The Journal of Hugh Campbell: Memorandum

This is Hugh’s own intro­duc­tion to his journal.…

The fore­go­ing pages were writ­ten in the month of Sep­tem­ber 1819 in Mil­ton, N. Car­oli­na from notes tak­en dur­ing my tour.  The only time, which the hur­ry of busi­ness would per­mit me to occu­py in this man­ner, was either the hours I deduct­ed from sleep or the short inter­vals in a morn­ing between cus­tomers call­ing in the store.  The hasty, uncon­nect­ed man­ner of writ­ing will form an apol­o­gy for the many errors and inac­cu­ra­cies it con­tains; and will be an excuse for me in request­ing that no per­son may see it out of the fam­i­ly except such friends as would think tri­fles when they relat­ed to me wor­thy a perusal.

In some let­ters from Ire­land I have been chid­ed for neg­li­gence and taxed with ingrat­i­tude for not com­ply­ing with a promise I made of send­ing home a Jour­nal.  To avoid this impu­ta­tion and to grat­i­fy my friends, I was oblig­ed to com­ply, though I might have excused myself from the task of plead­ing my depen­dent sit­u­a­tion, etc.  Should this (which is to be con­sid­ered rather in the light of a con­fi­den­tial let­ter than a reg­u­lar jour­nal) please, if it is request­ed, I shall send anoth­er small vol­ume next spring or fall as a con­tin­u­a­tion of this, but it will be most­ly obser­va­tions on the coun­try as my per­son­al trans­ac­tions have not been suf­fi­cient­ly var­ied to afford amuse­ment and my occu­pa­tions have had too much monot­o­ny in them to be worth perusing.

Hugh Camp­bell
Mil­ton, North Carolina
Sep­tem­ber 1819

*****

For an intro­duc­tion of the jour­nal and a biog­ra­phy of Hugh, vis­it Octo­ber 27th’s post.

One thought on “The Journal of Hugh Campbell: Memorandum

  1. Pingback: The Journal of Hugh Campbell: Part I | Campbell House Museum's Blog

Comments are closed.