1744 Like Thomas Jefferson, William Byrd II of Westover was a Virginia country gentleman. Unlike Jefferson, he did not fret in the fetters of the mother country. Byrd belonged to a generation content to be British. If they lamented their distance from the court, coffee houses and other locales of wit and good conversation found in the metropolis, it was not as inhabitants of an adversarial separate country, but as provincials on the edges of a great empire. Byrd had been born in Virginia, but was schooled in Essex, went to Rotterdam to study business, then back to London to study law, before returning to Virginia to inherit his father’s estate.
Back home he lived in a brick three-storey Georgian mansion on a plantation large enough to provide the land for present-day Richmond and Petersburg, as a government official (he was treasurer of Virginia), as an amateur naturalist (he was a Fellow of the Royal Society), and as the author of voluminous letters and diaries. He could read Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian and French. His library of 4,000 volumes, one of the largest in the colonies, made up in books for what he lacked in good conversation.
Byrd’s coded secret diary gives the flavour of his daily routine. On the last day of 1711, ‘I rose about 7 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew and six leaves in Lucian. I said my prayers and ate boiled milk for breakfast.’ On New Year’s Day, 1712, ‘I lay abed till 9 o’clock this morning to bring my wife into temper again and rogered her by way of reconciliation.’ Later, ‘Mr Mumford and I went to shoot with our bows and arrows but shot nothing, and afterwards we played at billiards.’
Private pleasures were balanced by public projects. His best known work, The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (widely circulated but not published until 1841), followed an expedition to survey the disputed boundary. It is a mixture of science and satire: close observations of flora and fauna, of the natives’ habits and the history of European settlement, spiced with sketches of the North Carolinans’ gluttony, laziness and sexual excess: ‘The only business here is the raising of hogs, which is managed with the least trouble and affords the diet they are most fond of’ – so much so that they are beginning to look like hogs themselves.
Properly used for improving the mind and morals, leisure was a virtue, Byrd thought. This was very much a southern belief, not one shared by New England, for example. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), St John de Crèvecoeur tells the story of ‘Mr Bertram, the botanist’, who first cleared his land, then cultivated it, through which effort he earned the leisure to study nature in the abstract, and to take pleasure in his studies.
Susan Manning thinks that Byrd’s contempt for North Carolina is displaced anxiety about his own idleness. After the Revolution, which imposed (even for Jefferson) a strict dividing line ‘between virtuous industry and unpatriotic indolence’, the precarious balance could no longer be maintained. Then the southern gentleman turned into a ‘historical and literary myth’, she argues, ‘from the effete, enervated, but perfectly civilised Augustine St Clare in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the atavistic heirs of Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor’.1
1 Susan Manning, ‘Industry and Idleness in Colonial Virginia: A New Approach to William Byrd II’, Journal of American Studies, 28 (1994), pp. 190, 172.