Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, 1773-1774.

In the autumn of 1773, a twenty-one-year-old Princeton graduate left New Jersey for Virginia's Northern Neck, carrying little but his books and a keen, uneasy eye. Philip Vickers Fithian had come to Nomini Hall, one of the largest plantations in colonial America, to tutor the children of Robert Carter III. He would leave a year later haunted. His journal captures the plantation at its glittering height: balls and hunting parties, libraries overflowing with Enlightenment thought, the refined chatter of Virginia's ruling class. But Fithian also saw what lay beneath the polish. He watched enslaved men and women build a world they would never own. He wrestled, in private, with a moral queasiness he could never quite name or act upon. Here is the American Revolution's prequel, told not by generals or planters, but by a young Northerner who arrived hopeful and departed quietly undone. For readers who want to feel the eighteenth century in their bones, not just study it.