Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (2 Volume Set)

conjectures of order

Conjectures of Order Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860

volume 1

Michael O’Brien

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London

© 2004 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Set in Monotype Garamond by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The publication of this book was supported by a generous grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc. Portions of this book have been reprinted with permission in revised form from ‘‘Italy and the Southern Romantics,’’ in Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 84–111; ‘‘ ‘A Sort of Cosmopolitan Dog’: Francis Lieber in the South,’’ Southern Review 25 (April 1989): 308–22; ‘‘ ‘The Water Rose in the Graves’: Discontinuity and Localism in Nineteenth-Century Southern Thought,’’ in The United States South: Regionalism and Identity, edited by Valeria Gennaro Lerda and Tjebbe Westendorp (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1991), 55–74; ‘‘On the Writing of History in the Old South,’’ in Rewriting the South: History and Fiction, edited by Lothar Hönnighausen and Valeria Gennaro Lerda (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1993), 141–66; ‘‘Finding the Outfield: Subregionalism and the American South,’’ Historical Journal 38 (December 1995): 1047–56; and ‘‘The Flight Down the Middle Walk: Mary Chesnut and the Forms of Observance,’’ in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan Donaldson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 109–31. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Brien, Michael, 1948– Conjectures of order : intellectual life and the American South, 1810–1860 / Michael O’Brien. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8078-2800-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Southern States—Intellectual life—19th century. 2. Intellectuals—Southern States—History—19th century. 3. Southern States—Social conditions— 19th century. 4. Southern States—Relations—Europe. 5. Europe—Relations— Southern States. I. Title. f213 .o27 2004 975'.03—dc21 2003011163 08 07 06 05 04

5 4 3 2 1

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For the Bacons and the Kellys

Contents

volume 1 Abbreviations, xv Introduction: The Position and Course of the South, 1

bo ok one The Softened Echo of the World 1. A Moral Terra Incognita, 27 2. Strolling Foreigners, 52 3. European Attachments, 90 4. The Big Valleys of the World, 162

bo ok two All the Tribes, All the Productions of Nature 5. Types of Mankind, 215 6. The Sex of a Human Being, 253 7. A Heterogeneous Mass from All Nations, 285 8. The Fabrics of Their Own Country, 333 9. Our Fictitious Social Scale, 364

bo ok t hree A Volley of Words 10. A Murmurous Sea of Conversation, 395 11. Private Impartments, 438 12. Chaotic Order of Books, 472 13. The Honors of Authorship, 526 [ vii ]

viii

Contents

volume 2 Abbreviations, ix

bo ok f our The Shape of a History 14. Retrospective Glances, 591 The Qualifications and Duties of an Historian, 591 Of Ancient and More Modern Times, 606 To Discover, Procure, Preserve, and Diffuse, 623 The Ancestral Mould, 636 The Unities of Biography, 653 As to My Self, What Shall I Say?, 671 15. To Write a People, 683 The Science of Criticism, 683 The Rationale of Verse, 706 Novels and the Like, 742

bo ok f ive Pride and Power 16. Our Present Peculiar, Complicated, and Remarkable System of Governments, 781 The Virginia Construction, 781 The Horn-Book of Politics, 799 South Carolina Doctrines, 817 The Great Principles of Democracy, 836 Power and Liberty, 849 Clustering Groups, 862 17. As If Money Was the Most Important Matter in This World, 877 Political Economy Will and Must Be Our Judge, 877 We Can Take Care of Ourselves, 907 18. Our Slavery Question, 938 Not So Much through Principle as from Necessity, 938 A Moral Pathology, 959

Contents

bo ok six Philosophy and Faith 19. The Dim Land of Vagaries, 995 The Numberless Brood of the Scotch Metaphysicians, 995 We Regard Man as Inherently a Being of Motion, 1014 Cloudy Transcendentalism, 1039 20. Theology for the South, 1067 Persuasions Different from Her Own, 1067 The Adoption of Sons, 1114

epilo gue The Imprisoned Bird 21. Cool Brains, 1161 Bibliography, 1203 Acknowledgments, 1293 Index, 1297

ix

Illustrations

volume 1 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘‘Simon Legree Whipping Uncle Tom,’’ 59 Moses Ashley Curtis, 60 Thomas Smyth, 65 Francis Lieber, 75 John Singleton Copley, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard (Alice DeLancey), 93 François-Xavier Fabre, Allen Smith, Seated above the River Arno, Contemplating Florence, 94 Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Ralph Izard (Alice DeLancey), 97 Gilbert Stuart, Margaret Izard Manigault, 98 William Campbell Preston, 101 Louis Rémy Mignot, Winter Scene, Holland, 111 Eugène Battaille, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, 115 A medical student carving his initials into the arm of a dead actress, 120 Peter Paul Rubens, Chapeau de Paille, 131 Title page of Thomas Caute Reynolds’s Heidelberg dissertation, 141 The American contingent at Göttingen, 144 Alexander Galt, Madonna, after Raphael, 148 Faure, A View of the Roman Forum, 152 William Brown Hodgson, 174 Omar Ibn Said or ‘‘Uncle Moro,’’ 177 Thomas Sully, Charles Izard Manigault, 190 Tingqua, Louis Manigault, 193 Louis Rémy Mignot, View of Riobamba, Ecuador, Looking towards Mt. Chimborazo, 194 William Wilson, Joel Roberts Poinsett, 197 ‘‘Travelling in a Litera,’’ 205 Mexican society, 206 John Bachman, 246 [ xi ]

xii

Illustrations

David Hunter Strother, ‘‘Female Education,’’ 261 Adalber Volck, Mistress Overseeing a Plantation, 263 Sarah Moore Grimké, 270 Louisa Susanna McCord, 276 David James McCord, 279 Charles Gayarré as a young man, 292 John Randolph in England, 306 The capitol at Frankfort, Kentucky, 344 The old capitol at Milledgeville, Georgia, 345 Calvin H. Wiley, 347 Littleton Waller Tazewell, 399 Thomas Sully, James Louis Petigru, 402 Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, 420 James H. McCulloh, The Delphians at the Hall of the Flamen, 427 Charles Fraser, Self-Portrait, 435 Henry Bounetheau, Samuel Gilman, 436 David Hunter Strother, ‘‘The Student,’’ 461 Slaves at Joseph E. Davis’s plantation, 467 Edmund Ruffin, 469 Agents for the Southern Review, 475 Bookplate of Charles Izard Manigault, 491 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘‘Savage Editor Preparing for an Onslaught,’’ 541 Washington Allston, The Poor Author and the Rich Bookseller, 574 Table 1. Southern Libraries in 1850, 513 Table 2. American Libraries in 1850, 515

volume 2 Mitchell King, 600 David Lowry Swain, 627 ‘‘The Canoe Fight,’’ 635 Hugh Blair Grigsby, 638 Giuseppe Ceracchi, George Washington, 656 ‘‘Firm as the Surge Repelling Rock’’: George Washington, 656 William Wirt, 660 John M. Stanley, Hugh Swinton Legaré, 697 Washington Allston, Self-Portrait, 711 Washington Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 711 William Gilmore Simms, 724

Illustrations Henry Timrod, 729 Paul Hamilton Hayne, 729 Pierre Guérin, Madame Récamier, 751 Nicholas-François Dun, Eliza Augusta Falconnet, 752 Edgar Allan Poe, Self-Portrait, 753 Johnson Jones Hooper, 756 ‘‘A Paleness More Ghastly’’: Simon Suggs, 757 John Pendleton Kennedy, 761 Caroline Howard Gilman, 764 William J. Hubard, John Taylor of Caroline, 786 Frank Blackwell Mayer, Independence, Squire Jack Porter, 794 William Goodacre, The Virginia Capitol in 1830, 801 Charles Fenderich, Abel P. Upshur, 804 George Catlin, The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30, 815 Hiram Powers, Andrew Jackson, 838 Clark Mills, Andrew Jackson, 846 John C. Calhoun, ca. 1843, 850 Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, 864 William Garl Brown[e], Thomas Roderick Dew, 889 William H. Brown, Thomas Cooper in Silhouette, 904 Frederick Langenheim, Henry Clay, 913 J. D. B. De Bow, 920 John C. Calhoun, ca. 1811, 925 Charles B. J. F. de St. Mémin, St. George Tucker, 940 ‘‘Horrid Massacre in Virginia’’: Nat Turner, 945 William Harper, 947 Matthew Brady, James Henry Hammond, 954 George Fitzhugh, 973 George Frederick Holmes, 1055 Washington Allston, Isaac of York, 1075 Isaac Harby, 1077 Billy Simmons, 1081 John England, 1085 William Scarborough, James Henley Thornwell, 1115 Augusta Jane Evans, 1162 James Johnston Pettigrew, 1171 Washington Allston, The Spanish Girl in Reverie, 1177 Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut and James Chesnut, 1189 William Henry Trescot after the Civil War, 1200 Death mask of Charles Gayarré, 1201

xiii

Abbreviations

ADAH ADI AJ AJP ALT BM CC CG ColU CU DBR DU EDL EU FL FU GF GFH GHS HBG HEH HNOC HSL

Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama Alice DeLancey Izard Andrew Jackson Albert James Pickett Augustin Louis Taveau Basil Manly Charles Campbell Charles Etienne Artur Gayarré Manuscripts and Rare Books Room, Nicholas Murray Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York Strom Thurmond Institute, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina De Bow’s Review Manuscript and Special Collections Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina Edwin DeLeon Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia Francis Lieber Special Collections Department, James B. Duke Library, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina George Fitzhugh George Frederick Holmes Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Georgia Hugh Blair Grigsby Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana Hugh Swinton Legaré [ xv ]

xvi HU

Abbreviations

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts JBH Jesse Burton Harrison JCC John Caldwell Calhoun JHT James Henley Thornwell JPK John Pendleton Kennedy JRT John R. Thompson JWM James Warley Miles LC Manuscript Division, James Madison Building, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LSM Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord LSU Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LV Archives and Manuscripts Department, the Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia MAC Moses Ashley Curtis MassHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts MDAH Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi MHS Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland MIM Margaret Izard Manigault MK Mitchell King PHH Paul Hamilton Hayne PHS Presbyterian Historical Society, Montreat, North Carolina PLB George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Maryland SCHS South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina SCL South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina SHC Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina SLM Southern Literary Messenger SQR Southern Quarterly Review SR Southern Review TC Thomas Cooper TSLA Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee TU Manuscripts Department, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana UA W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama UGA Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia

Abbreviations UVA VHS WBH WCP WGS WM

xvii

Special Collections Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia William Brown Hodgson William Campbell Preston William Gilmore Simms Special Collections Department, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

conjectures of order

Introduction

The Position and Course of the South

There is absolutely nothing permanent, either without me, or within me, but only an unceasing change. I know absolutely nothing of any existence, not even my own. . . . Images there are. . . . I am myself one of these images; nay, I am not even so much, but only a confused image of images. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, quoted in Southern Presbyterian Review (1851)

Thomas Dew of Virginia, writing in 1829 in the exordium of his Lectures on the Restrictive System, felt it important to stress that ‘‘[t]his is a world of relations and dependencies, and consequent continual changes. The earth upon which we tread, remains not a moment in the same position in absolute space, but is in constant and endless movement. . . . Throughout all animated nature, we see still greater bustle, change and movement; we see event following event in quick succession; mind operating upon matter, and matter upon mind.’’ 1 This was not an isolated opinion. In 1837, S. A. Roszel was writing in the Southern Literary Messenger, with more ambivalence: ‘‘Nothing is at rest. . . . All worlds, with their millions of animate and inanimate creatures, are in one perpetual progress of organization, increase, dissolution, reproduction, change. . . . Nor is this ceaseless change—this incessant mobility, repugnant to our material nature, or our intellectual aspirations. . . . [O]n the existence of this mutability does our happiness, or, at least, our pleasure depend.’’ 2 It was hard for an intellectual to live in the early nineteenth century and not have such opinions, for the culture of modernity conveyed this standpoint insistently. Epigraph from ‘‘Objections to the German Transcendental Philosophy,’’ Southern Presbyterian Review 4 ( January 1851): 342. 1. Thomas R. Dew, Lectures on the Restrictive System Delivered to the Senior Political Class of William and Mary College (1829; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 187. 2. S. A. Roszel, ‘‘Pleasureable Sensations,’’ SLM 3 (February 1837): 148.

[1]

2

Introduction

But such a message would not have been meaningful in places like Charleston, New Orleans, and Williamsburg, unless the experience of the people who came to explain themselves as Southerners had not also suggested mutability. For Southerners lived amid great movements. Millions came from Europe, millions more moved from the eastern South to its west, taking with them a million slaves.3 Some 50,000 Native Americans were expelled westward, perhaps 90,000 slaves escaped northward, while 15,000 ex-slaves and freed blacks moved eastward to Liberia.4 Commerce and education took white Southerners to the north, while economic opportunity drew foreigners and Northerners to the south. Movement between city and country was as incessant. Many went abroad, some as expatriates, most as travelers, and came back (or not) changed. So their worlds moved, little settled into coherence, and they noticed contradictions. There are many ways to comprehend these complexities, but one way is to observe that, in the early nineteenth century, Southerners were national, postcolonial, and imperial, all at once, and partly invented their culture in the tense encounters among these conditions. That they were national is the most familiar of facts. People from the South had helped to make the American Union, offered most of its early leadership, and furnished a disproportionate share of its governance even up to 1860.5 Their political culture had been born in revolution. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and John C. Calhoun were proprietary about the United States; it was their world, a thing they had made or were remaking, a thing whose meaning they felt capable of defining. Jefferson had explained that change was a moral duty, which ought to turn out for the best. More pessimistic men, like Madison, had suggested that, duty or not, change was a fate that humans could not evade. But certainly the experiences of change made 3. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 5–6. 4. Curtis C. Roseman, ‘‘Migration Patterns,’’ in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 551. 5. The literature on nationalism grows vast, but the works I have found most illuminating and pertinent are the following: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and enlarged ed. (London: Verso, 1991); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1998); Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Mapping the Nation, introduction by Benedict Anderson (London: Verso, 1996); Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The literature on American nationalism is thinner, but relevant here is Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

Introduction

3

a habit of mind. Having made a world, Southerners were aware that worlds could be made. Hence they liked to sit in judgment, not only on ordinary matters like who was in and who was out, but on the fundamentals of what made a society, of how constitutions interacted with human nature, of how legislation affected the running of an economy or a household. They retained a revolutionary frame of mind and, therefore, when they began to think that the United States was no longer a thing they could control, many among them did not hesitate to destroy it and make another world. Less familiar, at least to American readers, will be the proposition that Southerners were postcolonials, who had only recently repudiated a metropolitan authority and were anxious to possess and define their ‘‘place.’’ 6 But ‘‘postcolonial’’ is an omnibus term, which can obscure as much as it can illuminate, for empires take many forms, as do the regimes that succeed them.7 In India and Nigeria, for example, a small imperial class governed a large indigenous population with the aid of a collaborating or comprador class, which in turn took over a political entity largely shaped by the geopolitical vision of the imperialists. In Peru and Argentina, a large influx of colonists evolved a Creole governing class, which came ambivalently to mingle with a numerous and heterogeneous native population; the colonists then forced an independence, sometimes proclaimed in the name of both elements but invariably controlled by the Creole element, which subsequently encouraged other European migrants.8 In South Africa, postcolonialism came in three phases: first the independence of the disparate Creoles, then a squabbling among the governing classes, then their political (though not economic) displacement by the ‘‘natives.’’ In Jamaica, a small imperial class wiped out the indigenous population, replaced it with an imported slave workforce, which in turn successfully claimed nativity and the prerogative of nationality. In a settler society like Australia, the aboriginals were too small in number to resist the 6. ‘‘Place’’ has been a central organizing premise for Southern culture, perhaps even more in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth, but (not coincidentally) has also been central to the postcolonial imagination, especially of settler societies: on the former, see almost everybody, but especially the writings of Eudora Welty; on the latter see, for example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 140–43; and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 389–422. 7. There are now many guides to postcolonial theory; among the more useful are Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998). An intelligent critique, from an Australian anthropologist, is Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropolo, Travel and Government (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994). 8. Cf. José de San Martin’s remark in 1821 that ‘‘in the future the aborigines shall not be called Indians or natives; they are children and citizens of Peru and they shall be known as Peruvians’’: quoted in Anderson, Imagined Communities, 49–50.

4

Introduction

colonists, who became and remain the chief authors of independence and the possessors of social power.9 The United States in general and the South in particular occupy a significant, if oddly neglected, place in this spectrum.10 Like Australia, the South faced a small indigenous population that was pushed to the margins with considerable ease, but that did not become extinct. But, like Brazil, the South imported slaves on a large scale, who in time came to be a political force in their own right, though as a minority. However, as in South Africa, the settlers of the United States were disunited about what sort of society to make, though their differences (unlike those of the Boers and the English) arose less from ethnic and religious animosities carried from Europe than from social experiences and ambitions contrived in the colonial and early national years, which created different visions of how best to administer their newly conquered estate.11 For the purposes of an intellectual history, what matters is that in the early nineteenth century Southerners’ intellectual traditions continued to be formed mostly by the older cultures of Europe. Only a small proportion of their habits of mind can be said to have been produced indigenously. Indeed, it is surprising how little they were molded even by other Americans, who usually seem to have been viewed as competitors rather than as possible influences. To most Southerners, Madame de Staël mattered more than Ralph Waldo Emerson. The United States was more a political than an intellectual comity. Rather, Southerners had the habit of presuming that authority 9. Though I doubt that it is plausible to observe, as has been observed of other settler societies, that ‘‘[a]t the heart of the settler colony culture is also an ambivalent attitude towards their own identity, poised as they are between the centre from which they seek to differentiate themselves and the indigenous peoples who serve to remind them of their own problematic occupation of the country’’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 152). This seems more apposite to South Africa or even Kenya than the South, which was very little troubled by the fate of the Cherokees and the Powhatan. Only recently, for example, has the existence of Inuit cultures intruded much upon the Canadian debate about national identity; on this, see James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 10. Pleas for widening the rubric of postcolonialism, largely devised by and for cultures in Asia and Africa since 1945, to accommodate the American continental experience include, breezily, Peter Hulme, ‘‘Including America,’’ Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 26 ( January 1995): 117–23, and Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 2. See also Lawrence Buell, ‘‘American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,’’ American Literary History 4 (Fall 1992): 411–42, though Buell neglects the imperial dimension of the American experience. Hulme sensibly remarks (p. 122), ‘‘To use a more recent example, ‘postcolonial’ is not a description that should be awarded Indonesia when it became independent from The Netherlands and taken away again when it invaded East Timor: a country can be postcolonial and colonizing at the same time.’’ 11. A useful discussion is Donald Denoon, ‘‘Understanding Settler Societies,’’ Historical Studies 18 (October 1979): 511–27.

Introduction

5

rested abroad; in ancient Rome, in modern Paris, in the libraries of Göttingen. They spent much time at home and abroad trying to comprehend these traditions; they imitated Demosthenes, read Livy, followed Calvin, painted like Reynolds, and admired Madame de Staël, while they traveled to Edinburgh, Paris, and Rome. So they often saw the world through foreign eyes, indeed did not always grant the premise that coming to see the world on native grounds marked a moral and intellectual advance. These instincts bred a cosmopolitan imagination and mandated the outward gaze, but also delicately instilled the habit of doubt and a sense of provisionality. For always the metropolitan world elsewhere threatened to change the rules, to reinvent the paradigms, to transmute au courant knowledge into old-fashioned provinciality. A visitor could arrive, only to sneer at earnest young ladies playing Mozart and to say that Bellini was now the rage in Paris; the returned traveler could announce that no one, anymore, read Wordsworth, that Tennyson was now the man, or that Lamarck was an exploded theorist and someone called Darwin had a much better idea. Southerners lived at the edge of the known world and, like figures in a Chekhov play, some in it wanted to touch the center. ‘‘If you go back to Paris,’’ Yasha the servant says to Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard, ‘‘do me a favour and take me with you. I can’t stay here. . . . [Y]ou can see for yourself, this is an uncivilized country and no one has any morals. Besides it’s boring.’’ 12 But Southerners were also imperial, because their newly independent settler society was the heir of the conquerors, not of the conquered, nor of the people from Africa who had been stolen to make the settlement an economic success for the Europeans.13 Virginians and the others had not rebelled against George III to repudiate the venture of European imperialism, but to take the matter into their own hands. Movement was of this project’s essence, what made it work. People came in their many thousands from beyond the South’s limits, from Maine, Yorkshire, and Prussia, and by the pressure of their numbers and ambition assisted those born in the South to make an empire of liberty and slavery. The South was a moving target, a thing in process, never what it had been ten years before, never what it would be ten years later. In 1800, what was not yet habitually called the South encompassed a corner of the North American continent and the lower half of the United States. It numbered eight states; Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, plus the District of 12. Ronald Hingley, trans. and ed., The Oxford Chekhov, vol. 3, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Wood-Demon (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 182–83. 13. On the United States as an imperial culture, see Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). The historian most associated with the assertion is William Appleman Williams.

6

Introduction

Columbia (a slaveholding enclave within Virginia), and the Mississippi Territory that extended from the eastern border of Georgia to the Mississippi River but did not reach as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. The Spanish still owned Florida and a panhandle that extended along the coast to connect to their colony of Louisiana, which itself occupied the central portion of the continent as far north as Canada; but, in practice, most of this world belonged to Native Americans, whose numbers were not known. The population of the South, at least those people whom the census cared to count, numbered 2.6 million, of whom 1.7 million or 65 percent were of European descent, and 918,000 or 35 percent who were African American, mostly slaves; this represented about half the population of the Union. By 1860, this had grown fourfold to 11.1 million; 7 million whites (63 percent) and just over 4 million blacks (36 percent), but the proportion of this to the whole population of the Union had shrunk to 35 percent.14 The physical territory had expanded by the organization of the Mississippi Territory into the states of Alabama and Mississippi, the annexation of Florida, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory (which became Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri), and the further annexation of Texas. In total, this added up to a slave domain of fifteen states, which had grown from 378,890 to 877,437 square miles.15 These three conditions of being national, postcolonial, and imperial mingled unstably.16 Postcolonialism inculcated doubt; it asserted only a thin margin for cultural invention, though the margin began to widen as the analytical presumptions of the Enlightenment began to yield to those of Romanticism, which legitimated the indigenous and licensed the will. Still, cultural anxiety was insistent. Were colleges good enough? Were libraries too small? Was it bad that novels were published in New York? Did periodicals pay their contributors as well as elsewhere? Are we clever? Who reads a Southern book? Is someone, somewhere, laughing at us, or sneering at us? Yet nationality and imperialism, to the contrary, sanctified a sense of mastery. Southerners were the children of the American Revolution, which all Americans (and some Europeans) agreed had commenced a novus ordo seclorum. Providence smiled on them, promised them not only the manifest destiny of a North 14. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 1:22–23. 15. Ibid., 38–39. 16. Cf. the remarks in Gillian Whitlock,‘‘Outlaws of the Text,’’ in Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 349: ‘‘Responses to empire in settler societies, like Australia and Canada, comprise a site of contesting and conflicting claims, an array of identifications and subjectivities which refuse to cohere neatly into oppositional or complicit post-colonialisms. Settler post-colonialism confounds the positions of self and other in relation to discourse and discursive strategies; as a number of theorists of settler cultures argue, these ‘second world’ spaces are characterised by the ambiguity and ambivalence of both oppositional and complicit positions.’’

Introduction

7

American world, but perhaps even that of a wider world. They felt themselves simultaneously to have the moral sanction of George Washington and God Himself. While Europe punished itself with a generation of war, slaughtered peoples by the millions, and threw down and set up despotisms, the United States believed itself to have calmly and wisely ordered its affairs, expanded its domain, and acquired the habits of liberty. There might be little doubt here, only certainty and the expectation of a marble pedestal. Yet there was doubt. To make a world while looking over one’s shoulder at Niccolò Machiavelli and David Hume, at all those who smiled at the vanity of human wishes, was difficult. Even with a blithe spirit, it would have been hard. But the world did not offer easy reassurance. A Southerner’s will was always opposed; things went wrong. People in Massachusetts dissented, merchants in Liverpool pushed down the price of cotton, a slave in Virginia drove an ax through someone’s skull, a politician could not get elected to the White House, or there were disagreements about God. Dissent was habitual. Slavery itself was an education in uncertainty, a daily struggle of the will. An order was given; it was obeyed, or not. A smile might suffice to secure obedience, or a whip, or nothing would work. Here many Southerners faced an especial complexity, for they were ordering their world by compulsion. Making an empire, making a republic, making a democracy, making prosperity, all these would have been hard enough to hold together, but to drive the project forward while holding millions in bondage produced a cultural anxiety of stark proportions. Ambition and disillusionment became incessant companions in the Southern imagination. Indeed, there were those who came to think that ambition could only work if predicated on disillusionment. This book attempts to sketch the intellectuality that this confused world created. Its narrative runs from about 1810 to the eve of the Civil War, with a postscript on the Southern world after 1865. To use the terms favored by intellectual historians, this book describes the transition from a late Enlightenment, to a Romantic, then to an early realist sensibility, with the weight falling in the middle period. Broadly speaking, the organization of the book moves from society to thought, from the empirical to the abstract. The first volume is partly social history, in which intellectuals are implicated in the broader patterns of society and it is presumed that their thoughts are explicable by what went on around them; this narrative offers contexts. The second volume moves beyond the social and is, more strictly, an account of the Southern intellectual tradition and the men and women who made it. Not only idiosyncrasy matters here, as it must in any rigorous intellectual history, but also genre. Book One is called ‘‘The Softened Echo of the World,’’ a phrase Caro-

8

Introduction

line Gilman coined to describe how Southerners interacted with those beyond their own culture.17 The four chapters therein describe how Southerners located themselves, by a study of the Southern experience of the outside world. Mostly this involves seeing how people from the South responded when they were in Boston, London, or Buenos Aires, but it also involves seeing how strangers adapted when they came to live, permanently or not, in the South. Abroad was not only a place far away but also the house next door, if it was inhabited by an immigrant, as many Southern houses were. On the whole, these chapters confine themselves to physical interactions: who went where, what they saw, what they concluded, whether they returned, what they said. The abstract act of cultural traveling, which occurred when someone in Tuscaloosa sat down with a text produced in Weimar, Edinburgh, Boston, or Charleston, preoccupies much in the rest of the book. Book Two takes its title, ‘‘All the Tribes, All the Productions of Nature,’’ from a phrase of Stephen Elliott, in which he tried to justify the modern passion for classification, both natural and social.18 A major ideological shift of the early nineteenth century was how self came to be understood as implicated in social constructions. Romanticism did two things simultaneously: it told a person that he or she was alone and alienated, but it also claimed that the world was filled with cultural shapes, collectivities that contributed decisively to the sources of the self.19 Race, sex, ethnicity, class, place: all these freshly became salient categories. To the question ‘‘Who am I?’’ a Southerner by 1860 could make many answers, but increasingly the answer was produced in the alchemy of social identity. Yet not all categories were equally salient. Race, sex, and place became harder forms, more compulsory, more authoritarian in their demand for allegiance. Class and ethnicity, in a society so mobile, were more fluid, their shape and pertinence more difficult to pin down. Still, in general, the South drifted away from the premise that mankind had a common nature towards the sense that society and, hence, self were segmented. Further, the troubling theory developed that bodies might matter as much as if not more than minds. Increasingly, it was believed that men and women, whites and blacks, Huguenots and Scotch-Irish, aristocrats and crackers, Virginians and Alabamians, were not only cultural inventions but quasi-biological fates, things that nature made, not things that the human 17. ‘‘Though secluded, their hospitable doors are open to friends, and the frequent traveller brings to their tranquil abodes the softened echo of the world’’: Caroline Gilman, Recollections of a Southern Matron (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), 154. 18. ‘‘We must know all the tribes, all the productions of nature, before we can comprehend and exhibit accurately their mutual connexion and dependence’’: Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ SR 2 (November 1828): 416. 19. I borrow the phrase from Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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9

will had chosen. Few were sure of how this worked, but almost everyone was drawn into considering and accepting the proposition. Book Three, ‘‘A Volley of Words’’ (a phrase from Elizabeth Ruffin),20 tries to describe how Southern society structured intellectual interactions, by a sequence of chapters that moves from the most informal of discourses (conversation) to the semiformal (letters, diaries) to the most formal (the printed word as it was read, then as it was written). The rough movement is from the private to the public spheres, though these were unstable, interconnecting phenomena.21 Not all intelligence felt the need to express itself in a book or a periodical; indeed, print may be understood as only a place where conversation went to achieve a form of permanence. Talking on the street or at a club, writing a letter to a friend or a relative, sitting alone with a diary to make sense of events, all these formed part of this culture’s intellectual activity. These actions are hard to measure and narrate, because often ephemeral, but they too possessed a cultural logic. A club had rules, a letter had conventions, a conversation had habits of courtesy. Easier to understand is print culture. For good or ill, most of what was understood as the life of the mind did express itself in the printed word, which had a peculiar and growing prestige. So it mattered how this culture came by and produced printed words. Booksellers, libraries, publishers, and the business of authorship in the South had a distinctive shape, which formed much of what it was possible to know and to say. The second volume divides itself into what could be called the social and the metaphysical imaginations. Book Four, ‘‘The Shape of a History,’’ 22 concerns itself, first, with historical writing: how the genre was justified and organized, how the South imagined its place in the trajectory of Western history and conceptualized its own local history, how it dealt with the genres of biography and autobiography. Then I consider what was then called ‘‘belles lettres’’: how the critical theories of the Enlightenment gave way to Roman20. ‘‘When they are permitted a chance what a volley of words . . . tumble from the tongue’s tip’’: entry for 18 September 1827, Elizabeth Ruffin Diary, SHC, reprinted in An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67, ed. Michael O’Brien, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 102. 21. As David Shields has observed of the eighteenth century and his own writing, ‘‘Following recent historians of the public sphere, the social spaces in which these [literary] forms operated are viewed in light of a range of discursive communities, not in light of a simple dichotomy of public and private. Indeed, a central point of this account is that the communication (whether oral, manuscript, or printed) of ‘private society’ must be viewed as ‘publication’ ’’: David S. Shields, ‘‘Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture,’’ in A History of the Book in America, vol. 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 476. 22. ‘‘I had an idea myself of preparing something in the shape of a history’’: Francis W. Pickens to AJP, 30 September 1847, AJP Papers, ADAH.

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tic modes of understanding, how the idea of Southern literature fitfully developed, and how poetry and fiction were written in the South, in the forms (the Gothic, the romance, the frontier story, the historical novel) that became characteristic. Book Five, ‘‘Pride and Power,’’ 23 moves back to more worldly concerns: ideas of politics and the state, the venture of political economy, and the proslavery argument. First, political thought is examined, in six phases: as it came from the Southern Enlightenment’s most vigorous exponent and critic, John Taylor; as it was reassessed by Virginians in 1829–30, when a colder Burkeanism began to be expressed; as it was articulated by the South Carolinians of the 1820s, who ruthlessly exposed the contradictions of American constitutionalism and began to apply to it the social theories of cultural nationalism; as it was expounded by Andrew Jackson, the South’s preeminent democrat and nationalist; as it was reassessed by the later Calhoun, who began to see that there was something between individualism and national culture, more local shapes that American history had produced; and, last, as it was redefined by Romantic theorists who came to think that one could have a self only if first one had a society, and that society had come to be the South. Second, there is a chapter that looks at how classical economics was understood and became a Southern orthodoxy, but also at how it was criticized and flexibly applied. Last, I try to define the shape of the developing proslavery argument, which moved from a fleeting moment of antislavery optimism at the turn of the nineteenth century to a view in the 1820s and 1830s that slavery was a necessity that expressed men’s social constraints, to a late antebellum position that tended sentimentally or playfully to express a hope that slavery might improve the human condition. The contents of Book Six, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ is made clear by its title, which is taken from an article by George Frederick Holmes.24 Its first chapter concerns itself, first, with how Southerners responded to the analytical traditions of Scottish common sense philosophy, and then experimented with other philosophical conjectures (mostly German, sometimes French). The second moves to ideas about the relationship between God and man. The transition here is mostly one of emphasis. There was little in metaphysics that was not engaged by religion, little in theology not troubled by metaphysics. Partly, this second chapter seeks to recover the importance of religious diversity in the South, by looking at the Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Episcopalian traditions, though only by a sampling. It ends with a sustained analysis of Calvinist theology, at least as this theology was understood by its ablest 23. ‘‘For men’s most golden dreams of pride and power, / Are vain as any woman’s dream of love’’: poem in entry for 16 December 1835, Selma Plantation Journal, LSU, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 129. 24. GFH, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 3 (April 1851): 185–218.

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Southern exponent, who knew that modernity and the ancient beliefs needed reconciling. The epilogue, ‘‘The Imprisoned Bird,’’ takes its general title from a passage of James Warley Miles, in which he speaks of man as beating ‘‘the barriers of this dark and narrow earthly circle, like an imprisoned bird.’’ 25 Its particular title, ‘‘Cool Brains,’’ comes from a sentence of Mary Chesnut when in 1861 she wrote in her diary of the mood and necessities of secession: ‘‘This southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm deliberation—& cool brains. We have risked all, & we must play our best for the stake is life or death.’’ 26 These two phrases show the impulse and the decision of the Old South’s youngest generation, who felt trapped but who were willing to hazard escape. They did not arrive at this stark conclusion without knowing that their predecessors had thought differently. For Southern thought had undergone marked change over the preceding fifty years, as different options were considered, accepted, and rejected. Three moments are discernible. There was a late Enlightenment phase, which inclined to be individualist, skeptical of society, hopeful of human intelligence, and wary of human passion. Its figures included John Taylor, Isaac Harby, Thomas Cooper, Henry Clay, William Harper, and the young John C. Calhoun; their writings mostly ran from the 1810s to the early 1830s. The middle phase was Romantic and much more interested in collectivity, in the pleasures of belonging, and hence was more sentimental and historicist, but also jaggedly nervous about the possibility of failure. Its figures included Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, Hugh Blair Grigsby, Louisa McCord, Beverley Tucker, George Frederick Holmes, George Fitzhugh, and James Warley Miles; these flourished, roughly, from the mid-1830s to the early 1850s. Between these first two moments, some thinkers were poised: among these, one might count Thomas Dew, Hugh Legaré, even John Randolph and the later Calhoun. The last moment was bleaker; its cadres formed a sort of early realist generation who knew that life compelled choices and that all choices entailed loss. One might have God, or power, or belonging, but not everything, and not for everyone. Its figures included William Henry Trescot, James Johnston Pettigrew, Henry Hughes, Augusta Evans, and James Henley Thornwell. Their moment lasted from the late 1840s 25. ‘‘The hopes, the throbs, the panting aspirations of the soul for the full grasp of knowledge, truth, and immortality, which make it beat the barriers of this dark and narrow earthly circle, like an imprisoned bird’’: JWM, Philosophic Theolo; or, Ultimate Grounds of All Religious Belief Based in Reason (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1849), 80. Cf. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 460: ‘‘Every fabulist has told how the human mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which caged it.’’ 26. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 3.

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to the beginnings of the Civil War. Mary Chesnut had been one of them and she it was who wrote their epitaph, in a work that after 1865 rendered a verdict on the intellectual and social ambitions of her culture, which had failed. With her, that world and this book ends, though not without an intimation that she glimpsed a further moment, the world that William Faulkner and Allen Tate would come to inhabit. It had been the illusion and the experience of antebellum Southerners to think that they could make their world, though they disagreed over what sort of world to make, and what sort of men and women existed to undertake the making. This creative vanity died on many battlefields, in many households that absorbed the reality of defeat, in the extinction of slavery, in the spread of poverty and constraint. But the old ambition was not surprised to be defeated, for it had often been unsure. It had tried to imagine and create order, but it knew that disorder existed, that society might be overwhelmed by disintegrations unless effort was unceasing.27 The will was strong in 1840, even 1860. Later was a different matter. A few premises will begin to seem apparent. This is a book about those who were associated in the governing of the Southern world, but only obliquely a book about those whom, chiefly, they tried to govern. The imagination of the slave and free black communities in the South had different themes, origins, and ambitions.28 With good reason, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, 27. As Robert J. C. Young puts it, ‘‘The need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a counter-sense of fragmentation and dispersion’’: Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 4. 28. The literature on this, in the last two generations, has been unusually distinguished, indeed more sophisticated than that on the white Southern intellectual tradition: the more valuable books include Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Blyden Jackson, Afro-American Literature, vol. 1, A History of Afro-American Literature: The Long Beginning, 1746– 1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Slave’s Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (1978; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1993).

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and William Wells Brown had little or no cause to think themselves a part of Southern intellectual culture, which partly defined itself by their subjection. That some blacks, after the war which was their people’s partial liberation, reconsidered this stance and that Brown, for one, later wrote a book called My Southern Home does not alter the plain, brutal exclusions of the world before 1861.29 White Southerners went to great lengths to silence their Africans, by denying them education, access to the printed word, and hence to writing, even in manuscript form. Almost all the African American intellectual tradition before 1861, written by those born in the South, was expatriate. It was the lessening and rescinding of that necessary tradition of exile which, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was to lead to the possibility of ‘‘Southern’’ and ‘‘black’’ becoming other than mutually exclusive identities, though even today the ambivalences remain unresolved. However, the discourse of the antebellum black community, in the South and abroad, since it was formed by contiguous experiences, offers opportunities for comparative understanding. African Americans lived their own lives, but they sometimes formed a chorus in the white South’s House of Atreus, a chorus always watching, commenting, dissenting, knowing some parts of the same physical world, but experiencing it differently. This case indicates how the defining of parameters for a Southern intellectual history is not simple. A few generations ago, it might have been easier. I would have defined the physical limits of the South, identified those writers who were born there, given a priority to those who were proslavery and secessionist, and set my narrative in motion, with frequent reminders to the reader that all, happily, would turn out badly.30 But now I have chosen and been compelled to live in times not more complex, but different. Historians used to accept more readily the presumptions of cultural nationalism, used to think that making a national culture was a good thing, and one’s chief duty was to judge the adequacy of the culture that was made; in the United States, this was usually a moral judgment, in Europe, often an aesthetic one. The Old South fared badly under this rubric, since it made an immoral culture that failed to gain a place in a world of nations and succeeded only in contributing towards the making of a lesser thing, a regional culture, which occupied a politely 29. However, Wells, though he said that ‘‘the South is the black man’s home,’’ also argued that he could not find justice there and so blacks must emigrate; see William Wells Brown, My Southern Home: Or, the South and Its People (1880; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 245, 246–48. 30. See, for example, Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Stru le in the Old South (1940; revised and enlarged ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South (1964; rev. ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967); Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (1949; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967).

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Introduction

subsidiary place in the greater project of American culture. Some historians still think this way. I do not, doubtless because I am not a Southerner, but also because recent intellectuals in the United States, Europe, and Africa have grown more agnostic about the merits of national cultures, which were once offered as things that God had made for human beings, eventually became secular religions, and now seem very available for skepticism. This book was mostly written in the twentieth century, but is published in the twenty-first, in a world where the nation-state remains powerful, but where the idea of culture has semi-detached itself from the obligation of loyalty to such states.31 Women and men make cultures, but of many sorts, in many places, for many purposes; some of these are congruent, many not. Boundaries are invented and the nation-state is about enforcing these, insisting that this person belongs but that one does not, that he pays taxes and votes but she pays taxes and does not, that she may be illegal yet reside but he is illegal and must be sent away, that the world consists of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ Historically, the democratic nation-state has tried to tell human beings that it defines them, while they define it; the circle is closed. Fortunately or not, we live in times when the circle begins to break down, when lives move in different patterns, sometimes interested or compelled by the circle of the nation-state, often not. (As, indeed, they always have.) No doubt, a culture like the South in the early nineteenth century is partly of interest because then the circle tried to close and we can study how what may be now being unmade was first made. This is an abstract way of explaining a few practical decisions about whom to include, whom to exclude from this book. (Authors, alas, administer their own little worlds and stand at Ellis Island like petty policemen.) If one understands culture as a discourse, as people talking to one another with shared presumptions, if often in dissent, the criterion of nativity is of less interest, but it is not irrelevant. Strictly speaking, one might include Charles Sumner in this book, for in his own way he was involved in the making of Southern culture. That seems more logical than sensible, however. So I have gone with a mix of criteria. First, I have taken an interest in those born in the South, which I take to be the slaveholding states that came to form the Confederacy, but also those (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri) that did not. I go as far north as Baltimore, as far south as Florida, as far west as St. Louis and eastern Texas. However, the South distributed and encouraged its intellectuals very unevenly. So, in practice, the map is constructed differently. In the first tier are South Carolina and Virginia; of the two, the former had the most coherent and sophisticated of all the South’s local intellectual societies, while Virginia 31. My thinking on this has been influenced by Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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15

was more diffuse but almost as complex. In the second tier, one might place Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, Mississippi, and Louisiana, all of which had significant thinkers, usually associated with urban centers like Savannah, Tuscaloosa, Baltimore, Natchez, and New Orleans. In the rear come Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware, and behind the rear (being so new and little settled) are Arkansas, Florida, and Texas. However, since I take an interest in how the South interacted with other cultures, I spend much time following these Southerners around the world; to live abroad does not seem to me to exclude someone from consideration, if he or she had an acknowledged connection to what was left behind. Henry James is properly considered a part of American literature, though he lived in Kent, just as James Baldwin forms part of black American culture, though he preferred Paris. Similarly, I consider the Charleston-born Sarah Grimké, though she came to live in the North and became an abolitionist, to have been a salient part of Southern culture, for she wished to influence the South and considered she had a right to do so, which had something to do with her social origins. Likewise Daniel Hundley, though he came to live in Chicago, wrote his study of Southern social relations from within a sense of belonging. Likewise, I follow Richard Henry Wilde (born in Ireland) from Georgia to Italy, James Warley Miles from Charleston to Constantinople. But nativity is not everything. (If you were a slave, you were told it was nothing, no matter how many generations your American origins extended back.) The South exported people, but also imported them, from Bermuda, or Prussia, or Ulster, or the Hudson River Valley. Some of these stayed permanently and became Southerners, while others remained for a decade or longer before leaving. In general, I include most of the former, and some of the latter if they sustained a presence in Southern intellectual culture and somehow influenced it, by teaching, or writing, or by spreading ideas. These decisions create a motley crew, but not too much so. Mostly, these were people who, at various times, inhabited the same or similar drawing rooms, shared a world of discourse, knew one another, sometimes were intermarried, and read one another’s books. They formed an intelligentsia not so enclosed as that of England around 1900, for the South was a considerable part of a continent and such great distances diminished comity; but in the circumstances it is more striking how well they were connected, how much they shared, than how little.32 An intellectual history is not a democratic venture, and hence has tended 32. On the inbred character of the English intelligentsia, see Noel Annan, ‘‘The Intellectual Aristocracy,’’ in Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan, ed. J. H. Plumb (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 243–87.

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Introduction

to be somewhat illegitimate in the modern discipline of history, which has made much of the moral importance of inclusiveness and equality. There are more complicated ways of expressing the rationale of intellectual history, but the cold truth is that its subject matter is clever people who once expressed themselves in complicated patterns, which other clever people have taken seriously. Deciding who is clever, who is not, was first a judgment made by contemporaries, but finally is the historian’s decision, based on experience and prejudice. Cleverness may be a personal quality, but it is also authorized by society, which regulates who may acquire education, who has access to books, who is permitted to write, who is published, and who deserves criticism. Mute inglorious Miltons may form a subject matter for poetry, but not for intellectual histories, which are full of people less than mute, indeed often irritatingly garrulous. Nonetheless, an intellectual history is always the establishment of a canon, even if on a small scale. In general, I have tried to cast my net widely, occasionally as far as people whose claim to be thought intellectual might be regarded as tenuous. (Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay are dubious cases.) Some names have usually found their way, even into a tradition of American intellectual history which has thought the Old South to be mostly unworthy of attention: John Taylor, John C. Calhoun, Hugh Legaré, Thomas Dew, William Gilmore Simms, Edgar Allan Poe.33 Others have gained attention in a recent crop of valuable studies and editions: Beverley Tucker, Mary Chesnut, James Henley Thornwell, Edmund Ruffin, Louisa McCord, Henry Hughes.34 Yet others have been little or differently noticed: Hugh Blair Grigsby, James Johnston Pettigrew, Penina Moise, Mary Elizabeth Lee, Caroline Gilman. In all, nearly a hundred people get some measure of attention in this book, so its elitism is restrained, if nonetheless real. In all these cases, I have returned to the original texts and manuscripts. I have used secondary literature here mostly for information, since I do not 33. For example, in Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, vol. 2, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800–1860 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). 34. Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); James Oscar Farmer Jr., The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986); David F. Allmendinger, Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Edmund Ruffin, Nature’s Management: Writings on Landscape and Reform, 1822–1859, ed. Jack Temple Kirby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography, Letters, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Douglas Ambrose, Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

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wish this book to be dominated by historiographical debates, which are matters best left to essays and conferences, and best left implicit in narratives.35 A historian—at least, this historian—hopes to make the past seem real, even present in the illusory moment of narration. Nonetheless, a careful reader will not find it hard to discern that, in the wrangles among scholars, my positions are roughly the following, which have been obliged to be stretched over various analytical traditions. This is a book about the South, but also about intellectual culture, so it tries to bring together discourses not usually in conversation; what historians have said about the social structure of the Mississippi Delta is here relevant to the literature on the Scottish Enlightenment, or neo-Hegelianism, or the history of the book. My view is that a convincing intellectual history must, at once, reach into biography, but also into social history; texts are the necessary core, but where they come from, where they go to, ought to be a matter of interest. So, briefly, let me say that, on the score of social history, I see the Old South as not premodern but deeply implicated in modernity, though an idiosyncratic version mostly based on slavery.36 However, I see the South as more than its slaveholding areas, as less than a coherent society, with significant tensions between the world the slaveholders made and the worlds the nonslaveholders made. (The notion that societies exist and are coherent is a premise the nineteenth century itself especially sanctioned, and which is not selfevident.) As it happens, the South’s intellectuals were caught in the middle of these tensions, for their lives mirrored a pattern of instability. Almost all experienced marked social and physical movement, and even those who did not looked out on a world where rootedness seemed an aberration. Without grasping this instability, Southern thought is unintelligible. It used to be customary to conflate Southern intellectual life with the life of the plantation, 35. Those works that have helped to form my understanding but have not found their way into footnotes are listed in the bibliography. The listing is intended to serve the double purpose of indicating the immediate sources of this book, but also secondary works useful to understanding the social and intellectual contexts of Southern thought. 36. That is, I am more sympathetic to the standpoint expressed by historians like James Oakes, J. Mills Thornton, and Lacy Ford: see James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Concomitantly, I am less in agreement with Eugene Genovese, not only on the nature of the Old South, but on his understanding of that culture’s intellectual life. A reader interested in this respectful disagreement can follow it in my essay on Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), in Michael O’Brien, ‘‘Conservative Thought in the Old South: A Review Article,’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (July 1992): 566–76.

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Introduction

understood as a fixed point. Thomas Jefferson has been the model. However much he moved away from Monticello, to Paris or Philadelphia, he has been understood to mirror and comprehend the moral economy of agrarian life, partly because that is how he preferred to represent himself, as one of God’s chosen people. And certainly he embodied a social type, the man who was born to and lived upon land and slaves, inhabited a place for a lifetime, and wrote about its meaning. In the generations after Jefferson, the type recurred: Edmund Ruffin comes to mind, a Virginian who lived on ancestral lands, studied its soil, meditated on its improvement, defended the moral and practical necessity of slavery, and went to war to prevent its disorder. Yet this was not the norm for Southern intellectuals: rather, they came from everywhere and nowhere; started poor, middling, and rich, and became middling, rich, or poor, as the world’s luck and their talents dictated; they left plantations to become urban, or left cities to become planters, or oscillated between the two; they moved in place and status within the South and beyond its boundaries; they knew conflicting identities or, more rarely, felt themselves to be whole. On balance, more intellectuals were urban than rural, a disproportion that ought not to be puzzling, especially as the South had one of the fastest rates of urbanization of the first half of the nineteenth century. Beyond that, in youth, it helped to spark intellectual ambition and interest if a child had parents who dealt with words, needed books, and managed literacy. The lawyer with his Blackstone, the minister with volumes of sermons and the Bible, the merchant with ledgers and news from Liverpool, the physician with medical textbooks, the journalist, the bookbinder, the bookseller, all these made a child understand that print and ideas mattered. A plantation or farm could, of course, occasion intellectual curiosity. There were plantation libraries, from which a child could take down books. Nonetheless, the intellectual who was born on, mostly lived in, and died on the plantation or farm without significant urban experience was not common. Very few, coming to the life of the mind, stayed in the countryside, though some, after or during urban experiences, took on plantations as an investment or a hobby. This helps to explain why there was little cultural warfare in the South between city and country, little between planter and merchant. Occasionally the stubbornly rural, like John Taylor, might speak against the city. But, for most people, the city and the town and ‘‘trade’’ were respectable enough, not only because trade might invest in land, but also because the planter was a commercial creature who knew about and needed trade. Hugh Legaré, the son of a planter but the descendant of a clockmaker, once censured James Harrington for insisting that ‘‘tradesmen’’ could be no support for a republic, and Plato for having, in The Republic, proscribed merchants: ‘‘To speak disparagingly of professional men and tradesmen, as the founders of a commonwealth, in the country of Henry

Introduction

19

and Rutledge, of Franklin and Sherman, of Laurens and Morris, would be to advance a paradox not worth the pains of refutation.’’ 37 In general, most came from the middling orders and stayed there, a few descended into poverty, and a few more ascended from it; a minority started and ended wealthy, at least before the impoverishments that the Civil War would bring. This is, of course, the common pattern for modern intelligentsias. The poor seldom have the means or occasion for intellectual inquiry, and the upper class tend to leave reflectiveness to those with less power, who need intellectual ingenuity to reason out their predicament and often want the attention that can go with publication. Equally usual is that the Southern intelligentsia was mostly composed of men, with only a few women; this was not a society that much encouraged female intellectuality. Almost all had extensive experience of non-Southern society, either by origin, education, migration, or travel; perhaps a little over half had European experience. More than half ended up in states other than those in which they were born, but migration was complex and restless, with not a few returning to their native states after experiments westward. College education was very common, at least among the men. Very few lived upon their writings, but made a living in other ways: the ministry, journalism, the law, teaching, medicine, or officeholding were the most common pursuits. Slaveholding was habitual, though some did not have slaves and many owned only a few household servants; a minority were directly and extensively engaged in the political economy of slave plantations. Almost all were married with children, but they seem often to have been raised in households in which fathers or (more rarely) mothers had prematurely died. Of those unmarried, it is not possible to gauge how many were so because of sexual orientation, but it seems likely that a few were homosexual, intermittently or regularly. It is hard to know, because the antebellum South did not like to confess such matters, save in polite negations like ‘‘never married.’’ And, of course, homosexuality is scarcely confined to the unmarried. Though these were people whose intellectual lives tended often to be molded by local circumstances, the facts of migration and travel, the existence of gathering places (synods, court sessions, legislatures, spas, clubs), and the extent of kinship networks that extended through the South and beyond did much towards creating a wider discourse. Kinship, especially, should not be neglected as an encouragement to bringing minds into contact and (in the way of families) into conflict, nor the existence of a cheap, efficient postal system. Such connections were not even, but fell into patterns, which tended to conform to the broader configurations of the South. Virginia 37. HSL, ‘‘Cicero de Republica,’’ SR 4 (August 1829): 172.

20

Introduction

was a world of its own (if divided between its east and west), but a world that had better connections with its western offspring, Kentucky, and the Chesapeake world than the world to its south. Maryland was poised between North and South, becoming more the former. Kentucky was part-Virginian, partmidwestern, and in its western parts much connected to a river culture that went northward to Pittsburgh, southward to Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans. South Carolina was linked closely to Philadelphia and New York up the coast, but also to Georgia (with whom it had an old relationship) and to Alabama and Mississippi, to which many of its people migrated. Tennessee was linked to North Carolina, which itself faced two ways, south towards South Carolina, north towards Virginia. Mississippi faced partially towards Louisiana, which was very much a world of its own, linked mostly to Paris, and somewhat to the Caribbean. Arkansas was an offspring of Tennessee, also of the Mississippi River, but like Florida was something of a remote orphan. Texas was, as yet, semi-Mexican, but all an empire of its own. Intellectual life followed all these social trade routes; books, periodicals, conversations tramped along plank roads, down rivers, on railroads, along with the herded slaves, the cotton bales, the itinerant preachers. Nonetheless, these intellectuals were more associated with the modernizing sector of society, a fact that explains their access and receptivity to advanced ideas. Hence the South’s intelligentsia was in dialogue with its society, but was not very representative, as most intelligentsias are not. So what I describe in this book, the imaginative world created by Southern intellectuals, imperfectly mirrors the social world of the whole South, which was certainly more conservative than they were. This untidiness is not absent from or irrelevant to the formal presumptions of Southern thought. If one considers, not the contexts of social history, but those of intellectual history, the experience of studying the Old South does not weaken any sense that Romanticism marked a significant paradigm shift from the projects of the Enlightenment, but it does make one conscious (more than most intellectual historians allow) that paradigms persist, coexist, and come into conversation. The Enlightenment did not disappear in Southern culture in 1830 just because somebody was persuaded by reading August von Schlegel, any more than the evangelical culture of the Reformation ceased to be influential because somebody was reading Andrews Norton, or the Augustan imagination went away because William Wordsworth became more popular than Alexander Pope. Nonetheless, different times mandate different emphases, gather together the fragments of human experience into different patterns, give them names, and intellectuals are peculiarly in the business of naming. (Those who have lived during the invention of postmodernism will be aware of how these things, puzzlingly, can happen.) So Romanticism became and remains a formative influence on the modern imagination, because

Introduction

21

it is a philosophy of movement and change that offers a way to think about the fear of isolation and the pressure of society.38 But the perspectives of the Enlightenment have also lingered, because they offer a glimpse of what the world might look like, if we could contrive to stabilize it, if we could but recover a sense of trust about all those other human beings, with knives in their hands. Bringing together social history and intellectual history, however, affects another matter of boundaries, hence of narrative. Social history, on the whole, has been localistic. It has studied this county or that state, this social group or that gender. On the contrary, though not without microcosmic studies (the intellectual biography, the study of a local intellectual community), intellectual history has been powerfully biased in favor of the free movement of ideas and hence of the permeability of frontiers. An American intellectual history cannot fail, also, to be an intellectual history of other places, if Emerson read Carlyle, Carlyle read Goethe, Goethe read Hume, Hume read Epicurus, and Emerson, too, read Epicurus and Hume, who was reading Jonathan Edwards. Intellectuals, because they live in two places, their imaginations and places like Concord, live in more than two places. Their historians, likewise, must have a license to roam, if those imaginations are to be recaptured. Hence I have not hesitated to explicate, not only the texts Southern intellectuals wrote, but those they read. So the reader should not be surprised to 38. My earlier formulation of these issues can be found in Michael O’Brien, ‘‘The Lineaments of Southern Romanticism,’’ Journal of American Studies 20 (August 1986): 165–88, which is reprinted in Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 38–56. Like many scholars, I was much influenced by M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). My admiration remains strong, though recent studies offer a more diffuse understanding; useful guides to these shifts are to be found in Duncan Wu, ed., A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), and Michael O’Neill, Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). In general, I remain sympathetic, among recent works, to studies like Kathleen M. Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997); and David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). I am inclined to grant, for example, Wheeler’s remark (p. 6) that ‘‘[t]he late eighteenth century could be described . . . as a transformation from dualistic thinking to thought based on relation and integration, on dynamic opposition and functional, relative differences’’; Bowie’s assertion (pp. 14–15) that such a Romantic philosophy has been influential on modern thought, especially his claim that ‘‘in the Romantic conception art can be regarded as reconciling in the realm of appearance what is unreconciled in reality, and thus as a form of ideology’’; and Simpson’s understanding (pp. 15–16) that his own book ‘‘neither confirms nor denies a definitive relation between the Romantic and the modern and postmodern situation, but [argues] that there are significant and determining continuities.’’ See also Young, Colonial Desire, 54: ‘‘Post-Modernity marks the articulation and maturation of an inner dissonance that had quickly developed within the Enlightenment project—something that has previously gone by different names such as Romanticism.’’

22

Introduction

come across passages where I pay close attention to the works of, for example, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen or Hugh Blair of Edinburgh, since both had a marked influence on Southern thought. This is another way of saying that a sort of globalization has been going on in intellectual life, and hence of intellectual history, for a long time. There are schools of thought that have debated the nature of these conversations sans frontières. The tradition of the history of ideas, which arose from philosophy (especially political philosophy), tended to write as though time and place mattered little, that the historian put Aristotle and William James in the same room, to see how they coped with complicated questions put to them; this is an Enlightenment tradition, focused on what the Marxists like to call praxis or social action, not an intellectually fastidious thing. The venture of intellectual history, which is closer to Romantic historicism, has insisted that Aristotle belongs only in an ancient Greek room, William James only in a modern American room, and that, though James read Aristotle, Aristotle never read James, unless the Christian heaven or the Elysian Fields have good booksellers and libraries. I am more sympathetic to the latter school, though I am conscious that anachronism is a very common human experience. Indeed, anachronism is an especial accomplishment of print culture, which allows so many words from so many times to survive together.39 There is another cogent reason why a Southern history needs also, partly, to be a history of people and places beyond the South, a reason that extends beyond the South’s participation in the swirling patterns of physical and intellectual migrations. Once it was usual to write the intellectual history of Europe, as though it were only introspective. The colonies, the empires, the zones of influence of European cultures were understood as places where ideas made in Europe went to die or run to seed, but were not places whose existence were thought significantly to have influenced how Europeans thought at home. The development of postcolonial studies, especially the prominence of modern intellectual figures from what was once understood as the ‘‘periphery,’’ has changed this.40 It is now clearer that the existence 39. The classic statement of contextualism is Quentin Skinner, ‘‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’’ (1969), reprinted in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 29–67. A critique that defends anachronism as morally useful and indicates a preference for seeing ‘‘the history of our race as a long conversational interchange’’ is Richard Rorty, ‘‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,’’ in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 247–73 (quotation on p. 249). 40. Notably Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).

Introduction

23

of empire has had a great bearing on how Europeans conceptualized their worlds.41 It follows that the resonance that Southerners found in European texts arose not only from the deference of ex-colonials, but stemmed also from the fact that Southerners saw shapes in European ideas that existed because they, the Southerners, and others at the ‘‘margins’’ existed.42 Europe had faced the problem of ordering the multifarious knowledge that the project of empire had brought into its reckoning, while also sustaining its political, economic, and cultural suzerainty. The pace quickened from the seventeenth to the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as the knowledge piled up and as the agents of empire proliferated. The Enlightenment was a preliminary response, mostly a confident one.43 Romanticism was a more frantic response; the awareness of so many cultures, with so many values, with so many Gods, threatened the disintegration of intelligibility.44 Philosophers like Hegel found a way to finesse the problem, to describe the Bacchanalian whirl but also to define patterns, albeit patterns full of movement; these patterns they called history, society, culture. But it was no accident that the 41. Anderson, Imagined Communities, for example, argues that nationalism was first formulated by the Creole cultures of Latin America, not by the Germans or other Europeans, who may be said to have been imitative. I am less persuaded by this, since the chronology seems not to work, but his thesis is, at least, evidence of recent analytical propensities on the relationship between Europe and what can no longer clearly be called its periphery. 42. As Mary Louise Pratt puts it, ‘‘To the degree that ‘Romanticism’ shapes the new discourses on America, Egypt, southern Africa, Polynesia, or Italy, they shape it. . . . Romanticism consists, among other things, of shifts in relations between Europe and other parts of the world—notably the Americas, which are, precisely, liberating themselves from Europe’’: Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 137–38. For estimates of this dialectic, for the British experience, see John M. Mackenzie, ‘‘Empire and Metropolitan Cultures,’’ and Robert A. Stafford, ‘‘Scientific Exploration and Empire,’’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter, asst. ed. Alaine Low (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 270–319. 43. ‘‘In the eighteenth century, as during the Renaissance, great explorations abruptly widened the cultural and geographical horizon. The world of realities in which men lived changed, growing broader, richer in possibilities, and ultimately limitless. The eighteenth century undertook and largely achieved a heroically vast description of the sensible universe that moved from discovery to discovery’’; Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), 18. 44. The first historian to argue this was the French scholar Raymond Schwab, in a work first published in 1950; see Raymond Schwab, La renaissance Orientale: la découverte du Sanscrit, le siècle des écritures déchiffrées (Paris: Payot, 1950); the English edition is Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene PattersonBlack and Victor Reinking, with a foreword by Edward W. Said (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). On the general issue, see Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds., Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, eds., Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

24

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image, which seemed to Hegel to crystallize the problem of the modern self, was drawn from the experience of slavery. So European conjectures of order appealed to Southerners, since the latter were among the custodians of empire. They were out in the field, felling the trees, managing nature, driving the slaves, building the institutions, filling their libraries with texts that tried to make sense of the whole business.45 Sometimes Southern texts went back and modified the metropolitan paradigms; this was the case, for example, with the ethnographic studies of Josiah Nott, which earned him election as an Honorary Fellow of the Anthropological Society of London and as a Foreign Associate of the Anthropological Society of Paris, and made him an influence upon Ernest Renan, the leading French Orientalist.46 Not infrequently, Southerners worked in imperial ventures into other continents: James Warley Miles and John B. Adger were both missionaries in the Near East; William B. Hodgson was a diplomat in North Africa, where he acquired an Orientalist’s interest in Arabian languages; Southerners helped to found a colony on the western edge of Africa; Joel Poinsett and Louis Rémy Mignot followed in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt in South America.47 But, for North America, Southerners were sharp judges of what worked in these European conjectures, and what did not. Their margins were thinner, so they opted for a cautious version of Romanticism, less receptive to disorder, more interested in hierarchy. For the disintegrative side of the Romantic vision often hinted at a subversion of the imperialist project, and Southerners resisted this, for they were the project.48 Nonetheless, many knew the darker side, and not a few were nervous. Edgar Allan Poe fashioned perhaps the sharpest, coldest images of disintegration of anyone in his century, and he contemplated what happened if you ventured, like Arthur Gordon Pym, to the edge of the world and ‘‘rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us.’’ 49 45. Perhaps the easiest place to see the conjunction of ecological, proslavery imperialism is in the writings of Edmund Ruffin, conveniently assembled in Ruffin, Nature’s Management. 46. Young, Colonial Desire, 69. Young’s book is especially sensitive to the Southern influence on European racial theory; see especially his chapter (pp. 118–41) entitled ‘‘Egypt in America, the Confederacy in London.’’ 47. On Humboldt and imperialism, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 111–97. 48. See Tim Fulford, ‘‘Romanticism and Colonialism: Races, Places, Peoples, 1800–30,’’ in Romanticism and Colonialism, 47. Barbara Maria Stafford writes, for example, that ‘‘the Romantic quest ultimately leads, not unidirectionally out into the blank plains, dense forests, or nebulous skies of a beckoning or unknown land, but back into the tangled self ’’: see Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 444. Obviously, many Southerners were questing into all sorts of plains and forests. 49. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,’’ in Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1179.

book one

The Softened Echo of the World

Chapter One

A Moral Terra Incognita

There were many motives for Southerners going north: education, business, politics, religion, vacations, shopping. Then there was kinship. For generations, Northern and Southern families had been moving, intermarrying, visiting, moving again, writing letters, and exchanging cousins. Yet the overall pattern of movement between North and South, South and North, was asymmetrical. More Northerners came South for economic opportunity, if sometimes for their health, while Southerners (though they also sought the main chance) habitually went North to use cultural facilities. On balance, the result of these interchanges was that Northerners knew less about the South than Southerners did of the North. But in neither case did experience often translate into sympathy; indeed, it is striking how early and how deep were mutual suspicions and incomprehensions. There are many ways to understand these interchanges, but four will be most pertinent to an intellectual history: the Southern experience of Northern higher education, the responses of Southerners traveling as visitors beyond the Potomac, the character of Northern judgments about the adequacy of Southern culture, and the debate all this occasioned within the South about the comparative standing of that culture in American life and beyond. The structure of education is peculiarly telling, for here the asymmetry was most marked. The student body of Southern colleges was far less cosmopolitan than the faculty. Of the students who attended the University of Virginia between 1826 and 1874, just 1.7 percent came from nonslaveholdTitle from Lucian Minor, ‘‘Letters from New England,’’ SLM 1 (April 1835): 425: ‘‘Our people ought to travel northward more often. It would be a good thing, if exploring parties were frequently sent hither, (as to a moral terra incognita,) to observe and report the particulars deserving of our imitation.’’

[ 27 ]

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ing states, a total of 155 undergraduates out of 9,160.1 Of the graduates of the University of North Carolina after 1798, the first Northerner—Oliver Wolcott Treadwell of Connecticut—did not appear on the rolls until 1826, and the second—C. Stephens Croom of New York City—not until 1859.2 This was a mirror image of the situation in the North, where the faculty members were more local and the students more various, more national. As Francis Lieber the Prussian found to his distress, it was easier for him to get employment in the South than in the North. With the exception of Princeton, few Northern college were hospitable to hiring Southern teachers. However, the number of Southerners who attended Northern colleges was considerable, if much smaller than those educated at home. The earlier their experience in the North, the less contentious it seems to have been. John C. Calhoun, the Grimké brothers, Stephen and William Elliott, who all graduated before 1815, seem to have experienced little cultural tension. Thomas S. Grimké, who was a protégé of Timothy Dwight, returned to Yale often and, even in 1831, was having his pamphlets issued by a New Haven printer.3 Alfred Huger, in retrospect, warmed at the memory of his own undergraduate days, as a contrast to the ruin he saw around him in Charleston in 1865: I was educated at the North, receiving my first impressions of ‘‘country’’ at the College of Princeton, under the tuition of Samuel Stanhope Smith. I remember there, J. B. Ingersoll & Rush & Nicklin and Emlin & Scott & Biddle Wilkinson & Peters—all from Philadelphia, & all prominent, especially Mr. Ingersoll: also Mr. Sergeant! Every State was represented: there was Marshall, son of the Chief Justice & Breckinridge, father of the General, and a french boy from Louisiana, named ‘‘Toutant’’ father of Beauregard—with many others, and from that distant period / 1803 to 1807 / I always thought, & always spoke, as an American, of the North with pride & exultation! 4 When Frederick Porcher went to Yale in 1825, he found many Southerners among his contemporaries, twenty-four as he was to remember, from a 1. Herbert Baxter Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888), 167. 2. Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 1, From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789–1868 (1907; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1974), 787–815. 3. Thomas Smith Grimké, Reflections on the Character and Objects of All Science and Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Hezekiah Howe, 1831). 4. Alfred Huger to William Ravenel, 24 June 1865, William Ravenel Paper, SHC. Samuel Stanhope Smith, it may be relevant to note, had spent time in Virginia from 1773 to 1779, partly teaching at Hampden-Sydney College.

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29

student body of about 300.5 Porcher thought that Yale ‘‘did not at that time number many Southern students.’’ 6 In fact, they represented about 12 percent of the student body.7 On average, between 1820 and 1860, Southerners represented about 9 percent of Harvard students, 11 percent of Yale’s, but 36 percent of those at Princeton,8 enough for them to have their own institutions. At Yale, most notable was the Calliopean Society, one of the three debating societies, and the one ‘‘which all the Southern students joined.’’ Yet intersectional friendships were common. Porcher became friends with Northerners: Thomas Gold Alvord from New York, who lived nearby, Robert James Telfair of the same state (‘‘one of my most cherished associates,’’ who later moved to Georgia), Coburn Whitehead of Philadelphia, Oliver Payser Hubbard of Connecticut, David Bartlett of New York, Erskine and Tryon Edwards of Connecticut (descendants of Jonathan Edwards), David Downes of New Jersey, Ezra Palmer of Boston. With these, Porcher would smoke cigars, play football on the Green, swim in the bay, vacation, and shoot ducks.9 As to his educational experience, unlike Thomas Grimké earlier, Porcher was not very much impressed. Until the junior year, it was the common experience to be stuck with a single tutor, often a very young man ‘‘who had but recently gone through the same course in precisely the same way.’’ 10 Hugh Blair Grigsby was still less pleased. Soon after arriving, he was explaining to his stepfather in Virginia that instruction at Yale was weak, the classics 5. From South Carolina, John Brownlow Robertson, Nick Harleston Rutledge, William Robertson, Stephen Robinson, Adam Cox, Theodore DuBose, Daniel Jenkins Townsend, Thomas H. Gregorie, John Lanneau, Edmund Smith Rhett, Alfred Rhett, and a young Mr. Parker whose Christian name Porcher could not remember; from North Carolina, David C. McNeely and a Mr. Stanley from Wilmington; from Maryland, George Hoffman, Philip Rogers Hoffman, Simon Weeks, and Edward Long; from Virginia, Thomas Claggett; from Mississippi, Horatio Nelson Smith and Volney Metcalfe; from Louisiana, Charles McDermott; from Saint Croix in the West Indies and later Charleston, Judah P. Benjamin. 6. Samuel Gaillard Stoney, ed., ‘‘The Memoirs of Frederick Adolphus Porcher: Chapter VI: Yale College,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 45 (October 1944): 205–7. 7. Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: Free Press, 1988), 15, looking at Yale matriculation records, indicates that Southerners were nearly 30 percent of the student body then, and that Charleston had more representatives than anywhere, other than New York, New Haven, and Hartford. But this seems suspiciously high. 8. These figures, from Edgar W. Knight, ed., A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949–53), 4:248– 50, are as follows (giving year, number of Southern students, and their percentage of total class in sequence): Harvard, 1820/50/12.9%, 1830/16/3.88%, 1840/34/7.69%, 1850/65/10.9%, 1860/63/10.57%; Yale, 1820/47/11.16%, 1830/69/13.74%, 1840/67/11.67%, 1850/72/12.97%, 1860/33/6.33%; Princeton, 1820/42/34.71%, 1830/17/19.54%, 1840/98/43.17%, 1850/115/ 48.72%, 1860/113/36.21%. 9. Stoney, ‘‘Porcher Memoirs: Yale,’’ 207–13 (quotation on p. 211). 10. Ibid., 215.

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were neglected, the teaching by very young tutors negligent: ‘‘When a student recites his lesson, the tutor makes scarcely any remarks, but passes on to another.’’ He, however, seems to have struck lucky with a somewhat older tutor, a graduate in divinity from Princeton, ‘‘the best American classical scholar, I have ever seen . . . equal to any tutor in college . . . [and] an excellent mathematician.’’ In general, the tutors took themselves too seriously, he thought, by requiring that students bow to them, more so even than the professors and president, who seemed all to be invalids. Predictably, Grigsby liked the Calliopean Society, but was conscious that a New England faculty regarded a collection of Southerners with suspicion, even contempt. His main problem, his bane, was that mathematics was very important at Yale, and Grigsby hated the subject. ‘‘The moment I place the [mathematics] book before me, I become so sick, that I am almost incapacitated from attending on my other duties.’’ And why bother with it? After all, no mathematician ever became notable in public affairs: ‘‘Examine the history of every orator, and of every writer, and you will find none who ever studied mathematicks attentively.’’ But the faculty prized mathematics above the classics, and hence discriminated against the Southerners, whose values were opposite. The Calliopean Society was full of ‘‘very excellent speakers, fine writers, and good classical scholars; and poor mathematicians,’’ who had little hope of taking the highest college honors.11 Nonetheless, like Porcher, Grigsby took his friends from both South and North, if the list in his commonplace book is reliable.12 Yet his letters and diaries do show a marked nostalgia for the South, or at least for Virginia: ‘‘Fulton of the Senior class is the only Virginian in College; we always call each other ‘Virginian.’ He is from Richmond Va. we both slept together the other night on the only fine Virginia feather bed in College.’’ 13 By Christmas Day of 1825, Grigsby was far gone in his mathematical funk, further gone in his sectional interpretation: ‘‘The faculty do not treat the Southerners as they should do; if a southerner enters College, the bare fact of 11. HBG to Dr. Nathan Colgate Whitehead, 2 June, 3 June, 20 October, 12 November, 18 December, 30 November, 12 December, 18 December 1824, HBG Papers, VHS. 12. These inscribed his book with assorted messages: S. D. Ward; Stephen Galatty; Isaac DuBose, South Carolina; Robert Chisolm, Charleston; Hugh Wilson, John’s Island, S.C.; William M. Felton, Richmond; John B. McDowell, Baltimore; J. G. Seymour, Savannah; S. A. Maverick, South Carolina; Isaac M. Ward, New Jersey; Thomas Slidell, New York; Benjamin Perkins, Camden, S.C.; T. H. Gregorie; Alexander Duncan, Angus Shire, Scotland; C. B. Treat; S. M. Brown; Maurice Miller; George Brinkerhoff, Albany, New York; J. D. Bonesteel, Red Hook, New York; Alexander W. McClure, Boston; Alfred E. Clarke, Point Coupee, Louisiana; Samuel S. Day, Catskill, New York; J. Macrae [Demarara?], South America; R. K. Richards, New York City; Charles Walsh, Albany, New York; and (presumably not a classmate) Sophia Miller, Wading-River, Long Island. 13. HBG to Dr. Nathan Colgate Whitehead, 12 December 1824, HBG Papers, VHS.

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31

his coming from the south, makes him a suspicious character. All they like are those canting hypocritical wretches, who come from New England.’’ In February, the faculty had been deemed ‘‘a diminutive and lowminded set.’’ Their values were wrong, as history showed. Calhoun himself had missed out, while ‘‘the person who took the highest honor in his class is a preacher in some obscure village in New England.’’ By May Grigsby had taken a leave of absence and was pondering his algebra with a tutor in Wilton, Connecticut. This turned out to be a fortunate absence, since he missed a great rebellion of those who shared his discontent at mathematics. Many students were expelled, and most of the rest left.14 The experience of Grigsby’s Norfolk friend, John N. Tazewell, the son of Littleton Waller Tazewell, points up a further moral. The younger Tazewell went off to Harvard in 1822 to study with George Ticknor. Ticknor was friendly to Southerners, had known the likes of Hugh Legaré and William Campbell Preston in Europe, had sought the patronage of Thomas Jefferson, and, in turn, been asked to join the faculty of the new University of Virginia. The elder Tazewell sent his son to Harvard, partly for its intellectual benefits, but also to found associations that would be useful in later life. Harvard was a calculation that presumed the economic importance of nationality. As the father explained to the son: ‘‘Now you will regard yourself, and be regarded by all others, as a member of a very respectable community, whose interests and reputation it is as much your duty to sustain and advance, by all the means in your power, as it is theirs to support and assist you in your laudable efforts. . . . You and the college thus become assimilated nay identified, and rely upon it, so soon as you are regarded as a promising ‘alumnus’ of this ‘alma mater,’ all concerned in it will aid and assist you both in your literary and even proper pleasurable pursuits, by every means in their power.’’ The elder took this calculation more seriously even than intellectual matters, not because he undervalued the mind, but because he knew that it was possible to learn outside of a college. Later, after his son had migrated to Charlottesville, he wrote: ‘‘The question as to your return to the University after the present course I leave entirely to your own decision—With the exception of those studies which require experiment to exemplify and establish the truth of their precepts, there is none which may be as well pursued, and many of them certainly much better employed at home, than at any University whatever, by one aware of the importance of properly disposing of his time, and disposed to employ it to the best advantage.’’ 15 College, that is, was a matter of acquiring society, as well as knowledge, and Littleton Waller Tazewell, 14. Ibid., 25 December, 16 February, 1 May, 20 July 1825. 15. George Ticknor to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 14 May 1823; Littleton Waller Tazewell to John N. Tazewell, 17 November 1825, Tazewell Family Papers, LV.

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for one, felt that Harvard and the North offered a valuable connection. And Tazewell was not a man to spend money idly. These early Southern students in the North show marked local sensitivities, but less of a political response. For Grigsby it was the balance of mathematics and the classics, not slavery, that marked the gulf. Southerners knew they were moving among ‘‘strangers,’’ 16 whose odd ways needed definition, but not always strangers who threatened survival. With the onset of abolitionism, the mood changed. This can be traced even among older alumni, the men from North and South who had once inscribed each other’s yearbooks. Take the case of William Elliott of South Carolina, the author of Carolina Sports by Land and Water, the closet dramatist, the essayist, the rice and cotton planter from Beaufort.17 Elliott had attended Harvard from 1807 to 1808, he had many friends in the North, he visited often. Indeed, his account of attending the commencement exercises at Harvard in 1836 cautions against drawing too firm lines between North and South, even after William Lloyd Garrison had asserted his refusal to equivocate. For at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner in that year Elliott heard Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom he describes as ‘‘a son of Doctor Holmes (mother’s old friend),’’ deliver in verse ‘‘a hard hit at the Abolitionists.’’ Elliott frequented parties in Boston, to observe that ‘‘[t]here are many Carolinians here and hereabouts—Stephen Elliott & Wife & Phoebe—remain a week longer—Mr. & Mrs. Nott & Miss DeSaussure are here. The Heywards & Cuthberts are just gone for N. York.’’ 18 In 1847 William Elliott received a letter from an old Harvard classmate, William Plumer of New Hampshire. Elliott had just published Carolina Sports, it had been noticed in the North American Review, and Plumer had written a friendly letter of reminiscence about their old days in 1808, of the Hasty Pudding Club and of Elliott declaiming on Coriolanus. He sent along a copy of his own book, Lyrica Sacra; or, War-Songs and Ballads from the Old Testament.19 Elliott reciprocated the gesture with a copy of Carolina Sports. ‘‘I retain like yourself a lively interest in my classmates and shall always rejoice to hear of their prosperity,’’ he told Plumer. ‘‘I have frequently met those who resided in Boston and received from them, tokens of respect and hospitable attentions 16. J. W. Campbell to CC, 27 May 1823, CC Papers, WM. 17. This discussion of Elliott is taken from Michael O’Brien, ‘‘ ‘The Water Rose in the Graves’: Discontinuity and Localism in Nineteenth-Century Southern Thought,’’ in The United States South: Regionalism and Identity, ed. Valeria Gennaro Lerda and Tjebbe Westendorp, Biblioteca di Cultura, no. 418 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1991), 71–73. 18. William Elliott to Ann Elliott, 1 September 1836, in ‘‘The Letters of William Elliott,’’ ed. Beverley Scafidel (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1978), 342–46. 19. William Plumer Jr., to William Elliott, 25 January 1847, Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, SHC.

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that I can never forget.’’ All this was amiable. But Elliott could not repress an observation and a resentment. In his visits North in recent years, he had tended to stay away from Harvard, not only to avoid spoiling pleasant memories with recent realities, but because he was aware of ‘‘a difference in the tone’’ which had grown ‘‘out of political and sectional estrangement.’’ To his regret, ‘‘[t]he condition to which I was born—and which has attached to me throughout my life—that of a slaveholder—seems now a matter of offense—and degrades the [slaveholder] to the [position] of moral inferiority.’’ From this, Elliott turned to a brief autobiography and noted that he had ‘‘published some papers in the Southern Review’’ and promised to send along a pamphlet or two. Plumer replied with courtesy, disclaiming all partisan views on slavery, insisting he saw no moral inferiority in his old friend, blaming fanatics and mischievous politicians North and South for the controversy, saying that there were two sides to every question, knowing that Elliott was sincere. And yet Plumer too could not repress an observation and a resentment: ‘‘The language of such men does not indicate the true state of feeling in the mass of the people here, & still less in the more intelligent among us. We believe slavery to be morally, politically, & economically wrong—a wrong & an evil; & we think it our duty, so far our right extends, to labour for the removal of this evil & this wrong; & especially, at the present time, to prevent its extension to new territory.’’ Plumer was very anxious to be fair. To be sure, he said, ‘‘In the same circumstances, our conduct would probably be the same as yours; & yours the same as ours, if you were in our situation.’’ The generosity of this, however, must have been weakened for Elliott by the next sentence: ‘‘But this does not touch the question of the right, or the expediency of slavery.’’ Nor could Elliott have been pleased by Plumer’s belief that ‘‘[o]pposition to slavery did not begin with the politicians here. It is a moral feeling; which has been growing stronger & stronger, for many years; & it will, as we believe, work its way ultimately through the Union—slowly but surely, &, as we hold, beneficially for all concerned.’’ 20 There is little evidence of subsequent intimacy, though in 1859 Elliott does mention getting from Plumer a copy of the Boston Courier, with an account of Caleb Cushing’s condemnation of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.21 Slavery had put a veil between even those striving to be friendly, and the process of sharpening and defining ideas interposed barriers. But what happened in the 1840s to a postgraduate like Elliott happened then as an undergraduate for someone like Basil Manly Jr. 20. Ibid., 15 April 1847. 21. William Elliott to Ann Elliott, 18 December 1859, in Scafidel, ‘‘Letters of William Elliott,’’ 986.

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Manly was the son of the Baptist preacher who was president of the University of Alabama.22 Like his father, he aspired to the ministry and was sent north in 1844, to study at the Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts. He went, armed with his father’s acute sensitivity to sectional and religious issues, which had been brewing ever since the elder Manly had been a minister in Charleston during the Nullification Crisis, and which was to lead to his central role in the schism of 1845 that broke the Baptists into two churches. This sensitivity squarely rested on the matter of slavery, which was in turn connected to issues of theology. The Northerner was held to be lax on slavery, one of God’s institutions clearly elaborated in the Bible, for the same reason that he was unsound on theology, being prone to heresies. The younger Manly found a place less than congenial, though the professors were kindly. The pace of life seemed more hectic: ‘‘Minds move quicker here. Every thing rushes on by steam with great rapidity. My tendency is to be too phlegmatic & this may serve in some measure to correct it.’’ 23 Discipline was less than good. There was snobbery and divisiveness, the senior class being split between a group calling itself the ‘‘Aristocracy’’ and another of ‘‘Plebeians.’’ Worse, there was religious skepticism. Two-thirds of the seniors, Manly guessed, did not believe in the Sabbath as a Christian institution, often failed to attend church, and inclined towards Arminianism. The intermediate class were still more puzzled: ‘‘One of them told me the other day that they had proved the existence of God could not be proved: but only inferred from the tendency in the mind of man to embrace such a doctrine.’’ Not believing in God, the miscreant had confined his praying to Christ, for whom there was some evidence, until some faith falteringly returned. This example was troublesome, since ‘‘this is a man of strong mind—& thus is he tossed.’’ Manly worried that, by this, his own faith might be permanently unsettled, for he was aware of skeptical proclivities in his own mind.24 Initially, though there were hostilities towards Southerners at Newton and 22. The elder Manly grew up on the family farm near Pittsboro in Orange County, the illegitimate son of John Basil Manly and Elizabeth Maultsby; his parents got around to marriage a year after his birth. The son was educated at the Bingham Academy in Asheville, then mostly at South Carolina College. He was ordained as a Baptist preacher in 1821 and had a ministry in Edgefield, before moving to the First Baptist Church in Charleston in 1826. He became president of the University of Alabama in 1837. Later, in 1855, he returned to Charleston and the pulpit of the Wentworth Street Baptist Church, but it was not a success and he moved back to a ministry in Montgomery, Alabama. It was this position that led to his being the presiding minister at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy in 1861. See A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 23. BM Jr., ‘‘Newton / No. II / Jottings Down,’’ BM Jr. Papers, FU. 24. BM Jr. to BM, 3 February, 12 February 1845, Manly Family Papers, UA.

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heated debates with abolitionist students, Manly was inclined to be sanguine. ‘‘As to abolitionism . . . I never trouble myself with them,’’ he told his father early in February 1845. ‘‘I give them a hard rap now & then when it suits me, but generally let them alone, & make them let me alone. There is nothing like a wanton attempt to injure my feelings. Yet they all think slavery a great sin— & pray loudly that oppression may cease in the earth.’’ But a few weeks later he had changed his mind. He had talked to a faculty member, Dr. Sharp, about the refusal of Northern Baptists to permit slaveholders to serve on foreign missions, and this had incensed him, as indeed it had maddened his father. ‘‘I am roused. I can’t stand it. . . . Let it come! I am done apologizing. Let us be one, & let me be one. We have clung to the Union of Missions as long as we can with honor, or ought, by any principles of forbearance.’’ It was troubling to enjoy the ‘‘conveniences, advantages, & privileges’’ of an institution sustained by ‘‘men who cast out as evil my name, & the names of all I love & hold dear.’’ What to do, when faced with antislavery feeling which was ‘‘increasing, & strengthening, & becoming audacious & insolent’’? He should leave, but where? Hamilton was more abolitionist than Newton. Andover was ‘‘modernized & etherialized.’’ Princeton was more rigorous, but it was ‘‘bitter & bigoted—full of the stiff, starch spirit of Presbyterianism’’ of the Old School. Should he go back to the South, perhaps to Mercer in Georgia? After all, ‘‘there is an obligation (ceteris paribus) on Southern young men to sustain Southern Institutions.’’ 25 His father advised him coolly. Ride out the insults, take what was useful: ‘‘As to the implied confession of the inferiority of our Institutions; the fact is notorious, and ought not to be, even by implication, denied.’’ That being so, the better should be used, so that what might be better learned in the North could be brought back to strengthen the South. ‘‘It was to help build up our own, that I was the more anxious to have you complete your course at the best Institutions our country can afford.’’ After all, he argued, going to study in Massachusetts was like going abroad, to a foreign country ‘‘inimical, if you choose, and at war, with your own.’’ But, until there was an overt war, one could stay without dishonor. Many Americans stayed in England during the Revolution and ‘‘I never heard that any of them suffered in any respect, on this account.’’ He did not doubt that there would be a peaceful separation of the religious denominations, then later the creation of two countries: ‘‘I see no necessity for war; but shall look for us to dwell peaceably side by side— and citizens occasionally exchanging citizenship, & even frequently temporary abode.’’ 26 In the event, the younger Manly did migrate to Princeton. 25. Ibid., 3 February, 24 February 1845. 26. BM to BM Jr., 10 March, 24 March 1845, Manly Family Papers, UA.

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Yet part of the impulse for separation was less political, more institutional. The South in 1850 was richer in institutions of higher learning than in 1790, when it effectively had but one, the College of William and Mary. It was a pattern, not fixed, that fathers, born in the eighteenth century, went to Northern or to English colleges, but sons to Southern. The elder Stephen Elliott went to Yale, the younger to South Carolina College, not from hostility to New Haven but loyalty to Columbia. As the traveler John Melish observed even in 1815, ‘‘It was customary for a long period, for the more wealthy planters to send their sons to Europe for education; and even now they frequently send them to the northern states; but the practice is gradually declining, and the desire has become general to have respectable seminaries in the state.’’ 27 Many Southerners going north went not for education, but for pleasure. The South being hot in summer, they migrated towards the lower end of the thermometer at Saratoga Springs, at Ballston, at Newport, even in Canada. They usually traveled in packs, the closer for being family groups, and saw as tourists. They entered the shops of Philadelphia, pondered their novelties, and considered the ‘‘fashionable promenaders’’ of Chestnut Street. They stayed at the Astor House or the Girard House in New York, from which they stepped out to be impressed by the bustle of Broadway. The male visitors looked at the girls: ‘‘But Broadway—Broadway—How pleasant to walk on Broadway about 12 or 1,’’ wrote Grigsby in 1831. ‘‘The sun shining highly in the mean time. They slander New York, when they say there are no beauties here. There are hundreds of them. Small hands, small feet, beautiful forms, black eyes, fine complexions.’’ ‘‘New York is brilliant,’’ Albert James Pickett enthused in 1851. ‘‘Every body looks cheerful & happy & the ladies are adorned with the richest & most elegant apparel & they walk the streets from ten o’clock in the morning untill 12 o’clock at night, not minding the coldness of the weather.’’ Some found the bustle a strain: ‘‘We walked to Broadway which is near the Hotel the rush & throng have given me a headache it was confusing,’’ wrote Jane Caroline North a year later. Some even found it offensive: Pickett himself, having spent weeks struggling with his publisher, cried enough: ‘‘Since I have seen the splendor, the meanness, the selfishness & the ridiculous moneyed aristocracy of the North on the one side, & the poverty distress & destitution of the lower classes on the other I am content to live in Alabama the ballance of my days & never to go out of it.’’ 28 27. John Melish, Travels in the United States of America, in the Years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810, & 1811 Including an Account of Passages betwixt America and Britain, and Travels through Various Parts of Britain, Ireland, & Canada: With Corrections, and Improvements, to 1815 (Philadelphia: John Melish, 1815), 284. 28. Entry for 31 July 1827, Elizabeth Ruffin Diary, in An Evening When Alone: Four Journals

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There was so much to be done. Southerners went to bookshops: Mitchell King and Hugh Blair Grigsby both used John Penington of 169 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, Samuel and Caroline Gilman used James Munroe of Boston, while Pickett ordered from Bartlett & Welford of New York.29 They went to museums: that of Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia was an especial favorite. They liked to visit the curious phenomena of modern life: the new factories at Lowell, with their neat young girls; the great Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia; the Shakers in New Lebanon; Indian reservations; lunatic asylums or schools for the deaf. Colleges were often on the itinerary, so that sisters and mothers could see where their men had studied. ‘‘We passed through the often heard of town called Princeton,’’ wrote Elizabeth Ruffin in 1827, ‘‘the place where our Southern rustics are polished so smoothly.’’ ‘‘We visited Cambridge,’’ noted Jane Caroline North in 1851. ‘‘The grounds around the colleges are pretty being a nicely kept lawn with fine trees—none of the buildings are handsome but the library.’’ 30 They went to churches, considered architecture, and judged preachers. They experienced landscape—Niagara, the Catskills, the Hudson River, Cayuga Lake—and usually managed the required emotions of admiration or wonder. By the late 1820s, their reactions might be trained by Romantic reading. Richard Henry Wilde traveled up the Hudson in 1828 and was able to admire spots described by James Fenimore Cooper in The Pioneers, and think of Byron’s description in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage of the Abruzzian cascade at Velino when looking upon Niagara.31 Others, more pious, saw the hand of God in what even the skeptical thought ‘‘this glorious cataract.’’ 32 Above all, necessarily, they formed opinions on hotels, on waiters, and on menus. Much was summed up by the word ‘‘manners,’’ by which was meant both customs and courtesies. It was expected that the traveler would observe manners, perhaps even learn from them, either by example or repulsion. It was a of Single Women in the South, 1827–67, ed. Michael O’Brien, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 76; HBG to John N. Tazewell, 15 October 1831, Tazewell Family Papers, LV; entry for 21 August 1852, Jane Caroline North Diary, SHC, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 197; AJP to Sarah Pickett, 13 February 1851; AJP to Absalom Jackson, 7 March 1851, AJP Papers, ADAH. 29. Entries for November 1847 and 17 February 1848, in MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC; HBG to Mary Grigsby, 11 March 1848, HBG Papers, VHS; Samuel Gilman to Messrs. Monroe and Company, 19 March 1844, Samuel Gilman Mss, HU; Bartlett & Welford to AJP, 16 September 1847, AJP Papers, ADAH. 30. Entry for 29 August 1827, Elizabeth Ruffin Diary, and entry for 20 September 1851, Jane Caroline North Diary, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 93, 217. 31. Richard Henry Wilde to ‘‘Kate and Ann,’’ 1 December 1828, Richard Henry Wilde Papers, DU. The original is Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, stanzas 69–72. 32. Thomas J. Young to Anna Young, 3 September 1844, Gourdin-Young Papers in the Keith Read Collection, GHS; entry for 31 July 1830, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS.

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burden and obligation all travelers took north. Friends would remind you of this responsibility, as D. L. Russell, attending Hampden-Sydney, reminded Grigsby in 1825 to comment as a Virginian in ‘‘the land of steady habits.’’ For ‘‘there must be many things, in the character & manners of that people, illustrative of character in a high degree. . . . I wish more distinctly to understand the peculiarities of the Yankee character.’’ Lest he forget, Margaret Wilson of Norfolk nudged Grigsby again: ‘‘I shall be delighted to hear your opinion of the manners and customs of the place, and in what particular they excel those of your native State. this desire does not arise from a disposition to criticise; for I acknowledge their superiority in many things, but not in all. I have heard the ladies of New Haven remarked for their beauty, intelligence, and suavity of manners.’’ 33 If the mood took him, these observations might be set down in letters, fit to be published in the local newspaper. ‘‘I shall, now and then, send you something for insertion,’’ in the Norfolk newspaper, Grigsby told his sister in 1825. ‘‘The subject of New Haven is, by no means, exhausted, and, hereafter, I may send you a paper or two on the manners of the people, their moral and religious character &c.’’ Lucian Minor of Virginia traveled around New England in the early 1830s, and had his observations published first in the Fredericksburg Arena, and then revised in the Southern Literary Messenger as ‘‘Letters from New England.’’ 34 Manners were variously judged, often in reaction to fairly settled stereotypes. The cohesion of Northern culture was, for one thing, a matter of doubt. Some distinguished the New Englander from the New Yorker; some did not. The Pennsylvanian was intermediate, even approximate. At Newton, the younger Manly noted, Levering from Philadelphia was ‘‘classed as a Southerner’’ when Yankees picked on aliens.35 For all that, it was presumed that Northerners were avaricious, brusque, rapid, religious (and probably hypocritical), disciplined, diligent, self-improving, less courteous to women, less hospitable, uncharitable towards social inferiors, condescending towards outsiders, self-righteous, less adept at politics, and more prone to ideological enthusiasm. ‘‘I have not seen in any of the northern Ladies the genuine softness and delicacy of manners which I think our Southrons exhibit—but instead of it there is sometimes a squeamish and false delicacy which betrays the re33. D. L. Russell to HBG, 16 August 1825; Margaret Wilson to HBG, 6 October 1824, HBG Papers, VHS. 34. Lucian Minor, ‘‘Letters from New England,’’ SLM 1 (November 1834): 84–88; Lucian Minor, ‘‘Letters from New England,’’ SLM 1 (December 1834): 166–69; Lucian Minor, ‘‘Letters from New England,’’ SLM 1 (January 1835): 217–20; Lucian Minor, ‘‘Letters from New England,’’ SLM 1 (February 1835): 273–76; Lucian Minor, ‘‘Letters from New England,’’ SLM 1 (April 1835): 421–26. 35. BM Jr. to BM, 3 February 1845, BM Jr. Papers, FU.

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verse of what it affects,’’ wrote Samuel Mordecai to his sister in 1812.36 ‘‘You must allow for the difference of manners between north & South in judging of the apparent cordiality of an invitation to take a meal with a friend,’’ Basil Manly advised his son in 1845. ‘‘You must not expect from all the cordiality of a Southern invitation.’’ 37 Paul Hamilton Hayne wrote to his wife, Mary, in 1854 while he was in Boston, that ‘‘city of notions,’’ that ‘‘the people are very cold, haughty & reserved in their manners.’’ 38 ‘‘I suppose you have already heard of the womans’ rights convention a few weeks ago in Worcester,’’ Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick of North Carolina told his fiancée, Ellen Thompson. ‘‘I used to think all that was said about such things was mere talk. But there are a number of persons now in Cambridge who were at that the other day. The members and delegates are mostly of that peculiar class, called sometimes for distinction ‘old maids.’ These individuals abound more at the North than at the south. What is the reason I cannot tell.’’ 39 Those who found good words for the North did so by demonstrating the inaccuracy, great or little, of such prejudices. Lucian Minor in 1833 was pointedly generous. ‘‘It has been my good fortune to meet with some admirable female minds in New England,’’ he insisted. There was scant abolitionism about: ‘‘You have very little idea of the contempt in which Garrison, and his will-o’-the-wisp, the Liberator, are held here.’’ 40 As to hospitality, he thought New Englanders were equal to Southerners, perhaps even better, for ‘‘although their mode of using it is less amiable than ours, it is more rational, more salutary—better for the guest, better for the host, better for society.’’ It was good to value labor, to be ‘‘thrifty and industrious.’’ 41 True, their courtesies were less elaborate, less amiable, but this proceeded from worthy motives: ‘‘a dislike to outward displays of emotion; a hard-hearted sturdiness of soul, which content to feel kindly and deeply, and to act kindly too in things of solid import, forgets or disdains the petty blandishments of manner, as idle forms, often the offspring of deceit, and unworthy of a mind bent upon substantial good.’’ They were religious, but not hypocritical; theirs was ‘‘a quiet, Sabbathkeeping, morals-preserving, good-doing, and heaven-serving religion.’’ And 36. Samuel Mordecai to Rachel Mordecai, 1 March 1812, Mordecai Family Papers, SHC. 37. BM to BM Jr., 23 April 1845, Manly Family Papers, UA. 38. PHH to Mary Hayne, Tuesday, August 1854, PHH Mss, DU. 39. Benjamin S. Hedrick to Ellen Thompson, 22 October 1851, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, DU. 40. Minor, ‘‘New England’’ (November 1834): 87. On Minor, see Aubrey J. Rosser Jr., ‘‘Lucian Minor,’’ in W. Hamilton Bryson, Legal Education in Virginia, 1779–1979: A Biographical Approach (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982), 435–44; the article includes a bibliography of Minor’s writings. 41. Minor, ‘‘New England’’ (December 1834): 167, 168.

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it was untrue to accuse them of chicanery. They were honest folk; most of the belief in their knavery derived, not from real New Englanders, but the Yankee peddlers ‘‘who for many years have so swarmed over the South.’’ 42 The factory workers were not degraded, but ‘‘as moral as any class of the population.’’ And their common schools, their ‘‘Lyceums, Young Men’s Societies, Library Societies, or associations under some such name, for mental exercise and improvement,’’ were they not a good thing? 43 All this was self-consciously intended to diminish hostilities, upon the presumption that Southerners too little visited the North: ‘‘Our people ought to travel northward more often. It would be a good thing, if exploring parties were frequently sent hither, (as to a moral terra incognita,) to observe and report the particulars deserving of our imitation.’’ 44 But there is little evidence that there was a deficiency of such expeditions. Each year Southerners swarmed forth; each year the ruts of mistrust deepened. A letter from a Bible agent to a Presbyterian minister shows how deeply such prejudices ran. It was written from Oxford, Mississippi, in 1855, about an incident in South Carolina: Passing from Benton to Richland, (consider it from London to Paris) to avoid a 20 mile circuit, I left the stage, 5 miles from R., risking a conveyance—none to be had at the little store. ‘‘Go over to Parson Owens, you’ll find him a gentleman, & he’ll send you across.’’ Walked half a mile, through the ‘‘Parson’s’’ field. ‘‘Parson’’ at home. Introduced myself, & stated my mission, not referring to the want of a horse. That to come, in its place—after the usual thawing. To my statement, he responded coldly. Politics came on very soon. And the North caught it, for one hour I sought to mollify—oil on flame—the ‘‘chivalry’’ was a tongue of fire. I sought to make a diversion in behalf of religion—unfortunate— Northern coldness & deadness the particular point of view. Tried the fruit season—& Yankee pedlars had humbugged the neighborhood, the year before, with grafts & cuttings—a new & vivid manifestation. I gave up. Fortunately, dinner came to my relief. Happened then to mention, for the first time, that I was a Mississippian, born & bred. A change, like a shadow, passed over the phiz of high toned chivalry. After dinner, an apology. Presumed I was a Northerner, as all agents were from that quarter.45 42. Minor, ‘‘New England’’ (January 1835): 218, 219. 43. Minor, ‘‘New England’’ (February 1835): 273. 44. Minor, ‘‘New England’’ (April 1835): 425. 45. Thomas Railey Markham to Henry M. Smith, 17 October 1855, Henry M. Smith Papers, PHS.

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Implicated in such debates was the matter of mind. Did the intellectual exertions of the North seem greater, more energetic, more advanced than those of the South? Much later, the verdict of Appomattox seemed to settle the matter. Before 1861, the issue was murkier, at least for Southerners. Most Northerners, however, seem to have had little doubt of Southern inferiority, even those Northerners of moderate temperament who disliked the abolitionists. Henry Adams was famously to observe in long retrospect that his Harvard classmate Rooney Lee of Virginia ‘‘was simple beyond analysis,’’ and that ‘‘strictly, the Southerner had no mind.’’ In this, he was only retailing what most of his fellow Northerners had felt.46 In general and at first, the North tended to see the South as pastoral and gentlemanly. One can catch this tone in, for example, as late a work as Washington Irving’s Life of George Washington, first published in 1855. There Mount Vernon is described in this manner: ‘‘The mansion was beautifully situated on a swelling height, crowned with wood, and commanding a magnificent view up and down the Potomac. The grounds immediately about it were laid out somewhat in the English taste. The estate was apportioned into separate farms, devoted to different kinds of culture, each having its allotted laborers. Much, however, was still covered with wild woods, seamed with deep dells and runs of water, and indented with inlets; haunts of deer, and lurkingplaces of foxes.’’ 47 But Irving was a notorious Anglophile and himself inhabited a mansion with a sweeping view of a great river. Others could see the pastoral as ominous, as something that made people ignorant and unaware by forcing them into a ‘‘paradise of indolence,’’ especially if one paused to remember that man’s accomplishment came from the sweat of his brow after the expulsion from Eden.48 It was true that, in a Romantic age that often admired decay, to be thought a place humidly distinguished by ‘‘the mould and the rust’’ and an ‘‘air of remote antiquity’’ was not all to the bad.49 Yet a Romantic need not feel or even notice the thrill of such mustiness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, went to Charleston in 1826 in search of warm weather and health. He took rooms in a boarding house on East Bay. He knew almost no one, just a few Harvard connections: one introduced him to 46. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 57. 47. Washington Irving, The Life of George Washington, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1855), 1:311. 48. Alice B. Neal, ‘‘Marrying a Planter: A New Chapter of Romance and Reality,’’ Godey’s Lady’s Book 52 (April 1856): 327–28, quoted in Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 41. 49. Henry F. Harrington, ‘‘The Southerner’s Daughter,’’ Godey’s Lady’s Book 24 ( January– June 1842): 30–36, quoted in Grant, North over South, 41.

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the Charleston Library Society, where he sat and read; another was Samuel Gilman, once his Harvard tutor but then minister of the Unitarian Church. For the rest, Emerson seems to have browsed through the streets, was impressed by the good manners of both black and white, but made no connection with the city’s life. His journals, not unusually, have rapt reflections on God and himself, but bear little impress of the place. He felt himself at the ends of the earth. To his brother, he pleaded, ‘‘Edward Edward why dont you write. Why one wd. think I was in the same country with you & not as I am beyond the farthest islands mountains swamps in these offscourings of the world.’’ 50 Later his opinions hardened, though like others he was to find the South useful as a tool of self-criticism. So, in 1850, he thought that the Southerner ‘‘has personality, has temperament, has manners, persuasion, address & terror,’’ but ‘‘the cold Yankee has wealth, numbers, intellect, material power of all sorts, but not fire or firmness.’’ 51 He also dismissively believed that the South had no poets, libraries, or even men of note, once Archbishop Carroll was dead.52 So hostility was not without ambivalence. On the one hand, Southern incompetence might be viewed as a hindrance to national productivity, or (at best) a quaint nuisance. A Peter Parley school textbook, published in Boston in 1836, might strive to be amiable, but not consistently. ‘‘We have now reached Virginia, the oldest and largest state in the Union,’’ the children, perambulating in their imaginations, were told. ‘‘We shall not find as good roads, nor as good stages here, as in the Middle and Eastern States, nor shall we meet with so many handsome houses, nor shall we, at the distance of every few miles, come to a pleasant little village.’’ Slavery was ‘‘a bad system altogether, and all good people believe that it is wrong.’’ 53 This tone might occasion complacency. For what sensible Northerner could feel challenged by what the Albany Evening Journal was later to assert of Southerners, that they were ‘‘dwarfs by the side of the giants of the North’’? 54 Did one need to fear what Henry David Thoreau called ‘‘a moral fungus’’? 55 The rutted byways, the in50. William Henry Gilman and Alfred R. Ferguson, eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, 1826–1832 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1960), 57–78; Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 1:182–83. 51. A. W. Plumstead and William Henry Gilman, eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11, 1848–1851 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1975), 233. 52. Emerson to Lidian Emerson, 8 and 9 January 1843, in Rusk, Emerson Letters, 3:118. 53. The First Book of History: For Children and Youth: By the Author of Peter Parley’s Tales, 16th ed. (Boston: Charles J. Hendee, 1836), 67, 82. 54. Albany Evening Journal, 20 April 1849, quoted in Grant, North over South, 52. 55. Quoted in Howard Russell Floan, The South in Northern Eyes, 1831–1861 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 69. Thoreau was speaking specifically of Maryland.

