The Virginia Dynasty, Four Presidents and a Revolution

In the first thirty-six years of the American republic, a Virginian sat in the White House for thirty-two of them. The four men who made this possible, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, are so woven into the founding mythology of the United States that it is easy to forget how specifically, locally Virginian they were.

Washington was born in Westmoreland County in seventeen thirty-two, the son of a middling planter, and spent his adult life building Mount Vernon into one of the most productive estates in the Chesapeake. Jefferson was born at Shadwell in Albemarle County in seventeen forty-three and spent fifty years constructing and reconstructing Monticello as an architectural argument for the new nation's ideals. Madison, born in Port Conway in seventeen fifty-one, arrived at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in seventeen eighty-seven having drafted what became known as the Virginia Plan, the blueprint that shaped the document the convention eventually produced. Monroe, born in Westmoreland County in seventeen fifty-eight, rounded out the dynasty, serving two terms during the period historians call the Era of Good Feelings.

These four men knew one another's land as well as they knew one another's ideas. They were neighbors, rivals, colleagues, and correspondents across five decades. Their vision of republican government was shaped by the particular world they inhabited, the great-house culture of the Tidewater, the assumption of white male property ownership as the foundation of civic life.

That tension, between the soaring language of liberty and the lived reality of the plantation, was not incidental to the Virginia founders. It was central. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal. He also enslaved more than six hundred people over the course of his lifetime. Virginia gave the republic its finest words and some of its most profound contradictions. Both legacies are real.