixture of great and humble alike—land was not just an investment nor a mere commodity to be bought and sold in search for a return, but rather the sacred foundation of social station, personal freedom, and political prerogative.

The American Innovation

Thus, what developed in Virginia was a triune whole consisting of the plantation (the economic unit), the county (the legislative and judicial unit), and the parish (the ecclesiastical unit). All three of these pillars were tightly controlled by the same colonial gentry,12 and are what allowed the state to develop into the “Golden Age” that produced our Founders.

As disgust with the Stuarts turned formerly staunch Royalists into Whigs with the arrival of foreign monarchs after the passing of Queen Anne,13 this formulation changed somewhat, but only slightly: the king gradually lost his exalted place and was replaced by the society of landed gentlemen.

Their society was a pyramid, with varying rights and responsibilities depending on which part of the pyramid one inhabited, but it had no apex.14 Instead, the ever-permeable class of governing families was to be defined by its property, acting in support of the Established Church, and composing the governing bodies and infrastructure of the state.

The remainder of this article—covering how the Cavalier view was adapted to America, how it built the nation, how we could adapt it to modern America, and why doing so would be good for the right—is for paid subscribers. All those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, get ad-free versions of my history videos, and read this article in full.

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As a reminder, these history episodes are provided ad-free to paid subscribers. If you would like to watch it in full without subscribing, you can listen on YouTube or Spotify! If you would like to read it, the (rough) transcript, with timestamps, is provided below the paywall.

This episode follows William Lee of Stratford Hall, a younger son of the Lee family who was trained in the tobacco economy rather than given the advantages of his older brothers. After his father’s death, he worked under Philip Ludwell Lee as a clerk, steward, and estate manager, overseeing tobacco rents, warehouses, and shipping operations at Stratford Hall, the seat of the Lee family of Virginia and a major center of commerce in the colonial tobacco trade. The experience taught him how the Atlantic tobacco trade worked and how British merchants and factors controlled much of its profit.

William Lee then became a London tobacco factor and built his own merchant house in London, starting in 1768. He strengthened it through his marriage to Hannah Philippa Ludwell, which brought him capital and the historic Green Spring estate. From Tower Hill, he sold tobacco directly for his Virginia relatives and supplied them with imported goods, while also becoming active in London’s civic politics. He rose to sheriff and then alderman of the City of London, and in that role, he publicly presented petitions critical of the Lord North ministry’s conduct in America.

As the war worsened, Lee warned that the colonies could not depend on British goodwill and would have to rely on their own efforts. In 1777, he left London, gave up his business, and went to Nantes as a commercial agent for the United States. There, he found corruption in the American supply system and reported what he saw, clashing with Thomas Morris, Silas Deane, Jonathan Williams, Benjamin Franklin, and Robert Morris.

After being pushed out of Nantes, Lee was sent to Berlin and Vienna, where he received no useful audience. Cut off from official diplomacy, he traveled to Aix-la-Chapelle and drafted an unauthorized treaty with a representative tied to Amsterdam merchants. The treaty was later discovered on Henry Laurens and used by Britain as grounds for war with the Dutch Republic, which forced Britain to divert ships from America and helped weaken its blockade before Yorktown.

After the war, Lee returned to Virginia without compensation or public thanks. He died in 1795.

Chapters

0:00 The Lee Family of Virginia and the Sinews of Empire

2:51 The Education of William Lee

5:24 William’s Stratford Hall Apprenticeship

8:31 William’s Success as a London Tobacco Merchant

11:59 William Lee’s Rise in London Politics and Power

16:29 William’s Flight to France

18:22 Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin: More Corruption in Nantes

20:53 William’s Militia Diplomacy Masterstroke

25:25 The Dutch Treaty Triggers War

27:53 A Bitter Homecoming: Forgotten, Alone, and Blind

31:54 The Legacy of William Lee

Sources Referenced in this Episode:

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

Potts, Louis W.: Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary, https://amzn.to/4vpFLOF

Riggs, A.R.: The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee, Virginia Patriot, https://amzn.to/3Rh08Pd

Nagel, Paul C.: The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Dynasty, https://amzn.to/4uCI6o9

Hendrick, Burton J.: The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4uCN4BF

Lee, Cazenove G. Jr.: Lee Chronicle: Studies of the Early Generations of the Lees, https://amzn.to/4vGzbDe

McGaughy, J. Kent: Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4ewtGA4

Burt, Nathaniel: First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy, https://amzn.to/3Sopnj2

American Revolutionaries in the Making By Charles S. Sydnor, https://amzn.to/4dZsPaZ

The First Gentlemen of Virginia By Louis B. Wright, https://amzn.to/43dW3Oh

Tobacco Culture By T. H. Breen,https://amzn.to/43N4FLY

Transcript

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1. Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece by Adrian Goldsworthy

Adrian Goldsworthy is one of my favorite historical writers. His books tend to balance being fun to read without being vapid, and are full of detail without being overwhelming or boring. While I have mainly stuck to his Roman histories so far, I decided to branch out and get his newest book, Athens and Sparta.

It is fantastic. It is as fascinating as the best of his other works, manages to balance narrative and historical detail near-perfectly, and presents the interesting (and quite relevant) thesis that it was competition rather than unity that made the Greek world of Classical Antiquity great.

I wrote about that thesis and my thoughts on it in the article below, so I won’t be repetitive here, but I think it is a superbly argued claim that’s well supported by the evidence he brings, and the tales he uses to tell it are fabulously written. Despite this being a somewhat dense historical work, I had trouble putting it down; it was truly excellent, one of my favorite books I have so far read this year.

2. The Lees of Virginia: Biography of a Family by Burton J. Hendrick

In May, I read Nagel’s The Lees of Virginia. It was a near-total disappointment, being mainly about myth-breaking rather than the history of the Lees of Virginia. So, searching for another, better source for my The Old World Show series on the Lees, I turned to Hendrick’s The Lees of Virginia. Written a few decades earlier, it is much better.

