Polymath Aesthetics

If you haven't read "Tobacco Culture" by TH Breen yet, you really should. It explains the ideology and mindset of the Virginia Founders better than any other book His point about the Virginia gentry's adoption of the so-called country ideology, an issue about which Gov. Spotswood complained much, is particularly interesting. At one point, for example, he notes: "The radical Country ideology received a far more enthusiastic reception in the colonies than it did in the mother country. In England the opposition writers remained marginal, on the fringe of political life, and even the country gentry who sat in Parliament generally took a more flexible stance on public issues than did the essayists who allegedly spoke in their behalf. The story was quite different in America. The Country writers enjoyed broad popularity, and by mid-century the works of Trenchard and Gordon regularly appeared in the provincial press. In the southern colonies Bolingbroke was a favorite, and planters cited his ideas in letters, often without the slightest notion of where those ideas had originated. In fact, what had been a dissenting ideology became in the colonies the dominant political idiom."