Tidewater

The coastal plain of Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, settled by younger sons trying to reproduce an English rural gentry. The Chesapeake colonies were founded as commercial ventures and their leading settlers came disproportionately from royalist gentry families displaced by the English civil war, bringing an explicitly hierarchical model - great houses, deference, an established Anglican church, and labour supplied first by indentured servants and then by enslaved Africans. Tobacco shaped everything, because it exhausts soil and requires labour, so estates were large and dispersed along the rivers with no real towns. That dispersal meant no town meetings and no compulsory schooling; the county court and the vestry governed instead. The region produced an extraordinary concentration of the American founding generation - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Mason - whose republicanism was classical and aristocratic rather than democratic in the New England sense. Tidewater's economic weight faded as tobacco land wore out and the cotton frontier moved west without it. Federal Washington now dominates its northern end. Its influence on American constitutional language remains far larger than its size. The region runs along the Chesapeake and the coastal plain from Delaware to northern North Carolina. Its rivers are wide and navigable far inland, which is why plantations shipped directly and towns did not develop. Williamsburg, Annapolis and Charleston preserve its colonial architecture. The Mason-Dixon line marks its northern edge. Chesapeake watermen and blue crab remain a distinct local economy. Tobacco is barely grown in the region now, having exhausted the soil it built the economy on.

• Existed: 1607 CE – present
• Type: Entity