This is the story of the dynast who founded the Lee Family of Virginia: Richard Lee I, also known as Richard Lee the Emigrant. In it we tell the story of his rise in Virginia, from his start as a Clerk of the Quarter Court and Indian trader to his time as great landed proprietor and Secretary of State of Virginia.

We discuss his marriage to Anne Constable, how he accumulated landed wealth on a massive scale, and how he survived the Commonwealth and the Restoration. It’s an exciting tale of frontier adventure, family triumph, and a great man whose bravery shaped America more than perhaps any other, through his descendants.

0:00 Arrival in Jamestown

3:23 The Lee Family: Cavaliers, Merchants, or Both?

8:13 Richard Lee Becomes a Merchant, and Heads to Virginia

11:53 How Richard Lee Got Ahead: Governor Francis Wyatt

15:31 Richard Marries Anne Constable

17:51 Lee Becomes a Leader of Virginia

25:33 Tobacco, Trade, and Indentures: How Richard Lee Built the Lee Family Fortune, Despite Indian Attacks

35:27 Richard Lee’s Royal Mission to Breda

40:16 How Lee the Cavalier Survived the Commonwealth and Quietly Built a Fortune

45:00 The Stuart Restoration, and Lee Returns to Virginia

48:36 How Richard Lee I Ensured the Lees Would Become Famous

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!

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

Evans, Emory G.: A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790, https://amzn.to/4xs9gRt

Dowdey, Clifford: The Virginia Dynasties, https://amzn.to/4vlqoqN

Dowdey, Clifford: The Golden Age, https://amzn.to/3QbGNi4

Dowdey, Clifford: The Great Plantation, https://amzn.to/4gdOxKR

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

Wright, Louis B.: The First Gentlemen of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4ekuR5z

Image credits:

Coton Hall north of Birdsgreen in Shropshire by Roger D Kidd, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Glasshouse using elements by Sodacan, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Transcript

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There is much talk these days of the need for various former enemies and constant competitor groups to “unite” in a more or less permanent state against some larger threat. This comes from both left and right.

Europe must “unite” against…well, something or other. Not the migrants, that’d be racist. Russia, perhaps. The bogeyman looms, and requires Europeans to set aside their differences in favor of letting a technocratic elite fight Russia by covering farmland with solar panels in cloudy Britain. Such is how the EU and its few dozen operational tanks will triumph over the Slavic menace (but don’t put it in such terms!)

In America, we’re told that all states, races, and (non-oligarch) classes must “unite” against…Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk building rockets, or something, and of course those pesky data centers! The real threat isn’t the migrant trying to saw your head off, you see, nor Karmelo Anthony’s supporters wanting to murder you for the crime of being white, nor the Cultural Revolution coming for the statues of our heroes and the spirit meant to be inculcated by them. It’s that Elon Musk wants to go to Mars! That’s the real threat to “freedom”, which often seems defined near-purely as “the right to be a homosexual and/or on welfare”. By that definition we remain united as the land of the free, I suppose.

More realistically, the left says all the (non-white) races of the world must unite against whites, for outlawing sati, ending cannibalism in Sub-Saharan Africa, and ending human sacrifice in the New World is now deemed to have been the greatest of all injustices. So the various “non-aligned” nations of the world align against the few places that can build a rocket, or produce clean drinking water…while demanding more foreign aid from them, of course. Often, that international Danegeld is paid without a second thought to the Union of Dysfunctional Diverse (Fledgling) Republics.

This somehow becomes even more absurd when pushed by the right.

For example, there’s the idea that all nationalist groups must unite in a supra-nationalist campaign against the globalists, which would replace the EU with a…uhh, well, the EU. But with nationalists cooperating in a globalist body. Such was what Oswald Mosley advocated by the end of his life, as do many current rightists who are interested in Europe and decry “micronationalism” as something that keeps Europe weak…ignoring that Europe was strong when the states that composed it competed amongst one another.

Sorry, guys. I just don’t think that globalism, but with nationalist characteristics, will work.

Such seems like just as much a recipe for scleroticism at the leftist version.

That is, after all, what Europe’s recent history has shown. Compared to the Belle Epoque, has anything good come out of the European Union? No. Of any of the integration that preceded it? No.

Yes, being able to travel freely is pleasant enough, as is having a currency one can use across countries. But that was true in the pre-Great War time as well. Here is how AJP Taylor describes such a world in the famous opening to his English History, 1914-1945:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home.

Similarly, Keynes, in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace, notes:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share without exertion or even trouble in their prospective fruits and advantages...

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals [sovereigns] as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.

Whether in Berlin or Buenos Aires, Paris or the Panhandle, a man could do all is now regarded as remarkable in the European Union. Indeed, he could do more. For, as Taylor notes, he was free. Free from oppression and from anarchy, in fact. The state maintained order, collected enough taxes to keep the debt paid and the border or empire defended, and that was that. The idea that a man would be arrested for thought crimes would be deemed remarkable, as would be the idea that he couldn’t travel to France for a bit of fun in Paris or to Katanga to investigate a new mining concern in which he might wish to invest. Now things are more than a bit more controlled, and much more dangerous.

It seems that no state other than Singapore and the Gulf States can provide order or convenience as a general thing, as the two require exclusion and chastisement of those who get in their way.

What made their world better? Much, not least of which was spirit.

But, perhaps more importantly, it’s that they were not “unified.” Rather, they were competing. And that competition bred excellence; like a plant becoming hardier as it struggles to survive or a bird’s plumage becoming more beautiful as it tries to find a mate, the Western world blossomed when the member states that composed it were competing for prestige.

This prestige was a tricky thing to quantify, but it was nevertheless important to the states of the era, and thus is important to understanding the era itself. As Lawrence James notes in his Churchill and Empire:

Prestige was hard to quantify with any precision, but it mattered enormously for all the imperial powers. Its magic bewitched politicians, newspaper proprietors and voters in Britain, America and the Continent. Perceptions of national prestige facilitated the grafting of imperialism on to the intoxicating nationalisms that had emerged among the middle and working classes during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

And it was more than just imperial possessions for which they competed.

This was the era of national poet laureates, after all…and they were generally quite good. Similarly, this was an era of monumental architecture. Of incredible national palaces, booming ports and shipyards that betokened a nation’s prosperity, and of arches, statues, and monuments still without par. Each nation strove to have better operas and opera houses, more glorious deeds attached to the names of their greatest citizens, and more powerful economies that could outproduce and outinnovate rivals. Nations competed scientifically, and used events like the Crystal Palace Exhibition and World Columbian Exposition to show off their greatness, grandeur, and capacity for innovation. Such was the spirit of competition that defined the Victorian Age.

But it would be a mistake to view it as a period of purely intra-national competition. The classes and factions competed as well, as did their constituent members. Aristocrats competed with each other and plutocrats to outdo and outshine each other in displays of both splendor and rootedness. Military men, blue-blooded or not, competed with each other to achieve greater feats; to be involved in more of what battles there were, to win more imperial skirmishes, to do battle despite the odds and win with more courage than their peers. The Maxim gun (a result of innovation spurred by this period) helped with this, of course, but so did the bravery of the men behind it and the officers who directed its fire.

Honor, prestige, and glory were at stake at every level of society, and men acted like it. They were competing, after all, and so wanted to win. Whether that meant laboring crews on the Transcontinental being spurred to greater effort and mileage per day so they could outdo their rivals, innovators like the feuding Edison-Tesla-Westinghouse triumvirate1 competing to define and create the era in a better way, cities competing to have better amenities and more glorious buildings, or industrialists competing to build more successful and innovative concerns.

Indeed, when Carnegie was competing with the others, what became the bedrock of US Steel was still an innovative concern2; it is only when JP Morgan cobbled all the constituents together into US Steel that it became generally sclerotic and started raising prices. Such is what characterizes a life of unity with former competitors: competition defined the era, and so excellence did as well. When the competition went away, the fat and happy former competitors let their excellence fade away as well.

But this is nothing new. As author Adrian Goldsworthy notes repeatedly in his fabulous new book, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, the Greek city-states of Greece’s Golden Age3 were not “united” in any sense of the term. Some of them would occasionally co-operate—three dozen(ish) out of a few hundred banded together to defeat the Persians in the war that mostly ended at Plataea—but generally they were always competing, and always bickering amongst each other.

What great things they accomplished were attempts to earn more prestige than their rivals through displays of excellence. Describing this in the context of Athens, Goldsworthy notes:

Athenians celebrated their democracy because Athens flourished and became strong under it. In the same way, the Athenians’ greatest and most famous monument, the Parthenon, celebrated the glories of their city and its democratic system, not some abstract sense of Hellenic culture. While in design and decoration this monument—at which we still marvel today—drew upon concepts and taste shared with other Greeks, it was meant to parade the glory of the Athenians as greater and better than everyone else.

Similarly, describing that spirit and the sort of behavior that stemmed from it more generally, Goldsworthy notes:

One central theme of this book is that competitiveness lay at the heart of these societies. Within their own communities, Greeks vied for prominence, prestige, and power, while collectively they were just as eager to assert their city’s status and show its superiority to all the other cities out there.

And, much as in Europe two and a half millennia later, personal excellence counted for as much as a city-state’s excellence. Leaders and officers would only be followed by their men if they demonstrated their bravery and skill in grand ways.4 Men who wished to be recognized by their fellows as a cut above the rest had to earn that, which meant displaying their riches, talents, and courage publicly. Describing this culture, Goldsworthy notes:

At the start of the eighth century BC, the aristocratic culture remained dominant, and a small minority of the population continued to be buried in conspicuous style reflecting their status in life. Feasting, with its attendant vessels and luxuries, was a way of displaying wealth, while competition, in running, riding, or racing a chariot, allowed aristocrats to excel publicly, just like Homer’s characters. The Olympic Games and other festivals emerging around this time reflected this ethos. The aristocratic male ideal remained a good-looking, well-tended body, long hair, generosity in gift giving, and conspicuous bravery in war. For centuries most of this would remain the goal of the wealthy…

In short, it was a world of competition. “Free men wanted the respect of their fellow citizens, and ideally their admiration, and at the same time also wanted the equivalent reputation for their community as a whole,” as Goldsworthy puts it.

And that competition is what led to the glory of their people and their era. From the great architecture to the noble deeds of the phalanxes, from the incredible tragedies of Aeschylus to the statuary that remains inspiring, Greece was built and defined by the desire of its constituent cities to excel and rise beyond their peers, whether in democratic Athens or highly regimented Sparta.5

It was this relentless competition, this drive to compete in excellence rather than unify in mediocrity, that defined the Greek world. As Goldworthy writes:

Competition drove Greeks in all communities to excel, leading to competition, power struggles, and war. Of all these rivalries, the one between the Spartans and the Athenians led both to the greatest achievements and the worst destruction. Together they saved themselves and the other cities from the Persian threat and later fought a war that drew in the majority of the wider Greek world. The individualism so fundamental to Greek society meant that even when Athens was defeated, the competition soon revived as different states asserted themselves.

…

[T]he Greeks of this era came together to form communities but showed no inclination towards combining these to create a bigger state beyond attempts at leagues and the Athenian imperial experiments. Only in the city did they feel it possible to create effective corporate identity without altogether stifling individual freedom. Thus both the Persians and later the Macedonians dealt with many separate cities rather than a single united opponent. Xerxes lost in spite of this, and the margin of victory for Philip II may well have been less than is often assumed, for the Battle of Chaeronea was not a walkover but a hard-fought, costly victory.

Once, under first the Macedonians and then later the Romans they became an amalgamated Greece rather than a large collection of bickering city states, they lost much of what made them great, and it was only in the realms in which competition remained somewhat possible—namely philosophy, history, athletics, and the arts—that they excelled. But the glory days were past, for the grander sense of inter-city competition had passed.

We Must Learn from Greece

There’s much to learn from that. Yes, as shown by the defeat of the Persians, the ability of disparate factions to work together to defeat a greater enemy is useful and civilizationally important. Similarly, failing to do so can be an existential problem, as happened when Philip II turned his eyes on Greece.

But that cooperation is not the end-all, be-all. When engaged in more than necessary, when political ties that bind are imposed upon those who should be generally struggling against one another, whether as internal or external factions and always as individuals, stagnation sets in. No organism survives stasis for long: it either grows or dies, as indeed happened to Sparta, Goldsworthy notes, once it chose to stop growing.

In our world, that stasis and death from it is best seen in the imposition of ever more rigorous unification schemes. Economic zones, amalgamated political entities, intra-national homogenization efforts, and much else besides all combine to crush any real spirit of competition.

Imperial expansion has been snuffed out, as has the drive for prestige that led to it. Now those who once ruled the waves again lumber about in pot-bellied equanimity as invaders from the former colonies blight their shores; they’re all equal, after all, so why resist such deparations? Better to just homogenize.

Regulation has snuffed out the old sense of economic competition and the related field of competition in innovation. If anything, Europe (and increasingly blue America) compete in who can be the first to snuff out such innovation.

Tax policy is a leveling scythe that serves to snuff out or chase out those who build or inherit large fortunes, ending the old cycle of competition for displays of greatness amongst the various elites. They at least built country houses, city palaces, and leavened the social sphere and aesthetic of the lands in which they lived while providing good jobs, as was also done by Athens.6 Now, as Paul Fussell noted so well in Class, money hides from the public so that it won’t be taxed, and the result is a muddled mix of the death of duty and uglification.

Indeed, uglification brought about by Brutalist and modernist homogeneity is one of the most striking ways in which unification has brought about stagnation and mediocrity. In the past, beautiful styles of public and private architecture developed organically for the lands from which they came. Now, everything that is new is just ugly in the same way. Take, for example, these graphics showing how architectural styles around the world have changed over time, and the general monstrosity on which they converge:

There used to be different styles, well-suited to their environment and beautiful in their own ways. Those cities, states, and individuals within them all tried to set themselves apart and demonstrate their excellence by building what was appropriate, tasteful, and beautiful. Such was what was wrought by their competition amongst each other.

