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Like everyone else who has written about colonial Virginia, I am guilty of what John Fea describes as using Philip Vickers Fithian's journal as "window dressing for … studies of the plantation Chesapeake." In 1773 and 1774, Fithian served as a tutor on one of the great Tidewater plantations, and the journal he kept that year has provided historians with insightful and charming anecdotes about the religious and social lives of Virginia's élite.
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But if his account of Virginia is the most widely read (and plundered) of Fithian's journals, it was certainly not the only diary he kept. In 1766, he began two records: a journal devoted principally to assessing the state of his soul, and a journal in which he recorded the daily round of labor on his father's farm. From then on, Fithian was never far from pen and paper. He was an astute diarist, and a faithful letter-writer, and the paper trail he left is the basis for Fea's wonderful study of Fithian's conversion, education, and coming of age.
Fithian was born in 1747 in a rural and intensely Presbyterian pocket of southwest New Jersey called Cohansey. He grew up in the church, and he experienced a powerful conversion in 1766. Always a lover of ideas and reading, after his conversion Fithian sensed a call to ministry, and knew that he needed more formal education. Convincing his father that this was a good idea took some work: Fithian argued that an education would be a means of self-improvement, through which he would become more virtuous and refined. In turn, an educated Fithian could contribute to the betterment of society as a whole. Fithian's father finally relented, and Fithian enrolled first in a local academy run by Presbyterian cleric Enoch Green and then in the College of New Jersey (now Princeton).
In this absorbing and elegantly written biography, John Fea explores the conflict between Fithian's deep connections to Cohansey and the Enlightenment principles of cosmopolitanism he learned in school. How did Fithian reconcile his obligations to and love of home, a specific place and specific people, with the universalizing claims of the Enlightenment, whose prophets taught that enlightened people privileged a loyalty to international community above parochial ties? "The need to reconcile the pursuit of Enlightenment ambition with a passion for home or a desire for God," Fea suggests, "was perhaps the greatest moral problem facing the newly educated sons of British American farmers."
This tension is shot through Fithian's journals. He was always deeply attached to Cohansey. A third-generation Jerseyite, Fithian felt connected to the place through genealogy. He loved the landscape, how the apple and cherry trees bloomed in spring. He had close and abiding friendships with many of his neighbors, and he understood those friendships as seedbeds in which the virtuous life was nurtured.
Yet his education conspired to remove him from the place he loved. At the most general level, his book-learning elevated him to a social rank above most of his Cohansey compatriots. More specifically, in school he imbibed a principled cosmopolitanism that instructed him in obligations to the larger world. John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, taught his students that they possessed two kinds of affections: "particular" affections for local places and specific people, and the clearly superior "calm and deliberate good will to all." Local affections had their place, but they were to be subordinated to universal attachments. An expansive love of "mankind" trumped even patriotism, the love of one's particular country. "Philip would learn rather quickly at Princeton that it was far better to be a citizen of the world than a citizen of Cohansey," Fea writes.
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