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by Nancy Isenberg


  24.Because of the possible defect in the first charter, a second charter was issued in 1665. See “Charter to the Lord Proprietors of Carolina” (June 30, 1650), in Parker, North Carolina Charters and Constitutions, 90; Wolf, “The Proud and the Poor,” 69; McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People, 49–50, 97–99. On the effort of Berkeley to acquire Albemarle, see Cain, Records of the Executive Council, 7:xix. For putting Carolina under stricter controls, see “Mr. Randolph’s Memoranda About Illegal Trade in the Plantations, Mentioned in the Foregoing Presentment,” November 10, 1696, and another report by Randolph, dated March 24, 1700, in Saunders, CRNC, 1:464–70, 527.

  25.See Saunders, CRNC, 1:xxi; Mattie Erma E. Parker, “Legal Aspects of ‘Culpeper’s Rebellion,’” North Carolina Historical Review 45, no. 2 (April 1968): 111–27, esp. 118–20, 122–24; McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People, 56–57, 65–66.

  26.See “Answer of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina Read the 20 Nov. 1680” and “Petition of Thomas Miller to the King, November 20, 1680,” in Saunders, CRNC, 1:303, 326–28; and Parker, “Legal Aspects of ‘Culpeper’s Rebellion,’” 111–27, esp. 111–12; Lowry, “Class, Politics, Rebellion,” 49.

  27.On the controversy surrounding Thomas Miller, see “Affidavit of Henry Hudson, January 31, 1679,” and “Carolina Indictment of Th. Miller Received from Ye Comm. Of Ye Customes the 15 July 1680,” in Saunders, CRNC, 1:272–74, 313–17; and Lindley S. Butler, “Culpeper’s Rebellion: Testing the Proprietors,” in North Carolina Experience: An Interpretative and Documentary History, eds. Lindley S. Butler and Alan D. Watson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 53–78, esp. 56–57. On the scarcity of landgraves and caciques in North Carolina, see Paschal, “Proprietary North Carolina,” 184.

  28.Wolf, “The Proud and the Poor,” 68, and footnote 29 on 172; Paschal, “Proprietary North Carolina,” 179; McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People, 73, 80, 146; Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 54; Lowry, “Class, Politics, Rebellion,” 49, 96–97. On Governor Spotswood waging war on North Carolina, and the connection to the Tuscarora Indians, see “Colonel Spotswood to the Board of Trade, July 25, 1711,” in Saunders, CRNC, 1:782.

  29.“Journal of John Barnwell,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 6, no. 1 (July 1898): 442–55, esp. 451; on Barnwell’s treachery, see “Colonel Spotswood to the Board of Trade, July 26, 1752,” in Saunders, CRNC, 1:862. Barnwell was accompanied by around five hundred Yamassee and other Indian allies. Their interest in attacking the Tuscaroras was also spurred on by the desire to capture slaves. See Lowry, “Class, Politics, Rebellion,” 98–99.

  30.See “Governor Spotswood to the Earl of Rochester, July 30, 1711,” in Saunders, CRNC, 1:798; Lord Culpeper to the Board of Trade, December 1681, British Public Record Office, class 1, piece 47, folio 261, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and Barbara Fuchs, “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation,” ELH 67, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 45–69, esp. 50–51.

  31.See Byrd, SH and HDL, 19, 66, 195; Philip Ludwell and Nathaniel Harrison, “Boundary Line Proceedings, 1710,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 5 (July 1897): 1–21. It appears that Byrd wrote and revised his two texts between 1729 and 1740. Although the more polished “History of the Dividing Line” was not published until 1841, he did circulate the text among friends and other curious people. See Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674–1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 127, 142–43; and Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., William Byrd of Virginia: The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 39–40.

  32.See William Byrd to Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, July 25, 1726, in “Virginia Council Journals, 1726–1753,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 32, no. 1 (January 1932): 26–27; and Robert D. Arner, “Westover and the Wilderness: William Byrd’s Images of Virginia,” Southern Literary Journal 7, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 105–23, esp. 106–7.

