Virginia Gentry Research Articles

Domestic Tranquillity and the Management of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia

WRT T HEN Frederick Jones of Virginia visited his North Carolina kin I 757, he fell love. He married, made his home with his wife's folks (his cousins), and several years later reflected that except for his separation from his own family, in every other circumstance of life, I have the greatest reason to be vastly happy & thankful to the wise disposer of all things & upon the whole submit & agree ... that whatever is is right.' The story is many ways unexceptional, for by the early decades of the eighteenth century the Virginia gentry had cause for the complacency reflected Jones's evocation of Alexander Pope. After a tumultuous first century, Virginia's planter elite had come to preside over a society that was demographically secure and socially at peace.2 Recent studies of the character, temperament, and values of the gentry have given us pictures of its members at horse races and at worship, astride their favorite mounts and the front rows of their parish churches, always proving their prowess and displaying their persons, always on top or front. Self-confident and extroverted, the gentry exuded self-assurance on the public stage. We know both the impression that they wanted to make on others and the importance to them of making an impression.3 Less clear