Particularly, Hendrick manages to do a much better job of balancing addressing myths like that of the Lees’ Norman ancestry while also telling the story of their magnificent dynasty in a way that doesn’t come across as bitter, biting, or unduly negative. He also does a fantastic job of addressing all of their accomplishments as individuals and a family without getting bogged down in any one generation, as could have happened given the family’s immense contributions during the Revolution and the historical stature of Robert E Lee. That said, he also ends with Robert E Lee rather than discussing the post-bellum generations, such as Gov. Fitz Lee, which was frustrating.

While imperfect, Hendrick’s The Lees of Virginia is probably the best general history of the Lee family out there, as it is more informative than any of the other attempts at telling their history and is much more of a pleasure to read than Nagel or Cazenove Gardner Lee’s work.

On that subject, if I turned my scripts on the Lee family into a proper book—The Lives and Times of the Lees of Virginia—when I finish the series, would you be interested in reading it? It would be primarily a narrative rather than a dense history, but well-cited for those who wish to learn more.

3. The Jamestown Experiment: The Remarkable Story of the Enterprising Colony and the Unexpected Results That Shaped America by Tony Williams

While finishing up my background research on Colonial Virginia, I stumbled across The Jamestown Experiment by Tony Williams. In it, he argues that the early days of communalism and martial law were a disaster and free enterprise—when paired with John Rolfe’s tobacco innovation—saved the Virginia colony.

That’s true enough, but the problem is that it is an argument more suited for an article than a book because it can be proven quite well and relatively easily, so Williams fills the first roughly two-thirds of The Jamestown Experiment with background history of Jamestown and how things went before the system was changed to capitalism of a sort out of necessity. That makes it frustrating to read, as it isn’t a particularly focused work, other sources tell that history better, and the degree of background he provides is unnecessary to his argument. Further, as the book is quite short despite that lengthy introduction, it’s lacking in the sort of hyper-specific detail that might have salvaged it by adding information that more general histories don’t. As it is, it’s just a middling history of Jamestown with an interesting argument tacked onto the end.

The last third on how free enterprise saved the colony is interesting enough, but probably would have been better as an article or pamphlet. That said, this is still a reasonably good introduction for those interested in Jamestown and how its history shaped the fate of Virginia. I just wouldn’t recommend it to those who have already read anything good on the subject.

4. Tidewater Dynasty: A Biographical Novel of the Lees of Stratford Hall by Carey Roberts

For what it is, Tidewater Dynasty is fabulous. It is a novelization of (some) the history of the branch of the Lee family that lived at Stratford Hall, tracking the lives of Thomas Lee and his sons, particularly Richard Henry Lee, before ending with Robert E Lee having to leave Stratford as a little boy because his father, Light Horse Harry, was a speculation-prone and disreputable rogue after the War who lost most of the family’s money. It does a great job of capturing the eras in which it takes place, adding color to the historical record, and using letters and documentation worked into a narrative form to bring a number of great men—particularly Thomas and Richard Henry Lee—to life.

That said, it has its flaws. For one, it ends with Light Horse Harry rather than his eldest son, Black Horse Harry, who is the one who actually lost Stratford (he slept with his wife’s sister and lost her money, which had been the last chance to save the estate). Similarly, it does little to describe the early life of Thomas Lee, instead beginning with him as a young adult who is already feuding with Robert “King” Carter; beginning a bit earlier would have been better. Finally, the novel is unduly hostile to Philip Ludwell Lee, only displaying his vices and leaving out the important fact that he was a reasonably good businessman who did much to ensure Stratford remained prosperous in his lifetime and that his family benefitted from his efforts to turn it into a booming center of maritime commerce (I covered this in my episode on the Lee brothers). So, despite the author’s claim to authenticity, it is somewhat misleading at times.

Overall, however, it’s reasonably accurate, generally informative, and mostly a pleasure to read, so I would recommend it to those interested in Thomas Lee, his sons, and Light Horse Harry.

5. The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams by Pauline Maier

Maier’s The Old Revolutionaries is one of those few works that is not very good, but nevertheless helped clarify my thinking on a particular subject—in this case, the unique character of our Founding Fathers. In it, Maier profiles a number of the early American Revolutionaries, whom she labels “the Old Revolutionaries”. She then contrasts their more radical and egalitarian views with the views of the generally more hierarchy-minded Founding Fathers.

It’s a good book in that that is an interesting argument, and Maier makes it reasonably well in a few of the chapters. It is a bad book in that 1) the pacing is terrible and the writing boring, so it is a real snoozefest to read, and 2) she lumps in more complex characters like Richard Henry Lee with outright radicals like Dr. Thomas Young and Isaac Sears. She also ignores some of the more important early revolutionaries, such as Arthur Lee, whose pamphleteering did much to ignite sentiment in America and Britain. Overall, that means that The Old Revolutionaries includes both too broad and too narrow a collection of men: it is too broad to be coherent, and too narrow to present a full picture of the group she describes. The work would have been much better if confined to discussing the Yankee radicals of the early revolutionary period, as they were generally the Leveller types of whom she intended to write, and the argument would have been far more coherent.

If you are interested in the Founders, you might want to read this one. It isn’t absolutely terrible, but it isn’t particularly good either. I’d probably recommend against it unless you want to read it and imagine how terribly the Revolution could have gone had not the hierarchical Virginians and John Adams largely taken over by the mid-1770s.

6. The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of “King” Carter and the Golden Age by Clifford Dowdey

I reread part of The Virginia Dynasties to prepare for my episode on The First Families of Virginia, along with my episodes on the lives of Richard Lee I and Richard Lee II, as finding information about them elsewhere is difficult. It is a fabulous book that tells the story of how a few merchants and second sons created a colonial gentry that led the most important state in the union for centuries.

It is particularly useful as a resource to learn about the dynasts behind the “Topping People” families, particularly the Lee, Carter, and Byrd dynasts. Dowdey is a fantastic writer who tells the story well and provides a wealth of valuable information in narrative form that makes it easy to read and understand.