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complete railroads, the dirty taverns, all the squalidness of the South might be blamed on slavery. John Greenleaf Whittier spoke in 1833 of ‘‘the halffinished mansion already falling into decay, the broken-down enclosures, the seed-grown garden, the slave hut open to the elements, the hillsides galled and naked, the fields below them run over with brier and fern,’’ and think that the ‘‘profitless fern and thistle have sprung up under the heel of slavery.’’ 56 But this etiolation could also be understood as arising from a different descent; Northerners were energetic Anglo-Saxons, Southerners from feebler stock, a mongrel people. Later, when it was more clear that an imperial South was less than supine, when the fungal dwarf bore the laurels of Mexico City on his brow, the images became darker. Then the North might be thought uncertain, divided, the South united, purposeful. ‘‘The South moves in phalanx upon all great occasions and leaves us to our brawls,’’ Harrison Gray Otis had observed during the Missouri Crisis in 1820, and this opinion of Southern political efficacy grew more common.57 ‘‘The Southerner always beats us in politics,’’ Emerson sighed when contemplating what Whittier called the South’s ‘‘union, persistent energy, and audacity.’’ 58 Theodore Parker put it starkly: ‘‘Southern Slavery is an institution which is in earnest. Northern Freedom is an institution that is not in earnest.’’ 59 This was a class stereotype. If the South was aristocratic, the North democratic, the common man might be bewitched and herded by aristocrats who, if not intelligent, had ancestral habits of command and violence, even charm, and probably vice. Indeed, sex and violence mattered a great deal, especially to the abolitionist imagination, which was much drawn to visions of seraglios, whips, the noose, and flesh torn by chains.60 So the South came to embody what the North feared, that the great experiment of a moral, progressive republic might go awry. That is, the North saw the South as the continuation of Europe by other means; hence, to defeat her was to complete the project of the American Revolution. Certainly, this was how Lincoln would come to explain matters over the dead of Gettysburg. Francis L. Hawks of Newbern, North Carolina, the Episcopal minister of Calvary Church in New York, a historian, and the founder of a New York Review, felt the force of these condescensions and explained them to David Swain in 1860. In Hawks’s experience, Northerners ‘‘thought that the people 56. Ibid., 27. 57. Harrison Gray Otis to James Prince, 1 April 1820, Harrison Gray Otis Papers, MassHS, quoted in Grant, North over South, 64. 58. Quoted in Floan, South in Northern Eyes, 53, 30. 59. Uncited quotation in Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947), 197. 60. On this, see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 73–79.

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of the South were a set of craven imbeciles’’ whose only purpose was to ‘‘cultivate the earth’’ for the enrichment of Northerners, who in return ‘‘looked upon us as inferiors, morally, physically & intellectually.’’ Southern children could only learn from Yankee tutors. An anecdote pointed the moral. Once, in company, it was asked where Hawks was educated. One person said Yale, another ‘‘somewhere else at the North.’’ Hawks volunteered the information that he had attended the University of North Carolina. ‘‘They coolly asked me how it was possible I could have acquired there such an education as they knew me to possess?’’ Some did not know that North Carolina even had a university, let alone one dating from the 1790s and possessed of ‘‘400 undergraduates with as good a set of professors and instructors as Yale could show.’’ 61 This was written on the eve of war, when nerves were raw. But in cooler times, in 1839, James E. Heath had had the same experience in New York. ‘‘Why Sir!—!—they think no more of us Virginians than if we had been born before the flood!’’ he exclaimed to Charles Campbell. ‘‘You know all about that though, and therefore I will save you the infliction of talking on the subject!’’ Michael Tuomey visited the North from Alabama and noticed the condescension with amused irony. ‘‘My visit to Boston was one not to be forgotten,’’ he told Moses Ashley Curtis in 1847. ‘‘I was constantly reminded of the privations of us poor fellows buried in the woods without a book or a man to turn to for sympathy or assistance.’’ 62 After the war, the exquisitely urbane Richard Taylor of Louisiana was to call on Charles Sumner and had impotently to listen to this disparagement: ‘‘A rebel, a slave-driver, and without the culture of Boston, ignorant, I was an admirable vessel into which he could pour the inexhaustible stream of his acquired eloquence.’’ 63 But there was evidence enough before 1861. A Southerner had only to look into the writings of Theodore Parker to find a sweeping, unmitigated indictment: ‘‘Whence come the men of superior education who occupy the pulpits, exercise the professions of law and medicine, or fill the chairs of the professors in the colleges of the Union? Almost all from the North, from the free States. . . . Whence come the distinguished authors of America? . . . All from the free States; north of Mason and Dixon’s line!’’ 64 61. Francis L. Hawks to David L. Swain, 3 January 1860, David L. Swain Papers, SHC; on Hawks, see Battle, UNC, 1789–1868, 501–2, and Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, eds., Cyclopedia of American Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856), 2:265–68. 62. Michael Tuomey to MAC, 3 April 1847, MAC Papers, SHC, reprinted in The Papers of Michael Tuomey, ed. Lewis S. Dean (Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 2001), 117. 63. James E. Heath to CC, 27 August 1839, CC Papers, WM; Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (1879; reprint, Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell Publishing, 1968), 245. 64. ‘‘A Letter on Slavery’’ (1848), in Theodore Parker, The Slave Power, ed. James K. Hosmer (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1916), 77.

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Traveling little in the South, never attending its colleges, seldom publishing in or reading its periodicals, why should Northerners be able to arrive at an estimate? Some Northerners were aware of this problem and regretted it. In 1861 Grigsby sent some of his publications to Cornelius Felton of Harvard, who in reply praised the Virginian’s ‘‘eloquent and instructive pages’’ and mused on his ignorance of the Southern mind after the generation of Jefferson. ‘‘I could not help regretting that our country has not a common center where from time to time the men of letters, and leading professional gentlemen may meet, and become personally acquainted with each other. Your books have taught me how little I know of the literary works of Virginia, and how much there is in them which I and all our northern men ought to know.’’ He had an apprehension that ‘‘the best translation of the Iliad is by a Virginian,’’ but the rest was mostly a blank, since Felton had ‘‘only incidental opportunities’’ for knowing about recent Southern writers.65 Not all Northerners were so ill-informed. Evert and George Duyckinck of New York, when they put together their Cyclopaedia of American Literature for Charles Scribner in 1856, made some effort to learn. Evert Duyckinck was an old friend and correspondent of William Gilmore Simms, whose advice he had sought. Simms had sent along names, some of which Duyckinck had used. Simms was mildly annoyed at the omissions, but not much: ‘‘I am sorry you could not find a place for several of our Southern men, whose names I gave you, and some others whom I took for granted you would remember.’’ 66 Out of about seven hundred entries on authors and institutions, Duyckinck had included about ninety Southern items, about an eighth of the whole. This was an under-representation and it was true that he found space for many Connecticut parsons of some obscurity, but not for Robert Beverley, John Taylor, or Edmund Ruffin. But, by the standards of twentieth-century guides to American literature, an eighth was not ungenerous, and that portion was not condescending, mostly because Duyckinck had farmed out the writing to associates of Simms, like David James McCord. So Southerners observed the North more than they were observed, and they were very unsure about the matter of standing. There was a school of opinion that believed the South was too dependent upon the North. This was originally an economic opinion, one that J. D. B. De Bow turned into a life’s work. He estimated in 1851 that the South exported $80 million annually to the North in ordinary commercial transactions. He hazarded: ‘‘How much more does the North annually receive from us in support of her schools and col65. Cornelius C. Felton to HBG, 17 April 1861, HBG Papers, VHS. 66. WGS to Evert Duyckinck, 18 April 1856, in Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952– 82), 3:426.

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leges, her editors and authors—her Saratogas and her Newports? . . . And this, too, without reciprocity; for who of the North reads a Southern book, or attends a Southern college, or visits a Southern watering place, or brings the accumulated earnings of years to invest in Southern improvements?’’ 67 Thus political economy and the life of the mind melded, and this had been so even before the growth of abolitionism made such interdependence seem ominous. In the 1820s, Robert Young Hayne worried about this, with a passion. It drove him and others to found the Southern Review, from motives candidly explained to potential subscribers. ‘‘Among all the evils of our actual condition, there is none which has made a more forcible impression on my mind than the state of mental dependance on our brethren of the East and North, in which we have so long contentedly remained,’’ he wrote in 1827. Once Southern youth went to England and came back ‘‘with contempt for every thing American.’’ That period was over, but one dependence had been exchanged for another; New England had replaced Old England. ‘‘The Southern States have been long regarded abroad, and have submitted to be so regarded, as incapable of any great literary effort. We have been content like children to receive such mental food, as our Eastern friends thought proper to bestow upon us.’’ Was it safe to allow ‘‘the rising generation’’ to have its tone set by outsiders? But what to do? Grandees, ‘‘the wisest and best men in our country,’’ had been consulted and agreed upon a periodical ‘‘after the plan of the North American and Philadelphia Quarterly Review,’’ the kind of work which ‘‘has of late years exerted a wonderful control over public opinion both in Europe and America,’’ by educating the elite which, in turn, gave ‘‘the tone to the sentiments and opinions of the people.’’ 68 This vision was expansive. Though they aimed at arousing and defining Southern intellectual energies as a counterpoise to Northern views, the founders of the Southern Review did not intend a closed world. Knowledge of the outside world, ‘‘of the improvements of the age,’’ would be diffused in the South. Southern intellect would arise from its slumber, think, write, be read, but not only in the South. The place would come to define itself, but also would persuade others by a journal which might occasion ‘‘the diffusion of knowledge, the discussion of doctrines, and the investigation of truth,’’ and so extend ‘‘the boundaries of human knowledge’’ and review ‘‘the opinions of the days as in their perpetual fluctuations they set on the characters and conduct of society.’’ 69 Just as the Edinburgh Review was read in London, Boston, 67. J. D. B. De Bow, ‘‘The Approaching Rail-Road Convention at New-Orleans,’’ DBR 11 (November 1851): 544. 68. Robert Young Hayne to Warren Davis, 25 September 1827, Robert Y. Hayne Papers, SCL. 69. ‘‘Prospectus of the Southern Review’’ (24 September 1827), reprinted in Linda Rhea, Hugh

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and Charleston, so the Southern Review would be read in Charleston, Boston, and London. This was urgent. Intellectual life mattered because it molded public opinion, which molded the democracy, who controlled much of life. Knowledge was power, as Thomas Cooper passionately insisted to the trustees of the South Carolina College in 1831. ‘‘I have no hesitation in saying that the education received in this college is not exceeded in the U. States, and I have seen enough of applicants from other Colleges to be satisfied that it is far better than in many others.’’ But South Carolina was small; it needed to guard and build upon this educational advantage: ‘‘Its present superiority in point of reputation and political standing, is owing exclusively to the talents of its leading men, and a more general diffusion of information, than is found among its neighbours.’’ But the advantage was confined to too few: ‘‘The mass of population in South Carolina does not possess half the knowledge and information that they might & ought to possess. Knowledge they say is power: to a nation it is wealth; and to individuals it is virtue.’’ 70 It was easy to suspect that, in the ‘‘perpetual fluctuations’’ of modern society, the South might lose ground. Any culture could fear that, even those which bestrode the world. Victorian Britain was riddled with doubt. As we have seen, the elder Basil Manly did not agree with Cooper as to the equality of South Carolina College with the likes of Harvard but spoke of ‘‘the inferiority of our [educational] Institutions.’’ Others, too, looked at solid and permanent things like the North American Review, up in Boston, and fretted when Southern periodicals tottered, as they regularly did. In 1857, the Southern Quarterly Review died; Samuel Tyler of Maryland lamented to James Henley Thornwell, its last editor, that the ‘‘failure of the S.Q. Review is a disgrace to the Southern states. It shows that the literary taste of the South needs nothing daintier than the vulgar news-paper. We of the South must, to Europe, continue to appear inferior to the North in intellectual cultivation.’’ In 1839, James Heath had complained, not only of neglect but of inadequacy: ‘‘I wish we had energy, capital and enterprise enough in the metropolis of the Old Dominion and in the Old Dominion herself to creep out of the vassalage that we are placed in, to New-York literature.’’ 71 In truth, this was a culture that worried much about issues of inferiority and superiority, of independence and selfrespect; republicanism, race, gender, religion, all their discourses spoke the Swinton Legaré: A Charleston Intellectual (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 236–38. 70. TC to Trustees of South Carolina College, 30 November 1831, TC Papers, SCL. 71. BM to BM Jr., 10 March 1845, Manly Family Papers, UA; Samuel Tyler to JHT, 13 July 1857, JHT Papers, SCL; James E. Heath to CC, 27 August 1839, CC Papers, WM.

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language of hierarchy. Culture meant rank; so it was natural to ponder the relative strengths of North and South. Not all the estimates were self-abasing, or vainglorious. Robert Hayne, as one might expect, was skeptical of Northern claims. He went to a Harvard commencement in 1823 and thereafter told Thomas Grimké that ‘‘[t]he performances were [not] equal to those I have witnessed at Columbia. Indeed it has struck me forcibly that the New England people are eminently deficient in eloquence—they either do not value or do not understand it—I think as a people they seem to want the ener of genius—tho they possess a great deal of learning & much general information.’’ Their religion, too, was unsympathetic.72 In this spirit, it was customary to consider the South as superior in the political arts and, concomitantly, in political thought. Conservative theologians did not think much of Northerners who had strayed into liberalism, especially on the score of scholarship. And, in general, it was thought that Northern classical scholarship was inferior. George Frederick Holmes, at least, praised Hugh Legaré as a classicist above Edward Everett of Boston, sufficiently so to annoy Daniel Whitaker, expatriate New Englander and editor of the Southern Quarterly Review.73 Edgar Allan Poe liked to poke fun at Northern pretensions, at least when he was writing anonymously for the Southern Literary Messenger. Of James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics, he wrote: ‘‘It is a fashion among Mr. Lowell’s set to affect a belief that there is no such thing as Southern Literature. Northerners—people who have really nothing to speak of as men of letters,—are cited by the dozen and lauded by this candid critic without stint, while Legaré, Simms, Longstreet, and others of equal note are passed by in contemptuous silence. Mr. L. cannot carry his frail honesty of opinion even so far South as New York. All whom he praises are Bostonians. Other writers are barbarians and satirized accordingly—if mentioned at all.’’ 74 This was certainly the view of William Alexander Caruthers, who lived for a while in the North and wrote a novel, The Kentuckian in NewYork: ‘‘There is evidently a current in American Literature, the fountain-head of which lies north of the Potomac, and in which a southern is compelled to navigate up the stream if he jumps in too far south.’’ 75 72. Robert Young Hayne to Thomas S. Grimké, 15 September 1823, Norcross Collection, MassHS. 73. GFH, ‘‘Writings of the Hon. Hugh S. Legaré,’’ SQR 9 (April 1846): 338; Daniel K. Whitaker, ‘‘Critical Notices—Inauguration of the Hon. Edward Everett,’’ SQR 10 ( July 1846): 246–47. 74. ‘‘A Fable for Critics’’ (1849), in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 819–20. 75. William Alexander Caruthers, The Kentuckian in New-York, or the Adventures of Three Southerns. By a Virginian (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 2:218–19, quoted in Curtis Carroll Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers: A Life of the Virginia Novelist Dr. William A. Caruthers (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1953), 100.

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In the early 1830s, Edward W. Johnston of Virginia, who had been for some time librarian of South Carolina College and a contributor to the Southern Review, went north to make some money, to further his career, and for a change.76 He found the experience discouraging, as he explained to Langdon Cheves Jr.: ‘‘In a short time after I arrived here, I satisfied myself that, for any such literature, as I was willing to make myself a part of—any thing like good taste and sound knowledge—there was no such encouragement here, as a man might safely interpose between himself and starvation.’’ He had found work as a journalist, writing ‘‘daily leading article on Politics or the like’’ and had been approached by ‘‘a blockhead hopeless and unmanageable’’ to edit a literary miscellany. He had fallen into a respectable enough set, including William Cullen Bryant, James K. Paulding, Gulian C. Verplanck (at whose house one met ‘‘Artists and Amateurs’’), and Fitz-Greene Halleck. But these, in comparison to the intellectuals of Columbia, seemed like lightweights. There was ‘‘nobody with Dr. Cooper’s Atlantean shoulders, fit to prop a whole world of volumes; nor none with Nott’s nice fingers, that touch every thing, and know how to touch it so choicely and deftly; nor Lieber’s sturdy German grasp, that wields so much, by dint of taking every thing by its handle; nor Preston’s noble and elegant capacity that possesses itself, in a glance, of the better parts of all knowledge.’’ 77 So, some were sure that the South was inferior, some that it was superior, some made distinctions within genres, 76. He was the son of Peter Johnston, who had fought under ‘‘Light Horse’’ Harry Lee in the Revolutionary War and later became a judge and resident of Abingdon, Virginia. The family was a prominent one: Edward’s brother was Joseph Eggleston Johnston, the Confederate general, his nephew John Warfield Johnston was later a U.S. senator, and William Campbell Preston was his cousin. It is unclear where Edward Johnston was educated, but by the late 1820s he was in South Carolina and acting as an agent for the Southern Review; by 1833, he was in Columbia, where he became secretary of the board of trustees (in addition to being librarian) of South Carolina College, as well as editor of the Columbia Telescope, a pro-Nullification newspaper. By 1836, he had moved to New York, then quickly advanced to political journalism in Washington, where he became the literary editor of the National Intelligencer and often wrote under the pseudonym of ‘‘Il Segretario’’; later he moved to St. Louis. On the father, see HBG, The History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, with Some Account of the Eminent Virginians of That Era Who Were Members of the Body (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1891), 2:327. On the son, see Edward W. Johnston to Richard K. Crallé, 7 April 1833, Richard K. Crallé Papers, CU; John Warfield Johnston to Louisa S. Johnston, 31 October 1836, John Warfield Johnston Papers, DU; Edward W. Johnston to WCP, 26 May 1841, Preston Family Papers, VHS; Robert Young Hayne to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 4 August 1829, Littleton Waller Tazewell Papers, DU; Edward W. Johnston to Langdon Cheves Jr., 16 February 1836, Langdon Cheves Papers, SCHS; John Warfield Johnston, ‘‘Autobiography,’’ John Warfield Johnston Papers, DU; entry for 14 January 1859, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina, vol. 1, South Carolina College (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 120–21. 77. Edward W. Johnston to Langdon Cheves Jr., 16 February 1836, Langdon Cheves Papers, SCHS.

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others between institutions. Some were driven by a political vision, others were blithely indifferent to politics and cared only for God or verse forms. In all this, it would be easy to exaggerate dissidence, even late in the antebellum years when tensions grew marked. Incomprehension was the norm, but a few set their boats against the current. Some relationships survived the strains; others even flourished. Even on slavery, even in 1861, words of friendship and encouragement could cross the Potomac.78 In that year, James Henley Thornwell received two letters from the state of New York. The first praised an essay of Thornwell’s and added: ‘‘I have just read carefully Dr. Seabury’s justification of American Slavery with much satisfaction. It is learned & able & must relieve many minds from their difficulties respecting the morality of slavery.’’ The second read: ‘‘I belong to that class (more numerous here than you may suppose) who know no North—no South but feel a common sympathy and interest in the welfare of all. . . . [So] it was with a feeling of indignation that I saw an article of yours from the Presbyterian Review upon the condition of the country assailed in a most disingenuous manner and yet with a pompous parade of truth and candour.’’ 79 These were strangers who expressed sympathy. Others were schooled by friendship or acquaintance. George Ticknor, as has been noted, was friendly to many Southerners; Hugh Legaré died at his home and in his arms in Boston. George Bancroft corresponded with many Southern historians and much admired Thornwell, to whom in 1856 he gave a dinner in New York, at which he inscribed German editions of Aristotle’s works with a flourishing Latin tribute.80 Robert C. Winthrop, the senator from Massachusetts, was a distant cousin of the painter Charles Fraser; the latter once presented him with a book that once belonged to his ancestor John Winthrop, printed in 1537 and marked with his inscription in 1631.81 Winthrop was also a correspondent of 78. Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), indeed, argues that the roots of the proslavery argument were Northern and Federalist. While I have expressed doubts about the sweep of this argument, it is certainly true that many Northerners were sympathetic to slavery or, at least, opposed to interfering with it; see my review of Tise in the Alabama Review 42 (April 1989): 154–57. 79. Seth Bliss to JHT, 9 February 1861; J. B. Smith, M.D., to JHT, 5 March 1861, JHT Papers, SCL. 80. W. S. Patterson to South Caroliniana Library, 4 November 1948, JHT Papers, SCL. The edition of the Rhetoric had, on its flyleaf, ‘‘To James H. Thornwell, with best regard of his friend, George Bancroft.’’ The second, the Organon, had, ‘‘Viro reverendo, eruditissimo, doctissimo, J. H. Thornwell, magismac [?] observantiae pignus leve. G. Bancroft. Neo. El. Mai, 1856.’’ 81. Fraser’s sister had married a Winthrop. Fraser himself was a third-generation South Carolinian, who (despite being the fourteenth child of Alexander and Mary Grimké Fraser) inherited an income from his father’s having been a merchant and plantation owner. Fraser’s own life was consistently urban, though, like many urban men, he liked to portray the country-

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Hugh Blair Grigsby, whose works he placed in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and was a very close friend of John Pendleton Kennedy. In the summer of 1861, Winthrop, the Southern sympathizer, had James Louis Petigru, the Unionist, elected an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in a pointed gesture from the middle ground. To this gesture, Petigru responded in kind: ‘‘How willingly I would make any sacrifice that might avert from our common country the consequences of that miserable discord that now prevails between communities that ought to be for ever united. I say miserable for such we may certainly deem a controversy odious to the best men on either side.’’ 82 On that same middle ground, in and from Baltimore, Kennedy mingled with ‘‘the best men’’ and some women from all sections, whose comings and goings he meticulously noted in his diaries. But animosity and friendship were impeded and intensified by the remoteness and complexity of the American scene. This was something that William Campbell Preston understood. To his old friend Francis Lieber, then removed to New York, he remarked from Charlottesville in 1859 upon the evil ‘‘lack of a common center of thought’’ in the Union. In ancient Greece, Athens by her supremacy had become ‘‘a concentrating and radiating point, and thus conferred a sort of unity and individuality upon the idiosyncrasy of the various states.’’ But nothing comparable existed in the United States of the 1850s: ‘‘Washington is in no sense metropolitan, nor is New York except in respect to commerce. The thought . . . of that great amorphous ag[g]regation of people and effort is hardly perceived here in Virginia.’’ Someone attentive to the press might ‘‘learn vaguely that Dr. Lieber has been delivering a course of lectures upon the history of commerce’’ in New York and, eventually, might have access to ‘‘the weak form of a book,’’ but in the meantime would be ‘‘debarred from all knowledge.’’ 83 As the bitter history that created a civil war was to show, this fumbling ignorance could occasion hostility as often as indifference. Silence could be intimidating, when there was no center and no hope of any portion achieving intellectual dominance, but only fragments that postured, groped, and wondered. side and to paint the country estates of his friends and relatives. Fraser himself never went abroad and, except to visit his relatives in New England, did not often stir beyond Charleston, whose college he attended as a youth. As a young man, he practiced as a lawyer but gave up the bar in 1818 to become a professional artist, which earned him about $1,000 a year to supplement his income. See Martha R. Severens and Charles L. Wyrick Jr., eds., Charles Fraser of Charleston: Essays on the Man, His Art and His Times (Charleston, S.C.: Carolina Art Association, 1983). 82. Robert C. Winthrop to HBG, 29 May 1857, HBG Papers, VHS; James Louis Petigru to Robert C. Winthrop, 25 July 1861, Winthrop Papers, MassHS. 83. WCP to FL, 6 March 1859, FL Papers, SCL.

Chapter Two

Strolling Foreigners

The presence of ‘‘aliens’’ in the South took many forms; visitors, settlers, sojourners—the temporary, the permanent, and the uncommitted. A sampling only can be hazarded here, but the instances of William Makepeace Thackeray, Moses Ashley Curtis, Thomas Smyth, and Francis Lieber will provide a glimpse into how the migration often worked. The South had its centrifugal forces, which touched its black population most powerfully: for Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, or Harriet Jacobs, this was a place to leave. But, for whites elsewhere, the South appeared as a prosperous place, among the world’s most prosperous places, where there were opportunities, jobs, money, and futures to be made. Often noticed have been those who came briefly, went home, and wrote their books. These included friendly Northerners like James K. Paulding, ambivalent ones like Frederick Law Olmsted, hostile ones like Harriet Beecher Stowe. And then there were the foreign commentators: Charles Lyell, Alexis de Tocqueville, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Basil Hall, Harriet Martineau, Fredrika Bremer, and their ilk.1 The early nineteenth century liked to travel, liked to write books about it, liked to have opinions about the alien. The South was on the circuit, though peripherally, being not so remote as to offer the shock of the new, nor so familiar as to provide the shock of recognition. Such foreign opinions rebounded back to the South, which took them with varying degrees of indignation, curiosity, and enthusiasm, depending on the Title from BM to James L. Reynolds, 17 July 1838, Manly Family Papers, UA: ‘‘I have a great dread of these strolling Foreigners.’’ 1. A useful guide is Thomas D. Clark, Travels in the Old South: A Bibliography, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956–59).

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author and the reader. Mary Chesnut was later to note that, for example, ‘‘All Britons come here to make a book armed with three things, ‘pen, paper, and prejudices.’ ’’ 2 A character in Susan Petigru King’s novel Lily (1855) observes, with a more sweeping blow: ‘‘Strangers with prejudices come with their opinions, and, for the most part, leave us with these same opinions, just as we go to listen to political views given by our opponents, without the least intention of shaking their original faith. We are curious to hear, they are curious to see; but if we applaud the eloquence of the speaker, and appear temporarily impressed, it is only for the moment. We change when interest or when personal conviction demands it, not sooner.’’ 3 Americans, not just Southerners, were notoriously sensitive about alien opinion. Table manners, the habits of innkeepers, the brutality of the roads, the quality of music at balls, the brown slime of tobacco juice, the standard of legislative oratory, the perils of democracy, such things were the standard topics of interest to foreigners perambulating in both Ohio and Alabama, and the standard occasion for local resentment. But slavery was, of course, the great distinguishing feature, a linchpin of analysis. Yet slavery, Southerners were persuaded, could only be understood by those who stayed more than a few months, certainly more than Mrs. Stowe’s few days in northern Kentucky. The same character in King’s Lily lays it down as a maxim that abolitionists should be obliged to stay for a year before they could earn their opinions.4 There was, especially, a steady supply of British writers who traveled through the South: Frederick Marryat, Basil Hall, Frances Trollope, Philip Henry Gosse, Frances Wright, among many others. Often this movement was productive of little but impatient chapters in travel books that paid more attention to New York, Boston, and Niagara. The trade routes did not automatically carry a writer southward. Invitations to visit the United States often came from publishers, who were in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, places to which the ships went with more regularity than to Southern ports. A visitor’s first contacts seldom encouraged a Southern venture. From New York in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote of his plans to go to Washington, Virginia, on to Charleston, perhaps striking westward from Columbia. But in Washington in March, after counsel, he had changed his mind: ‘‘I have altered my route, and don’t mean to go to Charleston. The country, all the way from here, is nothing but a dismal swamp; there is a bad night of sea-coasting in the 2. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 77. 3. Susan Petigru King, Gerald Gray’s Wife and Lily: A Novel, introduction by Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 24. 4. Ibid.

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journey; the equinoctial gales are blowing hard; and Clay (a most charming fellow, by the bye), whom I have consulted, strongly dissuades me. The weather is intensely hot here; the spring fever is coming on; and there is very little to see, after all.’’ No doubt, Henry Clay was ill-disposed to send anyone into the land of Calhoun. But slavery was a great barrier, especially for Dickens: ‘‘When we reach Baltimore, we are in the regions of slavery. It exists there, in its least shocking and most mitigated form; but there it is. They whisper, here [in New York] (they dare only whisper, you know, and that below their breaths), that in that place, and all through the South, there is a dull gloomy cloud on which the very word seems written.’’ 5 But visits by foreigners could produce more permanent contacts and usually brought into Southern culture a fund of knowledge, allusion, and gossip. The geologist Charles Lyell, for example, came often enough to become a familiar figure among Southern scientists. Lewis R. Gibbes wrote of him in 1846 that ‘‘Lyell came along at Christmas, as usual in such a ‘dreadful hurry,’ that he had not time to look at what he came to see.’’ 6 Michael Tuomey spoke of the geologist with equal fondness, ‘‘Mr. Lyell spent a day here on his way to Phil[adelphia]. . . . I never saw any one so much absorbed in one subject. He seems to think of nothing else.’’ 7 Among his other contacts, Lyell spent ten days on the Hopeton Plantation of James Hamilton Couper, where he examined fossils; this, in turn, led to a correspondence.8 Among the British, it was Thackeray who became most intimate with the South. He came on two tours, the first in 1853 when he lectured on the ‘‘English Humourists,’’ the second in 1856 when he talked about the ‘‘Four Georges,’’ that is, the four British kings of that name. Thackeray came to acquire a fondness for the place. At various times, in various places, he was squired around and handed on from literary luminary to wealthy notable, from John Pendleton Kennedy in Baltimore, to John R. Thompson and Robert C. Stanard in Richmond, to Mitchell King in Charleston, to Andrew Low in Savannah, to Josiah Nott and Octavia Le Vert in Mobile, to Pierre 5. Charles Dickens to John Forster, 24 February, 13 March 1842, in Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, eds., The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 3, 1842–1843 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 88, 126, 90. 6. Lewis R. Gibbes to Augustus Addison Gould, 23 April 1846, Augustus Addison Gould Papers, HU. There was a correspondence between Lyell and Richard Henry Wilde: see Charles Lyell to Richard Henry Wilde, 19 April, n.d. (1840s), Autograph File, HU. 7. On Lyell’s travels, see Daniel D. Arden, ‘‘Charles Lyell’s Observations on Southeastern Geology,’’ in The Geological Sciences in the Antebellum South, ed. Francis X. Corgan (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 130–41. 8. Not all Southerners liked Lyell, however; see the disapproving review by C. A. Woodruff of Tuskegee: ‘‘Lyell’s Second Visit to the United States,’’ SQR n.s. 1 ( July 1850): 406–26.

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Soulé and Judah P. Benjamin in New Orleans.9 In Baltimore, Kennedy took him to his club (Thackeray liked clubs), introduced him to Whig magnates in Washington, and perhaps took him on an excursion into northern Virginia, which provided him with material for The Virginians, a chapter of which was to be written with the aid of notes furnished by Kennedy when both were in Paris in 1858.10 In Richmond in 1853, Thackeray was a particular hit, his discourse before the Richmond Athenaeum later inducing fond memories of his ‘‘charming manner and musical voice,’’ a geniality that altered previously critical opinion of the novelist’s cynicism.11 Asher Clarkson in the Southern Literary Messenger was insistent that personal acquaintance transformed one’s understanding of the novels: ‘‘When we first read ‘Vanity Fair’ and the ‘Yellowplush Papers’ we too were inclined to look upon him in the uncharitable light in which most of critics have viewed him; but when we came to read his other works, and hear him lecture—to see that noble, benevolent countenance, instinct with genius, beaming with feelings of kindliness and love; and of a character so inexpressibly sad and gentle; we could no longer blind ourselves to the great philosopher and philanthropist of the nineteenth century.’’ 12 Thackeray particularly came to know John R. Thompson, then the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, who arranged the Richmond appearance of 1853. Thackeray was to give Thompson a rocking chair, which became an object of banter between them, as well as permission to be the first to publish the satirical poem, ‘‘The Sorrows of Werther.’’ 13 Thackeray also had an interview with John Esten Cooke, which was converted into a memoir in 1879; this reiterates how much Thackeray’s personality transformed his reputation as a cold cynic.14 When Thompson visited Britain in 1854, he stayed with Thackeray in Onslow Square and, according to an effusive friend, the two had ‘‘boyish rambles together from Highgate to Hounsditch; jolly nights at ‘Evans,’ in Covent Garden (‘The Cave of Harmony’ of ‘The Newcomes’), and more than one cosey dinner at ‘The Ship’ at Greenwich, or ‘The 9. James Grant Wilson, Thackeray in the United States, 1852–3, 1855–6: Including a Record of a Variety of Thackerayana, 2 vols. (1904; reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1970), 1:128–31, 252–53, 254–55, 273–304. 10. Entry for 9 January 1856, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; Wilson, Thackeray in the United States, 1:347–48; Charles H. Bohner, John Pendleton Kennedy: Gentleman from Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 208–9, 218–20. 11. ‘‘Thackeray’s English Humorists,’’ SLM 19 (July 1853): 437. 12. Asher Clarkson, ‘‘W. M. Thackeray,’’ SLM 20 (July 1854): 385. 13. Gordon Norton Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 217. 14. John Esten Cooke, ‘‘An Hour with Thackeray,’’ Appleton’s Journal 22 (1879): 249–54, reprinted in Thackeray: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Philip Collins (London: Macmillan, 1983), 2:256–64.

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Star and Garter’ at Richmond-on-the-Hill.’’ 15 What is more certain is that, when Thompson was in London during the Civil War, after the novelist’s death, Thackeray’s daughters escorted him on a visit to Thomas Carlyle in Cheyne Row.16 In Charleston in 1853, the lectures in Hibernian Hall were a marked success. Thackeray struck up a friendship with Louis Agassiz, the Swiss and Harvard naturalist, who spent much time in the city. During Thackeray’s second visit, he was taken to the Conversation Club by Mitchell King, with whom he also dined (once when De Bow was present), and on one of these occasions King was treated to a ‘‘diatribe’’ against Queen Victoria.17 In the City Hall, Thackeray was duly shown its notabilities by the Mayor, who pointed to a bust of Christopher Gadsden with the observation that ‘‘no man did more than he to separate us from the Mother Country.’’ Thackeray smiled ‘‘and shook his head at it with the words, half whispered, ‘You rascal!’ ’’ 18 He also had two passages of arms with Susan Petigru King, one in 1853, the other in 1856. The first is flattering to the woman and is a story told by a man, the second hostile and told by a woman. Thackeray had heard of Sue King’s wit, for it was celebrated and scandalous and he wished to test it.19 He asked at a reception to be introduced to her. ‘‘Mr. Thackeray,’’ she said, ‘‘I am much pleased to know that the distinguished guest of the evening should have sought an introduction to me.’’ ‘‘Yes, Mrs. K.,’’ Thackeray replied, ‘‘I was very anxious to meet you because I had heard that you were the gayest woman in the South.’’ To this, she flung back, ‘‘Oh! Mr. Thackeray, you cannot believe everything you hear. Do you know, I heard that you were a gentleman!’’ It is said that Thackeray was greatly pleased at this, repeated it often, ‘‘remarking that it was the cleverest retort ever made to him.’’ 20 The second anecdote is darker. 15. Colonel W. Gordon McCabe, ‘‘Oration on John R. Thompson’’ (undated but postbellum newspaper clipping), JRT Papers, VHS. 16. Entry for 4 October 1864, JRT 1864 Diary, JRT Papers, UVA (this is a typescript, the original being in the Bryan Family Papers, UVA); it is Wilson, Thackeray in the United States, 1:128, which says not only that they had ‘‘an enduring friendship,’’ but that Thackeray gave Thompson a manuscript of the ‘‘Sorrows of Werther,’’ which first appeared in the SLM. 17. Entries for 29 January, 30 January, 5 February, 10 February 1856, MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC. 18. William James Rivers, ‘‘Anecdotes About Our Literary Men,’’ 11 (typed copy of original in hands of Thomas Moore Craig), William James Rivers Papers, SCL. 19. She was the daughter of James Louis Petigru, another wit. She had attended Madame Talvande’s school in Charleston, then another in Philadelphia. At nineteen, she married Henry C. King, another lawyer, who had been educated partly in Germany. Her husband was killed in the Civil War; in 1870, she remarried, but to a Radical Republican, a social experiment that seems not to have gone well. See King, Gerald Gray’s Wife and Lily, vii–xi. 20. Wilson, Thackeray in the United States, 1:137, where the source of this story is unattributed. But it is told, in a slightly different version, in the diary of Ella Clanton Thomas, in

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They are at a dinner party, Sue King is being an impertinent nuisance, and Thackeray is annoyed. ‘‘At last when something was said about the tribulations of authors, the lady leaned across the table, saying in a loud voice, ‘You and I, Mr. Thackeray, being in the same boat, can understand, can we not?’ A dead silence fell, a thunder-cloud descended upon the face of Mr. Thackeray, and the pleasure of the entertainment was at an end.’’ 21 The latter story was told by Sally Baxter Hampton, who did not like Sue King, but with whom Thackeray was much in love. They had met in New York in 1852, when she was nineteen and single, and he was middle-aged and lonely, his wife long mad and shut away. He became a habitué of the Baxter brownstone on Second Avenue, a besotted man who spoke and wrote of her so often, so widely, that on his return to Europe and climbing a Swiss mountain, an American voice called out to him, ‘‘Wanting to know how Miss Baxter did?’’ Later, he transformed her into Ethel Newcome, the heroine of The Newcomes. With this Daisy Miller, he corresponded from England. By the time of his return in 1855, she was engaged to Frank Hampton of South Carolina. When he reached Charleston in 1856, she was married. By 1862, she was dead of tuberculosis. In that year in London, Henry Adams was to meet the novelist, then half-blind and confused, and they spoke of her death. Thackeray was angry that her parents had been refused permission to pass through the lines to attend her deathbed; he blamed Lincoln ‘‘and his hirelings’’ for their habitual ‘‘coarse cruelty.’’ His ‘‘voice trembled and his eyes filled with tears.’’ 22 But he had not needed this love to train a pro-Confederate instinct; other emotions would probably have served. As a matter of principle, Thackeray leaned towards generosity and, though a great admirer of Dickens, he had not approved of the American Notes, which he thought showed a want of courtesy towards Dickens’s American hosts and an ignorant temerity in hazarding a book on a culture that Dickens barely knew. Thackeray preferred to pocket an entry for 18 January 1856: ‘‘By the way speaking of Mrs. Hull reminds me of a repartee given by Mrs. King of Charleston, which little Bob Allen told to me. When Thackeray was visiting Charleston where he was feted a good deal, he remarked in the presence of a crowd to Mrs. King—‘I understand Mrs. King that you are a fast lady’—Everyone present endeavoured to suppress a smile while she with her usual vivacity instantly replied, ‘Ah indeed! It appears we have both been under an erroneous impression. I have always understood that Mr. Thackeray was a gentleman.’’’ Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 142–43. Since Thackeray did not reach Charleston, on his second visit, until after this entry, this dates the exchange to his 1853 visit. 21. Lucy W. Baxter, ed., Thackeray’s Letters to an American Family (New York: Century, 1904), 14. It is repeated in Ann Monsarrat, An Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man, 1811–1863 (London: Cassell, 1980), 351. 22. Monsarrat, Uneasy Victorian, 315; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 131.

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his lecture fees, thank his audiences, and not add insult to benefit by dashing off a quick travel book. He was studiedly polite about what he saw, only gently satirical, as when a hostess in a Richmond mansion discoursed to him on republican simplicity and he ‘‘threw himself back in his chair, gazed at the beautiful artistic frescoes on the ceiling, worthy of a royal palace, and with arms extended exclaimed, ‘Oh! Mrs. Stanard, I do admire this republican simplicity.’ ’’ He tried to take no sides in American sectional disputes. But not to attack the South was, willy-nilly, to defend it. And, in truth, he saw little in slavery to trouble him. From Washington, he wrote to his mother in 1852: ‘‘They are not my men & brethren, these strange people with retreating foreheads, with great obtruding lips & jaws: with capacities for thought, pleasure, endurance quite different to mine. They are not suffering as you are impassioning yourself for their wrongs as you read Mrs. Stowe, they are grinning & joking in the sun; roaring with laughter as they stand about the streets in squads; very civil, kind & gentle. . . . Sambo is not my man & my brother; the very aspect of his face is grotesque & inferior.’’ In theory, he denied the morality of slavery ‘‘at the same time of course,’’ as did Carlyle and Tennyson, but not in extenso. Moreover, Thackeray felt that Southerners had a point when they indicated the inhumanities of English society: ‘‘God help us we are no better than our brethren.’’ Indeed, he composed a burlesque upon the Duchess of Sutherland’s letter to the slaveholding women of the South, a ‘‘Womanifesto Against Slavery’’ and drew a little caricature of Simon Legree whipping Uncle Tom, with Little Eva looking on.23 But his experiences in the South had been mostly urban; only once did he go to a ‘‘negro-plantation village,’’ where he saw only the women and children, the men being absent in the fields. They looked cheerful enough, to him.24 It made sense that he would observe, ‘‘I have just come back from the South and Slavery, which is not near so horrible in reality as in Mrs. Stowe’s book.’’ The place was warm, the Médoc and bouillabaisse in New Orleans were excellent, and there were agreeable and well-informed people. At the Café de Paris he had drunk claret uproariously with William Henry Trescot, who seemed a capital fellow. Why not nominate Edwin DeLeon for membership in the Garrick Club? Why not share in the companionship of the great and the good? 25 23. Monsarrat, Uneasy Victorian, 309; Ray, Age of Wisdom, 216–17; Wilson, Thackeray in the United States, 1:255, 183, 2:144. 24. ‘‘A Mississippi Bubble,’’ in William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.: Roundabout Papers, Etc. (London: Thomas Nelson, 1901), 141. 25. Thackeray to Miss Alice Jane Trulock (in London), 5 April 1853, in Wilson, Thackeray in the United States, 1:149; William Henry Trescot to William Porcher Miles, 4 December 1853, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC; Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952–82), 1:423n.

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William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘‘Simon Legree Whipping Uncle Tom’’ (1856) (From J. G. Wilson, Thackeray in the United States [1904])

Then the South was full of migrants, some of them Northerners, some from Europe, who came to stay. One instance is Moses Ashley Curtis, the son of a minister called Jared Curtis and a graduate of Williams College, who arrived from Massachusetts in 1830 (he was then 22) to be a tutor to the family of Governor Edward B. Dudley in North Carolina.26 His first response, arising from his business as a teacher, was unflattering. He believed that Southern youth were undisciplined, with a ‘‘reckless, indomitable spirit, fostered in childhood, & encouraged in youth, which they carry with them & which nothing human can subdue.’’ These ‘‘indulgent, neglectful habits’’ he thought ‘‘inseparable from the slave system.’’ By contrast, Northern children were carefully brought up and respectful of authority. This opinion was conventional, perhaps even true. Despite this censure, Curtis persisted in the South, partly because he seems to have felt only a shallow connection to his home. Sailing from Boston, he had felt ‘‘very little of that feeling which people are fond of describing as coming over them like a flood when they watch the receding shores of their country. . . . I was losing sight of one section of country to meet another and it mattered not whether the next sight rose there or in Europe.’’ 27 26. Thomas Cary Johnson Jr., Scientific Interests in the Old South (New York: D. AppletonCentury, 1936), 182. 27. Entries for 30 September 1831, 5 October 1830, MAC Diary, MAC Papers, SHC.

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Moses Ashley Curtis (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

Arriving in Wilmington, he felt the usual shock of newly seeing slavery, black, sweating, palpable. The pilots boarded on Cape Fear River: ‘‘What saw I? Slaves. The first I ever saw doomed to a servitude involuntary, irrevocable. My sympathies for that class of unfortunate beings had ever been deep, my joy in the prospect of a speedy arrival was merged in pity for these two negroes.’’ But immediately he showed the instinct that was to make it possible for him to assimilate. ‘‘But they look contented,’’ he observed. ‘‘Are they sensible of their degradation?’’ he asked. ‘‘Let a residence among them determine their situation,’’ he concluded. Did they not look happy, singing songs as they rowed, about Sally being a fine girl? Ashore, did they not look ‘‘noisy & careless’’? Curtis grew interested in curious black customs; for example, at Christmas they dressed up as ‘‘John Cooners’’ in rags and masks, danced and sang, and received gifts. It was said they drank heavily. As usual, contemplating slaves led to thoughts of masters. The whites were reputed to be ‘‘friendly & hospitable, though high spirited & mercurial.’’ These were people who ate oddly, things like clabber and tripe. It was said that ‘‘some men eat skunks; & in the southwestern states they eat dogs!’’ Others ate ‘‘hog’s guts.’’ 28 Soon after Curtis’s arrival, there was the Nat Turner rebellion, which spread 28. Ibid., 22 October, 25 October, 5 November 1830, 25 June 1831.

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alarm, too much so in his opinion. Nonetheless, Curtis kept a gun in his room, charged with two balls. By September 1831, he was analyzing the causes of slave insurrections like a native. They could proceed from two causes, he hazarded, ‘‘abuse & indulgence,’’ the latter being the more dangerous. For ‘‘[n]o class of beings I ever heard of take such vile advantage of favors as the blacks. . . . The faithfulness of a servant who at first brushed my boots as regularly as I took them off was rewarded by occasional donatives. Brushing immediately became irregular & now I cannot get my boots brushed once a month without issuing an order to that purpose.’’ Slaves were like children; they needed discipline. Curtis knew this, because for six weeks he had been left in charge of the plantation slaves and flattered himself that he had done well, even to the extent of flogging a boy. Yet, for a while, he remained disapproving of the institution. ‘‘When will the curse of slavery cease in our land!’’ he asked in December 1831. ‘‘Oh! my country; beautiful among the fairest of the earth, I fear a store of wrath is laid up for thee.’’ Slavery was wrong, but could it be disposed of ? ‘‘The property of many lies wholly in their slaves, & a sudden removal would reduce them to utter poverty. They cannot be expected then to free them at once. The evil has been entailed on them, they feel it, but cannot remedy it.’’ 29 Still, he found the Southerners friendly and hospitable. In the summer of 1832 he traveled to South Carolina and Georgia. A friend, George Hooper, was a tutor at the College of Charleston.30 There Curtis met up with the botanizing enthusiasts of Charleston, who welcomed him to their meetings. Gradually, back in North Carolina, he was to find a place. He courted Mary DeRosset of Wilmington and married her. He became ordained and Bishop Ives of North Carolina was encouraging about a ministry. He acquired property, including slaves, at least one donated by his father-in-law in his wife’s name. By 1844, he could visit Massachusetts, bump into an old classmate, a Congregationalist preacher from Maine, and mutter to his wife in a letter that G. W. Hathway had ‘‘rather too much abolitionism in him.’’ 31 Among others who came and remained, the case of Thomas Smyth, the theologian and Presbyterian minister, is especially telling. Curtis became assimilated, but Smyth tried to do what many migrants preferred, to effect a balance between his new place and his old one, to have the advantages of both worlds. But this proved very hard to do. 29. Ibid., 12 September, 23 September, 24 September, 3 December 1831. 30. J. H. Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: College of Charleston, 1935), 267. 31. Bill of sale, 29 May 1847; Mary Curtis to MAC, 13 March 1847; MAC to Mary Curtis, 9 September 1844, MAC Papers, SHC.

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He started life as plain Thomas Smith.32 He had been born in Belfast in 1808, the son of Samuel and Ann Magee Smith. The father was a man of means, being engaged in the ‘‘Grocery and Commission and Tobacco Manufacturing Business,’’ and someone who had participated in the abortive Irish rebellion of 1798 and spent some time in a British prison for his pains. Thereafter he had prospered until ruined by a financial panic in 1825, which led to the loss of his home, his fortune, and the scattering of his impecunious children, some to the United States. Samuel and Ann Smith were to die in Vincennes, Indiana, and were buried, as their son put it, ‘‘amid the silent prairies of the West.’’ The younger Smith was educated at the academy associated with what later became Queen’s College, before he entered Belfast College in 1827. The latter was ‘‘conducted on the plan of the Scotch Universities’’ and there he studied Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, elocution, logic, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Joseph Butler’s Analo of Religion, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism, and Thomas Reid’s philosophy were the staples, as they were in the South. Indeed, Smith studied moral philosophy under a Dr. Young, who had been ‘‘a fellow student with Dr. Thomas Brown under Dugald Stewart’’ in Edinburgh, the same Thomas Brown whose philosophy was to engage Southern colleges and periodicals. At this time, Smith was not a Presbyterian, his father having migrated into the Congregationalist Church. ‘‘The Presbyterian Church at this time was sadly degenerate both in doctrine and discipline,’’ Smyth remembered, ‘‘and the erection of an Independent Church on principles of greater Evangelic purity, was received with favor by many.’’ Indeed he went off in 1829 to London, to Highbury College in Islington, to study for the ministry in one of the Dissenting Academies.33 He came to America, partly to escape disgrace. In London, he had become engaged to a young lady. But there were tensions. His thoughts were on travel and missionary work, but this adventurous project did not commend itself to his fiancée or her father. Meanwhile, Smith’s parents announced plans to remove to Indiana. To complicate matters further, Smith found himself denounced by a fellow student ‘‘on a charge of intoxication, and of visiting the theatre and improper places.’’ To these charges, to be sure, he had a defense of sorts. Though he had entered a theater, he said, it was when he was newly arrived in London and was out with a young gentleman, who had wanted to go in. This suggestion Smith had refused, but the other had insisted. Being 32. By his own account, Smyth changed his name merely to resume an old family spelling and avoid confusion with another Thomas Smith. But, seeing that his son Augustine advanced from Smyth to Smythe, it is hard not to conclude that advancing respectability influenced the change. See Thomas Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, Letters and Reflections, ed. Louisa Cheves Stoney (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans & Cogswell, 1914), 4. 33. Ibid., 3–4, 428, 10, 12, 15, 23, 19–20.

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all alone in the great city, Smith felt he had no choice but to stick with his companion and so he went in, though they ‘‘saw only one or two scenes at most.’’ As for the other charge, it was true that, during the winter vacation, he had gone with a friend to witness an execution at the Old Bailey, which was certainly a proper activity for a young Dissenter, and they had afterwards ‘‘entered a house to get supper, where . . . we became convinced we had reason to think the inmates were not of the most reputable character.’’ Nothing self-evidently iniquitous was going on, though Smith had never been in a coffee house before and was puzzled to see female waiters. But his companion was less green, he smiled at Smith’s innocence, and he had even ‘‘unknown to me, frequently been out at night and had also when out preaching, indulged too freely in drink.’’ These genteel explanations seem to have been unpersuasive to the authorities. Smith was suspended, his fiancée dropped him, and so he decamped to America in the company of his sister.34 His eldest brother, Joseph, was living in Paterson, New Jersey, and was a member of the Presbyterian Church. There, abruptly, with little explanation to posterity, Smith switched from the Congregationalists to the Presbyterians. He proceeded to study at Princeton and was about to ‘‘missionate’’ in Florida, when he was invited to supply the pulpit at the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston. For a while they were pleased with him and he was offered a permanent place, though the pleasure did not last, certainly not to his death in 1873, still in the same pulpit. He had entered a place in which he did not feel too strange, for it was rich with others of his kind. James Adger, who invited Smith to stay with his family and whose eldest daughter, Margaret, Smith was to marry, was also from Ulster, also the son of a businessman, also a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian if ‘‘not a professing Christian.’’ 35 Another letter of invitation—this time, briefly to supply the pulpit of the First Presbyterian or ‘‘Scotch Church’’ in Charleston—was issued by Mitchell King, born of a prosperous family in the Kingdom of Fife and educated in Scotland, a man who had migrated to London, tried to go to India as a merchantman, ended up in Malta and then a Spanish gaol, before escaping to the Carolinas, where in Charleston he had become a schoolmaster, then a lawyer, a judge, and finally a rich man, one of the central pillars of the Charleston establishment.36 So South Carolina was one of the homes of the Scotch-Irish in America. Belfast, Glasgow, Charleston, these were mingled things. And 34. Ibid., 40–42. 35. John B. Adger, My Life and Times, 1810–1899 (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899), 87. 36. Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 60, 61–62, 65–67, 71; John Belton O’Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina (1859; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1975), 1:347–77.

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this new world did not expect Smith to relinquish the old one, but to represent its standpoint and erudition. This he did for decades, with great vigor and much turbulence. By his own admission, he was a vain, ambitious, and scribbling man. His complete works would eventually fill ten volumes.37 He not only loved to write, but to read, and to accumulate books. Indeed, books were his passion, to the point of lustful sin. As befitted an Ulsterman, if not an ex-Congregationalist, Smyth (as he became in 1837) stood aggressively for the Old School against the New School, and bit the ankles of the Papists and Puseyites. He poured forth pamphlets, lectures, and sermons in hasty profusion. As Michael Tuomey once observed, ‘‘There’s Dr Smyth ready to talk at a moment’s warning, for a month on any subject.’’ 38 Smyth always had an eye to the wider public and an unusual belief that the Presbyterian principle might be ecumenically embraced by other denominations. As one of his memorialists, Gilbert Robbins Brackett, was to observe, Smyth ‘‘was intensely denominational and intensely unsectarian . . . [and] was never happier than when he united with brethren of other denominations in Christian fellowship and associated activity,’’ especially of an Evangelical bent. For all that, he could be unrelenting: ‘‘He would go to the stake for Calvinism or Presbyterianism, and on the way to martyrdom, he would gather faggots to burn bigots and sectaries.’’ Yet Frederick Porcher was to remember him as someone smiling: ‘‘How he became a Presbyterian I know not, unless he was born one, for he was a very genial man and had none of the bitterness about him that seems to be one of the characteristics of that race.’’ 39 Smyth never abandoned his stake in North Britain, but traveled back frequently, to Belfast, to Glasgow, to Edinburgh. There he republished his works and they were widely noticed. He gave his support to the schismatic Free Church of Scotland, whose leader was Thomas Chalmers. As a theologian, Smyth remained knitted into a transatlantic, contentious culture. Thus stretched across several polities, he was at pains to argue that there was no innate hostility between Presbyterianism and any civil order (monarchical, aristocratic, or republican), because, properly understood, the Presbytery insisted on the separation of church and state, God’s things and Caesar’s. As he was to ask, ‘‘Our inquiry shall be, whether, and how far, the presbyterian form of church polity is analogous to our civil constitution; whether the 37. Rev. Prof. J. William Flinn, ed., Complete Works of Rev. Thomas Smyth, D.D., 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan, 1909–12). 38. Michael Tuomey to MAC, 4 April 1850, MAC Papers, SHC. 39. Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 734, 736; Samuel Gaillard Stoney, ed., ‘‘The Memoirs of Frederick Adolphus Porcher: Chapter XIII—Continued: The Conversation Club,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 47 (October 1946): 220.

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Thomas Smyth (From Thomas Smyth, Autobiographical Notes [1914])

genius of presbytery and of republicanism are found to be in strict alliance; and whether, in this respect, our form of ecclesiastical polity does not eminently commend itself to the admiration and regard of every American citizen, to whatever religious denomination he may belong.’’ 40 Smyth became an assimilated Southerner and, what was extra, a Charlestonian. At first, he was uneasy about the place, especially the climate that was ‘‘always distressing and disastrous,’’ sufficient to want to leave. His congregation he found ‘‘very divided and dissimular, very hard to please and to manage.’’ They were too prone to democracy, in his opinion, and hence to ‘‘parties, jealousies, contentions’’ which served ‘‘to thwart and neutralize the spiritual government of the church.’’ 41 From their point of view, in counterpoint, he had an ‘‘overbearing, dictatorial way.’’ 42 Offers came his way—from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Lexington, Danville, Indiana, Ireland— which he pondered, preened himself on, and declined. Not so gradually, hav40. ‘‘Ecclesiastical Republicanism, or the Republicanism, Liberality and Catholicity of Presbytery in Contrast with Prelacy and Popery’’ (1843), in Flinn, Works of Thomas Smyth, 3:3–4. 41. Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 162. 42. J. L. Kirkpatrick to Abner Addison Porter, 15 June 1858, Abner Addison Porter Papers, PHS.

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ing married a Charlestonian and siring nine children, he grew accustomed to the place and adopted some of its ways, though he never quite acquired the habit of smooth sociability. Still, he liked a drink and came to think that strict temperance, urged by the likes of John Bachman and Samuel Gilman (the Lutheran and the Unitarian), was carried to ‘‘a most uncharitable extreme.’’ For ‘‘[i]n Charleston and Columbia, Tee-Totalism took precedence of the Gospel and the Church as a reforming Institute, and the use of wine became intemperance and sin, and the users of it drunkards, measured by the glass or half glass.’’ 43 He sipped his own glasses on the intellectual side of polite society and was a regular at the Conversation Club, over which Mitchell King presided. The club sometimes, in turn, met at Smyth’s home.44 On one occasion, in the summer of 1840, he discoursed to it ‘‘On the Necessity of Literature and Men of Letters to the Stability and Happiness of a Republic.’’ 45 Yet something intruded between Smyth and the world beyond Charleston. There was slavery. Smyth had no qualms about the morality of the institution and became an ardent secessionist. In November of 1860, he preached to his congregation that ‘‘the condition of slavery has been and is recognized and regulated by God, who first ordained that it should come to pass as a penal affliction upon a guilty race, for the mitigation of greater evils, and for the good of all.’’ Christ himself had ‘‘assumed and acknowledged it, and chose from under its polity his apostles, disciples, and friends.’’ To this, Smyth added a peroration decorated with the words of an old Scottish Calvinist reformer, the ‘‘holy Rutherford,’’ to the effect that ‘‘ ‘I had rather be in Scotland beside angry Jesus Christ, than in any Eden or garden of the earth.’ ’’ 46 In the antebellum years, Smyth had entered into slavery’s internal controversies, the fine distinctions that mattered to its masters. Against Josiah Nott, Smyth argued for ‘‘the unity of the human races’’ as being most consistent with Scriptural authority and with scientific evidence, in a book that was republished by Johnstone and Hunter in Edinburgh, with endorsements from Edinburgh divines, including James McCosh, who was also to mingle Scotland, Belfast, and Princeton.47 But slavery was a problem in Smyth’s trans43. Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 165, 143. 44. For example, on 12 December 1849, 4 February 1852; see MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC. 45. Reprinted in Flinn, Works of Thomas Smyth, 10:511–30. 46. Smyth, ‘‘The Sin and the Curse; or, the Union, the True Source of Disunion, and Our Duty in the Present Crisis’’ (1860), in Flinn, Works of Thomas Smyth, 7:537–53 (quotations on pp. 544, 553). John Rutherford (d. 1577) was Provost of Saint Salvator’s College at the University of Saint Andrews. 47. Smyth, ‘‘The Unity of the Human Races Proved to be the Doctrine of Scripture, Reason and Science: with a Review of the Present Position and Theory of Professor Agassiz’’ (1851), in Flinn, Works of Thomas Smyth, 8:5–392. On McCosh, see J. David Hoeveler Jr., James

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atlantic world. For example, in 1850 a letter in praise of him was sent from Belfast to the Senate of the University of Glasgow: ‘‘There are very few living divines who have contributed more largely to our stock of theological literature than Dr Smyth, & the republication of his works in this country, as well as in America, sufficiently attests the estimation in which they are held by the religious public.’’ 48 A motion was laid for an honorary degree by Smyth’s agent, the Reverend James Seaton Reid, historian of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, who was confident that all would be well and even asked Smyth for the £20 fee ‘‘which custom required.’’ 49 But Reid’s son Edward, a professor at Glasgow, did not like the Free Church of Scotland, which Smyth had endorsed, and was an abolitionist; he argued that the University of Glasgow was unwise to meddle in the slavery question, and noticed that Smyth had endorsed the institution in his book The Unity of the Human Races. The Senate agreed and the motion was dropped.50 This was but one of several incidents that showed a gulf between Smyth’s old world and his new. In 1843, when the Free Church of Scotland had been founded, Smyth had taken up a collection in Charleston and sent it to Thomas Chalmers in Edinburgh. It was a large sum, £3000. Chalmers was pleased, but others were not. A Glasgow editor thought the money stained by the blood of slaveholding.51 In 1844, Smyth visited Edinburgh. Chalmers, then Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, welcomed him. They walked together through the city, its Grass Market and ‘‘many low and filthy lanes, or Wynds’’ to Chalmers’s Mission Church, where Smyth listened to the great man’s ‘‘majestic eloquence.’’ 52 They breakfasted together, and Chalmers gave Smyth an autographed picture of the Mission Building, not to mention a signed copy of Chalmers’s edition of the Treatises of Faith. Later, Chalmers was urged against this comity. Was not a slaveholder beyond the pale? ChalMcCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From Glasgow to Princeton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). 48. John Edgar, Robert Wilson, W. D. Miller, James G. Murphey, William Gibson, G. Vickie, and James McKnight to Senate of the University of Glasgow, June 1850, SmythStoney-Adger Collection, SCHS. These seem, mostly, to have been connected with institutions of higher learning in Belfast. 49. It seems that Smyth began this process. See John Brown to the Rev. Dr. J. S. Reid, 10 September 1850, Smyth-Stoney-Adger Collection, SCHS: ‘‘Dr. Smyth of Charleston lately spoke to me in Dublin, regarding a literary honor which he desires to obtain from the University of Glasgow.’’ 50. Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 228. 51. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 129; Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 241. 52. Other Southerners, unaffected by sectarian enthusiasm, shared this opinion of Chalmers’s oratory: see Hugh Legaré’s opinion, as described in WCP, Eulo on Hugh Swinton Legaré: Delivered at the Request of the City of Charleston (Charleston, SC, 1843), 13; ‘‘L,’’ ‘‘Dr. Chalmers,’’ SQR 12 (October 1847): 441–64.

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mers thought it best to explain his position in a formal open letter to Smyth. It began promisingly: ‘‘I do not need to assure you how little I sympathize with those who—because slavery happens to prevail in the Southern States of America—would unchristianize that whole region; and who even carry their extravagance so far as to affirm that, so long as it subsists, no fellowship or interchange of good offices should take place with its churches, or its ministers.’’ But, less promisingly, ‘‘as a friend to the universal virtue and liberty of mankind,’’ Chalmers had to say that he would rejoice in the day ‘‘when slavery shall be banished from the face of the earth.’’ Chalmers helpfully pointed to a passage in his collected works (volume 12, ‘‘page 395 and onwards’’) where he had outlined a scheme of emancipation, which Smyth might find valuable. For all that, Chalmers ended cheerfully, ‘‘I feel it a great acquisition that I have made your acquaintance,’’ and even added a postscript, lest there be a doubt, that he would ‘‘be happy at all times to hear from you.’’ This was too amiable, too poised, for the Anti-Slavery Society of Edinburgh, who called upon Chalmers for a disclaimer and explanation, which he duly offered upon the same middling lines: ‘‘Slavery, like war is a great evil. . . . Yet, destructive and demoralizing as both are, and inimical as Christianity is to all violence, and to vice, it follows not that there may not be a Christian soldier, and neither does it follow that there may not be a Christian slaveholder.’’ 53 Into this controversy entered, not a Scottish divine or a Charleston minister, but the fugitive slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who delivered seven lectures in Belfast in December 1845. These forcefully urged from bitter experience that there was, indeed, a contradiction between slavery and Christianity, and that morality required Christians to reject the fellowship of slaveholders. Not only did Christianity not ameliorate slavery, but worsened it, because the master felt himself armed with the sanction of God. These lectures were a great success. Douglass moved on to Scotland, to urge that subventions from slaveholders be returned. ‘‘Send Back the Money,’’ he demanded, in what became a popular chant: ‘‘Ragged children called it out to him as he passed them on the street; and in Edinburgh, he and two local antislavery women had the audacity to carve it into the sod of one of the city’s lovely parks.’’ This lionizing did not please Thomas Smyth, who came back to Europe in 1846 to attend the first world meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in London, only to learn of the celebrity of ‘‘a coloured man, formerly, as he 53. Thomas Chalmers to Thomas Smyth, 25 September 1844, in Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 351–52; Thomas Chalmers, Letter of the Rev. Dr. Chalmers on American Slave-Holding: With Remarks by the Belfast Anti-Slavery Committee (Belfast: J. Mullen, 1846), quoted in McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 129.

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said, a slave in Maryland.’’ ‘‘I heard of him for the first time on my voyage out,’’ Smyth later wrote, ‘‘but found on my arrival he was every where spoken about.’’ He also heard many disparaging and damning things about Douglass, ‘‘both as to morals and infidelity.’’ It seems likely that Smyth repeated some of these slanders. At least, from the Victoria Hotel in Belfast, Douglass threatened a libel suit and alleged that Smyth had called him ‘‘an Infidel’’ who ‘‘had been seen coming out a Brothel in Manchester.’’ 54 James Robertson, secretary of the Scottish Anti-Slavery Society, sent Smyth a letter very far in spirit from those transmitted by Thomas Chalmers. ‘‘You come from Charleston, S. Carolina, and altho’ a Scotsman by birth, you are the reputed defender and Ally of man-stealers—You are accused of being the enemy of our race—of being identified with, if not yourself actually guilty of, crimes the most dreadful and heaven daring of which men on earth can be guilty.’’ There was more in this vein, harsh words about ‘‘the galling Yoke of slavery,’’ about ‘‘the blood of the poor innocents’’ being on Smyth’s soul, about Charleston being a place where ‘‘the laws of the Eternal One are trampled openly under foot,’’ much more. ‘‘Be advised then to lay aside your unseemly airs; remember that you are an accused and suspected man—that you are considered a recreant Scotsman and an unfaithful minister of Jesus Christ.’’ 55 Smyth was invited to debate the issue of slavery in public, but declined. He was interviewed, pressed, and sent the draft of an apology, ready for his signature. Prudently, he wrote a letter to Douglass’s solicitors, in which he denied ever having uttered the alleged libel.56 Douglass, in turn, expressed himself ‘‘satisfied’’ with the explanation and the matter was dropped. It was, technically, a tie. But, to Smyth, it was a humiliation. Charleston slaveholders were not accustomed to ties with those born into slavery. In retrospect, for palliation, Smyth imagined he had been lured by cunning scoundrels into a trap and protested his innocence. This is doubtful. An arrogance, safe on Meeting Street, had been unsafe in the land of his birth, in his own city. The incident had shown that, when he confined himself to matters of Presbyterian theology, he could find many friends and allies in his old home. Once the issue of slavery was raised, bitterness ensued, his expatriation was exposed, he became ‘‘a recreant Scotsman.’’ When slavery killed his honorary degree at Glasgow, he should not have been surprised, but he was. Smyth thought the 54. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 127–28, 133; Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 362; R. Davidson and Torrens to Thomas Smyth, 16 July 1846, Smyth-Stoney-Adger Collection, SCHS, quoted verbatim in Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 371–72. 55. James Robertson to Thomas Smyth, 6 July 1846, Smyth-Stoney-Adger Collection, SCHS: the version of this in Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 369–70, is much abridged. 56. Smyth to Davison and Torrens, 17 July 1846, in Smyth, Autobiographical Notes, 373–75.

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bonds that stretched from Ulster to the South, from the Grass Market to the Battery, did not need to snap, but they did. Smyth became a permanent Southerner, but there were many who came and went, for a sojourn or a little more. This was especially true of academics. Jefferson’s University of Virginia had an early faculty, mostly recruited in Europe. Few stayed. George Long of Oxford, the classicist, remained only from 1825 to 1828, before moving back to a chair at the University of London. Robley Dunglison, the professor of medicine and another Englishman, stayed until 1833, when he moved north and ended up at Jefferson College in Philadelphia.57 Elsewhere, William and Elizabeth Ellet came from New York to South Carolina College in 1835 and stayed until 1848; he was a professor of chemistry, she was a poet and historian of Revolutionary women. Though she showed some signs of interacting with the Southern world and, indeed, wrote for the Southern Quarterly Review,58 neither of them ever became comfortable with the culture around them. She was prone to calling Columbia ‘‘the capital of the uninhabited globe,’’ and he later told Benjamin Hedrick that ‘‘he left because he could not stand the tyranny of negrodom.’’ 59 A middling case is that of Frederick A. P. Barnard of Sheffield, Massachusetts, and Yale who came to Tuscaloosa in 1838 as professor of mathematics at the University of Alabama, moved on to be president of the University of Mississippi in 1855, which disintegrated beneath him in 1861, so that (eventually) he returned to the North and became president of Columbia College in New York in 1864. In Barnard’s case, this re-removal stemmed from no revulsion from Southern society; he had married Margaret McMurray, a Southerner, in 1848, and he had owned slaves; he migrated back northward more because he could get a job there than because he objected to the Confederacy.60 Young tutors at schools and colleges, coming from the North, were especially common. Not all stayed, as Curtis did. There was, for example, Edward Hooker of Farmington, Connecticut, and Yale, who in 1807 became a tutor at the new South Carolina College for a year, before returning to a life in the North.61 In Columbia he found himself among a cosmopolitan faculty. 57. Herbert Baxter Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888), 116, 118, 162. 58. See Elizabeth Fries Ellet, ‘‘Taylor’s Edwin the Fair,’’ SQR 4 ( July 1843): 46–61; on Ellet, see WGS, ‘‘Ellet’s Women of the Revolution,’’ SQR n.s. 1 ( July 1850): 314–54. 59. Mary C. Izard to FL (folder suggests ca. 1845), FL Papers, HEH; Benjamin S. Hedrick to Mary Ellen Hedrick, 9 November 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC. 60. William J. Chute, Damn Yankee! The First Career of Frederick A. P. Barnard: Educator, Scientist, Idealist (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978). 61. Explanatory note dated 1946, in Edward Hooker, ‘‘Copy Book of Letters, 1807–1811,’’ Edward Hooker Papers, SCL.

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Over it presided Jonathan Maxcy, a Massachusetts man who had been president of Brown University in Rhode Island, as well as of Union College in Schenectady, New York.62 The professor of mathematics was Paul Perrault, ‘‘a native of France,’’ that of languages Thomas Park of Massachusetts, and a fellow tutor Nicholas Herbemont, once of France, lately of Charleston. Hooker naturally pondered this new place, to measure the gulf between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ ‘‘While I was at Farmington, we used when together, frequently to talk of the Southern States,’’ he wrote back to an old friend. ‘‘I believe you thought I entertained in some particulars undue prejudice respecting them.’’ Much of this prejudice had been confirmed by experience. ‘‘The public morals, God knows, are bad enough but from representation or from some source or other, I had expected to find them worse.’’ There was ‘‘so much drunkenness, profanity & other wickedness,’’ especially during the horse race season. The South Carolinians were, if anything, more illiterate than he had surmised. But experience had offered surprises. The place was unexpectedly democratic, at least in the upcountry: ‘‘I have seen together at an Independence Ball, the planter, the merchant, the lawyer, the mechanic, the overseer . . . in short all classes of people however deficient in property and in information; provided they were respectable in character and appearance.’’ So Hooker’s conclusions became mixed. There were advantages in Connecticut, no doubt, things like smallness of scale, support for education, and town meetings, though town meetings could give rise to ‘‘crazy disputes.’’ For all that, there was no slavery in Connecticut: ‘‘On this account at least, Conn. possesses over S.C. a glorious advantage.’’ 63 In general, the comparative issue for Hooker was muddled. In the college, for example, there was much indiscipline among the students. In Northern colleges, there was more order, or so he thought. But such was the spirit of equality among the students in Columbia, such was their resistance to ideas of rank and distinction—instincts of which Hooker, as a republican, felt he should approve—that the consequence was ‘‘a great difficulty in preventing turmoil & confusion.’’ This was, then, a mixed blessing, especially when poultry were stolen, tables broken, provisions plundered, windows crashed, and ‘‘scurrilous writings posted.’’ Further, the state of religion was very low and piety was ‘‘out of fashion.’’ The college chapel, ‘‘though spacious, elegant, and very commodious for public worship,’’ usually stood empty, unless some itinerant preacher used it. So, for religious and moral purposes, a Northern 62. Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina, vol. 1, South Carolina College (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 33. 63. Edward Hooker to William Hooker, 25 August 1807; Edward Hooker to Lemuel Whitman, 5 May 1807, in ‘‘Copy book of letters, 1807–1811’’; entry for 8 December 1806, Edward Hooker Diary, all in Edward Hooker Papers, SCL.

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college was probably better, simply because the town of Columbia was ‘‘in a considerable degree corrupt and dissipated.’’ On the other hand, the Methodists were doing their best, to some effect, and ‘‘no College in our Country is perfectly pure. The morals of youth are every where in danger, and to preserve them pure, requires on the part of parents and guardians, no small degree of care and caution.’’ 64 The premise that Northern colleges—by which was usually meant New England—were more religious, more orderly, though not significantly advanced intellectually, seems to have been widespread in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, especially among those migrating southward. Joseph Caldwell, the son of a New Jersey physician, graduate of John Witherspoon’s Princeton, came to the University of North Carolina in 1795 soon after it was founded, and stayed to become its president. He was twice married, the second time to a widow of a prominent local family, the Hoopers. In 1815, this was his verdict, defensively expressed in a letter to a minister in Albany, New York: ‘‘It has been the fixed principle of the Faculty to maintain in as great perfection as possible the discipline and scholarship of the best northern colleges.’’ Strict examinations, punctuality, and ‘‘a conscientious and exemplary attention to scriptural religion and morality’’ were maintained. Three out of the five faculty were communicants of the Christian religion, and Caldwell had hopes that a fourth, the professor of languages, might yet overcome an overscrupulousness of conscience to evidence his piety. The locals, no doubt, were a problem. ‘‘The people of this vicinity are generally well informed on religious subjects, and predisposed to attend publick worship.’’ But they lacked the advantages ‘‘commonly enjoyed in the northern states; their habits and manners are not so correct, and by many the sabbath is not well observed.’’ Still, things were getting better. Thomas Cooper, who did not care a whit for piety, who had come after his English years from Pennsylvania to South Carolina as Professor of Chemistry, then stayed as president at the state college, saw the same problem of indiscipline among students. To Thomas Jefferson, a man deep into creating a new university, Cooper observed in 1822: ‘‘Dr. Dwight prophesyed that no collegiate institutions could be permanent south of the Potowmack. In my own opinion the parental indulgence to the South, renders young men less fit for college government than the habits of the northern people; and the rigid discipline of the northern seminaries must be put in force inexorably in the South, or the youth who 64. Edward Hooker to Addin Lewis, 4 June 1807, 25 February 1808; Edward Hooker to Rev. David Lilly, 21 October 1807; Edward Hooker to Sally Hooker, 27 March 1808; Edward Hooker to Beaufort Watts, 14 June 1808, all ibid.

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are sent for instruction, will permit their teachers to give it them, only where the student condescends to be taught.’’ 65 Edward Hooker was only a bird of passage. Others stayed much longer, without becoming as permanent and assimilated as Smyth or Curtis. Among these, Francis Lieber offers the most illuminating and complex instance of a scholar who lingered in the South but never settled.66 From 1835 to 1856 he served as Professor of History and Political Economy at the South Carolina College. From the moment he arrived, he sent out a steady stream of unhappy letters to Northern friends that lamented his fate, stressed his isolation, and attributed his unhappiness to the culture around him. It was a lesson these friends were happy to see endorsed from within the Slave Power. As a Northern correspondent said to Lieber, the South was a place ‘‘where the sun ripens fruit, but not scholars, only here and there one, not indigenous to the soil.’’ 67 Why he came to the South was simple. South Carolina College paid him well. This was no small attraction for a man who had been born to modest circumstances in Berlin (his father ran an ironware business at 19 Breite Strasse),68 was exiled from Prussia for sedition, had fought in Greece and been penniless in Rome, had removed to the United States and suffered a number of improvised and impecunious literary jobs, mainly the editing of the first Encyclopedia Americana, and had applied unsuccessfully for a number of college positions. South Carolina offered a haven for him, his wife, and his family. Given a choice, he would not have gone to South Carolina, because he did disapprove of slavery. He would have liked to have been at the University of Berlin, but he was officially a criminal in Prussia. Failing that, a Northern college would have been nice, perhaps Harvard. But Harvard would not elect a German whose accent was thick, whose religion was dubious, whose political philosophy was heterodox. South Carolina College, by contrast, offered him a secure job at a very good salary: $2500 a year, a large house, various perks, a not exhausting schedule. It was better, indeed, than he could have 65. Elisha Mitchell to Maria North (in New London, Conn.), 11 February 1818, Elisha Mitchell Papers, SHC; Joseph Caldwell to Rev. William Neill (of Albany, N.Y.), 5 January 1815, Joseph Caldwell Papers, SHC; TC to Thomas Jefferson, 14 February 1822, TC Papers, SCL. ‘‘Dwight’’ is Theodore Dwight, the president of Yale. 66. The following is drawn from Michael O’Brien, ‘‘‘A Sort of Cosmopolitan Dog’: Francis Lieber in the South,’’ SR 25 (April 1989): 308–22. 67. George S. Hillard to FL, 7 December 1842, FL Papers, HEH. All Lieber manuscripts, henceforth in this chapter, can be assumed to be in the Lieber Papers at the Huntington Library, unless otherwise specified. 68. Frank Friedel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal (1947; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968), 2.

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done at many Northern colleges. He went expecting a temporary expedient. Thereafter various jobs were mentioned to him and cultivated by him in the North—Girard College, the Harvard Law School, the Astor Library—but they all came to nothing and the temporary slipped into twenty years before he knew it. Lieber spent those twenty years in confused suspension between Europe, the North, and the South, both physically and mentally. He spent the academic year in Columbia, but during most summers he went North, usually without his family. With surprising frequency, he traveled back to Europe, in 1844, in 1848, and in 1851: his wife spent a long period with her family in Hamburg, and he sent his eldest son, Oscar, to be educated in Germany. He never quite let go of Europe, though he came to regard himself as an American and was vexed when critics charged him with Germanic idiosyncrasies of style and thought. In 1851 Fanny Longfellow, the wife of the poet and an old friend, was to observe in a letter that foreigners found it hard to settle down in America, and Lieber fumed to George Hillard: ‘‘This is cutting. I, a foreigner—if I am not an American, what am I? German not—a sort of cosmopolitan dog, as the curs owned in Constantinople, owned by no one and owning nobody. It is bitter, in its nonchalance, though not intended.’’ 69 Yet he did own somebody. There was Tom, a fourteen year-old boy whom he rented when he first arrived in Columbia for $4.50 a month, who came with just a shirt and a blanket. There was Elsa, just thirteen when Lieber bought her from a North Carolina slave trader for $475 in 1836, who liked muslin dresses and preferred that her mistress wear fashionable clothes, who was to give birth in 1841 to a mulatto child whom the doctors killed, just before she herself died. There was Betsy, who cost him $675 from the same trader, who was married to a local slave carpenter, went at Christmas to visit her motherin-law in New Bern on the stage, attended church in the full panoply of a silk gown, stockings, open bonnet, and gloves, and made money niftily on the side by selling cakes and suppers to the undergraduates at inflated prices. There were Isaac and Henry, whom Lieber rented out.70 Lieber lived contradictions about slavery. To his friends in the North, he offered condemnation of the institution. This was both truth and expediency: to have become an apologist for the institution would have closed doors to him, but he also honestly felt slavery to be wrong. But within his household, he acted in ways indistinguishable from the Southerners around him. 69. FL to George S. Hillard, 23 June 1851. 70. Thomas Sergeant Perry, ed., The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882), 109; FL, notebook marked ‘‘Slavery,’’ cataloged as LI28; Matilda Lieber to FL, 16 August 1841, 28 August 1841; FL to Matilda Lieber, 14 August 1838.

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Francis Lieber (From T. S. Perry, Life and Letters of Francis Lieber [1882])

He kept condescending and sardonic note of his slaves’ behavior, believed unhesitatingly in their sexual abandonment, checked a slave’s teeth before buying, and grieved for Elsa while noting that her death cost him $1000 in capital. He seems to have had little skepticism of local tales about racial characteristics. Indeed, part of his hatred of slavery was that it condemned him to live among Africans. He cringed when his young son Hamilton played with black children, and expostulated on such ‘‘disgusting intimacy with . . . negroes which leads to every thing else bad when they grow older.’’ His letters, especially those to the Boston lawyer George Hillard, freely talked about niggers and niggerdom, and Hillard replied in kind. For Lieber, slavery was ‘‘a greasy institution,’’ and the issue of race was central. In a notebook, he was to observe, ‘‘I have always said . . . that the question is always put on a wrong issue—the question is not slavery, but negroism. The free negro stands in every consideration here in the South almost on a level with the slave. His freedom does not elevate him, but his negroism—though it consist only in a shade of yellow—degrades him.’’ Indeed, what moved Lieber most in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘‘the most harrowing book I know—are not the floggings and physical suffering; for partly they are not representative incidents,’’ but the ambiguities for slaves with refinement of feelings. In the Spanish West Indies the slave was still an insensate brute, but no longer so in the United States: ‘‘[W]here the blacks are bona fide blacks there is not [the] trouble and

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misery which exists where they have mingled with the white and . . . light slaves exist.’’ 71 But Lieber’s opinions on race were atypical. Anonymously in a Boston newspaper in 1851, he argued against the notion that the white race was inherently superior, but instead urged that cultural superiority was only a recent product of historical development. ‘‘I believe, indeed, in the inferiority of the Ethiopian race. . . . [But this] does not prevent me from seeing that they are men, and this brief term of man, includes a vast deal . . . the ideas of immortality, of capacity for education and progressive transmission of culture, of knowledge, and of the duty of a fraternal feeling toward them on the part of other men, and especially of those who in the dispensations of Providence have been created members of advanced races and favored races.’’ So Lieber, though he believed in the reality of race, believed in the reality of history and culture more. He was disposed to believe that not all whites were superior to all blacks, partly because he was anxious to demonstrate that some whites were superior to other whites: above all, the cultured heartland of ‘‘some four or half a dozen white nations,’’ especially France, Germany, and England, had of late pushed ahead. Hence, ‘‘I really should like to know whether the Croatian or Wallachian stands as high as the best class of negroes in Liberia. I believe not.’’ So Lieber scoffed at the ‘‘superiority of the Caucasian race.’’ ‘‘Superiority of the white race! Since when? Comparatively speaking, the white man’s superiority showed itself very late.’’ This was then an ambiguous skepticism of race, because it was delivered in the tones of a disdainful Prussian, looking eastward to barbaric hordes sharing the same skin color.72 Indeed, an efficient Prussianism in both Lieber and his wife Matilda is evident in their repulsion from slavery’s inefficiency, in their distaste for slaves who came to repair the house but worked little and late. Yet Lieber admired domesticity, and this could fuel his antislavery sentiments, too, as is exemplified by an incident in Washington in 1850, related to Matilda. He had gone to visit the president, Millard Fillmore. ‘‘Not far from his house I saw a group of well-dressed negros, loudly talking while one of them screemed and groaned and beat himself. I hurried toward them asking what was the matter, supposing at the time the man had been seized with the cholera. Only think said a woman, he just came home and found his house empty—wife, children— 71. FL to Matilda Lieber, 29 August, 31 June, 1 September 1841, 20 July 1847; FL to George S. Hillard, 24 August 1842, 22 February 1844, 5 January 1851, 15 January 1854; George S. Hillard to FL, 20 December 1849, 10 April 1854; FL to Dorothea Dix, 1 March 1851; FL, large bound book of clippings, marked ‘‘Slavery’’ on spine, 1845 and following, cataloged as LI29. 72. FL, ‘‘Letter on Races,’’ clipping from the Boston Daily Journal, 6 June 1851, pasted in notebook; see also FL to George S. Hillard, April 1850.

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all gone. They have carried them to Georgetown. Her master sold them all, and he did not know a word of it. My God, my God! And this is suffered? And slavery yet defended! Oh God, what a black thing is man!’’ This recognition of the slave’s humanity might, by the same token, have made Lieber uneasy, when in 1843 he received a letter from his son Norman near Columbia that read: ‘‘Dear Papa. I like this place very much, it is a pretty little farm. I can mention you the names of the dogs and the negroes if you wish to hear them.’’ 73 As a political economist and free trader, Lieber believed that slavery was an anachronism, doomed by the laws of progress and civilization. Yet he knew these were complicated issues, and morality was not simple. For years he kept a notebook on the institution, packed with clippings, random musings, and reports of conversations. The notebook shows a strong instinct for contradictions. The slave was a chattel and a thing, yet he had rights and responsibilities. The master was theoretically sovereign, yet often exercised a restricted power. Slavery for blacks was supposed to elevate the white race, yet slave mechanics undercut their white counterparts and made them discontented. Slavery and commerce were honored, but the slave trader was a pariah. Color was offensive to the ‘‘Anglican’’ race, yet ‘‘Thornwell told me of a highly respectable and highstanding family in Peedee S.C. in which there is negro blood from grandmother.’’ 74 Lieber kept a log of Southerners’ unease. ‘‘I returned from the West in Sept 1846. when I met young Davis our Librarian at Branchville, he returning from the North which he had seen the first time. His first word was: Dr, I return not an abolitionist but deplore slavery. Lo! that North! They beat us in every thing. Oh if we could get rid of this unfortunate slavery.’’ Then, ‘‘I met Wm De Saussure in the street. Well, how have you been &c &c. I praised the West, and he exclaimed: A slavery, slavery, slavery!’’ Later, ‘‘Mrs. De Hassell told me yesterday that Mrs. Preston, Wm C. Preston’s wife said to her she prayed every evening that God in his wisdom might devise some means to do away with this unhappy institution—the whole of this is remarkable to me only that Mrs. Preston should acknowledge slavery to be so sad a thing.’’ Elsewhere, ‘‘Ah Sir, said Dr. Sill once to me, when a wagon & a number of emigrating negros passed by, there goes our misery, our misfortune.’’ Lastly, ‘‘Prof. Williams said this day: yes slavery is an accursed institution, I donot [sic] care where you find it. He is a Southerner, slave owner &c. Told me that some time 73. FL, notebook marked ‘‘Slavery,’’ cataloged as LI28, 10 January 1836–27 April 1839; FL to Matilda Lieber, 2 August 1850; Norman Lieber to FL, 30 July 1843. 74. FL, large bound book of clippings, marked ‘‘Slavery’’ on spine, 1845 and following, cataloged as LI29.

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ago he exhorted a women cook of his to be religious (he is a pious Methodist) when the negro said: No master, I will not pray to a God that makes a distinction between white and black people.’’ All this disposed Lieber to believe that ‘‘the South has essentially no faith in its own doctrine.’’ 75 On occasions he would echo, not the antislavery, but the proslavery sentiments around him. After quoting a passage from a memoir of William Ellery Channing, which observed of St. Croix that pauperism and slavery could not there coexist and that slavery resembled the system of Robert Owen, Lieber noted, ‘‘Slavery as a Poor Law.—I have frequently said the same thing.’’ Reading of abolitionist meetings in London, his mind could not but think, ‘‘[W]ere they never stirred when [Mayhew] made his heart rending revelations of the state of crying misery and woeful immorality among the hundred thousands of London poor. . . . It is so welcome to many millions on the continent to be able to say: Ah, about that American and fine republican liberty, look at Uncle Tom.’’ 76 Most fundamentally—and this he concealed from his Northern friends— he knew that many slaveholders had their own kind of honesty. Lieber was to break with his old friend Charles Sumner, because the latter could not understand this, which Lieber knew of others, because he thought it true of himself, the slaveholder. The senator would pointedly send down to Lieber in Columbia clippings from Boston newspapers about slave whippings and castrations, and Lieber grew irritated at the reproach to him, the morally complex man in a morally complex situation. For Lieber felt himself to be a moderate. Indeed he felt the problem of American society consisted in the threat to moderate men from Jacobin extremes in both sections, from Sumner and Calhoun. So Lieber would express a preference for ‘‘sound beef and good wine’’ over ‘‘democratic gruel . . . and Jacobinical toddy,’’ and remark that Sumner was touched with ‘‘jacobinical abstractionism’’ and was ‘‘guided by sentiment alone,’’ a man who ‘‘boldly goes against associations, tradition &c.’’ By the same token, Lieber believed that ‘‘the South [is] made up of two elements—of rampant Jacobinical recklessness on slavery and against the federal government, and of stolid Austrianism [i.e., conservatism] on internals.’’ So he was suspended between two uncomprehending forces. As he remarked to Hillard, ‘‘You know whether I am an apologist for slavery! My life is a beautiful one indeed! Here I am called an abolitionist, there I am taunted as a slave holder. I wonder what sacrifice Sumner has ever made for alleviating slavery? I have made several and heavy ones.’’ 77 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid.; FL to George S. Hillard, 15 January 1853. 77. George S. Hillard to FL, 21 June 1853; FL to Dorothea Dix, 14 February 1854; FL to

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But Lieber was obliged to be discreet. In the classroom, though he lectured on history and political economy, he soft-pedaled slavery. In a farewell letter to the senior class of South Carolina College in 1849, which enunciates his basic principles of political economy, there was not a word about it. Yet omission was itself a commentary. Lieber always resisted the temptation and the rewards of the proslavery argument, though he knew that a nice little proslavery pamphlet would immeasurably have increased his chances of the Presidency of South Carolina College, a post for which he had had ambitions since 1835. Privately he kept his meticulous notebooks. Privately he wrote five passionate letters to John C. Calhoun (with whom his relations had always been cordial) about slavery, but did not send or publish them. Few misunderstood this silence. As Lieber noted, ‘‘reticents are treated like accusers.’’ 78 In truth, his unease was partly an example of a standing difficulty, the tension of criticizing a culture that employs you. Matilda Lieber, it is worth noting, was not a scholar and as a woman her engagement with slavery and the South was markedly different from her husband’s. For one thing, apart from an early extended stay in Hamburg, she traveled less and had to endure the summers that her husband evaded. She was thus less formed by the friendships of travel: indeed, she once confessed to her perambulating husband that she had begun to forget the names and faces of Boston. She felt as strongly as Lieber that Columbia was a provincial trap, but laid more emphasis upon the disadvantages of the small town over the city: he pined for Boston, she sometimes for Charleston. She was more compelled to the circle of domesticity than he, which meant the necessity of dealing with both white Southern women and slaves. She consequently felt an intimacy with their slaves that is absent from Lieber’s letters and journals. She grieved for the death of Elsa as a death in the family. ‘‘I cannot tell you,’’ she wrote to her husband, ‘‘the distress I felt and still feel, for apart from our loss and the void which we shall experience in our household when we return home, I have felt much personal attachment to that poor girl, who has never given us much cause of complaint.’’ 79 Matilda Lieber was much less settled in her mind about the business of where to live, and earlier in their Columbia sojourn seems to have pined for Europe more than he. Later she often seemed to echo her husband’s desire to George S. Hillard, 6 April 1850, 21 May 1851, 16 March 1853, 25 February 1847, 16 January 1851, [ July 1855], [ca. May 1853]. 78. Reprinted as ‘‘Some Truths Worth Remembering,’’ New York Evening Post (1869), clipping in oversize blue box, cataloged as LI287–307; [FL], ‘‘Five Letters to the Hon. John C. Calhoun, On the Present Slavery Question, by Tranquillus’’ (1849); FL to George S. Hillard, 1 May 1856. 79. Matilda Lieber to FL, 5 August, 28 August 1841.

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leave South Carolina almost as a wifely duty: ‘‘Do you know my Frank, that I almost feel displeased with my self for bearing so easily the situation in which I am now placed, the companions with whom I have to associate.’’ 80 She was torn between the worldly intellectual life of her husband and her own life. Indeed, she sometimes shrank from the prospect of a move, and was depressed by ‘‘a growing consciousness of your [her husband’s] superiority, which makes me feel as if I were not a fit companion for you, as if I could not share in anything that interests you, and as if I should almost dread returning amongst your friends, for they would not find me a fit associate, my heart desponds, I have no energy[,] how should I fare amongst the lively spirited, intellectual women?’’ To Fanny Appleton, she wrote in 1842 in the same spirit: ‘‘So many of you are distinguished by talents, by high cultivation and many acquirements; what will be your opinion of the Southernized dame, who has all the qualities of one long accustomed not to be observed, the doom of the married in this part of the world?’’ 81 Both Lieber and she liked to gossip, though his chattering was more egocentric. She preferred to record her defeats, he his triumphs. Her letters are full of accounts of visits made, scandals reported, and the doings of children. Indeed, the implications of raising children in the South were among her chief vexations: ‘‘Think of the society in which they mix, what evil examples are before them, in language, in actions, manners, everything. . . . The time they pass with their parents is comparatively short. Yesterday Hamilton exclaimed, ‘Jesus, what are you doing?’ I told him that was not proper.’’ 82 And she was right to be concerned. As the years went by, the gulf between German parents and Southern children widened in inconsistent ways, until the Civil War left Oscar Lieber dead in a Confederate uniform at the Battle of Williamsburg while his disowning father drafted a Code of War for the federal government, Hamilton joined the Illinois militia and lost an arm at Fort Donelson, and Norman became a lieutenant colonel assisting his father in the War Department.83 As for slavery, Matilda Lieber had mixed feelings. She disliked the institution, but felt warmly towards many of her slaves. Sometimes her references to their female slaves are almost sisterly, occasionally maternal, but usually specific and relatively uninterested (as Lieber was always interested) in generalization. Slaves were real, slavery less so, though she tried to keep the moral 80. Matilda Lieber to FL, 11 September 1841; see also Matilda Lieber to Fanny Appleton, 1 November 1840, 28 October 1842. 81. Matilda Lieber to FL, 4 August, n.d.; Matilda Lieber to Fanny Appleton, 28 October 1842. 82. Matilda Lieber to FL, 4 August, n.d. 83. Friedel, Francis Lieber, 325–26, 306, 324, 370–71.

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issue in mind and reproached the Southern women around her for being so baldly and insensitively proslavery. To Fanny Longfellow, she wrote in 1848 that in going beyond her home, ‘‘the scene of my duties and my pleasures,’’ she encountered, because of slavery, ‘‘neglected streets, children of every size and age lying about knowing that only their physical developement is attended to . . . and the women I think more than the men, are so bigotted in their devotion to the unhappy slave institution, that it is a decided barrier against heartfelt intimacy.’’ And yet she had friends, especially Charlotte Cheves, and there were social kindnesses which she could not fail to notice and share, ‘‘a great deal of . . . hospitality and [a] desire to assist which we city bred people are not accustomed to. So in cases of sickness, all acquaintances are the legitimate nurses.’’ 84 All this emphasized the great issue that complicated life in South Carolina for the Liebers. Yet there was scarcely an opinion Francis Lieber held that did not unite him to a Southerner and divide him from a Northerner, or divide him from a Southerner and unite him to a Northerner. His moderate Unionism aligned him with George Hillard and James Louis Petigru, but split him from Charles Sumner and Robert Barnwell Rhett. His views on free trade united him to David James McCord, but divided him from Daniel Webster. His attitude to race distinguished him from Josiah Nott, but found the approval of Simon Greenleaf. His hatred of Calvinism made an enemy of James Henley Thornwell, but a friend of William Campbell Preston. His dislike of Columbia’s isolation evoked the commiseration of Charles Francis Adams, but was echoed by Mary C. Izard, who wrote to Lieber during a long summer: ‘‘We exist after the manner of a cabbage; nothing new or interesting to talk or write about, and longing for the return of our absentees to enliven us a little. Wishing you all manner of pleasure and a safe return to what Mrs. Ellet calls ‘the capital of the uninhabited globe.’ ’’ By the opposite token, a Northern visitor might remark upon the interesting conversation of Columbia society, just as Charlotte Cheves, exiled to the tedium of a Savannah River plantation, pined for Columbia’s urban vitality.85 Moreover, a removal to the North earlier in his career might not have occasioned a different balance of unhappiness and happiness, though the texture would have varied. Later, living in New York was to bring him mostly contentment because the Civil War gave him an important role and, what he wished, genuine influence. Earlier, his fate would have been more doubtful. Even in 1856, George Hillard advised against Massachusetts, as a place 84. Matilda Lieber to Fanny Longfellow, March 1848; Matilda Lieber to Caroline Lomnitz, 13 January 1844. 85. Charles Francis Adams to FL, 13 June 1858; Mary C. Izard to FL, n.d. (folder suggests c. 1845); Charlotte L. [McCord] Cheves to FL, 25 March 1840.

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of long and severe winters, with a population that was ‘‘with all our cultivation and moral worth, [not] comfortable or pleasant,’’ but marked by intensity, grimness, hardness, sharpness, rigidity, and angularity. ‘‘You pass from mere money getters to ferocious fanatics and fervid one-idea-ists.’’ 86 It was easy to admire from a distance and to be admired, when distance prevented the insistent chaffing of everyday life. Lieber liked to correspond, to sit down in his study late at night and converse with distant friends. He was always disappointed when the zeal of others for such correspondence was unequal to his own. His letters were a kind of diary, by which he registered and expressed his passing thoughts and impressions. And his frequent discontent arose from more than the character of Southern society. For one thing, he was a vain and ambitious man, always restless with what he regarded as an inferior position. He saw himself as a great international thinker, not a provincial college professor. He was immensely pleased when Alexis de Tocqueville arranged Lieber’s election to the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and he took his seat as a ‘‘confrère’’ in 1851: ‘‘It was a noble moment of my life, when I was sitting in the midst of so many distinguished men, known where knowledge dwells and surrounded by the portraits of men of such portentous or hallowed names as La-place, Voltaire, Fenelon, Montesquieu, Buffon, Cuvier. I, the Columbia professor . . . among such!’’ He was pleased but not flattered, because he thought this was his due. He calmly observed to Samuel Allibone in 1856, ‘‘The simple fact I believe is this: The two highest statesmanlike political philosophers writing historical and philosophical survey now living are De Tocqueville and Lieber. The next is Guizot.’’ He went on, implausibly, to observe, ‘‘I say this without vanity.’’ 87 More than this, his letters were among his chief means of advancement. He constantly lobbied and plotted for better jobs. Strategically, disparagement of his condition in the South was essential, as a way of validating his credentials for a job in a free state. More subtly, he thereby displaced responsibility from himself the slaveholder to the slaveholding society around him. He made himself a victim, a prisoner whom it would be virtuous to free. So his letters do not show Lieber the resident of Columbia in full measure, partly because, when he left the South definitively in 1857, he sorrowfully destroyed thousands of his papers; doubtless a disproportionate number of Southern manuscripts found their way into the fire. And he did not need to correspond with people he met every day. But enough evidence has survived to show the pattern of his local friendships. He was especially close to William 86. George S. Hillard to FL, 14 April 1856. 87. FL to George S. Hillard, 12 October 1851; FL to Samuel A. Allibone, 19 October 1856.

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Campbell Preston, James Louis Petigru, and David James McCord (though not to Louisa McCord). Before the latter’s death in 1837, Lieber had an intimacy with Henry Junius Nott, one much missed. Stephen Elliott the younger he respected for scholarship, though his piety made Lieber uncomfortable.88 He seems to have known Beverley Tucker a little and they exchanged letters; in the Lectures on the Science of Government (1845), Tucker speaks of Lieber as ‘‘an enlightened foreigner, whom I am proud to quote.’’ 89 Lieber also corresponded in a friendly manner with Richard Henry Wilde, Lawrence Keitt, George Frederick Holmes, J. D. B. De Bow, Hugh Legaré, John C. Calhoun, James Warley Miles (whom he hyperbolically but shrewdly characterized as ‘‘ten times more a German than I am’’), and William Henry Trescot, and had a following among the many students that twenty years of teaching had brought him.90 He wrote for Southern periodicals and newspapers occasionally, and as often for Northern, though he was a writer who preferred the book and pamphlet. He cooperated with a number of Southerners on various causes: free trade, above all, but also prison reform, the establishment of lunatic asylums (he helped to design that in Columbia), the international copyright issue, and the issue of dueling. But he also had enemies. He especially disliked William and Elizabeth Ellet, the latter of whom he once called ‘‘repulsive.’’ Above all, he hated James Henley Thornwell, for his frigidity, self-righteousness, power, and Calvinism. When Thornwell became president of the college in 1852, Lieber remarked, ‘‘I feel somewhat like a man walking about in the catacombs.’’ Yet he recognized Thornwell’s gifts even across their divide. ‘‘There is, in Columbia,’’ Lieber once told Hillard, ‘‘but one man who would be capable of giving me some advice, but his mind and soul are so Calvinized, that any thing like an intercourse between us has long ceased. N’en parlons plus. It is one of the bitterest things in my life.’’ 91 There is evidence that, by the mid-1850s, Lieber had settled down in Columbia. In 1838 he could flatly write of South Carolina to his wife: ‘‘[N]o fibre of our soul is connected with the life there—no sympathy, no friend, no love to the place, no deep-rooted or penetrating interest.’’ But in 1856, even after the decision to leave had been made, Matilda Lieber was to write to Fanny 88. FL to George S. Hillard, 13 December 1856; FL to Samuel A. Allibone, 13 December 1856; FL to Charles Sumner, 23 October 1837; FL to George S. Hillard, 8 April 1840. 89. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, Intended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1845), 14. 90. On Miles, see FL to George Ticknor, 14 March 1853. 91. FL to Matilda Lieber, 12 August 1837; FL to Dorothea Dix, 12 January 1852; FL to George S. Hillard, December 1852.

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Longfellow in a different vein: ‘‘It is true that we have become more reconciled to our life at the South and less anxious for change which is the natural consequence of having lived here 21 years and formed our circle of duties.’’ By that year, Lieber had broken with Sumner. He now accepted that his chances of a Northern position were slim. To Samuel B. Ruggles, he bluntly stated the case: ‘‘You are astonished that I could stand a 20 years’ long residence here. The answer is simple: They paid me a salary. With all my friends and all the people at Cambridge saying they want me, I have never had an offer.’’ By 1855, Lieber had built up twenty years of Southern friendships and habits. His children were grown and become, somewhat against his will, ambivalently Southerners. He was fifty-seven and moving rapidly towards retirement. In publicly opposing separate secession, he had made enemies in the state, but also friends in a (for the moment) winning cause. He had reconciled himself to having lived less than youth had promised or wanted. On the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, in which he had been wounded, he told Matilda that his life had been a failure: ‘‘I have not been able to do that for which I was fit and fitted. I did not get to my sphere.’’ Yet, he reflected, ‘‘there is a difference between acknowledging that the day is cloudy, and moping at the window crying for sunshine.’’ 92 Late in 1855, Thornwell resigned the presidency of South Carolina College. Lieber’s name was mentioned around the state to succeed in the post, and especially from the Unionist areas of the West. Factional support developed, with Petigru as Lieber’s strongest backer on the board of trustees. In the balloting, Lieber came very close to success, but Thornwell balked him by the nomination of a lightweight but Presbyterian candidate in Charles McCay, the professor of Mathematics newly arrived from an undistinguished career at the University of Georgia. The ploy had been intended merely to deadlock the election and make Lieber unacceptable, but McCay ended up elected. This was a matter of no little embarrassment, a nonentity filling the position once held by Thomas Cooper, Thornwell himself, and William Campbell Preston. Disgusted, insulted, Lieber resigned.93 There were undoubtedly matters of ideology in this departure. In the campaign against him, it had been mooted that Lieber was a foreigner, a weak Christian, an abolitionist, and a Unionist. Yet these had been accusations with which he had lived for twenty years, which had occasionally generated campaigns against him; these had always failed. There were other objections to his holding a position like that of president, where sympathy with public opinion 92. FL to Matilda Lieber, 17 July 1838; Matilda Lieber to Fanny Longfellow, 16 February (1856); FL to Samuel B. Ruggles, 30 December 1855, FL Papers, LC, quoted in Friedel, Francis Lieber, 287; FL to Matilda Lieber, 20 June 1854. 93. On this, see Hollis, South Carolina College, 177–204, and Friedel, Francis Lieber, 280–91.

