History 216: "The Early Chesapeake"

J.P. Whittenburg

---

Email: jpwhit@wm.edu
Office: James Blair Hall 330/331
Web Page: http://jpwhit.people.wm.edu/
Telephone: 757-221-3725
Office Hours: By Appointment

Clearly, this isn't your typical class. For one thing, we meet all day on Mondays.. For another, we will spend most of our class time "on-site" at archaeological excavations, museums, or inside standing (or ruined) historic buildings. The schedule says the starting time is 8:00am, but most of the time we’ll gather in James Blair 219 at 8:30. Only when we have a long drive will I ask you to come earlier than that. I'll bring coffee, juice, and donuts each Monday morning.

This class will concentrate on the period from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 through roughly the death of Thomas Jefferson in 1826, but it is not at all a narrative that follows a neat time-line. I’ll make no attempt to touch on every important theme and we’ll depart from the chronological approach whenever targets of opportunities present themselves. As we have another course (History 220) that deals exclusively with Colonial Williamsburg, this class will focus mainly on “not-Colonial Williamsburg.” By this I simply mean that, instead of taking you to "CW" for a series of fieldtrips, I will mostly make assignments for you to visit specific places and events there on week days prior to our Saturday class meetings. The Historic Area is easily accessible by foot, your William & Mary ID cards will get you into all the exhibitions, and Colonial Williamsburg generally does a terrific job of interpretation. These are not optional activities: we'll incorporate what you see and hear at CW into our class discussions. By asking you to visit specific places at CW ahead of time and by matching them up with places we'll visit on Saturday, I've been able to add a few new fieldtrips to our itinerary.

I'll begin most classes with some sort of short background session--could be a clip from a movie, could be oral reports, or maybe something from the Internet. As soon as possible, though, we'll be into a van and on the road. Now, travel time can be tricky and I do hate to rush students when we are on-site. I'll shoot for getting people back in time for a reasonably early dinner--say 5:00. BUT there will surely be times when we'll get back later than that. If these admitted eccentricities are deeply troubling, I'd recommend dropping the course. No harm, no foul—and no hard feelings.

I've always held discussions in this class over an extended lunch hour. In my opinion, the food has added considerably to the fun of the course, and I'd like to retain the feature. We'll picnic some of the time. (pizza or sandwiches) On those days, I will take orders for food by email and you can reimburse me. When we eat at a sit-down restaurant, I'll usually put the entire bill on a credit card and, again, you can reimburse me. Whenever possible, I'll post a link to a menu on the class website several days before the trip.

Costs beyond the food might include computer supplies, photographic supplies/services (optional), and maybe some printing and photocopying. This is all "heap cheap," especially in view of....

Readings: Everything is available FREE on-line! All of the readings we'll use are available from Blackboard under this course--History 216-01. Just go to "COURSE DOCUMENTS."

The readings include both essays from the country's leading professional journals and chapters from key monographs. In all, you have here a selection of the most important writing on the early Chesapeake over the last fifty years (plus a "fun" piece or two). You may read these essays and book chapters on-line or print them out first. No need to bring them to class. Typically, there will be two or three essays or chapters to mull over for each Saturday. Our Blackboard site also includes a digital copy of the writing guide for this course: Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History (2006). If you would like to purchase a paper copy, I'd suggest doing it on-line. The ISBN is 1031244673X, but any edition is fine. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the readings for this class. If you need to install it, you can download it here:

Requirements & Grades: Students generally want to know every little thing about the grading system, but truth be known, it is all pretty-much a subjective process and in the end I will evaluate the totality of your work over the course of the semester. Admittedly, many students find this ambiguity unsettling during the semester, but few seem to think the grades unfair in the end. Keep in mind that A grades are reserved for EXCEPTIONAL work, and to win an A for the course means hitting on just about all cylinders just about all of the time. The grade of B covers a much wider range of perfectly acceptable, even superior, performance. Any student who scrambles over all the course requirements and delivers even a modest effort should have no trouble attaining a C--acceptable, but undistinguished. To receive a final grade lower than C, a student in this class would simply have to stop trying. I do use pluses and minuses, by the way.

