Did G. K. Chesterton exaggerate when he claimed that “the great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it was broken in the Civil War”? If so, it was not by much. After all, Jamestown was founded over a decade before the Mayflower set sail, and during the American Revolution it was Virginians who came to the rescue of Boston agitators—not vice versa. Four of the first five U.S. presidents were Virginians, and of those four at least three would have been figures of national stature even without the presidency: One of them was the victor of the War for Independence, another the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the last has been described by historians as “the Father of the Constitution.”  

In light of all this, the relatively modest status of Virginia in our collective consciousness may seem a bit odd. On the one hand, many ostensibly conservative accounts of American identity play up Northern symbols such as Paul Revere, the Statue of Liberty, and the abolitionist movement and neglect the Old Dominion State. On the other hand, the New York Times’s 1619 Project does acknowledge Virginia’s importance—but only in a purely negative sense, for the purpose of stigmatizing Virginians for their role in slavery. Some prefer to ignore Virginia and others try to shame her, but surprisingly few would share Chesterton’s view of the “Mother of States.” 

In his contribution to the essay collection Virginia First: The 1607 Project, Don Livingston of Emory University responds both to New England triumphalism and the 1619 Project. He argues that the triumph of the North at Appomattox marked both the ascendance of centralized nationalism over local sovereignty and a dangerous falsification of American identity: “After the Union victory, historians began rewriting American history in a Lincolnian idiom that excluded the Virginia part of the story or dismissed it as a failure from which nothing is to be learned or (as is fashionable today), to reject it as fatally stained by the mark of slavery. . . . Virginia constitutionalism was not only a solid achievement, but in respect to limiting the disposition in all modern states to totalitarianism, it was ahead of its time.” The ideal of true federalism derives from Virginia politics, Livingston contends, and he goes so far as to hold up the Confederate Constitution as an example. 

For instance, a Confederate president could anticipate a six-year presidential tenure, explains Livingston, but was forbidden a second term. And in the Confederacy, both the sovereignty of the constituent states and the supremacy of Almighty God were testified to explicitly by the constitutional preamble, while the “promote the general welfare” clause of the original U.S. Constitution had been deleted for being too ambiguous and open to creative mischief. The Confederate Constitution also ruled out tariffs on behalf of sectional interests and granted state legislatures the novel power to impeach federal officials operating within a given state’s jurisdiction. And contrary to what many today assume, the Confederate Constitution did not enshrine slavery in perpetuity but rather prohibited the central government from regulating it; however much we may deplore even that, it does not justify ignoring the other unusual, noteworthy markers distinguishing the Confederate version from the U.S. model upon which it was based.  

Looking even further back than the Civil War, Clyde Wilson insists upon the need to reconsider Thomas Jefferson. The recent fight over Jefferson’s legacy “has largely been a sham battle,” contends the professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina: “On one side are those who want to preserve the inaccurate but comforting image of Jefferson as the twentieth century liberal. On the other side are those liberals who have discovered the obvious fact that he is not one of them and therefore should be banished forever into outer darkness.” 

If more malevolent, the latter are at least more candid, suggests Wilson, since “it is impossible to imagine an American society that is more un-Jeffersonian than the regime we live under today.” Freethinking man of the Enlightenment or not, Jefferson was also an agrarian decentralist who regarded high finance with suspicion and countenanced only limited immigration from Europe; our politically correct society takes centralization for granted, is infatuated with mass consumerism and high tech, and celebrates multiculturalism at the behest of Wall Street. As a devoted Jeffersonian, Wilson tackles head-on recent aspersions against the Monticello Sage’s reputation: Jefferson “was on record about the undesirability of slavery and had done what he could to encourage its end. Like most thoughtful Southerners, he regarded it as an unfortunate thing, but a thing so interwoven with society that nobody knew what to do about it—what he meant by ‘holding a tiger by the tail.’”   

By no means does the above exhaust the range of Virginia First. In “The Real Significance of 1619,” John Devanny highlights that in said year Virginia’s Great Charter was promulgated, signifying the colony’s transition from a business venture to a sovereign political community; in “The True Barriers of Our Liberty and the Virginia Legal Tradition” William Watkins shows that Virginians opposed a National Bank not only on constitutional grounds but because they feared it would empower officials and stockjobbers at the expense of citizens; in “John Smith—First Southerner and First American” Thomas Fleming relates Captain Smith’s colorful international adventures, from single warrior combat against Turks to hobnobbing with Native American aristocracy; in “The Declaration of Independence: Founding Narratives, Contested Understandings, and Slavery’s Challenge,” Barry Shain argues that the localist movement must take a step back from the egalitarian mandate so often imputed to Jefferson’s most famous document. Those of a less expressly political bent might better appreciate “The Legacy of Southern Music in America from Jamestown Colony,” which is Tom Daniel’s reflection on the musical transactions between Jamestown colonists and Powhatan Indians, as well as the longstanding “overlap and coexistence of Scots-Irish and African culture.” 

Needless to say, none of this championing of Virginians should minimize the contributions of, say, New England to the American story. It would be impossible to efface a legacy that includes John Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John F. Kennedy. Rather, Virginia First offers a more deeply informed response to the 1619 Project’s assumption that the single issue of slavery should dwarf every other social, spiritual, constitutional, and cultural concern. This, in turn, implies that those conservatives who celebrate the North at the expense of Virginia’s legacy share more assumptions with their leftist adversaries than they may realize. Without the Cavaliers, without their character and contributions, the story of the American founding falls apart. Like it or not, the American South really is American.