Then that spirit died in the 20th century, and the distasteful blocks of modernist/brutalist/Bauhaus/etc. all converged on the same ugly style that shows nothing other than poor taste and a lack of a sense of place. It’s the perfect style for a cosmopolitan world scared of competition and that hates excellence.

Such is what we must not allow ourselves to become. Instead of worrying overly much about unity or cooperation, we ought try to reinvigorate the spirit of competition for prestige amongst men, cities, states, and nations. Such a world of competition is from what excellence comes, and it is that excellence that allows us to triumph, while giving us the spirit to do so.

If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and aids my attempts to share these important stories, such as the one on Civil War, and what they mean for you.

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This episode introduces the First Families of Virginia, explaining how a small group of younger sons of the gentry and merchant families became a class of elite colonial families came to dominate first the Tidewater, and then Virginia. It begins by describing how younger sons hoped to rebuild themselves as landed gentlemen in the New World, and then discusses the debate over whether these First Families of Virginia were truly “Cavaliers” or whether that label stems from a later legend meant to shroud their humble origins.

The episode then explains how these families used capital, trade, and officeholding to acquire huge riverfront estates, expand tobacco production, and eventually shift from indentured labor to enslaved African labor after Bacon’s Rebellion and the Navigation Acts made the old system less profitable. It then profiles several of the most famous First Families of Virginia, including the Randolphs, Byrds, Harrisons, Ludwells, Burwells, Pages, Nelsons, Carters, Beverleys, Wormleys, Lees, Fitzhughs, and Custises, describing their marriage alliance, massive estates, political offices, commercial activity, and in some cases, their role in the Revolution.

The conclusion of this episode covers the social peak and decline of the Virginia gentry. It describes how their intermarriages and grand brick plantation homes turned into lifestyles of debt that were wrecked by the effects of the American Revolution that the Virginia gentry did so much to lead, along with describing how soil exhaustion played a role in ending the reign of the old Virginia gentry.

0:00 Who Were The First Families of Virginia?

5:05 The History of the Virginia Cavaliers

8:35 The Younger Sons Form a Virginia Gentry

12:52 Land, Trade, and Slavery: The Basis of Financial Power for the FFVs

18:03 How the Virginia Gentry Dominated Local and State Politics

21:46 The Randolph Family of Virginia: The Adam and Eve of Virginia

22:47 The Byrd Family of Virginia: Fortune and Ruin

24:32 The Harrison Family

25:19 The Ludwell Family and Green Spring

26:26 The Burwell Family of Virginia

27:27 The Pages and Nelsons

29:03 The Carter Family of Virginia

31:32 The Beverlys and Wormeleys at Rosegill,

32:07 The Lees of Stratford Hall, and

34:08 the Fitzhughs

35:10 The Custis and Washington Families

37:03 Intermarriage Amongst the FFVs

39:07 Luxury and Debt End the Golden Age

43:26 Revolution and Collapse

46:46 Twilight of the Old Dominion

49:06 Virginia’s Lasting 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!

Evans, Emory G.: A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790.

Sydnor, Charles S.: Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, https://amzn.to/3QxjEXq

Isaac, Rhys: The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, https://amzn.to/4ee2INl

Dowdey, Clifford: The Virginia Dynasties, https://amzn.to/4vlqoqN

Dowdey, Clifford: The Golden Age, https://amzn.to/3QbGNi4

Dowdey, Clifford: The Great Plantation, https://amzn.to/4gdOxKR

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

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

Wright, Louis B.: The First Gentlemen of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4ekuR5z

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An area in which the American right is severely lacking is in its ability to form a counter-elite that can broadly and sustainably push back against the race communist regime apparatus that has systematically denied opportunities to white Americans, particularly white men, for decades, while also providing patronage opportunities to those men discriminated against by our present system. This presents a major problem, as such a counter-elite (which really must be an upper class of sorts,1 or at least aspire to be such) is generally necessary to displace even a despised regime of the sort we’ve long had.

That’s not to say there aren’t former members of the present elite who have defected from it. Elon Musk is one, though it remains to be seen if he grasps what getting to Mars will take, in terms of regime change. The JD Vance-Peter Thiel types are something of another and have been for some time,2 though Thiel has left rather than fight.3 Similarly, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan spoke positively about many of Trump’s policies back in 2024.4

Still, those defectors do not a counter-elite make, at least yet. Rather, they are much closer to being miniature (and generally less courageous) versions of Tiberius Gracchus, much like Trump himself: desirous of using populist tactics to effect a restoration of the existing system by reversing some of the worst outgrowths of it, rather than reordering it substantially in an effort to cement their rule of a world that is better for those who follow them.

While not necessarily a bad thing ceteris paribus, that does mean the political movement they’re pushing lacks the legs to operate on a time horizon much longer than a few years. Indeed, it’s already fragmenting as those who are dedicated populists and those who are generally conservative but friendly to populism clash. That is a major problem, for the amount of change necessary to substantially reorder our system without things devolving into some Ragnarok-style reckoning are far more substantial than that which can be achieved in a single year.

Reshoring even the bare minimum level of industry necessary for the defense industrial base will take the commitment of a techno-nationalist elite5 operating in much the same way as the better elements (the Andrew Mellon types) of the Gilded Age industrial buildout of America’s rail and electrical infrastructure. Reversing DEI will be a generational Reconquista across every major company and surviving institution. Fixing our cities will require similar levels of investment and years of committed effort, as noxious elements have been allowed to build up and take over for generations.

On and on it could go. The basic problem is that while the worst excesses of our system can be ameliorated well enough for people to feel back to normal in a few years, the effort required to reorder our system around what can actually fix those problems—capital punishment, economic nationalism, meritocratic hiring without regard to disparate impact, and the like—will require multiple decades, multiple generations, even, of effort.

The solution to that is the development of a counter-elite that is gradually able to build power to effect such ends over multiple generations, remains committed to doing so over those generations, and does so successfully.

The most relevant example of this in American history is the rise of Virginia’s cavalier gentry, and its key role in beginning the American Revolution and making the Revolution an ultimate success rather than an egalitarian disaster as in France.

The creation of that counter-elite, one which rose from the muddy banks of the Chesapeake and primordial forests of the interior to eventually lead the effort to challenge the mightiest empire on Earth at the time, is what I’ll discuss today, along with some of the ways that this history is relevant to Americans who understand the importance of building a counter-elite.

A Note On Sources: The most useful books in preparing for this article were the section on the Cavaliers in Albion’s Seed, The Virginia Dynasties by Clifford Dowdey, The First Gentlemen of Virginia by Louis B. Wright, A “Topping People” by Emory Evans, and Tobacco Culture by Breen; these works will be referred to by the last name of the author when cited in the article. Also useful in thinking about this was the article “Vectors of Power”. I would also recommend you read my articles on Virginia’s Cursus Honorum and Embodying Excellence for my thoughts on how to think about some of the issues presented in this article at the personal level.

Listen to the audio version here:

The Creation of the Virginia Gentry

Establishing the Foundation

Building the Wealth Foundation

Before John Rolfe, Virginia was merely a muddy hell full of malarial mosquitoes and Indians generally bent on exterminating the English. Rolfe, in bringing Spanish tobacco to Virginia and creating a precarious peace between the English and Indians by marrying Pocahontas, saved the colony and created the conditions for a substantial change.

Though impeded by occasional crises like drought or the Indian Massacre of 1622, what followed was a magnificent burst of prosperity that delivered much wealth into the hands of those who had been indigent, or at least of small means.

For some, this was no different than an oil strike. Like the residents of later boom towns,6 they paraded about in finery, failed to reinvest their winnings, and disappeared from history the moment conditions became a bit worse.

But there was also a different sort of man who arrived, represented by Richard Lee I, the dynast of the famous Lee family. Sent to represent his family’s mercantile interests in the colony in 1639,7 this first Lee had little money of his own but did have substantial family connections and resources that he could use to get ahead. Such is what he intended on doing, viewing his presence in the colony and the wealth that could be garnered in it as a long-term project from which he could become a landed gentleman like the Norman-descended Lees of Coton Hall from whom he (allegedly) got his name. Most of the other FFV dynasts arrived a few years later, but around the same time,8 and were of similar means, minds, and family connections.9

They used the open opportunity before them to gradually build immense wealth. They steadily used what starting resources they had, their reinvested profits from tobacco and mercantile activities, and their growing political connections to build great estates that could even survive dramatic drops in the price they earned for their tobacco crop, such as that brought about by the Navigation Acts.10 The post-Bacon’s Rebellion pairing of slavery with large acreage was particularly important in this,11 and was still only possible for them to achieve because of their long-time horizons and prudent use of the limited but greater than average resources with which they started.12

Importantly, they did so not just with the goal in mind of becoming wealthy, but of building estates that would turn them into landed gentlemen.13 As the British gentry essentially ruled England over much of the 17th and 18th centuries,14 this was their attempt to use their acquisitive minds to turn their families into genteel, respected ones that had a hand in government. To be a landed gentleman was more than to simply be wealthy: it was to be one who could govern. The landed wealth served as the basis of that, not the end-all be-all of it.

By using generally mercantile means to become landed,15 these dynasts generally succeeded in turning themselves into a gentry of sorts, if a somewhat more acquisitive one than present back in England.16 Out of this combination of acquisitive mercantile tendencies and vast landed estates was born the Virginia planter, a distinctly American variation of the domestic aristocracy on which he modeled himself.17

Keeping the Foundation

The problem then became how to maintain the family in dignity after the first generation so that the family’s ascent could continue, and it could accrue more political power over generations.

In England, this problem was generally solved through entail: the main estate was passed to each firstborn son through succeeding generations, all of which agreed to keep the estate inalienable. It was held in a form of trust where the income could be used for whatever purpose and could be pledged as collateral, but the underlying estate could not be sold, pledged, or divided. Generally, much of the testator’s personal property went to the other male children, and some annual subsidy was paid to (or dowry given) to the daughters. This kept the estate—and thus the dignity of the family’s name—intact, while also meaning the non-heir children weren’t left penniless.18

In Virginia, this was not the preferred practice. Though entail and primogeniture were assumed in cases of intestacy,19 those testators who chose to write a will generally preferred to divide their estate amongst their children.20 Generally, the eldest male would receive the main family seat and enough acreage to support it,21 while the remainder of the estate was divided amongst the other children.22

Occasionally, this meant the downfall of the family because the property was too divided to support any members in dignity.23 However, this was generally positive when new acreage was cheap in the early generations because it had the helpful side-effect of allowing family seats to multiply in a given area, adding to the public’s perception of the family’s size, power, and dignity.24 As the families were sorted into competent ones that would remain landed for the long term and incompetent or infertile ones that would quickly flame out early on, this had the added benefit of increasing the chances that one branch of the family would prove a notable success that could keep the name going and add to its lustre. Allowing multiple different male branches to develop their own “habit of command”25 by splitting the estates when there was enough land to do so increased the chances that at least one would be a political, social, and economic success. Such happened with both Thomas Lee and Robert “King” Carter, younger sons who became great dynasty builders in their own right.

In any case, after a few generations of this division of the estates, the land ran out and was no longer cheap, at which point the Virginia dynasties reverted to more traditional forms of English primogeniture and entail.26 Always the focus was on the preservation of the estate27 and, through it, the growth of the family’s wealth and power, as the establishment of such estates and power was the goal of the dynasts and remained the goal of their heirs, who became increasingly involved in politics.

Building Institutional Power As Families

Once a stable foundation of wealth had been built, the great families could begin using that wealth to become politically involved.

To some extent, this had been true from the beginning. Once men like Richard Lee I had built large enough estates to prove themselves worthy of Gov. Berkeley’s attention, he was drawn to them because they were a cut above most other settlers of the colony in terms of learning, education, and manners, all of which he prized.28 Importantly, such men were not merely appointed to the Governor’s Council because they were relatively rich and liked by the Cavalier governor. In reality, he chose them because the large estates they had built and the command-connected skill with which they managed them showed him that they could be trusted with governmental power.29

When the domineering Gov. Berkeley left the colony in 1677, it was this early experience in government that allowed the Virginians to gradually become a counter-elite: always they would remember that only he who could manage his estate well could be trusted with governmental power, and so plantation ownership and the successful running of it was seen as a sine qua non for even getting involved in politics. From there, one had to earn his way up each wrung, as the early dynasts had in effect done, going from the vestry council to the Governor’s Council. For those interested, I discuss this here:

Unlike when Berkeley ruled, it was not mere diktats from London that put such men in charge. The vestry council members and Justices of the Peace on the county courts had to be trusted enough to be appointed to those positions by their already successful fellows. If they wished to then ascend from there to the Burgesses, they had to be elected to the position by their yeomen neighbors,30 and approved to run by the established elite.

It was easiest to do this when a given family controlled much of a county, as in such a case the established men could promote family members, and had long been dispensing patronage—such as minor governmental posts, minor favors, famous Virginia hospitality, and the like—in the name of the family. So, areas where past divisions of the estate meant a family had clustered,31 with each cadet branch holding enough land to keep it powerful, were areas where generations of wealth and political power building had allowed the family to effectively capture the institutions of a given place.

This was hugely useful to these families, as it cemented their rule and associated their names with power.32 High rates of intermarriage amongst each other helped with this, as it bound the political fortunes of multiple dynasties together in the same neighborhood, further aiding in institutional capture and creating a true upper class.

