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Appendix 2 Bibliographical Notes COPY-TEXTS This edition takes as its copy-text for The History of the Dividing Line the version included in the Westover Manuscripts at the Virginia Historical Society (MSS1 B9966), with constant reference to the American Philosophical Society copy (975.5 B99h), the British Library manuscript (Add. MS 28260), and extant fragments. A fresh transcription was done from VHS microfilm and then carefully checked against the manuscript itself. The Westover Manuscripts include a set of miscellaneous texts by William Byrd, gathered in a vellum-bound folio that for many years was treated as a family treasure. The pages devoted to “The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina Run in the year of our Lord 1728” are numbered from 1 to 139. This text, in a middle-eighteenthcentury hand, was produced by a secretary or copyist. Additionally, throughout the manuscript there are frequent corrections, emendations, and expansions in Byrd’s own hand. Authorial interventions are indicated in the textual notes on each page, where variant readings also appear.1 The APS manuscript of The History of the Dividing Line is written in a hand very similar to that of the APS manuscript of the Secret History. Earlier editors have speculated that the hands may be the same; a close inspection neither confirms nor rules out this presumption. Three sections of the original APS Secret History manuscript are missing (pp. 1–28, 122–128c, and 138a–140). The missing passages were supplied in another hand much later, inserted and written on a different paper stock (not laid paper, as in the older, larger portion). The inserted passages are written in a small, regular nineteenth-century steel-pen hand; the ink is very light or faded.The nineteenth-century copyist does not use (or preserve) the capitalization standard in other Byrd manuscripts. Sometime after the APS acquired its History of the Dividing Line manuscript, Peter DuPonceau, the head of the APS publications committee, arranged with Benjamin Harrison, executor of the estate of William Byrd III, to have the missing text supplied from the Westover Manuscripts, then in the hands of George Evelyn Harrison, great-grandson of the author. These nineteenthcentury sections silently incorporate nearly all of the Byrd corrections and additions in the VHS manuscript, whereas the remainder of the APS manuscript mostly resembles the state of the VHS narrative before Byrd worked on it.2 1. The descendants of the Byrd family who long held the Westover Manuscripts occasionally allowed them to be read. In 1816 James Kirke Paulding read “The History of the Dividing Line”with considerableenjoyment and praised the author: “Judging by thework, the author was a deep scholar; a man of great observation, and a sly joker on womankind.” The writing drew praise: “The style of this work is, I think, the finest specimen of that grave, stately, and quaint mode of writing fashionable about a century ago, that I have ever met with any where.” Letters from the South, Written during an Excursion in the Summer of 1816 (New York, 1817), I, 28–29. See also Floyd C. Watkins, “James Kirke Paulding and the Manuscripts of William Byrd,” Modern Language Notes, LXVII (1952), 56–57. 2. Kathleen L. Leonard, “Notes on the Text and Provenance of the Byrd Manuscripts,” in Prose Works, 418. 476 } Appendix 2 It would seem that, when Byrd commissioned the copy now known as the APS manuscript , he was still making revisions; these are discussed below. It seems probable that multiple copies of the two narratives existed at one time, perhaps in various stages of revision and polishing; the extant copies were also subject to authorial attentions. The copy-text for The Secret History is the APS manuscript (975.5 B99h), supplemented with fragments in the Brock Collection at the Huntington Library (BR box 256.28) and at the Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (MS 40.2). The APS text, contained in an oblong notebook much resembling a surveyor’s notebook, was donated to the library by Thomas Jefferson in 1816. The manuscript was missing pages 155–156 (the entries for November 20–22), but the Huntington fragments provided the lost text.3 VARIATIONS BETWEEN THE VHS AND THE APS DIVIDING LINE The Virginia Historical Society’s manuscript of The History of the Dividing Line, bound with copies of other Byrd texts in a collection known as the Westover Manuscripts, has long been recognized as the better version. Its pages feature numerous revisions, corrections , and additions...

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