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That Dr Coxe, whose share of his father-in-law's will amounted to a single bequest of £100, appropriated to himself, by whatever means, the disposal of the Coldham estate is further evinced by his daughter Lydia's attempts, from about 1706 onwards, to extract her share of her grandfather's estate by litigation, as will be shown below. The only one of Dr Coxe's children who clearly did receive an appropriate share was Daniel, whose bequest of £800 was paid to him directly, and who ultimately reaped the benefits, and some of the problems, of his father's American property.
Whatever might have been his source of funds, or his expectations of imminent wealth, in June 1696 Dr Coxe bought the title to the province of Carolana from Sir James Shaen. About half the size of the more northerly grant of land unsuccessfully applied for six years earlier, Carolana was nevertheless the largest grant of American land ever made by the English crown to an individual. Named for Charles I, it was originally granted by that king to his Attorney General, Sir Robert Heath, in 1629. Heath had bequeathed it to Lord Maltravers, from whom it had passed, either by sale or legacy, to Shaen. The province consisted of about an eighth of the total land area of what are now Canada and the United States together, stretching from 31°N to 36°N, or from the present-day St Johns River, then the River St Mattheo, north to Albermarle Sound, formerly Passo Magno, and westward to the South Sea : that is, roughly from Nashville down to Baton Rouge, all the way across from Georgia and the Carolinas to the Pacific. The title specifically excluded the Spanish settlements of St Augustine and New Mexico, but included Norfolk County, Virginia, which had come into Lord Maltravers's possession through a separate grant from John Harvey, Governor of Virginia. Because of the Carolina grant of 1665 and inadequate or inaccurate geographic knowledge, there were inconsistencies between the Carolana patent, the boundaries of Carolina, and Spanish territorial claims. Dr Coxe evidently accepted that prior settlements were not included, claiming that his title was only to the unsettled parts south and west of Carolina on the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Mississippi Valley ; for his intents and purposes, Carolana began at Carolina's western boundary. Officially, boundaries of the several territories remained unresolved for years.
Dr Coxe commissioned a James Spooner, probably a lawyer, to draw up a charter and bylaws for his new colony. It was to be a commonwealth, and Coxe and Spooner decided to call it "the New Empire". Spooner's eleven-page, undated draft stated that £400,000 capital stock would be raised by creating an Imperial Company of 80,000 shares at £5 each. Fourteen original proprietors would hold 20,000 shares, the others being distributed among a thousand associates, although 5,000 would be kept aside to be given to selected "persons of quality", the idea being that these, the celebrities of their time, would attract national interest in the scheme and lend it glamour. From the associate members would be chosen the members of various committees : for Religion, Law, Trade, Accounts, Poor, Criminals, Charity and Natives. There would be a Governor, a deputy and twelve assistant officers. Two important aspects of the project, as Spooner made clear, were "the promulgation of the gospel amongst the Indians and infidels", and the transportation to the New World of the poor, particularly debtors. Dr Coxe was probably also thinking of the growing number of French Huguenot refugees, and their search for a new home. Several details of the Coxe-Spooner plan anticipated the later Oglethorpe settlement in Georgia.
While there is no evidence that Spooner's document was ever presented to the king, the fact that William III later became involved in Coxe's plans for the Protestant refugees suggests that this draft, or a modified version of it, would probably have been produced by Dr Coxe in support of his applications for royal assistance.
In the winter of 1696/7 his mother-in-law Rebecca Coldham died, leaving £100 to her eldest grandson Daniel, an annuity to her maidservant Dorothy Scrivener, and the rest of her property to her daughter Rebecca, whom she named her executrix. Dr Coxe had by now disposed of most of his West Jersey property. The New England mining venture was still alive, however, and in 1697 Dr Coxe joined with his associates and their agents in drafting a limited plan of colonial union in North America. They proposed that New England and New York be united under a civil governor, who would also have military command over Connecticut, the Jerseys and adjacent charter colonies. For the position of Governor they recommended the Earl of Bellomont. Like his son Daniel's suggestion in Carolana, a quarter of a century later, this would not have constituted a United States of America so much as an Amalgamated American Colonies of Great Britain.
