Robert Munford, the eighteenth-century Virginia squire and litterateur, has long served as both a symbol and subject of analysis for students of colonial American history and culture. In the nearly-barren ground of eighteenth-century American drama, Munford's plays, The Candidates and The Patriots, while never actually produced on stage during his lifetime, stand out as two of the most important attempts by a colonial American to use traditional dramatic techniques to illustrate distinctively American characters and themes. And for historians, these same two plays, which grew out of Munford's own experience in Virginia politics, have served as rich and evocative sources from which to reconstruct the operation and ethos of the political culture of revolutionary Virginia.