Dominion of Memories
Jefferson,
Madison and the Decline of Virginia
By
Susan Dunn
Basic Books, 2007
This topical history of Virginia
spanning the first forty years of the U.S. centers on the primary conundrum of Virginia. How did the region
that produced so many founding fathers, six of the first ten presidents, as well as John Marshall and many other Supreme Court
justices, become such a stagnant backwater for much of the remaining history of the nation? In particular,
this book examines how the primary authors of both the Declaration of Independence and Constitution came to be symbols of
reaction and oppression – sometimes actively.
The first intuition
is to blame slavery itself, but this doesn’t provide a completely satisfactory answer. Virginia didn’t
even provide many leaders or ideas for the pro-slavery movement. Ms. Dunn details a convincing argument
of how the concentration of power in the slave-holding Tidewater elite led to apathy among the remaining citizens, particularly
the more dynamic western counties of Virginia. Throughout the first 70 years of U.S. history, the need
of Virginia’s leaders, including Jefferson and to a lesser extent Madison, to protect their economic investment in slavery,
and the status it conferred, caused them to oppose reforms their younger selves had supported.
Ms. Dunn structures the book in both chronological and topical terms, with introductory covering Virginia
politics during and immediately after adoption of the Constitution, and concluding sections detailing the period 1829 through
about 1835, when the last chance for reform before the Civil War was turned back by the entrenched hierarchy.
Between the chronological sections, the chapters cover the components of Virginia’s political and economic decline
during this period, including industrial stagnation, education, infrastructure, capital formation.
Overall, the book is a good introduction, although I would have liked
more detail in the topical sections. The banking and capital formation chapter, in particular, left
me confused as to the source of Virginia’s finances. Ms. Dunn makes it clear that capital availability
was meager, but not entirely nonexistent. How much was a renewal of London ties, and how much supplied
by Northeastern capitalists.
The chronological
sections are most effective when illustrating the irony of minority rights as pursued by the Virginia elite. Not
a downtrodden minority to be protected from a tyrannical majority, rather an elite, powerful minority striving to maintain
the enslavement of a race that was a local majority in many Tidewater counties of Virginia. Only viewed
from the national perspective were the power-wielding planter class of Virginia a minority, threatened by the Northern majority
as represented by the Federal government. The irony continued as the antebellum dictum of states’
rights, along with the ghostly champion Jefferson, was once-again resurrected to maintain the oppression of the minority race
following Brown v. Board of Education.
The one quibble
I have is the paucity of explanation regarding the motivations of Jefferson and Madison. As the complexity
of their stance, and final capitulation to the conservative pro-slavery states’ right view is central to the book, I
would have liked more discussion and perhaps documentation of their motives or justification. Jefferson
is the most clearly contradictory. Madison on the other hand appears to always maintain true to the one
goal of maintaining the constitutional union, which he rightly viewed as his progeny. All his sometimes
baffling shifts make sense as compromises to preserve a peaceable union.
Jefferson’s
vision of the democracy as a collection of yeomen-farmers is at odds with the efforts he took to preserve his patrician lifestyle
of gentleman planter and amateur scientist. This thread of preserving the Tidewater lifestyle runs throughout
the first few chapters of the book. In one chapter, Ms. Dunn explores the general lassitude of this environment
as commonly present in early 19th century Virginia. She focuses on the indolence of the elites,
particularly their pride in lack of industry and even progressive education among themselves, labeling these qualities as
a central goal of their society. Rather, I felt clues to their goals are more evident in their self-description
as cavaliers, conservative knights standing as a bulwark against modern vices.
Throughout
colonial Virginia history, the leading families were trying to create and maintain the upper-class lifestyle of English society.
Without an established peasant base, Virginia elites had to import their labor. Indentured servants
were too transitory, eventually aspiring to their own piece of American prosperity, so quickly Virginians adopted the African
slave economy, which had originated in the Caribbean and was introduced to the original colonies through the Carolinas.
Once their patrician aspirations were chained to this slave economy, the Tidewater planters, including Jefferson, Madison,
Washington, and Monroe, could never find an avenue for reform without losing their livelihood.