I recommend this one unreservedly.

7. Institutional History Of Virginia In The Seventeenth Century, Vols I and II by Philip Alexander Bruce

After reading Bruce’s other works, I decided to order and read this two-volume set as well, as Gemini told me it might be a useful way to learn a bit more about Richard Lee I. While that was incorrect—it contains next to no information of interest about him—it was an interesting set, and taught me a great deal about how the Virginia militia and church were structured in the early days of the colony, along with providing more information about how the institutions involved in the Virginia cursus honorum came into being.

On the whole, this one probably isn’t necessary for anyone to read. It’s hyper-specific, and probably not of interest to 999/1000 people. But Bruce is a good writer, it is probably the most interesting of his non-biographical works, and it includes a tremendous amount of detail not available elsewhere. So, if you are 1 in 1000, you might enjoy it. I would recommend finding an original printing, as the modern print-on-demand options are uniformly terrible and about as expensive.

His commentary on the militia and self-defense in colonial Virginia, by far the most interesting part of it, formed the bedrock of research for this article, which is probably of more interest to you than the actual books:

8. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary by Kent McGaughy

Of the biographies of the Founders I have read, particularly those connected to the Lee family, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia was one of my favorites. In it, McGaughy does a commendable job of tracing the origins and history of the Lee family leading up to Richard Henry, then using that to show from what milieu Richard Henry came and how he developed as a man, a planter, and a politician.

What makes this book particularly good is that McGaughy manages to craft an entertaining and engrossing narrative that also conveys a great deal of detail about Richard Henry’s achievements and how his status as a Lee of Virginia and tobacco planter connected with Stratford helped and hindered him in those achievements. Yet further, the added details on his family life and relationships with his brothers help add a great deal of coloring to those men, who have not been written about in as much depth as Richard Henry.

So, I wholeheartedly recommend this one. While it is near-exclusively focused on the man and his family rather than also including much context on his times, it is otherwise excellent and is an absolute pleasure to read.

If you’re interested in the life of Richard Henry Lee, check out my show on him here:

9. First Founding Father: Richard Henry Lee and the Call to Independence by Harlow Giles Unger

First Founding Father by Unger is a significantly weaker work than McGaughy’s biography of Richard Henry Lee. It’s not necessarily a bad book—had I read it in isolation, I probably would have given it a 7 or 8 stars out of ten—but it does pale in comparison to McGaughy’s. It is less informative, less interesting, and includes a number of myths about Richard Henry (such as that he wasn’t really a planter, and was instead single-mindedly devoted to politics) that McGaughy shows to be false.

As Unger’s book is the more recently published one—meaning he had access to that information but failed to include it or explain why he thought it was incorrect—that pushing of falsehoods is inexcusable.

Still, Unger's work has its moments, and isn’t entirely bad. It is particularly useful for those who want to learn about his political career in comparison to his contemporaries. But McGaughy’s work is far better, as is a third biography of him I’ll discuss a few works later.

10. Arthur Lee, a Virtuous Revolutionary by Louis Potts

Arthur Lee has been all but forgotten in our day, but in his age he was probably the second most important of the Lee brothers of Stratford Hall, that gallant generation that helped effect and win the Revolution. He was a pamphleteer in the pre-Revolution days, a spy in London for the Patriot cause in the early days of war, a diplomat who secured the arms that won Saratoga, and one of the notable Anti-Federalists of later days.

Yet he has been mostly forgotten, primarily because he was an exceedingly difficult and unpleasant man, even in an era full of such types, and got along well with no one except a few relatives and fellow revolutionaries. He got along particularly badly with Benjamin Franklin, which did much to damn his memory in the eyes of Yankee historians of the Revolution, though Lee was vindicated in the end, as I covered in my episode on him.

Potts does a fabulous job in Arthur Lee, A Virtuous Revolutionary of showing what intellectual forces shaped Arthur, why his eclectic career developed as it did, why he behaved as he did, and what he accomplished for the patriot cause…along with why his accomplishments were generally forgotten. All in all, this is one of the more interesting books I read in June, in no small part because I knew very little about this difficult and brilliant man before researching his life.

If you are interested in him, watch my show on his life here:

11. The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee, Virginia Patriot by AR Riggs

The “book” The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee was really a bound pamphlet put out by Virginia about one of its greatest but forgotten sons for the bicentennial. For that reason, finding copies can be difficult, though they’re generally not expensive.

It’s a “basically fine” read. Potts’ work is better, as it is more detailed and the narrative Potts constructed is more interesting, and the information within them is otherwise quite similar. If you find a copy, it isn’t a bad book, and I learned some from it. But Potts’ work is the one to get if you only want to read one work on the fabulously interesting Arthur Lee.

From what I can tell, there are only two biographies on the man, so this one is either the second best or worst, depending on how you look at it.

12. Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero by Ryan Cole

Light Horse Harry Lee is a fabulously interesting man. As a child and teenager, he was known for his academic brilliance. As a young man, he was known for his courageous leadership of “Lee’s Legion” in the Revolution, and thus entered the annals of history as one of the few truly great American cavalry commanders. He was the only non-general to win a specially struck gold medal from Congress, a tactical genius, and a brave fighter. Then he quit in a huff, and from there his life was one long slide down the path to ruin. He wasted two fortunes, imploded his political career, dishonored Anne Carter Lee, and served mainly as an example of what not to do to his young son Robert E Lee.

Ryan Cole, in his Light-Horse Harry Lee, tells the story of how that happened and why his life went as it did. Cole describes his exploits and failures, his victories on the battlefield and disastrous speculations.

Overall, this is a reasonably good book. It’s an easy read, the narrative flows well, and there’s enough information in it to make it worthwhile. That said, I didn’t finish it with the impression that I had read a fantastic biography, as I did with McGaughy’s biography of Richard Henry Lee. But it is serviceable for what it is, and is probably of interest to those interested in the Lee family, Light-Horse Harry, and/or Robert E Lee.

