Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
identified, he was engaged in one battle of the wits which elicited from him
an amusing dialect burlesque, part of an exchange carried on for several
months in the I740S with John Webb, editor of America's first (Philadelphia)
magazine, who was in I747 living in Maryland. Employing in
part a quasi-Irish dialect, Thomson answered an essay signed "A Planter"
in the Maryland Gazette of June 23 and 30 of I747 in a letter and a
poem in the issue of July 28. The introductory letter concerns the tobacco
inspection law. The poem, "TEAGUE turn'd Planter," ridicules where the
letter debates:
My Honey dear, now by my Shoul, (excuse familiar Banter)
It was a wild Conceit you took, to write, and sign-A Planter
Too true it is, subscribing plain, wou'd been a sad Betrayinge;
But then, alas! a Lion's skin will n'er conceal-a Braying.
The remaining more than two-score lines are an even more direct attack
referring to Webb's magazine, the House of Burgesses, and the "Eastern
Shore Factor" (Callister). But in verse at least Town Side is far less effective
than Bacon, Callister, or Hamilton.
On July 7, I747, appeared a humorous letter in pseudo-Negro dialect
from "Toby Chew" at Herring Bay "from de grate House" to his master
then in London. The cover letter points out the sincerity of the piece and
alleges that it is being published with the permission of the addressee.
Spelling and reference are hilarious, and the linguist should find it an interesting
early experiment in writing in what is still recognizable as dialectal
English.
A more ambitious Eastern Shore or Baltimore satirist than Callister or
his friend Bacon, at least as far as is now evident, was the Reverend Thomas
Cradock (I7 I8-I770 ), a versatile pulpit orator and man of letters who,
like Hamilton, is still represented largely in manuscript. Born in Bedfordshire,
he had close connections with the Duke of Bedford, who it is said
planned to see that Cradock and his younger brother John were elevated
to the episcopate after they were educated at Cambridge. John did become
a bishop, in fact died as Archbishop of Dublin. Thomas, according to tradition,
had to be shipped off to America because of a romantic involvement
with a lady of the duke's family. There are indications that the peer
hoped to see him the first American bishop, as others in Virginia and Maryland
had come quite close to being. At any rate, Thomas Cradock migrated
to Mary land in I 742 and soon became rector of St. Thomas' Parish
near Baltimore. He was well known for his sermons on a variety of subjects,
and Jonas Green published in a separate pamphlet Two Sermons with a
Preface (I747), one of which, "Innocent Mirth Not Inconsistent with
Religion," represents the moral moderate hedonistic philosophy of living