Book Review

"Away! I'm bound away!" That evocative line from the folk tune "Shenandoah," argue David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, best describes the westward movement from Virginia—a movement both of people bound to a traditional culture of "hierarchical freedom" and of men and women literally bound in the chains of slavery.	1
The authors examine the westward movement in terms of its origins rather than its destination. Their perspective emphasizes the conservative nature of westering, a story of cultural persistence much like Fischer's earlier work in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). Seventeenth-century settlers had planted a tradition-bound, hierarchical, closed society. In the eighteenth century Virginia society was transformed, not by the force of the frontier, but by forces from abroad—the imposition of religious toleration by British authorities, the immigration of groups such as the Scots-Irish and the Germans with their own distinctive traditions, and the subsequent flowering regional cultures within the province. Toleration and diversity were imported, then flourished on the frontier.	2
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