Virginia, Rhodesia, and the World that Could Have Been

The Old Dominion and the Old World's Last Stand

One quite interesting aspect of Rhodesia is that its history is quite similar to that of Virginia, something I spoke about in a recent interview and wanted to expand on in this week’s article.¹ Both the Old Dominion and the last real stand of the Old World, Rhodesia,² were founded by companies for profit, became quite successful thanks to the growing of tobacco before shifting to wheat production, and were murdered by Progressive governments because they refused to accept egalitarianism. Further, the memories of both stand as a testament to what could have been had the disastrous trends of the 20th Century³ been avoided.

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Virginia, Rhodesia, and the World that Could Have Been

The Similarities

Culture

An exceedingly interesting aspect of Virginian and Rhodesian history is that both were turned from virgin land into incredible success stories by young men who desired to better themselves and become neither yeomen nor plutocrats, but gentry.⁴

Virginia

Jamestown, for example, wasn’t settled, like Australia, merely by the refuse of the country that the government wanted to ship out. While that was the case amongst a few of the indentured servants delivered to the early Tidewater settlement, it was really second sons and young men who wanted to better themselves financially who built Virginia into the colonial powerhouse it was.⁵

In fact, though the Old Dominion was known for being settled by cavaliers who fled to it after Cromwell won the Civil War, many sons of lesser gentlemen flocked to Virginia, first Jamestown and then elsewhere. They did so because in Virginia they had more hope of a prosperous and gentlemanly future there than at home, where they wouldn’t inherit due to primogeniture and entail. In the Old Dominion, however, they could get large estates on the cheap and rely on indentured servants rather than tenant farmers to do the farming. So, making the dangerous trip across the Atlantic to establish themselves in the New World seemed a wise and likely to be a prosperous decision; in many cases was.

Many of those who later were considered the Tidewater gentry, America’s early aristocracy, came from relatively humble origins, but became part of the gentry of Virginia and, after a time, gentlemen of a sort. Richard Lee I is a good example of this. But, in addition to those sons of gentlemen, it was many young men who had no notable family in England who moved to Virginia and created grand estates for themselves and their descendants. The Washington family, for example, was established as a family of note in Virginia by John Washington, son of a rector in Essex, and so a man who wouldn’t have been prominent in England but became quite so in Virginia.⁶

By moving to the relatively virgin land of Virginia, investing in buying large estates that rivaled, in size, those of England, and figuring out how to farm them with varied sorts of labor, second sons and relative nobodies became gentlemen. Though they never rivaled the wealthiest of the British gentry, or still less the vast, profitable estates of the peerage,⁷ they were able to become minor gentry and cultivate respect in a way that would have been impossible in England.

Rhodesia

Rhodesia was surprisingly similar in its founding: when Cecil Rhodes formed up the Pioneer Column, he wasn't looking for the rogues of the empire, the freebooters and ne'er-do-wells one might think of as being the sort to march into Africa on behalf of a corporate interest.⁸

Rather, he was looking for young men who were educated, competent, honorable, and wanted to better themselves. Somewhat like the early Virginia planters of the Washington mold, these were men who generally came from the lower and middle classes rather than the upper gentry or aristocracy of England, though some of such men came, particularly when the state was stable. They then established themselves as planters on a large scale, much like in Virginia, and used hired hands rather than tenant farmers to become successful planters.

Those men, early settlers who, like the Washingtons, came from little of note, were afterward regarded as Rhodesia's aristocracy. As early as 1895, their generally high levels of education and generally excellent manners were being remarked upon. They were added to by a number of English aristocrats who wished to avoid death taxes by buying large estates in Rhodesia, getting wealth out of heavily taxed England;⁹ the Duke of Montrose is a good example of this.¹⁰ When paired with the early settlers, those gentlemen helped create a somewhat gentlemanly culture in Rhodesia: one of pink gin, house parties, hunting, and large estates that was, all in all, not unlike the English countryside and made the Rhodesians known for being “more British than the British.”

