Governor Spotswood of Virginia lashed out against Albemarle County as a “common Sanctuary for all our runaway servants,” and censured its “total Absence of Religion.” He echoed a previous Virginia governor when he denounced the place as the “sinke of America, the Refuge of Renegadoes.” He meant by this a commercial sinkhole, and with the loaded term “renegadoes,” a bastion of lawless, irreligious men who literally renounced their national allegiance as well as their Christian faith. Though there were but few ministers to guide them, the real apostasy of the people was said to be their refusal to be good taxpaying Britons.30
Virginians constantly aimed to keep their neighbor in line. A surveying team was dispatched in 1710, but failed to settle anything. The same was attempted in 1728, when William Byrd II accepted his commission to lead a joint expedition. He endured trying months navigating the Dismal Swamp and met with residents, mocked them mercilessly, and lustily eyed their women as much as he coveted the fertile land beyond the Dismal Swamp. He instructed his men to beat drums and shoot off guns to determine the size of the swamp, and crudely compared the sound to that “prattling Slut, Echo.” Such petulance reflected his general feeling that the dark, mysterious Carolina terrain would never give up her secrets. Yet Byrd was undeterred. A man of letters as well as an amateur naturalist, he wrote two versions of his adventure: one was the less censored “secret history,” the other a longer, more polished tract called “The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina.”31
For Byrd, Virginia was an almost Eden-like colony, and a far cry from her uncivilized neighbor. In a bemused letter of 1726, written just two years before he began his tour of North Carolina, he described himself as a man resting underneath his “fig tree,” surrounded by “my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women.” Part feudal squire, part modern Abraham, Byrd portrayed his colony as a bucolic retreat far from the “Vagrant Mendicants” roaming the “island of beggars”—by which he meant England. He pretended that poverty did not exist in Virginia; his slaves were both dutiful and productive. A well-ordered society, based on slavery, had not only allowed him to indulge a pastoral dream but had also kept poor whites at bay.32
Things were different in Carolina. Just across the ill-defined border was an alien world where class authority was severely compromised. Byrd’s little band of land commissioners were “knights-errant” embarked on a grand medieval crusade. When people emerged from their huts, staring as a flock at the strangers from Virginia, “it was as if we had been Morocco ambassadors.” Having brought a chaplain along on their journey, they were able to christen children and marry men and women from place to place along their route. Byrd and his party of superior Christians sprinkled holy water on the heathen Carolinians.33
Or so he fantasized. In fact, the Carolinians proved resistant to religion and reform. As Byrd noted, the men had an abiding “aversion” to labor of any kind. They slept (and snored) through most of the morning. On waking, they sat smoking their pipes. Rarely did they even peek outside their doors, and during the cooler months, those who did quickly returned “shivering to their chimney corners.” In milder weather they got as far as thinking about plunging a hoe into the ground. But thinking turned to excuses, and nothing was accomplished. The unmotivated Carolina folk preferred, he said, to “loiter away their lives, like Solomon’s sluggards.” The little work that actually got done was performed by the female poor.34
Carolina obliged William Byrd to adjust his broader vision of America’s destiny. For his example of the “wretchedest scenes of poverty” he had ever seen in “this happy part of the world,” he isolated a rusticated man named Cornelius Keith, who had a wife and six children yet lived in a home without a roof. The Keiths’ dwelling was closer to a cattle pen, he said, than to any human habitation. At night the family slept in the fodder stack. Byrd found it especially odd that the husband and father was more interested in protecting feed for his animals than the safety of his family. Keith had chosen this life, and that was what most shocked the wealthy explorer from Virginia. Here was a man with a skilled trade, possessing good land and good limbs, who nevertheless preferred to live worse than the “bogtrotting Irish.” Byrd’s choice of words was, as usual, unambiguous. English contempt for the Irish was nothing new, but “bogtrotting” was an exquisite synonym for swamp vagrant.35
When Byrd identified the Carolinians as residents of “Lubberland,” he drew upon a familiar English folktale that featured one “Lawrence Lazy,” born in the county of Sloth near the town of Neverwork. Lawrence was a “heavy lump” who sat in his chimney corner and dreamt. His dog was so lazy that he “lied his head agin the wall to bark.” In Lubberland, sloth was contagious, and Lawrence had the power to put all masters under his spell so that they fell into a deep slumber. As applied to the rural poor who closed themselves off to the world around them, the metaphor of sleep suggested popular resistance to colonial rule. Byrd found the people he encountered in Carolina to be resistant to all forms of government: “Everyone does what seems best in his own eyes.”36
The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670) portrayed an imaginary territory in which sloth is contagious and normal men lack the will to work.
British Print, #1953.0411.69AN48846001, The British Museum, London, England
As he further contemplated the source of idleness, Byrd was convinced that it was in the lubbers’ blood. Living near the swamp, they suffered from “distempers of laziness,” which made them “slothful in everything but getting children.” They displayed a “cadaverous complexion” and a “lazy, creeping habit.” The combination of climate and an unhealthy diet doomed them. Eating swine, they contracted the “yaws,” and their symptoms matched those of syphilis: they lost their noses and palates, and had hideously deformed faces. With their “flat noses,” they not only looked like but also began to act like wild boars: “Many of them seem to grunt rather than speak.” In a “porcivorous” country, people spent their days foraging and fornicating; when upset, they could be heard yelling out, “Flesh alive and tear it.” It was their “favorite exclamation,” Byrd said. This bizarre colloquialism suggested cannibalism, or perhaps hyenas surrounding a fresh kill and devouring it. How could these carnivorous swamp monsters be thought of as English?37
Byrd left behind few practical ideas for reforming the godforsaken wilderness he had explored. Only drastic measures would work: replacing lubbers with Swiss German settlers and draining the swamp of its vile murky waters. He mused that colonization would have had a better outcome if male settlers had been encouraged to intermarry with Indian women. Over two generations, the Indian stock would have improved, as a species of flower or tree might; dark skin blanched white, heathen ways dimmed. Here, Byrd was borrowing from the author John Lawson, who wrote in A New Voyage to Carolina that men of lower rank gained an economic advantage by marrying Native women who brought land to the union. While he was at it, Byrd also condemned unrefined whites for marrying promiscuous Englishwomen right off the boat. He even suggested, satirically, of course, that social problems would disappear if the poor were more like bears and spent six months each year in hibernation: “’Tis a pity our beggars and pickpockets could not do the same,” he wrote.38