William Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina
Presented at the Early Ibero/Anglo Americanist Summit, May 16-19
Panel 14: Creolization and Empire
Andrew Newman, University of California, Irvine
William Byrd II of Westover was a second-generation Creole. He was educated and socialized in elite circles in England, but he spent most of his adult life as proprietor of the family estate in Virginia. His two Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina are overlapping accounts of a joint 1728 expedition undertaken by Byrd, other leading Virginians, and their Carolinian counterparts to settle a longstanding boundary dispute by surveying a line due west through the disputed borderlands between the colonies, thus officially opening the land on either side of the new Dividing Line to appropriation and settlement.
The two histories remained unpublished in the 18th century, but during Byrd’s lifetime they were circulated as manuscripts within Virginia. Presumably, his first account, the Secret History of the Line (SH) , was restricted to an inner circle. It’s the more ribald and implicating of the two. It’s also the more patently English in its literary style, using humorously descriptive pseudonyms for the commissioners and surveyors after the manner of, for example, Byrd’s friend William Congreve’s The Way of the World. The Secret History is, really, a bizarre amalgam, a picaresque measured out with surveyor’s chains, an urbane narrative of wit and political intrigue patched on to a linear trajectory that carries through the Great Dismal Swamp and the backwoods to the foothills of the Alleghenies. On the other hand, Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line Run in the Year 1728 (H), while also frequently jocular in tone, corresponds more fully to the genre of the colonial “historical geographical account”; it contextualizes the surveying expedition within the greater history of the region, and presents elaborate natural and ethnographic descriptions (Slotkin 215). Even so, as Gordon Sayre writes, “Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line can be read as a travel narrative turned to parody by taking the principle of a linear journey to a hyperrational extreme” (11).
In “William Byrd Surveys America,” David Smith denominates the dividing line as “a root metaphor for describing the American landscape” and, by extension, the American people (298). It follows that the literal dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina indicates a qualitative difference between colonial populations — the Virginians are characterized by industry and fair play, the Carolinians by indolence, gluttony, and duplicity. In describing the differences between peoples, Byrd humorously attaches cardinal importance to diet. The Carolinians are a “porcivorous” people, and their dependence on “Swine’s flesh” leads to a degenerative creolization: “it don’t only encline them to the Yaws, & consequently to the downfall of their Noses, but makes them likewise extremely hoggish in their Temper, & many of them seem to Grunt rather than Speak in their ordinary conversation” (SH 55, 61). Byrd remarks on the wisdom of the Jews, who “liv’d much in the same Latitude with Carolina,” but whose proscription saved them from the “foul and pernicious Effects of Eating Swine’s Flesh in a hot country” (H 56). Because of the bounty of the sultry climate, the Carolinian men are lazy, poor husbandmen. This characterization carries over to the Carolinian commissioners in Byrd’s company, who show up “better provided for the Belly than the Business” (SH 44). After passing by the last houses of the so-called “inhabitants” and using up the last of the “good liquor,” the Carolinians suddenly quit the expedition, declaring that they have no intention of continuing into regions that won’t be settled for the foreseeable future (H 174). The Virginians continue to survey, depending on “Providence” for their subsistence (SH 189).
This point, the limit of settlement, marks a second, vertical dividing line that is almost as significant as the horizontal one in structuring the narratives. Instead of dividing the territory in half, the expedition has divided it into quarters, with the implication that, due to the endemic laziness of the Carolinians, the Virginian portion of wilderness is sooner due for settlement and cultivation. Much of the pretext for witticism and calumny departs along with the Carolina commissioners, and the Secret History especially undergoes a marked change in tone — transforming from a mock adventure into a self-satisfied account of genuine adventure. This is Byrd at his furthest remove from his London literary circle, and he evidently relishes his immersion into Indian country.