  33.Byrd, SH, 66, 81; HDL, 182. For another discussion of the “knights-errant” allusion, see Susan Scott Parrish, “William Byrd and the Crossed Languages of Science, Satire, and Empire in British America,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, and Identities, eds. Ralph Bauer and Jose Antonio Mazotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 355–72, esp. 363.

  34.Byrd, HDL, 182, 204–5. The idea of women doing all the work and “husbands lie snoring in bed” is a much older theme. Thomas More alluded to this dysfunctional gender pattern in Utopia, where he felt all men and women should be engaged in productive labor. See Thomas More, Utopia, eds. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; rev. ed., 2011), 51.

  35.Byrd, SH, 143; HDL, 311–12. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “bogtrotting” was first used in 1682, and was associated not only with the Irish but with people who were poor and lived near marshes.

  36.Byrd, HDL, 196. Scholars have recognized Byrd’s reference to Lubberland and sloth, but failed to trace its roots to the folktale of Lawrence Lazy, which circulated orally and was first published in English in 1670. The influence on Byrd is that his lazy Carolinians sit in the corner like Lazy Lawrence. For the history of the folktale, see J. B. Smith, “Toward a Demystification of Lazy Lawrence,” Folklore 107 (1996): 101–5; also see Susan Manning, “Industry and Idleness in Colonial Virginia: A New Approach to William Byrd,” Journal of American Studies 28, no. 2 (August 1994): 169–90; and James R. Masterson, “William Byrd in Lubberland,” American Literature 9, no. 2 (May 1937): 153–70. Byrd was also influenced by “An Invitation to Lubberland,” which appeared as a broadside in 1685. In this long verse, Lubberland is a land of plenty where one can “lead a lazy life free from labour” and “everyone do’s what he pleases.” See An Invitation to Lubberland, with an Account of the Great Plenty of That Fruitful Country (London, ca. 1685).

  37.Byrd, HDL, 192, 196; SH, 59–61, 63. Wild boars cannibalize shoats and young pigs, and they eat everything, including newborn cattle. They are predators, and are willing to eat carrion and manure. Byrd’s theory about pork was probably influenced by John Lawson’s 1709 account of North Carolina. Lawson discussed how various Indians suffered from yaws, and he discussed pork as a “gross food,” spreading juices through the body. See Lefler, A New Voyage to Carolina, 25; it was a common assumption among the English that to be noseless reduced a person to the state of an animal, because it was believed that man was the only creature with a nose. English jest books were filled with nasty jokes about noseless people. See Simon Dickie, “Hilarity and Pitilessness in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: English Jestbook Humor,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 1, Exploring Sentiment (Fall 2003): 1–22, esp. 2–3.

  38.Byrd, HDL, 160–61, 221–22, 296. Byrd felt the Indians were healthy and strong, and less debilitated by the European disease of lewdness; see Fischer, Suspect Relations, 75–77. Lawson argued that men should marry Indian women rather than spend “four or five years Servitude,” in which they might suffer sickness and die. Both Lawson and Byrd argued that intermarriage was a better method of conquest than bloodshed. See Lefler, A New Voyage to Carolina, 192, 244, 246. Byrd did purchase 100,000 acres west of “Lubberland,” hoping to create a more stable community of Swiss-German settlers to offset the dangerous wastrels he observed on the expedition. By the end of his life, he had acquired 179,440 acres. See Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd, 140; Wright and Tinling, William Byrd of Virginia, 41.

  39.For the account of Reverend John Urmston, who was in North Carolina from 1711 to 1720, see “Mr. Urmston’s Letter,” July 7, 1711, in Saunders, CRNC, 1:770; for Governor Johnson’s remarks, see Ekirch, Poor Carolina, 67; and for the later traveler, see J. F. D. Smyth, Esq., A Tour of the United States of America (Dublin, 1784), 64–65.

  40.Smyth, A Tour of the United States of America, 65.


  41.A Voyage to Georgia: Begun in the Year 1735, by Frances Moore, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah.

