Becoming Americans

by Donald Batchelor

  "It would take Doctor Franklin and a host of angels to get North Carolina to join such a union," the assemblyman said.

  Every man laughed, and they all gave William Williams three cheers.

  "You any kin to our Junior Williams, here?" somebody called out.

  "Indeed I am," the gentleman replied. "We are both Englishmen."

  Junior, red-faced, cheered with the others, and the man went on.

  "I want you to know that we in the Assembly understand and share your grievances and are working to express our pain and oppression to His Majesty. The King and Earl Granville will eventually see that we suffer unduly. The King does not oppress his subjects."

  Junior stumbled from the tavern to find his horse. The sound of argument continued in the tavern, as it always did.

  Torches lit the small group of men who were clustered at the mill, breathing steam as they fought about God. Junior had no wish to join into a discussion there. Fights among the Baptists had become as frequent as those mounted against Corbin. Most of the war in Edgecombe was not directed towards the French or the Indians. Reverend Parker had nailed shut the door to the church he'd built, on his own land, when the congregation had turned Particular. Junior's father had been treated like a leper when he arrived; now he was a patriarch among his increasing fellow-believers. Manning kept his eye on Junior as a potential traitor.

  Junior walked his horse onto the flatboat, and Duncan's equally thicknecked son pulled him across the river. There was no moon, and the sky had finally cleared of clouds after two dreary weeks of rain. The sky was always brightest in winter, it seemed to Junior, and he wondered if that were God making up for the cold.

  He rode past Pridgen's dark, cold house and spat across his left shoulder, thankful that he had a fire and a family waiting for him on the Sapony. He started to count the years since Mary had died but had to recount, remembering that it was January 1759, and not 1758. The calendar had been changed seven years earlier and he was still confused by the year beginning in January, not March. How they could change the calendar he didn't know.

  He pulled his horse up quickly. There was a star in the sky like he'd never seen. It had a tail, and was as big as his fist! Was the world about to end! His heart began to pound and he whipped his horse into a gallop, praying that the animal wouldn't stumble in the hidden ruts.

  He took the path to his father's house, it being closest. He pounded on the door and went inside. Stephen turned and looked at the intruder.

  Stephen knelt by the side of his wife, who was lying in their bed, silent and stiff. For an hour he'd been praying, making promises to God, pleading for his wife to look him in the eyes.

  The ague had come on Nancy in the afternoon, and Stephen had nursed her as he always had, or she him, when the attacks came. He'd made the brew, he'd covered her, and he'd bathed her. It was as he bathed her an hour earlier that she died. He'd touched her breast as he bathed her, and she'd shuddered under his hand as she had so many years before when he'd touched her. It had shaken him more than anything had in his life—next to finding God, he supposed. He wanted to weep about his own life, not knowing why. He wondered if most of his life with her had been some sort of lie. He realized how much she'd loved him and he cried for not loving her back as much.

  Had that been God's wish, that she turn all her passion to loving Him. Maybe some of that passion would have been for him if he'd accepted it.

  September 15, 1767 was a momentous day for the Williams family: two sons were born. The two mothers were brought together in Junior's enlarged house, and relatives of the extended families, with dozens of their friends, gathered in the yard while two pigs roasted on open fires, and several jugs of brandy were passed around outside of open sight. It was a legitimate opportunity for celebration, and everyone grasped it. Another generation to carry on the proud name, they all said. The menfolk tried to avoid serious talk.

  Eight years after Halley's Comet, the political discussion at Lamon's Tavern raged fiercer, although religious disputes around the mill, and around the county and the province, had calmed. Only Reverend Parker, Mathias Manning, and a few others remained aloof when the Particular and the General Baptists agreed to unite as Regular Baptists in the Kehukee Association in 1765. This union freed people to join together to question and rebuke their common oppressors.

  Whether the comet had foretold the problems or brought them on, nobody knew, but there'd never been anything like the affair that brought on the 1759 Enfield Riots in North Carolina; maybe not in America. Some men from Lamon's had taken part in it. Junior wished he had. He wished he could have.

  The same week that his mother died, men from Edgecombe had stolen Corbin from his home near Edenton and taken him to Enfield. They made him post a heavy bond to ensure his appearance at the next Spring's Superior Court, and to refund all unjust fees that had been taken. Corbin agreed to remove any objectionable deputy surveyors and to appoint men of generally-known good character. The people were allowed to examine his entry books, and—by committee—to adjust conflicting claims to same properties. Junior had thought it was a grand day for the Granville District and the Province.

  There'd been a few weeks of hope for change until the Attorney General, the Assembly, and the Governor turned on them in turns. Governor Dobbs ended the affair with arrests and the jailing of several men in Enfield. The people united and freed their friends, but the promised reforms were forgotten.