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13. Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution by Charles Royster

Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution by Royster is another reasonably good, though not fantastic, biography of Harry Lee. I probably enjoyed it somewhat more than Cole’s, but the difference is mostly negligible. The information in them is broadly similar, as could be expected given that the Cavalier of the Revolution’s life was well documented.

The only real difference is that Royster argues Harry’s disgraced end was only different in degree from that of his fellow Revolutionary patriots, nearly all of whom ended life disappointed in the American people and state of the American government, and some of whom also died in dire financial straits, though few as bad as Harry’s predicament. That argument is somewhat convincing, though it breezes over the fact that the gulf between Harry’s disgraceful end and the somewhat distressed ends of some of his contemporaries was quite a wide one.

You probably don’t need to read both Cole and Royster’s work. Of the two, I liked this one marginally better, but both are reasonably good.

14. Richard Henry Lee, Statesman of the Revolution by Oliver Perry Chitwood

Before beginning my episode on Richard Henry Lee, I noticed that most books about the Revolution and Founders I read cited, when remarking upon the remarkable life of Richard Henry, neither Unger nor McGaughy. Instead, they referenced Oliver Perry Chitwood’s Richard Henry Lee, Statesman of the Revolution. So, when I finally found a reasonably priced copy of Chitwood’s work, I ordered and read it.

It lived up to expectations. Though perhaps marginally duller in terms of narrative than McGaughy’s, it is absolutely fantastic and is packed full of valuable information told well. Further, it is a good bit more focused on his political career and accomplishments, and so does a great deal more to show how integral he was to America’s success in the Revolution and why the Revolution played out as it did. Further, Perry does a great deal more to explain Richard Henry Lee’s post-independence political career and how he helped shape the new nation during the Articles of Confederation days, which was of a great deal of interest to me.

All in all, this one is fabulous. I would have trouble deciding between it and McGaughy’s, as the two complement each other quite well, with McGaughy more focused on Richard Henry the man and Chitwood on his political achievements. Overall, it is fantastic, and certainly worth reading.

15. R.E. Lee: A Biography, Vols I-IV by Douglas Southall Freeman

Finally, I read all four volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee: A Biography. Really, I finished these in July, but as I started them in June, I decided to include them in this month’s roundup.

I had mixed feelings about this famed work. On one hand, it is obvious why it is the definitive history of Lee: Freeman’s attention to detail is incredible, his writing is superb, and the amount of meticulous research that obviously went into them is nearly unbelievable. So, they are a wealth of information, and will likely remain the definitive work on Robert E Lee for all time.

That said, they can be a bit much, as I covered in a recent article on the subject. The painstaking descriptions of each battle in minute detail, the compulsive effort to include every scrap of information available and compress it into ~2500 pages, and the general inability to just move the narrative along rather than discuss every single matter in depth is just a bit over the top. That’s not to say they are bad. As a dense, complete history of a great man of history, they’re a fantastic set of volumes that do a great deal to show his exceptional character.

But I tend to prefer biographies that are longer versions of the sort found in Plutarch: stories that tell the tale of a man and his character, rather than exhaustive studies of everything he did or said. Others likely disagree with me on that. Nevertheless, it’s the reason I prefer Clifford Dowdey’s work to Freeman’s, as I discussed here:

Still, this set is fantastic, and you should read it if interested. Just set aside a lot of time to do so.

I hope you enjoyed those book reviews. They are always fun to write, and most of the books are fun to read. If you have made it this far, and are not yet a paid subscriber, I would really appreciate you upgrading your subscription. These books are quite expensive, and your subscriptions on here enable me to continue reading and reviewing works like these, all while producing new content that you find interesting. Thank you!

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Without Arthur Lee, America would not have won the revolution: one of the earliest revolutionaries and most important pamphleteers, he became a spy and diplomat whose efforts secured the arms that won the battle of Saratoga. Yet now he is all but forgotten. Why? He was described by John Adams as a man too honest and intrepid to be popular, and the episode traces how that temperament shaped his career, a career that was integral to the Founding of America and victory in the American Revolution.

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Born at Stratford Hall, Arthur Lee was the youngest son of Thomas Lee. Educated in Britain, Arthur was trained in the classics at Eton, where Greek and Latin study, particularly the works of Sallust, shaped his moral and political thinking. He became intelligent, gifted, and difficult, developing an unyielding belief in virtue and Republican principles.

He then studied medicine at Edinburgh and Leiden, earned a medical doctorate with high honors, and returned to Virginia to practice in Williamsburg. He disliked the provincial setting and quickly grew frustrated with colonial medicine. During this period, he also became involved in a duel-related dispute with the Mercer Family connected to his brother Richard Henry Lee’s role in the Stamp Act controversy, an incident that was defused before it turned deadly.

Lee later returned to Britain and shifted from medicine to law, studying at Lincoln’s Inn and the Middle Temple. In London, he moved among intellectual circles, became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and began writing political pamphlets. Under pseudonyms such as Monitor and Junius Americanus, he attacked Parliament’s Townshend Act policies and argued for colonial rights, becoming the most influential radical writer of his day.

With the outbreak of war, Congress commissioned Arthur Lee as a secret diplomatic agent. He worked with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais to secure covert French and Spanish aid through the fake firm Rodriguez Hortalez and Company, helping arrange arms and supplies that supported the American forces over 1777, particularly during the war-changing Saratoga campaign. He also traveled to Spain and Prussia, where he negotiated for aid and had his papers stolen and copied by British agents.

Lee’s later service in the American commission in Passy, outside Paris, brought conflict with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane. He accused Deane of corruption and Edward Bancroft of espionage, but Franklin rejected his claims. These disputes split American diplomacy, led to Lee’s recall in 1779, and left him politically isolated.

