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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 976
EAN num: 9780739121320
ISBN number: 0739121324
Label: Lexington Books
Manufacturer: Lexington Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 248
Printing Date: December 28, 2007
Publishing house: Lexington Books
Sale Popularity Level: 317918
Studio: Lexington Books
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Virginia's American Revolution focuses on the remaking of colonial Virginia into a republican society. It considers this topic with a focus on particular episodes, such as the Richmond Ratification Convention of 1788 and the adoption of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, that brought the question What does it mean to be republican? to the fore.
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In his preface Kevin Gutzman writes, "...I wanted to consider Virginia from the state level, because my understanding of the politics (broadly understood) of the period was that state identity dominated people's consciousness in a way barely conceivable now. ...I saw that the chief theme of the [Virginia Ratification Convention] was not the kind of America ratification would make but what effect ratification would have on Virginia."
So begins an indispensible study of a particular cultural and political setting in the early days of the United States, and how the formation of this nation was understood by one state -- Virginia. From the time that England's James I promised to honor Virginia's freedom and the English rights of its citizens through the Revolutionary War and the very first decades of the United States, Virginians understood themselves to be an autonomous people who had signed on to the Constitution with the primacy of their state's uniqueness and identity intact. After finishing this book one can better appreciate why, threescore and ten years later, Robert E. Lee would turn down the highest command in the U.S. Army rather than turn his sword upon his home country, Virginia.
Gutzman provides an overview of Virginia's uniquely hierarchical culture -- chiefly descendants of the Caroline kings and their servants -- and introduces the key players who shaped Virginia's understanding of and response to the Ratification Convention: George Bland, Thomson Mason, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Patrick Henry, among many others. Whether Federalist or Anti-Federalist, all parties worked to ensure Virginia's distinct identity within a non-binding contract of separate states.
Once the nationalist Federalists began to assert unstated powers, figures like the brilliant pamphleteer John Taylour of Caroline arose with prophetic vengeance, seeking to rally public and leadership sentiment back to very first principles. Yet, the aristocratic culture to which Taylour and many prominent Virginians belonged unwittingly alienated many of the frontiersman who had pushed beyond the Blue Ridge escarpment, setting the stage for a future rupture in the Old Dominion.
Gutzman masterfully traces these developments and the external forces which by 1840 had undermined Virginia's primacy and example of local autonomy. Daresay most Americans have a limited or skewed understanding of the Revolution -- one that is increasingly monistic and nationalistic. Virginia's American Revolution underscores that, from the beginning, America consisted of disparate political cultures with very different visions of what the agency of Federal government meant. The Virginian vision has been obscured if not lost, and many serious social and economic ramifications of that outcome continue to manifest themselves today.
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