12 This chronological fact must be stressed, because an opposite idea has become conventional—that Virginia’s high elite and its classical culture were not firmly in place until the early or even mid-18th century. A problem of evidence exists here. Surviving sources for the study of Virginia’s cultural history are more abundant for the 18th than the 17th century. But enough materials survive from the period 1650-90 to settle the question. They include the Fitzhugh letters and correspondence of the first William Byrd, and English materials including Filmer, Chicheley, Culpeper and Washington mss., together with the travel account of Durand of Dauphiné published in 1687. Further, the sources collected in Hening’s Statutes (from manuscripts now lost) also establish that the institutional development of this culture happened mainly in the period 1643-90. The question of timing is important in its causal implications, for it shows that Virginia’s classical culture emerged before the development of slavery on a large scale.
1 The speaker was Major William Stoddard (1759-93), a rich Maryland planter who lived on the Potomac River; the incident appears in Kathyrn Zabelle Derounian, ed., The Journal and Occasional Writings of Sarah Wister (Rutherford, N.J., 1987), 47, 77 (26 Oct. 1777).