[In the following essay, Smith suggests that the idea of the land survey and the image of the boundary are the central, sustaining metaphors in Byrd's Histories of the Line.]

I

Thus in the beginning all the world was America.

John Locke, “Of Property,” in The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690)

When John Locke set himself to thinking about a state of nature, it was natural for him to imagine life in “America” as illustrative of most of his arguments. In a state of nature, with vast tracts of wasteland and plenty for everyone, but no private property as such, “every man's possession” was confined to “a very moderate proportion, and such as he might appropriate to himself without injury to anybody in the first ages of the world, when men were more in danger to be lost by wandering from their company in the then vast wilderness of the earth than to be straitened for want of room to plant in.” Suppose

a man or family in the state they were at first peopling of the world by the children of Adam or Noah, let him plant in some inland, vacant places of America, we shall find that possessions he could make himself, upon the measures we have given, would not be very large, nor, even to this day, prejudice the rest of mankind, or give them reason to complain or think themselves injured by this man's encroachment.¹

It was the enclosing of land for the purpose of bringing it into cultivation that radically changed its value. Locke believed that individual acquisition of land (converting common lands into private property), if for the purpose of cultivation, was a positive good and that a man's labor on that land, so acquired, did not “lessen but increase the common stock of mankind; for the provisions serving to the support of human life produced by one acre of enclosed and cultivated land are—to speak much within compass—ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common. And therefore he that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have from a hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.” Turning once again to “America” for illustration, Locke asks “whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wastes of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated.”²

Locke's philosophy provided a rallying point for the property-hungry middle classes for the next century and a half. When Locke, the man largely responsible for the drafting of The Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, thought of America, it was as a place of primitive savagery. When he spoke of “Americans” in his essay on Property, Locke meant American Indians, not English proprietors. As friend, physician, and special advisor to Lord Ashley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the original proprietors of the colony, Locke undoubtedly had many opportunities to learn of “the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure and is still a tenant in common.”

The very aim and end of the English colonial impulse in Virginia, Carolina, and elsewhere may be understood in terms of the idea of “bringing within bounds” enormous tracts of land which, while they persisted in a “state of nature,” lay waste. Locke's principle—that property is through man's labor created by removing it from commons and “out of the state nature leaves it in,” regardless of “the express consent of all commoners”—shows him to be actually more interested in the legal than the historical argument of precedent. Thus his images of a “state of Nature” were derived as conveniently from an immediate though literary knowledge of the American savages as from his recollection of the state of things in the Book of Genesis. It was not uncommon, however—as in the passage I have already quoted—for him to combine the two: “Thus in the beginning all the world was America.”

Locke's theoretical premise found practical expression in the determination of the Virginia Burgesses and the Lords Proprietors of Carolina that each should not infringe upon the rights of acquisition of the other in the period of expansion inland from the Atlantic coast. Once the skirmishes and scuffles with the Indians of this area had effectually pushed those various nations west and south, these colonial gentlemen, each from his own side of the line, maneuvered to wrestle an advantage in a boundary dispute that had its origins in the original Carolina Charters of 1663, where Charles II had inadvertently set his royal signature to two different versions of the dividing line, the first declaring it to be 36°, the second 36° 30′—a difference which created a thirty-mile strip of borderland and endless quarrels over conflicting jurisdiction for the ensuing one hundred years.

II

William Byrd's expedition in 1728 to settle the boundary dispute once and for all was only the last and final effort to straighten things out, but it had significance far beyond its recognized importance as a record of social history or colonial literature. The idea of the survey and the metaphor of the boundary have received less attention than they deserve as informing and underriding concepts in American thought and writing. In The History of the Dividing Line, along with The Secret History of the Line,³ William Byrd fell upon a root metaphor for describing the American landscape. His difficulties in managing the metaphor account for both his failures and his successes in these two distinct, but inseparable, works. My aim in this study will be to show in what ways the peculiar nature of the survey acts to provide a sustaining metaphor for Byrd's Histories. The survey offers the author clues to characterization, a sense of drama and movement, and a vehicle suitable for observations he wished to make about value in property, personal behavior, social rank, and governance. Neither the form of conventional “Histories” nor polite essays nor satiric poetry suited Byrd's sprawling subject. The unique and highly original notion of a historical-literary piece organized upon the actual experiences of a cadastral land-survey confronted the author, however, with problems of composition that became insurmountable.

