Though the history and continuing
influence of the Continental Army most definitely presented a potential source
of concern for those who viewed the draft constitution presented to the various
American states in 1787 as investing far too much power in far too few hands,
there were yet other reasons for people like Patrick Henry to suspect that
certain of his countrymen were more interested in the projection of splendor
than the protection of civil liberties. Granting that the creation of the
Society of the Cincinnati in 1783 by Major General Henry Knox (1750-1806) as a
hereditary association of Revolutionary War veterans wholly closed off to those
below the rank of officer hardly spoke to the republicans bona fides of its
members and the broader fraternity to which they belonged, there existed a much
older and much larger – though comparatively informal – association of
like-minded individuals living in the United States whose general character was
similarly superficial. While there existed, at the time, no singular name for
them, they have become known to history as variously the planter class, the
Southern gentry, or the American aristocracy, all of which labels fairly
capably describe their general quality and disposition. They were, in essence,
the class of men living in what is now the American South during the colonial
(1600-1783) and antebellum (1783-1860) eras whose economic prospects and social
standing was inextricably linked to the style of plantation agriculture made
possible by the importation and ownership of African slaves. Prior to the advent
of cotton in the early 19th century, they chiefly farmed cash crops
like rice, tobacco, and indigo for export to European markets, the sale of
which – along with trading in slaves – made them some of the wealthiest men on
the continent and the de facto ruling class of their respective political
communities.
Notwithstanding the origins of their
wealth and influence in international commerce, the members of the planter
class tended to self-consciously set themselves apart from the merchants and
traders upon whom they depended by adopting a lifestyle whose material
trappings were distinctly ostentatious and whose social pretentions were
decidedly patrician. It was not enough for these men to possess tremendous
wealth, it seemed. Rather, they had to spend that wealth in a particular way,
on particular things, all the while cultivating a sense of innate superiority
that belied their origins as traders in human flesh and wholesale produce. The
English gentry unsurprisingly provided the default model for the resulting
socio-economic community. The “first families” of many southern colonies, after
all, were descended from the otherwise landless second sons of a number of
prominent English dynasties, and the events of the 1640s and 1650s – i.e. the
English Civil War (1642-1651) and the Interregnum (1651-1660) – provided ample
reason for aristocratic capital and noble manners to transport themselves to
the American wilderness. In time, however, what had started as the continuation
of established family lines became something more broadly aspirational. Certainly,
even as late as the 1770s and 1780s, they were many prominent members of the
political elite in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas for whom descent from
a prominent family remained a point of pride and distinction. Benjamin Harrison
V (1726-1791), for example, was the scion of a prominent Virginia dynasty which
claimed to trace its pedigree back to the 14th century, while
Maryland’s Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737-1832) was the grandson of
Charles Carroll the Settler (1660-1720), an Irish-born lawyer who had attended
the prestigious Inns of Court and became an aide and confidante of Charles
Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore (1637-1715). Often as not, however, the
wealthiest and most influential members of the contemporary southern gentry
were the successors of middling farmers and entrepreneurs whose claim to
prestige was acquired rather than inherited.
The migrant ancestor of George
Washington (1732-1799), for instance, was one John Washington (1631-1677), the
son of a village rector from Hertfordshire who was reduced to poverty for his
support of the Crown during the aforementioned Civil War. He managed to improve
his circumstances over many years by first clerking for a London merchant firm,
then becoming second officer on a trading vessel, then marrying into a planter
family in Virginia, and finally by becoming a tobacco farmer with the land he
received from his wife’s father as her dowry. Similarly, while the father of
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was not exactly born into a life of material
deprivation, the social capital possessed by the children of Peter Jefferson
(1708-1757) was much more the result of enterprise than entitlement. A surveyor
and cartographer rather than a planter, the elder Jefferson acquired land in
Albemarle Country on the western frontier of the Province of Virginia as a
consequence of his vocation, and spent most of his career in service to Thomas
Fairfax (1693-1781), a Scottish peer and prominent Virginia land magnate. While
neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson could accordingly claim to have
been the descendants of avowed members of the British gentry, they could
nevertheless aspire to the example set by that cohort in the way they made use
of their wealth. Indeed, by conforming to an unspoken but well-established set
of behaviors and customs by which the gentry of the southern colonies comported
themselves, they could effectively erase the origins of their prominence and
become simply one of many gentlemen in a society dominated by the tastes and
intentions of the same.
