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Contents
Contents
Prologue00
1The Cult of the Soil00
2The Cankers of Indolence and Slavery00
3"Let Us Have Our Own Schools"00
4Roads, Canals, Railroads: Moving in Place00
5Deluded Citizens Clamoring for Banks00
6The Case of Virginia v. John Marshall00
7Another Constitutional Convention00
8Tariff Wars00
9Abolitionists and Other Enemies00
EpilogueJefferson and Virginia, a Hundred Years
Later00
Notes00
Index00
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Prologue
In the late autumn of 1824, Thomas Jefferson made his way
slowly down the steps of his home, quickening his pace as he
approached his friend, the Marquis de Lafayette . The two men
had not seen each other for more than three decades. "Let me once
more have the happiness of talking over with you," Jefferson had
expectantly written to Lafayette a few months earlier, "your
first labors here, those I witnessed in your own country, its
past & present afflictions and future hopes."{EN1}
On the steps of Monticello, the two old friends embraced and
wept as Lafayette's official entourage of cavalry and American
dignitaries looked on.{EN2} The "Nation's Guest," Lafayette had
recently begun an official, ceremonial tour of all twenty-four
states, enthralling all who saw him. He found the eighty-one-
year-old Jefferson "much aged" but "marvelously well" and "in
full possession of all the vigor of his mind and heart."{EN3} At
sunset, just as they were finishing dessert, James Madison, now
74 years old, joined them. Madison later commented that
Lafayette appeared in fine health and spirits but so much
increased in bulk and changed in aspect that he hardly recognized
him.{EN4}
Jefferson seemed happiest discussing the new university he
had founded only a few miles away and the banquet to be held
there to celebrate the opening of the Rotunda, the majestic
building housing the library. At that dinner, Lafayette sat
between Madison and Jefferson; Madison charmed the guests with
his affectionate toast to Lafayette.{EN5} After dinner they all
toured the campus, Jefferson proudly pointing to the Rotunda and
the classical pavilions he designed and sharing his hope of
attracting eminent professors from Europe to the new school.
Before leaving the university, Lafayette's son, George Washington
Lafayette, was delighted to receive an unusual gift from a
professor: a Virginia rattlesnake.
Lafayette lingered for ten more days at Jefferson's gracious
estate. As they strolled around the grounds, rode their horses
side by side, dined together, sipping Jefferson's excellent
French wines, they reminisced about the astonishing revolutions
they had helped lead. "What a history have we to run over,"
Jefferson said. They revived memories of the evenings spent
together in Paris in 1789, when Jefferson was the American
minister to France and Lafayette one of the early leaders of the
French Revolution.{EN6} Jefferson mentioned the American
presidential election - among five candidates, all from the same
party - taking place that autumn, but declined to express his
feelings about the candidates.{EN7}
The conversation took a sociological turn as Lafayette
pondered the differences he already perceived between North and
South. Having just visited the "delightfully situated"{EN8}
New Haven, the "beautiful village" of Cambridge in Massachusetts,
the bustling, dynamic city of New York, Lafayette and his
secretary, Auguste Levasseur, could not but notice, "at every
step," the relative backwardness and poverty of Virginia. It had
taken them six hours to travel 25 miles from Richmond to
Peterbsurg.{EN9} Along the way, they saw isolated towns, sleepy
villages, depleted soil. The cause seemed only too clear to them,
as did the remedy. Only when Virginia comprehended "her true
interests better" and abolished slavery, Levasseur believed,
would it catch up to the Northeast.{EN10}
Slavery: the inescapable subject to which Jefferson and
Lafayette returned again and again. Lafayette "never missed an
opportunity to defend the right which all men without exception
have to liberty," Levasseur commented, and Jefferson himself
could not condone the indefinite perpetuation of slavery. One of
Jefferson's slaves, Israel Jefferson, overhearing Lafayette and
his master discuss the condition of the "colored" people,
later wrote that the conversation was "gratifying to me and I
treasured it up in my heart."{EN11} Indeed, Jefferson found it
difficult to grasp how an American patriot could "inflict on his
fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more
misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to
oppose."{EN12}
And yet, the Virginian had neither freed his slaves nor
