| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Gentlemen and Freeholders: Electoral Politics in Colonial Virginia. By John Gilman Kolp. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xiv, 249 pp. $46.00, isbn 0-8018-5843-7.)

Long viewed as a model of stability, Virginia's colonial political culture has been variously attributed to entrenched planter oligarchies, a model democracy, and a patron-client world of deferential freeholders and issueless elections. The problem with these structural approaches to political culture is getting it to move. They cannot explain process and change. John Gilman Kolp's functional approach revises this static model for Virginia in two ways. He recognizes two coexisting and interactive but distinct levels of political community—one centered on Williamsburg politics and the other at the level of the electoral district. But Kolp moves beyond the hustings and into local units of political community, those centered on parish, vestry, or even rural neighborhood politics, to uncover the practices that shaped their politics. Along the way he finds a dynamic model for Virginia's political culture. 1

He uses a labor-intensive method to get there. Tallying frequencies of contested burgess elections, Kolp divides Virginia's counties into categories of competitive, intermittently competitive, and noncompetitive electoral politics. Then, analyzing each voter in Virginia's county poll books (there are several hundred), Kolp uncovers patterns behind the contentiousness. His method of integrating and correlating each voter's decision with relevant local factors as well as relevant electoral issues allows the reader "to understand the workings of Virginia's political culture" (emphasis mine). . . .

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