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The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times
by Charles Royster
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Knopf (1999-10-03)
ISBN: 0679433457
EAN: 9780679433453
Dewey Decimal #: 975.552302
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 640 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 1999-10-03
SKU: 6000-Fabulous
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Spine tight and straight with clean unmarked pages.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In this absorbing narrative Charles Royster traces the rise and fall of the eighteenth-century transatlantic culture that was built on the insatiable demand in Europe for Virginia tobacco and the equally insatiable American demand for European manufactured goods.
Moving from the plantations of Virginia and Antigua to the warehouses of London and Glasgow, from the Gold Coast of Africa to the valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, from the iron furnaces of southern Wales to the subscribers' room of Lloyd's of London, Professor Royster gives us the story of the Dismal Swamp Company, a fantastically delusional enterprise that proposed draining and developing a vast morass along the Virginia-North Carolina border. Examining the interconnected lives of the company's partners, Royster reveals a colonial order built on a system of cronyism, conspicuous consumption, and debt that seems hauntingly familiar. He writes about the many schemers and dreamers (including George Washington, Robert "King" Carter, two William Byrds, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Morris) who failed to amass their desired fortunes, and a few realists (Samuel Gist, Dr. Thomas Walker, and Anthony Bacon) who succeeded, but at the dire expense of others. And we see the breakdown of this culture and the transition to a more democratic, though similar, system after the Revolution.
Throughout Royster's narrative we seepossessors possessed by their possessions, slaveholders possessed by slavery, and heirs possessed by litigation. Connecting all their stories are their unceasing efforts to make something substantial out of the insubstantial--chief among them the almost unbelievable delusion that fortunes could be made from the Dismal Swamp.
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Amazon.com Review
The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company begins, appropriately, amidst a time of extraordinary popular delusions. The mania surrounding the Mississippi Company and the South Sea Bubble was just properly breaking around 1720, leaving countless speculators broken and penniless. But any lessons to be learned from these legendary schemes seem lost on the principals of Charles Royster's historical epic, including such august figures as George Washington and Virginia's William Byrd. They--apparently like all other men of means at the time--were driven to convert the vast tracts of America into cold, hard cash. Speculation on land, along with the various ventures intended to exploit it profitably, is the central theme to Royster's interconnected patchwork of stories that spans some hundred years and sprawls the better part of the globe. Nearly all these tales relate to, if sometimes obliquely, a particular company and the men (including a young George Washington) who founded it to "save" the impassable, frog-infested marsh on the Virginia-North Carolina border known as the Great Dismal Swamp. (Never mind that local folk thought of it as "a low sunken morass, not fit for any of the purposes of Agriculture.") Fortunately, Royster, an accomplished historian and author of the Francis Parkman Prize-winning A Revolutionary People at War, had more luck getting something valuable out of the Dismal Swamp than his Colonial predecessors. His richly detailed, circuitous saga makes for dense, satisfying reading. --Paul Hughes
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Customer Reviews
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The only thing fabulous is the title
Rating  (1)
Date: 2010-03-17
0 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Being a fan of the AmRev/Colonial times, I really wanted to like this book. I really did. How could anyone resist such a title? Then I started reading it. I'm 100 pages into it so far, but am not sure if I'm going to finish it. Names are scattered like clover: who married whom, who's in business with whom, and so on. I guess this is to show how incestuous business dealings were back then... I guess. It seems like there's a good story in here trying to get out, but just when I think it's going to appear, Royster smothers it with more names.
This is definitely more for the academic than general history reader.
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Brilliant, fascinating failure
Rating  (4)
Date: 2010-01-16
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a brilliant, fascinating mess. Royster could have made it more approachable with the simple device of some genealogical charts and tables showing who the owners of the company were at a given time. The thousands of names flit in and out, and it's not until you're 50 pages into the book that the first chapter---about the Dismal Swamp Company---starts to tie in with the multitudes of narratives. Just as you start identifying with one person, his narrative ends and isn't taken up again for 20 pages, by which time, you've forgotten who he was. The only common element throughout the book is the greedy misanthropic Samuel Gist---and then, only because he lived so long. There are dozens of other ways Royster could have organized the book---and all of them would have made more sense. On the other hand, there's something about it that makes you keep reading. Ambitious, unique, and yes, as another reviewer said, weird. Royster's writing style is often annoying, as if he felt compelled to spew out every note he ever made; this often results in choppy, declarative sentences. The father died. The daughter sued. The author doesn't do transitions. Finally, the footnotes---for those of us who are compelled to find a particular source---are overwhelming and hard to use; they're organized by page, which is fine, but then lumped together in a mass grave.
I think it was worth the time reading it. It stands out enough that you won't forget. Like the movie "A Clockwork Orange," see it once, but you'll never watch it again.
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A shaggy dog history
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-10-10
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This strange, brilliant, sometimes exasperating, always fascinating book uses the forty-year history of a company that developed land in Virginia's Dismal Swamp as the hook for an overload of stories about the men who invested in that company. The results is a crazy quilt chronicle of 18th century Virginia replete with tales of ambitious orphans, elopements, bills of exchange, debt, bankruptcy, the tobacco trade, land speculation in Kentucky and Ohio, the slave trade on the Gold Coast, smuggling in Antigua, the underwriter rooms of Lloyds, theatergoing in London, and more marriages than one can keep track of. The American Revolution comes and goes somewhere in the background. The Dismal Swamp Company itself is just a MacGuffin at the center of a rich, lively rigamorole.
The reader who complained that this book is like reading through 18th century business ledgers actually captures some of its feeling, but I liked that quality. There is material here for a dozen or so historical novels, which is one of the book's problems, but I enjoyed navigating through the scattered storylines and assembling the pieces in my head.
Charles Royster's prose is always clear and quick and his research is amazing. The reader just needs to be patient and be able to go with the flow of it. I was helped by the fact that I grew up in Virginia and know some of the names and places: William Byrd, the Nelson family, Lord Dunmore, Williamsburg, Westover and Rosewell. But I've never encountered anything quite like this book. It's an experiment in storytelling and it won't work for everyone but it worked for me. The world of the 18th century will never be the same.
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Don't seek this out for entertainment's sake....
Rating  (3)
Date: 2009-09-27
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Ledgers, lists of names, etc., etc., etc. While this was far from a compelling read, there were bits and pieces that I picked up that thoroughy entertained me. I certainly doubt that the general history reader would find this compelling, but I did enjoy reading about Lord Dunmore's reluctance to come to Virginia and, apparently, disagreeable personality and genuine enjoyment of liquid refreshment.
I return to this book now and then for a quick refresher. However, I would not define it as a classic of historical literature.
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A good book on a fairly boring (but important ) subject
Rating (3)
Date: 2009-07-01
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
It is hard to believe that we were trading with England during the Revolutionary War but evidently we were. Many people owed a lot of money to British bankers and could not pay, and it seems that was a reason for the war not talked about. It is amazing to see how inbred Virginia was in those days, and how many names(Fairfax, Washington, Randolph) are prominent to this day from the 1600's. A slog but I enjoy slogs
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