recognized the children he fathered with one of them, Sally
Hemings, nor had he played an active public role in opposing
slavery. He had penned the very words - about the "unalienable
rights" of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness - that had become the foundation of American civic
morality - but he did not extend those rights and that dignity to
slaves. Indeed, to the extent that Jefferson gave serious thought
to solutions to the wrenching problem of slavery, he was more
concerned with rescuing white people from the moral degeneration
of slaveholding than with securing freedom for blacks .{EN13}
Lafayette did not hide his impatience. While politely
praising Jefferson's plan for the deportation of blacks to
colonies in the Caribbean and on the African coast,{EN14} he
implored his friend to go further than wishful thinking,
reminding him of "the importance and urgency" of
emancipation.{EN15} "I would like, before I die," Lafayette had
written Jefferson two years earlier, "to be assured that
progressive and earnest measures have been adopted to attain in
due time, so desirable, so necessary an object. Prudence as well
as honor seems to me to require it."{EN16}
Nine months later, in August of 1825, Lafayette returned to
bid a final farewell to Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe. This
time Jefferson was too weak to attend the banquet at the
university. "These partings and many others are very painful,"
Lafayette wrote in his Memoirs,{EN17} sensing that it was the
sunset of his friend's life.
It was also the sunset of the Virginia Dynasty. Four of the
first five American presidents were Virginians; but after Monroe,
only one other Virginian would occupy the presidency . John
Tyler would ascend to the presidency in 1841; when he died two
decades later, it was as a member of the Confederate Provisional
Congress and as a citizen of the Confederate States of America.
Virginia's eclipse was visible on the Supreme Court, too.
Four Virginians, led by the great Chief Justice John Marshall,
served on the high court during the first decades of the young
republic. But between 1841 and 1971, when Lewis Powell was
appointed, only one Virginian would occupy a seat on the court:
Peter Daniel, who voted with the majority in the Dred Scott
case that helped precipitate the Civil War.
The days when intrepid, daring Virginians led thirteen
backwater colonies in a war against the mightiest power on the
planet were becoming a distant memory, that fiery patriotism a
dying ember.
[line break]
The delegates streaming into Philadelphia in September 1774
for the First Continental Congress were eager to meet the
gentlemen from Virginia. They were "the most spirited" of all the
delegates, John Adams noted in his diary.{EN18} "We all look up to
Virginia for examples."{EN19} Next to the Virginians, said one
Pennsylvanian in a comment Adams might not have appreciated, "the
Bostonians are mere Milksops."{EN20} In truth, it was the
delegates from Massachusetts who comprised the avant-garde of the
revolutionary movement. But recognizing that the participation of
Virginia, the most populous colony, was indispensable, they
showed appropriate and sincere deference to the leaders from the
Old Dominion."I look back with rapture to those golden
days," wrote John Adams to Jefferson a year before they both
died, "when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together
like a band of brothers."{EN21}
Indeed, the Virginians did not disappoint. Passionately
demanding independence, penning unforgettable words,
demonstrating their courage, they helped make the revolutionary
movement a national one. At the Constitutional Convention in
1787, their ideas would dominate the agenda. No other state
played as prominent a role in shaping the young republic. No
other state produced such a galaxy of brilliant, forward-looking,
transforming leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe,
John Marshall, but also George Mason, who framed the Virginia
Bill of Rights; Patrick Henry who issued the call in 1774 for a
Continental Congress; George Wythe, jurist, teacher, and signer
of the Declaration of Independence; Peyton Randolph, president of
the First Continental Congress; Edmund Pendleton, president of
the state convention of 1776 that drew up a constitution for the
Old Dominion as well as president of the Virginia Ratifying
Convention of 1788; Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia,
delegate to the Philadelphia Convention, and Washington's
Attorney General. The Virginians, wrote Henry Adams, were "equal
to any standard of excellence known to history."{EN22} They
created a nation.
