If we were to travel today to the towns of Andover, Dedham, or Concord, Massachusetts, in search of the remnants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century community life, we probably could—through the clutter of gas stations, shopping malls, and fast food emporiums—still catch a glimpse of those institutional and physical structures that tied the people of the much simpler world of colonial New England together in a network of shared values and aspirations. Be the year 1783 or 1983, our search for those institutions and activities that define community life in the Virginia Southside is a far more perplexing endeavor....

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Virginia Southside, extending nearly nine thousand square miles from the Fall Line of the James River to the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, remained nearly untouched by the political institutions of eastern Virginia, the economic arrangements of the Chesapeake tobacco economy, or the influences of European immigration. It was, at least in the eyes of those white Englishmen who sought to bring it under their domain, a rude wilderness that needed to be tamed and mastered.

In 1733, William Byrd II, while surveying his lands in the Southside region that would...

The contrast between the humble way of life in Lunenburg and the styles of the gentry world to the east was dramatic. In the eastern Chesapeake, those who made it to the top of the economic ladder established and reinforced their hegemony by impressive displays of economic power. Their plantations, imposing in their design—with ballrooms, large and ornate dining rooms, wide hallways, glittering crystal and silver plate—were powerful symbols not only of their good fortune in the economic arena but also of their superior claims to political power and personal authority. No one living in Lunenburg could match...

While Lunenburg’s earliest residents and its subsequent immigrants brought with them to the county a great diversity of cultural traditions, the same settlers would, if they stayed in the county long enough, increasingly devote their energies to a common economic endeavor—the cultivation of tobacco. The lines of influence of the Virginia tobacco economy, like the lines of political influence within the county, ran from east to west. Following the dictates of a parliament far to the east, the legislature in Williamsburg framed the laws governing the tobacco trade; tobacco inspectors, operating in warehouses many miles to the east of...

There was considerable stir among the people in the church meetinghouses and parish vestries of the Southside in the 1760s and 1770s. As the Rev. James Craig complained, the enthusiastic, itinerant preachers “gain Proselytes every Day, & unless the Principal Persons concerned in that Delusion are apprehended, or otherwise restrained from proceeding further, the consequences will be fatal.” Of course the evangelical perspective on those developments was quite different. In the view of the itinerant preachers whose exhortations were witnessed by crowds numbering in the hundreds and occasionally the thousands, the revival of simple religious faith, uncorrupted by the worldly...

Whatever the potential for conflict posed by the “internal disorder” inherent in the evangelical revolt, the Virginia social order managed to display remarkable cohesiveness and unity of purpose in mobilizing itself for the external revolt against Great Britain. The cultural divisions appearing in areas like Lunenburg would ultimately produce profound changes in the way Virginians defined both their civil and religious polity, but in the short run the constitutional conflict provoked by the British—and the hardship produced by the military conflict that would follow—served to submerge the differences between Anglicans and evangelicals and to join virtually all the...

Given the escalation of social conflict between Anglicans and evangelicals before the Revolution, we might expect that the hardships and disruptions occasioned by the onset of war would serve to heighten those conflicts further. Indeed, in the years immediately preceding independence the evangelicals had more to complain about than they had a decade previously. As late as 1774 the Virginia House of Burgesses, which had spent much of its time during the previous ten years denouncing the arbitrary powers of the British Parliament, was close to passing a bill that sought to limit further the toleration granted to members of...

As French historian Fernand Braudel notes, the disruption of wars and the upheavals of religious conflicts are often only “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” According to Braudel, those slower but deeper currents of history are related at the most basic level to the relationship between human beings and their environment, and more generally to the long-term development of economic and social systems.¹ That wisdom appears to apply to Lunenburg in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries just as certainly as it does to the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century....

The forces of economic and demographic growth that gave most Lunenburg households an increased level of agricultural output and a slightly enhanced standard of physical comfort appear to have cut across the religious and ethnic lines that had worked to divide the white citizens of the county during the prerevolutionary period. While growing similarities in economic circumstance did not eliminate the cultural differences that separated evangelicals, Episcopalians, and unbelievers, they did, in combination with a revised institutional structure that removed the privileges and powers of sanction from the Episcopal church, greatly reduce the conflicts those differences had previously generated.

The...

From his vantage point in western North Carolina more than three decades ago, Wilbur J. Cash wrote about the transmission of the cavalier culture of traditional Virginia society to the frontier. He noted that there “was indeed a genuine, if small aristocracy in colonial Virginia . . . but this Virginia was not the great South. By paradox, it was not even all of Virginia. . . . All the rest, at the close of the Revolution, was still in the frontier or semi-frontier stage.” With that combination of acuteness and overstatement that has made his work such an enduring...

In the process of defending themselves from Northern attacks on the slave system and justifying the way of life that system encouraged, white Lunenburgers came to acquire a sense of group solidarity unprecedented in the previous history of their county. That solidarity would be given its most dramatic expression on the afternoon of March 11, 1861, at a meeting of the county’s citizens at the courthouse “for the purpose of taking into consideration the great crisis” created by those twin villains, Abraham Lincoln and abolitionism. The assembled freeholders unanimously passed a set of resolutions that left no doubt about Lunenburg’s...