Adding to this was that these families, thanks to their multi-generational time horizons, were comfortable building manor homes like Westover, Shirley, and Stratford Hall that dominated the landscape, reminding all who saw them of their rootedness, prestige, wealth, and thus right to rule.

As they grew frustrated with London and moved away from the empire in the late 18th century, once they had become not just an elite within the British Empire but a counter-elite devoted to breaking away from it, this control of theirs of the political process meant the common people were more likely to trust and follow them than would otherwise have been the case. The years of good rule and general stability brought by their control of the process gave them that space to push back against the regime, and their long-term capture of institutional control as a set of ruling families gave them the experience necessary to lead and govern once the British were gone.

The remainder of this article 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.

Building a Culture In Their Image

This institutional power also allowed what became the Virginia gentry to build the state in their image, shaping a relatively monolithic culture of the sort they desired, one that was built to enshrine a traditional-style hierarchy and intentionally excluded Quakers and Puritans—subversives.

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In this show, Alice Henningway tells Will what life was like in Rhodesia, where she grew up during the Bush War in the 1970s. Alice and Will discuss the dangerous reality of life on a farm during the Bush War, life after Rhodesia in Zimbabwe, and the unique culture of Rhodesia through the lens of her memoir “Nyika, I Love You”. Alice also describes her family’s relationship with the Shona people who worked on and lived near their farm on tribal trust land, the Shona traditions she learned there, her family’s background, and how she experienced the sharp contrasts of Rhodesian society, which combined formal colonial life with the rigors and dangers of the Bush War, and the excitement of living on the frontier.

Alice also describes her father’s Save Valley Conservancy project, describing how it was transformed from cattle ranch land into conservation land. She describes the species reintroduced, how elephants were moved there, the reality of protecting rhinos from poachers, and how local communities are involved in the work. Toward the end, she reflects on leaving Zimbabwe and explains that her memoir is a record of her life and a tribute to the country, Nyika, and her family, while also mentioning her next books.

Get “Nyika, I Love You” here: ⁠https://amzn.to/4uppLuF⁠

Get “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight”: ⁠https://amzn.to/4xdFEqJ⁠

(I am an Amazon Associate and will receive a small commission if you use the above links to order these great books).

Watch on YouTube here:

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IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile [young scholar]
To call upon a [white] neighbour and to say:–
“We invaded [your house] last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us [EBT] to go away.”

And that is called asking for [Dewayne]-geld,
And the [scholars] who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ‘em the [Dewayne]-geld
And then you’ll get rid of [Dewayne]!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy [white man],
To puff and look important and to say:–
“Though we know we should defeat you,
we have not the time to [beat] you.
We will therefore pay you [EBT] to go away.”

And that is called paying the [Dewayne]-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the [Dewayne]-geld
You never get rid of [Dewayne].

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any [young scholar],
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:–

“We never pay any-one [Dewayne]-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the [white man] that plays it is lost!”

-Rudyard Kipling on the Dane-geld, Edited by Will

You can listen to the audio version of this article here:

America’s Dewayne Geld Crisis

Take a moment, and consider the ends to which your tax dollars are funnelled. Then think about in what ways, if any, those uses are of the slightest benefit to you.

There is the defense budget, of course. It—primarily the Navy and Air Force, the more expensive components—is of some benefit to Americans when it succeeds in keeping trade lanes open. Social Security and Medicare can at least be justified as concepts, even if the way in which they have been managed is quite poor. I much prefer the somewhat privatized Singaporean method of mandating personal savings for retirement and healthcare rather than pouring it into a public pot. But, generally, the idea that those too old to work shouldn’t live in penury is a sensible one. Highway spending is tolerable, though that should, at this point, be left to the states. So long as it is not spent on researching some nonsense like transgender poetry in Ancient China, the federal research and development budget is generally of some use; much like Social Security, it must be reformed, but is at least not a terrible idea.

Then there is the remainder of federal spending.

Nearly a trillion dollars go toward Medicaid, which does not benefit America’s industrious citizenry in the least, as it exists for the benefit of the underclass, and that has largely meant that it is stolen by Somalis, Haitians, and the like. About a fifth of immigrants and over 50% of black and Hispanic children are enrolled in Medicaid.1 About 30% of blacks and Hispanics overall are enrolled in Medicaid, compared to about 15% of whites.

In any case, there’s much more to the welfare state than Medicaid. “Income security” spending is another three-quarters of a trillion dollars; this provides SNAP/EBT to the seething urban underclass, and pays for programs like Section 8, which is the means by which criminals are put in your neighborhood. The SNAP use rate per capita is even more stark than Medicaid: roughly a quarter of blacks are on it, compared to about 7% of whites, while Hispanics are also significantly overrepresented on the Dewayne-geld: EBT Edition rolls.

The cost of the federal civilian bureaucracy is about $600 billion; as this bureaucracy primarily has been used to inflict productivity-killing regulations on the country, to foist the immense burden of Civil Rights law upon us, and to tax us to pay for such blessings of liberty, it too goes in the “does not benefit me” pile.

Combined, these various ways of funneling cash to the underclass together cost well over $2 trillion per year. The federal deficit is somewhat less than $2 trillion per year, meaning it would be gone if we didn’t engage in this spending on the underclass. So, the interest on the federal debt can also be counted in the “does not benefit” column, as it wouldn’t exist but for the safety hammock of the welfare state and the bureaucracy that manages it. And that hammock is primarily filled not with hard working Americans temporarily down on their luck, but with Third World migrants and multi-generational, native-born problem-causers, both of which groups are lumped in as “Dewayne Geld recipients”.

But it is even worse than it appears at first glance, for the existence of the welfare hammock makes its own weight heavier. The subsidization of the teeming underclass that relies on it means that the underclass continues to expand, both through natural means and immigration, and to produce more public charges as it does so, which then worsens the spending problem and thus the debt, deficit, and interest problem. So, to continue paying for it is to make the problem worse, day by day.

So, why do we continue paying the Midgaard Serpent to eat its own tail, and to grow ever larger and more threatening as it does so?

Well, as I’ve written about before, we do so because much of our public policy consists of paying the Danegeld.

Whether in Inner City America or abroad, our courage-lacking rulers have decided to follow in the dubiously honorable footsteps of Æthelred the Unready and simply make ever more generous payments out of the public treasury in the hopes that doing so will keep the raiders away long enough for them to be someone else’s problem.

And so America gives foreign aid of one sort or another to 180 countries, including ones like Mexico that have only heaped costs upon us, instead of just straightening out those countries like Mexico with which we must deal (Pershing had the right idea,2 as did the United Fruit Company3).

More importantly—and more expensively—it also means that much of American domestic policy consists of one Danegeld wealth redistribution scheme or another, which is indeed how these policies are justified to the public: “We have to pay the Dewayne Geld, or there will be riots! Just think of the unrest!”

The question of why the riots would not just be put down, at relatively limited cost compared to the trillions we spend every year on theoretically preventing them, is never answered. The obvious answer, however, is the same one behind why Æthelred the Unready made those payments to King Sweyn Forkbeard and Olav Tryggvaso: cowardice.

Our regime lacks the spine necessary to simply put down riots and ensure they don’t happen again, and so we get the immense costs of the Dewayne Geld program. Solving that spiritual problem, as I’ll discuss below, will be critical to ending the monstrosity of our Dewayne Geld regime, which I’ll also describe below.

Kool-Aid Pineapple

The most bizarre, fever-dream-like, and utterly infuriating instantiation of the Dewayne Geld and what it has wrought, at present, is the viral “Kool-Aid Pineapple” trend, which is an EBT scam at its most ridiculous.

This is the process by which Dewayne Geld recipients launder food stamps into cash by selling each other ridiculous “plates” out of illegally operating restaurants. In the past, this meant selling “plates” of comfort food for cash, after having bought the ingredients using EBT/TANF/etc. Here’s an explanation for how the general “plates” and EBT fraud scheme works4:

But absurdity builds upon itself, and so the “plates” concept has transformed from meaning the buying and selling of taxpayer-subsidized plates of real food (without reporting income, of course), and has become the buying and selling of sugar, Kool Aid, and (sometimes) Hennessy-infused jars of pineapple spears. Note, at the beginning, the “these go for $20 a pop” line. Much like “plates”, it’s just Dewayne Geld laundering.

So, each working American has close to half of their income confiscated by the regime so that it can pay for:

• The provision of EBT/TANF/WIC to an urban underclass, which is money laundered into cash by the trade in this sugary slop, as the ingredients are bought with EBT, and payment is sometimes accepted in food stamps.

• The subsidies for corn farmers that make the corn syrup often used in this sort of junk inexpensive.

• The Medicaid programs that care for these enterprising entrepreneurs and their customers after years of guzzling pineapple soaked in corn syrup and Hennessy catch up with them

• The law enforcement apparatus that tries and generally fails to keep them in check, as the Dewayne Geld has tended towards increasing crime since it was begun with the Great Society of LBJ

• The vast and invasive federal and state bureaucracy that collects and distributes the Dewayne Geld

Such is a distinctly unappetizing prospect that can best be visually portrayed as this5:

And why is this allowed to happen?

Well, with the Dewayne Geld as with the Dane Geld, we are told that, even if expensive, it will lead to a lowering of tensions and limitation of violence, and so it is in the end preferable to having it out and just doing what it takes to tamp down on disorder.

So, has the violence ended? Did the Danes stop acting as Danes?

Hardly. A few examples will hopefully suffice, but if not, review our article on the relative death by homicide rates in American cities compared to active war zones.

As Kipling noted, the wages of paying the Danegeld are not peace, but more Danes, more suffering, and more claims issued upon your geld by the Danes. Or the Dewaynes, as it were.

And so we are stuck in a bizarre and infuriating situation where the surplus produced by the productive is skimmed off the top to pay the Dewayne Geld and for the bureaucracy that administers it. In exchange, we get not peace, but more and more public disorder and crime, which makes it ever more difficult to produce the productive surplus that allows for the Dewayne Geld to be paid in the first place.

Time to Stop Paying the Dewayne Geld

It is time for us to stop paying the Dewayne Geld. It’s gone on for too long, is too expensive, and produces nothing but misery. It inflicts immense harm on net taxpayers. In being the principal cause of the ever-expanding public debt, it is the ruination of the nation. It also leads many who could otherwise be law-abiding citizens astray, tempting them like a Siren song into yeast-like lives of petty criminality and purposelessness.

But getting rid of it, and restoring the honor, glory, and functionality of the nation in so doing, will require a substantial mindset shift.

Anglo-Saxon Britain was conquered because it had devolved to the point that it preferred to try to pay its enemies off, whatever the cost, rather than fight them.

First, Cnut the Dane came, saw, and conquered in the aftermath of Aethelred the Unready’s disastrous reign, and then came William the Conqueror and his Normans. They never left, but nor did they ever pay the Danegeld. Instead, excellence-oriented people that they were, the Normans used the taxes they collected to fight wars of conquest, to remain noble warriors, and to build great castles that still dominate the landscape.

As they did so, they “drilled” the Anglo-Saxons over whom they ruled into being something greater once again. Into being a people worthy of the name, into once again being great explorers and conquerors who eventually took Britannia’s flag and planted it in the Earth everywhere from Newfoundland to Sarawak, the Chesapeake to Ceylon. Once their spirit was changed so that for nearly a millennium they were unwilling to pay the Danegeld, the English were a great people who combined the virtues of the Anglo-Saxons and Normans alike, conquering and settling as they spread across the Earth and brought it under their Dominion.

Yet further, their spirit restored, they stamped out evil practices rather than tolerating them or paying the natives to stop. The clearest example is that of General Sir Charles Napier when he found, in the Raj, that the natives liked to set their widows on fire. Did he let them do it? Did he pay them off to stop, in the hope that there wouldn’t be riots if only enough gold was handed out? No. He constructed a gallows, and dared them to test his will. They were cowed, as such ignoble savages always are, and no violence was necessary, nor were widows burned.

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs!

Such stampings out of illegal, immoral behavior can occur when those in charge have spines made of steel rather than spaghetti.

Then the Great War broke their spirit,6 and now they are once again willing to pay the Danegeld. The result is the Grooming Gangs, the horrific murder of Henry Nowak7, and all the rest…and those who commit such evil actions are almost always subsidized by the British taxpayer.

If America is to get over its Dewayne Geld problem, or if Britain is to get over its Paki Problem, the spiritual transformation required will be akin to what Albion saw between 1066 and the Tudors. We must witness once again the turning of a people from those who wish only to, as Thomas Carlyle put it, be “A gluttonous race . . . capable of no grand combinations; lumbering about in potbellied equanimity”8—something that sure seems to be true of our day, even if a harsh characterization of the Anglo-Saxons of William’s—into a great, capable, and heroic one that has a spine of steel and is capable of whatever harsh reprisals and stern chastisements are necessary to scour the barbarians into compliance.

That will not be an easy task, nor a particularly pleasant one. Even the Empire at its height saw Liberals protesting on behalf of the bloodthirsty savages against whom the pith-helmeted heroes fought, something that was as true of Jamestown as of Rhodesia in the 1970s, the last outpost of empire.

But it is nevertheless necessary. Such a transformation—a drilling of a people into a sort of chivalric hero Lewis describes9—is the only path out of paying the Danegeld. The arrival of William and the spirit he brought with him is what kept the Danes and their sort away for a millennium, up until the Pakis were invited in. The same sort of spiritual change is needed now, so that we stop falling prey to the myth of the noble savage, and instead learn that the savage is always ignoble at his core, and must be defeated rather than paid off, come what may in terms of unrest when we do exactly that.

If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and aids my attempts to share these important stories, and what they mean for you.