In 1697 a French explorer, Father Louis Hennepin, published an account of his American discoveries as Nouvelle découverte d'un très grand pays situé dans l'Amérique, in which he stated his belief that once the boundaries of Carolina and Carolana were properly surveyed and agreed upon there would be ample land in the American interior for both the British and the French. Dr Coxe is believed to have been responsible for the London edition of this book, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, published in October of the same year, which included a bid for a colonisation project similar to Spooner's proposed charter and references to a forthcoming work which would contain a map of Carolana and accounts of its inhabitants, commodities and trading potential - all of which would be true of the 1722 Carolana, and perhaps indicates that Dr Coxe had already begun to work on the book which was later published under his son's name.
Dr Coxe's first move to populate his "New Empire" was to transfer half a million acres of land west of the Apalachicola River, part of the Carolana patent, to Sir William Waller and two French refugee associates, the Marquis Olivier de la Muce and M. Charles de Sailly. The transfer was signed on 2 May 1698, and was conditional that 200 French Huguenot families would be settled there inside two years. Within the first seven years, provided that all conditions were met, Waller and his associates had an option to take up additional land, up to a maximum of a further 500,000 acres. Payment for the initial tract during the first seven years was "a ripe ear of Indian corn in the season", after which a quit rent of five shillings per 500 acres of land, "or the value thereof in other coin", would be payable on the original acreage as well as on any further land taken up. About a month later, in conjunction with this, Dr Coxe published a one-page pamphlet entitled Proposals for Settling a Colony in Florida, inviting beleaguered northern European Protestants to settle on his lands, and extolling Florida-Carolana's material possibilities and trading prospects. He proposed a project in two parts : a land and trading company, and an association of merchants to provide food and transportation costs for the refugees. A one-quarter share would secure for a settler 100 acres of land, transportation to the New World and food for the journey. Meetings were scheduled at a Cheapside tavern, and at the Marquis de la Muce's home.
Another French journal of exploration, Henri de Tonti's Dernières découvertes, was published in London this year, the translation, according to Dr Coxe, being made from his copy. The French Government, aware that Father Hennepin had been in correspondence with interested parties in England about his discoveries, and learning of Dr Coxe's plans to settle Huguenots in Carolana, sent a secret agent to London in July to investigate. Dr Coxe's "New Empire" worried them more than the desultory settlement attempts of the Spanish. Perhaps the secret agent even attended the wedding of Dr Coxe's daughter Anne and Samuel Harris, an East India Company merchant, which took place on 6 July in St Giles's Church, Cripplegate.
In October two small brigantines, filled with about five hundred prospective settlers, mostly Protestant refugees, sailed from England for the Gulf coast, the first wave of what Dr Coxe hoped would become a flowing tide of emigrants to his land of promise. The expedition was jointly organised by Waller's French Huguenot associates and the doctor, and Captain William Bond was in command of both vessels. They arrived in Charleston and settled in there for the winter. The plan was to sail around Florida to the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, there to meet up with a group of Chickasaw traders who were exploring westwards from Carolina. Meanwhile the French and Spanish, alerted to Coxe's plan, had sent out similar parties in a race to create settlements on the Gulf. The Spaniards were the first to arrive, in November, and established themselves at Pensacola ; the French, under d'Iberville, finding Pensacola occupied, sailed on to Biloxi. The English expedition, sheltering in Charleston, were probably not even aware that they had inspired a race, let alone lost it.
