Canada and the United States
flaw. It is written in a captivating style; it is superbly
documented and finely argued; it is short and incisive;
it explores a wide range of cultural, historical, and
political issues, from those revolving around "flag
etiquette" to Wait Whitman's poems and Jasper
Johns's flags, from the flag's use as yet another instrument of Americanization of the immigrant working
classes to the various controversies dating from the
turbulent 1960s and 1970s. For each facet of such a
broad and complex subject it offers interpretations and
explanations, because, as Testi writes, "since the Revolution, a multiplicity of ideal and social traditions had
emerged, diverse and in conflict among themselves,
experimental and unaccomplished, contaminated and
uncouth, in which freedom for some could mean
non-freedom for others-and each tradition claimed
to have the 'stars and stripes' on its own side" (p. 72).
The one minor flaw, in a book so dense and attentive
to the many guises in which the relationship between
the American flag and American culture has manifested and manifests itself, is that of not taking into
account a situation in which the "totem" served still
other aims and purposes: the appearance of a rigid,
shining stars-and-stripes flag against a black sky, on the
pock-marked face of the moon-the source of innumerable controversies. I am sure Testi has many
interesting things to say about that, and I remain
curious to know them. But this is really a minor flaw, in
an essay that is otherwise complete and very stimulating, both for a European reading public and (I am
sure) for an American one.
MARIO MAFFI
Universita degli Studi,
Milan
WARREN M. BILLINGS. A Little Parliament: The Virginia
General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century. Richmond, Va.: The Library of Virginia. 2004. Pp. xxi, 284.
$30.00.
The approaching 400th anniversary of the founding of
Jamestown provides an opportune moment for reassessments of the early years of England's first permanent settlement in America. Warren M. Billings's
succinct study of the General Assembly of Virginia in
the seventeenth century makes a significant contribution to recent literature (much of it his own) detailing
innovative adaptations of English law and government
in the colony, and it will surely become the standard
account of the subject.
The book is divided into three parts. The first
explores the assembly's development over the course
of the century, beginning with its creation in 1619 as
part of reforms sponsored by the Virginia Company of
London to breathe new life into the ailing colony.
When the company collapsed five years later and the
colony was placed under crown jurisdiction, the assembly's constitutional legitimacy became uncertain
(Charles I made no reference to the assembly in his
proclamation of 1625, which formally designated the
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467
colony a royal dominion), but colonial governors continued to convene assemblies nevertheless, finding
them useful for the implementation of legislation.
During its early years, the assembly sat as a single body
that incorporated the House of Burgesses, the Council
of State, and the governor, but following the arrival of
Sir William Berkeley in 1642 the assembly evolved into
a bicameral legislature that took on an impressive
array of parliamentary powers. In this period, the
assembly reached the apogee of its influence, viewing
itself as the "wellspring of sovereignty in Virginia" (p.
39), with authority over virtually every aspect of the
colony's affairs. After 1677 and the debacle of Bacon's
Rebellion, however, the House of Burgesses' broad
powers were steadily eroded by an increasingly assertive imperial government in London anxious to reverse
the consequences of neglect of the previous half
century and to reassert crown control by supporting
the governor and council, a trend that necessarily
distanced royal governors from their assemblies.
Derived from the author's extensive biographical
files, part two provides an assessment of officeholders-governors, councilors, assemblymen, speakers,
and clerks-in terms of the functions of their office
and diversity of their backgrounds. As in earlier chapters, this section underlines both the similarities between English and Virginia practice and important
departures and shows how Virginia officeholders often
combined the roles of numerous English counterparts.
The direct representatives of the monarch, royal governors exercised executive, legislative, judicial, and
military responsibilities, as well as having supervisory
authority over the church. Burgesses fulfilled similar
legislative functions as members of Parliament at
Westminster, but for much of the century they also
acted in a judicial capacity as a final court of appeal.
Part three expands upon the foregoing by examining
the work of assemblymen and thereby illustrating the
creative interplay of Old World precedents, colonial
exigencies, and improvisation. Although the General
Court (the colony's superior court) echoed English
assizes and quarter sessions in dealing with criminal
offenses and regulatory cases, it also exercised jurisdiction over a range of civil, maritime, and ecclesiastical matters that would have fallen to a complex
hierarchy of different courts in England. Wherever
possible, assemblymen borrowed from English practice
and custom, but in some areas unique to conditions in
the New World they had to create their own precedents. Perhaps the clearest examples of the latter were
the growing body of laws dealing with Indians and
enslaved Africans. The assembly played a highly influential role in defining and legitimizing chattel slavery
in Virginia by enhancing the authority of masters while
stripping away the rights of slaves. By 1705, Billings
writes, "colonial law regarded slavery as the permanent condition of most African Virginians, and it
deemed them things rather than persons" (p. 207).