As I am incapable of higher mathematics, I have devised "the rule of quarters." Each component of the course will determine 25% (more-or-less) of your grade for the course:

I. Electronic Journal (25%):

The writing you do in this class will take the form of an electronic journal in which you will write a weekly entry that includes both text and images pertaining to our field trips, readings, and class discussions. NO COMPUTING EXPERTISE IS ANTICIPATED—I WILL TEACH YOU ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW. You can check out some recent examples of these electronic journals here: http://www.wm.edu/niahd/journals. You will also log on at this site to begin and maintain your own journal. These journals are on-line, so anyone with access to the Internet (like parents and deans) can view them, so please use good taste. What you write is the key, and the greatest tool you have is the English language. It is the medium of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen; Rhys Isaac and Edmund Morgan. It is free to you for the taking. Don't abuse it.

I will assign you a very simple digital camera with which you will be able to record fieldtrips in a visual way and from which you may upload images to your on-line journal. If you have your own digital camera, you are certainly free to use it instead. You may use any of the images you take as "art" for your journal, but you can also use absolutely any images you can find on the internet. I'll give you plenty of help with that. While it is certainly true that what you write is more important than these digital images, the photos can provide very useful “talking points” for your prose. In any event, you MUST post at least three images per fieldtrip. They can come from the internet, indeed from any source, as well as from the digital camera. There is provision for identifying the source of the images as you place them in your journal.

The electronic journal must be complete by 5:00pm on the Monday following the end of class (Monday, 10 December). Length is unimportant. Quality is everything. I will expect to see evidence of (1) a grasp of the major points in the readings, (2) critical evaluation of the meaning of the museums or historic sites in relationship to the themes expressed in the readings, (3) an understanding of the class discussions. Although this "electronic term paper" will be a work in progress without formal grades until I evaluate it as a whole at the end of the semester, I will look at it weekly and give you feedback from time to time.

II. Oral Reports (25%):

Each of you will undertake two oral reports that stress the presentation of factual information linked in some way to the week's topic. The research should be easily accomplished from readily-available material on the Internet, in Swem Library or from the Colonial Williamsburg Research Library (where you will be welcome, by the way, and where you will have borrowing privileges if you fill out some paperwork). I'll be happy to guide you to additional places to look. My purpose is to have you become familiar with a few of the most basic sources of factual information about early American History and to provide in your reports some "take off points" for class discussions. You'll get the topic assignments approximately one week ahead of time. If you will email me an outline of the report by 5:00 pm on the Thursday prior to your time at center stage, I'll alert you if anything is amiss and suggest additional sources if you need them. These are to be SHORT reports--no more than 5 minutes--sometimes delivered before we depart, sometimes at lunch, sometimes in the middle of a site visit. Think of them this way: You are standing near the punch bowl at a party. Two or three people come up and demand that you explain your topic to them. In the space of consuming one glass of punch and two crackers loaded with Brie, what would you tell them?

III: Classtime Discussions (25%):

As much of the discussion for any week will take place over lunch, we'll often do a lot of talking before we even see whatever it is we came to see after lunch, which in turn privileges the readings. Indeed, the only preparation I will expect is that you have a firm grasp of the readings. There will be also ample opportunity to talk as we poke around the places we visit and on the way home--anyplace we have an opening for an impromptu seminar session. Here again you are subject to my appallingly subjective evaluation of your participation in all class time activities.

IV: Final Exam (25%):

The exam will consist of short-answer questions that will require you to know the readings and be able to relate them to the sites we'll visit and the discussions we'll have. I’ll talk more with you about this component toward the end of the course.

Schedule

The schedule below is tentative, but probably about right.

