which were characteristics of the late 17th Century founders
of the great families. Rarely did these men want to overturn the
prevailing political leadership, they wanted to join it. The declining
fortunes of the Tidewater planters and the crises of the 1760's
accelerated the rise to power of all three of these new elements in the
House of Burgesses.

The Political Philosophy of Virginia, 1763

From that moment on September 2, 1774, when the Virginians appeared at
the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and John Adams recorded
in his diary, "The gentlemen from Virginia appear to be the most
spirited and consistent of any", until Chief Justice John Marshall died
in 1835, Americans marveled at the quality, quantity, and political
brilliance of this generation of revolutionary Virginians. And we have
marveled since. It was not just the towering national figures like
Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, James Monroe, and John Marshall, or the great state
leaders like Peyton Randolph, Richard Bland, George Wythe, or Edmund
Pendleton who astounded contemporaries. It was the fact that they knew
of other men in Virginia as capable--Thomas Nelson, Jr., Benjamin
Harrison, Severn Eyre, Francis Lightfoot Lee, John Page, John Blair,
Jr., Robert Carter Nicholas, or Dr. Thomas Walker.

The key to the political sagacity of these revolutionary Virginians is
found in the willingness of an elite group of planter gentry to serve
government and to serve it well and in the acceptance of their
leadership by the rest of the Virginians. It is found in the
enlightened attitudes these leaders had about their responsibilities as
officeholders to the people. It is found in the day-to-day operations
of government in the county and the General Assembly not just in the
great crises of the Stamp Act, the Coercive Acts, and Lexington and
Concord. Liberty and freedom do not spring full-blown into life only in
times of trial, they are nurtured carefully and often unknowingly over
the years. They demand, as Jefferson said, "eternal vigilance".
Certainly, liberty and freedom were not allowed to atrophy and become
weak in colonial Virginia. Instead, it was the English who had not been
vigilant and who had allowed a particularly strong concept of liberty
to grow strong in Virginians.

How could a planter elite become the fount of republicanism.[4] First,
the common bond of land and tobacco farmin