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was of some legitimate moment. Lieber was well above the other canvassed candidates as a scholar, but he had grave disadvantages as an administrator, as a disciplinarian, and as someone who might be influential with the state legislature. Indeed, in an earlier cycle of his ambition for the position, Matilda had cautioned him in 1841 that the game would not be worth the candle. His duties would be greater, his time engrossed, and, ‘‘As for doing the college any good, in raising the character, I almost fear you would not even have that in your power, for the views of the people are so limited, they would not understand you nor assist you in your purposes!’’ 94 The wonder is, not that Lieber lost the position, but that he came so close to winning it. So Lieber left because he had lost a faculty power struggle, because he, an old and distinguished man, had been insulted by his college preferring an inferior. His story at South Carolina College then is curiously modern: the tale of a man coming for a haven and a salary, staying for lack of an equally well paying option, enduring complicated ambivalence about the surrounding culture, leaving because of a feud and a slight. Yet there was a deeper ambivalence in Lieber’s Southern career. He was a man in cultural flux, taking color from the cultures he encountered. Europe left him with much, and the basic substructure of his ideology was European, bourgeois, and liberal. The North gave him much, though mostly late in his career. Earlier, the North had given him cool summers, admiring friends, agreeable conversation, publishers, and tantalizing prospects, but it is hard to document what ideas he received there. Curiously, it was the South, by tension, that gave Lieber his most characteristic doctrine, the notion of the tension between the ethics of change and the obligations of community. This can be best seen in his reaction to the Know-Nothing controversy. Much of Lieber’s condemnation of the American Party was conventional: he disapproved of secret societies and religious intolerance. He made fun of a Know-Nothing letter signed ‘‘Luther’’ that condemned foreigners, including Germans.95 But his main objection, unsurprisingly, was to nativism as a doctrine that discouraged immigration, created barriers between cultures, and denied recognition to foreigners who had made contributions to alien cultures. It was, he wrote anonymously to the South Carolinian, nativism that had once in Pennsylvania denied the position of president of Girard College (itself endowed by a naturalized Frenchman) to ‘‘a person who for many long years had been a citizen of the United States, and to whom actually the drafting of a plan for the whole organization of the institution had been committed,’’ that is, to Francis Lieber. In American history, he argued, much had been done 94. Matilda Lieber to FL, 11 September 1841. 95. ‘‘Y’’ (FL), clipping ca. 1855, in red folder, cataloged as LI94.

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by the foreign born, by the likes of John Paul Jones, the Marquis de Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin. ‘‘We say, then, that so far as skill, industry, intelligence, productive labor, elevating talent and success of every kind are concerned, citizens by choice are found among the foremost.’’ And this was as true of Europe: Aristotle was no Athenian by birth, Columbus no Spaniard, Napoleon no Frenchman, Catherine the Great no Russian. ‘‘The very country,’’ he noted, ‘‘in which the Know-Nothing now reviles ‘the foreigner’ was discovered by Cabot, a Genoese, in the service of England.’’ 96 The ethic of individualism and the right of mobility were hence baldly endorsed. ‘‘The term free trade has a far wider meaning than a merely economical one. It applies to all merit, truth, intellect. Let every one stand and fall by his own individuality, and take the best of everything where you find it best.’’ This was a brave doctrine, but it left Lieber open to the charge that he was rootless, with no acknowledged obligations but to himself. He answered that those who chose a country held it as dear as, if not more than, those merely born in it: such a person ‘‘clings to the country of his choice, even as a man cleaves to his chosen wife faster than to his kin.’’ In this, Lieber knew himself, because in 1844 he had been offered a position as inspector of prisons and lecturer on penology in Prussia by Frederick William IV, and Lieber had declined, thus closing a door back to Europe.97 But this doctrine also left him open to the charge that someone who could forsake one country might forsake a second. Here Lieber frankly avowed the prerogatives of individuality. Only the love of God, he once wrote, was absolute: all other loves, including that of country, were conditional. ‘‘If our country is a state of pirates as St. Domingo began we cannot love it any more than a criminal.’’ For in Lieber’s judgment, ‘‘each individual has to pursue his individual end, physical[,] mental & moral, and if he cannot possibly attain this in his country he may leave it.’’ If a man cannot find sustenance in his own country, he has ‘‘the right and obligation to emigrate.’’ Hence Winckelmann had been right to leave Germany for Rome, because ‘‘the pursuit of individual development’’ is the first of obligations, whereas duty to ‘‘the protecting state’’ was only the second. The slogan ‘‘My country right or wrong’’ was no doubt fit for the incitement of soldiers, but ill served the moralist. So for Lieber, emigration was a ‘‘great law . . . of civilisation,’’ because by it individualism fertilized culture.98 96. ‘‘Citizen’’ (FL), Letter to the Editor of the South Carolinian, reprinted in the New York Evening Post, March 1855, in red folder, cataloged as LI94; it was also reprinted in Greenville (S.C.) Southern Patriot, 5 April 1855, copying the Washington Globe (clippings in the same folder). 97. Ibid.; FL to Chevalier Bunsen, 3 August 1844; Friedel, Francis Lieber, 218–20. 98. FL, ms headed ‘‘Chapter: Of the Love of Country and the Obligation of sacrificing one’s self or one’s interest to the Common Weal,’’ ca. 1835–51.

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All this was not meant absolutely to undercut what Lieber called in 1851 the ‘‘joyful inspiriting of nationality . . . the consciousness of belonging to a vast country,’’ the pleasure of joining ‘‘the great chorus of our times and our peculiar era.’’ But it did mean that Lieber looked with skepticism upon the pieties of his day—nation and race—because always his cultural categories were fluid, blurring because of the necessary and healthy shocks administered by the mechanisms of individualism. In 1856, he jauntily remarked to Matilda: ‘‘The Germans are a funny people. So delicate—even to ludicrous sentimentality in some things, and so coarse in others! I suppose all people are funny people.’’ 99 Whatever the permanence or impermanence of all these various in-migrations, whatever their ambivalences, people such as Curtis, Hooker, Smyth, and Lieber greatly enlarged the stock of knowledge and analysis available to Southern culture. Lieber brought as wide an acquaintance as perhaps anyone in the United States, and numbered among his friends Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, Richard Cobden, the Chevalier Bunsen, Barthold Niebuhr, and numerous others. Many Southerners understood the value of such bridges; if they had not, far fewer aliens would have ended up as tutors and professors. Equally, many Southerners disliked such promiscuous and unpredictable connections. Their cultures were old enough to have achieved a workable distinction between the immigrant and the native, between them and us. So Jefferson’s acquisition of so many Europeans for the University of Virginia was widely distrusted. D. H. Mahan complained vociferously to John N. Tazewell in 1841 about this ‘‘mistake of calling professors from abroad into our seminaries.’’ They came only for the money, Mahan thought, and did not care for the locals or understand them: ‘‘To such a person a University is something like Oxford or Cambridge, or the Sorbonne . . . its pupils are young men who have been prepared for a University course of lectures. What does he find amongst us? . . . [a] kind of High School, termed by courtesy a University.’’ Robert Lewis Dabney, writing from Charlottesville in 1842, was of a similar mind. The latest batch of foreigners, Kraitsor and Sylvester, ‘‘keep us in a perpetual broil.’’ The first was too passionate and too irreligious, ‘‘a complete heathen,’’ though a gentleman. The second was ‘‘the most perfect goat that ever walked on two legs.’’ ‘‘I hope this may serve as a warning to our lords and masters not to make fools of themselves by running over to England any more.’’ This specific complaint was characteristically embedded in the wider belief that Europe and the United States were so culturally dissimilar that xenophobia was a moral duty. Stephen F. Miller, writing in 1858 99. FL to Dorothea Dix, 12 November 1851; FL to Matilda Lieber, 9 July 1856.

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of Richard Henry Wilde, was to see his time in Italy as a dereliction of republican duties. ‘‘[In Europe] there was delight to the senses, but mildew to the heart. The voluptuary, the man of fashion, the idler, were gratified; but the moral hero, the public benefactor, the man of enterprise and the scholar of a just ambition, desirous to leave a record of public utility, would turn with generous self-denial from such enchantments.’’ 100 Robert W. Gibbes of Columbia was an inveterate opponent of foreigners, even of non–South Carolinians, on the faculty of South Carolina College. He constantly schemed against their appointment and, if that failed, for their removal. In 1846, he observed to his brother Lewis: ‘‘I think the S.C. College is likely to flourish now, and I hope to see S. Carolinians hereafter in all its professorships. The day for foreign influence is I think past.’’ The victim who proved this new day was George Frederick Holmes, who had campaigned for a Professorship of Greek, only to see it handed to Charles Pelham, a graduate of the college. As Holmes’s sister-in-law explained: ‘‘Col [ John S.] Preston who has never I think been a warm friend of Holmes’ has lately been heard to say that ‘he did not think the claims of a foreigner would weigh against those of a native, as public feeling seemed against it’ or in other words Hampton had said that none but a native should have the place & so ‘public feeling’ decided it.’’ Holmes went on to a position at William and Mary, but there too he found resistance. One of the visitors of the college, Judge John B. Christian, ‘‘began to talk of the pernicious influence of these damned foreigners—as a consequence of the dismissal of his son from College,’’ Holmes explained.101 The immediate objects of Christian’s scorn were Professors Millington and Minnegerode, the former of whom was, as Oscar Lieber once explained, ‘‘an old though hale and hearty man, [who] used to lecture to Lord Byron and rode Humboldt’s mule,’’ an Englishman who had come to the United States in 1830.102 Millington went on to the University of Mississippi. The latter was a German scholar and refugee, who taught ancient and modern languages, whom Beverley Tucker had drawn to the college.103 All 100. D. H. Mahan to John N. Tazewell, 29 July 1841, Tazewell Family Papers, LV; Robert Lewis Dabney to Moses Drury Hoge, 6 March 1842, Hoge Family Papers, PHS; Stephen F. Miller, The Bench and Bar of Georgia: Memoirs and Sketches (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1858), 2:360. 101. Robert W. Gibbes to Lewis R. Gibbes, 9 August 1846, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC; Letitia Preston Lewis to Nicketti Johnston, 6 December 1846, and GFH to George Floyd, 25 January 1848, both in John Warfield Johnston Papers, DU. 102. Oscar Lieber to FL, 5 September 1851, FL Papers, SCL; see also Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt, eds., Science and Medicine in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), x–xi. 103. Minnegerode married Tucker’s stepmother’s daughter, Mary Carter. See Beverley D.

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three—Holmes, Millington, and Minnegerode—eventually left William and Mary.104 Such xenophobia was echoed by Basil Manly, soon after he had assumed the presidency of the University of Alabama and was contemplating the appointment of a professor of modern languages. ‘‘I confess I do not want the place filled unless I can get you or some man in whom I have confidence,’’ he wrote to James L. Reynolds of South Carolina. ‘‘I have a great dread of these strolling Foreigners.’’ This was to express harshly what David Swain, president of the University of North Carolina, was to express benignly in 1859, that, all things being equal, he would appoint a Southerner over an outsider. But, of course, things were not always equal. In foreign languages, outsiders often had an advantage. In the natural sciences, the South was underdeveloped. Still, candidates might know this local predilection as part of the game. Edward Johnston in 1841 thought it prudent to claim nativity, when lobbying for a position at the University of Virginia: ‘‘I could do far more; first, because I am a gentleman, not a learned blackguard; 2ndly, because I am a Virginian, not a foreigner; 3rdly, because I have a far higher desire of distinguishing myself and serving my state. These foreigners don’t understand what we, in this country, want. With them, knowledge is all for a pompous Erudition: with us, it is only wanted so far as it can add vigour & skill to the powers of practical life. For the greater part, they who come among us, are either impostors in learning or in character. The best of them come into this country, as into a sort of exile, which they have been hired to undergo, and their only thought is their stipend.’’ 105 Of course, if you were one of the strolling foreigners, the issue looked differently. In 1845, when there was criticism of strangers teaching at South Carolina College, Michael Tuomey, the geologist who had migrated from Ireland in 1830, observed tartly to James Henry Hammond: ‘‘If the Profs. neglect their duties, why, discharge them. The world could not all have been born in S.C.’’ 106

Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker: Prophet of the Confederacy, 1784–1851 (Tokyo: Nan’Un-Do, 1979), 400–401. 104. Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 172–73. 105. BM to James L. Reynolds, 17 July 1838, Manly Family Papers, UA; David L. Swain, letter to Raleigh Spirit of the Age, 15 February 1859, reprinted in Fayetteville Observer, 3 March 1859, clipping in David L. Swain Papers, SHC; Edward W. Johnston to Richard K. Crallé, 30 April 1841, Richard K. Crallé Papers, CU. 106. Michael Tuomey to James Henry Hammond, 13 September 1845, James Henry Hammond Papers, LC, reprinted in Dean, Tuomey Papers, 73.

Chapter Three

European Attachments

Most of the Southern cultural engagement with the world beyond the United States lay in Europe, the ancestral continent. Though Southerners did venture further, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they did so in far fewer numbers, mostly as merchants, missionaries, and diplomats. The European link was more complex, the categories of traveler more nuanced. After the Civil War, William Henry Trescot was to express the Jamesian opinion that ‘‘the American who has studied history in books, never understands until he has lived in Europe what history really is. He never comprehends where in the point of human progress he stands in America, until he looks back upon it from Europe. . . . He feels that the future, which to the genuine American looks so free, is, in fact, bound irrevocably to that humanity which has suffered and struggled and failed and achieved through so many centuries.’’ Not everyone felt this; certainly not everyone would have agreed with Trescot that the European experience taught Americans that their lives were only variations on ancient ways, that ‘‘we are acting our part in that one solemn and continuous drama the plot of which is above the comprehension, as it is beyond the alteration of the greatest actor in its varied scenes.’’ 1 Most Southerners, in fact, concluded that they were living out a different drama. There were those who went to Europe as young men, as bachelors, usually to complete an education begun in the United States. For some years after Waterloo, these young men went as Grand Tourists, but with serious educaTitle from ADI to MIM, 5 May 1811, Manigault Family Papers, SCL: ‘‘There is no danger, however, of any of us acquiring European attachments. For myself a Country life, no matter how retired, has more charms than Paris or London.’’ 1. William Henry Trescot, Memorial of the Life of J. Johnston Pettigrew, Brig. Gen. of the Confederate States Army (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1870), 22–23.

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tional purposes. By the 1830s, they often went formally as postgraduate students, usually to Germany if they were scholars of the law and the humanities, to Paris if doctors. Then there were those who toured in later life, usually with a family in tow, sometimes to teach their children French or Italian; the richer the family, the longer and more frequent the visits. After the coming of the steamship, the quality of these visits altered, because it was practical to visit for a few months in the summer. By the 1840s the world that Henry James was to chronicle later had been created, and the Grand Tourist had become the tourist. Next were those who went on business: the South was part of the networks of international trade, which needed tending; and the region supplied about a third of the American diplomatic corps, at a time when it was not unusual to appoint men of letters to embassies and consulates.2 Occasionally Southerners came to Europe in search of health, to doctors in Paris or spas in Germany. More common were adult writers or artists in search of knowledge, conversation, or contacts. Frequent were returning immigrants, who visited family or took children to be connected to cultural roots. Finally, there were the expatriates, who stayed in Europe for a decade or a lifetime, because they preferred it or despised their home. The tradition of the American in Europe was older than the United States because it was continuous with the European travel traditions that stretched back beyond even John Milton in the cool woods of Vallambrosa, back to Thomas à Becket in Bologna, back to ancient Celts visiting Rome. For those on the western shore of the Atlantic, this tradition was disrupted by the American Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars, but only by degrees. Thomas Jefferson in Paris was a new American in the Old World, but also a transplanted Welshman who had employment on the Continent. Networks of kinship and friendship did not stop at the American strand, but crossed and recrossed the ocean in dizzying array. In such matters, nationality was only one consideration amongst many. A delve into the history of South Carolina will serve to indicate, as a first instance, the genealogical maze that engendered so many cultural and intellectual implications. The Izards were a French Huguenot family, who had been in South Carolina since the late seventeenth century and much prospered. Ralph Izard (1742–1804) was educated in England at a school in Hackney, then at the University of Cambridge. In 1767 he married Alice DeLancey of New York, the daughter of Peter and Alice DeLancey of Westchester County, New York, 2. This estimate is derived from Richardson Dougall and Mary Patricia Chapman, United States Chiefs of Mission, 1778–1973 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973). This does not include, however, secretaries, consuls, or attachés, who are separately listed.

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and an heiress of striking beauty and intelligence.3 (As a letter writer of high distinction, she will feature later in this book.) From 1771 to 1780 they traveled in England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Indeed, he bought a house in London, with the intention of remaining permanently. But war intervened and, in 1776, the American revolutionary government appointed him as commissioner to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, an office he discharged mostly from Paris. He returned to become one of South Carolina’s first two U.S. senators and to live in the parish of St. James Goose Creek in self-conscious splendor, at the family plantation of ‘‘The Elms,’’ whose garden he nurtured to resemble that of Chantilly. In 1805, after Ralph Izard’s death, the plantation was sold and his widow settled at Clifton, an estate near Philadelphia, but she often revisited South Carolina for the sake of her children. Her daughter Margaret, who had been educated mostly in France, in 1785 married Gabriel Manigault of Charleston, the planter and architect, who had been educated at the Middle Temple in London and in Geneva.4 Margaret’s sister Charlotte was married in 1786 to William Loughton Smith, also educated in England and Switzerland, who was a notable South Carolina Federalist who served as American Minister to Portugal between 1797 and 1801. A third and younger Izard sister, Charlotte Georgina, married in 1809 William Loughton Smith’s brother, Joseph Allen Smith, who had lived in Europe (mostly in London) from 1793 to 1808 and, between 1802 and 1805, had undertaken the most extensive tour of eastern and southern Europe, including Russia, Turkey, and Greece, by any American to that date; he is credited with being ‘‘the first American to form an art collection from Italian sources,’’ which he was with originality to give to an art museum.5 This IzardManigault-Smith connection became so powerful as to count as a faction in South Carolina and American politics. In the next generation, Margaret Izard Manigault’s son, Henry, studied at the Lycée Imperiale, ‘‘Bonaparte’s favorite Military School,’’ between 1805 3. Maurie D. McInnis and Angela D. Mack, In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 112. 4. Mary-Elizabeth Lynah, ‘‘Ralph Izard and Alice de Lancey, Famous Huguenot Belle, His Wife,’’ Americana 28 (October 1934): 486–97; George C. Rogers Jr., Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of South Carolina (1758–1812) (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1962), 364, 126–27, 80–86, 129. 5. Rogers, William Loughton Smith, 338–40; John T. Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars in Goethe’s Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 7–8; R. A. McNeal, ‘‘Joseph Allen Smith, American Grand Tourist,’’ International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4 (Summer 1997): 72. See also George C. Rogers Jr., ‘‘Preliminary Thoughts on Joseph Allen Smith as the United States’ First Art Collector,’’ in Art in the Lives of South Carolinians: Nineteenth-Century Chapters, ed. David Moltke-Hansen (Charleston, S.C.: Carolina Art Association, 1979), GR1– GR12.

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Image Not Available

John Singleton Copley, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard (Alice DeLancey) (1775) (Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Edward Ingersoll Brown Fund, reproduced with permission, © 2002 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, all rights reserved)

and 1809, to which he was introduced by the Du Ponts, the French family that had come to Delaware in 1799. Henry’s brother, Charles Izard Manigault, traveled as a merchant between 1817 and 1823, to Canton, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Australia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. He married Elizabeth Heyward, the daughter of the richest rice planter in South Carolina (himself the brother-in-law of Gabriel Manigault, and the owner on his death of 2,300 slaves), and thereafter spent extensive periods in Europe, mostly in Paris in 1828–30, 1835–36, 1846–48, and during the summer of 1855. On this last visit, he took his family to the eastern Mediterranean, as far as Greece and Egypt. His sons, Gabriel Edward and Louis, in turn, spent much of their youth abroad, with the latter emulating his father’s merchant adventures in the Far East and Latin America during the 1850s.6 The Izards and Manigaults were extensively intermarried with both the 6. Charles Izard Manigault, ‘‘Book containing loose papers, 1776–1872,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL (p. 6 of ms, p. 5 of typescript); Louis Manigault, ‘‘Family Records, 1860,’’ pp. 248–50, 209, of typed copy, Manigault Family Papers, SCL.

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François-Xavier Fabre, Allen Smith, Seated above the River Arno, Contemplating Florence (1797) (Courtesy Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)

Pinckneys and the Middletons. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746–1825), educated at Westminster School, Christ Church, Oxford, and the Middle Temple, was American Minister to France between 1796 and 1798; he married Sarah Middleton, and their daughter Eliza Lucas Pinckney married the second Ralph Izard, whose first wife had been Elizabeth Middleton and whose elder brother Henry’s first wife had been Emma Middleton. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s brother, Thomas (1750–1828), was educated similarly (though he added a spell at the Royal Military Academy at Caen in 1769), and was American Minister to England between 1792 and 1796 and negotiator of a treaty with Spain in 1795; his second wife was Frances Motte Middleton. Their cousin Charles Pinckney was American Minister to Spain between 1801 and 1805.7 Arthur Middleton, signer of the Declaration of Independence, had been educated at the Westminster School and St. John’s College, Cambridge, in the 1750s. In 1764, he married Mary Izard, daughter of Walter Izard. In the early 7. Frances Leigh Williams, A Founding Family: The Pinckneys of South Carolina (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 15, 16, 20–22, 40–41, 348–52.

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1770s they lived in England and southern Europe, especially Italy, where he is said to have studied the fine arts. Their eldest son, Henry, not only served as governor of South Carolina, but as American Minister to St. Petersburg between 1820 and 1830. Their second son, John Izard Middleton, also studied at Cambridge, became a notable artist and archaeologist, and lived for most of his adult life in Paris and Italy. In 1810 he married Eliza Augusta Falconnet, the daughter of a Swiss banker who lived in Naples but who had married a Miss Hunter of Newport, Rhode Island, and was related to a Parisian family, the Hottingers.8 In the next generation, a son of ‘‘Governor’’ Henry Middleton was a second Arthur Middleton, who was secretary to the American legation in Madrid between 1833 and 1840 and married twice, on the second occasion, in 1841, to Paulina, Contessa Bentivoglio, daughter of the castellan of San Angelo in Rome. His heir was Henry Bentivoglio Van Ness Middleton, born in Charleston in 1843, but educated in Paris, Heidelberg, and at the Citadel; after the Civil War, in which he served the Confederacy, he returned to Rome, where he became a captain of the Papal Zouaves, then an officer at the court of Victor Emmanuel; in 1868 he married Beatrice, Contessa Cini, a grandniece of Pope Leo XIII.9 The Middletons were, in turn, intermarried with the Kinlochs. Francis Kinloch (1755–1826), who was educated at Eton, the Middle Temple, and in Geneva, but who went reluctantly to fight for the Whig cause in the American Revolution, returned to England in 1790 and then lived between 1802 and 1806 mostly in Geneva. His first wife was Mildred Walker, who died in 1784, though not before bearing Elizabeth, who was farmed out to her maternal grandparents in Virginia and subsequently married Hugh Nelson of Albemarle County, who was to be American Minister to Spain. His second wife, whom he married in 1785, was Martha Rutledge, daughter of Edward Rutledge, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Francis Kinloch’s brother was Cleland Kinloch, also an Etonian, whose children included Harriet, who married Henry Augustus Middleton of Charleston and Newport in 1819, and a second Cleland Kinloch, who died in London in 1823. The third child, a second Francis Kinloch (1798–1840), lived and died in Rome, where he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery a few yards from the grave of Shelley. When 8. Langdon Cheves, ‘‘Middleton of South Carolina,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 1 ( July 1900): 228–62; Life in Carolina and New England during the Nineteenth Century: As Illustrated by Reminiscences and Letters of the Middleton Family of Charleston, South Carolina, and of the De Wolf Family of Bristol, Rhode Island (Bristol, R.I.: privately printed, 1929), 68; Charles Izard Manigault, ‘‘Description of paintings, 1867,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL (p. 28 of original, p. 15 of typescript). 9. Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 84, 90; Life in Carolina and New England, 121, on Heidelberg (though this says a niece, not a grandniece).

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he was dying of a fever, he was reported to have babbled ‘‘Italian, French & English alternately & sometimes all three in the same sentence,’’ a reverie befitting someone embedded in so cosmopolitan a heritage.10 Buried in this maze was a complicated burden of connection with European culture. Though these were unquestionably American families, founders of the nation’s politics and culture, the barrier they perceived between America and Europe was porous; it might require an effort of will to sustain it, and not all thought the effort worthwhile. The Jamesian image of British colonists become American patriots, dissevered from the courtly muses of Europe, then returning with shining morning faces as innocents abroad, was irrelevant to their experience. They never lost their contact with Europe; it just gradually modulated. To visit Europe was to visit an aspect of home, a branch of the kinship network. Such intimacy one generation transmitted to the next. So when Alicia Hopton Middleton arrived in Paris in 1835, she and her children were called upon by John Izard Middleton. As the mother noted, ‘‘We came home at night to receive Mr. Izard Middleton upon whom Izard & Charles had called in the morning—he was very punctual to the appointed time & sat with us until half past ten—very agreeable—made kind offers of services, which he said at the same time he knew to be unnecessary as Mr. Manigault was as much of a parisian as he.’’ They were taken up by this fellow Parisian, Charles Izard Manigault, who was to write to his wife from Geneva: ‘‘Mrs. Middleton, with her Son & Daughter . . . were so totally unused to travelling in Europe, that I started off with them from Paris to Geneva solely to put them in the way of it.’’ Later, when Nathaniel Russell Middleton was visiting Italy in 1836, he was guided by Francis Kinloch. They went to the Pitti Palace together, where the former expressed enthusiasm for a Madonna by Raphael but skepticism about a piece of modern art, Canova’s Venus: ‘‘Upon expressing my opinion to Mr. Kinloch I was glad to find that I had not committed treason. Indeed he says that statue never had the celebrity among artists which it so undeservedly enjoys with the public, and that Canova himself is by no means looked upon as having excelled in his art.’’ This was an opinion given with all the authority commanded by residence, by being within European culture. The family and Europe were intertwined. When John Izard Middleton died in Paris in 1849, his nephew Henry Middle10. H. D. Bull, comp., ‘‘Kinloch of South Carolina,’’ South Carolina Historical Magazine 46 (April 1945): 63–69; Felix Gilbert, ed., ‘‘Letters of Francis Kinloch to Thomas Boone, 1782– 1788,’’ Journal of Southern History 8 (February 1942): 99; Chalmers Gaston Davidson, The Last Foray: The South Carolina Planters of 1860: A Sociological Study (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 229; H. D. Bull, comp., ‘‘Kinloch of South Carolina,’’ South Carolina Historical Magazine 46 ( July 1945): 159–65; George W. Greene to Harriet Kinloch Middleton, 28 July 1840, Cheves-Middleton Papers, SCHS.

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Image Not Available Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Ralph Izard (Alice DeLancey) (1772) (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Jeanne King de Rham in memory of her father, David H. King Jr., 1966)

ton observed: ‘‘This event has put Paris out of my head for the present; for Paris it would be to me no longer. I should be constantly reminded of one who, whatever he may have been to others, was to me uniformly kind & affectionate. Until I get over this feeling, it would give me, as you may imagine, but little pleasure to be again in Paris.’’ 11 Such overlapping brought a complexity of connection, too rich fully to be narrated here. An illustration will have to suffice. Alice DeLancey Izard and her daughter Margaret Izard Manigault corresponded, as mothers and daughters did. They gossiped, they moralized, they talked about books and relatives. Since they read French as readily as English, they kept up with the latest literature. Over the years, they encountered various books by Madame de Staël. In 1807, the mother was reading Corinne: ‘‘[It] far surpasses Delphine in my mind the moral is more correct, but the ideas highly enthusiastic. There is more over a great deal of knowledge to be gained from it, & I like it far better than any work of Made de Stael’s that I have seen.’’ In 1815, she was 11. Alicia Russell Middleton to Nathaniel Russell Middleton, 24 June 1835, Middleton Family Papers, SCHS; Charles Izard Manigault to Elizabeth Heyward Manigault, 20 September 1835, Manigault Family Papers, SCHS; Alicia Russell Middleton to Nathaniel Russell Middleton, 26 February 1836, and Ralph Izard Middleton to Nathaniel Russell Middleton, undated but probably late 1835 or early 1836, Middleton Family Papers, SCHS; Henry Middleton to Williams Middleton, 1 November 1849, Williams Middleton Papers, SCL.

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Gilbert Stuart, Margaret Izard Manigault (1794) (Courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo)

reading De L’Allemagne: ‘‘What strange ideas their [Germany’s] Men of letters have, how horrid! how shocking to the gentler feelings of humanity are the Catastrophes of their Plays, & Novels. Her philosophical disquisitions are beyond my comprehension. What a pity it is that the practise of the moral duties does not always accompany the knowledge of them.’’ And, a little later: ‘‘I have just got thro’ Mad. de Stael’s Allemagne, & like her concluding chapters very much; if I did not know her character I should suppose her one who did great honor to our sex; but with manly abilities, & manly learning, she has, by all accounts, adopted manly vices.’’ 12 This deprecation of vice was an insistent theme in Alice Izard’s reading of Madame de Staël, one little prompted by the published record. But the kinship network had long known about the Necker girl. She was, after all, Swiss. Francis Kinloch had, in Geneva, lived near to and been acutely conscious of Lausanne, where Edward Gibbon had once wooed and lost Suzanne Curchod, Germaine Necker’s mother-to-be. Indeed, there is an account of Kinloch’s visit to Gibbon’s home in his Letters from Geneva and France. Among Kinloch’s closest friends, with whom he once shared a home ‘‘at the foot of 12. ADI to MIM, 9 December 1807, 21 September 1815, 5 October 1815, Manigault Family Papers, SCL.

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the hill of Chambeisi,’’ was Johannes Muller, the German historian, whom Madame de Staël herself was to characterize in De l’Allemagne, and who visited her at Coppet in June 1804 in the company of Kinloch, who in turn seems to have met her several times thereafter.13 It is no surprise therefore that Kinloch was deeply read in her works, which would (irrespective of personal acquaintance) have been natural for someone who lived between France and Switzerland, and had an interest in German culture. Similarly, Joel Poinsett of South Carolina spent several months on Lake Leman in 1803 and frequented Coppet, where he watched the daughter tend the aged Necker’s tottering afternoon walks in the garden, and acted as interpreter between her and Robert Livingston, the American Minister to France, who was touring Switzerland and Savoy. Poinsett’s friend and Alice Izard’s son-in-law, Joseph Allen Smith, had also known her. In 1801, Madame de Staël wrote on Smith’s behalf to Joseph Bonaparte, to secure an audience for (as she inaccurately put it) ‘‘un des hommes les plus influents en Amerique.’’ In 1814, according to Margaret Izard Manigault, a visitor might use Smith’s name as a passport to Madame de Staël’s favors. Margaret Manigault testified as much, of a visitor called Mrs. Derby: ‘‘Mme. de Stael . . . could not do enough for the friends of Mr. Smith. She was at dinner with her Father when they arrived at Coppet. They left their card & letter, but had not time to drive to the gate when they saw Mme de Stael running towards them crying arretez—arretez! Comment—des amis de mon cher M. Smith!’’ 14 Most pertinently, John Izard Middleton had been a habitué of Coppet, one whose presence seems to have given Madame de Staël pleasure. At least, she was anxious for his return when, in the winter of 1808 and 1809, he went to Italy. ‘‘Dites à Middleton de revenir avec vous,’’ she told François Gaudot. Middleton had been notable for his participation in one of Coppet’s favorite distractions, the drama. Gaudot noted in October 1807: ‘‘Le premier spectacle dont le jour n’est pas irrévocablement fixé, sera rempli par le Grande Monde, 13. Francis Kinloch, ‘‘Letters from Geneva and France: Letter XVIII,’’ The Port Folio 5 (28 May 1808): 333; Francis Kinloch, ‘‘Letters from Geneva and France: Letter XVIII,’’ The Port Folio 5 (21 May 1808): 325. See Béatrice W. Jasinski, ed., Le Léman et l’Italie, 19 Mai 1804–9 Novembre 1805, vol. Tome 5, deuxième partie of Madame de Staël: correspondance générale (Paris: Hachette, 1985), 366n, 460, 471n. Staël writes of Kinloch in a letter to Müller, 20 November 1804, written from Geneva (2:460), to which Jasinski adds this note: ‘‘Il [Kinloch] avait bien connu Necker et il avait été reçu à Coppet en juin 1804, lors du séjour de Müller. Il avait revu par la suite M me de Staël à Gènève.’’ 14. J. Fred Rippy, Joel R. Poinsett, Versatile American (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1935), 15; Béatrice W. Jasinski, ed., Lettres d’une républicaine sous le Consulat: 16 Decembre 1800–31 Juillet 1803, vol. Tome 4, deuxième partie of Madame de Staël: correspondance générale (Paris: JeanJacques Pauvert, 1978), 356; MIM to Charlotte Georgiana Izard Smith, 23 January 1814, Manigault Family Papers, SCL.

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comédie en vers de M. de Sabran, où M. Middleton, jeune Américain, jouera un rôle d’Anglais, composé pour lui.’’ In truth, he was there less for Madame de Staël, more for Juliette Récamier, by whom he was ‘‘trés épris,’’ much infatuated, ‘‘de qui la grâce de Mme Récamier allait faire tourner la jeune tête.’’ When she left, Madame de Staël was obliged to dry Middleton’s tears, as she explained to Juliette: ‘‘Après votre départ, je suis restée à consoler Middleton qui pleurait à sanglots.’’ But he was also a serious student of Italy. Indeed, Madame de Staël had met him, for the first time, in Rome, which seems to have earned him the right to advise her on the characterizations in her Corinne. And she seems even to have met his wife-to-be: ‘‘Je me réjouis d’y voir M me Falconet que me plaisait beaucoup à Naples,’’ she said to Gaudot (then in Rome) in February 1809. So De l’Allemagne was not just a crisp new book from the booksellers for Alice Izard and Margaret Manigault, but its author was a part of family gossip, sufficient to earn Alice’s clucking that ‘‘if I did not know her character I should suppose her one who did great honor to our sex.’’ 15 Still, this was familiarity above the normal. Even a Middleton or Manigault could feel a stranger in much of Europe. Many Southerners came with far less intimacy. Still, intimate or not, they came in numbers; Henry Junius Nott looking for library books, Louisa McCord to mend her eyes, Henry Clay to negotiate a treaty, James Henry Hammond in search of escape and gentility, Mitchell King coming back to his homeland, James Henley Thornwell after Calvinist sights, Mary Chesnut on her honeymoon, Francis Walker Gilmer looking for scholars to employ, these and many more. George Tucker wanted to understand modern economies, David Strother to learn painting, John R. Thompson to cosy up to literary greats, and James Johnston Pettigrew to acquire an education, but to possess girls, too. Yet, for all these, one should not exaggerate the ubiquity of the European impulse. Perhaps half the antebellum Southern intelligentsia never left the United States: John C. Calhoun and Edmund Ruffin, George Fitzhugh and Paul Hamilton Hayne, these and others never traveled to Europe in anything more than their reading and imagination. Perhaps the best way to comprehend the discernment of those who did travel, however, will be to follow their routes. A preliminary look at William Campbell Preston of Virginia (and South Carolina) will be instructive, for his 15. Pierre Kohler, Madame de Staël et la Suisse: étude biographique et littéraire (Lausanne: Payot, 1916), 486, 475; Georges Solovieff, Madame de Staël, ses amis, ses correspondants: choix des lettres (1778– 1817) (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1970), 376; Maurice Levaillant, Une amitié amoureuse: Madame de Staël et Madame Récamier: lettres et documents inédits (Paris: Hachette, 1956), 109, 137; Geneviève Gennari, Le premier voyage de Madame de Staël en Italie et la genèse de ‘‘Corinne’’ (Paris: Boivin, 1947), 69–70, 135; ADI to MIM, 5 October 1815, Manigault Family Papers, SCL.

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William Campbell Preston as a young man (From M. C. Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William Campbell Preston [1933])

was the pattern that later Southerners were to vary.16 He sailed in May 1817 from New York to Cork, on a swift journey that took thirty days; he stayed until 1819.17 He went armed with bundles of introductions from Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and the Abbé Correa da Serra (the Portuguese Minister), a botanist well known to Southerners. Such letters were long considered necessary, because the traveler was an emissary between gentlemanly elites and needed certification to be admitted to hospitality; one also needed letters to banks, so that one’s credit could be acknowledged.18 Returned travelers certified outbound travelers to those who were known, by experience, to be friendly or useful. When Preston landed in Ireland, he came across the Virginian Edward 16. Preston was the son of a Virginian father who had extensive land in Washington County in the far southwestern corner of the state, though his mother happened to be in Philadelphia when she gave birth to him, as her husband was then in Congress. The son studied at South Carolina College and stayed on in the state, where he became a lawyer, politician (including a period as a U.S. senator), and latterly the president of his alma mater. 17. Legaré’s voyage from New York to Bordeaux in 1818 took thirty-four days; see Michael O’Brien, A Character of Hugh Legaré (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 20. 18. On the letter of introduction for the voyage littéraire, see Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 14, 24–25.

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Coles, ‘‘my friend and kinsman,’’ who was ‘‘on a secret mission from the President to the Czar of Russia.’’ Coles had been secretary to and a protégé of James Madison, to whose wife Coles was related, as was Preston, whom the Madisons had entertained in the White House.19 Coles introduced Preston to various parts of Dublin society, including Sir Charles and Lady Morgan, the latter a popular novelist whom Preston would encounter again in Paris. Traveling on to Liverpool, Preston fell ill of a chill and was put to bed in an inn. The American consul, James Maury, who was to hold the post from 1789 to 1837 and so had already tended generations of American travelers, was sent for and procured a doctor. Washington Irving happened to be in Liverpool and took an interest in Preston; they agreed to travel together into Wales with Irving’s elder brother Peter. This done, Preston and Irving went on to Scotland. From Edinburgh, they took the road for Stirling and the Highlands. From Linlithgow they passed through Bannockburn, into the ‘‘region of Burns and Scott, [where] every stream and every rock was vocal with the voice of poetry.’’ He and Irving ‘‘decided to take the first canto of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ (the Chase) as the programme of our route . . . and we could not have made a better choice of a guide, for besides the poetical beauties of the exquisite poem, it is as exact in the description of the scenery and localities as the most minute and painstaking itinerary.’’ In the Trossachs, they stayed with James Stuart, ‘‘a stalwart farmer somewhat above the rank of peasants,’’ who was hospitable once he realized that his visitors were not ‘‘you Southerners,’’ Sassenachs of the English variety. From Lake Katrine they passed to Loch Lomond, with Scott’s Rob Roy in their minds, then southward to Glasgow and the Ayrshire coast, along ‘‘the memorable road of Tam O’Shanter’’ to Kirk Alloway, there to see ‘‘with reverence and awe . . . the humble mansion, where was born the greatest British poet since Shakespeare.’’ Returning to London, Preston came across an old college mate, Andrew Govan, with whom he went to winter in Paris. There some difficulties with the secret police were eased by the Swissborn Albert Gallatin, once Secretary of the Treasury to Jefferson, but then Minister to France. In Paris, Preston found other Southerners and Americans for company. James Brown, a U.S. senator from Louisiana, later himself Minister to France (1823–29), was there; he was a kinsman, as ‘‘his mother was the daughter of John Preston, my great grandfather.’’ In the spring of 1818, Hugh Legaré appeared; he and Preston had been in college together. Lafayette was benign towards most visiting Americans, a favor Preston was able to return in South Carolina in 1825.20 19. Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 28, 6–7; Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19–21. 20. Yarborough, Reminiscences of Preston, 29–30, 45–47, 49, 53, 130, 61, 63.

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Preston and the other South Carolinians took their meals with a French family, the better to improve their facility with the language. This was a superior kind of instruction, ‘‘stately and somewhat elegant,’’ for dinner was punctually at 6, with all in formal dress. There were soirées, to which Republicans and ex-Bonapartists repaired. During the day, Preston studied the language, written and spoken. In the latter, he fumbled somewhat and thought himself (rightly) less accomplished than Legaré. Preston went every morning except Saturday to the Bibliothèque du Roi, where the officials reserved for him a seat, and he read assiduously for four hours between 9 and 1. In the afternoons, he would see the sights, especially the Louvre, where some of his friends were copying the paintings; there he learned his tastes: ‘‘The French style of art in all its manifestations was unpleasant to me, the Dutch painters not at all agreeable and least of all Rubens, but the Italian a perpetual glory to my imagination, first the Roman and then the other schools.’’ He would then dine ‘‘with artists or savants’’ or ‘‘what was better’’ with Madame d’Esménard. He would go on to the theaters (the d’Esménards had a free ticket to the Théâtre Française), at a time when Anne Mars, Catherine-Joseph Duchesnoise, and François Joseph Talma were acting; or to the opera to hear Angelica Catalini, the Italian soprano; or to the ballet, to watch Emilie Bigottini.21 Preston took lessons in Italian, to prepare himself for a trip beyond the Alps. All this was done with self-conscious ease. Preston was famous for his clothes, his figure, and his urbanity. But grace was used to conceal labor, the hard work of acquiring a difficult education. He left for Italy in the company of Andrew Govan and James and Nancy Brown, at a time when Americans were a rare sight there, often irritatingly confused with the abominable English.22 Indeed, John Blair Hoge remarked in 1815, from Marseilles, that the English sometimes passed themselves off as Americans, to evade French dislike. Preston recounts the following anecdote of Turin, which makes the point. Walking on the banks of the Po, ‘‘I met a friar in a tippet cloak with a long beard. . . . The friar said, ‘You are a stranger, Sir, apparently looking at the river.’ ‘Yes, I am a foreigner, and see it for the first time.’ ‘You are an Englishman.’ ‘No Sir.’ ‘A Russian?’ ‘No Sir.’ ‘A German?’ ‘No Sir.’ ‘Of what country may I be so bold as to ask?’ ‘An American.’ ‘Hah,’ said he, as he stepped back, and regarded me from head to foot. ‘I have never seen an American before, and yet you are my countryman, for your country was discovered by an Italian and I too am a Genoese,’ whereupon he 21. Ibid., 63, 64, 67. The actors all frequented the soirées of Mme. d’Esménard: see ibid., 54–55. 22. Identified in James A. Padgett, ed., ‘‘Letters of James Brown to Henry Clay, 1804– 1835,’’ Louisiana Historical Quarterly 24 (October 1941): 925. Nancy Brown’s sister Lucretia was married to Henry Clay.

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threw his arms round me, with a sort of ecstasy as if he had found a treasure.’’ But if Preston was unusual as an American, he was trite as a visitor, which he well knew; all the world had been coming to Italy for millennia. Preston did what was usual: he witnessed the fine arts, studied the baroque corruptions of the Church, was blessed by Pius VII, and struggled with thieves, police, and rogues. Unlike in Paris, they did not much mingle with the locals: ‘‘In Rome we made no acquaintances.’’ In Naples, however, they were entertained by Monsieur Falconnet, the old Swiss banker whose daughter Eliza had married John Izard Middleton, at his country residence in Capodimonte. Returning north, Florence was to make a deep impression on Preston that lasted into old age, when he toyed with retiring there to die. ‘‘Surely there is not upon the face of the earth a spot comparable to it, one that so fills at once the soul and the senses with scenes of and sentiments of beauty.’’ Not least, there ‘‘the eye was offended by fewer priests, prostitutes, and paupers than in any Italian town.’’ In Venice, he saw Byron ‘‘the Monster’’ in a gondola, a sight equally pestiferous, or so he claimed in a memoir written for a young relative.23 Preston returned to Paris and, from there, went to study at the University of Edinburgh. He, Legaré, and Govan were in Scotland joined by the Northerners, George Ticknor and Joseph Cogswell. More thoroughly even than in Paris, Preston was admitted to Edinburgh society. He went, as did the other Americans, to the soirées of Mrs. Grant, who entertained Whigs like Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review. Late in life, Cogswell was to remember to Virginia Preston Carrington that Mrs. Grant much appreciated the young Preston and predicted great things for him: ‘‘Mrs. Grant then had with her several young ladies of distinguished families in England & Scotland, who were placed under her protection to be introduced into society, & on their account she gave frequent parties to a select circle. At these parties your brother was one of the great lions, his powers of conversation were so brilliant & his manners so courteous & so fascinating he was sure to gather around him on all occasions a circle of listeners & admirers.’’ As Ticknor noted, there one met the likes of the socialist Robert Owen, ‘‘who talked me out of all patience with his localities and universalities’’; the poet John Wilson, then on the editorial staff of Blackwood’s, soon as ‘‘Christopher North’’ to write his Noctes Ambrosianae, but then a recent satirist of Edinburgh notables; James Hogg the poet and novelist; Walter Scott himself who, as Preston appreciated, in the evening joined ‘‘in the chitchat of a tea-table without ped23. John Blair Hoge to Moses Hoge (his father), 4 March 1815, Hoge Family Papers, PHS; Eliza Falconnet Middleton to Mary Hering Middleton, 12 September 1819, Hering-Middleton Papers, SCHS; Yarborough, Reminiscences of Preston, 72–73, 87, 91, 112, 118–19.

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antry or jealousy.’’ 24 But Edinburgh, unlike Paris, offered formal instruction. Preston went to lectures at the university: on geometry and geology by John Playfair, ‘‘who has been the competitor of Cuvier’’; on philosophy by Thomas Brown, ‘‘who has combatted with success Locke and Hume’’; on the civil law by Alexander Irving. By late April, Preston had concluded his studies, went to Liverpool, and embarked with Ticknor for New York on a voyage that lasted thirty-seven days.25 Preston’s tour was typical of his generation, save in being more thorough. It was postgraduate but had no professional purposes, beyond his sense that a future lawyer and politician should know the European world. It was informally structured, even when he attended the University of Edinburgh; he found tutors for studying French and Italian, as he needed them. He received no diplomas, but just went to libraries to read. He saw books and lectures as part of an eclectic education that necessarily embraced the fine arts, the theater, the ballet, the opera, the architecture of ancient and modern Europe. He stuck to the traditional routes of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, as amended by an American to embrace the British Isles, in spending the most time in Paris and much in Italy. He saw Europe as offering refinement, an education of his sensibility: the ability to discriminate in music and painting, to converse in French and Italian, to understand the civil law, to encounter alien religions. But he traveled often more with his fellow Americans, less with Europeans, though—unlike the summer tourists to come—his visits were sufficiently extended that he knew local society beyond mere hotels and restaurants, beyond waiters and chambermaids. Preston’s immediate contemporaries varied the pattern here and there. Legaré spent a little less time and omitted Italy; he was a more assiduous scholar. John Blair Hoge, as a Presbyterian clergyman in Europe between 1814 and 1816, spent more time in the South of France and went more carefully to places of Protestant significance: to Geneva, for example, of which he wrote, ‘‘It affords me some satisfaction to be able to say, altho’ I may never realize any benefit from it, that I have seen the house in which [Calvin] lived & the pulpit in which he preached & the city in which he labored & some manuscripts & letters written with his own hand.’’ Judging from Preston’s description, it is improbable that Andrew Govan studied anything much beyond guide books and ladies’ ankles: ‘‘Govan was of an elegant and most athletic person, more 24. George S. Hillard, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876), 1:278; WCP to Major O’Connor, 4 December 1818, WCP Papers, SCL. 25. Joseph Cogswell to Virginia Preston Carrington, 26 September 1860, Virginia Carrington Scrapbook, Preston Family Papers, VHS; Hillard, George Ticknor, 1:278, 298; WCP to Major John O’Connor, 4 December 1818, WCP Papers, SCL.

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studious of his physical accomplishments than of his mental. He took lessons in dancing, fencing exercise of the fire lock and in boxing, and was quite au fait in each art.’’ Thomas Green Clemson, on the other hand, in Paris from 1826 to 1831, enrolled as an auditor at the Royal School of Mines for three years, and received a diploma as an assayer from the Royal Mint.26 But Preston offers a hint of how the patterns of travel tended to go. If a Southerner traveled first to Britain, he or she first went North and took a ship from New York to Liverpool. Liverpool, fixed in the Southern mind as the place where cotton prices were decided, was of peculiar interest, an introduction to modernity, impressive but dirty, an immediate lesson. ‘‘The Docks are really a magnificent work,’’ Thornwell observed in 1841. ‘‘The public buildings are large & elegant—built upon a more durable extensive & costly scale than buildings of the same sort in America. But in external neatness we far excel them. Our cities are more refreshing to the eye—being neither dingy nor smoky.’’ The scale was unexpected. The docks ‘‘extend something like two miles, and for all that space are literally crammed with ships, their masts pointing to the skies like huge forests, and their colours gracefully floating to the breeze.’’ And the poverty was intimidating, ominous: ‘‘The police is stationed, a man for about every fifty yards, along every street, so as to be within a moment’s call for the purpose of suppressing mobs, riots, and all disorders. You see an immense poor population, all ragged and dirty, and begging for alms at almost every corner you turn.’’ 27 There one decided whether to travel westward to Ireland, northward to Scotland, or press on to London. Relatively few went to Ireland, which had yet to earn much standing as a site for Romantic reveries, so its scenery often came as a surprise, ‘‘picturesque in a high degree.’’ Ireland, John Young Bassett thought in 1836, was ‘‘one of the loveliest countries I have ever seen,’’ though he heard rumors that ‘‘in the south & west the population is in a wretched state. . . . [T]he stage was beset by beggers [sic] every time it stopped.’’ As for Dublin, it reminded him of Baltimore. Presbyterians sometimes went to Belfast and might go on to Dublin, as John Blair Hoge did in 1815, to reflect upon the horrors of Catholicism and the consequences of British power: ‘‘The religious state of the country is truly melancholy. The Catholic priests are I presume men of better conduct than their brethren on the continent, but . . . [f ]rom an account which 26. John Blair Hoge to Moses Hoge, 25 July 1815, Hoge Family Papers, PHS; Yarborough, Reminiscences of Preston, 74, 129; Ernest McPherson Lander Jr., The Calhoun Family and Thomas Green Clemson: Decline of a Southern Patriarchy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 2. 27. JHT to General James Gillespie, 15 July 1841, JHT Papers, SCL; JHT to Nancy Thornwell, 16 June 1841, in Benjamin Morgan Palmer, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, D.D., LL.D. (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1875), 168.

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I heard of a procession or pilgrimage, or celebration which occurred recently near Cork they seem scarcely above the level of the worshippers of Juggernaut. I am astonished that Britain who has done & proclaims to the world that she has done so much abroad for the promotion of Xnty should have neglected so much, for her own unhappy subjects.’’ 28 And this was how Ireland tended to be viewed in Southern discourse, as the convergence of things characteristically mistrusted by Southerners: British power, the enervations of Catholicism, the Malthusian perils of Europe, the ‘‘calamity of scarcity and famine.’’ 29 It was more usual to go to Scotland, sanctified by the legends of Burns and Scott, ancestral home of so many Southerners, the fount of the kirk, common sense philosophy, and the wild charms of Ossianic and Romantic landscape. Unlike Ireland, Scotland was mostly a success story, a nation that had reasoned and felt its way towards prominence. Its climate might be grim. ‘‘I came to Glasgow with the intention of visiting the Highlands,’’ Thornwell observed in 1841, during midsummer, ‘‘. . . but the constant rains and the severe cold, for the season, have led me to abandon the project.’’ Indeed, William Campbell Preston thought in 1818 that such soddenness had left no option but intellectual pursuits and ‘‘social affections’’: ‘‘An Italian in his lovely country is contented with the luxury of alternate sunshine and shade. . . . These poor Scotch on the contrary have . . . no sun to enervate them—No court to refine them into polished nothingness—no wealth to debauch them into english brutality. They have nothing but what Athens had when the Roman robbers were triumphant—learning and philosophy.’’ Early travelers like Preston might make as much of David Hume, William Robertson, and Adam Smith, and might dally as appreciatively in the elegant symmetries of Edinburgh’s New Town as in the Castle of Holyrood or in the Highlands. Later visitors like Augustin Louis Taveau were more exclusive in their sympathies: ‘‘Wandering among the romantic hills of Scotland, I have experienced the liveliest pleasure which a practical temperament could be susceptible of. With the ‘Lady of the Lake’ in my hand and seated in a graceful little barge that glides over Lake Katrine like one of Sir Walter’s ‘summer ducks’ imagine how delightful my sensations must have been surrounded as it were by all but the lovely Helen herself.’’ In truth, it was the combination that was appealing, philosophy and romance, head and heart. Samuel Gilman in 1847, meditating on cultural nationalism, glided easily from one moment 28. John Blair Hoge to Moses Hoge, 23 September 1815, Hoge Family Papers, PHS; John Young Bassett to Margaret Bassett, 28 February 1836, John Young Bassett Papers, ADAH. 29. ‘‘Address to the Patrons of the Review, and to the People of the South,’’ SQR 11 (April 1847): v; see also Jacob N. Cardozo, ‘‘Political Economy—Rent,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 216; ‘‘Ireland,’’ SQR 6 ( July 1844): 1–31.

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to the other, as though David Hume jigged in a ceilidh: ‘‘The influence of foreign cultivation awakened so much ambition and so much dormant power in her [Scotland’s] sons, that in her philosophy and her literature, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, she enjoyed the acknowledged preeminence of being the instructress, not of England only, but of Europe. And at the moment, when mere English poetry . . . was at its lowest ebb, were heard the native wood-notes wild of Robert Burns, bursting on the astonished and delighted ear of civilized man, and creating even new schools of thought, of poetry, of criticism and of philanthropy, founded on the widest basis of human sympathies and human interests.’’ 30 If the traveler did not go north from Liverpool, he or she went south to London. Almost no one went to Wales, except Mrs. Evan Philip Thomas, for obvious reasons.31 On the way to London, it was almost obligatory to stop in Chester, which for the first time raised the issue of antiquity and feudalism, those un-American things. The city had Roman walls, a cathedral, and a stately home. Thornwell wandered the cathedral, ‘‘a huge Gothic pile,’’ sat playfully on the bishop’s chair, ‘‘feeling myself to be as much of a bishop as any body,’’ conjured in his Reformed mind the sound of ‘‘monks counting their beads and muttering their idle prayers.’’ He went to visit nearby Eaton Hall, the home of the Marquis of Westminster. There he was dazzled and depressed by the abundance conferred upon a real aristocrat: the thirty square miles of grounds, the deer, the orangery, ‘‘its rich and gorgeous saloons, its plated furniture, its spacious halls,’’ its stables done in the modern Gothic manner. ‘‘[I] came away almost a Chartist. . . . [the Marquis] himself is rolling in luxury & supporting a thousand beasts of pleasure while multitudes around him are absolutely starving for the very necessaries of life. . . . The contrast produces a terrible revulsion in one’s feelings.’’ James Henry Hammond felt much the same, if more conflicted because more interested in his own lordly claims as a great planter.32 Southward lay more contradictions: industry in Manchester and Birmingham, coal mines in the Black Country, feudalism at Warwick, Tudor cottages 30. JHT to Nancy Thornwell, 15 July 1841, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 176; WCP to Major O’Connor, 4 December 1818, WCP Papers, SCL; ALT to his sister (‘‘March 1853, Cadiz,’’ is written in pencil on the manuscript), ALT Papers, DU; Samuel Gilman, ‘‘Mutual Influence of National Literatures,’’ SQR 12 (October 1847): 324. 31. Mrs. Evan Philip Thomas, ‘‘Diary’’ (16 June 1836–13 August 1837), MHS. See also F. Henry Quitman to Eliza Quitman, 29 June 1853, John A. Quitman and Family Papers, MDAH: Quitman went from Liverpool to Dublin, via Conway and (presumably) Holyhead. 32. JHT to Nancy Thornwell, 28 June 1841, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 170–73; JHT to General James Gillespie, 15 July 1841, JHT Papers, SCL; Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 188–89.

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at Stratford, the immensity of London. Energy, squalor, vestiges, modernity, it was all confusing, often repulsive. Southerners who stayed home were more prone to Anglophilia: travelers seldom were. ‘‘I hate, I detest it [England],’’ Hammond insisted. The English were ‘‘a people full of arrogance, humbuggery, & frivolity.’’ ‘‘Every thing is artificial in England—every thing over wrought & over strained.’’ There was too much conceit, nothing but sardonic glances. ‘‘I saw but two men smile in England. This is a literal fact.’’ ‘‘Well I will not repeat the number of disgusting epithets that rise in my mind at the mention of the very name of London’’ was John Young Bassett’s sweeping condemnation. It was notoriously hard to gain access to English society, so the traveler was compelled into tourism. ‘‘Whether [it] is to be ascribed to the deficiency of my means, or the additional reserve of the English I will not decide, but I have made fewer acquaintances in England than any where else that I have been,’’ John Blair Hoge lamented. By contrast, Americans were welcomed into Scottish society, Preston noted, ‘‘which indeed is the case every where but in England.’’ To encounter such suspicion was debilitating. Throughout English society, from high to low, ‘‘every one is considered a knave until he is proved the contrary—and every one is considered vulgar who is not fiercely repulsive.’’ At best, this might be amusing, as Henry Middleton managed to find it in 1838: ‘‘I have written you this hurried scrawl in the coffee room of Morley’s Hotel surrounded by bustle and movement, though not much interrupted by talking, for John Bull is a silent animal, and nothing is more common here than to see two people sit daily side by side eating drinking and blowing their noses for weeks together without ever uttering a word to one another.’’ The English themselves were not unaware of this fault, and Americans noticed them seeing it. In 1815 Alice Izard read Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties and remarked: ‘‘I think the characters of the three elderly Ladies is the most severe satire upon the English reserve, pride, & insolence that ever was written.’’ 33 Still, London was the center of a great Empire, great despite the defeats of Saratoga, Yorktown, and New Orleans. Modern Britain had to be reckoned with; she posed the question of the future of economic society. As Beverley Tucker told his classes in Williamsburg in 1845, ‘‘The history of the world affords no parallel to the advance of Great Britain in wealth, and in all elements of prosperity, during the present century.’’ Hugh Legaré stated the issue in 33. James Henry Hammond to Francis W. Pickens, 6 September 1836, James Henry Hammond Mss, DU; John Young Bassett to Isaphoena Bassett, 23 February 1836, John Young Bassett Papers, ADAH; John Blair Hoge to Moses Hoge, 4 October 1815, Hoge Family Papers, PHS; WCP to Major O’Connor, 4 December 1818, WCP Papers, SCL; Henry Middleton Jr., to Mary Hering Middleton, 15 March 1838, Hering-Middleton Papers, SCHS; ADI to MIM, 5 April 1815, Manigault Family Papers, SCL.

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England’s favor. ‘‘I appeal to anyone who has been abroad’’ to consider the standing of modern Britain, he asked the House of Representatives in 1837, when the financial system of the United States was under debate. No doubt, other societies had more refined cultures. ‘‘But, in that civilization, which . . . it is the great end of modern political economy to promote . . . there is nothing recorded in the annals of mankind that does not sink into the shades of the deepest eclipse by the side of England.’’ Abroad, she was supreme, with her fleet, her armies, her ‘‘subsidised allies.’’ At home, there was ‘‘the Thames crowded with shipping . . . her arsenals, her docks, her canals, her railways, her factories, her mines, her warehouses, her roads, and bridges; go through the streets of that wonderful metropolis, the bank, the emporium, and the exchange of the whole world.’’ 34 Legaré had had his own social difficulties in England; he approved despite this. Less charitable Southerners would mitigate such benedictions with finger-wagging about William Mayhew’s London, which was Thornwell’s Liverpool writ large. But, for good or ill, England promised or threatened a future that might come to the South. Nonetheless, few Southerners had reasons to dally in Britain. It had once been otherwise. In 1828, Hugh Legaré looked back on a vanished moment: ‘‘Before and just after the Revolution, many, perhaps it may be more accurate to say most, of our youth of opulent families, were educated at English Schools and Universities.’’ 35 Now there were no English colleges that a young man might wish to attend: Eton, Oxbridge, the Inns of Court were disused experiences. Doctors now went to Paris, lawyers to Germany. Since Washington Allston’s departure from Bristol, England had been of little use to students of the fine arts, let alone music, both of which were better studied in Florence and Paris. It offered no opportunities for engaging alien languages. The food was bad, the climate worse. Britain might be the future, but it had little interest in, few mechanisms for instructing the alien about how to achieve or avoid that future, except its streets, its institutions, its externals. These were usually accomplished in short order, and the traveler hurried on to the Continent. But in climbing on to the Channel ferry, Southerners mingled in a great outward stream, for the English were reinventing travel with their enthusiasm and money.36 Thomas Cooper, sitting in South Carolina in 1830, was amused and appalled by it all. ‘‘The propensity to visit foreign countries, 34. ‘‘Spirit of the Sub-Treasury’’ (1837), in Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:304. 35. HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 3. 36. The literature on this is now extensive, but see especially John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and, for earlier years, Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

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Louis Rémy Mignot, Winter Scene, Holland (ca. 1853) (Whereabouts unknown)

has grown . . . almost into a mania,’’ he clucked. ‘‘Europe is overwhelmed with the mob of assumed gentility from that Island; nor would it be, in any degree, a matter of surprise to find a leather-seller’s spouse, from Fish-streethill, perched on top of the Pyramid of Cheops, or supping her breakfastbeverage on the great wall of China. A friend of ours, whose labours have occupied some pages in the Southern Review, wrote in his last letter, ‘if I am not a punctual correspondent this summer, pray impute it to absence from home; for I propose taking a stroll into Syria for about a twelvemonth.’ ’’ 37 It was customary to go to Paris, though a few made their way via Ostend to the Low Countries, to Antwerp and Brussels, usually if they were making their way down the Rhine towards Switzerland and Italy. Antwerp’s Cathedral then held a fascination now vanished. Advising the painter John Beaufain Irving in 1853, Alfred Huger of Charleston insisted upon the merits of this route, because there ‘‘you will see a picture that has no superiour Reubens’ Ascent to the Cross—and ‘Descent’—the Sentiments elicited in the ‘Heart’ and conveyed by the Heart to the ‘Mind’ are in themselves evidence of the 37. TC, ‘‘Social Life in England and France,’’ SR 6 (November 1830): 403–4.

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Truth of the Work. I would not miss seeing these Paintings!’’ Thus seeing in 1819 had been peculiarly important to the young Hugh Legaré, by prompting Romantic reverie in him. But almost no Southerners spoke Dutch, let alone Frisian, which made things inaccessible. John Blair Hoge wandered through in 1815 ‘‘unknowing and unknown,’’ seeing little but buildings, paintings, and the inside of inns.38 American culture had some conception of the Netherlands, because of dim memories of the William of Orange after whom a Virginian college was half-named, but almost none of Belgium, which tended to be regarded as an unsuccessful version of France. And, since the days of New Amsterdam and John Adams’s mission of the 1770s, the Low Countries were little relevant, or so it seemed. Even Southern Calvinists went elsewhere. Making the more usual trip from Dover to Calais was to pass over a much-meditated cultural divide, was ‘‘like sunshine after darkness’’ as one approached Paris, the City of Light. Here, one could study medicine, the fine arts, languages, dancing, the opera. Even walking the streets was thought to improve one’s cultural standing. Preeminently, here was Europe’s metropolis, where everything that rose converged. James Johnston Pettigrew once listened to a conversation in Spain, which exemplified the logic of this centralization of the imagination: ‘‘One day while I was in Seville, a party of French engineers at the table d’hote were discoursing of the delights of Paris. ‘But,’ said a Spaniard, ‘every Frenchman cannot be born at Paris.’ ‘True, but every Frenchman can move to Paris. I love my province, yet nothing could induce me to pass fifteen days there. There is no place like Paris; it is the only place in the world.’ ‘Yes,’ says another, ‘and the only place in Paris is the Boulevard des Italiens.’ ‘Yes,’ says a third, ‘and the only place in the Boulevard des Italiens is the Café Tortoni.’ ‘And,’ maliciously adds a fourth, ‘the only place in the Café Tortoni is table No. 7.’ ’’ 39 Many came as Preston and Legaré had done, to be informally educated. Some came as children escorted by their parents. In 1846 Charles Izard Manigault began a sojourn of several years so that his two children, Gabriel and Henrietta, could attend school. As Manigault explained to his friend and banker, ‘‘Our boys & girls at home are too apt to take things Carelessly all the time, just as they happen to come without ever feeling themselves called upon for any great excitement to ambition energy or reflection. They consider themselves Young men at 16 or 18, and young women at 14 or 15, but at these French Boarding Schools our young Ladies are made to perceive that Such 38. Alfred Huger to John B. Irving, 20 July 1853, in ‘‘Letterpress Book,’’ Alfred Huger Papers, DU; John Blair Hoge to Moses Hoge, 24 October 1815, Hoge Family Papers, PHS. 39. James Henry Hammond to Francis W. Pickens, 6 September 1836, James Henry Hammond Mss, DU; James Johnston Pettigrew, Notes on Spain and the Spaniards, in the Summer of 1850, with a Glance at Sardinia (Charleston, S.C.: Evans & Cogswell, 1861), 32.

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American ideas are all Nonsence.’’ Henriette was good at the piano, and Paris was the place for the best pianos. Gabriel went to ‘‘one of the best schools for Boys in Paris, where in pursuing his latin, greek, & other studies, he is also jabbering french constantly with his instructors & classmates.’’ Each week, the children went off on Monday morning and returned on Saturday afternoon. The patriarch felt there was value in keeping his children from Charleston, the girl especially. In 1847, he decided to stay for another year: ‘‘We would not know what to do with her [Henriette] in Charleston now for she is Neither one thing nor the other neither woman nor child with no experience. . . . We therefore want to give her some ideas, & something to talk about by shewing her some of the most interesting Parts of Europe.’’ 40 But Charleston was not left behind, not entirely. The Manigaults’ music master, Monsieur Delue, had many students. ‘‘Tho’ we profess to have no prejudices,’’ the Manigault patriarch sniffed improbably, ‘‘there were a couple of Mulatto Boys there from Cuba.’’ Remembering the Declaration of Independence, he told young Gabriel ‘‘that whatever we might feel or resolve respecting Slavery, that nevertheless nearly the whole of the Christian world (in ignorance and prejudice) are against us and that in Europe Negroes are generally regarded as equals.’’ But Mother was less flexible. She ‘‘never could reconcile herself to these two Niggers and when we went to the examination one of them gained a prize for Music (he performed on the piano) & on receiving his prize (a Book) he grinned, & made a regular Negro bow by wiping one foot all along the floor just as our Cook Joe does when you give him anything.’’ Taken all around, it seemed best to look for another school.41 For Louisianians of French descent or birth, Paris was their metropolis. Between it and New Orleans, they could pass with intimacy, ease, and frequency. Charles Gayarré the historian spent eight years in France, from 1836 to 1844. Adrien Rouquette, the Roman Catholic priest and poet, had a father who had migrated from Fleurance in southwestern France in 1800 and become a wealthy wine-importer. Though the son was first educated at the nearby Collège d’Orleans, then at Transylvania University in Kentucky, and briefly was a law student in Philadelphia, he was sent to France in 1829, when only sixteen. There he studied at the Collège Royal in Nantes and then in Rennes for four years, and returned to Louisiana in 1833. A year later, he was back in France to study law, which he did in Paris until 1837, with a brief return to New Orleans in 1835. He was back again in France in 1840, then again 40. Charles Izard Manigault to R. Habersham & Sons, 1 November 1846; Charles Izard Manigault to Alfred Huger, 1 August 1846; Charles Izard Manigault to Charles & Louis Manigault, 1 June 1847, all in ‘‘Letterbook, 1846–1848,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL. 41. Charles Izard Manigault to Charles H. Manigault, 1 October 1846, in ‘‘Letterbook, 1846–1848,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL.

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in 1846 to 1847 for six months.42 The Francophone world was wide and complex. Marie Drivon Girard (1814–1913), for example, came from a family from Sainte Lucie in the Lesser Antilles. In 1830 she was a student in Paris, at the Institut Afforty, a boarding school in the St. Philippe du Roule District; there she witnessed the Revolution of 1830 and supported the Orleanists. She returned to the Caribbean and married Jean Marie Aquart, who died in 1838. She took her family to New Orleans in the early 1840s. A second husband disappeared in the Mexican War, while her son died of scarlet fever. She taught French to children, wrote for L’Abeille, and after the Civil War published a school text, Histoire des États Unis suivie de l’histoire de la Louisiane (1881).43 Most exuberantly notable, on the Parisian scene, was Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the Louisiana composer and pianist, perhaps the most important American composer of the mid-nineteenth century. He had been born in New Orleans in 1829, the son of Edward Gottschalk, an English Jew (the family was originally German) and slave trader, and a Roman Catholic Creole of Sainte-Dominguan descent, Aimée Bruslé.44 He became a musical prodigy, whose imagination was nourished by the complex musical traditions, black and white, Congo Square and the opera, that converged in New Orleans. Indeed, it was not only white Creoles who made their way to Paris. Among Gottschalk’s contemporaries were Edmond Dedé and Lucien Lambert, both free blacks, who went to France to study music, with the former ending up as the conductor of the Bordeaux municipal orchestra. Victor-Eugène Macarty, the son of a slave and a Louisiana planter, studied voice at the Paris Conservatoire in the early 1840s.45 When Louis Gottschalk was twelve, he was sent to a Parisian boarding school, run by a Monsieur and Madame Dussert, who had connections in the musical world. Gottschalk applied to the Conservatoire, but was rejected as an American (in theory, the Conservatoire did not admit foreigners) with the dismissive remark that ‘‘L’Amérique n’état qu’un pays de machines à vapeur.’’ So he turned to Charles Hallé, the German pianist, who was married to a New Orleans woman whom the Gottschalks knew, and whose household was staffed by freed slaves. Eventually, Gottschalk ended up with Camille Stamaty, a Greek who had grown up in Italy, whose other students included Camille Saint-Saëns. In due time, Gottschalk began to give concerts, the first in 1845 at the Salle Pleyel, which was attended by Frédéric Chopin himself. 42. Dagmar Renshaw Lebreton, Chahta-Ima: The Life of Adrien-Emmanuel Rouquette (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), 1–2, 30–47, 52–66, 84–88, 113–18. 43. Her Parisian school notebooks can be seen in the Marie Drivon Girard Papers, TU. 44. S. Frederick Starr, Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15–31. His mother’s great uncle was Louis Moreau-Lislet. 45. Ibid., 36, 50, and elsewhere.

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Eugène Battaille, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Courtesy Free Library of Philadelphia)

A few more years brought him membership in the salon of Émile Girardin on the rue de Chaillot, whose habitués included Alphonse Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas pére. More importantly, Gottschalk became a celebrity as a virtuoso and composer, who some thought might become the peer of Chopin and Berlioz, someone who might fuse American and European musical traditions.46 Though religion was among the many reasons that brought Roman Catholic Southerners to France, irreligion was the Protestant temptation, part of the sensual thrill of French culture. John Young Bassett of Huntsville, who came to study medicine in 1836, had flattered himself a skeptic in Alabama. In Paris, matters looked different. Upon arrival, he took lodgings in the Place Pantheon, next to the temple where Voltaire and Rousseau were entombed and celebrated. Bassett reflected that, in Alabama, religion seemed notable 46. Ibid.

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for ‘‘ignorance, bigotry, & deceit.’’ But France was another world: ‘‘God save me from a country without religion; & from a government with it . . . & return me safe to a country with religion & a government without it—I am convinced that the evils of infidelity are worse, aye much worse, than any religion whatever.’’ However necessary it had once been to ‘‘correct the evils of a corrupt priesthood,’’ the reforms of the anticlericals ‘‘were edge tools, given to children,’’ fallible human beings who could not cope with ‘‘refined dry perfected systems of morals.’’ So Bassett rendered the Romantic verdict, that much had been occasioned by the blunders of the Enlightenment: ‘‘The french are religious without being honest, I speak of the common people, they will cheat, lie, & steal, every thing has to be kept under lock & key.’’ At fault was ‘‘the moral doctrine of the past century.’’ This was a conventional judgment, common since at least the 1790s. As a reviewer of the works of Jean Baptiste Massillon observed in 1843, in the pages of the Southern Quarterly Review: ‘‘From the saloon of Baron D’Holbach, where the Voltaires, the Diderots, and D’Alemberts congregated, issued streams of corruption, which infected all classes of society. . . . [During the Revolution] Liberty, in uniting with impiety, embraced a fiend, that despoiled her of her innocence, and consigned her to an ignoble end. Religion was her only lawful spouse.’’ 47 Irreligion was a subtle temptation. Paris had cruder ones, such as ‘‘the beautiful living proportions of the French girls’ legs.’’ As Robert Massengill Porter, medical student from Tennessee, observed in his journal in 1846: ‘‘The women . . . hoist their petticoats above their knees & exhibit such admirably proportioned limbs, such elegantly turned ankles & feet as to make a Titian or Canova go into exstacies.’’ John D. Osborne was in Paris two years later, to study the civil law and use it in New Orleans. He wrote back to his old classmate, John Coles Rutherfoord, of the University of Virginia, that Americans could not conceive of Parisian sexual freedoms: ‘‘You find attached to every ‘appartement de garcon’ or bachelor rooms two bed-rooms one for himself and the other for his friend. You cannot walk ten steps at night without being frequently accosted by women of the town who beg you to come and stay with them.’’ Landladies did not mind lady visitors, for ‘‘it is nobodys business but yours.’’ The newspapers carried advertisements from young girls who volunteered ‘‘to do every thing.’’ All things considered, ‘‘Paris my dear Rutherfoord is a glorious place to live while the fire of youth is in your blood and your mind is yet seething with the fancies of the younger days.’’ In 1853 Augustin Louis Taveau wrote to a friend that ‘‘I saw ‘Lady Gay Spanker’ in the streets a few days and endeavoured to avoid her but she came up very boldly and addressed 47. John Young Bassett to Isaphoena Bassett, 13 March, 27 March 1836, John Young Bassett Papers, ADAH; ‘‘Oeuvres de Massillon,’’ SQR 3 (January 1843): 38–39.

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me without a blush. She also very kindly asked me to pay her a visit but I rather think I can find better entertainment elsewhere.’’ 48 In turn, one of Taveau’s French friends, Henri Foubert, inquired in 1853, amiably ‘‘in english with not Dictionnary’’: ‘‘Remember you well of Paris and the Balls and the ladies; I seen the miss bookseller in the . . . street I have take a Book for my sister. this lady is very pretty but she is not for me. Have you had . . . women in your way?’’ 49 Philip Claiborne Gooch of Virginia, another medical student, found a grisette called Clementine in his way: ‘‘She says tu toi—the votre—the familiar form. We are friends. Three bottles of champagne are empty. we are warm. The cognac flows. . . . Everyone goes to bed and—and—what follows.’’ 50 Much is encapsulated in an anonymous, Flaubertian letter sent to James Alexander Ventress of Mississippi in 1835. It purports to be from a young French doctor in Paris, an old friend in carousels, who had been asked by Ventress to instruct a Parisian tailor about shipping some clothes to the United States. ‘‘So you are happy and contented at Moundville?’’ the friend asks. ‘‘What a contrast there must be between that town and this. You must regret Paris occasionally? The théâtres, operas, Rubini, Tamburini &c &c et ‘Il mio tesoro’?’’ It was pleasant to hear that Ventress’s political career was advancing, but pleasantry was not the point of the letter. Could Ventress convey a message? It was for Mr. , ‘‘I omit names, you will know who the person is.’’ While in Paris, ‘‘he became acquainted with a young lady—no matter how— they became attached to each other; he, at least, for a time, loved her, and she perfectly adored him (she does so still).’’ She became ‘‘what is here named ‘sa bonne amie’ we think nothing of such things here.’’ The couple were together, 48. Taveau was a South Carolinian poet, perhaps not worth close attention as such, but a man whose sprightly life is worth an aside. He was the son of Louis Augustin Thomas Taveau, a French immigrant turned rice planter but also a gambler and drinker who gave little aid to his children; Augustin’s mother, Martha, was a descendant of the Swintons, a Scottish family, and hence he was a cousin of Hugh Swinton Legaré. Augustin studied the law in a desultory fashion under James Louis Petigru in Charleston and went to Europe between 1852 and 1854, where in Gibraltar he acquired and married a Bostonian bride and cousin called Delphine Sprague, whose father was a merchant and the American consul. Her dowry was ample, but he seems to have run through most of it during the 1850s and ended up with a small farm near Abbeville on the eve of the war. (This is based on the manuscripts in ALT Papers, DU, among which see, especially, ALT to Robert Hepburne Swinton, 10 November 1850; ALT to ‘‘Gentlemen,’’ 3 September 1854.) 49. Robert Massengill Porter, ‘‘Journal, 24 April 1845–3 June 1846,’’ Miscellaneous Collection, TSLA; John D. Osborne to John Coles Rutherfoord, 15 October 1848, John Rutherfoord Papers, DU; ALT to ‘‘Colonel’’ (n.d., but ‘‘A’’ and ‘‘Paris August 1853’’ have been written in pencil afterwards), and Henri Foubert to ALT, 9 February 1853, ALT Papers, DU. 50. Entry for 23 October 1848, Philip Claiborne Gooch Diary, VHS. There is a good account of Gooch in John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 119–25.

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for four or five years, ‘‘a strong proof that the girl was worthy of being loved, for he was an excellent judge of these matters, a sort of a Don Juan.’’ And she was better than usual, more than the ‘‘La! la! la! la!’’ sort. But the time came for him to return to his home, a place near New Orleans, and promises were exchanged. She entrusted a letter and a ring to the ship’s captain, who assured her that they would be given to the lover upon arrival in America. The correspondent knew all this because, a few days ago, he returned to his room to find a woman dressed all in black satin, with a veil that concealed ‘‘the pale, or sallow, & rather thin features of a lady evidently suffering.’’ She had heard that the doctor had received a letter from her lover. She begged news, for someone had told her that he had lost his fortune. She was glad to learn that this was not so. She had written often but heard nothing, though he seemed to find time to write to his tailor. She had not forgotten him; ‘‘he was her first, her only amour.’’ On his departure, she had contemplated suicide and murder; ‘‘for many days she had to combat the horrid but heroic temptation of poisoning him in order that she might at least die with him, die in his arms.’’ Only religion had stayed her hand. ‘‘She wept bitterly.’’ The doctor tried to comfort her. Worse was that the ship’s captain had pocketed her letter and ring, had indeed tried to seduce her, thinking her a likely and willing mistress. ‘‘Do not communicate it to her lover—for you southerners are a fiery people.’’ All this affair, if known in America, would do our mutual friend ‘‘serious injury, not with those who think as you and I do, but you know we do not think, on this point and on many others, as the rest of the world does.’’ He asked Ventress to persuade the friend to write to her, ‘‘his amie.’’ It is all she wanted. Indeed, if she did not hear from him by the first of January, ‘‘she will immediately leave here and go to New Orleans, where she will expose him to the whole world.’’ It would be an ‘‘esclandre.’’ ‘‘Unfortunately, in my bewilderment, I forgot to ask her name and address.’’ She vanished.51 Southerners of less flexibility deprecated these liberations. In 1829 Jesse Burton Harrison frowned upon hanging about in cafés. Remembering his time there in 1815, Henry Clay concurred: ‘‘It is to be regretted that so few of them who visit that captivating metropolis are able to resist the temptations to indulgence which it presents.’’ Paris was always considered a risk. ‘‘There may be objections to my remaining so long in Paris,’’ Henry H. Cumming told his father in Georgia, ‘‘I shall ’tis true, be exposed to a great many tempta51. Anon. to James Alexander Ventress, 4 July 1835, Ventress Papers, MDAH. This letter is, almost certainly, describing a liaison of Ventress himself, perhaps with Marion Delorme, ‘‘que vous aime de couer,’’ whose letters can be found elsewhere among Ventress’s papers; see Marion DeLorme to James Alexander Ventress, 27 [ January?] 1831, Ventress Papers, MDAH. Since it bears a sort of title, ‘‘Prudentia,’’ above the place and date, the letter might even be a literary concoction by Ventress himself, who was a writer.

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tions to foolish dissipation. . . . [But] the Love I bear to my friends at Home, and my fear of displeasing them, will counteract them all and enable me to pass uninjured.’’ 52 Paris catered for more than bodies in search of sensuality. It catered amply to those curious about the diseased and dying. In the eighteenth century, the Southern medical student had usually gone to Edinburgh to complete his education, after having studied in Philadelphia. By the 1830s, though many still went northward for their initial studies, there were indigenous Southern medical schools, falteringly in Charleston and New Orleans, more successfully in Louisville.53 But Paris began to outstrip Edinburgh by its clinical resources and innovations; so loyalty was increasingly transferred. It has been estimated that 677 American doctors studied in Paris between 1820 and 1861, though the number might run as high as a thousand. During the 1830s alone, there were about 222 of them, of whom 34 were New Englanders, 58 from the middle states, 91 from the South, and 15 from the West (including Kentucky).54 In any given year in the 1830s, there were perhaps 30–50 American students in Paris, of whom just under half were Southerners. Before the Civil War, the Medical College of South Carolina alone sent 51 students, partly because two of its founders, John Edwards Holbrook and Samuel Henry Dickson, had themselves been educated there, as were many of its early graduates and faculty.55 Unsurprisingly, those from Louisiana were especially prominent and were almost the only Americans to become candidates for the diploma of the Faculté de Médecine; of the 21 Americans who did so in the 1830s, 19 were from Louisiana.56 Paris was preeminently attractive because it offered such an abundance of accessible and cheap medical resources. The city itself was enormous: 785,862 people in 1831, when the largest Southern cities (Baltimore and New Orleans) 52. JBH to Henry Clay, 20 October 1829, Francis B. Harrison Papers, WM; Henry Clay to JBH, 3 January 1830, Francis B. Harrison Papers, WM; Henry H. Cumming to Thomas Cumming, 13 April 1819, Hammond-Bryan-Cumming Families Papers, SCL. 53. On medical education in Charleston, see Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, ‘‘Intellectual Life in the 1830s: The Institutional Framework and the Charleston Style,’’ in Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, ed. Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-Hansen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 243–49. 54. Russell M. Jones, ‘‘American Doctors and the Parisian Medical World, 1830–1840,’’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 17 (1973): 46. The higher estimate is in Warner, Against the Spirit of System, 38–39. 55. Jones, ‘‘American Doctors,’’ 48; Russell M. Jones, ‘‘American Doctors and the Parisian Medical World, 1830–1840 (Concluded),’’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 17 (1973): 200. Or so Jones says about Dickson, though Joseph Ioor Waring, M.D., A History of Medicine in South Carolina, 1825–1900, with a preface by Richard H. Shryock (Charleston: South Carolina Medical Association, 1967), is unclear on this. 56. Jones, ‘‘American Doctors,’’ 46.

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A medical student carving his initials into the arm of a dead actress (From Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris [1846])

had only 80,620 and 46,000 people in 1830.57 To cater for such a population, Paris had thirteen general and eleven special hospitals, as well as twelve hospices. The Hôtel Dieu, La Pitié, La Charité, and Cliniques were, of the general hospitals, most notable. But special diseases were treated at, for example, the Accouchement (maternity), Enfans Malades (pediatric), St. Louis (dermatological), Vénériens (venereal), and Salpêtrière (mental). The French government was unusually generous in allowing foreign students to attend lectures and clinics without paying fees, and French clinicians were pioneering in an emphasis upon observation and practice. The Collège de France, the Sorbonne, the Jardin des Plantes, and the École de Médecine all offered lectures, some by men as distinguished as Georges Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire. The city was blessed or cursed with several competing medical theories, whose controversies and experiments were stimulating to watch and discuss. The poor of the city lived with cruel pain and died with convenient regularity, and so their ulcers could be cauterized, cancers excised, testicles castrated, and legs amputated, while their corpses could be dissected with easy cheapness. 57. Russell M. Jones, ed., The Parisian Education of an American Surgeon: Letters of Jonathan Mason Warren (1832–1835), Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 128 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 12; Gary Lawson Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, 1789–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 87; Walter G. Cowan, et al., New Orleans: A Guide to the City (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 26.

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The callousness with which French doctors went about their bloody business, in fact, tended to repel the Americans. It was often said that a French doctor preferred the patient to die, so that another body might be investigated. But, repelled or not, Southerners crowded around the hospital beds.58 So Paris, unlike any other European capital, attracted sufficient Americans and Southerners—abroad this distinction did not always matter—that they formed a community. It had a leader or facilitator, whose name was David Bailie Warden. Warden was an Irishman who had migrated to the United States, graduated from the New York Medical College, and been appointed as secretary to the American legation in 1804. Though his official status fluctuated, his main role came to be as an intermediary between visiting Americans and French society. He saw to hotels, smoothed over the police, effected entry to Instituts and bibliothèques, lent books, gave letters of introductions to notables elsewhere in Europe, advised on local customs, entertained, and procured entertainment. Several generations of Southerners availed themselves of his services. They would come, armed with their letters from their predecessors in knowing Warden, which would say that ‘‘my friend Col. Drayton having participated in the Toils of our War (altho short) seeks for Enjoyment in the good Society, & the Sciences of France’’; that Dr. Tucker ‘‘proposes to visit Europe and Paris in particular to improve himself in his profession’’; that George and Morgan Gibbes were visiting Paris for ‘‘amusement and instruction’’; that ‘‘my friend & townsman Mr. Mitchell King . . . visits Europe to lay up stores for future literary labors’’; that John Bachman was visiting ‘‘Europe for the restoration of his health’’ and, as a naturalist, would be grateful for introductions to ‘‘such members of the Academie des Sciences who are engaged in the same branches to which he has particularly devoted his time’’; that ‘‘having been recently reduced to widowhood by the loss of a most amiable & excellent wife, [Dr. Landon Cabell of Lynchburg] comes to Europe to distract his thoughts & to improve himself by foreign travel’’; that Josiah Nott was coming ‘‘chiefly for Professional improvement’’; that Mr. Jackson of Georgia ‘‘leaves for the moment his political pursuits to seek the most pleasing Enjoyments from the acquaintance of the Arts, the Sciences, & brilliant Institutions’’ of France.59 58. Jones, ‘‘American Doctors,’’ 57, 47; Jones, Parisian Education, 13; John Harley Warner, ‘‘The Selective Transport of Medical Knowledge: Antebellum American Physicians and Parisian Medical Therapeutics,’’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (Summer 1985): 213–31. 59. John R. Fenwick to David Bailie Warden, 5 July 1815; R. H. Cabell to Warden, 20 May 1838; Joel R. Poinsett to Warden, 24 February 1818; Joel R. Poinsett to Warden, 3 June 1840; F. Wurdemann to Warden, 4 June 1838; Joseph C. Cabell to Warden, 19 March 1834; J. A. Washington to Warden, 18 March 1835; John Fenwick to Warden, 10 May 1836, all in David Bailie Warden Papers, LC.

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Though he discharged tasks, Warden was no servant. He was himself an author and journalist, best known for his three-volume work, A Statistical, Political, and Historical Account of the United States of North America (1819), to whose writing Preston had offered some help. Warden was secretary to the editorial board of the Revue des Deux Mondes, he wrote for the Moniteur,60 and he corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Priestley, was a friend of Benjamin Constant, knew Jean-Baptiste Say, and gave Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont letters of introduction when they left for the United States in 1831. Americans would send him pamphlets and books, such that he acquired a formidable library. In 1838, for example, Lewis R. Gibbes of South Carolina, recently returned from his medical studies in Paris, wrote to Warden: ‘‘The pamphlets I send are four; A correspondence between Mr. Calhoun and Gen. Hamilton of this State on the subject of State Rights; The principal papers put forth by the Convention of this State, called for the purpose of nullifying certain acts of Congress; Consolidation by Dr. Cooper, and a pamphlet published anonymously but written by the same gentleman, entitled, To any member of Congress.’’ 61 Later Southerners would lack Warden’s services, but not the company of others of their kind. John R. Thompson wrote to his father in 1854, that he had changed his lodgings to be around the corner from Meurice’s Hotel, ‘‘the head-quarters of Americans in Paris.’’ On Sunday, he noted, he dined at Judge Mason’s, where there were eight persons from the immediate vicinity of Richmond at table. ‘‘Of course it was quite a delightful gathering of Virginians and we had for dinner a genuine old-fashioned Smithfield ham which everybody ate more heartily than they did the French dishes.’’ The American community had its familiar mechanisms and institutions. There were bankers, who dealt especially with them: up to his death in 1850, it was John Bulkley Greene.62 There was a plan in 1841 and 1842 to establish an American Athenaeum, a library and reading room to be run by an association headed by Henry Wheaton, Lorenzo Draper (the American consul), and Alexandre 60. Revue des Deux Mondes to James Alexander Ventress, 16 July 1830, James Alexander Ventress and Family Papers, MDAH; JBH to Henry Clay, 20 October 1829, Francis B. Harrison Papers, WM. 61. Thomas Jefferson to David Bailie Warden, 20 December 1820, 30 October 1822, 31 October 1823; Joseph Priestley to Warden, 31 August 1820; Benjamin Constant to Warden, 30 July 1823; J. B. Say to Warden, 12 October 1822, all in David Bailie Warden Papers, MHS; Gustave de Beaumont to Warden, ‘‘Lundi 28,’’ and Lewis R. Gibbes to Warden, 6 April 1838, David Bailie Warden Papers, LC. 62. JRT to father, 13 September 1854, JRT Papers, UVA; Fred. van den Broek to Charles Izard Manigault, 10 December 1850, Manigault Family Papers, SCHS; see also Charles Izard Manigault to Thomas Middleton, 15 September 1826, in ‘‘Letterbook, 1846–1848,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL.

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Vattemare, with perhaps a journal to be edited by Hugh Legaré.63 There was already an English-language morning newspaper, Galignani’s Messenger, which also offered a reading room. It circulated broadly in Europe and could even be obtained in the United States: Mitchell King took it.64 In Göttingen in 1850, the young David Ramsay of Charleston was reading it: ‘‘The Göttingen Museum contains the Galignani the paper published at Paris, containing extracts from the English papers—it is published for the benefit of English travellers on the continent & of course as the Americans understand English, I come in for part of the benefit.’’ Indeed, since Galignani’s gathered together reports from the English language press, including the American, a Southerner could find himself printed in it. William Brown Hodgson of Georgia, then American chargé d’affaires in Algiers, discovered in 1827 that Galignani’s had reprinted a letter of his to Peter Force on the decline of piracy in Algiers.65 Such huddling together was partly a response to growing American numbers, partly a revulsion from Parisians, usually less popular than the amenities of their city. ‘‘Every American that I have seen here complains justly of the inhospitality of the Parisians,’’ James Lawrence Cabell complained in 1837. ‘‘Many like myself brought bundles of letters which have never been noticed. . . . I begin to think the French a mean & selfish people, as regards personal enjoyments, who think only of making a show.’’ William Cabell Rives Jr., wrote in 1850 of the magnificence of Paris, but ‘‘[it] palls after a while. There is death & disease & misery & mud & snow & filth (yes—in the most uncommon degree) in the midst of all this splendour.’’ 66 Robert Massengill Porter, who was to be the first Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical Department of the University of Nashville, kept a journal, where he set down his discomfort at the city’s ablutionary habits: ‘‘Wherever I go—within house or out of doors I cannot escape from odour of urine 67 & ‘salphenetted hydrogen.’ Often have I been obliged to hug walls very closely to keep vehicles from running over me—men & women will stop in the streets in the presence of every one to relieve themselves.’’ Nonetheless, he conceded: ‘‘After a time one becomes habituated to these offences to eyes & nostrils: & ere long the eye begins to discern through the dust & mist, something to admire; immense 63. Circular, headed ‘‘American Athenaeum,’’ with handwritten endorsement by George M. Gibbes, 20 January 1842, and George M. Gibbes to Lewis R. Gibbes, 29 June 1841, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC. 64. Entry for 31 January 1848, MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC. 65. David Ramsay to Joseph J. Legaré, 22 April 1850, David Ramsay Papers, SCL; WBH to [Peter Force], 6 March 1827, WBH Papers, DU. 66. James Lawrence Cabell to Joseph C. Cabell, 25 February 1837, James Lawrence Cabell Papers, UVA; William Cabell Rives Jr., to John Coles Rutherfoord, 22 January 1850, John Rutherfoord Papers, DU. 67. In the manuscript, someone has tried to scratch this out and written above ammonia.

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palaces rise to view & a closer & longer inspection will reveal most beautiful architecture of every style—most elegantly executed.’’ 68 Whatever else Paris meant, it meant revolution. This was a subject of marked ambivalence for Southerners, heirs to a revolution and sponsors of one to come, but persons who mostly accepted the standpoint of Edmund Burke on the meaning of 1789. But Paris furnished revolutions with convenient regularity for visiting students of society. John Blair Hoge was there to witness, in 1815, the flight of Napoleon from Waterloo, his abdication, the return of Louis XVIII with the help of ‘‘200,000 foreign bayonets.’’ The experience lowered his estimate of monarchs, those ‘‘very foolish or very wicked men,’’ whose power rested only on force, and led him to reaffirm the old policy of avoiding the entangling alliance. For ‘‘we have very little to expect from the governments of Europe except what their policy commands.’’ 69 In 1830, Paul Fitzsimons Eve of Georgia was studying medicine when the July Revolution broke out. Interested, he participated and, ‘‘wishing to aid in repaying the debt to Poland for the services of Pulaski,’’ volunteered. He served in a hospital in Warsaw, was the field surgeon of the Fifteenth Regiment of Infantry and Surgeon of Ambulances attached to General Turno’s division, and was taken prisoner and released in October, whereupon he was awarded the Golden Cross of Honor.70 In 1848, Charles Izard Manigault saw the fall of the Orleanist monarchy and the July Days. ‘‘We passed through it without much fear, & very little annoyance,’’ he wrote to an American friend in Rome. Not unexpectedly, the slaveholder leaned towards the party of order and against ‘‘the blood thirsty designs of these 50,000 horrible Assassins.’’ ‘‘There was no actual fighting near our residence,’’ he noted, ‘‘but as we live in the Rue de Rivoli No 22 Bis Close to the Palace of the Tuileries we saw a constant succession of every variety of Military and Mob exhibition.’’ He and his sons went out on 23 June, the better to see action. From a bridge, ‘‘We had a very interesting view of the Bombardment of the barricades constructed on both sides of the river . . . in the vicinity of the Hotel de Ville and on the opposite side of the Seine at a bridge leading to Notre Dame Cathedral.’’ The revolutionaries had courage, but paid a heavy price for it: the wounded were brought in litters past the watching Manigaults. The two sons grew desirous of a closer view. Both crossed the river amid ‘‘danger & confusion’’ and reached the Faubourg St. Germain, thus evading the troops posted on the bridges. Local 68. Robert Massengill Porter, ‘‘Journal, 24 April 1845–3 June 1846,’’ Miscellaneous Collection, TSLA. 69. John Blair Hoge to Moses Hoge (his father), 25 July 1815, Hoge Family Papers, PHS. 70. There is a set of papers at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, of Paul Fitzsimons Eve (1806–77). They are mostly postbellum, but there is a sheet that summarizes his career.

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knowledge helped in returning: ‘‘Louis managed very cleverly by retreating thro’ the Centre of the Faubourg St Germain coming out by the Hotel des Invalides, and crossing the suspension bridge above, & thus reached home by the Champs Elysée. But Charles got entangled in the Cordon Militaire, but took refuge with a Medical Student of his acquaintance & we lost him for three days, without any tidings of his ‘where abouts.’ ’’ 71 This was serious theater, at the heart of modern history. As Hugh Legaré was to observe in 1840, in a Carlylean voice, the death of the ancien régime, an ‘‘artificial and forced system,’’ had released ‘‘all the mighty agents of convulsion and decomposition’’ at once, to sweep away instantly ‘‘every thing ancient or established.’’ For intellectuals, this was an opportunity, unparalleled since ‘‘the last days of ancient Greece.’’ Europe had become an experiment in ‘‘political chemistry,’’ a privileged laboratory. Watching, ‘‘they saw society resolved into its elements, and these elements, like atoms in the void of Epicurus, disengaged, seeking, according to their affinities, new combinations, or too refractory to be reduced into any.’’ 72 Though Southerners felt some exemption from these experiments, they were not confident, they felt exposed, and so they watched with anxiety what all these fusillades might mean. Germany seemed less pertinent, at least at first. For many, it was little more than a pretty corridor down the Rhine towards Switzerland. For some, the response to prettiness was more complex. Jesse Burton Harrison’s diary in 1829 speaks of how the ‘‘romantic ruins of this river’’ next to a modern steamboat served to emphasize ‘‘the contrast between the reality of life & the spectral world of Rhine romance.’’ The lesson was historical, a corrective to a Southern education that had privileged the Mediterranean and classic. Seeing ‘‘the last outposts of Gothic civilization’’ led him to modify his devotion to ‘‘classical recollections.’’ He came to learn, rather, that ‘‘the better features of modern life come peculiarly from the barbarous ancestors of the existing European races.’’ So, ‘‘I glow more & more with love to those times & that mode of life which begot Honor, Love, Gallantry, & Sentiment, & bestows them on their descendants.’’ This came to be a habitual reaction, once Southern visitors had been trained to the thought. ‘‘Every height & crag & dilapidated castle suggests some story of romance & chivalry,’’ Robert Massengill Porter observed in 1846. Even a Calvinist could notice landscape. ‘‘The whole country on the banks of the Rhine is enchanting,’’ Thornwell wrote in 1860, though he also noticed a frequency of wooden crucifixes ‘‘to secure blessings upon the coun71. Charles Izard Manigault to W. M. Jackson (in Rome), 21 July 1848, in ‘‘Letterbook, 1846–1848,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL. 72. HSL, ‘‘Constitutional History of Greece’’ (1840), in Legaré, Writings, 1:376.

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try, and to attract the devotion of the traveller.’’ This sight he deprecated, since it substituted ‘‘dead images of wood and stone for the living Saviour.’’ 73 But Germany’s greatest importance was pedagogical. It was once customary, in narratives of the American mind, to make much of the break in the pattern of the Grand Tour initiated by George Ticknor, Joseph Cogswell, and George Bancroft, when they ventured to German universities in 1815 and soon thereafter.74 In truth, not only for New Englanders but also Southerners, this was less a break, more a modulation. Ticknor spent as much time on the Grand Tour as he did at Göttingen, and most early American students at German universities sampled the intellectual wares with some casualness and much incomprehension; they proclaimed the advances of German scholarship more than they understood them.75 Germany was not so much a break with the old tradition as it was an addition, if one remembers that the Grand Tour could often be—and was, in the hands of Preston and Legaré—a serious intellectual and aesthetic endeavor.76 Moreover, destinations were much affected by the vagaries of European violence. Upon the advice of Jefferson, Ticknor had planned in 1815 to stay first in Paris for his education, but had been forced immediately to Germany because of the turmoil attendant upon Napoleon’s return from Elba, news of which greeted him upon landing in Liverpool in May. Conversely, in 1818 Legaré was planning to study at Göttingen, but was deflected to Edinburgh by civil disorder in Hanover. And it is easy to be misled by the matter of university degrees. The first American to get a German degree was Philip Tidyman, a Charlestonian. Yet Tidyman seems to have used knowledge gained elsewhere, mostly at Edinburgh, to secure German qualifications. He matriculated at Göttingen on 4 June 1800, took his examination in the same month, submitted his dissertation De Orysa Sativa on 24 July, and was granted the degree on the same day.77 German dissertations of that period were much abbreviated and not everyone thought 73. Entry for 12 September 1829, in JBH, ‘‘European Diary, 1829–30,’’ Francis B. Harrison Papers, UVA; Robert Massengill Porter, ‘‘Journal, 24 April 1845–3 June 1846,’’ Miscellaneous Collection, TSLA; JHT to General James Gillespie, 15 August 1860, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 456–57. 74. See, for example, Orie W. Long, Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935); William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 37–65. 75. On this, Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 49–69. 76. Paul G. Buchloh and Walter T. Rix, American Colony of Göttingen: Historical and Other Data Collected between the Years 1855 and 1888 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), 11, observes: ‘‘Germany was drawn into the circuit [of the Grand Tour] largely because of the quality and reputation of its universities.’’ 77. Hillard, George Ticknor, 1:49–50; Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 165, 6–7.