The history of events leading to that day early in March 1728, when representatives of the two colonies met on the “North Shoar of Coratuck Inlet” to begin a march due westward which would occupy them for a month in the spring and two more in the following autumn, are well-accounted for and need not be repeated here.⁴ Less attention, if any at all, has been paid by students of Byrd and his time to the details concerning the conduct of the survey itself. It has been assumed, for example, that the total of the party entering the wilderness was in the neighborhood of twenty men.⁵ This figure is drawn, most probably, from Byrd's own requests to the legislature (pp. 135-46) and his own listing of the fifteen names of woodsmen employed by the Virginia commission (p. 29), which it was his responsibility to round up. By simple addition, however, it can be shown that the Virginia complement alone adds up to at least twenty-five men, namely, the fifteen listed men hired as the crew for the surveying team, the three commissioners (Byrd, Richard Fitzwilliam, William Dandridge), the three surveyors—one a volunteer—(Alexander Irvine, William Mayo, Joseph Mayo), the Chaplain (Rev. Peter Fontaine), Byrd's two white body servants, Fitzwilliam's manservant, and, at least in the beginning of the survey, “Astrolabe's negro” (pp. 41. 67). This is not to mention others who are casually referred to in the narrative, such as the “3 Men that conducted the Bread-Horses” (p. 147).

Nor is it to begin to account for the entire contingent from North Carolina! That government had agreed to furnish equally commissioner for commissioner, surveyor for surveyor. Apparently Byrd agreed to do the actual hiring of the crew for both the Virginia and North Carolina surveyors, but from North Carolina assuredly came the Commissioners Christopher Gale, John Lovick, Edward Mosely, and William Little and the surveyor Samuel Swann (Mosely serving in a dual capacity as commissioner and surveyor). Also mentioned in the spring expedition are the Irishman John Rice (pp. 33-34) who staggers from one frontier tavern to the next, and one Robin Hix (pp. 33-34, 87).

We now face a surveying party of half again as many as have hitherto been noticed or accounted for. But the woods are only beginning to fill up. Byrd's own accounting of the necessary complement for the return to work in the fall is illuminating and deserves repeating in full, for it demonstrates his expert understanding of the nature of survey work, his habit of planning from actual experience, and his superiority to Firebrand (Fitzwilliam) as an able commander. Those who, like Fitzwilliam and one of the North Carolina commissioners, criticized him for padding the payroll with unnecessary laborers misconstrued the nature of the enterprise. Fitzwilliam, who was often carousing at a pub when the survey was taking place, and who took no interest whatever in details, was in the summer of 1728 overturned by Byrd's advice to the Council:

I humbly conceive that the Business of running the Line towards the Mountains will require at least 20 men, if we intend to follow it with Vigour. The Chain-carriers, the Markers, & the Men who carrys the Instrument after the Surveyor must be constantly reliev'd. These must be 5 in Number always upon Duty, & where the Woods are thick, which will frequently be the Case, there shou'd be 2 more Men to clear the way & upon the Prospect to the Surveyors. While this Number is thus employ'd, their Arms must be carry'd, & their Horses led after them by as great a Number. This will employ at least 10 Men constantly, and if we must have no more, who must then take care of the Baggage & Provisions which will need several Horses, & in such Pathless Woods, each Horse must be led by a carefull Man, or the Packs will soon be torn off their Backs. Then besides all these, some Men shou'd be at Leizure to hunt and keep us in Meat, for which our whole dependance must be upon the Woods. Nor ought we in an Affair of so much Consequence, be ty'd down to so small a Number of Men, as will be exactly requisite for the dayly business, some may be sick, or Lame, or otherwise disabled. … Nor wou'd it be prudent or safe to go so far above the Inhabitants, without a competent Number of Men for our Defense. … It may be possibly be objected, that the Carolina Men will encrease our Number, which is certain, but they will very little encrease our Force. They will bring more Eaters than Fighters, at least they did so the last time. … From all which I must conclude, that our safety, our Business, & the Accidents that attend it, will require at least 20 Men. …