Together

So, all in all, Virginia had more of an original "gentry" stock than Rhodesia, but in both the effect was the same: the creation of a very Anglo culture that brought with it a leading group composed mainly of gentlemen who were a landed elite. They then ruled and prospered until their countries were destroyed.

Related to the building of the culture aspect is that both became, as noted above, a refuge for gentlemen and aristocrats fleeing oppressive tyranny in the home country.

In Virginia, such men were the cavaliers. Governor Sir William Berkeley worked hard to draw the aristocracy to the colony, particularly in the wake of the English Civil War, when he offered asylum in Virginia to gentlemen on the royalist side. Given how awful Cromwell and his Roundheads were for the gentlemen of England who sided with their king rather than dreary progressivism, they flocked to Virginia in large numbers, pouring into it capital and the culture of the English countryside.

Such was true of Rhodesia as well. Kenya was largely where the ne'er-do-well of the landed elite went to engage in debauchery, but it was Rhodesia to where men like the Duke of Montrose flocked when death taxes, income taxes, and later capital gains taxes in Britain rose to punitive levels, a process that began in 1911 and lasted until Rhodesia got dicey in the 60s. Such men could, as in Virginia, buy huge estates in Rhodesia for a relative pittance, farm them using modern technology without government interference, and avoid the disastrously bad taxes of a socialist government that sought only their destruction.

An Agrarian Economy

Virginia

When the Spaniards found El Dorado in the treasure of the Aztecs and silver mines of South America, the British hoped to get in on the action by sending men to the Eastern seaboard. There, they found no gold of note but did find rich land to farm and forests to exploit. So, the growing of tobacco became heavily invested in and settlers raced to buy estates on which they could grow it. Eventually, tobacco growing became less remunerative, as the market was swamped by supply. However, for a time, it was highly remunerative, and large estates were created to grow it.

Additionally, a lesser-known aspect of Virginia’s agricultural history is that many of the tobacco plantations switched to wheat as tobacco exhausted the soil and became a crop that planters had a difficult time trying to profit off of, due to the large supply surplus. George Washington famously transitioned to wheat early on,¹¹ but in the 1850s large-scale wheat growing using modern machinery became a success in the Old Dominion.¹² Adding to the success of machinery was that, unlike in England, there weren’t legacy small farms that got in the way of exploiting scale; instead, it began as virgin territory farmed primarily in large estates, making scale possible without large political battles.

Also notable is that it wasn’t the English government so much as a private company that opened Virginia for settlement. That company was, of course, the Virginia Company, headquartered in London. It started the for-profit settlement of Jamestown, through which early settlement came and around which plantations cropped up. Only later was Virginia’s seat of government built at Williamsburg, with the state filling out as more settlers poured into the thriving colony.

Rhodesia

Rhodesia’s founding was quite similar to that of Virginia. It was founded by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, which controlled it until 1921.

Rhodesia was also first envisioned as a place where a fortune could be made off of gold mining, as the Rand mines of South Africa were becoming quite prosperous when Rhodes sent the Pioneer Column into what became Rhodesia.

However, though some gold was found in Rhodesia, it quickly became a colony in which the BSAC encouraged agricultural settlers.¹³ They first grew tobacco, which they were able to farm on a grand scale with modern machinery, as there weren’t legacy small farms like in England that limited the scale on which farms could operate. For them, tobacco growing remained profitable until the Bush War embargoes, which made it difficult for them to export their cash crops or import foodstuffs.¹⁴ So, they switched to wheat and proved quite successful at growing it as well, eventually becoming the breadbasket of Africa.

Together

So, in both the Old Dominion and Rhodesia, large estates could be bought for a relative pittance compared to an estate in England. Those estates then became the bedrock of the economy, not the intended mining. Further, in contrast to England, the agricultural estates were generally farmed on a grand scale by the owner, rather than tenants, to produce first tobacco and then grain. Both were hugely successful at growing tobacco, though Rhodesia proved more successful at becoming a large grain producer.