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that, even at a German university, the getting of a degree need be intrinsic to the procuring of an education. However, Southern students went to German universities in numbers.78 About forty or so names, at least, are visible.79 The evidence of what they 78. Their numbers are hard to gauge. Diehl gives figures for the South that are certainly too low, just ten Southern students in German universities between 1810 and 1859. This would seem to be explicable only because he gives separate figures for ‘‘middle Atlantic’’ states, which presumably includes slaveowning states like Maryland and Delaware; because he lists graduates of Harvard and Yale separately, who may include Southerners; and because he notes that thirty-six American students were of ‘‘unknown’’ origin; see Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 159. Daniel B. Shumway, on the other hand, lists fifteen students at Göttingen between 1830 and 1860 from South Carolina alone, more than any other state but Massachusetts, a figure that Krumpelmann has revised to eighteen; Daniel B. Shumway, ‘‘The American Students of the University of Göttingen,’’ German American Annals n.s. 8 (1910): 199–254, quoted in Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 6. 79. It will be useful to list them, insofar as I have been able to ascertain names and whereabouts, since (as noted in the previous note) the secondary literature on this matter is very inconsistent. They are, in chronological order: Phillip Tidyman (Göttingen, 1800), George Izard (ca. 1800 at an unnamed German ‘‘military College’’), George Henry Calvert (Göttingen, 1824–26), William Hume (Göttingen, Berlin, 1824), Jesse Burton Harrison (Göttingen, 1829–30), Amory Coffin (Göttingen, 1829–31; Berlin), James Alexander Ventress (Berlin, 1830), Charles Boehme (Heidelberg, 1831; Göttingen, 1833–35), Macmillan King (Göttingen, 1831–33; Berlin, 1832), W. C. King (Göttingen, 1831), A. Walker (Göttingen, 1836–38), Thomas Caute Reynolds (Berlin, 1839, 1840–41; Munich, 1839–40; Heidelberg 1840–43), George Henry Guerard (Munich, 1839), William C. Moragné (Berlin, 1841; Heidelberg, 1842), C. B. Baltzel (Göttingen, 1841), A. Litton (Göttingen, 1842), G. W. Dingle (Göttingen, 1847–49, 1850–51; Berlin, 1849–50; Heidelberg, 1852), Oscar Lieber (Berlin, 1848; Göttingen, 1848–49; Academy of Mines at Freiburg, 1849–50), Basil Gildersleeve (Berlin, 1850–51; Göttingen, 1851–52; Bonn, 1852–53), David Ramsay the younger (Göttingen, 1850–52; Berlin, 1851; Heidelberg, 1852), James Johnston Pettigrew (Berlin, 1850–51), Samuel Lord (Göttingen, 1850–51), W. D. B. Dingle (Göttingen, 1850–52), Joseph P. Carr (Berlin, 1850–51), V. Geddings (Berlin, 1850–51), G. W. Geddings (Berlin, 1850–51), Robert C. Starr (Berlin, 1850–51), J. H. Wilson (Berlin, 1850– 51), Henry W. Carr (Berlin, 1850–51), W. K. Bachman (Göttingen, 1851–52), J. S. Atkinson (Göttingen, 1850–51), Christopher Happoldt (Berlin, 1852), J. D. Easton (Göttingen, 1852–53), Joseph B. Cumming [Berlin? 1854?], James Lowndes (Göttingen, 1855–56; Bonn, 1855), C. W. Boyd (Göttingen, 1856–57), S. C. Thomas (Göttingen, 1856), John Rhett (Göttingen, 1856– 57), Albert Rhett (Göttingen, 1856–57), Alfred H. Preston (Göttingen, 1856–57), John Preston (Göttingen, 1856–57), William C. Preston (Göttingen, 1856–57), Edward S. Joynes (Berlin, 1856), James Woodrow (Heidelberg, 1856), George Little (Göttingen, 1858–59), F. Gibson (Göttingen, 1859), Thomas Edwards Hart (Göttingen, 1859–60, Heidelberg, 1860–61, 1866), Claude Gibson ( Jena, 1859), John McKinley Gibson (Jena, 1859), Tobias Gibson (Heidelberg and Jena, 1859), Edward Mitchell Whaley (Heidelberg, late 1850s), Julian Mitchell (Heidelberg, Berlin, late 1850s), Charles Pringle (Berlin, 1860), John R. Pringle (Berlin, 1860–61), John J. Harvey (Göttingen, 1860–64), E. A. Pringle (Heidelberg, 1860–61), John Julius Pringle (Berlin, 1860; Heidelberg, 1860–61), and Charles P. Pelham (?). I have drawn most of this information from my own research but also from Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, and Buchloh and Rix, American Colony of Göttingen. For George Izard, see Charles Izard Manigault, ‘‘Description of paintings, 1867,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL, which mentions that George Izard, the son of Ralph Izard, later appointed governor of the Arkansas Territory by Andrew Jackson, com-

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studied and learned is very mixed, varying from brute incomprehension, dueling scars, and hangovers to a lifetime’s dedication to scholarship. Most notable among the earliest Southerners were George Henry Calvert and Jesse Burton Harrison, who both went in the spirit of Ticknor, halfway between touring gentlemen and students. In addition, Calvert went as a half European.80 He was born in 1803 on a plantation in Prince George’s County, Maryland, midway between Annapolis and Washington; his midwife was a slave. His father, George, was a Calvert of the most ancient Maryland line, grandson of the fifth Lord Baltimore, and ‘‘a southern gentleman.’’ But his mother, Rosalie Eugenia, was the daughter of Henri Joseph Stier d’Artselaer, a prosperous Brabant gentleman and merchant who fled the French Revolution in 1794 but returned in 1805 when the annexation of Belgium to France extended the laws of confiscation of emigré property. The father left to the daughter his estate of Riversdale near Bladensburg; she was a thrifty ‘‘person of rare common sense,’’ her son affectionately remembered, who had been reared ‘‘in her native home amid surroundings refined and dignified,’’ and educated at an English convent in Liège.81 Calvert himself was educated by English tutors at home and in Washington, then by French emigrés named Carré and Constant in boarding schools near Philadelphia.82 The Constant school in Mount Airy, near Germantown, had a cosmopolitan body of pupils, a ‘‘diversity of nations and individualities’’: many of the diplomatic corps sent their children, who came from Europe, the West Indies, South America, and Java, to add to those from Pennsylvania and states to the south.83 In 1819, Calvert went to Harvard at the recommendation of various Maspleted studies ‘‘at a Military College in Germany’’; the context suggests ca. 1801. For Amory Coffin, see Waring, Medicine in South Carolina, 215, who says mid–1830s, but Buchloh confirms his residence in Göttingen. On Happoldt, see Claude Henry Neuffer, ed., The Christopher Happoldt Journal: His European Tour with the Rev. John Bachman (June–December, 1838) (Charleston, S.C.: Charleston Museum, 1960), 18. One might also note that the introduction to Susan Petigru King, Gerald Gray’s Wife and Lily: A Novel, introduction by Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), ix, says Henry C. King was ‘‘educated for the law at home and in Germany.’’ 80. The same is true of Philip Tidyman, whose family name was originally Tiedeman. He was a patron of the German Friendly Society of Charleston; see George J. Gongaware, The History of the German Friendly Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1766–1916 (Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1935), 77–79, 97–115. 81. George Henry Calvert, Autobiographic Study (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1885), 36, 53, 39, 51; Ida G. Everson, ed., ‘‘Some Unpublished Letters of George Henry Calvert,’’ Maryland Historical Magazine 42 (September 1947): 198. On the mother, see Margaret Law Calcott, ed., Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795–1821 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 82. He was for a year taught Latin by John A. Quitman, not yet of Mississippi: see Calvert, Autobiographic Study, 65. 83. Ibid., 66.

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sachusetts members of Congress, among them Harrison Gray Otis. Calvert remembered his education as unsatisfactory, it being then the old system of recitations where the teacher ‘‘sat passively in his chair, a monosyllabic hearer of lessons, rather than an active agent of instruction.’’ He entered college knowing little Latin and Greek, and Harvard did not disturb his ignorance. He proved adept at composition and oratory, was interested in but incompetent at political economy, while (as Grigsby might have predicted) ‘‘mathematics I did not go into with any zeal.’’ He did listen to Edward Everett’s lectures on the Greek orators, however, though they made little impression; Ticknor he was to remember not at all.84 His greatest gains were extracurricular, notably his acquisition of a passion for Byron, whose Corsair and Giaour he read secretly in a pew of the Episcopal Chapel on Cambridge Common.85 Calvert’s autobiography, written in the 1880s, spends much time deprecating the unhealthy influence of Byron and regretting that the religious inspirations of Cambridge were not then more influential. But all this, the collegiate tedium and the extramural excitement, was cut short in the early summer of 1823, when there was a rebellion against the college in which Calvert participated. For this, he was expelled.86 Thus released, he sailed for Europe. He did so, therefore, with no particular inspiration from Ticknor and Everett’s German education. Though he did feel the need to extend his truncated and unsatisfactory education, he was as much inspired by a natural desire to visit his Flemish relatives, particularly his childless maternal uncle, Charles J. Stier of Antwerp.87 Indeed, his first impressions of Europe were familial. As his diligence approached Antwerp, a vague outline appeared on the horizon. Calvert asked, ‘‘What is that?’’ ‘‘The Cathedral of Antwerp,’’ answered a Swedish traveling companion. ‘‘The words knocked familiarly at my heart,’’ Calvert later wrote. ‘‘’T was the sudden apparition of an early friend. My mother had often told us children of having gone, when a child, with her parents up into the spire of the cathedral to witness a far-off battle, in which the French were victorious. . . . There it was, that great spire, with my mother in it, growing taller and livelier as mile after mile we neared the city.’’ 88 His uncle lived in an old chateau, six miles outside the city; he was a connoisseur and possessor of art. The Stier family was in part descended from Peter Paul Rubens, whose Chapeau de Paille had remained in Calvert’s grandfather’s possession until his death in 1821 (it had gone with him to America), when it was 84. Ibid., 90, 108, 143–44, 179. 85. Ibid., 124. 86. Ibid., 144; Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 23. 87. Calvert was later to inherit more than $25,000 from Stier: see George Henry Calvert to Hiram Powers, 11 February 1849, Calvert Papers, Butler Library, ColU. 88. George Henry Calvert, First Years in Europe (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1866), 22.

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bought at auction by an English dealer: but several paintings by Anthony Van Dyck had been bought by Calvert’s uncle, to keep them in the family.89 Calvert arrived in Göttingen on 21 January 1824. He was ‘‘deaf and dumb to the speech around him,’’ and had decided to attend this university partly because it was a place to which young English gentlemen of the era resorted; ‘‘this had become a fashion in England because the numerous sons of George III had been sent thither.’’ (It will be remembered that, until 1837, the King of England was also Elector of Hanover.) Calvert found himself ‘‘old, stale, and noisy’’ lodgings in the Birkenbusch Haus, Weender Strasse 37. He was among more than 1500 students in a city that housed ‘‘the best endowed, and most liberally conducted, and the most numerously and variously frequented’’ of the German universities, a preeminence contested only by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s new university in Berlin. For three months before the semester began in May, Calvert studied German under a Brunswicker, a man ‘‘ignorant as well as dull,’’ who knew no English and only a few words of French. ‘‘By downright fagging and Teutonic tenacity’’ the American learned enough to attend with a measure of comprehension his first lectures, all held in each professor’s private home. Thereafter he took himself, for further language instruction, to Georg Friedrich Benecke, the professor of English Literature, whom Ticknor had found ‘‘an uncommonly good English scholar’’ and Calvert ‘‘a strongly-marked character, energetic, decisive, one-sided.’’ 90 Benecke spoke German with a broad Swabian accent, whose influence Calvert decided needed to be counteracted by ‘‘Madame Vedemeyer and the Laffert ladies, natives of Celle, a small Hanoverian town, the Orleans of Germany, the one spot in all the broad Teutonic land where this great language is spoken in euphonious purity.’’ 91 Göttingen had a distinguished faculty, among whose ‘‘distracting variety of intellectual cheer’’ Calvert was free to roam, if he paid his fees. In his first semester, he listened to Arnold H. L. Heeren, the ancient and modern historian, whose writings on Greece were later to be translated into English by George Bancroft.92 Heeren was not the most brilliant of German historians, 89. The Rubens is now in the National Gallery in London. 90. George Henry Calvert, ‘‘Göttingen in 1824,’’ Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 8 (December 1856): 595, 600, 596, 598, 599; Calvert, Autobiographic Study, 150; George Ticknor to Elisha Ticknor, 5 November 1815, in Hillard, George Ticknor, 1:79. 91. Calvert, ‘‘Göttingen in 1824,’’ 596, 599. Herr von Laffert was Supervisor of the University and his daughter was Frau von Vedenmeyer [sic]; Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 24. Benecke was a critic of German literature; see Georg Friedrich Benecke, Beyträge Zur Kenntniss der Altdeutschen Sprache und Litteratur (Göttingen: H. Dieterich, 1810). 92. Arnold H. L. Heeren, Reflections on the Politics of Ancient Greece, trans. George Bancroft (Boston: Little, Brown, 1824).

Peter Paul Rubens, Chapeau de Paille (Courtesy National Gallery, London)

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though he was significant among exponents of late Aufklarung historicism.93 He was thorough and indefatigable, if—in Humboldt’s cutting phrase—‘‘a rather dull man.’’ Later he was to be caricatured by Heinrich Heine and dismissed as overrated by Friedrich Meinecke.94 Calvert himself was not overwhelmed. He found Heeren to be of ‘‘shrinking mien and rapid gait,’’ fleshy, florid, possessed of a ‘‘feminine blushing diffidence,’’ who dictated to auditors who scribbled his words mechanically. Still, Heeren on modern history was ‘‘the most attractive and instructive course that I attended while at Göttingen,’’ even if his message was oddly muddled, since Heeren praised both the Declaration of Independence, Paine’s Common Sense, and the younger Pitt for leading the coalition against France.95 Less dry, more comic, and especially lucid were the lectures of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the naturalist, who was then over seventy but who had, half a century earlier, in his De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (1775), been the first to venture a ‘‘scientific’’ study of human races. Forty years Blumenbach’s junior was Karl Otfried Müller, who was then beginning to revolutionize the study of ancient history by stressing the centrality of the Dorians and the local roots of Greek culture, its Romantic particularism, the nature of which could be located in mythology and the evidence for which could be lovingly traced by means of archaeology. In 1825, Müller was in the midst of publishing his Introduction to a Scientific System of Mytholo, but later he strove to show how Greek literature ‘‘sprang from the taste and genius of the Greek races and the constitution of [their] civil and domestic society.’’ 96 Calvert heard Muller’s lectures on ancient art. From all these professors, Calvert got a steady dose of Göttingen’s characteristic racialist social theory, ideas which would not have been puzzling to a Marylander. Calvert never became a historian, except of himself, but he did later become a student and critic of Romantic thought. From Benecke, with whom Calvert studied the literature as well as the language of Germany, he received 93. For this interpretation of Heeren, see Peter Hans Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 94. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 297; Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, with a foreword by Isaiah Berlin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 236. 95. For evidence of Heeren’s influence on the South, see M. R. H. Garnett, ‘‘Relations of the Ancient World,’’ SQR 5 (January 1844): 156–87; ‘‘Oeuvres de Vico,’’ SQR 2 (October 1842): 409–10; Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Education in Germany,’’ SR 4 (August 1829): 86–123. 96. Bernal, Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 308–16; Karl Otfried Muller, A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, 3 vols. (London: Longmans Green, 1858), 1:1; Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 82–83. See also Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 6, 42, 47, 79, 83; G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 33–38.

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the gift of a deep pleasure in Goethe. Benecke introduced Calvert to Faust and to a wonder at ‘‘its fantastic, weird scenes played on the ground of solid, burning reality; in their terrible power and beauty like the frenzied flames that shoot through the windows of an indestructible edifice, consuming in and about it whatever is perishable.’’ From modern German literature, they advanced backwards to the Niebelungenlied. From this, they passed to gossip about Coleridge, whom Benecke taught when the Englishman was at Göttingen in 1798–99: ‘‘Benecke told me that Coleridge . . . was an idler, and did not learn the language thoroughly, and that he got a long ode of Klopstock by heart and declaimed it without understanding it, playfully mystifying his countrymen with the apparent rapidity of his progress.’’ But Calvert also listened to Friedrich Bouterwek, who seemed very old, a European name that had ‘‘outlived his reputation.’’ 97 (In fact, he was only 58.) Yet Bouterwek, like the others, was deeply implicated in the exploration of national literatures. His History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, which had been translated into English in 1823, was influential.98 However, it was Bouterwek’s course on German literature that Calvert took and found ‘‘valuable.’’ 99 It was the custom of Göttingen professors to entertain students, even those not enrolled in their classes, in their homes. An American, an exotic, was peculiarly welcome: both in the drawing room of Blumenbach in the evenings, and in that of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, ‘‘the redoubtable rationalist commentator, who, in his handling of Isaiah or Moses, cut sacrilegiously through the adipose deposits of tradition,’’ who received visits on Sunday mornings. Calvert became a drinking and smoking companion of Friedrich Saalfeld, a bachelor professor who lectured and wrote widely on European history since the French Revolution, political economy, the ius gentium, the history of the East Indies, and the history of his own university.100 Often the two would dine together at the Stadt-London Hotel. It was Saalfeld who once 97. Calvert, ‘‘Göttingen in 1824,’’ 600, 604. 98. This was drawn from a larger study of European literatures that encompassed Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Germany; see Friedrich Bouterwek, Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit Seit dem Ende Des Dreizehten Jahrhunderts, 12 vols. (Göttingen: J. F. Röwer, 1808–19). 99. See Thomas R. Hart Jr., ‘‘Friedrich Bouterwek, a Pioneer Historian of Spanish Literature,’’ Comparative Literature 5 (1953): 351–61. For Bouterwek in Southern discourse, see Thomas Smith Grimké, ‘‘Origin of Rhyme,’’ SR 2 (August 1828): 44, and Thomas Caute Reynolds, ‘‘History of Spanish Literature,’’ SQR n.s. 2 (September 1850): 85–123. 100. See, for example, Friedrich Saalfeld, Essai sur l’importance commerciale et politique des trois villes libres Anséatiques Lubec, Hambourg et Bremen (Hambourg: F. Perthes, 1810); Friedrich Saalfeld, Geschichte der Universität Göttingen in-dem Zeitraume von 1788 Bis 1820 (Hannover, 1820); Friedrich Saalfeld, Geschichte Des Portugiesischen Kolonialwesens in Ostindien (Göttingen: J. F. Röwer, 1810); and Friedrich Saalfeld, Geschichte Des Holländischen Kolonialwesens in Ostindien (Göttingen: H. Dieterich, 1812).

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playfully told Calvert that books by German professors were produced by a machine, kept by each of them in their studies, which mechanically passed before them ‘‘row after row of the most choice material methodically arranged.’’ He was, as Calvert remembered, ‘‘mobile, excitable . . . in temperament more Gallic than German.’’ Otherwise, Calvert spent time with outlanders like himself: among his contemporaries were the Englishman Edward Pusey, ‘‘a slight figure, with a thin face, exhausted by study,’’ soon to become Regius Professor of Hebrew and a leader of the Oxford Movement; Henry Dwight of Yale, ‘‘sprightly, sociable, and affectionate,’’ who would write a book on his German experiences; John William Semple of Edinburgh, who was later to translate Kant’s Metaphysics of Ethics into English; William Emerson, the younger brother of Ralph Waldo; and William Weir of Scotland, who was studying the civil law.101 Occasionally there was Seth B. Watson, the English doctor and friend of Coleridge, who was to publish the poet’s Theory of Life in 1848, and who helped to alert Calvert to the significance of Xanadu.102 There was also a Charlestonian, William Hume, ‘‘an intelligent and cultivated man,’’ a medical student who went on to Berlin, then to Paris and London.103 During a vacation in 1825, Calvert made his pilgrimage to Weimar and to Goethe. It was the done thing; many went, or tried to. Heine himself went from Göttingen in October 1824, to visit the great man with reverent trepidation. Calvert thought that Goethe had encountered only six other Americans; in fact, over the years, there were twenty. Since the old man had an interest in the New World, access was simplified. All Calvert needed to do was to show up, pass in a card upon which was written that he was ‘‘aus Washington, America,’’ and he was admitted. The brief interview was a courtly and decorous business. Goethe was polite, asked about Calvert’s travels and the professors at Göttingen, and quizzed him on the peculiar electoral process by which John Quincy Adams had recently been elevated to the presidency. It lasted for half an hour. Thereafter, Calvert dallied in Weimar, was introduced to court, engaged a dancing master (his waltzing was deficient), and came to know Ober-medicinal-rath Friedrich Ludwig Froriep, whose home was ‘‘a modest centre of political liberalism.’’ 104 After more time in Göttingen and a visit to Bonn, where he was granted 101. Calvert, ‘‘Göttingen in 1824,’’ 602–7 (quotations on pp. 604, 606, 605, 602). 102. Gian N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge’s Manuscripts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 232; Calvert, First Years, 208–10. 103. Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 27, 169; Waring, Medicine in South Carolina, 248–49. Hume later taught at the Citadel. 104. Max Brod, Heinrich Heine, trans. Joseph Witriol (1957; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1962), 206–10; Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 8; George Henry Calvert, ‘‘Weimar in 1825,’’ Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 8 (September 1856): 257, 262.

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interviews by Barthold Niebuhr and August von Schlegel, Calvert went on to Edinburgh, where he spent his time more idly, before joining his parents at Liverpool in June 1826. With them he returned to Antwerp, before the Stier and Calvert families went together to Paris for the winter of 1826–27, where they were entertained by the American Minister and Preston’s old traveling companion, James Brown, at a dinner whose guests included James Fenimore Cooper.105 But Germany had made the greatest impression on Calvert. Back in Baltimore, he was to publish translations from the German, notably of Schiller’s Don Carlos in 1834. He was to write on German literature for the North American Review, for which he did a critique of Carlyle’s Life of Schiller; for the Southern Literary Messenger, in which was republished a lecture (also on German literature) in 1836 to the Athenaeum Society of Baltimore; for the American Museum of Literature and the Arts on the poetry of Goethe and Schiller; and for the New York Review on Jean Paul Richter. In 1845, he published a translation of the first volume of the Goethe-Schiller correspondence and, after the Civil War, a biography of Goethe, as well as memoirs that were modeled on Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit.106 But before Calvert began to proselytize German literature, the elder Stephen Elliott, in a review of Henry E. Dwight’s Travels in the North of Germany, in the Years 1825–26, had instructed Southern readers that German education was the world’s ‘‘most varied, most extensive, most profound’’ and offered an analytical survey of its gymnasia, universities, modern curricula, libraries, and competitiveness. ‘‘If our commercial and political intercourse with Germany is not great,’’ he observed, ‘‘a literary intercourse ought to be sedulously cultivated, and our scholars should no longer continue ignorant of the language of a people preeminent in modern times for the originality of their conceptions, the extent and variety of their erudition, and the depth of their researches.’’ For the American position was, he reasoned, potentially analogous to that of Germany, if rigor could be imported. ‘‘The United States are now in that stage of society when improvements can be incorporated most easily in their systems—when the fresh and pliant spirit can receive any impression from the plastic power of experience and wisdom.’’ Decentralized and progressive American states, like those in Germany, might ‘‘by mutual and active competition, save each other from the negligence, the abuses, the lethargy which too often creep into or hover around old and privileged establishments. There will not be one Capital absorbing the talent, wealth and enterprize of the country, leaving the extremities cheerless and desolate; but 105. Everson, ‘‘Unpublished Letters of Calvert,’’ 101. 106. Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 34–45.

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many separate points radiant with light and intelligence, and we should hope, with unfading freshness and perpetual youth.’’ 107 Jesse Burton Harrison, who set out for Göttingen in the same year that Elliott was urging the merits of Germany, was thus being au courant as well as imitative of Calvert, though the Virginian had few comparable ancestral motives for European travel. His father, Samuel Jordan Harrison, was a tobacco merchant in Lynchburg, Virginia.108 But he did have Thomas Jefferson as a mentor, who cautiously endorsed a period of European education. Harrison’s cousin Henry Clay was anxious that the former report on economic conditions in northern Europe, observe the institution of serfdom in Russia, consider the consequences of German political division, and form an opinion on the state of German manufactures.109 His teacher at Hampden-Sydney, James Marsh, was the chief American enthusiast of Coleridge, the Germanizer.110 His mentor at Harvard was George Ticknor, who suggested Göttingen and offered letters of introduction, among them one from Francis Lieber, newly arrived in the United States. One of Harrison’s correspondents was Hugh Legaré, who had a great respect for German learning but less so for ‘‘Northern smatterers’’ and who thought a German university might save Harrison from ‘‘trans Potomac’’ insubstantiality.111 On his way out of New York, Harrison even called on Aaron Burr, who had been in Weimar in 1810, exiled by Jefferson’s wrath but not beyond his vengeance, as Burr was bitterly to recall; the ex-president had arranged, even in the vicinities of Goethe, to have Burr spied upon.112 Beyond these influences were Harrison’s own firm opinions 107. Elliott, ‘‘Education in Germany,’’ 112, 117. Much the same argument was to be made by Thomas R. Dew, ‘‘On the Influence of the Federative Republican System of Government Upon Literature and the Development of Character,’’ SLM 2 (December 1836): 261–82. 108. Michael O’Brien, ed., All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse in the Old South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), 55. 109. Henry Clay to JBH, 3 January 1830, Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC. While in Weimar, Harrison mentioned to Maria Paulowna, the Grand Duchess of Saxe-WeimarEisenach, that he desired ‘‘to study the servage in Russia with a hope of drawing profitable instruction with reference to the slavery of America’’: see JBH, ‘‘European Diary, 1829–30,’’ Francis B. Harrison Papers, UVA. 110. James Marsh to JBH, 31 January, 2 April 1824, Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC; see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, in the Formation of a Manly Character, on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion Illustrated by Select Passages from Our Elder Divines, Especially from Archbishop Leighton, notes by James Marsh (Burlington, Vt.: C. Goodrich, 1829); John J. Duffy, ed., Coleridge’s American Disciples: The Selected Correspondence of James Marsh (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973); Peter C. Carafiol, Transcendent Reason: James Marsh and the Forms of Romantic Thought (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1982). 111. George Ticknor to JBH, 20 January 1828; HSL to JBH, 3 November 1828, both in Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC. 112. Fairfax Harrison, ed., Aris Sonis Focisque, Being a Memoir of an American Family, the Harrisons of Skimino (n.p.: privately printed, 1910), 106–7.

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that Virginia had too many semi-educated lawyers, too few ‘‘men of letters of the higher order; professional men, of high literary taste mingling with their professional feelings.’’ 113 So Harrison did what was becoming the usual things, propelled along by a network of friends and kin. In 1829, he visited Paris, there to meet James Brown, who was a relative. He proceeded to Ghent, where once his cousin Henry Clay had negotiated a treaty, to meet Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, who had traveled amiably in the South (Legaré had reviewed his memoirs in the Southern Review) and who gave Harrison letters of introduction to Weimar. He proceeded to Göttingen, after calling on Schlegel in Bonn. He presented himself to Blumenbach, ‘‘a name dear to Englishmen and Americans for 50 years,’’ as Harrison told his mother; the anatomist encouraged Harrison to ‘‘sit at the same tea table where Ticknor & Everett had sat.’’ Like Calvert, he called on Madame Vedenmeyer and her three daughters. He got to know Saalfeld, ‘‘a laughing gay little man, a great lover of America, a despiser of England and a genuine good-fellow.’’ 114 He studied his German. With the semester over, in March 1830 he went to Weimar for a month and twice met Goethe, who quizzed him about Jefferson’s new university and praised Everett (though which one, Alexander or Edward, Goethe seemed unsure) as ‘‘une bonne tête.’’ In turn, Harrison was entertained at court, where the Grand Duke Karl Friedrich remembered Calvert as a Quaker ‘‘from his remarkable quietude, folding of his hands, &c.’’ Harrison duly became friends with Froriep, and went to the theater, where—among other things—he heard Carl von Weber’s opera Oberon and saw Goethe’s dramatic version of Hermann und Dorothea. Unlike Calvert, however, Harrison ventured beyond Weimar. He went to Jena, to see the battlefield and the university. At the latter, he met with Dr. Heinrich Luden, a historian who lectured on American history twice a week for a whole semester and used for a textbook the work of David Ramsay of Charleston, presumably the history of the Revolution that had been translated into German in the 1790s by Günther K. F. Seidel.115 Luden damned the English, praised the American constitutional system, but thought it ‘‘too beautiful to last’’: the states would ‘‘split, have wars, generals, military tyrants & then settled monarchies,’’ which was the usual European, Machiavellian presenti113. JBH, ‘‘The Prospects of Letters and Taste in Virginia’’ (1827), ibid., 294. 114. JBH to Henry Clay, 20 October 1829, Francis B. Harrison Papers, WM; Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 52, 55–56, 58–59. 115. David Ramsay, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Revolution Aus Den Des Congresses der Vereinigten Staaten, trans. Gunther Karl Friedrich Seidel (Berlin: In der Vossischen Buchhandlung, 1794–95); see Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770–1800: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 293, 412. Luden had edited Duke Bernhard’s American travels: see Harrison, Aris Sonis Focisque, 110.

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ment. Cattily, competitively, he dismissed Göttingen as little more than a library, for its professors ‘‘old & young, were old,’’ and that Saalfeld was ‘‘nothing.’’ 116 In May Harrison proceeded with Froriep to Leipzig, where he saw the Book Fair. He also encountered central European Jewry, which elicited from him an abrupt anti-Semitism. They wore ‘‘strange costumes . . . long beards, tall fur caps & long folding black robes,’’ which were picturesque. Nonetheless, ‘‘a Jew is toutes choses egales a filthy brute.’’ Encountered on the road, they traveled on ‘‘dirty straw many together in their waggons.’’ It was ‘‘most unsavory,’’ for what could be ‘‘more repulsive than a tattered robe of greyish black linnen with inhabited crevices & a sallow Apella peeping out of it with his pedlar face?’’ 117 From Leipzig, he made his way to Berlin, where he probably listened to lectures at the university. He may even have heard Hegel lecture, for later Harrison was to be the first American to mention Hegel’s philosophy of history, as yet unpublished, even in Germany.118 More certain is that Harrison met Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philologist and founder of the FriedrichWilhelm Universität, and was invited to dine at Tegel, Humboldt’s country estate, where they seem to have discussed Indian languages.119 Harrison also pursued Henry Clay’s desire for information; at the end of his diary are dutifully listed the nature of various German tariffs. From Berlin, he went southward to Dresden (where he encountered James Fenimore Cooper), Munich, 116. Entry for 22 March 1830, JBH European Diary, Francis B. Harrison Papers, UVA. 117. Ibid., 1 May 1830. ‘‘Apella’’ is an allusion to Horace, Satires, I, v, 100: ‘‘Credat Iudaeus Apella.’’ It was the most famous and familiar of anti-Semitic texts in the classical tradition. 118. See JBH, ‘‘English Civilization,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 463. On Harrison and Hegel, see O’Brien, All Clever Men, 59. 119. Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 67. It is likely that Warden effected the introduction, as he did later for James Ventress; see David Bailie Warden to Baron Humboldt, 15 September 1830, James Alexander Ventress and Family Papers, MDAH. But Francis Lieber also knew Humboldt; see Friedrich Wilhelm C. K. F. Freiherr von Humboldt to FL, 17 November 1828, FL Papers, HEH. In 1852, Lieber was to render this verdict: ‘‘Wm de Humboldt was a very learned man, a man of genius, a man of liberal political opinions, of comprehensive mind, inclining to Schiller rather than to Goethe, therefore warm, expansive, still, naturally and, perhaps, necessarily belonging to that authentic school, which then flourished in Germany and which produced the expression eine schöne Seele, a type totally different from any French or English type—with whom the Beautiful took sway—in the last appeal—over the strictly pure, manly substantial—a type, which with naturally noble natures could produce but little wickedness, because they were noble, but which when spread and diluted for the masses, as all types must be—or, which means the same thing though expressed by an opposite metaphor, when distilled into an extrait or essence, for the masses, produced the greatest mischief, and is still producing it. Humboldt was not a type of this phase of the soul, but he deeply partook of it. . . .’’ (FL to George S. Hillard, 15 February 1852, FL Papers, HEH.)

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and Switzerland, and reached Venice by September; he spent October in Florence and the winter in Rome. After a brief visit to Naples, he returned to Paris in the spring. From there, he made an excursion to England to meet again George Long, once professor of ancient languages in Charlottesville, now of the University of London, but also Thomas Babington Macaulay, with whom Harrison had corresponded over antislavery matters.120 He returned to Virginia in the summer of 1831. Harrison’s German experience was less rigorous than Calvert’s, the intellectual consequences less permanent. He was, like Preston and Legaré, more in the business of fashioning a public man informed by scholarship than of making a man of letters who might dabble in politics. What Harrison shows, however, is that by 1830 it was becoming customary that such an ambition might demand an engagement with German culture, that pressures within the South might propel a young man into lodgings in Göttingen. More, he shows that choosing Germany might involve a self-conscious rejection of English culture. The records of Southerners show how often England, seen from the Continent, seemed arrogant and contemptible, which only reinforced a Jeffersonian suspicion of the old enemy. Though Calvert was later to grow into an appreciation of English literature, of Wordsworth and Carlyle, in 1825 he mainly saw the English through German eyes. In Weimar, he witnessed the ‘‘crop of hate’’ that the English elicited. An Englishman, ‘‘a type of the animal, muscular, coarser John Bull,’’ called upon Calvert in his hotel. On the stairway were officers, escorts to the Elector of Hesse Cassel, who was about to go to the palace. The Englishman was not impressed and asked the identity of ‘‘these epauletted fellows.’’ Dissatisfied, he resolved to show his contempt: ‘‘he . . . struck his hat down on his head, giving it a saucy cant on one side, thrust his hands into his pockets, descended the steps with a careless, loose gait, cast his eyes neither to the right nor to the left, utterly ignoring the presence of the dazzling Hessians, and whistled as he went. . . . Contempt could not have been more emphatically expressed, even in words. . . . With motionless wrath, the Hessians beheld this sudden insolent apparition. Their moustaches seemed almost to curl with impotent rage.’’ Harrison, with more thoroughness even than Calvert, was repelled by the English. To Clay, from Paris, he wrote of ‘‘the travelling English in their extravagant taste & alien follies.’’ When he came to consider the respective merits of English and German culture, in an article for Legaré in the Southern Review, Harrison was to find little of merit in the former, corrupted into reaction by opposing the French Revolution and Napoleon, imperial in her 120. Harrison, Aris Sonis Focisque, 120–23.

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maritime policy, insensitive to ideality in the arts, persuaded of the merits of a Burkean prejudice, merely commonsensical in philosophy.121 The motives and procedures for studying in Germany began to shift later, certainly by the time that Thomas Caute Reynolds of Virginia and South Carolina, a graduate of the University of Virginia, went to Berlin in 1839 when he was only eighteen, then to Munich and Heidelberg.122 Hugh Legaré, who had done the Grand Tour, made himself a thorough scholar, and become a politician, signaled the change in a letter of advice. Be brisker in your European studies than I was, he told Reynolds in 1841. ‘‘Nothing is more perilous, in America, than to be too long learning, and to get the name of bookish. Stay in Europe long enough to lay the ground-work of professional eminence, by pursuing the branches of knowledge most instrumental in advancing it.’’ In 1825, Saalfeld had suggested to Calvert that, with a very little effort and the payment of ‘‘thirteen Louis d’ors’’ to the university treasurer, he might leave Göttingen with the dignity of doctor philosophiae. Calvert preferred the money to the ‘‘dry parchment.’’ 123 Harrison did not trouble himself with securing a degree and spent relatively little time enrolled in university. But Reynolds spent about three years at German universities (and just half a year in Paris) and freely accumulated certificates of his studies, culminating in his Heidelberg doctorate of civil and canon law, written on the ‘‘origins and devel121. Calvert, ‘‘Weimar in 1825,’’ 263, 264. JBH to Henry Clay, 20 October 1829, Francis B. Harrison Papers, WM; JBH, ‘‘English Civilization.’’ 122. Reynolds was born in Charleston, but his family was Virginian; his father, George Norton Reynolds, came from Yorktown and moved back there when his son was still young. (His siblings were also writers: William Sims Reynolds was a doctor and occasional essayist; James L. Reynolds, who was a Baptist, later wrote on and taught the classics at South Carolina College.) After being in Germany, he became a lawyer in Richmond, before accepting the secretaryship of the American legation in Madrid, a post he held between 1846 and 1848. While in Europe, he married Heloise Marie Sprague in Gibraltar, and hence he was to be related by marriage to Augustin Louis Taveau, who was to marry Delphine Sprague on the same island in 1854. Back in the United States, he migrated to Missouri in 1850, where he became U.S. district attorney (1853–57) and in 1860 was elected lieutenant governor; he was prosecessionist. After the war, he lived in exile in Mexico for a while, before returning to St. Louis in 1869. See Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 77–103; ‘‘Letters of Thomas Caute Reynolds, 1847–1885,’’ Missouri Historical Society 10 (January–June 1943): 1–54. For examples of his brothers’ writings, see William S. Reynolds, ‘‘The Agricultural Prospects of South-Carolina; Her Resources and Her True Policy,’’ SQR 8 (July 1845): 118–47; James L. Reynolds, ‘‘Roman Literature,’’ SQR 10 (October 1846): 352–76. On the latter, see Hollis, South Carolina College, 4, 202, 204, 206, 208. W. S. Reynolds had a plantation near that of William Gilmore Simms; see Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 1:cxxxiii. 123. HSL to Thomas Caute Reynolds, 6 February 1841, in Legaré, Writings, 1:236; Calvert, ‘‘Göttingen in 1824,’’ 607.

Title page of Thomas Caute Reynolds’s Heidelberg dissertation

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opment of the jury system’’ and dedicated to Legaré.124 He seems to have contemplated an academic career or, at least, in 1844 he applied for the professorship of modern languages at the University of Virginia. His first credential, in his letter of application, was his doctorate, which he was at pains to indicate was granted ‘‘examine rigoroso summa cum laude superato.’’ 125 It was not that casual attendance at German universities disappeared as a phenomenon; this continued for Southern and Northern students alike. Young men often wished to go to Europe and a German university was as good an excuse as any to gull skeptical parents. As Henry Adams later wrote of going to Berlin in 1858: ‘‘Therefore, when he presented to an exceedingly indulgent father and mother his request to begin at a German university the study of the Civil Law—although neither he nor they knew what the Civil Law was, or any reason for his studying it—the parents dutifully consented.’’ But, by the time of Basil Gildersleeve of Charleston, who went in 1850 for three years to study philology, there were those who went as nascent professional scholars, though even Gildersleeve went with broader belletristic ambitions that were specialized by the scholars under whom he studied. He was born in 1831, well into the era when Germany had become a plausible option. His father was Benjamin Gildersleeve, who had come from Connecticut to be a Presbyterian evangelist and the struggling, tenacious editor of a succession of urban religious periodicals in the South, the Charleston Observer in South Carolina, the Watchman and Observer in Richmond, and then the Central Presbyterian in the same city. (Basil’s maternal grandfather, Bazile Lanneau, was French, an Acadian expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755.)126 From the earliest age, the younger Gildersleeve had acquired languages: Latin, Greek, French, all by the age of fourteen. At Princeton in 1847, he had begun German, with a little Italian and Spanish on the side. He became interested in Carlyle, who led him to Goethe, who engendered a passion. ‘‘Goethe’s aphorisms were my daily food,’’ he was to remember. He memorized favorite pas124. Thomas Caute Reynolds, De Vera Judicii Juratorum Origine, Natura et Indole. Dissertatio Inauguralis, Quam Illustri Jurisconsultorum Ordini in Alma Literarum Universitate, Ruperto-Carola, Heidelbergensi, Ad Gradum Doctoris Summos in Jure Civili et Canonico, Honores Rite Obtinendos Submisit Auctor (Heidelberg, 1842). On this, see ‘‘Critical Notices—Origin of Trial by Jury,’’ SQR 6 ( July 1844): 251–55. The certificates can be seen in the Thomas Caute Reynolds Records, LV. As noted in Reynolds to FL, 31 May 1843, FL Papers, HEH, Charles Sumner noticed the thesis favorably in the Law Reporter. 125. Thomas Caute Reynolds to William Cabell Rives, 5 August 1844, quoted in Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 83–88. 126. Ward W. Briggs Jr., ed., The Letters of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–2; Ward W. Briggs Jr., ed., Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 1–23.

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sages, repeated them to himself on walks. ‘‘Goethe was my mainstay at a time when my faith had suffered an eclipse. This was the epoch of my Teutomania, the time when I read German, wrote German, listened to German, and even talked German—to myself if I could not find any long-suffering German to submit to my experiments.’’ He went, not precisely to become a philologist, but to study Altertumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity, which was considered the foundation of humane knowledge. To this, he was then promised, philology was the key, an ideal whose ‘‘hopelessness’’ he was only later to realize, without bitterness.127 In the winter semester of 1850–51, he studied in Berlin, mainly with August Boeckh, who had been professor of Greek at Berlin since 1811 and was then lecturing on Demosthenes and Greek literature. Gildersleeve, by his own admission, ‘‘worshipped, ignorantly, no doubt’’ Boeckh, whose ‘‘teaching made a passionate classicist out of an amateurish student of literature.’’ 128 Gildersleeve then proceeded to Göttingen, where he worked for two semesters; there he attended the lectures on Greek and Roman literature of Karl Friedrich Hermann, a Plato scholar, ‘‘the most eminent of the classical philologians at Göttingen,’’ those of Friedrich Wilhelm Schneidewin on Latin and Greek syntax, as well as Greek elegiac poetry, and those of Heinrich Ritter.129 For the winter semester of 1852–53, Gildersleeve went to Bonn, where he worked with several professors, but chiefly Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, the Latin philological professional par excellence, editor of Das Rheinische Museum für Philologie, later the puzzled mentor of Friedrich Nietzsche, who felt Ritschl disdained philosophy for drier studies, among which his work on Plautus was most notable.130 Unlike Nietzsche, Gildersleeve was to feel no revulsion from 127. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 71; Basil L. Gildersleeve, ‘‘Formative Influences,’’ Forum 10 (February 1891): 614–15. 128. Briggs, Gildersleeve Letters, 5, 121, quoting Charles William Emil Miller, ed., Selections from the Brief Mention of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1930), 141, and Basil L. Gildersleeve, Hellas and Hesperia: Or, the Vitality of Greek Studies in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), 42. 129. Briggs, Gildersleeve Letters, 5, 24. For references to Ritter in Southern discourse, see Reynolds, ‘‘Roman Literature,’’ 353, and JWM to Robert N. Gourdin, 21 August 1854, Robert N. Gourdin Papers, DU, written from Berlin, which speaks of a letter of introduction for Miles from Louis Agassiz to Ritter. This Ritter should not be confused with Karl Ritter of the University of Berlin; on the latter, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 450, 496. 130. Briggs, Gildersleeve Letters, 5, 65. On Ritschl, see Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York: Free Press, 1991), 68–70, 72–77. See also Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 170.

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The American contingent at Göttingen (Courtesy Basil Gildersleeve Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia)

Ritschl, whose bust he kept on his desk for all his life. There was also the young Jakob Bernays (himself a former student of Ritschl), who lectured to Gildersleeve on Aristotle, Thucydides, and Cicero, and was a man of ‘‘keen insight and a fatal command of sarcasm’’ who was then working on Joseph Scaliger. It was, in fact, Bernays who was to suggest the topic of Gildersleeve’s dissertation on Porphyry.131 These scholars were not all remote and esoteric names, as viewed from the Battery in Charleston. Some were figures whose accomplishments Southern scholarship had estimated. As long ago as 1832, Legaré had analyzed Boeckh’s The Public Economy of Athens for the readers of the Southern Review, and George Frederick Holmes in 1844 in the pages of the Southern Quarterly Review had called Boeckh ‘‘the prince of writers’’ upon Pindar. Legaré had reviewed Hermann’s Manual of the Political Antiquities of Greece for Cogswell’s New York Review in 1840, the same book that James Warley Miles was to cite in 1848 as a guide to ancient parties and demagogues.132 Holmes, in particular, had been 131. Briggs, Gildersleeve Letters, 5, 35, 25. See Jakob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1855). 132. HSL, ‘‘The Public Economy of Athens,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 265–326; GFH, ‘‘Criti-

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assiduous in keeping up with German scholarship of this type. Gildersleeve, therefore, was perfecting rather than breaking with an aspect of the Southern tradition. Still, it was a long way from William Campbell Preston’s reading in the Bibliothèque du Roi to Gildersleeve’s dissertation, De Porphyrii Studiis Capitum Homericis Trias.133 Beyond Germany was Switzerland, which was sacred ground for a Presbyterian like Thornwell. ‘‘Here I am in Geneva,’’ he told his wife, ‘‘the city of Calvin, of Beza, of Farel, of Viret, of Turretin, and of Pictet. I have stood under the same canopy which covered the head of Calvin three hundred years ago, when he preached the gospel in the dawn of the Reformation.’’ 134 But, for others less religious, Switzerland was two things, the modern European republic of greatest continuity and, as an extension of the Rhine and a pause before Italy, a further education in Romantic landscape. The former had meant much to Francis Kinloch’s generation, as it had to Edward Gibbon, who once contemplated writing a history of Swiss liberty, ‘‘a subject, so full of real virtue, public spirit, military glory, and great lessons of government.’’ 135 John Taylor hoped that the United States might be ‘‘the Switzerland of the world.’’ It was widely believed that landscape (as Taylor put it, ‘‘a rugged country under a severe climate’’) had somehow created liberty, though a sweating Southerner, in a place like Alabama which he believed to be a democratic republic, could scarcely think such preconditions indispensable.136 By the late antebellum period, this theme of liberty was less urgent, because Southerners thought it had been safely accomplished at home. But mountains remained impressive, even if Southerners were not given to climbing or indefatigable Alpine walking.137 As Rossini’s William Tell showed, a Romantic might still find the Swiss pertinent. But, as William Elliott’s review of Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein showed, liberty, long-sustained, was liable to seem dull. ‘‘A spot—not unusual in Alpine scenery—where a soft green valley, watered by a limpid scene, was seen to repose in striking contrast with the bleak and savage craggs that hemmed it in’’ was well enough, as was ‘‘the cal Notices—Anthon’s Greek Prosody,’’ SQR 6 (July 1844): 248; JWM, ‘‘The Danger and Safety of the Republic,’’ SQR 14 (July 1848): 152. See also Reynolds, ‘‘Roman Literature,’’ 353. 133. Basil L. Gildersleeve, De Porphyrii Studiis Homericis Capitum Trias (Gottingae: E. A. Huthii, 1853). 134. Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 458. 135. Journal A, 103–104, quoted in Patricia B. Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 163. 136. John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, ed. F. Thornton Miller (1822; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 191, 12. 137. For a letter in praise of Swiss landscape, see F. Henry Quitman to Eliza Quitman, 23 September 1853, John A. Quitman and Family Papers, MDAH.

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diadem of clouds that crowned the summit of Pilatre—the outward seeming sign of glory—the real index of storm and disaster.’’ All this Washington Allston had felt in 1805, looking at ‘‘the sublime scenery of Switzerland,’’ and seeing the sun rise on Lake Maggiore, as the ‘‘giant Alps seemed to rise from their purple beds, and putting on their crowns of gold to send up a hallelujah almost audible.’’ 138 But, as Elliott concluded, ‘‘the stern hardy features of Swiss republicanism’’ were by 1829, though worthy, lacking in melodrama. ‘‘In the contented domestic traits and unvarying tenor of such a life, there is but little aliment for the novelist—and they must, consequently, be as distasteful to him, as long periods of national tranquillity, have ever proved to the historian.’’ A tourist, like a novelist and evidently a literary critic, sought the excitement and movement observable from a café table, which was not to be found amid ‘‘the tame, unvarying expression of Swiss bluntness and honesty.’’ 139 From Switzerland, Southerners usually crossed the Alps and descended to Milan. To travel east was rare. In 1850 James Johnston Pettigrew was in Austria and in 1854 so was John R. Thompson, there to have an experience reminiscent of the South: ‘‘The moment we got into the dominions of the two-headed eagle, I began to feel like a negro. Our passports were taken from us at the frontier and were not returned until just before we entered Vienna, when a police officer in military uniform came along with them and handed us at the same time a pass, exactly such an one as Pa gives Lewis to go to Mrs. Jenkins’s, permitting us without molestation to enter the Austrian capital.’’ 140 Francis Lieber, the Prussian liberal, seldom spared a harsh word for Austrian despotism. In 1851, he thought that Francis Bowen was unfit for a chair of history at Harvard: ‘‘I say it will amount to a scandalum publicum to confirm in the U.S. a man for history who has made himself the advocate of Austria. Why, Bowen’s opinions are so outrageous that they approach the asinine.’’ 141 Beyond Vienna, visits to Hungary 142 and Poland were very rare, Russia was remote, Scandinavia a silence. Nonetheless, Joel Poinsett did travel through Scandinavia and reach St. Petersburg late in 1806. There he met Alexander I on friendly terms on several occasions. Indeed the tsar, after courte138. Jared B. Flagg, Life and Letters of Washington Allston (1892; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 58–59. Simms makes the obvious connection between Allston’s reaction and Coleridge’s poem on the Vale of Chamonix: see WGS, ‘‘The Writings of Washington Allston,’’ SQR 4 (October 1843): 378–79. 139. William Elliott, ‘‘Anne of Geierstein,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 500, 501–2, 513–14. 140. Clyde N. Wilson, Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 45; JRT to mother, 13 August 1854, JRT Papers, UVA. 141. FL to Dorothea Dix, 9 February 1851, FL Papers, HEH. 142. Pettigrew was there in 1850; see Wilson, Carolina Cavalier, 45.

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ously observing that he would be a republican were he not already an autocrat, once offered Poinsett a job, which was politely declined. Otherwise, the South Carolinian was introduced at court and attended the soirées of Count Gregory Orloff, at which he met Pozzo di Borgo. In the spring of 1807, in the company of an English aristocrat, Lord Royston, he set out for Moscow, then down the Volga, on to Astrakhan and the Caucasus, where they were entertained by the Khan of Kuban in northern Persia.143 Later, in the 1820s, Henry Middleton of South Carolina was to serve as American Minister in Saint Petersburg. But Italy was the most sacred, most comprehensive of European destinations, being ancient, medieval, religious, aesthetic, and thereby central to understanding the modern dialectics of cultural identity. For the English and Germans especially had invented the counterpoint between North and South from their Italian experiences. Johann Winckelmann’s History of Art among the Ancients (1764) and Gibbon’s visit in the same year, Goethe’s stay from 1786 to 1788, August von Schlegel’s travel with Madame de Staël in 1804, Byron, Shelley, Keats—all this is familiar.144 The country homes of northern Europe are still packed with the booty of such travel, with paintings of the Forum, views of Pompeii, imitations of Canaletto, prospects of Florence from Fiesole. Boston’s Charles Eliot Norton, traveling in England in 1856, observed to Arthur Hugh Clough, the English poet who had lived in Charleston, ‘‘How much of Italy lies enclosed in these country-houses.’’ 145 The plantation houses of the South were little different. James Henry Hammond hauled back to Redcliffe, among much else, copies of Raphael’s Madonna della Se iola, Caravaggio’s Gamblers, Titian’s Three Graces, plus busts, engravings, porcelain, all cased up and sent from Leghorn in 1837.146 In 1849 Carter B. Poindexter of the U.S. Navy arranged to send to Hugh Blair Grigsby twenty-two oil paintings, among them ‘‘four beautiful views of Venice, four of Naples, one of Messina, two portraits of the Magdalene one by Correggio, the other by Scardino—[a] portrait of John Baptist—two portraits small of the Madonna & child.’’ 147 Such a letter betrayed a 143. David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 14; Rippy, Poinsett, 20–30. Also, Barnwell Heyward was in Stockholm and St. Petersburg in 1847; see Anne E. Middleton to Charlotte DeWolf, 12 November 1847, Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, SHC. 144. This section is an abridgment and rewriting of my essay, ‘‘Italy and the Southern Romantics,’’ in O’Brien, Rethinking the South, 84–111. 145. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, eds., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1913), 1:149. 146. Marion Edmonds, ‘‘James H. Hammond’s Art Collecting on His European Tour of May 1836–November 1837,’’ in Art in the Lives, ME1–ME16. 147. C. B. Poindexter to HBG, 13 October 1849; Mary Eliza (Whitehead) Poindexter to HBG, 24 February 1850, both in HBG Papers, VHS.

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Alexander Galt, Madonna, after Raphael (Courtesy Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary)

sense of layers, palpable to all who thought about or traveled in Italy. John R. Thompson, giving his ‘‘Impressions of Italy’’ to the readers of the Southern Literary Messenger in 1857, piled allusion upon reference, noted both the visited and the visitor, both Dante and Byron, Raphael and John Murray, Pio Nono and George W. Hillard.148 Crucial was the idea that there was a counterpoint of North and South, a cultural premise most famously embodied in Madame de Staël’s Corinne, upon which John Izard Middleton had been an adviser. Its themes were, as we shall see later, deeply influential in the other South across the Atlantic. Corinne is a novel about the cold rationality of the North killing the imaginative freedom of the South. Corinne embodies the Italian virtues of genius and spontaneity, without the vices of ignorance, envy, discord, and indolence. Upon her account, Italy has given the world her antique Roman glory, the Renaissance, and the moderating balm of her climate. Italy is ‘‘a mystery which must be comprehended by the imagination’’ rather than by the cold judgment developed by an English education. History is the burden of the South, for its citizens are ‘‘much more remarkable for what they have been, and for what they might be than for what they actually are.’’ This explains why the ruins of the past are stoically nourishing to the present: ‘‘the silence of the living is homage paid to the dead; they endure and we pass away.’’ Hence the charm of Rome ‘‘is to reconcile the imagination with the sleep of death. 148. Lieber’s friend, George W. Hillard, published what became the standard American travel account; see George S. Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853). See JRT, ‘‘Impressions of Italy,’’ SLM 25 (November 1857): 353–71.

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Here we learn resignation, and suffer less pangs of regret for the objects of our love.’’ 149 Italians are described as greatly vehement, indolent, amoral, unstudied, and open. Romantic love is little known, because Italian love is rapid and public, untouched by domestic felicity. Italians endure tyranny by cunning and the stoicism nurtured by Roman Catholicism, the force that had bound together a balkanised peninsula. Paganism had deified life, while Christianity deified death, but in the Catholicism of Italy the latter was mollified by the legacy of the ancients. Northern Europe, by contrast, stands for mourning and melancholy, the veiled. There reason predominates over imagination, there all is ‘‘subordination, regularity, silence, and serious deportment.’’ The Protestantism of the North is rigid, while Catholicism is tender. The Reformation, though it stood for freedom, created puritanical constraint; Catholicism, though despotic, generated indulgence. By a similar logic, Northern literature is marked by melancholy, by attention to the internal, the ‘‘knowledge of the human heart.’’ 150 Climate is thought to explain much. Madame de Staël, in her own way, mirrored the attitudes of most northern travelers to Italy, as she was partly condescending, partly admiring. A Southern author in 1849 could admire her equilibrium: ‘‘Painfully conscious of Italian degradation, she does not fail to discover the redeeming traits of Italian character.’’ Many others thought similarly, though most Southerners were more likely to identify with the traits of northern Europe. As Brantz Mayer put the matter in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1846, ‘‘As for Italy, she has, in turns, had the tourist’s sigh, his love and his anger . . . we know not whether to bestow our blind adoration or unmitigated contempt.’’ 151 Southerners tended to like the scenery, but less often the people who inhabited it. As James De Veaux candidly put it: ‘‘The people enter not my calculations,—the climate, the scenery and the arts make the chief of its [Italy’s] charms.’’ Passing through Lombardy in 1833, William B. Crawford of Alabama observed, ‘‘The people are a wretched looking set, and would hardly be suspected of being descended from the ancient inhabitants.’’ Some dispensation was granted for urban dwellers, as opposed to peasants, for their gaiety and passion for amusement, if the traveler was inclined to judge leniently an amusement that might turn to ‘‘low vices and brutality.’’ William Boulware, from Naples in 1842, wondered at this capacity for joy: ‘‘The Italians appear to be a very happy people. They are more gay, much more gay & 149. Madame de Staël, Corinne or, Italy, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1894), 1:38, 44, 24, 45–46. 150. Ibid., 45, 47, 75, 307, 2:77, 45–46, 1:277, 171–72. 151. ‘‘The Corinne, or Italy, of Madame de Stael,’’ SLM 15 ( July 1849): 382; Brantz Mayer, ‘‘Italy,’’ SQR 10 ( July 1846): 92.

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joyous than we are.’’ During the Carnival, he saw them ‘‘form long lines of carriages of a mile in length, one line going up & another coming down & as they would pass they would pelt one another with bonbons with an enjoyment & an ecstacy which to me was unaccountable.’’ The same gift for pleasure was evident at their masquerade balls, where, in their disguise, ‘‘they regarded but little the conventional proprieties of society, though there was no indecency—they danced, they leaped, they laughed, they told stories under the cover of the incognito on one another & seemed absolutely almost beside themselves with joy.’’ 152 Like Paris, Italy offered alluring bodies. ‘‘Nothing can excel the loveliness and surpassing beauty of the female form develloped in all the loveliness and ellegance of most exquisite beauty,’’ Crawford tumbled out, of the ladies he saw at the opera. Richard Haynesworth, a sailor, came ashore in 1857 to endorse this opinion in blunter terms: ‘‘There are many beautiful women here in this city of Genoa, and I pass no inconsiderable portion of my time admiring them. I generally carry my big whiskers and mustache to the opera in company with a six inch lorgnette, and stare around the house as impudently as any.’’ Better yet were ballerinas in ‘‘exceedingly short petticoats.’’ But worse were the consequences of ballerinas, as W. H. Huger cautioned Augustin Louis Taveau in 1853: ‘‘Take care how you play with tail in Italy, for an Italian pox is no trifle.’’ 153 Southerners complained of bad roads and expected to suffer from the harassment of bandits. Henry H. Cumming of Georgia was unusually sanguine and cheerful in writing to his father in 1819 that reports of banditti were much exaggerated. They were ‘‘a very civil sort of people considering their profession,’’ who treated their prisoners rather well, ‘‘except that they sometimes exact very large sums for their Ransoms.’’ Not carrying much money, he expected an easy time: ‘‘I shall be able, by beating them down a little, to buy myself off on moderate terms.’’ 154 Southerners tended to despise both the government and the religion. William Crawford thought Milan had been improved by the modern rule of the French, and William Campbell Preston thought the same of Rome. It was a pity, the latter wrote to Washington Irving in 1818, that Napoleon had not continued his dominance of Italy. The emperor had usefully weakened the 152. Robert W. Gibbes, A Memoir of James de Veaux, of Charleston, S.C. (Columbia, S.C.: J. C. Morgan, 1846), 59–60; William B. Crawford Journal, Gorgas Family Papers, UA; William Boulware to Molly, 20 February 1842, Dew Family Mss, WM. 153. William B. Crawford Journal, Gorgas Family Papers, UA; Richard G. Haynesworth Diary, UA; W. H. Huger to ALT, 12 February 1853, ALT Papers, DU. 154. Henry H. Cumming to Thomas Cumming, n.d. [1819], Hammond-Bryan-Cumming Papers, SCL.

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clergy and suppressed the convents. Further, ‘‘He was introducing the useful arts, he was employing the poor in repairing the highways or rescuing the monuments of antiquity from the ruins under which they are buried— but under the spiritless and paralyzing dominion of priests everything languishes.’’ Few had good words for the Roman Catholic Church. Despotism, cruelty, superstition, parasitism, were its characteristics. Charles Pelham, entering St. Peter’s in 1845, was being unusually mild merely to think the rites ‘‘prosaic & dull.’’ ‘‘It is astonishing,’’ William Crawford had more typically observed, ‘‘what numbers there are to be seen, parading the streets, of these holy loungers, these drones of society, that live on the labour of the industrious and are supported by ignorance and superstition.’’ 155 Preston explained the problem with his usual precision. Observers of Italy might be divided in spirit into Catholics and Protestants. The former ‘‘sees in every thing the consummation and perfection of a noble hierarchical system fraught with whatever is glorious in Religion and admirable in piety.’’ The latter ‘‘sees nothing but a degraded and creaking superstition depressing the human soul and body into vice and crime, and with so deep a degradation that men are transformed to such an extent as not to perceive their foul disfigurement, but boast themselves more comely than before and are content to roll with pleasure in a sensual sty.’’ Protestants outnumbering Catholics among Southern travelers, the latter opinion predominated, although there were Southern Catholics. But even for them, there could be complications. De Veaux attended in 1843 a meeting of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, at which Jeremiah Cummings of Washington gave his brief student oration in Latin to general applause, to be succeeded by three or four ‘‘coal black’’ Ethiopians.156 Armed only with such prejudice, few Southerners would have come. But their heads were full of antiquity and the Renaissance. ‘‘Long had it been my most ardent and one of my earliest wishes, to visit Italy, so endeared by every school boy recollection,’’ Crawford observed. De Veaux visited the Campidoglio with a friend who ‘‘warmed into a classic fit,’’ reinforced with notes from Oliver Goldsmith, and launched into pointed declamation upon Caesar’s murder, the rape of Lucretia, and had barely reached the Sack of Rome, before their old attendant called a halt, so that he might return home to his dinner. Preston offered the formal reason for the taste for antiquity: ‘‘I was stupefied with amazement at St. Peters but my most frequent visits are to the Capitol the Forum and the Coliseum. I believe that Americans from their 155. William B. Crawford Journal, Gorgas Family Papers, UA; WCP to Washington Irving, 16 March 1818, Preston Family Papers, VHS; Charles P. Pelham to JHT, 20 February 1845, JHT Papers, SCL. 156. Yarborough, Reminiscences of Preston, 78–79; Gibbes, James de Veaux, 111–12.

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Faure, A View of the Roman Forum (1858), purchased by Francis James Porcher (1821–70) in Italy (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

republican sympathies are more interested in the history of Rome between the two Brutus’ than any other people, and therefore we would visit the remains of that period with deeper feelings.’’ But this motive was overlaid with Romanticism. Crawford in 1833 punctuated his journal with long quotations from Byron’s Childe Harold, and recommended that the ruins of antiquity be viewed by moonlight, the better to let imagination recreate the remote past. By 1857, Romanticism had aged sufficiently that John R. Thompson could revise this opinion: ‘‘It is fashionable to visit the Coliseum by moonlight. . . . But the contrasts of light and shade are too violent at such a time; the depths of gloom excite the imagination with something of tragic horror, while the eye loses the delicious tints of orange and purple, of which the afternoon is so lavish, upon the wasted structure.’’ 157 It was rare to find a Southerner who could muster indifference to all this. Ralph Izard Middleton in 1836 managed it, in defiance of family tradition. 157. Gibbes, James de Veaux, 94–95; Preston to Washington Irving, 16 March 1818, Preston Family Papers, VHS; William B. Crawford Journal, Gorgas Family Papers, UA; JRT, ‘‘Impressions of Italy,’’ 363.

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For him, Italy was ‘‘a series of disappointments.’’ In Rome, only the Colosseum was worth seeing. For the rest, ‘‘the triumphal arches and old tottering columns, the dilapidated statues and smoked frescoes, all these are fudge.’’ The Torso of Hercules (usually called the Belvedere Hercules) in the Vatican was but ‘‘a weather beaten piece of stone somewhat in the shape of a mans body curtailed of head, arms, and legs.’’ Puzzlingly, the guidebook devoted pages ‘‘to descanting upon the godlike majesty and I know not what of this same torso.’’ Perhaps it was of use to artists to study such things, to acquire ‘‘notions on the subject.’’ But, for ordinary people, ‘‘who could not model a dog out of a piece of wax (among which class I enroll myself ) to go and spend hours together in the middle of winter in the Vatican constantly exclaiming how beautiful, how beautiful when they are all the while thinking how cold, how cold, this I think utterly absurd.’’ 158 The Southern engagement with Italy is, perhaps, best exemplified by the experience of Richard Henry Wilde. Wilde was born in Dublin in 1789, where his father was an ironmonger and hardware merchant. His parents moved to Baltimore in 1797. A year after the death of his father in 1802, his widow Mary Wilde moved to Augusta, where she ran a ladies’ dress shop.159 There her son became a lawyer, politician, widower, and poet. He seems to have been a fairly conventional Georgian slaveholder and politician. He supported William H. Crawford for the presidency, followed the faction of George M. Troup, became a candidate for the States Rights Party, and was later a Whig. On and off he served in Congress. He tacked between Nullifiers and Unionists in the early 1830s, but he drifted onto the States’ Rights ticket by dint of skepticism of Jackson, and this led to his defeat in 1834. It was, indeed, partly the tangled bitterness of politics that helped to drive Wilde away to Florence. He left as an expatriate, wishing not only to be somewhere else, but wanting to leave a dissatisfying home. Experience had indicated to him that he was ‘‘not at all fitted’’ for the life of a politician, and he was irked by the unreality of both public praise and vilification. As he was to put it later in verse: ‘‘Spurning restraint, disdainful of the crowd, / Statesman I am not, and never will be, / For rule too indolent, for strife too proud.’’ Italy, by contrast, offered a people to whom he did not belong, to whom he owed nothing, to whom he was not accountable. Italy offered too the chance of ‘‘travel—study—science—literary occupation—the arts—the untroubled enjoyment of Nature.’’ In short, it 158. Ralph Izard Middleton to Nathaniel Russell Middleton, 28 March 1836, Middleton Family Papers, SCHS. Other Americans responded less unsympathetically to the Torso: see William L. Vance, America’s Rome, vol. 1, Classical Rome (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 329–44. 159. Edward L. Tucker, Richard Henry Wilde: His Life and Selected Poems (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), 1–7.

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offered a life ‘‘uselessly delightful.’’ Like Keats before him, he also thought that his poor health might be redeemed by a gentler Italian climate.160 As a poet, Wilde was more than primed for an Italian venture. The tradition of Byron, Keats, and Shelley was now well established, and for years Wilde’s verse had conformed to their themes. His mind ran on Byron, as he traveled south from Paris through Switzerland. Just as Corinne had spoken of Rome as offering the reconciliation of imagination with the sleep of death, so Wilde wrote in September 1835 from Florence, ‘‘My eyes filled with tears, as I thought this would be the appropriate end of my wanderings—a place where it would be so sweet to die!’’ 161 Wilde found in Florence an established if small American colony. There were the sculptors, Hiram Powers and Horatio Greenough. There was George Washington Greene, the grandson of Nathanael Greene, who was married to an Italian and was later American consul in Rome, where he helped the career of Thomas Crawford. There was Francis Kinloch of South Carolina, the sculptor, who shared lodgings with Greenough. Charles Sumner, William Ellery Channing, Edward Everett, and assorted Middletons passed through. Unlike most expatriates, however, Wilde did not confine himself to his own kind. Knowing Italian, he mingled with Italians, even fathering a bastard, Niziero Novelli, who was born just after Wilde’s abrupt departure for America in 1840, was consigned to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and was handed over to a local peasant.162 It was through an invitation to the house of Count Mariano Alberti, where some newly discovered and controversial manuscripts of Tasso were read, that Wilde began his literary researches. In 1842 he was to publish in New York his Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso, though the manuscript had been completed in 1837: a book that, consisting chiefly of excerpts from and translations of Tasso’s verse and letters, culled to demonstrate Tasso’s sanity, shows great awareness of the historical problem of evidence. Unpublished, and now in the Library of Congress, were an anthology of Italian lyric poets, translated by Wilde himself, 160. Tucker, Richard Henry Wilde, 42; Richard Henry Wilde, Hesperia: A Poem, ed. William Cumming Wilde (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 93. 161. Tucker, Richard Henry Wilde, 43, 45; cf. Wilde, ‘‘Sonnet to Lord Byron,’’ in Tucker, Richard Henry Wilde, 133. 162. Sylvia E. Crane, White Silence; Greenough, Powers, and Crawford, American Sculptors in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1972), 35–112, 189–269; Nathalia Wright, ed., Letters of Horatio Greenough, American Sculptor (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 192–93, 196, 211, 219, 247, 287–88; Tucker, Richard Henry Wilde, 47– 50; Alicia Middleton to Charles Izard Manigault, 1 December 1835, Manigault Family Papers, SCHS; Nathalia Wright, ‘‘The Italian Son of Richard Henry Wilde,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 43 (December 1959): 419–27.

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and a biography of Dante. Wilde went much further than most American visitors in the depth of his acquaintance with Italian culture, perhaps because he expected to live out some twenty years in Italy. He did not content himself with picturesque descriptions in letters to American magazines nor even, as Madame de Staël had, with rapid judgments of Italian literature or society. He undertook serious research in the grand-ducal archives of Florence, consulted manuscripts in the Riccardi Library and in Ferrara, searched the papers once assembled by the Florentine antiquarian Antonio Magliabechi, vainly solicited entry to the depositories of Vienna, pined for access to the Vatican, checked published correspondence against extant originals, carefully footnoted his sources, and corrected the bias of older biographies. Such Rankean energy carried him through some five hundred pages on Tasso and a thousand in a draft on Dante before flagging. But his zeal had earlier been sufficient to uncover a lost fresco portrait of Dante, concealed with whitewash in the chapel of the Bargello.163 Wilde wrote much poetry in Italy. Most are lyrics, about women, death, loss, melancholy, parting. He continued to write his epic poem Hesperia, which was done in the manner of Childe Harold, with echoes of Wordsworth and Thomas Moore. It interestingly scrambles the equation of Italy and America. Hesperia is the name the ancient Greeks gave to Italy, but Wilde applied it to America, ‘‘as, since that time, the West has moved westward.’’ It has four books, focusing on Florida, Virginia, Acadia, and Louisiana. Much is pastoral, a reverie on nature, and the remembrance of places and people. There are modest passages of celebration of America’s revolutionary history but still more assertion that America is the land of the future, a historyless land, inhospitable to poetry. In testimony of his awareness of the European tradition, Corinne is twice alluded to, the first time to explain that, apropos of the United States, ‘‘the most beautiful countries in the world, when they bring to mind no recollection, when they bear the stamp of no remarkable event, are stripped of interest when compared with historical countries.’’ The South is not exempted from this verdict.164 A slice of the epic is a Romantic dissertation on the rise and fall of cultures, ‘‘the changing fortune of each various race.’’ This was a characteristic perspective. John Blair Hoge had been in Rome in 1816 and written home: ‘‘I gaze on paintings & statues & altars & idols & works of art from all quarters of the world & in the magnificence of ruined Rome I behold an instructive example of the instability of all human grandeur.’’ Like Corinne, Wilde 163. Richard Henry Wilde, Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso, 2 vols. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1842), 1:141, 209, 53, 2:74; Tucker, Richard Henry Wilde, 52–59. 164. Wilde, Hesperia, 67, 230, 138, 295; Staël, Corinne, 1:233.

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seems to have learned the grim lesson of Italy’s past: ‘‘The soil we reap is of our ashes made, / Ruins on ruins rise, and tomb on tomb.’’ There is no escape from history: ‘‘Nature’s sublime and most incessant care / Is to create, destroy, and reproduce; / Love, Death, her ministering angels are. / Time measures ceaseless change.’’ Fleetingly Wilde mentions that in America ‘‘man may yet his vices spurn,’’ but he immediately and unconvincingly adds that this is but a ‘‘cheerful probability of Hope, / For man’s despair a palliative or cure.’’ 165 Hesperia has, in its fourth canto, passages on Italy. They Byronically catalog a land of literature, history, and pastoral beauty, ‘‘the land where Tasso loved and raved . . . Petrarch sighed and sung. . . . Where in their second birth arts, letters sprung.’’ The memory of home, of America, is not banished by this: in Venice and Rome, the poet finds ‘‘in all the thought of thee and home.’’ Yet Italy, too, is home, ‘‘Thy child in heart I am. . . . Mother of my Soul! at whose behest / My life’s high enterprise was first begun.’’ Yet Italy is fallen on hard days, ‘‘wronged and despised, and chained and scourged,’’ beset by tyrants both foreign and domestic. She must rise up, do more than talk of liberty, manage more than ‘‘plots and curses.’’ Britain and France will help in this Risorgimento, he prophesied, accurately; America will not. Here, too, Wilde drew a melancholy conclusion. Italy was not free, but then neither was America, for ‘‘all the earth are slaves! whom call we free? / Each bends before some favorite idol’s shrine: / Misers make gold their only deity, / And in the midst of riches trembling pine.’’ Caprice, envy, greed, faction, deceit, are everywhere. The knowledge of this occasions pastoralism. Freedom can only be sought ‘‘on the wave, / Or mountain-peaks that seem the Heavens to kiss, / In the dark forest, or the hermit’s cave.’’ This tone of resignation about slavery, metaphorical or real, seems to have predated his Italian years. In 1827, he was involved in a scheme to buy thirty-nine slaves from Florida. Inter alia, he observed: ‘‘My feelings towards these poor creatures, induces me to wish them free. But if slavery is their destiny I desire to render it as endurable as slavery can be.’’ 166 As an expatriate, Wilde cared for home with enough ambivalence to embrace exile. Only financial necessity forced him to leave Florence in 1840, and he expected and wanted urgently to return. He was driven back to the law and politics with the utmost distaste, for he felt that America would kill his intellectual and literary endeavor, his ‘‘high enterprise.’’ In New Orleans in 1846, 165. John Blair Hoge to Moses Hoge, 18 January 1816, Hoge Family Papers, PHS; Wilde, Hesperia, 66, 24, 73, 72. 166. Wilde, Hesperia, 168, 169, 173, 175, 192, 195; Richard Henry Wilde to John McPherson Berrien, 22 May 1827, John McPherson Berrien Papers, SHC.

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a year before his death by yellow fever, he met and liked Sir Charles Lyell, visiting the Delta on a geological tour. Lyell presented him with a copy of Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s La Beatrice di Dante, and two other works on Dante, in one of which was reproduced the Bargello fresco that Wilde himself had uncovered. ‘‘This roused for a little while my ‘passione Dantesca,’ but it has all died away again,’’ he wrote to Hiram Powers, still in Florence. ‘‘Such things can’t live in the atmosphere of Law and Commerce. It is like putting some innocent warm-blooded animal into carbonic gas.’’ 167 This sentiment, the usage of Italy as a refuge from a vulgar America, was to be echoed by Paul Hamilton Hayne in 1855, when writing from Marietta. ‘‘I hear nothing about me now but politics, slavery, & anti-slavery ad nauseam. Fat old gentlemen catch me by the button, & want to know with a fierce look what I think about Nebraska. My days are rendered wretched by such persecution. Thank God! I shall have a prospect in time of living in Florence under a quiet despotism.’’ Earlier James De Veaux had commiserated from that same Florence with a friend, a candidate for political office in South Carolina, obliged to endure ‘‘paper puffs, retorts, sly squibs, foul inuendoes, barbecues, stump speeches, whoops, hurras, a few stiff ‘brandy and waters,’ then a fight, with a knock down and drag out, to finish the first flushing of a maiden speech!’’ Indeed, a contempt for democracy often went with a taste for Italy. In 1846, Wilde from New Orleans complained of the society around him: ‘‘The tendency of the mass being envy, hatred, & malice towards all Superiority either of worth, talent, or public service, nothing but the extreme pressure of physical suffering will ever unite them in favor of true merit. They hate a man of talent as much for being so as they do a rich man for being rich.’’ All this had been so since at least Aristides. Such constancy encouraged Wilde to believe that democracy was but an episode, and that there would be a reaction to a ‘‘more settled form of polity.168 Such sentiments presaged Henry James, who was to abandon the political imagination of New England to find solace in a purely aesthetic Italy. But this willingness to neglect the political achievement of America, to make light of the Founding Fathers and the beacon of commercial progress, to embrace the apolitical imagination, was rare among antebellum Southerners in Italy. Southerners seldom saw a parallel between the South and Italy. In fact, it is antebellum New Englanders who first systematically drew the analogy. This, for example, is Charles Eliot Norton, the translator of Dante, writing 167. Nathalia Wright, ‘‘The Letters of Richard Henry Wilde to Hiram Powers,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 46 (December 1962): 430–31. 168. PHH to Richard Stoddard, 23 July 1855, PHH Papers, DU; Gibbes, James de Veaux, 58–59; Richard Henry Wilde to ‘‘Mason,’’ 27 August 1846, individual item, SHC.

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from Charleston in 1855: ‘‘The climate, the southern habits, the social arrangements, all give a picturesqueness in their separate ways, and there is a fine air of age, and dusty decay which invests whole streets with the venerableness of the past.—It is like Italy in the feeling that belongs to it.’’ The indolent air, the sense of repose, both offered a counterpoise to ‘‘our sharp, driving, restless North.’’ This, later, is Henry Adams: ‘‘In Virginia . . . men and women are languid; life seems, as in Italy, sensuous and glowing with colour; one is conscious of walking in an atmosphere that is warm, palpable, radiant with possibilities.’’ 169 By this logic, after the Civil War, the South became an iron lung for industrial America, just as Italy had offered sensual release for chilled northern European. There were, it is true, a very few antebellum Southerners who drew the parallel. Henry Cruger spoke in 1832 of Charleston as a Venice, moldering, sinking. But Cruger wrote just before abandoning Charleston for New York, because he felt that Charleston was failing to match the insistent demands of American progress and vitality. Brantz Mayer of Baltimore was more typical in remarking of a fortnight’s visit in 1833 to Venice, that ‘‘curious city of palaces, prisons, shrines, art, despotism and degradation.’’ There, ‘‘amidst the solitude of her abandoned dwellings, against which the gondolas rested, unoccupied and motionless, our feelings came back with a rebound, from the grave of the old Republic to the active life and energy of our new one!’’ 170 Italy was the heart of the European South. Spain, however, was off the beaten track. Even the English, who poured over the continent, mostly ignored it. The journey over the Pyrenees was notoriously painful, the country’s inns singularly fleabitten. ‘‘No country is less known to the rest of Europe,’’ Samuel Johnson observed in 1761; not much changed in the next century. Henry Junius Nott noted in 1831 that Spain was ‘‘a country now almost as little traveled as Egypt or Mongolia.’’ It was true that a few Southerners from the Deep South who faced towards the Gulf of Mexico traveled to Europe via Havana and Spain, instead of traveling around to New York and Liverpool; this was the case for Octavia Le Vert of Mobile in 1855, and for Sarah Gayle Crawford traveling in the reverse direction in 1854.171 Nonetheless, even if 169. Charles Eliot Norton to Francis Child, 15 March 1855, quoted in Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1959), 76; Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel, in Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 58. 170. Henry Cruger, ‘‘Cooper’s Bravo,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 398; Mayer, ‘‘Italy,’’ 99. The identification of Cruger as the author of this essay is conjectural; see O’Brien, Hugh Legaré, 296. 171. Black, British Abroad, 76–79; Johnson, quoted in Pemble, Mediterranean Passion, 48;

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little visited, Spain was much thought about. Her importance as the founding imperial power of the New World gave her a large place in the Southern imagination. Madrid had one of the oldest and more coveted American embassies, created in the days when Spain had been an awkward sponsor of American independence. To this, a steady succession of Southerners were assigned as either ambassador or secretary, among them Charles Pinckney, John Forsyth, Hugh Nelson, Arthur Middleton, Pierre Soulé, James Johnston Pettigrew, Romulus M. Saunders, Daniel Moreau Barringer, and Thomas Caute Reynolds. Moreover, many Louisianians had Spanish antecedents, most notably Charles Gayarré, whose great-grandfather, Don Estevan de Gayarré, had come to New Orleans from Spain as royal auditor and comptroller of Louisiana in 1766. The historian himself spent time in Spain during the 1840s, and later, when writing his history of Louisiana, he had Pascual de Gayangos y Arce (the help of so many) undertake research in its archives.172 Abstractly, Spain had a significant place in the typology of Romanticism, as an object of Sismondi’s and Bouterwek’s researches.173 This tradition had been domesticated by Americans, by Washington Irving’s studies of Columbus and the Alhambra, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Outre-Mer, by William Hickling Prescott’s histories, and by George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature.174 Roncesvalles, the gardens of Cordoba, the Cid, Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus and Cortes, all made for pretty reverie. ‘‘We pity the man who can read a genuine old Spanish romance,’’ Legaré wrote in 1830, ‘‘and not feel ‘his heart,’ in Sir Philip Sidney’s phrase, ‘more moved than with a trumpet.’ For these artless lays are the very language of nature, at once heroic and simple—the living record of what the most ‘renowned, romantic’ race of modern men . . . did and suffered.’’ Henry Nott added in 1831, when reviewing John McKenzie Slidell’s A Year in Spain, ‘‘We remember the by-gone glories of the Moors who covered every hill and valley with fertility, and amid a gothic Henry Junius Nott, ‘‘A Year in Spain,’’ SR 8 (November 1831): 154; Octavia Walton Le Vert, Souvenirs of Travel (1857; reprint, New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859), 1:287–384, 2:1–56; Sarah Gayle Crawford Diary, 1853–54, UA. 172. Edward M. Socola, ‘‘Charles E. A. Gayarré: A Biography’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1954), 1–5, 49. Gayangos was used by Irving and Ticknor, and came recommended to Gayarré by Prescott; see William Hickling Prescott to CG, 25 January 1848, CG Papers, TU. On Gayangos, see Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of American Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), 2:60–62. 173. For a comparative analysis of these scholars, see Thomas Caute Reynolds, ‘‘History of Spanish Literature,’’ SQR n.s. 2 (November 1850): 273–313. 174. A useful discussion is Richard L. Kagan, ‘‘Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,’’ in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 324–48.

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age, showered abroad an elegance in arts, and polish in literature, that is still seen in the majestic ruins of the Alhambra, and in the pathetic ballads that celebrate the charms, or bid an eternal adieu to Grenada.’’ 175 Yet Spain’s modern image was dark, repressive, and gloomy. The United States had inherited from England a suspicion of the black ships of the Armada and the blacker robes of the Inquisition. Henry H. Cumming of Georgia sat in Choisy-le-Roi, near Paris in 1819 and contemplated an invitation to be secretary to the American Minister to Spain, John Forsyth of Georgia, but decided not; Cumming’s mind ran on civil war, the Inquisition, torture, and reflected that such things, though interesting to view, ‘‘would be of too shocking a nature to be very desirable. I freely give up all idea of being any nearer such wretches.’’ Spain was, after all, a country that had lurked on the American borders and was said to have encouraged the treason of Aaron Burr. As Andrew Jackson succinctly put it in 1806, ‘‘I love my Country and Government, I hate the Dons.’’ ‘‘The conception we still retain of the Spaniard,’’ James Johnston Pettigrew wrote in 1861, ‘‘. . . would represent him enveloped in a huge cloak, shaded by a still huger sombrero, and rejoicing in a half-drawn stiletto, his country devastated by the Inquisition, and the abode of ignorance, idleness and prejudice.’’ 176 To suspicion was added rancor, for half the South had once been Spain’s possession and the South had an eye on yet more Spanish booty. Pierre Soulé of Louisiana all but started a war in 1854 over his aggressive stance towards Cuba.177 There was little reason for a Spaniard to like a Southerner or to sheath his stiletto against a people who could write of his culture, as De Bow did in 1850: ‘‘The victim of arbitrary and despotic power—the theater of court intrigues and revolutions—with a wealthy, dominant, but unscrupulous, hierarchy fattening upon the substance of the land, and repressing and crushing out the vital energies of the people by a system of intolerance the most perfect, and a total suppression of all light and knowledge . . . such is Spain.’’ Worse, Southerners began to take Spain lightly, as a place for comic Don Juans and discordant town bands. John Randolph dismissed ‘‘the rival Coxcombs who are intriguing to obtain the mission to England’’ (which he fan175. HSL, ‘‘Early Spanish Ballads: Charlemagne and His Peers,’’ SR 5 (February 1830): 63– 64; Nott, ‘‘Year in Spain,’’ 170. 176. Henry H. Cumming to Thomas Cumming, 24 September 1819, Hammond-BryanCumming Families Papers, SCL; AJ to William C. C. Claiborne, 12 November 1806, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser et al., 6 vols. to date (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980–2002), 2:116; Pettigrew, Spain and the Spaniards, iii. 177. Amos Aschbach Ettinger, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé, 1853–1855: A Study in the Cuban Diplomacy of the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932). For a general survey of U.S.-Spanish relations, see James W. Cortada, Two Nations over Time: Spain and the United States, 1776–1977 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).

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cied) and observed, as a final insult, ‘‘No; Spain, Portugal, or some of these barbarous sister Republics of ours are the only Theatres where such actors could be tolerated.’’ 178 With the exception of Pettigrew, whose Notes on Spain and the Spaniards (1860) will be considered later, these were the common sentiments of progressive Southerners, who coupled Spain with Italy, as evidence for the declension enforced upon countries by the intellectual enervations of Catholicism. But, while regret tinged accounts of Italy’s decline, little but satisfaction can be found in most accounts of Spain’s failure.

178. J. D. B. De Bow, ‘‘Literature of Spain,’’ DBR 9 (July 1850): 66; John Randolph to AJ, 5 July 1832, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926–35), 4:460.

Chapter Four

The Big Valleys of the World

At the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Orient and remote worlds were thought to begin. Visits to Greece by Southerners were uncommon, but not rare, though far more contemplated Attica than went.1 John Izard Middleton resided there for a while and, as a memento, had his wife painted ‘‘in Grecian Costume’’ by Thomas Sully.2 Francis Lieber fought for Greek independence and wrote in German an account of his journey, in 1823 while living in Barthold Niebuhr’s ambassadorial residence in Rome.3 William Townshend Washington of Virginia and the U.S. Army, ‘‘an unprincipled, dissipated fellow,’’ was in Athens in 1825, and was to die in Greece two years later, thereafter to become the only American to have his name carved on the tablet at Title from Grandville B. Woodson to Isaac R. Wade, 10 February 1853, in Bell I. Wiley, ed., Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia, 1833–1869 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980), 162: ‘‘This is the land of our fore fathers, the land from which the children went, back to the land they are Returning. Liberia is now spreading her rich perfume roun and about the big valleys of the World and introducing and calling out to her suns and Daughters to rise and come up out of the Valley of ignorence and Hethenism.’’ 1. Both Hugh Legaré and Jesse Burton Harrison planned Grecian journeys that never happened. See HSL to Henry Middleton, 25 March 1835, in Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:229–30; JBH to Henry Clay, 20 October 1829, Francis B. Harrison Papers, WM. 2. Eliza Falconnet Middleton (writing from Naples) to Mary Hering Middleton, 1 February 1818, Hering-Middleton Papers, SCHS, says that John Izard Middleton was planning to go; and Charles Izard Manigault, ‘‘Description of paintings, 1867,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL (p. 23 of original, p. 13 of typescript), indicates that Middleton had, though since the painting was done in Philadelphia in 1814 (p. 28/15), there might have been more than one residence. 3. FL to Alexis de Tocqueville, 19 September 1839, FL Papers, SCL.

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Nauplia that commemorates the Philhellenes.4 Moses I. Cohen of Baltimore, who went everywhere, often staying with fellow Jews and sometimes traveling with a Rothschild, was in Athens in 1831. Afterwards he made his way to Cairo and Jerusalem, there to accumulate a great mass of Egyptian antiquities and to carve his name into the Wailing Wall.5 Horatio Allen and his wife, Mary M. Simons Allen, were guided through Athens in 1836, partly by a Presbyterian missionary. Looking at the Caryatids, they looked also on one of Lord Byron’s numerous graffiti, still visible in pencil, ‘‘Quod non fecerunt Gothi, fecerunt Scoti.’’ 6 Charles Pelham, who was to teach Greek at the South Carolina College, went to Greece for three weeks in 1845. ‘‘Athens kindled within me the liveliest emotions,’’ he told Thornwell. ‘‘Already I regard it as the dearest reminiscence of the past. The sites of the Academy & Lyceum, the Prison of Socrates, the Acropolis, the Bema, the Areopagus, spoke to me in tones more eloquent than all the splendors of the Capitals of Europe.’’ Charles Izard Manigault went to both Greece and Egypt in late 1847. The American Consul-General to Egypt, Edwin DeLeon, traveled to Athens in 1857, there to translate in French between the new American Minister to Greece and King Otho, who was pleased by this courtesy.7 Both the Allens and Manigault found themselves under the wing of the Reverend Mr. John Henry Hill and his wife, American Episcopal missionaries, who for many years ran a school in Athens and often offered hospitality to American travelers.8 Manigault summed up the usual response, mingling the familiarity of Greece as a legacy, with the unfamiliarity of modern Greece as a place: ‘‘Here in this 4. David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 15; James A. Field Jr., America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 123, citing Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, 2 vols. (Boston: D. Estes, 1906–9), 2:102. 5. Moses I. Cohen to Judith Cohen, 6 January 1830, 15 July 1831, 19 March 1832, Moses I. Cohen Correspondence, MHS. This is probably the ‘‘Colonel Mendes Cohen of Baltimore’’ who in 1832 brought back 680 Egyptian antiquities, which were later donated to the Johns Hopkins University: see Finnie, Pioneers East, 165. 6. See Volume 5, 11 October–10 November 1836, Horatio Allen Travel Journal, SCHS; in fact, the diary was kept by the wife, not the husband. The Latin translates: ‘‘What the Goths spared, the Scots have destroyed.’’ 7. Charles P. Pelham to JHT, 20 February 1845, JHT Papers, SCL; Charles Izard Manigault to Thomas Middleton, 24 May 1848, Cheves-Middleton Papers, SCHS; EDL to Rebecca Lopez DeLeon (his mother), 20 October 1857, EDL Papers, SCL. 8. See Julius Richter, A History of Protestant Missions in the Near East (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1910), 165–66; Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 165. For the name of Hill, see Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 132.

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country of remote Associations which formerly ruled so large a portion of the world ‘for weal or for woe’ whose own early advances in arts sciences manners & morals have left such an indelible impression on many things of the kind still visible at the present day elsewhere. Here in this City which still possesses so many stupendous remains of former greatness there is much to engross even the torpid & unclassical Mind.’’ 9 By the 1850s, Egypt was a not-infrequent resort of Americans. Earlier, there had been only a few a year, although in 1821 the Egyptian artillery had been briefly under the command of an American general. George Bethune English, once a divinity student at Harvard, had become (it is improbably asserted) the first white American to convert to Islam ‘‘of his own free will.’’ 10 This was an oddity. The records of the American consuls in Alexandria and Cairo between 1832 and 1842 show the more orthodox pattern of travelers. Of the 58 who registered at the consulate, 14 seem to have been Southerners, and there is evidence of a few others.11 William Boulware of Virginia, the American Minister to Naples, was in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the early 1840s. Randal McGavock of Tennessee was there in the winter of 1851– 52, where he was met by the American consul in Alexandria, Daniel Smith McCauley of North Carolina, and encountered on his travels a ‘‘Mr. Rice of Mississippi’’ and on his Nile steamer ‘‘Ewing, Price, and myself from Tennessee, [and] Johnstone of South Carolina.’’ 12 By 1853, Edwin DeLeon could report that ‘‘about 40 or 50 Americans are now up the Nile,’’ among them 9. Charles Izard Manigault to Robert Habersham, 12 November 1847, in ‘‘Letterbook, 1846–1848.’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL. 10. Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 133; Finnie, Pioneers East, 143–49. 11. Moses Cohen of Baltimore, 1832; Ralph Izard of South Carolina, 1833; William Hodgson of Georgia, 1834; Horatio Allen (given as of New York, from which he came, but by the 1830s he was a resident of South Carolina), 1836; W. McHenry Boyd of Baltimore, 1836; Dudley M. Haydon of Kentucky, 1838; A. S. Willington of Charleston, 1839; Rev. Simeon H. Calhoun of South Carolina, 1839; Samuel R. Houston of Virginia, 1839; Thomas M. Preston of Charleston, 1840; Mr. DeHon of Charleston, 1840; F. Oliver of Baltimore, 1841; J. O. Colt of Baltimore, 1841; Rev. C. W. Andrews of Virginia, 1842. In 1835, there seems also to have been a ‘‘Dr. N.’’ and his son, of Mississippi: see John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in the Russian and Turkish Empires (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), 1:212–13, cited by Finnie, Pioneers East, 220. These are probably Dr. Rush Nutt and his son Haller, of Natchez; the father, according to J. F. H. Claiborne, ‘‘traveled extensively in cotton producing countries’’ in search of hybrids, one of which was called ‘‘Egypto-Mexican’’: see J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi as a Province, Territory and State, with Biographical Notices of Eminent Citizens (1880; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 141; D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 156. 12. William Boulware to B. Franklin Dew, 3 August 1843, Dew Family Mss, WM; Randal W. MacGavock, A Tennessean Abroad, or Letters from Europe, Africa, and Asia (New York: Redfield, 1854), 208–37; Herschel Gower and Jack Allen, eds., Pen and Sword: The Life and Journals of Randal W. McGavock (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1959), 283, 286.

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‘‘Dr. Flint & Mr. Ward of Baltimore,’’ and ‘‘Mr. Yeatmen of Tennessee.’’ 13 Indeed, by then, a Southerner had furnished a travel guide: Francis Hawks had published in 1850 a volume entitled The Monuments of Ept, or, Ept a Witness for the Bible.14 All this was possible because Mehemet Ali, the Albanian who had come effectively to govern Egypt, had made his country safer for travelers. This he explained to Charles Izard Manigault at an audience in 1847, when the latter offered a compliment on the newly secure ease of travel: ‘‘Yes said he when I first entered upon the Government of this Country it was quite different. I remember 30 years ago Lord Moira was passing thro Egypt to assume his post of Governor General of India & was desirous of viewing the Pyramids & such was the lawless Condition of the population every where that I had to send 600 Dragoons to protect him.’’ Certainly, Southerners had reasons to be interested in Egypt, beyond the usual curiosities that the rage for Egyptology had created. For one thing, Egypt featured largely in the debates over race, antiquity, and polygenesis. George Gliddon, DeLeon’s British predecessor in Cairo, was to make a living from hawking mummies around America. In 1847, he was making his way through Charleston, Augusta, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans. In 1851, he was in Baltimore, where John Pendleton Kennedy went to listen.15 In 1854, Gliddon was to write a book with Josiah Nott on the Types of Mankind. For another, Egypt was developing cotton production, a matter which had long borne watching by Southerners.16 Manigault in 1847 checked into the matter, without being too impressed: ‘‘As for their cotton, they make only 90,000 Bales badly cleaned & put up. So that humbug of their being able to drive us out of the European Market is but a small potatoe affair.’’ 17 Later, the potato grew, though only when the Confederacy embargoed its own cotton production and world prices rose.18 13. EDL to ‘‘Dearly Beloved,’’ 2 January 1853, EDL Papers, SCL. See also the travel letters from Egypt and Jerusalem in Parker Family Papers, SCL. 14. Francis L. Hawks, The Monuments of Ept, or Ept a Witness for the Bible, with Notes of a Voyage up the Nile, by an American (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850). Hawks himself had not visited Egypt. 15. Charles Izard Manigault to Robert Habersham, 10 January 1848, Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL; George R. Gliddon to Robert W. Gibbes, 8 November 1847, item cataloged as ‘‘X973/C72/v7/p135,’’ ColU; entry for 26 May 1851, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB. 16. For discussions of the issue, see William S. Reynolds, ‘‘The Agricultural Prospects of South-Carolina; Her Resources and Her True Policy,’’ SQR 8 ( July 1845): 122; ‘‘The Growth and Consumption of Cotton,’’ SQR 13 (January 1848): 103–36. 17. Charles Izard Manigault to Robert Habersham, 10 January 1848, in ‘‘Letterbook, 1846– 1848,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL. 18. Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 90, 159.

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DeLeon had come to Egypt, as he put it, ‘‘before the days of railways and Cook’s tourists.’’ He was a jaunty man, all cigar-smoke and hail-fellow-wellmet, a journalist-turned-diplomat with a gift for anecdote. He had grown up Jewish in Columbia, where his father Mordecai Hendricks DeLeon, born in Jamaica and married to a South Carolinian Sephardic Jew called Rebecca Lopez-y-Nuñez, had been a doctor. The father was an avid reader, with a library of several thousand books, in which were to be found ‘‘an original folio edition of . . . Bayle’s Philosophical Dictionary,’’ the skeptic’s companion. The family’s friends included Francis Lieber and Thomas Cooper; Edwin’s younger brother was named for the latter. Further, the DeLeons knew the Prestons. Indeed, as a child, Edwin DeLeon would read aloud the novels of Walter Scott to his mother and to Mrs. Louise Preston, wife of the senator, as ‘‘they sat and sewed.’’ 19 The son went to South Carolina College, thought of becoming an academic,20 moved to Savannah, wrote extensively for the Southern Literary Messenger and the Southern Quarterly Review,21 and became a journalist for the Daily Telegraph in Washington by 1850, where he had gone at the invitation of ‘‘the Southern Committee of Congressmen . . . to co-operate with them in disseminating Southern doctrines.’’ 22 As his reward for services to the Democratic Party, he was appointed Consul-General in Egypt by Franklin Pierce, who liked and needed to keep Southerners happy. DeLeon had long shown a gift for venturing, for the ‘‘hair-brained freak.’’ 23 When an undergraduate, he had been spending the summer at Saratoga, the usual spots, but impulsively decided to travel westward to meet the scandalous Joseph Smith, the Mormon leader at Nauvoo, then poised upon war with Missouri.24 The Egypt of the Pashas was scarcely more strange. There DeLeon played the exotic game of the Orientalist diplomat to the hilt. He 19. EDL, Thirty Years of My Life on Three Continents, 2 vols. (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 1:123, 4–6, 8; James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 23, 309–10. 20. He applied for a professorship of English Literature at the University of Alabama in 1846: see Alexander Beaufort Meek to EDL, 14 June 1846, EDL Papers, SCL; FL to [?], 20 June 1846, FL Papers, SCL. 21. EDL, ‘‘Our Poets: H. W. Longfellow,’’ SLM 8 (February 1842): 150–54; EDL, ‘‘Ponce DeLeon,’’ SLM 8 (April 1842): 328–30; EDL, ‘‘Modern Fiction,’’ SLM 8 (May 1842): 342–48; EDL, ‘‘Our Poets,’’ SLM 8 (September 1842): 567–73; EDL, ‘‘Cheap Literature: Its Character and Tendencies,’’ SLM 10 (January 1844): 33–39; EDL, ‘‘E. D. to J. D. B,’’ SLM 10 ( July 1844): 415–22; EDL, ‘‘Writings of Washington Irving,’’ SQR 8 ( July 1845): 69–93; EDL, ‘‘England under Seven Administrations,’’ SQR 8 (October 1845): 480–96; EDL, ‘‘Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,’’ SQR 10 (October 1846): 257–92. 22. EDL, Thirty Years, 1:97; Howell Cobb to EDL, 22 January 1850, EDL Papers, SCL. 23. EDL, Thirty Years, 1:46. 24. On this, see EDL, Thirty Years, 1:41–73, and EDL, ‘‘The Rise and Progress of the Mormon Faith and People,’’ SLM 10 (September 1844): 526–38.

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arrived in Alexandria in an American man-of-war, ‘‘the corvette St. Louis, commanded by Capt. [Duncan Nathaniel] Ingraham, a brother South Carolinian,’’ which he had boarded at La Spezia, where the American Mediterranean Squadron was stationed.25 He presented his credentials in Cairo to Abbas Pasha, who ‘‘loved nothing European’’ (this embraced Americans), but later to Said Pasha, with whom relations were friendlier. At first, DeLeon lived at Shepheard’s Hotel, run by an Englishman and the familiar resort of foreigners. Later he rented during the summers (the court was often in Alexandria) an aged palace in the Old Cairo Quarter, ‘‘where no European dwelt,’’ except Sir Frederick Bruce, the British Minister. DeLeon and Bruce spent their days agreeably, in an idle Orientalism. They rose at dawn, went for an hour’s ride in the desert towards Suez upon ‘‘Arab steeds,’’ after passing through the Gate of Victory past the tombs of the Mamelukes. (DeLeon would bring back, as a gift for Jefferson Davis, the stallion that Davis rode throughout the Civil War.) Then home for Turkish coffee and bread, then a bath: ‘‘Then, slipping on pajamas, or some other thin costume, we wiled away the hot hours of the day reading, talking, smoking; or stretched at lazy length on the luxurious divans, where the afternoon siesta was taken.’’ After sunset, another gallop, then dinner, cards, billiards, and bed. It was a perfect life for an amiable poseur, whose favorite poems included Shelley’s ‘‘Prometheus Unbound,’’ which spoke of the ‘‘flight of the eagle towards the sun, revelling in the blaze of light.’’ 26 Such leisure was attendant upon a relative absence of duties, though there were American tourists, sailors, and merchants to tend, and the odd excitement. During the Crimean War, the Sultan in Istanbul decided to expel all Greeks from his dominions. The Greek Consul-General in Egypt was promptly sent packing, but most Greeks dallied, prevaricated, were persecuted, and appealed for help, which DeLeon eccentrically offered for some eighteen months, somewhat to their puzzlement and over the opposition of the European powers. This initiative was to earn DeLeon renewal as ConsulGeneral by the Buchanan administration and, more decorously, a trip to Athens in 1856. There King Otho, King of the Hellenes, bestowed upon him 25. EDL, Thirty Years, 1:124–25. On Ingraham, see Allen H. Stokes Jr., A Guide to the Manuscript Collection of the South Caroliniana Library (Columbia, S.C.: South Caroliniana Library, 1982), item 2419; Thomas A. Bryson, American Diplomatic Relations with the Middle East, 1784– 1975: A Survey (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977), 20. Ingraham shows up very extensively in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). 26. EDL, Thirty Years, 1:140, 154, 156–59, 181–82; Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 1:423n; EDL, ‘‘The ‘Prometheus Unbound’ of Shelley,’’ SLM 8 (March 1842): 196.

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the Cross of the Royal Order of the Saviour, which DeLeon, good republican that he claimed to be, promptly returned with all due courtesy.27 On another occasion, DeLeon was obliged to travel to Jaffa. Five Arabs had murdered an American missionary from Maine called Dickson and his son, as well as raping the wife and daughter. The American consul in Jerusalem, John Warren Gorham, had tried in vain to procure some action from the Turkish governor of Jaffa. So DeLeon showed up to help and tried threatening the governor with bombardment from American warships. Astonished, the governor promised action and sent out his men, who arrested the first five ‘‘vagabonds’’ they could find. These were presented to DeLeon, who asked for proof of their guilt, which was unforthcoming. So the governor tried again, arrested a genuine suspect, tortured him, and procured the names of his accomplices. Two were easily found in Jaffa, but the others proved a problem, for they were Bedouins, members of ‘‘a very powerful tribe’’ with a ‘‘great Sheik.’’ But the governor, by this point, seems to have been committed to playing va banque. He invited the Sheik to a conference, seized him, thrust him in manacles into prison, and demanded the surrender of the villains. The Sheik was defiant. His tribe converged upon the city, which was kept under siege for several days, ‘‘by the angry and threatening swarm outside, who patroled the roads on their lean horses, with long lances gleaming in the sun, and those long single-barreled guns, with ornamental breeches, never seen now out of the East.’’ DeLeon resolved to break the deadlock, by ‘‘a bold stroke,’’ for he ‘‘knew the Arab character well enough to know that any appearance of timidity on my part might imperil the success of my mission.’’ He put his retinue of reluctant janissaries, Vice-Consul, and Dragoman on horseback, gave them revolvers, ordered the city gates to be opened, and rode forth to the Bedouin encampment ‘‘with as much coolness and indifference as I could command.’’ Naturally, ‘‘the audacity of the act overawed them,’’ the Sheik capitulated, though not without fixing a baleful and lingering scrutiny upon the audacious and impertinent American, so that he ‘‘could know him among thousands,’’ and later satisfy honor by revenge. At least, that is how DeLeon was to tell his story in 1890. It would be a pity to check such an afterdinner pleasantry for accuracy.28 DeLeon was not remarkable for piety and was more at home with the skeptic Sir Richard Burton than the fervent General Gordon, both of whom he later knew. To DeLeon, as it might have been to Thomas Cooper, the suffering Dicksons were but ‘‘religious enthusiasts.’’ 29 But they were more typical of Southerners in the Near East, who often went as missionaries to reclaim Holy 27. EDL, Thirty Years, 1:192–245. 28. Ibid., 246–70 (quotations on pp. 258, 260, 261, 262, 265). 29. Ibid., 249.

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Lands from apostasy, even though the majority of such people were New Englanders.30 Indeed, the Methodist and Baptist Churches in the United States split, partly because Southerners insisted upon the coequal right of slaveholders to redeem the Near East and elsewhere. The Reverend Samuel R. Houston of Virginia, for example, tried to evangelize the Orthodox Christians of Greece and ended up in Sparta, where he worked with another Virginian, George Leyburn.31 Thomas P. Johnson of North Carolina was at Trebizond. The Rev. John Francis Lanneau of Charleston served in Jerusalem, Beirut, and Mount Lebanon between 1832 and 1846.32 There was the Rev. Simeon Howard Calhoun of South Carolina, agent of the American Bible Society in the Levant, later a missionary in Syria.33 Most notable was John Bailey Adger of Charleston, who spent twelve years in Smyrna between 1834 and 1846. He was the son of James Adger, who had migrated from Ulster in 1793 with his mother, her ‘‘intemperate’’ second husband Robert Rodgers and a gaggle of children; the son James had started as a hardware businessman in Charleston and then, in his own son’s words, had ‘‘commenced the commission and factorage business, also buying and selling exchange’’ for a Baltimore house. He purchased wharves on East Bay, which are still known as Adger’s Wharf, dabbled in railroads, and owned a steamship line that plied between Charleston and New York.34 His son John was educated at the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he talked to those who 30. Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World, 29, offers numbers on American Board missionaries before 1840, which are divided by region and colleges, though not by place of birth. These seem to suggest that the South may have provided about a sixth of the missionaries, if those who went from Princeton and Yale included the usual ratio of Southerners. 31. Ibid., 144. 32. John B. Adger, My Life and Times, 1810–1899 (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899), 117, 127, 124; Ward W. Briggs Jr., ed., The Letters of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 313. One should note also that James Lawrence Smith, ‘‘a mining engineer from Nashville,’’ was invited to Constantinople ‘‘to help develop the empire’s mines.’’ Smith had been an associate of Samuel F. B. Morse and, with Cyrus Hamlin’s aid, set up the first demonstration of the telegraph, with the Sultan as an audience. See Marcia Stevens and Malcolm Stevens, Against the Devil’s Current: The Life and Times of Cyrus Hamlin (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), 161–64; Finnie, Pioneers East, 111, has this: ‘‘An even more ambitious project took shape in 1846, when Brown [ John Porter Brown] reported that the Sultan was anxious to retain two or three experts on the culture of American cotton. The State Department willingly cooperated and engaged Dr. John Belton Davis of South Carolina and Dr. James Lawrence Smith of Nashville. Davis organized an experimental farm for the Sultan near San Stefano, manned by American slaves brought from his own plantation. (It failed.) Smith, evidently a versatile fellow, doubled as the Turkish Government’s geological consultant, and also assisted at the successful demonstration of Morse’s telegraph.’’ 33. Adger, Life and Times, 119. That he was from South Carolina is indicated from the consulate records of Egypt, where he was in 1839; see Finnie, Pioneers East, 284. 34. Adger, Life and Times, 17, 36–37.

