Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
paragement, puns, and epigrammatic statements the two histories share
with Byrd's letters and character sketches. "The History" is in general more
urbane, sophisticated, and polished and thus has less of an air of spontaneity.
In both, the saints of New England receive a number of glancing
blows, with perhaps more anti-Puritanism in "The History." Disparaging
allusions to North Carolina appear in plenty in "The Secret History,"
chiefly in the form of caricatures of that colony'S commissioners and anecdotes
about its people, but such allusions are much more frequent in "The
History." And more sweeping and generalized condemnation of Carolinians
and other more northern colonists is employed in "The History"
to accentuate Virginia as earth's only paradise-for prospective settlers.
Thus as clearly as "The Secret History" was intended as witty social
satire, "The History" was at least in part a redirecting of the same materials
for propaganda purposes. Yet "The History" remains essentially a
work of art, the projection of a not too unusual colonial official enterprise
into a travel-adventure symbolic of the frontier experience. The basic material
for both histories sprang, of course, from the two-stage Dividing
Line expedition authorized by the King and implemented by the governors
of Virginia and North Carolina in 1728 to determine the exact location of
the boundary between the two colonies. This old problem involved titles
to land and squatters who evaded taxes from either colonial government.
Byrd and his fellow commissioners from his own colony and North Carolina
began on the Atlantic shore and reached the foothills of the mountains,
or at least the Virginia portion of the party reached their agreed-upon
destination.
As already noted, Byrd's friends who heard or read "The Secret History"
must have found this account of the journey as entertaining as a Restoration
or sentimental comedy. Byrd himself was "Steddy," his Virginia compatriots
Dandridge and Fitzwilliam appear as "Meanwell" and "Firebrand," their
surveyors "Orion" and "Astrolabe," and the North Carolinians Moseley as
"Plausible," Lovick as "Shoebrush," and Little as "Puzzlecause." The vignettes
are apt and cutting: "puzzlecause [Harvard-educated} had degenerated
from a New England preacher, for which his Godly Parents design'd
him, to a very wicked, but awkward rake," The vignette becomes a full
portrait as the journey continues and "Puzzlecause" shows his rabid and
indiscriminate sexuality. Other Carolinians' portraits and even those of
some fellow Virginians are equally unflattering. In both histories Byrd
gives the first descriptions of the American poor whites who live along
the border, the inhabitants of Lubber land. That they are almost all North
Carolinians is declared in both accounts but emphasized in "The History,"
for if the work were to entice immigrants these wastrels had best be non­
Virginians.
1372