Were the Greatest Americans the Virginia Planters or the Old West's Cowboys?

Decline Measured in an Ideal

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Today’s article is something I’ve been researching and thinking of for many months, and, as yesterday was Robert E Lee’s birthday, I figured it was time to set pen to paper. Paid subscribers: thank you so very much for your generosity in supporting this project. 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, and read this article in full. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it! Listen to the audio version here:

[AUDIO] The Cult of the Cowboy and World of the Planters

Two myths hold a special place in the American heart and soul right alongside the men behind those myths: the founding and creation of the early American republic by the great planters of Virginia, and the settling of the Old West by a rough and rowdy collection of frontiersmen and cowboys.

Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Monroe, and most of the other great men who were integral to the Founding and earliest days of our Republic were great planters, and the unique view of life stamped on them by their circumstances is what they, in turn, imprinted upon our nation. It is thanks to them that we have the Neo-Classical splendor of DC’s public buildings, the cultivated refinement and stern republican ideals that were for so long what we looked for in our leaders, and the air of paternalism and detachment that characterized much of pre-Civil War politics. This type of American, the blending of southern gentleman and ancient patrician, culminated in Robert E Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia he led, and died with them in the war that ended at Appomattox.

On the other hand, there is the American ideal of the frontiersman and the cowboy. The man who, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, or Wild Bill and Doc Holliday, is a bold and reckless adventurer content with a pistol on his hip, long gun in his hand, and a bottle of tepid whiskey on the card table at which he rests after a long drive with the herd. The rugged individual, the intrepid swashbuckler, the gun-toting desperado. These are the men who tamed the Old West without taming themselves, who represented civilization to the savages in their midst but were deemed savages by the civilization to their east.

There was, of course, some overlap between the groups. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were both Virginia planters who shared much of the outlook of their class, as is noted well in Undaunted Courage, but also some of the greatest American frontier explorers. The first great Western novel—The Virginian by Owen Wister—was not about Texan cowboys, but the tale of a Virginian planter who moved West after Sheridan destroyed his home, and brought a dram of his native land’s spirit and refinement with him. Washington was a surveyor and explorer who fought Indians along the Virginia frontier, Andrew Jackson was a frontier rascal and speculator who became a dignified planter, and the cattle barons dominated their arid domains in a way that even the Virginians were rarely able.

But there is, nevertheless, a difference between the two American spirits—the planter and the cowboy. Further, the switch from viewing the great planters as the greatest Americans to viewing the cowboys as the prototypical great American spirit does signal a significant change that has, over time, not necessarily developed to America’s advantage. In fact, the shift in who we view as the greatest is, I think, responsible for many of our present problems, particularly in how that shift destroyed the concept of one’s public duty as part of American public life, thus aiding and abetting the creation of the present bureaucratic hell. Yes, the myth of the cowboy helped create the bureaucracy those cowboys so heartily disdained and despised. I’ll explain why here, after discussing each myth of the ideal American and its origins.

A note on sources: the books consulted for this article primarily include The Age of Federalism, The Great Plantation by Clifford Dowdey, The Golden Age by Clifford Dowdey, Lee: A Biography by Clifford Dowdey, The Life of Andrew Jackson by Robert Remini, Henry Clay by Remini, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites by Plinio Correa de Oliveira, The Undiscovered Country by Paul Hutton, The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner, Revolutionary Characters by Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood, The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer by James Huston, and Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides. All except The Radicalism of the American Revolution are reasonably good reads. Dowdey’s work is by far the best of the bunch.

The Great Shift in the American Spirit