The following May Captain Bond set off from Charleston in one of the ships, the Carolina Galley, a corvette of twelve guns. He sailed south along Florida's east coast, into the Gulf of Mexico, and passed the Spanish settlement at Pensacola and the French at Biloxi without observing them. Meanwhile in England, on 3 June, Dr Coxe was proposed for membership of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Carolina Galley sailed on past the mouth of the Mississippi and about 300 miles to the west, before turning back to explore the river and rendezvous with the traders. They arrived at the river mouth on 29 August, and began exploring its lower reaches, with the aid of a map Dr Coxe had put together from Spanish sources. Captain Bond noted in his journal that he could make no headway in the middle of the stream, but found that he could run easily up the side of the river where the current was weaker. About seventy miles upriver they encountered two canoes ; a party of Frenchmen under the Sieur de Bienville, who had entered the Mississippi on 2 March with his brother, the French leader d'Iberville. De Bienville was engaged in sounding the river, and was perhaps more startled to see an English ocean-going vessel so far up the Mississippi than the English were to find Frenchmen in canoes. De Bienville, doing his best to bluff, told Captain Bond he was not in the Mississippi at all, but another river which communicated with it further north, but Bond produced Dr Coxe's map, somewhat to the Frenchman's surprise, and pointed out that the English claim to the Mississippi had been established for at least 50 years. De Bienville replied that the French had, unlike the English, established a settlement - which Bond, not having spotted Biloxi, did not believe. His first thought was that this group of Frenchmen had come downriver from Canada to trade with Indians. Nevertheless, the Carolina Galley turned round, after Captain Bond had advised de Bienville that he would return with a stronger force to lay claim to the country. The place where they met has been known ever since as English Turn, and d'Iberville, perhaps with his brother's report in mind, later described Bond as "un estourdy peu capable" - "a scatter-brain of little efficiency"12. But the French did in fact take the English expedition seriously ; Bond's meeting with de Bienville was directly responsible for their decision to build a fort about 50 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi to protect it from further encroachment by the English.
The Carolina Galley returned to Charleston, and both ships set off on the voyage back to England. In London, Dr Coxe, unaware of the fate of his expedition, submitted a memorandum to the Board of Trade proposing a trading and colonising company for Carolana, to be called the Florida Company. He argued that it should have the same privileges and protection granted to any other English trading company and claimed that the country was ideally suited for both settlement and trade. If a joint stock company could be organised and £50,000 raised by 24 June 1700, Dr Coxe stated, he would willingly surrender his own title to the province. But he also requested a further land grant, comprising a large stretch of the Gulf coast south of Carolana's 31°N boundary, in order to provide access to his lands in the interior - a problem Captain Bond would point out on his return. To assure the Board of Trade of his rightful claim to the Carolana patent, Dr Coxe appended to the memorandum a history of the discovery, exploration and apportioning of the area, entitled A demonstration of the just pretensions of the King of England to the Province of Carolana alias Florida, and of the present Proprietor under his Majesty, an abstract of which was later included in his son Daniel's Carolana. The Board of Trade passed this document to the Attorney General, who reported that "Dr. Coxe has a good Title in Law to the said Province of Carolana, extending from 31 to 36 Degrees of North Latitude inclusive, on the Continent of America, and to several adjacent Islands"13. But the Board of Trade turned down his bid for incorporation of the Florida Company on the grounds that a Carolana settlement would weaken other English possessions in America by attracting settlers from the older colonies and thereby depopulating them. They also noted their fears concerning the ultimate religious and political affiliations of the French Huguenots, the possibility of Spanish retaliation against British ships, and the likelihood that coastal settlements in the Gulf would provide a haven for pirates. Nevertheless, the Board did submit both Dr Coxe's proposal and their own list of objections to the king ; the doctor later claimed that William III had approved and promised to aid the venture, and that the death of another supporter, Lord Lonsdale, in 1700, followed by the king's death and the outbreak of war in 1702 had finally put paid to the project. At the time, however - on 2 January 1699/1700, within a fortnight of the Board's rejection - Coxe proposed abandoning his Florida Company idea, and suggested instead that those who had intended to go to Carolana should be settled instead in Virginia, asking for a new grant of land on the Morisco River. This and later actions suggest that his claims of royal support were unsubstantiated, and that what help the king eventually offered was rather in response to the plight of the unsuccessful Huguenot settlers than in support of Dr Coxe's plans. A few days later, on 8 January, Dr Coxe informed the French refugee leaders that he now anticipated difficulties in establishing a colony in Carolana. As he had not yet had Captain Bond's report, this was probably based on news that the French had established settlements on the Mississippi as well as in reaction to the Board of Trade's objections. On 25 January he withdrew his proposal of 2 January and submitted new plans to move the French refugee settlers from Carolana to Norfolk County, Virginia, already part of his title to Carolana. The French leaders rejected this idea and accused Dr Coxe of trying to deceive them. Dr Coxe denied this, and announced that to vindicate himself he would publish a full account of his activities in America over the past twenty years, in which he had personally spent more than £10,000. If this did not reveal that he had acted "in the best interests of his country" he would accept their accusations. The account seems not to have been published.
