William Byrd II was a wealthy Virginia plantation owner who lived from 1674 to 1744. He was a statesman, a social dilettante, a slave owner. His was the very picture of that special ironic breed of American: the Southern gentleman. At the same time, his story was the ebb tide of divergent historical forces far beyond his control . His political involvement in both the American colonies and in England put him at the cathexis of the old and new worlds. His chronicles of the history of the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia juxtaposed with his comparatively bland j ournaling made him an unwitting case for the tension between deliberate and fortuitous myth-making. The result of those dynamics, as Byrd biographer Kenneth Lockridge suggests, is that "created by his culture, he finally became an instrument shaping that culture in turn, during the golden age of the tidewater gentry just before midcentury." (Lockridge, p. vii) If Lockridge is correct, Byrd stands in the middle of an American Studies question that is as relevant to the Virginian as it is to General Custer and Teddy Roosevelt. Are American male archetypes built from exceptional men, or is that identity borrowed from larger mythological notions of Americanness and Masculinity? Does Byrd create a myth or merely imitate it?
Byrd was
born in Virginia, where he lived until age seven. In that
year, due to his father's role in Bacon's Rebellion
young William
Byrd was sent to England to be educated at the prestigious Felsted School,
with which his mother's family was loosely associated. As a consequence
of his involvement with the rebellion, Byrd Senior won the influence that would transform him from a moderately successful planter and Indian trader to the model of new American aristocracy. By
his
death in 1704 he left a large Virginia estate to Byrd Junior. Five
years later, the second Byrd had taken his father's seat on the Virginia
Council of State, had made unsuccessful bids for the Virginia and Maryland
governorships, and had begun his secret diaries. (Lockridge, p. xiii)
Each event reflected a pattern that would hold for the rest of his life.
The first two themes - assuming his father's role in life and entangling
himself in political schemes, more often fruitless than not - were
significantly omitted from the third: his secret diaries. The outcomes of the first two Byrd could not control, so it is important that his life's compromises and failures make only small cameos in the self-selected history of his diaries.
Diaries have turned up from three distinct periods of Byrd's life -- from 1709 to 1712, from 1717 to 1721, and from 1739 to 1741. In the earlier diaries Byrd seems to have been more detailed in his accounts (inasmuch as his journaling were ever "detailed"). Furthermore, the entries from the early years were written when Byrd was still acclimating to the colonies, where he had lived as a young boy and spent bouts of time, but had never really inhabited in adulthood. They give an indication of life in the colonies to someone who might be unused to it, a useful perspective for scholars and historians. For that reason, I will concentrate on the entries from the first years.
In 1941 Byrd's journal were finally compiled, decoded and given the title The Secret Diaries of William Byrd of Westover, a name which has affected, I think, the way scholars have approached Byrd ever since. The "secret diaries" suggests that Byrd's aim was to hide them. This assumption is not entirely wrong. After all, Byrd wrote his entries in a method of shorthand first detailed in stenographer William Mason's La Plume Volante, or the Art of Shorthand Improved - a book that was conspicuously absent from Byrd's otherwise extensive personal library. But the notion of "secret diaries" seems to imply "personal diaries" as well, and whether they are that is a matter of some debate. For Byrd's diaries are particularly bankrupt in affect, leading historians like Lawrence Stone and Michael Zuckerman to assume that Byrd was simply as cold and dull as they find his entries. In an effort to do credit to Byrd, others have read emotion into "tiny variations in Byrd's rigid routine... as clues to his feelings." (Lockridge, p. 10) But it seems a bad approach to go so far to contextualize the diary's most salient characteristic as to disregard it altogether. Any analysis of the diaries must contend with its peculiar tone, and so that will be my starting point. As we go, I will try to pick apart what these diaries say about Byrd personally and what they say about more general normative behavior for an aristocratic colonial Virginian. We must, whenever possible, separate Byrd from Byrd's conception of himself. In order to do that, we must deconstruct the diaries.