The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (review)

The Planting of New Virginia resembles Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975) in style (narrative without meta-, drama without melo-) as well as significance, building its persuasive momentum smoothly, gradually leading to lofty vistas. From the Blue Ridge crest, Hofstra first peers east beyond the hazy piedmont settlement frontier toward Morganian Virginia circa 1730, a land of dispersed tobacco planters who were linked vitally to Europe by Chesapeake waterways and to ordinary white folk by a shared racial identity. From there arose a paradoxical but victorious revolutionary political culture fusing freedom and slavery.

Around 1730, a different Virginia began unfolding to the west and north of Morganian Virginia. Hofstra's New Virginia physically encompassed the Shenandoah River Valley as well as the Upper James River Valley, watersheds delimited dramatically by the Blue Ridge and the North Mountain. Within those broad bounds ran an evolutionary process driven by personal, familial, social, and imperial quests for security. Out of many motives grew a unified landscape, dubbed town and country.

Small towns—Hofstra focuses on Winchester—anchored one end of "a functional continuum of surrounding villages, hamlets, and open-country neighborhoods" (12). This town-and-country end state was a product of economic forces that Hofstra interprets in part via "central-place, staple, functionalist, and long-distance trade theories," leaning especially toward the latter two. Hofstra "also looks at the more conventional historical fare—land policy, imperial relations, local and colonial government, war, capitalism, and consumerism" (15). Actually, Hofstra's "conventional historical fare" fuels most of his work's raw explanatory horsepower. In any event, the resulting Valley of Virginia landscape included a more differentiated clustering of habitation than did the geography of Tidewater planters. By 1800, "town and country landscapes [prevailed] throughout the Shenandoah Valley and the broad swath of the North American interior for which the Valley served as fore country well into the nineteenth century" (13).

New Virginia emerged from Old Virginia's misconceptions. By about 1730, colonial leaders convinced themselves that French legions and French-allied Indian hordes menaced Old Virginia from just beyond the Blue Ridge. This early and essential error forms a major chord in one of Hofstra's recurring themes—that imperial misperceptions about colonial reality resulted in new imperial policy, which in turn led to new misperceptions. Most importantly, Virginia authorities came to believe that French forces were actively encircling Britain's coastal North American colonies; that French troops would foster Indian militancy; that Indian militants would encourage Virginia's fugitive slaves to form maroon communities in Appalachian strongholds; and that an alliance of Catholics, Indians, and former slaves would storm Old Virginia.

Old Virginians therefore recruited foreign Protestants to establish buffer settlements west of the Blue Ridge for protection of the colonial core: Enter the Germans, followed by the Scotch Irish, fresh from Pennsylvania farms or Philadelphia's port of entry. Creating "a geography of private property" (107), the newcomers settled themselves energetically, albeit not always martially. Rather than gathering for security, the immigrants dispersed across the lower (northern) Shenandoah Valley in order "to achieve economic competency within the limits and opportunities of an exchange economy" (16). Despite the newcomers' disinclination to settle as village or town garrisons, Old Virginians in 1738 handed to imperfect strangers the reins of western-county governments. Hofstra's carefully researched analytical narrative is the new benchmark account of that fateful step (160–169).

New Virginia's initial inhabitants had other objectives, however; they diffused through the lower Valley without regard for Old Virginia's imperial concerns. Hofstra argues from initial settlement patterns that settlers cared mostly about comfortable subsistence, secondarily about market development, and minimally about a centralized defense. Towns therefore emerged first as garrisons sponsored by Old Virginia (especially Winchester during the Seven Years' War), then as government centers (Winchester again, plus Staunton, Lexington, Harrisonburg, and Martinsburg), and ultimately, during the relatively peaceful last decade...