 Studies focused exclusively on the white planter elite who were portrayed as both the descendants of English Cavaliers and the progenitors of the Virginia dynasty that controlled the first fifty years of post-Revolutionary American politics.Much attention was given to the families of prominent Virginian statesmen George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.Challenges to the Cavalier myth and its influence on the historiography appeared in Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker's "Torchbearer of the Revolution