The Council as well as the Governor was convinc't by these Arguments, & unanimously voted 20 Men were few enough to go out with us, & thought it reasonable that the Command of them shou'd be given to me, as being the first in Commission. Firebrand oppos'd each of these Points with all his Eloquence, but to little purpose no Body standing by him.

(pp. 138-139)

Byrd's detailed accounting of the party necessary for the survey gives an enlarged picture of the group that gathered together at Mr. Kinchin's plantation to meet the Carolina Commissioners on the nineteenth of September. These worthy gentlemen, with their own people, had arrived with five hundred pounds of bacon and dried beef, an equal weight of biscuit, and three or four men. Byrd observes that, given the few men and the huge weight of provisions, they must have intended to carry the line to the South Sea. Unfortunately, they had foolishly expected to hire carriers and horses on the frontier. Byrd, on the other hand, came with baggage, food, equipment, and transportation. “We had no less than 20 men, besides the Chaplain, the Surveyors and all the servants” (p. 144).

In all, one can account for close to forty persons setting out in September to complete the line beyond the last habitations, and, if Byrd indeed got what he was granted from the Council, as seems likely, one can add another ten “back up” or relief-men to the others. It is conceivable that there was a party of nearly fifty, with perhaps thirty or so horses, especially when we remember that Byrd hired two Indian guides (one of whom left after a week because he was sick).

III

So much for numbers. The division of labor indicated in Byrd's request to the Council suggests a technical hierarchy worth noting, which, as we shall see, had its counterpart in a social hierarchy, although the two are not entirely symmetrical. At the bottom of this masculine pyramidal structure⁶ are the virtually invisible servants, black and white. They are so common as seeming not to require mention, except casually in passing, and yet without them—like the horses that carry the food and equipment—the survey could not have proceeded expeditiously a mile. It is significant that the servants do not require naming or listing, except for an occasional nickname or first name, “Tipperary” (p. 41), or “Tom” (p. 39) for example. In marked contrast, the woodsmen who take up the special technical roles as pioneers (axemen), markers, instrument-carriers, and the like, are entered in the report and referred to in the journal by their full names.

There is no reason to think that certain of these men were more technically trained than others. The division of their labor is determined by the requirements of this particular kind of survey (which is essentially a “chain survey”—common since the first half of the sixteenth century—consisting of measuring distances along a given compass line), but we can assume that some of the men were more experienced than others, there being fathers and sons, oldsters and youngsters, in the crew.

Set above the “able Woodsmen,” who were recommended to Byrd by his fellow Virginian Colonel Munford who lived near the edges of settlements, and comprising men “most of which had been Indian Traders,” commanding them, were the surveyors themselves. These men are an interesting study in contrasts. What they had in common was a “modern” or practical university education, with grounding in mathematics. But in experience and responsibility they varied greatly. Least experienced was Samuel Swann (Bo-otes), a “young man of much industry but no experience” (p. 43). Swann, one of the appointees of the Carolina Commission, worked hard but was worn out by his exertions in the Dismal Swamp. He quit on March 29, getting permission to return to his bride of a few weeks. The work for North Carolina was then carried on alone by “Old Plausible,” the venerable Edward Mosely. Next in experience was Joseph Mayo, brother of surveyor William Mayo, who came along as a kind of volunteer. Joseph apparently understood the rudiments of field surveying and note-keeping but was not allowed to serve as more than an assistant. His brother William, “Astrolabe,” Byrd's favorite, had come to Virginia five years earlier, in 1723, after having been employed as a surveyor on the island of Barbados. He subsequently worked on a survey of Richmond. Mayo had been called into service to replace John Allen, “Gent.”, who begged off because his wife was indisposed. The second Virginia surveyor was Alexander Irvine, “Orion,” recommended by Richard Fitzwilliam. Irvine, who turned out on the trip to be something of a classic poor sport, was Professor of Mathematics at William and Mary until his death in 1732. One hesitates to say that the rigors of outdoor work and practical field surveying were the death of him, but there can be no doubt about his discomfort: he was a constant complainer. To others he was a pain in the neck. The men took malicious pleasure in his discomforts. Byrd's portrait of Irvine leaves us with the first literary glimpse of a type and a stereotype: the cerebral college professor who is very uncomfortable outside of his ivory tower and who is unable to control his body.