The other states, surpassed by Virginia in wealth and
influence as well as size and population (a fifth of the people
in the colonies lived there), almost took it for granted that
Virginia would be their leader. During 32 of the first 36 years
of constitutional government, the Old Dominion had a monopoly on
the executive branch of government. Of course, in the
presidential election of 1796, Virginians George Washington and
especially John Marshall had opposed Thomas Jefferson,
disagreeing with his philosophy of limited government and his
agrarian vision for the nation's future. Instead they supported
their fellow Federalist John Adams. But after Adams's one term in
office and Jefferson's ascension to presidency in 1800,
Virginians returned to the executive mansion. By 1816, some
people wondered if Virginians would forever occupy the
presidency. Was Virginia unstoppable?
Virginians seemed to have hatched, as one disquieted
politician asserted, "a systematic design of perpetually
governing the country."{EN23} Indeed, many Americans were
convinced that it was the unstated policy of the Virginia
presidents to block the political rise of any potential rival who
might threaten their dynasty.{EN24} Conspiracy theories circulated
from North Carolina to New York. Some suspected that Jefferson
chose New York governor George Clinton, already advanced in age,
as his vice president in 1804 so that Secretary of State James
Madison would be his unchallenged successor in 1808. And when
President Madison appointed the talented young John Quincy Adams
minister to Russia in 1809, shipping him off to the other side of
the world, people surmised that it was a maneuver to assure the
continued dominance of the Virginians.{EN25} Wouldn't
Americans balk at electing James Monroe, Lord Liverpool asked
John Quincy Adams at a London dinner party in 1816, "on account
of his being a Virginian?"{EN26}
By then, people in the North and South, Republicans no less
than Federalists, demanded a change. Anti-Virginian Republicans,
including Albert Gallatin, treasury secretary to both Jefferson
and Madison, rallied around other candidates in 1816 - New York
Governor Daniel Tompkins and Secretary of War William Crawford of
Georgia. Some politicians even called for a constitutional
amendment to "wrest the sovereignty of the union out of the
hands" of the Old Dominion and prevent any one state from
dominating the presidency.{EN27} But neither caucuses nor
political maneuvers{EN28} nor backroom machinations could block
Monroe's nomination and election in 1816 and again in 1820.
"That nothing less than a Virginian will satisfy Virginia is
to me perfectly demonstrated," wrote John Quincy Adams in his
diary in 1818.{EN29}
Still, the real danger, according to Supreme Court Justice
Joseph Story of Massachusetts, lay not in Monroe's election or
even in Virginia's hold on the presidency, but rather in the
contagion of its doctrine of states' rights. Virginians,
including Thomas Jefferson, had recently denounced several
Supreme Court decisions, claiming that the federal judiciary had
no constitutional authority to overturn state statutes or the
judgments of state courts. Their insistence on the sovereignty of
their state, on states' rights, and on strict limits on the
powers of the federal government terrified Justice Story. "As a
republican & a lover of the Union," Story wrote in 1821 to John
Marshall, who shared his nationalist views, "I look with alarm
upon [Virginia's] opinions & conduct. I would rather allow her
the exclusive possession of the Executive power for a half
century than witness the prevalence in other States of any of her
new constitutional dogmas. If they prevail, in my judgment there
is a practical end of the Union."{EN30}
George Washington would surely have agreed with Story and
Marshall. More than half a century earlier, Washington had
already criticized the provincialism of his fellow Virginians.
"Our Views [are] too confined," he had written in 1770."{EN31} The
first president always encouraged Americans to adopt a national
perspective, to see that "our interest, however diversified in
local & smaller matters, is the same in all the great & essential
concerns of the Nation."{EN32} Especially in the late 1780s
and 90s, he was disappointed to find among Virginians "the most
malignant (and if one may be allowed the expression, the most
unwarrantable) disposition toward the new government."{EN33} His
own people, Washington lamented, identified only with their own
state; cool to his great vision of a unified nation and an
energetic, dynamic government, they refused to follow his and his
fellow Virginian John Marshall's lead.
