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The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605-1677. Edited by Warren M. Billings with the assistance of Maria Kimberly. (Richmond: Library of Virginia, c. 2007. Pp. [1], 682. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-88490-207-2.)
Sir William Berkeley is among the most oft-quoted of early Americans. Few quotations from the seventeenth century seem to appear in textbooks as frequently as his desperate comment made as governor of Virginia amid the chaos of Bacon's Rebellion in July 1676: "How miserable that man is that Govemes a People wher six parts of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed . . ." (p. 537). Only Massachusetts governor John Winthrop' s exhortation that "we must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill" surpasses Berkeley's as emblematic of seventeenth-century colonial America. Set alongside each other in the conventional narrative of American history, each quotation conveniently marks the starting point of diverging historical trajectories: Winthrop' s Massachusetts, with its submission to common purpose, order, and responsible government stewardship; and Berkeley's Virginia, plagued by self-interest, disorder, and exploitation.
Warren M. Billings has done much to correct the simplistic binary in what he modestly described as his forty-year "acquaintance" with Berkeley in the preface to his magnificent biography of Sir William (Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia [Baton Rouge, 2004], xi). Berkeley's career encompassed much more than the uprising that ended in the bloodbath of a frontier insurrection....