The Carolina Galley arrived back in England in February, without its companion vessel, which had been wrecked off the English coast with all hands lost. Captain Bond duly reported to Coxe that the French had a strong foothold in the Gulf of Mexico, and that the Carolana patent did not extend far enough south to include the Gulf coastline. Dr Coxe immediately arranged a meeting to introduce the Captain to members of the Board of Trade, at which Bond presented them with a number of maps of the Gulf coast drawn up during his voyage, while Coxe gave a report on the health, fertility and pleasantness of the country. Bond's maps later "created a sensation"14 in Paris, and his journal of the voyage proved useful to subsequent explorers of the Mississippi.
The returning and disillusioned Huguenot refugees, having failed to settle in Carolana under English protection, petitioned Louis XIV for permission to settle on the Mississippi under the French flag, but Louis "replied that he had not chased heretics out of his kingdom to create a republic for them in America"15. Dr Coxe then submitted a request to the Board of Trade to settle the Huguenots either at the head of the St Johns River or in Norfolk County, as he had proposed on the 25 January. Charles de Sailly represented the doctor, who was ill, at a meeting with the Board, at which he told them that Coxe still intended to prevent French Catholics from settling on the Mississippi, regarding them as dangerous neighbours - a view which was self-evidently even closer to de Sailly's heart than to Dr Coxe's. The Archbishop of Canterbury offered to come to the French Protestants' aid, promising them charity money to assist them in their voyage to wherever it was decided they would settle.
The Huguenot leaders reported to the Board on 20 February that they had negotiated with Dr Coxe for a tract of land near Dismal Swamp in Norfolk County. They requested that the king recommend them to Francis Nicholson, Governor of Virginia, and grant them assistance for the trip. On 7 March the Board, having reached agreement on the Norfolk County plan, referred the refugees' request for aid to the king, asking him also to make the French Protestants British subjects, which would give them privileges not accorded to foreigners. William approved the request, immediately authorised letters of denization (naturalisation), and wrote to Governor Nicholson directing him to give the colonists all possible help and encouragement ; he granted them £3,000 through the Committee for the Distribution of the Royal Bounty, and instructed Dr Coxe to supervise the emigration.
A month later the Mary-Anne, carrying 207 Huguenot refugees including Charles de Sailly and the Marquis de la Muce, departed for Virginia. They arrived at the mouth of the James River on 23 July 1700. Governor Nicholson, having decided in the meantime that the Dismal Swamp site, unsurprisingly, was not suitable for settlement, had selected for the incoming Frenchmen better land at Manikin Town in the Virginia Piedmont. By this time both Nicholson and the French Huguenot leaders were openly critical of Dr Coxe. The Governor, who believed Coxe to be "an honest gentleman and an able physician"16, thought Coxe had given up such projects after his disappointments in the Jerseys, and considered that others had taken advantage of his good nature, telling him of new lands and providing him with maps and literature ; if Coxe could be persuaded to come to America to see exactly what his purchase entailed he might perhaps be dissuaded from pursuing his grandiose ideas. The Frenchmen were less charitable, considering their association with Dr Coxe a sorry failure.