In both cases, corporate founding and a focus on large-scale cash crops were very different from, say, primarily religious/dissenter colonies like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, penal colonies like Australia, port colonies like Hong Kong, or more self-consciously extractive, imperial territories like Spanish Mexico.

Particularly different from the religious colonies was that practicality and muddling along took more of a precedent to conforming actions to ideology: Virginia and Rhodesia retained an air of wanting to succeed as they saw fit, rather than doing things because some ideologue like a Puritan preacher said so. Similarly, they were different from the penal colonies in terms of genteel culture, with their cultures revolving around being region-adapted imitations of the British landed gentry rather than being the outgrowth of throwing prisoners on an island together. Georgia (the state) is a slight contradiction to this, as it eventually became at least somewhat gentlemanly due to plantation agriculture, but the original Georgia was a very different beast from the original Virginia or Rhodesia, and even tried to restrict how much land any one person could buy within it.¹⁵ And, of course, they're different from the extractive imperial colonies like Mexico in that they lack the legacy of being an extractive appendage of the state and instead were successful colonies of settlement in which the wealth came from creating a functioning society rather than pulling rocks out of the ground.

Resistance to Destruction

The final similarity between Rhodesia and Virginia is that both fought to the last gasp to resist the destruction that progressives, or meddlesome moralizers, desired for them.

Virginia

Virginia was famously skeptical of secession and didn’t join with the early confederacy, but then took a note from Stonewall Jackson and drew the sword while throwing away the scabbard when Lincoln invaded the southern states.¹⁶ That came after a long train of abuses, not least of which were the antics of abolitionists. Those radicals, such as John Brown, routinely attacked the long-held assumption of state's rights, attacked the sacrosanct nature of private property as then understood, and launched brutal terrorist attacks like that at Harper's Ferry while trying to stir up murderous slave rebellions of the genocidal Haitian mold.

Slavery probably could have been done away with peacefully in Virginia; it, having succeeded in early attempts to transition away from tobacco and to wheat, wasn’t as reliant on the system as the much more radical planters of the Deep South. But the murder of innocents at Harper’s Ferry, cheered as it was by the North, was, when paired with invading armies and radical attacks on the basic fibers of Southern society, too much for the Virginians.

So, they went to war and fought like lions against the invaders, only surrendering when completely defeated. Notably, it is the sons of the Old Dominion in the Army of Northern Virginia - Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart, and John Mosby - who most inspire young men when they pour over the histories of the war, not the generals and officers from other states and theaters.

Rhodesia

Rhodesia proved similarly resistant to the moralizing progressives and was destroyed because of it. In Rhodesia’s case, it was not state rights and slavery that sparked the conflict, but anti-egalitarian voting laws that required a minimum amount of Rhodesian property (about $60k USD in modern currency) to vote on the A voter roll in national elections.¹⁷

Those anti-egalitarian voting rules were largely the basis of the West's hatred of it, as they supported a view of a hierarchy amongst men rather than "all men are interchangeable economic units" mass democracy-ism that the West has been committed to since the 1911 Parliament Bill.¹⁸ Rhodesia refused to give in to demands for civilization-wrecking majority rule, preferring to fight with honor rather than tamely surrender. And so the West embargoed Rhodesia, preventing it from importing the weapons and fuel it needed to fight communism, eventually destroying it and enabling the depredations of sick, bloodthirsty communists.¹⁹

As with Virginia, Rhodesian raids and heroes still inspire those who know about them. Though the individual figures are less known than in the case of the War between the States, raids like Operation Dingo and the general mental picture of FAL-toting men in short shorts slaying communists capture the knowledgeable public’s imagination.

Together

In both cases, it was the same sort of progressive,²⁰ meddlesome moralism that led to the rejection of long-held Western views and the destruction of both states in the name of some moral crusade that men of centuries past would have found nonsensical if not heretical.