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had been in India, China, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, young men who belonged to ‘‘a secret association of Princeton men, all specially interested in foreign missions, who made it their business to bring that subject to the attention of individuals in their respective classes.’’ 35 As important was his sister Margaret, who later was to marry Thomas Smyth, but who had earlier ‘‘renounced the world and devoted herself to her Lord, had become very much interested in the subject of foreign missions, so much so that she fully intended entering on that work with me.’’ 36 Adger himself married Elizabeth Shrewsbury on 29 June 1834, and they sailed together from Boston in early August on the brig Padang, which was bound especially for Smyrna. Adger was assigned the Armenians, who were thought by Bostonians and Charlestonians to have a bastard version of Christianity, marked by ‘‘an almost universal ignorance of the fundamental truths of the gospel.’’ Adger’s duty was to enlighten them by the power of a press, located in Smyrna. In fact, he seems to have done little conventional evangelizing: ‘‘I was . . . very much confined to my desk, revising the work of my translators, and reading proof sheets, as they came from the printing office.’’ 37 First he had to learn their language, mostly under the instruction of Sarkis Hohanissean, ‘‘one of the evangelical Armenians . . . a gentleman and a scholar,’’ who, along with Baron Arisdages from Istanbul, was to aid in translating the New Testament into modern Armenian. This was Adger’s great task and accomplishment. There existed an ancient translation, done in a.d. 410–431, much admired but unreadable for modern Armenians, their language having so much changed. Adger’s version, done in concert with the Rev. Elias Riggs, was to become the new standard.38 Upon the testimony of Cyrus Hamlin, another missionary, 300,000 copies of it were to circulate among the Armenians, cruelly scattered through the world. But Adger translated other works: the Psalms, the Presbyterian ‘‘Assembly’s Shorter Catechism, and various religious tracts, relating to gospel doctrine, adapted to popular reading.’’ Among these was a catechism, 35. Ibid., 81. This association, called ‘‘The Brethren,’’ had been founded by Samuel J. Mills, when he was an undergraduate at Williams College in 1810; it latterly spread to Andover, Princeton, and other graduate seminaries; see Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World, 24–28. 36. Adger, Life and Times, 84. 37. Ibid., 94, 103. 38. Adger claims his priority as the translator, but Richter, Protestant Missions in the Near East, 406, has it differently. He says that the first modern Armenian version of the New Testament, done by ‘‘Dr. Zohrab of Constantinople,’’ was published in 1825 and ‘‘repeatedly revised by the American missionaries.’’ ‘‘The translation of the Old Testament was begun in 1840 by Dr. Elias Riggs, with the assistance of his colleague, Adger, at first. The complete Bible appeared in 1852.’’ In view of Riggs’s preeminence as a scholar, the latter is more likely to be true; on this, see Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on American Policy, 1810–1927 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 21.

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first written by Charles Colcock Jones for use among the slaves of Liberty County, Georgia, which Adger thought might suit the needs of the Armenians, who also inhabited a slaveholding world. These matters Adger contemplated, as he rode on a donkey into Smyrna from Boujah, which Mary M. Simons Allen in 1836 thought a ‘‘pretty little village, which serves as a summer resort for many families,’’ especially Europeans and Americans. ‘‘My dwelling is among the Armenians,’’ Adger wrote back to his Charlestonian sponsors in 1838, with satisfaction at the biblical resonances. ‘‘My study window looks out upon Mount Pagus upon which the ancient city of Smyrna was built and where still exist the ruins of the theatre, & the Stadium, this last the probable scene of Polycarp’s Martyrdom.’’ 39 Adger left in 1846, to return eventually to Charleston. Two years earlier, James Warley Miles of South Carolina had spent a week in Smyrna, on his way to Istanbul, a city whose American chargé d’affaires was a Marylander.40 There Miles was to stay until 1847, to be joined by his aunt Anne Warley, who ran a mission school. Miles did not go as an evangelical missionary, however. Indeed he was later to look upon such missionaries as ‘‘a factious, unscrupulous set.’’ The hostility was mutual, since the evangelicals preferred to establish their own institutions, while the Episcopalians strove to work in concert with the traditional Christian hierarchies and even ‘‘sided with the Armenian ecclesiastics in the struggle against Protestant heretics in their communion.’’ 41 The Near East was an object of marked competition between different Christian sects, from both the United States and Europe. These sects were encountering each other in an Islamic empire that was suspicious of them, prone to civil war, and presiding over a complicated myriad of ancient Christian communities.42 The Protestant Episcopal Mission to Constantinople and Mesopotamia was impelled by Horatio Southgate, officially designated ‘‘Foreign Missionary Bishop to exercise the functions of a Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Dominions and Dependencies of the Sultan of Turkey.’’ 43 39. Entry for 7 October 1836, Mary M. Simons Allen Travel Journal, SCHS; Adger, Life and Times, 97, 100, 104; John B. Adger to ‘‘Brethren,’’ 29 March 1838, Smyth-Stoney-Adger Collection, SCHS. 40. Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 174. Dabney Smith Carr was a relative of Thomas Jefferson. 41. JWM to Mrs. Young, 24 August 1864, JWM Papers, DU, quoted in Ralph Luker, A Southern Tradition in Theolo and Social Criticism, 1830–1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Warley Miles, William Porcher DuBose and Edgar Gardner Murphy (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), 31; Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World, 160–61. 42. Richter, Protestant Missions in the Near East, gives an overview. For an example of Anglican mission, see J. F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 11–54. 43. Luker, Southern Tradition, 33.

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Southgate had traveled through the Near East and conceived a vision of (but not a plan for) reeducating its ancient Christian communities, especially the Armenians, Nestorians, and Syrians.44 It was first suggested that Miles, after linguistic training in Istanbul, would proceed to eastern Anatolia, there to work among its Jacobites and Monophysites. By the spring of 1844, this had been amended to his staying and working among Istanbul’s Armenian Christians. Like Adger, he worked on translations, though of Episcopalian texts, like the Book of Common Prayer, the Communion Service in the American liturgy, a treatise by Southgate on the Anglican Church, and Bishop Samuel Seabury’s sermon on Christian Unity.45 Little of practical consequence flowed from this mission, which dissolved in ill-planning, impecuniousness, and dissension. But Miles himself was vastly educated by the experience of one of the world’s great cosmopolitan cities, whose despotic amenities put the democratic South to shame: ‘‘Many of the Turkish sovereigns have been liberal patrons of literature; and Constantinople abounds with colleges and libraries, which owe their foundation to royal munificence. Two universities, one consisting of six, the other of sixteen colleges, owe their existence to the conqueror of Constantinople; who, learned himself in the languages of Asia and Europe, encouraged the scholars and artists of Italy, no less than the poets and literati of Persia and Arabia.’’ 46 Such riches, and a sense of the abundance of the world’s languages, made him one of the South’s most serious linguists, ill at ease back in the United States and pining for his Turkish coffee.47 A similar legacy of languages was collected by William Brown Hodgson of Georgia, who was among the first of Southern Orientalists. He had been born in Savannah in 1801 and grew up in Georgetown near Washington. He had no university education, but in 1824 became a clerk in the State Department.48 John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State, had decided that the de44. See Horatio Southgate, Narrative of a Tour through Armenia, Kurdistan, Persia and Mesopotamia with an Introduction, and Occasional Observations Upon the Condition of Mohammedanism and Christianity in Those Countries (New York: D. Appleton, 1840); Horatio Southgate, Narrative of a Visit to the Syrian (Jacobite) Church of Mesopotamia (New York: D. Appleton, 1844). 45. Luker, Southern Tradition, 33; ‘‘Bishop Southgate’s Report,’’ Spirit of Missions 12 (November 1847): 419–29, however, does not specify who did which translations. 46. JWM, ‘‘A Grammar of the Turkish Language,’’ SQR 13 ( January 1848): 68. 47. Luker, Southern Tradition, 32, quoting Anne Miles to Anna Dulles Stillé, 12 September 1844, Cheves-McCord-Miles Papers, SCHS. The more obvious fruits of his experience can be found in JWM, ‘‘Turkish Language’’; JWM, ‘‘Oriental Studies,’’ SQR n.s. 7 (April 1853): 273– 332; JWM, ‘‘An Adventure in the East,’’ Charleston College Magazine 1 (1 April 1854): 3–11; JWM, ‘‘Old Stamboul,’’ Charleston College Magazine 1 (1 November 1854): 174–76. On his disillusion, see Miles to the Foreign Committee, August 1847, reprinted in Spirit of Missions 12 (November 1847): 444–59. 48. Thomas A. Bryson, ‘‘William Brown Hodgson,’’ in Dictionary of Georgia Biography: Volume 1, ed. Kenneth Coleman and Charles Stephen Gurr (Athens: University of Georgia Press,

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partment needed people skilled in foreign languages and so Hodgson became ‘‘America’s first language officer’’; this was an appointment endorsed by Adams’s successor, Henry Clay. To accomplish this office, Hodgson was sent in 1826 as ‘‘pupil-interpreter’’ to William Shaler, the American consulgeneral in Algiers, whom Hodgson replaced in 1827 and where he remained until 1829. There he studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish and grew interested in the Berbers.49 Hodgson was to explain to John Quincy Adams in 1828 that he could then read and speak Arabic and Turkish, though with a proficiency in need of improvement.50 He mentioned various Arabic books he had been reading, including ‘‘the Koran of Maraccius, the learned antagonist of Islam, from whom Gibbon borrowed extensively’’ and ‘‘D’Herbelot’s bibliothèque orientale.’’ 51 He was studying Persian to help him understand Turkish. He was contemplating ‘‘the study of the Modern Greek.’’ He had a need of many books, which Shaler had promised to buy him in Marseilles: ‘‘The principal book is the Turcico-Arabico Persico Lexicon of Meninski, in 4 vols folio. Had I that, I would require no other for the study of those languages. From its great value and rareness, it may cost me 2 or $300. I have also sent for a Sanscrit and Chinese grammar, and for the philogic works of Remusat, principally on the Tartar and Chinese languages.’’ 52 This was seriousness. Between 1829 and 1831, Hodgson was back at his desk at the State Department, until he was asked by Andrew Jackson to convey to the Sublime Porte the ratified copy of the treaty negotiated between the United States and the Ottoman Empire in 1830. He sailed with the newly appointed American 1983), 464–65. Oddly, Hodgson received an honorary A.M. from Princeton in 1824, evidently because its president, James Carnahan, had formerly been headmaster of Hodgson’s school: see Thomas A. Bryson, An American Consular Officer in the Middle East in the Jacksonian Era: A Biography of William Brown Hodgson, 1801–1871 (Atlanta: Resurgens Publications, 1979), 7. 49. Bryson, American Consular Officer, 6–12; Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 193; WBH to Peter Force, 6 March 1827, 29 June 1826, WBH Papers, DU; Finnie, Pioneers East, 89. 50. This probably explains why, when he translated the U.S.-Turkish treaty of 1831 into English, though he claimed it was ‘‘from the original Turkish,’’ he actually used a French version. See Hunter Miller, Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America (Washington, D.C., 1933), 3:588–92, cited in Finnie, Pioneers East, 90. 51. That is, Barthelemy D’Herbelot, Bibliothèque Orientale, ou dictionnaire universel, contenant tout ce qui fait connoitre les peuples de l’Orient; leurs histoires & traditions, tant fabuleuses que véritables; leurs religions & leurs sectes; leurs gouvernements, loix, politique, moeurs, coutumes; & les révolutions de leurs empires, &C. (Paris: Moutard, 1781). 52. WBH to the President of the United States [ John Quincy Adams], 12 April 1828, WBH Papers, DU. These works include Franciszek Meninski, Linguarum Orientalium Turcicae, Arabicae, Persicae Institutiones, Seu, Grammatica Turcica (Vienna: Meninski, 1680). Abel Rémusat (1788– 1832) wrote extensively on Oriental languages, but Hodgson might have reference to Abel Rémusat, Programme du cours de langue et de littérature Chinoises et de Tartare-Mandchou; précédé du discours prononcé à la première séance de ce cours, dans l’une des salles du Collège Royal de France, le 16 Janvier 1815 (Paris: Charles, 1815).

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William Brown Hodgson (Courtesy Georgia Historical Society, Savannah)

chargé d’affaires, Commodore David Porter, on the sloop-of-war John Adams, which reached Istanbul in August 1831. Hodgson seems to have pleased the Turks, by being the first American diplomat capable of speaking to them in their own language. When the Sublime Porte had, in turn, ratified the treaty, Hodgson bore the completed document to Washington, and then came straight back as Porter’s dragoman in the summer of 1832.53 Rapidly, Hodgson’s relations with Porter degenerated. The chargé ran the legation with the help of his nephews, of whose education and linguistic skills Hodgson was critical. It did not help that he further thought Porter was embezzling funds. Porter and ‘‘that puppy Hodgson’’ stopped talking. Indeed, matters grew so tense that Porter’s son, in defense of his father’s honor, struck the dragoman on the head, while he stood on a pier at Seraglio Point, 53. Bryson, American Consular Officer, 18–19; Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 193– 94; Finnie, Pioneers East, 83, 90.

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and shredded Hodgson’s coat. The State Department gave Hodgson $35 as compensation, but thought it wise to part the two and, not wishing to waste Hodgson’s talents, sent him in 1833 to Egypt as a ‘‘confidential agent’’ to report on the prospects of trade and then return to the United States. Hodgson twice met with Mehemet Ali and his Minister of Foreign Affairs in Alexandria in 1834, visits sufficient to apprise himself of the former’s interest in developing trade, by exporting opium and importing cotton-ginning equipment and naval stores. Hodgson delivered a thoughtful report to Washington, which shrewdly noted that it seemed ‘‘probable that Mehemet Ali will be the Henry 8th of Egypt, and by rejecting the temporal and spiritual authority of the Sultan, establish an independent state.’’ He also accurately noted that, for the moment, no formal treaty could be negotiated with a Pasha, still technically subject to the Sultan’s suzerainty. Back in the United States, Hodgson was to publish a Biographic Sketch of Muhammad Ali, Pacha of Ept (1837).54 This did not conclude Hodgson’s wanderings. In 1836 he was in London, in 1837 in Peru, and in 1841 in Tunis as Consul-General. He retired from the diplomatic service in 1842, to settle down as a scholar in Savannah, where he lived upon the income from his new wife’s plantations. In 1855, he was Georgia’s commissioner at the Paris Exposition.55 Along the way, he sold valuable manuscripts to the British Museum, and in 1830 was elected a foreign member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London and the Société de Géographie in Paris. In the United States, Paris, and London, he published brief, erudite pamphlets upon the cultural and linguistic history of northern Africa, as well as translating from Arabic the North African travels of Ibn al-Din al-Aghwati.56 Further, he himself helped to translate into Berber the first 54. Finnie, Pioneers East, 90–93; Bryson, American Consular Officer, 22–23, 464; WBH to Secretary of State, 25 August 1834, quoted in Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 194. 55. Leonard L. Mackall, ‘‘William Brown Hodgson,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 15 (December 1931): 324–45. Hodgson was preceded as a diplomat in North Africa by Mordecai Manuel Noah, who was American consul in Morocco or Tunis from 1813 to 1819. Upon his return, he published an account of his travels; see Mordecai Manuel Noah, Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years 1813–14 and 15 (New York: Kirk and Mercein, 1819). Noah was born in Philadelphia and was residing in Charleston when appointed by Madison, but later lived in New York. See Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, eds., Cyclopedia of American Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856), 2:73–76. 56. WBH, Notes on Northern Africa, the Sahara and Soudan, in Relation to the Ethnography, Languages, History, Political and Social Condition of the Nations of Those Countries (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1844); WBH, Remarks on the Recent Travels of Dr. Barth in Central Africa, or Soudan: A Paper Read before the Ethnological Society of New York, November, 1858 (New York: n.p., 1858); WBH, The Science of Language: A Lecture. Sanscrit and Hebrew, the Two Written, Primitive, Languages, Compared (Newport, R.I.: Frederick A. Pratt, 1868); WBH, The Foulahs of Central Africa and the African Slave Trade (Savannah, Ga.: n.p., 1843); WBH, Grammatical Sketch and Specimens of the Berber Language: Preceded by Four Letters on Berber Etymologies (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1829); WBH, Equisse du système grammatical de la langue Berbère (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1836);

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twelve chapters of the Gospel according to Luke, which were published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1833.57 James Warley Miles was to write in 1853 that Hodgson’s investigations ‘‘first gave an impulse to the scholars of France and Germany, towards the prosecution of certain philological researches respecting the North of Africa,’’ which seems strained. Less so was the observation that ‘‘[i]t is with no little gratification that we frequently meet with honourable references to his valuable labours in the works of many of the most distinguished literati of Europe.’’ 58 Hodgson was among the few white Southerners to take a scholarly interest in Africa, though he was more a student of the Mediterranean littoral than of the sub-Saharan continent. Once, when the slave trade had been active, Southerners had felt many reasons to discriminate among the peoples of Africa. South Carolinians, for example, had had marked preferences as they picked their way through the Charleston slave market in 1750; they liked human cargo from the Senegambia, preferably short in stature, but would take slaves from the Gold Coast as a second choice, and ‘‘had a marked dislike for those from the Bight of Biafra.’’ 59 By the 1830s, such practical discriminations had largely lapsed, though the occasional planter would grow curious about the ethnography of his or her slaves. Hodgson’s friend, James Hamilton Couper, grew very curious, while noting in 1857 that ‘‘[t]he race of imported Africans is now however nearly extinct.’’ Couper was very wealthy, possessed of about 600 slaves on four sea-island plantations.60 He was a planter-érudit, with an interest in scientific agriculture, a care for the history of Georgia, and a library of about 5,000 books, among which were numbered many European travel accounts of Africa, whose reading was the usual route by which Southerners knew about the origins of their forced labor.61 Among Couper’s slaves was a Muslim called Tom, ‘‘whose African name Ibn al-Din al-Aghwati, Notes on a Journey into the Interior of Northern Africa, trans. WBH (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1831). 57. Strictly, he did so with the help of someone called Sidi Hamet. The particular dialect of Berber was that of the Lesser Kabyle, who live in Algeria: see WBH, Extrait d’une traduction MS. en langue Berbère de quelques parties de l’Écriture Sainte: contenant XII chapitres de S. Luc (Londres: Société de Biblique Britannique et Étrangere, 1833). 58. JWM, ‘‘Oriental Studies,’’ 320. 59. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 156–57. 60. James Hamilton Couper to WBH, 18 June 1857, WBH Papers, DU; James E. Bagwell, ‘‘James Hamilton Couper,’’ in Dictionary of Georgia Biography: Volume 1, ed. Coleman and Gurr, 223–24. 61. See, for example, Moses Waddel Diaries, Waddel Family Papers, PHS, where on 24 October 1826, Waddel writes of having read ‘‘Laing’s Travels in Africa’’: that is, Alexander Gordo Laing, Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima Countries, in Western Africa (London: John Murray, 1825).

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Omar Ibn Said or ‘‘Uncle Moro,’’ a Muslim slave in North Carolina (Courtesy Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

was Sali-bul-Ali, [who] was purchased about the year 1800, by my father, from the Bahama islands, to which he had been brought from Anamaboo.’’ Tom was Couper’s head driver, responsible for about 450 slaves. He was a ‘‘strict Mahometan,’’ who drank no ‘‘spiritous liquors,’’ kept fasts, prayed towards Mecca, read but did not write Arabic, and owned a copy of the Koran. In conversations with Sali-bul-Ali, Couper learned that the slave came from Kianah ‘‘in the Kingdom of Massina,’’ on the Niger River ‘‘between Jenne and Timbuctoo,’’ and accumulated assorted facts about the commerce, architecture, religion, agriculture, and diet of his bondsman’s home. Tom spoke the Foulah language and, in fact, was an intimate of another slave called Bul-Ali, who spoke similarly, but belonged to Couper’s neighbor, Randolph Spalding of Sapelo. Couper spent many hours writing down the vocabulary of the Foulah language, to learn that ‘‘quainga’’ meant foot, and ‘‘djungo’’ hand. These facts he passed along to Hodgson, who assimilated them into one of his learned papers.62 62. James Hamilton Couper to WBH, 18 June 1857, 22 November 1843, 9 June 1844, WBH Papers, DU; WBH, Notes on Northern Africa, 68–76.

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Such curiosity was not usual, except when driven by the exigencies of racial and proslavery arguments.63 Louis Agassiz, for example, who was deep into the controversy over the unity of the races, in 1850 looked over plantations in the vicinity of Columbia. ‘‘He saw Mandingo, Ebo, Gullah, Gurie, Coromantee, Foulah and Congo tribes among those I found on our plantations,’’ Robert W. Gibbes reported, ‘‘and was much pleased with his investigations.’’ David James McCord once stirred himself to write an article on ‘‘Africans at Home,’’ that is, in Africa. He intended, symptomatically, only a ‘‘rapid but faithful sketch of the present wretched condition of the African, and to show that this condition has continued substantially, if not literally, the same, for the last three hundred years, and as far back as we have any accounts of this peculiar people.’’ He managed a ragbag of assorted facts and observations, mostly drawn from La Harpe and a British Methodist missionary. His tone was of this sort: ‘‘They hate each other to such a degree that their battles are simple butcheries; and those that survive, having no other mode left for glutting their vengeance, surfeit themselves by feasting upon the flesh of their dead enemies, and taking their skulls and jaw-bones to ornament their drums and portals, if such a word can be applied in connection with the dog-kennels which they inhabit.’’ His patience was limited, as is evidenced by his concluding sentence: ‘‘But, we must cease the disgusting picture of a people, whose savage and shocking barbarities, and loathsome habits, and horrid crimes, are supposed to establish a condition so preferable to that of slavery to the white man, that the fleets of civilized Europe and America, are employed to maintain and perfect them in it.’’ 64 It is striking that, in the learned treatises of the proslavery argument, there are extended disquisitions on the slavery of ancient Greece and Rome, the patriarchy of ancient Judea, the serfdom of the Middle Ages, from none of which Southern slavery immediately derived, but almost nothing on African slavery, whose stepchild it was. With such an image, there was little reason for Southerners to visit Africa, unless you were a missionary, as was the Reverend John Leighton Wilson of South Carolina, who sailed for Liberia on the brig Ann in 1834, and Lancelot B. Minor of Virginia, who died there of tropical fever in 1843, and John 63. But see Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America. To Which is Prefixed, an Historical Sketch of Slavery. Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnston, 1858), ccxxii–ccxxviii on Liberia; cf. entry for 12 October 1858, in The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, ed. William Kauffman Scarborough (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 1:237: ‘‘Finished reading Cobb’s ‘History of Slavery’—an interesting & able work, evincing much research. The author has a chapter on the colony of Liberia—of which he thinks as I do, but does not go quite as far in his opposition & denunciation.’’ 64. Robert W. Gibbes to Augustus Addison Gould, 31 March 1850, Augustus Addison Gould Papers, HU; David James McCord, ‘‘Africans at Home,’’ SQR n.s. 10 ( July 1854): 70–71, 76–77, 96.

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Payne of Kentucky (later bishop), who went in 1836 and stayed until 1869.65 Of these, Wilson was to produce what was perhaps the most elaborate account of Africa written by an antebellum white Southerner, the Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects of 1856. One might note a few others, but their connection to the South was incidental. Paul Belloni Du Chaillu, who published his Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa in 1861, though born in New Orleans in 1838 to a Franco-American family, left very young when his father went to trade in West Africa; his book was broadly influential, but he was especially celebrated for having ‘‘discovered’’ gorillas and, it is said, his writings later helped Edgar Rice Burroughs to invent Tarzan.66 There was also Henry Morton Stanley, who famously located the lost missionary David Livingstone in 1871, and whose In Darkest Africa (1891) much inflected late Victorian images of the continent. Stanley was born as a bastard in Wales in 1841 and given the name John Rowlands; he spent much of his childhood in a workhouse and in 1858 signed on as a cabin-boy for a vessel bound from Liverpool to New Orleans. There he jumped ship and found his way into the household of an English-born merchant called Henry Hope Stanley, whose name the boy adopted. The younger Stanley wandered away along the Mississippi, into Arkansas, and in 1861 joined the Confederate army. He was captured at Shiloh, sent to prison at Camp Douglas, near Chicago, where the wretched conditions persuaded him of the merits of the Union cause. (Consistency, indeed honesty, were never Stanley’s strongest traits.) Thereafter he served in both the Union army and navy, before becoming a New York journalist; it was as the correspondent of the New York Herald that he went in search of Livingstone.67 John Leighton Wilson’s connection to the South ran much deeper. His father owned an extensive plantation near Salem, South Carolina, which had two dozen slaves on it. The son, born in 1809, was first a student at Union College in Schenectady, then at the Columbia Theological Seminary, from which he emerged in 1833 to become a Presbyterian missionary. (One of his closest friends was John Bailey Adger.) Wilson then studied Arabic at the Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. He seems, from an early 65. Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831–1857 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 81; Wiley, Slaves No More, 13, 314. 66. See Paul B. du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa; with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, the Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and Other Animals (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1861). On Chaillu, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 208–13, and Michael McCarthy, Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 40–46. On Chaillu and Burroughs, see Sarkis Atamian, The Origin of Tarzan: The Mystery of Tarzan’s Creation Solved (Anchorage, Alaska: Publication Consultants, 1997). 67. Richard Hall, Stanley: An Adventurer Explored (London: Collins, 1974), 99–175.

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age, to have been skeptical of slavery and, when he married, he promptly freed thirty slaves who had come to him from his wife, Jane Elizabeth Bayard, and arranged for their passage to Liberia. (Two of them did not fancy the idea and stayed as slaves, until he emancipated them in 1842.) Wilson himself went after them in 1834 to establish a mission station at Cape Palmas, where he took a great interest in the Grebo language, for which he furnished a dictionary and a grammar. He worked hard, not only as a missionary, but as an opponent of the slave trade. Indeed, when there was a suggestion that the Royal Navy cease patrolling the coast of West Africa to catch slavers, Lord Palmerston reprinted 10,000 copies of an article by Wilson in a successful effort to prevent the withdrawal.68 Wilson came back to United States in 1852 (his health was bad) and went to live in New York, where he wrote his major book. But when South Carolina seceded, he returned home and worked, during the war, as the foreign mission coordinator of the Presbyterian Church of the C.S.A., perhaps not an onerous assignment.69 Wilson’s own history helps to explain the relatively moderate tone of Western Africa. It is, no doubt, a book deeply structured by the characteristic hubris of the Christian missionary and the American racial theorist. Wilson was committed to Liberia because he felt the African had no future in the United States, though he was conscious that this was not exclusively the African’s fault: ‘‘The feeling, prejudice, or whatever it may be that prevents it, in its origins and effects may be wrong, but it is alike preposterous and absurd to contend with it.’’ Naturally, he had a low opinion of paganism, witchcraft, and polygamy, and regretted natives who did not wash regularly. He doubted that Africans could ever attain ‘‘the energy, the enterprise, or the inventive powers of the white man.’’ Still, he admired them for being ‘‘social, generous, and confiding,’’ and thought they might come to be ‘‘examples of the purest and most elevated Christian virtues,’’ which was a kind of praise from a Presbyterian.70 (In this, he was one influence among many upon his fellow missionary, the African American Alexander Crummell, who also saw Africa becoming a great Christian empire.)71 And Wilson’s tone was, for the most 68. It is reprinted in J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), 430–51. 69. I rely on the account in P. C. Kenemy, ‘‘John Leighton Wilson,’’ in American National Biography: Volume 23, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 596–97; see also Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, vol. 1, 1607–1861 (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1963), 297. 70. Wilson, Western Africa, 413, 379–80. 71. On this, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 148, 329, n4, and Tunde Adeleke, Unafrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 88.

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part, even. He was acutely aware that Africa was worth more than an easy generalization or a ready sneer, but needed to be understood as a complicated mosaic of cultures, religions, and languages. His book describes the geography of western Africa with great care, and he fills in the historical background, mostly of European incursions, of which he was no great enthusiast, especially when the Europeans were prompting the slave trade. (He was also anti–Roman Catholic and has fierce passages about Rome’s influence in, especially, the Congo.) He knew that much in African deprivation was the fault of Europe and America. He had some gifts as an anthropologist and was curious about marriage customs, religious rites, political structures, manners, agricultural products, and oral traditions. Above all, he knew the difference between the Mandingo and the Wolof, the Kru and the Foulah, the Yoruba and the Pangwe. He noticed when one group was Islamic, another Christian, one was an autocracy, another an open society. He observed differences of physiognomy, who was light, who dark, who was tall, who short. He did not hesitate to prefer one group to another; the Ashantis come in for especial criticism, but he liked the Mpongwe for their intelligence, urbanity, and linguistic skill. In particular, he had an interest in languages and part of the concluding pages of the book are preoccupied with explaining the grammatical differences between Grebo, Mandingo, and Mpongwe. He was often conscious of hazarding generalization about facts which were hard to control, or even to know. So he wrote, ‘‘It is not an easy task to give a full and satisfactory exposition of the religious creed of the pagan tribes of Africa.’’ Likewise, ‘‘[t]here is much diversity in the habits, character, and circumstances of the inhabitants of Southern Guinea; and especially between those residing along the seacoast and the tribes of bushmen immediately in the rear of them.’’ 72 Similarly, he frequently offered up his evidence with the skeptical formulation that suchand-such ‘‘is said to be.’’ 73 In his sympathy for Africa, Wilson was unusual, but not for his Liberian interests. White Southerners had long been prominent in the leadership of the American Colonization Society. There was a period, in the 1820s, when it was fashionable and safe for a Southerner to help and subvent the Society’s enterprise in west Africa. Francis Scott Key of Maryland, slaveholder and author of ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’’ boyhood friend of William B. Hodgson, helped to found it. Henry Clay of Kentucky was its patron, and was rewarded by having a town (Clay Ashland) named for him and his plantation. James Monroe of Virginia likewise survives in the name of Liberia’s capital, 72. Wilson, Western Africa, 292–93, 452–80, 208, 257. 73. For example, ‘‘The Susus are said to be more industrious than the Mandingoes’’: Wilson, Western Africa, 92.

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Monrovia. Between February 1820 and December 1866, the American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society sent 11,909 and 1,227 emigrants, respectively. Of the former group, 4,541 were free born, and 7,054 were ex-slaves. Virginia alone was represented by 3,733. All Southern states, except South Carolina and Arkansas, had auxiliary societies that were dedicated to sponsoring relocation, which bore names like ‘‘Mississippi in Africa.’’ While McCord condescended with random ethnology, his fatherin-law’s former slave, Francis Devaney, was making himself one of Liberia’s merchants.74 Liberia was, ironically, the most conspicuous outpost of Southern culture in the nineteenth century and the only colony, apart from the imperial territories of the United States, that the South helped successfully to found. Only 10 percent of Liberia’s colonists came from the North; the rest were free blacks or ex-slaves from the South. Indeed, in 1849, James Henry Hammond thought it proper to count Liberians among the South’s black population, however strayed. So, in despised Africa, the South’s names and customs and hierarchies were to be duplicated and modulated. Scattered along the St. Paul River were towns named Caldwell, Careysburg, Louisiana, Millsburg, and Virginia. There was a Ladies Benevolent Society of Monrovia, founded in 1836, and a charitable organization called the Ladies Dorcas Society, beginning in 1843. In Grand Bassa, there was a Young Men’s Literary Association of Buchanan and a Female Literary Institute of Edina. In Montserrado, there was the Liberia Lyceum, the Literary and Social Club of Monrovia, the Monrovia Athenaeum, and the Monrovia Ladies Literary Institute, which held weekly meetings, ‘‘at which members read alternately from books on a wide range of subjects and answered questions from the audience.’’ There was an abundance of fraternal orders: Odd Fellows, Good Templars, Masons, but also, more distinctively, the Independent Order of the Sons of Ham and the Sisters of the Mysterious Ten. The Whig Party was recreated as the True Whig Party, to be challenged eventually, differently, by a Republican Party. There were religious revivals, denominational tensions, Temperance Societies (such as the Rose of Sharon Union Daughters of Temperance), and a workhouse.75 Habits of racial discrimination were not erased in Africa. Winwood Reade, with unsympathetic acerbity, observed in 1870, ‘‘There are no real parties 74. Bryson, American Consular Officer, 7; Wiley, Slaves No More, 311; P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 154. 75. J. R. Oldfield, Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) and the Creation of an African-American Church in Liberia (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 59; James Henry Hammond, ‘‘The North and the South,’’ SQR 15 (July 1849): 287–88; Tom W. Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 75, 42–72.

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in Liberia, though the terms borrowed from the States, such as Democrats, Whigs, Old Whigs, etc., are in frequent use. The real parties consist of mulattoes and negroes. . . . The mulattoes are aristocrats, and call the black men niggers. The negroes, on the other hand, call the mulattoes bastards and mongrels and declare that they are feeble in body and depraved in mind.’’ 76 But colonists did speak of captured slaves as ‘‘Congoes,’’ who were characterized as ‘‘the most Savage, & blud thirsty people I ever saw or ever wishes to see.’’ ‘‘I took my Rifle in hand to go to fight a savage King,’’ Peyton Skipwith announced in 1840. To native Africans, distinctions of hue were less important. Diana Skipwith wrote back from Monrovia in 1843: ‘‘I wrote you a long catalogue about the Natives customs which I am in hopes that you have found very amusing. In conversing with one of them I ask him how it was that the[y] could not read & write like white man (they call us all white man) & had not as much Sence as the white man.’’ 77 The sponsoring of emigrants by different states added an extra dimension of discrimination, even of interstate rivalry. Unsurprisingly, Virginians were notable for their hauteur. An American physician visiting in 1858 observed a year later that some colonists ‘‘complain of caste and say that the Virginians are most too high-headed and are all the time claiming that they are the quality of Liberia.’’ 78 It is little surprise that elections denied the vote to natives and the minority race (in this case, whites). So Liberia strangely echoed the American experience of imperial expansion, of colonial wars (against natives, English, French, and Spaniards), of death at the hands of unwonted pathogens.79 Cultural ambivalence is reflected, most poignantly, in the tension between the black American migrants and that other source of Liberian population, Africans recaptured from slave traders, whom the Americans often regarded as uncivilized.80 There was nostalgia for the old country: ‘‘Nothing could afford me more pleasure than to visit again the scenes of childhood or look upon those faces which were once familiar to me,’’ Matilda Skipwith Lomax wrote back to Virginia in 1851. There was talk of a New World, conferred by God’s beneficence. ‘‘Though Africa is a new country with some inconveniences, yet we enjoy many blessed privileges,’’ Robert M. Page said in 1839. ‘‘Liberia, Our glorious asylum, is still 76. William Winwood Reade, The African Sketch-Book (London: Smith, Elder, 1873), 257, quoted in Oldfield, Alexander Crummell, 80. 77. Matilda Skipwith Lomax to Sally Cocke, 4 July 1848; Peyton Skipwith to John H. Cocke, 22 April 1840; Diana Skipwith James to Sally Cocke, 6 March 1843, in Wiley, Slaves No More, 67, 52, 57. 78. African Repository and Colonial Journal 35 (1859): 3, quoted in Wiley, Slaves No More, 6. 79. Staudenraus, African Colonization, 241; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 19–101. 80. Wiley, Slaves No More, 313.

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under the wise and judicious protection of a god, moving slowly, yet surely, in wealth & prosperity,’’ he reiterated in 1855. ‘‘Persons coming to Africa should remember that it is a new country,’’ William C. Burke cautioned Mary Custis Lee, ‘‘and everything has to be created, and they should naturally expect to find things inconvenient and uphill.’’ So there was a sense that colonization could only succeed, if local labor was suborned. ‘‘As it respects farming their is no Chance for it unless we would get the nativs to work for us and then you must be wit them,’’ Peyton Skipwith, late of Bremo Plantation in Virginia, observed in 1834. There was also something that looked very like slavery, or (more accurately) the peonages of the post-emancipation South. There was ‘‘a practice of natives apprenticing their children to colonists for training, or as security for loans’’; these were sometimes called ‘‘pawns.’’ 81 This was easily, perhaps deservedly misunderstood, even by newly arrived ex-slaves. ‘‘Those that are well off do hav the nativs as Slavs and poor people that do come from america have no chance to make aliving for the nativs do all the work,’’ Skipwith complained. That Liberia did practice slavery was, however, widely asserted and believed in the United States. David James McCord asserted in 1849 that Liberians ‘‘not only aided and abetted, but joined in the [slave] trade, and those only lived comfortable who owned slaves.’’ William Henry Holcombe, the reformed son of someone who once manumitted his slaves, gleefully entered the following in his Natchez journal in 1855: ‘‘Went to day to see a negro patient the property of another negro! It reminded me of the naval officer who expressed his surprise to a Liberia ‘darkie’ emancipated from American thraldom, that he should make slaves of the poor natives he could catch or buy on the frontiers of his new country—and of said darkie’s reply—‘Lord bless you, Sir! we must do like they do in old Virginny’—The negro is disposed to be tyrannical and is any thing but a natural abolitionist.’’ 82 Yet this new country was also an old country, ‘‘this beautiful land of our forefathers.’’ The themes of oldness and newness could inhabit the same sentence, as when Pascal Woodson observed in 1853, ‘‘But it is a good country because it is aland of freedom and the land of our fore Father (the man Ham).’’ Even oldness could be providential: ‘‘In My Estimation this is a good Country, taking all things in consideration, asspecaly for the colored Man or the Suns of Ham Who have been So Long bound Down beneth the penatration 81. Matilda Skipwith Lomax to John H. Cocke, 18 October 1851; Robert M. Page to Charles W. and Sarah P. Andrews, 6 May 1839, 1 April 1855; William C. Burke to Mary C. Lee, 20 February 1859; Peyton Skipwith to John H. Cocke, 10 February 1834, ibid., 73, 102, 115, 204, 36. On ‘‘pawns,’’ see ibid., 315. 82. David James McCord, ‘‘Slavery and the Abolitionists,’’ SQR 15 (April 1849): 208; entry for 26 February 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC.

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of the Gospel light. . . . This is the land of our fore fathers, the land from which the children went, back to the land they are Returning. Liberia is now spreading her rich perfume roun and about the big valleys of the World and introducing and calling out to her suns and Daughters to rise and come up out of the Valley of ignorence and Hethenism.’’ Some found this mixture of novelty and antiquity, this going home to a very old place, a puzzling contradiction. ‘‘It is something strange to think that these people of Africa are calld our ancestors,’’ Peyton Skipwith wrote in 1840. ‘‘In my present thinking if we have any ancestors they could not have been like these hostile tribes in this part of Africa for you may try and distill that principle and belief in them and do all you can for them and they still will be your enemy.’’ 83 So it was natural that there would be division, in Monrovia as once in Charleston, over whether newness required political independence: ‘‘The majority of this place [Monrovia] is much in favour of independence & those at Edina, the Leeward Settlement, are against it & that bitterly,’’ Peyton Skipwith said in 1846, a year before the new republic was born.84 But Liberia was also, fundamentally, a reproach to the South. As one of its first premises, the rules of the colony forbade slavery, a prohibition reiterated by the constitution of the independent republic of Liberia. It was in the habit of mounting military expeditions against slave traders, their factories, and native allies.85 Though white American sponsors sent their manumitted slaves to rid themselves of a group whom they despised, felt charitable towards, or did not know how to assimilate, blacks themselves went to Liberia to rid themselves of humiliating constraints and signal their disillusionment with the hollow implications of a Virginian’s Declaration of Independence. What they created in Liberia was, in part, a South and a United States, rid of the disadvantages peculiar to their previous conditions, but possessed of what they remembered as beneficial; this was, after all, what the colonists of Virginia and Massachusetts had wanted for themselves in the westward migrations of the seventeenth century. What James C. Minor, formerly a slave in Fredericksburg, wrote from Monrovia in 1833, reechoed the old themes of the American idyll’s disillusionment with the Old World: ‘‘Africa is a land of freedom. Where else can the man of color enjoy temporal freedom but in Africa? They may flee to Hayti or to Canada, but it will not do. They must fulfil the saying of Thomas Jefferson: ‘Let an ocean divide the white man from the man of color.’ Seeking refuge in other parts of the world has been tried; 83. Augustine Lamberth McDonagh to John McDonagh, 8 March 1844; Pascal Woodson to Isaac R. Wade, 21 February 1853; Grandville B. Woodson to Isaac R. Wade, 10 February 1853; Peyton Skipwith to John H. Cocke, 22 April 1840, in Wiley, Slaves No More, 132, 165, 162, 53. 84. Peyton Skipwith to John H. Cocke, 25 June 1846, ibid., 63. 85. Staudenraus, African Colonization, 66; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 174, n74.

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it is useless. We own that this is the land of our forefathers, destined to be the home of their descendants.’’ As Abraham Blackford observed, with satisfaction, in 1844: ‘‘I am very well pleased. My reason why is, I can use my own privileges in every respect. There are a few white people out hear, though they are very polite. I meet them sometimes in the streets and they steps one side of the pavements and touch their hats. I call at their dwelling in the course of the day and sets down at large and talks a great deal about the States and about Religious subjects. The white man never calls me by name unless they call me Mr. Blackford.’’ 86 That respect and freedom rested upon privilege was a fact that Blackford understood as clearly as any proslavery thinker in his native state. Certainly, few wanted to go home. ‘‘I find it is the only Place for the man of Colour,’’ Erasmus Nicholas noted in 1843. ‘‘Here we Sit under our own vine & Palm Tree. Here we enjoy the same rights & priviledges that our white brethren does in America. It is our only home,’’ Henrietta Fuller McDonogh insisted in 1849. ‘‘It is no longer a doutfull Question wether Liberia is the home for the Colored man or not,’’ Henry B. Stewart observed in 1851. ‘‘There is no outher place for him But Africa. He may of injoyed a letel more priviledge to the North, in Som things than what are alowed the free Collord man to the South. But what is that to Be compared with a free Liberian Citizen very Litel Beter than a water man.’’ Washington W. McDonogh was most decisive: ‘‘I will never consent to leave this country for all the pleasures of America combined together, to live, for this is the only place where a colored person can enjoy his liberty.’’ 87 Liberians were the South’s most adamant expatriates. The Southern engagement with Asia beyond the Levant was, on the whole, very slight. The most exotic of American traders were the emissaries of New England and New York, though Baltimore did trade with China in the antebellum years.88 Brantz Mayer of that city was in Canton in 1821 and again in 1827–28. On the second occasion he kept a small notebook, in which can be found pencil drawings of a pagoda, a boat girl, and Chinese men.89 86. James C. Minor to John Minor, 11 February 1833; Abraham Blackford to Susan Wheeler, 10 September 1844, in Wiley, Slaves No More, 17, 23. 87. Erasmus Nicholas to Lucy Nicholas Skipwith, 5 March 1843; Henrietta Fuller McDonogh to John McDonogh, 24 October 1849; Henry B. Stewart to William McLain, 26 September 1851; Washington W. McDonogh to John McDonogh, 7 October 1846, ibid., 56, 153, 286, 142. 88. China had a taste for ‘‘Baltimore-made brown sheetings’’: see Gary Lawson Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, 1789–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 163. 89. Brantz Mayer to Christian Leins, 27 November 1821, Brantz Mayer Papers, MHS; Brantz Mayer, ‘‘Memoranda and Notes on a Voyage to China by Bz. Mayer, 1827, 1828,’’ Mayer and Roszel Papers, MHS.

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Later he wrote a little on the subject.90 Two of the American commissioners to China in the 1850s were Southerners, as was its Minister Plenipotentiary from 1859–60.91 After the Civil War, Southerners were to be numerically important among American missionaries.92 Before 1861, however, they were far fewer, but at least one Southern missionary did not lack for impact. In 1837 Issachar Jacox Roberts of Shelbyville, Tennessee, came under the auspices of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board to preach the Gospel in Canton, eventually alongside Karl Gutzlaff, a Pomeranian missionary from the Moravian Brethren who was especially gifted in Chinese dialects.93 Roberts rented a small house outside the city walls, took to Chinese dress, and went around the local countryside with a convert to preach and distribute tracts. He studied the dialect of the Hakka, local migrants from northern China who had come to the area centuries before and were still a ‘‘guest people,’’ with their own customs, among which a resistance to footbinding was notable.94 One of them, called Hong Xiuquan, encountered Roberts in 1847. Hong was a frustrated young man who had several times failed the Civil Service examinations, and a mystic who in 1836 had been given on a Canton street (perhaps by Edwin Stevens of Yale)95 a collection of Christian tracts called ‘‘Good Words for Exhorting the Age,’’ translated into Chinese by Liang Afa. Hong did not, at the time, pay much attention, but in 1843 he read them more closely and began to imagine and believe in a passionate syncretism of Confucianism and Protestant evangelicalism, which he started to preach, on travels to the west of Canton. In his vision, God the Father had commissioned Hong in a dream to save mankind, maintain Heaven and Earth ‘‘in gracious 90. Brantz Mayer, ‘‘China and the Chinese,’’ SQR 12 (July 1847): 1–51. 91. On the first two, Humphrey Marshall of Kentucky and Robert McLane of Maryland, see Paul Hibbert Clyde, ed., United States Policy Toward China: Diplomatic and Public Documents, 1839–1939 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1940), 22–34. 92. For example, John Leighton Stuart (1876–1962), a Presbyterian missionary, whose great-grandfather Robert Stuart (1772–1856) had taught the classics at Transylvania University, and whose father John Linton Stuart, a graduate of Washington and Jefferson College and of Princeton Theological Seminary, came to China as a missionary in the early 1870s, accompanied by his wife, originally from Mobile. See Yu-Ming Shaw, An American Missionary in China: John Leighton Stuart and Chinese-American Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 11–20. 93. The following is based on Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Chinese Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), and John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800–1995 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 73–83. 94. Spence, God’s Chinese Son, 20, 62, 25. 95. This may be the classmate of Frederick Porcher, whom the latter misremembered as ‘‘Henry Stevens,’’ but also as someone who ‘‘became pious when in College, and . . . became a clergyman and went to China as a missionary.’’ See Samuel Gaillard Stoney, ed., ‘‘The Memoirs of Frederick Adolphus Porcher: Chapter VI: Yale College,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 45 (October 1944): 211–12.

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harmony and convivial peace,’’ 96 and thus to succeed Hong’s Elder Brother, Jesus Christ. So Hong began to acquire converts, whom he formed into a ‘‘God-Worshiping Society.’’ Early in 1847, Issachar Roberts’s Chinese assistant wrote to Hong, to urge that the latter visit Roberts’s chapel. Hong came and studied Gutzlaff ’s translation of the Bible with Roberts. Hong asked to be baptized, which the Southern Baptist was known to do with locally famous ceremony: ‘‘For choice, in the hot seasons of the south, Roberts takes the baptismal candidates out into the water at nighttime, when the moon is full and bright, immersing each one completely ‘in the spacious deep in imitation of the death and burial of his Lord,’ before raising them once again ‘in imitation of the resurrection of Jesus.’ ’’ For unclear reasons, Roberts (a man of ‘‘sudden tantrums and zealous adherence’’) refused Hong’s request.97 Hong left, gained more converts, acquired allies and an army, mounted a great rebellion against the Qing Dynasty, came to control much of east central China, and until his death in 1864 unstably governed from Nanjing the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, the Taiping Tienkuo. Hong seems to have harbored no resentment against the Tennessean, indeed long wanted him as a moral guide and intermediary with the foreigners who were siding with the Qing. In 1854, he invited Roberts to visit Nanjing, but the latter was turned back by a Qing gunboat on the Yangzi River. In the succeeding years, Roberts did not fare well in Canton. His children and wife, ill and discontented, abandoned him for the United States; his first Chinese assistant died and his second ‘‘after grave mistreatment’’ left; he became bankrupt, his house and chapel being twice looted by mobs. So a Heavenly King for a friend came to seem a good idea. Roberts tried again to reach Nanjing and, on this occasion, succeeded. There Hong greeted Roberts with great pomp; he was appointed ‘‘minister for foreign policy and of justice in all cases involving foreigners’’ and granted apartments in the palace. Roberts declined the offer of three wives, but he did accept Taiping court dress, ‘‘a blue satin fur gown, and yellow embroidered jacket over it, with red hood, and satin boots.’’ Thereafter things went less well. Hong wished Roberts to preach Taiping Christianity, but Roberts wished to purify Hong’s religion. So the two evangelists struggled for the possession of each other’s soul, which would thereby define the soul of China, and accomplish a great work in God’s cause. In outdoor services, the Taiping preachers ‘‘in their glittering yellow coronets’’ would give their version, then Roberts would give his. Much was 96. These are among the words on the Great Seal of the Taiping: Spence, God’s Chinese Son, xxvi. 97. Ibid., 93.

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lost between cultures and in Roberts’s Cantonese dialect: ‘‘When a soldier, chosen at random, is asked, ‘Who is the Holy Spirit?’ he replies, ‘The Eastern King.’ ’’ 98 Increasingly, Roberts lost access to Hong, who sat in his own apartments like Thomas Jefferson and wrote emendations and commentaries in the margins of his Bible, and (unlike Thomas Jefferson) came to think himself the voice of Melchizedek, the priest and king of Salem. So Roberts fled on 20 January 1862, and took refuge on a British ship on the Yangzi. On that day, the Union Army was moving south through Kentucky towards his native Tennessee and Shiloh. In China, too, there was civil war. Roberts had hoped to use the Taiping to bring the Word of God to the Orient. But in China, civil war was a more brutal thing than Abraham Lincoln and Mary Chesnut could imagine. The Taiping Rebellion had encouraged other dissidents, the Nian and the Chinese Muslims. Bloodshed spread, some 600 walled cities were taken and lost, massacres were frequent, the Qings and God-Worshipers alike proclaimed the usefulness of slaughter. Certainly 20 million people died, perhaps as many as 60 million. No one is sure. Southern influence on the rest of Asia was, happily, less significant. As Secretary of the Navy, John Pendleton Kennedy amplified the resources of the Matthew Perry expedition that reopened Japan to Western influence, while the editor of the expedition’s first history was Francis Hawks of North Carolina.99 Nonetheless, the early contacts between American ships and Japan had little or nothing to do with the South, though the naval expedition of 1853–55 sent to reconnoiter the Bering Straits, the North Pacific Ocean, and the China Seas (which spent much time in and around Japan) was first commanded by Cadwalader Ringgold of Maryland and included, as its scientific officer, John M. Brooke of Virginia.100 As for India, there is little record of Southerners making physical contact with the sub-continent, although Southern intellectuals, though perhaps less than their New England counterparts, took some interest in Sanskrit, Hindu mythology, and Aryan theories: George 98. Ibid., 286–88. 99. Charles H. Bohner, John Pendleton Kennedy: Gentleman from Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 206–7; see Matthew Galbraith Perry, George Jones, and Francis Lister Hawks, comps., Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, Under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, by Order of the Government of the United States (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856). 100. Alfred Tamarin, Japan and the United States: Early Encounters, 1791–1860 (London: Macmillan, 1970); George M. Brooke Jr., John M. Brooke: Naval Scientist and Educator (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980), 76, 95–134. Ringgold was relieved by Matthew Perry in Hong Kong, because of illness, and replaced by Lt. John Rodgers. See John M. Brooke, ‘‘Coasting in Japan,’’ U.S. Nautical Magazine and Naval Journal, in first part beginning December 1856 (cited in Brooke, John M. Brooke, 132).

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Thomas Sully, Charles Izard Manigault (1817) (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

Frederick Holmes and James Warley Miles were, probably, the most engaged by these considerations.101 The most energetic of Southern travelers in the East were the Manigaults père et fils, Charles Izard Manigault and Louis Manigault. The father sailed from Philadelphia on the London Trader on 25 May 1817 and arrived in Canton on 27 September. Three months later, he went on the Eugenia to the Dutch colony of Batavia. For the next two years he moved between Batavia, the ‘‘Isle of France’’ (the name given to Mauritius by the French, though then the colony was British), Malacca, Manila, Calcutta, Penang, Timor, Macao, and Canton, with a side trip to Australia in 1820. Late in 1821, he began his return journey, traveling to Peru and Chile, riding ‘‘across the Pampas to Buenos Ayres’’ in fourteen days, then taking ship on the brig Saunders to Pernambuco and, finally, Philadelphia on 17 May 1823. He was absent for almost exactly six years. He had gone, partly for the excitement of the thing, partly as a merchant adventurer. He took with him ‘‘all that I could scrape up of my patrimony in cash, viz $10,000.’’ With a Mr. Willcocks 102 he purchased freight on 101. See, for example GFH, ‘‘Thimm’s Book,’’ SQR 11 ( January 1847): 90–105; JWM, ‘‘Oriental Studies.’’ 102. Possibly Samuel Willcocks, a merchant of Philadelphia, who married Manigault’s sister Harriet in 1815.

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the Eugenia and went as the ship’s supercargo on its voyage to Mauritius, with the plan ‘‘to invest the proceeds in the produce of this Island (Cloves, Ebony &c) with the hope of a transient vessel calling at the Isle of France bound to China by which I could return there with the Cloves, &c.’’ But no ship came. So, instead, Manigault bought outright the brig Helen (‘‘nearly as slow as a Tub’’) for $14,779.58, manned her with lascars and three French officers, and set out on ‘‘a slow & tedious voyage across the Indian Ocean—Thro’ the Straits of Malacca & up the China Sea.’’ On the coast of China, they encountered the autumnal monsoons, whose violence ‘‘shattered Our Little Brig’’ and required repairs in Manila. In addition, Willcocks sent intelligence that India was suddenly overstocked with cloves, whose high price had led to a superfluity, and it would be best to divert to the Philippines and ‘‘endeavor to dispose of my Cargo there, But if found impracticable then to ship the Cloves to Bombay, & take in a small Cargo at Manila for the Isle of France Consisting of Cordage, Hides, &c, and returning to the Isle of France sell Brig & Cargo & wind up the Concern.’’ Which he more or less did, except that he went to Calcutta instead of Bombay, all for the loss of his patrimony of $10,000 and $5,000 besides. ‘‘I had much trouble, anxiety & exposure during these voyages,’’ he was to tell his son in 1850, ‘‘but never in Spirits, or in energy of Character.’’ 103 This journey was not merely a failed mercenary venture. Manigault had a genuine intellectual curiosity about the scenes of his travels. The catalog of his library, compiled in 1826, contains, inter alia, evidence of many books that mark his travels.104 103. Louis Manigault, ‘‘Family Records, 1860,’’ pp. 248–50, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; also Charles Izard Manigault, ‘‘Book containing loose papers, 1776–1872,’’ Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL. 104. On Australia, there are accounts by convicts sent to Botany Bay: George Barrington’s A Voyage to Botany Bay (1792) and The Memoirs of George Barrington, from His Birth in MDCCLV to His Last Conviction at the Old Bailey (1790), the Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux (1819); and then general works, William Charles Wentworth’s Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales (1819), John Oxley’s Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales . . . 1817–18 (1820), Edward Curr’s An Account of the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (1824), and Barron Field’s Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales (1825). On China, India, and the Pacific, there are Jean B. J. Breton’s La Chine en miniature (1811), William Milburn’s Oriental Commerce (1813), Auguste Billiard’s Voyage aux colonies orientales (1822), John White’s History of a Voyage to the China Sea (1823), the Memoires du capitaine Peron, sur les voyages aux cotes d’Afrique . . . a la Chine, etc. (1824), Amable L. M. M. B. Jourdain’s La Perse (1814), John Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee’s Considerations on the Present Political State of India (1815), William Ward’s A View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos (1815), Jean Antoine DuBois’s Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India (1817), David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean . . . in the United States Frigate Essex, in the Years 1812, 1813, and 1814 (1815), and James Weddell’s A Voyage Towards the South Pole, Performed in the Years 1822–24 (1825). On South America and Africa, there are Isaac Foster Coffin’s Journal of a Residence in Chili (1823), Peter Schmidtmeyer’s Travels into Chile, Over the Andes, in the Years 1820 and 1821 (1824), Basil Hall’s Ex-

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In 1850, Louis Manigault ‘‘determined to follow my Father’s footsteps’’ and was given $4000 by his grandfather Nathaniel Heyward to defray expenses. He sailed from New York on the clipper Oriental on 28 April, around the Cape of Good Hope to Canton, where he entered the counting house of Russell & Company. For a year, he traveled to ‘‘Macao, Hong-Kong, Amoy, Ningpo, Shanghai,’’ and Manila. He left China on 26 April 1851, in the ‘‘Peruvian Bark Linda’’ for San Francisco and a look at the gold mines. In July, he sailed down the western coast in the steamer Panama for Monterey, San Diego, Mazatlan, Acapulco, and Panama. From thence he shifted to an English steamer for South America, where he spent six months ‘‘visiting all the principal Towns along the Pacific Coast, from Panama to Valparaiso.’’ In Peru, he traveled inland from Lima to the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco and a little north, to Urubamba and the head waters of the Amazon. He sailed back to Panama, crossed the Isthmus on a mule, and went ‘‘down the Chagres River in a Canoe.’’ From there he sailed back on the steamer Ohio to New York, via Nicaragua and Havana. The father probably spoke for the son when he observed in old age that, if there was such a thing as predestination, ‘‘I then was Born a Traveller.’’ 105 After the Civil War, about 8,000 to 10,000 disillusioned Confederates made their way to Mexico and Latin America, to establish themselves among the quasi-familiar surroundings of regimes that were either slaveholding or thought pliable. Nearly 4,000 settled in Brazil, where their descendants still live. One might speculate that this migration grew from the perspectives of the antebellum South, which might have been expected to take a marked interest in the parallel slaveholding regimes of North, Central, and South America. Certainly the mid-twentieth-century South was to find the subject illuminating.106 But the Old South shared this sense of relevance very little. It was its misfortune mostly to look towards Europe for its comparative cultural understandings, not to Brazil or Cuba, with which it shared many experiences. Latin America, on the whole, seemed a countervision of what the tracts from a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, and 1822 (1824), Maria Dundas Graham, Lady Calcott’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822 (1825), and Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa: in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (1799). 105. Louis Manigault, ‘‘Family Records, 1860,’’ pp. 208–10, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Charles Izard Manigault, ‘‘Book Containing Loose Papers,’’ p. 56, Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL. 106. See, for example, Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional & Intellectual Life (1959; reprint, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1963); Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the New World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971).

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Tingqua, Louis Manigault (Private collection)

South might have looked like, but for the grace of a Protestant God, and was a warning rather than a model. Indeed, Latin America’s fault was to have remained too much like Europe. To South America itself, relatively few Southerners went. Nonetheless, when John Pendleton Kennedy wrote Swallow Barn (1832), he found it reasonable to include a character, Ned Hazard, who ‘‘was seized with a romantic fever which principally manifested itself in a conceit to visit South America, and play knight errant in the quarrel of the Patriots. . . . He accordingly sailed from New York in the Paragon, bound for Lima, and, in due time, doubled Cape Horn.’’ The southern continent acquired a humid and languorous glamor, captured in the work of the Charlestonian painter, Louis Rémy Mignot, the best Southern painter in the generation after Washington Allston. Mignot was of French Catholic descent, his father being from Normandy; the son was born in 1831, studied painting (especially landscapes) in the Netherlands in 1848, came back to New York in 1853, and in 1857 traveled with Frederick Church (his American exemplar) to Ecuador. During the Civil War, though pro-Confederate, he went to live in London, where he died in 1870. Mignot seems to have liked scenes of seasonal extremity and drama. His Dutch and American landscapes were often of bleak and snowy winter days, or of lush summer foliage, or brilliant sunsets in the manner of Turner.

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Louis Rémy Mignot, View of Riobamba, Ecuador, Looking towards Mt. Chimborazo (Private collection)

In Ecuador for four months, he visited Quito briefly, then passed through the Avenue of the Volcanoes to Riobamba in the central Andean highlands, from which he climbed by mule 10,000 feet to the peak of Sangay. The outcome of his trip was a rich collection of sensuous painting; ominous volcanoes, intoxicating jungles, limpid lakes, solitary palms, and threatening moonlight; scenes in which humanity’s contribution is superfluous, and neat Spanish towns are dwarfed by the Andes.107 The most visible of Southerners in Latin America, however, were diplomats; forty-five of them served as heads of mission to Central and South America during the early republic.108 When Joel Poinsett went in 1810 to be the American ‘‘commercial agent’’ to Buenos Aires and Chile (in 1811 he was promoted to consul-general for Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru), he passed through Rio de Janeiro; there he found in residence another South Carolinian, Thomas Sumter Jr., the American Minister to Lisbon, in exile with the Portuguese monarchy.109 Poinsett himself was also to serve contentiously 107. JPK, Swallow Barn; or, a Sojourn in Virginia (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832), 1:53; Katherine E. Manthorne and John W. Coffey, Louis Rémy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). 108. They came from Virginia (7), Kentucky (6), Mississippi (5), South Carolina (4), Tennessee (4), Louisiana (3), Maryland (3), Missouri (3), Georgia (2), Alabama (2), and North Carolina (2), with single representatives from Delaware, Florida, Arkansas, and Texas. 109. J. Fred Rippy, Joel R. Poinsett, Versatile American (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1935), 37, 39.

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in Mexico, whose American legation was to be dominated by Southerners, among them Waddy Thompson and Brantz Mayer. The tradition was a consistent one. Theodorick Bland, the Virginian politician and poet, had been sent in 1818 by James Monroe as one of three agents, to look into the situation occasioned by the South American revolutions.110 Henry A. Wise was Minister Plenipotentiary to Brazil from 1844–47, where he was energetic in attempts to suppress American involvement in the African slave trade.111 Alexander Dimitry of Louisiana, the friend of Charles Gayarré, was Minister Resident in Costa Rica and Nicaragua in 1859–61. The early phase was marked by a desire to encourage Latin America to form free republics like the United States. In 1811, James Monroe sent Poinsett instructions that observed, ‘‘The disposition shewn by most of the Spanish provinces to separate from Europe and to erect themselves into independent States excites great interest here. As Inhabitants of the same Hemisphere, as Neighbors, the United States cannot be unfeeling Spectators of so important a [movement].’’ Formally, this was neutrality. But Poinsett was anything but unfeeling and neutral; indeed he was passionate and cavalier in the execution of his own quasi-independent policy. He did not have a social background that encouraged insecurity. His mother, Ann Roberts, was English and had married Elisha Poinsett when he was studying in England; he was of a South Carolina Huguenot family and was to become a doctor, but also the possessor of a ‘‘small fortune in town houses and lots, plantations, bank stock and ‘English funds,’ ’’ perhaps to the extent of $100,000, which passed to his son in 1804. Joel was variously educated in England, Charleston, and Connecticut, then in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Eventually he took up the law somewhat negligently. Between 1801 and 1809 he made two long trips to Europe, including a visit to Russia. After his public service as a diplomat in South America, he was later to be Secretary of War. He never lacked for self-confidence, which meant he did not always feel the need for display. When not in Washington, for example, he lived in a fairly plain house on the outskirts of Charleston, though one richly furnished, with a carefully tended park crowded with plants, in which Poinsett (after whom the poinsettia was named) had a great interest. Still, modesty was not imprudence. Late in life he married a Charlestonian widow, Mary Pringle, who brought him further land and wealth.112 110. See Theodorick Bland, Report of Theodorick Bland, Esq. on South America; a. Buenos Ayres, b. Chile, to the Honorable John Quincy Adams (Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1818); Rippy, Poinsett, 66. One of the other commissioners was Caesar Rodney of Delaware. 111. Craig M. Simpson, A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry M. Wise of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 61–69. 112. See Rippy, Poinsett.

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Late in 1811, he traveled from Buenos Aires, whose junta was (in his judgment) too circumspect, across the Pampas and over the Andes to Chile. There he found a more ambitious junta, led by Jose Miguel Carrera, in rebellion and glad to welcome the first foreign emissary to reach Santiago. Poinsett, so far from Washington and Charleston, did not trouble himself with diplomatic restraint. He offered Carrera the draft of a constitution for a liberated Chile, became involved in the fratricidal politics of the junta, and became chief military adviser in 1814 when a campaign was waged in southern Chile against the royalist army of the Viceroy of Peru. So completely did he identify with the Carrera junta that its fall from power compelled Poinsett’s departure in 1814.113 Such experience made Poinsett one of the most knowledgeable people in the United States about Latin American affairs. His papers are full of manuscripts descriptive of his time in Chile, Peru, and Argentina.114 In 1818, for John Quincy Adams, he wrote a report on the situation in Argentina, wherein he opposed diplomatic recognition. In 1822, he was sent to survey the situation in Mexico, so that the American government could judge the wisdom of recognizing the new emperor Agustín de Iturbide. From this came Poinsett’s Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of 1822 (1824), one of the earliest American studies of Mexico. The book helped to form a minor literary tradition, which was to reach a height during and after the Mexican War. But Poinsett himself, as he freely acknowledged, was much influenced by the pioneering work of Alexander von Humboldt in the Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (1811) and the Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland . . . relation historique (1814). Indeed Poinsett seems to have been intimidated by the precedent of Humboldt, who had traveled for five years after 1799 through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Cuba.115 Looking at some Mexican pyramids, Poinsett noted that Humboldt had once been there: ‘‘When I turn to the work of this extraordinary man, I am disposed to abandon my journal. He has seen more of the country, and described it better, than any other can hope to do, and he has left almost nothing for the future traveler, but the narrative of his own adventures, and a record of his own feelings and impressions.’’ 116 Humboldt’s accomplishment was no less than rediscovering the Americas which, in the centuries immediately after Columbus, had been a topic of centrality to European thought, but which later, in the long years 113. Ibid., 39, 41–55. 114. ‘‘Journal to Rio Janeiro, Buenos Ayres and Chile, 1810 & 11. No. 1’’; ‘‘Notes on Chile by Joel R. Poinsett’’; ‘‘Chile, Kingdom of ’’; ‘‘Peru,’’ all in Joel Roberts Poinsett Papers, LC. 115. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 24–27, 104–15. 116. Joel R. Poinsett, Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of 1822: Accompanied by an Historical Sketch of the Revolution (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1824), 43.

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William Wilson, Joel Roberts Poinsett (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

of Spanish colonial rule, had slipped from view. Yet the German perspective and the American differed. What travelers like Poinsett, fixed within a tradition defined by the American Revolution, were obliged to consider was: How singular was the U.S. experience in the Americas, or how duplicable? In this interest, they dissented from the tradition of Humboldt, who had tended to strip the people out of South America, to leave only a landscape.117 Poinsett’s Notes was much driven by the comparative question of the Western Hemisphere. This was a thing to be seen in matters large and small. So on the small things, he observed that ‘‘the houses of Mexico . . . are not so well furnished as our houses in the United States, but the apartments are more lofty and spacious, and are better distributed.’’ American cities were neater, without ‘‘that striking and disgusting contrast between the magnificence of the wealthy and the squalid penury of the poor’’ evident in Mexico. Likewise, ‘‘The markets of Philadelphia and New York display butchers’ meat in greater quantity, and generally of better quality, but here we saw game in abundance.’’ On the large things, Poinsett indicated that the Mexican revolution had produced, not a Washington and Jefferson, but a cheap despot in Iturbide. Church and state were not separated, but ominously conjoined. The 117. On this, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

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mummery of Catholicism was too much respected, or too much scorned by ‘‘sceptics and infidels.’’ The facilities of intellectual life were absent or impoverished. Beggars disfigured the streets, one seeking charity from Poinsett by the display of a naked ulcerated body. Rank was too much displayed and demanded. Out of diplomatic courtesy according the title of tratamiento (highness) to the Emperor’s wife, Poinsett reflected: ‘‘These people can have no idea, how ridiculous this miserable representation of royalty appears to a republican.’’ Land was abundant, though famine common. The Indian population was degraded, superstitious, and exploited, if amiable and polite.118 Writing early in the intellectual history of American racism, Poinsett noted without dwelling upon the complications of Mexican racial and caste distinctions: ‘‘Here, to be white, was to be noble; and the rank of the different casts is determined by their nearer or more distant relation to the whites; the last on the scale being the direct and unmixed descendants of the Africans or Indians.’’ Especially towards the conclusion of Notes on Mexico, Poinsett displayed a statistical and analytical habit of mind, characteristic of a man who had organized the logistics of the Chilean army and would later, as Secretary of War, reorganize the American armed forces. He numbered population, finances, trade, exports, soldiers, geographical divisions, ecclesiastical revenues, and the production of the mines. It was as though he were making an inventory of Mexico, though he did not wish to buy it and even wished its independence well. Yet Poinsett was not a man eager to admire. He found the wines ‘‘abominable. . . . sweet, and astringent, and mawkish.’’ Of the dispossessed of Mexico City, he said: ‘‘After passing the night sometimes under cover, sometimes in the open air, they issue forth in the morning like drones to prey upon the community, to beg, to steal, and in the last resort to work.’’ For all that, Poinsett’s Notes show some generosity of spirit. Even the usual slanders against Latin society, he ironically mollified: ‘‘There are certainly some young ladies (very few I am afraid) who do not smoke—some married women (many I hope) who have no lover, or if this would be interpreted to derogate from their charms, who consider him only as a convenient dangler, and are fondly and faithfully attached to their husbands; and there are certainly many gentlemen who are not gamesters.’’ 119 In 1825, Poinsett was appointed the first American Minister to Mexico by John Quincy Adams. His career there was, like his Chilean episode, energetic, impetuous, and interventionist. His instructions called upon him ‘‘to show on all occasions an unobtrusive readiness to explain the practical operation and the very great advantages which appertain to our system.’’ Unobtrusiveness 118. Poinsett, Notes on Mexico, 48, 49, 122, 77. 119. Ibid., 119, 28, 49, 119.

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did not come naturally to Poinsett. He opposed the British chargé d’affaires, Henry George Ward, who exercised a predominant influence over the Mexican government, itself dominated by Spaniards and pro-Europeans. Ward had the advantage of bringing the promise of loans, sanctioned by the name of George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, him who flattered himself to have called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old. To effect a counter to Ward’s conservative allies, Poinsett turned to nurturing (what he hoped would be) a democratic opposition. He gave instruction in political organization, especially by helping to found Masonic lodges of the York Rite.120 This briefly impressed the government, until Ward counterattacked. In truth, Poinsett failed to gain many of his formal objectives, which were supposed to encompass a commercial treaty or a negotiation of the U.S.Mexico border. His main success lay in restraining Mexico from launching an expedition to seize Cuba, which was important to a United States that then preferred to keep Cuba Spanish and hence ripe for later acquisition.121 Poinsett’s meddling in Mexican politics proved his undoing. The Yorkista candidate in the 1828 presidential election was General Vincente Guerrero, whose defeat precipitated a revolt, fighting in the streets of Mexico City, and the flight of the successful candidate, Gómez Pedraza. Poinsett, whose life had been at risk, was openly an ally of the insurgents. But their success made him a liability to a new administration justly accused of being, as Guerrero put it, ‘‘under the influence of the Agent of a Foreign Power.’’ So they asked Washington to recall Poinsett, who was obliged to leave early in January 1829.122 Poinsett’s actions, however undiplomatic, betrayed a sense that Mexico might become another United States, if wisely directed and properly instructed in ‘‘the very great advantages which appertain to our system.’’ This was, no doubt, the habitual illusion of American foreign policy, the presumption that all the world, with time enough, would wish to become American and cease to be itself. When Waddy Thompson came from South Carolina as American Minister and later published his own notes in the form of Recollections of Mexico (1846), this intoxicating sense had been palpably weakened by twenty more years of contact and (in Texas) war with a turbulent 120. Masonry was not insignificant in Southern culture. Edward R. Welles, an Episcopal minister in Vicksburg though originally from New York, observed in his diary in May 1855: ‘‘Secret societies and public associations are more generously cultivated here than at the North. The public displays of the Masonic Lodges in this town are more frequent, more gorgeous in their arrangements and more universally appreciated than in Northern towns.’’ (Edward R. Welles Diary, MDAH.) 121. Rippy, Poinsett, 104–17 (quotation on p. 106). 122. I follow the account in ibid., 120–31 (quotation on p. 128); he is indulgent.

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polity. Thompson was a cruder version of Poinsett, with the latter’s subtlety modulated into prejudice, ironic hope into disdain. There was the same antiCatholicism, but more dismissive. The same comparative question was asked, but more decisively answered against Mexico, which was accused of throwing away the advantages of an early and splendid settlement, an excellent climate, a rich soil, an abundant fund of resources, only to arrive at an unanswerably inferior position to Massachusetts, whose initial prospects and resources had been so less promising. ‘‘Although the whole road from the city of Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico passes through a country inexpressibly picturesque and beautiful,’’ Thompson observed, ‘‘yet the ignorant, idle, and degraded population, the total absence of cultivation and improvement, produced with me feelings partaking of gloom and melancholy.’’ Mexico’s politics, embodied in Santa Anna (whom Thompson half-admired), were explained by their Europeanness. Santa Anna was a Spaniard, from a race noble but ‘‘more than ordinarily sanguinary,’’ a race for generations prone to civil wars, both religious and racial. (‘‘That between the Goths and the Moors lasted for eight hundred years.’’) Thompson was more interested in race than Poinsett, more attracted by it as an explanation, and was closer to Rudyard Kipling than James Madison: ‘‘My residence in Mexico furnished me more evidences than one, of the powerful sympathy of race.’’ While Poinsett took Britain to be a cultural and political enemy, Thompson saw her as a racial ally against the lesser, darker peoples: ‘‘I can say with truth, that I never met an Englishman there that I did not feel the full force of ‘the white skin and the English language.’ . . . I would not sell ‘for a seas’ worth,’ my share of the glory of my English ancestry . . . and on the other hand, Englishmen should have a just pride in the prosperity and greatness of our country.’’ As a result, Thompson abandoned Poinsett’s hope for Mexico as a democratic republic and cited Santa Anna’s judgment that Mexico was ‘‘not prepared for such a government—an opinion, in which I think most intelligent foreigners who have visited Mexico agree with him.’’ 123 Despite these differences, Thompson and Poinsett were sharp critics of President James K. Polk’s war policy. Poinsett wrote in 1846, ‘‘No triumph of our arms, no accession of territory, can ever compensate for having in any wise contributed to the establishment of kingly government in North America. . . . While we war against a tyrannical military despotism, let us never forget that the Mexican people are brother Republicans.’’ 124 In 1847 Thompson was more abrupt, bluntly calling it a ‘‘war of conquest,’’ a depreda123. Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 8–9, 68, 157–58, 80. 124. Joel R. Poinsett, ‘‘The Mexican War,’’ DBR 2 (July 1846): 23–24.

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tion both immoral and inexpedient, for the United States did not need more land and would pay a penalty for such absorptions.125 Further, slavery would not be successfully transplanted to the ceded lands. In this, Thompson was consistent with the views expressed in his Recollections. ‘‘I am not one of those who have a rabid craving for more territory; on the contrary, I believe that we have enough. I know of no great people who have not been crowded into a small space—the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks and another people who have exercised a greater influence upon man and his destiny than all others, the Jews; and, in our own time, the English.’’ 126 Neither Poinsett nor Thompson were scholars, but men of affairs who wrote in their leisure hours. Brantz Mayer of Baltimore was more serious and assiduous. He had served between 1841 and 1843 as secretary of the U.S. legation in Mexico City. Upon his return he published Mexico As It Was and As It Is (1844) and later wrote extensively about the war, particularly for the Southern Quarterly Review, then edited by his friend Simms. These writings were assimilated into a two-volume work of 1851, Mexico, Aztec, Spanish, and Republican, one of the more considerable accomplishments of Southern historicism. It was self-consciously an attempt to establish a longer perspective on Mexican culture, founded upon the best old and most useful recent authorities: ‘‘It is perhaps one of the most difficult duties of a historian, who desires to present a faithful picture of a remote age, to place himself in such a position as to draw the moral from his story with the justice to the people and the deeds he has described,’’ Mayer begins a chapter on Cortes. The historian must forget himself and the culture that made him, and instead ‘‘endeavor to make himself a man and an actor in the age of which he writes.’’ He must learn sympathy, just and impartial, with the past ‘‘and estimate the motives of his fellow beings in the epoch he describes.’’ He must judge historical actors ‘‘not by the standard of advanced Christian civilization under which he has been educated, but by the scale of enlightened opinion which was then acknowledged by the most respectable and intellectual classes of society.’’ 127 All this was in the spirit of Leopold von Ranke, an author whose Fursten und Volker was cited in the bibliography with which Mayer prefaced his book, an author who came 125. Ernest McPherson Lander Jr., Reluctant Imperialists: Calhoun, the South Carolinians, and the Mexican War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 66–67, quoting Thompson, 5 February 1847, in National Intelligencer, reprinted 12 March 1847 in the Greenville Mountaineer. 126. Lander, Reluctant Imperialists, 154–55; Thompson, Recollections of Mexico, 235. 127. Brantz Mayer, Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican: A Historical, Geographical, Political, Statistical and Social Account of That Country from the Period of the Invasion by the Spaniards to the Present Time: With a View of the Ancient Aztec Empire and Civilization; a Historical Sketch of the Late War; and Notices of New Mexico and California (1851; reprint, Hartford: S. Drake, 1853), 1:75.

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naturally to the son of a German immigrant.128 But Mayer knew some of the limits of historicism. At one point, he lamented the want of original sources about pre-Columbian culture and praised the utility of such evidence, however prejudiced. Any such source came ‘‘warm and breathing with the vitality of the beings in whose presence and from whose persons it [was] drawn.’’ By comparison, histories were ‘‘cold mosaics, made up by skilful artizans, from the disjointed chips which they are forced to discover, harmonize, and polish, amid the discordant materials left by a hundred writers.’’ These works might ‘‘reanimate the past and bring back its scenes, systems and people, with wonderful freshness,’’ but were nonetheless ‘‘but mere restorations,’’ things with ‘‘an electrical instead of a natural life.’’ 129 The historian, in short, was Victor Frankenstein. The most striking features of Mayer’s Mexico are completeness and patience. It was common enough to be interested in the period of the Conquest, whose romance had been so successfully narrated by Prescott. There were antiquarian travel books about the pre-Columbian period, especially those by John Lloyd Stephens. There were contemporary works, like those by Poinsett and Thompson, on modern Mexican society. No American had tried to bring these matters together in a sustained, detailed historical narrative. And no one, in any language, had provided a connected history of colonial Mexico. As Mayer himself noted, with justifiable pride, ‘‘The complete Viceroyal history of Mexico is now for the first time presented to the world in the English language, while, in Spanish, no single author has ever attempted it continuously.’’ 130 The chronological balance of the first volume betrayed his interests: twelve chapters on the Conquest, two retrospective chapters on the Aztecs, sixteen chapters on the colonial period, seven on the Mexican revolution and its aftermath, ten on the war with the United States. His second volume was synchronic, an analysis of Mexico’s geography, demography, economy, Church, and constitution, to which was added a description, with their antiquities, of its various provinces, including those now annexed to the United States, California and New Mexico. Mexico, Aztec, Spanish, and Republican is not a work of grace, though it often has a rough force and an analytical intelligence by no means conventional. Mayer was by trade a journalist, used to quick work. Indeed his Mexico came close to being a compilation, being replete with long extracts from his sources. And, despite valiant efforts to the contrary, he narrated Mexico with the United States much in mind. This was, indeed, part of his book’s inapt 128. Ibid., 3–4; in his preface, he notes that these books have been consulted in his own library and that of the Mexican Legation in Washington. 129. Ibid., 100. 130. Ibid., 2.

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strength, for his history of colonial Mexico was a mimickry of the history of British North America, suffused with a sense that colonial experience formed the national identity that independence ought to have culminated, but could not create. (Inapt, because strictly Spain never had an empire or colonies; rather, there were a series of principalities governed by a single king and his viceroys, which might be European or American or Asian, indifferently, and hence Castile and Mexico had the same status.)131 For Mayer, Mexico was the United States gone wrong, or rather, with insufficient preconditions for going right. He had the usual excoriation of Roman Catholicism’s effect on Mexican culture and a pointed catalog of its huge ecclesiastical establishment, though, as a Marylander, Mayer was differently scathing. For his account of the Church in Mexico as It Was and as It Is he had been rebuked by Father Augustine Verot of the St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. In his revised reflections, Mayer was at unconvincing pains to proclaim his want of bigotry, and to distinguish between what the Church might be or was elsewhere, and what it had wrought in Mexico.132 As for the indigenous population, Aztec civilization was deemed to have bequeathed a people whom Mayer found to be ‘‘commonly indolent and often vicious.’’ Long subjection had created in them ‘‘an Arab fatalism,’’ a culture of dependency, a reliance upon chance as a maker of fortune.133 In this, Mayer was partially dissenting from Francisco Clavigero, the eighteenth-century Jesuit founder of Mexican history, who had been at pains to found the Mexican sense of identity upon a community shared between natives and creoles, which grew out of the American environment.134 For Clavigero, the origins of this identity were therefore pre-Columbian; the Aztecs had built an ancient world out of which a modern Mexico had emerged. Mayer’s title, Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, acknowledges this connected succession, not least in adopting the incorrect term Aztec for pre-Columbian society, a coining for which Clavigero had been most responsible.135 Clavigero, though 131. Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 3. 132. Mayer, Mexico, 2:141. On Verot, see Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John England, First Bishop of Charleston (1786–1842) (New York: The America Press, 1927), 1:596. Mayer thought Catholicism intrinsically hostile to modernity, since the former’s principal doctrine was unity and discipline, and Mayer saw tolerant multiplicity as the essence of the modern world: see Mayer, Mexico, 2:161. 133. Mayer, Mexico, 2:22, 23. 134. Clavigero distinguished between the patria, Mexico, and the nacion, the racial inheritance of Spain; on this, see ‘‘From Noble Savages to Savage Nobles: the Criollo Uses of the Amerindian Past,’’ in Pagden, Spanish Imperialism, 98. 135. Ibid., 104. However, Clavigero’s history is of ancient Mexico and is mostly silent about viceregal Mexico.

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he had noted the later degradation of natives, did not attribute this to native incapacity, but to social conditions riveted upon them by conquerors whose actions produced ‘‘a miserable servile life.’’ 136 Mayer, too, sympathetically asserted that circumstances were adverse, that conquest had violently destroyed older institutions: ‘‘Their government and laws were overthrown by force; their religion was changed by power; their graven idols, the material emblems of their gods, were ground to dust; their social system was completely overturned; and thus, perfectly annihilated as a nation, in politics, theology, and domestic life or habits, they were, in the end, but wretched outcasts in their own land.’’ 137 Mayer was not, however, impressed by Clavigero’s claim for a shared Mexican identity, or anxious to accept his refutation of the Iberian sneer, ‘‘Who reads a Mexican book?’’ What the Spanish and Creole enslavement of the indigenous population had given planters was a share in their degradation, ‘‘a mere physical life of personal indulgence, or an avaricious devotion to the rapid acquisition of fortune . . . amid the lonely wastes of their large territorial possessions.’’ This was, of course, what (in the United States) Northerners had long said of Southerners. But Mayer saw a difference: ‘‘The planter who resides in a populous nation, or who is enabled to visit easily the capitals of commerce, literature, and art, is a man, who, from his personal independence, culture, and wealth, is usually in our own country to be envied for the peculiar privileges which his station affords him.’’ The American South provided invigorating colleges, city life, and a system of unfree labor that was better, even for the unfree. (Like most Southerners, Mayer felt the 1829 Mexican abolition of slavery had changed little.) American slavery made Africans who were ‘‘sober, careful, faithful,’’ and even respectable, but the Indian, ‘‘who becomes a slave in spite of law,’’ was superstitious, vicious, and servile.138 Or so it seemed from Baltimore. Far beyond Poinsett and even Thompson, Mayer cataloged the racial divisions in Mexican society. Clavigero had thought that multiracialism had helped to create Mexican national identity. Mayer’s many tables were intended to question this contention. In one, ‘‘Indian Tribes or Races in Mexico,’’ arranged by locality, there are the names of 153 different tribal 136. Clavigero, Historia Antigua de Mexico, quoted in Anthony Pagden, ‘‘Identity Formation in Spanish America,’’ in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 76. One of Clavigero’s purposes was to refute the philosophes (Raynal, De Pauw, Buffon) who argued the New World was degenerate: on this, see Charles E. Ronan, S.J., Francisco Javier Clavigero, S.J. (1731–1787), Figure of the Mexican Enlightenment: His Life and Works (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1977), 245–96. 137. Mayer, Mexico, 2:30. 138. Ibid., 34, 35.

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‘‘Travelling in a Litera’’ (From Brantz Mayer, Mexico, Aztec, Spanish, and Republican [1853])

groups. Another is a ‘‘Table of Castes,’’ which has five parts. Part 1 defines ‘‘original races,’’ that is, whites, in turn distinguished into those born in Europe (called gachupines or chapetones) and the native-born (creoles). Part 2 lists the ‘‘Castes of White Race,’’ defined patrilineally: mulatto, mestizo, quarteron, chino-blanco, quintero. Part 3 are the ‘‘Castes of Negro Race’’: zambo-negro, mulatto-oscuro, zambo-chino, zambo, dark mulatto. Part 4 are the ‘‘Castes of Indian Race’’: chino, chino-oscuro, mestizo-claro, chino-cholo, zambo-claro, brown mestizo. Part 5 lists those of ‘‘Mulatto Corruption’’: the offspring of mulatto fathers and mothers who are zamba, mestiza, or china. ‘‘This tabular statement exhibits at a glance,’’ Mayer helpfully concluded, ‘‘the mongrel corruptions of the human race in Mexico, and presents an interesting subject for students of physiology and ethnology.’’ 139 Race helped to explain why ‘‘the world has advanced in commerce, manufactures, science, literature and arts, but Mexico has remained comparatively fixed in the midst of a stagnant semi-civilization.’’ She had failed in war and military organization, clung to an intolerant religion, sustained a proliferating and inefficient legal system, wasted resources, sunk into debt, and made 139. Ibid., 37–40. Such a table is to be found in Johann Jakob von Tschudi, Travels in Peru, During the Years 1838–1842 on the Coast, and in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, Into the Primeval Forests, trans. Thomasina Ross (London: Bogue, 1847). The table is reproduced and discussed in Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 175–82.

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Mexican society (From Brantz Mayer, Mexico, Aztec, Spanish, and Republican [1853])

a mockery of republican and constitutional government. When transferred to the United States, Texas and California had been invigorated into modern prosperity, almost at a stroke. Why? Mayer quoted Don Francisco Lerdo, who had observed in 1847, ‘‘In Mexico, there neither is nor can there be what is called national spirit, because there is no nation.’’ ‘‘This, perhaps,’’ Mayer glossed, ‘‘is the key to Mexican decadence. The national spirit is centrifugal, if any thing can strictly be called national when citizen is armed against citizen.’’ To prove it, Mayer turned to statistics. Mexico had 7,626,831 inhabitants. Of these, 4.3 millions were Indians. Two millions were ‘‘mixed bloods or negroes.’’ There were but one million white people, and of these ‘‘not many more than seven hundred and forty thousand are to be regarded as either educated or at all instructed.’’ Upon such ‘‘an exceedingly small white civilized nation,’’ Mayer believed, no republic could rest and function.140 Unlike the American colonies in 1776, Mexico lacked a people and had only the ‘‘discordant and heterogeneous materials of races, characters, politics and purposes.’’ ‘‘a people is not a mere aggregation of human beings,’’ Mayer insisted. ‘‘A nation, in the true sense of nationality, is only a great family, for whose strength and power it is necessary that all its individual members should be intimately united by the bonds of interest, sympathy and affection. Such a nation may form a government, but it is difficult for a government to form 140. Mayer, Mexico, 2:155, 75.

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such a nation.’’ Unlike the Mexicans, the Americans had not required a social revolution in 1776. Its army had been frugal, its treasury too small to prompt corruption, and no one had wished to ‘‘fall into the error of amalgamation with Indians and negroes.’’ Instead, Americans had been ‘‘controlled by reason and not governed by passion or instincts. We had nothing but liberty and space; soil and freedom.’’ The English had occupied the land and developed it, the Spanish had only exploited it. Elsewhere, this opinion was shared by Mayer’s friend, William Gilmore Simms, who took a marked interest in the Spanish colonial experience.141 By the American annexation of Texas, Mexico stood on the borders of the South. Racial complexity produced contradictions that made her seem manageable to Southerners. The Caribbean, to the contrary, produced more volatile emotions, being closer and more familial. Once the South had been, less south of the North, more north of the Caribbean. The plantations of the British Empire, based upon slavery and the staple crops of sugar and tobacco, had been a world that stretched from Trinidad to the Chesapeake. Within this world, there had been extensive movement, not least for the slaves who were often captured in Africa, sent to the West Indies, then transferred to the mainland. South Carolina had been settled from Barbados. After independence, this relationship changed. Albeit porous, trade barriers were created. Above all, the status of slavery changed. The French Revolution swept the institution away in the French West Indies, a measure briefly reversed by Napoleon. The British abolished it in 1833, and in Jamaica launched an experiment in apprenticeships that Southerners cynically monitored. In Cuba, however, slavery lingered powerfully, even retaining the slave trade. But the emotional focus of Southern attitudes lay in Haiti, in the Saint-Domingue which had fallen to a slave revolt of ominous ferocity, a cataclysm which had sent to the mainland a flood of nervous and angry French refugees, often bringing their reluctant slaves, the former pointing to the possibility of butchery if Southern vigilance was not maintained, the latter remembering the possibility of freedom. To Louisiana alone, there came many refugees (1,887 whites, 2,060 free blacks, 2,113 slaves).142 This was a lesson the South was eager to learn and sel141. Cf. WGS, The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence. An Oration, Delivered before the Erosophic Society of the University of Alabama, December 13, 1842, with a preface by David Moltke-Hansen (1843; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: Southern Studies Program, University of South Carolina, 1980). Simms’s Spanish tastes are observed by Charles S. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 47–54. 142. Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 47.

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dom tired of reiterating. Sixty years on, Louisa McCord found the lesson still pertinent: ‘‘As the ocean to the wave—as the rill to the torrent—as the zephyr to the whirlwind—would any such scenes, if possible among us, be those to Hayti, fearful as they were; and as ocean’s gulf to a rain-puddle, would be the ensuring barbarism.’’ 143 This diaspora brought more than fear, it brought talent.144 Anne-Marie Talvande taught generations of South Carolinian girls, most famously Mary Chesnut. In New Orleans, the most sustained of French newspapers, L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans and the Courrier de la Louisiane, were both founded by Sainte-Domingan refugees, François Delaup and J. C. de Sainte-Romes. Jules d’Avezac founded the Collège d’Orléans in 1812, and later taught Charles Gayarré. Louis Guillaume Valentine du Bourg created St. Mary’s Academy in Baltimore, as well as the St. Louis Academy (the ancestor of St. Louis University) when later he was bishop of ‘‘Louisiana and the Floridas.’’ Refugees were especially important to the development of the theater and opera in New Orleans and Charleston. In the law, Louis Casimir Moreau-Lislet played a vital role in the establishment of the Civil Code in Louisiana.145 His greatnephew, the pianist and composer Louis Gottschalk, was to sail past Haiti in 1857, at night, on his way to St. Thomas. While the other passengers slept, he went on deck and looked at the island’s dark mountains. Later, he set down his thoughts: ‘‘Can anyone be astonished that the mere name of Santo Domingo awakens somber memories in me. . . ? Our dwellings burned, our properties devastated, our fortunes annihilated—such were the first effects of that war between two races who had in common only that implacable hatred which each nourished for the other. Can anyone, however, be astonished at the retaliation exercised by the Negroes on their old masters?’’ 146 For Haiti was a flicker of hope for Southern slaves. Gabriel Prosser, who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1800, had been partially educated in the possibility of success by Haitian slaves, carrying their ‘‘mischief ’’ (as James Monroe put it) into the quarters. When Denmark Vesey, who had been born on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, planned his insurrection in 1822, it was to Haiti that he planned to escape, a place where he had once been a slave. But 143. ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’ (1853), in Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, ed. Richard C. Lounsbury, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 271. References to Haiti are ubiquitous, but see also GF, ‘‘Free Negroes in Hayti,’’ DBR 27 (November 1859): 526–49, and JWM, The Relation between the Races at the South (Charleston, S.C.: Evans & Cogswell, 1861). 144. I am summarizing material in Hunt, Slumbering Volcano, 37–83. 145. William B. Hatcher, Edward Livingston: Jeffersonian Republican and Jacksonian Democrat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940), 241–42; Hunt, Slumbering Volcano, 61. 146. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Notes of a Pianist, ed. Jeanne Behrend (1881; reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 12.

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there was a more peaceable route to Port-au-Prince for free blacks, since Haiti served as a more local and cheaper Liberia for colonizationists. The Haitian government made concerted efforts to attract Americans, an effort in which they were encouraged by institutions like the North Carolina Manumission Society. Several thousand migrated in the 1820s. The experience was mostly disillusioning, but not everyone on the mainland knew that. The idea of black liberty in the Western hemisphere remained potently alive in the name of Haiti. In the 1850s William Wells Brown would celebrate the achievement of a black republic.147 For whites, migration was northward. George Tucker, for example, was born in Bermuda, where his father Daniel co-owned stores and a fleet of seven ships.148 When twenty, the son came to the mainland United States for its wider opportunities and mingled with his kin, the many and talented Tuckers of Virginia; after marrying well, in time, he became an unsuccessful lawyer, a planter, a politician, eventually a professor at the University of Virginia. In 1846, he moved to Philadelphia, where he lived for the rest of his life. His autobiography, written in 1858, captures the way in which the United States and the South seemed in his childhood to brood, immense and metropolitan, over the scattered islands: ‘‘I had long felt that the little Island on which I was born was a sort of imprisonment which I was most impatient to break through, and in my solitary rambles on the sea shore, or in the narrow woods to be found there, I indulged my fancy on the various novelties I was to meet, the acquaintances I was to make, and the scenes I was to mingle in.’’ 149 But, in general, the Caribbean became more remote for Southerners as the antebellum years proceeded, unprominent in itineraries even if it became more important in political imaginations. A very few realized that a wise policy for the future of Southern slavery might require a comparative analysis of slavery in the Caribbean; John A. Campbell, at least, did.150 In such an analysis, Cuba would loom large. But for most, Cuba meant illness or geopolitics. The Spanish island became a place that a few, eccentrically, went for their health. J. G. F. Wurdemann of Charleston visited, ‘‘flying from death’’ 147. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 45–49; Lionel Henry Kennedy and Thomas Parker, eds., The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), xi; Hunt, Slumbering Volcano, 147–88; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 28–31; William Wells Brown, St. Domingo, Its Revolutions and Its Patriots (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855). 148. Robert Colin McLean, George Tucker, Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 3–4. 149. ‘‘Autobiography of George Tucker, 1775–1861,’’ Bermuda Historical Quarterly 18, nos. 3 & 4 (Autumn/Winter 1961): 94. 150. See John A. Campbell, ‘‘Slavery in the United States,’’ SQR 12 ( July 1847): 91–134.

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as Simms put it, with some regularity in the early 1840s and published Notes on Cuba in 1844.151 Robert Wilson Gibbes did the same in the late 1850s and published Cuba for Invalids in 1860.152 But Poinsett’s pause there, on his return from Mexico in 1823, struck the more important note; his account is unpreoccupied by Cuba itself, but passionate when discussing its strategic importance: ‘‘Cuba is not only the key of the Gulf of Mexico, but of all the maritime frontier south of Savannah, and some of our highest interests, political and commercial, are involved in its fate.’’ Above all, Cuba should be kept out of the hands of any great naval power.153 There was a growing interest by later Southerners in the annexation of Cuba and the prospect of turning the Caribbean into a Southern lake. This interest sometimes turned to filibustering action, as when William Walker of Tennessee seized Nicaragua and became its president from 1856 to 1857, though with an expedition in which Northerners outnumbered Southerners. At the urging of Pierre Soulé, who visited Nicaragua in August 1856, and (probably) John H. Wheeler, the North Carolinian who was American Minister, Walker even reinstated slavery.154 So, the Caribbean had to do with the cold necessities of power, real or imagined, it being so far from God and so close to the South. From all of these travels to Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Southerners took no very clear lessons. The act of traveling acknowledged connection, but also was intended to refine difference, and individuals decided for themselves where the emphasis should lie. Still, in general, they learned to be competitive with the northern United States, as a matter of power and survival; this was a family quarrel, so alternately bitter and forgiving, and usually uncomprehending, because in a family everyone presumes knowledge of other family members but few try to acquire it. Oddly, Southerners’ European experience led to better understandings or, at least, knowledge, because with Europe the conflict had ceased to be political, once the matter of British, French, and Spanish power in North America had been violently, fiscally, or diplomatically settled. The issue became cultural, which for intellectuals was important enough, but seldom urgent and so available for measured reflection. However, in Europe, Southerners were most torn between their identity as postcolonials who wished the Atlantic to be wide, and their identity as migrant Europeans, who wished for a comity with the old places, the old stones. 151. WGS to William Cullen Bryant, 5 May 1849, in Oliphant, Simms Letters, 2:509. 152. Robert W. Gibbes, Cuba for Invalids (New York: W. A. Townsend, 1860). 153. Poinsett, Notes on Mexico, 220–21. 154. On this, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), and Robert E. May, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

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In Asia and Africa, matters were simpler, for there European and Southern purposes ran together, however much there might have been subtle disagreements over how imperialism might be administered. In the Americas, on the other hand, what might have been a family relationship between societies which shared European origins, as well as the postcolonial experience and the brutal business of slaveholding, was almost never so. This lack of sympathy arose, partly for religious reasons, mostly because Latin America was seen not as a partner in imperialism, but as an object of imperialism, whether formal (as in Texas, Mexico, Nicaragua, or Cuba) or informal (almost everywhere else). If Southerners had known the Americas to their southward as well as they had known Europe, they might have known themselves better. But the power of Europe, political and cultural, represented not only what Southerners had been but what they wished to emulate, even to transcend, so their minds (and their bodies) went more often to Paris than to Rio de Janeiro. There was a greater fascination in desire. But what sorts of beings existed in the South to express desire? As will be seen next, this too was not easy to decide.

book two


ll the Tribes,
ll the Productions of Nature

Chapter Five

Types of Mankind

Southerners thought much about how mankind might be intelligibly classified, and where they themselves stood in the order of nature. What was a race, a sex, a people, a class? Where did these things come from, how did they work, how might patterns be discerned and used? These were questions that had been inherited. For several centuries, the irruption of Europeans into the wider world had produced a torrent of knowledge—social, botanical, biological, temporal—which had posed severe problems. Latterly, much in the projects of the Enlightenment had been implicated in ordering this knowledge, with many modern disciplines invented or reinvented in order to cope with it.1 Ethnology, historicism, evolutionary theory, the study of mythology, much of modern science itself—all flowed from this great task of comprehension, which involved the subjection of particularity to a greater order.2 From Las Casas onwards, figures like Locke, Linnaeus, Buffon, and Voltaire had struggled to keep pace, to reason out what early American societies, or Peruvian plants, or gazelles, or Confucianism said about God’s order and man’s nature. In this huge endeavor, much was done with little thought to or anticipation of the implications that might be drawn by others, elsewhere in Paris, Title from Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854). 1. See, for example Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnolo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 2. On this, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); also, Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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Edinburgh, Stockholm, or Charleston. The flower sent by Commissary Alexander Garden to Linnaeus in Sweden, the New Hampshire moose presented by Jefferson to the Parisian savant, the Rosetta Stone plundered by Napoleon’s armies in Egypt, all these might occasion understandings of unexpectedly dark significance. Things had arrived in disorder from the corners of the world. Men in periwigs had unpacked them and tried to understand. They sat in Baroque libraries, they put artifacts in elegantly wrought cases, they drew patterns on manuscripts. They seldom saw the world they sought to classify, the men and things they chose to denominate. Josiah Nott of Mobile understood a part of this process, in his own dramatic terms, even in 1851. He explained it to the readers of De Bow’s Review. Once, historians had ‘‘treated mankind as a unit,’’ had tried ‘‘to unravel the machinery of this ‘mighty maze’ by a few broad general principles, applicable to all,’’ which might ‘‘make all great, good and happy.’’ Now, this delusion was dead. ‘‘Now we begin to talk of races.’’ Why? Because ‘‘outward and accumulating circumstances . . . are directing the attention of science to new and unexplored fields.’’ The races, ‘‘since the discovery of the mariner’s compass,’’ had been brought into contact and ‘‘mixed up.’ As a result, races ‘‘have been compelled to study each other; and ethnological inquiries have been forced upon modern civilized nations—they have become a positive necessity.’’ 3 But races were but part of the wider problem of the division of nature, which concerned even those who busied themselves with collecting flowers. Stephen Elliott of Charleston understood this. He was perhaps the most dispassionate, if the least worldly of his city’s intellectuals. He was by profession a doctor, but also a banker, being president of the Bank of the State of South Carolina. Somewhat casually, he was a founder or co-founder of institutions, first the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina in 1807, then the state’s medical college in 1823, finally the Southern Review itself in 1828.4 But, by avocation, he was a botanist. His Sketch of the Botany of SouthCarolina and Georgia, which appeared in two definitive volumes between 1821 and 1824, was the most considerable contribution made by a Southern botanist to learning. He was very much part of the international scientific community. Visiting botanists would call upon him, like the Abbé Correa da Serra, who came on a Southern trip with Francis Walker Gilmer in 1815. ‘‘He was much pleased however with a Mr. Elliot [sic], who is a Man of knowledge, & a good Botanist,’’ Alice DeLancey Izard reported to Margaret Izard Manigault, after the Abbé got back to Philadelphia. Elliott’s scanty surviving 3. Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘Diversity of the Human Race,’’ DBR 10 (February 1851): 114. 4. J. Mauldin Lesesne, The Bank of the State of South Carolina: A General and Political History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), 21–34.

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papers include a letter in 1825 from Franz Carl Mertens of Bremen, author of the Mémoire sur plusieurs espèces de Fucus, nouvelles ou peu connues, observée dans la collection du Museum (1819) and coeditor of the Deutschlands Flora, who presented Elliott with Martens’s latest book: ‘‘I wish you would accept it, as my acknowledgment of your eminent merit in the successful task you have undertaken towards the improvement of the Science in your highly valuable Sketch of the botany of South Carolina, and as a small proof of the gratitude I owe you for a great number of highly obliging favours you have bestowed upon me.’’ Elliott seems to have known André Michaux well, perhaps gave him hospitality in Charleston and, in return, for many years Michaux sent from Paris books for the Charleston Library Society, of which Elliott was president from 1816 to 1826. After Elliott’s death in 1830, Robert Habersham of Savannah, who would ride of a morning to collect flowers identified for him by Elliott’s book, remembered of him: ‘‘Mr. Stephen Elliott who was a good Botanist though with very little time to attend to it, was continually receiving letters for information from Botanists in Scotland England Germany France & even Russia. In a late visit to his family I saw numberless presents he had received from them in return for southern plants pressed,—on information sent to them.’’ 5 Elliott wrote widely for the Southern Review on travel, contemporary history, politics, and botany. In 1828 and 1829, he wrote two essays on the philosophy of nature, which explain with great clarity how some Southerners approached the matter of classification, not only of flora and fauna, but of ‘‘man in society.’’ Elliott had a sharp sense of the connectedness and fecundity of nature, and the problem this posed for modern knowledge. Like most natural scientists, he was a Christian impressed by God’s prodigal handiwork. The earth, the air, the oceans, the human mind, the planets, ‘‘all are parts of one system, productions of one power, creations of one intellect, the offspring of Him, by whom all that is inert and inorganic in creation was formed, and from whom all that have life derive their being.’’ This fabric was teeming, complex, and waste5. ADI to MIM, 17 December 1815, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Mertens to Stephen Elliott, 24 October 1825, item cataloged as ‘‘X973/C72/v8/p90,’’ ColU; Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Preface,’’ to A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Charleston Library Society (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1826), vi; Robert Habersham to Dr. George Shattuck, 27 May 1832, George Shattuck Papers, MassHS. Other, younger men were less impressed with Elliott’s legacy. Michael Tuomey wrote to Lewis R. Gibbes in 1844, ‘‘I tell you what is much wanted [is] a new edition of Elliott. You are the only man in the State that can do it—Leave out the Latin—throw it into the Nat[ura]l method, introduce Torrey & Gray’s nomenclature and you will do a good service to science in your state.’’ See Tuomey to Gibbes, 27 July 1844, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC, reprinted in Lewis S. Dean, ed., The Papers of Michael Tuomey (Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 2001), 45.

