Gentlemen and Freeholders explores the role of elections in the public culture of Britain's most populous North American colony during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. In this pre-Revolutionary world, John Kolp explains, wealthy men with stately homes, fine clothes, and a genuine belief in rule by "Gentlemen of Ability and Fortune" shared the local political arena with common freeholders--small planters with a hundred acres and a servant or slave to help cultivate the labor intensive tobacco crop. Gentlemen clearly ruled this society, yet they did so with the electoral support of the freeholders. How did such a system work?
Previous attempts to understand eighteenth-century Virginia's local politics have portrayed a stable, consistent, and uniform public culture extending from 1725 to 1815 and variously described as aristocratic, oligarchic, democratic, or ritualistic. Kolp, by contrast, proposes a dynamic model of a local political culture, one broadly shaped by regional, provincial, and imperial influences but primarily conditioned by local personalities and issues. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, he reveals who ran for office, who voted and with what frequency; he explains how candidates jostled for position before running for office, how they appealed to freeholders, how public issues and private considerations influenced voter behavior, and whether levels of competition can contribute to a better understanding of social stability and unrest.
Not since Charles Sydnor's landmark work in 1952 has an historian of Virginia so thoroughly examined the political culture that produced such a startling number of revolutionary leaders and founding fathers. Gentlemen and Freeholders offers a fresh look at a subject of enduring interest.
