Locating American Indians along William Byrd II’s Dividing Line

The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (c. 1730), William Byrd II’s revised narration of the 1728 Virginia–North Carolina boundary line survey, begins by emphasizing the multiple players who shaped both boundary lines and histories in colonial America.¹ While Byrd constructs his home colony of Virginia as a natural entity, claiming that in the “early Days” all of British North America “went at first under the General Name of Virginia,” he quickly undermines this preeminence by describing the complex interactions between various European and Native groups that defined Euro-American settlement (1). In particular, Byrd qualifies Virginia’s established settlement in America based on relationships with American Indians. Byrd notes that the early English settlers at Roanoke were “either Starved or cut to Pieces by the Indians,” and that the predecessors to Jamestown chose to search for “Wild Fruits” rather than plant Indian corn, which “Exposd them to be knockt on the head by the Indians” (2–3). Though Byrd grants that the Virginians and the Indians eventually established some kind of peace, he quickly asserts that this peace did not last because the English “disdained to intermarry” with the Natives (3). Byrd posits intermarriage as the only way to “civilize” and “convert” Natives to Christianity, and to “blanch” their skins (3–4). Yet, again, he qualifies this ideological claim of “white” superiority with attention to particular colonial relationships. According to Byrd, the Quakers, who have treated the Indians with justice and kindness, as well as the French, who have adopted a policy of intermarriage, are the only Europeans who have fostered successful relationships with Natives (10). Thus, even as it touts European and specifically Virginian preeminence in America, Byrd’s introduction grants Natives a central role in the creation of Euro-American history and place, and by extension in Byrd’s own narrative project, the “history” of a “dividing line.”

This tension between foregrounding a Euro-American landscape and stressing the material, multilateral dynamics of that landscape’s creation and maintenance shapes The History as a whole and points to the significant role of American Indians in its formation. Yet it has been obscured by scholarly tendencies to divide European and Native American histories and literacies and to approach the History along disciplinary lines. Literary criticism has positioned Byrd narrowly as one of Virginia’s colonial elite and a European man of wit and letters, detached from the material relationships with Indians that significantly shaped his colonial experience.² Such readings are particularly limiting considering that just a quick look into Byrd’s background reveals his continuation of the legacy of his father, the prominent trader William Byrd I, through consistent interactions with both tributary Indians in Virginia and other, more distant Native groups like the Cherokees.³ By contrast, historians acknowledge Byrd’s exchanges with Indians yet tend to divorce historical Indians from the literary nature of the text and take passages about Indians at face value, while the History’s ironies and subtleties necessitate rigorous textual analysis.⁴ Separately, these approaches have not considered that actual Indians might have influenced the History’s textual complexities. Yet instead of instituting a divide between “white” and “Indian,” or literature and history, Byrd’s History reminds us that these categories are not closed or static. Indeed, Byrd’s History evinces the instability of subject positions, the multiple and mutable identifications possible in a colonial situation.

This essay argues that a careful reading of Byrd’s History must take into account what I call its “intercultural materiality”: the History’s consistent indications of material relationships with Indians that disrupt its boundaries as a solely Euro-American text.⁵ Byrd’s History points to interactions with Natives in the material spaces of the colonial Southeast, with tangible results like human contact, the exchange of goods, and transmission of oral and textual information. The influence of these interchanges and their results can be traced in the form, style, and content of the text itself. Indeed, the History resembles Native oral narratives and Native maps from this period that describe a...