ABSTRACT

Virginia was the first of the colonies to have a permanent settlement but slow to develop a civilized culture. In its early days it resembled colonial experiments elsewhere: economic greed, shameless exploitation of the land and original inhabitants, large turnover of population, few long-term inhabitants with education, and no sense that the task a person did contributed to anything of long-term importance in the history of the world. Compared to John Winthrop or William Penn, the first leaders in Virginia resembled a group of pirates. By the early eighteenth century, Virginians developed mental lives not all that different from those in the North. They too tended toward low-church Protestantism; what they lacked in zeal they imported, in the form of Scots Presbyterian tutors for their children. They too read the Whig commonwealthmen and absorbed their puritanical notions about high taxes, established churches, tyrannical kings, concentration of property, restricted voting, and a standing military.