  42.For the motto, see Mills Lane, ed., General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733–1743 (Savannah, GA: Beehive Press, 1990), xviii. On the first group of settlers, see E. M. Coulter and A. B. Saye, eds., A List of the Early Settlers of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1949), xii, 111. Oglethorpe took on the unusual role of “gossip,” helping pregnant women to give birth; see Mr. Benjamin Ingham’s journal of his voyage to Georgia, 1736, in Egmont Papers, Philips Collection, University of Georgia, vol. 14201, 442–43; and Joseph Hetherington to Mr. Oglethorpe, March 22, 1733/34, in Lane, General Oglethorpe’s Georgia, 138.

  43.On emulation, see James Edward Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design for the Trustees for Establishing Colonies in America, eds. Rodney M. Baine and Phinizy Spalding (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 31–32. On Oglethorpe’s sacrifices for the community, and giving up the soft bed, see Samuel Eveleigh to the Trustees, April 6, 1733, in Lane, General Oglethorpe’s Georgia, 1:13; and Governor Johnson to Benjamin Martyn, July 28, 1733, and Mr. Beaufain to Mr. Simond, January 23, 1733/34, and Extract of a letter from Georgia, March 7, 1735/36, Egmont Papers, vol. 14200, 36, 62; vol. 14201, 314.

  44.Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design, 51; Rodney E. Baine, “General James Oglethorpe and the Expedition Against St. Augustine,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 84, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 197–229, esp. 197–98. On the military design of Savannah, see Turpin C. Bannister, “Oglethorpe’s Sources for the Savannah Plan,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 20, no. 2 (May 1961): 47–62, esp. 60–62.

  45.Oglethorpe wanted Georgia to allow men to “labour at a decent maintenance,” and he calculated the labor value of wives and eldest sons to offset the needs for servants and slaves; see James Oglethorpe, A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia (London, 1733), 39, 42–43; also see Philip Thicknesse to his mother, November 3, 1736, in Lane, General Oglethorpe’s Georgia, 1:281; Rodney Baine, “Philip Thicknesse’s Reminiscences of Early Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 74, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 672–98, esp. 694–95, 697–98. For the citizen-soldier idea, see Benjamin Martyn, An Account, Showing the Progress of the Colony (London, 1741), 18. For Oglethorpe’s views on women and cleanliness, see Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design, 23, 26, 29–31. On the problem of female slaves, see Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 18. From 1732 to September 1741, 45.4 percent of the settlers sent on charity were “Foreign Protestants”; see Coulter and Saye, A List of the Early Settlers, x.

  46.James Oglethorpe to the Trustees, August 12, 1733, in Egmont Papers, vol. 14200, 38–39.

  47.See Colonel William Byrd to Lord Egmont, July 12, 1736, in “Colonel William Byrd on Slavery and Indentured Servants, 1736, 1739,” American Historical Review 1, no. 1 (October 1895): 88–99, esp. 89. On John Colleton, see J. E. Buchanan, “The Colleton Family and Early History of South Carolina and Barbados, 1646–1775” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1989), 33.

  48.James Oglethorpe to the Trustees, January 17, 1738/9, Egmont Papers, vol. 14203, 143.

  49.“The Sailors Advocate. To Be Continued.” (London, 1728), 8, 10–17; and Julie Anne Sweet, “The British Sailors’ Advocate: James Oglethorpe’s First Philanthropic Venture,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 91, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 1–27, esp. 4–10, 12.

  50.John Vat to Henry Newman, May 30, 1735, and Patrick Tailfer and Others to the Trustees, August 27, 1735, in Lane, General Oglethorpe’s Georgia, 1:178, 225.

  51.“Oglethorpe State of Georgia,” October 11, 1739, (Introductory Discourse to the State of the Colony of Georgia), Egmont Papers, vol. 14204, 35; and “The Sailors Advocate,” 12; Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 66; Coulter and Saye, A List of the Early Settlers, 106–11.

  52.On the small number of Indian slaves, see Rodney M. Baine, “Indian Slavery in Colonial Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 418–24. On debtors and economic vulnerability, see Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design, 11–12; Oglethorpe, A New and Accurate Account, 30–33; and Rodney M. Baine, “New Perspectives on Debtors in Colonial Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 1–19, esp. 4.