Joseph Story did not exaggerate the dangers of Virginia's
doubts about the national government and its retreat into the
domain of states' rights, for James Madison himself, even
though he had toyed with states' rights in 1798, would later
forcefully and unequivocally condemn the growing states' rights
movement. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Madison would come
to view Virginia's determination to defend its sovereignty
against the national government not only as a real threat to the
union but, just as important, also as a convenient pretext for
refusing to face and address the state's escalating economic and
moral woes. Whereas Jefferson had warned Madison in 1810 against
appointing Story tot he Supreme Court, remarking that he was a
"tory,"{EN34} Madison named Story to the Court. Now, echoing
Justice Story, Madison predicted that the states' rights doctrine
would ultimately poison and divide the nation. What he did not
predict was that violence would become the only mediator between
North and South.
But as for Northerners' apprehension of Virginia's hold on
the presidency, the growing anti-Virginia contingents need not
have worried. After Monroe, the Virginia Dynasty - as well as the
state itself - would reach an abrupt dead end.
[line break]
"The times are hard indeed," wrote James Madison to a young
friend in 1820. Virginia had been one of the few states to
prosper during the early 1780s under the Articles of
Confederation, but forty years later, signs of that prosperity
had disappeared. Crops had failed, and Virginia planters could
not pay their debts, for there were no buyers to purchase their
depleted land. {EN35} In 1827, James Mercer Garnett, too, lamented
the dramatic decline of agriculture in his state. "Virginia-poor
Virginia furnishes a spectacle at present, which is enough to
make the heart of her real friends sick to the very core." The
state's agriculture nearly gone to ruin, the situation could not
have been more destructive, he grieved, "if destruction had been
its sole objective."{EN36}
Over the next decades, the desolation of much of the
Virginia countryside would sadden visitors to the Old Dominion.
Even the grand homes of Washington and Jefferson would fall into
disrepair. At Monticello, all was "dilapidation and ruin," wrote
the visiting William Barry, the nation's postmaster general, in
1832. Horace Greely reported in 1856 that all of Mount Vernon
"has an aspect of forlorn neediness which no description can
adequately paint." Had Mount Vernon been situated in
Massachusetts, wrote a shocked reporter from Boston, "how the
spot would be treasured in our hearts, and beautified by our
hands!"{EN37}
Dispiriting scenes of poverty and cruelty disheartened
William Seward, the soon-to-be governor of New York, and his wife
when they visited Virginia with their young son in 1835. Frances
Seward described ten naked little boys being led to a slave
auction, "tied together, two and two, by their wrists, all
fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man,
who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little
procession." Sick of slavery and the South, the Sewards cut short
their tour and returned home.{EN38}
A decade later, Frederick Law Olmsted, the writer, landscape
architect, and sociologist of the South left his farm in New York
State to visit eastern Virginia. He described the poverty and
dejection he observed. "The mass of the citizen class of Virginia
earn very little and are very poor," he wrote, "immeasurably
poorer than the mass of the people of the adjoining Free States."
Peering into houses and inspecting farms, Olmsted found that
everything was "slovenly and dirty, with swine, dogs, and black
and white children "lying very promiscuously together on the
ground about the doors." There were few signs of industry - one
tannery and two or three saw-mills in one seventy-five mile
stretch; never had he seen so little evidence of an active and
prosperous people.
As he traveled from the Alleghenies to the banks of the
James, Olmsted almost never saw a volume of Shakespeare, a piano,
a sheet of music, a reading-lamp, an engraving or a copy of a
work of art. "I am not speaking of what are commonly called `poor
whites'", he explained, "a large majority of all these houses
were the residences of slaveholders."
