Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America@@@Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800

The farmers o f piedmont Virginia’s Tye River Valley adapted their agriculture to a commercial frontier during the eighteenth century. This ‘frontier agroecosystem’ optimized labor returns by exploiting the stored fertility o f mature ecosystems at the expense of conservation, but proved vulnerable to population growth and soil exhaustion. Productivity stagnated and out-migration increased after the Revolution, and the gentry’s promotion of economic development was stymied by the lim ited build-up o f capital and consumerism. The hard-pressed frontier agroecosystem could not provide the reliable commercial returns needed to promote dynamic development or stable neighborhoods. During the early nineteenth century, prominent planters began to demand that Virginia farming be intensified that land productivity be maximized, rather than labor productivity. This strategy, many claimed, would anchor farm families while promoting economic independence. Those among the Tye Valley’s ordinary farmers who practiced traditional intensification increased land productivity through increased labor investment found it led to declining labor productivity, resulting in lower profits, declining consumer opportunities, and diminished political influence. Practical plantation owners with commercial ambitions turned to entrepreneurial intensification the build up of per-acre productivity through the importation o f improved seed, livestock, fertilizer, and machinery. This would also maintain or even improve labor productivity. To attract the capital needed to purchase these imports, the Valley’s leaders had to abandon colonial for capitalist politics, and practice the natural resource conservation necessary to use farmland to insure long-term investments. The commercial and ecological self-sufficiency idealized by republican ‘high farmers’ was compromised. Many Tye Valley farmers, however, resisted the dependence implicit in capitalist agriculture through a popular republicanism that accepted lower living standards and curtailed opportunity as the price o f agrarian independence. Farmers in the lower classes pursued traditional intensification on their land while trying to maintain common access to the ‘free’ resources left over from the frontier property system. They also resisted attempts by the district’s entrepreneurial planter-politicians to modernize Virginia’s political economy and force the state into a capitalist economy. High crop prices during the 1850s, however, helped the Valley’s capitalist farmers reinvest profits in modernized cultivation. By I860, they had gone far toward incorporating the landscape o f the Tye River Valley into a capitalist agroecosystem. Popular resistance, however, slowed the development o f the capital needed for a full transformation. The region therefore still lagged in the intensity o f its cultivation and the profits its farming generated. Valley farmers thus found entrepreneurial farming, elite republicanism, and traditional intensification in jeopardy on the eve o f the C ivil War.

The agroecologies of a southern community : the Tye River Valley of Virginia, 1730-1860

This title revisits the history of American colonization. In this iconoclastic book, Francis Jennings recasts the story of American colonization as a territorial invasion. The traditional history of early America paints the colonies as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent - a 'virgin land' in which Native Americans were assigned the role of foil whose main contribution was to stimulate the energy and ingenuity of European dispossessors. Jennings rejects this ideology and examines the relationships between Europeans and Indians from a far more critical point of view. Shorn of old mythology and rationalizations, Puritan actions are seen in the cold light of material interest and naked expansion.

The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest

Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws: Farther account of the rattle snake

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction@@@Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution

This is a history of a frontier county in late colonial Virginia. Augusta County was created in 1738 and subdivided for the first time in 1770. During the intervening years it encompassed most of Virginia's claims to land west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As drawn by Virginians, the borders of Augusta County simultaneously encompassed two types of frontiers: a frontier of settlement on which white immigrants created a new society, and a frontier of culture in which those settlers interacted with a variety of Indians. This study examines both types of frontier experiences. On the settlement frontier, white immigrants rapidly created a deferential and hierarchical society identical in its major features to contemporary counties throughout colonial Virginia. The aspects of white society examined by this dissertation include landholding, control of labor, religious diversity, and resistance to magisterial authority. In the cultural frontier, Indian-white relations included routinely peaceful contacts as well as occasional violent outbursts. Cherokees responded to white expansion primarily with diplomacy and accomodation, while the tribes of the upper Ohio River Valley chose more militant resistance. For contemporary whites and Indians, the complex frontier that was colonial Augusta County seemed at times to offer great rewards. Red or white, individual successes in realizing those rewards varied widely, depending partly on chance and larger historical events beyond local control. One constant continually influenced both destinies—the form and function of white society. That society, simultaneously conservative and dynamic, supported the expansion of colonial Virginia into the North American interior.

Nathaniel Turk McCleskey

Papers

Across the first divide: Frontiers of settlement and culture in Augusta County, Virginia, 1738-1770