"Accommodating Revolutions "addresses a controversy of long
standing among historians of eighteenth-century America and
Virginia--the extent to which internal conflict and/or consensus
characterized the society of the Revolutionary era. In particular,
it emphasizes the complex and often self-defeating actions and
decisions of dissidents and other non-elite groups. By focusing on
a small but significant region, Tillson elucidates the multiple and
interrelated sources of conflict that beset Revolutionary Virginia,
but also explains why in the end so little changed.
In the Northern Neck--the six-county portion of Virginia's
Tidewater lying between the Potomac and Rappahannock
rivers--Tillson scrutinizes a wealthy and powerful, but troubled,
planter elite, which included such 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 confronted not only contradictions in cultural
ideals and behavioral patterns within their own lives, but also the
chronic hostility of their poorer white neighbors, arising from a
diverse array of local economic and political issues. These
insecurities were further intensified by changes in the system of
African American slavery and by the growing role of Scottish
merchants and their Virginia agents in the marketing of Chesapeake
tobacco. For a time, the upheavals surrounding the War for American
Independence and the roughly contemporaneous rise of vibrant,
biracial evangelical religious movements threatened to increase
popular discontent to the point of overwhelming the gentry's
political authority and cultural hegemony. But in the end, the
existing order survived essentially intact. In part, this was
because the region's leaders found ways to limit and accommodate
threatening developments and patterns of change, largely through
the use of traditional social and political appeals that had served
them well for decades. Yet in part it was also because ordinary
Northern Neckers--including many leaders in the movements of
wartime and religious dissidence--consciously or unconsciously
accommodated themselves to both the patterns of economic change
transforming their world and to the traditional ideals of the
elite, and thus were unable to articulate or accept an alternative
vision for the future of the region.
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