We called him the Cavalier. During the Revolutionary period, the idea of the English country squire in the New World yielded Washington and Jefferson and their compatriots; less than a century later, the same concept found full flower in the gallantry of Robert E. But the story is more complicated than that. Seen through this gauze, the past becomes a haze of white columns and red brick peopled with valorous aristocrats on horseback. What made the Virginia aristocrats great—distinguishing them from, say, the plutocrats of the Gilded Age—was the earnestness with which they took on "the burden of government and public responsibility," as historian Daniel Boorstin put it.

The original was said to hang in a museum in Richmond, so ours was a faded black-and-white photocopy mounted in a dime-store frame. Go to Williamsburg, the colonial capital where they forged the ideas that would be realized in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Today's Cavaliers are a football team (the University of Virginia's), but the kind I grew up China instant heating faucet Suppliers with—dashing, heroic, extinct—are as essential to the Virginia myth as ever. Lee. Visit Richmond to see the shrines of the Confederacy and taste the ashes of defeat. . Over the years, the legend of the Lost Cause has covered the Virginia landscape with a patina of regret that no amount of suburbanization seems able to erase.April 06, 2009 Like most native-born Virginians, I grew up with an ancestral portrait on the wall. The lawns have been covered with graves ever since Lee left to command a Confederate army and Union authorities started burying their dead there: in Virginia, all time can be measured from this spot.

And since the past is what you're here to find, it's a good idea to know what you're looking for. It showed a mustachioed English dandy, black curls falling luxuriantly past his shoulders, lace collar spread grandly across his chest, staring into the Xerox machine with an air of courtly insouciance: my mother's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, loyal supporter of Charles I, forced into exile after the beheading of his monarch and newly arrived in Virginia with a retinue of servants and of cattle in the year 1649. Visit Monticello and walk the grounds of the University of Virginia to experience the perfect geometries of the Enlightenment, which Jefferson the architect rendered in brick as expertly as he did in government. Work your way down the Potomac to Mount Vernon and Gunston Hall and Stratford Hall, plantations of the gentry who created the new republic.C. But something changed between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the utopian ideal of pure reason gave way to Romantic notions of chivalry—notions that masked the economic imperatives of a 19th-century slaveholding society. To understand why this happened, start your visit at Arlington House, Lee's grandly porticoed mansion overlooking Washington, D