Below The Beltway

When the United States of America was still more of an idea being fought for than an actual idea, the Colony of Virginia was at the forefront of the intellectual, and physical, battle for independence. Physically, the Old Dominion contributed one of it’s most distinguished citizens, who went on to lead the Continental Army to victory and become the Father of his Country. Intellectually, it was the birthplace of many of the men at the forefront of the revolutionary movement — not just Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but also Patrick Henry, George Mason, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, and Lighthorse Harry Lee.

When Independence was achieved and the colonists set forth on the task of building a new nation, it was, again, Virginians that helped lead the way in drafting a new Constitution and, for 32 of the first 36 years of the new Republic’s existence, it was led by men from Virginia.

But, then, something seemed to go terribly wrong. After the Founders’ generation had passed on, and even long before that, the Commonwealth of Virginia fell further and further behind it’s northern sister states in every measurable respect. Even the estates of it’s greatest citizens, Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon (pictured above in 1858) fell into a sad state of disrepair.

In Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison & the Decline of Virginia, Susan Dunn seeks to find the reasons why the Commonwealth went from being first among equals in the late 18th Century, to a sad backwater as the Civil War dawned.

Stripped to it’s bare essence, Dunn’s thesis is that the Virginia’s slave-holding aristocracy, entranced by the agrarian, small-government ideals of Thomas Jefferson, and especially by his belief that only a nation based in farming and the land could live up to the republican values of the Revolution, used their power and influence to stop any efforts to improve the state’s economy or system of government. While states in the North, such as New York and Pennsylvania, embarked upon ambitious internal improvement programs, encouraged manufacturing and educated their citizens, Virginia’s aristocracy restricted the franchise to while landowners, dominated the political system, and thwarted any effort to bring the benefits of the Industrial Revolution that threatened to overturn the state’s agrarian society.

Dunn also lays bare the extent to which the protection of slavery came to dominate nearly every aspect of Virginia’s political and economic life in the first half of the 19th Century. While Virginians such as Jefferson, Madison, and Mason had admitted openly the evils of slavery and expressed a desire to see the institution eliminated (although none of their emancipation proposals were realistic), by the 1820s leaders in Virginia and elsewhere in the South were defending slavery as a moral good. As Dunn demonstrates, this obsession with slavery damaged Virginia in two respects; first by artificially encouraging the maintenance of a plantation-based economy that would not otherwise have been viable and, second, by denigrating the value of manual labor among the white population as a whole.

In some respect, Dunn does go overboard with her thesis, though. For example, she levels an astounding degree of criticism at Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for their roles in drafting the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1799 as a protest against the blatantly unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts. These resolutions, Dunn contends, gave intellectual ammunition to a later generation of Virginians and Southerners who cited the arguments that Jefferson and Madison had made in support of both John C. Calhoun’s Nullification Doctrine, and even secession itself. What Dunn fails to take into account, though, is that the 1799 Resolutions were a perfectly reasonable response to a blatantly illegal act, and that neither Jefferson nor Madison can be held responsible for what a later generation of politicians do with their arguments.

Dunn paints a compelling picture of a Virginia locked into a social and political system dedicated to protecting the idyllic lifestyle of landed gentry farming the land — or, rather, having their land farmed by slave labor — and dedicating themselves to a life of intellectual pursuits and political involvement. Reality, of course, was far different. Most white residents of ante bellum Virginia were not wealthy planters, and even the wealthy planters lived a far less tranquil life than the ideal vision painted (debt was a frequent problem for plantation owners, and Jefferson was only one such “gentleman farmer” who died tens of thousands of dollars in debt). Because of that unrealistic vision, Virginia never became the manufacturing and industrial powerhouse that it had the potential to be, and, if it had, the history of the later half of the 19th Century might have been very different.

Whether you agree with her thesis or not, though, Dunn’s book is well worth reading for anyone interested in how the birthplace of so many of the most important men in our history lost it’s way in such a short period of time.