Eighteenth-Century Virginia Research Articles

‘I have been obliged to Send Nassaw’: an enslaved healer’s medical labour and skill in eighteenth-century Virginia

AbstractThis article examines the medical career of an enslaved physician in Virginia named Nassaw from the mid eighteenth-century until the period of the American Revolution. I develop a taxonomy of Nassaw’s labours as a nurse caring for the sick, a healer administering medicines at the behest of his enslaver and as a doctor in his own right making medical judgements as he treated his patients. Nassaw is in some ways comparable to other enslaved healers of African descent in the Atlantic world, including well-known Mohanes and ritual specialists in Brazil and Latin America. However, due to his role as a physician employed by his slaveholder to principally heal other enslaved people, Nassaw struggled to find satisfaction in his labours as a healer as other enslaved people rightly perceived him as an agent of their enslaver whose medical work healed their bodies while extending their oppression. I argue that Nassaw became frustrated and depressed, and turned to drinking because of his inability to pursue or experience what Sharla M. Fett terms a ‘relational vision of health’ in the Chesapeake. Moreover, I interpret his drinking as a rebuke to the racist pretensions of his enslaver – who instructed him in pharmacy and surgery – who aimed to transform Nassaw into an Enlightened ‘black exhibit’ by training him to be a doctor. I conclude by returning to how precisely different Nassaw was from other enslaved healers in the Chesapeake like Tom of Nomini Hall or Romeo, and make the case that Nassaw deserves a place in histories of slavery and medicine precisely because he was an enslaved plantation doctor rather than a popular healer or conjuror.

Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia by Tristan Stubbs

Reviewed by: Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia by Tristan Stubbs John C. Coombs Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. By Tristan Stubbs. The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 234. $44.99, ISBN 978-1-61117-884-5.) There is no denying the centrality of workforce management to plantation operations in the staple colonies of the early American South, and therefore [End Page 134] Tristan Stubbs’s examination of overseers in the eighteenth century helps fill a notable hole in the historiography of both American slavery and southern colonial society more generally. In topically arranged chapters, Stubbs endeavors to address not only how conditions of employment, parameters of responsibility, performance expectations, and interactions with employers and enslaved laborers shaped the experience of overseers, but also how perceptions of overseers as a social group changed over time with the geographic expansion of staple production and the resulting rise in absentee plantation ownership. This second line of inquiry, which constitutes a major component of Stubbs’s analysis, posits that overseers, having been seen in the eyes of larger slave owners in a neutral and at times even positive light, acquired over the course of the eighteenth century a reputation as brutal, incompetent, and untrustworthy. Stubbs maintains this stigmatization matured and became entrenched after the American Revolution. This stereotype was partly rooted in overseers’ generally humble origins. According to Stubbs, many “locally born white managers in both regions were the sons of small farmers,” which rendered them subject to the aspersions that patricians cast on all plebeians as being vulgar, ignorant, and preoccupied by the pursuit of their narrow self-interest (p. 26). As to their prospects, Stubbs paints a mixed portrait, stating that “many overseers stayed in the profession until they had put aside enough capital to purchase a smallholding or become a tenant,” while subsequently presenting evidence that suggests relatively few were able to achieve such “a life of independence” (pp. 31, 158). The signal contribution of Stubbs’s work is its significant insight into the complicated relations between overseers and their planter employers, which he effectively shows as being riven with inherent conflicts. Overseers were “supervisors but supervised,” and “they were at once autonomous and dependent,” especially on absentee plantations (p. 102). If on the one hand elite planters demanded the maximum profits from their holdings and crop production that enhanced their credit and reputation among their peers, then on the other they interfered with plantation operations through in-person visits and written criticism. They asserted their patriarchal authority and minimized the managerial influence and autonomy of overseers, who were ostensibly subordinate. The often contradictory character of the relationship reached its most poignant expression in the decades after the Revolution, when planters, seeking to distance themselves from the violence upon which slavery had always depended, assuaged their consciences by depicting overseers as brutal agents of tyranny, even as they relied on them to police and discipline enslaved laborers through corporal correction. Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of Stubbs’s analysis is that it focuses too intently on the largest estates. While he clearly has conducted an extensive examination of the extant records of wealthy planters, revealing a great deal about the thoughts and opinions of men like George Washington, Landon Carter, and Henry Laurens, one wonders if some equally thorough digging in surviving local court records might have yielded additional evidence about the position of overseers on the plantations of smaller operators, who receive at best only minimal consideration. Still, on the whole, Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and [End Page 135] Georgia is a solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it. John C. Coombs Hampden-Sydney College Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early America ed. by Patrick Griffin