The refugees left for their new settlement on 31 July, and in August de Sailly wrote, "We are, thank God, in a fine and beautiful country, where, after the first difficulties, we shall live well and happily."17 At about the same time a second ship, the galley Peter and Paul, sailed from London carrying 169 refugees under the charge of a M. de Joux, who had just been ordained a minister of the Anglican Church by the Bishop of London. This second vessel arrived in Jamestown in November, followed by a third, the Nassau, carrying 191 Protestant refugees from northern Europe. By the time the Reverend de Joux arrived in Manikin Town "half of the first party lay sick at the Falls, languishing under misery and want". De Joux and de Sailly were quickly at loggerheads, mainly because of de Sailly's insistence that the newcomers could only have supplies if they swore an oath of fidelity to his personally-appointed Justices of the Peace. De Joux, who described de Sailly as hardhearted and his conduct as "odious and insupportable", complained to Governor Nicholson. De la Muce also wrote to Nicholson, attempting to pour oil on troubled waters, pointing out that Charles de Sailly was ill, and that there really was not enough food for the newly-expanded settlement. Nicholson took matters into his own hands and started a subscription for the refugees : "a considerable sum was raised and applied to their relief".
Thus, only four years after he acquired the patent, ended Dr Coxe's first and last attempt to settle Carolana - and with it, effectively, his direct involvement with America. For the rest of his life he continued to take what opportunities he could to try to resurrect his dream of a "New Empire", but increasingly the responsibility came to rest on his son Daniel. The latter's Carolana could be said to represent a last-ditch attempt to revive interest in the doctor's plans, as well as being a son's tribute to his father. After Carolana's publication and the younger Daniel's return to America he was probably too deeply immersed in his New Jersey activities even to give any thought to that vast property of his father's, its very identity becoming blurred year by year as the settlers and surveyors encroached further inland. The War of the Spanish Succession, or Queen Anne's War, beginning in 1702, virtually silenced Dr Coxe throughout his sixties ; the British Government was not going to devote money, thought or energy to one man's settlement project when there was a war to fight and to finance. His new royal appointment undoubtedly also played a part in suppressing his American ambitions - and perhaps he needed a rest from the energetic campaigning and pamphleteering of the past decade. As an epitaph to Dr Coxe's career as an empire-builder, it has been said that "after 1700 his sole significance was a voice warning England against French encirclement in North America".18
Dr Coxe conveyed the last of his Jersey properties, consisting of 4,500 acres and other interests, to his son Daniel in a deed dated 29 July 1701. Within a year Daniel Coxe fils was in New Jersey.
In August 1702, at the outbreak of war, Daniel Coxe père and several associates revived a project - which had previously been presented unsuccessfully for the approval of James II and William III - to charter a company to provide naval stores from New England. Believing that the requirements of a wartime navy would tip the scales in their favour, they petitioned Queen Anne, who eventually granted them a company charter in 1704.
Of the doctor's family, his son John, a linen draper, had married Margaret Robinson on 26 November 1700, and in 1702 Dr Coxe wrote to his eldest son in Burlington that Daniel's sister Anne Harris had been seriously ill and was still uncertain to recover. Anne survived, but in the spring of 1705 Dr Coxe's mother and his brother Nathaniel died within a few weeks of each other. In 1706 his unmarried daughter Lydia sued her father in the High Court of Chancery for her share of her grandfather John Coldham's legacy. On 14 November the Court ordered Dr Coxe to produce the £500 still owed to Lydia from the original bequest of £800, an order he seems to have ignored. Whether the commission of bankruptcy (which included a further £225, her share of outstanding rents on the properties bequeathed to the Coxe children) was issued against him at this time or later as a result of prolonged litigation is unclear, but it seems certain that by 1706 Rebecca's fortune and his own profits - if profits there were - from his American investments were spent, and that Dr and Mrs Coxe's circumstances were straitened in comparison to those of their years in Aldersgate Street. Whether or not he still retained his appointment as physician to the Queen - the dates of this are unknown - his medical practice by now must either have been much quieter or the doctor had retired. He was still collecting literature on the New World, and in 1707 is generally supposed to have been instrumental in having The Humble Submission of Several Kings, Princes, Generals, etc., to the Crown of England published in London. It was the text of the 1705 alliance between South Carolina and the Creek Indians, inhabitants of Coxe's lands, against French and Spanish settlers. He would not have passed up any opportunity to keep Carolana in the public eye.