Methodically, Olmsted set about compiling and comparing
statistics about life in the North and South. Whereas there was a
post-office to every fourteen square miles in New York, in
Virginia there was only one to forty-seven square miles; he
counted over five hundred publishers and booksellers in New York,
but only forty in Virginia; thirty thousand volumes in public
libraries in Virginia, eight hundred thousand in New York.{EN39}
Land in Virginia, he noted, produced less than one-eighth as
much per acre as in the Northeast.{EN40}
The Old Dominion had fallen from the first to the fifth most
populous state, as a steady stream of Virginians - whites
searching for better lives, slaves accompanying their masters or
sold out of state - abandoned the state. During the 1830s, while
the nation's population increased by 33 percent, Virginia's
population increased a meager 2 percent.
Voting statistics revealed a population of slumbering
citizens, demoralized and passive. In the election of 1800, when
native son Thomas Jefferson challenged Federalist John Adams,
only 25% of eligible voters in Virginia cast votes. In 1804, when
he ran for reelection, 11% voted. By 1820, when Monroe ran for
reelection, only the smallest fraction - a mere 3% - of eligible
voters bothered to go to the polls.{EN41}
Nor did Virginia keep up with other states in the field of
education: illiteracy among whites was four times higher than in
New England and the mid-Atlantic states.{EN42} Wealthy Virginians,
historically averse to taxation, refused to support public
schools.
Economic numbers were also ominous. The value of
farm land in Virginia was less than one third of what it was in
adjoining Pennsylvania. In areas in Virginia where there were few
slaves and where the white to black ratio was 15 to 1, the value
of land was over $7 an acre; but where the white to black ratio
was only 2.2 to 1, the value was $4.50 an acre.
Trade, too, was in decline. In 1800, while the exports of a
relatively small state like Massachusetts were valued at $11
million, Virginia's were worth $4.5 million. By 1853,
Massachusetts exports totaled $16 million, and Virginia's had
sunk to $3 million - less than half that of Maryland, one of the
smallest exporters in the nation.{EN43} Meanwhile, in the 1850s,
the cotton exports of the Deep South accounted for almost half of
the nation's foreign shipments, creating "flush times" in Alabama
and Mississippi.{EN44}
"We slight the warnings of dull statistics," commented
one Virginian in 1852, "and drive lazily along the field of
ancient customs." While other states "glide past us on the
road to wealth and empire," bewildered Virginians could see their
power ebbing, their influence almost extinct,{EN45} their
cherished way of life vanishing. "Nothing can be more
melancholy," congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had wailed,
"than the aspect of the whole country in Tidewater - dismantled
country seats, ruinous churches, fields forsaken."{EN46}
Even Virginia's aristocracy came under siege. John
Randolph's own brother Richard, deeply in debt, obliged to sell
the family plantation, was accused of murdering the infant child
he was said to have fathered with his sister-in-law. Though John
Marshall successfully defended him, he died prematurely in 1796,
unable to preserve and pass on his family's traditional,
privileged way of life.{EN47} Another illustrious family would
meet a more violent end when, a few years later, the famous
jurist George Wythe, with whom Thomas Jefferson had studied the
law, was murdered by a depraved grandnephew, impatient for his
inheritance.
Dejected novelists of the 1820s and 30s, like John
Pendleton Kennedy, John Randolph's half-brother Nathaniel
Beverley Tucker, George Tucker, and James Kirke Paulding,
portrayed the dilapidated estates of incompetent plantation
owners, and the offspring of "ancient cavaliers" anxious to leave
the Old Dominion and begin their lives anew in the west.{EN48}
"Whither has the Genius of Virginia fled?" cried a
dejected Benjamin Watkins Leigh. "Virginia has declined, and is
declining-she was once the first State in the Union-now she has
sunk to be the third, and will soon sink lower in the
scale."{EN49} Virginia's House of Delegates no longer bore any
resemblance to the House in which Jefferson, Pendleton, Henry,
Richard H. Lee, Wythe, Bland and others were members, wrote
Virginian William Wirt, the attorney general under James Monroe
and John Quincy Adams. "I am a disappointed man," Wirt sighed.
