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This is the tale of the heroic John Rolfe, the English farmer and gentleman who saved the fledgling colony of Virginia not once, but twice. In this episode, we describe how Rolfe smuggled Orinoco tobacco into Virginia, and used his unique skills to learn how to cultivate it and save the broke colony from financial collapse. We then tell the true story of Rolfe's fairy tale-like marriage to Pocahontas, focusing on how the marriage created the colony-saving "Peace of Pocahontas" and how London Society in the Court of King James I viewed her with immense interest and respect.

We then turn to how John Rolfe died, discussing the 1622 Indian Massacre that he tried and failed to stop, but why his previous work to save the colony ensured the 1622 disaster wasn't enough to totally destroy it. In this episode, we also describe Rolfe's family background, the immense tragedy he suffered when the Sea Venture wrecked in Bermuda, Captain Argall's capture of Pocahontas at the cost of a kettle, Rolfe's Christian faith, and how Rolfe helped develop representative government in Virginia.

0:00 How John Rolfe Saved Virginia with Tobacco

3:41 Reviewing the Golden Age

3:57 Who Was John Rolfe?

8:10 Tragedy Strikes Rolfe

9:39 John Rolfe Saves Virginia by Cultivating Tobacco

15:21 How Tobacco Built Virginia

15:39 Rolfe Saves Virginia Again: The Peace of Pocahontas

17:22 The Capture of Pocahontas and the Anglo-Powhatan War

18:39 Pocahontas Meets John Rolfe

21:26 Pocahontas Becomes Beloved in England, and Dies

23:30 Rolfe Returns to Virginia, and Helps Create Representative Government

25:06 Rolfe Dies in the 1622 Indian Massacre

26:48 The Legacy of John Rolfe

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support my work at no cost to yourself, you can do so by ordering the sources I used for this episode using the links below

• Bruce, Philip Alexander: Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, https://amzn.to/437bho4

• Dowdey, Clifford: The Great Plantation, https://amzn.to/434EBeS

• Willison, George F.: Behold Virginia: The Fifth Crown, https://amzn.to/4do9YG4

• Bruce, Philip Alexander: Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, https://amzn.to/4tDRsQd

• Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson: Virginia Under the Stuarts, 1607-1688, https://amzn.to/431VN4O

• Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson: Planters of Colonial Virginia, https://amzn.to/4tyVARt

• Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson: Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia, https://amzn.to/48ZgIcl

• Morton, Richard L.: Colonial Virginia, https://amzn.to/4ua3bqY

• Andrews, Matthew Page: The Soul of a Nation: The Founding Of Virginia and the Projection of New England, https://amzn.to/4d9Ut60

• Bruce, Philip Alexander: The Virginia Plutarch, Vol I, https://amzn.to/437cAU0

This is the story of Colonial Virginia in its fullest flowering. From its unique culture to its excellent people, from the glorious Georgian mansions for which it is still remembered to the political leaders its tobacco plantations produced, this is how the special society that grew out of the Virginia Tidewater turned into the cradle of the American Revolution. Particularly, we discuss why the Virginia gentry produced such excellent leaders as it did, and how the culture of leadership and command, when paired with the sense of dignity and refinement for which the classic Virginia Gentlemen were known, created most of America's greatest heroes and most important leaders.

In this episode, we dive into both those leaders and what enabled them to be such. We uncover the importance of architecture to the Virginia gentry's social dominance, how leadership was built at the local level and cultivated from the ground up, how the political culture of Virginia's Golden Age produced the Founders, and how their reliance on depleted soil, London merchants, and British debt became a budding economic crisis for colonial Virginia. But, most of all, we discuss how the civil society of the Golden Age was refined and cultivated, and how that produced the men who led the Revolution and created the Early American Republic.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

• Sydnor, Charles S.: Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington's Virginia: https://amzn.to/3R0ujKf

• Isaac, Rhys: The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790: https://amzn.to/4dEcMiL

• Evans, Emory G.: The "Topping People": The Rise and Decline of Virginia's Old Political Elite, 1680-1790: https://amzn.to/430Fmpi

• Bruce, Philip Alexander: Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: https://amzn.to/4eEocVF

• Wertenbaker, Thomas J.: The Planters of Colonial Virginia, https://amzn.to/4uDFJ4Y