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Also, consider checking out my history channel, such as this video on Captain John Smith, the first great American adventurer, and one who understood how the Indians needed to be treated:

5

For reference, this is the famous image of the Dane geld being paid by the Anglo-Saxons that the included meme is based on:

7

wrote about it well here:

Postcards From Barsoom

I Don’t Think You Have Been, Mate

This is going to be quick and raw, because I want to get it out there while it’s relevant, and I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to write in the next few days…

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10 days ago · 437 likes · 165 comments · John Carter

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These are the works I read to study and learn about the history of Virginia, from the earliest days of colonization into the modern, postbellum era. Collectively, these are a good way of learning about practically every aspect of the Old Dominion over that time period, from managing a plantation and Cavalier culture, to the mechanics of politics in the state and Westward expansion.

In this video, I discuss which ones are best for getting a general history of the state, learning about the development of the Virginia Gentry, understanding plantation life and the economics of the plantations, understanding what set Virginia apart from the rest of the South, and getting into learning about the great men of the state’s history. I’ll also cover which ones are terrible, and should be avoided.

You can watch the full video on YouTube here, or subscribe here to get full access to the full thing ad free!

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Note: I am an Amazon affiliate. If you would like to help support the show at no cost to yourself, you can do so by using the link I have attached for each book, if that book is one you would like to read.

A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War By Thomas Fleming, https://amzn.to/4oeeRqs

A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790 By Emory G. Evans, https://amzn.to/4o7ILN0

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America By David Hackett Fischer, https://amzn.to/4fHA89R

Behold Virginia: The Fifth Crown By George F. Willison, https://amzn.to/3RZUalS

Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs By Mary Newton Stanard, https://amzn.to/4e2nT4W

Colonial Virginia, Volume I: The Tidewater Period, 1607-1710 By Richard L. Morton, https://amzn.to/3SjTUy8

Colonial Virginia, Volume II: Westward Expansion and Prelude to Revolution, 1710-1763 By Richard L. Morton, https://amzn.to/3SjTUy8

Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I and II By Philip Alexander Bruce, https://amzn.to/4vsQ4RP

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 By Gordon S. Wood, https://amzn.to/4xcNUaO

First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy By Nathaniel Burt, https://amzn.to/4dWhGaJ

Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia By Charles S. Sydnor, https://amzn.to/4dZsPaZ

George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father’s Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World By John Berlau, https://amzn.to/4ui7PCq

Lee By Clifford Dowdey, https://amzn.to/4o7H7Lk

Lee Chronicle: Studies of the Early Generations of the Lees of Virginia By Cazenove Gardner Lee, Jr., https://amzn.to/43dYssh

Myths & Realities: Societies of the Colonial South By Carl Bridenbaugh, https://amzn.to/4dMbKlV

Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal by Robert S. Tilton and William M. S. Rasmussen, https://amzn.to/4e2mueG

Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia: Or the Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion By Thomas J. Wertenbaker, https://amzn.to/43efFll

Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century By Louis Morton, https://amzn.to/4xmlX0e

Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America By Benjamin Woolley, https://amzn.to/43ccJWA

Seat of Empire: The Political Role of Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg By Carl Bridenbaugh, https://amzn.to/4ellGmz

Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia By Warren M. Billings, https://amzn.to/49FDqqd

Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War By Thomas Nelson Page, https://amzn.to/4fXkhUn

Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century By Philip Alexander Bruce, https://amzn.to/4x2jkk5

The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 By Stanley M. Elkins and Eric L. McKitrick, https://amzn.to/3QfnQuR

The Birth of Virginia’s Aristocracy By James C. Thompson II, https://amzn.to/4dZDoun

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the. Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North by James L. Huston, https://amzn.to/4uhZOgx

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 By Gordon S. Wood, https://amzn.to/4uVFwLi

The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class By Louis B. Wright, https://amzn.to/43dW3Oh

The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 By Robert Middlekauff, https://amzn.to/4uIXcJH

The Golden Age: A Climate for Greatness, Virginia 1732-1775 By Clifford Dowdey, https://amzn.to/4obCIXQ

The Great Plantation: A Profile of Berkeley Hundred and Plantation Virginia from Jamestown to Appomattox by Clifford Dowdey, https://amzn.to/4vkxLy2

The Landed Gentry By Sophy Burnham, https://amzn.to/4vq7Vss

The Lees of Virginia: Biography of a Family By Burton J. Hendrick, https://amzn.to/3RL7nip

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

The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners By Thomas Nelson Page, https://amzn.to/4uNU0wn

The Planters of Colonial Virginia By Thomas J. Wertenbaker, https://amzn.to/4dNhls9

The Radicalism of the American Revolution By Gordon S. Wood, https://amzn.to/43xdklT

The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 By John E. Selby, https://amzn.to/4uer7sa

The Sociology of Colonial Virginia By Morris Talpalar, https://amzn.to/4o8Ny0v

The Soul of a Nation: The Founding of Virginia and the Projection of New England By Matthew Page Andrews, https://amzn.to/4dMwUjV

The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 By Rhys Isaac, https://amzn.to/4e4YZSs

The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of “King” Carter and the Golden Age By Clifford Dowdey, https://amzn.to/4o8o2Zm

The Virginia Plutarch, Volumes I and II By Philip Alexander Bruce, https://amzn.to/4uTuAxy

Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era By Arthur Pierce Middleton, https://amzn.to/4dRzKmg

Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution By T. H. Breen,https://amzn.to/43N4FLY

Virginia, 1705-1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? By Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown, https://amzn.to/3S3TLil

Virginia Baron: The Story of Thomas 6th Lord Fairfax By Stuart E. Brown Jr, https://amzn.to/4uVBIK0

Virginia: The English Heritage in America By Parke Rouse, Jr., https://amzn.to/4x4dcrg

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

Virginia, The Old Dominion By Matthew Page Andrews, https://amzn.to/4dZmjB3

Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607-1688 By Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, https://amzn.to/4o8LPIz

Washington By Douglas Southall Freeman, https://amzn.to/4fY4rJe

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In any case, enjoy the list! I think you’ll find some of these fascinating reads, and you will be glad to know stay away from a number of them as well.

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

1. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James

Speaking of terrible books to stay away from, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James was up there as one of the worst books I read this month. (I know what you’re thinking: I have given very unfavorable reviews for almost all of his books, so why keep reading them? Because I ordered them all at once, and I don’t like wasting money. So I am trudging through them. Fortunately, the finish line is in sight.)

What makes this one terrible is that though the content is broadly interesting, James’s outlook—a befuddling mixture of worry for the “human rights” of civilian-murdering savages and Little Englander-style caustic complaining about the supposed cost of empire—turns the book into a bore, filled with endless moralizing rather than an interesting narrative where he could have used much the same information to tell the tales of America’s colonization, imperialism in Africa, the Brooke dynasty in Sarawak, and so on.

Instead, he primarily berates colonial administrators and military men for being too harsh with the fuzzy wuzzies after catching them murdering women and children.1 Further, his support for decolonization flies in the face of all that happened during and after the process, yet he remains entirely unreflective about that and instead vaguely gestures at some notion of national self-determination, making it the morally good thing, even if it tossed countless Europeans and natives alike into the cannibal’s pot.

That’s too bad, as it is packed full of useful information, particularly about the practicalities involved in the development of the empire and British imperial strategy. In that respect, it pairs quite well with the much better The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy by Andrew Lambert, one of my favorite books on strategy. Still, it is quite an awful book, and probably not worth reading unless you enjoy being annoyed by inane paragraphs full of moralizing by a safe and secure academic about the tactics of men living a hair’s breadth from death on the frontier.

If you are interested in that subject, I wrote an article about it last month:

2. The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family by Paul C. Nagel

While nowhere near as bad as James’s monstrosity, The Lees of Virginia by Nagel was also a disappointment.

On the one hand, it is full of much useful information and I got a great deal from reading it that will make its way into my future videos on the Lees. It is researched well, is packed full of useful historical details, and has a reasonably good narrative despite generally being more scholarly than fun as a read. Nagel also does an admirable job of not just focusing on Robert E Lee, but instead giving the other members of the family, good and bad alike, their due. So, as a general resource, it’s reasonably good.

That said, Nagel evidently wanted to use this book to break apart myths about the Lees, from their genteel Anglo-Norman origins to the military talents of the otherwise feckless Light Horse Harry Lee. That desire is problematic in two respects, both of which unnecessarily make the book unpleasant at times.

The first is that his myth-busting evidence is quite slight, and often flies in the face of what evidence we do have. To use the Anglo-Norman aspect as an example, we know the Lees believed themselves to be descended from Launcelot de Lee, a knight who allegedly arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066, as they thought themselves descended from the Lees of Coton Hall. At least some variation of that story is probably true, given what we know and can tell, but the lack of records makes it hard to tell for sure. It was deemed accurate enough that the College of Heralds accepted it, and it was good enough for Clifford Dowdey. Yet Nagel insists repeatedly that it is false, while offering no real evidence of it being false. Unfortunately, that happens a number of times throughout the book, and is grating, as it comes across as him desiring to tear down a legend not in the name of truth but just to see it destroyed and replaced by something more mundane, a nasty leftist tendency.

The second is more mundane: at times it breaks up the narrative of the book quite severely, and the middle of a story is interrupted by Nagel insisting that this or that fun legend isn’t true despite his not bringing any substantive evidence to overrule the legend. This too is grating, and entirely unnecessary.

Overall, this book is still fine. It is a useful resource and is a concise and detail-filled history of the Lee family for most of its era of glory (Nagel fails to include Fitz Lee2 at the end, which is odd, given that he was the last real Lee of note). That it is flawed does not make it a bad book, though those flaws are annoying. I would recommend it if you are interested in learning about the Lee family, but I recommend against believing Nagel’s claims that most legends are false. They are not, and he offers no evidence to show that they are.

3. Virginia: The English Heritage in America by Parke Rouse

Virginia: The English Heritage in America was yet another disappointment, though for a quite different reason than the first two: while a good history of Virginia, the title implies it will discuss the ways that a certain sort of genteel Anglo culture set its roots deeply in Virginia, and Virginia spread them to the nation. That indubitably happened, as shown by the Virginia of the Golden Age, and a full work on how and why that happened would have been fascinating.

Unfortunately, that is not what this book is. It is instead a short and general history of Virginia from the earliest days of colonization through the 19th century, with a focus on its time in the sun leading America and why it declined from that position atop the American Olympus. Rouse does a reasonably good of that, and his writing is superb.

Still, the title is misleading, which was annoying, and I found myself disappointed with it. So, if you want a very general introduction to the history of Virginia with a focus on why it led America for a time, this is a reasonably good one with which you can start. Do not read it expecting what the title implies, however.

4. Virginia Baron: The Story of Thomas 6th Lord Fairfax by Stuart Browne

Virginia Baron was the first book of May that I found entirely satisfactory. It is a good history of Lord Fairfax, the somewhat impoverished lord who owned Virginia’s “Northern Neck”, the strip of land from which many of the greatest Founding Fathers and Virginians came.

In it, Browne does an admirable job of concisely describing how the land came to be in Lord Fairfax’s hands and why its development was of immense personal interest to him (the financial extravagance of his father leaving the family in straightened circumstances), before getting into discussing how Lord Fairfax developed the territory and thus Virginia. It is a fascinating story involving many of the greatest men of the mid-18th century, not least of whom was young George Washington, a close friend of Lord Fairfax.

It is also interesting in that it tells the colonial history of the Northern Neck well, putting it in context and describing its development in some depth, along with the cast of historically influential characters involved, which is of immense utility for anyone interested in the history of Virginia or its role in the Revolution.

So, this is one I can wholeheartedly recommend. I quite enjoyed it and think you will as well.

5. Virginia: The Old Dominion, Vols I and II by Matthew Page Andrews

Virginia: The Old Dominion by Matthew Page Andrews is a superb general history of Virginia, stretching from the colonial era to the then-present (it was written in 1937). Andrews is a great writer, both volumes are well researched and written in a very engaging fashion, and the length is just right to do the subject justice without being overly long. I wish there were a study of Rhodesia of this sort, rather than the lacking options that are out there.

Were I to recommend one general history of Virginia for you to read, this would be it. It lacks the annoying progressivism present in Virginius Dabney’s general history of the state, is about a much broader period than Morton’s otherwise excellent history of the state, and is full of much more detail than the shorter, one-volume works. Further, it accomplishes that without feeling like an overly long read.

That said, it is out of print, so finding a good copy can be somewhat expensive. I recommend looking for the special edition bound in blue, as it is of a somewhat higher quality and isn’t much more expensive than the original prints.

6. One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

I needed a break from Virginia, but wanted to read something useful, so I reread One Up on Wall Street, which I first read back in college. I figured it might be useful for my articles on dynastic wealth and its benefits.

On the whole, it probably wasn’t. I don’t think there’s much of use in this book, though Lynch is an engaging and entertaining writer, and it’s full of fun anecdotes about good and bad investments. His point that one should invest in what one knows rather than speculating on buzzwords is almost certainly a good one, but also not really worthy of an entire book. Much better, I think, is studying the life of Andrew Mellon and his family, as he and they did this to quite incredible effect.

It did, however, spark one thought: when he wrote it, most companies went public quite early on, and it is the tales of small-cap stocks becoming large-cap successes that make up the bulk of the success stories in this book. In fact, companies with more than 100 shareholders were required to go public. This meant that buying any one stock was riskier, as many of those companies went belly up, but also meant that the general public had more of a chance of investing in companies early on, and so they could benefit from technological revolutions and the like if they paid attention to markets. Since the late 2000s, that has been less true, as a rule change allowed companies to stay private for longer. On one hand, that has probably been efficient, as the costs of being a public company are large. But it also means that most Americans don’t really have an opportunity to financially benefit from new companies in the same way they once did. SpaceX is going public this summer at a $2 trillion valuation…how much compounding is left? Not the same amount as if it had gone public two decades ago, when it hit the 100 shareholder mark. The same is currently true of AI companies that refuse to go public. I think that needs to be considered.