Reviewed by: Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early Americaed. by Patrick Griffin Cameron B. Strang Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early America. Edited by Patrick Griffin. Early American Histories. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp. [x], 269. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-3988-9.) Experiencing Empire: Power, People, and Revolution in Early Americaclearly fulfills its two main purposes: adding to a growing body of work that explores continuities across the Revolutionary era and honoring the career of historian T. H. Breen. Like Breen's own scholarship (which is summarized in an afterword by Joyce E. Chaplin), the chapters range from the early colonial era to the decades after independence. These essays analyze "[t]he relationship between sovereignty—the stuff of empire—and how people manage it" in colonial America, Britain, the French Atlantic, and the imperial United States (p. 11). As Patrick Griffin discusses in his introduction, the Revolutionary era has usually been broken into two periods, each with its own set of historiographical debates. On the one hand, the thirteen years between 1763 and 1776 have generated countless efforts to understand how colonists' pride in being British at the end of the Seven Years' War could have so quickly morphed into a new American identity. The eleven years between 1776 and 1787, on the other hand, have inspired historians to regard 1787 as a "litmus test" for determining the extent to which the Constitution realized the Revolution's most radical aspects (p. 3). Instead of seeing 1776 as either an end or a beginning, Griffin suggests approaching the years between 1763 and 1787 as "the 'imperial-revolutionary' moment," a period when some colonists came to believe that British imperialism had failed and, by fighting to replace British rule with a minimal government, brought about "a near-anarchic state" that only stabilized after the Constitution ordered the United States into a new empire (pp. 19, 20). In other words, empire-imposed order bookended social revolution. Breen offers his own thoughts about "What time was the American Revolution?" in the conclusion (p. 233). More emphatically than Griffin, Breen situates the years between 1760 and 1773 "as a general crisis of imperial rule throughout the Atlantic World" (p. 234). He contends that agitation in Boston was pretty typical of how imperial subjects protested unfair treatment, but Parliament's overreaction to the Tea Party (and not the party itself) pushed this quotidian kind of resistance into a more general mobilization. Breen also posits that the experience of war—not ideology—led many white men to the revolutionary conclusion that they were each other's equals; moreover, he argues that most Americans were brightly optimistic during the years before [End Page 976]the Constitution, despite historians' penchant for taking "elite fears of looming anarchy" at face value (p. 242). Far from undermining the volume as a whole, the subtle but important differences in how Griffin and Breen reenvision Revolutionary time ensure that this collection can encourage further debate rather than attempt to impose definitive answers, a worthy achievement for any volume on something as thoroughly studied as the Revolution. The chapters themselves cover a wide array of subjects, including political economy, military fortifications, and (in Seth Cotlar's fascinating essay on antiquarian John Fanning Watson) nostalgia. Three chapters may be of particular interest to readers of this journal. Owen Stanwood examines attempts to establish wineries in the South from sixteenth-century Florida to eighteenth-century Virginia. Imperial visionaries and Huguenot experts persisted in experimenting with wine because it seemed to offer a path toward a "more virtuous empire" (p. 51). Viniculture, which required German and French laborers, would make slavery less central to colonial society and even ease tensions between colonists and British officials by creating ample work for white colonists as producers of raw materials and, therefore, ensuring that they ceased undermining mercantilism by striving to become manufacturers. Patricia Cleary explores allegations of sexual misconduct against white women in colonial St. Louis. French and Spanish officials cataloged white women's sexual transgressions, especially adultery, but were surprisingly tolerant of these scandals. Cleary argues that this benign neglect stemmed from a mixture of officials...

