50 songs for 50 states: Virginia

For sheer emotional weight, my heart lies with Rosanne Cash, whose “When the Master Calls the Roll” might just be the best song ever written about the Civil War. But I feel like Virginia demands something broader. Beautiful as that song is, it remains the expression of a particular moment. A profoundly important moment, to be sure, but still just a moment.

Hamilton, though, reaches far beyond the immediate terrain of the battle. Yorktown was the final major conflict of the American Revolution, but it’s so much more than that. As told by Miranda, it’s the turning point in the life of his story’s troubled hero, and the foundation stone for an entire new realm of possibility. As the song goes: it is when the world turned upside down.It’s also the origin of the line – “immigrants we get the job done” – which has in some ways become the critical cultural resonance of Hamilton.

And this all feels right. Virginia has meant so much in so many ways over the course of American history. But more than almost any other state, it feels deeply and essentially political. From Jamestown in 1607 to Alexandria in 2020. The home of George Washington, of Jefferson, of Madison. In fact, it’s the home state of eight American presidents, more than any other state.

Virginia is the borderland between North and South, where identities jostle and push each other. Where white supremacists march through Charlottesville, where Liberty University resides in the city of Lynchburg (!), where DoD employees come in every day to work at the Pentagon, where old soldiers lay in their rest at Arlington.

It was also a central reference point of the Constitutional Convention, with Madison’s Virginia Plan creating the skeleton for our entire constitutional system. It effectively enfolds the nation’s capital, and it also contained the capital of the treasonous Confederacy. Its shifts from Democratic to Republican to Democratic to Republican have defined major themes in demographic and ideological change.

Every state is a microcosm of the nation in its own way. But I’m not sure that any state more fully embodies the entire scope of American political history.