The most experienced surveyor of all is Ed Mosely. This veteran, dubbed “Old Plausible” in the Secret History, who had been a member of the abortive Boundary Commission of 1710—and indeed had, through his objections, contributed to its abortion—seems to have commanded Byrd's respect and regard. Mosely was the prototype of the colonial entrepreneur. At various times he had served as Council Member, Acting Governor, Treasurer, Judge, and Boundary Commissioner. His holdings of land were extensive (25,000+ acres) and he owned upwards of one hundred slaves. That he could serve as both commissioner and surveyor is indicative of his skill, shrewdness, and experience. It was he who was the subject of complaints in the earlier boundary disputes, in particular that he deliberately delayed and sabotaged efforts to establish the boundary, because by so doing he could augment his own fees and holdings. In Mosely's career, as in Byrd's, and subsequently in those of Washington, Jefferson, and other Southerners, we can see the close relation between a technical knowledge of surveying, an intimate familiarity with the western lands, and the consequent accumulation of vast landholdings as a means of reinforcing one's position as a gentleman with status and power in the colonial hierarchy.

Ranking above the surveyors were the Boundary Commissioners. These were, without exception, on both sides of the line, the gentlemen of status and authority. Many were or had been Council members in their provincial governments. Fitzwilliam, a “Royal official” of some kind, went on to become Governor of the Bahamas; Christopher Gale was Chief Justice of North Carolina and Collector of Customs; John Lovick became Surveyor General of North Carolina in 1732; William Little, Gale's son-in-law, was the typical “man on the way up.” The only Northerner (he had graduated from Harvard in 1710), Little became Attorney General in 1725, Receiver of Quit Rents a year later, and Chief Justice in 1732. We can see by these careers that a combination of a knowledge of the law, inheritance or acquisition-by-marriage, combined with active participation in provincial political life, prepared a man for a leading role in the community. His authority and prestige were augmented by his continuing acquisition of land-holdings, especially if these could be of large acreage, gained cheaply, developed rapidly, and made to yield a profit as income or through resale. In this context, to be a member of the Boundary Commission is instrumentally important. The ultimate purpose of establishing the bounds was to open up new land, hitherto unassignable because of the dispute, for speculation, sale, and settlement. There was hardly a commissioner who did not return from the survey in possession of the rights to title of thousands of acres of choice real estate.

IV

We can begin to see that the vertical hierarchy of skills in surveying was related to the social and political hierarchy, not only structurally but also in relation to the meaning and value placed upon the acquisition of land. This is not to say that there was a simplistic formula of “upward social mobility” operating in attaching oneself to a survey party, but it is to observe that shrewd men multiplied their opportunities for advancement by an awareness of the detailed legal, technical, and physical attributes of value in land. Perhaps this situation also makes it easier to understand why William Byrd felt that a large company—over and above the sheer technical and physical requirements of the survey—was needed in the woods. The hierarchy, in all its divisions, was not to deteriorate in the Great Woods. Gentlemen were still gentlemen, and needed to be served, and others below that rank needed to see them being served.