  The French-Indian war had finally ended in America, but the increased burden of taxes and the stalemate between Governor Dobbs and the north-south stalled Assembly, brought people to the feeling of "a pox on both their houses." Governor Dobbs retired in 1764—news joyfully received by Edgecombe residents—and the new Governor, William Tryon arrived in the fall.

  On the heels of Tryon, in the spring of 1765, word came of yet another tax, one ordered by Parliament, not by the King. It was for stamps on documents and newspapers, not of much consequence to the county, but of great concern to the merchants in the port towns. The outcries from the towns of Boston and Philadelphia were echoed in Wilmington. It was taken up by the farmers in Edgecombe who, no longer distracted by religious squabbles, directed their anger at Granville towards the government in London: the Americans weren't being treated the same as their English brothers.

  Samuel Williams was a proud new father, and it was obvious to him how proud his own father was to have a first grandchild. He was seeing the beginning of a dynasty, and Sam was glad to have pleased him. Sam's own grandfather, the ancient Stephen, had thoughts of his own, Sam knew, and wasn't thinking of him and his child. Still, Sam knew, and was grateful, that much of what he had and would have was from Grandfather Stephen. The old "Dismalite's" knowledge of the forest and of cooking tar had earned him a comfortable old age, with little effort.

  After Sam's Grandmother Nancy had died, Stephen needed a helpmate, which everyone understood. Within six months he'd taken twenty-year-old Sallie Creekmore as a bride, and the odd pair became leaders in the church. Sam's grandfather's telling and retelling the story of ticks leading him from the Dismal Swamp by "trusting in the Light," made him famous among young boys. He spoke of his days with the pirates, before he found God. He told stories of his own grandfather, who'd come from England as a boy, of his great-grandfather, who'd died fighting Republican rebels. Grandpa Stephen still spoke of Virginia as "home." Sam was proud to be from North Carolina. He'd never been away from it.

  Sam considered himself an energetic and contented man, but he had questions about his future, and that of his new son. Every day, with every rider from Williamsburgh, or Tar Borough, or Wilmington brought word that seemed to lead his world toward destruction.

  Sam's father had been gone on many nights after the Enfield Riots, returning home with a darkened face and stories of revenge against criminals, Granville's agents, or men working for the King. He and his friends called themselves "Regulators," and, more recently, had organized themselves on the lines of Boston
's "Sons of Liberty." They'd called for public meetings for discussions with officials as to whether or not the King's American subjects were being subjected to abuses of power, but public officials had been barred from attending that meeting, and the participants labeled "insurrectionists."

  There was a mixed feeling of despair and anticipation in all the provinces, travelers on the Halifax Road reported, and Sam wondered what his role would be in the uncertain days ahead. Tom Harbut, some of the Pridgens, some of the Joyners, and many newcomers had left for the westernmost lands of the province, hoping to escape the reaches of all authority. Sam wasn't leaving. Whatever happened, Edgecombe County was his home. But, he was following his father's advice, and being especially careful not to waste powder, and not to miss a target.

  With the blessing of God and the hard work of Sam and his younger brothers, the Williams land was prospering, and with the community respect that came with being a grandchild of Old Stephen, the Williams boys and girls were closely watched as marriage prospects in the neighborhood. Sam had wed in 1766, the first of his generation of Carolina Williamses to marry. He'd chosen Lucy Creekmore, a sister of his grandfather's wife, and found nothing strange about it. The mothers would raise the boys as brothers.

  Sam stroked the back of his nursing infant son as he watched his grandfather lift his own new son from its mother and raise him in the air.

  "This is my son, Daniel!" Old Stephen said. "A son whom no one shall call 'bastard!'"

  Daniel's mother smiled, with a knowing look.

  Something in the air was troublesome to Samuel. He was confused, and looked toward his father, Stephen Williams, Junior.

  Junior had heard his father but was confused, himself. Was he become a lesser son?

  Father Manning came to Junior's side and put a supporting hand on his shoulder. Margaret put her arm around her husband and grew rigid, as she stood taller.

  Afterword

  Northeastern North Carolina was among the earliest settled sections in British North America. Largely because of peculiar geographic influences, a great portion of the population of these seventeen or eighteen counties has always descended from the first Anglo-Saxon-Celtic colonists of the mid-1700s. Many of those settlers had come, first, to southeastern Virginia during the latter half of the seventeenth century, joining friends and families who had arrived even earlier from neighboring villages and towns of southwestern England. Several generations of British subjects lived and died here—prayed and fought for more than a half-dozen British monarchs—while evolving into self-assertive, republican Americans. Becoming Americans is a tale of these men, women and children who, during more than a century of discovery and rebellion, religion and politics, loving and dying created the personalities and setting of the American Revolution.