After returning to America, a journey interrupted by two mutinies he provoked aboard the Alliance, Arthur Lee served in Virginia and Congress, worked on treasury oversight, and later withdrew to Lansdowne, where he lived in isolation and died in 1792. A century later, archival evidence confirmed some of his suspicions about Bancroft and Deane.

All in all, Lee was a gifted patriot and his role in the American Revolution was long underestimated. This is the story of how a doctor, lawyer, pamphleteer, spy, diplomat, politician, and planter was, at his core, a patriot who helped win the Revolution.

Chapters

0:00 Arthur Lee: The Forgotten Patriot

4:15 How Studying the Classics Turned Arthur Lee Into a Revolutionary

8:36 Arthur’s Foray into Medicine and London Politics

12:21 Arthur Lee Almost Fights a Duel with George Mercer

15:54 Radical Writer in the Empire

19:11 America’s First Secret Agent

24:53 “Militia Diplomacy” in Paris, Spain, and Berlin

30:40 Squabbles with Benjamin Franklin, Feuds with Silas Dean, and the Discovery of Corruption

36:56 Arthur Lee’s Recall from France, Mutiny on the Alliance, and Homeward Exile

47:01 Arthur Lee Vindicated by the British Archives

48:56 Arthur Lee’s Revolutionary Legacy

Sources Referenced in this Episode:

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

Potts, Louis W.: Arthur Lee: A Virtuous Revolutionary, https://amzn.to/4vpFLOF

Riggs, A.R.: The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee, Virginia Patriot, https://amzn.to/3Rh08Pd

Nagel, Paul C.: The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Dynasty, https://amzn.to/4uCI6o9

Hendrick, Burton J.: The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4uCN4BF

Lee, Cazenove G. Jr.: Lee Chronicle: Studies of the Early Generations of the Lees, https://amzn.to/4vGzbDe

McGaughy, J. Kent: Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4ewtGA4

Burt, Nathaniel: First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy, https://amzn.to/3Sopnj2

American Revolutionaries in the Making By Charles S. Sydnor, https://amzn.to/4dZsPaZ

The First Gentlemen of Virginia By Louis B. Wright, https://amzn.to/43dW3Oh

Tobacco Culture By T. H. Breen,https://amzn.to/43N4FLY

Image credits:

Landsdowne house, By Ryanlintelman - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:/ /commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40834707

Transcript

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Flock Cameras are covering the country (100,000 of them surveil 6000 communities), and so a wildly disparate collection of leftist anarchists, libertarians, and right-wing dissidents are going berserk about this obvious threat to liberty. Who can live free, after all, if one’s every move is watched by a vast panopticon created and funded by one’s tax dollars under the supposed guise of building infrastructure to catch fugitive criminals? No one, particularly in the land of Three Felonies a Day.

That said, the response has also been as incoherent and fragmented as could be expected from so disparate a collection of mutually hostile interest groups. Should the cameras be cut down, as has long happened with ULEZ carbon-tracking cameras in London? Should a national law banning them be passed? Should control of the most boring version of the Ring of Power—the vast surveillance network built to spy on ordinary Americans—be appropriated to instead catch “changing consumer habits” (Pitbull Americans) committing crimes en masse?

Nobody knows. Even fewer people care, really. The point is not the solution, nor even what Flock cameras are really being used for, or even if they are actually being used for anything malicious. People want to be left alone, and the surveillance dragnet that AI has finally enabled is making people realize that they are not, in fact, being left alone. Perhaps we’ll soon get whatever the modern equivalents of torches and pitchforks are in response to this obvious tyranny.

The problem is that such a response, whatever the level of response actually is—from Luigi Mangione-style “direct action” to posting a black square on Instagram in #solidarity with some stupid cause or another—is almost always futile and self-destructive. As I spoke about in my recent podcast on the Virginia Gentry with , going postal rarely achieves anything productive. Peasant rebellions always fail, even if they sometimes produce dashing figures like Florian Geyer and Nathaniel Bacon. Perhaps today’s anti-Flock rebellion can come up with a phrase as exciting as “Nulla Crux, Nulla Corona”1 before they too get obliterated. Regardless, rebellion alone means the cameras will rise and stay, in the end.

That’s depressing, of course, particularly given that the national political scene is largely too full of comically inept lemmings at best and comically evil spiteful mutants at worst to ever deal with the “omnipresent, AI-enabled surveillance infrastructure” issue. It’s unlikely one in four Congressmen could even tell you what the Fourth Amendment provides, much less how it is applicable to the Flock issue. Regardless, Congress doesn’t legislate anymore—malicious, anti-liberty goblins called bureaucrats do—so it’s mostly a moot point.

The national political scene can still be pushed in a direction that is useful on some overarching issues, like taxes, general regulations, and whether cannibalistic race communists imported from Gambia have the right to eat my liver in the name of cultural sensitivity. It is less useful for handling similarly pressing but much more mundane or specific issues, such as whether the town of Somaliland, Michigan gets Flock cameras that will be used to ticket (white) residents for going 5 mph over the speed limit while doing nothing to stop the Somalis from stealing trillions of tax dollars. Such is the state of our anarchotyranny regime.

The simple truth is that no one in that scene cares about that issue. Congressmen, after all, don’t care about what outraged voters care about; even large popular movements have effectively no ability to shape Congressional policy in the absence of elite support.2 Members of Congress care about what their donors care about, and the donors don’t care about this, nor anything like it. They might be dragged to caring about some issues like immigration after the immigrants start targeting the wealthy (this is why the 1920 bombing of JP Morgan led to the exceedingly restrictive 1924 Immigration Act), but a few rabble-rousers and serially disaffected types using hacksaws to cut down camera poles won’t do the trick.

That doesn’t mean the problem is hopeless, nor is this a new problem: it is, after all, why our ancestors came to America.

