Review: Planting an Empire

June 16, 2018 Hunter Wallace Alt-South, American South, Books, History, Maryland, Negroes, Race Relations, Virginia 43

Jean B. Russo and J. Elliot Russo’s Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America is the Chesapeake counterpart to Matthew Mulcahy’s Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean which I reviewed at Occidental Dissent in 2017.

I bought this book at the time and posted a few excerpts about the emergence of White identity in the Chesapeake and the Virginia model. My attention drifted from history to activism last summer and I never returned to Virginia’s history although I have written about the creation of Tidewater’s aristocracy and the conquest of Tsenacommacah. I’ve recently finished reading the book.

The most striking thing about the colonization of the Chesapeake is how different it was from the colonization of New England:

– The settlers who colonized New England were religiously motivated Separatists and Puritans. In contrast, the settlers who came to the Chesapeake were motivated by commerce and geopolitics. They came to the Chesapeake to contest the Spanish claim to North America and to get rich. Their goal was to emulate the Spanish conquest of Mexico. They weren’t anything like the saints who came to New England.

– The founding settlers of Virginia were Anglicans. Anglicanism was the established religion in Virginia like it was in England. The colonists paid taxes to support the Anglican Church. They were mainstream Englishmen from the north of England, the West Country and Metropolitan London. The settlers of New England were Dissenters.

– The settlers who came to Virginia migrated as individuals while the settlers who came to New England tended to migrate as families. For the first several decades, men drastically outnumbered women in the Chesapeake and it took much longer for the population to stabilize and gain cohesion. In Congregationalist New England, the reverse was true. It started out more cohesive and became less so over time.

– In New England, the godly created compact settlements and trained a native born clergy while in Virginia the population was dispersed over a much wider area. The climate was far more sickly in Jamestown. There were more Indians to deal with too. Virginia and Maryland came to rely on cash crop agriculture and a labor system based on servitude and later slavery.

– Unlike Virginia, Maryland was founded as a proprietary colony and served as a refuge for Catholics. It was one of the first places in the European world to institutionalize religious liberty. This later changed during the Glorious Revolution when Protestants seized power only to change hands again when Maryland was restored to the Calvert family.

In some ways, Virginia and Massachusetts were similar:

– In both Virginia and Massachusetts, settlers initially attempted to live in peace with the local Indians, but this changed in the aftermath of devastating Indian attacks – in Virginia, the attempted genocides launched against the English in 1622 and 1644 and later in Massachusetts during King Philip’s War.

– In Virginia and Massachusetts, slavery was legal and blacks came to be seen as racially inferior in the colonial era, although Massachusetts never developed into a ‘slave society’.

Interestingly, Virginia and Maryland were still 90% White in 1700. These two colonies didn’t start out as slave societies like Barbados and South Carolina and could have conceivably gone in another direction. This wasn’t due to a lack of willingness on the part of Virginia and Maryland planters to import negroes so much as it was due to the remoteness of the Chesapeake which was poorly served by slave traders until after the Royal African Company was founded in 1660. The English seized the initiative in the transatlantic slave trade and slaves became much cheaper in the Chesapeake. Previously, only the wealthiest planters with Caribbean connections had been able to afford negroes.

By 1700, Virginia and Maryland were beginning to stabilize. The Indians were no longer a threat to the survival of the colonies. A majority of colonists were native born. The gender ratio was leveling out. The mortality rate was falling as the population shifted to higher ground with access to better freshwater. Virginia and Maryland were becoming more settled and civilized and both colonies were dominated by a gentry class that intermarried and monopolized access political offices and controlled the church vestries. Britain was also dominated by the Anglican gentry after the Glorious Revolution.

In the backcountry, the Germans and Scots-Irish were beginning their journey down through the Great Valley of Virginia where they ran into English settlers expanding out of the Piedmont. This migration brought Lutherans and Presbyterians into Virginia in significant numbers. The Great Awakening also brought about the expansion of the Baptists. In terms of exports, the economies of Virginia and Maryland diversified and became less reliant on tobacco as large parts of both states, particularly in Maryland, were turned over to the cultivation of grain like in the Middle Colonies.

I get tired of hearing about the “Founding Fathers.” In Virginia, the Founding Fathers were the third or fourth generation of native born Virginians. They inherited a thriving society that was built by their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. These generations had built Virginia and Maryland into what they had become by 1776 on a foundation of slavery, white supremacy and colonialism. “Liberty” was meaningful in slave societies because most people were not free. “Equality” was meaningful because most people didn’t have rights. Virginia’s gentry saw itself as the equals of the British gentry and this sensitivity and feeling of being insulted as a class along with the threat to slavery goes a long way towards explaining why the Chesapeake revolted in the American Revolution.