7. Lee Chronicle: Studies of the Early Generations of the Lees of Virginia by Cazenove Gardner Lee

Lee Chronicle is a great history of the first four generations of the Lee family, and does a superb job of describing how the family became such a success, how it built itself into a politically important dynasty, and so on. That it ends where it does is unfortunate, as a full history of the family at this level of depth and without the flaws of Nagel’s book would be superb.

Still, for what it is, it is excellent. It is even more scholarly of a work than Nagel’s, so I would only recommend it if you are interested in studying up on the Lee family and its history. That said, if you are, it is a must-read.

8. All Hail Rhodesia by K.M. Breakey

All Hail Rhodesia is the second book in KM Breakey’s science fiction/history series about the decline of the West. It is a fun read—though you really need to read the first novel first to understand the sci-fi elements in it—that investigates what it would have taken for the Rhodesians to win the Bush War and independence, and what the world might have looked like had they done so.

I agreed with much of it, though I disagreed with some parts, and would have preferred more details about what Breakey thinks Rhodesia should specifically have done to win the war.

The most interesting part of this novel is his thought exercise regarding what Southern Africa might have looked like had Rhodesia won, and rejected the aspects of Western thought that held it back from doing so in real life. I’ll dig into that in more depth in a soon-to-come article, as it’s a fascinating thought exercise.

Check out our podcast on the first book in the series here:

9. The Birth of Virginia’s Aristocracy by James C. Thompson II

The Birth of Virginia’s Aristocracy was yet another disappointment, and a much more substantial one than my dissatisfaction with Nagel’s work. The primary problem is that it’s not particularly interesting, and is not about what the title suggests it will be about, which is how the oligarchy in Virginia developed into a true aristocracy, meaning rule by the best. Had it been about that, I would likely have found it quite interesting.

Instead, this is just a somewhat droll and tedious read on the Virginia Company’s interest in money-making and how that led to Virginia’s development, which then turns into commentary on private property in Virginia and Governor Sandys administration, before later turning into a lengthy screed on the Northern Neck and the difference in land tenure in it compared to the rest of the state. It’s an odd jumble of topics that is neither particularly interesting nor well put together. While it has some useful information, that information is not well presented. And none of it has anything to do with aristocracy.

I would strongly recommend against wasting your time with this one. It has many negatives, few redeeming features, and it isn’t even an enjoyable read. If the subject of aristocracy in Virginia interests you, I’d recommend the two books cited in this article:

10. Savage Kingdom By Benjamin Woolley

I read Savage Kingdom to learn about Jamestown and John Smith for The Old World Show, and I had low expectations when I started it, as it is a modern book that involves Anglo-Indian relations…which typically means a tiresome mix of noble savage mythology and moralizing about bad English behavior. But I was pleasantly surprised, and this ended up being one of my favorite books I read this month.

Admittedly, Woolley does lean somewhat towards more praise of the natives than I think is justified. But, on the whole, it is a remarkably balanced book that shows the virtues and vices of the English and Indians in equally fair lights and is brutally honest about the repeated treachery and frequent brutality of the Indians. He even includes gruesome and honest tales of the atrocities they committed, which is rare amongst modern authors, most of whom want to hide the savagery the English faced. Even better, he did so while writing a fabulously interesting and informative book full of detail and developed via an interesting narrative. It’s great, and a pleasure to read.

So, this is one I wholeheartedly recommend if you are at all interested in learning what immense reserves of courage and perseverance it took to colonize America, with a particular focus on how poor decisions made by Virginia Company leaders doomed successive waves of colonists, what Anglo-Indian relations were actually like over the period, and how each side tried to outmaneuver the other. It’s great.

Watch my show on John Smith here:

11. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 by Robert Middlekauff

The Glorious Cause, which is part of the Oxford History of the United States set, is a work that is often praised online. After reading it, I have no idea why that is. While not terrible—at least Middlekauff generally doesn’t moralize about slavery, other than in a few random virtue signaling paragraphs scattered about the book like forgotten socks—it simply isn’t good. I suspect those who recommend it do so because they like the title and never bothered to read it, or have not read any other books against which they might compare it.

Despite being about the climactic moment in American history, it is dull and boring to the point of inducing drowsiness. It contains little original information, no original claims or points, and consists of being a jumbled collection of political and military history that often focuses on one to the exclusion of the other, to the great detriment of the whole. Thus, the work consists of a tedious and dry chunk of pages on the prelude to Revolution that simultaneously leaves out much of importance, particularly regarding Virginia’s role in the budding colonial crisis, and includes far too many irrelevant details that add little to the narrative or work generally. Middlekauff then, without much of a transition, jumps to a tiresome and uninteresting history of the Revolutionary War itself that essentially ignores what politics and diplomacy went on during the on-and-off fighting. He concludes with an interesting but random section on the economy of America after the war—a subject essentially ignored until then—and a history of the creation and adoption of the Constitution that finally does due justice to Virginia’s role in the process. This section at least serves as good research material, and is more interesting than the rest of the book, but is not enough to save it.

Overall, this is another book to ignore. It is dry to the point of being almost unreadable despite also being nothing more than a cursory overview of all the subjects included within it. One could do far better by choosing a few better books on aspects of the Revolution or early Republic in which one is interested.

12. Offensive Christianity: Restoring the Strength of Men in a Feminized Age by Chase Davis

Offensive Christianity is a solid book by about how organized Protestant Christianity got to its dire present state, and what could be done to restore it. Particularly, he focuses on why men—and I think the generally unstated presumption is white men—have left the church in droves, and what could be done to bring them back by restoring the church to its original attitude and message. It’s a much-needed book, and I recommend watching our podcast if you’d like to learn more about it:

13. The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 by John Selby

The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 by Selby is a dry but extremely informative history of Virginia during the American Revolution. Selby covers the administrative, political, and military history of the state throughout the entire period in painstaking detail, managing to include in a relatively concise volume both what decisions Virginia’s leaders made as the war progressed and why they made them. He covers the successes of the state during the war, along with its major failures, such as currency inflation and organizing to respond to raids launched by Benedict Arnold and the infamous Tarleton’s Raiders.

I won’t pretend that this book is a page turner. It is not. It is as dry as a saltine cracker, and reads like a dense textbook rather than a narrative history of the sort one might like to flip through on an airplane or at the beach. But for those who wish to learn about Virginia’s involvement in and contribution to the Revolution as a state—rather than just what Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson did and said while George Washington led—it is without par. Selby covers everything imaginable, from tax/monetary policy and the handling of logistics to battles with privateers in the Chesapeake and militia call up regulations, along with the political battles that led to each major decision. It is interesting and incredibly informative.

So, if you’re looking for a light read, don’t order this one. But if you want to become well-informed about this subject, this is a book without par.

14. Nyika, I Love You by Alice Vye Henningway

Finally, I read Nyika, I Love You by Alice Henningway, a tale of a young girl’s life growing up on a farm during and after the Rhodesian Bush War. It is a tale of traumatic childhood events and incredible moments of the sort that give Rhodesia its romantic lustre and air of colonial grandeur. It’s a tale of life on an isolated farm with a host of dependent natives and their resolute chief, of country club life with fellow white Rhodesians, and of boarding school in South Africa.

It’s a tremendously interesting tale full of anecdotes that do a good job coloring in the details of what life was like on a farm in Rhodesia during this period, and what sort of worries, fears, and hopes were held by members of the white population, along with what their relationship with the native workforce was like. That combination of social and economic history told through tales and anecdotes makes it both a valuable contribution to the history of Rhodesia, and worth reading if you are interested in the subject.

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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In it, Will and Clossington explore the history, foundation, and structure of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. We discuss its roots in earlier filibustering expeditions in Florida, Texas, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Cuba, including the famous campaigns of Narciso López and William Walker. Further, we discuss the life and career of George Bickley, the lifelong huckster and founder of the KGC, who built the organization through lodges called “castles”, secretive rituals, and surprisingly serious political connections in the highest levels of the American government. We then discuss how his foibles caused disaster when the Knights of the Golden Circle tried to invade Mexico.

Finally, we discuss the history of the Knights of the Golden Circle in the American Civil War period, during which KGC members supported secession, challenged Republican policy as Northern Copperheads, and helped form the local Confederate units that served as the foundation for much of the early Confederate Army.

Follow Clossington:
X: @Chossingstone1
URL: https://substack.com/ ⁨@Clossington⁩
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Recommended further reading: Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War by David Keehn. You can support this show at no cost to yourself by using my Amazon associates link to get it here: https://amzn.to/4dQfLo3

Chapters

• 0:00 Who Were the Knights of the Golden Circle?

• 3:45 The Organization and Goals of the Knights of the Golden Circle

• 11:40 Filibustering in American History, from Taking the Floridas to William Walker

• 19:01 George Bickley and Narciso López: The Cuban and Mexican Schemes

• 29:35 George Bickley: The Man Who Built the Knights of the Golden Circle

• 35:33 The Grand Strategy of Bickley’s KGC

• 43:36 Why the Filibusters Failed

• 46:17 President Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, and Why American Elites Took It Seriously

• 49:54 The Role of the Knights of the Golden Circle in the Civil War

• 58:26 The KGC Falls Apart

• 1:01:40 The Legacy Of the KGC, and Further Reading

Houses are expensive, and homes in gated neighborhoods are eye-wateringly expensive. Private schools are expensive, and ever more so. Delta tickets cost more than Spirit Airlines did, when Spirit survived…and an increasing number of companies are trying to extend forms of private air travel to the upper middle class. Backyard pools are increasingly prevalent despite their expense, and the obvious inefficiency. Vacation spots that aren’t a status symbol amongst Knockoff Gucci Slides Americans are extortionately expensive. If you like eating out, hopefully your restaurant is miles away from a “teen takeover” destination…and expensive enough to maintain a dress code that keeps out certain sorts. On and on it goes, from malls to planes, streets to trains: life in public spaces is an often hellish, and almost always unbearable experience

Where once there was a nice and well-maintained commons—a public park, a public school, a form of public transport, or a shared pool—now there is instead a disaster zone in the shell of what was once the public amenity, and an extortionately expensive private alternative. One can choose to live life behind the gate, or to face the consequences of being without it, amongst the barbarians.

Don’t want your kid to get stabbed to death by some “high school bully” the school refused to punish for disparate impact reasons? Well then, you can shell out tens of thousands of dollars a year to a private school that—infuriatingly—has a scholarship program for diversity, or quit your job and try to homeschool your kids.

Want to go for a swim without being surrounded by Joe Biden’s friend “Cornpop” and his cronies? Have fun paying for one in your backyard, or for a club that has one…and hopefully that club is a “nice” or “good” one…and we all know what that means.

Want to let your kids run around for a bit at the park without worrying about some “schizophrenic” vagrant trying to murder them in between puffs on a crack pipe? Enjoy the private park in your gated neighborhood, and that $600,000 mortgage.

The Commons

The situation is much the same in every case: the world that used to exist was, despite its relative poverty, more than capable of providing reasonably high-quality public amenities in exchange for tax dollars. The state provided, protected, and maintained the Commons, using the tax dollars it collected to do so.

This was the case with schools, parks, public transport, and all the rest. The standards that maintain and compose civilization were upheld, and so that which was provided as a public good could be generally relied upon and enjoyed by the taxpayers who paid for it, even if the upper class preferred private alternatives.

So, one could take the bus, train, or subway to work and be generally confident that it would both get there on time and lack the stabbings so prevalent today. One could let one’s kids roam around the neighborhood, even if it was an urban one, and generally not worry about crime. The parks were family-friendly rather than vagrant-friendly. The schools were quite good.

And best of all for the growing American middle class and upper working class was that there was no real added expense, other than the nominal fee for public transport. The slight amount of taxation necessary to pay for these amenities was spent wisely on everything from the building of them to the police-led protection of them, and so the direct cost of, say, having access to a nice park was quite low.

Further, the secondary costs that now characterize everything were not around yet.

For example, there have always been better and worse neighborhoods, but the cost of not being in the posh one wasn’t “potential death” in the way it now is. Now, choosing the wrong sliver of even the right zip code means your kids will face being stabbed to death at school, your house will face constant break-ins, your car will probably be stolen, and a trip to the park is liable to involve more heroin needles and shell casings than footballs or baseballs. Not if you live in the (very expensive) right little spot on the right side of the tracks…but everywhere else.

Similarly, Americans have long enjoyed automobiles, but the safety differential between driving to work and just living near work or taking public transport didn’t used to be existential. That decision was a matter of convenience and paying more to transcend the commons, not a serious decision about personal safety. Now it is. Every day, we are assailed with tales of stabbings, burnings, shovings in front of trains, and so on that happen to those who rely on the services their tax dollars fund.

And so immense secondary costs are imposed. One must have a car and drive it to work, which involves the car itself, gas money, insurance, and so on. One must live in a neighborhood far away from the urban chaos, which involves more expense and inconvenience—and of course public transport isn’t available, for any neighborhood planner with a brain knows it merely gives mobility to the enemy. So massive road infrastructure must be built, and taxes raised to pay for it. And those neighborhoods are limited in number—in no small part thanks to how much of each city is taken over by squalor and ruin—so the cost of houses within them is squeezed ever upwards by those who just want a bearable enough life. To pay for all that, the wife must get a job…which probably requires a second car, and childcare; more expenses, more inconvenience, more unpleasantness…a worse life.

