29 Lord Adam Gordon, “Journal of an Officer … in 1764 and 1765,” in Newton D. Mere-ness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York, 1916), 404-5.
30 The historiography of the Virginia cavalier is itself a fascinating subject. In the 19th century, gentlemen-scholars such as Philip Bruce documented the Royalist origins of the Virginia elite, and argued that it came from an integrated group of English gentry and merchants, of whom the latter “traced their pedigrees back, and that not too remotely, to landed proprietors in the different shires” (Social Life of Virginia, 83).
Bruce was correct. But another scholar from a very different part of Virginia’s society, T. J. Wertenbaker, condemned this interpretation as nostalgic nonsense and made a career of debunking the “cavalier myth.” Wertenbaker argued that “few men of good social standing” came to the Chesapeake, and that the “leading settlers in Virginia” were petty tradesmen of “humble extraction” (Patrician and Plebian in Virginia (1910, rpt. New York, 1959), 10, 11, 28-30, passim).
Wertenbaker was unable to consult English materials until after he wrote this book, and in the few cases where he made specific attributions of social rank to individual Virginians, he was mistaken in his facts (e.g., Thoroughgood, Cary, Ludwell, even Byrd). By reason of his origins, he also had an axe to grind against the first families of Virginia. But the image of the cavalier was unwelcome in the New South, and his argument was quickly accepted. W. A. Reavis appeared to buttress it with a quantitative test which reported that 8296 of Maryland’s elite were “not real English gentry at all.” But under the heading of “not real” he included younger sons, shrinking fortunes and any sort of commercial connection (“The Maryland Gentry and Social Mobility, 1637-1676,” WMQ3 14 (1957), 418-28). Similar conclusions appear in Aubrey Land, “Economic Base & Social Structure: The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century,” JECH 25 (1965), 639-54, and “The Planters of Colonial Maryland,” MDHM 67 (1972), 109-28; but Land had virtually no evidence on English origins, and Maryland was not Virginia. The Wertenbaker thesis has been accepted by social historians of the “Chesapeake group,” by cultural historians who write about the “cavalier myth” and by leading historians of the New South.
A few scholars have confirmed parts of the Bruce thesis: as to origins, John E. Manahan, “The Cavalier Remounted: A Study of the Origins of Virginia’s Population, 1607-1700” (thesis, Univ. of Va., 1946); as to timing, Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” 90-118; as to beliefs, Bertram Wyatt-Brown in his excellent and useful Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford, 1982).