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Prologue



David Hackett Fischer, in his remarkable book Albion’s Seed, describes a particular Virginia culture – probably better described as the Chesapeake Bay culture – that attempted to emulate the social order of seventeenth-century southern England. With an abundance of evidence, he sets out the characteristic folkways and social institutions of the Chesapeake Bay culture. Fischer argues that to a large extent, this social structure was the deliberate creation of the long-serving governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, who set out to re-create the hierarchical and deferential world of southern England.

In many ways this was an unattractive culture. Its greatest evil, of course, was the practice of slavery – a thing which in itself tended to mean that Virginia was not, in fact, an altogether faithful reproduction of Old England. At the same time that Virginia gentlemen were turning into slaveholders, southern English gentlemen were turning into Sir Roger de Coverley.

One can see why, however, men like Berkeley took this path. They valued hierarchy and deference and could not conceive of a social order without them. However, hierarchy and deference were hard to sustain in a world where land was abundant and labour was scarce. Berkeley’s answer was to create a racialized hierarchy instead. When one considers the immense suffering that resulted from this path, one has to consider Sir William Berkeley as one of the great villains of history, on this ground alone. There were many other deplorable features of the Chesapeake Bay culture, which are explored in Fischer’s great work.

It is probably fortunate, then, that over time, the dominance of this culture in American life has lessened. Fischer argues that there were four major types of social order established in America during the colonial era. The Chesapeake Bay culture had its headquarters in Virginia and could be called a Cavalier order. The other cultures were the Puritan culture of Massachusetts Bay, the Quaker-influenced culture of the Delaware Valley, and the Borderer culture of Appalachia. Each of these had a distinct regional origin (or set of origins) within the British Isles. Ultimately the biggest single influence on the American way of life, in Fischer’s interpretation, was the Delaware culture, derived from the social institutions and material culture of what he calls the ‘North Midlands’ of England – the counties of Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and some surrounding areas. The present writer grew up in the latter-day manifestation of that culture, so is not unbiased about its qualities. He will therefore leave further consideration of that question to the philosophers.

However, if the Chesapeake Bay culture had any redeeming feature, then it lies – as with any system of aristocracy – in the remarkable personal qualities of the aristocrats themselves, personalities who strike the imagination in the same way as a work of art. Undeniably the glamour of the aristocrat is a historical force. Many people are immune to it, but throughout history there is a pattern, observable in every continent and epoch, whereby aristocrats attract the loyalty of the commons by particular patterns of behaviour – a mixture of leadership in war and open-handed generosity in peace. There is more that could be said about the operation of the aristocratic principle, but for now I wish merely to point out that this glamour was a salient feature of old Virginia.

We can note that old-school Virginia gentlemen regarded a military career as almost a default setting, and their society placed upon them certain expectations of behaviour. From they to whom much has been given, much will be expected. The qualities they displayed, of calm under pressure, calculation of risk, decisiveness, the ability to set and keep to priorities, and (not least) physical courage, were the key to victory in many places, in many wars. The Civil War was the time - perhaps even more than the Revolution - when the qualities of the Old Dominion's officer class stood out most strongly.

Some of them wore blue.
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