Slave owning overseers in eighteenth-century Virginia and South Carolina

ABSTRACTThis article examines the position and experiences of plantation overseers in Virginia and South Carolina in the eighteenth century who, whilst themselves employed by planters to supervise their slaves, were also slave owners in their own right. The current historiography often does little more than dismiss the overseer as a figure drawn from the lower stratum of white society. Notwithstanding the reputation of overseers as poor whites who were dependant, shiftless, and villainous, for many of these hard-working and determined individuals, working as an overseer was a transitory phase. Slave-owning overseers and those who acquired slaves while working as overseers demonstrated their long-term aspirations and the opportunities for social and economic mobility that this employment presented. This study is based upon a range of archival sources from plantation records such as diaries, letter books, account books, legal deeds and contracts.

Representation of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Virginia Press

Newly discovered published material from colonial Virginia offers a new perspective on the attitudes toward blacks in that slaveholding colony just prior to the American Revolution. Some lines in verse, discovered by this researcher in an almanac thought not to be extant, and an allegorical essay in a newly found newspaper, offer us an alternative view of attitudes toward slaves in the 1760s. While not abolitionist in character, these printed works—never before analyzed—demonstrate that opinions in this slaveholding society were not, in fact, universal and demonstrate sympathetic attitudes toward slaves earlier than previously noted. The fact that these views appeared in print adds weight to their meaning. The dualism of treating slaves as both property and as lesser human beings and the theory of patriarchalism as justifying this dualism are supported here. This research concludes that the very fact that these writings were published demonstrates that at least some residents understood the practice of slavery to be abhorrent and not all Virginians of this time viewed the slaves as less than human.

Escaping servitude: a documentary history of runaway servants in eighteenth-century Virginia

Escaping servitude: a documentary history of runaway servants in eighteenth-century Virginia

Debt of Honor: A Sabine Hall Gamester Comes to Ruin in Fredericksburg

In October 1791, Sabine Hall scion George Carter (1762-1802), so inebriated and exhausted from “three days & three whole nights” of play that he could barely hold up his cards — or his head — lost £1,893 to John Cooper in a final late-night round of the game Twenty-One at Benson’s Tavern in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Though Virginia newspapers discretely omitted mention of Carter’s shocking loss (out of respect for his powerful, elite family), tongues wagged with the sordid story in Fredericksburg and beyond, and the question of how to deal with Cooper’s demand for payment presented a profound crisis of family honor for the Carters. This paper will examine the culture of gaming in eighteenth-century Virginia and the clash between family honor, as it was understood by Virginia's elite at the time, and the law. It will illustrate how at least one family would sooner render themselves insolvent than breach their notion of family honor.

Review: Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape by Kirk Savage

Kirk Savage Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, x + 390 pp., 126 b/w illus. $34.95, ISBN 9780520256545 Dell Upton’s groundbreaking 1984 essay “Black and White Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia” opens with a simply stated observation: “For me, one of the most engaging problems in architectural history is to understand the social experience of architecture.”1 This mind-expanding approach to the study of the built environment prompted a new chapter in architectural history that continues to include not only industrial buildings but also spaces and grounds, interior and exterior, and marks on the landscape such as monuments. Nearly three decades later Kirk Savage’s most recent book, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape , carries on this inclusive consideration of American space with another watershed publication that deals also with a Virginian-Maryland landscape of Washington, D.C., and specifically the National Mall. In his synthetic history of Washington’s memorial landscape, Savage identifies basic issues of monumentalization from Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s efforts in the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century. In doing so, he marks a series of transformations of this celebrated place wrought partly by design, partly by human use and practice. Savage asks important questions in Monument Wars : How can one stand apart from everyday experience to make public space match the extraordinary and authoritative events of our history? How do monuments in Washington retell the official story of the nation? How have the Mall and its monuments changed national history itself? This last question assumes a big claim, but after reading his compelling interpretation that offers a model for rereading cultural landscape anywhere, one is convinced of the power of that ceremonial landscape in our lives. Savage takes one on a long journey of 200 years, gradually moving through the history of transformation on the National Mall in form and function right up to today, offering a challenging …

