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The city of WASHINGTON DC and the four states of VIRGINIA, WEST VIRGINIA, MARYLAND and DELAWARE constitute a cross-section of the nation. Since the days of the first American colonies, US history has been shaped here, from agitation towards independence to the battles of the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Now, the contrasts and incongruities of contemporary America are shown in high relief: the corridors of power in Washington are literally a stone's throw away from dire inner-city poverty while, nearby, dozens of time-worn farming and fishing towns seem straight out of some Norman Rockwell idyll. Early in the seventeenth century, the first British settlements began to take root along the rich estuary of the Chesapeake Bay ; the colonists hoped for gold, but found their fortunes growing tobacco. Virginia , the first settlement, was the largest and most populous; it originally included most of what are now Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, and as late as the 1790s had double the population of any other state. Fully half of these people were slaves , brought from Africa to do the backbreaking work of harvesting the tobacco. Despite its central position on the east coast, the whole region lies below the Mason-Dixon Line - the symbolic border between North and South, drawn up in 1763 as the boundary between slave and free states - and until the Civil War one of the country's busiest slave markets was just two blocks from the White House. Besides generating the bulk of colonial wealth, the region also produced many of early America's great leaders, from firebrand politicians like Patrick Henry ("Give me Liberty or Give me Death") to patrician intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson . Another Virginian, George Washington , led the Continental Army against the British in the Revolutionary War and served as the first president, while James Madison was the primary author of the Constitution. For all its colonial importance, by the mid-nineteenth century the region had lost power and status to the industrial and mercantile centers of Philadelphia and New York. Tensions between North and South finally erupted into the Civil War , of which traces are still visible everywhere. The hundred miles between the capital of the Union - Washington DC - and that of the Confederacy - Richmond, Virginia - were a constant and bloody battleground for four long years. This sense of a nation divided against itself is especially acute at the grand manor of Robert E. Lee , the Confederacy's military leader: high on a hill overlooking the heart of Washington DC, its grounds are now filled with the war dead of the Arlington National Cemetery. Washington DC itself, with its magnificent monumental architecture, is an essential stop on any tour of the region. Virginia , to the south, holds literally hundreds of historic sites, from the homes of early politicians to the colonial capital of Williamsburg , as well as the narrow forested heights of Shenandoah National Park , along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Much greater expanses of wilderness, crashing white-water rivers and innumerable backwoods villages await you in less-visited West Virginia . Most tourists come to Maryland for the maritime traditions of Chesapeake Bay - though many of its quaint old villages have been gentrified by weekend pleasure-boaters. Baltimore is full of character and enjoyably unpretentious (and has a phenomenal concentration of bars), while Annapolis , the pleasant state capital, is linked by bridge and ferry to the eastern shore , where Assateague Island remains an Atlantic paradise. New Castle , across the border in Delaware , is a perfectly preserved colonial-era town; nearby are some of the east coast's best and least crowded beaches.
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