Virginia became the land of the Cavaliers because its settlers wanted to make money in a way that would have been made generally impossible by the hidebound stagnation of Britain, and because they wanted to be sovereign in a way that never would have been possible for them—whether younger sons, tradesmen, or indentured servants—in that settled society. For them, sovereignty meant a union of church, state, and property into a governing gentry that rising new men entered as they became capable of doing so. For the Puritans to the North of those Cavaliers, self-sovereignty meant being able to be religious dissidents and avoid suffering the rigors of state persecution for their Dissenter stance. For the Scots-Irish frontiersmen, it meant being generally free of any landed elite telling them what to do…though Andrew Jackson came to represent the sort of Scots-Irish gentry that developed in America.

In every case, there was the idea that a given locality ought generally be left alone to be in charge of those decisions that impacted it the most, and that such localized sovereignty meant different men would live differently. Hence the differences and similarities between the Tidewater, the frontier, and New England, amongst other regions. Further, there was a sense that those men of good quality who composed the community—generally white men of good character who possessed at least some property—should have a say in that community’s decisions and would be led by the best men of the community in putting those preferences into practice. The degree to which this was the case varied, but on the whole it was more community involvement than in England.

This combination of democracy and aristocracy reached its flowering peak in Revolutionary Virginia, as Charles Sydnor notes in American Revolutionaries in the Making:

Eighteenth-century Virginia did not regard democracy and aristocracy as contradictory kinds of government. It employed both of these qualities in its political system, and it was the interplay of these two forces, democratic and aristocratic, that gave to the government of colonial Virginia much of that distinctive quality which made for the selection of those men who ruled Virginia during the era of the American Revolution.

Notably, the aristocratic tendencies of the state’s political system ensured exceedingly high-quality men were involved,3 and the democratic tendencies ensured that men who actually cared about the community and putting its general interests into practice in the most effective way possible were the ones elected.4

That wasn’t all. There was also an understanding that the liberty to participate in deciding the state of exception in one’s community meant one also had the obligation to remain informed about the issues confronting one’s community, the various candidates involved, and to participate to the best of one’s ability. No propertied man of good character missed election day: it was his duty to show up, and so he did so. This sense of duty compelling one to be politically involved was true at the voter level, and was also true at the level of the politically leading gentry. As Carl Bridenbaugh notes in his Myths and Realities, noblesse oblige was cultivated to ensure that the highly competent remained rooted to and interested in that which was best for their people as well.5 As Chitwood puts it in Richard Henry Lee, Statesman of the Revolution:

The wealthy planters of colonial Virginia, especially those of the eighteenth century, seemed to feel that their position carried with it the duty to take the lead in securing for their fellow countrymen a wise and just political system. And few of the Virginia patriciate of that day were influenced more by a sense of noblesse oblige than was Richard Henry Lee.

This duty to provide good governance, for example, was why the Cavaliers chased the Quakers out of Virginia6: they saw them as dangers to public order (which indeed they were).7

Such remains exceedingly relevant, particularly in regard to the Flock issue and others like it. Though many state powers regarding Freedom of Association have been abrogated by Civil Rights Law, there is still an immense amount of room for localities to make their own rules, and even more leeway in the enforcement of rules.

The decision to put these cameras up is not one being made nationally. The legislature doesn’t care one way or another, the NSA can track us all already, and no will exists to muster the “put a camera along every five miles of road” bill that would be necessary to make it happen. No, the decision is being made locally. In nearly every case, it isn’t even the preserve of state legislators or officials, but local office holders…who largely are just as goblin-like and anti-liberty as their national-level bureaucratic peers, if not more so.

Such is an excellent opportunity for productive action that is neither impotent raging about “fighting tyranny” with those unused AR-15s nor impractical demands that Nancy Mace and Cory Booker unite to pass a bill banning the Des Moines police department from putting up license plate cameras. If you want to stop the Flock cameras or change anything of that sort, recovering the old sort of attitude regarding state and local politics, and building infrastructure to wield it for the long term, is the path forward.

The cameras are a great example of this. If you live in a small to moderately sized town, the sort of place where personal politics can still occur and a dedicated group can make a difference, having a group of friends mobilized to run candidates for local positions and get them elected—the sort of thing the colonial Virginia cursus honorum was great at—much of this can be avoided.

You can be the ones who decide not to erect the cameras, and to instead just arrest troublemakers like thieves and vagrants who generally provide the justification for such surveillance infrastructure. That is legal. That is possible. It likely requires a mere few hundred votes and relatively small annual expenditure of campaign funds. Moving to a given place with friends and pressing forward such an agenda would make it even more possible and plausible, and is far easier than sailing across an ocean and building a new civilization out of the primordial forest, as our ancestors did when they sought to build sovereignty for themselves.

That’s not to say it’d be easy, but it is nevertheless possible. It’s also the only real path to any durable gains on this front, or others like it. Whining about zoning, about the HOA, about Flock cameras, and all the rest is not likely to be productive. Nor is chopping down what ones exist; you’ll get arrested, new ones will be raised, and taxes will be raised to pay for those new ones. Resistance is not futile, but sputtering is.

No one cares that you (or I) want to be left alone. That’s not how our political system works, or has ever really worked at the national level.

But we can still shape things at our local level, if we get involved in them at every level of the process, as our ancestors did.

The joke is that the state legislator is different from the national legislator in that he’s owned by a car dealer’s donations rather than Raytheon’s donations. That’s largely true. It’s also an opportunity, for it is much easier to be of commensurate wealth as a car dealer than to build a company as large as Raytheon. It’s also an opportunity to be better than both, and start living out the lifestyles of duty-informed competent governance that built our nation.

The sort of gentry that ruled Virginia in its Golden Age would never have tolerated this nonsense. For one, they had no inclination to do so, being raised to see ordered liberty as the highest good. But also they were personally accountable to those who elected them, and would have been tarred and feathered had they pushed such tyranny.

Such was the union of interests and power between the commons and the gentry that built the state that built the early Republic, and indeed became the model for the early Republic as a whole.

