Book Review

Canada and the United States

The question that John Gilman Kolp asks himself in this book is what made the political system of colonial Virginia work on the smallest and most personal levels of the county, the parish, and the neighborhood. Thus, his focus comes to rest on electoral politics: on who ran and on how the enfranchised voted for delegates to Virginia's House of Burgesses in the only election in which they had a voice. Setting aside debates over political stability or instability in seventeenth-century Virginia politics, Kolp turns to the eighteenth century in search of consistent patterns in the choices voters made that illuminate the distinctive political culture Virginia bequeathed to the nation. Thus his work falls into company with some of the most distinguished scholarship on Virginia political history including Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown's Virginia, 1705–1782: Democracy or Aristocracy? (1963) and this book's near namesake, Charles Sydnor's Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington's Virginia (1952).

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Kolp's play on Sydnor's title is significant. Sydnor asked why Virginia property holders voted consistently for their social betters, and he decided that deference between classes provided the glue of colonial politics. Democracy—a word little used in the eighteenth century—according to Sydnor came not in competition over issues for voter interests but in the respect gentry officeholders displayed for the men and families who put them in office. Accepting distinctions between an elite and a larger middling class of freehold planters—and marshaling an impressive array of statistics to demonstrate the superior wealth in land and slaves of candidates over voters—Kolp focuses his attention more on the latter and asks how their choices at the polls reflected social relations.

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