Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE CO LONIAL SOUTH '
ballad in theme and repetitive phrases. It is the story of a young girl, a
brazier's daughter, sold off to a Virginia sea captain by a mother who
could not bear to see her upper-class son wed to a servant maid. The final
stanzas describe his pining away to death. The Lads of Virginia is the lament
of a former London apprentice who was lured to the hard life in
the colony and who feels he is about to die there.41
Another more recently recovered ballad touching upon life in Virginia
is in chapbook form, based presumably on the actual experiences of the
"unhappy sufferer," James Revel. In this last instance the subject is clearly
a criminal. The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon's Sorrowful Account of
His Fourteen Years Transportation, at Virginia, in America, in one copy
printed in Dublin with no date, was probably published in the decade
I765-I775. Other versions include one of london, undated but probably
( ?) seventeenth century, now in the library of Congress; another undated
of london, at Harvard; another copy once owned at Belvoir in Virginia,
photostat in the Virginia Historical Society; and two later london editions,
of which copies are owned in America. It may be based on actual events in
Virginia. But it is also part of the rogue literature Defoe and his contemporaries
made so popular in the earlier half of the eighteenth century
in Britain. John M. Jennings has shown that the real or supposed Revel
reached Virginia between I656 and I67I and that possibly the original
form of the ballad, perhaps only in oral tradition or manuscript until the
eighteenth century, was composed between these dates.42
Homely details give the narrative verisimilitude, names are unfamiliarto
Britons-places such as Wicomico and the Rappahannock River and
situations are peculiarly southern colonial, such as the mixture of white
indentured and black slave servants in one plantation establishment and
the daily and weekly routine of each. The examination by would-be planterbuyers
became a familiar feature of later national plantation literature.
Made up of six major divisions, versions of the poem's separate sections
might include twelve of fifteen complete questions. The narrator's two
masters, the planter who dies and the Jamestown cooper, impress the
reader as real persons. The whole ballad is one of the most significant portrayals
of life among the bondsmen of later seventeenth-century Virginia.
Its details may be corroborated as fact in a dozen places.
The author also has a sense of proportion and of the naturally dramatic.
Unlike other poets to be discussed, he shows no tendency to satire
or to bitterness-though there is a good deal of indignation--or on the
other hand no tendency toward sentimentality. Though the poem concludes
with the narrator back in Britain, one is tempted to speculate
whether at least basic portions of his verses were not composed in the
colony.
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