---

3 September: Outpost of Empire—What really happened at Jamestown?

Theme: There are several competing explanations for the near-failure of Virginia under the Company, 1607-1624. Some historians argue for poor management by the Virginia Company. Recent archaeological excavations seem to undercut that thesis, and even to cast doubt of the long-accepted notion that Jamestown nearly failed. Certainly, however, the "starving time" was a reality. It may be that environmental factors hold the key to understanding that bleak period of Virginia history, or maybe it was the state of mind of the colonists. Since we’re on “the island,” we’ll also jump ahead to the post-fort era when Jamestown became—for about 75 years—a true urban place—a city of surprising size and elegance, when compared to the first decade or so when the rough timber walls of the fort symbolized the place.

Sites:

Colonial National Park Jamestown Island
Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities/Rediscovery Archaeology Project

Readings:

Carville V. Earle, "Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia," in Thad W. Tate & David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 95-125.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown," The Journal of American History, Vol. 66, No. 1. (Jun., 1979), pp. 24-40.

Edmund S. Morgan, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jun., 1971), pp. 595-611.

Lunch: Jamestown Pizza (picnic)

10 September: Worlds Colliding

Theme: Almost as soon as the English landed at Jamestown, they busied themselves with finding a source of profit from the Virginia enterprise. After many failed experiments and a continuing bloody struggle with Native Americans, the English hit upon tobacco, which required massive amounts of both land and labor. For more than fifty years, white indentured servants from England itself supplied labor for Virginia's tobacco fields, but in one of the most fateful events in American history, 20 Africans were sold into indentured servitude in Virginia by Dutch traders. By mid-century, racial slavery was a fact in Virginia, and another half-century later, slaves were the primary labor force.

Sites:

Jamestown Settlement

Readings:

J. Frederick Fauz, “’Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides’: England’s First Indian War, 1609-1614,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 98 (1999), 3-56.

John Thornton, "The African Experience of the '20. and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 55, No. 3. (Jul., 1998), pp. 421-434.

Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 53, No. 2 (1996), pp. 251-288.

Lunch: The Backfin Restaurant

17 September: After the Fall: Virginia from the Dissolution of the Company through the Era of Bacon's Rebellion

Theme: By the middle of the seventeenth century, a true gentry class had taken shape in Virginia. It distinguished itself from the yeomanry and from servants through elements of lifestyle such as the first grand plantation homes, of which only "Bacon's Castle" (1665) survives. In large measure, the gentry rose to their exalted position by exploiting the majority of Virginians—white indentured servants, whites just emerging from the servant class, and the ever-increasing number of African slaves. In 1676, discontent boiled over into Bacon's Rebellion. Bacon was never at the Castle, but his men garrisoned it, hence the name. South of the Castle, St, Luke’s church offers a good look at parish churches from the era of Bacon’s Rebellion. As out-of-chronology extras, we’ll visit an 1850s slave house at Bacon’s castle and an 18^th-century courthouse in Smithfield.

Sites:

Bacon's Castle & slave house

St. Luke’s Church
Isle of Wight Courthouse

Readings:

Darrett & Anita Ruttman, " 'Now-Wives and Sons-in-Law,' Parental Death in a Seventeenth-Century Virginia County," in Thad W. Tate & David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (1979), pp. 153-182.

Edmund S. Morgan, "Discontent," from his book, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), pp. 235-249.

T. H. Breen, "Looking Out for Number One: Conflicting Values in Early Seventeenth-Century Virginia," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 78 (Summer 1979), pp. 342-360.

