Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL S OUTH '
and organization give them some title to be considered with more purely
belletristic writing. The South no more than New England produced its
best prose in the purely belletristic essay.
PERSONAL RECORDS: LETTERS, DIARIES, JOURNALS, AND WILLS
Among the subjects the eighteenth-century southern colonial wrote
about most easily were himself and the society of which he was a part. As
in the seventeenth century, if he had a good formal education or was a
fairly wide reader, he was conscious that there were traditions in letter
writing and in voyage and memoir writing which included certain rhetorical
conventions. But even within a genre-tradition he had new and fresh
models to follow, such as several celebrated late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century travel accounts or memoirs and new manuals and new
editions of old manuals of letter writing, as well as the epistolary-essay
forms of the Tatter and Spectator and Guardian and several popular translations
of French epistolarians.189
The southern letter writers continued from where they had left off in
17°O, writing to friends in Great Britain and in the colonies on somewhat
the same subjects they had before, but with perhaps greater consciousness
of the letter as an art form. Even the religious and scientific and business
letters, which constituted most of them, were, like William Fitzhugh's,
composed with constant awareness that in such communications there
were rhetorical rules to be observed.
Most of the major minds or prominent characters of the Chesapeake
colonies survive in several letters, usually addressed to persons in England
or Scotland. The governors of Virginia have left bodies of official and
personal letters. In the instances of Spotswood and Dinwiddie, their official
papers, principally letters, were edited and printed late in the nineteenth
century. Though there exists an interesting series of personal letters from
Sir William Gooch to his brother the Bishop of Norwich, their publication
has been delayed because the scholar working on them hopes to find more,
including some replies. Also extant are three volumes of Gooch's miscellaneous
official letters. Scattered here and there in the journals indexed
by Earl G. Swem forty years ago are a number of single letters, some personal,
from these and other Virginia viceroys, and a greater number still
unpublished in the repositories within the United States and the British
Isles. Letters of Francis Nicholson have been individually printed in a
number of places, letters both official and highly personal. There is little or
nothing by Botetourt or Fauquier now in print, though both were articulate
men. In Maryland there are a number of epistles by the Proprietors or their
governors, usually kinsmen, though no collective edition exists. Governor