The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 51Byrd, of course, did not have to struggle to acquire wealth, he inherited it. Once
he had done so, however, he worked hard to sustain that wealth and even acquire
more. He personally supervised his properties, once he settled in Virginia, arranging
for the planting of crops, orchards, and gardens; he also attended to his duties within
his own community and in the county and the colony. And he was just as intent as
his wealthy neighbors were on assuming the appearance of idle nobility. When writ-
ing back to friends in England, for instance, he tended to turn his life in Virginia into
a version of the pastoral As his small hymns to Southern pastoral intimate, the desire
to paint plantation life as a kind of idyll sprang from two, related things, for Byrd
and others like him: a feeling of exile from the centers of cultural activity and a
desire to distance the specters of provincialism and money-grubbing. Exiled from
the “polite pleasures” of the mother country, in a place that he elsewhere described
as the “great wilderness” of America, Byrd was prompted to describe his plantation
home as a place of natural abundance, ripe simplicity, and indolence. Describing it
in this way, he also separated himself from the work ethic that prevailed further
north. A clear dividing line was being drawn between him and the life he and his
social equals in Virginia led and, on the one hand, England, and on the other, New
England. In the process, Byrd was dreaming and articulating what was surely to
become the dominant image of the South.
That Byrd and the first families attempted to live according to this image there is
no doubt. Both Byrd himself and Robert “King” Carter, for example, assumed the
role and function of feudal patriarch on their plantations. Considering themselves
the guardians of the physical and moral welfare of their slaves – whom they often
chose to refer to as their “people” – they considered it an important part of their
social duty to act as benevolent overlords: punishing the lazy “children” – as they
also sometimes referred to their slave labor – rewarding the industrious, and having
all “imaginable care,” as one Virginia planter, Landon Carter (1710–1778), put it in
his diary for 1752, of such “poor creatures” as were sick. That Byrd and others also
felt exiled sometimes, in the Southern colonies, there can be no doubt either. “The
Habits, Life, Customs, Computations, etc of the Virginians,” declared Hugh Jones,
“are much the same as about London, which they esteem their home.” Byrd himself
never ceased to think of England as, in many ways, the right place for him – a center
of culture, entertainment, as opposed to what he called, in a letter written in 1726,
“this silent country.” His writings are full of references to the scenes and life of
London, as if language and more specifically imagery could make up for what he
lacked in life. For example, after finding some horses that had strayed near the misty,
mainly marshy region known as the Dismal Swamp, Byrd wrote: “They were found
standing indeed, but as motionless as the equestrian statues in Charing Cross.” The
contrast between the scene described and the mode of description could hardly be
more striking: on the one hand, a world of immense and disturbing strangeness, on
the other a cultural referent that is comfortingly familiar and known. In its own way,
the remark appears to sum up the process of accommodation to which so many of the
great planters like Byrd committed themselves: their effort, that is, to create a sense of
connection, as well as division, between the Old World and the New.GGray_c01.indd 51ray_c 01 .indd 51 8 8/1/2011 7:54:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 55 AM