Fraser D. Neiman, “Domestic Architecture at the Clifts Plantation: The Social Context of Early Virginia Building," Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine 28 (1978). pp. 3096-3128

Lunch: The Smithfield Ice Cream Shop

24 September: Culture Wars: The Ruins of Rosewell & Christ Church

Theme: Along with churches and courthouses, great houses became the key features of the rural landscape in eighteenth-century Virginia. Many houses and churches were begun early in the century but only finished (if they ever were finished) very late in the colonial era. At a place like Christ Church, the presence of the greatest of all gentry patriarchs—Robert “King” Carter (1663-1732) —is still keenly felt. Carter’s mansion, “Corotoman,” was one of the earliest of the grand mansions and was certainly a rival to the Governor's Mansion in Williamsburg. Corotoman no longer stands, but we can see “Rosewell" on the way to Christ Church, using it as a sort-of stand-in. Generally considered the grandest private residence of eighteenth-century America, Rosewell was home to the powerful Page family. Like Corotman, it burned, but the ruins have been preserved. By the time of the Great Awakening, however, the hegemony of the Anglican gentry was under fire from a perhaps surprising quarter. The Evangelical Baptists found nothing to like about the lifestyle of the gentry and did not hesitate to tell them so.

Sites:

Historic Christ Church
Ruins of Rosewell Plantation

Site of King Carter’s “Corotoman”

Please visit Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg during the week prior to this trip.

Readings:

Carter L. Hudgins, "Robert 'King' Carter and the Landscape of Tidewater Virginia in the Eighteenth Century," in William M. Kelso, ed., Earth Patterns: Essays in Landscape Archeology (1990), pp. 59-70.Century Chesapeake (Ithaca, 1980), pp. 55-125.

Rhys Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists' Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 345-368.

Rhys Isaac, "Church and Home," from his book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982), pp. 58-87

1 October: River Gods: The Rise of the Georgian Elite

Pride & Prejudice

Theme: By the early eighteenth century, the great gentry families had consolidated their power in Virginia. They used marriage to create family alliances that promoted a "super gentry" whose lifestyles set them quite apart from almost everyone else. Their great power, wealth, and access to massive amounts of slave labor allowed them to begin to build homes that were unlike those of earlier Virginia in terms of size and quality. Many a great family fortune was under great financial stress as a result of individual- or family-wide-building campaigns. But ownership of a “great house” was early-on a necessary component of being gentry. The great "river plantations" like Shirley and Westover tell us much about the Georgian Age of the Chesapeake. We’ll see two: Shirley and Westover, and discuss the intertwined lives of the families there: the Carters and the Byrds. These two families were very much among the the select few at the top level of Chesapeake Society during the so-called "Georgian Age" from roughly 1720--when the first grand mansions began to appear--to the Revolution, when they faced some very hard choices and followed different paths.

Sites:

Shirley Plantation
Westover Plantation

Readings:

Paula Treckel, "'The Empire of My Heart': The Marriage of William Byrd II and Lucy Parke Byrd," Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 105, no. 2 (1997), pp. 125-156.

T. H. Breen, "Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., Vol. 34, No. 2 (Apr., 1977), pp. 239-257.

Willie Graham, Carter Hudgins, Carl Lounsbury, Fraser Neiman, and Jim Whittenburg, "Adaptation and Innovation: Archaeological and Architectural Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., Vol. 64, No. 3 (July., 2007), pp. 451-522..

Michael Olmert, "Necessary and Sufficient," Colonial Williamsburg: The Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, XXIV (Autumn 2002), 33-36.

Lunch: Picnic at Shirley Plantation

8 October: Patrick Henry’s Virginia: Deference or Democracy?

Theme: Patrick Henry (1736-1799) emerged in the 1760s as a radical advocate of independence, a position he articulated in his unforgettable "Give me liberty or give me death" speech at St. John's Church. He often walked a fine line between courting the popular will to protect the common good, on the one hand, and mob rule, on the other. But Henry was also the product of the conservative Virginia system in which money and power were concentrated in the hand of only a few extremely prominent families--the "super gentry." Like churches and "great houses," courthouses such as the one for Hanover County--where Henry argued the "Parson’s Cause" (an important step down the road to Revolution) in 1763--were bastions and symbols of gentry power and of the deferential political system they dominated. Henry never made it into that highest echelon of colonial society, and through his revolutionary activity, he helped to pull it down. Is that what he intended?

Sites:

Scotchtown (Patrick Henry's plantation), Hanover County, VA
Hanover County Courthouse, Hanover County, VA
Hanover Tavern, Hanover, VA
St. John’s Church, Richmond, VA

Please visit the Public Hospital, the Raleigh Tavern, and the Courthouse of 1770 in Colonial Williamsburg during the week prior to this trip.

Readings:

Pauline Maier, "Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 27, No. 1. (Jan.,1970), pp. 3-35.

A. G. Roeber, "Authority, Law, and Custom: The Rituals of Court Day in Tidewater, Virginia, 1720 to 1750," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 37, No. 1. (Jan.,1980), pp. 29-52.

Polly Longsworth, " 'I am murdered': Trial and Acquittal in the Wake of George Wythe's Death," Colonial Williamsburg: The Journal of Colonial Williamsburg (Spring 1986), pp. 5-11.

Lunch: Hanover Tavern

15 October: Fall Break

22 October: The World Turned Upside-Down

Theme: The objectives of the American War for Independence reflected a mixture of aspirations from many sections of colonial society. The emphasis on equality or democracy--indeed, the very definitions of liberty and freedom--differed greatly depending upon your condition in life, your race, and your gender. Society in Revolutionary Virginia was deeply divided by considerations of race and class throughout the war. Did those internal divisions affect the war effort? In 1780, the British embarked upon a new "Southern" military strategy. General Charles Cornwallis succeeded at first in the Carolinas, but after suffering reverses, he decided to invade Virginia. That provided the Americans with an opportunity to bring to bear the potential military power of their alliance with France, and in October 1781 the allied Franco-American forces under General George Washington and the Compte de Rochambeau forced Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown. By the time the Revolutionary War ended, there was also subtle evidence of a parallel liberalization in the status of women, including some teenaged young women from Yorktown.

Sites:

Yorktown Victory Center

Yorktown
Yorktown Battlefield

Please visit the Governor's Palace and the Magazine in Colonial Williamsburg during the week prior to this trip

Readings:

Woody Holton, " 'Rebel Against Rebel': Enslaved Virginians and the Coming of the Revolution," Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 105 (Spring 1997), pp. 157-192.

Catherine Kerrison, "By the Book: Eliza Ambler Brent Carrington and Conduct Literature in Late Eighteenth-Century Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 105 (Winter 1997), pp. 27-52.

Michael A. McDonnell, "Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below," Journal of American History, Vol. 85, No. 3. (Dec., 1998), pp. 946-981.

Holly Mayer, "Retainers to the Camp: The Conjugal Family," chapter 4 of her book, Belonging to the Army: Camp
Followers and Community during the American Revolution (1996), 122-152.

Lunch: Carrot Tree Restaurant, Yorktown

28 October: OPTIONAL Barbeque at the Ruins of Rosewell

Theme: A favorite haunt of Thomas Jefferson, Rosewell was probably the most impressive private home in British North America—three full stories with magnificent details. The Page family seat, it was begun about 1725 and survived until 1916, when it burned. The ruins are spectacular in their own right—worthy of Edgar Allen Poe. Each fall the Rosewell Foundation sponsors a barbecue at the ruins. It is on a Sunday, includes some fabulous food, great live music, and a silent auction. If you’d like to come with me, I'll cover the cost.

Sites:

Ruins of Rosewell Plantation, Gloucester County, VA

Readings: NONE

Lunch: Barbeque at Rosewell

29 October: The Warrior in Peacetime

Theme: The Early Republic was a mixture of exciting opportunities for great political and economic success--and the danger of equally spectacular failures. The unfortunate post-Revolutionary career of General Light Horse Harry Lee (1756-1818)--a favorite of George Washington, a staunch Federalist, and governor of Virginia after the Revolution--is an example of the darker side of the era. In war a bold and able man, Lee over-extended himself in all manner of speculative peacetime ventures and at one point went into debtor’s prison. Nonetheless, he remade ancient Stratford Hall to reflect new styles appropriate for a mover-and-shaker of the Federal era. At the same time, women of the early republic such as Harry's second wife, Anne Hill Carter of Shirley Plantation, were urged to take on a new role as agents of morality and civic responsibility who molded their husbands and sons into responsible republican men. How well did Ann Hill Carter succeed? Light Horse Harry's career is one sort of evidence. The life of their son--Robert E. Lee--might be said to offer another sort of evidence. One wonders also how, had he lived that long, the old Revolutionary War general might have viewed his son's decision to make savage war on the federal union that Light Horse Harry so cherished.

