Dunn is a serious historian. She has combed the correspondence of the well-known and not-so-well-known players in the first and second generations of Virginia's political leaders. She has read the newspaper accounts and records of the Virginia legislature and state constitutional conventions.
Dunn is also a nationalist. She betrays incredulity toward the hopes of that second generation that Virginia exist forever as a non-commercial, agrarian, non-industrious, slavery-based society dominated by the Tidewater elites. Internally, no education even for poor whites. No internal improvements and certainly no taxes, which would have subjected the vast wealth in the form of slaves to claims for the common good. Externally, a hankering for a return to the power of the States under the short-lived Confederation, and assertion of interposition in the meantime. In short, Dunn finds Virginia's wholesale rejection of modernity hard to fathom.
Yet Dunn deals charitably and, I think, fairly with her subject. As she concludes
[Virginia's second generation of leaders] sought only to perpetuate the status quo with passive government, nurture a spirit of assertive provincialism averse to outside interference, and defend their own self-interest. Ironically, they did not even succeed well in that self-serving cause, for they failed to grasp that energy, ideas, and reform are necessary merely to maintain the status quo.Until someone comes up with a better explanation, Dunn's seems right to me.
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