The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley.

The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra. Creating the North American Landscape. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xviii, 410. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-8018-8271-0; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-7418-1.)

This study persuasively depicts the evolving landscape and society of Virginia's eighteenth-century Shenandoah Valley as the result of a complex interaction of the natural environment, judgments of the human inhabitants, objectives of imperial policy makers, and the changing Atlantic economy. As European settlers arrived they created open-country neighborhoods of scattered farms. Earlier hostilities between the Iroquois and other Native American groups had encouraged resident Indians to leave the area, thus reducing the need for clustered settlements. Decisions on which land to settle and purchase were influenced by the trails and cleared fields left by Indians, the advantages of combining shale and limestone uplands with rich creek bottomlands into single holdings, and the settlers' preference for economic independence through diversified grain-livestock agriculture.

Yet developments at provincial and imperial centers of power also influenced this emerging frontier. British officials feared French encroachments into the Ohio Valley and the Appalachians, destabilization of the frontier through warfare among Indian groups or between Indians and settlers, and the establishment of hostile communities of escaped slaves in the Virginia mountains. These concerns prompted officials to encourage settlement by Scotch-Irish and German Protestants, whose anti-Catholicism and preference for agricultural patterns that minimized slaveholding made them the ideal counters to these threats. To attract this population, authorities ceded control of land distribution to speculators who had connections to the desired groups and who accommodated settlers' preferences in dividing frontier real estate. A dispersed-settlement pattern resulted, which made the establishment of county governments necessary for defense. Settlers themselves pushed for such action in order to secure their property and the web of roads and economic relationships that bound them together.

Ultimately Winchester emerged at the top of a hierarchy of smaller towns. Winchester's central role in frontier defense during the Seven Years' War stimulated its economy as settlers provided food and other goods and services to the military personnel stationed there. In the following decades, expanded demand for wheat in Britain, southern Europe, and the West Indies and the growing availability of European consumer goods tied the rural countryside more closely to these towns and the outside world.

Throughout these changes, valley settlers sustained an economy and culture that minimized inequality and emphasized stability and cooperation over competition. Exchanges of goods and services created widespread networks among residents, binding them together by the debts and credits recorded in countless single-entry and double-entry account books. The logic behind wheat marketing and book accounts fostered a Newtonian view of the economy as static, balanced, and cooperative, hindering even the calculation of profits and losses. At century's end the region was only beginning a transition toward a world shaped by cash, profit, competition, and conflict.

For this reviewer at least, Hofstra overstates the role of harmony and consensus in valley life. Debts and book accounts could tie rural families together as scholars of eighteenth-century New England suggest. Yet Max Weber and other theorists have argued that double-entry bookkeeping facilitated calculations of profit and encouraged the development of capitalism. Certainly such accounting allowed Falmouth merchants who traded with the Shenandoah Valley to assess their profits and compare themselves to competitors. Presumably calls to balance an account could provoke resentment when one party was substantially indebted to the other. One also wishes to know more about the roles played in this society by slaves, tenant farmers, and the poor for whose benefit a 1794 Winchester ordinance set aside the bread confiscated for overpricing. Even though in the valley the American Revolution occasioned none of the draft riots and insurrections that troubled the surrounding Virginia regions, valley leaders' correspondence indicates significant popular unrest.

None of this detracts from Hofstra's achievement. The complexity of the argument, the skillful intermixing of narrative and analysis, and the abundance of maps and illustrations make this required and pleasurable reading for anyone interested in the development of the early American frontier.

University of Tampa 

ALBERT H. TILLSON JR.