author
Philip Vickers Fithian
1747–1776
Remembered for a vivid diary that opens a window onto colonial Virginia, this young tutor and Presbyterian minister left one of the most human firsthand records of life on the eve of the American Revolution. His writing is valued for its sharp eye, warmth, and everyday detail.
1 Audiobook
Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, 1773-1774.
by Philip Vickers Fithian
About the author
Born in Cumberland County, New Jersey, in December 1747, Philip Vickers Fithian studied at the Presbyterian academy of Enoch Green and later attended the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. He is best known today as a diarist whose journals and letters captured the world around him with unusual clarity.
In 1773 and 1774, he worked as a tutor at Nomini Hall, the Virginia plantation home of Robert Carter III. There he recorded daily life, education, religion, music, slavery, and social customs in a way that has made his journal an important source for understanding colonial America.
Fithian later prepared for the ministry and served as a Presbyterian missionary during the Revolutionary era. His life was brief—he died in 1776 at just twenty-eight—but his surviving journal and letters have given him a lasting place in early American history.