Philip Vickers Fithian

Born in Cumberland County, New Jersey, in 1747, Philip Vickers Fithian was raised in a farming family and later pursued a classical education through Presbyterian schools. He studied at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, graduating in 1772, and eventually prepared for the ministry.

Fithian is remembered above all as a diarist. In 1773 and 1774 he worked as a tutor in the household of Robert Carter at Nomini Hall in Virginia, where he carefully recorded plantation life, family routines, social customs, music, theater, religion, and the brutality and contradictions of a slaveholding world. Because he wrote with curiosity and detail, his diary has become an important firsthand source for understanding colonial America on the eve of revolution.

He later married Elizabeth Beatty and served as a chaplain during the Revolutionary era. His life was short: he died in 1776 at only twenty-eight. Even so, the journals and letters he left behind gave him a lasting place in early American history.