Byrd prefaces his History with a brief review of the settlement of the eastern seaboard in which he advances a radical counter-factual formulation: had the original settlers at Jamestown chosen to intermarry with the Indians, they would have secured a lasting peace, accomplished the good work of conversion to Christianity, and finally — and as Dana Nelson points out, most significantly — come into Indian land without any conflict (35). Far from posing a threat to corrupt the European gene pool, the natives “are healthy & Strong, with Constitutions untainted by Lewdness, and not enfeebled by Luxury” (H 3). In other words, the Indians might inoculate the Americans against the sort of degeneration suffered especially by low-class Carolinians. And Byrd, typically of those who putatively favor an ameliorist program of miscegenation, asserts that whiteness is dominant and “Darkness” is recessive: “for if a Moor may be washt white in 3 generations, Surely an Indian might have been blancht in two” (H 4). While the reference to the “Moor” invokes Spain and thus the Spanish-American context, Byrd’s more immediate contrast is to the French, who according to Byrd successfully pursued a policy of intermingling with North American natives. “And I heartily wish this well-concerted Scheme don’t hereafter give the French the Advantage over his Majesty’s good Subjects on the Northern Continent of America” (SH 4).
As Nelson argues, Byrd’s “mischievous banter on intermarriage” does not amount to an appreciation or even really an acknowledgement of Indian culture (34). What it does entail is a substitution scheme, with white men taking the place of Indian men, because both Indian men and white women are left out of the proposed coupling. Byrd makes the stereotypical distinction between the industriousness of Indian women and the laziness of Indian men, thereby privileging the women within the value system that prevails in the first halves of the Histories. Yet unlike the indolent, “porcivorous” white Carolinian (and southern Virginian, as Byrd concedes), the Indian man has a stereotypical, enviable characteristic—virility. One is reminded of Kathleen Brown’s “gender frontier” along which Anglo-Americans were confronted with a value system in which industriousness and agricultural labor were hardly a sign of masculinity (Brown).
In the latter-portion of their westward journey, Byrd’s party plays out a fantasy of naturalized manhood. Again, diet plays a role. Byrd asked the Indian hunter Ned Bearskin the secret for the fertility of native women, and learned that Indian men had an infallible potency formula: a strict diet of bear meat. In both histories, Byrd makes countless jokes about his party’s bear consumption, including: “that all the Marryed men of our Company were joyful Fathers within forty weeks after they got Home, and most of the Single men had children sworn to them within the same time” (H 251).
The wilderness sequence undermines Byrd’s more conservative proclamations — it seems that a fine climate and an ample, automatic food supply is not necessarily deleterious after all. And dependence on Providence rather than industry and husbandry can be construed as more Christian. One of the more remarkable passages in the Histories — excerpted in the anthology — is Byrd’s ethnographic examination of Ned Bearskin, in which he learns the topography of the Saponi afterworld. The “good” are directed to a “extremely Levil” “fine warm country” where there are “Deer, Turkeys, Elks and Buffaloes innumberable” and the “Soil brings forth Corn Spontaneously, without the Curse of Labour.” Meanwhile, the “bad” are directed to a mountainous, “barren Country, where ‘tis always Winter” (H 200, SH 201). Uncannily, the topographic typology Byrd attributes to Bearskin is replicated in his own descriptions of the immediate landscape. The company has just come into sight of the mountains which will put a period to their westward progress, and almost immediately after the interview with Bearskin, Byrd’s company comes upon what he takes to be abandoned Indian cornfields. “We encampt near one of these Indian Corn Fields, where was excellent Food for our Horses. Our Indian kill’d a Deer & the Men knock’d down no less than 4 Bears and 2 Turkeys, so this was truly a Land of Plenty for Man & Beast” (SH 209). In other words, as this juxtaposition suggests, Byrd had developed a taste for the Native American good life.
Works Cited:
Brown, Kathleen. "The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier." Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Ed. Nancy Shoemaker. New York: Routledge, 1995. 26-48.
Byrd, William. Histories of the dividing line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina. With introd. and notes by William K. Boyd, and a new introd. by Percy G. Adams. 1929. New York,: Dover Publications, 1967.
Nelson, Dana. "Economies of Morality and Power: Reading 'Race'" A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America. Ed. Frank Shuffleton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 19-38
Sayre, Gordon M. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through violence : the mythology of the American frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Smith, David. "William Byrd Surveys America." Early American Literature 11.3 (1977): 296-309.