{EN50}
"Where are our men of abilities? Why do they not come forth
to save their Country?"{EN51} George Washington had impatiently
demanded in 1779. In the nineteenth century, Virginians of
ability would indeed come forth, wielding considerable power and
influence in Virginia as well as in Washington - men like John
Randolph, Spencer Roane, Philip Barbour, James Barbour, William
Branch Giles, John Tyler, John Floyd, and others. And yet,
although they admired and were influenced by the great men of
Washington's generation, they shared neither their boldness nor
their intellect, neither their creativity nor their optimism -
not Washington's inclusive continental vision, not Jefferson's
passion for democracy and equality, not Madison's nationalism,
not John Marshall's faith in the Constitution.
In truth, despite their disappointment, frustration, and
lamentations, the members of Virginia's social and political
elite would not have wished for the return of those founders, the
transformational, adventurous, forward-looking revolutionary
leaders who had so courageously and imaginatively embraced
change. On the contrary, Virginia's leaders in the nineteenth
century prized social and political stability, having grown
disenchanted with a revolutionary experiment that had given them
far more than they had bargained for. They prized independence
and liberty, but took a dim view of democracy, a vociferous,
insubordinate people who challenged their authority, and an
intrusive national government. Bereft of an inspiring, compelling
vision of the future, they were comfortable with the status quo.
In 1810 the young Henry St. George Tucker remarked that
the greatness of the American patriots "was their aversion to
change."{EN52} His strange reinterpretation of the American
revolutionary past would have baffled both Jefferson, who had the
bracing perception that the "earth belongs to the living,"{EN53}
and Madison, who extolled the Framers for charting a path with
"no parallel in the annals of human society."{EN54} But unlike the
men of the founding generation, the eminent Virginians who
inherited the Revolution looked backwards, clinging to the
aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family,
hospitality, books, and slaves on lovely Tidewater plantations,
loyal also to the agrarian myth of yeoman farmers leading
independent, virtuous lives on the sacred soil. Their
generation of nostalgic Virginia leaders located the future in
the past - and in the South. They rejected the Northern faith
that economic growth and industrialization were the guarantors of
happiness. On the contrary, in the industrializing trend that was
sweeping the North, they perceived, not the potential for
development and prosperity, but only the deadening prospect of
dehumanization and anomie. And if those material, commercial
values of the North were coloring - even defining - the very idea
of America, as the visiting Alexis de Tocqueville perceived in
the 1830s, well, then Virginians would have no choice but to
proclaim and defend their collective difference and identity.
Even if Virginia's arts, literature, manufactures, commerce,
and agriculture were all in a state of decline, said Virginia's
senator Benjamin Watkins Leigh, "is Virginia inferior to any of
her sister States in social peace and happiness, in intelligence,
in the virtues of private life, in political purity, in national
character? No, sir-I say, proudly and confidently, no. I shall
not vaunt of her superiority- but I acknowledge no inferiority."
Withdrawing into the murky shadows of domesticity,
frustration, and nostalgia, failing to grasp that happiness, like
life itself, cannot survive without energy, these Virginians
looked inward instead of outward and shortsightedly and
tragically shut the doors to improvement and to the future.
[line break]
"My dearest grandfather," Ellen Randolph Coolidge wrote in
1825 to Thomas Jefferson upon arriving in Boston with her new
husband, "it is certainly a pleasing sight, this flourishing
state of things: the country is covered with a multitude of
beautiful villages; the fields are cultivated and forced into
fertility; the roads kept in the most exact order; the inns
numerous, affording good accommodations; and travelling
facilitated by the ease with which post carriages and horses are
always to be obtained." Wishing to show his bride the beauty and
prosperity of the New England states, Joseph Coolidge had decided
not to take the direct route from New York to Boston but instead
to journey up the Hudson to Albany, and then to Lakes George and
Champlain, north to Burlington, Vermont, and then on to the towns
of the Connecticut valley before finally reaching Boston.
