It Was Only a Dream

Cities are nodal, geographers inform us. Within their sprawl, individuals and neighborhoods are connected one to another, while the sum of these communities is itself bound by intricate threads to the suburbs and hinterlands. Neither city nor countryside stands alone. Paul Musselwhite offers an intriguing study of the abortive roots of one set of these urban-rural relationships in Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake. He seeks new answers to an old question: why did the Chesapeake develop as such a rural, planter-dominated landscape by the eighteenth century? He concludes that “the absence of urban places was no mere coincidental product of Chesapeake plantation agriculture. In fact, the relationship between plantations and towns was quite the opposite. A century of failed urban development was instrumental in forging the contours of Chesapeake society” (p. 2). The end result of Musselwhite’s study is a book that intimately explores urban planning and civic ideology, but which sometimes ignores other contexts that were central to life in the Chesapeake before the American Revolution.

The book is organized in a clear and logical fashion; it unfolds in chronological order from the years preceding Jamestown’s founding until the mid-eighteenth century, with each chapter focusing on English urban visions during a period of one or two decades. Musselwhite notes that city plans were central to the Virginia Colony’s foundations, thanks in part to investors who hoped that the English borough model of civic communities would foster a stable and diversified colonial economy. Jamestown was a planned community, as were the unsuccessful Bermuda City and Argall City. The coordinated Powhatan attack led by Opechancanough in 1622 destroyed many of the nascent boroughs, contributed to the revocation of the Virginia Company’s charter, and thus undermined these initial urban efforts. Fluctuating tobacco prices and Crown worries that a luxury crop was a poor foundation for a colonial economy prompted renewed efforts at town founding in the 1620s, led in Virginia by Governor John Harvey. Planters resisted Harvey’s plans, however, and worked to install their own vision of proper governance and an economic structure rooted in county jurisdictions. The Calvert family—granted proprietorship of Maryland by King Charles I in 1632—also undertook colonization with grand visions of the St. Mary’s settlement as an urban hub, but the colony would ultimately adopt the county structure as well.

Parliament’s victory in the English Civil War generated a new set of urban visions. Puritans questioned the emerging Chesapeake model of county governments and personal patronage that had developed under William Berkeley and the Calverts, renewing an imperial emphasis on town centers that might serve as social and religious models as well as economic engines. Musselwhite argues that the 1651 Navigation Act hoped in part to funnel trade through colonial towns, where it might be better regulated (and taxed), though this regulation was often framed in a language of civic virtue (pp. 101–2). This Parliamentary vision gained more traction in Maryland than in Virginia, where planters increasingly touted agrarian independence and clandestinely traded with Dutch ships in violation of the Navigation Act. As a consequence of this resistance to Parliament’s plans, Jamestown actually shrank during the 1650s, and then, in the 1660s, “proposals for urban development once again had the counter-intuitive effect of reinforcing planters’ faith in their own rural civic authority within the empire” (p. 129).

Musselwhite also sees urban development as a root cause of Bacon’s Rebellion, the armed revolt beginning in 1676 that nearly toppled Governor Berkeley’s rule and also unsettled Maryland’s government. He portrays Chesapeake residents who were upset with the particular form town development had taken—especially Berkeley’s grand vision for an expanded Jamestown and the Calverts’ dream of a network of new port cities—as more crucial to colonial unrest than the Indian troubles on the frontier or resentment of corrupt county governments and...