In 1848, the 28-year-old Henry Augustine Washington, a lawyer in Richmond, published a remarkable essay on “The Social System of Virginia” that propelled him into a professorship of history at the College of William and Mary. For Washington – kin to George Washington, son-in-law of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and editor of Thomas Jefferson's papers – Virginia ranked as an anomaly in modern times or, more accurately, with parallels only in other southern slave states. Washington described Virginia's social system as “the remnant of an older civilization – a fragment of the feudal system floating about here on the bosom of the nineteenth century” and focused on the emergence of a society based upon slave and indentured-servant labor. Noting an abundance of histories of kings, rulers, and statesmen, he welcomed a marriage of history with philosophy: “We are now at last, to have a history of the PEOPLE.”