Where this kind of behavior might
have become a source of concern within the context of the ratification of the
proposed constitution in 1787/88 – whereby a weak, confederal government was to
be replaced by a strong, national one – was in what the nature of the planter
lifestyle implied about the men who sought to embody it. For all their
pretensions to the contrary – which, as will be discussed momentarily, were
many – the landed gentry of the southern states were not actually aristocrats.
They were not members of any peerage or nobility, for the American republic did
not recognize such things. And for all the influence they wielded over the
public affairs of the communities in which they dwelt – which was substantial
– they were still a far cry from the dukes and lords of Britain and Ireland who
practically owned entire counties and filled the ranks of the great ministries
of state. And yet, for all the rigidness of that basic reality, the planters
behaved as a class as though they thought themselves the equal of any marquis
or baron that old England could boast. They built great manors, in the English
fashion, and gave them names, and furnished them with gardens, and cultivated
massive estates from the surrounding country. They sent their sons to the best
schools, and taught them to dance, and speak Latin, and to play music, and
patronize the arts. And always, they comported themselves with a mixture of
gentility and hauteur – an attitude of “to the manor, born” – that gave clear
and constant proof of their innate preeminence.
There was nothing
innate about their prestige, of course; they were simply very wealthy men. Shameful
as this seemed to be to them, however, they accordingly went to great lengths
to convince the world otherwise. How
important to them was the concept of splendor? To what extent would they have
been willing to carry it? These were important questions, and ones which
someone like Patrick Henry – himself a Virginian of considerable means – was
arguably bound to consider within the context of essentially re-founding the
United States of America along much more centralized lines. If the American
planter class really did aspire to the level of social prestige enjoyed by the
English gentry upon which they modeled themselves, the elevation of America’s
reputation abroad would seem an ideal means of accomplishing just that. Within
a strictly colonial context, the southern magnates would forever be
overshadowed by the existence of an actual aristocracy for whom displays of
conspicuous wealth were a function of their status rather than the cause of it.
Just so, with the United States of America operating under a government which
the great powers of the world seemed to tolerate more than respect, the planter
gentry would yet still struggle to affirm themselves as equal members of the
European aristocratic order. But if the American republic were to become a
splendid thing, possessed of all the trappings of empire, then no one could
deny that its great landowning families were deserving of all the respect and
admiration which they had long since claimed as their birthright.
Consider, by way
of context, some of the things that the southern planter elite in the United
States did in order to make conspicuous their patrician bona fides. Architecture
having long been a means by which individuals, organization, or government make
known both the extent of wealth they possess and the superiority of their tastes
or aspirations, it at length became customary for the “gentlemen” of the
southern colonies/states to invest some portion of their personal worth in
magnificent manor houses in the style of English country estates. Westover
Plantation, for example – located approximately halfway between Williamsburg and
Richmond – was built around the year 1750 by one William Byrd III (1728-1777), grandson
of enterprising migrant William Byrd I (1652-1704), in a style and on a scale
that left little room to doubt the pretensions of its owner. Encompassing some
twelve hundred acres, Westover was centered on a three story Georgian mansion
adjoined by extensive wings, replete with secret passages and winding
staircases, and surrounded by magnificent gardens in the contemporary English
style. Grand fireplaces abounded, surrounded by gleaming white plaster, and the
front façade included soaring pillars flanking a massive front door. By way of
comparison, the house in Quincy, Massachusetts that future president John Adams
(1735-1826) lived in for the first part of his adult life – and in which his
son, future president John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), was born – was a 2 ½ story
saltbox dwelling given to him by his father John Adams Sr. (1691-1761) in 1764.
It had four rooms, a single fireplace, and a white clapboard exterior.
