“This infant Borough”: The Corporate Political Identity of Eighteenth-Century Norfolk

The rapidly growing eighteenth-century port city of Norfolk, Virginia, occupied an unusual position. It was the largest city in a colony known for its rural gentry culture and also a formally incorporated borough in an era when urban corporate independence was increasingly unusual in the British Atlantic. This essay explores Norfolk’s corporate political identity and argues that it was crucial to the city’s position in a planter-dominated society. The charter helped reconcile the city’s need for local authority over trade and urban policing with the planter elite’s suspicion of commerce by effectively quarantining the port city outside the planters’ political world. As tensions rose within the British Empire during the 1760s, however, the borough’s corporate authority became a contentious issue, as planters asserted their civic authority to regulate trade. The planter revolutionaries’ suspicion of Norfolk’s corporate status led to the showdown between the borough and the new revolutionary government and eventually to the destruction of the city in January 1776. These experiences informed the efforts of Virginia’s new state government to craft a unique subsidiary status for municipal government in the 1780s. Norfolk’s corporate status is therefore crucial to understanding the republican political economic vision of Virginia’s planter class.