Sites:

Stratford Hall, Westmoreland County, VA

Please visit the Public Gaol in Colonial Williamsburg during the week prior to this trip

Readings:

Charles Royster, Light Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution (1981), pp. 56-185.

Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 44, No. 4. (1987), pp. 689-721.

Lunch: Stratford Hall Dining Hall

5 November: The Frontier

Theme: The American frontier began at Jamestown and proceeded west from there. But exactly was the "frontier" was (is?) has never been defined. Was it a place? a process? How, exactly, was it different from the east? WAS it different from the east, or just a rude copy of eastern norms. Most historians recognize on the frontier a mixture of people of widely differing cultures who borrowed hodgepodge from each other. Certainly, that is the message of the Frontier Culture Museum, which concentrates especially on various farm houses--German, Irish, English, and two American houses--plus barns and other outbuildings that have been brought from their original settings and reassembled for us in Staunton, Virginia.

Sites:

The Frontier Culture Museum, Staunton, VA

Readings:

Elliott J. Gorn, ""Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch": The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, Supplement to Volume 90. (Feb., 1985), 18-43.

Gail S. Terry, “Sustaining the Bonds of Kinship in a Trans-Appalachian Migration, 1790-1811: The Cabell-Breckinridge Slaves Move West,” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 102 (1994), 455-476.

Susan Kern, "The Material World of the Jeffersons at Shadwell," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 62, No. 2 (Apr., 2005), pp. 213-242.

Lunch: Christian's Pizza, Charlottesville, VA

12 November: The Merchant of Norfolk

Theme: Born in New York to an émigré Jewish family from Amsterdam, Moses Myers (1753-1835) ran the Amsterdam branch of the New York merchant house, Isaac Moses & Sons, during the American Revolution. The 1787 passage of the Bill of Religious Toleration by the new State of Virginia apparently was the spur to his decision to relocate to Norfolk. Moses married Eliza Judah Chapman, a young Canadian widow on Passover Eve in 1787. They moved to Norfolk in March, the first Jewish household in the town. Thereafter, the couple produced children at the rate of about one every fourteen months. Myers soon emerged as the most important import merchant in the port and one of the most important in the new nation. As his financial standing rose, so did his social prominence. In 1792 Myers built a two-story brick townhouse in the Federal style to reflect that rising status. About 1796 a two-story octagon ended wing was added as a dinning room--a space in which to take social advantage of the new trends in entertaining. The Myers family represents the up side the just-post-Revolutionary era--sometimes called the "Revolutionary Settlement." With seemingly everything in flux, the times were ripe for success, if one could be bold, skillful, AND fortunate.

Sites:

Moses Myers House, Norfolk

Readings:

Richard L. Bushman, "Bodies and Minds," chapter III from his book, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992), pp 61-99.

Mark R. Wenger, "The Dining Room in Early Virginia," in Thomas Carter & Bernard L. Herman, eds., Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, III (1989), pp. 149-159.

Lunch: Doumar's Drive-In, Norfolk

19 November: First in War, First in Peace, & First in the Hearts of His Countrymen

Theme: No early American was more important to the American Revolution, and therefore to the history of the “First New Nation” than George Washington (1732-1799). He was not a master tactician, a great strategist, nor a gifted intellectual. He was, however, the quintessential leader, who by force of will kept the Continental Army in the field long enough to win an improbable victory over Great Britain. A great politician but not a great political thinker, Washington provided equally essential service to the country after independence as the one person capable of holding the fledgling federal government together. Over all of this time and more, Washington showed enormous personal growth, and in the end, freed the Mount Vernon slaves. At his home on the Potomac, we will investigate the nature of the man and the forces that shaped his life. We will also consider George and Martha Washington as key players in the new social world of the New Nation.