  53.See Milton L. Ready, “Land Tenure in Trusteeship Georgia,” Agricultural History 48, no. 3 (July 1974): 353–68, esp. 353–57, 359.

  54.See Translation of Reverend Mr. Dumont’s Letter to Mr. Benjamin Martyn, May 21, 1734, Egmont Papers, vol. 14207. Dumont wrote from Rotterdam, and represented a community of French Vaudois.

  55.See Oglethorpe, A New and Accurate Account, 73–75. In his other promotional tract, he used a similar argument about the Roman colonies, noting that only men with land married and had children; see Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design, 6, 9–10, 40.

  56.James Oglethorpe to the Trustees, January 16, 1738/9, and James Oglethorpe to the Trustees, January 17, 1738/9, in Egmont Papers, vol. 14203, 142–43.

  57.Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 67.

  58.For the attempted murder, see “New York. Jan. 9. We Hear from Georgia,” Boston Gazette, January 22, 1739.

  59.Alan Gallay, “Jonathan Bryan’s Plantation Empire: Land, Politics, and the Formation of a Ruling Class in Colonial Georgia,” William and Mary Quarterly 45, no. 2 (April 1988): 253–79, esp. 253, 257–60, 275.

  Chapter Three: Benjamin Franklin’s American Breed: The Demographics of Mediocrity

  1.Poor Richard, 1741. An Almanack for the Year of Christ 1741, . . . By Richard Saunders (Philadelphia, 1741), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 40 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 2:292. Hereafter cited as Franklin Papers.

  2.On Silence Dogood and Franklin’s creation of literary disguises, see Albert Furtwangler, “The Spectator’s Apprentice,” in American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 15–34, esp. 28–30; R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 21–65. On Dingo, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004), 50–52, 220. On the financial success of the Pennsylvania Gazette, see Charles E. Clark and Charles Wetherell, “The Measure of Maturity: The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1765,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April 1989): 279–303, esp. 291. On the wide reach of his almanacs, see William Pencak, “Politics and Ideology in ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack,’” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116, no. 2 (April 1992): 183–211, esp. 195–96. On his retirement, see Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography, with introduction by Daniel Aaron (New York: Vintage, 1990), 116.

  3.Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1938), 170–71, 174–80, 195–96, 210–15, 220, 223–24. On his proposals for his academy, see George Boudreau, “‘Done by a Tradesman’: Franklin’s Educational Proposals and the Culture of Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History 69, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 524–57. On Pennsylvania Hospital, see William H. Williams, “The ‘Industrious Poor’ and the Founding of the Pennsylvania Hospital,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 4 (October 1973): 431–43. On his reception in Europe, see J. L. Heilbron, “Benjamin Franklin in Europe: Electrician, Academician, and Politician,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 61, no. 3 (September 22, 2007): 353–73, esp. 355; and L. K. Mathews, “Benjamin Franklin’s Plans of Colonial Union,” American Political Science Review 8, no. 3 (August 1914): 393–412.

  4.For his arguments about human impulses shaped by pleasure and pain, see Franklin, “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain” (London, 1725), in Franklin Papers, 1:
57–71, esp. 64, 71; also see Joyce Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2006), 12–16.

  5.Peter Kalm, Travels into North America; Containing Its Natural History, and a Circumstantial Account of Its Plantations and Agricultural in General, with the Civil, Ecclesiastical and Commercial State of the Country, the Manners of the Inhabitants, and Several Curious and Important Remarks on Various Subjects, trans. John Reinhold Forster, vol. 1 (Warrington, UK, 1770), 1:305–6; Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Johnson, August 23, 1750, Franklin Papers, 4:40–42, esp. 42.

  6.For “uneasy in rest,” see “A Dissertation on Liberty,” Franklin Papers, 1:64. For the English as “stirrers abroad,” see the dedication in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 1:[2].

  7.Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751), Franklin Papers, 4:225–34, esp. 228. This manuscript was first published in 1755; see William F. Von Valtier, “The Demographic Numbers Behind Benjamin Franklin’s Twenty-Five-Year Doubling Period,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155, no. 2 (June 2011): 158–88, esp. 160–61, footnote 9.

 

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