american slavery american freedom the ordeal of colonial virginia

By the 1720s and 1730s, the gentry were well established and were erecting substantial and impressive churches, courthouses, and homes throughout Tidewater Virginia to symbolize and strengthen their power.īy this time, the foundation of gentry wealth and power was the production of tobacco. More debatable is whether the transition to slavery was the unplanned consequence of changing market conditions throughout the Atlantic world or the result of deliberate promotion by the great planters who saw its economic advantages and, after Bacon’s Rebellion, its utility as a means of reducing class conflict and promoting racial solidarity among whites. The colony’s transition from a primary reliance on indentured servants to the predominance of enslaved labor late in the seventeenth century clearly facilitated the gentry’s rise because it required more capital than many smaller planters could muster and because the enslaved population’s reproduction further enriched their enslavers. Many of the leading families arrived and established themselves as planters in the middle third of the seventeenth century. The process by which Virginia’s gentry emerged is somewhat uncertain. Their land ownership entitled them to a share of political power, and their leisured lifestyle supposedly facilitated the cultivation of refined standards of personal conduct and cultural appreciation.

The term “gentry” was imported from Britain, where it referred to similar groups of well-to-do men in England and Ireland, normally not members of the titled nobility, who owned extensive country estates and lived off the rental income of their tenants. Nevertheless, the gentry weathered these storms and remained in power well into the nineteenth century. Many of the nongentry, drafted into the Continental Army, resented the planters’ ability to avoid the fighting. Already overwhelmed by debt, they had trouble negotiating changes that came with a diversifying economy, religious dissent, and the social shifts that accompanied the American Revolution (1775–1783) and its emphasis on the rights of the common man. Over time, however, the gentry’s power began to decline. Another symbol of the gentry’s prestige was the inordinate amount of time the planters spent on leisure activities such as gambling and dancing. They constructed large homes, especially in the Tidewater, that dominated the landscape and symbolized their great power.

As the richest men in Virginia, they dominated colonial government, sitting on the governor’s Council and in the House of Burgesses and running Anglican vestries. Of landed but not noble lineage, the gentry established themselves in Virginia as tobacco planters relying heavily on the labor first of indentured servants and then enslaved Africans. The gentry were a small class of men who dominated the economic, social, and political life of Virginia through much of the mid- to late eighteenth century.

American slavery american freedom the ordeal of colonial virginia