Homemakers, Supervisors, and Peach Stealing Bitches: the role of overseers' wives on slave plantations in eighteenth-century Virginia and South Carolina

The otherwise extensive historiography of slavery in colonial America has rather neglected the overseer and his family, as indeed the wider historiography of colonial society has often neglected the white poor. By considering, specifically, the role of overseers' wives, this article seeks to recover the history of poor white women who, although often vilified by their employers for their allegedly wayward behaviour, made a significant contribution, economically and socially, to the plantation community. By so doing, it casts fresh light upon white women who lived on the margins of wider colonial society and the shadowy ‘edges’ of slavery itself.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia. By Lauren F. Winner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. xii + 275 pp. $45.00 cloth.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia. By Lauren F. Winner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. xii + 275 pp. $45.00 cloth.

<i>Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery Maurie D. McInnis (bio) Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, editors Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 294 pages. 49 black-and-white illustrations. ISBN 978-0-300-12042-4, $45.00 HB Cabin, Quarter, Plantation opens with an essay by W. E. B. DuBois called "The Home of the Slave." Originally published in 1901, it is an excellent beginning to Ellis's and Ginsburg's volume on the architecture and landscapes of slavery because DuBois is able to give voice to the human cost of the "peculiar institution." Of the twelve essays in the volume, it is the only one that could be considered a primary source; the others are a combination of four previously published pieces and seven new scholarly works. Taken together, the authors hope the work will serve as both a teaching resource for professors and a spur to additional research among scholars. The architectural history of slavery is still a young field. Despite decades of work on vernacular architecture, archaeology, and material culture, there is still a dearth of published materials from these fields that deals with human bondage in America. This volume thus promises to fill an important gap. The book's essays cover a range of geographies, chronologies, and methodologies. Like almost any anthology, the editors comment in their Introduction that they were challenged by the proper arrangement of the essays. They considered chronology and geography but opted instead for grouping essays according to three theoretical approaches: agency, racialization, and standpoint theory. The first, agency, is well defined in the historiography of American slavery, although no longer a primary theoretical construct; the other two, argue the editors, provide additional routes to understanding the complexities of the landscapes of slavery. Readers will notice the [End Page 118] variety of their methodological and disciplinary approaches, with archaeological and vernacular architectural studies predominating. Together these essays make important advances in how to think about the architectures of slavery by extending beyond the house to the yard, beyond the yard to the plantation, beyond the plantation to the fugitive landscape, beyond the landscapes of freedom to the geographic mapping of the United States itself. In making these extensions, the essays demonstrate that the entire landscape of the United States was shaped by slavery. These are essays that everyone interested in American history should read. Much of the challenge in writing about the material life of enslaved African Americans is the paucity of extant structures and how comparatively few primary sources survive. It is thus apt that many of the authors in the volume are archaeologists. Those who specialize in the African diaspora have led the way in expanding our knowledge of the material world of slavery. The essays by Barbara Heath and Garrett Fesler draw from archaeological research in Virginia and demonstrate that for African slaves it is the area outside the cabin—that is, the yard and landscape beyond—where we can begin to understand the communities that they built in the face of enslavement. Heath's essay, although it appears nearly halfway through the book, is one of the few to offer a needed historical overview touching on such important topics as the regions of origin for African slaves, settlement patterns in the Chesapeake, and archaeological topics such as subfloor pits and yards. Dell Upton's "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," originally published in 1985, is arguably one of the most important in the field. It is hard to imagine a volume on slave landscapes that did not include this work because so many of the other authors in this collection were influenced by Upton's methodology of close fieldwork and archival research and his articulation of a processional landscape. This determination to combine fieldwork and archival research is clearly evident in the work of several authors. Clifton Ellis's essay details the various plans that James Bruce employed in the houses of his enslaved workers in antebellum Virginia. Through careful examination of building details, Ellis argues that these structures clearly marked the architecture of enslavement despite the planter's attention...

