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Chapter 4 The Politics of Pathos Richard Frethorne’s Letters Home Emily Rose In April 1623, young Richard Frethorne wrote a letter to his parents that has become one of the most famous and widely reproduced documents from colonial North America.1 At the time he wrote, Frethorne was an indentured servant who had recently arrived in the struggling colony of Virginia, and his letter tells of tough times. A year earlier, a devastating attack by the Powhatan confederacy had killed one-third of the English settlers and nearly destroyed the colony. Frethorne reported that that he was going hungry, everyone else was sick and dying, his clothes had been stolen ; in short, life in England was infinitely better. He implored his parents to help him return home—or at least to send him some food. Until he arrived in this new world, Frethorne wrote, ‘‘[I] thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath and doth daily flow from mine eyes.’’ As an eyewitness account of the young Jamestown settlement, the Frethorne letter has been widely cited by historians of early colonial America and frequently used in high school and college classrooms. Little is certain about its author (except that he was a young English Protestant male indentured servant) but more is known, or knowable, about Frethorne than is generally thought. To place the letter in its proper context, one needs to situate it within the course of events on both sides of the Atlantic during the same years and to take account of the historiography of Virginia . America’s most pathetic settler died and was forgotten for several centuries , but in recent decades he has been dramatically revived in the historical imagination. Indeed, Frethorne’s changing fortunes reflect broad changes in historical understanding of early colonial Virginia. Excerpts of the letter were first published in 1881, but were ignored for decades. Frethorne ’s pitiable condition did not fit the heroic mold favored by turn-ofthe -century historians such as Alexander Brown and Thomas Wertenbaker .2 The leading colonial historian of the early twentieth century, Charles Andrews, referred to the letter only in a footnote—and then only The Politics of Pathos 93 to dismiss it as ‘‘lugubrious.’’3 But since the middle of the twentieth century historians have become less invested in ‘‘cavalier’’ interpretations of the Old South and more interested in the experiences of ordinary settlers. From their perspective, the early Virginia settlers were not sophisticated ideological exiles motivated by high political or spiritual ideals, but rather ambitious servants of humble origins motivated by the pursuit of wealth. Building on earlier work by Oscar Handlin, Bernard Bailyn, and others, Edmund Morgan famously emphasized the varied backgrounds of the early settlers, the intense hardships they faced, and the class conflicts that soon developed.4 Almost four centuries after the fact, historians finally discovered the sorrowful world of Richard Frethorne. Resurrected by historians, Frethorne has taken on a new life in the contemporary classroom, where in countless commercial document collections, textbooks, and online offerings, his letter provides a short, vivid account of the hardships of Virginia ’s early settlers. Surprisingly, few historians have looked closely at Frethorne’s letter, attempted to trace the life of its author, or questioned the nature of the document. What were the conditions under which it was written? Who was the letter’s intended audience? What purposes might it have served? Perhaps because of its ‘‘domestic’’ character—a private letter to obscure parents —the letter is taken as uncrafted and innocent of the manipulation, bias, and distortion that characterize more public writings about the struggling colony at a time when it was just beginning to produce a vastly profitable staple crop. The Frethorne letter owes its current prominence to the fact that, far from being typical, it is actually one of the few of its kind. Frethorne may be appealing as a representative of ordinary servants during the dramatic early years of the Virginia settlement, but the letters he wrote home—and at least one of his other letters has been preserved—suggest that he himself was not all that typical. Not many private letters from early emigrants to the New World remain and only a handful appear in print. Most of the letters that have survived are business correspondence, lengthy memos, and reports from one official to another. Those colonial letters that survived were copied and circulated because they contain information of a general character and of economic interest...

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