Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
irritated but devout gentleman so deeply committed to moderation that
the excesses of a son and some others around him produced a bitterness
which shows through his comments even on apparently unrelated subjects.
Two personal beliefs are kindred to his bitterness or produced it, his conclusion
after long observation and experience that all earthly things are
imperfect, and the conviction that he had never been given his due as a
leader in the movement toward independence.
Carter's journal indicates how he labored to improve his crops and his
system of agriculture, to employ his slaves and servants properly, to educate
children of all classes, to eradicate agricultural pests and waste. He
believed in theory to explain practice, but he was at heart an empiricist.
Though he was ardent in the American cause, he always feared independence
and republicanism and was committed to the "mixed form" of government
already noted. In the end, resigned to being ignored in his efforts
for the public good, he rationalized on the inward satisfaction he might
attain. He thirsted for praise, not riches or comfortable life, partly because
he already had the latter.
Thus the major Chesapeake colonial diary, and perhaps what will be
declared finally the major southern colonial private journal, was kept by a
patrician or colonial aristocrat who was as introspective as any of his Presbyterian
and Puritan contemporaries and even predecessors. The lifelong
tendency toward withdrawal grew upon him with age. And though these
qualities are not those most obviously southern, they were present in other
men as well as Landon Carter.ISS For some, southerners through the centuries
have come to feel, by way of consolation or rationalization or deliberate
conviction, that the post of honor was a private station. This is no New
England spiritual autobiography, but it is spiritual and it is autobiography.
North Carolina is perhaps best represented among journals by those of
that colony'S commissioners of the Dividing Line, really a number of letters,
proposals, and records of the proceedings. These have been printed
but seem to be in need of the re-editing they will receive in the new edition
of the colony's documents. Naturally the accounts do not quite agree with
Byrd's, but for historical reasons and for an understanding of Byrd's final
versions as literature, they are of some significance.1s4
Advertised in the South-Carolina Gazette of November 20, 1740, was
The Journal of a Voyage from Savannah to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia
to England, MDCCXL by William Seward, gentleman companion
in travel with the Reverend George Whitefield. It was offered for sale by
printer Timothy himself. A Continuation was advertised on January 8,
1741, and on January 29 A Journal of a Voyage from London to Gibralter
by Whitefield, scarcely an American item save for its author's connections,
was advertised in the same newspaper. There are also for South Carolina