The Commissioners were, in traditional terms, most like the surveyors-general of the sixteenth century and after in England, who were distinguished from the “land-meters,” the technicians actually responsible for going out in the field and measuring the land, for whom and by whom manuals of surveying were published, books like Valetine Leigh's The Most Profitable and Commendable Science of Surveying of Landes, Tenements, and Hereditamentes (London, 1577). When a Lord of the Manor needed to sell or otherwise conduct business with an estate, he held a “court of survey,” commissioned one or two “surveyors,” and held what was essentially an inquiry or inquisition respecting traditional holdings by tenants of the manor. The surveyor's role was similar to that of a presiding judge. He scrutinized previous written documents (lease books, field books, court rolls, and the like) and attested to their accuracy and legitimacy. He might not set foot on an actual field. “Under supervision of the jury, the surveyor enrolled the copies, leases, and deeds. The manorial survey was not a survey of the lands of the manor in a general sense, not a field survey, but a survey of the deeds of the manorial tenants. … The surveyor might … have a stroll about the premises and even walk some of the farms, but he was not usually commissioned to do either.”⁷

As compelling as the vertical divisions were what might be termed the “horizontal” divisions of the survey. These are very complex as Byrd works with them and can best be understood by laying them out in order.

The first “horizontal” is the most obvious: the presence of a theoretical, and thence real, line extending from the edge of the sea westward into the remote mountains. As if to anticipate with one singularly intense and penetrating symbol the whole vision of America's territorial destiny, William Byrd sets out to record the “history” of a line. It is important to emphasize that in the narrative this line becomes far more than a mere technical division of two provincial states. The prior confusion, intrigue, and mystery connected with the line, the sense of drama that accompanies its unfolding mile by mile (and sometimes, as in the Dismal Swamp, yard by yard), Byrd's grasp of the implications that as the line pushes westward it extends always further, like some super-intelligence, into Terra Incognita, that he and his fellow-surveyors are “Discoverers” and “Explorers,” constitute much of the invocative power of the Histories. The “idea” of the line was ingenious and entirely original in the history of literature.

It is in the nature of a survey line that it is at once both literal and symbolic. Literal, in that it can be at one, and only one, place on the surface of the earth. Symbolic (and civilized) in that, from the beginning of the history of surveying, its location will be set down in words and drawings on paper, thence securely deposited in a cadastre, or land-office, for perpetuity, there to be consulted by lawyers, judges, tenants, and landlords alike. It may be true, as John Locke so eloquently surmised, that at one time in the history of the world all mankind was in a state of nature. However, even for Locke, that view was speculative and was introduced only as a figure of speech to determine the state men were in subsequently, that, is, “by their own consents they make themselves members of some politic society” (p. 128). If for Locke, America was a state of nature, he would have been in total sympathy with the makers of the boundary line, for bringing land out of the common, where it lay waste, into the bounded, where it was owned by individuals and cultivated, was at the heart of the Lockeian premise.

So it was that the Dividing Line carried with it a conception of a dynamic division, almost like that of history itself, between a state of nature and a state of civilization. In the narrowest sense, the establishment of the line settled the “Grand Debate which had so long Subsisted between the two Governments,” wrote the Carolina Commissioners, but in a larger sense it symbolized the possibility of “settlement” of hitherto unused (i. e. uncultivated) and unsurveyed lands of great potential richness. At one end of the line, at any given moment, was civilization. At its utmost western end, wherever that moving point might be, mile after mile, was the “state of nature.” “The last Tree we markt was a Red Oak, growing on the Bank of the River, and to make the place more remarkable, we blaz'd all the Trees around it” (p. 234).⁸