While clearly the
Byrd family and the Adams family lived in different material universes – the
former being wealthy planters and slave traders, the latter being deacons,
farmers, and lawyers – they were also separated by ideas of perception and
ambition. The elder Adams, though far from wealthy, was reportedly very proud
of the life he’d carved out for himself and his family. He owned his property
outright, farmed during the spring and summer and made shoes during the winter,
attended Harvard College, and was active as a town councilman for some twenty
years by the time of his death. William Byrd III, lord of stately Westover, was
conversely a gambler and a spendthrift who inherited almost two hundred
thousand acres from his father and sold almost all of it off either to pay for
the construction of his manor home or to service his mountainous personal
debts. Whereas Adams was content with what his own enterprise could gain for
him, Byrd was unsatisfied even with the substantial fortune in property that
his family had preserved for his inheritance. He built larger, grander; damn
the cost and the likelihood of losing it all to his creditors, there was an
image someone in his position was expected to maintain. Though this example may
represent something of an extreme – not every planter was as compulsive and as
unlucky as William Byrd III – it is also in many ways characteristic of the
manner in which the southern elite carried themselves. The image of wealth was
often as important to them as – if not arguably more important than – actual
wealth, and splendor often as cherished as substance.
Mount Vernon,
famous as the beloved estate of George Washington, was in fact the product of
several generations of improvements and consolidations on the part of the
Washington family. Originally acquired by George’s great-grandfather John
Washington (1633-1677) in 1674, the first permanent dwelling was built there by
John’s grandson, Augustine Washington (1694-1743), sometime between 1726 and
1735. This initial construction, dubbed Little Hunting Creek, was evidently
quite modest, with two rooms on the ground floor and an third room in an
additional half-story. Augustine’s eldest son Lawrence Washington (1718-1752)
was subsequently gifted Little Hunting Creek upon his return to Virginia from
schooling in England in 1738, and spent the next several years buying up
adjoining parcels of land until obtaining a coveted officer’s commission and
departing to serve in the British Army during the so-called War of Jenkin’s Ear
(1739-1748). Upon his return, having served under Royal Navy Admiral Edward
Vernon (1684-1757) during the late conflict, he decided to change the name of
his estate to Mount Vernon as a form of tribute. Lawrence’s younger
half-brother George Washington left this moniker unchanged upon inheriting the
property in full in 1761, though that was about all he allowed to remain in its
original state. Between 1758 and the late 1770s, the latest master of Mount Vernon
undertook at least two major renovations, raising the central building to 2 ½
stories, adding north and south wings, a cupola, and a piazza that overlooked
the nearby Potomac River. The final enlargement left the compound with over
twenty rooms covering eleven thousand square feet.
It bears noting
that throughout the period of his ownership, Washington, his wife Martha
(1731-1802), and her two children from her first marriage to Daniel Parke
Curtis (1711-1757) were the only permanent residents of the manor house at
Mount Vernon. Slaves owned by the Washington family – of which there were many
– lived in separate quarters, and guests, while frequent, never appeared in
such numbers as to require entire wings to be built to house them. The sheer
size of the dwelling could not therefore have been described as being in any
sense practical. On the contrary, it was decidedly impractical, particularly in
light of the remoteness of Mount Vernon from the nearest major settlement.
Floating the produce of the plantation down the Potomac and out to the
Chesapeake for shipping aboard was one thing, but moving materials and artisans
upriver in order to undertake major expansions and renovations represented an
economically needless expense that could only have eaten into Washington’s
yearly profits or else caused him to go into debt. Just so, the physical
arrangement of the estate embodies a distinctly inefficient style of landscape
planning. Though it was a working farm whose continued existence depended on
cash-crop agriculture, Washington nevertheless made a point of reserving no
small amount of potentially arable land at Mount Vernon for well-manicured
gardens and a grassy bowling green planted with English boxwood trees. Tobacco
would have been more profitable, no doubt, or indigo, or even wheat. But
profit, clearly, was not all that men of George Washington’s class cared about.
Mount Vernon was both extravagant and needlessly expensive, but to its master’s
thinking it was also entirely necessary.
