Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison & the Decline of Virginia

by Susan Dunn

Overview

For decades, the Commonwealth of Virginia led the nation. The premier state in population, size, and wealth, it produced a galaxy of leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Marshall. Four of the first five presidents were Virginians. And yet by the middle of the nineteenth century, Virginia had become a byword for slavery, provincialism, and poverty. What happened? In her remarkable book, Dominion of Memories, historian Susan Dunn reveals the little known story of the decline of the Old Dominion. While the North rapidly industrialized and democratized, Virginia's leaders turned their backs on the accelerating modern world. Spellbound by the myth of aristocratic, gracious plantation life, they waged an impossible battle against progress and time itself. In their last years, two of Virginia's greatest sons, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, grappled vigorously with the Old Dominion's plight. But bound to the traditions of their native soil, they found themselves grievously torn by the competing claims of state and nation, slavery and equality, the agrarian vision and the promises of economic development and prosperity. This fresh and penetrating examination of Virginia's struggle to defend its sovereignty, traditions, and unique identity encapsulates, in the history of a single state, the struggle of an entire nation drifting inexorably toward Civil War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465003563
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	03/25/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Susan Dunn is Professor of Humanities at Williams College. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Something That Will Surprise the World: The Essential Writings of the Founding Fathers; and Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Prologue     1
The Cult of the Soil     15
The Cankers of Indolence and Slavery     31
"Let Us Have Our Own Schools"     61
Roads, Canals, Railroads: Moving in Place     85
Deluded Citizens Clamoring for Banks     113
The Case of Virginia v. John Marshall     133
Another Constitutional Convention     149
Tariff Wars     171
Abolitionists and Other Enemies     191
Epilogue: Jefferson and Virginia, a Hundred Years Later     213
Notes     225
Acknowledgments     289
Index     291

Editorial Reviews

Slavery's role in the decline of the South is an old story, but Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, finds fresh insights by making a case study of Virginia. She emphasizes the significance of lesser-known figures like Thomas Roderick Dew, who in 1832 published an essay that laid the intellectual groundwork for an uncompromisingly pro-slavery ideology, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, who anticipated secession with an 1836 novel envisioning a Southern rebellion. Dunn's chief aim, though, is to show the complicity of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia's stagnation.
—The New York Times

Mick Sussman

Whatever happened to the great Commonwealth of Virginia? Dunn (Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800) investigates how Virginia fell from being the most advanced and vibrant of the 18th-century American states to being among the new country's most stultified and parochial. Dunn points out that four of the first five American presidents were Virginians, and it was often supposed in the early Republic that, in the words of one politician, the Old Dominion had hatched "a systematic design of perpetually governing the country." By the 1820s, however, the commonwealth's once thriving economy had shuddered to a halt, its aristocratic planters were defaulting on their considerable debts, many lived in poverty and visitors from the industrializing, bustling Northeast noticed that everything was dirty and dilapidated—even Monticello and Mount Vernon. Dunn attributes Virginia's downfall to a combination of its ruling elite adhering to a "gentlemanly" way of life, its obsession with states' rights and the retention of slavery. These factors, Dunn says, fostered an atmosphere of indolence and tedious provincialism that condemned the Old Dominion to the status of a has-been champion musing nostalgically on the pleasures of the past. By focusing intently on the stresses within a single state, Dunn's is an admirable guide to those perplexed by the eventual sundering of the entire Union. (June)

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Publishers Weekly

Virginia went from cradle of presidents to political backwater in a couple of generations-mostly for reasons of its own making, argues Dunn (Humanities/Williams College; George Washington, 2004, etc.). Jefferson's death in 1826 coincided with the "sunset of the Virginia dynasty," writes Dunn. Hitherto, Virginia had provided four of the first five presidents and much of the early judiciary; afterward, Virginia would supply only one president, John Tyler, and two justices, Lewis Powell and Peter Daniel. The reversal of fortunes owes to many factors, by Dunn's account. One was the state's "population of slumbering citizens, demoralized and passive," bullied by property requirements and custom to leave politics to the landed aristocracy; another was illiteracy, four times higher than in states to the north, since "wealthy Virginians, historically averse to taxation, refused to support public schools." Jefferson's granddaughter, Ellen Coolidge, rightly remarked that for the state to prosper it required good soil and intelligent farmers, good citizens willing to support roads and schools and other amenities, a diversified economy, bustling cities and widely shared ideals of freedom and equality. Yet hidebound social traditions met political and economic reaction to produce resistance to change, such as breaking away from a tobacco economy, abandoning slavery and investing in industrial expansion. In the early republic, Virginia had no cities of note, no means to support the textile industry that it could have developed; had the state not cut off funding for geological surveys, Virginia explorers might have discovered its stores of "coal, gold, iron, copper, lead, and even salt" and yieldedwealth that way. (One of the state surveyors left in disgust and, as Dunn notes, founded MIT.) Irrelevant to the nation's progress, Virginians came to embrace a wounded sense of state's rights, still led by a gentry that subscribed to the view that "good government was simply government of, by, and for themselves and their interests." And so it would long remain. A lucid, provocative work of historical inquiry, though unlikely to win any praise among the First Families of Virginia.

Kirkus Reviews