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parallel lives 47 chapter five Parallel Lives t Before following young Harrison out to the frontier, where the data on his life becomes more continuous and his motivations somewhat easier to discern, I would like to consider the lives of a few other Virginia boys, contemporaries of his from the top level of the planter class, whose lives intersected or paralleled his in the years just after the Revolution. Their early lives are fragmentary too, in some cases even less complete than Harrison’s, but, set side by side, they point to themes and stresses that pervaded Virginia society in those difficult postwar years. They suggest the context in which Billy Harrison grew up, and they hint that many of his friends had problems similar to his own. William Henry Harrison and Charles Willing Byrd were only three years apart in age and grew up on plantations only six or seven miles apart. One can assume they associated as neighboring planters’ sons were apt to do—rode around the country together, hunted, visited one another’s houses for extended stays, and met at dancing school and after service at Westover Church, which both their families attended. (The church stood on the Byrd plantation, Westover, and its rector had married one of the Byrd girls.) True, during much of their adolescence one or the other was away—Billy with his father in Richmond and then at school in the Piedmont, Charley (at some point during these years) at school in Philadelphia—but in the late1780s and early1790s they were both near 47 Booraem text.indb 47 5/22/12 1:53 PM 48 a child of the revolution home. Harrison was attending the Reverend Burges’s school at Millfield at that time, and so, it appears, were Byrd’s younger brothers, Dicky and Billy. Then Harrison went on to Richmond to apprentice with Dr. Leiper, while Byrd remained in Charles City.1 The situations of the two youths were very similar: both were younger sons of great planting families that were threatened with economic disaster. Harrison’s father had devoted himself to public business and politicking at the expense of his financial well-being; Byrd’s father, William Byrd III, a gambler and a Tory, had taken his own life at the beginning of the Revolution. Mary Willing Byrd, daughter of a rich Philadelphia merchant (and sister of Colonel Harrison’s chief creditor), lacking many resources of her own, was desperately trying to hold her children’s inheritance together and arrange advantageous marriages for them.2 As part of this strategy, Charley Byrd was sent to Philadelphia in his teens to stay under the care of his mother’s sister Elizabeth, wife of a wealthy Quaker merchant, Samuel Powel. Part of the plan was that he was to study law, and, indeed, an early sketch of his life claims that he did so there under the brilliant lawyer Gouverneur Morris, who was a partner, though no relation, of Robert Morris. This claim, like the assertion that Billy Harrison apprenticed under Benjamin Rush, seems to be an exaggeration, although Morris may have overseen Charley’s education in a general way. In any case, by the time he was seventeen or eighteen, old enough for serious law study, Charley was back in Virginia, “studying with a local attorney, perhaps one of the Tylers.” He understood that he was being moved from place to place because of “the ills and mortifications, which the want of wealth gives rise to,” as he expressed it in a letter to a sister. Harrison might have said the same thing.3 Both youths ended up in the Ohio Valley in early manhood, Harrison because of his romantic decision to seek military glory on the frontier, Byrd “dragged by poverty . . . [to] a distance of six hundred miles from my brothers and sisters”; evidently an attempt by Byrd to practice law in Charles City was not thriving, and, in fact, he may have lacked money to pay his way to Philadelphia. Charley went out to Kentucky as Robert Morris’s land agent in 1794, when Harrison was still a lieutenant in the army, urged to do so by Ben Harrison as a step “to future independence and happiness.” Harrison and Byrd may have corresponded occasionally during these years. Once settled in the West, they came into close contact; Byrd sucBooraem text.indb 48 5/22/12 1:53 PM [18.190.156.80] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10:18...

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