Horizontal symbolism is subject to even further subdivision. In a field survey, at a given time and place the physical environment is the locus of the line. Due to the unique nature of the progress of this kind of survey, we see the environment not as a single, elaborately framed landscape in conventional perspective, but as a continuum in time. This survey, for practical purposes—the necessity of firm ground in the Dismal Swamp, no mosquitoes, and few rattlesnakes—began in early March and carried on through the swamp into April, and then, by mutual agreement, was postponed until the following September. Byrd's account, therefore, mirroring the actual experience of running the survey, was broken into two sections, the spring expedition and the fall expedition.⁹ The spring journey takes on something of the nature of a light-hearted group pilgrimage, an American Canterbury Tale; there is indeed something decidedly Chaucerian in Byrd's mood in the Secret History. We meet unexpected characters along the way—the conjurer, the Irish drunks, the tavern wenches, hermits, porcine, noseless squatters, and the various levels of landlords and hosts—and through the linear effect of the account we participate in the sense of day-by-day discovery. All of the spring pilgrimage is undertaken within the confines of inhabited land, and there is a certain completeness about the way in which the “Great Swamp” controls the action of the surveyors, on the one hand, who have to slog through its eerie interior, and of the Commissioners on the other, who tour around its outer borders and wait uneasily for the surveyors to come out of the swamp near a farmer's plantation.

A secondary purpose of this section of the survey, this first movement of the suite, is to allow for the offering of a comparison between two contrasting types of gentlemen, typified in Firebrand and Steddy. Where the one is careless and sloppy, the other is organized and resourceful; where one displays unfortunate childish fits of pique and temper, the other is calm; where one shows no consideration whatever for the comfort of his subordinates, the other has this as his whole care; where one has no sense of humor except that bred through contempt and disgust, the other is genuinely a man of wit; where one learns absolutely nothing from his experience in the wild, the other counts it as part of his education and is a continual discoverer both in the field and in his study. For literary purposes, at least, the nicknames fit.

V

The Fall expedition is of an entirely different cast. Beginning somewhat short of the banks of the Roanoke, the party must now push “beyond the Inhabitants” into Indian country. But a difference of intention arises between the Virginians and North Carolinians, and abruptly on the fifth of October, when the party has been out only a little over a week, the gentlemen from North Carolina announce they are quitting. For them, it is enough to have pushed the line beyond the last settlement. For them, it is improbable that the land they have already surveyed, or that lying further to the west, will fill up in “Ages.” For them, it is getting cold, the wine and brandy are all drunk up, and they are going home. As Byrd put it: “They stuck by us as long as our good Liquor lasted, and were so kind as to drink our good Journey to the Mountains in the last Bottle we had left” (p. 174).

The rest of the Fall survey, carried on by the Virginia crew alone, and without the assistance of the Virginia Commissioner Firebrand, takes on an entirely different mood. From the moment that Firebrand and the North Carolinians leave, the spirit in camp changes. “A General Joy discover'd itself thro' all our Camp, when these Gentlemen turn'd their Backs upon us, only Orion (Alexander Irvine) had a cloud of Melancholly upon his Face, for the loss of those with whom he had spent all of his leizure Hours” (p. 185).

From hence forward, the spirit of the survey is that of a great male hunting party. William Byrd inadvertently initiated a theme which would not be laid to rest before its ironic treatment by William Faulkner in The Bear, James Dickey in Deliverance, and Norman Mailer in Why Are We In Vietnam. Yet if Byrd was to stand poised at the beginning of the tradition, there must have been already present in the culture some unexpressed need for which this narrative journal is the first example, some deep-seated, archetypal yearning for contact with the territory of the unbounded, for an encounter with “the Demon of the Continent,” in D. H. Lawrence's classic expression, or with our “mythological geography,” in the words of Leslie Fiedler.¹⁰

One does not want to commit the error of distorting the straightforward quality of Byrd's account of this section of the expedition by loading it with overtones of the “mythic” which are not in fact there. Nevertheless, these final three weeks of moving west, the period from the fifth of November until the twenty-sixth, where the line stops, require more than superficial attention.

During this time the journals reflect the greatest spirit of camaraderie. Here Byrd comes closest to fraternizing with the men. Here the sense of military deportment breaks down, and the remaining commissioners (Byrd and Dandrige, i.e. Steddy and Meanwell) share more directly in the day-by-day business of the survey. Here the Indian Bearskin emerges as a fully recognizable figure, as Byrd undertakes to record his tales of Indian mythology and cosmology.

