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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Nothing in the literature and historiography of Virginia is more familiar than the “myth of the cavalier.” The term applies most strictly to the notion that royalist refugees of the English Civil War “were the immediate ancestors of the aristocracy which prevails in Virginia to this day,” as William Alexander Caruthers wrote in The Cavaliers of Virginia in 1834. It quickly became conventional to extend the usage to the descendants as well as the ancestors, and twenty years later another novelist, John Esten Cooke, found it natural to invoke the “beautiful dames and gallant cavaliers” of Virginia society in the period of the American Revolution.
1 Caruthers, William Alexander, The Cavaliers of Virginia, or The Recluse of Jamestown: An Historical Romance of the Old Dominion, 2 vols. (1835; rept. Ridgewood, N.J.: The Gregg Press, 1968), 1, 4Google Scholar; Cooke, John Esten, The Virginia Comedians; or, Old Days in the Old Dominion, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 2, 107.Google ScholarWatson, Ritchie Devon provides an extended treatment of the literary uses of the cavalier myth in The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
2 Taylor, William R., Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961)Google Scholar; Buck, Paul H., The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937)Google Scholar; Little, Robert Darden, “The Ideology of the New South: A Study in the Development of Ideas, 1865–1910” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1950)Google Scholar; and Gaston, Paul M., The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mytbmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970)Google Scholar are fundamental for understanding the Old and New South uses of the cavalier.
3 Fiske, John, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 2, 18–29.Google Scholar For an account of northern receptiveness to southern themes see Buck, , 220–35.Google Scholar C. Vann Woodward shows how Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and Henry James used southern characters to criticize northern society in The Burden of Southern History, rev. edn. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 109–40.Google Scholar
4 There are many studies dealing with these developments. Among those of most general significance are Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981)Google Scholar; Lowenthal, David, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Crunden, Robert M., Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilisation, 1889–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982)Google Scholar; Fraser, John C., Americans and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Glassberg, David, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990).Google Scholar
5 Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 131–49, 165–75Google Scholar; and Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in America, rev. edn. (New York: George Braziller, 1959), 170–200Google Scholar, are standard treatments of these versions of Anglo-Saxonism.
6 Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia: or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion (1910; rept. New York: Russell and Russell, 1958)Google Scholar; Fischer, David Hackett, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 212–27, 786–7.Google Scholar See also criticisms of Fischer's thesis by Greene, Jack P. and Horn, James, and Fischer, 's rejoinder, in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48 (1991), 224–30, 238–45, 260–308.Google Scholar The subject has a long historiography. Whitmore, William H.'s early attack on the cavalier theory, The Cavalier Dismounted: An Essay on the Origin of the Founders of the Thirteen Colonies (Salem, Mass.: G. M. Whipple and A. A. Smith, 1864)Google Scholar, reflects Civil War emotions. Cash, Wilbur Joseph, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941)Google Scholar, epitomizes later iconoclasm. Wright, Louis B., The First Gentleman of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Ruling Class (San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1940)Google Scholar, represents more judicious skepticism. Manahan, John Eacott revived the cavalier thesis in “The Cavalier Remounted: A Study of the Origins of Virginia's Population, 1607–1700” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1946).Google Scholar Balanced modern views include Bailyn, Bernard, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Smith, James Morton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 90–115Google Scholar; and Billings, Warren M., Selby, John E., and Tate, Thad W., Colonial Virginia: A History (White Plains, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1986).Google Scholar Martin H. Quitt argues that mid-17th century immigrant leaders broke decisively with traditional values in “Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (1988), 629–55.Google ScholarTate, Thad W. provides an historiographical overview in “The Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake and Its Modern Historians,” in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, ed. Tate, Thad W. and Ammerman, David L. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 3–50.Google Scholar I am indebted to Warren M. Billings for helpful suggestions about the preparation of this article.
7 Goodwin, Maud Wilder, The Colonial Cavalier (1895; rept. New York: Arno Press, 1975) 9Google Scholar; Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, The Cavalier in America (Richmond: Whittet and Shepperson, 1913), n.p.Google Scholar Tyler explained that although Wilson was a Presbyterian, and the Presbyterians had taken up arms against Charles I, they had supported the “just prerogatives of the Crown.”
