Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
quality and character of the southern portions of their writings when he
mentions "the sustained exaltation and historical importance of Fox's, the
blunt power of William Edmundson's, ... the learning and rich detail of
Thomas Story's."25 But as pointed out in Chapters V and VI, these Quaker
journals are representative and revealing of the southern colonist as well
as of their authors. William Edmundson's Journal (London, 17 I 5 ) describes
Quaker success in various areas of Virginia and Maryland and the
Carolinas through the people's hunger for religion and a great deal of his
own and his colleagues' eloquent persuasiveness or dedicated zeaL Through
trackless forests and swamps, through rain and snow and darkness, these
men pursued their way and wrote without pride of their "convictions"
(conversions) of isolated rural colonists. Edmundson gives a succinct and
convincing portrait of Sir William Berkeley, who in 1672 proved to be
"very peevish and brittle" and absolutely intransigent.26 A few years later
Edmundson visited Virginia during Bacon's Rebellion and was pleased to
find, apparently, that "only Friends stood Neuter" and that "Friends were
highly commended for keeping clear."
Thomas Story's A Journal (Newcastleupon-Tyne, 1747 ) is indeed rich
in detaiL The author's direct disputations with the "hireling priests" of
Puritan New England or the English Chesapeake country, his conversa­
tions with officialdom in each colony he visited, the texts of his "Quaker
sermons" and letters from Church of England Virginia clergy, his account
of "meetings" within a few miles of Williamsburg as well as in the wild
or rural areas, his anecdotes of parish priests, traffic with Indians, and de­
bates on baptism, and his attractive sense of humor as well as the con­
siderable space devoted to his other adventures physical and spiritual in
the southern provinces, make his large volume as genuinely American,
and southern, as John Smith's.
At least one other religious leader, this one a Puritan, left written
expression of his experiences in at least one southern colony. This was
Elder William Pratt of Dorchester in South Carolina, a New Englander
who lived in Charleston from 1696/1697 to 1701.27 Despite the relative
brevity of the diurnal items of the South Carolina portion of this journal,
it suggests in the individual entries the interests of a Samuel Sewall or
some earlier Puritans. Pure factual event, grim notations of illness and
death, religious services, encounters with more or less hostile officialdom,
and prayers for advice from the Almighty are qualities which demonstrate
its author's devout sincerity, his courage, and his characteristic Puritan
mixture of realism and high spiritual idealism.
Seventeenth-century wills are perhaps as American as voyages and
journals and diary confessions. From John Rolfe's will of 1621 to that of