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American Revolutionaries in the Making: Political Practices in Washington's Virginia
Originally published by UNC Press as Gentlemen Freeholders.
160 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1965
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About the author
Charles S. Sydnor
7 books1 followerThe son of a Presbyterian pastor, Charles Sackett Sydnor was the oldest of five children. After graduating from Hampden-Sydney College, he received a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He taught history and political science at Hampden-Sydney before accepting an offer to become chair of the history department at the University of Mississippi in 1925. In 1936, he became an associate professor of history at Duke University, where he was eventually named the James B. Duke Professor.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 10, 2016
The American Revolution did not occur in a vacuum. There were specific historical factors that caused the people of thirteen North American colonies to rise up against the might of Great Britain and form a new nation. One of those colonies-turned-states, Virginia, did particularly well at molding leaders for the new United States of America. It gave us four of the first five presidents – the “Virginia dynasty” of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe – as well as other eminent leaders like Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and George Mason. How did Virginia do it? How did the aristocratic Old Dominion become the “Mother of Presidents,” a wellspring of American democracy?
In American Revolutionaries in the Making, Charles S. Sydnor seeks to answer that question. Sydnor, an eminent mid-20th-century historian of the American South, brings all of his knowledge of the region to this study of Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (the book’s subtitle). Sydnor addresses a central paradox of Virginia’s colonial and Revolutionary history: that a system that was so un-democratic in so many ways nonetheless produced a great generation of leaders for democracy.
Sydnor provides a thorough look at the factors that made Virginia’s colonial system for choosing its leaders distinctive. The franchise, as in other colonies, was restricted to white male “freeholders” (owners of developed real estate), and “By law all freeholders were required to vote in elections” (p. 38). Many Virginians of the time would have taken pains to differentiate between the “vulgar herd” of ordinary freeholders and the “gentlemen of long-tailed families” who wielded much of the real power, and whose inclinations at election time were noticed and emulated by less affluent voters. During the run-up to an election, candidates were expected to demonstrate their public-spiritedness and generosity by providing free food, and prodigious quantities of complimentary alcoholic beverages, for their prospective voters: “In 1795 Jefferson wrote that he was in despair because ‘the low practices’ of a candidate in Albemarle County were ‘but too successful with the unthinking who merchandize their votes for grog’” (p. 49).
The picture for Virginia democracy becomes even more paradoxical when one makes one's way forward to the actual election day. Voters had to announce their choices publicly; and considering the amount of free booze that was flowing around among those hard-drinking Virginia gentlemen, it is no surprise to hear that elections were frequently marred by “tumults and riots” that were regulated, with varying degrees of success, by the county sheriffs who themselves held enormous power over how elections were conducted. A Virginian’s path to power went first through the county courts that functioned as virtually all-powerful, de facto oligarchies for their respective counties, and then through the House of Burgesses where “assemblymen certainly knew more about the strength and weakness of the leading men of Virginia than most of the voters could have known” (p. 98). It was, in short, a strongly conservative and patronage-oriented system – profoundly different from the shape that American democracy would take in later years.
And yet it produced all those great leaders. In an intriguing final chapter, “The Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth,” Sydnor acknowledges that, “judged by modern standards of political excellence, [Virginia’s 18th-century political system] was defective at nearly every point” (p. 107). Paradoxically, however, “One might…argue that a combination of bad practices on election day in colonial Virginia – oral voting, treating, and long journeys to the courthouse – came nearer to producing a working democracy than have the more rational and sophisticated devices of a later day” (pp. 109-10).
There may be some very good reasons why Sydnor was thinking about the contrasts between 18th- and 20th-century American democracy when he was giving the 1951 Oxford University lecture that subsequently developed into this book. In the early 1950’s, the U.S.A. was gripped in the climate of fear that accompanied the Cold War. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee had already begun their anti-communist “witch-hunt”; ordinary Americans were losing their jobs and livelihoods, seeing their good names forever besmirched, because of vague accusations launched by powerful politicians who realized that they could gain more power by thus playing to the galleries of a fear-stricken American electorate. Had they no decency?
Meanwhile, back in Virginia, the political leadership of the Old Dominion had strayed a long way from the days of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Henry, Marshall, and Mason. A succession of Virginia governors and legislatures dedicated themselves with grim single-mindedness to the task of trying to maintain an unjust and immoral system of racial segregation. In the years just after the publication of Sydnor’s book, Virginia leaders like Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. would craft the “massive resistance” strategy designed to prevent implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. An entire Virginia county – Prince Edward County, in the Southside region of the Commonwealth – closed all of its public schools rather than integrate. Small wonder if Sydnor was not feeling overly optimistic regarding the state of American democracy in the 1950’s. One wonders what he would think regarding the election of Donald Trump.
I first read American Revolutionaries in the Making as an assigned textbook for a history class at the College of William and Mary; it was fun to sit and read Sydnor’s ideas about 18th-century Virginia democracy while sitting outdoors, on a wooden bench, along Duke of Gloucester Street in the restored area of Colonial Williamsburg – a place where it’s easy to imagine that one of the great Virginians of the revolutionary generation will walk on by and tip his hat to you, any moment now. More recently, I re-read this book when my wife and I were on a weekend trip to Fairfax, where one can dine in an elegant restaurant while looking across at the old county courthouse building that was built in 1799, the year George Washington died. History is everywhere in Virginia, and a group of great Virginians are at the heart of the beginnings of the American experiment in democracy. American Revolutionaries in the Making does well at encouraging the reader to think about what historical and social factors brought those great democratic leaders to power in that long-ago time.
