The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times
Charles Royster
Language: English
Pages: 640
ISBN: 0679433457
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this absorbing narrative Charles Royster traces the rise and fall of the eighteenth-century transatlantic culture that was built on the insatiable demand in Europe for Virginia tobacco and the equally insatiable American demand for European manufactured goods.
Moving from the plantations of Virginia and Antigua to the warehouses of London and Glasgow, from the Gold Coast of Africa to the valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, from the iron furnaces of southern Wales to the subscribers' room of Lloyd's of London, Professor Royster gives us the story of the Dismal Swamp Company, a fantastically delusional enterprise that proposed draining and developing a vast morass along the Virginia-North Carolina border. Examining the interconnected lives of the company's partners, Royster reveals a colonial order built on a system of cronyism, conspicuous consumption, and debt that seems hauntingly familiar. He writes about the many schemers and dreamers (including George Washington, Robert "King" Carter, two William Byrds, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Morris) who failed to amass their desired fortunes, and a few realists (Samuel Gist, Dr. Thomas Walker, and Anthony Bacon) who succeeded, but at the dire expense of others. And we see the breakdown of this culture and the transition to a more democratic, though similar, system after the Revolution.
Throughout Royster's narrative we seepossessors possessed by their possessions, slaveholders possessed by slavery, and heirs possessed by litigation. Connecting all their stories are their unceasing efforts to make something substantial out of the insubstantial--chief among them the almost unbelievable delusion that fortunes could be made from the Dismal Swamp.
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describing his terms for selling some land in Gloucester County. He said that he wanted to sell, not lease to renters, “having found, from experience, that estates at a distance plague more than they profit the Proprietors of them.” The unaccountable failure of land in and near the Dismal Swamp to rise rapidly in value disappointed men who tried to emulate the foresight of the Dismal Swamp Company and to profit by the coming canal. Among these were Thomas Ruston and William Short. After coming
the company’s canal. Beginning in 1810, the Dismal Swamp Company paid steady dividends to shareholders. That year a quarter-share drew $333. In 1811 a quarter-share drew $500—in 1812, $400; in 1813, $300; in 1814, $600. The estate of George Washington, with four quarter-shares, received a dividend of $2,000 in 1811. Before the partners’ meeting, Justice Bushrod Washington wrote to James Henderson: “The handsome dividend which you anticipate in May furnishes a strong evidence of the prosperous
“foreigners … them”: Merrill Jensen et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, 1976–), X, 1469. 252 “benign … men”: William Lee to Samuel Thorp, Nov. 29, 1792, William Lee Letter-book, 1792–1793, Lee Family Papers, ViRHi. 253 “indolent … tricksters”: François Dupont to Etienne Clavière, Jan. 10, 1789, “Letter from Petersburg,” ed. Nall, VMHB, LXXXII (April 1974), 146. 254 “I … State”: Joshua Johnson to Wallace & Muir, Nov. 12, 1787, Joshua Johnson
end the war until Sir Jeffery Amherst sent a force of regulars on a punitive campaign of destruction among Cherokee towns. William Byrd resigned his command in August. He went to Philadelphia, where his pregnant wife had remained with her parents. Mary Willing Byrd was twenty-one years old, child of a marital alliance between two prosperous merchant families, the Willings and the Shippens. She gave birth to a daughter in November. The following summer, Dr. Walker came north; and he and Byrd
received it as a grant from a grateful King Charles II. Even after North Carolina came under royal governance in 1729, one of those proprietors, John Carteret, Baron Carteret of Hawnes, later Earl Granville, retained the right to grant tracts and receive quitrents along its northern boundary. William Byrd, when he found time to write, heaped sarcasm on clowns who had celebrated their exclusion from Virginia. The surveying party pushed westward, slicing across farms, passing log huts covered with