Here is actual Indian country and signs of Indian activity in the distance, like the smoke from great fires. Here, too, we are in the foothills of the “Great Mountains,” and the vegetation and wildlife change visibly as they are observed and recorded in the journal. This is elk country, buffalo country, bear country. Here the hunters kill six bear in a day, and the “Men eat up a Horseload of Bear.” Even the Chaplain, until now fussy about trying the Bearmeat, which is said to be prescribed for virility, becomes a devotee. Here the men come back from the day's work and feast on Bear “till the Grease ran out of their Mouths.” Here surveyor Mayo has a race with a bear cub. Here, in short, the merging of the human with the animal instincts, the headiness accompanying extreme physical exertion in the wilderness and the daily, hourly need for the instincts of survival, the real danger of men getting lost just a short way from camp, are conveyed in a language that is refreshingly full of the undisguised idiom of camping: the smoke of campfires, the smell of bearsteaks on gridirons, the shouts of laughter when someone gets an unexpected dunking, the tall tales told in the evening before men (boys) drop off to sleep and to fantastic dreams. One feels that, despite their weariness, the dwindling of supplies, and the pitiful condition of their horses, the men do not want to stop, in spite of worsening weather, steeper and impenetrable mountains, and a hunger for home. They have become something other than what they set out as—they are now woodsmen, pioneers, couriers du bois. They belong to a fraternity.

It cannot be overlooked that this was a masculine trip. It hardly seems profitable to belabor the obvious, that, from our perspective, Byrd's sexism (even that coupling of words is historically jarring) and the sexism of his all-male companions is rampant. Earlier editors and commentators have noted the value of the History and the Secret History for their frank and candid record of “the attitude of the men of the expedition toward the women of the frontier.” There has yet to be a study that takes fully into account the effect a masculine-dominant culture has upon the attitudes, language, prejudices, brutalities, oversights, and posturings of which the Histories are a devastating record. It is no longer enough to agree with the assured, complacent judgment of William Boyd, editor of the first edition of the Secret History, that while “Byrd himself had an eye for feminine charms … he also had the restraint proper in one of his station” (p. xxvi).

Can we push beyond easy stereotyping to discover the real significance of attitudes that made of the expedition a hungry male searching for, at best, sex objects in a Sunday frontier congregation, at worst, the virtual gang rape of female scullery maids, chambermaids, and mulatto squatters in cabins along the way? It serves little purpose to condemn Byrd and his male companions in a fury of after-the-fact historical indignation or to judge them for the cultural failure that ill-equipped them to regard their feminine contemporaries as equals. If we cannot see the same sexism in ourselves we need only to turn to a novel like Deliverance, with its male posturing, grooming, and muscling, as a mirror to help us appreciate the insidiousness of the legacy.

Why did American males, even then, feel the need to flee into the back country for open indulgence in sexual license, violence, and brutality?¹¹ Why were the deep woods or the unencumbered raft the only permissible locations for male homosexual fantasy? Why have we persisted in the illusion, the myth, that the wilderness was womanless?¹²

With respect to the two Histories of the Dividing Line, the issue must be understood in the light of the survey that initiated the whole affair and the documents which are its legacy. The survey created a situation in which a small company of men working together on a special task in a unique environment gradually became aware of each other as people. The final push of the fall survey by the Virginians offers one of the earliest case histories of a deepset cultural pattern. The boundaries so arduously and painstakingly measured on this survey, which when duly recorded in the Colonial Records of Virginia and North Carolina would initiate the process of establishing orderly settlement—notice the conservatism implicit in these last three words—were also at the moment of their creation paradoxically the loci of the unbounded, of a territory implying a deep moral discrepancy that permitted acting out in the wilderness, even as it could never fully acknowledge or account for, a latent homosexuality and an embracing of an alien Indian culture.