Much of their world is gone, lost to the sands of time and ravages of bureaucratic rule. But flickers of it remain—namely the vast power of localities to make our lives better or worse to an exceedingly appreciable degree—and acting as our ancestors acted to seize that power and use it to make our lives better is the necessary first big step to national renewal. It’s also the way to get those damned cameras off the road.

Here’s how we can rebuild the counter-elite we need to make this possible:

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Was the greatest Christian gentleman in American history, Robert E Lee, of Norman descent? Probably. Was George Washington descended from a Norman? Yes, actually.1 So too are the Grosvenors, Percys, and Fitzwilliams, those noble families from across the Atlantic about whom I occasionally write.

But why does it matter? The Normans are long since gone, after all, their blood and spirit having faded like that of Tolkien’s Numenorians into the general mass of the population. Yet their deeds stand as a testament to a different age, one of shimmering glory rather than droll “progress”, and it is the addition of their spirit that made the English people a great and world-conquering force, changing them into a protagonist of history.

For one, the Normans are one of the most impressive people groups in world history. Small bands of them conquered England, half of France, Sicily, and Southern Italy while also terrorizing the Byzantines and the Mohammedans. They were the history-shaping force of the Medieval world, and did it in little bands of mounted men who couldn’t be stopped.

Such a story is fun and fascinating, and also worth keeping at the top of one’s mind. For example, Erik Prince recommends men read the book To Dare and to Conquer to be reminded of the fact that little bands of great men can achieve incredible things. Much the same is true of studying the Normans and their descendants. During the mid-Medieval period, it was they who, like the subjects of To Dare and to Conquer, achieved unimaginable feats as small bands of intrepid and excellent warriors. As such, to read of them is to be reminded of how personal excellence can shape history, and thus why it must be cultivated.

Then there’s the matter of rejecting leftist tellings of history, namely the tale of the supposed “Norman Yoke”—the claim that the Norman aristocracy was uniquely exploitative in how it ruled the British people after the Conquest.

That phrase has been nonsense from the beginning: its author intended it to castigate William the Conqueror for his harsh rule (he was indeed a scoundrel and tyrant, if also a great man of history), but admitted that Henry I was a great and just king.2 The phrase soon died out, as the Plantagenet kings were on the whole well-liked, and it was not until the 17th century that it re-appeared. At that point, it was appropriated by the Levellers and Diggers of Cromwell’s day, who wanted to expropriate the property of others. Two centuries on, it was then resurrected by the Chartists (socialists, essentially) of the mid-19th century.

To this day, the “Norman Yoke” remains a popular phrase used to push the idea that great estates ought be expropriated because they are inherently tyrannical. Such concepts must be pushed back upon, for reasons I have before explained.

The Norman Spirit: The One Who Does, Rather than the One To Whom Things are Done

The main reason I write about and focus on the Normans, however, is the great bequest they made to the English-speaking world—their spirit—and what it can teach us today.

Before the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons had become the people to whom things were done rather than the people who did things, to use Fussell’s famous phrasing from Class. Such, in fact, was true of British history generally. The Britons were blue-painted bog dwellers drinking beer until the Romans showed up, and little else happened for about five centuries; the Britons were ruled, and that was their contribution.

Then the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived. For a brief flicker of time, they were the ones who did things: they inflicted themselves upon the Britons, and conquered Britannia. Out of their brave and intrepid conquest comes the name “England,” or Angle-land.

But they did little with it. Brave warriors at the small scale level, those who became the Anglo-Saxons were soon content with what they had. They were happy to be small farmers, to not look beyond their shores, to exist and feud over that which they already had rather than that which they might conquer. No Anglo-Saxon expeditions were headed to seize Jerusalem back for the Cross, much less conquer some godforsaken place like Sarawak or Virginia. They were content, and even those brave and mighty Huscarls who are rightly the stuff of legend for their courage and prowess felt no need to go out and conquer.

Nothing, however, can long exist in a state of stasis. That which is not growing is dying. And so soon the Odin-worshipping axe-wielders descended upon Lindesfarne, and soon the Anglo-Saxons were the ones to whom things were done. They were constantly fighting back, the receivers of blows they tried to fend off and later tried to reverse.

Many times they were heroic warriors, a set of battles and stories that Bernard Cornwell has done much to memorialize in his The Last Kingdom series. Sometimes they paid the Danegeld. But never did they set out to strike back and conquer Norway or Denmark; they contented themselves with trying to win back the Danelaw and fend off future blows. Because they were content with Albion, no grand expedition to strike the Vikings at their root was ever embarked upon. Instead they built burhs.

By 1066, England was living under a Danish Occupied Government. King Cnut had conquered two generations before, after Aethelstan the Unready had hardly proven worthy of his warrior lineage. His issue had ruled for a few decades, and now Harold Godwinson, whose father had served Cnut and whose mother was related to Cnut by marriage, ruled. Harold was defeated at Hastings after a valiant effort reminiscent of the best of Anglo-Saxon tales—the Huscarls of Anglo-Saxon England are a testament to the warrior spirit of the English people—and soon England had a Norman Occupied Government rather than a Danish Occupied Government.

The Normans were harsh taskmasters at times, it is true. They tended to treat their Anglo-Saxon subjects as piggy banks, and were rarely worried overly much about cutting too close to the skin when shearing their manorial sheep. But they also changed something for England: it became the protagonist of history.

With the Normans at the helm, England was no longer the nation to whom things were done, whether by the Danes or Romans or anyone in between. It was the nation that did things to others. It conquered much of France, saved the day in the Holy Land, and conquered Cyprus.

That continued past the end of the Middle Ages, even as the Norman aristocracy gradually fused with the Anglo-Saxon people and the Anglo-Norman culture, which is essentially the upper-class part of English culture, developed. The English were now a people who did things. Notably, the Hundred Years’ War, along with the conflicts that preceded it, had taken place in France rather than England. With the Normans at the helm, the English were a protagonist of history who attempted to bring others under their dominion, rather than the opposite, which had been the case in British history up until then.