Sites: Mount Vernon

Readings:

Joseph J. Ellis, “The Farewell,” from his book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2000), 120-161.

Barbara G. Carson, "Ways to Make a Meal," from her book, Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (1990), 24-57.

Francois Frustenberg, "Washington's Family: Slavery and the Nation," from his book, In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006), pp. 71-103.

Lunch: Mount Vernon Inn

26 November: John Marshall's Richmond

Theme: John Marshall (1755-1835) is most famous as perhaps the most important Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, but he was also an American officer during the Revolution, after which he married Mary Ambler, the little sister of one of the "Yorktown Girls" from Catherine Kerrison's essay, "By the Book." The Marshalls settled in Richmond, where they built one of the first large homes in the fashionable "Court End" neighborhood near the new state capitol that had been begun in 1785 on a Thomas Jefferson design and was still under construction. The Marshalls were a key family in the social life of Federal-era Richmond and John became a leading political player. In 1812, attorney John Wickham (1767-1839) and his wife, Elizabeth McClurg, daughter of Richmond's mayor, built a stately townhouse near the Marshall home. Wickham had been a Loyalist in New York during the Revolution, but was nonetheless a close friend to Marshall, with whom he served in the effort to build Monumental Church (1812-1814) as a memorial to the 72 people who died in a theater fire on Christmas Eve, 1811. Like his friend and colleague Marshall, Wickham was a staunch Federalist and opponent of Thomas Jefferson. During the treason trial of former vice-president Aaron Burr in Richmond in 1807, Marshall presided as judge and Wickham was part of Burr's defense team. Much to Jefferson's displeasure, Burr was acquitted. By the time Marshall and Wickham died in the 1830s, Richmond was a major American city deeply involved in national politics, yet deeply southern as well.

Sites:

John Marshall House

John Wickham House

Monumental Church

Capitol Square

Hollywood Cemetery

Readings:

Anthony Upton, "The Road to Power in Virginia in the Early Nineteenth Century," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (1954), 259-280.

Sheila Phipps, “My Birthday—I Have Spent It Profitably,” from her book, Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee (2003), 12-31.

Elizabeth R. Varon, “Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too: White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia,” Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Sept. 1995), 494-521.

Lunch: Bill's Barbecue, Richmond, VA

3 December: Race and the Alumnus on "Little Mountain"

Theme: William & Mary alumnus Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) mirrored the contradictions in American life after the Revolution. The quintessential advocate of liberty for white men, he owned slaves his entire life, including Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his wife. Jefferson's celebrated liaison with Hemings complicates our interpretation of his legacy. His relationship with the African Americans who lived and worked at Monticello is a metaphor for race relations all over the antebellum South. At Monticello, Jefferson’s material and intellectual world is well documented and displayed in meticulous detail. "Mulberry Row," where his slaves resided, began only a few yards from the main residence and is represented only by archaeology. Still, thanks to archaeology and Jefferson's own habit for recording details on paper, we know a good deal about slavery on "little mountain." As the property of even such a man as Thomas Jefferson, the men, women, and children of "Mulberry Row" faced very real limitations of their ability to exert control over their world, but they did manage to construct lives for themselves and even within the confines of the institution of slavery, they were able to find small areas of autonomy and privacy.

Sites:

Monticello

Readings:

Annette Gordon-Reed, "Engaging Jefferson: Blacks and the Founding Father," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 171-182.

Lucia Stanton, "The Hemings Family," from her book, Some Free Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (2000), pp 102-140.

Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., “Constructing Independence: Monticello, Mount Vernon, and the Men Who Built Them,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4, Special Issue: Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1993: An Anniversary Collection. (Summer, 1993), pp. 543-580.

Lunch: Mitche Tavern, Charlottesville, VA