On and on the cycle of inefficient costs goes, and it all could just be avoided if the Commons still existed and was maintained. Townhouses near where everyone socializes and works were once a favorite style of living for even the American upper-middle and upper class, after all! You can walk to work or take the trolley, the kids can walk to school and play around the streets, everyone lives nearby and so drunk driving and the like isn’t an issue with socializing, the tax burden can be lower because the shared costs are lower. That’s more convenient, obviates the cycle of increasing costs, and so long as order is ensured, it’s a great way of living. So, it’s how people used to live, and they relied on the Commons to make their lives nice, avoiding those massive expenses we now find not just common but necessary.

Civil Rights Made the Good Life Illegal

Then came the Civil Rights Act, and the various insanities—the worst of which was disparate impact law—that were inflicted upon the public as part of it. Disparate impact law outlawed private property, as put it. Or, more specifically, Civil Rights law made the commons illegal.

Suddenly, it became illegal to keep “troublemakers” out of a public park or pool if most of those troublemakers were from a certain demographic group. But if your club is private and has entry criteria that aren’t exclusively racial, then you can just prevent those troublemakers from becoming members of your gated Arcadia. At great financial cost to members, of course. Or you can build a pool in your backyard, and patch together a backyard large enough to act as something of a park, at even greater cost. And everyone who has even the faintest financial hope of participating wants access to those things, which drives up the cost yet further, in a never-ending cycle.

Suddenly, it became illegal to expel “troublemakers” from school if doing so meant the demographic group of which they were a part was being punished at a higher rate than whites. As Virginius Dabney notes in his Virginia: The New Dominion, “the unsettled conditions in the public schools” that came with Civil Rights meant the number of (expensive) private schools skyrocketed by 10% in just one year alone, and 20% in a year in urban zones most harmed by the equalitarian legislation.1 The same sort of story is true of every American city, and increasingly of the suburbs as well. A public school or two might be pretty good, but in a very expensive zip code. Everywhere else, the choice is between a violent zoo and an expensive private school.

Such were the consequences of Civil Rights: the Commons infrastructure on which everyone had once relied was destroyed, and replacing it were the unenviable choices of immense personal danger and an unpleasant life, or the added expense of trying to buy one’s way out of the consequences of the Civil Rights Act.

And, of course, it became illegal to try to maintain the political conditions that could lead to that being pushed back against. The Voting Rights Act required southern states to hand dozens of Congressional seats to radical black race communists in the name of equality. Similar laws, rulings, and regulations vastly expanded the power of urban zones, putting the usual suspects in charge and turning formerly nice places into hellholes.

The results of that became clear immediately: equality brought with it blood in such prodigious quantities that it drenched the country. It’s hard to enjoy a swim when you can hear the staccato of a Glock in the parking lot as “young scholars” express their disagreements over responsibility for scuffed sneakers.

That was what Civil Rights achieved. Before it, you could rely on the state to use your tax dollars to provide services that worked, or trust that other forms of shared amenities—neighborhood pools, local parks and gyms, etc.—would be relatively pleasant and civilized. The Commons existed, was an organic way of sharing the cost burden of such amenities without anyone bearing undue expense, and it worked quite well.

And then that came to a screeching halt. Now, it was unlikely that the Formerly Undervalued American kleptocrats running a city would much care about making sure the public parks were nice, well-maintained, and usable by normal, law-abiding people, for there’s more money to steal if everything is allowed to just fall into ruin.

Further, most of the ways of keeping amenities nice became illegal. The police are forbidden from proactively enforcing law and order, and often from even punishing criminals. Private citizens are harshly punished if they try to stand up for their community, as seen by the cases of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny. Neighborhoods couldn’t be kept safe from “newcomers”, and so blockbusting and the like destroyed generations of accumulated capital in cities like Detroit.

And so there are weeds growing through the needle-strewn sidewalks that used to surround nice public parks and now surround wastelands full of fentanyl zombies, for to restore order would require the infliction of force against problem-causing demographics, which has long been generally illegal to do at any scale. Bye-bye, civilization…it was nice knowing you.

Generally, then, we have had a breakdown of the commons areas that make civil society worth participating in. From the Greeks and Romans to the America of the 1950s, what set great civilizations apart from barbaric hells is that they could and did provide incredible amenities to their citizens. Now that is all dead, and where it is not buried already, it is dying.

Unless it is escaped with a profundity of money, that is. Ski towns, posh beaches, and Arcadian retreats in the glorious West have great amenities, after all. Houses in neighborhoods are getting larger, with more amenities like home gyms and home pools. Neighborhood parks can be nice enough.

But all of that is paid for out of pocket, on top of taxes. Unlike the baths of Diocletian, what is nice in our world comes at immense private cost, rather than as an expected service of the state. The state instead exists to tax us to fund various initiatives that are against our interests, such as investigating or harassing private clubs for being “racist”. It would never think of providing services and security of a high enough caliber to generally obviate those clubs.

South Africa

We have a glimpse at what this looks like in the near future: South Africa.

As Roman Cabanac explained when he came on my podcast, one can still live a good life in South Africa. One can live in a nice neighborhood with similar-looking and similarly minded neighbors, spend time at the pool or park with one’s kids and have a grand time, and do all the other little day-to-day things that are typical of civilized life in the Anglosphere.

But that comes at great cost. That sort of life is only possible in the gated compounds that dot South Africa, where the cost of homes is extortionately expensive and (competent but expensive) private security must be paid for on top of taxes because the police force is generally incompetent. But life in those compounds is nice. There is shopping, there are restaurants, there are maid services, there are safe sidewalks on which to walk, and all the rest. The good life, or at least what passes for it in our materialistic world, can still be lived…at great financial cost.

Or one can live in the boonies, where the troublemakers aren’t. That too is costly, given the private well, solar power, security systems, and so on that are required. But it is a bit freer than life in the safe pen.

Or one can live in a poor area, face unspeakable horrors inflicted by the criminal underclass, and then die or watch one’s kids die in the cruelest ways imaginable.

Such is life in South Africa, where the commons has also been made illegal by egalitarianism. The choices are going to great expense to live the precarious and penned-in life of a human cow, expensive and somewhat dangerous homesteading, or misery and death. One of the first two is preferable, I guess, but requires means out of reach of most.

That is our future. In fact, it’s increasingly our present.

Resisting the Death of the Commons

One of the greatest things that Trump is doing is publicly rejecting and reversing the death of the commons in any way he can.

Take DC. There, he has deployed the National Guard to shut down crime, has cleaned up the vagrant camps to make the parks and squares nice, and has engaged in a clean-up campaign to remove the muck and mire that coated everything, as recently seen with the Columbus Circle initiative.

These are baby steps, of course, and far from enough. However, when paired with moves like a reversal of disparate impact law, they’re steps in the right direction—particularly since the Guard deployments to crack down on crime are happening across the nation, and appear to be working even in cities like Memphis.

Our public life should be nice, and uplifting. Our public amenities should be nice. The state should be able to provide such things, and use force to keep them nice.

That is what civilization is: much as standards and the enforcement of them at the individual level, with things like manners and dress, matter, so too does public decorum, decency, and pleasantness matter.

The Commons should be restored, and “clothed with marble,” as Augustus called his restoration of Rome. That sort of thing is important. It reflects upon a people, and determines the quality of life for all but the richest. The alternative is to end up like South Africa, as we increasingly are.

If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and aids my attempts to share these important stories, and what they mean for you.

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Also, consider checking out my history channel, such as this video on Captain John Smith, the first great American adventurer, and one who understood how the Indians needed to be treated:

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They discuss the egalitarian drift of the church and where it began, how the Enlightenment and rise of democracy played into that drift, and what we can do about it. They comment on steady state Christian society versus a fervent Christian society that burns itself out, the Puritans, monarchy, and the evangelical movement before discussing finding a church that fits with your heritage and culture, what Nietzsche got wrong, and what sort of men we can look up to.

Overall, they go back and forth over what it will take to return to the days when the church and Christian society create Christian heroes rather than the sort of gelded church we generally have today.

Get Chase’s book here: Offensive Christianity

Follow Chase on X here: https://x.com/jchasedavis

Watch and listen on YouTube here:

Such is the world of the Harry Potter series as seen from the Quidditch pitch. At first glance, it is a compelling picture of a traditionalist, rightist world. One of the few seen in modern literature of any sort, much less children’s books! Only The Lord of the Rings can really compare, in that regard.

But it is a false impression. A magical illusion, or charm spell, to use the language of the books. Closer inspection shows that while Harry Potter is bedecked in the aesthetics of a rightist world, it is really only wearing those aesthetics as a skinsuit.

What lies underneath is a convoluted mess of an ideology that shunts aside what should be a justification for a traditionalist society to instead glorify…a rotten and ridiculous bureaucratic state not unlike that of Harold Wilson that destroyed Rhodesia. In this, Harry Potter is the antithesis of The Lord of the Rings, and represents an attitude of the sort that led to the West’s decline,1 as I’ll show in this article.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

The Skinsuiting Spell: The Rightist Aesthetic of Harry Potter

A hierarchical, lordly attitude of the sort once familiar to the right pervades the Harry Potter story, particularly the early books.

Hogwarts

For one, of course, there is the general setting of Hogwarts and all that entails. The four Great Houses of the school stretch back a millennium, according to the mythology of the story, and the traditions and spirit of the Founding houses have remained intact over time because diligent training of their heirs of blood and spirit has ensured it. To remind them of their predecessors’ noble deeds and spirits, they are surrounded not just by ties and banners, but by portraits, whispered tales passed from one generation to the next, and even ghosts who serve as semi-living reminders of days past.

Their lessons consist of reminding them of their duty to rule well and responsibly, and to train them in how to exercise their power in such a manner. Their extra-curriculars—namely Quidditch, which in its dangers, expense, and excitement is something like polo—are meant to accentuate their spirits and propel them to lives of noble deeds (or so it seems). Professors are treated with deference and respect, and in turn treat their pupils as near-equals to be trained and tutored rather than boxed about the ears and treated as a rabble of inept children. Personal and spiritual excellence is glorified and further developed rather than damned, students are taught of traits in houses and families, and the understanding that blood makes one magic and can confer special characteristics makes them unusually focused on ancestry and heritage.

Such is very aristocratic. Hogwarts, from its uniforms to its traditions, is meant to be a top-notch boarding school of the sort like Eton or Harrow that once trained the aristocracy and gentry to rule Britain and her empire. That is to say, it is a place not just where the best are educated, but where they are molded into the sort of men who can exercise just rule of the sort expected from them and do their duty in all circumstances. Similarly, Great Houses within it are references to the various noble lines that once ruled, and the way certain lines seem to have unique characteristics.

It’s not for nothing that the Hogwarts scenes in the early movies were filmed at Alnwick Castle, the ancient seat of the Percy family, a ducal family of Norman blood that came across in 1067 and ruled North England as effective sovereigns for much of the Middle Ages. They’re still around, and their blood and castle capture the sort of eternal connection that makes both families like them and literary versions of the sort seen in Harry Potter seem special, mystifying, and so on. Nothing survives for a millennium by mere chance, after all.

But it is deeper than just the ties, banners, and lessons of Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and the Damned Bourgeoisie

Take the general scorn shown towards the middle class in the books, principally through the lens of the Dursleys, the upper-middle-class and non-magical family that took Harry in after the death of his parents.

The Dursleys are shown as being myopically focused on money, for one thing. They lack any sense of honor or higher things, and are instead driven by an insatiable lust for material pleasures and constant accumulation of things with little real value. Dudley’s wrecked toys are the distillation of this, but so is the expensive though unattractive home at which they live.

Similarly, the Dursleys are shown to have, by their very nature, no sense of personal excellence. Both males are so fat that they can hardly walk, are described as lacking any sense of athletic prowess or the point of exercise, and are driven by their gluttony for food as much as by their lust for material possessions. There is nothing sporting about the Dursleys, whereas Harry is portrayed as naturally excelling at the aristocratic and challenging sport of Quidditch.

On much the same note, they are only able to use force in a non-sporting way against those over whom they exercise tyrannical control. Whereas Harry is willing to engage in an artistocratic duel in the first book despite not knowing the first thing about it, Dudley—his cousin and a tyrannical bully—is only willing to prey on the weak when he knows he can win, and runs away from danger and to his shrew of a mother at the first sign of anyone pushing back against him. Similarly, his father buys a rifle with which to ward off wizards, but shows no real ability to use it and is easily disarmed and intimidated by the unarmed Hagrid.

And, of course, the Dursleys show no real interest in ancestry, heritage, blood, or the like. Dudley’s father shows a slight attachment to his un-aristocratic boarding school, Smeltings, but that’s about it. Nothing is said by them or anyone else of their ancestry, of any noble deeds once performed, of characteristics innate to the Dursley clan, or of anything else that would indicate they had ever once looked beyond their checkbooks and plates of sausages.

Similarly, they have no sense or care for aesthetics. They are fat blobs who appear like it, or who find some horrid outfit like the Smeltings uniform very attractive. That pairs well with their beady-eyed skepticism of anything not exactly of the comfortably mundane sort they like and expect.

That general impression of them is more or less the exact same one used by the British landed elite and its retainers to describe the middle class at its worst. Myopically focused on money gained through business, unsporting to the nth degree, gluttonous in the worst ways, uncharitable, uncurious, suspicious, and petty. Merciless little tyrants to those dependent on them, and disgustingly obsequious to those on whom they depend.

Both the greats of the wizarding world who are of ancient and noble lineage—such as Harry Potter and Hogwarts Headmaster Dumbledore—and the humble—such as Hagrid the Gameskeeper and the Weasleys, express this general opinion of the Dursleys and their ilk. It is the view of those trained in lordly virtue and traditional leadership looking askance at those devoid of all such principles.

Blood in the Potterverse

Then there is the matter of blood. In the universe of the Harry Potter series, blood and lineage confer special characteristics. For one, a mixture of lineage and chance determines if one is a wizard—a member of the ruling elite that secretly rules itself and controls the non-wizard (“Muggle”) world—or not.

