Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement

Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement. By David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. xvi, 366. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $19.50.) Virginia suffered a curious fate amongst the original thirteen states. The first successful English colony-and throughout the colonial era the crown's largest and most populous New World possession-understandably took a leadership role during the Revolution. The Virginia dynasty guided the young republic through thirty-two of its first thirty-six years. But even as others complained about this seeming lock on the presidency, the Old Dominion already had begun to decline. Soon Virginia led the nation in only one area: the number of its people who moved away. This migration, argue coauthors David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, explains not only much of Virginia's history, but of the nation's history as well. Appropriately, the Virginia of this study is far larger than the present state. In addition to the large area once claimed and administered by the Old Dominion (West Virginia, Kentucky, and other parts of the Ohio Valley), the authors also examine African and European migration to the Chesapeake, movement within the province, and the great outpouring of black and white Virginians across the continent after the Revolution. Fischer and Kelly have organized their study of this westward movement as an in-depth examination of Frederick Jackson Turner's wellknown frontier thesis. They argue that Turner did ask the right question and sometimes offered the correct answer, but only in certain areas and not always for the right reasons. Fischer and Kelly also reject the more recent interpretations of the new western historians. In the authors' words, the frontier "was not, in the fashionable sense, a `zone of interaction' between cultures but a place where one culture rapidly established a hegemony which persists to this day" (xvi). The first two chapters-approximately one third of the text-are devoted to migration to and within the Old Dominion. The authors examine migration streams from various regions of the British Isles, northwestern Europe, West Africa, and from other colonies. Within Virginia, each of these streams influenced the others, and together they formed the components of a common Virginian identity. Despite regional differences in speech, folkways, religion, and agriculture, all Virginians shared a social and political identity tied to the colony's Tidewater elite. Each region also embraced the ideal of personal freedom-not necessarily the democracy associated with Turner's frontier, but "the hegemonic freedom of the cavaliers, who believed that people of different ranks possessed different liberties and that some possessed no liberty at all"(134). By studying Virginia as a source region for the westward movement, the authors underscore the impact of outmigration on the region that the migrants left behind. The state's rate of population growth waned, especially in comparison to other states. The new western states did not become the closely allied sister republics that Thomas Jefferson had envisioned. …