It was John Locke who associated childhood and childishness with a state of nature. Childhood was an “imperfect state” (p. 148).¹³ It was as much a right of parents to keep children in subjection as it was to subject “those who are in a state of nature.” Women, when adult, were only slightly better off. The rule of will always fell to men as “the abler and stronger,” but women, unlike children, at least had “liberty to separate” from a husband, or should have had, “where their contract allowed it” (p. 161).

More is at issue here than what can be circumscribed by the conventional “pastoral forms and attitudes.”¹⁴ Assuredly the juxtaposition of nature and society afforded by this expedition into the American wilderness invoked the usual contrasts between freedom and constriction, democracy and hierarchy, plainness and artificiality, violence and order, innocence and experience that we associate with the pastoral modes. But this was a survey not a hunt. This is not William Faulkner's Ike McCaslin but William Byrd's Steddy who comes back out of the primal woods. No one understood better than Byrd the need for a line, the “proof of being not unbounded,” (see n. 8) and no one was more sensitive in his own time to the ironies that “being bound” introduced: the constriction, the hierarchy, the masks of a cultured order, the daily routine of Westover plantation. As Lewis Simpson has rightly observed, “Byrd is an anticipation of a singular figure in the American South: the patriarch-philosophe of the plantation—the slave master and the man of letters. More specifically he is an anticipation of Thomas Jefferson of Monticello. … Without the conscious intention of doing so, Byrd both in his life and writings created an image of the Southern reality, or of the Southern doom, which was implacably to unfold in history.”¹⁵

In this perspective, the Histories of the Dividing Line document something more than the freedom of the encamped male in the wilderness or the restrictions back on the plantation that are contrasted with it: they exist as a record of the line itself, the master-symbol of property. And from that measure all the other divisions followed, for Byrd, for the South, and for ourselves in America.

Notes

1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Cook (New York, 1947), p. 138.

2. Locke, p. 139.

3. All references in this paper are to the Dover reprint edition, William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, ed. Percy G. Adams (New York, 1967).

4. There is Byrd's own introduction to the events, as well as those of subsequent editors of the Histories (Adams, Boyd, Louis Wright). The reader may wish to consult Pierre Marambaud, William Byrd of Westover (Charlottesville, 1971), especially Chapter IX, “Chronicler,” but would be well-advised to see also in this connection Lewis P. Simpson's splendid review article “William Byrd and the South,” Early American Literature, VII (Fall, 1972) 187-95.

5. “It is the day-by-day journal that tells how in 1728 some twenty men traveled a few miles from home to survey the disputed boundary line …,” Percy Adams, editor of the Dover edition, in his Introduction, V.

6. The close relation between the history of topographic land surveying and the military should not go unnoticed. Military command accounted for most of the surveying of American public domain, and military organization dominated the field.

7. Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London, 1969), pp. 27-28. See also, A. W. Richeson, English Land Measuring to 1800 (Cambridge, 1966).

8. Some two hundred years later Robert Frost would speak of Witness Trees in “Beech” as his “proof of being not unbounded,” Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York, 1964), p. 439.

9. For transition, he includes an account of the back-at-home maneuverings in preparation for the fall continuation of the line.

10. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. “The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white man will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. … Within the present generation the surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp.” Quoted in Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York, 1968), p. 11. One shortcoming of Fiedler's hit-and-run sort of scholarship—is the fact that he could overlook William Byrd II in a book on this theme!

11. Leslie Fiedler, of course, has been asking these questions and answering them for many years, but his is a point of view that many women find both inaccurate historically and revolting personally. See n. 10.

12. My thinking on this subject is influenced by the work of the late Dawn Landers. See “Eve among the Indians,” in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, eds. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst, Mass., 1977), pp. 194-211.

13. See especially “Of Paternal Power” in the Second Treatise of Civil Government.

14. Harold Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley, 1971) and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York, 1964).

15. Simpson, “Byrd and the South,” p. 192, 195.