• Morton, Richard L.: Colonial Virginia, https://amzn.to/4ua3bqY

• Dowdey, Clifford: The Golden Age: A Climate for Greatness, https://amzn.to/4wkvVi7

• Stanard, Mary Newton: Colonial Virginia: Its People And Customs, https://amzn.to/4u5X2Mm

• Wright, Louis B.: The First Gentlemen of Virginia, https://amzn.to/3PgaHRM

• Bridenbaugh, Carl: Seat of Empire, https://amzn.to/42WMhQn

0:00 The Virginia Golden Age

2:51 The Refinement of Virginia and Creation of the Virginia Gentleman

4:39 How Architecture Supported the Gentry's Pre-Eminence

6:54 The Inheritors: How Merchants Became Gentlemen

10:20 Virginia Hospitality

11:49 How Plantations and Local Leadership Built the Great Virginia Statesmen

19:02 The House of Burgesses, The Training Ground of the Founders

23:48 The Dire Economic Reality In Colonial Virginia

28:43 How Virginia's Culture Was Refined

29:45 Liberty and Duty: Why the Founding Grew Out of Virginia

34:34 The Golden Age Fractures

38:26 The Sun Sets on Colonial Virginia, and Rises on a Republic They Built

The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe: 12 Virginia Gentlemen who embarked upon the Transmontane Expedition with Governor Alexander Spotswood as he sought to open new lands to settlement, defeat the attempt of the French to box Virginia in, and bend the Topping People to his will. A romantic adventure story populated by frontier guides, swaggering Cavaliers, and a frolicking tavern of an expedition through primeval forests!

It is a riotous tale of high living on the frontier, from the travelling tavern that the expedition became known as with its many toasts and bottles of everything from claret to rum, to the great work these beknighted Virginians did in opening frontier lands for new settlement. It's a story of adventure and high living that explains why America became a continental empire.

Further, this is also the tale of Gov. Alexander Spotswood, the most influential Royal Governor of Virginia in the 18th century. This is the story of how a veteran of Marlborough's campaigns who was wounded at Blenheim, a consummate Cavalier dedicated to High Tory principles, bent the "haughty" ruling classes of Virginia to his will, and did so in such a way that they loved him for it and became all the wealthier and more powerful for it.

So, listen in to hear how 12 gentlemen, 14 rangers, 4 Indian guides, a governor, and a bevy of dozens of servants and porters pierced the rocky veil of the Blue Ridge for the first time ever, and did so with goblets of rum in hand, one of the most romantic adventure stories of American history.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support my work at no cost to yourself, you can do so by ordering the sources I used for this episode using the links below

• Fontaine, John: The Journal of John Fontaine, 1710-1718 (Edited by Edward P. Alexander).

• Evans, Emory G.: The Topping People: The Rise and Decline of Virginia's Old Provincial Elite.

• Bruce, Philip Alexander: Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century.

• Isaac, Rhys: The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790.

• Morton, Richard L.: Colonial Virginia.

• Bruce, Philip Alexander: The Virginia Plutarch, Vol. I

• Dabney, Virginius: Virginia: The New Dominion

The Great Massacre of 1622 almost destroyed Virginia. Understanding that the ever-larger numbers of settlers and their accumulation of land would destroy his people and their way of life, Great Chief Opechancanough, the brother of Powhatan and uncle of Pocahontas, bands the Powhatan people together and launches a surprise attack on the English on the morning of March 22, 1622. A third of the colony is wiped out in the blink of an eye, its precarious prosperity is wiped away, and the outlying plantations are ravaged by treacherous natives who pose as friends of the unsuspecting settlers before striking down them and their families. Jamestown is saved by the bravery of an Indian boy named Chanco and a settler named Richard Pace who had taken him in, but only just, and the settlers respond with fury, launching the Third Anglo-Powhatan War. This is the full tale, and the story of how Virginia survived such treachery!