In American Revolutionaries in the Making, Charles S. Sydnor seeks to answer that question. Sydnor, an eminent mid-20th-century historian of the American South, brings all of his knowledge of the region to this study of Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (the book’s subtitle). Sydnor addresses a central paradox of Virginia’s colonial and Revolutionary history: that a system that was so un-democratic in so many ways nonetheless produced a great generation of leaders for democracy.
Sydnor provides a thorough look at the factors that made Virginia’s colonial system for choosing its leaders distinctive. The franchise, as in other colonies, was restricted to white male “freeholders” (owners of developed real estate), and “By law all freeholders were required to vote in elections” (p. 38). Many Virginians of the time would have taken pains to differentiate between the “vulgar herd” of ordinary freeholders and the “gentlemen of long-tailed families” who wielded much of the real power, and whose inclinations at election time were noticed and emulated by less affluent voters. During the run-up to an election, candidates were expected to demonstrate their public-spiritedness and generosity by providing free food, and prodigious quantities of complimentary alcoholic beverages, for their prospective voters: “In 1795 Jefferson wrote that he was in despair because ‘the low practices’ of a candidate in Albemarle County were ‘but too successful with the unthinking who merchandize their votes for grog’” (p. 49).
The picture for Virginia democracy becomes even more paradoxical when one makes one's way forward to the actual election day. Voters had to announce their choices publicly; and considering the amount of free booze that was flowing around among those hard-drinking Virginia gentlemen, it is no surprise to hear that elections were frequently marred by “tumults and riots” that were regulated, with varying degrees of success, by the county sheriffs who themselves held enormous power over how elections were conducted. A Virginian’s path to power went first through the county courts that functioned as virtually all-powerful, de facto oligarchies for their respective counties, and then through the House of Burgesses where “assemblymen certainly knew more about the strength and weakness of the leading men of Virginia than most of the voters could have known” (p. 98). It was, in short, a strongly conservative and patronage-oriented system – profoundly different from the shape that American democracy would take in later years.
And yet it produced all those great leaders. In an intriguing final chapter, “The Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth,” Sydnor acknowledges that, “judged by modern standards of political excellence, [Virginia’s 18th-century political system] was defective at nearly every point” (p. 107). Paradoxically, however, “One might…argue that a combination of bad practices on election day in colonial Virginia – oral voting, treating, and long journeys to the courthouse – came nearer to producing a working democracy than have the more rational and sophisticated devices of a later day” (pp. 109-10).
There may be some very good reasons why Sydnor was thinking about the contrasts between 18th- and 20th-century American democracy when he was giving the 1951 Oxford University lecture that subsequently developed into this book. In the early 1950’s, the U.S.A. was gripped in the climate of fear that accompanied the Cold War. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee had already begun their anti-communist “witch-hunt”; ordinary Americans were losing their jobs and livelihoods, seeing their good names forever besmirched, because of vague accusations launched by powerful politicians who realized that they could gain more power by thus playing to the galleries of a fear-stricken American electorate. Had they no decency?
Meanwhile, back in Virginia, the political leadership of the Old Dominion had strayed a long way from the days of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Henry, Marshall, and Mason. A succession of Virginia governors and legislatures dedicated themselves with grim single-mindedness to the task of trying to maintain an unjust and immoral system of racial segregation. In the years just after the publication of Sydnor’s book, Virginia leaders like Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. would craft the “massive resistance” strategy designed to prevent implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. An entire Virginia county – Prince Edward County, in the Southside region of the Commonwealth – closed all of its public schools rather than integrate. Small wonder if Sydnor was not feeling overly optimistic regarding the state of American democracy in the 1950’s. One wonders what he would think regarding the election of Donald Trump.
I first read American Revolutionaries in the Making as an assigned textbook for a history class at the College of William and Mary; it was fun to sit and read Sydnor’s ideas about 18th-century Virginia democracy while sitting outdoors, on a wooden bench, along Duke of Gloucester Street in the restored area of Colonial Williamsburg – a place where it’s easy to imagine that one of the great Virginians of the revolutionary generation will walk on by and tip his hat to you, any moment now. More recently, I re-read this book when my wife and I were on a weekend trip to Fairfax, where one can dine in an elegant restaurant while looking across at the old county courthouse building that was built in 1799, the year George Washington died. History is everywhere in Virginia, and a group of great Virginians are at the heart of the beginnings of the American experiment in democracy. American Revolutionaries in the Making does well at encouraging the reader to think about what historical and social factors brought those great democratic leaders to power in that long-ago time.
February 16, 2016
What a great little read! Although 60+ years old, there is a lot the Sydnor puts forth that is still worth pondering today. I would especially consider giving students (both secondary and college level) the last chapter "The eighteenth century through the twentieth" as an assigned reading and creating an essay question concerning some of the points Sydnor asks his readers to consider.
November 11, 2010
Excellent classic study of the mechanics of colonial Virginia politics. While not a "democratic" system it did produce some excellent leaders.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews