Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 111 / Number 3
ABSTRACT:
The Conflict and Co-existence of Values on Virginia's Northern Neck in the Revolutionary Era
- By Albert H. Tillson, Jr., pp. 221–62
As contemporary debates over globalization remind us, adjustment to a
dynamic market economy and its values can be difficult and conflicted.
Many groups in the early modern world faced similar problems. Certainly
the major planters of eighteenth-century Virginia expressed and acted
upon contradictory attitudes toward the commercial world in which they
lived.
This essay argues that the lives and identities of the gentry of
the Northern Neck region were fundamentally shaped by conflicting
loyalties to both the ideal of friendship with its connotations of
unselfish benevolence, intimacy, and similarity and that of commerce
with its emphasis upon rational pursuit of individual self-interest and
exchange between diverse parties. Rather than being either disconnected
visionaries who ignored material realities or hypocrites who espoused
one principle while practicing another, they embraced both standards so
deeply as to shape in sometimes contradictory ways their analyses of and
responses to the economic world in which they operated. Paradoxically
the values of friendship and commerce often proved to be interdependent
as well as antithetical. They were materially connected because bonds
and professions of friendship could be used to win business and to press
trading partners for concessions beyond those justified by the market.
They were semantically affiliated because staking a claim to the
"higher" standard of friendship or criticizing the "baser" conduct of
others required that both claimant and audience be acquainted with and
acknowledge the existence of both standards.
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