| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia. By Susan Dunn. (New York: Basic, 2007. x, 310 pp. $27.50, ISBN 978-0-465-01743-0.)

This is a story of decline. Virginia led the American colonies during the Revolution and gave the new nation four of its first five presidents, as well as a host of influential politicians and thinkers. But even in those years, Susan Dunn argues, Virginians were planting the seeds of the Old Dominion's decay, successfully resisting any reform that might unsettle the fortunes of its planter elite, including not only the emancipation of black slaves but also the extension of the franchise to non-landowning whites or a more equitable representation of western counties in the legislature. The planters kept an antediluvian state constitution on life support for decades, rejected calls for economic diversification and public funding of education, stiff-armed federal aid for internal improvements, and descended into a rear-guard defense of both slavery and the states' rights that bolstered it against the "consolidationist" proclivities of the federal government. Essentially, as Dunn tells it, this is the tale of how Virginia resisted the market revolution—the economic devel opment and culture of democratic modernity that was transforming the rest of the nation— and thus became a backwater, almost the antithesis of what it meant to be American.

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