Such remained true in the many centuries that followed. They took the war to Philip across his world-spanning dominions, burning ports in Spain and capturing treasure fleets in the Caribbean. They conquered bits of the Mediterranean, set up trading companies abroad, conquered and settled the North American seaboard, and generally inflicted their will upon the world rather than having it inflicted upon them.

Yet better, the Anglo-Norman fusion was greater than the sum of its parts, a great flowering of a people that took centuries to occur but was a brilliant blossoming when it finally happened: a quarter of the world was theirs by the end, after all, and that would not have happened but for the Normans turning them into history’s protagonists.

There is much to say about the Anglo-Saxons that is good. There is much to say about the Normans that is good. The combination was best of all,3 and is what allowed them to cultivate England into a garden while bringing a quarter of the world’s land and all of its seaways under their Dominion. The Anglos would have done the former but not the latter. The Normans would have attempted the latter and neglected the former. The combination intertwined the two, and used the flowering fruit of it to great effect.

Such is why I write about the Normans. We need their addition to the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon people back. Ever since the Parliament Bill, the English have been the ones to whom things were done again, a process that has culminated in unwashed hordes of rape and rapine-minded migrants washing up upon their shores in a conquest and harrying far worse than anything William and his mailed thugs did. It must be turned back, defeated, scoured from the Shire. America, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the Anglosphere are little better: their native born have things done to them, rather than being the ones who do things, and the results are dire.

That must change, and recovering the Norman spirit is the way to do it. That little drop of blood and spirit contained within it, like the Cavalier “leavening” given to Virginia, raised our people up once and taught them to be the conquerors who made sure to enforce their will upon the rest rather than having anyone else’s will enforced upon them.

More is needed to make a society functional, of course, which is the steadying influence the Anglo-Saxon added to the English (and thus American) soul.4 But the leaven must not be forgotten. The drive to dominate, to conquer, to be the protagonist must be brought along too. The Norman influence is needed, is good, and must be recovered. Such is why it is a subject about which I write, and why I find it so important.

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The 250th is upon us, summer is here, and so many people are looking for biographies of great Americans to read while on vacation.

Amongst those men whose moment in the sun has come yet again thanks to the fighting over American identity is Robert E Lee, son of famed Revolutionary Cavalier Light Horse Harry Lee and commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. A rebel with little interest in secession, a man renowned for his generalship in a war he lost, a son of the Old Dominion who mourned its passing even as he expended all his remaining life force upon rebuilding it anew in the wake of war and ravages of Reconstruction, Lee is one of the great figures of American history.

Lee’s greatness has long been recognized not just by Southerners, but by Englishmen, Midwesterners, and even Northerners.

"General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation... Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul,” Midwest-born General and President Dwight Eisenhower said. Or, as his contemporary Winston Churchill put it, "Lee was the noblest American who ever lived and one of the greatest commanders known to the annals of war”.

Similarly, New Yorker of ancient lineage Teddy Roosevelt said, "General Lee has left us the memory, not merely of his extraordinary skill as a general, his dauntless courage and high leadership in campaign and battle, but also of that serene greatness of soul characteristic of those who most readily recognize the obligations of civic duty."

That makes reading about him worthwhile, though the plethora of Lee biographies makes choosing one difficult. Having read numerous of them for my The Old World Show videos on the Lee Family, and out of general personal interest over the years, I can help narrow it down somewhat.

Pretty much anything written after the 1960s, such as Michael Korda’s 2015 Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee, isn’t worth reading. Some of these are fine (Korda’s is the best of the bunch); most are terrible: all suffer from the same affliction, which is the need to make ritual denunciations of slavery and break apart the Lee myth to some extent.

The better ones minimize this; the worse ones emphasize it. None of the mainstream ones avoid it, and all do it because modern authors struggle to understand Lee or his times. Suffused by the egalitarian delusion from birth, they neither understand the essentially aristocratic nature of the Old Dominion that made Lee the last of a different breed of men, nor see how that helped make him one of Plutarch’s men in a way that no one at present is. All the modern hogwash about equality, democracy, and so on permeates these works, and so the real character of Lee and the Old Dominion for which he fought is lost. The last chevalier of a vanished civilization cannot be understood by those who think only of Excel spreadsheets and the equality of man.

Further, other than a more thorough investigation of his Norman ancestry, little if anything has been “discovered” about Lee since Douglas Southall Freeman did the meticulous research for his work on the man in the 1930s, so modern scholarship doesn’t benefit from having had more time to gather research on him. Instead, working with the same source material, modern historians come to predictably modern conclusions.

On the other hand, the earlier biographies of Lee—such as anything written by Thomas Nelson Page or John Esten Cooke—lean too far in the other direction. Intended to cement Lee’s legacy rather than be a factual or accurate reprisal of his generalship or character, they tend to be overly flowery, poorly researched (if researched at all), full of inaccuracies that make them unreliable at best, and reading more like a propaganda pamphlet than a biography. That can be enjoyable to read, and is certainly more fun than the dreary modern alternative. But, still, they’re far from being the best that is available.

That leaves works that came out of the Golden Age of American historical scholarship, which lasted for roughly the middle third of the 20th century: the period where interest made writing historical works remunerative for authors, scholarly standards were high, and the Civil Rights Cultural Revolution had not yet forced a reappraisal of all of American history in the name of making various communist subversives somewhat less surly.

Of those works written in this period, two stand out: Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography of Lee, titled R. E. Lee: A Biography, and Clifford Dowdey’s single-volume history of the man, which is titled Lee: A Biography. Margaret Sanborn wrote a two-volume biography of Lee around the same time that is fine but not exceptional. What makes these works particularly interesting to view in tandem is that Dowdey was a protege, contemporary, and disciple of Freeman, and wrote his Lee to complement his friend and mentor’s most famous work. Of the two, one is distinctly better, for reasons I will describe below, along with a few thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.

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Which Lee to Read?

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