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ful, yet it had its Newtonian laws, definite and immutable. But, for Elliott like most scientists, God was more a prefatory assumption than a subject of study. The scientist was not given the task of contemplating ‘‘the seraphim and cherubim that surround the throne of God himself,’’ but something more worldly and lower, ‘‘the human race’’ and ‘‘the rude and inorganic materials of which that globe is composed, and of the living forms that repose on its bosom, and derive support from its teeming and productive surface.’’ 6 The problem was that the pace of science was accelerating: ‘‘In the rapid increase of knowledge which has distinguished the close of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth century, every department of science has felt the animating influence of improvement.’’ Linnaeus once knew of 10,000 species of vegetable life, but now there were 100,000 ‘‘and new species, we might almost say new genera if not families, are annually added to the long catalogue of recorded names.’’ 7 Hence classification was the great driving force of science. Natural history needed ‘‘a comprehensive, complete and accurate knowledge of every form and substance, every structure and combination, every principle and power in the material world.’’ It was natural history’s purpose ‘‘to group, to arrange all of these objects, all of these modifications of being on such principles, that the individuals of each group shall be connected by common qualities, by composition, by structure, by habit, and, as an almost necessary consequence, by their properties and uses.’’ 8 As knowledge accumulated, so the subdisciplines of inquiry multiplied. Zoology was no longer enough, but biologists specialized in quadrupeds, birds, fish, or insects. The results were taxing: ‘‘The imagination is almost become wearied with contemplating the boundless variety of organized beings, and the variety scarcely less boundless of habits, instincts, and qualities.’’ 9 Elliott distinguished between natural and artificial systems of classification, the former being the procedure of an earlier age, the latter of the modern. Once naturalists had ‘‘objected to system altogether, and proposed that the objects of nature should be considered individually and in detail.’’ In this natural system, they looked at ‘‘the agreements and harmonies of internal structure,’’ and ‘‘all the analogies of organized beings,’’ so that one could ‘‘place together those which agree in all their important and fundamental characters.’’ But this called for an immense scale of cooperation among scien6. Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ SR 2 (November 1828): 409, 410. 7. Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Classification of Plants,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 466, 467. 8. Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ 413. On this, cf. Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, reprint, 1793–94 (Paris: Boivin, 1933), 217–39, which argued that classification, in the midst of the explosion of knowledge, made possible the retention of reason and order. 9. Elliott, ‘‘Classification of Plants,’’ 468.

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tists. This was no longer possible; too much was known, too much to be known. No mind, no group could cope with so much. ‘‘Who could pursue or connect his own studies without those general views which associate together multitudes of individuals by some common characters?’’ So began, with Linnaeus, the modern era of artificial classification, which looked only on ‘‘the peculiarities or discrepancies of external form.’’ Linnaeus hoped that eventually it might be possible to work back towards nature, the internal. But, for now, progress lay in the observance of the external. As Elliott saw it, this habit of thought was fundamental to natural history since about 1750: ‘‘It was only then that the discoveries of the enterprizing naturalist could be rendered intelligible; that his researches could pervade all nature; that the discrepancies between objects nearly allied and strongly resembling each other, could be clearly pointed out, that the connexion between those widely separated, could be traced and determined.’’ So opened the floodgates: ‘‘Year after year added to the multitudes already seen and distinguished.’’ There was ‘‘inexhaustible abundance,’’ a ‘‘tide of discovery,’’ ‘‘unabated momentum.’’ So began science as a great cooperative discipline, a multicelled organism, no longer dominated by single minds. So man might secure his dominion over nature, ‘‘a real dominion, an efficient sovereignty over the earth.’’ 10 But Stephen Elliott did not believe in evolution; at one point, he dismissed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck as ‘‘visionary . . . incongruous if not absurd.’’ The recent theories that life began simply, long ago, and had grown progressively complex, ‘‘extending as the wants, varying as the desires of each successive race or generation should direct its vital powers,’’ he rejected.11 For Elliott, nature was not a chain, but a web—the image had been Buffon’s 12—‘‘so wonderfully woven, as to form but one work; yet displaying in every part radiating centres of distinct circles; some closely allied to adjacent circles, some so slightly attached that we can with difficulty trace the film that unites them to their fellows.’’ This was the final purpose of science: ‘‘We must know all the tribes, all the productions of nature, before we can comprehend and exhibit accurately their mutual connexion and dependence.’’ 13 However, though knowledge might be rapidly accumulating, the dizzying complexity of nature herself was fairly static. For 3000 years, ever since man started describing the animal kingdom, no mutations have been witnessed. 10. Ibid., 470, 471, 473–74; Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ 412. 11. Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ 427, 426. 12. William Henry Longton, ‘‘Some Aspects of Intellectual Activity in Ante-Bellum South Carolina, 1830–1860: An Introductory Study’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1969), 31, citing Francis C. Haber, The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 140. 13. Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ 416.

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The camel and the horse were now what they had been in the days of Moses: ‘‘Can the leopard change his spots? was asked many ages ago, and the leopard has not yet changed his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin. And yet it may be remarked, that peculiarities of colour are among the most variable and fugitive properties of organized bodies.’’ 14 Yet Elliott knew the fossil record. Refusing evolution, he still knew about change. Static forms did not mean constant ones. ‘‘When we examine the now existing forms, and compare them with the remains of the extinct races which are still so perfectly preserved, it becomes obvious that there have been successive creations.’’ (By ‘‘races,’’ he here meant not merely human races, but all the groups of nature.) Early species had died, new ones had appeared, perhaps ‘‘to meet the varying temperature and the revolutions of the globe itself.’’ If this was not so, how could one explain the absence of recent forms from ‘‘the more ancient strata’’? A species, once created, might vary slightly. But one might examine ‘‘the great living book of nature, under a strong persuasion that we are studying the permanent and enduring forms of creation, not the varying, the inconsequential results of chance and accident.’’ Elliott looked around and saw ‘‘beings almost innumerable, forms endless in their variety, creatures infinitely diversified in their habits and their pursuits.’’ Thus Elliott refused the environment as an explanation for the plasticity with which species and individuals varied. Underneath all the movement was form, stillness. One might only be able to observe the externals of nature, but they expressed what was internal. The butterfly, the caterpillar, the bee, the wasp, the salmon, ‘‘all yield an unqualified obedience to the laws of their instinctive lives. These laws operate with unceasing force—they are permanent and unchangeable. They have governed the living tribes of nature since their existence began; they will control them while their races exist. Chance can have no agency in principles so stable and so uniform.’’ Only man, Elliott thought, had gained some exemption from this remorselessly ‘‘blind and uncontrollable instinct.’’ Only man had ‘‘the awful responsibility of free-will,’’ had reason, which made him a ‘‘wonderful anomaly in the system of life.’’ That being so, natural history had an obligation to investigate man himself, ‘‘his own position, to ascertain his connexion with the past, with the present, and with the future.’’ 15 Elliott nowhere mentioned the races of man. He scarcely needed to. Even in his silence on this score, his was a natural science for the South, progressive in knowledge, eager for understanding, convinced that reason would 14. Ibid., 428. 15. Ibid., 429–31.

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discover stability; knowing movement, wanting order. His was a mode of understanding that offered his blunter successors, less interested in plants and butterflies, more drawn to the shape of human bodies, an entry point. But Elliott’s faith in the explanatory power of physical forms was consistent with a widespread stoic pessimism in the nineteenth century. His refusal of Lamarck, though much driven by Elliott’s theodicy, spoke also to a reluctance to trust too much to man. After all, Lamarck offered the quintessence of free will as the key to the domain of nature. Elliott wanted the reassurance of free will, not its ‘‘awful responsibility.’’ Such pessimism was more marked in the Europe that had experienced the French Revolution, perhaps, but even Southerners who inherited the American Revolution had known enough uncertainty and confronted enough necessity to be drawn to this darker view, characteristic of the age. The logic Alexis de Tocqueville tried in 1853 to explain to the Comte de Gobineau: The last century had an exaggerated and a rather puerile confidence in the power that man exercises over himself and in that of peoples over their own destiny. That was an error of the time; a noble error, after all, which, if it brought about the commission of many follies, led to the accomplishment of some very great things, besides which posterity will find us very small. The fatigue of revolutions, the tedium of emotions, the failure of so many generous ideas and so many vast hopes, all this has now precipitated us in the opposite excess. After having believed ourselves capable of reforming ourselves, we believe ourselves incapable of reforming ourselves; after having had an excessive pride, we have fallen into a humility that is not less excessive; we believed ourselves capable of everything, today we believe ourselves capable of nothing, and we like to believe that from now on struggle and effort will be useless and that our blood, our muscles, and our nerves will always be stronger than our will and our virtue. This simply is the great malady of our time; a malady completely opposed to that of our fathers. Your book, however you arrange things, favors it instead of combatting it. . . .16 So, to be preoccupied with bodies betrayed a want of confidence in minds. But what were the bodies and where did they come from? Broadly speaking, the answers to these questions derived from two intellectual traditions, which were converging upon Southern thought: the British tradition of ethnicity 16. Tocqueville to Gobineau, 20 December 1853, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche, trans. Roger Boesche and James Toupin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 303.

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and the Continental scientific tradition of physical anthropology. The latter better addressed the philosophical problem, so it would be well to start there. The modern conception of race began, mostly with the biologists and botanists. Their driving question, at first, had been the problem of human nature. All the accumulating evidence had begun to point to a dizzying variety of human cultures, beliefs, and customs. Traditional Christianity, upon which most science had rested and to which all science was held responsible, said this diversity should not exist. Yet it did exist. Why? Most in the eighteenth century turned to the environment, the palpable fact that climate, landscape, flora, and fauna, varied in the plenitude of God’s inventiveness. David Hume, thinking on national characteristics, was in a minority when inclining to prefer as an explanation for this, what he called, moral causes, ‘‘the nature of the government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours, and such like circumstances.’’ As to physical causes, ‘‘those qualities of the air and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone and habit of the body, and giving a particular complexion,’’ he was doubtful. Men did not, he asserted, ‘‘owe any thing of their temper or genius to the air, food, climate.’’ But he knew that others thought otherwise, and plausibly, ‘‘since we find, that these circumstances have an influence over every other animal. . . . It may be asked, why not the same with men?’’ 17 Most declined Hume’s logic, in this as in much else. Montesquieu, Buffon, Jefferson, all looked to the environment, to climate, to the plasticity of circumstances, which introduced variety into a single human race. Lord Kames, exuberantly, insisted that variety was so profound and recorded time so little that it was only rational to assume that God, to people His Creation, had scattered separately created pairs of human beings across the globe, a profligacy which was dispensed after the Tower of Babel.18 Voltaire, too, thought that blacks might be a separate species, partly because he liked impishly to challenge those who believed in the Garden of Eden.19 How the presumption that human diversity arose from environment gave way to the axiom that it was encoded in bodies can best be understood by looking at the case of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, with whom George 17. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (1777; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 198–202. 18. Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (1945; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 64–66. 19. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 44; John R. Baker, Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 19–20.

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Henry Calvert studied in the 1820s, the man whom many intellectual Southerners took to be the final authority on race. Blumenbach was born in Gotha in 1752, the son of the proctor of a gymnasium. He went to Göttingen to study medicine and approached the ‘‘whimsical and remarkable’’ Christian Wilhelm Büttner, who was lecturing (not something he usually did) on natural history. Büttner had a collection of coins and natural objects, which lay in ‘‘unexampled disorder . . . utterly undistinguished from each other by this most unhandy of men.’’ The university agreeing to acquire these, the young Blumenbach was deputed to arrange for their ordering. Meanwhile, Blumenbach undertook for his doctorate in medicine a dissertation, De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa Liber.20 Blumenbach was then twenty-three, had never then been beyond Germany (and would only ever travel to London through Holland, to Paris, and to Switzerland), had a decent smattering of erudition, a willing heart and mind, and so saw no reason why a Göttingen dissertation, which in its English translation comes to about seventy pages of text, might not settle the matter of humankind. The first edition of Blumenbach’s dissertation was a work founded upon environmentalist presumptions. Near the beginning, he observed that the effects of climate ‘‘seem so great that distinguished men have thought that on this alone depended the different shapes, colour, manners, and institutions of men.’’ With this, he was inclined to agree. As evidence, he discussed horses, cattle, squirrels, even Germans in their development from the ancient to the modern world. But Blumenbach had, even then, grains of doubt. Perhaps climate could not explain all, for there was also ‘‘the mode of life and of bringing up,’’ and there was the troubling issue of hybridity. He sifted through rumor and report about how often hybrids were fertile; he credited some and denied others. Rabbits with hens? Hares with rabbits? A filly born of a cow? A bull and a mare? By the conjecture that bitches could be impregnated by male apes, he was especially convinced: ‘‘One took place in the territory of Schwartzburg; a picture of this hybrid, carefully drawn, is in the possession of Büttner, who very kindly lent it to me.’’ In these musings, Blumenbach was only half a step beyond Othello’s world of wonders, of Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. But he prided himself upon science and was anxious to distance himself from those who had written of ‘‘centaurs, sirens, cynocephali, satyrs, pigmies, giants, hermaphrodites, and other idle creatures of that kind.’’ 21 20. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa Liber: Cum Figuris Aeri Incisis: Naturae Species Ratioque (Göttingen: Abr. Vandenhoeck, 1776). 21. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, ed. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865), 71, 72, 74, 141.

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Nonetheless, Blumenbach’s belief in the power of environment was then so great that he attributed human reason, not to physiognomy, but to upbringing. A man, brought up among wild beasts, was a beast, in society a rational creature: ‘‘Reason . . . may be compared to a developing germ, which in the process of time, and by the accession of a social life and other external circumstances, is as it were developed, formed, and cultivated.’’ But what was man? He was a creature that spoke, was erect, and had a distinct shape, a creature with a ‘‘great occipital foramen,’’ a pelvis, shoulder-blades, flanks, a skeleton, two hands. He was naked and defenseless, having no talons and no hairy hide. He had emotions, although Blumenbach was unsure whether this was a distinction. For it was said that animals could weep from grief, and cats (a footnote attested) were known to purr. But other physical marks were clear. Only human females had a hymen—granted ‘‘perhaps much more for moral reasons, than because it has any physical uses’’—and menstruation was peculiar to them. Büttner had owned some female apes, which Blumenbach had observed, but he never saw a menstrual flux come from one. On the other hand, other animals had a clitoris, ‘‘the obscene organ of brute pleasure.’’ Blumenbach knew this, because he had dissected a ‘‘papio mandril’’ during the preceding winter and found a clitoris of half-an-ounce in weight; he had, more cursorily, looked at a lemur. And so Blumenbach tumbled on, to brains, skulls, teeth, third eyelids, eye muscles, vertebrae.22 Eventually, he stopped to consider the great question, the nearness or distance of man from the apes: ‘‘I have been induced to do this because of the opinions lately expressed by some famous men, who however are illinstructed in natural history and anatomy, but who are not ashamed to say that this ape [the orang-utan] is very nearly allied, and indeed of the same species with themselves.’’ Here a footnote discreetly indicated Jean-BaptisteFrançois Hennebert’s Cours d’histoire naturelle, Rousseau’s Sur l’inégalité parmi les hommes and Essai sur l’origine des langues, and Edward Long’s History of Jamaica.23 Blumenbach was anxious on this point, for he thought the orangutan theory was being used to support those favorable to ‘‘the idea of the plurality of human species.’’ (Footnotes indicated Voltaire and Kames, among others.) The theory derived, Blumenbach thought, not only from a hostility to Scripture, but intellectual laziness: ‘‘For on the first discovery of the Ethiopians, or the beardless inhabitants of America, it was much easier to pronounce them different species than to inquire into the structure of the human body, to consult the numerous anatomical authors and travellers, and carefully to 22. Ibid., 82, 85, 89. 90. 23. Ibid., 94–95. In fact, he is so discreet that no authors’ names are given, save that Rousseau is called ‘‘that good citizen of Geneva.’’

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weigh their good faith or carelessness.’’ Men were too entranced by novelty, too ready to dismiss ‘‘ancient truths.’’ 24 The young man was a close student of the classics, as befitted a German scholar, and habitually mingled modern with ancient sources, Buffon with Pliny. Blumenbach was very anxious to defend the unity of the human species, even while studying the varieties of its ‘‘widely separate nations,’’ whether from southern Africa, Greenland, or Circassia: ‘‘For . . . when the matter is thoroughly considered, you see that all do run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them.’’ 25 Because of this, the definitions of human varieties had been ‘‘arbitrary.’’ Linnaeus had defined four, Oliver Goldsmith six, and so forth. Blumenbach agreed with Linnaeus on four, which was not surprising since Blumenbach had attended Büttner’s lectures, for which the twelfth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae had been the basic text. But Blumenbach felt it helpful to provide a geography for these varieties, as was logical if you made much of environment. These boundaries he defined as: 1) Europe, plus ‘‘Asia this side of the Ganges’’ and ‘‘all the country situated to the north of the Amoor, together with that part of North America, which is nearest both in position and character of the inhabitants’’; 2) Asia beyond the Ganges, plus the islands and Australasia; 3) Africa; and 4) ‘‘the rest of America.’’ So Blumenbach described his varieties first from landscape, which in turn occasioned physiognomy.26 At this point, nearly half way through his dissertation, Blumenbach turned more resolutely to appearance, to bodies. Though he reiterated that ‘‘the whole bodily constitution, the stature, and the colour, are owing almost entirely to climate alone,’’ nonetheless there were the bodies. So he talked about skeletons and skulls, Ethiopians and Germans, plants and animals, of where people were tall, where short, where dark, where black, where red. He pondered the epidermis. He dismissed idle explanations of blackness in Ethiopians, and plumped for ‘‘climate, and the influence of the soil, and the temperature, together with the mode of life.’’ Aristotle had thought this, too. For, 24. Ibid., 98. 25. Ibid., 98–99. Later, when Blumenbach had moved to the classification of races, Herder reiterated this presumption contra-Blumenbach: ‘‘Some . . . have thought fit, to employ the term races for four or five divisions. . . . [But] there are neither four or five races, nor exclusive varieties, on this Earth. Complexions run into each other: forms follow the genetic character: and upon the whole, all are at last but shades of the same great picture, extending through all ages, and over all parts of the Earth.’’ See Johann Gottfried von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. Frank E. Manuel, trans. T. O. Churchill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 7. 26. Blumenbach, Blumenbach Treatises, 99.

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‘‘there is an almost insensible and indefinable transition from the pure white skin of the German lady through the yellow, the red, and the dark nations, to the Ethiopian of the very darkest black, and we may observe this . . . in the space of a few degrees of latitude,’’ from the Bay of Biscay to Granada in Spain, from the northern bank of the Senegal River to the southern. In this process, class mattered, for it affected how individuals were touched by climate: ‘‘The face of the working man or the artizan, exposed to the force of the sun and the weather, differs as much from the cheeks of a delicate female, as the man himself does from the dark American, and he again from the Ethiopian.’’ A European can be blacker than an African, especially when transplanted: ‘‘An Englishman who had spent only three years with the Virginians, became exactly like them in colour, and Smith, his countryman, could only recognize him by his language.’’ 27 By analogy with other hybrids in nature, Blumenbach listed the various names by which the offspring of people of different nations and colors were called: mulattoes, quadroons, and so forth. But this was only so that he could say that, ‘‘colour, whatever be its cause, be it bile, or the influence of the sun, the air, or the climate, is, at all events, an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species.’’ 28 From outward appearance, he moved inward, to the skull. Here too he was anxious to find plasticity. The skull of the newborn infant, he observed, was malleable and so the rearing practices of different nations were important to understand. Germans had wide and compressed skulls, perhaps because they lay on their back in their cradles and were swaddled. Belgians had longer skulls, since they slept on their sides.29 ‘‘Albinus declares that the skulls of the English, the Spanish, and French, are without any peculiarity of structure at all.’’ Thereafter he tumbled out assorted, random observations on skulls, from Hippocrates onwards, roaming eclectically around the globe, before concluding that, ‘‘almost all the diversity of the form of the head in different nations is to be attributed to the mode of life and to art,’’ although he acknowledged there might be merit to Hippocrates’s view that ‘‘with the progress of time art may degenerate into a second nature.’’ 30 From skulls, he moved on, with no very remarkable sense of order, to other physical variations: eyes, hair, feet, breasts, genitals, nails, propensity to different diseases. Throughout, Blumen27. Ibid., 101, 107, 108, 111. 28. Ibid., 113. 29. Later, Louisa McCord was to make fun of Blumenbach’s understanding of childrearing practices: see ‘‘Negro-Mania’’ (1852), in Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, ed. Richard C. Lounsbury, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 234. 30. Blumenbach, Blumenbach Treatises, 115–16, 121.

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bach wandered from humans to animals, from Egyptian mummies to white mice, in his cheerful quest for evidence. In the 1775 dissertation, material appearance was only an epiphenomenon; what mattered was climate and custom, where men lived and what they did, in a world of plasticity and imperceptible gradation. Then Blumenbach gave no names to these human varieties, but merely accorded them a geography. He nowhere spoke of one variety being superior to another. Indeed his 1847 elegist, M. Flourens of the Institut de France, who seems to have been an opponent of the slave trade, was to be adamant that Blumenbach was without prejudice and had been decisive in repudiating Pierre Camper’s assertion that the Negro was close to the orang-utan. This, upon other evidence, is implausible. Still, Flourens’s paraphrase of Blumenbach’s view that the European and African skull and brain was essentially identical was not far off: ‘‘And, besides, what has the brain to do with the matter? The human mind is one. The soul is one. In spite of its misfortunes, the African race has had heroes of all kinds. Blumenbach, who has collected everything in its favour, reckons among it the most humane and the bravest men; authors, learned men, and poets. He had a library entirely composed of books written by negroes.’’ 31 What is evident is that, with great consistency, Blumenbach was anxious to defend the unity of the human race. Nor was he overly preoccupied with human varieties. In a long career, he was interested in many things in the natural order: geology, mineralogy, the bituminous marl-slates of Riegelsdorf, fossils, the teeth of Egyptian mummies, esteemed professors at Göttingen, doctors of various sorts, the eyes of seals, melancholy and suicide among the Swiss. He used to keep a kangaroo in his house.32 In this spirit, his students followed many lines of inquiry; most notable among them was Alexander von Humboldt, who took all the cosmos to be his subject matter. Blumenbach is a good instance of the proposition that method makes conclusion. There had been, among Büttner’s collection, various skulls. In time, Blumenbach would come to collect more, which were gathered in his home, which he jokingly called his Golgotha. This interest made sense, given his reasonings of 1775, though he could as easily have collected withered clitorises or nail clippings. But skulls it was, for him as for a growing band of scientists: his pupil and friend Samuel Thomas Sömmerring, who published a book in 1784 on the comparative anatomy of Negroes and Europeans; Petrus Camper, who was much interested in orang-utans and developed a way to quantify the variety of skulls, by defining something called ‘‘the facial line’’; later, there was Friedrich Tiedemann. There came to be a gentlemanly trade in skulls. Éru31. Ibid., 57. 32. Ibid., 13.

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dits, knowing of Blumenbach’s interest, would send him samples. He had the skull of a Tahitian, acquired by ‘‘the brave and energetic Captain Bligh’’; that of an ‘‘Ethiopian female of Guinea,’’ the concubine of a Dutchman who had died in Amsterdam, whereupon she was dissected by Van Geuns, ‘‘the learned professor at Utrecht.’’ What could not be obtained in the bone was sometimes duplicated in plaster casts, an invention and skill of Professor von Launitz of Frankfurt; of these, Blumenbach was to have ‘‘race-busts’’ of Benjamin Gattegna the ‘‘Constantinopolitan Jew,’’ Muhamed the Bedouin, Hassan the Nubian, Abdallah the Negro, Zeno Orego the ‘‘bearded Negro from Guadeloupe,’’ a nameless Gypsy girl, among others. Most significantly, he had the skull of ‘‘a young Georgian female, made captive in the last Turkish war by the Russians, and brought to Muscovy,’’ where she died and was dissected by ‘‘Hildebrandt, the most learned anatomical professor in Russia.’’ Hildebrandt preserved the skull ‘‘for the extreme elegance of its shape,’’ sent it to Baron de Asch of St. Petersburg, the imperial physician, who forwarded it to his old professor in Göttingen.33 Georgia is in the Caucasus. Thinking it pretty, wanting to use it as representative of the European variety, Blumenbach dubbed it Caucasian, but only eventually. The De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa Liber went through several editions. In each, method drove conclusion a little more. The second edition of 1781 broke from Linnaeus, in raising the number of human varieties from four to five, by the splitting off from the Asian category of those from ‘‘the Sunda, the Molucca, and the Philippine Islands.’’ Blumenbach’s description of these varieties was broadly similar, though he began ominously to intermingle physical descriptions with moral discriminations, where once he had been content to name places. Of the European group, he wrote: ‘‘All these nations as a whole are white in colour, and, if compared with the rest, beautiful in form.’’ He subdivided the Asian variety into ‘‘two races,’’ and observed that the Chinese and their neighbors spoke ‘‘rather monosyllabic languages, and [were] distinguished for depravity and perfidious of spirit and manners.’’ The Africans were ‘‘black men, muscular, with prominent upper jaws, swelling lips, turned up nose, very black curly hair.’’ The Native Americans had a ‘‘copper colour, . . . thin habit of body, and scanty hair.’’ The Southeast Asians were ‘‘of a very deep brown colour, with broad nose, and thick hair,’’ while those in the Pacific Islands differed; New Zealanders, Otaheitans, and the like were ‘‘men of elegant appearance and mild disposition,’’ while those from the New Hebrides and elsewhere were ‘‘blacker, more curly, and in disposition more distrustful and ferocious.’’ 34 Still, in 1781, there were no ‘‘Caucasians.’’ 33. Baker, Race, 27–31; Blumenbach, Blumenbach Treatises, 162, 352. 34. Blumenbach, Blumenbach Treatises, 100. It should be noted that there is no English trans-

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The third edition of 1795 was very different. It was nearly twice as long, and arranged differently. It began with a brief letter to Sir Joseph Banks, which was mostly concerned to repudiate those ‘‘who, especially of late, have amused their ingenuity so much with what they call the continuity or gradation of nature.’’ Rather, Blumenbach insisted that nature did make leaps and did display ‘‘large gaps.’’ This new opinion came from the man who in 1775 had insisted, of humanity, that the world was seamless, that ‘‘all do run into one another.’’ Now he insisted that one could see how discontinuity worked by looking at the skulls, of which he had so many and was evidently proud, the collection being ‘‘unique in its kind,’’ much better than those of Camper and Hunter. The first skull he named was that of ‘‘the middle, or Caucasian variety,’’ of the unfortunate Georgian woman captive.35 So now, instead of beginning with climate, Blumenbach began with physique, working from ‘‘the very structure of the human body’’ towards the mind. Human reason was no longer the product of civilization but its maker, something God had given man to cope with ‘‘the almost infinite variety of climate, soil and other circumstances.’’ Ominously, he was now arguing that the varieties of animals and men developed from degenerations, which he illustrated with a discussion of color, hair texture, stature, ‘‘figure and proportion of parts,’’ and ‘‘above all, the shape of the skull’’ among various wild and domestic animals. He talked vaguely of a formative force, a nisus formativus, as an explanation.36 Only eventually now did he turn to climate, about which he was still enthusiastic, indeed thinking that recent advances in science had strengthened the case for its effect upon physiognomy. In 1795 Blumenbach spoke more decisively about ‘‘racial varieties’’ when it came to skin color. The insistence of 1775 that all was flux, much was overlapping, had weakened into a brief disclaimer: ‘‘Although the colour of the human skin seems to play in numberless ways between snowy whiteness of the European girl and the deepest black of the Ethiopian woman of Senegambia; and though not one of these phases is so common either to all men of the same nation, or so peculiar to each nation, but what it sometimes occurs in others, though greatly different in other respects; still, in general, all the varieties of national colour seem to be most referable to the following classes.’’ Then the classes followed, ordered from lightness to blackness, all the descriptions denoted by crisp, clear numerals. ‘‘The white colour holds the first place.’’ ‘‘The second is the yellow . . . very usual in the Mongolian nations.’’ Then ‘‘the lation of the second edition, but Blumenbach’s English translator intercedes a long footnote, which quotes verbatim from the second edition, at the relevant point in the first edition. 35. Ibid., 150–51, 155, 159. 36. Ibid., 164–65, 183, 191–93.

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copper colour . . . peculiar almost to the Americans.’’ Then ‘‘tawny . . . common to the Malay race.’’ ‘‘Lastly, the tawny-black, up to almost a pitchy blackness ( jet-black), principally seen in some Ethiopian nations.’’ So, white is first, black is last. Again, Blumenbach made much of climate, but as much of the bodily structures upon which climate worked. From skin color, he moved on to hair, the iris of the eye, faces, then skulls. He had illustrative plates of skulls and commented on them, giving praise to the young Georgian woman, who had ‘‘a most beautiful skull.’’ At ‘‘the other extreme,’’ there were the Ethiopians, where the forehead was ‘‘knotty and uneven . . . the jaws projecting . . . the alveolar marguin narrow, elongated, and very elliptical . . . the primary upper teeth slanting.’’ From skulls, he moved around the body, to teeth, ears, breasts, genitals. ‘‘It is generally said,’’ he noted, ‘‘that the penis in the Negro is very large. And this assertion is so far borne out by the remarkable genitory apparatus of an Aethiopian which I have in my anatomical collection.’’ 37 From this, he proceeded to other parts of the body, to legs, feet, hands, and stature. In Section IV, he summed up. Again, there was the disclaimer, that ‘‘innumerable varieties of mankind run into one another by insensible degrees.’’ But this preceded a crucial passage where Blumenbach summoned up his courage, to disavow environmentalism. ‘‘After a long and attentive consideration’’—he started, by way of asserting his credentials, his twenty years of collecting, reading, thinking—‘‘all mankind, as far as it is at present known to us’’—he went on, to remind the reader that travelers had kept traveling, strange reports had kept coming in, and this might be expected to continue—‘‘seems to me as if it may best, according to natural truth, be divided into the five following varieties; which may’’—still he was tentative, saying may not should—‘‘be designated and distinguished from each other by the names Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay.’’ So there it was, cold, tidy, fit for student notes. Thereafter, his doubts having been elbowed aside, the language became brisker: ‘‘I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian . . . which make me esteem it the primeval one.’’ From the Caucasian, there were two lines of divergence: one ran Caucasian-American-Mongolian; the other CaucasianMalay-Ethiopian. So, though Blumenbach did not develop the theme, the case was now being made that, in the beginning all the world was Caucasian, and other races were late varieties of and degenerations from the original stock. Hence, Blumenbach had no conception of evolution.38 The history of the natural world did not move from the inferior primitive to the complicated modern, with certain races marooned at earlier stages of development, 37. Ibid., 209, 237, 238, 249. 38. Ibid., 264; Baker, Race, 26.

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but began with God’s creation of the beauteous Caucasian, from which others came to vary, according to changed circumstances. Having achieved his categories, Blumenbach cheerfully filled in the details of physiognomy. He briefly ran over the classifications hazarded by other authors: Linnaeus (4), Buffon (6), Pownall (3), Kant (4), Hunter (7), Zimmermann (4), Meiners (2), Klügel (4), Metzger (2). Having fragmented mankind, Blumenbach was anxious not to end on a dissonant note, but upon a note of unity, expressed with the circumspection he had shown elsewhere: ‘‘No doubt can any longer remain but that we are with great probability right in referring all and singular as many varieties of man as are at present known to one and the same species.’’ 39 In this manner, environmentalism mutated into something harder, unyielding, imposing. Blumenbach was not alone in pondering species, human variety, unity, environment, and in inventing boxes into which human shapes might be fitted. The intellectual pace had quickened between his first and third editions. Others were contemporary or quickly joined in: in France, Baron Georges Cuvier, François Péron, and Julien-Joseph Virey;40 in Britain, John Hunter, James Cowles Prichard, and Sir William Lawrence.41 The curious might, by the 1820s, have a substantial shelf of books on this subject. Among these, Blumenbach was a great name, a touchstone, the more so for being an anatomist who spoke with the authority of science.42 For Prichard in 1813, Blumenbach was ‘‘celebrated’’ as an anatomist, more reliable than Camper on skulls, while others were ‘‘inferior reasoners.’’ 43 When Samuel Stanhope Smith, president of Princeton and the first American to dabble in racial ethnology, came to revise a 1787 book into the more substantial Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1810), he relied heavily upon Blumenbach, ‘‘one of the most celebrated naturalists, anatomists, and physicians of Germany.’’ 44 Smith himself had served as a Presbyterian minister in rural Virginia and taught at Hampden-Sydney during the 39. Blumenbach, Blumenbach Treatises, 267–68, 276. 40. George W. Stocking Jr., ‘‘French Anthropology in 1800,’’ in Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropolo (New York: Free Press, 1968), 13–41. 41. The complexity of influences can be ascertained from ‘‘The Guide to Smith’s References,’’ in Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1965), 253–68; and ‘‘Guide to Prichard’s References,’’ in James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (1813; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), cxix–cxliv. 42. See, for example Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, vol. 3, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 41–45, which shows a marked reliance on Blumenbach. 43. Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, 46, 55, 241. 44. Smith, Variety of Complexion and Figure, 5.

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1770s; then, he had corresponded with Jefferson and Madison.45 But the only Southerners to feature in his Essay were Jefferson, for the Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), a work much connected to the debates to which Blumenbach was contributing, and James M’Clurg, a Virginian doctor who had written several treatises in the 1770s upon human bile.46 Racial theory remained, on the whole, a matter for American naturalists, and those who read them. Doctors were especially important, as they had been in Europe. Those who spent their lives prodding bodies, watching them, trying to understand what flesh meant, were vulnerable to the physiological explanation; their concepts used their experience. Such men in the South— the botanists, doctors, and anatomists—began to involve themselves in these controversies, like Blumenbach often giving the impression that only other men in disordered museums were listening. In the pages of the Southern Review, for example, between 1828 and 1832, science was a matter for concerted debate. Readers were kept informed about recent developments in medicine, botany, geology, as well as the birth of a new science in phrenology. Virey, Cuvier, Gall, Spurzheim, Combe, Alibert, Broussais, all these were names with theories which an attentive reader would notice. All had implications for concepts of race, for they touched on the age of the earth, the structure of the human body, the balances between reason and emotion, the relevance of Revelation. By the authority of science were races, as a construct of science, made to matter. The idea of race had many attractions. The most obvious was its legitimation of conquest and subjection. Less obvious was that race gave intellectual authority to postcolonials. Once Alexander Garden of Charleston had sent off specimens to Linnaeus, as a cultural provincial on the edges of the world, who provided information to a European savant, who in turn decided what the world meant and placed the specimens in a Systema Naturae, about which Garden was not expected to have opinions. The world, by 1830, was different. It was not yet possible for Linnaeus to be a Charlestonian and receive parcels from Sweden. But Stephen Elliott was a citizen of the republic of science, which had worked out its classifications, its divisions. As a botanist, he held sway over South Carolina and Georgia; from him, there was no appeal, until he should be displaced by another local. The botany and geology of the Northern Neck mattered no less than that of the Thames Valley or the Loire, indeed might matter more, for science conferred glamor upon the remote, upon the frontiers of knowledge and space. As Beverley Tucker put it 45. Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 66–73. 46. See William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815– 1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 18ff.

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in 1844: ‘‘To the great marts of science, where its votaries congregate for the exchange of knowledge for knowledge and thought for thought, each man should come freighted with that which his own country yields, and especially that which can not be found elsewhere. Should there appear among us an inhabitant of the interesting but unknown country of Oregon, professing to tell us of its soil and climate, its streams, mountains and minerals, we should listen with patient interest.’’ Likewise, he insisted, the Southerner speaking of the South.47 The attractiveness of racial theory for Americans was connected to this sense of comity and equality. However illogically for an environmentalist, Blumenbach had extended the courtesy of including among the Caucasians those of the race who had emigrated to North America. This delivered Americans from the reproof of Buffon, which had so vexed Jefferson. North American air, climate, miasmas, shortness, hairlessness, sexual feebleness—the threat of mutation implicit in Buffon’s natural science—melted away.48 A Caucasian was a Caucasian in whichever Georgia he or she was found. At least, this premise of equality helped to overcome European ignorance and condescension, which had once been surprised to find Benjamin Franklin not a Red Indian, and which Jesse Burton Harrison encountered in Germany in 1830, in the small town of Nordhausen: ‘‘Startled another of the natives by telling him who I was; he seemed incredulous & finally let out that he thought America a part of Africau, and that we were schwartz (black.) This hitherto I had heard from other Americans returned home from Europe but thought it a jest; now know it true.’’ 49 In the South, as elsewhere, this intellectual tradition of physical anthropology encountered a second, an English mode of thought, less coherent, but as pertinent. Race was a word used by Southerners with marked eclecticism, though most often as a synonym for a ‘‘people.’’ Races could take many forms; they could be small, medium, or large, indifferently. They might, for example, be the people of an American state. George D. Alexander, a school principal in Salem, Mississippi, was visited by a Virginian lady in the mid1840s and noted in his diary: ‘‘She is quite a favorite of mine. A whole souled Virginian. . . . There is more of that old Scottish spirit about them than any 47. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘‘An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave,’’ SLM 10 ( June 1844): 330. 48. On these issues, see Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, eds., Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth-Century Controversy (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); and Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. and rev. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). 49. JBH, ‘‘European Diary, 1829–30,’’ Francis B. Harrison Papers, UVA.

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race under heaven.’’ By this was meant a particular instance of, what the twentieth century would come to call, ethnicities. So too, Native Americans were a ‘‘noble and heroic race,’’ and Europe had its races, the Celts, the French, and ‘‘the Teutonic races.’’ This habit of mind coexisted with the Continental tradition, which came unstably to have something to do with color. There was, as Harvey Lindsly explained in 1839, ‘‘the human race,’’ but within that there were ‘‘the white and dark races.’’ 50 The word race itself came from Old Norse, where it meant a rushing of water, a usage that survives in a phrase like ‘‘mill race.’’ From this it came to mean a channel or course, and then the path of a life. By the late sixteenth century, it came also to signify a collective name for those who shared a life, an ancestry, and a posterity. Usually, race was a way of translating the Latin word gens, which might as easily be rendered as nation or people. But the scope of race might be small and familial, as when David Hume (the early seventeenthcentury Scottish historian, not the philosopher) published in 1643, a History of the House and Race of Douglas and Angus. These usages persisted until the nineteenth century. In 1824, George Crabb, in the third edition of his English Synonymes Explained, defined the word race in three places. In one, it was connected with ‘‘course,’’ as in horse racing. In another, it was grouped as ‘‘Race, Generation, Breeding’’: so, ‘‘we speak of the race of the Heraclidae, the race of the Bourbons, the race of the Stuarts and the like.’’ But the reader was also referred to ‘‘Family,’’ where there was offered a dubious but symptomatic etymology: ‘‘RACE, from the Latin radix a root, denotes the origin or that which constitutes their original point or resemblance. A family supposes the closest alliance; a race supposes no closer connexion than what a common property creates. Family is confined to a comparatively small number: race is a term of extensive import, including all mankind, as the human race: or particular nations, as the race of South-sea islanders: or a particular family, as the race of the Heraclides: from Hercules sprang a race of heroes.’’ 51 There had been heady, if incoherent debate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the genealogy of European races. William Camden (1551–1623), the historian, had been much engaged in defining what British 50. ‘‘Journal of The Life, Correspondence and Private Transactions of George D. Alexander,’’ George D. Alexander Collection, MDAH; ‘‘Critical Notices—Stone’s Life and Times of Red Jacket,’’ SQR 1 (January 1842): 271; JWM to FL, undated (folder suggests ca. 1853), FL Papers, HEH; Harvey Lindsly, ‘‘Differences in the Intellectual Character of the Several Varieties of the Human Race,’’ SLM 5 (September 1839): 617, 618. 51. The Oxford English Dictionary, second ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1496; David Hume, The History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus (Edinburgh: Evan Tyler, 1643); George Crabb, English Synonymes Explained, in Alphabetical Order with Copious Illustrations and Examples Drawn from the Best Writers, 3rd ed., revised and corrected (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy; Simpkins and Marshall, 1824), 264, 690, 405.

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meant; he had wished to refute the old idea, touted by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the British were the descendants of Brutus and the Trojans.52 Camden favored a Germanic origin, an Anglo-Saxon source, as one might understand the Germans from Tacitus’s Germania. Later in the seventeenth century, Robert Molesworth preferred to derive the British from the Scandinavians, whom Whig writers thought liberty-loving, but he saw them as another version of the Germanic. By 1703, the Celts had been imported into the debate, having been invented then by a Breton abbé, Paul-Yves Pezron, who ruled that the Welsh and Bretons were descendants of the ancient Celtae or Keltoi, ‘‘a barbarian people whose sway in antiquity stretched from Gaul to Galatia . . . and who had been the scourge of the Greeks and Romans.’’ But there was much confusion over whether Celts were a subdivision of the Germanic people or separate, whether they were more or less favorable to liberty than Anglo-Saxons. Paul-Henri Mallet, the historiographer royal of Denmark, author of L’Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc (1755) thought Germanic and Celtic had been closely connected, but in England Bishop Percy unsuccessfully tried to persuade him otherwise and, in the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), make clear a separation. According to Percy, the Germans, Saxons, and Scandinavians were descendants of the Goths or Teutons, while the Celts were distinct.53 John Pinkerton’s Dissertation on the Origin of the Scythians or Goths (1787) agreed with much of this, but was hostile to the Celts. According to Pinkerton, the Goths or Scythians, a people who embraced the Greeks and Romans as well as the Germans and Scandinavians, had radiated from Persia and then (happily for Europe) triumphed over the inferior, savage Celts. By the early nineteenth century, these matters had been swept up into the high Romantic argument, both British and continental, with each culture focusing on different shards of the European (and Indo-European) puzzle. What did Ossian teach us of the Celts? Who were the Scythians? What did the Ostrogoths do in Italy? Who were the Troubadours? At stake was the shape of European culture. Had it begun in pieces and evolved towards coherence? Or had it begun with coherence and splintered into nations of rich particularity? Southerners disagreed about this. Thomas Grimké, who knew more about these things than anyone else, inclined towards the theory that Europe 52. On this, see Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982). 53. Prys Morgan, ‘‘From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,’’ in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 67, 68; Reginald Horsman, ‘‘Origins of Racial AngloSaxonism in Great Britain before 1850,’’ in Race, Gender, and Rank: Early Modern Ideas of Humanity, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1992), 81.

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began with the heterogeneous. There were, firstly, the ‘‘Northern nations’’ and ‘‘Celtic nations,’’ 54 whom Grimké called collectively ‘‘Pagan Northern Europe.’’ There was, secondly, the ‘‘Christian Latin’’ South, itself later influenced by the Arabs. These two groups had together interacted to create modern European culture.55 But Thomas Cooper inclined to a theory of radiation, that there once been a single race, which had diversified. In 1829, he reviewed Godfrey Higgins’s The Celtic Druids, an ‘‘elaborate and splendid publication’’ that, as Cooper put it, was ‘‘in favour of the Celts . . . in direct opposition to Mr. Pinkerton’s, which holds that ancient people in great contempt.’’ 56 Higgins was, however, more splendid than original, having purloined much from Sylvain Bailly, author of the Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, depuis son origine jusqu’à l’établissement de l’école d’Alexandrie (1775).57 ‘‘M. Bailly, the astronomer . . . was the first who advanced the opinion, that much of ancient and of modern knowledge has been transmitted to their descendants by a race of men, whose existence, whose origin, whose duration, on the face of the earth, whose place of abode, whose history, whose memory have all been but lost to their successors; a race of men, who lived and flourished in times of the most remote antiquity.’’ With the self-confidence which marked him, especially on matters he had just learned, Cooper asserted that this theory, once challenged, was now the conventional wisdom: ‘‘We apprehend that among learned men there will be no dispute at the present day, but that the high land of Asia, from the northern Caspian Caucasus, eastwards toward Inaus or the Himalaya mountains, comprise the region of country that may be considered as the cradle of the human race.’’ From this central spot, they spread ‘‘southward and eastward during a long succession of ages, till they finally became the ancestors of the Hindoos, Chinese, Persians, Scythians, Goths, Huns, as well as the Pelasgi, Egyptians, Phenicians, Greeks and Romans; that they were the original inventors of much scientific knowledge, of which only the remnants and the practice, not the reasons and demonstrations, were known to the Hindoos and Orientals generally, and from them derived to the Greeks.’’ 58 This was demonstrated by customs, languages, scientific understandings, religious beliefs, mythologies, all of which—though now dispersed among many nations—could be discovered to have affinities. One did not need to assent to Bailly’s theory to absorb a vision of the Euro54. Though here he is quoting John Millar: see Thomas Smith Grimké, ‘‘Origin of Rhyme,’’ SR 2 (August 1828): 68. 55. Ibid., 37, 66; Thomas Smith Grimké, ‘‘Origin of Rhyme,’’ SR 3 (February 1829): 157, 191. 56. TC, ‘‘Higgins’ Celtic Druids,’’ SR 3 (February 1829): 207, 225. 57. For a Southern citation of Bailly’s theory, see John Holmes Bocock, ‘‘Ralph Waldo Emerson—History,’’ SLM 18 (April 1852): 254. 58. TC, ‘‘Celtic Druids,’’ 207–9.

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pean past as composed of these jostling races. Romantic literature crowded them into the Southern consciousness: the Ossian that gave a name to the town of Selma in Alabama and evoked the Celtic twilight; Walter Scott and Ivanhoe where Anglo-Saxons, Jews, and Normans competed; Robert Southey’s poem Roderick, The Last of the Goths; the old Spanish ballads that spoke of the Moors, the Franks, and the Visigoths, which Hugh Legaré found so affecting; these and many more provided resonance. So the idea of race was commingled with this discourse about nations and the origins of Europe. David Hume had been squarely within this tradition in his 1748 essay on ‘‘National Characters.’’ Hume confined most of his remarks to European cultures, ancient and modern, but also spoke of Egyptians, Persians, Turks, Chinese, Tartars, Muscovites, Saracens, as though these were comparable ‘‘nations.’’ 59 His comments on Africans (‘‘the negroes’’), added in a revised version of 1753–54 and revised again in 1777, were relegated to a footnote.60 This marginality was symptomatic. The question of Africa had been peripheral to the early modern discourse of race-as-nationality. What changed things, eventually, was the shock of confrontation between the Old World and the New World, which compelled a reconsideration that, latterly, included Africa. Clearly, the emergence of the idea of race-as-biology occurred because Europeans and their colonial descendants, from a sense of their superiority to those whom they had conquered, enslaved, and diminished, began to think it inapt to speak of the English, the Caribs, and the Hottentots in a language that implied equivalence. By the late nineteenth century, the separation had grown almost absolute. Europe and North America had nations, Africa and Asia had tribes. All had races, but in a strict hierarchy. There is little need to write an extended narrative about the emergence of racial theory in the South; the story has been often told.61 By the 1830s, the ethnic categories of Anglo-American and Romantic thought had collided with the natural science of Blumenbach and his heirs, to produce habitual disquisitions on the ‘‘Types of Mankind.’’ The natural order of man was divided, hierarchical, organic. Questions about the respective influences of environment and physiognomy had been mostly decided in favor of the latter. So, for example, Gerard Troost, who was Professor of Chemistry, Geology, and Mineralogy at the University of Nashville between 1828 and 1850, was writing in his notebook in the early 1830s, for a ‘‘Lecture on Man,’’ about the difficulty 59. Hume, Essays, 197–215. 60. On this, see ibid., 629–30. 61. Perhaps best told by Stanton, Leopard’s Spots.

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of deciding whether was a single human race or several human species, just as in the animal kingdom: ‘‘The climate, the food which he takes, slavery, and sickness seem to influence very much the varieties [of man]. . . . Five principal varieties or races compose the human species: they differ from one another in the colour of the skin, in the form of the face and the part of the globe they inhabit. These races are: 1 the Caucasian, or European tribes; 2d the Hyperborean; 3 the Mongol 4 the Negro 5 the American.’’ 62 So, Dr. Harvey Lindsly (a doctor from the District of Columbia and later president of the American Medical Association)63 in 1839 was writing for the Southern Literary Messenger and offering a version of Blumenbach’s five varieties of man, even so far as reiterating the disclaimer that ‘‘as in the brute creation the different species are connected together, and pass into each other, by almost imperceptible gradations.’’ Unlike Blumenbach, however, Lindsly insisted that the varieties existed in an intellectual and social hierarchy, which was ancient, but flowed through the record of historic peoples; his account is littered with the names of Celts, Mongols, Chinese, French, and Germans. Caucasians had always been the superior race, had ‘‘invariably held the same undisputed and enviable superiority over all the other races.’’ Degeneration was not vague, but specific. Caucasians were the most civilized, inventive, best governed, and most benevolent: ‘‘While the other races, in precisely the same proportion as their physical organization has varied from, and been inferior to ours, have manifested those traits of character which belong to savage life—ignorance, debauchery, sensuality, cruelty—idolatry in its most degraded and disgusting forms—indifference to the pains and pleasures of others, and an almost total want of all that we comprehend under the name of elevated sentiments, manly virtues and moral feelings.’’ 64 This was the new tone. The older science of the Enlightenment had made a social discourse that had discriminated and classified, if with an air of puzzled detachment. The new Romantic science eagerly saw the diversity of creation and rushed to its cruel judgments.65 By 1844, even the undergraduate knew of these things. Francis Lieber was much interested in the problem of race, kept obsessive notebooks on it and slavery, and would lecture on the phenomenon to the young men of South Carolina College. Among his lectures notes are some, written in about 1840, on the ‘‘General character of Gothic nations.’’ In Francis Peyre Porcher’s un62. Gerard Troost, ‘‘Notebook, 1833–36,’’ pp. 115–27, in TSLA. 63. See http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/printcat/3603.html. 64. Harvey Lindsly, ‘‘Differences in the Intellectual Character of the Several Varieties of the Human Race,’’ SLM 5 (September 1839): 616, 617. 65. On the general topic, see Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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dergraduate commonplace book, kept between 1843 and 1845 also in Columbia, one can find these jottings. ‘‘Dr. Pritchard divides mankind into 7 varieties or classes but there is rather three leading divisions indicated by the form of the skull,’’ that is, Caucasian, Ethiopian, and Mongolian. ‘‘Mr. Lawrence adds the Malay & American.’’ Then, ‘‘The comprehensive & classifying mind of Baron Cuvier inclines him to a less complex division in 3 varieties, as also Blumenbach.’’ Further, Alexander Bradford in his American Antiquities ‘‘goes into a long discussion in relation to the change affected by climate, he remarks that Englishmen in India, not intermarrying with natives, beget as fair children, just as clearly exemplified as themselves, even unto the 3d & 4th generation (‘and yet I have seen a passage where Bishop Heber says ‘‘That Portuguese in a residence of 200 years in Cape of Good Hope become as black as Caffies).’’ 66 This was much garbled, but of the age. By 1850, few quarreled with the existence of races or that race was, somehow, one of the most compelling explanations of things. As Gobineau put it, ‘‘I was gradually penetrated by the conviction that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.’’ 67 But race was unstable. Intended to demonstrate order, race had a singular gift for creating intellectual disorder. Blumenbach had laconically listed the many schemes of racial classification, current in 1795. 1850 was not much closer to a consensus. Gobineau shrank the number of races to three: white, black, and yellow. For him, the white race embraced ‘‘those . . . which are also called Caucasian, Semitic, or Japhetic.’’ But Lindsly had thought that the Caucasian embraced ‘‘all the ancient and modern Europeans, except the Laplanders and Finns, the former and present inhabitants of western Asia, as far as the rise of the Caspian Sea and the Ganges, including the Assyrians, Medes, and Chaldeans; the Sarmatians, Scythians, and Parthians; the Philistines, Phenicians and Jews; the Tartars, Persians and Hindoos of high caste; the northern Africans, Egyptians, and Abyssinians.’’ 68 But he was uneasy about the Egyptians and felt compelled to have a footnote, since he knew that many felt them to be negroid.69 And Abyssinian, after all, was another name for Ethiopian, so one was left with the conundrum that an Ethiopian might be Caucasian. 66. FL, ms beginning, ‘‘General character of Gothic nations’’ (which appear to be lecture notes), undated but folder suggests ca. 1840, FL Papers, HEH; Francis Peyre Porcher, ‘‘Commonplace book, 1843–1845,’’ Porcher Family Papers, SCHS. 67. Quoted in Michael Denis Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideolo: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 112–13. 68. Ibid., 118–19; Lindsly, ‘‘Differences in the Intellectual Character,’’ 616. 69. Cf. Alexander Hill Everett, ‘‘The Ancient Egyptians,’’ SQR 2 ( July 1842): 5–55.

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The incipient notion of Aryanism raised complicated questions about whether Indo-Europeans moved from east to west, or radiated from the Urals. (Aryan seems not to have been a term used by Southerners, though it had been in use in Germany since 1819 and France since 1837.) Josiah Nott was to grow profligate in splitting the Caucasians into many races. John Campbell of Philadelphia published his Negro Mania in 1851 as a not-very-dispassionate primer to this chaos. His first words were: ‘‘The most arbitrary distinctions have been made to endeavor to classify the races of men: one asserts that all are descended from one pair, another entirely dissents from this view, all are equal says the ignorant fanatic, negroes and red men as well as whites.’’ 70 Most contentious was polygenesis, because it focused several issues: the authority of the Scriptures, the age of the earth, and the unity of mankind. The idea itself had been around since the mid-eighteenth century. As long as science, especially geology, took care to accept the biblical definition of the earth’s age, the idea of multiple origins would not go away. Shortened time, many species (human and otherwise), a single Creation, little evidence of mutation during the historical record, a resistance to the inheritance of acquired characteristics, all these left a devastating problem of explanation, which homilies upon the sons of Noah offered a scant chance of resolving. Before Charles Lyell expanded time, Charles Darwin posited evolution, and the Bible slipped off the scientist’s laboratory desk, polygenesis was the skeptical man’s natural choice. The unity of man was the uneasy position of the Christian conservative, diversity of origin the confident assertion of the radical modernist. Josiah Nott proved the point. He was, in many ways, the quintessential modern, hustling Southerner, the more so as he effected a gentlemanly disdain for a sordid, money-grubbing world. His father, Abraham, had migrated from Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1787 and had ended up as a lawyer and planter in upcountry South Carolina. Josiah grew up in Columbia, in the days of Thomas Cooper, in a family of lawyers and physicians; his brother, Henry Junius, was one of Hugh Legaré’s best friends and a whimsical student of modern French literature. (By trade, Henry taught at the South Carolina College.)71 Josiah was educated as a doctor in New York, Philadelphia, and Paris, in the most progressive and empirical of schools; he believed in evidence, he 70. Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (1973; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1977), 35, 193; Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 193; John Campbell, Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men (1851; reprint, Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1969), 3. 71. Horsman, Josiah Nott, 5–13.

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followed Broussais’s doctrine that ‘‘all could be explained by observation and logical analysis,’’ but he applied the doctrine with a flexibility beyond that of Broussais.72 (Nott’s elder brother named his son John Broussais Nott, and Cooper had translated him.)73 Josiah laughed at Revelation, mocked priests, liked to make money, was willing to move for it, and had his eye on the main chance. He was cosmopolitan, knew the best people, in Paris, London, Philadelphia, and Charleston. He was charming, hail-fellow-well-met. And he was a polygenist, since it was the latest thing. Among Americans, Charles Caldwell had first defended polygenesis in 1830 in a book entitled Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race. Julien-Joseph Virey’s polygenist views on Negroes were translated and published in Charleston in 1837,74 though Elliott had cautiously hinted at them at the end of his article on ‘‘Views of Nature.’’ In 1839, George Morton of Philadelphia published his Crania Americana, which asserted that races had been physiologically constant since ancient times.75 Josiah Nott first entered these disputes in 1843, by publishing an article quietly in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, which argued that mulattos were hybrids, short-lived and tending to infertility. This was a step towards making whites and blacks into separate species, since fecundity defined a species. Inter alia, Nott observed that, while it was unclear whether all five races were separate creations or merely varieties, he was sure that ‘‘the AngloSaxon and Negro races are, according to the common acceptation of the terms, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a Hybrid.’’ A little later, he was invited to give two lectures to the Mobile Franklin Society, and chose to turn his new interest in race into a broader exposition. At the time, he had not read much of the relevant secondary literature. He thought it would be good to stir things up, to bring a little controversy into his quiet Mobile life, to make his mark in the world. As one of his brothers was to write to a helpful Northern scientist (in these matters, Northerners were very helpful) in enclosing a copy of Nott’s pamphlet: ‘‘It is a subject curious in itself and one which is exciting much interest throughout the Southern country and is particularly potent 72. Ibid., 28. Broussais, in old age, grew dogmatic and the smart young French doctors scorned him for this. The criticism was picked up by Nott in Paris: see ibid., 50–51. 73. F. J. V. Broussais, On Irritation and Insanity. A Work, Wherein the Relations of the Physical with the Moral Condition of Man, Are Established on the Basis of Physiological Medicine, trans. TC (Columbia, S.C.: S. J. M’Morris, 1831). 74. Julien-Joseph Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race, trans. J. H. Guenebault (Charleston, S.C.: D. J. Dowling, 1837); Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ 429–31. 75. Charles Caldwell, Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race (New York: E. Bliss, 1830); Elliott, ‘‘Views of Nature,’’ 429–31; Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana: Or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839).

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in stirring up the bile of the orthodox.’’ 76 So, giving his two lectures, Nott threw caution to the winds and pounded out his fashionable heterodoxies. One should not pay much attention to the Bible, because modern science— geology, astronomy—had disproved so much of it. Truth alone mattered; let the chips fall where they may. The Ark? Not big enough, too many species. Adam and Eve? Only one creation of a human species was insufficient. The biblical chronology? Too short, probably by several thousand years; Moses and Bishop Ussher would not do. One human race, before God? No, blacks were a separate species, separately created, intermediate between Caucasians and apes, possessed of smaller brains. The Chinese were half-way between blacks and whites. Native Americans, even the Aztecs, were ‘‘miserable imbeciles,’’ below the Chinese. To mingle races created only sterile hybridity, and social degeneration. Environment explained little. ‘‘Can any reasoning mind believe that the Negro and Indian have always been the victim of circumstances? No, nature had endowed them with an inferior organization, and all the powers of earth cannot elevate them above their destiny.’’ 77 Uproar duly followed. Nott liked the fun, although it did entail unexpected labor and expense. Called to account by those better read than himself, he was obliged to read up, to order books from the North and Europe, which cost him money. He did not like to spend money. ‘‘With regard to works on ethnology, it is an immense field and runs deeply into the French, German, & Italian languages,’’ he ruefully explained in 1858. ‘‘Many of the works too are very expensive. The works of Lepsius, Champollion, & Rosellini, in German, French & Italian are each worth some $200. In English the works are not so expensive, but the material is so scattered in journals, works on Natural History, Geology &c that it requires a very large library to get at everything. My library on the subject has cost me upwards of $2000.’’ In time, Josiah Nott would make himself a world expert. Indeed it is arguable that he was the most famous Southern intellectual of his day, insofar as Northern and European reputation defined celebrity. In the great roaring torrent of anthropological racism, Nott roared with the best or worst of them. His book with George Gliddon, the Types of Mankind went through ten editions before 1871.78 76. Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘The Mulatto a Hybrid—Probable Extermination of the Two Races If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,’’ American Journal of Medical Sciences n.s. 6 ( July 1843): 254; James E. Nott to John Collins Warren, 27 April 1845, John Collins Warren Papers, MassHS. 77. Josiah C. Nott, Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races (Mobile: Dade and Thompson, 1844), reprinted (with some abridgments) in The Ideolo of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 208–38 (quotation on p. 235). 78. Josiah C. Nott to William S. Forwood, 27 February 1858, William S. Forwood Papers, Duke University Medical Center, Duke University; Horsman, Josiah Nott, 179.

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He had honors of satisfyingly intercontinental scope. If one examines the English translation of Blumenbach’s Treatises, published by the Anthropological Society of London in 1865, one will find, at the back, a list of the Society’s Honorary Fellows. They include Louis Agassiz, Paul Broca, Charles Darwin, Charles Kingsley, Charles Lyell, and Ernest Renan, luminaries all. There is also, ‘‘Nott, Dr. J. C. Foreign Associate of the Anthropological Society of Paris. Mobile (Alabama, C.S.A.).’’ Broca, though he disagreed with much that Nott wrote, felt obliged to disagree on the second page of his Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo (1864) and acknowledged Nott as ‘‘one of the most eminent anthropologists of America.’’ 79 For the moment, in the South, Nott was less popular. His Two Lectures fell to Moses Ashley Curtis to review in the Southern Quarterly Review. Curtis was part of the legacy of Stephen Elliott’s world, even in small material ways. Elliott’s herbarium, after his death in 1830, had fallen into the hands of John Bachman, the son of a Dutchess County, New York, farmer and slaveholder of some prosperity. The younger Bachman had been educated partly in Philadelphia but, contracting tuberculosis, had come south to Charleston for his health in 1814, where he had become the minister of the St. John’s Lutheran Church, married into the local community (he had eight surviving children), and became a stalwart of the South’s scientific community. This was the man who was to partner Curtis in opposition to Nott.80 In his review, Curtis coupled Nott with Nicholas Wiseman’s Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion (1837), which ranged widely over matters of languages, geology, Egyptology, in a cautious, respectful manner that Curtis found congenial.81 Curtis was, apart from being a naturalist, an Episcopal minister, a combination which Nott had purposed to annoy, successfully. As such, Curtis had to find a way to reconcile Scripture and science, which was 79. Paul Broca, On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo, ed. Charles Carter Blake (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1864), 2, 32; for an extended discussion of Nott’s work see pp. 32–35, 37. See also Georges Pouchet, The Plurality of the Human Race, trans. and ed. Hugh J. C. Beavan (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1864), 50, 60, 97, 110. Pertinent is Stocking, ‘‘Polygenist Thought in Post-Darwinian Anthropology,’’ in Race, Culture, and Evolution, 42–68, which draws together Darwin, Broca, Nott, and Carl Vogt, and argues for the persistence of polygenist thinking beyond 1859. 80. Lewis R. Gibbes to John Torrey, 27 May 1839, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC (typed copy of original at the New York Botanical Garden); on Bigelow sending plants to Elliott’s herbarium, see Stephen Elliott to Jacob Bigelow, 2 June 1817, Jacob Bigelow Autograph Book, MassHS; Claude Henry Neuffer, ed., The Christopher Happoldt Journal: His European Tour with the Rev. John Bachman (June–December, 1838) (Charleston, S.C.: Charleston Museum, 1960), 30; Lester D. Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion in the American South: John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815–1895 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 11–14. 81. Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion. Delivered in Rome (Andover, N.Y.: Gould and Newman, 1837).

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the old problem, but little Nott’s, who had escaped from the obligation in a single bound. How could Curtis do this? The broad insistence was conventional: ‘‘Several discoveries have been made in modern times, which have obliged theologians to modify and change their opinions of what, it had been before supposed that Scripture taught; but never has it yet been shown, that any demonstrated truth of physical or moral science has contradicted the sacred word.’’ Indeed, with this assertion, Curtis felt safe to grant much that a more orthodox Christian might have blushed to admit. Among others, he gave Nott the notion that there had been ‘‘several creations and destructions in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, previous to the creation spoken of by Moses.’’ He admitted that there were animals now on Earth different from those existent before the Flood, and probably created since. He even conceded that Noah’s Flood and his animals were confined to the fauna of his locality, not all of Creation. He waved aside the option of incessant Godly intervention and was content to believe that ‘‘natural causes are fully competent to the production of all the varieties of the human family.’’ As to details, Curtis insisted that Christianity had more generous chronologies than Ussher’s; there was that of the Septuagint, which is ‘‘amply sufficient to meet the high antiquity of the monumental chronology of Egypt.’’ The Bible’s chronological information was vague, broken, but there seemed little reason to believe that the discoveries of Egyptology falsified it. As for the Flood, modern geology was in much confusion and Nott was overconfident in asserting that it insisted upon a multiple of floods: ‘‘the subject of Diluvium is still undergoing much examination and discussion, and affords material for very diverse theories, and is not likely to be soon settled.’’ 82 This was shrewd of Curtis. Nott’s tactic was to assert that science’s conclusions were firm and decisive, while the divines were muddled. Curtis returned the compliment by showing how science was controversial even among scientists. Though it was easy to show that Nott, who had hazarded opinions upon Ham, Shem, and Japtheth, had a modest command of the Scriptural texts, it was more pointed (and accurate) to indicate that Nott’s science was often haphazard: ‘‘He seems to have read some books, and has garnered up some isolated facts of the Natural Sciences, [but] he has never systematized or digested them, and never studied, and has no knowledge of, a single one of them as a science.’’ Nott was muddled on the distinctions between species, orders, and genera, which much compromised his sweeping assertions. He did not understand climate, especially its relationship to disease, and much underestimated human ability to adapt when transplanted; this applied to blacks moving to cold climates, as well as whites to hot. He was unsound on the 82. MAC, ‘‘Unity of the Races,’’ SQR 7 (April 1845): 390, 391–92, 394, 388, 399.

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fossil record. In conclusion, Curtis observed: ‘‘No law of the animal constitution has been discovered which forbids the extreme changes observable in the varieties of the human family; but, on the contrary, many animals, when brought into new states and subject to the influence of various natural agencies, have swerved from their original type of form and color, to a greater extent than exists in the various races of mankind.’’ 83 As to color, anthropological evidence was very mixed: there were light people in Africa, dark ones in Europe, heterogeneity everywhere. This being so, one could conclude with Blumenbach that, ‘‘since there is a regular and imperceptible gradation from the pure white, and the regular features of the Caucasian, to the jet black, and the abnormal contour of the Ethiopian by transitions which defy all definition, we can have nothing in physical characters upon which to found a certain distinction of species.’’ 84 Even the best authorities—Curtis mentioned Blumenbach, Lawrence, Cuvier and Prichard— disagreed on the number of human varieties. The physical evidence (from Sömmerring, Tiedemann, Spurzheim) was equally unclear and, on the whole, Curtis inclined to doubt that a Caucasian skull was habitually larger than an Ethiopian. As to Nott’s ideas on mulattos and hybridity, Curtis was dismissive. Pitcairn’s Island alone disproved him, since its mixed population had since the Mutiny increased nicely. The world was full of mixed races, all propagating with good effect. This was a clever review, which attacked Nott mostly on his incompetence as a scientist. By moving subtly between scientific authority and those moments where science was divided, Curtis strove to gain the leeway where biblical difficulties might be regarded charitably. Much was doubtful, he seemed to say. Nott’s radicalism was unnecessary, both on scientific and religious grounds. Curtis’s tone was especially shrewd; beginning with pained vexation and some conciliation, moving to facts and contradiction, ending with dismissal. ‘‘On perusing the pamphlet,’’ he sniffed, ‘‘we came to the conclusion that the writer was a young man, too eager for taking rank among savans to wait for a due digestion of his varied reading, too impatient for the slow toil of laying deep and sure the foundations of an impregnable reputation.’’ 85 In 1845, Curtis was 37, Nott was 41. So battle was joined. After checking his facts and acquiring fresh information from Morton and Gliddon, Nott replied in two installments.86 Curtis, in 83. Ibid., 411, 427–28. 84. Ibid., 438. 85. Ibid., 447. 86. Horsman, Josiah Nott, 97; Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 80; Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘An Issue with the Reviewer of Nott’s ‘Caucasian and Negro Races,’’’ SQR 8 ( July 1845): 148–90; Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘Unity of the Human Race,’’ SQR 9 (January 1846): 1–57.

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John Bachman (unattributed portrait) (From G. J. Gongaware, The History of the German Friendly Society of Charleston [1935])

turn, replied. The editor of the Southern Quarterly Review fretted at the vigor of it all, but did not like to pass up a controversy that engaged readers.87 Nott found his allies, notably Morton, George Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz, as well as assorted Europeans. Indeed, the deeper into the controversy Nott got, the more allies he found, because he had touched a nerve. By 1849, the Charleston Conversation Club was embroiled. In September 1849, John B. Adger was writing to Lewis R. Gibbes that the club was to debate the unity of the race at his home: ‘‘I shall introduce the discussion with a brief defence of the commonly received views & Dr. Bachman will follow at length & in detail on the same side—and as the question has of late occasioned a good deal of conversation about town, it is hoped gentlemen of the opposite side will be present and favour us with their objections to Dr. B’s arguments.’’ So John Bachman joined against Nott, then Thomas Smyth also anti, then Louis Agas87. MAC, ‘‘The Unity of the Human Race,’’ SQR 9 (April 1846): 372–91; editorial note, prefacing Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘Issue with the Reviewer,’’ 148.

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siz pro. Passions ran high. A flavor of the excitement and nervousness that this topic generated can be glimpsed in a letter, written by Cranmore Wallace to Curtis in October 1849, when yet another Nott pamphlet needed a reviewer in the Southern Quarterly Review, then under the editorship of Simms. Curtis had suggested Wallace do it, but the latter begged off. ‘‘I do not well understand some of the topics, which Dr. Nott has introduced. Tho’ a small book, & an exceedingly shallow & contemptible one, it includes a large range of topics, physiology, geology, authenticity of the Pentateuch &c. Now I have but a slender acquaintance with anatomy & physiology, & am a mere beginner in geology.’’ Dealing with Nott required either assurance or temerity. ‘‘Tho’ I could easily show up Nott’s ignorance, I might perchance show up my own.’’ So he had passed the buck to ‘‘Dr. Lynch (the Roman priest, a man of considerable learning—oriental & occidental; & much devoted to geology). . . . Since that I hear, that he & Bachman have combined to do it.’’ If this fell through, it might be back to Curtis. ‘‘I have no doubt that Simms will pay: & if you do not care to appear a second time as the opponent of this miserable pretender have the Article transcribed in another hand, & I can get it inserted under some nom de guerre such as you shall choose.’’ Nott’s book or pamphlet, as Wallace understood it, were first given as lectures in the University of Louisiana; they were ‘‘partly his own recollections of his father-in-law, Dr. Cooper’s teachings, & partly, as you rightly judge an indigesta moles of stuff taken at 2d hand from German rationalists, & directly from French infidels— pretending all the while a wonderful reverence for Christianity.’’ 88 The veracity and interpretation of the Scriptures, the authority and nature of science, chronology, nature, environment, these were the things that agitated nerves. Explicitly, the social subjection of Africans to white Southerners’ control was almost the least important issue embroiled in these disputes. Slavery was seldom mentioned. Students of race did not reach towards slavery, though conversely the racial argument was contentiously pressed into service by the proslavery argument. A few, notably Fitzhugh, thought race confused matters. But there were others, especially Samuel Cartwright, who made much of it.89 88. John B. Adger to Lewis R. Gibbes, 29 September 1849, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC; Cranmore Wallace to MAC, 10 October 1849, MAC Papers, SHC. Wallace was, like Curtis, a Northern transplant, a botanist, and an Episcopal minister, though in South Carolina; see Tamara Miner Haygood, Henry William Ravenel, 1814–1887: South Carolina Scientist in the Civil War Era (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 34–35. 89. Samuel A. Cartwright, ‘‘Canaan Identified with the Ethiopian,’’ SQR 2 (October 1842): 321–83; Samuel A. Cartwright, ‘‘Unity of the Human Race Disproved by the Hebrew Bible,’’ DBR 29 (August 1860): 129–36; Samuel A. Cartwright, ‘‘Nacash Canaan and the Negro Identical,’’ DBR 29 (October 1860): 513–20.

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The omission of slavery from racial theory will seem curious, since all these Southern men were slaveholders. They sat in their studies, thought themselves white, were brought lemonade by their slaves, whom they might denominate Ethiopians. Europeans gave especial weight to someone like Nott, because they knew he lived among Africans in their diaspora; like a Sahib in British India, Nott sent back news from the frontier. Partly, the omission of slavery was because race was a great international concept, a cosmopolitan idea. Southern scientists sought to engage others beyond local boundaries. Race was everywhere, but slavery was only in a few places; they could not make it central. Blumenbach had been antislavery. When Nott had Henry Hotz of Mobile translate Gobineau into English, Hotz carefully removed Gobineau’s strictures against slavery and his endorsement of a theory of American degeneration. Gobineau noticed and complained to a friend: ‘‘Do you not wonder . . . at my friends the Americans, who believe that I am encouraging them to bludgeon their Negroes, who praise me to the skies for that, but who are unwilling to translate the part of the work which concerns them?’’ Likewise, Pierre Paul Broca was polygenist but antislavery, and resented the former doctrine being associated with ‘‘the sophisms of slaveholders.’’ Polygenism, he protested, was a modern doctrine, scarcely responsible for slavery, which was very old: ‘‘When generous philanthropists claimed, with indefatigable constancy, the liberty of the blacks, the partisans of the old system, threatened in their dearest interests, were enchanted to hear that Negros were scarcely human beings, but rather domestic animals, more intelligent and productive than the rest.’’ He was especially put out by Bachman: ‘‘The Rev. John Bachmann [sic], a fervent monogenist of South Carolina, has acquired in the Southern States much popularity by demonstrating, with great unction, that slavery is a divine institution. It is not from the writings of polygenists, but from the Bible, that the representatives of the Slave States have drawn their arguments.’’ No, ‘‘the difference of origin by no means implicates the subordination of races.’’ 90 A Southerner might wink or get angry at the naivete of this, but he or she also knew that, conversely, slavery did not need rigorous racial concepts. Such ideas helped, but they were not essential, and that help would not have compensated for the isolation that proslavery would have imposed upon the Southern scientist, wishing to engage in the discourse of race. To jump from race to slavery meant embattlement, a barrier. Louisa McCord, for example, liked the new racial science, was convinced of polygenesis, though was diffident (not a quality usual to her) about the complexity of the science: ‘‘It is 90. Arthur de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of the Races, ed. and trans. Henry Hotz, appendix by Josiah C. Nott (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856); Gobineau to ProkeschOsten, quoted in Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideolo, 147; Broca, Phenomena of Hybridity, 69–70.

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only the learned naturalist who has a right to mingle in such a discussion. He whose studies have not long and laboriously led him in this direction, has the right only to listen, to read, to weigh authorities, and, thus, from the learning and investigation of others, to find his own belief.’’ 91 And even she pulled back from Robert Knox, the Scot, whom she found ‘‘startling,’’ for his flat assertion that, ‘‘Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization.’’ Was there not something in the old idea, ‘‘the common idea,’’ that ‘‘circumstance . . . location, institutions’’ counted for something? But McCord was very much interested in slavery, centrally so. So, it was with satisfaction that, after running over the debate, she could say, ‘‘This question of race is, then, most important in the consideration of negro slavery.’’ Her next words showed the difficulty, for they were immediately embattled: ‘‘The whole world seems to have joined in a crusade against us.’’ 92 The barrier slammed down, Paris against Charleston, though both racist, both complacently ‘‘Caucasian.’’ Further, scientific racism wandered into infidelity and, forced to choose between a proslavery God and an antislavery scientist, most Southerners chose Jehovah as the weightier endorsement. Slavery was comprehensive, strict, formal, effective, an iron curtain between them and us. Race, by contrast, was fluid, uncertain, contentious; it pitted white against white, infidel against cleric. Later, with slavery gone, racism became more urgent, more necessary to segregate masters from servants in a differently fluid world. Then Southern racism melted agreeably into the wider world; it made sense in Richmond, New York, London, Berlin, Calcutta, Penang. Which is not to say, of course, that the Old South lacked the brutal prejudices of color, which were simpler, more direct. ‘‘We’’ were white, more or less; ‘‘they’’ were black, more or less. But color prejudice had existed in Elizabethan England, in colonial Virginia; it would survive, in the twentieth century, past the moment when the science of race was discredited. The subordination of them by us, of us by them, persisted through these mutations. ‘‘What degrades more, in the U.S.—Colour or slavery?’’ Francis Lieber once asked himself. ‘‘In the U.S. colour degrades far more than slavery, for the free man of colour stands little above the slave.’’ 93 91. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 160. This diffidence was very common: cf. A. L., ‘‘On the Unity of the Human Race,’’ SQR n.s. 10 (October 1854): 275: ‘‘So complicated indeed is the problem, and so dependent for its solution on upon a due consideration of Biblical hermeneutics, comparative philology, history, comparative anatomy, archaeology and other (mostly modern) sciences having little connection with one another, that writers on ethnology have usually confined themselves to one branch of the subject.’’ 92. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 176, 174. 93. Cf. Bachman on this, cited in Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 172; FL, notebook marked ‘‘Slavery,’’ cataloged as LI29, FL Papers, HEH.

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It will be evident, by now, that the unstable complexities of the word, race, makes it easy to misread many antebellum writings, the more so as Southerners themselves did not always know what they meant by the word. The modern reader sees the words black, colored, African, race, and runs them together into something coherent, something called race, something different from ethnicity, or family, or class, because peculiarly unyielding and bitter. Antebellum discourse was more loose jointed. Iveson Brookes might write to a coreligionist: ‘‘The more I have investigated the subject the more clearly I have become convinced of the true character of African slavery as an Institution appointed of God and fraught with the highest degree of benevolence to the negro race.’’ Yet Brookes the Baptist minister had no truck with polygenesis, geology, the fossil record, all the essential paraphernalia of race. Thomas Caute Reynolds might say to James Johnston Pettigrew in 1858, ‘‘I have ever viewed the Slavery Question as mainly a question of race.’’ 94 But he need not mean, by this, anything that Blumenbach or Prichard or Nott might recognize. Or he might. This looseness cut both ways. The old language of race-as-ethnicity did not die in these years. Surviving alongside the newer, harder language of ethnology, it acquired a severity absent from older discourse. Race-as-biology did not undercut race-as-ethnicity; the former gave ethnicity a harder edge. An article by William Falconer of Alabama on ‘‘The Difference of Race between the Northern and Southern People’’ in the June 1860 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger sharply marks this.95 Indeed its argument is a little startling, even for the passionate moment of its composition, but was a logical consequence of much that had preceded it, for it combined ethnology with ethnicity to explain the American crisis. Southerners were deemed to be of the Norman race, the ancestors of the Cavaliers; ‘‘warlike and fearless,’’ gallant, gentle, imperial, the ‘‘race who have established law, order and government over the earth,’’ natural commanders over black and white alike. 94. Iveson L. Brookes to ‘‘Bro. Slade,’’ 20 March 1849, Iveson L. Brookes Papers, SHC; Thomas C. Reynolds to James Johnston Pettigrew, 9 October 1858, Pettigrew Family Papers, NCSA. 95. William Falconer, ‘‘The Difference of Race between the Northern and Southern People,’’ SLM 30 ( June 1860): 401–9. (I am indebted for this ascription of Falconer to Robert Bonner, ‘‘Roundheaded Cavaliers? The Contexts and Limits of a Confederate Racial Project,’’ Civil War History 48 [March 2002]: 40.) A year later, there was, evidently also by Falconer, ‘‘The True Question: A Contest for the Supremacy of Race, as between the Saxon Puritan of the North, and Norman of the South,’’ SLM 33 (July 1861): 19–27. This extends the argument, by insisting that democracy and universal suffrage have compromised the Norman instinct of command in the South, which needs instead a patrician republic; such a polity, in turn, ought to abandon passivity, a mere desire to be left alone by the North, but should wage a long, aggressive war to subjugate the North to its will.

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Northerners were ‘‘ancient Britons and Saxons,’’ the ancestors of the Puritans and ‘‘the present common people of England,’’ those who in Caesar’s day were seen as ‘‘wild, savage, bold, fond of freedom, and greatly given to religious [rites], exercises and belief, and quite as greatly under the influence of the Druid priests and ‘sacred women.’ ’’ These were people who flew from order, were incapable of giving it, and were ‘‘squabbling, fighting, singing psalms, burning witches, and talking about liberty.’’ Northerners were, in intellect, ‘‘vigourous, inventive and discursive,’’ and, in character, ‘‘devotional, and contentious, with but a little appreciation of a delicate and honourable sensibility.’’ They liked to legislate, but did not understand order: ‘‘Thus, while they evince no capacity for control, they are uncontrollable,— while deeply religious, they yet nearly approach infidelity—and while loving liberty, they yet make the poorest republicans, and enjoy the least freedom.’’ By contrast, ‘‘the Southern mind . . . is disposed to quiet and to gentleness, coming to conclusions by the almost instinctive application of the simplest rules,—yet, when roused to action, capable of an almost incredible effort, and equal to the highest flight of genius,’’ a people generously capable of command.96 Perhaps conscious that history did not quite fit, Falconer hedged with a little hegemonic theory: ‘‘By the words Southern people, is not meant all the people of the South, but that controlling element which exists with every people, and gives character to the whole.’’ The drones of the South might not be Normans, those of the North not Saxon, but that did not effect the overall pattern.97 The self-serving conclusion of this dubious analysis was that the United States would best survive, perhaps only survive, if the South governed the North, since the former was so capable, the latter so incompetent. What matters more is the language of the article, the decisiveness with which Falconer connected biological racism with ethnicity. No more was ‘‘race’’ a quiet little word of vague import. It was now a word that demanded capitalization and italics. ‘‘a contest of race exists at present between the people of this government, and broods threateningly and impendingly over us as a nation,’’ he says, at the beginning. It is ‘‘a question of race.’’ Clay, Webster, and Calhoun are praised for having ‘‘perfectly controlled their separate people,’’ and their exit has ‘‘given full development to these ethnological differences which exist among us.’’ The United States, by a Providential design, is ‘‘a refuge and a home for the surplus population of all the races of the earth,’’ and so statesmen must see that policy and law shall not infringe upon ‘‘the interests, rights and feeling of one race’’ against those of another. So, ‘‘The 96. Falconer, ‘‘Difference of Race,’’ 407, 404–6. 97. Ibid., 406.

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basis of the present difficulties between the North and South, is the difference in RACE which exists between the two people. . . . the Southern people in the main—in other words, the representative blood of the South—comes of that branch of the human race which, at this time, controls all the enlightened nations of the earth, and they are false to their instincts when they even discuss, much less admit, the propriety of a dissolution of this government.’’ 98 Few were as drastic as this. But the language of scientific racism had leeched into the wider discourse. Race, blood, body, mind, these were harder words in 1860 than 1800. No more, in the American world, could one say that ‘‘all do run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them.’’ The world had became a harder place, full of unyielding forms, peopled with tribes which demanded a fierce allegiance, delimited by barriers. This came to be so especially of the idea of the sexes, which seemed to demonstrate Tocqueville’s pessimism with even more precision. But, whereas scientific racism had a way of driving people’s minds away from slavery, sex had the opposite effect. Thoughts of women’s bodies seemed to prompt a consideration of slaves’ bodies.

98. Ibid., 401–3.

Chapter Six

The Sex of a Human Being

On his travels in Europe, William Campbell Preston was a young man whose thoughts, just sometimes, dwelled on sex. In Edinburgh in 1818, he found the young ladies forward and blunt. They greeted him on the street; he saw them walking about at all hours. The Virginian was disconcerted. ‘‘This may be all well enough to the eye of reason—but either my prejudice or my pride makes me like to see woman—with a shyness which requires the first advance and a sense of imbecility which requires to be sustained and protected.’’ He hazarded a climatic explanation, in the spirit of the young Blumenbach and the mature Montesquieu. ‘‘As we travel from North to South—we find the space between woman and man gradually widening—from the perfect equality of both sexes in the Lapland fishing boat—until we arrive at the Seraglios of the luxuriant south—where women are trained for the bed as beasts are fatted for the table.’’ On the whole, he preferred what he knew at home, the ‘‘weakness not to say helplessness’’ of Southern ladies. ‘‘Such an one is certainly more lovable—with her languishing black eyes and light fragile person—and luxurious indolence and seducing dependance and conquering blushes than these plump—active—rosy cheeked—bustling ladies.’’ 1 Yet when Preston came to marry Louise Penelope Davis, he married a woman with a sharp mind, who wrote well, was a shrewd observer of persons and politics, and was a brisk critic. ‘‘Dined en famille at Mr. E. Greenway’s,’’ Title from ‘‘Enfranchisement of Woman’’ (1852), in Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, ed. Richard C. Lounsbury, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 113: ‘‘The sex of a human being was fixed long before its entrance into this world, by rules and causes, which, entirely unknown to man, were equally beyond his reach and that of accident.’’ 1. WCP to Major O’Connor, 4 December 1818, WCP Papers, SCL.

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her diary in 1838 noted of a visit to Baltimore. ‘‘No one but Mr. Kennedy, author of ‘Swallows Barn,’ & one or 2 indifferent American Novels, to meet us. The family were as agreeable as folk can be whose idea of worth, power, happiness, all consists in wealth.’’ Such a woman noticed when men condescended to her. ‘‘Was amused at the littleness of a great man, as some folk think Mr. [Daniel Webster],’’ she wrote after another dinner party. ‘‘He had commenced to tell me why Cicero and the Romans were more intellectual than the Greeks,’’ when a lady called out to speak about flowers. After this, she ‘‘again assumed a listening attitude to Mr. Webster, who somewhat testily remarked, I pray you, madam, not to turn from these pleasantries.’’ She noticed, but she smoothed it over. ‘‘However I replied truly I was interested, and must beg to have the rest; when he went on to tell me that Cicero said the Romans called their feasts conviviums, which signified ‘Live together,’ and the Greeks symposiums, which meant to drink together.’’ 2 It is not impossible that she knew more of the matter than Webster, who knew little enough. Louise Preston was in a tradition of high-born, intelligent women who had the delicate task of mediating between the lively interests of their intellect and the deadening expectations of their society. Their problem began in childhood with the matter of education. Before the 1820s, girls had tended to be educated episodically at home. Brothers had tutors or were sent to school, while sisters occasionally shared the tutors, sometimes were sent to schools, and often educated themselves with guidance from mothers and, rarely, fathers. Sarah Grimké at the turn of the nineteenth century in Charleston sat in on the lessons being given to her brother Thomas by his tutor; these concerned mathematics, geography, history, Greek, natural science, and botany. This was in addition to the studies thought peculiar to her sex; arithmetic for the household accounts, sketching, needlework, French, piano, and matters of courtesy and etiquette. Louisa McCord, partly because she spent some of her childhood in a North that came to the idea of elementary female education more quickly, fared a little better. When very young, her education had been handled by her mother. In 1819, when she was about ten and her family had removed to Philadelphia, she was sent with her sister Sophia to a school for young ladies run by William Grimshaw, and to another where she was taught French by the Picots, an emigré French couple. At home, her brothers had tutors, to whom she seems to have been denied access. Being inquisitive, she was said to have sat behind the door and taken notes on the mathematics lessons. Discovered, she was licensed by her father 2. Louise Penelope Davis Preston Diary, pp. 46, 25, Mrs. William Campbell Preston Papers, SCL.

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to step inside the school room and ‘‘be instructed also in subjects taught more usually to boys.’’ 3 It was common for households to leave first matters to the mother or her surrogate, a maiden aunt or an elder sister. Augusta Evans, after a brief spell in school terminated by illness, was mostly educated (and well) by her mother. Louisa McCord, in her turn when twenty-four, helped to educate her younger siblings, Charles and Anna, in English, French, writing, and arithmetic. In Mississippi in the 1850s, Ann Hardeman gave the six children she inherited from her dead sister lessons in geography, reading, writing, and history, though nearly all of them, boys and girls, also and later went out to schools. This, indeed, was what Thomas Jefferson in 1818 had thought the education of women was for: ‘‘I thought it essential to give them [his daughters] a solid education, which might enable them, when become mothers, to educate their own daughters, and even to direct the course for sons, should their fathers be lost, or incapable, or inattentive.’’ 4 In general, what girls were allowed outside the household depended much upon the whim and finances of patriarchs, for boys had to be educated but for girls such things were optional. In 1835 James Louis Petigru sent his daughter Caroline off to be schooled in New York, and then changed his mind after a year.5 Sarah Grimké was forbidden Latin by her father, when her brother progressed to it, but Greek seems to have been permissible. Some fathers and mothers feared the consequences of knowledge freely acquired, others took an expansive view, but almost all cocked an eye towards the expectations of suitors. A learned woman might frighten off a witless beau, the kind of man who might casually write ‘‘commending very highly the waters the donkeys & the women.’’ Yet an intelligent man might temperately ‘‘want a wife a clever companionable woman to get through the evening with, and to keep a neat parlor and a choice table for me and my friends.’’ 6 The scope of ‘‘clever’’ was great, from pert, uninstructed wit to erudition intelligently used. 3. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 17–18; Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography, Letters, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 425n; Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 13. 4. ‘‘A Note on Augusta Jane Evans,’’ in Beulah, by Augusta Jane Evans (1859; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), ix; Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 3; Michael O’Brien, ed., An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 221– 330; Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Burwell, 14 March 1818, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1411. 5. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Ladies, Women, & Wenches: Choice & Constraint in Antebellum Charleston & Boston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 73–74. 6. Ibid., 73–74; Henry Middleton Jr., to Mary Hering Middleton, 13 July 1836, Hering-

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In general, it is more surprising how expansive was the scope of female education in the South than how restricted. Marcus Cicero Stephens from Florida wrote in 1841 to his granddaughter Mary Ann Primrose of New Bern, North Carolina, then in the Burwell School in Hillsboro. ‘‘You tell me you are taking lessons in music, drawing and French besides the usual studies,’’ he began. ‘‘All this is very well, a young woman ought to perfect herself in all the accomplishments she can, that she may in the first place render herself interesting & agreeable to others, and moreover possess internal resources of pleasure & amusement in those moments of listlessness and apathy to which we are all more or less subjected.’’ But he saw a need for much beyond this. ‘‘Dont neglect the higher branches of education—Study History, Geography and some of the best ethical writers—with care and attention—this will greatly add to your stock of ideas.’’ No doubt, he reasoned thus because he saw women as contributory. Such ideas would ‘‘enable you when occasion serves, to take part in a rational conversation, for nothing is so insipid as some ladies I have seen, they have been asked to sing & play on some instrument, or to exhibit their drawings to the visitors after doing which they retire to their seats and sit mumchance, until some dandy of a beau sidles up to them and talks of the weather, the last ball or some such frivolities.’’ Still, he thought that ‘‘the women have not been treated with Justice by the male sex.’’ Men hazarded and were destined for ‘‘the rougher walks of life’’ and needed ‘‘the knowledge necessary for such purposes,’’ but ‘‘if the woman be inferior to the man in bodily strength, her mind is equally vigorous as his, & the records of ancient and modern History set this matter beyond doubt.’’ Indeed, he confessed that ‘‘the men have entered into a kind of conspiracy to keep the women in the back ground—a prejudice has been excited against their improvement beyond a certain limit—the women have been cowed if I may so term it—for should she in her remarks on any subject of conversation shew any superiority of intellect, she is instantly announced as a bas bleu, or blue stocking, and is avoided in a measure by both men & women.’’ This was ungenerous and he encouraged her to venture herself intellectually. Still, he was a man and a grandfather, and his last words to her were perhaps less liberal, if meant to be kindly. ‘‘Learn to play and sing ‘Highland Mary[.]’ It is the sweetest thing I ever heard and should we ever meet, it will be the first tune I shall call for.’’ 7 On the face of it, Francis Pickens of Edgefield, South Carolina, later the state’s governor, was less generous. Like most men, he liked to give advice, Middleton Papers, SCHS; entry for 28 March 1838, in Philip Pendleton Kennedy Diary, Kennedy Family Papers, VHS. 7. Marcus Cicero Stephens to Mary Ann Primrose, 7 November 1841, Marcus Cicero Stephens Papers, SHC.

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to shape how women might think, and about what. So he wrote to Maria Simkins in 1833 to caution her against the fate of the bluestocking. ‘‘I think those most pleasing who indulge more in the softer sympathies of nature, whose minds are cultivated & by nature guided, who observe what they see and take interest in all around them, who indulge in the feelings & affections of the heart—who utter refined & delicate sentiments rather than learned or literary ones.’’ Nonetheless, when he fell to concrete advice on reading, he offered a tolerably wide expanse of human knowledge: Burke, Addison, Cicero’s letters, Scott’s novels, Milton, Shakespeare, Vergil and Homer (if only in translation), Byron (‘‘corrupt although splendid’’), the Bible, and various ancient and modern historians, both European and American. By the same token, the suggested vacation reading list for students at the South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute in 1836 was not a slight thing; it included (omitting more elementary texts) authors such as Heeren, Hallam, Kames, Alison, Mackintosh, Burke, Bacon, Clarendon, Gibbon, Marshall, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, and Pascal.8 Republican motherhood could be taxing, intellectually. Thomas Dew, in his 1835 ‘‘Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences between the Sexes, and on the Position and Influence of Woman in Society,’’ was full of advice. Like Stephens, he was not convinced that women were intellectually inferior, or not naturally so, for bodies were not everything: ‘‘I am inclined . . . in the belief, that there is no natural difference between the intellectual powers of man and woman, and that the differences observable between them in this respect at mature age, are wholly the result of education, physical and moral.’’ In this, doubtless, he was atypical of Southern male opinion, even of Southern female opinion, for the latter had often learned to derogate themselves. ‘‘I find La Harpe rather a bore & shall not proceed,’’ Anne Deas observed with self-satisfaction in 1813. ‘‘The two volumes I have of him are criticism of the french poets, & it does not interest me at all for I am not a Literary Lady.’’ For Dew, as for many Americans, it came to seem that the sexes had their spheres which were founded upon their physical natures, which distributed mixed strengths and weaknesses to both, which in turn occasioned an interdependence rhapsodic in its beauty. Henry Hilliard of Alabama rooted the idea of separate spheres in the premise that, ‘‘The very soul of the universe is harmony.’’ For Dew, men were physically strong, adventurous, warlike, courageous, active, candid, but also vain, rude, selfish, misanthropic, dissipated, less religious, sophist, and wanting in stamina when faced with adversity. Women had the obverse of these qualities: passivity against 8. Francis W. Pickens to Maria Simkins, 15 September 1833, Francis W. Pickens Papers, SCL.

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initiative, weakness against strength, morality against degradation, fortitude against the palsied will. While women might not be naturally inferior in mind, education and society made them so, or so Dew believed: ‘‘It is now a conceded point, that under the actual constitution of society, and with the superior education of our sex, the intellectual endowments and developments of man are generally found superior to those of woman at the age of maturity.’’ This was so, now and historically, ‘‘every where and in every age.’’ 9 In particular, Dew felt that men, by training, acquired the greater gift for the ‘‘higher’’ powers of mind, by which he meant abstract and synthetic reasoning, the power of generalizing from the particular to the general. ‘‘The intellectual eye of woman,’’ by contrast, ‘‘is like the pleasing microscope; it detects little objects, and movements, and motives, upon the theatre of life, which wholly escape the duller and more comprehensive vision of our sex.’’ This was partly because boys were taught things women were not, more science and more Latin and Greek, but mostly because they went on to college at the moment that girls were plunged into the maelstrom of society and compelled to learn the arts of womanhood. Dew felt that little of rigorous moment was learned much before the age of eighteen. Likewise, in the form of ‘‘parents, guardians, and friends,’’ society discriminated against women. It encouraged even the dull boy to effort, it discouraged the smart girl, or at best looked upon her efforts with condescending indifference, as though she were Doctor Johnson’s performing dog.10 Nonetheless, female education grew more expansive. In 1810, the debate hinged on whether a girl needed education at all. By 1830, it had conceded the point but now hovered around what should be taught, for how long, and for what purposes. The consistent answer was to make wives who were ladies. But the notion of what sort of wives and ladies varied. ‘‘It has justly been considered . . . that the minds of the gentler sex should be cultivated and enlarged by every practicable means, that the mothers of an enlightened nation, should be well prepared to train the mental faculties of their offspring,’’ the Southern Literary Messenger observed in 1835. ‘‘Much greater attention is now bestowed upon the culture of the female mind than formerly; and parents generally seem more impressed with the propriety of giving to their daughters a solid education.’’ By 1850, matters had progressed to concede the reality, if not the universal necessity, of female higher education. So gradually the number 9. A. I. Deas to MIM, 6 August 1813, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Henry W. Hilliard, Speeches and Addresses (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), 477; Thomas R. Dew, ‘‘Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences between the Sexes, and on the Position and Influence of Woman in Society,’’ SLM 1 (August 1835): 676. 10. Dew, ‘‘Dissertation on the Sexes,’’ 679, 677.

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of female schools proliferated, and their curricula went much beyond what the late eighteenth century had offered. Thus in Petersburg in 1817, for example, a Mrs. Barbour opened an academy that taught ‘‘orthography, reading, writing, grammar, composition: belles-lettres, geography, natural history, history of nations, chronology, natural philosophy and chemistry.’’ Other schools added arithmetic, ‘‘experimental philosophy,’’ foreign languages, and Livy unabridged.11 Usually, Latin and Greek were not taught, though it was not unknown (the Mordecai family’s Warrenton Female Academy did so in 1822) and it seems to have been less taboo than in the North.12 By 1839, the Methodists had established in Macon the Georgia Female College, which was not only the South’s first college for women, but precedent to anything else in the rest of United States and (it is claimed) western Europe. This began partially to remedy a situation, which in 1831 Henry Nott had lamented with a liberality unusual in his culture. ‘‘We have colleges from Maine to Florida for young men,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but the talents of an Agnesi, a Montague, a Sévigné or de Staël, have no resource but schools set up on speculation, without libraries, without apparatus of any kind. Our State legislatures meet annually, and take into consideration, with befitting gravity, the important subject of education, leaving out of their deliberation exactly one half of the whole community.’’ By the 1850s, thirty of the thirty-nine female colleges chartered in the United States were in the South, and in some states female colleges outnumbered those for men.13 From the beginning, they took male education as a standard to be emulated. It was hazarded in 1843 in Macon that ‘‘our daughters’’ ought to have ‘‘as good a disciplinary education as was offered by the best colleges for our sons,’’ and in 1856 in Asheville that they should have a mental discipline and knowledge ‘‘not inferior to those enjoyed by the other sex in the best American Colleges.’’ 14 This seems not to have been completely accomplished, though many of the female colleges gave a better 11. ‘‘Female Education: Young Ladies Seminary at Prince Edward Court House,’’ SLM 1 (May 1835): 519; Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 173–74. 12. Jane Turner Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 44, notes that teaching the ancient languages was unusual, but Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of a Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 31, cites five schools in various states that did. 13. Henry Junius Nott, ‘‘The Life and Times of Daniel De Foe,’’ SR 7 (May 1831): 81; Farnham, Education of a Southern Belle, 11, 18. Of these names, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–99) may be least familiar; she was an Italian, who held a chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna. 14. Circular of the Georgia Female College, 1842–43, and the 1856 Catalogue of the Holston Conference Female College, quoted in Farnham, Education of a Southern Belle, 17.

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education than many male ones. Young ladies at the Mansfield Female College in Louisiana were being asked in 1857 to read Vergil, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Livy, while in Greensboro in 1846, they were adding Sallust, studying Greek grammar, and reading Xenophon, Euripides, the New Testament in Greek, and assorted texts from an anthology. Their scientific education was about equivalent, their teaching of modern foreign languages perhaps better, and certainly their attention to the fine arts (painting, music) was superior. Many of the prescribed texts were identical to those used in male colleges: Francis Wayland and William Paley on moral philosophy, Joseph Butler on religion, and the like.15 No doubt the intellectual rigor of the teachers was, on average, less high, not because the female professors were inadequate, but because the male ones were often those unable to find a place in the better male colleges. Missing from female higher education, however, were the clubs and debating societies that trained men for public life, for the bar or the legislative chamber. Women might read Lord Kames and Hugh Blair on rhetoric, but they concentrated on his advice about letter writing rather than the forensic arts. Somewhat more prominent was religion, for female colleges were usually sponsored by religious denominations, while the state universities lived at least fitfully in the shadow of Mr. Jefferson’s prescriptions about the separation of church and state. Religion fitted, too easily, into the arts of the private realm, where women were supposed to be confined: conversation, dancing, singing, playing the piano or guitar, even the making of wax flowers.16 In general, it was presumed that a woman’s education was more practical, more vocational, and the vocation was the home or (if a husband was unforthcoming or delayed) the education of other young ladies. In this spirit, compared to the rough spartan quality of male colleges, their female counterparts devoted more attention to comforts, as the foreshadowing of how a home should be arranged. The prospectus of the Spartanburg Female College boasted in 1855 of ‘‘an elevated and beautiful site,’’ of ‘‘groves and woods contiguous,’’ of ‘‘hills and dales’’ which afforded ‘‘pleasant drives and walks’’ amid ‘‘water pure, gushing from natural fountains.’’ Female college students were often advised to exercise, by walking, riding, or calisthenics. Botany, indeed, was often recommended because it required outdoor rambles. Moreover, ‘‘They [the students] will not be crowded together in one, large, ill ventilated building, but placed in groups, according to age, sympathy, class, etc., in separate circles, in each of which the paramount object will be, to continue to them, so far as may be possible, the several advantages of their own homes; the genial 15. Farnham, Education of a Southern Belle, 21–28. 16. Ibid., 76, 86.

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David Hunter Strother, ‘‘Female Education’’ (From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine [ July 1857])

relationships and loving cares which make the charm, and are the source, of the refinement, the gentlenesses, and the pure delights of the family circle.’’ 17 Consistent with this emphasis, Southern society told young women to be very conscious of their bodies. As Sarah Grimké put it in 1838, ‘‘We approach each other, and mingle with each other, under the constant pressure of a feeling that we are of different sexes . . . that we must never forget the distinction between male and female. Hence our intercourse, instead of being elevated and refined, is generally calculated to excite and keep alive the lowest propensities of our nature.’’ So, minds and eyes were full of the curve of a neck, the clarity of a complexion, the shape of breasts, the thinness of a waist, the hips to bear children, and many women were, willingly or not, followers of fashions, close and anxious students of what to wear and how to carry themselves. High society licensed an awareness of sexuality and authorized some of its arts, the teasing flirtatiousness of the drawing room. Religious society, however, did not; it kept its women away from balls, playing cards, flounced dresses, and décolleté. Evangelicalism especially denounced the err17. Quoted in Edgar W. Knight, ed., A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949–53), 5:438.