The Russos make clear that “from the time of initial Chesapeake settlement English migrants regarded Africans as different and inferior to themselves.” They also had no inhibitions about conquering the Indians and reducing them to servitude. It is worth remembering that the founding of Virginia coincided with the founding of the plantation of Ulster. The English didn’t even consider the Irish papists to be their equals at the time so imagine what they must have about pagan Africans and Indians.

Thomas Jefferson’s speculations about natural rights was still in the distant future. The real founders of the Chesapeake didn’t have the luxury of entertaining such notions.



About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

41 Comments

  1. Just got back from a tour of parts of NC. Tennessee, western Va, and West Virginia.

    Our people live!!! Southern men can lull this yankee all night with their long vowels and gentle-white-man ways.

    The English hated the Irish catholics more, at times and places, than they did the blacks. In antebellum Maryland a planter famously desisted from lending his black laborers to a friend, ‘take my Irish my negroes are worth something.’ Among my most interesting stops was Hermitage outside Nashville, Andrew Jackson’s estate. For the first time in my life I witnessed the complex truth of America’s slave system which treated blacks more humanely than Jewish myth would ever acknowledge.

    Like our forebears, I left my heart on those appalachian fields of dreams and desertions.

    My people live.

    Love.

  2. Isn’t it amazing what logical thinkers that previous generation whites were? Blacks seen as inferior? Well……they were. They also believed in reward for hard work and real punishment for real crimes.
    Now its all……black is white, pigs might fly and
    ‘dIversity is our strength’. What the hell went wrong?

    • john The deadly words “All men are created equal”, concentration of wealth, the industrial revolution removing men from their households for a great part of the day, compulsory education, cultural marxism.

      • Mandingo Believe it or not, some women don’t think about the flabby dicks of niggers constantly.

        • They’re show-ers not growers. Live Leak sometimes offers a glimpse into all the nastiness some white whores find desirable.

    • The negative distortion of wise words spoken in earlier times and believed by the masses provides ecstasy for our Zionist overlords.

  3. Cavaliers vs Roundheads.

    I offer that this divide stretches back at least thousands of years if not to the height of the last Ice Age. We can safely talk about the Kurgan Hypothesis where “Old Europe” (eg Vinca culture) was overrun by Aryans from the East (eg Yamnaya culture).

    I will go one step further and say that the type of person that survives in an Ice Age refugium is at variance with the type of person that goes out and colonizes land that is opened up by receding ice. The former need to be comfortable within social and economic constraints – law abiding. The latter brave, daring with practical skills – able to be a law unto ones self, an individualist. It’s hard to think of any white person that isn’t some mix of both.

    The Aryan expansion is still underway – it hit a road block of the Atlantic ocean until 1000 years ago, and it hit another roadblock of gravity until 50 years ago. As far as I know there is nothing out there that can stop us.

    Which brings me to another challenge to the movement: if you could be richer, healthier, live longer, be safer, smarter and happier all for the price of one move*; would you do it? Some would say no citing an attachment to a particular area, even though (at least for the last 6 to 8 thousand years) that is not the Aryan way. In fact, I would call this another “Magic Dirt Theory” thinking that they themselves, their culture, their genes depend on and are inextricably linked to a particular volume of dirt.

    I bring this up because, despite Trump having some good weeks, the area where I live, Texas, is seeing a dramatic spike in illegals. And now they are without fear. The math still stands that we will have to have civil war or partition (or both) in order to salvage the situation in America. And it still stands that even if you could bind these people to yourselves and your descendants, why the heck would you? A “clean break” will be better for us for sure, and possibly even for them as well.

    Just think of how facile it would be to secure all the things people claim that they want: one simple household move!* If people aren’t talking this talk, then I am mothballing them as unserious.

    *$10,000 per household? Is that about right? And not everyone will have to move.

    • For some unfathomable reason you have neglected to mention the Solutreans, an Ice Age band of prehistoric fishermen and seal hunters who settled in Eastern North America thousands of years before the Red Injuns. I’m going to assume this was a mere oversight on your part and was not done with malicious intent.

    • @After – uh huh. The big, glaring, problem, in your thesis, is that there is no place left to go – save Hungary, perhaps. Every White country has been over-run. We are going to have to deal with it. Russia, fyi – doesn’t WANT us. We are going to have to learn that our Race is literally our Nation. Something that’s centuries overdue. And act accordingly……………

  4. “Which brings me to another challenge to the movement: if you could be richer, healthier, live longer, be safer, smarter and happier all for the price of one move*; would you do it?”