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (review)

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (review)

A cheerful and comfortable faith: Anglican religious practice in the elite households of eighteenth-century Virginia

This enlightening book examines the physical objects found in elite Virginia households of the eighteenth century to discover what they can tell us about their owners' lives and religious practices. Lauren F. Winner looks closely at punch bowls, needlework, mourning jewelry, baptismal gowns, biscuit molds, cookbooks, and many other items, illuminating the ways Anglicanism influenced daily activities and attitudes in colonial Virginia, particularly in the households of the gentry.

Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: An Archaeological Perspective

Evolutionary approaches to agency offer some of the most promising frameworks for identifying individual agents and their archaeological correlates. Agency theory calls attention to the individual as the fundamental feature of human relations, and evolutionary theory provides historically situated models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. The following paper offers one such model. Using data from 41 slave-site occupations from eighteenth-century Virginia, I explore how and why enslaved African Americans actively participated in the burgeoning "consumer revolution" that swept across the early modern Atlantic World. Artifact patterning suggests that the acquisition and display of costly imported goods functioned as a form of communication for slaves in both public and private venues. The data show that enslaved women and men used several different consumption strategies to solidify social and economic relationships within precarious and rapidly changing environments. Signaling theory, derived from evolutionary theory, illuminates the contextual factors that structured slaves’ consumer choices and provides a model for understanding their choices as the result of dynamic and mutually beneficial behaviors.

A Mean-Spirited Merchant Bringing Ribbons and Rum to a Messy World

A Mean-Spirited Merchant Bringing Ribbons and Rum to a Messy World Paul G. E. Clemens (bio) Ann Smart Martin . Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xiv + 260 pp. Figures, colored plates, tables, notes, essay on sources, index. $55.00. One way to appreciate the enormous accomplishment of Ann Smart Martin's illumination of late eighteenth-century consumerism in the Virginia backcountry is with some snapshots from this multi-dimensional book. One is of the female slave, Suckey, owned by Richard Stith, going to John Hook's New London (Bedford County) store to exchange four pounds of "cotton in the seed" for a looking glass (mirror) and a ribbon. A second is of Hook, the backcountry trader this book is built around, suing in the early 1780s to recover the value of two steers taken by an army commissary during the Revolutionary War and being humiliated in court by the defendants' famous lawyer, Patrick Henry. A third, at the end of the book, asks us to imagine Sam Walton and his Wal-Mart empire as the successful legacy of the Scottish store system in eighteenth-century Virginia. Suckey's story makes us consider the meaning of consumer goods, as it highlights two items resonant with significance to those who procured, used, or observed them. It makes us consider, as well, someone who, at first glance, is an unlikely consumer: a female slave of a local planter. Hook's clash with Patrick Henry meant one thing to Hook—another chance for his unscrupulous neighbors to parley their patriotism into a way to avoid paying their debts—while it meant another to those backcountry neighbors who saw in Hook the embodiment of every stereotype they had about Scottish merchants: "cheap, quarrelsome, and greedy" (p. 196). Thus it makes us realize that there was a politics and a culture to buying in the eighteenth century. The Wal-Mart analogy invites speculation about just how the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy, with its worldwide linkages, differed from today's globalization. Martin's point of entry to this study is her examination of the surviving store ledgers of John Hook. Hook came to Virginia in the mid–eighteenth century as an apprentice to a Glasgow tobacco firm. He stayed on as an employee, junior partner, and independent storekeeper. He died in 1809—wealthy, disliked, and [End Page 332] quickly forgotten, except for his unfortunate run-in with Patrick Henry. His store ledgers document business at one or more stores in operation immediately before the American Revolution and in the two decades following the war. Martin's aim is to triangulate the relationship between Hook, his customers, and the objects in this world; and as a specialist in material culture, she has written a different type of book about consumerism—one that pays particular attention to the objects that people needed and desired, the stores that sold these goods, and the homes in which they were used. The first chapter locates Hook economically and chronologically in the world of Atlantic trade. His was a frustrating life: he began by sweeping floors; spent too many years as a partner in a family firm that was willing to cast him aside to help out their own; and ended up, as revolution rippled through the backcountry, hauled from his house by a mob largely of his own customers, accused of treason as a Tory, and threatened with tarring and feathering. Martin believes it true that Hook was not very likeable, for his letters capture a "pessimistic man, driven to succeed, sensitive to perceived slights, and quick to complain" (p. 34). And to top it all off, when he finally got his chance, even as he toyed with the idea of returning to Scotland and formed a new partnership in 1771 with David Ross that finally gave him a degree of independence, the credit crisis of 1772 undercut the tobacco consignment trade and brought to an end more than two decades of economic prosperity in the Chesapeake. Yet he seems to have prospered, for he stayed on, even as other Scottish merchants fled back to their homeland. In the years...

Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America , and: Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 , and: God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (review)

Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America. By Janet Moore Lindman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 272 Pp. Cloth, $39.95.)Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740-1840. By Randolph Ferguson Scully. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Pp. 303. Cloth, $42.50.)God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World. By David L. Rowe. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008. Pp. 249. Paper, $24.00.)Reviewed by David MorganBaptists exhibit a broad and varied history in colonial North America, ranging from establishing a colony of their own under Roger Williams to their persecution as a tiny minority in the early history of Anglican Virginia. Their history is only more dramatic in the national period, when the once reviled sect became one of the nation's fastest growing Protestant denominations. This was especially true in the South, where Baptists grew from a slender and embattled presence during the early eighteenth century to become the dominant evangelical church in the twentieth. Baptists have been expertly studied by a generation or two of leading scholars, but Janet Moore Lindman and Randolph Ferguson Scully both offer helpful studies. Lindman helps correct an overwhelmingly doctrinal and textual framework in the historiography (much of which has been denominational) by stressing the importance of the body, ritual, and gender. Scully trains a careful eye on the history of race among eighteenth-century Virginia Baptists leading up to the visionary Baptist preacher and prophet, slave, and would-be revolutionist Nat Turner. David Rowe provides an insightful biography of millennialist William Miller, one of America's most fascinating Baptists.The temptation in studying religious groups, especially those that are marginalized and deemed sensational by virtue of their unusual behavior, is to focus on their doctrines. To be sure, Protestant sects have themselves encouraged this approach by investing enormous energy in what strikes many observers as dogmatic hair-splitting - whether it is prudent to preach extemporaneously or to read a prepared text, or how the third angel in the Book of Revelation is to be understood. But even embedded in these arcane queries are conceptions and practices that urge scholars to look beyond the pedantic surface of dogmas to the robust worlds of felt life and lived religion.Happily, Janet Moore Lindman steps out from traditional historiography to pay attention to what she aptly describes as the Baptists' bodycentered religion. Devoting an entire chapter to the careful description of evangelical conversion, Lindman shows how for Baptists getting religion was a deeply embodied experience, not a merely intellectual one. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Baptist faith spread through many practices, all of which were dedicated to constructing and maintaining community. Unlike some extreme Calviniste, the point was not to articulate an airtight message crafted in the meticulous interpretation of Scripture and the decisive application of the weaponry of polemical doctrinal interpretation, but to build up a countercultural ethos, an alternative way of being in the world. The body in question was not only the individual bodies of believers, important as they were, but the social body of communitas. Individuals submitted themselves to the collective scrutiny of the group. How one dressed, spoke, and conducted worldly affairs was subject to the shared inspection of the group. Decisions were made by congregational councils to endorse and promote the well-being of the entire community. (This might strike one as Utopian during the early days of the group in eighteenth-century Virginia, but by the end of the century it came to mean squashing dissent against slavery, because objections to slave ownership were considered partisan and therefore subversive of religious community. …

Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century

Jewel L. Spangler's fine study of the rise of evangelical dissent in eighteenth-century Virginia retraces some familiar ground. More important, it offers a well-argued interpretation of how first the Presbyterians and then the Baptists impinged on and finally broke the Anglican monopoly in the colony. Spangler shows how the Baptists, especially, succeeded not by challenging the planter-dominated order, but by adapting to it even as the political culture of Virginia underwent important transformations during the revolutionary era. Recent scholarship has shown that the established church was not the decaying institution it was once thought to be. Anglicanism, with its formal liturgy, hierarchy, and intimate ties to the elite, did reinforce planter hegemony. Yet contrary to such historians as Rhys Isaac, Spangler insists that Presbyterian and even Baptist growth did not represent an upsurge of lower-class resentment against an elitist culture. Instead, Spangler uses a supply- and-demand model to explain evangelical emergence in some parts of the colony. Where Anglicans were weak, in the western Southside, for example, Baptists did relatively well, assuming an effective preacher came to a locality ripe for proselytizing.

The Rebel Within: Unruly Slaves, Women, and Children in Colonial Virginia

Was British North America a deferential society, as most American historians have argued, or was it a defiant one? Before rebellion turned into revolution, did ordinary colonists—artisans and merchants, yeoman farmers, indentured servants, and slaves—submit to their social superiors, or did they refuse the counsel of their betters? In “Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America,” Michael Zuckerman, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, challenged conventional wisdom. As part of a round table discussion about deference or defiance in eighteenth-century America, published in The Journal of American History in June of 1998, he took exception to the view that deference characterized colonial America, thus complicating the current narrative concerning colonial politics and society and, ultimately, the very meaning of the American fight for independence. Judging from Sally E. Hadden’s Slave Patrols, Terri L. Snyder’s Brabbling Women, and Rhys Isaac’s Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom, Zuckerman’s contention appears to be a fair one—particularly with respect to eighteenth-century Virginia.

Marbury v. Madison and the Establishment of Judicial Autonomy

Marbury v. Madison and the Establishment of Judicial Autonomy1 WILLIAM E. NELSON My topic is Marbury v. Madison,2 the 1803 Supreme Court case that we understand to be the progenitor ofjudicial review—the doctrine allowing courts to hold acts of Congress uncon­ stitutional. My claim is that Marbury was actually about something larger. It was about main­ taining a balance between two concepts, democracy—the idea expressed by Lincoln in the Get­ tysburg Address of government of the people, by the people, and for the people;3 and the rule of law—the idea expressed by John Adams in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 that ours is a government of laws and not of men.4 Virtually all Americans believe in both concepts—one, that the people make the law, and two, that law somehow transcends mere human will and incorporates ultimate princi­ ples ofright. So defined, however, the two con­ cepts are potentially in tension with each other. My claim this evening will be that for nearly two centuries, Marbury v. Madison provided a set of distinctions that enabled Americans to keep both the concept of democracy and the concept of the rule of law at the base of their constitutional theory. This claim, in turn, has three compo­ nents. First, we need to understand that John Marshall, by deciding Marbury, did not direct how we today should resolve the tensions we face between democracy and the rule of law. He couldn’t possibly have done that because he, like us, could not predict what would hap­ pen two centuries in the future. All he could know—all we can know—is what has hap­ pened in the past; all he could do—all we can do—is use knowledge ofthe past to try to con­ trol events in the present. The future, for Mar­ shall like us, was beyond both knowledge and control. Thus, if we want to appreciate the insight that Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madi­ son can provide us, we need to proceed to the second component of my claim—we need to understand what Marbury meant to Marshall. Only then can we turn to the third compo- THE ESTABLISHMENT OF JUDICIAL AUTONOMY 241 nent—understanding in broad outline how change that has occurred since Marbury has partially transformed its meaning, leaving it both different and the same as the case de­ cided by John Marshall. It is to the second component—what Marbury meant in its time—that I now want to turn. Understanding what Marshall decided in Marbury requires, in turn, that we begin with the government, law, and society of eigh­ teenth-century Virginia—where Marshall was born and raised and from which he derived his ideas and values. We need to appreciate that eighteenth-century Virginia, unlike America today, was not governed by a ubiquitous bureaucracy with clear chains of command reaching upward to central political authori­ ties. There were no police, state or local, no department of motor vehicles, no highway department, no state education bureaucracy. There was no colonial equivalent, on any level of government, of the Internal Revenue Ser­ vice or the Social Security Administration.5 Because there was no modern bureau­ cracy, thejudiciary and the officials like sher­ iffs responsible to it were the primary link be­ tween a colony’s central government and its outlying localities. The judiciary alone could coerce individuals by punishing crimes and imposing money judgments. Courts also ap­ portioned and collected taxes, supervised the construction and maintenance of highways, issued licenses, regulated licensees’ busi­ nesses, and administered the Poor Law.6 As one member of Congress observed in an endof -the-century recapitulation, “[ojther depart­ ments of the Government” may have been “more splendid,” but only the “courts of jus­ tice [came] home to every man’s habitation.”7 But even though courts possessed vast jurisdiction, no one believed that judges pos­ sessed policy-making prerogatives of the sort that we assume Congress and the President possess today. It was a commonplace, as Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts argued in 1770, that courts merely dispensed justice ac­ cording to law, which was thought to be “founded in principles, that are permanent...

