These passages are quoted from:

Chapter 11: "British Strategy Shifts Southward"

The British soon gave Virginians a foretaste of their plans for the South when Major General Alexander Leslie at the head of an invasion force of over 2,200 men sailed into the Chesapeake Bay on October 20, 1780. A small fleet commanded by Commodore George Gayton consisting of three naval ships, the Romulus of 44 guns, the Blonde of 32, and the Delight of 16, along with one of the Goodriches' privateers and several smaller craft, escorted Leslie. James Parker, Hector McAlestor, and other tories from the Norfolk area were on board. The British divided their force, landing the next day at Portsmouth and two days later at Newport News and Hampton. Cavalry swept out to take Kemp's Landing and Great Bridge to the southeast of Portsmouth and moved northwest of Newport News about halfway to Williamsburg.

According to Leslie's instructions from the British commander in chief, General Clinton, the excursion was to provide "a diversion in favor of Lt. Gen. Earl Cornwallis." The latter had been beseeching Clinton to assist in his invasion of the Carolinas by distracting American defenders to the north. The best way, Clinton concluded, was for Leslie to establish a post at Portsmouth from which he could raid the major American supply ... Читать дальше »

These passages are quoted from "Part Two: Land and the American Revolution"

Chapter 12: "Evading the 1763 Proclamation: The Land Companies"

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government, they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten, that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage." -- H. L. Mencken

The Ohio Company Whelps the Mississippi Company

The Ohio Company of Virginia, which had been launched with such golden hopes, soon ran into problems. The long years of the French and Indian War paralyzed all activity, preventing the company from meeting the terms of a grant that called for settling two hundred families. Also, the internal politics in Virginia was hostile to the company, not only because of public ire against its role in starting the war, but also because of party politics.

This hostility requires some explanation. Although the aristocratic class formed a united front when its collective privileges were threat ... Читать дальше »

Adapting to a New World
Part III

English immigrants arriving in the Chesapeake in the middle decades of the seventeenth century would have been struck initially by the features of their new environment that so obviously differed from the one they had left behind in England: the intricate maze of waterways; the vast tracts of unbroken forest; the hot, humid summers; the "strange" native population; the novel seasonal rhythms of life and labor imposed by plantation agriculture; the absence of towns and manufactures; the social mix of English people from different regions of the parent society; the high incidence of death and disease; and the larger numbers of males than females. Before considering living standards and local community in the Chesapeake, it is worth outlining some of the salient features of society as it developed along the tobacco coast in the second half of the century.

Social structure differed from that in England in several important respects. Entire sections of English society were missing. There was little in the Chesapeake to attract men of established fortune in the mother country, despite the efforts of promotional writers to convince them otherwise. In numerical terms, apart from a brief flurry during the early years of settlement, the gentry and aristocracy did not play an important role in colonizin ... Читать дальше »

Clearly, neither expectations nor opportunity were the same for all Eastern Shore whites. Eveyone was not equally concerned with economic advancement to permanent residency in the region, and not everyone had the same ability to improve his situation. If there was a shared desire, it was probably for family, land, and independence -- householder status -- but the specific way people defined and sought this goal surely varied from settler to settler depending on how great a stake a person already had in society, how readily he accumulated capital, and how strongly he was tied by family loyalties to other whites in the area.

The poor had the most to gain and least to lose by leaving Talbot. For the disinherited and distressed, migration had long been a way of life. The poor of rural England moved often, some coming all the way to the New World. In the colonies, the landless continued to migr-ate from place to place in search of security. Thus many of Talbot's sharecroppers and laborers had moved before. Moreover, most were like Thomas Salmon and without attachments to other people in the county; most were also like Salmon in that their small incomes made it difficult to get a start on the Eastern Shorc. All could hope that in a less settled area they would have the opportunity, generally denied them in Talbot, to marry and become indepen ... Читать дальше »

This excerpt is from:

Chapter 7: This Land of Promise

Railroad promoters recognized that the American character was compounded of equal elements of deep-seated fear and overweening pride. They probed the admixture, soothing their countrymen's worst anxieties and exploiting the national character's more positive aspects, which often lay much closer to the surface, especially its proclivity to expect a rosier future. Nowhere was this appeal to native optimism more evident than in the literature that touched on the possibility that railroads would unlock the treasures of the West.

Nothing so captured Americans' imaginations as their West. It became a metaphor for the character of America. For generations, it stood as the quintessential symbol for everything that made the country unique. The adjectives that promoters used to describe the West were those that were often applied to the entire nation. Enthusiasts loved to emphasize that the West was big, continental in scope, and, like the nation itself, boundless, with its limits always beyond the horizon. Writers emphasized the West's fertility, evoking a natural comparison with the whole nation's tremendous population growth, scientific maturity, and ability to generate new ideas. Americans were also convinced their West was a great national storehouse. The undeveloped region ... Читать дальше »