8 Watson, , 37, 133.Google Scholar Wertenbaker noted the party meaning of the term “cavalier” in Patrician and Plebeian, 4–5.Google ScholarBeaty, John O. characterized Cooke as “very democratic” for his time and place in John Esten Cooke, Virginian (New York, Columbia University Press, 1922), 1.Google Scholar
9 Cooke, John Esten, Virginia: A History of the People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 159–61, 200, 229.Google Scholar
10 Page, Thomas Nelson, The Old South: Essays Social and Political (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896), 9, 16–17.Google Scholar See also Page, Thomas Nelson, Address at the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of Jamestown (Richmond: Whittet and Shepperson, 1919), 24.Google Scholar
11 Trent, William Peterfield, William Gilmore Simms (1892: rept. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 31Google Scholar; Cooke, , Virginia, 229–30.Google Scholar In an early novel Cooke described 18th-century “cavaliers,” including George Washington, as meriting the title by nature as much as by family status — “by God's patent, as by the King's”: Fairfax: or The Master of Greenway Court. A Chronicle of the Valley of the Shenandoah (New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1868), 301.Google Scholar Matthew C. O'Brien comments on these efforts to fuse aristocratic and democratic values in “John Esten Cooke, George Washington, and the Virginia Cavaliers,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 84 (1976), 259–65.Google Scholar
12 Page, , Old South, 106–7Google Scholar; Page, Thomas Nelson, The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908), 366Google Scholar; Page, , Three Hundredth Anniversary, 16, 22.Google ScholarFlusche, Michael in “Thomas Nelson Page: The Quandary of a Literary Gentleman,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 84 (1976), 478–79Google Scholar, comments that Page depicted colonial Virginia “alternately as aristocratic or democratic.” I would emphasize Page's efforts to combine the two views.
13 Jones, Augustine, The Life and Work of Thomas Dudley, the Second Governor of Massachusetts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 52.Google Scholar
14 Page, , Old South, 40Google Scholar; Tyler, , Cavalier in America, n.p.Google Scholar Wayne Mixon distinguishes between the tradition of Virginia nationalism as opposed to South Carolina sectionalism in Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 34–5.Google Scholar Taylor notes the vigor of the “national legend” in the South up to the eve of the Civil War in Cavalier and Yankee, 264.Google Scholar
15 “The Ter-Centenary of Jamestown,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 8 (1901), 416Google Scholar; Chandler, Julian A. C. and Thames, Travis B., Colonial Virginia (Richmond: Times Dispatch Co., 1907), 247.Google Scholar
16 Page, , Three Hundredth Anniversary, 11–12, 18, 27.Google Scholar
17 Ibid., 14–19, 27–8.
18 Bruce, Philip Alexander, The Virginia Plutarch, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), 1, 68Google Scholar; Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, The Cradle of the Republic: Jamestown and James River (Richmond: The Heritage Press, 1906), 182.Google Scholar Tyler was prominently identified with Virginia: he was the son of President John Tyler and himself president of the College of William and Mary.
19 Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, A Criticism by Lyon Gardiner Tyler of History of the American People by David S. Muzzey, of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. rev. (Richmond: Richmond Press, 1932), 5, 13Google Scholar, and passim. See also Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, Virginia Principles: Address of Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, before the Waynesboro (Va.) Historical Society, October 11, 1927 (Richmond: Richmond Press, 1928), 1–7.Google Scholar
20 Bullard, Julia Wyatt, Jamestown Tributes and Toasts (Lynchburg, Va.: J. P. Bell, 1907), passim.Google Scholar
21 Page, , Old Dominion, 60–1.Google Scholar
22 Craven, Wesley Frank, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 1–23Google Scholar, traces the historiography of the problem. See also Craven, Wesley Frank, “‘… And So the Form of Government Became Perfect’,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 77 (1969), 133–4Google Scholar. Vaughan, Alden T., “The Evolution of Virginia History: Early Historians of the First Colony,” Perspectives on Early American History: Essays in Honor of Richard B. Morris, ed. Vaughan, Alden T. and Billias, George Athan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 9–39, deals especially with the histories of Smith, Robert Beverley, and William Stith.Google Scholar
23 Brown, Alexander, The First Republic in America: An Account of the Origin of this Nation, Written from the Records then (1624)Google ScholarConcealed by the Council, Rather than from the Histories then Licensed by the Crown (1901; rept. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 184–5, 249, 252, 258.Google Scholar
24 Brown, , First Republic, xx, xxii, 332, 650Google Scholar; Brown, , English Politics, 24, 209, 262Google Scholar. Another example of prominent use of biological imagery is Johnston, Mary, Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), 26, 94–6.Google Scholar
25 Brown, , First Republic, 615, 650Google Scholar; Brown, , English Politics, 53, 140, 143–4.Google Scholar
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34 Fiske, John, The Beginnings of New England: or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 7–12, 20–5Google Scholar; Fiske, John, American Political Ideas: Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885), 87, 124.Google Scholar
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