In this authoritative account, Billings gives full
expression to the General Assembly's critical role in
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468
Reviews of Books and Films
the government of the colony, which not only survived
a resurgence of centralized power in the final decades
of the seventeenth century but also provided the
foundations of colonial resistance in a greater imperial
crisis yet to come.
JAMES HORN
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
WARREN R. HOFSTRA. The Planting of New Virginia:
Settlement and Landscape in the Shendoah Valley.
(Creating the North American Landscape.) Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 410.
$49.95.
"Old" Virginia in the eighteenth century was the
Chesapeake tidewater extended westward through the
piedmont to the eastern wall of the Blue Ridge
Mountains. This was the late colonial Virginia of a
waterborne tobacco trade, few towns, plantations, and
African slavery. "New" Virginia, beginning during the
1730s, lay beyond the mountain wall in the great valley,
first in the "lower" (i.e. northern) Shenandoah River
valley, particularly in a new county, Frederick, and its
courthouse seat, ultimately named Winchester. By
1800, the valley was well settled, or "planted," and
new, especially in contrast with the old eastern commonwealth. The valley boasted a bustling string of
commercial towns southward from Winchester past
Stephensburg, Strasburg, Woodstock, New Market,
Harrisonburg, Staunton, Lexington, all well-connected
by roads to local hinterlands where farms were small,
slaves few, and wheat-most bound to Philadelphia
and Baltimore shippers-was king.
Warren R. Hofstra has devoted much of his professional life to Frederick County's origins and the valley's lush development; and this dense and well-argued
volume reflects well on the interdisciplinary series"Creating the North American Landscape"-in which
it appears.
The valley's eighteenth-century European settlers
were less often eastern and English than German and
Scots-Irish, who arrived mostly via Pennsylvania. Hofstra meticulously matches their rural cultural mentalities with the geology and land covers of the Shenandoah subregion. Settlers spread out on individual and
family farms by creeks and where dominant deciduous
woods indicated rich land, land they often recognized
as derelict Indian agricultural settlements. This is an
oft-told tale of Euro-American frontiering: common
men and women dispersing ever westward, establishing
independence (they called it "competence") on cheap
"new" landscapes. There is truth here, except that
Hofstra establishes that the planting of New Virginia
was first of all an imperial imperative. The aggressive
French empire in North America threatened to link
Canada and Louisiana in the Ohio Valley, not only
thwarting British territorial ambition but disrupting
Native American nations and directing endless war
eastward. The Shenandoah was already the highway to
battle and revenge between southern tribes and the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Iroquois. So London and Williamsburg wisely offered
enormous transmontane land grants to men who would
populate the Virginia frontier with armed European
farmers loyal to Britain, not unlike General Oglethorpe's contemporaneous plan to create a yeoman Georgia to protect plantation Carolina from the Spanish
and warring Indians.
Imperial policy and war, indeed, made the Shenandoah's first county and its seat simultaneously vulnerable and permanent. The long North American prelude to the Seven Years' War rendered Winchester a
mighty fortress, built by Colonel George Washington
himself, and bound hinterland farmers to Winchester
merchants who supplied flour and meat to Fort Pitt
and other British frontier bastions. Government cash
payments for wartime valley provender accelerated an
ongoing transition from an exchange economy toward
a modern cash-based one. As Hofstra lavishly illustrates, valley farmers and tradespeople had ever been
business-minded, insisting upon meticulous doubleentry bookkeeping for every exchange of labor or use
of animal power, commodities, or imported trade
goods, often settling balances with small amounts of
cash. During the war, however, as the valley's rural and
forest products flowed outward in all directions and
unprecedented volume, Winchester merchants began
to offer goods at discounts to buyers offering cash. The
alluring simplicity of cash exchange reverberated
throughout the rural hinterland, tying it more efficiently to the valley's growing network of towns.
With victory over the French and relative pacification of Native peoples, the valley became a provisioning way station for waves of civilian migrants headed
for Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The world of
wheat-and of corn, cattle, hogs, and sheep-made by
thousands of small-scale producers linked by excellent
roads to functioning market towns would long endure.
This was essentially the same economy that General
Phillip Sheridan expropriated and burned in 1864, but
which survived to reconstruct itself and thrive until at
last, after World War 11, the Shenandoah version of
eastern yeoman production succumbed to the tsunami
of giant-scale industrialized agriculture.
JACK TEMPLE KIRBY
Miami University
PATRICIA E. RUBERTONE. Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Washington, D.e.: Smithsonian Institution. 2001.
Pp. xxi, 248. $40.00.
Inanimate objects speak to those who will listen to
them. For historians, the things that speak loudest are
books and manuscripts. But not all scholars listen only
to words on a page. Archaeologists make nonwritten
objects speak. Oral historians collect wisdom maintained by specific members of a community. They
listen in the most literal sense.
Patricia E. Rubertone is an archaeologist whose
excellent study of Rhode Island draws its strength from
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