Timestamps:

0:00 The Indian Massacre of 1622

3:49 The Great Peace after John Rolfe Married Pocahontas

5:47 Opechancanough Plots the Destruction of the English

6:35 The Powhatan Launch the Great Good Friday Massacre of 1622

10:07 How Jamestown Survived the 1622 Massacre

10:54 The Aftermath of the 1622 Good Friday Massacre

12:44 The English Settlers Respond to the Powhatan with Total War

15:14 The Virginia Company Dies

17:04 Virginia is Born

Farmer at Colonial Williamsburg, Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jamestown House, Hudson, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Berkeley Hundred First Thanksgiving, By Joe Orbin - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51846533

George Thorpe Coat of Arms, By Glasshouse - Crozier, William Armstrong. Virginia Heraldica. 1908; rpt. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co, 1965, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137116635

Thomas Gates Reaches Jamestown, Jna. P. Davis Sc (via Edward Eggleston) via Internet Archive Book Images, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Bennett's Plantation, Steveprutz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Arrival at Jamestown, Drake, Francis S. (Francis Samuel), 1828-1885, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Henricus, Morgan Riley, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

An Indian Warrior, W.H. Drake via via M.E. Thalheimer (Internet Archive Book Images), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

In this episode, Will and Paul Fahrenheidt discuss Virginia's unique military culture. They begin with its origins in the British militia system and Indian fighting, then discuss how the mercantile backgrounds of the first families impacted it, and then discuss how it became a tremendous force that drove American military culture starting in the early 1800s. They further discuss how it can be glimpsed in the Mexican-American War and War Between the States, and how it lives on today. They also discuss the Cavaliers, the Scots-irish and Anglo-Normans, and in what capacities Virginians excelled as military men.

Follow Paul on X here: https://x.com/cavkingpaul

Find the Old Glory Club Substack here: https://oldgloryclub.substack.com/

This is the tale of Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion against Governor Sir William Berkeley, the long-ruling governor of Virginia who went from beloved Cavalier to despised despot. It is the story of how the engrossment of Virginia's lands by the Virginia gentry, the sub-penny trap in tobacco prices that drove the yeomen of the Old Dominion under, and the Indian attacks along the frontier that finally led to Bacon's Rebellion.

Bacon's private campaign against the Susquehannock and the Occaneechi, the story of how Bacon got his commission, and why Bacon's Men burned Jamestown, is all covered, as is the story of Berkeley's revenge after Bacon died and his men were defeated.

Finally, we describe how the Virginia of the Golden Age was born from the ashes of Bacon's rebellion, and how rising tobacco prices and the switch from indentured servants to an enslaved workforce stopped revolution from happening again.

Were the famed Virginia Cavaliers truly the architects of the Old Dominion, or are they merely a phantom of Southern chivalry's imagination? Did those proud and defiant Royalists, the "Distressed Cavaliers" of legend, ever actually flee to the Tidewater to escape the dreary tyranny of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, or is the "Cavalier" just a convenient myth—a mask worn by a merchant class in search of a noble pedigree? This episode resolves that perennial question.

We discuss the reality of the Cavalier-Puritan split in America—a conflict of visions rooted in an irreconcilable divide between the Tobacco Plantations of the Virginia Gentry and the Gospel of Labor. We explore the offer of Cavalier sanctuary provided by Governor Sir William Berkeley, and how Virginia culture became Cavalier culture. Most of all, we discuss the reality of the Second Sons myth of the First Families of Virginia, and if there really were nobles in America's Old Dominion, or at least their second sons.

This is the foundational story of the Tidewater Gentry and the rise of the First Families of Virginia. It is the tale of how a tobacco plantation economy was transfigured into a colonial aristocracy, how the fires of the English Civil War were reignited in the New World, and how Virginia became the land of the Cavaliers.

0:00 The Cavalier of Virginia: Man or Myth? 3:47 The English Civil War Comes to Virginia 5:59 Why Virginia Remained Cavalier 7:10: What the Conflict Between Puritan and Cavalier was All About 10:50 Were There Puritans in the Tidewater? 11:23 Puritan Levellers and Diggers Chase the Cavaliers Out of England 12:27 The Three Stages of Cavalier Migration to Virginia 17:21 The Cavaliers Define the Virginia Gentry 19:07 Governor Berkeley Invites the Cavaliers and Creates a Ruling Class 23:09 The Importance of the Anglican Church of Virginia 25:47 Virginia's Cavalier Ruling Class Has Formed 26:46 Was the Virginia Cavalier Real?

