Old Dominion, New Republic: Making Virginia Republican, 1776-1840

Virginia's justification of its secession from the British Empire on 15 May 1776 was based on fealty to inherited ways and preference for inherited legal arrangements. Although some, particularly Thomas Jefferson, strived in the half-century thereafter to bring Virginia's "state" into consonance with "Enlightenment" norms, they usually met with failure. Even some of the reformers' apparent successes, such as the establishment of the University of Virginia, turned out to reinforce the old ruling class.;Reformers found a promising means of skirting the backward-looking General Assembly: they would create a powerful American government and delegate some of the state's traditional powers to it. By "extending the sphere," they would guarantee that the new class of men so much in evidence in Virginia politics as the Revolutionary decade wore on would be absent from the federal legislature. Yet, as chapter three of this dissertation shows, this stratagem ran aground on the shoal of elite opposition. In the end, Federalists in the Virginia Ratifying Convention had to promise their colleagues that the proposed constitution would have limited effects.;Virginia's political majority accepted the constitution on that basis. It also insisted from the new government's inception that the new government had, as the Virginia Federalists of 1788 had promised, only those powers it was "expressly" delegated. Thus, the parochialism Virginians had displayed in their disputes with the king and in rejecting "Enlightenment" constitutionalism also lay behind their political creed when Virginia ruled the American roost.;Having defeated Federalism in the election of 1800/1801, Republicans expected political peace and economic prosperity. Instead, the Republican party soon splintered, and even the governing majority sensed that their best-laid plans had gone awry. Denizens of the new lands of Virginia's West, resentful of the dominant East's parsimony, endeavored to secure the internal improvements program they wanted by pushing one of Jefferson's failed reforms: constitutional revision. They succeeded only in laying the seeds for West Virginia's eventual secession from Virginia. By the time James Madison died in 1836, then, the Revolutionary Virginia political disposition had both endangered the Union and undermined the Old Dominion.