And then there was
Mount Airy, built by John Tayloe II (1721-1779) in Richmond County, Virginia on
land his family had already owned for over a century. At the time of its
construction in the late 1750s, Tayloe was one of the richest planters in
British North America, and the resulting complex of structures and gardens was
appropriately grandiose in scale and design. Of the five main structures that
comprised the central pavilion, the main building rose two 2 ½ stories above
surrounding land, with two, curving one story passageways leading to two
further two story wings that combined to enclose a large, semi-circular sunken
courtyard. Wide stone steps led from a circular carriage drive and between a
pair of pedestals topped with carved stone vases to the columned, limestone main
façade. Further entrances on the north and south faces of the central building
led to finely manicured gardens that collectively occupied almost ten times the
acreage of the manor itself, with terraces, topiary, and even an enclosed “orangery”
for the purpose of growing tropical plants in an otherwise inhospitable
climate. Sheer size and extravagance was not all that Mount Airy had to offer,
however. Evidently eager to establish a reputation for good taste as well as
fantastic wealth, Tayloe consulted some of the latest manuals of architecture
and design during the planning phase of his palatial manor home. Several
aspects of the resulting structure were accordingly copied directly from the
works of some of contemporary Britain’s foremost architects – James Gibbs
(1682-1754) for one, William Adam (1689-1748) for another – with the whole
built on a ridge overlooking the north bank of the Rappahannock River.
Compared to the
plantation estates of the vast majority his American contemporaries, Tayloe’s
Mount Airy was truly palatial, approaching more closely the scale of an English
aristocrat’s country seat than just about any of its nearest contemporaries.
Doubtless this was exactly the conclusion which Tayloe hoped all those who
heard tell of or visited him home would arrive at, yet the association could
not but have embodied certain problematic implications. Mount Airy very likely
represented the closest that any of the southern colonial elite ever came to
truly meeting the material aspirations they had set for themselves as New World
gentry on the Old World model. But in the way that he financed and maintained
his manor, Tayloe was pointedly not an English aristocrat. Whereas most members
of the English landed gentry sustained themselves on rents collected from
tenants whose labor generated the actual wealth – and were thus only marginally
involved in the economy from which they benefited – the planter class of the
southern colonies were agriculturalists who, though they also refrained from
working the soil themselves, were nevertheless forced to pay heed to things
like crop rotation and market trends in order to sustain the wealth upon which
they depended. The significance of this distinction would seem essentially to
be twofold.
First, it appears
to further emphasize the aspirational quality of the planter lifestyle. Near
though Tayloe came to replicating the material circumstances of the English
landed gentry, he could not but fail to surmount the vulgar commercial
underpinnings of the wealth that made it possible. Aristocratic gentility,
therefore, operated as a kind of screen by which a sufficiently wealthy
individual could at the very least project the image of effortless social
superiority absent the customary feudal privilege. Second, in light of the
economic activity which the planter class was obliged to undertake in order to
sustain themselves, the extravagances of Mount Airy appear yet more extreme. A
contemporary plan of the estate buildings and gardens reveals a truly
distressing amount of potentially productive land entirely given over to the
cause of cementing Tayloe’s status as the wealthiest man among a cohort of
frighteningly wealthy men. As with Mount Vernon, one imagines that far from
unsubstantial revenues could have been derived from the property which at Mount
Airy was allocated to the growing of ornamental shrubbery or exotic fruit.
Likewise, Tayloe’s fame as an owner and breeder of racehorses represented a
drain upon his yearly profits that was almost certainly unaccompanied by a
commensurate return.
While this was, it bears repeating, entirely intentional, it also reinforces the seemingly
destructive superficiality with which the members of the American planter class
conducted themselves. Though commercial agriculture was absolutely central to
their ability to sustain the aristocratic lifestyle that they had collectively
chosen to imitate, this same act of imitation was also decidedly noncommercial. Bowling
greens, and boxwood trees, and ornamental gardens, and racing stables could
only cost these men money, and make it harder for them to continue to fund such
needless extravagances. To them, of course – to the attitudes and customs of
the particular social class to which they belonged – they were absolutely
essential. They were not aristocrats in the truest sense, and in all likelihood
would never become them. Image, therefore, was arguably all they had as a means
of setting themselves apart from the merchants and manufacturers that comprised
the elite class of northern colonies. The southern planters accordingly showed
themselves more than willing to pour every pound, shilling, and pence they
could possibly bear to part with into whatever would help them appear as
something more than particularly wealthy farmers – which was, in truth, all
that they were.
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