Between 1706 and 1719 Dr Coxe himself vanishes from the public record, with the exception of an attempt, about 1713, to have Governor Robert Hunter of New Jersey removed from office. Together with his sons Samuel and Daniel, he put his name to a series of documents attacking the Governor's record. This was the younger Daniel's campaign, and is described more fully in the next chapter. Daniel and his wife Sarah, who had been married in Burlington on 8 May 1707, had returned to London to escape a political maëlstrom - largely of Daniel's own making - in New Jersey, but this effort to remove his arch-enemy failed.
Dr Coxe's son John died in the summer of 1707, aged 32, leaving two young children ; their mother Margaret married again in March 1710/1. His daughter Priscilla married Richard Jennys on 11 May 1712 at St Mary Magdalene Church in Old Fish Street, London, near the newly-completed St Paul's Cathedral. Susan Trapham, the doctor's sister, died on 31 January 1712/3. Circumstantial evidence suggests that while Lydia Coxe had allies among her siblings, her antagonism towards her father was not generally shared, and Dr Coxe probably found himself able to spend more time with his children in his seventies than had been possible during the years of medical practice and American adventure. It was probably during this period that he and Rebecca moved from Coxe Court to Hoxton, about a mile east of Islington and not far from Stoke Newington ; several of his children and grandchildren had now settled in Newington Green, between Stoke Newington and Hoxton.
The Peace of Utrecht, which terminated the war in 1713, left unresolved the French government's claims to American territory west of the British colonies, and a map of America, produced in 1718 by the Frenchman Guillaume Delisle, showed the British territory bounded on the west by the Appalachians. The Board of Trade, worried by these implications of French ambition in America and the possibility of losing ground by default, summoned Dr Coxe in 1719 to give evidence of his holdings and title to Carolana. He made several appearances and produced a mass of documentation (despite being unable to find some accounts of explorations he had sponsored) including a revision of his 1699 memorandum. He suggested to the Board that the boundary with the French be drawn at the River Mississippi, indicating that he was now prepared to give up his claim to the western part of Carolana. Nothing was resolved by the Board of Trade, but Dr Coxe evidently saw the meetings as an opportunity to revive his Carolana settlement project, to the extent of raising suspicions that he was trying to "make a bubble out of it".19
But the doctor was now almost eighty years old, and content to leave his son Daniel, on a long visit to England, to collate and publish the substance of his fifty years' collection of literature. We see Dr Coxe now only fleetingly, from the pen of his daughter Anne Harris, who wrote in 1722, "Docter Packs in the middle More feilds sells the Best Purging Salts of any Body. We must ask by no other name then the Best Purging Salts and tell that we was recommended by Doctor Coxe",20 and then, in March 1724/5, that her father had one of her husband Samuel Harris's fringed neckcloths, and was visiting the Harrises in Newington Green because his granddaughter Polly (Mary Harris) was ill. Anne sent a loaf of sugar for her mother back to Hoxton with her father.
In March 1727/8 Lydia Coxe, in her will, recounted the history of her financial disputes with her father, and referred to money still owed to her "from the estate of my said father Daniel Coxe". Other accounts of Dr Coxe have given his date of death specifically as 19 January 1729/30, but if Lydia's statement is taken at face value it would appear that he died between 1725 and 1727 - and died a bankrupt. His daughter Mary, who married Michael Burnett on 25 January 1725/6, applied for administration of her grandparents John and Rebecca Coldham's estates, which had been left unadministered by her mother, Rebecca Coxe. Letters of administration for both were granted to Mary Burnett on 19 December 1732. Assuming that her mother's death prompted Mary's application, it could well be that Rebecca outlived her husband, and possibly the 1730 date refers to her death and not Dr Coxe's ; perhaps "Mrs Daniel Coxe" was once misread as "Mr" or "Dr", and the misreading perpetuated. There is a record in Boyd's London Burials Index of a "Dan Cox" who was buried in Clapham in 1731, but Clapham is on the other side of London from Hoxton, and Cox is a common name.
