The English settlers who staked their claims in the Chesapeake Bay were
drawn to it for a variety of reasons. Some sought wealth from the land,
while others saw it as a place of trade, a political experiment, or a
potential spiritual sanctuary. But like other European colonizers in the
Americas, they all aspired to found, organize, and maintain functioning
towns--an aspiration that met with varying degrees of success, but
mostly failure. Yet this failure became critical to the economy and
society that did arise there. As Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth
reveals, the agrarian plantation society that eventually sprang up
around the Chesapeake Bay was not preordained--rather, it was the
necessary product of failed attempts to build cities.
Paul Musselwhite details the unsuccessful urban development that defined
the region from the seventeenth century through the Civil War, showing
how places like Jamestown and Annapolis--despite their small size--were
the products of ambitious and cutting-edge experiments in urbanization
comparable to those in the largest port cities of the Atlantic world.
These experiments, though, stoked ongoing debate about commerce,
taxation, and self-government. Chesapeake planters responded to this
debate by reinforcing the political, economic, and cultural authority of
their private plantation estates, with profound consequences for the
region's laborers and the political ideology of the southern United
States. As Musselwhite makes clear, the antebellum economy around this
well-known waterway was built not in the absence of cities, but upon
their aspirational wreckage.
