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Reviews of Books
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The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the
Shenandoah Valley. By
Warren R. Hofstra
. Creating the North American Landscape. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 410. $49.95.)
Reviewed
by
Thomas J. Humphrey
, Cleveland State University
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Virginia's history is both long and filled with the kinds of delicious stories that fascinate historians. Warren R. Hofstra has looked west to illustrate how whites colonized new land and people as they moved across the Appalachian ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Once in the Shenandoah, white inhabitants began turning the region—land that Indians had been living on and changing for generations—into European-style farmland dotted with barns and farmhouses, bounded by roads and fences, and anchored by towns. By the end of the eighteenth century, whites had turned the Shenandoah Valley into an "open-country neighborhood" filled with independent yeomen who increasingly produced for markets in the east (p. 8). Settlers repeated this process so frequently west of the Appalachian Mountains that, in the nineteenth century, these small towns and neighborhoods became "indelibly associated with the American midlands" (p. 2). |
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Hofstra contends that the transformation of the Shenandoah Valley occurred in three "evolutionary phases" (p. 5). The first began in the 1730s when Europeans moved into the region and ended when colonial officials organized towns and county political infrastructure in the 1740s and 1750s. Hofstra uses Winchester, Virginia, as his prototypical open-country neighborhood. During the second phase, Winchester grew and then prospered as goods, services, credit, and debt flowed into the town and into the hands of its inhabitants before the Seven Years' War. By the end of that war, wheat and flour prices had increased enough to make it possible, and then profitable, for farmers to ship their flour to markets in Alexandria, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The defeat of the British in the Revolutionary War stabilized the valley's political structure, making possible widespread market participation. As farmers increasingly produced for these markets, they entered the third evolutionary phase. When they expanded their endeavors, Shenandoah farmers attracted the attention of tidewater planters and overseers who brought slaves into the valley. These migrants carried with them the power relationships defined by deference and dependence that had characterized the tidewater and that conflicted with the more republican society emerging in the Shenandoah. |
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Colonial and imperial officials began encouraging settlement of the region after a violent conflict in 1742 between white Virginians and a group of seven Oneidas and twenty-one Onondagas, led by an Onondaga named Jonnhaty, who were traveling from Iroquoia to Virginia. The skirmish pushed to the breaking point tense relationships between English colonists and the Iroquois Nation and prompted officials to try to formulate ways to prevent similarly explosive interactions in the future. They concluded, usually independently, that settling the region with white farmers was the best way to protect against being ensnared by the French or left open to Indian attack, and in short order Alexander Spotswood of Virginia began recruiting settlers to the Shenandoah Valley. At much the same time, the Board of Trade in London issued a report that legitimated white settlement of the territory and consolidated power over those settlements in the hands of the Board of Trade, the Privy Council, and various colonial officials. But, because the report "represented a consensus of broadly shared opinions and ideas ... most of what it recommended came to pass" without the implementation of any specific policies (p. 81). |
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