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ing woman and seems not to have accepted the premise that women were naturally passive and pious. ‘‘The Devil in Petticoat is to me a most dangerous animal,’’ Basil Manly as a young man in Beaufort, South Carolina, once announced. ‘‘Oh Woman! Thou hast led many a promising youth by the nose till he has become but little better than a chicken feeder.’’ 18 But even high society was formally puritanical about sexuality itself, which was forbidden beyond marriage and little discussable even within it. Sexual transgression meant social death, if discovered. Madaline Edwards, who was the mistress of a New Orleans businessman in the 1840s, knew herself to be ‘‘pollution’’ and was not surprised, if hurt, when her family turned away from her on the street. William Porcher Miles in the early 1850s had an affair with a woman whose marriage had been contracted for money not love, and the liaison had become known. For Miles, ‘‘the full glare of fashionable notoriety’’ was a mild social impediment. For the woman, it meant immurement, a banishment to ‘‘the country to find with God and her children what comfort she might.’’ For her, ‘‘no future can compensate her past—for the rest sorrow may sanctify—hope can never brighten it.’’ For Miles, as Trescot explained and the code required, ‘‘it is not so.’’ 19 For marriage was intended to be a finality, divorce being extremely rare, though separation informally undertaken was more common and the precedent death of husbands was usual. Some, indeed, never married, but this was a hard road. The single woman was regarded with condescension and society offered little by way of a profession (except as a teacher or governess) for such a person that might free her from dependence upon the world of married people, who took themselves to be the center of the social universe. Even to be married but childless was to invite knowing sneers or, worse, pitying advice. Mary Chesnut was tormented by her barrenness, if that is what it was, and other women were her tormentors. On the whole, Southern men feared the dangers posed by women’s bodies more than their minds, or rather felt at ease about the minds because the bodies were so imprisoned. In the North, where women’s rights had begun to make more headway, female higher education was more constricted, more feared. But it was also the case that the domestic realm was, for a Southern woman who was born or married well, a greater domain, for a plantation was also a business in which wives and mothers participated actively; a certain 18. Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays, ed. Elizabeth Ann Bartlett (1838; reprint, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 41–42; BM to Iveson Brookes, 19 March 1819, Manly Family Papers, UA. 19. Entry for 9 February 1845, Madaline Edwards Diary, Charles W. Bradbury Papers, SHC, reprinted in Dell Upton, ed., Madaline: Love and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans: The Private Writings of a Kept Woman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 238; William Henry Trescot to William Porcher Miles, 13 November 1853, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC.

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Adalber Volck, Mistress Overseeing a Plantation (ca. 1860) (Courtesy Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

knowledge and shrewdness was useful. As the Rev. C. W. Howard reminded the graduating class of the Cassville Female College in South Carolina in 1858: ‘‘It is a common mistake . . . to represent the life of a southern matron as one of indolence and self-indulgence. But . . . she has the care to provide, in sickness and health, for the numerous laborers under her control; to preside over the system of slavery, which is one, not of oppression, but of protection to the laborer.’’ This was not a mistake that Andrew Jackson, for one, made. When counseling Andrew J. Hutchings in 1833 on choosing a wife, he observed: ‘‘Seek a wife, one who will aid you in your exertions in making a competency and will take care of it when made, for you will find it easier to spend two thousand dollars, than to make five hundred. Look at the economy of the mother and if you find it in her you will find it in the daughter. recollect the industry of your dear aunt, and with what economy she watched over what I made, and how we waded thro the vast expence of the mass of company we had. nothing but her care and industry, with good economy could have saved me from ruin.’’ 20 Yet this was, though important, a limited power. The expansion of Southern female education was, potentially, on a collision course with the adult role of women, which was greatly restricted. Charles Fraser, when an old man, observed in 1854 the growth of all these 20. Russell’s Magazine 4 (October 1858): 92–93, reprinted in Knight, Documentary History of Education, 5:451; AJ to Andrew J. Hutchings, 18 April 1833, in John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926–35), 5:60.

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‘‘ ‘Female Institutes,’ and ‘Female Collegiate Establishments’ ’’ and thought them ‘‘unsuitable,’’ for ‘‘the object of their instruction ought not to be to make them learned, but it should be directed to the development of the moral and intellectual qualities suitable to the becoming discharge of the peculiar duties designed for them by nature; to their position in society, and their relations in domestic life.’’ Certainly a Southern woman’s legal position and prerogatives were drastically constrained. A single woman and a widow controlled her own property (a one-third dower was usual), but a married one conferred all on her husband and lost the power of independent contract, unless an equity court made a special exception. This was somewhat softened in the late antebellum period, especially in the western South, and Louisiana’s Napoleonic Code had long given more discretion, but in general the law discouraged female economic independence and action.21 A woman was denied almost all the public realm, except as an informal adviser: the franchise, officeholding, juries, religious office. Most, too, of the informal realm of public culture was forbidden or inaccessible; most libraries, conversation clubs, all debating societies. No woman was allowed public speech if her body was present (no sermons or orations, except student ones), but was permitted a voice when her body was absent, as in the printed word. A Southern marriage was a republican purdah, for youth ended very quickly; the average marrying age for elite women was about 19, some five years earlier than their Northern counterparts.22 (It may be significant that many of the South’s female intellectuals tended to marry later than the average.)23 Jefferson had set the tone even in the 1780s, when he condemned the life of the aristocratic French woman, explicitly for frivolity and license, implicitly for the freedom and mobility with which she dodged ‘‘in and out of the doors of her very sincere friends.’’ By contrast, in America ‘‘the society of your husband, the fond cares of the children, the arrangements of the house, the improvements of the grounds, fill every moment with a healthy and an useful activity.’’ A fear of intellectual freedom was mated to that of sexual freedom, which the salon had notoriously sanctioned. Alice Izard saw the connection with precision. She advised her daughter to be hospitable, not secluded, but with a propriety that was opposed to ‘‘the present riotous, boisterous man21. Charles Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1854), 111–12; Sally G. McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South (Arlington Heights: Harlan Davidson, 1992), 40–44. 22. McMillen, Southern Women, 29. 23. Mary Chesnut was younger at 17, Susan Petigru King the average at 19, but E. D. E. N. Southworth was 21, Caroline Lee Hentz 24, Caroline Gilman 25, Louisa McCord 29, Augusta Evans 33, and Angelina Grimké 33. Sarah Grimké never married.

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ners.’’ Henry W. DeSaussure spoke to her likewise, after reading the shocking memoirs of Madame d’Épinay: ‘‘The licentiousness of conversation, & the total relaxation of all principles in domestic life, is I believe unparralelled [sic] in any other nation. . . . Can we wonder that this people were ripe for revolution, & ready to throw off all the restraints of law & Government, when they had thrown off all those of religion & morals?’’ Such opinions were not based upon a sense of the impotence of women, but was a back-handed compliment to the power of mothers. ‘‘They are the reformers of the World,’’ Alice Izard coolly asserted.24 ‘‘Give me a host of educated, pious mothers and sisters,’’ Thomas Grimké once asserted, ‘‘and I will do more to revolutionize a country, in moral and religious taste, in manners and in social virtues and intellectual cultivation, than I can possibly do in double or treble the time, with a similar host of educated men.’’ 25 This helps to explain why women had a restricted role in Southern intellectual life, as well as the character of their contribution, which was much preoccupied with the matter of sex, that mixed blessing. By contrast, men seldom found the premise of manliness to be problematical.26 (Anxiety about performance was, of course, another matter.) Dew was unusual in finding fault with male characteristics, Trescot more common in casually speaking of ‘‘healthy manliness’’ and presuming that masculinity and health were natural companions. Indeed, men used ‘‘manly’’ with habitual self-praise. They spoke of ‘‘a kind, manly thing,’’ of things ‘‘manly, scholarlike and philosophical,’’ of ‘‘honorable, and manly exertion,’’ of ‘‘manly eloquence,’’ of a ‘‘manly and noble stand,’’ of being ‘‘candid & manly,’’ of a ‘‘bold manly course,’’ of ‘‘high, manly, and noble virtues.’’ 27 But women understood ‘‘womanly’’ as 24. Thomas Jefferson to Anne Willing Bingham, 17 February 1787, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 888; ADI to MIM, 31 March 1811, and Henry W. DeSaussure to MIM, 30 November 1818, Manigault Family Papers, SCL. 25. Quoted in Sarah Grimké, Equality of the Sexes, 58. 26. For a different view, which suggests a crisis of male confidence caused by the ‘‘market revolution,’’ see Christopher Morris, ‘‘What’s So Funny? Southern Humorists and the Market Revolution,’’ in Southern Writers and Their Worlds, ed. Christopher Morris and Steven G. Reinhardt (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 9–26. 27. William Henry Trescot to JHT, 25 June 1856, JHT Papers, SCL; FL to Samuel A. Allibone, 22 October 1856, FL Papers, HEH; entry for 14 March 1850, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; Robert Young Hayne to Warren Davis, 25 September 1827, Robert Young Hayne Papers, SCL; Alfred Huger to MK, 23 July 1849, MK Papers, SHC; Hanson Robinson to Benjamin S. Hedrick, 1 October 1856, A. D. Rankin to Benjamin S. Hedrick, 15 October 1856, and Benjamin S. Hedrick to Peter M. Hall, 18 October 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC; Benjamin Watkins Leigh Jr., to John Esten Cooke, 9 July 1852, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU.

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a more complicated thing, being both praiseworthy and suspect. ‘‘See our vanity; woman-like,’’ Elizabeth Ruffin once ironically enjoined herself and the readers of her diary.28 Southern men felt very little pressure for a readjustment in the civil standing of women. During the Virginia State Convention of 1829, it was idly mentioned that women were often thought to be men’s equals and were certainly superior to slaves, Indians, or foreigners. So why should they not have the vote? Samuel Moore had an answer: ‘‘It is not because we deny to these an equality of natural rights, or because they are inferior in intelligence, morality, or virtue, to ourselves; for I will be as ready to admit as any gentleman on the opposite side of the question, that in all these particulars they are our equals at least, and in most of them, our superiors.’’ So why? ‘‘The women have never claimed the right to participate in the formation of the Government, and that until they do, there can be no necessity for our discussing or deciding upon it.’’ These are burdens they do not want, ‘‘are unwilling to bear.’’ Besides, ‘‘their interests are so completely identified with our own, that it is impossible that we can make any regulation injuriously affecting their rights, which will not equally injure ourselves.’’ Do they not have ‘‘unlimited confidence in our sex’’? 29 On the last score, Moore was egregiously misled, for it will be evident that many Southern women thought of men with less than confidence, indeed often with contempt. But, on the first score, Moore was not so wrong. There were no suffragettes picketing the Virginia Convention, and no antebellum Southern woman chained herself to a iron railing or threw herself under a horse at the Washington races in Charleston. This is not the place to consider all that women wrote or thought about, which can be assessed at those other places in this book where their contributions to fiction, poetry, social criticism, or autobiography are considered. Rather, it is a place to consider what sorts of women managed to find a foothold in intellectual life, and what they said about sex when they spoke of it. In general, the social configurations of the Old South made it extremely difficult for any woman who was not well born to become a writer. This was in some contrast to the experience of men, among whom modest origins were common. Society leaned against the literary woman; so she tended to need affidavits of respectability or the confidence that social standing conferred to hazard her opinions. Hence many female intellectuals were the wives or 28. Entry for 28 February 1827, Elizabeth Ruffin Diary, SHC, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 68. 29. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, of 1829–30 (Richmond: Samuel Shepherd, 1830), 227.

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daughters of notable men, usually of means, if often self-made men; most, too, had children of their own. Louisa McCord was the daughter of Langdon Cheves, who had been Speaker of the House of Representatives and president of the Second Bank of the United States; she inherited much wealth; and she married a prominent South Carolina lawyer and politician. Indeed, when once asked by Simms for a self-portrait, she defined herself by these connections: she knew ‘‘nothing of herself, except that I am my father’s daughter, born Dec, 1810, married May, 1840, and am not dead yet.’’ The sisters Grimké were the daughters of a wealthy judge, and (while Sarah remained single) Angelina became the wife of Theodore Weld, an abolitionist of note and some means. Mary Chesnut’s father owned plantations in several states and was a governor of South Carolina; her husband was the heir to one of the state’s richest patrimonies and became a U.S. senator. As for the novelists, they offer a slight variation; though often well born and usually married, they were not infrequently harried into print by adverse financial circumstances, the death or incompetence of husbands. Caroline Gilman, certainly the most energetic of female editors and among the most influential of novelists, was married to a Unitarian minister in Charleston who had been to Harvard and furnished a comfortable, if not extravagant home; her earnings helped to add domestic staff and build a summer home on Sullivan’s island. Augusta Evans’s Georgian family was, at first, respectable and affluent, but then bankrupt and migrant, before settling in Mobile; she published Beulah in 1859 as a single woman and its success made her financially independent; in 1868 she married a rich widower. Caroline Hentz was, like Gilman, a migrant from New England and of no very lofty origin, but she married a Frenchman who taught modern languages at various Southern colleges and schools, a man eccentric, jealous, and a little mad; she herself taught and ran schools and she turned to writing as a way of sustaining herself and her family.30 It was very unusual, therefore, for a Southern female writer to break free from matters of gender as saliently understood from within the household (love, courtship, disappointment, marriage, religion, education, and death) and write on the genres of ‘‘public’’ matters (history, politics, economics), except by embedding the latter into the former. Indeed, Louisa McCord is probably the only Southern woman who managed to do so, and even she often turned such essays into a meditation upon the family. Hence, too, their writings provide a very partial understanding of women’s understandings in their culture, for many women were poor or unmarried or childless. But, as 30. Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 276; Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 281; ‘‘A Note on Augusta Jane Evans,’’ ix–x; Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 5, 74–76.

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the writings of Sarah Grimké show, even the ummarried could be drawn to speak of the family as normative and motherhood as the center of a woman’s meaning. To sample the antipodes of Southern female thinking on gender, it will be helpful to look at Sarah Grimké and Louisa McCord. The former stood for turbulent defiance of the old ways expressed in exile, the other for turbulent defense from within slavery’s heartland. But both offered a grim assessment of men’s ways and power. The story of the Grimké sisters has often been told, if seldom in books about the South, yet their thought was indelibly formed by their Southern experience and their words often were aimed deliberately at the community of Southern women, whom they were among the first to define as a community. ‘‘I stand before you as a southerner, exiled from the land of my birth by the sound of the lash and the piteous cry of the slave,’’ Angelina Grimké told a committee of the Massachusetts state legislature in 1838.31 For our purposes, Sarah’s story is more salient, for she came closest to feminism.32 While Angelina tended to see the problem of women as subsidiary to that of slavery, Sarah moved beyond that to a fuller sense that women had their own problems, mission, and need for social thought. The latter’s story was, in outline, simple enough. She grew up in the prosperous and idiosyncratic household of Judge John Faucherand Grimké in Charleston. She had the usual sort of halfeducation, went into society as a belle and hated it, partly because she nurtured the impossible ambition of being a lawyer like her father and brother. She became religious under the influence of Henry Kollock, the Presbyterian minister, put away fashionable things, and took to prayer meetings and visits to almshouses. Visiting Philadelphia in 1819 with her terminally ill father, she came to know Quakers. After his death, she returned to stay there for another fifteen years, became a Quaker, refused to marry a widowed Quaker minister with children, and was joined by Angelina in 1829, the sister who being thirteen years her junior was, in many ways, a surrogate child. Angelina had come to antislavery and Quakerism by her own route, more marked by revulsion at slavery’s violence and the unsettling experience of being formally tried for religious nonconformity.33 From Quakerism, with which they both grew disillusioned for its racial intolerance, Sarah advanced by 1835 to abolitionism, the more so after Angelina 31. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 8. 32. I should note that I refer to ‘‘Sarah’’ and ‘‘Angelina’’ out of no familiarity, but because in moving between sisters, it would be confusing to speak only of ‘‘Grimké’’ and cumbersome always to write ‘‘Sarah Grimké’’ and ‘‘Angelina Grimké.’’ 33. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 40–41; Sarah Grimké, Equality of the Sexes, 15–16.

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married Theodore Weld in 1838 and the sisters continued to share a household. In truth, Sarah’s experience of both South and North was disquieting, for in the latter she and her allies were abused and vilified for their advanced opinions, while in the former her antislavery views made it impossible or dangerous for her to visit, the more so as Angelina’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States was publicly burned by the Charleston postmaster. After they became abolitionists, neither woman was ever to see Charleston again, for no one was sure that even the Grimké household would be proof against a proslavery, antifeminist mob. As such, Sarah’s mature writings sought to learn from but transcend both places. Angelina was, in many ways, the bolder spirit when it came to public performance, but Sarah was the deeper thinker and more adventurous intellectually, though each saw beyond the problem of slavery to that of racial prejudice, which was further than many abolitionists saw.34 The vital text is Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, first published in 1838. It is a work part theology, part comparative ethnography, part memoir, and all sermon, which above all contemplates ‘‘woman as an immortal being, travelling through this world to that city whose builder and maker is God.’’ During its composition, she was still a Quaker and the spirit of that religion much informed the book, for she was anxious to be plain and modest: ‘‘To me it appears beneath the dignity of woman to bedeck herself in gewgaws and trinkets, in ribbons and laces, to gratify the eye of man.’’ Consistent with this, she mistrusted sexuality and wanted ‘‘our intercourse [to be] purified by the forgetfulness of sex,’’ which might diminish a degrading emphasis upon woman’s ‘‘animal nature.’’ Her greatest complaint against slavery was its habitual sexual abuse; ‘‘the virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians.’’ So, being religious, she was preoccupied with a quarrel with biblical exegesis, by arguing that Genesis showed God making man and woman equal, that Adam and Eve shared in a fall ‘‘from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality,’’ and that the old charge that Eve was delivered into inferiority by her temptation of Adam was unfounded, that man and woman shared equally in sin. So, there34. Sarah Grimké regularly submitted an unsuccessful resolution to the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women that ‘‘prejudice against color was the very spirit of slavery and that it was ‘the duty of abolitionists to identify themselves with these oppressed Americans, by sitting with them in places of worship, by appearing with them in our streets, by giving them our countenance in steamboats and stages, by visiting them at their homes and encouraging them to visit us, receiving them as we do our white fellow citizens.’ ’’ See Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 251.

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Sarah Moore Grimké (From W. P. and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison [1886])

after, the growth of male dominion grew contingently, but not legitimately. The Fall let men acquire a ‘‘lust for dominion . . . and as there was no other intelligent being over whom to exercise it, woman was the first victim of this unhallowed passion.’’ Quickly men’s abuses mounted. In the age of ancient Jewish patriarchy, women became property, bedecked as was Rebecca with golden earrings and bracelets, but property nonetheless. Hence there were all the abuses around the world, which Grimké painfully and episodically documented; the sale of women at auction in Babylon, the raffles for them in Hindostan, the hard labor of the Muslim woman whose husband takes his ease, the sufferings of European women from the ancient Greeks onwards, the indignities of the Native American woman.35 When she came to speak ‘‘On the Condition of Women in the United States,’’ Grimké became reminiscent and scathing. (She was always good at scorn, because sensitive to slights.) ‘‘During the early part of my life, my lot was cast among the butterflies of the fashionable world,’’ the young women who abjured intellectual acquirements for fear of being shunned by men who wanted only ‘‘pretty toys’’ and ‘‘mere instruments of pleasure.’’ Just as bad, 35. Sarah Grimké, Equality of the Sexes, 67, 70 42, 59, 33, 35.

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she was trained to think of marriage as ‘‘a kind of preferment.’’ ‘‘To be married is too often held up to the view of girls as the sine qua non of human happiness and human existence.’’ So should one, as an act of freedom, refuse marriage? Here Grimké was old-fashioned, for she did not understand singlehood as a disconnection from marriage, but as an experience implicated in it. After all, she lived her later years in the household of her married sister, which was a common enough accommodation for single women. This was not always easy. Sarah, being older and making large financial contributions to the household, had a way of taking over household duties, even mothering the offspring whom she tellingly called ‘‘Theodore’s children,’’ not Angelina’s. Once, indeed, in 1853–54, Sarah left temporarily because Angelina came to resent this and wrote to her, ‘‘It seems unnatural that a wife and Mother should ever thus be willing to share of the affection of her dearest ones with any human being and my heart refuses its assent.’’ But such experiences were foreshadowed in what otherwise might seem a curious passage in the Letters on the Equality of Sexes, where Sarah wrote, ‘‘I believe that a complete knowledge of household affairs is an indispensable requisite in a woman’s education,—that by the mistress of a family, whether married or single, doing her duty thoroughly and understandingly, the happiness of the family is increased to an incalculable degree, as well as a vast amount of time and money saved.’’ Nonetheless, though often part of an extended family— even, she seems to suggest by the phrase ‘‘mistress,’’ head of one—a single woman might often have to work, so Sarah was sensitive to the problem of economic discrimination, what she called ‘‘the disproportionate value set on the time and labor of men and of women,’’ and was even aware of the injustices experienced by lower-class working women, such as seamstresses and launderers. Rather, she seems to have wanted that women effect a balance: they needed to work both outside and inside the home, because exclusively within it they tended to be ‘‘supported, in idleness and extravagance, by the industry of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who are compelled to toil out their existence, at the counting house, or in the printing office,’’ and this was diminishing for the women, who thus missed out on the ‘‘strength and dignity’’ that might attach to useful work. The passage is Janus-faced, looking back to the gilded indolence of Charleston, but forward to the more modest, hard work of her Northern life, where she helped to run a school but also to bake pies with her own hands. In both cases, however, she never quite shed her class origins. ‘‘Brute force, the law of violence,’’ she wrote with a lady’s shudder, ‘‘rules to a great extent in the poor man’s domicil; and woman is little more than a drudge. They are less under the supervision of public opinion, less under the restraints of education, and unaided or unbiased by the

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refinements of polished society.’’ How did she know this? ‘‘Duty as well as inclination has led me, for many years, into the abodes of poverty and sorrow.’’ 36 Hence Grimké’s idea of separate spheres was complicated. At one level, she was its fierce critic. She insisted that women ought to have a public role, that history proved (Semiramis, Elizabeth I) their competence in authority. ‘‘Intellect is not sexed,’’ she boldly asserted, nor ‘‘strength of mind.’’ ‘‘Our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of man and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals.’’ So did this mean, as Margaret Fuller was in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) to assert, that spheres might dissolve, that women might be sea captains, that Grimké would ‘‘have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. . . . every path laid open to woman as freely as to man’’? Grimké was gnomic: ‘‘As moral and responsible beings, men and women have the same sphere of action, and the same duties devolve upon both; but no one can doubt that the duties of each vary according to circumstances; that a father and a mother, a husband and a wife, have sacred obligations resting on them, which cannot possibly belong to those who do not sustain these relations. But these duties and responsibilities do not attach to them as men and as women, but as parents, husbands, and wives.’’ She glimpsed possibilities: she praised Harriet Martineau for writing, working to improve lighthouses, and knowing various languages; she trumpeted Madame de Staël as ‘‘intellectually the greatest woman that ever lived.’’ She knew the old order was wrong, she deeply resented the scoffing condescensions of men, she detailed with passion all the mortifying legal and financial disabilities of women, but her sense of what the new order would look like was shadowy. Women will be free to choose; ‘‘they will regard themselves, as they really are, free agents, immortal beings, amenable to no tribunal but that of Jehovah.’’ She wanted them to have the right to be preachers, for example, to reassume their old sacerdotal roles as priestesses.37 But, on the whole, she was tentative and vague. ‘‘It is not my intention, nor indeed do I think it is in my power, to point out the precise duties of women. . . . There is a vast field of usefulness before them.’’ What was in the field was a matter of some obscurity. In Grimké’s Letters women seem often to choose something like the old roles, as parents and wives. She has a long 36. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 323, 324; Sarah Grimké, Equality of the Sexes, 57, 59, 61. 37. Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (1845; reprint, Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855), 37; Sarah Grimké, Equality of the Sexes, 47–48, 66–67, 99, 85–95.

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and stern defense of marriage, perhaps the sterner because she admitted many would think her ‘‘altogether disqualified for the task, because I lack experience.’’ 38 She was very insistent that marriage was one of God’s blessed institutions. As one might expect, her vision of marriage was rooted in her theory that God had made men and women equal, and she tried (with a necessary lack of success) to show that the Bible did not sanction patriarchalism and, inter alia, she afforded herself the easy luxury of abusing the wretched Saint Paul. Nonetheless, she seemed to oppose divorce, for she wrote that ‘‘God established [marriage], and man, except by special permission, has no right to annul it.’’ 39 And in 1838, she was not claiming the suffrage, as she would do later in life, or the right to sit in legislatures, but only (as Angelina asserted elsewhere) the right of petition.40 What Sarah wanted, above all, was the right to be heard, the freedom to choose, the ability to control her life, but she was too close to the eighteenth century in which she was born to choose anything drastically radical. Or rather, so she seems from a later perspective. Seen from Charleston in 1838, she was radical enough, indeed almost a moral impossibility. The Grimké sisters were formally abolitionists before they were advocates of women’s rights; they became ‘‘feminists’’ (to use an anachronistic term) partly because of the hostilities from the Northern public they had encountered as antislavery activists, partly because the abolitionist community liked to restrict them to being Southern women. For talking about slavery bound them, in memory, to the South. It was their utility as testifiers from within the citadel of the Slave Power that made them useful to the abolitionists and, like Frederick Douglass who wanted to be more than a fugitive slave, the Grimkés wanted to be more than just cultural refugees. To be a reasoner upon women, in general, was to become more than a Southern woman, in particular, and the Letters on the Equality of Sexes touch only glancingly upon Southern matters. Nonetheless the Grimkés used their Southern experiences habitually, scathingly, both as women and as ex-slaveholders, and their mature writings can be read as autobiography. Yet they connected the issues of womanhood and slavery differently. In many ways, Angelina came to women’s rights, because she started with a visceral revulsion from slavery: ‘‘The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own.’’ 41 Though she claimed 38. Sarah Grimké, Equality of the Sexes, 100, 78. 39. Ibid., 78; Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 334, writes that Grimké ‘‘never quite could make up her mind to come out in favor of divorce.’’ 40. Angelina Emily Grimké, Letters to Catherine Beecher (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1836). 41. Letter 12, ibid., 114.

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otherwise in retrospect, Sarah seems to have felt the constricting bonds of womanhood before she noticed that others were in heavier chains.42 The earliest memories she recounted concern gender, especially the story of being denied tutors. ‘‘The only answer to my earnest pleadings was ‘You are a girl —what do you want with Latin and Greek etc.? You can never use them,’ accompanied sometimes by a smile, sometimes by a sneer.’’ In both cases, however, this nexus of gender and slavery meant that the Grimkés were especially alert to the role of women in the sustenance of slavery. Their contributions to the chamber of horrors that was Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is: Testimonies of a Thousand Witnesses (1839) were insistently drawn to the image of the cruel mistress. ‘‘A punishment dreaded more by the slaves than whipping, unless it is unusually severe, is one which was invented by a female acquaintance of mine in Charleston,’’ relates the author in one of the earliest incidents in the ‘‘Narrative and Testimony of Sarah M. Grimké.’’ ‘‘It is standing on one foot and holding the other in the hand. Afterwards it was improved upon, and a strap was contrived to fasten around the ankle and pass around the neck; so that the least weight of the foot resting on the strap would choke the person.’’ This same acquaintance ‘‘had the ears of her waiting maid slit for some petty theft.’’ Another woman ‘‘had starved a female slave to death.’’ A third, in Sarah’s presence, poured out ‘‘a tirade of abuse’’ for misconduct on a young and dying female slave, who in repentance was seeking Jesus, and turned in scorn on Grimké’s emollient intervention. Likewise Angelina remembered a Charleston lady who ‘‘used to keep cowhides, or small paddles (called ‘pancake sticks,’) in four different apartments in her house; so that when she wished to punish, or to have punished, any of her slaves, she might not have the trouble of sending for an instrument of torture,’’ a lady who harassed her slaves incessantly, and liked to send the most recreant to pace the treadmill in the Charleston workhouse.43 No doubt, this was for the Grimkés the road not taken, or rather the road still taken by their mother and sisters. There is only one reference to the Grimkés in the writings of Louisa McCord. In her 1852 essay on the ‘‘Enfranchisement of Woman,’’ she speaks of women’s rights activists and mentions Angelina Grimké Weld, whom she mocks as ‘‘the gentle’’ and ‘‘the fair,’’ someone who would be wise not to 42. ‘‘It was when my soul was deeply moved at wrongs of the slave that I first perceived distinctly the subject condition of women’’: ‘‘Condition of Women,’’ in Sarah Grimké, Equality of the Sexes, 130. 43. Ibid., 114; Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is, new preface by William Lorem Katz (1839; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 23, 44, 53.

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contest with the crudity of men in the public arena.44 Yet they came from the same, small South Carolina and it is improbable that they did not know of each other, since theirs was a world of gossip and the Grimkés, at least, were notorious and McCord was the daughter of fame. They shared much, powerful fathers and troublesome brothers, the discomfort of being awkward belles, the witness and consciousness of men’s violence, the meditating upon God and suffering, the idea that slavery offered a key to a woman’s selfunderstanding. They agreed, in fact, on much, except the crucial thing of how a woman should respond to the pressure of a harsh world; above all, they disagreed on the cogency of hope. Most of McCord’s published writings on gender were written in response to the ideas of Northern and European theorists. Superficially, she did not like them, but as with most conservatives she came to know what she wished to conserve in dialectic with those who wished to reform her world. Indeed, she was among the earliest Americans habitually to use the world ‘‘conservative’’ to describe her ideology and to say ‘‘we, of the conservatives.’’ 45 Most of her response came in a brief burst in 1852, when she reviewed for the Southern Quarterly Review and De Bow’s in swift succession: first, an article by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor (who, being anonymous, she mistook for Harriet Martineau) in the Westminster Review on the ‘‘Enfranchisement of Women’’ and the proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1851; then, second, Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s book on Woman and Her Needs. McCord’s earlier writings, especially her poetry, were deeply inflected by the matter of women, but they did not formally engage the many texts and ideas (from Wollstonecraft or Fuller or Grimké) that might have come her way. Much was impelled into clarity by the problem of slavery, for she became engaged by the problem of gender in the same year she read and abused Uncle Tom’s Cabin.46 In general, Louisa McCord had little sympathy with hope and reform. Whilst she conceded that mankind, though not perfectible, was capable of great improvement, little proposed for that amelioration (beyond the theories of Adam Smith) met her approval. Scorn was her usual response to the ‘‘wild dream of ‘fraternity,’ ’’ the ‘‘extravagant madness’’ of the ‘‘right to labor,’’ the futility of ‘‘the possibility of forcing brotherly love upon the world.’’ For her, the world was growing dangerous with ‘‘free-soilers, barn-burners, antirenters, abolitionists,’’ who threatened social anarchy. This was the more so, 44. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 115–16. 45. For example, ibid., 77, 114, 115. 46. She had ‘‘lately’’ read the book in early October 1852: see LSM to Mary Cheves Dulles, 9 October 1852, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 294.

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Louisa Susanna McCord (Courtesy Georgia Historical Society, Savannah)

as (she reasoned like a mother) America was young, a ‘‘child of wide and expansive mind’’ easily impressed and led astray. The proponents of women’s rights fell easily under this rubric. But her disagreements can be readily misunderstood. In fact, she shared many of their presumptions; it is even possible that her understandings were partly derived from reading them, that McCord was a sort of wayward Grimké. She had the same contempt for ‘‘silks or ribands, frippery or flowers,’’ 47 and for the belle, whom she calls ‘‘a flirt, a coquette, a heartless trifler . . . [who] forgets duty, conscience and heart, in the love of notoriety.’’ 48 (But then she had been a belle for an unconscionably long time, and once joked after a summer season at the springs, ‘‘I’ll pin a piece of paper with, ‘aged twenty-nine,’ on my shoulder, and if that don’t scare off the young seventeen-year olders who come to flirt with me, the dear knows what will.’’)49 She freely conceded that ‘‘woman’s condition cer47. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 109–10. 48. Ibid., 58, 59, 61, 73, 74, 109–10, 132. 49. LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 7 October 1839, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 269.

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tainly admits of improvement.’’ If anything, her estimate of men was more scathing. ‘‘When have the strong forgotten to oppress the weak?’’ she asked, and knew the answer in woman’s case. ‘‘Man is corporeally stronger than woman,’’ she observed, ‘‘and . . . he, in the unjust use of his strength has frequently, habitually . . . and even invariably, oppressed and abused woman.’’ She even was willing to own that a majority of women were ‘‘out of place, unappreciated, having their talents and powers not only hidden under a bushel, but absolutely thrown away, while she becomes either the slave or the toy of men.’’ 50 She spoke of male vice, of his ‘‘brutal superiority,’’ of a world without women’s influence as ‘‘a wrangling dog-kennel.’’ 51 She even acknowledged, and forcibly, the analogy of woman and slave: ‘‘In every government, and under every rule, woman has been placed in a position of slavery—actual, legal slavery.’’ This was not so perfect a slavery as that experienced by ‘‘our negroes,’’ but was still ‘‘a very decided state of bondage,’’ because it involved the deprivation of rights and being ‘‘legally subjected to the supremacy of man.’’ From this came hardship and suffering. ‘‘Many a woman of dominant intellect is obliged to submit to the rule of an animal in pantaloons, every way her inferior.’’ Why then so conservative? It is a mistake to imagine that conservatives have been so because they did not see injustice or approved of it. Often they were so, because they saw no choice. ‘‘The individual . . . who finds the laws of society irksome to him, has no resource but submission to the discomfort entailed upon him,’’ McCord wrote of men and women alike. She founded much upon her idea of nature, about which she permitted herself an unwonted mysticism. She blamed God for these cold facts of submission. ‘‘Go then . . . and cavil with God who hath thus dictated it. He gave to the man the right, even as He gave him the power. He laid upon his strong right arm those folds of muscles by whose might he can rule, must rule—ay, and in all physical right ought to rule—all that God in his wisdom has made weaker. Ought to rule, we say; because whatever God has made ought to be.’’ That is, McCord had no interest in gender as a thing socially constructed. She believed in the reality of sex, because she believed in the compulsion and fate of bodies, both in the case of women and of slaves. She emphasized this even in the case of children, whose bodily weakness might be temporary but was inescapable. ‘‘Sex and colour are severally so essential to the being of a woman and a negro,’’ she asserted, ‘‘that it is impossible to imagine the existence of either, without these distinctive marks. . . . [T]he sex of a human being was fixed long before 50. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 108, 131. 51. Ibid., 119. Cf. John Randolph, in Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 459, where he speaks of women in politics as being unsexed and observes, ‘‘If ladies will plunge into the affairs of men, they will lose the deference they now enjoy; they will be treated roughly—like men.’’

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its entrance into this world, by rules and causes, which, entirely unknown to man, were equally beyond his reach and that of accident.’’ 52 Much in McCord’s criticism of the women’s rights advocates rested in her sense that they merely succeeded in becoming a ‘‘third sex’’ or ‘‘unsexed,’’ unable to be men, ceasing to be women. Women’s bodies enforced upon them certain duties, sensibilities, and feelings. Of God’s creatures, they were mandated to endure, suffer, love, and nurture. ‘‘Passion governed, suffering conquered, self forgotten, how often is she called upon, as daughter, wife, sister, and mother, to breathe, in her half-broken but loving heart, the whispered prayer, that greatest, most beautiful, most self-forgetting of all prayers ever uttered, ‘Father, forgive them, [for] they know not what they do.’ ’’ 53 Women were, in short, charged with Christ’s mission, redemption by love. So they had no place in the public sphere, in voting booths, on hustings, or in legislatures. They had no claim upon power or property, in the ordinary sense. ‘‘The world of action must to her be almost entirely a closed book,’’ she once told William Porcher Miles. Corporeal weakness and nature’s bargain meant women needed men’s strength for protection, however ugly was that strength. But McCord unquietly expanded this meek sphere. She was adamant that a woman’s duties were not confined ‘‘to shirt-making, puddingmixing, and other such household gear, nor yet even to the adornment of her own fair person.’’ She placed intellect within woman’s sphere, as well she (the author) might if she was to retain any sense of personal rationale. She insisted that woman was not inferior, merely different, and she flirted with asserting superiority. For she thought that, if mankind was to improve, it was by the intensification of woman’s mission to man: ‘‘By perfecting herself, she perfects mankind; and hers . . . is the highest mission, because, from her, must the advance towards perfection begin.’’ The millennial ambition McCord mocked in the socialist, she was willing to grant to the woman ‘‘in her true place,’’ which was ‘‘the quiet, unwearied and unvarying path of duty, the home of the mother, the wife, and the sister, teaching man his destiny.’’ For men might be powerful, but they were confused and needed guidance: ‘‘Her duty is always clear, while his may be doubtful. . . . His is too often a divided struggle. She has but to strive and to pray; while he has to strive and to fight. She knows that to smoothe, to comfort and to heal, is her highest duty. He doubts whether to wrangle, to strike and to wound, be not his. . . . [M]an, summoned by nature, and often by duty, to the whirl of strife, blinded in the struggle, forgets too often where wrath should cease and mercy rule.’’ 54 Yet women did not always 52. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 406, 407, 151, 441, 113. 53. Ibid., 109, 110. 54. LSM to William Porcher Miles, 12 June 1848, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 275; Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 108, 119, 149.

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David James McCord (Courtesy Georgia Historical Society, Savannah)

know this, or else why was it necessary to explain all this to them? So McCord was inverting the order of gender in her society. She lived in a world where men were self-confident of their manliness and she called them doubtful, and she took Southern woman’s doubtfulness and tried to purify it to her own specially tense commitment. Her own history casts a complicated light on all this. She worshipped her father, ‘‘my idol through childhood and womanhood,’’ and probably did not have a very happy marriage to David James McCord, a widower of a famously hot temper, the wielder of a cane and a fist, a man gifted in storytelling and known as ‘‘Handsome Davy.’’ 55 He is the most likely candidate for the ‘‘animal 55. Susan Smythe Bennett, comp., ‘‘The McCords of McCords’ Ferry, South Carolina,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 34 (October 1933): 192.

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in pantaloons,’’ a man whose funeral she declined to attend.56 Her references to her own mother are few and matter-of-fact, including the letter in which the latter’s death was announced.57 The only anecdote she tells that concerns her father and mother together is a story of man’s strength, woman’s weakness, and the necessity of the former for survival. It is in the fragmentary ‘‘Memoir of Langdon Cheves,’’ written in 1876. Father driving through [McCords?] swamp—to my Aunt’s—came following with nurse and other children—Water everywhere and all landmarks covered. Mother clinging to his arm, endeavoured to draw his reign hand round to what appeared a clear road through the forest and which was as it afterwards proved doubtless the River (He had no eye for locality and caused her mistrust of his judgement)—But there was no possibility of pausing—no time for consultation. One sign[,] one idea had struck him—one sign was faintly apparent to him—none other noticed it—His whole anxiety concentrated and feared to allow his mind to be turned off by persuasion or argument. As she seized his arm He said only to her—‘‘Wife[,] trust me’’ and turned the horses heads towards what she believed to be certain death—The great sheet of water covered [with?] [illegible word ] offered only one road which gave the chance of life—My Mother saw the way open and clear before her— Turn here, here to the right, and she seized his arm drawing back fr[o]m the certain death. ‘‘Wife[,] trust me and do not touch my arm.’’ He turned to the left into the much denser part of the forrest.58 As is apparent, the fragment tells the story twice, as though McCord struggled to get it right. And, perhaps as significantly, she first wrote ‘‘road which gave him the chance of life,’’ as though the others did not matter in life’s 56. He came from St. Mathew’s Parish, S.C.; his father, called Russell, died a few months after David’s birth. The family (originally from Armagh) had been involved in running a ferry boat across the Catawba River. His mother was Hannah, née Turquand, from a family with relations in Canada. There seems to have been land, for in the census of 1790, the father was shown as owning seventeen slaves. The son was educated at South Carolina College and admitted to the bar in Columbia in 1818, where he became the law partner of Henry Junius Nott and William Campbell Preston. He was at various times a newspaper editor, a member of the state legislature, president of a bank, and a planter. He was twice married, on the first occasion to Emmeline Wagner, who bore him eleven children and died in 1839. He was forty-three when he married Louisa Susanna Cheves, for whose father he had sometimes worked as an agent. See Bennett, ‘‘McCords of McCords’ Ferry.’’ 57. Ibid., 192; LSM to Sophia Cheves Haskell, 8 April 1836, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 268. 58. I omit the cancellations in the text, scrupulously provided in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 260.

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chances, either to Langdon Cheves or to his eldest daughter, before canceling ‘‘him’’ and reintegrating the women into the ambition for survival. Yet nothing, in her mature life, mattered more to Louisa McCord than being a mother, especially to her son, Langdon Cheves McCord. She wished to be for her woman’s sphere what she romantically believed her father was to the public realm, an influence for stability and good in a world full of the less prescient and less competent. But this does not quite capture the complexity of her views, for Louisa McCord was also not unlike her own mother, someone who wanted to lean trustingly on a great man’s arm in hours of danger. McCord’s surviving correspondence shows her tacking between these two impulses, the fearsome strength she took as necessity and which others habitually discerned in her, and the desire to be protected. ‘‘I like a woman who leans a little,’’ Dexter Clapp of Savannah once observed, and it will seem odd to observe that McCord could be such a woman, if often against her will. It was her misfortune that, during her life, she needed strength more than she was satisfied in being protected, for after her father the men she knew intimately seemed often to have been violent, weak, or inadequate. Over them she had powers of persuasion, but not power. Power was the mother’s prerogative, including the power to protect, just as it was understood to be the prerogative of the slaveholder over the slave. ‘‘You believe the negro to be an oppressed race, while we believe him to be a protected one,’’ she once told Henry Carey.59 Part of McCord’s incomprehension of abolitionism was that she did not understand why anyone would wish to forfeit protection for freedom, if freedom meant a reckless danger. The complexity of her position is most starkly exposed in the story of her father’s long dying, which casts a bleak light on what was possible for even the strongest of Southern women in a man’s world. Langdon Cheves grew old and, after a stroke which occasioned partial paralysis, his mind started to become ‘‘constantly confused, constantly restless, constantly changing.’’ So, in the middle of the winter of 1855–56, his daughter took him into her Columbia house and away from his residence in the Sandhills. This was awkward, as it usually is between generations. She was a widow, in possession of her own household, in charge of her children and slaves. He was a patriarch—her patriarch—a man accustomed to command, bringing his own slaves, a man half lost in mind but one whose ‘‘firm will is uncontroulable.’’ It rapidly became clear that he would not accept living in a house not his own, and talked often of returning to the Sandhills. This action 59. Dexter Clapp to Henry W. Bellows, 12 January 1844, Henry W. Bellows Papers, DU; LSM to Henry Charles Carey, 18 January 1854, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 297.

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would (as she told her brother) have been ‘‘a wretchedness and a shame,’’ which others would not understand: they would conclude that ‘‘he who has made us all, is turned out to pine and to suffer.’’ ‘‘I do not think it will be possible to keep him here, unless he could get the impression that this house belongs to him,’’ she saw. She was willing to try subterfuge, perhaps to fake a purchase by him of her house. Yet her father was so determined, while so excited and volatile, that she reeled under the pressure of making decisions not quite within her power, for legally her brother managed her father’s financial affairs. She threw herself into the task, though, as she said, ‘‘I do not know what to do, I am giving up every moment of my time, neglecting business, children and every thing else, but without success.’’ For, as she knew, her father ‘‘needs controul,’’ and would not take it from a woman. ‘‘Some form, some apparent transfer must be gone through, before he will submit to be so told. He now gets angry or at least displeased if I say so.’’ She was distraught; ‘‘I become almost crazy myself and do not know what to do.’’ This not knowing, for so competent a woman, was terrible, desperate. Her letter of 25 January 1856 says, ‘‘I do not know what to do,’’ three times. Though, in fact, she did know what to do, for she had lived her life around men of her father’s kind: ‘‘He must own property, he must be told ‘this is yours,’ wherever he stays.’’ It was just that such men did not listen to a woman, so she needed constantly to inform her brother, ask his advice, seek his consent for legal and financial transactions, while he seems to have been negligent and inattentive to the mounting and debilitating crisis. ‘‘I think you could help Father now as no one else can do, because you can assume a kind of authority as manager of his business,’’ she told him. ‘‘I assume a great deal in other points, but the moment business of any kind is spoken of, Father immediately speaks of you and says it will be arranged when he sees you.’’ 60 So the father wavered in his senility. Now he was better, stronger in mind; then he was weaker, irritable, dissatisfied, abusive. She strove to give him the illusion of mastery. She gave up ‘‘my whole lower story to him except one small back room’’ and kept away her friends, but that was not enough. Eventually she was driven to build a second, small house on her town lot, where she could hide herself and her children, to leave him with the belief that he lorded over the main building. She spent her own money to protect Cheves and then had to beg recompense from her brother’s stewardship of her father’s means: ‘‘I am sorry to trouble you now but I really need money.’’ Consistently, she protected her father from bad news, especially that his son Hayne was dying 60. LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 18 February, 1 February, 25 January, 7 March, 29 January 1856, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 312, 309, 304–5, 318.

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in Florence. She had often to lie, to contrive the ‘‘concocted falsehood.’’ 61 She flattered his self-importance, for ‘‘he thinks that he has a hundred important communications to make.’’ She dealt with his slaves (who clashed with her own), Cilla who was pregnant, and June who she felt was a troublemaker, both of whom Cheves was determined to free upon his death, even though technically June had been Louisa’s slave for about a dozen years and Cilla was to be hers upon the terms of her father’s will. She managed his paranoia: ‘‘Father is very unhappy today, thinks he is ruined, that I am cheating him, you are cheating him and every thing is wrong.’’ She was central to the events, yet, being a woman, marginal. Indeed her father’s imagination expunged her very existence. His greatest annoyance now, beside the June and Cilla emancipation question, is a habit of imagining that there are two of sundry persons habitually about him, and particularly myself. I have a double, whom as I cannot give a name for, he constantly calls the ‘‘nameless one’’ and ‘‘the lonely one,’’ and whom he thinks I have displaced in his house and in the Lang Syne property. Indeed it is with this ‘‘lonely and nameless one,’’ rather than with myself, that he desires the arrangement about June and Cilla to be made. He considers them to belong to her and not to me, and because he cannot see her, wishes you to be a surety for the promises made. She came very close to despair: ‘‘My position here is so intensely distressing that you must excuse me if I press upon you more urgently than you think right,’’ she told her brother. ‘‘I know you have troubles, I know you have cares; perhaps even, you are not well yourself, perhaps I am goading you beyond endurance, but God help me what can I do?’’ 62 And all this at a time when her eyes were beginning to trouble her, and she feared blindness.63 Eventually the crisis eased. The old man grew too weak to express his way61. LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 1 February 1856, ibid., 309. 62. LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 29 January, 1 February, 5 May, 13 April, 29 February, 5 March 1856, ibid., 332, 309, 328, 323–24, 313, 325, 316. 63. It is worth adding that there seems to have been an extra dimension to the crisis, which is hard to fathom, but clearly was structured by considerations of gender. Almost as soon as Cheves was installed, she learned ‘‘a most painful feature of his case . . . making it doubly imperative that he should reside constantly and permanently with one of his children and yet the same cause acts to make him desire to return to the Sandhills.’’ Whatever this was, she could not as a woman write it down, though she could speak of it to her brother. Nor could she, as a woman, solve the problem, for it needed ‘‘family influence and gentleman influence,’’ which ‘‘any son’’ could manage (except, oddly, her physician brother John ‘‘for reasons that you know’’), but no daughter. (LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 28 January 1856, ibid., 308.)

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ward will, became ‘‘helpless almost as an infant,’’ and a woman was permitted to deal authoritatively with infants. He grew sufficiently oblivious that she could put him in the new cottage and return to her own quarters. She bought two doll-like figures for his room, ‘‘one of a dog life size and one of Little Red Riding Hood.’’ And these ‘‘seemed to satisfy him when real children and dogs would wander.’’ 64 He died in June 1857. All this was, in many ways, a stark commentary on even McCord’s version of the separate spheres. It confirmed her hard assessment of woman’s difficult lot and man’s brute insensibility. But she had liked to think that the boundaries of the spheres were distinct, that everyone knew his or her place. Yet it was not so. Keeping place required effort, a repression: ‘‘Although I have been pushed back in every possible way,’’ she told Miles in 1848, ‘‘and have myself endeavoured for many a long year to crush my own propensities, there has been a struggling consciousness of something which has goaded me on.’’ Necessity half-dissolved boundaries and compelled different fictions, a blurring of his and hers. ‘‘I think he will be much happier when he sees something of a house getting up on my lot and will feel that this is his,’’ she observed at one point of her father.65 This was the ‘‘concocted falsehood’’ of the doctrine of separate spheres. Everyone was told what they must be, but it was seldom possible to accomplish this, for reality was too fluid, ‘‘constantly confused, constantly restless, constantly changing.’’

64. LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 5 February 1857, ibid., 333; Smythe, ‘‘Recollections,’’ 19, quoted in A. V. Huff Jr., Langdon Cheves of South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 244–45. 65. LSM to William Porcher Miles, 12 June 1848; LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 7 March 1856, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 274, 318.

Chapter Seven

A Heterogeneous Mass from All Nations

It was to become customary later for white Southerners to speak of their unity of origin. By 1900, Southerners were supposed to be Anglo-Saxons to a man and woman, happily blessed with a rich and providential English heritage of language and culture, which elsewhere in the country was being corrupted by immigrant floods of greasy Italians and darkly gabbling Jews. But antebellum Southerners had a different view. In 1890, Boston was ethnically more complex than Charleston, but earlier the reverse had been true. Distinctions of ethnicity, later swept away, were powerfully relevant in the earlier South, when it mattered whether one’s forebears were English, Scottish, ScotchIrish, Irish, Spanish, French Catholic or French Huguenot, Sephardic or Ashkenazic, German Catholic or German Lutheran. In 1823 Hugh Legaré was to describe his world in the language that would later be inscribed upon the Statue of Liberty, as a place of ‘‘the unfortunate, the persecuted, the adventurous, the bold, the aspiring of all climes and conditions, congregated and confounded in one vast asylum.’’ As Alexander Beaufort Meek put it later, ‘‘Though our population is composed principally of the several varieties of the Anglo-Saxon stock, yet every other race of Europe, and some from the other continents, have contributed to swell the motley and singular combination.’’ When Mary Chesnut sat down to remember her Charleston schooldays in the 1830s at Madame Talvande’s, she explained the scene largely by ethnicities. There was Bishop England, ‘‘with the richest of brogues,’’ and the Irish priests he brought in tow, who sang of Rory Title from BM to James L. Reynolds, 21 August 1849, Manly Family Papers, UA: ‘‘As the home population disperses, and the new & wide fields are brought to view, filled with a heterogeneous mass from all nations,—whom we must instruct in laws & liberty, and in religious truth.’’

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O’Moore. There were the French refugees from Saint-Domingue, ‘‘wonderfully handsome girls’’ always studying their catechism. There were Huguenots who ‘‘were not ashamed to be both Americans and protestants’’ and ‘‘loved to dwell upon the heroic virtues of the noble colony who had planted them here.’’ There were the English girls, ‘‘Cavalier stock,’’ who were hidden from the sun. There were the Africans, Ben, Dédé, and Maum Jute, among whom one needed to distinguish the ‘‘africans pûr sang’’ and the ‘‘Guinea Negroes.’’ 1 Hence the South was a polyglot culture. The cultural influence of the Spanish, though long since displaced from Florida, lingered in Louisiana and was reinforced by the annexation of Texas in 1845.2 In Louisiana itself, French powerfully competed with English as the language of ordinary life and was to do so well up until the First World War. In the 1840s, there were fifty French newspapers and periodicals published in the state, notably the L’Ami des Lois (1809–24), L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (1827–1925), and the Courrier de la Louisiane (1807–79). When Henry Clay was advising Jesse Burton Harrison in 1831 about the advantages of moving from Virginia to New Orleans, he observed: ‘‘Your knowledge of French and Spanish would be of great advantage to you. They are almost indispensable.’’ After Josiah Nott went from South Carolina to southern Alabama, he wrote back to a friend: ‘‘We have a great deal of french population here & I am forced to speak as much french here as I was in Paris.’’ 3 But there were many other tongues and peoples. The Jewish communities of the South used Hebrew and Spanish in their rituals and households. There were the older German-speaking communities: the Moravians of western North Carolina and the Salzburgers of Georgia. After 1830, various colonization societies were founded in Germany to settle along the Brazos River in Texas, among them the Rhein-Bayerische Gesellschaft and the Mainzer Adelsverein. In the 1850s, after the wave of immigration that followed the 1. ‘‘Oration on 4th of July, 1823,’’ in Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:261; ‘‘Americanism in Literature’’ (1844), in Alexander Beaufort Meek, Romantic Passages in Southwestern History; Including Orations, Sketches, and Essays, 2nd ed. (Mobile, Ala.: S. H. Goetzel, 1857), 121; ‘‘Two Years—Or the Way We Lived Then,’’ in Two Novels by Mary Chesnut, ed. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 166, 167, 168, 181–82. 2. Robert C. Reinders, End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850–1860 (New Orleans: Pelican Publishing, 1964), 20; Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 434, 441, 437. 3. Edward Laroque Tinker, Bibliography of French Newspapers and Periodicals in Louisiana (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1933), 37; Henry Clay to JBH, 11 September 1831, Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC; Josiah C. Nott to James M. Gage, 28 July 1836, James M. Gage Papers, SHC.

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Revolution of 1848, 10 to 15 percent of the free populations of Memphis, Louisville, and New Orleans were German.4 About 10,000 Germans arrived in Virginia between 1830 and 1860. Richmond in 1860 was a quarter German (among the whites), and many more were foreign-born.5 In 1850, 49 percent of free New Orleans was foreign-born; prominent among these were about 24,000 Irish. In 1860 half the adult white males in Savannah were of foreign birth, and of these, 70 percent were Irish. Among these, many spoke Gaelic.6 Then there were all the Native American languages: the varieties of Algonquian spoken by the Pamlicos, Powhatans, and Shawnees; the Iroquoian of the Meherrin, Nottaway, Tuscarora, and Cherokee; the Siouan of Ofo, Biloxi, Tutelos, Occaneechis, Saponis, Quapaws, Osage, Missourias, with distant linguistic relatives in the Catawbas and Woccons, in turn linked to the Cheraw, Eno, Congaree, Pedee, Santee, Sewee, Wateree, Waxhaw, Yadkin, and Yuchi. There were Muskogean-speaking tribes; the Seminoles, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Miccosukee, Coushatta, and Alabama. In addition, 30 percent of the Southern population was of African descent, many of whom spoke an English deeply inflected by African survivals, some of whom, notably Gullah speakers on the Sea Islands and Louisiana slaves, spoke a creole language of their own, compounded of African languages and, variously, English, French, and Spanish.7 Early in the antebellum years, there were still slaves, born in Africa, for whom English was a second language. So, perhaps only a bare majority of the population of the southeastern United States spoke English as a first language. Hence, to walk through Southern culture was to move through a world where many voices were audible. In 1842, Caroline Mordecai Plunkett wrote from Mobile to the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth about a visit from the former’s soldier brother, Alfred, who had been touring the region: ‘‘He said, in our towns Pensacola, Mobile & New Orleans he could scarcely believe himself in the United States. . . . [I]n the streets you hear every thing spoken more than English, as 4. Randall M. Miller, ‘‘Germans,’’ in Wilson and Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 429; Reinders, End of an Era, 19. John Fredrick Nau, The German People of New Orleans, 1850–1900 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1958), 4, says that 53,909 German immigrants entered the port of New Orleans between 1820 and 1850; the figure for Louisiana in 1860 comes from p. 7. 5. Klaus German Wust, The Virginia Germans (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 203, however, says Richmond was ‘‘close to one third’’ foreign-born; Myron Berman, Richmond’s Jewry, 1769–1976: Shabbat in Shockoe (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 143. 6. Joseph G. Tregle Jr., ‘‘Creoles and Americans,’’ in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold H. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 164; Reinders, End of an Era, 18; Herbert Weaver, ‘‘Foreigners in Ante-Bellum Savannah,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 37 (March 1953): 1–17. 7. Wilson and Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 770–74.

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they were first settled by the Spanish & French; these still constitute a great proportion of the inhabitants & there are constant importations in German, Dutch & Irish.’’ 8 New Orleans was most polyglot. In 1851, De Bow’s Review reported that, of the 2,256 scholars registered in the city’s public schools, ‘‘There are 179 whose mother tongue is the French; 909, the English; 308, the German; 43, the Spanish; 16, the Italian, and 1 the Polish language. 1,163 were born in Louisiana; 306 in other states of the Union; 269 in France; 227 in Germany; 167 in Ireland; 69 in England and Scotland; 16 in Italy; 11 in Spain; 8 in Mexico; 5 in the West Indies; 4 in Cuba; 3 in Canada; 3 in Belgium; 2 in Switzerland; 1 in Denmark; 1 in Poland; and 1 in Australia.’’ 9 And this underestimated drastically the French, since they mostly attended not public but Catholic schools. The census of 1850 showed ‘‘20,200 Irish, 11,425 Germans, 7,522 French, and 2,670 English and Scotch.’’ 10 Ethnicities had their institutions. Charleston had a full array. For Scots and Scotch-Irish, there was the St. Andrew’s Society; for Catholic Irish, the Hibernian Society, the St. Patrick Society, and the Emerald Isle Society; for Germans, the German Friendly Society; for Jews, the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the Hebrew Harmonic Society, and the Hebrew Orphan Society; for Huguenots, the South Carolina Society; for French Catholics, the French Benevolent Society. Savannah had a similar array, including an Irish Union Society and a German Turnverein. In New Orleans, there was the Deutschen Gesellschaft, the German Society. Richmond had the Hebrew Young Men’s Literary Association. Militia companies often had an ethnic basis: Georgia had the Irish Jasper Greens and the German Volunteers, the former serving in the Mexican War.11 In addition, religion was a great repository of ethnic affiliations; synagogues for Jews, Episcopal churches for the English, Methodist chapels for the Welsh, Roman Catholic cathedrals for the French and Irish, Presbyterian churches for the Scots, African Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches for Africans. All these had congregations where one would meet people of reassuringly similar background and experience, where a Peyre might meet a Porcher, a Cheves encounter a McCord, where cultural memory and ritual might be shared; here the Battle of Culloden invoked, there a Mandingo word. Except when they involved matters of white supremacy, many of these in8. Caroline Mordecai Plunkett to Maria Edgeworth, 25 September 1842, Mordecai Family Papers, SHC. On Alfred Mordecai, see Edgar E. MacDonald, ed., The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 332. 9. ‘‘Sources of New Orleans Population,’’ DBR 11 (July 1851): 96. 10. Nau, German People of New Orleans, 14. 11. Ibid., 20–25; Weaver, ‘‘Foreigners,’’ 14.

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stitutions evolved towards the inconsistently inclusive. Ethnicity became an emphasis more than an indispensable qualification, as the lines of ethnicity began to blur. The German Friendly Society of Charleston, for example, had been founded in 1766 with the firm mandate ‘‘[t]hat none but Germans, or those born of German parents, can be admitted as members in this Society,’’ and the insistence that all members should be able to speak German.12 But the latter rule quickly lapsed and the former was much ignored. Benevolent societies, founded for the care of this group or that, often came to spread their philanthropy eclectically. Intermarriage between ethnicities was so extensive that exclusivity was hard to sustain and not required by even the most arrogant of custom.13 Charles Gayarré, himself of mixed French and Spanish blood, married a Buchanan. J. D. B. De Bow, descended from Huguenots who had lived in Amsterdam and once called themselves de Boog, married a Poe, a cousin of the writer. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet came from a Dutch family, once named Langestraet, which by the late eighteenth century had intermarried with Wooleys and Randolphs. William Henry Trescot’s mother was a McCrady and his paternal grandfather a Cornishman, and he married a Cuthbert. Southern Jews were, often to their distress, very prone to intermarriage. It has been estimated that the rate of intermarriage for Jews with Christians in New Orleans was about fifty percent, at least between 1802 and the 1830s. Of the thirteen children of Jacob Mordecai, one of the most Orthodox defenders of the faith, ‘‘only two chose Jewish spouses and remained loyal to Judaism.’’ It was very common for Jews to be Masons, which brought them into habitual fraternal contact with Gentiles in rituals that were explicitly intended to discourage Christian sectarianism and promote universalism.14 As between ‘‘white’’ ethnicities, almost everyone was mongrel and pride in origin could be selective. James Louis Petigru was, on his father’s side, a Pettigrew, which was a Scotch-Irish family, and on his mother’s a Gibert, which 12. George J. Gongaware, The History of the German Friendly Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1766–1916 (Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1935), 3. Basil Manly Jr., for example, was educated at the Society’s school, upon the slim excuse that his mother, Sarah Murray Rudulph, was partly of German descent; see A. James Fuller, ‘‘Chaplain to the Confederacy: A Biography of Basil Manly, 1798–1868’’ (Ph.D. diss., Miami University, 1995), 48, 218. 13. See Reinders, End of an Era, 13, for a list of intermarriages among ‘‘prominent families’’ in New Orleans in the 1850s. 14. Ottis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 1, 108; John Donald Wade, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet: A Study of the Development of Culture in the South (1924; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969), 2– 4; Robert Nicholas Olsberg, ‘‘A Government of Class and Race: William Henry Trescot and the South Carolina Chivalry, 1860–1865’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1972), 23; Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (Waltham, Mass.: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), 214; Berman, Richmond’s Jewry, 111; Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776–1985, 4 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989–93), 1:572–73.

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was Huguenot. When he came of age the young James split the difference when, as Mary Chesnut observed, he ‘‘Huguenotted his name’’ to Petigru, but ‘‘could not tie up his Irish.’’ Similarly, Hugh Swinton Legaré was acutely conscious of being both Huguenot and Scottish, both Legaré and Swinton, and divided his time when in Europe in 1818–19 between Paris and Edinburgh. In 1859, when William Porcher Miles was asked to give a brief account of himself, he replied by stressing doubled origins. ‘‘I was born in South Carolina where my father’s family (an English one) had been settled from the earliest colonial times. . . . On the father’s as well as mother’s side of the House . . . I have a liberal infusion of the old Huguenot blood. My father’s mother was a Porcher—my mother’s mother was a Turquand.’’ 15 It was characteristic of those descended from the Protestant refugees of the late seventeenth century to show such a sensitivity. In Paris in 1847, Charles Izard Manigault dined with George Bancroft. A bumper of Old Carolina Madeira, presented by Manigault, was drunk and the historian proposed a toast to ‘‘the memory of the Huguenots of South Carolina,’’ before launching into a disquisition upon ‘‘the trials sufferings, & perseverance’’ of an ancient Manigault. ‘‘I told Mr. Bancroft in reply,’’ Manigault told Alfred Huger, ‘‘that all of us Huguenots felt great pride in our Ancestry, & descent, from such Honest, Poor, Virtuous, and energetic people, who abandoned homes, friends, & all that they had to encounter such trials & Sufferings with fortitude & energy with a view of Maintaining their faith, & their liberty intact.’’ Huger scarcely needed persuading of the merits of a Huguenot descent. In 1853, when Robert Gourdin presented him with a copy of the old French Protestant liturgy, Huger expostulated with his usual passion for exclamation marks: ‘‘Oftimes, in streams of ‘doubt’ and ‘trial,’ have the examples of our Huguenot Ancestors, encouraged & sustained me!! and now, in the seventh decade of my Pilgrimage, I say, with perfect Truth! ‘Heaven be praised, that I have descended from such Men!’ ’’ 16 Huguenots were ubiquitous in South Carolinian culture. Manigault, Legaré, Ravenel, Grimké, Porcher, De Bow, LeConte, Moncure, all were names whose presence in the making of Southern culture was prominent. They saw the world distinctively. When they sailed into the harbor of Bordeaux, it was not to anywhere, but to somewhere ancestral, lost to them by the brute forces of history. In their homes were pieces of furniture, articles of silver, and fashioned gold that bore the marks of Huguenot craftsmen. Among family 15. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 366; William Porcher Miles to Mr. Lanman, 26 October 1859, William Porcher Miles Papers, SCL. 16. Charles Izard Manigault to Alfred Huger, 1 April 1847, Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL; Alfred Huger to Robert N. Gourdin, 2 November 1853, Alfred Huger Papers, DU.

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papers were old French documents, deeds to a despoiled heritage. When they considered even their American experience, they saw differently by having a distinguishable genealogy for liberty. Those sensitive to the English tradition saw a line going back from the American Revolution to 1688, to the English Civil War and, beyond, to Magna Carta. But Hugh Legaré saw something double, a synthesis. ‘‘On this side of the Atlantic,’’ he observed in 1829, when an Englishman (Basil Hall) was misunderstanding something, ‘‘the love of liberty is unsophisticated and virginal. The children of the Puritan and the Huguenot have never ceased to breathe the spirit which animated the first Pilgrims—the spirit of Naseby and Marston-Moor, of Montcontour and of Ivry.’’ 17 Indeed, orating upon the American Revolution in 1823, he had taken pains to indicate the relevance of the Huguenots, ‘‘the devoted Huguenots, who, after having extorted by their valor in the field, with bourbon and coligni, with rohan and soubise, a short interval of repose from persecution, had at length abjured forever their beautiful native land’’ to contribute in America their ‘‘solemn duty, to free themselves from every species of restraint that was incompatible with the fullest rights of conscience.’’ 18 In Paris in 1836, he went to a performance of Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots and was moved to remember the conflicted heritage of the ‘‘deep, fervent, solemn & sublime tho’ withal severe & stern, fanaticism of our fighting & praying Calvinistic fathers.’’ 19 Whatever else the Huguenots were, they were not English. William Henry Trescot, explaining in 1859 the character of early South Carolina, distinguished it from that of Virginia, indeed saw the contrast as more illuminating than that between South Carolina and New England, because more subtle. Thereby, he marked off us from them. We had ‘‘the influence of the Huguenot immigration,’’ they did not. ‘‘Virginia was essentially an English settlement, with old English prejudices, habits and institutions.’’ While South Carolina had some of this, though from an England more than half a century older, the French immigration was so extensive and influential, that ‘‘it modified very considerably the mind and temper of our people, and by the combination produced a third character, which differed widely from both its components, and developed a decided and vigorous life of its own.’’ 20 17. HSL, ‘‘Hall’s Travels in North-America,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 336–37. 18. Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 1:261. For a similar interpretation, see ‘‘Onslow, or the Protege of an Enthusiast,’’ SQR 10 (July 1846): 81, which observes of the American Revolution in the South: ‘‘The Cavalier and Huguenot traits should be kept in view, whenever that era is studied.’’ 19. HSL to Mary Swinton Legaré, 28 March 1836, HSL Papers, SCL. 20. William Henry Trescot, Oration Delivered before the South-Carolina Historical Society, Thursday, May 19, 1859 (Charleston, S.C.: James and Williams, 1859), 14, 17–18.

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Charles Gayarré as a young man (Courtesy Special Collections, Tulane University Library, New Orleans)

Conversely, whatever else the Huguenots were, they had ceased to be very French. In religion, they had faded unobtrusively into the Episcopal church. They no longer spoke French, or only a little more than educated Southerners might. It was in Louisiana where French remained central, formative, and Catholicism was the norm. The mild sense of otherness that Huguenot friends permitted Trescot to feel towards Virginia was hugely amplified in Louisiana, whose Creoles and Acadians were peoples sold away by the Corsican and victims of a bitterly resented invasion by English-speaking and Protestant Americans. There are many ways to measure the implications of ethnicity for intellectual life, but the simplest may lie in examining the career and writings of Charles Gayarré, a man who betrayed an acute awareness of these issues of origin and culture, for his ethnic background was rich and complicated. He had a father who had lived in Mexico for a while as a boy, then became a functionary of the royal Contadoria in New Orleans and married in 1802; he died in 1813, when his son was eight. Hence the historian grew up on the plantation of his maternal grandfather, Etienne de Boré, six miles beyond the limits of New Orleans, on the east bank of the Mississippi. He went to school at

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the Collège d’Orléans. His grandfather died in 1820, his mother in 1822, and Gayarré became very wealthy when only seventeen; there is evidence that his mother had begun to liquidate her landed holdings, and her son may have continued the process, though he kept land and slaves until the Civil War impoverished him.21 Gayarré lived most of his life in New Orleans, but he studied the law in Philadelphia in the late 1820s and lived in France and Spain for eight years after 1835. So he might have seen himself as Spanish or French, perhaps even as American. But as a historian, at least, he began his literary career in French, which was his first language. His earliest publication was the Discours addressé à la législature en réfutation du rapport de Mr. Livingston sur l’abolition de la peine de mort (1826), and his earliest oration was an effort delivered in French in St. Louis Cathedral upon the fifteenth anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, an event he had lived through with much satisfaction at the slaughter of so many from perfidious Albion.22 Next came the Essai historique sur la Louisiane (1830– 31), which was largely a translation and adaptation of François Xavier Martin’s History of Louisiana (1827–29), which Gayarré hoped would be useful for ‘‘cette partie de notre population pour qui le Français est encore la langue maternelle’’ and hence a work intended to be enclosed within the French world of Louisiana culture.23 Lastly, there were the two volumes of the Histoire de la Louisiane (1846–47). Indeed, Gayarré was to publish nothing in English (apart from the occasional newspaper piece in his capacity as a politician) until a People’s Lyceum lecture on ‘‘The Romance of Louisiana History’’ appeared in De Bow’s Review in 1847, when he was 42. So evidently and insistently Francophone was he that it was others, not Gayarré himself, who proposed to publish an English translation of his writings. And no one doubted, even when he migrated into writing in English, that his writings were a vindication of Creole culture. As a friend wrote to him, in a letter that mixed broken English and easy French: ‘‘I am glad to hope, & proud to indulge in my national belief, that all the true creoles, shall be as much grateful to the historian of their 21. Edward M. Socola, ‘‘Charles E. A. Gayarré: A Biography’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1954), 1–19. 22. Ibid., 30–31. This was a dimension not lost upon Andrew Jackson at the time, as Gayarré’s own history was to narrate. In his proclamation of 21 September 1814, Jackson exclaimed: ‘‘Louisianians, the base, the perfidious Britons have attempted to invade your country. . . . Louisianians, the proud Briton, the natural and sworn enemy of all Frenchmen, has called upon you, by proclamation, to aid him in his tyranny, and to prostrate the holy temple of our liberty. Can Louisianians, can Frenchmen, can Americans, ever stoop to be the slaves or allies of Britain?’’ CG, History of Louisiana: The American Domination (New York: William J. Widdleton, 1866), 352–53. 23. CG, Essai Historique sur la Louisiane (New Orleans: B. Levy, 1830), 1:iii.

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country, as me, in particular.’’ Further, ‘‘Excusez le griffonage: quand je parle anglais, j’écris de la main gauche.’’ 24 Gayarré published the four volumes of his History of Louisiana in stages. The first two volumes on The French Domination and the third on The Spanish Domination all came out in 1854. The final volume on The American Domination did not appear until 1866.25 Collectively, the series was a study in cultural tension and ambivalence. The titles of the volumes, by themselves, were eloquent. It was, of course, customary in places like Virginia and South Carolina to speak of the colonial period as the preface to the nationality inaugurated by the American Revolution. But Louisiana had no share in this paradigmatic understanding. She had not experienced the American Revolution and its inhabitants had never claimed their independence; they were in the Union only because in 1803 Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder, thought it a prudent investment to acquire more land and people, and Napoleon, ambitious spendthrift, needed some ready cash. A Creole could stand before the New Orleans City Hall in the Place d’Armes on 30 November 1803 to observe the Spanish flag being displaced by the French tricoleur, and then return three weeks later to see the French flag replaced by the Stars and Stripes. Seeing three imperial flags hoisted and lowered, hearing solemn and empty proclamations, he would have known that his preference in the matter had not been consulted by anyone. Indeed, in Gayarré’s lifetime, only once, in 1861, were Louisianians asked to express a fundamental preference about their membership in a polity, which they asserted should not be the United States. In 1865, as in 1803, this was to make little difference. Gayarré knew this: in his later work, all of Louisianian history is colonial; France, Spain, and the United States offered but a series of comparable dominations. Gayarré himself was inclined to be generous to the French and Spanish regimes. No doubt in this he was influenced by the fact that his greatgrandfather, Don Estevan de Gayarré, had been a Spanish colonial administrator who commenced generations of intermarriage. His son Juan Antonio Estevan married Constance de Grand-Pré, and their son Carlos Anastasio Estevan Gayarré married Marie Elizabeth de Boré, who became the parents of the historian. But the founding Gayarré had originally been from Navarre and had entered the service of the Spanish crown as a soldier, so cultural diversity had been a European as well as a Louisianian experience. Knowing 24. CG, Histoire de la Louisiane, 2 vols. (New Orleans: Magne & Weisse, 1846–47); CG, ‘‘Romance of Louisiana History,’’ DBR 3 (June 1847): 449–62; A. P. Dietz to CG, 10 June 1853, CG Papers, LSU; Josh. Nicolas to CG, 16 June 1848, CG Papers in the Grace King Collection, LSU. 25. Socola, ‘‘Gayarré,’’ 203–4, plausibly dates this period of composition from internal evidence.

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this, Gayarré the historian leaned over backwards to be generous to the Spanish. His summary verdict, at the end of his third volume, was that, notwithstanding ‘‘all the foul abuses and tyrannical practices with which it has been so long the general custom to reproach the government of Spain . . . her administration in Louisiana was as popular as any that ever existed in any part of the world.’’ Indeed, he called upon ‘‘the unanimous support of my contemporaries’’ to assert that there was scarcely an elderly Louisianian who had experienced Spanish rule ‘‘who did not speak of it with affectionate respect, and describe those days of colonial rule as the golden age, which, with many, was the object of secret, and with others, of open regrets.’’ 26 To this verdict, he had promptly added: ‘‘Such a government would, of course, have been insupportable to us, but it is not hence to be inferred that it did not suit the tastes and feelings, and deserve the gratitude of our ancestors.’’ This was being not only historicist, but briefly polite to American democratic ideology. In his antebellum writing, Gayarré could show the instincts of a sometime American politician who knew about the Fourth of July, even if his ancestors in 1776 had not relished its significance, except as a blow to Britain. In this spirit, he observed of the Louisiana Purchase that it was ‘‘the most important treaty perhaps ever signed in the nineteenth century,’’ and that, among its consequences, might be numbered ‘‘the extension of the area of freedom, an immense accretion to the physical and moral power of the great American republic, and the subsequent acquisition of the Floridas, Texas, California, and other portions of the Mexican territory.’’ By the standards of eagle screaming, this was modest, though even eagle screamers usually thought that the significance of freedom lay much in immensity, power, and acquisition. What differed was that Gayarré seldom showed other than contempt for democracy, except when in an election, and he usually respected power for its own sake. In his own eyes, he was a gentleman, a seigneur, a don. In his history, he reveled in the gaudiness of brave inceptions. The opening pages of his first volume are full of sunshine, pleasure, color, and romance. With De Soto came ‘‘chivalry, with all its glittering pomp, its soul-stirring aspirations, in full march, with its iron heels and gilded spurs, toward the unknown and hitherto unexplored soil of Louisiana.’’ There is ‘‘glorious pageantry,’’ there are Andalusian chargers ‘‘with arched necks and dilated nostrils,’’ who stop in a ‘‘verdant valley’’ by a ‘‘bubbling stream.’’ The grass is ‘‘velvet,’’ the songs are ‘‘old Castilian or Moorish roundelays.’’ By contrast, the opening pages of The American Domination are marked by darkness: ‘‘On the 20th of December, 1803, the colony of Louisiana had passed from the domina26. Ibid., 1–5; CG, History of Louisiana: The Spanish Domination (New York: Redfield, 1854), 627.

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tion of Spain into that of the United States of America, to which it was delivered by France after a short possession of twenty days. . . . Its inhabitants, of French and Spanish descent, and almost all the foreigners who resided in the province, either permanently or temporarily, were discontented and gloomy. To them the change of government, or nationality, was extremely distasteful.’’ 27 For Gayarré, whatever his formal position, the passage from feudalism to bourgeois democracy was no movement into the light. In fact, The American Domination dealt largely with Louisiana’s years as a territory of the United States, which is a partial explanation for its title, and indeed also only those few years between its admission as a state in 1812 to the battle of New Orleans in 1815. It is a study in cultural mistrust, which began in gloom and advanced to misunderstanding, in which the Americans were the outsiders, the misunderstanders. Much hinged on the figure of William C. C. Claiborne, who appears as an uncomprehending despot, ‘‘a republican magistrate . . . transformed into an absolute proconsul, in whom centered all the executive, judicial and legislative authority lately exercised, in their respective capacity, by the superseded Spanish dignitaries.’’ These ‘‘extraordinary powers’’ were exercised by a man required to administer Spanish laws of which he was ‘‘entirely ignorant,’’ to govern a population ‘‘of which he knew nothing,’’ whose languages he could not speak or read. This being so, errors quickly abounded. Claiborne commanded that the courts use English, which was resented, and that there should be no appeal beyond himself, of which Gayarré concluded, ‘‘There could not be under the sun a more perfect despotism.’’ Then New Orleans was split off from Louisiana, which was ‘‘a fresh source of discontent . . . a very unpopular measure . . . keenly resented by the old population.’’ Into the territory was introduced the principles of the common law. Louisianians were invited to ‘‘petition in the form of a bill in chancery.’’ ‘‘What was a bill in chancery?’’ Gayarré mocked. What was the common law? he had his compatriots ask, in wonder. ‘‘They were told that it was ‘unwritten law.’ Unwritten law! . . . How could law be unwritten? Where was it to be found? They were answered, it was ‘that law which draws its binding force from immemorial usage and universal reception in England.’ Is it to be wondered that they shook their heads in utter bewilderment?’’ 28 With relish, Gayarré quoted Pierre Laussat, the outgoing French prefect, on his incompetent and insensitive successors, Claiborne and Wilkinson: ‘‘ ‘The first, with estimable qualities as a private man, has little intellect, a good deal of awkwardness, and is extremely beneath the position in which he 27. CG, Spanish Domination, 627, 525–26; CG, History of Louisiana: The French Domination (New York: Redfield, 1854), 1:15–16; CG, American Domination, 1. 28. CG, American Domination, 2, 4, 21–22.

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has been placed. The second . . . is a rattle-headed fellow, full of odd fantasies. He is frequently drunk, and has committed a hundred inconsistent and impertinent acts. Neither the one nor the other understands one word of French, or Spanish.’ ’’ With indignation, Gayarré narrated the debates in Congress, by which the principles of territorial government were established. He pointed to congressmen who spoke of Louisianians as a conquered people without rights, a population little above the level of slaves, unable to be trusted because so long the subjects of despots. He observed, ‘‘Thus the Louisianians, a few months after they had been delivered to the warm embraces and paternal protection of that great Republic which invited all mankind to the enjoyment of liberty, had the intense mortification of being branded, before the whole world, with a solemn official declaration that they were incapable of self-government,’’ a sentiment expressed ‘‘by a democratic Congress, and promulgated by Thomas Jefferson, that great apostle of universal liberty.’’ 29 The measure of Gayarré’s sympathies can be taken by comparing his narration with that of other Southern historians, not Creole. J. F. H. Claiborne’s Mississippi as a Province, Territory, and State (1880), though postbellum, embodies antebellum perspectives. Claiborne did not blush to repeat what, to Gayarré, was the old slanders. ‘‘Martin, the first historian of Louisiana,’’ Claiborne wrote, ‘‘censures him [W. C. C. Claiborne] for Americanizing the Spanish laws and for ordering judicial proceedings to be conducted in the English language. Martin was a Frenchman by birth, and notwithstanding he owed all his success to American patronage, he was a Frenchman to the hour of his death,’’ evidently not a good thing, for a Frenchman could not ‘‘comprehend the patriotism and philosophy that prompted the order.’’ Claiborne noted Laussat’s complaints but dismissed them as malcontent hypocrisy expressed by the ‘‘egotistical creature of a despotic centralism.’’ ‘‘No one will contend,’’ Claiborne sweepingly asserted, ‘‘that the French and Spanish population of Louisiana, just emancipated from their Captain-General, were then capable of republican self-government. It had been tried in France and proved an utter failure.’’ They were too witless to understand checks and balances, too deluded by encyclopedists, less knowing ‘‘than the old Romans,’’ and heedless wreckers of society. If Thomas Jefferson, who to Claiborne unironically was ‘‘the great champion of popular rights,’’ thought them unsafe, it must have been so. Besides, if the Creoles were so discontented with the United States, ‘‘it would have been unwise to have confided to them the sole powers of government.’’ 30 29. Ibid., 10–11, 56. 30. J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi as a Province, Territory and State, with Biographical Notices of Eminent Citizens (1880; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 252–53.

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Claiborne was the nephew of Louisiana’s territorial governor, so it was natural that he would repeat the ancestral perspective. Yet this analysis was more than familial, merely the traditional American views of the French and Spanish. John Wesley Monette’s History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi (1846) had been more polite, but similar in standpoint. He praised Governor Claiborne for assiduous devotion to arduous labors, ‘‘in which he was cordially supported by the patriotic Americans,’’ who gave him public dinners, at which it was asserted that ‘‘the eagle of Liberty has extended its flight to Louisiana, and will cover its virtuous inhabitants with its protecting wings.’’ He noted that the American government had charged Claiborne with respecting ‘‘the customs, habits, and dispositions of the inhabitants of the said territory,’’ and that the governor had performed this duty ‘‘with such fidelity and discretion as gained for him the most unbounded confidence of the Federal executive, and exalted him in the estimation of his friends and all admirers of American liberty.’’ Monette did notice that the ‘‘French population were dissatisfied,’’ but did not dwell on the matter and thought that the problem was, in time, amicably resolved. Nonetheless, Monette affected dispassion, unlike Claiborne, for whom English is ‘‘our language,’’ while French is what they have. We ‘‘comprehend the nature of a constitutional government,’’ while ‘‘they dethrone kings and demolish aristocracies, but of popular rights and the barriers of law, civil liberty and social order, they are sublimely ignorant.’’ 31 In Gayarré, the pronouns were reversed and there was little amiability. Passages that in Monette were unproblematic became ironic in Gayarré. Governor Claiborne was quoted as observing, ‘‘There are, indeed, some ancient prejudices which it is difficult to remove, and there are some local parties encouraged by a few designing men, whose native language is English—which, in some measure, stifles the germ of patriotism; but I persuade myself that the time is not far distant when the Louisianians generally will be zealous members of our republic.’’ Gayarré made clear that such pieties deserved skepticism, that too much was forced too quickly, that local habits and prejudices were too little regarded, that honor was slighted. Even his narration of the Battle of New Orleans, though mostly celebratory, was prickly about those incidents where Andrew Jackson or others of ‘‘the Americans’’ were insensitive to Creole needs, contribution, or custom. But, at moments, even of Claiborne and Jackson, Gayarré could be forgiving, for he did recognize that 31. John W. Monette, History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi, by the Three Great European Powers, Spain, France and Great Britain, and the Subsequent Occupation, Settlement, and Extension of Civil Government by the United States, Until the Year 1846 (1846; reprint, New York: Arno Press & New York Times, 1971), 2:449–52; Claiborne, Mississippi, 253 (my emphasis).

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New Orleans was ‘‘a city containing a motley population, which was without any natural element of cohesion, and in which abounded distraction of counsel, conflicting opinions, wishes and feelings, and much diffidence as to the possibility of warding off the attack with which it was threatened by a powerful enemy.’’ On balance, Gayarré disliked the British more than the Americans. He was also aware that the diehard French party could be as obtuse as the Americans, that both occasioned ‘‘virulence of feeling,’’ ‘‘jealousies, injustices, and collisions,’’ which ‘‘embittered social intercourse, made a perpetual storm of political life, and, at one time, almost threatened the State with civil war.’’ 32 This was not a contradiction. The perspective of the Creole mistrusted loyalties beyond the local, whether to France or Spain or the United States, which by such logic never became quite local, never became quite ‘‘us.’’ Gayarré had two candidates for ‘‘us,’’ Creole Louisiana and the South. Pierre Soulé once described himself to Gayarré as ‘‘un homme du sud avec quelque dignité,’’ and the description would have been accepted by his correspondent. Indeed, in May 1861 Gayarré offered his patronage to a new journal in New Orleans, La renaissance Louisianaise: organe des populations Franco-Américaines du Sud, whose purpose was ‘‘absolute victory’’ for the new Confederacy and the ‘‘creation within it of a Louisiana restored to [its] original estate as a community whose heart, mind, and spirit were irrevocably French.’’ True to this, the History of Louisiana was much kinder to Americans when they appeared as Southerners. He complained that ‘‘the United States which, in time of peace, had treated the inhabitants of Louisiana [between 1803 and 1812] with harshness and injustice, and with very little regard for their feelings . . . had been very negligent in providing for their defence in time of war.’’ He reiterated with bitterness how New England states had looked upon Louisiana’s accession to the Union ‘‘with such aversion as to threaten . . . a dissolution of the fundamental compact’’ and hinted that this neglect of defense against the British stemmed from New England’s Anglophile sympathies, expressed at the Hartford Convention. Left to the United States qua New England, abandonment might have been expected. ‘‘Fortunately the man who was sent for the defence of Southern Territory was southern born. He was a native of South Carolina, and had grown to hardy manhood on the forestclad hills of Tennessee. It was still more fortunate that he was equal to the occasion.’’ Competence seems to have arisen from origin. But such compliments were distributed with discrimination. Claiborne, after all, was a Virginian; to Gayarré, Claiborne (being incompetent) was an American, never a Southerner. America was them, but the South was us, rich and textured. Jackson’s army camps beneath ‘‘the melancholy-looking cypress, hoary with the 32. CG, American Domination, 149–50, 352, 379–89, 586.

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long gray moss of our Southern latitude, [which] reared its gaunt, funereal form over their heads.’’ 33 This sense of Southern comity was much influenced by slavery and race. Gayarré missed few opportunities to condemn the Americans when they misunderstood and botched racial matters. When Congress in 1804, for example, ‘‘exercised the contested power of preventing the importation of slaves into territories,’’ Gayarré saw an ominous precedent, useful to modern ‘‘adversaries of slavery’’ who might ‘‘avail themselves with that pertinacity of purpose and that fanatical vigor of intellect they have ever displayed in assailing that institution, which the South considers its very life-blood and the indispensable condition of its existence, and also as the very breath and essence of its prosperity.’’ The Louisiana slaves, who revolted in 1811, he portrayed as foolish, cowardly, easily cowed, shrieking with ‘‘demoniacal gesticulations,’’ vainly trying to gain a social position ‘‘which, for the welfare of their own race, will ever be denied to it in the Southern States of North America, as long as their white population is not annihilated or subjugated.’’ 34 The themes of racism and anti-Americanism could, on occasion, meld. Andrew Jackson’s 1815 proclamation to the free population of Louisiana had spoken of the British as slaves, of America as ‘‘the only country on earth where man enjoys freedom’’ and insisted that ‘‘the individual who refuses to defend his rights when called upon by his government deserves to be a slave.’’ On this, Gayarré observed: ‘‘Frenchmen, Spaniards and other Europeans, who constituted a numerous body in New Orleans . . . felt instinctively that this contemptuous expression could not strike England without glancing from her breast to their own. It might be inferred that they were at best but emancipated slaves among the free-born Americans.’’ Nor did Gayarré much like Jackson’s reference to the United States as ‘‘the Government of their choice,’’ when ‘‘it was so well known how little they had been consulted on the subject.’’ Even worse was Jackson’s proclamation to the free blacks of Louisiana, which flattered them as ‘‘sons of freedom’’ in order to enlist their military service, bribed by bounties. For Gayarré, mulattos could not be free, citizen, or ‘‘ ‘the country-men’ of the white race.’’ 35 Gayarré had begun to write The American Domination in 1859, and he continued its composition during the Civil War, to finish it near the end of the Confederacy. Being, among other things, a study in cultural tension and ambivalence, it is unsurprising that the experience of secession and war deepened Gayarré’s skepticism about membership in the United States and his cyni33. Pierre Soulé to CG, 9 May 1850, CG Papers, LSU; Tregle, ‘‘Creoles and Americans,’’ 168; CG, American Domination, 387–88, 465. 34. CG, American Domination, 57, 267. 35. Ibid., 352–54, 356.

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cism about the imperial hypocrisies of Washington, both in 1804 and 1863. Though the book was published in 1866, he left in the passages, written at various times during the war, which denoted his anger, although he did so against the wishes of his New York publisher. In Chapter 9, it boiled over: ‘‘I write these lines when the State of Louisiana has been invaded by Northern troops, when a general from New England is a military dictator in New Orleans, when Louisianians are called traitors and rebels, when their property is confiscated, and all sorts of outrages are heaped upon them by the sons of sires who sat in the Hartford Convention, where treason was meditated, but found not hearts bold enough to carry it into execution.’’ In Chapter 10, he quoted a piece of military exhortation from Jackson and hoped that its lesson ‘‘will be forever remembered in our Southern armies.’’ A little later, when Claiborne was expressing satisfaction that the British defeat in 1815 had secured the Union, Gayarré intruded with ‘‘The ‘American Union’ has been dissolved, temporarily at least; its members have been severed from what the Governor calls ‘the original stock,’ but the tempestuous wind which caused the wreck blew from another quarter than the one which was then looked to as the source of danger.’’ 36 The addition of the little word ‘‘temporarily’’ would seem to indicate that, by page 500, Gayarré had reached a stage in the dissolution of the Confederacy where hope had dwindled. The American Domination ended its considered narrative in 1815, but has a ‘‘supplemental chapter’’ of sixty-one pages that runs, helter-skelter, over the years to 1861, when Louisiana ‘‘in company with several of her sister States of the South, declared the Federal Union at an end, and resumed, as an independent Sovereign, the powers which she had delegated.’’ In these pages, Gayarré’s bitterness was unbridled. There are ‘‘Federal injustices or neglects.’’ Louisiana was portrayed as a Cinderella in ‘‘‘the glorious American family,’’’ obliged to endure ‘‘jeers and gibes’’ from the ‘‘inhospitable regions of the North,’’ the ‘‘Federal Shylock.’’ He quoted Governor Villeré’s annual message of 1818, which said something of Louisiana’s good fortune in being received into the bosom of the ‘‘great American Confederation,’’ and could not resist the gloss that the governor was not a prophet, that his grandsons would curse his day of Union and ‘‘probably think that the worst tyranny of Kings was amiable, when compared with the treatment they were destined to undergo from the fierce, fanatical and unrelenting majority of their Republican associates and loving brothers.’’ At the end, Gayarré turned his state into the careless and brave gentleman, whom he had flattered himself to have been. Of 1861, he wrote, ‘‘Louisiana was then in as high a state of prosperity as ever 36. Socola, ‘‘Gayarré,’’ 203–4; Clement Eaton, The Waning of the Old South Civilization (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968), 72; CG, American Domination, 390–91, 491, 501.

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any land was blessed with, but with sublime imprudence she did not hesitate to stake the whole of it on the cast of a die, at what she conceived to be the call of honor and duty.’’ Four years of war had proved the gamble ill-judged. Then, a desolate and subjugated Louisiana had lived to see ‘‘the hoof of the conqueror’s horse’’ withering ‘‘her opulent fields,’’ once ‘‘a fit residence for her brave and free population of the Caucasian race, and an Elysium for her African bondsmen.’’ 37 That the Creole, with other reasons to keep a distance from Americans, had slavery to use as a means of connection shows a significant truth. Slavery helped to dissolve the singularities of ethnicity, by offering a sharp fear of Haitian danger and suggesting the merit of racial solidarity, but also by offering slaveholders a shared experience, which amended other cultural traits resistant to assimilation. Take, for example, the case of the town of Salem, stuck away in the North Carolina mountains and hiding from the world.38 The village had been created in 1765 by the Moravians of the Renewed Unitas Fratrum, who had migrated southward from Pennsylvania in the 1750s, to North Carolina and the area they named Wachovia. Nothing in the South of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was more defiantly unassimilated than this place, few places more peculiar or resolutely ethnic. The rules of God were supposed to guide all things. In Salem, the secular and religious were profoundly intermingled, with village and congregation governed by overlapping jurisdictions. The Aeltesten Conferenz, chaired by the minister, dealt with spiritual matters and was itself subordinate to a hierarchy of such conferences reaching back to Berthelsdorf in Saxony. There was a Congregation Council, which ‘‘concerned itself with the broader issues and matters which affected the long-term prospects of the congregation, such as changes in the congregational rules’’: this was elected by adult males. This council in turn elected the seven-member Aufseher Collegium, which was the city council, charged with the secular. The congregation itself was divided into choirs; one each for children, boys, girls, older boys, older girls, single men, single women, married men, married women, widows, and widowers. Many of these choirs had separate residences, as in the Single Sisters’ House, with each presided over by a Pfleger, a sort of spiritual leader. The Moravians had many festal commemorations, notably that on 6 July to mark the martyrdom of Jan Hus. They were fond of Love Feasts. But agape might wander into eros, sisters might stray, young men get drunk, and the stern and loving rules of 37. CG, American Domination, 632, 638, 634, 692–93. 38. I draw this discussion of Salem from Michael O’Brien, ‘‘Finding the Outfield: Subregionalism and the American South,’’ Historical Journal 38 (December 1995): 1047–56, which is in part a review of Michael Shirley, From Congregation Town to Industrial City: Culture and Social Change in a Southern Community (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

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sisterhood and fraternity might be flouted. For this, the congregation had coercive powers of the usual sort, but with one extra. Families might own their houses but were not permitted to own land, which was leased from the congregation. The force of the congregation’s communal morality lay partly in this leasing system, since miscreants could be threatened with the revocation of a lease, which effectively meant expulsion. Economic life, largely confined to crafts, was closely regulated. Masters had apprentices, but numbers were controlled, prices fixed, and indentures licensed. In time, this displaced Middle European community fell into the ways of Southern life. The world crowded upon them and all the powers of the congregation proved incapable of resistance. In the North Carolina Piedmont, as in east Tennessee, roads and railroads were built. By mid-century, farmers in Salem’s hinterland of Forsyth and Stokes Counties started to produce staple crops for wider markets. Artisan crafts were threatened by manufactured goods from the Northeast. Population growth was great and not confined to Moravians. Social stratification increased, which was a problem for fraternity. Entrepreneurs, Moravian and not, were unhappy to be restrained by the community. A leading malcontent was William Fries, who in 1826 was running the town’s tobacco store and joiner’s shop. He lost money on stocks and, to help, started to sell glass, coffee, and sugar. These were, by rule, reserved to others. He petitioned the Collegium for a dispensation, the more so as others were similarly breaking the rules. The Single Sisters were selling calico and dry goods, when they should have been confining themselves to millinery. The Collegium sternly refused. Fries could live well enough, they reasoned, upon the sale of tobacco. If he wanted to live better, he could leave for more acquisitive communities. Their mandate was ignored. Unrepentant, Fries started selling even more forbidden things: molasses, spices, nails, paints. Members of the Collegium itself were similarly tempted. Petitions and transgressions swelled to unmanageable proportions. The Collegium held the line. It made little difference. Crucially, there was the matter of slaves. Like the Jews and the Creoles, the Moravians were untroubled about the morality of slavery itself, but slave ownership needed to be authorized by the congregation. The willful Fries bought two female slaves, then another, all without permission. Such slaves, in the heart of the community, gave him (it was said) an unfair competitive advantage, threatened to displace apprentices, and discredit the Moravian work ethic. Nonetheless, the slave population of Salem grew, from 2,204 in 1820 to 4,233 in 1860. Here, too, unavailing resistance was offered by the Collegium. By the 1840s William Fries’s son Francis had founded a textile mill, in which venture he was later joined by his brother Henry; half the workforce was slave, forty-seven of them by 1860. Another mill, the Salem Manufacturing Com-

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pany, turned to women and children for a labor force, mostly drawn from the non-Moravians in the rural hinterland. By then, the old communitarian ethic of Salem had been all but displaced by the new ethic of individualism, cooperation by competition. As Francis Fries bluntly put it, in celebrating his success, ‘‘Early in life I never attended to anything that I did not consider my own business . . . nor to look after public matters, nor the concerns of individuals, further than they were in connection with my own affairs. I relied on myself, I depended on myself, I took care of myself.’’ 39 However, the Moravian way was not utterly extinguished. Companies created boarding houses and family houses, where patriarchal social relations persisted. Families were paid a single wage, handed over to the head of household, usually a father. Nonetheless one spoke, less and less, of masters and apprentices, more of employers and employees. From a Salem where meaning was found in the divisions of the congregation emerged a Salem where people thought of themselves in economic terms (workers, trades unionists, spinners, weavers), or political (Democrats, Whigs), or religious (evangelical, Methodist, Baptist, Moravian, temperance), all categories that led to the world beyond Salem, though not to Berthelsdorf. Indeed, in 1849, that world formally perched on Salem’s doorstep, when a county reorganization led to the foundation of the city of Winston, barely to the northward. The rest was predictable. In 1856, after two years of debate, the lease system was abolished. The Moravians then numbered only about half of Salem’s population. In the same year, it was incorporated as an ordinary town under the secular laws of North Carolina. Winston and Salem voted 925 to 171 against a secession convention in 1861, but became loyally Confederate, until marked privations spawned rioting, looting, and a peace movement. But one could be a Southerner and have doubts about secession. Slavery and trade had helped to dissolve the singularity of a civic and ethnic culture, stringently dedicated to resisting the modern world, with weapons at its disposal, in religion, economics, ideology. The Moravians had coercions superior to anything available even to New England Puritans, let alone the average Southern community, when the circus of modernity came to town and young people went off to be acrobats and mill owners. Hence the South had appeal to or pressed upon those who regarded themselves as culturally marginal. The marginal thought they might work inwards towards a center where lived the unalienated, the real Southerners. It is unclear whether there were, in fact, many such people in the middle of the Southern world, though the minority who were the descendants of the En39. Shirley, From Congregation, 56.

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glish were the obvious candidates. But the English themselves, either visiting or immigrating, saw little reason to feel a shock of recognition about Southern culture, which had far too many alien qualities to justify much sense of comity. Dickens, Marryat, Hall, Kemble, Lyell, even Thackeray, returned the consistent message that the South was a very strange place. The most notable of English migrants, Thomas Cooper, a man who did much to advance the cause of the South, saw little sympathy between his two cultures, for which fact he was heartily glad. After all, among his other criticisms, Cooper thought that English law was a ‘‘dreadful curse,’’ ‘‘a system of fraud, falsehood, absurdity, pretension, and deception,’’ ‘‘of injustice, extortion, vexation, quibble, and protraction.’’ 40 But even those natives who might have been expected to feel this centrality, the Virginians of English descent, were ambivalent. The matter of England was much in dispute among Virginians. On the one hand, Virginia had been preeminently the colony that had most mimicked English ways, had most received English immigration, and had thought itself another England, as much so as (perhaps more than) the Dissenters who had given their settlement the name of New England. On the other hand, the revolutionary generation had spat on England’s name, felt themselves betrayed by George III, and violently forced a separation. Anglophobia was a brisk Virginian tradition, expressed with consistent passion by Thomas Jefferson; the worst thing he could say of the Federalists was that they had striven to warp American institutions ‘‘into all the principles and pollutions of their favorite English model.’’ James Madison not only fought two wars with Britain, but was in later life happy to supply information to Robert Walsh, whose Appeal from the Judgements of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (1819) was a Bible to those who resented English calumnies. John Taylor of Caroline always used England as a negative model, whether he was discussing agricultural practices, governmental structure, or political economy; in the Jeffersonian tradition, he wrote darkly of ‘‘the cloven foot of the old English prejudices, which made tories of many respectable men.’’ Jesse Burton Harrison, who had grown up in the shadow of Monticello, in the next generation treated the readers of the Southern Review in 1832 to a consideration of English civilization that, though novel in its enthusiasm for German culture, was traditional in its bitter condemnation of the English.41 40. TC, ‘‘Bentham’s Judicial Evidence,’’ SR 5 (May 1830): 384, 406. For a contrasting view, which speaks of the glories of the English law, see ‘‘Law and Lawyers,’’ SQR 6 (October 1844): 370–427. 41. ‘‘The Anas. 1791–1806’’ (1818), in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 670; Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 106–7; John Taylor,

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John Randolph in England (From Hugh Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke [1856])

The great exception to this was John Randolph. His Anglophilia was the mark of his disenchantment with St. Thomas of Cantingbury, ‘‘the saint of Monticello,’’ and with an American world, ‘‘this miserable, undone country’’ that had come to be governed by ‘‘King Numbers.’’ The preference was thoroughgoing. He had English furniture, drove an English coach and four, and exclaimed ‘‘What Sir!’’ like someone in a comedy by Vanbrugh. He once regretted that Rufus King could not be president (‘‘for that unfortunate vote on the Missouri question’’) and explained: ‘‘He is, sir, a genuine English gentleman of the old school; just the right man for these degenerate times.’’ In 1822, for the first time, Randolph went to England. He is said to have expostulated, ‘‘Thank God, that I have lived to behold the land of Shakspeare, of Milton, of my forefathers! May her greatness increase through all time!’’ He was to return on three more occasions, in 1824, 1826, and 1830. By 1832, he was writing implausibly to Andrew Jackson, ‘‘I happen to know England far better than I do the United States or even Virginia, where all is ceaseless and senseless change.’’ 42 (He was angling to be made American Minister to Tyranny Unmasked, ed. F. Thornton Miller (1822; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 257; JBH, ‘‘English Civilization,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 462–91. 42. Hugh A. Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1850), 2:346, 175; John Randolph to AJ, 28 March 1832, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson,

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the Court of Saint James, at the time.) Lord Lansdowne, whom he came to know, once observed to another American, ‘‘I have never met with so thoroughly well-informed a gentleman as your friend Randolph, no matter what the subject—history, belles-lettres, biography; but, sir, the most astonishing part of all is, that he possesses a minute local knowledge of England and Ireland. I thought I knew them well, but I assure you I was obliged to yield the palm to him.’’ 43 Lansdowne would have been less astonished if, like Hugh Blair Grigsby in the 1840s, he had browsed in Randolph’s library, which was marked by ‘‘richness in the department of history, and that of Virginia especially, and in old English literature.’’ 44 This Anglophilia was not undiscriminating. There were English authors he liked (Milton, Byron) and those he disliked (Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne). Some of Randolph’s Anglophilia was driven by his distaste for the North. Sailing on the Amity to England in 1822, he was asked by a New Yorker why he had brought so many books with him. Randolph answered that he proposed to have them bound in England. The Northerner exclaimed, ‘‘laughing,’’ why not have it done in New York or Boston, where it would be ‘‘cheaper’’? ‘‘What, sir,’’ replied Randolph, ‘‘patronize some of our Yankee taskmasters; those patriotic gentry, who have caused such a heavy duty to be imposed upon foreign books? Never, sir, never; I will neither wear what they make, nor eat what they raise, so long as my tobacco crop will enable me to get supplies from old England; and I shall employ John Bull to bind my books, until the time arrives when they can be properly done South of Mason and Dixon’s line! ’’ 45 But what was south of that line, for Randolph, was not a land that stretched from Virginia to Louisiana, but only Virginia, his singular passion. John Randolph was a peculiar man, hard to regard as paradigmatic. Nonetheless this dialectic between conservative disenchantment with the democratic Union and Anglophilia had its parallels elsewhere. Deep into the Confederacy, Edmund Ruffin mused on these matters, on whether for the slaveholding South the American Revolution had been a mistake. He had read an essay in Harper’s Magazine by John Scott, which had recommended constitutional reform for the United States, no longer Ruffin’s country. Among the changes was a hereditary presidency. Setting down his entry for 1 November ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926–35), 4:428 43. Garland, John Randolph, 2:187. Garland says ‘‘Lord L,’’ but I infer from Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, with Selected Speeches and Letters (1951; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978), 185, that this conceals Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, third Marquis of Lansdowne. The American was Jacob Harvey of New York, who supplied Garland with stories of Randolph’s 1822 visit. 44. HBG, ‘‘The Randolph Library,’’ SLM 20 (February 1854): 78. 45. Garland, John Randolph, 2:173.

