The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

4. The Grandees of Government

4 22 THE GRANDEES OF GOVERNMENT John Robinson Jr. (1705–1766) (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) was Speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of Virginia from 1738 until his death and was one of the most talented and formidable political leaders in colonial Virginia. Wealthy and influential, he was also at the center of the largest financial scandal in the history of the colonial government. As such, he personified the political culture of the colony that blended and reinforced personal, family, and class interests with public service. It was he who in 1756 was first referred to as one of the “Grandees of Government.” Richard Bland began an argument in a case before the General Court in the Capitol in Williamsburg one day in April 1772 by saying that “societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordination of one to another, and that from the highest to the lowest degree. That this was conformable with the general scheme of the Creator, observable in other parts of his great work, where no chasm was to be discovered, but the several links run imperceptibly into one another. That in this subordination the department of slaves must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order.” That was how attorney Thomas Jefferson recorded Bland’s remarks that day when some of the colony’s finest legal minds were arguing about which one of their laws applied in a suit that several people filed claiming illegal enslavement of their female Indian ancestor and consequently illegal enslavement of themselves.1 Bland was the oldest and most senior member of the elite corps of Virginia men qualified to practice law in the General Court, the highest court in the colony. He was also one of the longest-serving members of the House of Burgesses and one of its guiding members, second only, but just barely, to Speaker Peyton Randolph in respect and influence. Bland was the most learned student of the colony’s history and its laws. He collected and studied ancient documents, reading and rereading them through his thick eyeglasses. Known for his studiousness and his spectacles, Bland, according to one of his neighbors, had “something of the look of musty old Parchents wch he handleth & studieth much.”2 The political culture that Bland studied was the one that had survived Bacon ’s Rebellion of 1676 and flourished in its aftermath. During the century between that rebellion and the one that began in 1776, the differences between the governing elites and all of the people whom they governed grew more conspicuous . The great tobacco planters imported thousands of enslaved men, women, and children from Africa to work their plantations. They built stately mansions where they and their privileged families lived in comparative opulence . They built new and larger churches where the justices of the peace and other local notables continued to have their own seats or private pews. They built handsome brick courthouses where on court day the justices of the peace ascended to a bench and literally looked down upon the people whose local affairs they regulated and policed. They built a brick capitol in the new city of Williamsburg and a stately residence (significantly, they called it a palace) for the royal governor or his deputy, the lieutenant governor. The wealthiest of 86 the grandees of government them rode to church, to court, or to the capital of the colony in fine carriages that they imported from England. They raced their finest horses against each other and bet large sums of money as if, or in order to show that, they could afford to lose any amount. They danced formal minuets or lively reels and jigs at country-house parties and at the governor’s palace in Williamsburg. Exactly halfway between the two rebellions, William Byrd II wrote in 1726 what many another privileged Virginia gentleman could have written at almost any time during the previous or the following half century had any of them had his gift of language. He boasted about the benefits that Virginia provided to members of families who thrived and reached the top and to which many others near the top aspired. “We abound in all kinds of provisions , without expence (I mean we who have plantations),” Byrd informed an English earl who never saw the small-scale aristocracy of the colony in its...