Ellen happily described for her grandfather the densely
populated villages that had "an air of neatness and comfort that
is delightful," the churches with their tall white spires, the
many school houses, and the groups of "little urchins returning
from school with their books in their hands" who courteously
greeted travelers. Citizens of each town and city paid taxes to
maintain their schools, she reported, adding that "there is no
tax paid with less reluctance." Children of the rich and poor
attended these schools and were educated gratis.
She and her husband also visited one of the huge textile
factories that had recently begun to spring up in New England.
"Although it was a flourishing establishment, and excited my
astonishment by it's powers of machinery and the immense saving
of time and labor," she wrote, "I could not get reconciled to
it." She hated the hot and crowded factory rooms that smelled
from sour and greasy chemicals; her head ached from the constant
whirl and deafening roar of machinery. Instinctively preferring
"the pure air of heaven and the liberty of the fields in summer"
to the domain of the rich manufacturer, she thought that the
farmers she had glimpsed looked more cheerful and healthy than
the men and women employed in the factories.
It had been a fatiguing voyage, but Ellen did not regret
having taken it: "It has given me an idea of prosperity and
improvement, such as I fear our Southern States cannot hope for,
while the canker of slavery eats into their hearts, and diseases
the whole body by this ulcer at the core."{EN55}
Replying to his granddaughter, Jefferson
acknowledged that slavery was indeed destroying the South. "One
fatal stain," he wrote, "deforms what nature had bestowed on us
of her fairest gifts." Still, he did not dwell on the subject or
on his granddaughter's penetrating observations about New
England. He was content instead to resurrect memories of his own
trip through New England 34 years earlier. Ellen's itinerary, he
wrote, was "almost exactly that which Mr. Madison and myself
pursued in May and June 1791" when the two friends traveled up
the Hudson to Lake Champlain.{EN56}
While the problems of Virginia had become too complex even
for Jefferson to ponder and address, his astute young
granddaughter had pointed to virtually all the ingredients for a
vital and prosperous society: fertile soil and farmers who are
knowledgeable about agriculture; citizens who are willing to pay
taxes to support good roads and free public schools; plentiful,
densely populated areas; churches; factories; a diversified labor
force - and the ideals of freedom and equality.
The reluctance of Virginians in the early nineteenth century
to dismantle slavery and launch practical plans to improve their
state and enrich the lives of ordinary Virginians would condemn
the Old Dominion to irrelevance and poverty. But loath to give up
memories of slow-moving, honey-colored days and the long shadows
of soft Tidewater evenings, the members of the Old Dominion's
small ruling class believed that were right to take a principled,
courageous, and rational stand in defense of a way of life - and
a human civilization{EN57} - that they cherished. And might they
have been right in their skepticism about laissez-faire
capitalism, materialism, urbanization, commercialization, and
even about the inflated promise of progress itself? That
skepticism would linger for a century. "It all comes down to the
most practical of all points - what is the end of living?" wrote
a Southerner, Stark Young, in 1930. It may be that Success,
Competition, Speed and Progress are the goals of life, he
remarked. And yet his Southern instincts told him that the true
meaning of life could be found in "more fleeting and eternal
things . more grace, sweetness and time."{EN58}
Were the early nineteenth-century Virginians who desired
those "fleeting and eternal things" hardy optimists who believed
it possible to retrieve an idyllic past? Or were they moody
dreamers, spellbound by the myth of a magical past, determined to
wage an impossible battle - a battle against time itself? "I
linger still in the haunted domain of my memory," wrote Virginia
novelist John Esten Cooke before the Civil War, "a company of
ghosts which I gaze at, fading away into mist. A glimmer-a
murmur-they are gone!"{EN59}
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Virginia -- History -- 1775-1865.
Virginia -- Politics and government -- 1775-1865.
Virginia -- Social conditions.
Elite (Social sciences) -- Virginia -- History -- 18th century.
Elite (Social sciences) -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century.
Regionalism -- Virginia -- History -- 18th century.
Regionalism -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century.
Virginia -- Economic conditions.
Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826 -- Political and social views.
Madison, James, 1751-1836 -- Political and social views.