Of Dr Daniel Coxe's appearance, we have the evidence of Sir Peter Lely's portrait, which shows a youngish man with a kindly expression and bright, dark eyes. Because of his wig, it is difficult to guess his age, but he cannot have been more than forty because the painter died in 1680. The fact that Lely, much in demand as the court's favourite portraitist, painted him as a young man indicates that Dr Coxe was already perceived as a substantial figure in London.
The catalogue of official and promotional literature concerning Dr Coxe's activities, mostly in relation to America, gives only a hint at his character. He has been variously described as having "a credulous temperament and a penchant for exaggerated statements",21 as accepting naively the various maps and descriptions of exploration that came his way, and being a "man of grandiose ideas".22 He was by all accounts an ardent Anglican, although there is no evidence that he was anywhere near as hostile to Quakers and Roman Catholics as his son Daniel. Of Coxe as a doctor, we have the statement that he was "in very great Business in his Profession"23, together with the professional prestige that went with his appointments to Charles II and Queen Anne and his membership in the Royal Society and the College of Physicians. He was "one of the great American speculators of his age"24 - but his imperial ambitions and his hopes of trade profits came to nothing. He never saw the country in which he invested so much money and hope. His attempt to settle Huguenot refugees on the Mississippi stimulated the French and Spanish to step up their own colonising plans, instigating a struggle for control of the Mississippi Valley which continued for half a century and which, without Coxe's actions and words of warning, might arguably have gone another way. He has been credited as the first person to suggest that England's future in America must entail westward expansion.
There can be no doubt that Daniel Coxe possessed exceptional energy and an insatiable curiosity, a hunger for scientific, geographical and anthropological knowledge. If he appropriated his wife's dowry and his children's inheritance in order to finance his over-ambitious projects, it was what most men in his position, in his time, would have done and would have been expected to do. If he failed to meet his financial obligations to his children, it was apparently because those projects failed and not through vice or carelessness. He had little of his son Daniel's combative nature, but rather seemed usually ready to compromise, to make allowances, to placate. It seems fair to say that the inheritance he passed on to his children, and to their children, was his energy and his passion to achieve.
NOTES
1. Alexander Du Bin, Coxe Family, Historical Publication Society of Philadelphia, 1936.
2. Will of John Coldham, 1696.
3. Will of Edmund Dethick, 1702.
4. William S. Coker, Introduction to facsimile reproduction of Col. Daniel Coxe's Carolana, University of Florida, 1976.
5. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. VII, 1883.
6. Reproduced from Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. VII, 1883. Transcribed by G. D. Scull from the original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
7. G. D. Scull, Biographical Notice of Doctor Daniel Coxe, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. VII, 1883.
8. John E. Pomfret, Colonial New Jersey, Scribner, 1973.
9. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 1708.
10. Reproduced in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. VII, 1883.
11. Du Bin, Coxe Family.
12. Coker, Introduction to Carolana. This is Coker's "best translation" of d'Iberville's phrase.
13. Reproduced in Carolana.
14. Coker, Introduction to Carolana.
15. Justin Winsor, ed., Narrative and Critical History of America, AMS Press, 1967.
16. Coker, Introduction to Carolana.
17. All quotes in this paragraph are taken from Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. VII, 1883.
18. Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier 1670-1732, Philadelphia, 1929.
19. Coker, Introduction to Carolana.
20. Transcribed from the original, Anne Harris's household book, in the Special Collections Library, University College London.
21. Frank E. Melvin, Dr Daniel Coxe and Carolana, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1914-15.
22. Pomfret, Colonial New Jersey.
23. Oldmixon, The British Empire in America.
24. Pomfret, Colonial New Jersey.
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