Richard of Jamestown, Internet Archive Book Images, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Astley Bernard, Unknown artistUnknown artist, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rev. Hunt Reads, Internet Archive Book Images, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Pilgrim Fairmount, Internet Archive Book Images, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Westover Plantation, Internet Archive Book Images, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Berkeley, D.H. Maury (via Internet Archive Book Images), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Church of All Saints, Lewis Hulbert, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Berkely, John Philip Davis via Frank X. Sadlier (via Internet Archive Book Images), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jamestonwn Church, Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Colonial Williamsburg, Harvey Barrison from Massapequa, NY, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Colonial Williamsburg Parish Church, Carolyn from Pemberton Township, NJ, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Colonial Williamsburg, Mobilus In Mobili, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Settlers, Frank X. Sadlier (via Internet Archive Book Images), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

How did NASA boldly advance the Apollo Program over the course of a decade to accomplish the greatest feat of mankind: the landing of humans on the Moon and their safe return to Earth? In this episode, Will sits down with Charles Murray—renowned author of The Bell Curve and Coming Apart—to discuss a lifelong passion project: the Apollo Program. While many focus on the astronauts, Murray's book, Apollo: The Race to the Moon, tells the story of the engineers, the mission controllers, and the institutional genius that made the impossible a reality.

What We Discuss:

• The Cold War Background: How the Bay of Pigs Disaster led to President Kennedy deciding to set the Moon as a benchmark of Space Race victory, and why he chose it, along with whether the Soviet space program was really that far ahead of America's. They cover Von Braun and the Germans at the Marshall Space Center, the incredible story of the NASA Langley Research Center.
• The Engineering Talent Pool: How the mid-century U.S. produced an unprecedented concentration of technical brilliance, and how many of Apollo's engineers came from backgrounds other than what one might expect.
• The Saturn V & The Lunar Module: Examining the "otherworldly" engineering and the sheer scale of the incredibly advanced spacecraft and rockets.
• Saving the Mission: How a handful of personnel in Mission Control made split-second decisions that saved the program from disaster, and how courageous decisions made by NASA leaders over the decade ensured Kennedy's pledge was fulfilled.
• The SpaceX Connection: Why Elon Musk is the true heir to the Apollo legacy and how SpaceX mirrors the NASA of the 1960s.
• The Future of Human Achievement: What missions today could inspire the same civilizational impact as the moon landings.

About the Guest:

Charles Murray is a Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. While widely known for his sociological work, his history of the Apollo program is considered a definitive look at the technical and organizational triumphs of the Space Race.

Get Charles Murray's book about Apollo here: ⁠Apollo: The Race to the Moon⁠

See his other books here: ⁠Charles Murray's books⁠

Find his other work here: ⁠Charles Murray AEI⁠

Note: I am an Amazon affiliate. Using the above Amazon links to Mr. Murray's books is a way of supporting my work at no cost to yourself.

his is the tale of how tobacco created the plantations in Virginia for which the Old Dominion is known, and how those plantations entrenched and solidified the power of the famous "Topping People" of Virginia, those First Families of Virginia and Virginia Gentry who ruled the state for decades. It is a tale of indentured servants in colonial Virginia and slave labor workforces on vast Virginia plantations. It is a tale of the Navigation Acts, of soil exhaustion, of Starving Times in Jamestown and dying gentlemen in their starched, ruffled shirts. This is the story of Virginia's shift, brought about thanks to John Rolfe of Pocahontas fame, from the blighted land Captain John Smith and Gov. George Percy knew, to that flourishing and flowering Old Virginia of Robert "King" Carter, Thomas Lee, and the others of Virginia's Golden Age. But most of all, this is the tale of tobacco and plantations in Virginia, and why they developed as they did.

In this episode, Will and Richard Easton, a historian of GPS and son of one of the inventors of GPS, discuss the history of the Space Race and Apollo missions. They go over the impetus for Eisenhower committing America to launching a satellite, the reasons for the Gemini and Mercury missions, why Kennedy settled on the moon mission, and how the Apollo program progressed. They discuss the technical advancements required to make Apollo happen, the characters and competence of the men involved, the scientific legacy of Apollo, and why the missions were ended. They discuss also why space exploration slowed to a crawl after Apollo 17, the challenges NASA faces, and the incredible technical competence shown by SpaceX, along with GPS and Richard's book about its history.

Note: the Apollo 16 CapCom whose name Richard could not remember is Charlie Duke

Get Richard's Book here: GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones

Get Michael Collins's Book here: Carrying the Fire

Get Charles Murray's book about Apollo here: Apollo: The Race to the Moon