Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
life, the study of the classics to bring aesthetic delight or to learn the prob­
lems of practical government, the kind of loneliness that leads the country
gentleman to communicate with his pen. In other words, the last of the
seventeenth-century letter writers goes far toward explaining the mind
and manners and mode of expression of the eighteenth-century southern
epistolarians, who in some sense culminate in Thomas Jefferson or even in
the urbanite South Carolinian Henry Laurens.
THE PERSONAL JOURNAL, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND WILL
Close to the letter as personal expression or revelation are the journal­
diary, the autobiography, and the preamble to the last will and testament.
Though the seventeenth century was in Old England the age of great
diaries such as those of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, and of the spiritual
autobiography such as that of John Bunyan, and in New England the
age of Samuel Sewall's diary and Puritan spiritual narrative, in the southern
British colonies the personal revelation was much less frequent and dis­
tinguished. When it did occur, it was usually secular, with the exception
of those Quaker journals written in and concerning experiences in the
lower Atlantic provinces, and parts of the legal testaments of many kinds
of people. The resident Quaker such as John Grave, who wrote devo­
tional verse, the devout puritan-Anglican clergyman Alexander Whitaker
cut off in his youth, the Jesuit fathers of Maryland, and many another
Chesapeake or Carolina immigrant may have kept journals describing
or explaining their physical and spiritual lives, but only a few secular
diurnal records survive, with some tantalizing fragments, to indicate that
in the seventeenth century the southern colonial methodically recorded the
wants of his age or his personal behavior or his probing of his own con­
science and consciousness. Dozens of New England autobiographies or
journals for this period remain, but it is not until the eighteenth century
that southern writings in these genres were preserved so carefully that a
few have been brought down to us.20
Most extant southern journals or diaries of the first century do reflect
directly the characteristic interests and behavior of the settlers. One of the
earliest is the journal of Captain Henry Fleet of Virginia and Maryland,
fur trader and sailor who may have come to the older province as early as
1621, had been captured by Indians, and may have traveled with them as
far as the Great Lakes. He was the principal negotiator between the red men
and Lord Baltimore's expedition when it arrived in 1634 in the Ark and
the Dove. His manuscript journal beginning July 4, r631, and now lo­
cated in the Lambeth Palace Library, describes his voyage in that year from
England to Virginia and to the Potomac River, then to New England and