Becoming Americans (76 page)

      After Sam's Grandmother Nancy had died, Stephen needed a helpmate, which everyone understood. Within six months he'd taken twenty-year-old Sallie Creekmore as a bride, and the odd pair became leaders in the church. Sam's grandfather's telling and retelling the story of ticks leading him from the Dismal Swamp by "trusting in the Light," made him famous among young boys. He spoke of his days with the pirates, before he found God. He told stories of his own grandfather, who'd come from England as a boy, of his great-grandfather, who'd died fighting Republican rebels. Grandpa Stephen still spoke of Virginia as "home." Sam was proud to be from North Carolina. He'd never been away from it.

      Sam considered himself an energetic and contented man, but he had questions about his future, and that of his new son. Every day, with every rider from Williamsburgh, or Tar Borough, or Wilmington brought word that seemed to lead his world toward destruction.

      Sam's father had been gone on many nights after the Enfield Riots, returning home with a darkened face and stories of revenge against criminals, Granville's agents, or men working for the King. He and his friends called themselves "Regulators," and, more recently, had organized themselves on the lines of Boston's "Sons of Liberty." They'd called for public meetings for discussions with officials as to whether or not the King's American subjects were being subjected to abuses of power, but public officials had been barred from attending that meeting, and the participants labeled "insurrectionists."

      There was a mixed feeling of despair and anticipation in all the provinces, travelers on the Halifax Road reported, and Sam wondered what his role would be in the uncertain days ahead. Tom Harbut, some of the Pridgens, some of the Joyners, and many newcomers had left for the westernmost lands of the province, hoping to escape the reaches of all authority. Sam wasn't leaving. Whatever happened, Edgecombe County was his home. But, he was following his father's advice, and being especially careful not to waste powder, and not to miss a target.

      With the blessing of God and the hard work of Sam and his younger brothers, the Williams land was prospering, and with the community respect that came with being a grandchild of Old Stephen, the Williams boys and girls were closely watched as marriage prospects in the neighborhood. Sam had wed in 1766, the first of his generation of Carolina Williamses to marry. He'd chosen Lucy Creekmore, a sister of his grandfather's wife, and found nothing strange about it. The mothers would raise the boys as brothers.

      Sam stroked the back of his nursing infant son as he watched his grandfather lift his own new son from its mother and raise him in the air.

      "This is my son, Daniel!" Old Stephen said. "A son whom no one shall call 'bastard!'"

      Daniel's mother smiled, with a knowing look.

      Something in the air was troublesome to Samuel. He was confused, and looked toward his father, Stephen Williams, Junior.

      Junior had heard his father but was confused, himself. Was he become a lesser son?

      Father Manning came to Junior's side and put a supporting hand on his shoulder. Margaret put her arm around her husband and grew rigid, as she stood taller.

Northeastern North Carolina was among the earliest settled sections in British North America. Largely because of peculiar geographic influences, a great portion of the population of these seventeen or eighteen counties has always descended from the first Anglo-Saxon-Celtic colonists of the mid-1700s. Many of those settlers had come, first, to southeastern Virginia during the latter half of the seventeenth century, joining friends and families who had arrived even earlier from neighboring villages and towns of southwestern England. Several generations of British subjects lived and died here—prayed and fought for more than a half-dozen British monarchs—while evolving into self-assertive, republican Americans.
Becoming Americans
is a tale of these men, women and children who, during more than a century of discovery and rebellion, religion and politics, loving and dying created the personalities and setting of the American Revolution.

      
Becoming
Americans
personalizes that evolution and those early Americans in the perspective illuminated by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their work
Generations, The History of America's Future, 1584-2069:
that American history is a repeating cycle of generation types, causing and/or reacting to predictable secular and spiritual crises. Understanding that process of age-cohort development illuminates history and the future—national
and
personal. Vice-President Gore has called
Generations
one of the "…great works of interpretation, capable of producing a paradigmatic shift in thinking."