Muggles have no magic in them, and generally don’t know of wizards. Squibs have magical parents, but lack the magic gene; however, this is rare, indicating that generally the trait is passed, much as being mostly good at being a member of the gentry was passed from one generation to the next.

Then there are the degrees of magical blood within the wizarding world. Pure-bloods have magical parents and are magical. Mudbloods have no magical parents, but by chance have the trait. Half-bloods have mixed parents.

Predictably, there is a fight within the magical community over who counts. Much like the landed elite of old, the old families are skeptical of “mudblood” newcomers; the wealthy and ancient Malfoys are of this arch-Tory mindset. Similarly, much like the landed elite of old, few much care about half-bloods; marriage into the ruling elite is considered good enough, so long as the children it produces are as well. And, also like the landed elite of old, the more liberal elements insist that newcomers don’t matter even if those newcomers immediately push for full recognition and change. There is a distinct strain of the 18th century’s feud between Whigs and Tories over how and whether to include arrivistes with industrial or mercantile backgrounds throughout the blood discussion in Harry Potter (which is interesting, as are the other Whig-Tory style of feuds present throughout the early books; on the whole, they are much more interesting than the Gay Liberal vs. Literal Hitler dynamic present in the later stories).

But, overall, the matter of blood is handled positively and in a traditionalist way. Hagrid is surprised upon meeting Harry that he doesn’t know that he is an already honored member of an exalted elite because of his very blood and ancestry, for example. Similarly, it is generally considered unremarkable that different sorts of kids should be sorted into different Great Houses based on their innate virtues and vices.

In our egalitarian world, that would not fly. Imagine sending 5th graders to a different school because you sense that they are designing, like Malfoy, or innately honorable, like Potter. The school board probably wouldn’t approve that. In their world that appears fully comfortable with and accepting of such aristocratic tendencies, however, it’s portrayed as simply being common sense.

The Other Little Aesthetics

There is much else that imbues Harry Potter with a decidedly un-liberal aesthetic.

The great families have house slaves called house elves, for example, and this is treated as unexceptional. Indeed, the Weasleys indicate the ownership of slaves is limited but highly desirable, and say that they’d own one if they could afford it.

Similarly, the operation of Hogwarts in the early novels is portrayed as being generally a matter of individual sovereignty amongst the professors. They can, on a whim, choose to punish students, award or subtract points, insist students engage in dangerous activities, and so on. The restraints imposed are not chains of bureaucracy but limits of decency and social acceptability. And at the top sits Dumbledore, who is the sovereign who decides the exception—as he does to much fanfare with the awarding of points at the end of the first novel.

Other little things abound. Wands are like specially crafted sidearms molded to the spirit and capabilities of the users—much like swords, the traditional preserve of the aristocracy, are carried at all times, and are used frequently in formal and informal duels. The general understanding that the wizarding world ought rule the Muggle world because it can, but that it also ought do so honorably and justly, is very aristocratic. Brooms are a personal, special, and often expensive form of personal locomotion, much like horses once were for the landed elite. On and on it could go.

Those little things that flesh out the wizarding world in an attractive way are all decidedly aristocratic, and thus rightist, in orientation.

The Skinsuiting: The Blood and Bureaucracy Underneath the Aesthetic

Be that as it may, the world of Harry Potter is not a rightist one. Or, at least, the books are decidedly not rightist in tone, though what exactly they are is hard to discern. There are certain elements of it that reek of the Whig worldview—particularly surrounding the matter of blood and of rule being more secretive than open—and a great deal that consists of presenting the British bureaucratic state of Harold Wilson as the way things ought be done, within proper bounds.

The Blood of Potter

Particularly, there is Rowling’s obvious discomfort with the world of blood and tradition that she created.

The remainder of this article 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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This is the true story of Pocahontas, not the Disney one. This is the tale of a beloved little princess in the Powhatan Confederacy named Matoaka known for her curiosity, hence the nickname “Pocahontas” that became invariably associated with the tale of Virginia’s earliest days. She was used in a game of high-stakes frontier diplomacy with John Smith that turned into a legend of lovestruck sacrifice, she was sold to Samuel Argall by her own people for a copper kettle during the Anglo-Powhatan War, and then she was Westernized and christened Lady Rebecca by the English.

Abandoned and betrayed by her father and her people when the Powhatan betrayed her yet again to keep a few rusty swords, she then married John Rolfe and became the feted belle of the ball in England, where she met the king and queen, reunited with John Smith, and caught the illness that laid her low. But, it turns out, not just her memory, but her original name lives on in the name of one of America’s most famous battlefields…

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!

• Smith, Captain John: The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles., https://amzn.to/49H3hxR

• Willison, George F.: Behold Virginia: The Fifth Crown, https://amzn.to/4do9YG4

• Dabney, Virginius: Virginia: The New Dominion, https://amzn.to/4dtAE8l

• Andrews, Matthew Page: Virginia: The Old Dominion, Vol. I, https://amzn.to/4uZBW2h

• Bruce, Philip Alexander: The Virginia Plutarch, Vol I, https://amzn.to/437cAU0

• Morton, Richard L.: Colonial Virginia, https://amzn.to/4ua3bqY

• Andrews, Matthew Page: The Soul of a Nation: The Founding Of Virginia and the Projection of New England, https://amzn.to/4d9Ut60

Episode Timeline

• 0:00 Pocahontas Saves John Smith

• 3:20 Why Is Pocahontas Important?

• 3:54: How Maoaka Got the Nickname, “Pocahontas”

• 5:27 Growing Up in the Powhatan Confederacy

• 7:18 Did Pocahontas Really Save John Smith

• 10:22 The First Anglo-Powhatan War

• 12:36 Pocahontas Is Captured by Samuel Argall

• 15:03 Pocahonas Is Westernized at Henrico

• 17:01 Pocahontas Meets John Rolfe, and They Fall In Love

• 21:15 The Powhatan People Refuse to Fight or Negotiate for Pocahontas

• 23:28 Pocahontas Marries Rolfe

• 23:33 Pocahontas Marries John Rolfe

• 26:11 Lady Rebecca and John Rolfe Travel to London

• 28:14 Pocahontas and John Smith Meet Again

• 29:00 Pocahontas Takes London Society by Storm

• 30:20 Pocahontas Grows Sick in Polluted London

• 31:10 Pocahontas dies

The Transcript

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One lesson that I think has special relevance for Americans, particularly those in “the bad things map” area of the country, stood out across those works: whatever the era, whatever the ideology of the politicians in charge, those domestic politicians never understand the situation and have a terrible tendency to side against vengeful settlers and with savage natives out of a deluded belief in their humanity. They think the myth of the noble savage real, and apply it to policy.

Naturally, the same tendency applies to police handling of “Crime committing Americans” today—pitbull Americans, if you will.

Those who live near tigers know why they should be shot. He who sees them at the zoo, or on TV, thinks of them as being cute, cuddly, and redeemable. Such a dichotomy played out across imperial history, as I’ll discuss here.

NOTE: Most of the footnotes are multi-paragraph stories from four books: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James, The Savage Wars by Lawrence James, Savage Kingdom by Benjamin Woolley, and Rhodesia: A Complete History by Peter Baxter. All four books are “fine”—Savage Kingdom is the best of the bunch—but the stories I have selected them are really fantastic and show this well. I’ve included them as footnotes because the article would otherwise be overly long, but I really recommend you read them. I found them quite enlightening. You can listen to the audio version of this post here:

“Oh, How Cute”: The Last Phrase Your Civilization Hears, From Jamestown to Bulawayo

Rhodesia’s War of World Opinion

Some of the most glaring examples of this tendency for domestic governments to demand that settlers let the tiger in the gate because it looks cute and cuddly come from Bush War-era Rhodesia, during which every Western government sided with murderous terrorists rather than the settlers trying to fend them off.

As Peter Baxter notes1 in his Rhodesia: A Complete History, for example, the Catholic Church was more than willing to openly side with murderous, atheistic communist terrorists over the Rhodesian civilians and soldiers fighting for an openly Christian civilization. In fact, the Catholic Church was perfectly fine praising the terrorists who were documented raping and torturing nuns!2 It did so despite well-documented evidence3 that the “terrs” were murderous gangsters bent on rapine, claiming that the Rhodesians were simply engaging in the “pernicious heresy” of racism in fighting rather than bowing before such rebels. The other organized Christian churches were little better, with the Archbishop of Canterbury being notoriously anti-Rhodesian.

This was true throughout the war. When the ZAPU terrs shot down two civilian airliners and bayoneted the survivors to death, Nkomo laughed about the butchery during an interview on the BBC. He faced not a word of official condemnation in America, Britain, or anywhere else for that.4 But when Rhodesia responded to the horrific atrocity with Operation Vanity, a bombing campaign against terrorist training camps, it was of course condemned by the world.5 “You must let the tiger eat you if it wants. It is its nature to be hungry, you see…”

In case after case, governments across the Western world were more than willing to look the other way when black terrorists engaged in unspeakable barbarity against Rhodesian civilians, black and white alike. Whether it was cutting the lips and ears of blacks who worked with Rhodesian forces, raping white women to death, murdering entire families, cutting open pregnant women, or anything else…the world was perfectly fine with it, so long as ZAPU or ZANU were behind it. But when the Rhodesian security forces responded to such horrors with well-planned, well-executed military operations targeting exclusively military targets? Well, then the howls of protest rose!6 Such sneak attacks were against the rules of war, the Rhodesians were told! Nevermind that it was the terrs, not the Rhodies, attacking civilians. All Western governments cared about was the idea that the precious black communists must never be harmed.

And what was true of the war was doubly true of the political crisis. Rhodesia long and accurately argued that it was interested only in “Responsible Government”, which meant keeping the country out of the hands of those who would turn it to communism. Those, like the Duke of Montrose, who emigrated to Rhodesia quickly saw the wisdom of such a decision.7 It made perfect sense: giving the franchise to those who would obviously be intimidated into voting for communism would be a disaster that would destroy the country.8 But the politicians back home didn’t care. They wanted mass democracy, come what may. They were siding with the savages and sticking to that decision.

But while this attitude was particularly detestable and open during the Bush War, it was not a new phenomenon. No, it existed throughout the colonial and imperial era, and was just as much an issue when Rhodesia was being founded as when it was dying. In fact, it’s an attitude that went all the way back to Jamestown.

Jamestown

One might think that the British of the Stuart era were made of sterner stuff than their gelded descendants of the Harold Wilson era. Perhaps many were. John Smith certainly was; one doesn’t earn a coat of arms with three Turks’ heads on it via peaceful means.

But, regrettably, the London-based leadership was just as ridiculously pro-savage as Wilson’s regime three and a half centuries later, as shown by Jamestown’s experience in dealing with the savages they found.

This was the case from the beginning, as the book Savage Kingdom by Benjamin Woolley inadvertently shows.

For example, when the settlers landed in the Chesapeake, they were under strict orders to avoid antagonizing or fighting with the Indians because churchmen back home wanted to ensure that their souls could be saved. This meant, when it came to following the London Company’s instructions that flowed from such a hopeful policy, avoiding building fortifications, avoiding responding violently to attacks as much as possible, and otherwise being magnanimous in the face of Indian attacks, atrocities, and treachery.

Unlike the Rhodesians, the first Virginians mostly followed these strictures from churchmen and capitalists back home in London, safe and snug in their abbeys and The City of London as the settlers they had consigned to death tried to carve civilization out of the New World. In fact, upon the expedition’s landing at Jamestown, President Wingfield overruled Captain John Smith and initially refused to even let the settlers build a palisaded fort in which to live, or to prepare most of their weapons for active service. He thought that such decisions would antagonize the Indians. This immediately set up a near-disaster, as the Indians were not welcoming and used this absurd weakness of the settlers to attack them and almost wipe out the colony before it had even properly begun. Only a desperate, last-minute cannon shot from a ship that conveniently returned managed to save the fledgling colony from being completely overrun and the settlers massacred.9

While Wingfield then let Smith build his fort, the pro-savage policy otherwise generally remained in place. Smith was often reprimanded for engaging in his more “robust” form of Indian relations when attacked,10 and otherwise the English suffered humiliations, indignities, and repeated assaults because of the London-based directors and churchmen wanting to maximize the chance of saving savage souls and keeping relations peaceful. That relations with those whose land they were engrossing would never be peaceful, in the end, does not seem to have crossed their minds.

This remained true even when the Indians tortured captive Englishmen to death in some of the most painful and horrific ways imaginable.11 Peace was the policy foisted on the English by those back home, and they only broke it in times of utmost necessity.

It didn’t matter that the Indians were treacherous, and did things like torture Ratcliffe to death after luring him in with false claims of parlay and corn sales.12 No, the orders remained the same. The settlers eventually started breaking them out of a desire for vengeance,13 but the rules remained in effect.

Or at least they did until March of 1622. That is when the Indians, after years of peace in which they pretended to be friends of the settlers and affected a desire to learn of Christianity, took advantage of the opportunity to strike and so did so with a vengeance. In a single day, they wiped out somewhere between a quarter and a third of the colony. More died in the starvation and disease-ridden aftermath. Pretending to be friends, pretending to be interested in Christianity, they massacred men, women, and children alike.

Naturally, the Virginians were incensed. This attack set back the precarious prosperity and stability they had finally built after years of labor. It led to the murder of their friends. It was abominable, atrocious, and launched as a ruthless and ignominious sneak attack. So, they responded in like terms to savage aggression, and were damned for it by the pearl clutchers back home. As Woolley notes:

[A] group led by Captain William Tucker took twelve men up the Potomac to collect some English held by the Indians, 'and withal in colour to conclude a peace with the great King' Opechancanough. Terms were agreed, and concluded upon the banks of the river with speeches at which Tucker proposed a toast to peace. Several of the assembled Indians drank the toast, and were killed by a poison specially prepared by the colony's physician, a Dr John Potts. A battle ensued, during which the English claimed to shoot forty or fifty Indians, including, Tucker mistakenly believed, Opechancanough himself.

