Tidewater

The Chesapeake plantation society founded at Jamestown (1607), built by an Anglican gentry that recreated the hierarchy of the English countryside. Its tobacco economy ran first on indentured servants and then on enslaved Africans. It prized a classical, aristocratic notion of liberty — self-government for gentlemen — and produced much of the Revolutionary leadership (Washington, Jefferson, Madison). Deferential and hierarchical, but constitutionalist in its own gentry idiom.

• Existed: 1607 CE – present
• Type: Entity