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by PAULA A. TRECKEL*
THE month was unusually cold, noted William Byrd II in his diary on 30 July 1710, "indeed the coldest that ever was known in [Virginia]." Could the weather, he wondered, have caused the fever and headaches suffered by his people? Thank God none had died. On that chilly day he also "read a sermon in Dr. Tillotson and then took a little [nap]." In the afternoon Byrd had a "little quarrel" with his wife, Lucy, but "reconciled" their dispute "with a flourish. Then she read a sermon in Dr. Tillotson to me. It is to be observed," he recorded, "that the flourish was performed on the billiard table." After eating fish for dinner and reading a little Latin, Byrd and his wife "took a walk about the plantation." That evening, although he "neglected to say [his] prayers," he enjoyed "good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thanks be to God."1
Most students of early American history are familiar with William Byrd II, the "great American gentleman," whose secret, coded diaries reveal the daily life of a member of Virginia's eighteenth-century planter elite.2 These journals have given generations of historians insights into the Chesapeake's changing economy, master-slave relations on early Tidewater plantations, and the development of plantation society and culture in the colonial South.3
Byrd's remarkable candor in recording his most personal activities-the most infamous is his account of giving his wife a "flourish" on the billiard table-also provides a glimpse into the private world of a Virginia gentleman. In recent years, biographer Kenneth A. Lockridge used the diaries to psychoanalyze Byrd and trace his self-conscious struggle to construct an independent identity as a man and as an American. Historians Michael Zuckerman and Daniel Blake Smith also studied the diaries to shed light on familial mores in the eighteenth-century South. They argue that Byrd blurred the distinction between his public and domestic worlds and created a community, a web of relationships, in the region he ruled.4
In addition to providing insights into individual development and the establishment of community in the Chesapeake, William Byrd's diaries give the modern reader an interior view of marriage and gender relations among the Virginia gentry during an important transitional period in American history. The journal entries...