When news of this action reached England, there was disapproval of the underhand manner of the attack, and calls for Dr Potts to be disciplined for supplying the poison.

Those back home would discipline the settlers for responding aggressively to treachery! They’d let the colony be wiped out rather than see the settlers defend themselves in extremis! Such was to be a repeated attitude throughout colonial history: the savages are savage and expected to act like it, but to treat them like it is something that ought not be tolerated!

Fortunately for Virginia, the settlers did not let such criticism and chastisement rankle them. “In Virginia, however, such qualms were swept aside. ‘Whereas we are advised by you to observe rules of justice with these barbarous, perfidious enemies, we hold nothing unjust that may tend to their ruin,’ Governor Wyatt told the Virginia Company in London,” Woolley notes. In fact, this was the defining moment of their identity.

Henceforth, the frontier would be a place of near-constant race war as they steadily pushed the Indians back, treating them as the enemies they had shown themselves to be. No longer would the prattling on about teaching them the love of Jesus be tolerated. They had shown themselves to be irredeemable, perfidious, and dangerous, and so whatever London said, the Virginians would treat them as such.14 Eventually, Nathaniel Bacon crushed the Indian menace nearly entirely, and it did not resume until the French and Indian War.

But it must be noted: that victory came because of what the Virginians did. They learned they had to do it themselves, and so did so. Having grown up as a civilization near the tiger, they knew to treat it like one, rather than to try to pet it. As a result, they could build a new civilization. Had they listened to the whining liberals and churchmen in London, all that would be left would be a charred church and school for the savages.

Elsewhere

The same story was true elsewhere in the empire as the imperial experiment ground on over the ages.

Sarawak

Take, for example, Sir James Brooke. He was the perfect and quintessential Victorian hero. Rakish and handsome, a talented adventurer, uncommonly brave, and quite capable at rule, he had become rajah, as Professor Bruce Gilley notes, of the “chaotic province of Sarawak in 1841. Order and prosperity expanded to such an extent that even once a British protectorate was established in 1888, the Sultan preferred to leave it under Brooke family control until 1946.”

He did so by fighting countless wars against headhunters, local pirates, and even massive pirate fleets sailing from the Philippines. He had brought order and stability to what had been a blighted land, spending his fortune and expending his life force upon his little patch of mud and jungle, largely for the benefit of the natives, foregoing riches gained through corruption or exploitation of the natives as he did so.15 It was a humane, even liberal, program of rule he established.16

The response of Liberals in London? To criticize him for it. To berate him for killing too many pirates, much as the Virginians were earlier damned for defending themselves too successfully, or the Rhodesians later browbeaten for counter-attacking with too much skill. Detractors of Brooke in Parliament relentlessly attacked and browbeat him and his Royal Navy allies for their success in utterly crushing the pirate scourge.

In fact, after he and the Royal Navy defeated a massive pirate armada and waged a steady campaign against the pirates that finally broke their power after centuries of them terrorizing the waters and people around Sarawak, it was Brooke who was accused of acting like a pirate!

As Spencer St. John records in his The Life of James Brooke, one MP even claimed, "Sir James Brooke seized upon a territory as large as Yorkshire, and then drove out the natives, and subsequently sent for our fleet and men to massacre them." Then, when Sir James rebutted the charge, he was attacked for it! As St. John notes, “The insolence and ignorance here displayed are about equal, and yet Sir James is censured for resenting the accusation of having massacred the peaceful inhabitants of his own country.”

Brooke was even investigated by the Liberal British government for his victories. Though he was vindicated, in the end, it was an embittering experience that left him skeptical of the British government, and showed just how much those tender-hearted Liberal politicians who put the rights of savages ahead of the rights of the peaceable and law-abiding either didn’t understand the situation on the ground, or didn’t care about it. In their eyes, the white man and his allies were always in the wrong, and the costumed barbarian with a lace of trophy heads around his neck always in the right.

For those interested, I tell this part of the story of Sir James here, in this episode of The Old World Show:

The Rest of Empire

I don’t wish to belabor the point, but this was the case across the rest of empire as well.

In case after case, those on the ground—particularly Tory military men, whether the aristocratic officers or their rougher enlisted men—knew what needed to be done to keep the natives in check, and so did it. Never were they particularly upset about it. Generally, even when they faced the risk of great personal harm, they found such actions quite enlivening and sporting. But the Liberals back home—and the various members of that political coalition, namely Radicals, Unitarians, and like specimens of equality-minded brain rot—were furious about it.

There was Col. Frederick Burnaby, killed on active duty after horrifying the tender-hearted by “potting Dervishes” (shooting Muslim warriors of the sort who had killed Gen. Chinese Gordon and doing so easily, as if they were pheasants).17 Kitchener, similarly, was damned by the tender-hearted for “desecrating” the bones and tomb of the murderous Mahdi, despite his doing so having successfully stopped the tomb from becoming a religious shrine with which radical Islamists could further destabilize the Empire.18

Similarly, the British South Africa Company was repeatedly attacked by Liberals in Parliament for responding aggressively to a revolt launched by the Matabele—a Stone Age tribe known for treating cattle better than their captives, whom they turned into maltreated slaves.19 The settlers in Natal faced similar criticism for defeating the notoriously bloodthirsty Zulus.20

Nevermind that the Matabele rebels against whom the BSAC fought had, in the words of one trooper, “gone beyond their own etiquette of war, and have killed our women and children”.21 Nevermind that they had slaughtered civilians. The Liberals were upset that the reprisals were harsh!22 Meanwhile, those on the ground, much like the Virginians of an earlier date, knew what needed to be done, and so did it. As Lawrence James records in The Savage Wars:

A professional soldier who came across the bodies of murdered settlers felt this wild spirit: 'I left the laager that day holding staunchly the opinions of Mr Labouchere and his supporters, condemnatory of the slaughter of the blackman; but a quarter of an hour among such sights as these sufficed to convert me into a zealous advocate for their prompt extermination.’

That such opinions might be at least somewhat justified, given the risks at play and horrors seen, never seems to have crossed the minds of the Liberals. They, instead, remained upset that such reprisals had been engaged in regardless of whether they were justified or necessary.

Much as in Jamestown centuries earlier, never do the murdered settlers whose families were tortured to death by the rampaging savages seem to have crossed their minds. And so, as Peter Baxter notes, “from the evangelicals and Fabians could be heard a steady drumbeat of condemnation”. This infuriated the settlers. As Baxter tells it:

To those steeped in moderation and fair play, and secure under the rule of law, criticism of this nature might have appeared justified, but to those on the frontline, it was not. When in Rome we do as the Romans do, and conditions of African violence often invited the same in kind. When living beyond the pale, rules of conduct are necessarily less defined. The settlers believed that their sacrifices were for Queen and Empire, and for that, they were owed a debt of gratitude, not disapprobation.

And it was not just in Africa that this played out in the later imperial era. When the British conquered the Maori cannibals, for instance, the Tories—gentry-born officers and enlisted soldiery alike—realized such types couldn’t be helped, and wanted to crush them. Meanwhile, the usual collection of malcontents who “tended to be Nonconformists, middle-class, and Liberal or Radical in their politics” formed “a powerful body of Christian philanthropists who believed that these races could be raised to standards of education and conduct which would place them alongside Europeans.”23 Remember, that tender-heartedness was for the benefit of literal cannibals.

Much the same came when the military had to restore order in Jamaica in an incident remembered as the “Eyre” scandal. When the military shot down black rioters, domestic Liberals went utterly berserk, prompting exasperation from those tasked with maintaining order. As James records:

The significance of the Eyre scandal lay in the fact that it revealed a substantial body of intellectually respectable opinion which believed that large proportion of the empire's subjects were impervious to improvement and needed a firm hand to keep them in order. Humanitarians had misjudged the 'savage': he was a fickle creature whose capacity for moral and intellectual elevation was limited. For some, his role within the empire was that of a permanent underdog. Nevertheless, the fuss that had been made about Eyre acted as a brake on others of like mind. In 1879, General Sir Garnet Wolseley, commander-in-chief in South Africa, had reluctantly to abandon a plan to unleash the Swazis against the Zulus. He wrote:

’I have to think of the howling Societies at home who have sympathy with all black men whilst they care nothing for the miseries inflicted on their own kith and kin who have the misfortune to be located near these interesting n-ggers.’

Such sentiments echoed through the empire, and remained consistent over the centuries. A certain sort of liberal-minded types, particularly those who mixed religion with their liberal views, never could stomach what had to be done to maintain order and civilization in the colonies. And so they nearly always sided with the savages against the settlers out of the deluded belief that the noble savage was being maltreated. In reality, he was nearly always just being treated on his terms, in response to his barbaric behavior, and if anything those sent to establish or restore order were quite sparing in the use of much-justified force.

The End Of Empire

Gradually, that Liberal mind rot overtook more and more of the populace, and so by the post-World War II era, even the supposed “far-right” in Britain was incapable of understanding what had to be done, then doing it.

Worrisome signs of this had cropped up during the interwar period. For example, even those domestic conservatives desirous of holding onto the Raj were made queasy by tactics of the sort displayed at Amritsar,24 which were necessary for the holding onto of it. What a far cry from what they had been cheering on during the Sepoy Mutiny and its aftermath!

After the war, Labour and Conservative cheered as the Empire became the “Commonwealth”, which consisted of a motley collection of decolonized states run by thugs who were dependent on handouts from British taxpayers.25

Successive governments were unwilling to use force to crush disorder, much less dissent, and so the empire was riven into little pieces of land soaked by the blood of innocents as the worst tyrants and scoundrels imaginable took over, often with the aid of British authorities. The settlers were left to suffer or forced to flee as the government that had never been fully on their side as they attempted to treat the savages as they ought be treated finally abandoned them entirely to those savages.26

And so, as one soldier stationed in India put it, “as things are nowadays, these bloody wogs only have to open their mouths and dribble, and everyone in the world's on their side against us. No one wants to know the truth of it. They're just for the wogs and against us—and so are half our own people, come to that.”27

Indeed. Even Enoch Powell, today remembered as quite the rightist, responded to rumors of harsh tactics being used against the evil and bloodthirsty Mau Mau rebels by saying:

“We cannot say, ‘We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home.’ We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility”.

Such is not the stern stuff of which civilization is built; it is the weakness that rots civilization.

This Still Matters

This remains relevant and matters a great deal, even beyond the obvious examples of America’s cities being crime-ridden hellholes.

Why were the members of the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, and Black Liberation Army never hanged? Because the liberal regime was on their side, and the conservatives were entirely unwilling to do what needed to be done to restore order.

And why was that the case? For much the same reason as why the British became unwilling to use force in India, Enoch Powell lost his stomach at the thought of restoring order in Kenya, and the Rhodesians were damned for bombing ZANU: “What the underground movement was truly about—what it was always about—was the plight of black Americans,” as Bryan Burrough puts it in Days of Rage.28 Such made them untouchable, for to use force against them would be to unjustly insist upon imposing order upon the noble savage. By the 1970s, such a thought had become unspeakable.

And so Eldridge Cleaver could write his book about raping white women as a fun form of racial revenge29 while Nkomo laughed about bayoneting pregnant women to death, and no one in the mainstream said a word about it. Well, some words were said. Andy Young and Jimmy Carter praised Nkomo, and Cleaver’s book was a much-praised NYT bestseller. The fate of their victims was conveniently forgotten.

The theory of the noble savage has been applied to everything, from rebels in Kenya to skyscraper bombers in New York, from terrorists in Rhodesia to cop-ambushing criminals in Oakland. It’s all the same thing to those who lack the stomach to put it down, and who in any case can ignore the issue because it’s not part of their lives.

From the clean and comfortable halls of Whitehall, to pronounce that the Mahdi’s Tomb should have been respected, that Sir James was wrong to slay pirates, that settlers at Jamestown ought fight the perfidious Indians fair and square, or that cannibals in New Zealand should be patted on the head and taught the bright light of Christ carries no cost. It is a mere phantasm, a creation of the mind that makes them feel cheery inside. The tiger is without their wall, and so they can consider the beautiful pattern of its coat without fear of its claws or fangs.

Not so with those who must deal with the issue. Why do cops in Ferguson and BSAC mounted rangers hold similar opinions about the nature of man? Why did the Tory officers and their men always understand the reality of the situation, but scolding schoolmarms and their henpecked husbands back in London always side with the enemy?

The lie of equality. The myth of the noble savage. The belief that those who have never risen beyond the Stone Age will willingly do so if exposed to the correct collection of trinkets, or that those who have been criminals for generations will be otherwise if only EBT is tweaked upwards by some certain percentage. The thought that the prattling sermon of some Puritan priest can convert cannibals who wish you dead never worked, yet it is no different from what most believe now—whether Enoch Powell’s ramblings about Kenya or the London Company demanding Jamestown not build walls because doing so might offend the savages.

We, after all, have our own contingent that is quite against walls…well, walls other than those that gate their neighborhoods.

Such lies and delusions can be believed when one lives far away from the tiger, as the proponents of these deluded ideas always do. Never ask a Civil Rights supporter why his second home is in Vermont rather than Memphis, after all.

But they cannot be believed when the problem draws near. As Virginia’s 1622 experience shows, such is the path to disaster. Such is why we must relentlessly press home the message that all men are not equal, most criminals are not redeemable, and the stern authority of the Maxim gun and he who wields it might be harsh, but is far preferable than the anarchy wrought by those on the other side of it, wherever we may be.

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