The fabulous history of the Dismal Swamp Company: a story of George Washington's times

The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times. By Charles Royster. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Pp. xi, 622. Illustrations, maps. $35.00.) The transition of Virginia's society from the colonial era into the early republic has been the focus of numerous histories and continues to be a source of scholarly interest. Charles Royster's The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company is as much a history about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia culture as it is a study of the founding and management of the Dismal Swamp Company. Royster explores the lives of the Dismal Swamp Company's founders, which include many eighteenthcentury Virginia luminaries, to expose the underpinnings of Virginia's society-a society based on cronyism, transatlantic trade, personal debt, and endless land speculation on the western frontier. Located on the Virginia-North Carolina border, the Dismal Swamp was approximately 900 square miles of marshy land between the two colonies. In 1728, William Byrd, the architect of Richmond and an accomplished author, served on a survey team composed of both Virginians and North Carolinians who delineated the dividing line between the colonies. Byrd's experiences inspired a manuscript entitled History of the Dividing Line that chronicled the survey process and a plan to drain the Dismal Swamp in order to create arable farmland. Royster notes that Byrd's plan called for a company to be formed with 4,000 of capital to finance the project for years. In Byrd's mind, the company could start with ten slaves to dig ditches, fell trees, make boards and shingles, render pine tar, grow rice and corn and hemp, and tend cattle (6). A proponent of hemp cultivation, Byrd believed the Royal Navy's constant need for cordage and the British Empire's desire to reduce their dependency on Russian products would make hemp the most profitable crop in Virginia, even surpassing tobacco. Byrd calculated it would take years to convert the Dismal Swamp into a fertile and lucrative farming operation. In reality, it took thirty-five years for Byrd's proposal for the Dismal Swamp Company to come to fruition, and he would never see it-he died in 1744. In May 1763, twelve members of the Virginia gentry founded the Dismal Swamp Company and requested a land grant for the swamp from the Crown. Most notably, the company's founders included George Washington and John Robinson, the speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of the Colony of Virginia. The company's efforts to convert the Dismal Swamp into a profitable business enterprise took much longer than Byrd's initial ten-year estimate. In 18 10, the Dismal Swamp Company finally turned a profit, but only by jettisoning the idea of draining the swamp for hemp cultivation and focusing on lumber harvesting and the creation of the Dismal Swamp Canal, which connected the Chesapeake Bay with the Pasquotank River that led to the Albermarle Sound. Throughout his narrative, Royster notes several factors that contributed to the inability of the Dismal Swamp Company to fulfill its original objective of draining the swamp. Royster argues that the Dismal Swamp Company's members never committed sufficient resources and capital to the project, instead favoring other land speculation schemes and business enterprises. …