  Becoming Americans personalizes that evolution and those early Americans in the perspective illuminated by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their work Generations, The History of America's Future, 1584-2069: that American history is a repeating cycle of generation types, causing and/or reacting to predictable secular and spiritual crises. Understanding that process of age-cohort development illuminates history and the future—national and personal. Vice-President Gore has called Generations one of the "…great works of interpretation, capable of producing a paradigmatic shift in thinking."

  Strauss and Howe identify and locate in time the American generations and their cycles. They begin their study with the Colonial Cycle and the Puritan Generation (born during the years 1587 through 1614), a spiritually motivated age group that was reacting to the worldliness of its Elizabethan predecessors. They, in turn, created the moralistic, judgmental environment that was rejected by the next generation, the Cavaliers (1615-1647). There followed the secular, hardworking Glorious (1648-1673), and then the polished, worldly Enlightenment (1674-1700). This repeating pattern was continued in the subsequent Revolutionary Cycle of Awakening (1701-1723), Liberty (1724-1741), Republican (1742-1766), and Compromise (1767-1791). Today's living representatives of overlapping cycles include the triumphant survivors of the civic-minded GI Generation (1901-1924), the adaptive Silent Generation (1925-1942), the idealistic Boomers (1943-1960), the reactive X or Thirteenth (1961-1981), and the promising new civic Millennial Generation (1982-????), still in its youth.

  Becoming Americans is a unique dramatization of the Colonial and early Revolutionary Cycles as lived by one tenacious family, from the arrival of an orphaned, immigrant Cavalier servant in 1658 Virginia, though the colonies' evolution to ripening political self-consciousness in 1767 North Carolina. The passions, disasters, triumphs, and challenges of that formative century are reflected in the family of Richard Williams.

  Richard Williams (b.1645), the immigrant, was orphaned at the age of four, victim of a religious and political struggle that had orphaned thousands of children in England, including those of the beheaded King Charles I, himself. The strict Puritans brought on a reaction among the young. Richard and his Cavalier peers shared undisciplined appetites and disdain for authority. His life as an indentured servant was common for the time, too, as was his transition into independent planter status.

  Anne Biggs (b.1650), Richard's wife, John (b. 1666) and Joseph (b.1667), his oldest sons, and Edy (b.1669), his oldest daughter were Glorious children, raised in safer, more stable times and circumstances. They were bold, rational, and free to contribute their talents and energies to the development of infrastructure and tradition. Anne held the fractious family together with her wits, and made a new life for them in the "Rogues Harbor" of North Carolina where, in 1691, she moved with her third husband, the notorious Robert Fewox, taking Edy and the youngest children with her. Her adult sons stayed in Virginia. John organized and managed a large plantation, while his brother, Joseph, conducted commerce, built a water mill, a road, and established a village.

  The youngest children of Richard and Anne Williams—Edward (b. 1674), Richard (b. 1675) and Sarah Alice (b. 1676)—and some of their grandchildren of the Enlightenment generation entered adulthood during a period of peace and prosperity that they relished. "Rogue's Harbor" offered opportunities, despite and because of the pirates and poor land. The growing Empire and the Royal Navy needed Carolina's naval stores.

  The next generation of Americans, stifled by the secular concerns of their socially striving elders, reveled in their spiritual and idealistic natures and joined in the Great Awakening of religion in the mid-eighteenth century. Stephen Williams (b. 1701) broke with his family and from a sullen past of adventure and swamp exploration to rejoice in that emotional religious movement, while his older Enlightenment brother James (b. 1700) clung to the ritual and respectability of the Church of England.

  Children of the Awakeners were temperamentally reminiscent of Richard the Immigrant and were among the adventurers who so resented that moralism and the authority of Britain that they ventured forth in great numbers to the western frontier, following the footsteps of Daniel Boone and other explorers of their Liberty Generation. Stephen's son, Junior (b. 1730), made attempts to follow the teachings and lifestyle of his Baptist community, but, like his Liberty cohorts, Junior resented all intrusion into his life and personal liberty. He exercised that resentment whether against his church community or against the King's men.

  Junior's son, Samuel (b.1747), was among those who would fight for his country's independence from the King and the King's men. The Republican Generation became tireless foot soldiers of the Revolution. The cycle continued.

  Becoming Americans is the story of America's early beginning, the study of a culture in formation; that culture of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic settlers which became a dominant one of the southern United States. The men and women who grew the tobacco, who boiled the tar for Britain's ships, who defied the Established Church as non-conformists, and "populated the Earth" with settlers for the frontier were the humble but exciting yeomen stock of much of our country, themselves the first frontiersmen, the homefolks of the pioneers. Their story is a
n important part of our national family history.

  END