      Strauss and Howe identify and locate in time the American generations and their cycles. They begin their study with the Colonial Cycle and the Puritan Generation (born during the years 1587 through 1614), a spiritually motivated age group that was reacting to the worldliness of its Elizabethan predecessors. They, in turn, created the moralistic, judgmental environment that was rejected by the next generation, the Cavaliers (1615-1647). There followed the secular, hardworking Glorious (1648-1673), and then the polished, worldly Enlightenment (1674-1700). This repeating pattern was continued in the subsequent Revolutionary Cycle of Awakening (1701-1723), Liberty (1724-1741), Republican (1742-1766), and Compromise (1767-1791). Today's living representatives of overlapping cycles include the triumphant survivors of the civic-minded GI Generation (1901-1924), the adaptive Silent Generation (1925-1942), the idealistic Boomers (1943-1960), the reactive X or Thirteenth (1961-1981), and the promising new civic Millennial Generation (1982-????), still in its youth.

      
Becoming Americans
is a unique dramatization of the Colonial and early Revolutionary Cycles as lived by one tenacious family, from the arrival of an orphaned, immigrant Cavalier servant in 1658 Virginia, though the colonies' evolution to ripening political self-consciousness in 1767 North Carolina. The passions, disasters, triumphs, and challenges of that formative century are reflected in the family of Richard Williams.

      Richard Williams (b.1645), the immigrant, was orphaned at the age of four, victim of a religious and political struggle that had orphaned thousands of children in England, including those of the beheaded King Charles I, himself. The strict Puritans brought on a reaction among the young. Richard and his Cavalier peers shared undisciplined appetites and disdain for authority. His life as an indentured servant was common for the time, too, as was his transition into independent planter status.

      Anne Biggs (b.1650), Richard's wife, John (b. 1666) and Joseph (b.1667), his oldest sons, and Edy (b.1669), his oldest daughter were Glorious children, raised in safer, more stable times and circumstances. They were bold, rational, and free to contribute their talents and energies to the development of infrastructure and tradition. Anne held the fractious family together with her wits, and made a new life for them in the "Rogues Harbor" of North Carolina where, in 1691, she moved with her third husband, the notorious Robert Fewox, taking Edy and the youngest children with her. Her adult sons stayed in Virginia. John organized and managed a large plantation, while his brother, Joseph, conducted commerce, built a water mill, a road, and established a village.

      The youngest children of Richard and Anne Williams—Edward (b. 1674), Richard (b. 1675) and Sarah Alice (b. 1676)—and some of their grandchildren of the Enlightenment generation entered adulthood during a period of peace and prosperity that they relished. "Rogue's Harbor" offered opportunities, despite and because of the pirates and poor land. The growing Empire and the Royal Navy needed Carolina's naval stores.

      The next generation of Americans, stifled by the secular concerns of their socially striving elders, reveled in their spiritual and idealistic natures and joined in the Great Awakening of religion in the mid-eighteenth century. Stephen Williams (b. 1701) broke with his family and from a sullen past of adventure and swamp exploration to rejoice in that emotional religious movement, while his older Enlightenment brother James (b. 1700) clung to the ritual and respectability of the Church of England.

      Children of the Awakeners were temperamentally reminiscent of Richard the Immigrant and were among the adventurers who so resented that moralism and the authority of Britain that they ventured forth in great numbers to the western frontier, following the footsteps of Daniel Boone and other explorers of their Liberty Generation. Stephen's son, Junior (b. 1730), made attempts to follow the teachings and lifestyle of his Baptist community, but, like his Liberty cohorts, Junior resented all intrusion into his life and personal liberty. He exercised that resentment whether against his church community or against the King's men.

      Junior's son, Samuel (b.1747), was among those who would fight for his country's independence from the King and the King's men. The Republican Generation became tireless foot soldiers of the Revolution. The cycle continued.

      
Becoming Americans
is the story of America's early beginning, the study of a culture in formation; that culture of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic settlers which became a dominant one of the southern United States. The men and women who grew the tobacco, who boiled the tar for Britain's ships, who defied the Established Church as non-conformists, and "populated the Earth" with settlers for the frontier were the humble but exciting yeomen stock of much of our country, themselves the first frontiersmen, the homefolks of the pioneers. Their story is an important part of our national family history.

END