Christopher Michael Curtis. Jefferson's Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion

Christopher Michael Curtis's engaging monograph traces the complicated relationship between citizenship and land ownership in Virginia from the eighteenth century through the antebellum era. Delving into the contested process through which Virginia's legal system redefined the concept of the “freehold,” Curtis uncovers the struggle of elite Virginians to steer their republican political agenda through the pitfalls created by British tyranny and the demands of modern merchant capitalism. Resting his analysis on a marvelous array of legal, political, and cultural sources, Curtis argues that common-law conceptions of the freehold as a “feudal tenure” that by definition limited landholders' rights were, by the 1780s, giving way to a new system of law that “vested freeholders with an absolute right of ownership in their lands” (p. 7). By the 1830s, however, Virginians recognized that this legal shift was threatening their society with the specter of commercial corruption and instability. As this antebellum generation struggled over the role that slavery should play in their society, they ultimately de-emphasized the freehold as the principal pillar on which political power rested. Liberal understandings of property rights gave ground, by the end of the antebellum era, to an ideology that openly and increasingly expressed its hostility to commercial exchange that seemingly threatened to subvert slaveholding society in Virginia.

Capitalism · Dominion · Elite · Expropriation · Feudalism · Freehold · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law