Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Early America: History, Context, Culture)

Amazon.com Price: $54.00 (as of 12/04/2019 10:17 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Gentlemen and Freeholders explores the role of elections in the public culture of Britain’s most populous North American colony right through the middle decades of the eighteenth century. In this pre-Revolutionary world, John Kolp explains, rich men with stately homes, fine clothes, and a genuine belief in rule by “Gentlemen of Ability and Fortune” shared the local political arena with common freeholders–small planters with a hundred acres and a servant or slave to lend a hand cultivate the labor intensive tobacco crop. Gentlemen clearly ruled this society, yet they did so with the electoral toughen of the freeholders. How did any such system work?

Previous attempts to remember eighteenth-century Virginia’s local politics have portrayed a stable, consistent, and uniform public culture extending from 1725 to 1815 and variously described as aristocratic, oligarchic, democratic, or ritualistic. Kolp, by contrast, proposes a dynamic model of a local political culture, one broadly shaped by regional, provincial, and imperial influences but primarily conditioned by local personalities and issues. Drawing on all kinds of primary sources, he reveals who ran for place of job, who voted and with what frequency; he explains how candidates jostled for position before running for place of job, how they appealed to freeholders, how public issues and private considerations influenced voter behavior, and whether levels of competition can give a contribution to a better understanding of social stability and unrest.

Not since Charles Sydnor’s landmark work in 1952 has an historian of Virginia so thoroughly examined the political culture that produced any such startling number of revolutionary leaders and founding fathers. Gentlemen and Freeholders offers a fresh look at a subject matter of enduring interest.


Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Colonial Period » Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia (Early America: History, Context, Culture)

Recent Products