Antiques

Magazine Antiques, April, 2008 by Wendell Garrett

Williamsburg is now incorporated and made a Market Town.... Here dwell
several very good Families.... They live in the same neat Manner, dress
after the same Modes, and behave themselves exactly as the Gentry in
London; most Families of any Note having a Coach, Chariot, Berlin, or
Chaise.
Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia, 1724

In the "half century immediately preceding the American Revolution," wrote Hunter D. Farish, "a remarkable civilization reached its zenith in the broad coastal plain of eastern Virginia. Gradually, during a century of colonization and expansion, the heavily wooded tidewater had been converted into a land of settled order and accumulated wealth. Vast estates had been carved out of the wilderness and large plantations," like Landon Carter's Sabine Hall, "were everywhere the rule." A French traveler in 1686 had seen a great plantation as "a rather large village"; a hundred years later another Frenchman remarked that the Byrds' seat of Westover, seen from across the James River, "with its different annexes, has the appearance of a small town and forms a most delightful prospect."

While life in the tidewater during this golden age was dominated by the families who possessed these vast estates, if they constituted an aristocracy, it was an aristocracy of middle-class origins. Virginia's great families all became great in the New World--they did not bring their status with them. Landon Carter's father, Robert "King" Carter, for example, had come to the colonies as a self-made man with connections to a family of London wine merchants. In Virginia, where he made his fortune as a tobacco and slave trader, he became the greatest grandee of his time, holding every major office the colony could offer, even up to the acting governorship. When he died in 1732, he left his descendants more than three hundred thousand acres of land and more than a thousand slaves.

He and his contemporaries among the first families of Virginia were not remotely democratic. They were energetic and opportunistic businessmen, with an eye toward their own best advantage, willing and able to exploit labor and land to grow rich quickly. They were men of probity and had a strong sense of responsibility, and if their ideal was that of the English country gentleman, they believed in duties as well as privileges. As Hunter wrote: "They sat as justices in the county courts, served as sheriffs and as colonels of militia in their counties, and acted as vestrymen and church wardens in their parishes. They accepted seriously their duty to preserve the peace and watch over the less fortunate classes." They valued learning--especially of a practical sort--and they patronized the arts. Architecture was one of their strongest points. Their great houses were monuments to their good taste, and their gardens were widely admired from afar.

Despite Hugh Jones's observation of their outward similarities to the gentry in London, the wealth and position, education, resourcefulness, and keen sense of public responsibility of Virginia's first families led them to influence and to impress their ideals and tastes upon the community in a measure rarely equaled by the aristocracy in England.