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
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
The swamp featured in this book is a vast marshy region in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. In 1763, a small group of investorsAincluding George WashingtonApurchased a huge chunk of this terrain. With the help of slave labor, they hoped to drain parts of the land to make room for farms for tobacco and other crops. They also planned to sell timber and wood shingles from the area's dense forests and to profit from roads and canals built through the land to transport commerce. The Dismal Swamp Company was largely a failure, not turning any profits until a decade after Washington's death. More than tracing the unhappy history of one business enterprise, this impressively annotated book by distinguished historian Royster (Louisiana State Univ.) provides a fascinating panorama of colorful characters (including numerous shady entrepreneurs), interesting glimpses into master-slave relations, and expert analyses of both American and British economic developments. Recommended for university and large public libraries.AThomas J. Schaeper, St. Bonaventure Univ., NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
