This is the in-depth story of how the Virginia gentry built itself into a true ruling class. Focusing in particular on “American Revolutionaries in the Making,” this explores how the planter class of Old Virginia used a system of obligation, duty, and cultivated excellence to go from being Virginia gentlemen to Founding Fathers. Particularly, it explores the role of the tobacco plantation, parish vestry, county court, and House of Burgesses in this process, describing their progression as a cursus honorum that created a political aristocracy unlike any other.
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Read the article on which this video is based here, for the full set of lessons: https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/equality-and-the-only-political-question
Read my article on what we can learn about building a new elite from them here: https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/how-to-build-a-durable-counter-elite
Read my article on what they can teach us about developing personal excellence here: https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/embodying-aristocratic-excellence
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Virginia’s Excellent Aristocracy
4:48 Plantation Management as Training for Politics
14:51 The Parish Vestry Nursery of Government
24:43 Justice of the Peace: A Ladder to Achievement
32:14 Burgess Elections and Political Selection
38:50 Training for Greatness
46:42 Democracy and Aristocracy Combined
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!
Sydnor, Charles S., Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (published also as American Revolutionaries in the Making), https://link.amazon/B02HL4Fy1
Andrews, Matthew Page, Virginia: The Old Dominion, https://link.amazon/B0cJFsEsu
Breen, T. H., Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution, https://link.amazon/B05hVviv7
Bridenbaugh, Carl, Seat of Empire: The Political Role of Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg, https://link.amazon/B0gSTbbv4
Bruce, Philip Alexander, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, https://link.amazon/B0ahxJuCL
Ellis, Joseph J., His Excellency: George Washington, https://link.amazon/B0i9vFMQc
Evans, Emory G., “A Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680–1790, https://link.amazon/B0edgPGMV
Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, https://link.amazon/B01m4dJnu
Flournoy, Mary, Twin Patriots, https://link.amazon/B0998i1j1
Middlekauff, Robert, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, https://link.amazon/B0h1qfajq
Morton, Louis, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century, https://link.amazon/B0eE8BLfY
The Written Version
“We must go back to Athens to find another instance of a society so small in numbers and yet capable of such an outburst of ability and force”. Such is how the Virginia gentry–not the Boston Brahmins–was described by Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts Republican. Theirs was a civilization calculated to produce such men, a world of prolific statesmen and excellent soldiers, of proud patriots who drove the nation forward and shaped its history while stamping their face upon it. The public men it produced were recognized as some of the greatest examples of public excellence in American history, as Cabot recognized.