    Yes, but it depends on your compatibility with those in close proximity. Of all the people I have met throughout my life perhaps two dozen would make my list of desirable neighbors. Hunter is one of those few. And this despite having never met him. I have followed him since Matt Parrot was involved and that’s a long time. People like him are few and far between and they always are. Of course, he may want to avoid someone like me at all costs! I can be very tolerant of racially-conscious whites I disagree with regarding secondary issues but for some it’s all about optics and thinking inside the box. I can be more tolerant of non-whites who broadly think like me than whites who broadly don’t.

    I take it your mention of “richer and smarter” is of the wide-scope variety. But, how can any place be physically safe with the inescapable hazards of 5G on the horizon (and its potential infliction of cataracts and skin cancer) in addition to the poisons contained in municipal water if that is the only source available? Not all threats are from your neighbors. At least if one believes in these things. Perception of safety is very individual even for those in identical circumstances.

    Is the land itself the real source and sustenance of an ideology? Where is this Shangri-La you hint of?

  5. The con-men-servatives like the ones on breitfart and freerepublic are no different than the left. They like to push the lie that blacks are not inherently savage, that they could just be reformed with being told about “conservative values”, and being told how evil the progressive left is(in reality, the jews are the main source of the problem, leftists control nothing), but at the same time these same black loving fools waste bandwidth and breath to persuade the niggers to start to vote republican because they think that, all of a sudden, niggers secretly want to have a shot at the american dream, and that someday most of them will be convinced to get off of welfare, support law and order, end black on black crime(those idiots think of it as if it’s a bad thing), and last of all, for niggers to stop their niglets from being aborted. What complete fucking insanity and cuckness. These repooplicans simply want more nigger votes just like the democrap tactic, really there is no difference between repooplican or democrap at the end of the day. Abe lincoln, who the repooplicans constantly bring up as some lover of blacks and not an “evil plantation owner democrat”, viewed negroes as inferior and suggested for them to be deported. He was a so-called republican. He truly believed in racial differences, but these niggerball watching fakers calling themselves “patriots” willfully refuse to admit that. It all comes down to collective black vs white genetics. No amount of flag waving, trump supporting “smart” uncle toms like Jesse Lee Peterson and other shoe shiners can change the genetic reality of black inferiority. The real everyday blacks are dwelling in the pits of shitty places like detroit, baltimore, atlanta etc. not at right wing rallies. The “democrat plantation” nonsense they push is a farce, it’s the jew plantation and the repooplicans and trump supporters love kissing some jew and negro ass!!

  6. The comment section of Occidental Dissent is turning into Riker’s Island, what with all the niggers and Puerto Ricans posting here.

  7. “They came to the Chesapeake to contest the Spanish claim to North America ”
    How did they contest this? Pretending the Spanish exploration that opened up the new world and claimed it for Catholics were secretly Anglo-prots?

  8. Russo sounds like a guinea name and Elliot is more often a Jewish one in modern day. They both obsess over slaves lives, virtually ignoring the non-planter white population.

    Always consider the source.

  9. HW, how do you think the course of history would have been changed if the Pilgrims had sailed to Virginia, as they had originally intended? It was a storm that blew them off course and forced them to land on Cape Cod. When I was in school the emphasis was on Plimouth Plantation, not the Jamestown colony, even though Jamestown was settled some 13 years before Plimouth. Clearly an anti-Southern bias!

    • Very interesting question albeit purely academic. As a grade school kid from a Northern state I knew all about Plymouth and nothing about Jamestown.

  10. I’ve read a book a couple of years ago, a guy called O’Callahan or something like that about the Irish slavery in the New World. Very though stuff.
    Irish were treated worse than negroes by their masters, because a Negroid slave was significantly more expensive to buy.
    The first shipment of slaves was a group of 60 Irish CHILDREN in the 16th century.

    Disturbing because English and Irish are very similar genetically.
    They Irish slaves were marked on the skin like cattle because there was no physical difference between the slaves and owners.

    • Irishwomen were also bred by Black Bucks to create mulatto slaves in Barbados, because the British did not trust full blooded Africans as servants, felt they were too savage.

  11. alot of the so-called irish slaves were actually scots-irish indentured servants ,mainly presbyterian stock,they were hated more than the catholic irish!they brought their resentment of the anglican establishment to america and helped fight in the revolutionary war!most of the catholic irish came to america later ,mostly during the potato famine!

    • A lot of Scots-Irish in the South. Was that one of the reasons for the hostility between the Confederacy and the Anglo-Saxon ruled Union?

      • scots-irish had folk fighting on both sides,but mainly for the confederacy!like so many brothers wars ,kinfolk killing kinfolk !

