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A World Turned "Topsy Turvy": Robert Munford, The Patriots, and the Crisis of the Revolution in Virginia
Michael A. McDonnell
| AS the War of Independence began, two Virginia gentlemen lamented the "phrenzy of the times" and the political and social disorder the resistance movement and the onset of hostilities caused their community. Members of the local County Committee—violent upstarts "intoxicated" with their newfound "liberty"—had persecuted them and many of their genteel peers. If this public insolence was not enough, the gentlemen had suffered private humiliation at the hands of these "noisy hypocrites," who hid under a "mask of patriotism." One man's nephew had been forced to disguise himself in the character of a "lowly" common servant to avoid persecution. The other had been denied the hand of the daughter of one of the committee members in marriage, to which he felt he had an "undoubted right." Worse still, "female politicians" had abandoned their traditional roles and had helped spur these "violent patriots" to action. Even the gentlemen's servants had tested their authority. Dismayed and distraught by the turn of events, the two gentlemen worried that, at the very moment resistance to Britain turned into rebellion, rebellion would turn into revolution. Patriots themselves, they envisioned the loss of their traditional, comfortable world as their private and public lives were turned "topsy turvy."1 |
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The two unhappy gentlemen were Meanwell and Trueman, characters in a play, The Patriots, written by Robert Munford of Mecklenburg County, Virginia. The dark satiric comedy was written in 1777, in the midst of the Revolutionary War in Virginia, and thus presents a remarkably vivid portrait of a society and political culture under stress. Ostensibly about a thwarted romance between Trueman and Mira, a committeeman's daughter, the action of the play takes place amid dramatic committee deliberations on the patriotism of suspected loyalists and ranges widely over a number of different private and public scenes. The play only very thinly disguises—and often heightens—the author's uncertainties, anxieties, and worries about the direction that the Revolution appeared to be taking. As conservative resistance to British imperial rule increasingly led to radical action, internal challenges and upheaval became commonplace. The Patriots reveals that the nature of those conflicts and confrontations was both domestic and public. |
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Munford was also the author of the
better-known play The Candidates, written in 1770.
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The Candidates, which satirizes eighteenth-century
elections for the House of Burgesses in Virginia, has had an enormous
impact on scholarship dealing with political culture in pre-Revolutionary
Virginia, particularly since Charles Sydnor's wonderful evocation
of Virginia politics in Gentlemen Freeholders.
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Sydnor's interpretation of the play as demonstrating a "genteel,
hierarchical, deferential, and essentially consensual style of eighteenth-century
Virginia politics" has been subject to some intense criticism, but
most commentators on Virginia's political culture have had to begin
with the play itself or at least Sydnor's description of late-colonial
Virginia.
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