Welcome back, and thanks for reading! As I thought this article’s content would fit so well with the content I have been doing for The Old World Show, the audio version of this article will be released tomorrow as a video. Further, I have made one slight change to the style of this article: rather than being included as footnotes, most of the source quotes have been included as block quotes. People have said they love it when I read those in the history videos, so I thought you might like them here. Please just let me know in a comment, either way. I am happy to include more moving forward if you do like them, or happy to revert to just including them as footnotes so the narrative is not as broken up. Thanks!
One of the more interesting aspects of the Virginia gentry’s rise to power and maintenance of that power for generations is that it managed to inculcate the so-called “habit of command.” A term that was made famous by Henry Adams when he used it in his The Education of Henry Adams to describe the natural bearing of his Harvard classmate Rooney Lee, it refers to the quiet assumption of authority, leadership capability, and ingrained sense of public duty that defined the Virginia gentry from the colonial period through the nineteenth century.
Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginian openness towards all he liked, he had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit. No one cared to contest it. None of the New Englanders wanted command.
To a certain extent, this made sense. It developed out of the plantation, as Carl Bridenbaugh notes in his Seat of Empire, and Virginia was a land of plantations.
Nowhere did the eighteenth century provide a more thorough schooling in the management of practical affairs and in the handling of people than on these Tidewater plantations where young Virginians were reared. Early did they develop an awareness of their privileged status; early did they acquire the habit of command.
Similarly, Clifford Dowdey, describing their “habit of authority” in his book The Great Plantation, argues that the attitude stemmed from the culture of the plantation and was responsible for their dominance during the Revolutionary and Early Republic period, which coincided with the last decades of Virginia’s Golden Age. He writes:
Within four and, at the most five, generations from the arrival of the first obscure settlers in Indian country, families such as the Lees, the Washingtons and Jeffersons, the Harrisons of Berkeley Hundred, had grown sufficiently imperious to challenge the might of Great Britain and lead an armed rebellion that a new nation might be created on earth—for themselves.
They not only had imperiousness, they possessed the true leadership, and this, too, developed from the plantation culture. These men had the habit of authority, they were familiar with the assumption of responsibility, and making decisions was second nature. In the period of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary leaders (the Virginia Dynasty), covering roughly the half century from 1770 to 1820, when Virginia produced more giants in a single era than any other region in America before or since, the plantation culture reached its fullest flowering and the aristocratic republic attained its "golden age."
That wasn’t all. It wasn’t just that they had this “habit of command”, but that in them it was a virtue rather than a vice. Rather than being the self-dealing, sneering and overbearing patricians one might imagine, they were by and large well-liked by those around them and generally recognized as governing in the interest of their fellows rather than just themselves. It is Carl Bridenbaugh who describes this aspect of the habit of command best, doing so in his Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South:
Noblesse oblige was as much a part of the creed of the Chesapeake gentry as it was of the old regime in France. The inferior and middling sort of people generally found the owner of the big estate courteous, kind, and a fair and understanding judge on the quorum, ready to extend a helping hand before his aid was sought. A gentleman knew his neighbors of every rank and called them by name. Above all, the leading planters were imbued with the belief that they constituted a class whose obligations to serve and to govern well must be fulfilled in return for the privileges which were their birthright. This was a part of their code; this duty of service to the state was to be given without charge, as George Washington made clear to the Continental Congress when he accepted command of its army. There is no denying that aristocrats ruled in the interests of their class, but they brought to the political office a sound practical knowledge of the needs of their agricultural community, an understanding of how to deal with human beings learned on their estates, a habit of command that made them good leaders whether in politics or war, and a strong sense of justice. It was a responsible aristocracy.
There was a martial aspect to it as well. Historians of the class and the period tend to associate the “habit of command” not only with the development of the great plantation, but also with the added aspect of the danger of the Indian-inhabited frontier.
In such a view, the lifestyle of mastery that came with the running of a plantation and the necessity of being comfortable with and trained in the use of arms that came with the frontier turned the Virginians into such men as they were: virile leaders who viewed leadership as their birthright, and assumed it with natural grace and effort. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was the best articulator of this view, doing so in his famous Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia:
We see not the slightest inclination on their part to rush into the conflict for the love of fighting and adventure that was so typical of the aristocrat of the Middle Ages. They were more than content to stay at home to attend to the business of the plantation and to leave to humbler hands the task of defending helpless families of the frontiers. But the economic and political conditions in the colony were destined to work a change in this as in other things in the Virginia planter. The gradual loss of the mercantile instinct, the habit of command acquired by the control of servants and slaves, and the long use of political power, the growth of patriotism, eventually instilled into him a chivalric love of warfare not unlike that of the knights of old. It is impossible to say when this instinct first began to show itself. Perhaps the earliest evidence that the warlike spirit was stirring in the breasts of the planters is given in 1756, when two hundred gentlemen, moved by the pitiful condition of the defenseless families of the Shenandoah Valley, formed a volunteer company, and marched against the Indians.
To a certain extent, this makes sense. One can imagine how those who spent the overwhelming majority of their lives on self-contained estates, ruling them as kings or patriarchs of old, would come to grasp the mantle of rule by habit. After all, their lives were spent around those who were their dependants or chattel, and so it was they and they alone who made the daily decisions regarding everything from agriculture to construction, finance to disciplining slaves. One could not help but acquire a habit of expecting obedience from such circumstances, and that their economic circumstances meant they were called upon to lead the militia on the frontier must have made that habit all the stronger.
But that is a simplistic view, I think. For one, Rooney Lee—the exemplar of the habit of command and reason for the term—was raised in Arlington, which was hardly the plantation of a domineering master and was far away from the frontier. Further, much as it would be incorrect to claim the excellence Virginians demonstrated in political leadership and governmental design during the Revolution stemmed solely from their study of the classics—ignoring the way in which their cursus honorum cultivated the best men into the best leaders—to think only of their lifestyles and ignore how they cultivated their response to their daily circumstances to develop a more virtuous “habit of command” is a mistake.
After all, anyone can become domineering and swaggering when surrounded by those who must obey. That is the habit when left unrefined, uncultivated. What made men of Washington’s stripe different was how they paired the natural aura of authority they carried with them with a deep sense of public duty and self-mastery. That is what made the “habit of command” a virtue and positive we ought try to recreate, rather than a mere novelty.
This they did through the manner in which they raised their sons, which is covered well by Daniel Blake Smith in the great book Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society. I will cover how they did it, and what we should learn from that below, in much the same style as my recent articles on their cursus honorum, developing aristocratic excellence as they did, and learning from them how to build a counter-elite.