      • The Scots Irish in the South were largely commoners, the Aristocracy was largely of English Extraction and High Church Episcopalian which is the same as High Church Anglican only the Monarch isnt the head of the Church, the Presiding Bishop is the head. The Scots Irish became prominent in the new states, KY, TN AL MS, TX, AR, and Northern LA, (South LA remained French in this period). The coastal states were dominated by Anglo-Norman nobility.

        The Scots-Irish split over slavery. Some like Tennessean John Rankin, who Henry Ward Beecher credited as being the man who ended slavery, moved to Ripley Ohio and became one of the biggest Abolitionists in the USA. The Presbyterian Church in Dixie largely went into upheaval over slavery many of them became hard Unionists, some became abolitionists, while those who remained loyal to the Southern ways either left and joined the Southern Baptists, or remained in small Presbyterian churches. The situation didnt rectify itself until the Presbyterian Church in the CSA was formed in 1861, which after the war was renamed the Presbyterian Church in the United States. The Northern Church was Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Still by 1861, the Southern Baptist Convention founded in 1845 in Augusta Georgia and the hundreds of other Baptist Churches were growing so fast the Presbyterians soon found themselves a footnote in Southern History.

        Following the War, the Southern Aristocratic Episcopalian Church was destroyed and many of the Aristocrats children married Baptist spouses and that era was soon forgotten. By 1900, if you werent a Foot-Washin’ Mourners Bench sittin’ Baptist in most of the South, you couldn’t get elected dog catcher.

        • Abraham Lincoln’s family was part of this Scots-Irish migration, although they were an old English Puritan family, they were actually intermarried with Daniel Boone’s family in Pennsylvania. Scots Irish who got off the ship in Boston or New York, always migrated to Pennsylvania or deep into the frontier of New England, as the Puritan Yankees were horrible to them. The Migration, beginning around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, goes down through Maryland, the Shenandoah Valley, to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina then up into East Tennessee and finally to the Cumberland Gap and on into Kentucky. The thing was what these Scots Irish became depended on what stream of the migration they took. Those migrating from North Carolina and into Tennessee, usually if they continued migrating migrated more southward, eventually to Texas and the West, Those in Kentucky split, some went North some went South. Those who went north usually went into Indiana, Illinois and a smaller number in Southern Ohio. The Scots Irish who stayed in Virginia and didn’t migrate South usually migrated through West Virginia and on up into Ohio and from there west.

          As I said before other places, had Thomas Lincoln remained in Kentucky or moved southward, we would have been spared a lot of pain. In Dixie, all his son Abe could have been was a Dirt farmer his place in the Caste System PRE ORDAINED In the North where there was no White Caste System, he could become a Politician.

    • A lot of the best country music artists are/were Scots-Irish, including the great Johnny Cash.

    • Irish Catholics who came to America in the British Colonial Period would have been Convict Slaves.You see there were TWO LEVELS OF WHITE SERVITUDE. Convict Slaves were slaves for life and their children were slaves as well. Indentured Servants were free after Seven years. The reason Southern States have White Trash and Northern States did not have White Trash was this Convict slave trade. Oliver Cromwell’s pacification of Ireland sent thousands of Irish Catholics to Barbados as slaves. The Irish in Barbados were stripped of religion and identity and often bred with Africans some forcibly bred such as Irishwomen to create Mulattoes. Today in Barbados, White Bajans are on the lowest rung of society, the only place where Whites are lower than Negroes besides Marxist South Africa. They are called Red legs.

      Thousands of White slaves from Barbados and their Mulatto children were brought to Charleston SC.

      • Rhianna is from Barbados and has green eyes. She is descended of Afro-Irish people on the island and her mother is black from Guyana in South America. This was not uncommon at all. The British stripped the Irish of their language, their Catholicism and their racial identity in Barbados, leaving nothing. They did similar things here in British North America to Irish Catholics, Roamchil Gypsies, Scottish people who supported the Stuarts, Welsh and English Criminals as well. WHITE SLAVERY IS THE REASON YOU HAD SO MANY MULATTOES IN Maryland and Virginia. Massa wasn’t fornicating like a madman with the wenches.

      • during the english civil war in ireland it wasnt a simple protestant fought for cromwell and catholics fought for for royalists ,part of the royalist army was both protestant & roman catholic ,in some cases the o neils of ulster aided roundhead forces during the 1st seige of londonderry of 1649!part of the british force in ireland,based in the north west of ulster were called the laggan army they were mainly of lowland scots decent and helped besige londonderry with the irish confederate army !i would think both irish catholic and ulster-scots covenanters would have been both deported as prisoners !

Comments are closed.