Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
Urlsperger, and others interested in the Salzburger colonization in Georgia.167
They are supplemented by the Urlsperger Tracts now being
translated and published by the same press. Founding fathers such as
Oglethorpe, Bolzius, and Gronau are mentioned, and much-publicized
Chief Tomochichi, Anglican missionaries Samuel Quincy and John and
Charles Wesley, and the German and Portuguese Jews are among the
individuals commented upon, and naturally there is much about missionary
or religious activity among red men and white. But there are also anxious
and vehement letters between the Trustees in England and their Georgia
representatives such as Habersham and Martin. Habersham, friend of
Whitefield and a leader in the colony down to the threshold of the Revolution,
has left a considerable body of letters, including some fastidious
specifications to his tailor for clothing. While some Georgians patriotically
were wearing homespun, in one letter he ordered his silk vests and dress
coats from London as usual, probably not amusing to him but very
much so to us. He was also one of the first to use the word "cracker" in
referring to the pinelanders and poorer classes generally.l68
Though the best portraits of many early national-period Americans survive
in their letters, this is rarely true for the colonial southern leaders. Too
frequently most of their letters have disappeared, especially personal
and family epistles, and the public and published documents reveal relatively
little about them personally. But if one could gather in printed
volumes letters grouped chronologically colony by colony, he certainly
would produce a much clearer idea of the mental as well as social character
of those people than we now possess. Fortunately too there are some exceptions
to mediocrity of individual letters, for the epistles of Dr. Alexander
Hamilton, William Byrd II, and Eliza Lucas Pinckney, and some
dozen others of the eighteenth century compare with the better British
correspondence of the period. But what these epistolarians really show is
that the time was ripe for the great letter-writers of the southern Revolutionary
generation, as the editions now under way indicate, the rich variety
and quantity of the communications of Jefferson, Madison, Carroll
of Carrollton, even Henry Laurens as he continues into the new day.
Journals, diaries, and autobiographies were certainly kept or composed
in the southern colonies, though relatively few of them survivemany
more, however, than are mentioned in recent bibliographies of the
genre.169 As in Britain and the northern colonies, in the South records of
this kind were kept for a variety of reasons, from the most materialistic
diary (really bookkeeping) to spiritual autobiography. Sometimes the
diurnal entry feature has been absorbed into a continuous narrative,
usually by rewriting. But with the letters they reveal a great deal about
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