All seems at present to be trade, riches, magnificence, and great state in everything

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 21.

“On the eve of the Revolution, a young, well-connected New Englander, Josiah Quincy, Jr., arrived in Charleston following a voyage from Boston through storms that left him prostrate: “exhausted to the last degree, I was too weak to rise, and in too exquisite pain to lie in bed.” But in a reference that many observers made to the sickly pallor of fever-ridden Carolinians, he wrote his wife in March 1773 that “There are such a multitude of ghosts and shadows here, that I make not so bad a figure on comparison.” On the splendor and prosperity of the town he had no reservations. “The number of shipping far surpasses all I had ever seen in Boston. I was told there were then not as many as common at this season, tho’ about 350 sail lay off the town.” In an oft-quoted passage Quincy wrote that “This town makes a most beautiful appearance as you come up to it, and in many respects a magnificent one. Although I have not been here twenty hours, I have traversed the most popular parts of it. I can only say in general, that in grandeur, splendour of buildings, decorations, equipages, numbers, commerce, shipping, and indeed in almost every thing, it far surpasses all I ever saw, or ever expected to see in America. Of their manners, literature, understanding, spirit of true liberty, policy and government, I can form no adequate judgement. All seems at present to be trade, riches, magnificence, and great state in everything: much gaiety, and dissipation.” Quincy’s final remarks have been linked to his Puritan heritage, but as we have seen the European soldier Captain Hinrichs presented in even stronger terms the same picture of a nouveau riche society greatly enjoying itself.