Further, in both the Bush War and War between the States, war was fought in the name of honor and at least trying rather than tamely surrendering despite being nearly unwinnable from the start. The Rhodesians could hardly fight the whole world any more than the agrarian South could fight a financialized, industrial North. But, in both cases, they decided to fight it out and try to hold onto the paternalist rule of the best in the name of societal success rather than just surrender to the egalitarianism they knew would destroy their world.

And, of course, both are still hated by the woke, moralizing left for that reason. Those who tear down statues of Confederate generals, Southern gentlemen like Lee and Jackson, in the name of a dead fentanyl addict are much the same sort who spread the lie that Rhodesia was an apartheid state deserving of destruction. To such people, it doesn't matter that Lincoln's legions were killing the grandsons of the Founding Fathers when they marched South. It doesn’t matter that Zimbabwe was a genocidal disaster. It doesn't matter that Sherman's men acted like gangsters or that Mugabe and Nkomo tortured civilians to death and shot civilian airliners out of the sky. It certainly doesn’t matter that Rhodesia was far freer and more prosperous for blacks than Zimbabwe. What does matter is that they weren’t egalitarian societies, and so had to be destroyed.²¹

What Could Have Been

In both cases, it’s hard not to look at what was and could have been. Despite books like “Dominion of Memories” that present Virginia as a struggling backwater by the time war came, or leftist lies that present Rhodesia as an awful apartheid state on the verge of complete destruction by natural forces, none of that was the case and both were highly successful lands.

Admittedly, Virginia was doing less than well in the 1830s and 40s, as the soil was exhausted from centuries of tobacco. But, by the ‘50s, it had managed to start switching to grain and looked ready to do so in a very successful fashion, on a large scale. It was still the premier state of the South and full of leaders, particularly of the military sort. Further, as shown by its skepticism of secession, it was more reasonable than its Deep South cousins and would have likely made a much better, more peaceful transition out of chattel slavery and charted a course for doing so for the rest of the region. Instead, Lincoln sent his legions south, forcing its hand and leading to cataclysm.

Similarly, Rhodesia was a thriving land. It had the highest standard of living for blacks on the continent, was industrializing, and lacked the interracial tensions of the sort that wreaked havoc in the Congo and Kenya. What’s more, it not only had immensely fertile soil but vast reserves of minerals like platinum and cobalt that are critical to modern economies. With those resources, that societal strength, and a shown willingness to fight the communists, Rhodesia could have been the bulwark of the “free world” against communism in southern Africa. Ian Smith offered as much to the Western powers, begging them to help him fight the advance of murderous Reds. Instead, England and America worked with bloodthirsty communists to destroy it in the name of egalitarianism.

Oh, what could have been! Prosperous lands serving as an example of what societal stability and prosperity could be created in the absence of modern mass democracy, of the sort of society built by gentlemen who know the virtues of their ancestors and are willing to fight for what those ancestors built is like. It’s hard to imagine either accepting the America-destroying tyranny of FDR, the gay race communism of Obama, or the current push to mutilate the genitals of children in the name of “gender-affirming care.” Both were, built as they were around the twin concepts of duty and honor, willing to fight for what was honorable rather than tamely surrender to those who hated them. They could have served as bulwarks against progressivism in America and communism in Africa, resplendent examples of the Old World.

Instead, they were destroyed by liberalism and communism in the name of equality.

1. Kontrarian Korner #27 - Will Tanner

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5. Albion’s Seed tells this story quite well

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Washington

7. Noted in “The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America”

8. Discussed here: https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/you-rhodesians-are-more-british-than-the-british-the-development-#:~:text=During%20the%20interwar%20years%20the,maintained%20a%20restrictive%20immigration%20policy.

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10. Brian Masters discusses this aspect of Rhodesia in his fabulous “The Dukes”

11. Douglas Southall Freeman describes this shift in detail in his fantastic biography of Washington

12. Noted in “The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America”

13. Covered here: https://www.aehnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/AEHN-WP-29.pdf

14. https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1845179063729606814

15. Turner discusses this in Chapter I of The Frontier in American History

16. https://www.historynet.com/stonewall-jackson-quotes/

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18. https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1856364465626792367

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