Accommodating revolutions: Virginia's Northern Neck in an era of transformations, 1760-1810

Accommodating Revolutions addresses a controversy of longstanding among historians of eighteenth-century America and Virginia-the extent to whichinternal conflict and/or consensus characterized the society of the Revolutionary era.

Inparticular, it emphasizes the complex and often self-defeating actions and decisions ofdissidents and other non-elite groups.

By focusing on a small but significant region, Tillsonelucidates the multiple and interrelated sources of conflict that beset Revolutionary Virginia, butalso explains why in the end so little changed.In the Northern Neck-thesix-county portion of Virginia's Tidewater lying between the Potomac and Rappahannockrivers-Tillson scrutinizes a wealthy and powerful, but troubled, planter elite, which includedsuch prominent men as George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, Landon Carter, and Robert Carter.

Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Northern Neck gentry confrontednot only contradictions in cultural ideals and behavioral patterns within their own lives, but alsothe chronic hostility of their poorer white neighbors, arising from a diverse array of localeconomic and political issues.

These insecurities were further intensified by changes in the systemof African American slavery and by the growing role of Scottish merchants and their Virginia agentsin the marketing of Chesapeake tobacco.

For a time, the upheavals surrounding the War for AmericanIndependence and the roughly contemporaneous rise of vibrant, biracial evangelical religiousmovements threatened to increase popular discontent to the point of overwhelming the gentry'spolitical authority and cultural hegemony.

But in the end, the existing order survived essentiallyintact.

In part, this was because the region's leaders found ways to limit and accommodatethreatening developments and patterns of change, largely through the use of traditional social andpolitical appeals that had served them well for decades.

Yet in part it was also because ordinaryNorthern Neckers-including many leaders in the movements of wartime and religiousdissidence-consciously or unconsciously accommodated themselves to both the patterns ofeconomic change transforming their world and to the traditional ideals of the elite, and thus wereunable to articulate or accept an alternative vision for the future of the region.