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1864, Ruffin thought there was merit in the idea. ‘‘Practice has shown us fully, & in the short space of 70 years, that the possession of the highest order of talent rather operates to exclude citizens from this high honor & position.’’ Kings were ‘‘rarely either virtuous or wise,’’ so a wise political system found ways to mitigate their incompetence. The American system, hoping for competence but seldom getting it, imperfectly restrained the president, who came into power sanctioned by the people. ‘‘Rather than to submit to be ruled by such a government . . . I would gladly accept, instead, a limited monarchy, with hereditary succession of the chief magistrates, but with the parliamentary checks, & indirect appointment & control of ministers as existing in Great Britain—& with the removal of our great evils & sources of corruption, universal suffrage & the appointment by popular election of all, (or any) executives & judicial functionaries.’’ Forced to choose between the North and Britain, he would opt for the latter, with all its faults. Two days later, Ruffin returned to Scott’s suggestion that independence in 1776 had been a mistake, that a reformed membership of the British Empire would have served better. ‘‘Judge Thomas Ruffin is the only other person from whom I had before heard a like opinion, & his went still farther.’’ The Judge had felt that the South had had no real stake in the revolution and gone along ‘‘from generous sympathy’’ and disinterest, to be repaid by ‘‘the more greedy, selfish, & stronger northern states [who] began, by, cunning, fraud & superior (& fast growing) political power, strengthened by the terms of the federal constitution, & still more by its abuses, to oppress the southern colonies.’’ Edmund Ruffin was not sure of this. To have independence grounded upon an English-style system was one thing. To have remained governed from London might have been another. The consequences would have been unstable, hard to foresee even in retrospect. Britain, after all, had ruined her slaveholding West Indian colonies and had encouraged the abolitionists, so she might have abandoned the South. On the other hand, the South would have been an immense interest, which would have affected Britain’s drift into the hands of Wilberforce and Clarkson. And British rule would, in turn, have mitigated the American drift to democracy.46 Still, Ruffin had known only one other man with these opinions and Ruffin himself moved to these thoughts only in his despair at the war. Not even John Randolph would have repealed the Revolution or the Constitution, just stopped the Jeffersonians, restricted the franchise to the few, and arranged the Virginian world to his whip-swishing convenience. By mid-century, a number of Virginians had drifted towards a mild Anglophilia, which was bound up with a growing skepticism towards the Jeffersonian tradition. It was helped by the receding of Anglo-American political 46. William Kauffman Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–89), 3:633–34, 637–40.

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animosities, as the battle of New Orleans gave way to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Slavery was a running sore, for Britain had made itself the great antislavery power, but this was mild compared to former troubles, to the British troops who had burned Washington and freed slaves on Southern soil. Literary people, many of them associated with the Southern Literary Messenger, like John R. Thompson, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Cooke, John Pendleton Kennedy, and John Esten Cooke, even (in some moods) Edgar Allan Poe, felt a comity with aspects of the new English literature.47 Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and Swinburne offered a side to English culture that was far from the battles of the eighteenth century, was both sentimental and modern, all at once. For many, clubbable jocularity offered a surcease from the incessant politics of the Southern and American scene. This encouraged a certain, often a satirical interest in manners and customs, which seemed to point backwards to an eighteenth-century Virginia of periwigs and drunken conviviality, hospitality, and courage. Contentiously, there emerged the notion that Virginia was English and Cavalier, in contradistinction to New England, which was English and Roundhead. This seemed to explain both the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, for the warfare of sectionalism in the Union was thereby just a continuity with Marston Moor. It was also a form of ethnic identity for Virginians. Clearly, being English tout court offered them no singularity, for Massachusetts could claim as much, perhaps more. But being English and Cavalier seemed to offer some grounds for distinction.48 The eighteenth century in Virginia itself had not given sympathetic thought to these matters. Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia (1705) specifically disavowed the notion, sensibly observing, ‘‘ ’tis now unlikely that any Man of plentiful Estate, should voluntarily abandon a happy Certainty, to roam after imaginary Advantages, in a New World.’’ The same was broadly true of Henry Hartwell’s The Present State of Virginia (1727) and Hugh Jones’s Present State of Virginia (1753).49 Thomas Jefferson was innocent of 47. Thompson collected English literary autographs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: see JRT to Lewis J. Cist, 4 September 1852, JRT Papers, UVA. 48. On this, see Frederick Grimke, The Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions, ed. John William Ward (1848; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1968), 52: ‘‘The difference between the people of New England and of the Southern states of America has been supposed to arise from the fact that the former were descendants of the Saxons, the last of the Normans. This is another instance of confounding a coincidence with cause and effect. The cavaliers (who we will suppose were descendants of the Normans) first planted Virginia, but the great bulk of the emigration afterwards were of the same class as that to New England. The difference between the two people is attributable solely to outward circumstances.’’ 49. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 287–88, cited in Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., The

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the idea, which was as well for a man who, like Jones, was of Welsh descent. The notion crept forward only in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, and its groundwork was laid by those often not English nor Virginian, who were contemplating as outsiders the decline of Virginian preeminence and sought an explanation. William Wirt, whose Letters of the British Spy (1803) may be said to have commenced the exploration of this historical problem, had a Swiss father ( Jacob) and a German mother (Henrietta), and Wirt himself was born in Bladensburg, Maryland.50 George Tucker, whose The Valley of the Shenandoah (1824) advanced matters, was born in Bermuda, though of a family English in origin. John Pendleton Kennedy, whose Swallow Barn (1832) came close to the heart of the matter, was, on his mother’s side, firmly English, being descended from a schoolmaster from Norwich who migrated to Virginia’s King and Queen County in 1674, but his father had come from northern Ireland in 1784 and the son was born in Baltimore. William Alexander Caruthers, whose The Cavaliers of Virginia (1834–35) sealed the process, was born in western Virginia and educated at Washington College, but he was of Scotch-Irish descent and was living in New York and Savannah when he wrote his novels.51 Only later do stubborn Virginians get drawn into the theory and then, sometimes, only to repudiate it. These are books that will bear examination for many reasons. Here it is relevant only to note their description of a colonial and revolutionary gentry, who could be fitted (with a little violence) into a Cavalier myth of Virginian origins. Wirt’s book, following upon the model offered by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, assumed the voice of the outsider, which for Virginia was someone British and spying. So a differentiation between the native Virginian and the old country was the book’s presumption and there was nothing of the Cavalier myth in it. There was, however, a suggestion that there was something aristocratic about Virginia, and aristocracy was a predicate of subsequent mythologies. In Virginia, the spy reports, property is very ill-distributed, especially in ‘‘the lower counties on the Potomac.’’ There was the occasional ‘‘stately aristocratic palace,’’ surrounded by ‘‘the little smoky huts and log cabins of Cavalier in Virginia Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 35–36. Watson’s book is very useful, though he engrafts the fully developed notion of the Cavalier onto some early books, notably Tucker’s and Kennedy’s, where it seems to me to be absent or only formative. 50. JPK, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney-General of the United States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849), 1:16. 51. Robert Colin McLean, George Tucker, Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 3; Charles H. Bohner, John Pendleton Kennedy: Gentleman from Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 3–4; Curtis Carroll Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers: A Life of the Virginia Novelist Dr. William A. Caruthers (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1953), 3–5.

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poor, laborious, ignorant tenants,’’ who ‘‘approach the great house cap in hand, with all the fearful, trembling submission of the lowest feudal vassals, [but] boast in their court-yards, with obstreperous exultation, that they live in . . . a land of equal liberty and equal rights.’’ But the generality of this passage was undermined since, on the very page on which these words begin, Wirt has a footnote that reads, ‘‘The reader needs scarcely to be reminded that the writer is a Briton, and true to his character.’’ 52 So The Letters of the British Spy was both a study of Virginian society and a mimickry of the British sensibility. As Wirt himself explained to a friend, ‘‘I endeavored to forget myself; to fancy myself the character which I had assumed; to imagine how, as a Briton, I should be struck with Richmond, its landscapes, its public characters, its manners, together with the political sentiments and moral complexion of the Virginians generally.’’ 53 In this vein, it would have been easy to conclude that Wirt’s description marked the inapt understanding of the Briton more than the reality of Virginia. There was little support for this vision of aristocracy elsewhere in the book. Patrick Henry was paraded as a representative Virginian, and he was no artificial, mincing aristocrat but ‘‘an orator of nature,’’ ‘‘a plain farmer or planter of the back country,’’ someone whose splendid and prophetic force emerged from ‘‘looks and expressions of humility so lowly and unassuming.’’ There was a glancing reference to John Smith as ‘‘that pink of gallantry, that flower of chivalry,’’ but this was preface to the lament that colonial and modern Virginia had nothing of this heritage, was devoid of public spirit, ‘‘that sacred amor patriae which filled Greece and Rome with patriots, heroes and scholars,’’ and was instead given over to private acquisitiveness that had impoverished the public realm. Indeed, this theme was important to Wirt, because one of his major preoccupations was eloquence and its social preconditions. As Kennedy was to observe, The Letters of the British Spy was Wirt’s De Oratore.54 However, if one looks at Wirt’s 1817 biography of Patrick Henry, it is clear that, by then, Wirt did feel that colonial Virginia had been marred by aristocracy, against which Henry had led a liberty-loving struggle.55 When Wirt 52. William Wirt, The Letters of the British Spy, introduction by Richard Beale Davis (1803; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 101–2. 53. Wirt to Dabney Carr, 16 January 1804, quoted in JPK, William Wirt, 1:113. 54. Wirt, British Spy, 144–45, 189, 192; JPK, William Wirt, 1:110. 55. Although Wirt criticizes its inadequacies, he was clearly influenced by John Daly Burk, The History of Virginia from Its First Settlement to the Present Day, 3 vols. (Petersburg, Va.: Dickson & Pescud, 1804–5). Burk was an Irish nationalist who fled Ireland in 1796 and lived in Boston and New York, until moving to Virginia in 1799; he was an unstinting admirer of Jefferson. See Joseph Isidore Shulim, John Daly Burk: Irish Revolutionist and American Patriot (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1964). John Minor to CC, 23 March 1845, CC Papers, WM, gives a jaundiced estimate of Burk as ‘‘a drunken Irishman,’’ whose style was ‘‘a string of

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showed Henry first entering the House of Burgesses in 1765, he observed: ‘‘The forms of the house . . . were . . . most awfully dignified; its active members were composed of the landed aristocracy and their adherents; and amongst them were men to whose superiority of talents, as well as influence and power, the yeomanry of the country had long been accustomed to bow with tacit and submissive deference.’’ He glossed an early speech of Henry’s as being startling to the ‘‘aristocracy,’’ as ‘‘a phenomenon from the plebeian ranks.’’ He surmised that, ‘‘It is not improbable that . . . the strongly marked distinction of ranks which prevailed in this country, and the resentment, if not envy, with which the poorer classes looked up to the splendour and ostentation of the landed aristocracy, had a considerable agency in inflating Mr. Henry’s hostility to the British court.’’ But there was no suggestion that this aristocracy was anything other than homegrown from a migrant population of lesser folk, no hint that boatloads of silken Cavaliers fleeing from Cromwell had marked the origins of the colony. What Henry was—‘‘a plain man’’ who wanted to encourage others of his ilk, the migrant ‘‘husbandmen, the mechanics, the merchants of the old world’’ who ought to fill up the Virginian and American world—was broadly what Wirt’s Patrick Henry intimated was the social pattern of colonial Virginia. There might have been an aristocracy, but it was made on American soil, not imported.56 The next step both weakened and strengthened this assertion. On the first score, George Tucker’s The Valley of the Shenandoah (1824) introduced ethnic cross-currents into a social portrait of Virginia. It was more a book, after all, about western Virginia than the Tidewater. Its early pages are preoccupied with describing the valley’s inhabitants, not often English. A character asks, after another speaks of Scotch-Irish and Germans, ‘‘I thought your people were more homogeneous, and were principally of English descent.’’ He receives the reply, ‘‘That is true with the eastern part of Virginia,’’ and then is treated to an extensive discourse on the said Germans (‘‘a pains-taking, plodding, frugal people’’) and Scotch-Irish (‘‘ardent and impassioned’’ but ‘‘often idle, indolent, and improvident’’). In Tucker unlike Wirt, slavery is real, even defended as a mitigator of class distinction. A character is made to observe, ‘‘We owe our tranquillity, our love of order, our submission to the laws, to the Fourth-of-July Orations.’’ ‘‘We fancy,’’ he went on, ‘‘a rednosed Orator mounted on a platform of rough boards, yelling & roaring to a motley multitude that England is Pandora’s Box from which every evil comes—his head, body & limbs enforcing his reasoning (if it may be so called) by movements that nature never meant them to perform—the conclusion of every flight being cheered by the audience with ‘Huzza! for the red-nose man—‘Meriky for ever!— Give him some grog.’’ 56. William Wirt, The Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817), 44, 54, 92, 306, 234.

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circumstances that our yeomanry are people of property, and commonly of education. As the labouring class are slaves, those who are free must be of a superiour character.’’ 57 On the whole, the world of western Virginia is portrayed as unpretending. But, in its second volume, the novel strays towards the east, where Tucker conveys the sensual amiability of Virginians and writes of agrarian abundance and ease. ‘‘The mansion house is pleasantly situated, on an eminence, about a mile and a half from the Potomac, whose broad stream it overlooks.’’ There is ‘‘known hospitality . . . visiting, and junketting, and merry-making . . . barbacues, fish-fries, cock fights, horse races, and balls.’’ The woods teem with game. ‘‘The old gentleman imported his wine from Madeira, and his porter from England.’’ Young men sail on the river; ‘‘there are also backgammon, shuttlecock, chess, and cards, an old harpsichord, a flute, and violin, and two or three cases of books, which were exclusively those that had been of greatest celebrity when Col. Barton was a young man.’’ There are ‘‘lively jests and urbane suavity.’’ There is, in short, a dying order. ‘‘Mr. Barton was a specimen of that class of old fashioned persons (the Virginia gentlemen,) which is now nearly extinct,’’ men of urbanity, frankness, ease, and honor. They hated meanness, were ‘‘more fond of hospitality than show,’’ loved food, drink, a joke, horses and dogs. They had ‘‘a goodly store of family pride, and a moderate portion of learning’’: they never quarreled over a bill, but seldom paid one; they were ‘‘kind and indulgent, rather than faithful husbands, deeming some variety essential in all gratifications of the appetite.’’ 58 But was this an aristocracy? It was the highest part of Virginian society and, like any higher class, it had ‘‘polished and easy grace’’ and ‘‘a high sense of self-respect.’’ But, ‘‘from the equality which existed there,’’ it abjured ‘‘forms and ceremonies, invented to preserve the distinction of ranks and titles.’’ These were not Wirt’s proud aristocrats, surrounded by cap-doffing ignorant tenants, but a slightly scruffy gentry, primus inter pares. Certainly Tucker’s portrait was a half-step away from Walter Scott’s Woodstock, where Cavaliers were amiable, unpretending, good-natured, losing ground to the modern world, on their way to becoming Squire Western in Tom Jones, who also thought that variety was ‘‘essential in all gratifications of the appetite.’’ Nonetheless, Tucker himself never took that step. As late as 1837, when he came to write a life of Jefferson and began by sketching colonial Virginian history, he saw no reason to mention Cavaliers.59 57. George Tucker, The Valley of the Shenandoah, or, Memoirs of the Grayson (1824; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 1:47–55, 209. 58. Ibid., 2:20–23, 105–6. 59. Ibid., 105; George Tucker, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1837), 1:1–19.

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Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) was, in some essentials, a duplication of Tucker, in others not. The plantation of Swallow Barn itself is portrayed as sitting on the James River, and so the white ethnic complexity of western Virginia is absent. A character speaks unambiguously of ‘‘our English ancestors.’’ On the other hand, Kennedy portrayed slaves with some care, while Tucker did little but refer to them as problems of political economy. While Tucker was close to being an eighteenth-century rationalist, Kennedy, being a generation younger, was much influenced by Scott and Irving, whose Bracebridge Hall was a model. Hence the plantation house was ‘‘an aristocratical old edifice,’’ ‘‘time-honoured,’’ with a hall door that was ‘‘an ancient piece of walnut’’; its barn was ‘‘venerable’’ with ‘‘an air of drowsy decrepitude.’’ Its schoolhouse was ‘‘old,’’ planting a germ of education and liberty ‘‘that fructifies through generations,’’ and was presided over by parson Chub, ‘‘a plump, rosy old gentleman’’ from Ireland, whose reading was only of ‘‘the learning of the ancients,’’ gained from folios. Kennedy spoke of ‘‘the gentlemen of Virginia,’’ who lived hospitably ‘‘surrounded by their bondsmen and by their dependents,’’ their ‘‘congregated household and . . . numerous retainers,’’ who together afforded ‘‘a tolerable picture of feudal munificence.’’ 60 Much is made of decay and decline. Characters ride through the Tidewater, where they see ‘‘the vestiges of former trading stations,’’ ‘‘a ruinous tenement standing on the bank of a river, embowered in deep and solitary shade,’’ ‘‘two or three dilapidated buildings.’’ A swamp adds an air of ‘‘desolation.’’ There is a ‘‘mouldering wharf.’’ The interior of the ‘‘mansion house at the Brakes’’ seems Jacobean, ‘‘decorated with a profusion of wood-work, chiselled into the gorgeous forms of ancient pomp. The doors have huge pediments above them, with figures carved upon the entablatures; garlands of roses, as stiff as petrifactions, are moulded, with a formal grace, upon the jambs of the window-frames; and the mantel-pieces are thickly embossed with odd little mythological monsters, as various as the metamorphoses of Ovid. . . . The fire-places are noble monuments of ancient hospitality.’’ 61 Throughout, Kennedy liked to refer to Virginia as ‘‘the Old Dominion’’; indeed the book’s subtitle came by the 1853 edition to be turned from ‘‘A Sojourn in Virginia’’ to ‘‘A Sojourn in the Old Dominion.’’ 62 In this vein of antiquity, the state was described as ‘‘into the sere and yellow leaf,’’ delapidated, superseded, and old enough to be Gothic. There a traveler might wander during ‘‘nights as dark as pitch, over commons, around old churches, and 60. JPK, Swallow Barn; or, a Sojourn in Virginia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832), 1:19, 21, 23, 66, 68, 69, 75, 76. 61. Ibid., 179–81, 254, 257. 62. This may have been a term of recent coinage; see, for example, Stephen T. Mitchell, The Spirit of the Old Dominion (Richmond: Shepherd & Pollard, 1827).

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through graveyards, and all the while the rain may be pouring down with its solemn hissing sound, and the thunder may be rumbling over his head, and the wind moaning through the trees, and the lightning flinging its sulphurous glare across the skeletons of dead horses, and over the grizzly rawheads upon the tombstones,’’ and see in the church door a snoring and drunken cobbler with a ‘‘livid, dropsical, carbuncled face, like that of a vagabond corpse that had stolen out of his prison to enjoy the night air.’’ 63 In short, Kennedy went in for what, in the furniture world, is called ‘‘distressing,’’ the turning of notso-old things into antiques by the application of faked varnish and carefully placed dents. The book ends with one of its characters in an old library. Through a ‘‘love of the obsolete,’’ he leafs through ‘‘the heavy folios and quartos that lumbered the lower shelves’’ and comes across an old book about John Smith, dated in the 1620s. In the ensuing disquisition, he laments that ‘‘we have nothing to record the early adventures and chivalric virtues of the good soldier,’’ whose character was ‘‘moulded in the richest fashion of ancient chivalry.’’ This seems to tremble on the edge of a Cavalier myth, which would have reinforced an earlier chapter entitled ‘‘Traces of the Feudal System,’’ in which it was asserted that Virginia’s ‘‘early population . . . consisted of gentlemen of good name and condition, who brought within her confines a solid fund of respectability and wealth. This race of men grew vigorous in her genial atmosphere; her cloudless skies quickened and enlivened their tempers, and, in two centuries, gradually matured the sober and thinking Englishman into that spirited, imaginative being who now inhabits the lowlands of this state.’’ In fact, Kennedy was careful to note that Smith had been born ‘‘poor,’’ however much he may have demonstrated ‘‘many of the points of a true knight.’’ Nonetheless, Kennedy did write of his own ‘‘renewed admiration for the hero of the Old Dominion.’’ 64 So, although Swallow Barn was not quite there, it was a bare step away from a developed Cavalier myth. This final step was made by William Alexander Caruthers and carried on by John Esten Cooke, who responded to Evert Duyckinck’s 1854 invitation to be the Walter Scott of Virginia: ‘‘I wish your pen could be employed in a picturesque history of Virginia . . . a history not merely of the rich colonial times but of the middle ages of Virginia when the settler was mid way between the cavalier and the modern enterprizing or trading farmer & manufacturer who is to come upon the scene.’’ 65 The idea of Cavalier Virginia, however, found its most formal echo in historical lit63. JPK, Swallow Barn (1832), 2:1–2. 64. Ibid., 272, 276, 314, 1:74. 65. Evert A. Duyckinck to John Esten Cooke, 17 August 1854, John Esten Cooke Papers, LC.

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erature with Henry Augustine Washington’s ‘‘The Social System of Virginia,’’ an article published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1848.66 Unlike his belletristic contemporaries and predecessors, Washington was unimpeachably Virginian. He had grown up at a place called Blenheim in Westmoreland County and was the son of a ‘‘well-to-do farmer’’ called Lawrence Washington; his mother Sarah Tayloe was a great-niece of George Washington. He had been educated at Georgetown College and Princeton, then had studied law in Fredericksburg. In the early 1840s he practiced in Richmond, but moved to the Northern Neck in 1847, after his father bought him a plantation. In 1849, however, he became Professor of History, Political Economy, and International Law at William and Mary, which had once been Thomas Dew’s chair. So his credentials were solid, he being not only a relative of the preeminent Founding Father, but also a son-in-law of Beverley Tucker and an editor of Thomas Jefferson.67 In this essay, Washington was offering a questioning gloss upon the recent books on colonial Virginia by Robert Reid Howison and Charles Campbell. Washington’s question was, Who were the Virginians? This was, in fact, a novel question, but necessary to create any theory of social genesis, which needed to be at the heart of the Cavalier myth. It was also a modern question, asked by a complacently modern man. Henry Washington was a dispraiser of those who had gone before, and a great admirer of François Guizot’s General History of Civilization and Thomas Carlyle’s essay ‘‘On History,’’ and hence an advocate of social history and a skeptic of histories that concerned themselves only with governments. So, who were the Virginian people? They were ‘‘men of Anglo-Saxon descent,’’ with a love of the soil which was ‘‘said to be an Anglo-Saxon passion.’’ 68 They were accustomed to and needed dependents and soon acquired them in the form of ‘‘African slaves, or European serfs.’’ Along the rivers, ‘‘there resided, in almost baronial state, the Gentry of Virginia . . . a class of men holding vast landed possessions, rivalling in extent and fertility the 66. That the idea was afoot can be seen in ‘‘Religion in America,’’ SQR 7 (April 1845): 350– 72, which runs a contrast of Virginia and New England as that between Cavaliers and Roundheads; ‘‘Another class of men colonized Virginia. The gay cavalier chose it for his home’’ (358). 67. John Johns, A Memoir of Henry Augustine Washington, Late Professor of History, Political Economy, and International Law in William and Mary College, Virginia (Baltimore: John Young, 1859), 3–4; Carol H. Sturzenberger, ‘‘The Diaries of Henry A. Washington’’ (master’s thesis, College of William and Mary, 1979), 2–26. 68. It is probably relevant that Jefferson had been interested in the idea of the Saxon, if not then the Anglo-Saxon, as early as his Summary View of 1775: see Thomas Jefferson, ‘‘A Summary View of the Rights of British America,’’ in Peterson, Jefferson Writings, 118–20. On this, see James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 152–54.

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estates of many of the English nobility, and controlling, with absolute despotism, a body of serfs, which a feudal lord of the middle ages might have envied.’’ These ‘‘lords of the soil and masters of slaves’’ were, to a considerable extent, ‘‘Cavaliers, and [the] younger branches of noble English houses.’’ Unlike the Puritans, they were not fugitives, but acquisitive sojourners, much attached to home, expecting to return with their wealth. So ‘‘society in Virginia was, as far as circumstances would permit, a continuation of English society.’’ This loyalty had political consequences throughout the seventeenth century, as Virginia stayed loyal to the Stuarts. Hence ‘‘there existed, from the first, a class of men, descended from the nobility of England—imbued with the tastes, feelings and principles of their order, and confirmed in power by their superior culture, the extent of their possessions, and the character of the laboring classes.’’ 69 Washington did not assert these facts entirely to praise Virginia. In this, he was following his predecessors, who with their varying passions had found something wanting in the Virginian aristocracy, whether homegrown or imported. In Washington’s case, he adduced a Cavalier origin to explain a strength that became a failing. As he saw it, the isolated conditions of a plantation life sealed off by slavery, and the absence of cities, led to powerful ideas of individualism and liberty among the Cavalier Virginians, which made the American Revolution possible. But it also contributed to a debilitating absence of ideas of society and communal responsibility, without which a modern civilization of sustained material and moral improvement was difficult to achieve. This was the standpoint of a modern Whig, an admirer of Macaulay, who was no friend to Cavaliers but a proponent of the middle class and the National Debt. That the Cavalier idea was born of doubting hostility, which softened later into nostalgia, is evident too from Kennedy, who was an active Whig who came to speak of ‘‘our Anglo Saxonry.’’ 70 There was a glimmering of this in the Virginia politician William Cabell Rives, who was a Conservative Whig, perhaps more Conservative than Whig. In his life of James Madison, which he began to publish in 1861, Rives defended an elitist version of the Cavalier myth. In his history, Henry Washington had balanced breeding with environment and, if anything, made more of the sociology of the Virginian political economy. But Rives doggedly stressed continuity with English culture: ‘‘The colonists of Virginia left their native land in cordial amity with the civil and religious government of their fathers.’’ 69. Henry Augustine Washington, ‘‘The Social System of Virginia,’’ SLM 14 (February 1848): 71. 70. JPK to Martin Farquhar Tupper, 5 May 1851, JPK Papers, PLB. On American Whigs and history, see Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 69–94, esp. 70–71.

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Virginians were ‘‘free-born Englishmen.’’ 71 Rives acknowledged that there were some un-English accretions after the Restoration, ‘‘the interesting band of Huguenots, who were concentrated in a single settlement on the James River . . . a number of Scotch-Irish and German families.’’ These were ‘‘valuable accessions . . . but the main stream of emigration continued to be from England and Scotland, and of those who brought with them loyal attachments to the constitution of England, in both Church and State.’’ 72 For Rives, what seems to have mattered was ‘‘the genealogy of individual families,’’ who were patriots during the American Revolution: ‘‘We are met by the indisputable fact that [these] . . . were the descendents of men who had sealed, with their blood in the field of battle, their loyalty to Charles I, in his contest with the Long Parliament.’’ Rives considered George Washington, George Mason, Archibald Cary, and went on to assert, ‘‘The Lees, the Blands, the Carters, the Randolphs, the Digges’, the Byrds, and others among the foremost patriots of the day . . . were of well known Cavalier descent.’’ And what was a Cavalier? Not a slave to church and state, as many had asserted. Even Macaulay, ‘‘the great oracle’’ of that ‘‘school of politics most decidedly opposed to the pretensions of the King,’’ had acknowledged that they were honorable men, and even a biographer of Hampden that they were ‘‘‘high-minded and steady friends of liberty.’ ’’ Rives himself thought them ‘‘brave and noble and free spirits,’’ whose American descendants were ‘‘the vigilant and faithful guardians of the rights, liberties, and interests of the people of the Colony.’’ While Rives conceded that not all was good in this heritage, the faults were amiable: ‘‘a genial fondness for sports and diversions, an elastic joyousness of temper, a sympathetic nature, a free and uncalculating hospitality, and too great proneness to inaction and self-indulgence, except when the public cause summoned to exertion.’’ This character might not be ‘‘in all respects free from the animadversions of the moral censor, yet, in the mixed and imperfect condition of humanity,’’ it formed ‘‘a whole that might well be the basis of high deeds and noble aspirations.’’ 73 This tone of doubt, this ‘‘might well be,’’ had been a problem for Henry Washington, too. Were English Cavaliers fit for the modern world? They might be very well for winning Revolutions, but what of ‘‘the melioration of man’s social condition,’’ what of ‘‘material greatness’’? Washington thought the record poor, the prospects doubtful. ‘‘What the Virginians of that day meant by liberty was quite a different thing from the modern acceptation 71. William C. Rives, History of the Life and Times of James Madison, 3 vols. (1859–68; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 1:41–42. 72. It is, no doubt, a mark of the distance between Rives and the seventeenth century that, like a modern American, he is vague about the distinction between England and Scotland. 73. Rives, James Madison, 1:79, 80, 81, 83, 87–88.

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of that term,’’ for it understood the individual better than the citizen, freedom better than responsibility. Where would ‘‘social progress’’ come from? Washington was not sure. Perhaps modernity too much favored society over individuality, perhaps the age too much worshipped Mammon, and Virginia might help to redress the balance. Many thought so, though Washington admitted, finally, that he did not. Perhaps there was hope in a society marked by aggressive individuality. Even material progress and invention had often come from ‘‘isolated and individual energy and devotion.’’ 74 Perhaps in rural isolation, there lurked the Founding Fathers of modernity. On such a note, with such a wanting to be optimistic, Washington ended his essay. But it is easy to see that his mind ran on, after he put his pen down, to the thought that, well, perhaps such modern men did not lurk in rural Virginia. Rives, too, had been timid, and had mildly asserted that the Cavalier character ‘‘might well be the basis of high deeds and noble aspirations.’’ There was little confidence in ‘‘might well.’’ Such doubt was characteristic of the Whigs, who wanted ballast against the storm of American modernity and often turned to ethnicity and Anglophilia as a store of experience that might teach the trick of continuity and survival. As Edward Johnston observed, as early as 1831, ‘‘We are learning, as fast as nations ever do learn, not only that we ourselves are not the first founders of every thing like rational government, but that our own achievements, in that way, were actually preceded by many an older exploit of our British ancestors.’’ Inventing a free government was but a first step; the second and harder step was preserving it. ‘‘It is utterly vain to hope that any excellence of original institutions, can ever maintain a freedom, that shall have no need of perpetual struggles to support it.’’ 75 This Cavalier theory, something warm and reassuring to carry into a future that Virginians had every reason to mistrust, was vulnerable to evidence. More exact historians than Washington and Rives were not convinced. Hugh Blair Grigsby, to whom all Virginian historians were inferior in knowledge, never accepted the idea of the Cavaliers, although he was not (despite having a Scottish name) adverse to the English tradition and once wrote to John N. Tazewell in praise of ‘‘the master spirits of English genius,’’ Milton and Bacon and Bolingbroke. Nonetheless, when the first volume of Rives’s Madison came out in 1861, Grigsby wrote to Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts: ‘‘While I 74. Washington, ‘‘Social System of Virginia,’’ 73, 75, 80, 81. 75. Edward W. Johnston, ‘‘American Literature,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 436. On Johnston as a Whig, see entry for 27 April 1857 in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB: ‘‘Edwd W. Johnston from Washington calls to see me and spends the greater part of the morning. He wants to get some employment in editing a paper. He is a man of fine talents, and an excellent writer. I suggest to him the establishment of a paper much wanted just now in Maryland, to bring the old Whig party and the American into union and concerted action.’’

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concede the great and distinguished merit of the author, I dissent altogether from his notion of the cavalier character of our early progenitors of Virginia.’’ This was an old opinion of Grigsby’s, with which Charles Campbell (also of Scottish descent, also a Virginian historian) had expressed agreement in 1848. ‘‘In regard to the Cavaliers & Puritans in Va. Mr. Grigsby’s view appears to be just. There were families in the colony of good descent—but the bulk of them were plain people.’’ There were a few Cavaliers, to be sure, but not enough to make a difference and seldom distinguished. And much was faked by rich parvenus elaborating genealogies. ‘‘I have been surprised in looking into Burke’s Landed Gentry of Great Britain to find how few of our leading families of Va. can trace back to ancestors who owned land in the mother country.’’ 76 Grigsby’s Scottishness and Jeffersonianism were not irrelevant to this skepticism. In 1857, he explained to David Swain that he had been trying to overthrow the notion that Cavaliers were more important than Cromwellians in the settlement of Virginia, because the latter were ‘‘far more abundant; and I believe that they were the main authors of the Rebellion in 1676.’’ Many of Monmouth’s rebels ended up in Virginia, he thought, after being transported to the West Indies. ‘‘Do you remember that Walter Scott, in the Heart of Midlothian, finally settles the unfortunate child of Effie Deans, as late as 1736, in the back settlements of our state or yours?’’ Grigsby put it more forcibly to Henry Stephens Randall in 1856: ‘‘I shall prove that the Colony of Virginia was settled by thousands of Cromwellians—the bone and sinew of the British people, who gave that colony its peculiar caste, aided as they were by the peculiar circumstances of the colony.’’ 77 In Grigsby’s case, ethnicity endorsed political ideology; he was no Whig but a Jeffersonian, to whom even Whigs could look like Tories, and so he was no lover of Macaulay.78 In 1849, he wrote to William Henry Ruffner that Macaulay ‘‘had learned his notion of history from Waverley and Kenilworth.’’ His history was ‘‘not only not true in many of his splendid delineations, but . . . impossible to be true,’’ splendid but finally only an ‘‘oratio pro parte Whi iana.’’ 76. HBG to John N. Tazewell, 6 October 1829, Tazewell Family Papers, LV; HBG to Robert C. Winthrop, 26 February 1861, HBG Papers, VHS; CC to Thomas H. Williamson, ca. August 1848, CC Papers, WM. 77. HBG to David L. Swain, 20 August 1857, David L. Swain Papers, SHC; HBG to Henry Stephens Randall, 8 December 1856, in Frank J. Klingberg and Frank W. Klingberg, eds., The Correspondence between Henry Stephens Randall and Hugh Blair Grigsby, 1856–1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 76. 78. Macaulay, being a Whig centrist, was vulnerable to criticism from both democrats and conservatives. Cf. Grigsby’s views with those of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘‘Macaulay’s History of England,’’ SQR 15 (July 1849): 374–410. Of this, Grigsby observed, ‘‘I have just finished the scathing review of Macaulay’s History by the Quarterly. It is just in many aspects.’’: HBG to Mary Grigsby, 2 June 1849, HBG Papers, VHS.

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Whiggery would not do, because too elitist. Virginians might be chivalrous, not because they were ‘‘the miserable offshoots of the British aristocracy,’’ but because of their experience as slaveholders and tobacco planters.79 The Cavalier myth was, irreducibly, a condescension to those not Cavalier, and such pretensions irritated Grigsby. In 1858 he published an article in the Daily Southern Argus on those buried in the chapel of William and Mary, of which he was a trustee, and pursued his theme of the humble origins of many Virginians. This annoyed Dr. Robert Randolph of Clarke County, who wrote to the newspaper to complaint that his ancestor, William Randolph, had been spoken of as a ‘‘man of low degree.’’ Grigsby replied: ‘‘We confess we do not precisely comprehend what he means by ‘Low degree.’ With us every man stands on his own worth; and in fixing the ‘degree’ of a citizen we no more regard the character of his immediate ancestors than in discussing the merits of one of the fine pears sent us the other day by a friend in Smithfield we enquired whether it grew in the orchard of an Anglo-Saxon or a Norman, or a descendant of Confucius, or of one of the peers of Charlemagne.’’ 80 This was good, stinging democratic rhetoric. But, in fact, Grigsby did care. When he pointed to indigenous Virginian experience, he wrote, ‘‘We were a slaveholding, tobacco planting, Anglo-Saxon people.’’ 81 Being ‘‘Anglo-Saxon’’ mattered to him. He once joked with Randall that he seldom washed, which might be attributed to his ‘‘Anglo-Saxon tendencies,’’ for ‘‘an Anglo-Saxon never took a bath unless when caught in the rain, or when he was driven through a river by a Norman.’’ This was a Jeffersonian joke, an echo of the serious proposition that there had been a great historic struggle of the plain folk of the Anglo-Saxons with the Norman yoke, which had been transferred to American soil. At least for Grigsby, to be Anglo-Saxon was something different from being English, a thing older, truer, wider. Indeed, the term was often used to convey a sense of plain energy. Even Kennedy, though Whig, used it this way. In 1848, he noted in his diary that he would add to a lecture, the idea that the Anglo-Saxon loved work ‘‘a much better quality than this vulgar brag of the day of his love of land and his land stealing,’’ and this was ‘‘the secret of the triumphs of that race.’’ Philip Pendleton Cooke used it similarly in 1844, when he observed, ‘‘The Anglo 79. HBG to William Henry Ruffner, 20 July 1849, Ruffner Family Papers, PHS; Klingberg and Klingberg, Randall and Grigsby Correspondence, 17 (but quoting a letter not identified). 80. Klingberg and Klingberg, Randall and Grigsby Correspondence, 145–46, n111. The original article is HBG, ‘‘The Dead of the Chapel of William and Mary,’’ Daily Southern Argus, 31 July 1858, and the letters of HBG and Randolph were published simultaneously in Daily Southern Argus, 21 September 1858. 81. HBG to Thomas Ritchie, 14 March 1854, quoted in Klingberg and Klingberg, Randall and Grigsby Correspondence, 17.

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Saxon who is pressing towards California with a knapsack on his back, has no leisure for scholarly indulgence; and he is the type of our population.’’ 82 Cavaliers did not carry knapsacks. Certainly, Grigsby would have been distressed that the spiritual blood of Anglo-Norman Cavaliers should have been held, by later Virginians, to have flowed through the veins of the Army of Northern Virginia.83 He would have been horrified to learn that the Virginia Historical Society, one of his pet projects, would come to be housed in a building named for Battle Abbey, the monastery built by William the Bastard to celebrate his victory.84 Hence much in Southern intellectual culture was structured by ethnic loyalties. But it would be wrong to overstress the burden of this. Few felt ethnicity to be a bounded thing, which demanded exclusive loyalty. One might know one’s heritage, but this need not circumscribe one’s self. You might inherit the language of one’s family, but it was good to know other languages, too. Intellectual culture was, indeed, peculiarly associated with multilingualism, with fluency in ‘‘foreign’’ tongues, whose acquisition was the serious business of anyone aspirant to the life of the mind. It might be useful, therefore, to end this chapter with a brief notice of the pattern of languages, formally studied in the South, as opposed to those picked up from kinship. Southern culture, for one thing, provided Latin and Greek. No doubt, for most this was wasted effort, badly done. For Legaré in 1828, it was a puzzle how college professors of Greek and Latin in the United States ‘‘in possession of comfortable livings, and discharged from all other duties and engagements, have dozed over their sealed volumes in such stupid uninspiring ignorance—how so many schoolmasters . . . have been satisfied to ‘barter’ . . . for competent fees and a precious period of their pupils’ lives, such a wretched, vulgar, and worthless smattering of classical literature.’’ As George D. Alexander, schoolmaster of the Salem Academy in Tippah County, Mississippi, cheerfully remarked in 1846, this was ‘‘the good old plan of beating, ciphyering, Latin & Greek in [a pupil’s] head, that is as fit to learn Latin & Greek as my dog.’’ Certainly, many students felt dull enough. Louis Manigault wrote to his brother about school in Charleston in 1843: ‘‘I am getting on so so at 82. Grigsby to Randall, 12 May 1856, ibid., 49; entry for 9 February 1848 in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; Philip Pendleton Cooke to John R. Cooke, 6 July 1844, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU. 83. See, especially, ‘‘The Record of Virginia,’’ in George W. Bagby, Selections from the Miscellaneous Writings of Dr. George W. Bagby, 2 vols. (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1884), 1: 341–51. 84. Cf. EDL, Thirty Years of My Life on Three Continents, 2 vols. (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 1:18–36, which discourses on Saxons, serfs, and Walter Scott, and insists that they cast a light on Southern slavery.

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school I do not find Latin Exercises so hard as I thought it would be, the only thing I do not like is nasty Greek I can never find out the verbs but I am not the only boy that finds it hard.’’ Henry F. Jones, an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, more engaged by hunting than Homer, noted gloomily in his diary in 1857: ‘‘I have a tremendous hard lesson to get to night. I dread it too. It is a greek lesson.’’ Spot McClung of Lebanon, Tennessee, was more decisive in his distaste: ‘‘I wrote to Grand Ma about 2 weeks ago and requesting her to say to you that I dont wish to study greek. For I dont see any use in studying it at all for I dont see that it does any one any good at all.’’ 85 No doubt, the occasions on which a talented student met an accomplished teacher were rare enough, as William Henry Holcombe judged in 1855: ‘‘In our American hot-house culture, in which a universal smattering is a prelude to an equally hasty and imperfect study of some profession . . . genuine Greek and Latin scholars are as rare among us as larks, nightingales and other gems of old-world poetry.’’ But it did happen. At the Ebenezer Academy in Tennessee, J. G. M. Ramsey as a boy was run through serious, traditional paces by James Houston, a graduate of Washington College in Virginia, ‘‘a student of theology . . . and a rigid disciplinarian.’’ ‘‘I have always thought,’’ Ramsey remembered in old age, ‘‘that my knowledge of classical literature might be mainly ascribed to his attainments in Latin and Greek.’’ 86 From November 1809 to April 1810, he had worked on Latin grammar, then read the colloquies of Corderius (as had John Randolph and Littleton Waller Tazewell before him in their grammar schools), then Aesop’s Fables and the first part of Erasmus’s Dialogues.87 Between May and October 1810, he finished the last part of Erasmus, began the Selectae (evidently an anthology of classical texts), and the first half of Cornelius Nepos’s Lives. This he found ‘‘far superior to the 85. HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 11; entry for 2 November 1846, in ‘‘Journal of The Life, Correspondence and Private Transactions of George D. Alexander A.B.’’ (1844–46), George D. Alexander Collection, MDAH; Louis Manigault to Charles H. Manigault, 2 October 1843, Louis Manigault Papers, DU; entry for 14 September 1857, in Henry F. Jones Diary, SHC; Spot McClung to S. D. Cabaniss, 23 October 1852, McClung Family Papers, UA. 86. Entry for 3 February 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC; J. G. M. Ramsey, Autobiography and Letters, ed. William B. Hesseltine (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1954), vii, 8, 13–15. As will be noted later, Ramsey became a historian, though also many other things (a farmer, a canal and school commissioner, a railroad promoter, a postmaster, a college trustee, a bank president, and the operator of a ferry), but always in eastern Tennessee. He was the son of Colonel Francis Ramsey, the clerk of the court for the Hamilton District in Knoxville (not yet in the state of Tennessee) and later president of the new state bank. 87. On Randolph, Tazewell, and Corderius (usually called Cordery), see entry for 25 October 1829, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS.

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last’’ session. From November 1810 to April 1811, he did the second half of Cornelius Nepos, began ‘‘an Introduction to the making of Latin,’’ studied the first six books, plus four hundred lines in the thirteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as, mysteriously, fifty-three ‘‘rules of the introduction’’; this was followed by ten of the ‘‘bucolicks of Virgil.’’ ‘‘And then on the first day of April I went home and stayed their [sic] five weeks employed in shooting.’’ In his fourth session, May–October 1811, he ‘‘began the Georgics of Virgil with the Greek Grammar,’’ the Aeneid, then Horace and the Greek Testament. November 1811–April 1812 saw more Horace and more of the Greek Testament: ‘‘I have now finished the Latin and have now only to apply myself to the Greek language which I find hurts my eyes very much. However I began Lucian’s Dialogues which is a most pleasant and entertaining book.’’ From May to October 1812, he proceeded to Lucian’s Misanthropos, Xenophon’s life of Cyrus, and Homer, ‘‘which I think I spent in the most intense study of any before or after it. The reasons of which were first because I desired much to compleat the languages in 3 years, Second I knew that it would keep me busy to get through and would therefore keep me from Idleness, the beginning of all vice. Accordingly I studied late & early and compleated the languages in 3 years in 15th year of my age.’’ In his later sessions, attention shifted to arithmetic, geography, natural and moral philosophy, logic, English grammar, and a debating society.88 The South was full of such people, who knew the gerund, the ablative absolute, and oratio obliqua, people like Moses Wadell in South Carolina, Frederick Coleman in Virginia, Carlos Smith in Alabama, William Bingham in North Carolina. At Coleman’s Concord Academy the slave janitor cried out familiarly to the students, ‘‘ ‘Sophocles, with your candles, young gentlemen,’ ’’ so that ‘‘Old Fred’’ could expound on Antigone.89 Such teachers tended, on the whole, to value grammar above literary grace, and to make too much of prose translation. Of this, Legaré the aficionado complained: all the attainments of a young man were limited to translation, ‘‘to . . . rendering into uncouth or nonsensical English, the most exquisite beauties of poetry and eloquence, without so much as the remotest idea, of what it is that has recom88. J. G. M. Ramsey, ‘‘A Short Sketch of the Course of Education Pursued by The Author’’ (August 1814), J. G. M. Ramsey Papers, SHC. 89. Charles Forster Smith, ‘‘The South’s Contribution to Classical Studies,’’ in The South in the Building of the Nation: A History of the Southern States Designed to Record the South’s Part in the Making of the American Nation; to Portray the Character and Genius, to Chronicle the Achievements and Progress and to Illustrate the Life and Traditions of the Southern People, ed. Julian A. C. Chandler, 12 vols. (Richmond: Southern Historical Publication Society, 1909), 7:160–72 (quotation on p. 164). On Carlos Smith at the La Grange College, see Faye Acton Axford, ed., The Journals of Thomas Hubbard Hobbs (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976), 11–30.

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mended to the admiration of the ages, those ‘Delphic lines,’ whose unspeakable harmony he utterly destroys by a barbarous pronunciation.’’ Equally, Latin was given more prominence than Greek, though a surprising amount of the latter was normal, and faintly prestigious, especially to those ignorant of it. When Griffith John McRee published his life of James Iredell in 1857, he left a copy with a friend, then called to reclaim it: ‘‘He good naturedly asked if there was any Greek in it. I told him I had but little Greek but had ventured on some Latin. ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘Latin is too common, hunt up some Greek.’ ’’ 90 Latin was certainly common, an ordinary part of intellectual culture. One finds it scattered through private correspondence and diaries, unaffectedly as well as self-consciously. Thomas Grimké bantered in his letters to James McBride in Latin. David James McCord routinely observed to William Porcher Miles, ‘‘Though much from home the last week I have read nearly all of Aurelius Victor and a small part of Caesar. I will stick to it; for I find that it refreshes my Latin very finely.’’ Philip W. Alston, an Episcopal minister in Memphis, included Latin parodies in his letters to Moses Ashley Curtis. In 1829, Hugh Blair Grigsby wrote in his journal: ‘‘Have resolved to write my journal in Latin occasionally, as Gibbon wrote his in French. / I think it would be best for me to purchase an edition of Cicero—not only to improve me in Reading Latin, but supply me with phrases for my journal.’’ Being taught in youth, Latin had a quality both nostalgic and puritanical, for its use might seem to continue the discipline of education. Robert Chisolm, a Yale classmate, wrote to Grigsby in 1825 from Charleston that he had twice tried to write to him in Latin; the first he had finished but it had sat on the mantelpiece for two weeks, while the second had faltered, ‘‘because I found that all my ideas and communications vanished at the very thought of having themselves expressed in Latin.’’ 91 In 1852, Edwin DeLeon attended in Washington a public banquet in honor of Louis Kossuth, and found himself in an antechamber with Kossuth’s Hungarian retinue, who spoke no English nor any of the modern European languages tried out upon them: ‘‘The happy thought occurred to me, that Latin was still a living language in Hungary, so I addressed the Governor [Uhazy] in that tongue. I soon regretted my temerity, for I was like an imprudent boy who loosened an avalanche. The Hungarians 90. HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ 11; Griffith John McRee to David L. Swain, 12 March 1857, David L. Swain Papers, SHC. 91. Thomas S. Grimké to James McBride, 19 October 1808, James McBride Papers in the Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC; David James McCord to William Porcher Miles, 15 October 1846, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC; P. W. Alston to MAC, 21 January 1846, MAC Papers, SHC; entry for 13 October 1829, in HBG Diary, and Robert Chisolm to HBG, 4 March 1825, HBG Papers, VHS.

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spoke Latin as their mother tongue, and my college training was badly fitted to make me their equal in conversation in that dead tongue.’’ 92 There was much dispute over the utility of the ancient languages. Not only Spot McClung thought them useless. Thomas Grimké strenuously argued for their diminution in the schemes of education. Robert Rucker, as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, found them much overrated. ‘‘I regret very much that I took Latin & Greek instead of Moral philosophy, Chemistry & Natural philosophy,’’ he told his father in Tennessee. ‘‘Some knowledge of Latin & Greek I think is very essential. . . . I think it is necessary if one is going to make himself a teacher, to study it in detail, but for a professional man I think it not necessary, & after he has gotten a tolerable knowledge of it, that his time could be much better spent in the study of the Sciences.’’ Yet preparation for the professions had long been the classics’ defense. William Wirt advised his skeptical son in 1832: ‘‘I never would have returned you to greek again, or latin either, but for two considerations—one is my desire to give you the education of a gentleman of the present age; the other to put it in your power to take up, to advantage, either of the learned professions, if such should be your own choice.’’ 93 Greek had little such utility and was of small use to the lawyer or doctor; it vaguely instructed the student in republicanism or advised in the skills of oratory. But its rareness was thought to intimate class standing. George Fitzhugh was to remember: ‘‘We once told a distinguished man that ‘we did not purpose to have our son taught Greek, for it would be useless in these utilitarian times.’ He replied, ‘It will help to make him a gentleman!’ ’’ The experience of reading Greek was thought to be aesthetic, even sensual, though also (the uninformed did not always realize) vulgar, for it was a literature that waved phalluses. Gessner Harrison, when an undergraduate in Charlottesville in 1827, wrote to his brother: ‘‘Mr. Hunter, Temple, Tutwiler and myself are now reading Aristophanes’s play called Nubes—that in wh. Socrates is ridiculed. The wit compels us to laugh very heartily sometimes tho’ it is occasionally quite vulgar—I cant conceive a very high notion of the delicate sensibility of the ‘sovereign plebs’ of Athens if they could listen to Aristophanes plays without an occasional blush.’’ Nonetheless, while Latin was thought to inculcate rigor, Greek was thought to prompt sublimity. The consequence was that the teaching of Greek was often imprecise, since the rigor of a meddling intellect might despoil the exquisite passion. James Warley Miles, no mean linguist, 92. EDL, Thirty Years, 1:93–94. On Kossuth’s American tour, see Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 692–97. 93. Robert M. Rucker to Samuel R. Rucker, 24 March 1850, Samuel Rucker Papers, DU; William Wirt to William Cabell Wirt, 26 January 1832, Wirt Family Papers, SHC.

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had to learn his Greek with thoroughness in later years, despite having attended the South Carolina College. When William James Rivers was considering reforming the teaching of the classics in Columbia, Miles offered him advice that says much about the preceding state of affairs. Too often, students came to college with ‘‘a vague reading of half-a dozen authors, and a flimsy acquaintance with sundry half-studied Grammars.’’ This had been Miles’s own experience. Much later, when he ‘‘found it necessary to know Greek, or, at least, to be able to consult its Literature,’’ he was so ignorant, that he had ‘‘to commence de novo—, not being able to construe a sentence, or to conjugate a verb, or (necessarily, as consequence,) to comprehend the importance of the Article and Particles in their necessary relation to the Logic of the Language.’’ All he had was the alphabet and a few ‘‘stereotyped phrases.’’ So it was wise, in any possible reform, that students be rigorously taught the principles of the language.94 Yet no educational system can be expected to train scholars, merely to make it possible for scholars to train themselves, in areas of understanding that the system has indicated may be worthwhile. This, in the classics, the South mostly managed to do. Hugh Legaré, James Warley Miles, Gessner Harrison, George Frederick Holmes, M. R. H. Garnett, Thomas Caute Reynolds, William James Rivers, all were serious classicists. Basil Gildersleeve was the greatest classical scholar produced by American culture in the nineteenth century, the founder of its professional philology. Dozens were knowledgeable about the language and literature of the ancients, without any pretension to scholarly precision. Thousands more were influenced by the classics, saw them as a touchstone for their culture, a measure by which it might be judged. Beyond the ancient languages were the modern. French mattered most, but Spanish and Italian were surprisingly common, and German grew in importance. French was, naturally, considered a necessary civilized acquirement, even beyond its practical value in a society that embraced Louisiana. Rich planters, like James Henry Hammond, would hire tutors whose purposes would include the teaching of French. This was done for boys and girls alike. The young Harriott Horry Rutledge in 1841, in Charleston, learned her French with enthusiasm and addressed letters to her mother as ‘‘Ma tres chere Maman.’’ Her tutor observed complacently: ‘‘The other day I repeated two lines of Béranger’s Chant du Cosaque—She caught them at once & by little persuasion learned a stanza of eight lines long difficult lines. . . . [I]n a few days she will be introduced to DelaMartine.’’ 95 94. GF, ‘‘Bayard Taylor’s Travels in Greece and Russia,’’ DBR 27 (December 1859): 649; Gessner Harrison to Edward Tiffin Harrison, 9 April 1827, Tucker-Harrison-Smith Papers, UVA; JWM to William J. Rivers, n.d. (ca. 1856–57), William J. Rivers Papers, SCL. 95. James Henry Hammond to Lewis R. Gibbes, 5 November 1847, Lewis R. Gibbes

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This was a tradition that stretched back to the eighteenth century, at least, and can be best caught in the elegant moralizing correspondence of Alice DeLancey Izard with her daughter, Margaret Izard Manigault, where the oldest and latest French literature was reviewed with cool discrimination, in which the perils of French immorality were constantly weighed against the advantages of French style and precision. ‘‘It is a great gratification to me to know that . . . your mind has not been influenced by your acquaintance with so many French authors,’’ the mother told the daughter in 1811. ‘‘Many of them are excellent I know, but many are only specious.’’ In 1816, the daughter was reading Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses and wrote of the avid, absorbing experience with exquisite reprobation: ‘‘Persons who have had opportunities of knowing have assured me that such things were. They make one shudder.’’ The mother had asserted ‘‘such books cannot be dangerous to a mind which is formed & fixed in its principles.’’ But, in America, many were too innocent to cope. ‘‘Our marriages are in general so well assorted, & so completely the effect of choice founded upon attachment,’’ that the situation of Mademoiselle de Tourville ‘‘can hardly be conceived—any more than such wickedness as that of her seducer, & such atrocity as that of the odious Marquise.’’ 96 After the daughter died in 1826, her library was counted at ‘‘near One Thousand (967) unbound Volumes mostly french.’’ Her son, Charles Izard Manigault, carried on the tradition to his own son, who was advised in 1843 that learning French formed a valuable part of education, especially useful when traveling: it was the language of diplomacy, science, and letters: ‘‘La langue de la musique—et la plus agréable de causer—sur tout avec les dames.’’ On the father’s own travels, it had been useful, not only with ladies. In Indonesia, in 1821, Manigault corresponded with a Dutchman on business matters in the only language they shared, French. This was a common pattern for traveling Southerners, which Thomas Cooper used as a prime reason for teaching the language, when advising Thomas Jefferson on a rational plan for a collegiate curriculum: French was ‘‘the pass-port language of Europe.’’ 97 In truth, however, with so much Latin and Greek in curricula, little time was left for other languages. Even French was not always standard. It was Papers, LC; Harriet R. Holman, ed., ‘‘Charleston in the Summer of 1841: The Letters of Harriott Horry Rutledge,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 46 ( January 1945): 9; Harriott Pinckney Rutledge Holbrook to Rebecca Motte (Lowndes) Rutledge, 26 August 1841, Harriott Horry Rutledge Papers, DU. 96. ADI to MIM, 4 August 1811; MIM to Charlotte Georgiana Izard Smith, 15 September 1816, Manigault Family Papers, SCL. 97. ‘‘In the Library,’’ manuscript in Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Charles Izard Manigault to Charles Manigault, 25 November 1843, and Van Schuipen to Charles Izard Manigault, 14 June 1821, Louis Manigault Papers, DU; TC to Thomas Jefferson, 22 September 1814, TC Papers, SCL.

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not included at the University of North Carolina even when the curriculum was enlarged in 1819, though Nicholas Hentz became Professor of Modern Languages from 1826 to 1831, at which later time the position was abolished; a tutor in French was only intermittently employed until the professorship of Modern Languages was recreated in 1856. After 1856, there was also a single two-hour class of German a week for the junior year, and optional classes in German, Spanish, and Italian. The university’s first historian was to observe, ‘‘The modern languages, except German, were regarded and taught as dialects of the Ancient.’’ 98 This odd record was not unconnected to morality. In the 1830s, after Hentz’s tenure, there had been pious concern that French taught by a Frenchman might inculcate immoralities. The university’s president, David Swain, recommended to the Board of Trustees that any tutor would have to be ‘‘an educated American.’’ This nativist injunction may not have been unconnected with the sad tale of Charles Marey, who had taught French in Chapel Hill in the late 1830s. Marey was ‘‘a Frenchman born,’’ as well as ‘‘a man of good accomplishments and handsome physique,’’ whose ‘‘usefulness was ruined by his fondness for ardent spirits.’’ One day the president heard a great din in Marey’s classroom, entered to find him drunk and the class happily out of control. Swain is said to have grimly said, ‘‘Mr. Marey, I will take charge of this class. You are relieved, sir.’’ To this, Marey loftily replied, ‘‘If you give this order as President of the University, I obey. But if you give it as David L. Swain I demand satisfaction!’’ The former seems to have been the case, for Marey left Chapel Hill immediately. Reports drifted back that ‘‘he had been killed in a brawl in Charleston, South Carolina.’’ 99 South Carolina College taught French from its inception, but it too wavered in its commitment, sometimes abolishing, sometimes creating professorships and tutorships in the language. Thomas Cooper believed deeply that French was ‘‘so indispensable a branch of modern education that it is a disgrace to any college not to furnish a means of acquiring a knowledge of that language.’’ But after Edward Michaelowitz, the ‘‘Teacher of Oriental Literature and Modern Languages’’ (he did German, French, and Hebrew), decamped for Europe in 1831, no more modern languages were taught in the college before the Civil War, though Henry Junius Nott seems to have used various specimens of continental literature in translation in his lectures to the juniors on the principles of criticism, and Francis Lieber taught the odd Ger98. Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 1, From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789–1868 (1907; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1974), 662–63. 99. Battle, UNC, 1789–1868, 255–56, 461–64, 659, 452; William Earle Drake, Higher Education in North Carolina before 1860 (New York: Carlton Press, 1964), 168, 175–76.

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man class.100 In 1838, Basil Manly discussed a chair of modern languages at the University of Alabama, which others wished would encompass French, Spanish, Italian, and German, but which Manly thought in practice would deal only with French, eventually Spanish: ‘‘Neither of these languages would be pursued here as a mere matter of polite literature. But there are circumstances in this South western world that make these languages necessary to a man of business—The French on account of the constant intercourse with Mobile & New Orleans; and the Spanish on account of the proximity to Texas (only 5 days journey) and the rage for land speculations. All the records, titles &c were in Spanish before the recent revolution.’’ 101 In the same decade a Catalan, Mariano Cubí y Soler, was teaching at the College of Louisiana.102 As for Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had long since helped to establish a professorship of modern languages at William and Mary, soon after 1779, which had been held then by Charles Bellini. In Charlottesville later, Jefferson had been anxious to include the modern languages from the beginning of his university, such that the School of Modern Languages existed coequally with the more usual disciplines of Ancient Languages, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Natural History, Anatomy and Medicine, and Moral Philosophy; moreover, very unusually, Anglo-Saxon was taught. The first incumbent of the chair of Modern languages was Georg Blaettermann of Leipzig, who was succeeded in 1844 by Maximilian Schele de Vere. The historian of these matters judges that, though Harvard was preeminent, Harvard, Virginia, and Bowdoin were the three chief centers of Spanish study in the United States before the Civil War.103 Schele was a serious scholar. He had been born in Sweden in 1820, moved to southern Germany when eight, studied at Berlin and Bonn, at the former of which he was awarded a doctorate in 1841. He then (it is said) studied the civil law in Rome and fought with the French in Algeria, before coming to the United States in 1843. Among his antebellum productions were a Spanish grammar and a study of comparative philology.104 100. Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina, vol. 1, South Carolina College (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 42, 48, 79, 83–84; Henry Junius Nott to George McDuffie, 25 November 1835, Henry Junius Nott Papers, SCL; FL to Robert W. Barnwell, 17 June 1836, FL Papers, SCL. 101. BM to James L. Reynolds, 17 July 1838, Manly Family Papers, UA. 102. Stanley T. Williams, The Spanish Background of American Literature, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), 1:174. Williams only infers that Soler taught Spanish. 103. Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790–1830 (1964; reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), 51; Herbert Baxter Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888), 120; Williams, Spanish Background, 1:188–89, 192. 104. John S. Patton, ‘‘Maximilian Schele de Vere [1820–1898],’’ in Library of Southern Literature, vol. 11, Schele De Vere-Stuart, ed. Edwin Anderson Alderman and Joel Chandler Harris

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On the whole, Italian was acquired by those who planned to visit Italy, as a by-product of neoclassical enthusiasms, often in Paris on the eve of departures southward. But, among serious scholars in the very early nineteenth century, Italian literature had still a marked reputation: Tasso, Ariosto, Dante, Machiavelli were supposed to form a part, albeit minor, of the armory of the accomplished philosophe. Hugh Legaré spent long hours among tall Venetian folios. Isaac Harby wrote a drama called Alberti in 1819, whose original purpose was ‘‘the vindication of the character and conduct of lorenzo d’medici, from the calumnie of alfieri, in his tragedy, called ‘The conspiracy of the Pazzi.’ ’’ Harby assumed, rightly, that such matters would be of interest to Charlestonian theatergoers.105 Richard Henry Wilde was among the more serious students of Italian literature in the country, but his own recounting of how he acquired the language shows how little it was, on the whole, after Jefferson’s generation, cultivated in the South, as the memory of the Renaissance grew attenuated.106 As the fourth or fifth language, it was easily squeezed out. Increasingly, German displaced it; indeed German came to challenge French itself. The number of Southern intellectuals who came to cultivate German, its language, literature, and philosophy, was remarkable. Robert Henry wrote on Goethe and worked at a translation of Niebuhr.107 With Jesse Burton Harrison and Francis Lieber, the reader is already acquainted, but the latter’s son Oscar was educated in Hamburg as a schoolboy, then as an undergraduate at Berlin, Göttingen, and Freiburg; Alexander von Humboldt was among his mentors.108 Hugh Legaré self-consciously took up the study of German, while chargé d’affaires in Brussels in the early 1830s, the better to understand German classical scholarship and literature; he visited, among others, August von Schlegel in Bonn. As has been shown, a large number of Southerners went to Germany to study, formally and informally. But others, though they seem never to have visited Germany, made a serious study of the language, in(New Orleans: Martin & Hoyt, 1907), 4687–892. See Maximilian Schele de Vere, Outlines of Comparative Philolo with a Sketch of the Languages of Europe, Arranged Upon Philologic Principles; and a Brief History of the Art of Writing (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853); Maximilian Schele de Vere, A Grammar of the Spanish Language, with a History of the Language, and Practical Exercises (New York: D. Appleton, 1854). 105. Isaac Harby, ‘‘Discourse before the Reformed Society of Israelites,’’ in A Selection from the Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Isaac Harby, Esq., ed. Henry L. Pinckney and Abraham Moise (Charleston, S.C.: James S. Burges, 1829), 5. 106. See the preface to Wilde’s manuscript Life of Dante, Richard Henry Wilde Papers, LC. 107. Robert Henry, ‘‘Niebuhr’s Roman History,’’ SR 1 (May 1828): 320–41; Robert Henry, ‘‘Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister,’’’ SR 3 (May 1829): 353–85. 108. There are a great many letters from Oscar Lieber to his parents, written from Germany in German, in the FL Papers, SCL.

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cluding James Henley Thornwell, Moses Ashley Curtis, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, George Frederick Holmes, Gessner Harrison, William Henry Holcombe, Basil Manly Jr., and John Young Bassett. In Charleston, Augustus Sachtleben, a German emigré from Brunswick who taught in the schools, was especially influential in teaching the language; he lectured in 1857, for example, on German literature to the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina, and guided James Warley Miles and Edward Mitchell Whaley, serious students, and William Gilmore Simms, a dabbler, into an appreciation of the language.109 All these foreign words allowed Southerners access to a wider world. When we come to consider libraries and print culture, it will become clearer what proportion of intellectual life was formed by languages other than English. But even the exogenous could be used to comprehend what was indigenous, what was local, the topic to which it will now be useful to turn.

109. JWM to William J. Rivers, undated letter, William J. Rivers Papers, SCL; entry for 4 March 1857, in MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC; David Ramsay to Joseph J. Legaré, ca. April (1851?), David Ramsay Papers, SCL; ‘‘Short Account of the Experiences of Edward Mitchell Whaley of Edisto Island, S.C.,’’ Edward Mitchell Whaley Papers, DU; WGS to FL, 21 October 1851, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952–82), 3:147–48.

Chapter Eight

The Fabrics of Their Own Country

Among self-descriptions, the sense of coming from a specific locality loomed large. When Henry Augustine Washington looked at the Virginian world inherited from the colonial period, he saw localism as its marked characteristic: Virginia was but ‘‘a number of little societies scattered through the country, each with a distinct organization,’’ a colony that ‘‘proceeded upon the principle of leaving each of these little societies all the power which could abide there, and carrying to the great central society only so much as was absolutely necessary to the ends of social order.’’ A decade earlier, John C. Calhoun had said of Daniel Webster: ‘‘I do not censure him for his local feelings. The Author of our being never intended that creatures of our limited faculties should embrace with equal intenseness of affection the remote and the near.’’ 1 But locality took many forms. There were states, regions, counties, and cities. Of these, the most important was loyalty to a state, for it was in states that law, culture, and manners were thought most powerfully to intermingle. States had widely different origins, English, French, Spanish, and Mexican; proprietary, royal, conquered, chartered, territorial, annexed. All were idiosyncratic, something of which their residents were acutely aware. The Marylander was conscious of Catholic toleration, the Virginian of Jamestown and Title from C. H. Wiley, The North-Carolina Reader (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1851), 11: ‘‘The schools, the books, the fabrics of their own country are not worthy of their patronage; and the idea of permitting their children to learn to read in the work of a North Carolina author, and which does not treat of far off places and foreign customs, cannot for a moment be tolerated.’’ 1. Henry Augustine Washington, ‘‘The Social System of Virginia,’’ SLM 14 (February 1848): 77; ‘‘Speech in Reply to Daniel Webster on the Subtreasury Bill,’’ 22 March 1838, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Robert L. Meriwether et al., 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959–2003), 14:206.

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George Washington, the South Carolinian of Francis Marion and Charles II; each state had its peculiar mix, an awareness of which the antebellum years did much to enrich. Whatever else a state was, it was a legal fact. It had a constitution and laws that defined rights and obligations, controlled property including that of slaves, possessed a politics, structured marriage and divorce (or the lack of it), monitored many of the rules of finance and trade, provided higher education, and represented its citizens to the nation and the world. As between state and nation, the state was incomparably the more influential upon the life of citizen and noncitizen alike. Indeed, it defined citizenship; before Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment, no one was a citizen of the United States first, but only an American by virtue of being the citizen of a state. As Abel P. Upshur put it, ‘‘In all the daily business of life, we act under the protection and guidance of the State governments. . . . There is nothing dear to our feelings or valuable in our social condition, for which we are not indebted to their protecting and benignant action.’’ The intellectual historian need not dwell upon the centrality of the state, for generations of political and social historians have cumulatively stated the case. Suffice here to say that, in most of the dealings of ordinary life, not excluding the life of the mind, the state was obliged often to be implicated. William Henry Trescot was not idiosyncratic in understanding this. ‘‘Political philosophers may disagree as to the respective merits of a consolidated or a federal government,’’ he observed in 1859, ‘‘this much is certain, that now States have become the great factors by which nearly all our results are accomplished, that State pride, State influence, State enterprise, as distinguished from the action of our central congressional government, are the means by which, and the channels through which, the far larger and more important part of our daily life is conducted.’’ 2 In the years before 1860 an intellectual’s life could begin to be occupied with attending and speaking to state historical societies and agricultural societies, in undertaking state geological surveys, running state Bible societies, giving sermons to state denominational organizations, and writing textbooks for state schools. A large number of periodicals, for example, began to be published, technically dedicated to state audiences.3 The most ubiquitous, unsurprisingly, were those dedicated to religion. Early, there is the Virginia Religious Magazine (1805–7) and the Kentucky Missionary and Theological Magazine 2. Abel P. Upshur, A Brief Enquiry into the True Nature and Character of the Federal Government; Being a Review of Judge Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1840; reprint, Philadelphia: John Campbell, 1863), 97; William Henry Trescot, Oration Delivered before the SouthCarolina Historical Society, Thursday, May 19, 1859 (Charleston, S.C.: James and Williams, 1859), 9. 3. I cull these names from Sam G. Riley, Index to Southern Periodicals (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 19–51.

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(1812–14), later the Georgia Reporter and Christian Gazette (1826), and the Georgia Christian Repository (1831–32). The Baptists of each state usually had a periodical, beginning with the Alabama Baptist (1835–38), ending with the Arkansas Baptist (1859–61); likewise the Methodists, from the South Carolina Methodist Advocate (1837–71) to the Texas Methodist, which began in 1847 and still exists. The Presbyterians, however, had only the North Carolina Presbyterian (1858– 1931). In addition, there were several temperance journals: from the South Carolina Temperance Advocate (1838–51) to the Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader, founded in 1860. There were a large number of agricultural journals: the Virginia Farmer (1829–33), the Tennessee Farmer (1834–40), the Kentucky Farmer (1837– 42), the Carolina Planter (1840–41, 1844–45), and the like. There were journals dedicated to medicine, science, and the law, most of them sponsored by professional societies. The doctors had outlets like the Maryland Medical Recorder (1829–32), the Louisiana State Medical Society Journal (1844–current), and the Medical Journal of North Carolina (1858–90). Scientists had the Carolina Journal of Medicine, Science and Agriculture (1825–26) and the Georgia Botanic Journal and College Sentinel (1847–48). Lawyers fleetingly had the Carolina Law Journal (1830–31) and the Louisiana Law Journal (1841–42). In the 1850s, there was an outbreak of educational journals, as states began to create common school systems: the North Carolina Common School Journal (1856–57), the Alabama Educational Journal (1857), the North Carolina Journal of Education (1858–61), and the Tennessee Journal of Education (1859–?). Then there were fugitive literary journals: the North Carolina Magazine (1813), the Louisiana Recorder and Literary Gazette (1835), the Revue Louisianaise (1846– 48), and the Arkansas Magazine (1854). There were a few historical journals: the Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida (1846–75), the Virginia Historical Register (1848–53), the Virginia Historical Reporter (1854–60). And there were journals whose purposes were sectarian, general, or obscure: the Georgia Analytical Repository (1802–03), the North Carolina Telegraph (1826–27), the Georgia Constitutionalist (1832), the Virginia Advocate (1832–?), the Virginia Spectator (1849–1937), the Kentucky New Era (1850–52), the Georgia Home Gazette (1851–52), the Mississippi Palladium (1851–52), the Texian Monthly Magazine (1858–?), the Texas Freemason (1858–59), the Kentucky Family Journal (1859–60), the Georgia Citizen Advertiser (1860), the Kentucky Campaign (1860), the Virginia Register (1860). And there are two it would be imprudent to characterize: the Tennessee Organ (1848–52) and the Georgia Blister and Critic (1854–55). Such insistent cultural affiliation strengthened a sense of mission and belonging, a mystical obligation that informed even those who had left the state. The ritual discourses, by which many of these periodicals and state societies were launched and confirmed, provide clues as to their formal, local meaning. Two can be regarded as symptomatic, that by William Cabell Rives to

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the revived Virginia Historical Society in 1847, later published in the Virginia Historical Register, and that by William Henry Trescot to the South Carolina Historical Society in 1859. The former was bland and conventional, the other subtle and skeptical, but each converged on shared assumptions. Rives the Unionist showed how state history, undertaken in a federation, was a matter for anxiety, because it might legitimate what his friend Hugh Legaré had once called ‘‘centrifugal tendencies.’’ On the one hand, Rives complained about the glamour of nationality: ‘‘Too long have we followed after strange Gods, and turned our backs upon those of our own household. The false glare of national honors has been wont to dazzle the eyes of Virginians, and make them forget the duty and service they owe, primarily, to their own State.’’ On the other hand, ‘‘I am far from wishing to encourage any feeling of an anti-national character,’’ for Virginia retained a stake in ‘‘our glorious confederacy,’’ which the cultivation of state interests could only serve. For, squaring the circle, ‘‘by a law of our moral nature, all our public affections take their origin in the small, but magic circle, which defines our home, and thence spread, by successive expansions, ‘till they embrace and repose upon our country. The more intensely they glow at the centre, the warmer will their radiations be felt upon the circumference.’’ To states were given the great tasks of development; roads, canals, railroads, schools, factories, the ‘‘public-spirited improvements’’ whose accretions of strength at home would lead to enhanced influence abroad. Hence ‘‘State patriotism’’ was an instrument of ‘‘progressive improvement.’’ And Virginia had peculiarities, like any state, idiosyncratic ‘‘domestic resources, whether of mind or matter,’’ which required close knowledge to understand and advance.4 As usual, by contrast, Trescot was cold and analytical. ‘‘If an American be asked abroad of what country are you, his first impulse is to answer, I am a New Yorker, a Virginian, a Massachusetts man, or a Carolinian, as the fact may be. Whatever his pride in his nationality, his home instincts and affections are bounded by State lines.’’ In this, Trescot drew upon his own foreign experience, but the memoirs of William Campbell Preston provide a confirming anecdote. When in Paris in 1818, Preston met Pozzo di Borgo at dinner and had the following exchange: ‘‘He said to me, as I rose to bow to him,—‘Vous êtes monsieur de la Province de Virginia.’ ‘No, Sir, of the State.’ ‘Hah,’ said he, with somewhat a doubtful smile, ‘de l’état.’ ’’ This was elegantly prickly. Writing from Göttingen in 1851, the younger David Ramsay had the same response to European ignorance, when sitting in the coffee room of his Han4. HSL, ‘‘The American System,’’ SR 6 (August 1830): 211; ‘‘Mr. Rives’ Address,’’ Virginia Historical Register 1 (January 1848): 2, 6, 7.

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over hotel and conversing with some gentlemen, one of whom claimed to have read in a newspaper that South Carolina had just seceded: ‘‘I told him I did not believe it, inasmuch as I had seen recent news which made no mention of it—Very probably, was his answer, this South Carolina was a small & unimportant state—I told him I had the honour to be a citizen (in esse) of that State & that it was decidedly the most important in the Confederacy.’’ 5 No doubt, Preston’s and Ramsay’s interlocutors would have been surprised to discover with what assiduity and sophistication were theories of the modern state, drawn from Machiavelli, Locke, or Harrington applied to places like Virginia and South Carolina, trifling districts to the European, but moral universes even to cosmopolitans like Preston and Ramsay. As Trescot saw it, states involved power; they were, indeed, the main power in the land, predominant even in Washington. A president had to consult state representatives in matters of patronage, while a senator was only efficacious insofar as he was ‘‘the expression of his State.’’ Caroline Gilman had seen this in 1836: ‘‘Washington is not as I expected, a good place for removing mere State feelings. My constituents! the very phrase carries with it a host of local sympathies, perhaps prejudices. . . . how is it that the Southern delegates seem to me clothed with double interest? The secret is all in State feeling.’’ Local sentiment mattered. As even a dispassionate mind like Trescot’s could see, ‘‘On every American heart there is written the name of some locality, obscure, hidden away from the eyes of historians and geographers, in the nook of some great mountain range, in the cove of some great river, in the rich valley of some empire State, but the spot still around which all that is truly his life revolves.’’ On the other hand, not all local sentiment was created equal. Making much of the formative experience of the colonial years, Trescot thought little of states to his west, which lacked a colonial history and so could ‘‘scarcely be said to have any history at all.’’ Places like Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa had been ‘‘settled so regularly, so entirely in accordance with the established, normal principles of our growth, that the events of their history possess no more individuality than any sum selected as the example of an arithmetical rule.’’ For Trescot, history was not an assemblage of interesting passages, famous spots, and famous men, least of all ‘‘the obscure villages, and old homesteads, and deserted homes . . . scattered all over the land, which have been consecrated as the birth-places of the great men who have lived and died among us.’’ What mattered was what his South Caro5. Trescot, SCHS Oration, 9; Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 58; David Ramsay to Joseph J. Legaré (ca. April 1851), David Ramsay Papers, SCL.

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lina had distinctively contributed ‘‘to the general civilization of the Union,’’ a contribution it was the business of historians to explain.6 So Trescot had a sense that history, locality, and self were interwoven. In this, he concurred with Rives, not least in intimating a concern about declension. For localism was often a jeremiad; it lamented loss in order to urge improvement. It was often thought that state pride had a tendency to sink into complacency, which history might correct by encouraging memory and emulation. About this, Rives was blunter, because Virginia’s greatness had once been so clear, and her decline was now so palpable. It was necessary ‘‘to awaken a stronger feeling of State patriotism’’ and elicit ‘‘action for the restoration of the State to her former elevated position, by such improvements of every kind as the spirit of the age demands.’’ South Carolina had been less conspicuous once, but Trescot too felt that there had been a falling away from the years which had made the Revolution and fashioned the institutions of the state, the generations that stretched from John Rutledge to William Lowndes. For the Revolution had distilled the character of the state, as much as great men had made the Revolution; ‘‘Just then came the revolution to draw our society yet closer together; to bring out, in all their strength, the peculiar excellencies of our character; to temper that character by suffering, and to crown it with the glory of successful and heroic achievement.’’ In Trescot’s own time, the state had grown divided, vainglorious, impatient, irritated, extravagant. So history and a knowledge of the ‘‘peculiarities of our State character and constitution’’ could serve to chasten pride, to show the past merit and present usefulness of that via media, a liberal polity conservatively governed. ‘‘We cannot draw strength and knowledge from a purer source than from the words and deeds of those sagacious men who, with time and great trouble, laid the foundations of the State. . . . The task which they began it is ours to carry on through difficulties and dangers not greater but different.’’ 7 Though the state was an intellectual and moral focus, state governments themselves were only perfunctorily interested in sponsoring the institutions of intellectual and cultural life. A formal charter, the odd room, the occasional tiny appropriation, the lending of a reluctant librarian was as far as they ever went. Unlike the federal government, states had almost no patronage for intellectuals; they could offer no embassies and consulships, no customs houses. An intellectual society needed to become attached to a fabric of greater force; a university was something, but the most successful formula was to become rooted in a prosperous civic culture like that of Savannah, 6. Caroline Gilman, ‘‘Notes of a Northern Excursion,’’ Southern Rose 4 (14 May 1836): 149; Trescot, SCHS Oration, 9, 11, 12. 7. ‘‘Rives’ Address,’’ 7; Trescot, SCHS Oration, 22, 32, 33.

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Charleston, or Baltimore. A city could provide a reliable audience, a merchant class for subventions, a series of institutions that might assist the life of the mind, such as a club, a lyceum, a reading room, an archive, and a library. In most cases, a city provided the base, and a state, it was hoped, would provide an audience. Often this hope was disappointed. Nonetheless, as Trescot indicated, a state was a matter for powerful loyalty and emotional attachment; it was an incitement to institutional and intellectual endeavor. The language used to describe it was familial, and usually feminine. Thomas F. Furman, for example, wrote in 1833 of Virginia: ‘‘She who once enjoyed so proud and conspicuous a stand among her co-states, for her talent, patriotism, and sound republican principles.’’ ‘‘Your state is more beloved & really respected by many here than she is probably aware of,’’ John Holmes Bocock assured James Henley Thornwell in 1860. ‘‘My native state (Va.) seems slow but she will turn truer to you I earnestly hope & truly believe than now outwardly seems probable.’’ A state was, of course, mostly feminine because implicated in nativity, in birth. In old age, Preston returned to his native Virginia and mused on such things to Francis Lieber: ‘‘I go up to Monticello now and then to enjoy the prospect. . . . The ancient dominion—my fatherland, or what is a better idea than the german, my mother state, is going ahead and will hold that supremacy which Washington and Jefferson gave her. They celebrate the fourth at Monticello and I hear at this moment the drums of the gathering population. . . . The ancient dominion is the true mother of men.’’ Grigsby was profligate of maternal imagery for Virginia: ‘‘Well may our blessed mother contemplate with joy her colleges and churches. . . . Behold our beloved mother! How beautiful she seems! Pure as she is beautiful, good as she is great!’’ Even citizens of other states might acknowledge a hierarchy among the sisterhood of mothers. Alfred Huger of South Carolina in 1869 looked back on greater days and observed: ‘‘Without question in my own opinion, Virginia is a great commonwealth by herself, and her sons are the race of men, par excellence, who inhabit this American continent.’’ 8 Of course, mothers could be demanding. Mitchell King explained to J. G. M. Ramsey in 1858: ‘‘I trust you are continuing your Annals of Tennessee to the present time. Your state I am sure expects it from you. Do not I pray you permit her to be disappointed.’’ A state could set an example to other 8. Thomas F. Furman to Ann M. Armstrong, 2 January 1833, Thomas F. Furman Papers, EU; John Holmes Bocock to JHT, 22 December 1860, JHT Papers, SCL; WCP to FL, 3 July 1858, FL Papers, SCL; HBG, The Virginia Convention of 1776 (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1855), 195; Alfred Huger to Dr. William H. Huger, 17 September 1869, Civil War Manuscripts Series, TU.

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mothers and sisters, other children: ‘‘Delaware, the state of my nativity and residence, being a slave state, I am enabled in a measure to appreciate your situation,’’ Hanson Robinson told Benjamin S. Hedrick in 1856, ‘‘but it is with pride and pleasure that I assure you, that her citizens exhibit a bright example to those of her sister slave states, in respecting the opinions of those who differ from them in regard to the policy of the extension of slavery.’’ A state, as a mother, could suffer: Charles Gayarré spoke of Louisiana as his ‘‘sainted and martyred mother.’’ A state could be abandoned, a mother might be left behind, and the expatriate could look back, as Hinton Rowan Helper did in 1856, to ‘‘my dear old native state.’’ And there might be sibling rivalry; states might hiss at one another. John R. Thompson declaimed to mechanics about Virginia: ‘‘For years, Sir, the commonwealth has been in the transition state from that exploded system of society to one of higher aims and larger and juster views of the purposes of national existence and we have been derided by the rest of the Union as having fallen asleep, while our sister commonwealths were awake and active. North Carolina alone has shared with us these reproaches, and the sobriquet of Rip Van Winkle which was given to her is perhaps less uncomplimentary than some of the epithets with which Virginia has been honoured.’’ 9 The gendered language of statehood was not exclusively maternal. A state might be a child to be encouraged. John Pendleton Kennedy wrote to L. B. Todd in 1852, ‘‘To your great and prosperous state of Kentucky I look with pride upon what it has already done, and with . . . hope in its future endeavors.’’ More rarely, a state could be a father, a gentleman with peremptory opinions to be obeyed. John H. Pleasants urged Jesse Burton Harrison in 1828 to found a periodical in Richmond, and wrote: ‘‘I think that the honour & character of V a demand the establishment of such a work.’’ 10 Being humanized, states were individuals, who might think with a single mind. ‘‘The mind of Virginia is with you,’’ Beverley Tucker wrote to James Henry Hammond in 1836. ‘‘What, then, are the obligations of the State—of each controlling mind of the State?’’ Eugenius A. Nisbet asked in 1845. Somehow a state might be more than the sum total of its citizens: ‘‘Virginians will cooperate. But not Virginia. The mind of the State will act,’’ Tucker was to add to Hammond. Or a state might feel with a single body. William Camp9. MK to J. G. M. Ramsey, 16 September 1858, MK Papers, SHC; Hanson Robinson to Benjamin S. Hedrick, 1 October 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC; CG, History of Louisiana: The American Domination (New York: William J. Widdleton, 1866), 693; Hinton Rowan Helper to Benjamin S. Hedrick, 15 October 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC; JRT, (second) speech to the Mechanics Institute, JRT Papers, UVA. 10. JPK to L. B. Todd, 31 January 1852, JPK Papers, PLB; John H. Pleasants to JBH, 29 May 1828, Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC.

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bell Preston observed to Waddy Thompson in 1829 of South Carolina, ‘‘The state is exhausted by its paroxism of excitement, and must be left to recover strength before it can go thro another.’’ Thereby, the deeds of all the individuals in the state somehow adhered to other individuals. George Bancroft spoke to Charles Campbell in 1844 of ‘‘the glorious history of your state,’’ something that Campbell endorsed when he referred to ‘‘our ancient glory,’’ as though he himself had thundered with Patrick Henry. A state, like any familiar, could have a nickname, the Old North State, the Old Dominion, the Palmetto State. It could be an object of love and service. Francis Hawks, expatriated in New York, wanted to write a history of North Carolina and explained to David Swain: ‘‘I do so love my country that I cannot give her up. She is on the eve of great & beneficial changes. I would fain help her on to prosperity to the extent of my powers. I have nothing to offer her but intellectual work, & I do think that her history rightly told, just at this time, would be an element to help her further progress onward and upward.’’ 11 Exile, which was so common, could amplify loyalty. John D. Osborne, studying the civil law in Paris, wrote back to his college classmate in Charlottesville in 1848: ‘‘I regret most heartily the cursed fortune which drove me from the old state an exile—Pretty women—classic buildings—witty men of the world—and perfect independence still leave me sighing for the good old times of old Virginny with all the slavery which public opinion enforces.’’ Preston, who spent almost all his adult years in South Carolina, never quite surrendered a sense of himself as migrant and unsettled. In 1851, soon after suffering a stroke, he replied to a letter from David Campbell of Virginia: ‘‘It brought a gush of old recollections over my mind and heart, carried me back to scenes ever dear and touching to me, and for the instant superceded the ruin & dilapidation of the present with the freshness of a long time ago. My emigration to this country was at first a mistake, for my heart has always been in the mountains—and now that I am old and broken it is doubly so.’’ So states might stand even in a relationship to God; they might be blessed by the deity, or cursed, or admonished. God might even take an interest in migration. Pondering whether to accept the presidency of the University of Alabama in 1837, Basil Manly prayed, ‘‘May God, our King and Saviour, direct me aright!—Alabama is a great state—settled in great part by Carolinians— 11. Beverley Tucker to James Henry Hammond, 18 February 1836, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker Mss, DU; Eugenius A. Nisbet, ‘‘The State of Georgia—Its Duties and Destinies,’’ SQR 8 (October 1845): 435; Beverley Tucker to James Henry Hammond, 15 March 1836, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker Mss, DU; WCP to Waddy Thompson, 23 January 1829, WCP Papers, SCL; George Bancroft to CC, 14 May 1844; CC to James E. Heath, 31 March 1846, both in CC Papers, WM; Francis L. Hawks to David L. Swain, 16 August 1858, David L. Swain Papers, SHC.

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The college is one of the richest in the union. If I am the right man, it is a sphere of surpassing interest and usefulness.’’ 12 These were heavy burdens of obligation, intentionally fashioned to strike at an individual’s most vulnerable emotions and loyalties. In a Romantic age, the state could be enlisted to confirm emotional richness, alienation, complexity. Sometimes this expressed itself in anticosmopolitanism. George Frederick Holmes reviewed John B. Irving’s A Day on Cooper River in 1843 and reflected on those, like Bolingbroke in the Reflections of Exile, who effected ‘‘to disparage local attachments—that singular and almost inexplicable affection for a particular spot of ground.’’ Such a stance was, for Holmes, cold, heartless, enervating, for it ‘‘would sacrifice the generous and spontaneous instinct of feeling to a beggarly calculation of the items of a profit and loss account.’’ Better to acknowledge the beneficial ‘‘depth and sincerity of local affections,’’ which needed strengthening. Speaking against himself, born in Guiana, educated in England, living in South Carolina, soon to move to Virginia, later to teach in Mississippi, Holmes hazarded that the rooted man was a better citizen, ‘‘than he whose fancies are ranging all around the compass, and whose estimation of his place of abode is measured invariably by the amount of rice, cotton, tobacco, or corn, which the adjacent fields will produce.’’ But those disparaged were, less Parisian dilettantes, more young Southerners on the make on the moving frontier. Since so many did migrate, as Holmes discerned, books like Cooper’s had a deliberate value: ‘‘When there are on all sides so many temptations to the indulgence of a roving disposition . . . of migration to the far and uncertain West—the banks of the Alabama, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Red River, or Rio Brazos;—we think that any one, who, at such a time, invests his native country, or region of country, with new charms; who throws around it the halo of romance; who calls into reinvigorated existence old associations, and so multiplies the chords of local affection, is a true patriot and merits well of his countrymen.’’ 13 There was work of invention to be done, selves to be invigorated, by older states to rivet loyalty, by new ones to create it. For modern nations, most of the elaboration of their iconography, symbol, and ritual was a product of the late nineteenth century.14 In Southern states, a little was done in the earlier part of the century, though only a little. Each state had a coat of arms, and a militia (with the attendant heraldry of arms). 12. John D. Osborne to John Coles Rutherfoord, 15 October 1848, John Rutherfoord Papers, DU; WCP to [David Campbell], 22 August 1851, Campbell Family Papers, DU; BM to Mrs. Henrietta D. Furman, 7 August 1837, BM Papers, FU. 13. GFH, ‘‘Critical Notices—a Day on Cooper River,’’ SQR 3 ( January 1843): 257–58. 14. On this, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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But only Texas had an official flag before the Civil War, an inheritance of its brief career as an independent republic. In 1861, a few more (South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia) scrambled to assume one of the symbols of sovereignty, a matter that most did not trouble themselves with until the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.15 A few states acquired symbols, the pelican for Louisiana and the palmetto for South Carolina, but these were informal, vernacular. The natural foci of iconography, the state capitals, were often migrant in these years, as cities struggled for possession of their symbolism and patronage. Nashville did not become the capital of Tennessee until 1843; previously the legislature had migrated among Knoxville, Kingston, Nashville, and Murfreesboro. In states that predated 1776, much of the concrete imagery of a more ancient history stayed in the old capitals, Williamsburg, Charleston, New Orleans, or Savannah, and were mostly British and royalist (statues of William Pitt and the like), while new places like Richmond and Columbia, Baton Rouge and Milledgeville, had to commence de novo, rather like the capitals of new states like Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. In each, there grew up a very modest collection of architecture, statuary, and portraiture, which gave the state some meaning for the eye. But, in general, antebellum Southern states were niggardly, reluctant to spend money on artists. In 1856, the South Carolina legislature paid $5,000 to acquire the Palmetto monument, a metal tree that celebrated the deeds and deaths of those South Carolinians who had served in the Mexican War, but it had started life as a commission from an insurance company. The buildings themselves, the statehouses, were ambivalent statements of state identity. Their styles were cosmopolitan and alluded little to locality. Jefferson’s statehouse in Richmond was modeled upon the Maison Carrée in Nimes. That for Kentucky in Frankfort (1830) was in the Greek Revival style, fronted with Ionic columns, ‘‘the proportions of which [were] taken from the temple of the Minerva Polias at Priene in Ionia,’’ though its stone was ‘‘a grey limestone known as Kentucky marble.’’ Those for Georgia in Milledgeville (ca. 1829) and Louisiana in Baton Rouge (1847–52) were Gothic. The state capitols of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (1827), Mississippi in Jackson (1840), and Tennessee in Nashville (1845–59) were similar to the Capitol in Washington, having a rotunda crowned with a cupola.16 15. The sequence is Kentucky (1792), Texas (1839), South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (1861), Mississippi (1894), Alabama (1895), Florida (1900), Maryland (1904), Tennessee (1905), Louisiana (1912), Missouri and Arkansas (1913), West Virginia (1929), Georgia (1956). See E. C. M. Barraclough and W. G. Crampton, eds., Flags of the World, 2d ed. (London: Frederick Warne, 1981). 16. Nell S. Graydon, Tales of Columbia (1964; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan, 1981), 54– 55; Jessie Poesch, The Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture & the Products of Craftsmen, 1560–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 215, 217, 121, 231.

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The capitol at Frankfort, Kentucky

So iconography sent mixed, federal signals. The statehouse of Georgia in Milledgeville had ‘‘nine full-length portraits of early state and national leaders.’’ ‘‘National’’ was characteristic, since George Washington was popular throughout the South, in Richmond carved in modern dress by Houdon (a copy of this sat before the capitol in Columbia), in North Carolina in Caesarian armor and cloak by Canova. In Virginia, of course, Washington was both local and national. Thomas Crawford was commissioned by the state in 1849

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The old capitol at Milledgeville, Georgia (Courtesy Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta)

to do an outdoor monument of the Founder, though he died before completing it in Rome, but it was finished by Randolph Rogers. It had ‘‘a tripartite conception, with Washington at the top, six great past leaders of Virginia— Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason, John Marshall, William Nelson, and Meriwether Lewis—on a lower level, then eagles below.’’ Such piety was more common by the 1850s. In 1858, for its new capitol in Columbia, South Carolina commissioned Henry Kirke Browne to represent ‘‘thirteen figures for the pediment of the State Capitol,’’ some of them South Carolinians, but not all.17 Concrete expressions of state pietas often came more from individuals and voluntary associations. A 1859 statue of Henry Clay, done by Joel Tanner Hart, was commissioned not by the Commonwealth of Kentucky but by the Ladies’ Clay Association of Virginia, and reproductions of it showed up, not in Frankfort, but in Louisville and New Orleans. The same pattern can be found in the matter of celebrations and parades. The most widespread ritual of the year was the Fourth of July, though the anniversary of American independence was also often a celebration of state history, of Patrick Henry the Virginian as much as the orator of American liberty; the Fourth was not sel17. Poesch, Art of the Old South, 307, 308. The figures were destroyed by Sherman.

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dom used as a way to argue the case for states against or within the Union. Edwin DeLeon gave one in 1841, of which Lieber observed: ‘‘Young Edwin [has] made a fourth of July oration, much talk about the distinguished sons of Caroline.’’ Washington’s birthday was also celebrated with speeches and parades, and was subject to a similar ambivalent logic. But, usually, these marches and speeches were sponsored by local, private organizations. When Hugh Legaré delivered himself of a Fourth of July oration in 1823, it was before the ’76 Association in Charleston.18 When states began to mandate public schools in the 1850s, there developed an increased market for school textbooks, that instrument of state patriotism. Even in 1849, there had been a Virginia Speller and Reader. In 1864, in the midst of the Confederacy, there was to be The New Texas Reader Designed for the Use of Schools in Texas.19 But North Carolina, intellectually the least regarded of Southern states, had been most energetic before 1861 in this matter. In 1851, Calvin H. Wiley published The North-Carolina Reader, which was succeeded in 1855 by Fordyce Mitchell Hubbard’s The North-Carolina Reader, number II, an adaptation of Wiley’s book that was prepared ‘‘with special reference to the wants and interests of North Carolina, under the auspices of the Superintendent of Common Schools,’’ who was, by then, Wiley himself. Wiley had come from Guildford County and a family that was seriously Presbyterian (hence his Christian name). He was first educated at a church school, the Caldwell Institute, in Greensboro, before going on to the University of North Carolina, from which he graduated in 1840. He inherited little of consequence, indeed was obliged to go into debt for his education, his ‘‘father’s circumstances having begun to fail.’’ He became an indigent lawyer and local newspaper editor in Oxford, North Carolina, and began to write historical novels about his home state; around 1850 he was a Whig member of the state legislature and it was as a Whig that he had become a notable advocate of a public school system. As a needy office seeker, this innovation promised preferment. Being passionate about the cause of his native state not only offered patriotic satisfactions but also dollars.20 Wiley had planned, at first, to publish a gazetteer of 18. Ibid., 308; Matilda Lieber to FL, 24 July 1841, FL Papers, HEH; Mary Swinton Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:257. 19. J. Russell Webb, The Virginia Reader, no. 1; or, Child’s First Book: Consisting of Easy Progressive Lessons Calculated to Teach Ideas as Well as Words, edition no. 4, revised (Richmond: Harrold and Murray, 1849); The New Texas Reader Designed for the Use of Schools in Texas (Houston: E. H. Cushing, 1864). 20. Calvin H. Wiley to Willie P. Magnum, 29 June 1847, in ‘‘Letters of Young Novelist: Calvin Henderson Wiley,’’ ed. Richard Walser, North Carolina Historical Review 31 ( July 1954): 414; J. Y. Joyner, ‘‘Calvin Henderson Wiley,’’ in Library of Southern Literature, vol. 13, WashingtonYoung, ed. Edwin Anderson Alderman and Joel Chandler Harris (New Orleans: Martin & Hoyt, 1907), 5805–10.

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Calvin H. Wiley (Courtesy North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh)

the state, to which he had asked Moses Ashley Curtis to contribute a section on botany, which Wiley had urged ought to be patriotically particularist: ‘‘I wish the intelligent reader to know how our vegetable productions will compare with those of other parts of the world, & the scientific one to know what contributions we are able to make to the vegetable kingdom—You will also please to notice the localities &c &c of such plants as you may treat of: I mean their distribution & places in this state.’’ He moved on to the idea of a state reader, although he was cautioned that a Southern Reader was a better idea, since it commanded a wider market. Curtis was skeptical: ‘‘Would not your series of Books have a larger sale & wider acceptability, if they had a title less local? I do not know [how] they feel in Virga, but in this State we should not be very likely to adopt a Book with the N.C. brand.’’ 21 The North-Carolina Reader was a hybrid. It was partly a conventional school book, intended to help students with their reading and life. So it laid down rules for pronunciation, articulation, pauses, emphasis, inflection, as well dis21. Calvin H. Wiley to MAC, 25 May 1850, MAC Papers, SHC; T. Babcock to Calvin H. Wiley, 5 May 1851, Mary C. Wiley Mss, private collection, cited in Howard Braverman, ‘‘Calvin H. Wiley’s North Carolina Reader,’’ North Carolina Historical Review 29 (October 1952): 502; MAC to Calvin H. Wiley, 18 November 1851, Calvin H. Wiley Papers, NCSA.

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pensing assorted bits of moral advice. (‘‘Avoid reading rapidly and carelessly as you approach the end of a sentence.’’ ‘‘When you are alone, think of your faults; when with others correct those faults.’’) It provided a chronology of important events in history, another of important inventions (‘‘1798 Galvanism discovered by Galvani’’), a brief almanac, a glossary of ‘‘popular or common terms,’’ and a list of the more common foreign phrases (‘‘Credat Judaeus Apella. Let the circumcised Jew believe it. Latin’’). It had various literary selections, many of them of North Carolinian provenance, but others not, notably in the section on poetry, which had pieces by Whittier, Thomson, Pope, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Milton, and others.22 But Wiley’s main purposes were confessedly patriotic, even mystical. He started by observing that ‘‘enlightened patriotism’’ had sought ‘‘to imbue the minds of the rising generation with just ideas of the resources and desirableness of the country in which they live,’’ just as the Almighty had given light to the world. North Carolina too pined for light, because generations had ‘‘grown up in ignorance of the capabilities and the actual advantages of their native state.’’ So the North Carolinians were the Israelites in exile, the walls of whose Jerusalem needed rebuilding, a people who needed to repudiate those like ‘‘Sanballat and his brethren [who] scoffed at Nehemiah.’’ And the problem was partly North Carolina’s own fault, for having lacked common feelings and sympathies. Their omission had been occasioned by not having had ‘‘a single bard, annalist, historian, or novelist, to call forth, embody, and fix on common objects the affections of the public.’’ Nonetheless her citizens had yearned for instruction and so (lacking native guidance) they had looked abroad. Some wayward cosmopolitans, betraying ‘‘their mother as a shame to them,’’ had pined only for the exotic and become ‘‘especially spiteful towards the mother which bore them, and the state which protects them.’’ For them, ‘‘the schools, the books, the fabrics of their own country are not worthy of their patronage; and the idea of permitting their children to learn to read in the work of a North Carolina author, and which does not treat of far off places and foreign customs, cannot for a moment be tolerated.’’ This, Wiley suggested, was a form of cultural servility: ‘‘A true slave is readily recognized by his disposition to mimic his master and gossip about his affairs; and so . . . the servitors of a base passion, will continue to sport the liveries of masters voluntarily selected, and offer their cringing service across oceans and continents.’’ This habit of dependence, this deference to books and authors who shared a silence about North Carolina, this exporting of money and praise, ought to end, Wiley insisted. Identity, not alienation, was the solution to despair. For was not North Carolina ‘‘sacred,’’ a compact of generations which 22. Wiley, North-Carolina Reader, 19, 317, 324.

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‘‘contains the ashes of his ancestors, in whose affairs he is an actor, and which he expects to hold his own mortal remains’’? 23 After this overwrought introduction, the rest of his book consisted of a benign tour of the state’s landscape. So, ‘‘Nothing can be more grand and beautiful than the views about Nag’s Head’’; ‘‘[Salem] contains an excellent population, while several factories in the suburbs give it now a lively and business-like appearance’’; ‘‘Some of you will be surprised to find Ashville a place of much intelligence and refinement.’’ To this was added a history from Walter Raleigh to the end of the American Revolution with only the briefest look at matters since 1789, and then selections from various North Carolinian writers. Throughout, Wiley spared no pains to impress upon the young reader his Whig philosophy of internal improvement, especially the value of a pubic education system: ‘‘Let the sun of universal education shine upon it, and the matchless resources of the State, by works of improvement, be made to minister nutriment to its wants, and soon its bright blossoms will imparadise the soil from which its sturdy trunk has sprung, and its green, unfading foliage furnish umbrageous retreats for the weary of the earth.’’ (This is about the standard of his prose.) Education would not only reform and elevate the people of North Carolina, but would draw in the young of other Southern states, so that ‘‘very soon our State will be the very centre of Southern literature, and have tributary to its schools all the neighbouring States.’’ 24 Throughout the reader, Wiley’s vision is of a North Carolina that is diverse, with a complicated flora and fauna, ‘‘a great variety of people, of all classes and professions, of all trades, and of almost every kind of genius.’’ 25 There were ‘‘large slave-owners,’’ ‘‘moneyed capitalist[s],’’ gold miners, manufacturers, ‘‘intelligent clerks and traders.’’ For ‘‘human inclinations and human talents are extremely diversified; and in every large family there will be quite a variety of tastes and aspirations.’’ So the state must make provision for them all, resolve into harmonious diversity the strife endemic to man since Cain and Abel. Landscape and climate conspired to this end; the varieties of the seasons acting upon sea, swamp, plain, and mountain. All was various, yet mysteriously all was one. ‘‘It is delightful to think that all this variety of scenery and interest, and pleasure, is embraced in one indivisible country; that all these places are inhabited by people of one heart and one patriotism.’’ At the heart of North Carolina’s success would be its character, its robust modesty, its capacity for equality.26 Wiley was frankly xenophobic, and wrote freely and darkly of ‘‘foreigners.’’ 23. Ibid., 9–12. 24. Ibid., 23, 57, 80, 222, 75. 25. Ibid., 84. 26. Ibid., 84–88.

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But these were not necessarily Europeans or Yankees. He seemed mostly to be indicting other Southern states, those to the west who were drawing away the sons of the Old North State, those to the north and south of the state line. For the despising of North Carolina was, after all, a hobby of Virginians and South Carolinians. He wrote, in one of his many exordia, that there was ‘‘mad ambition in many places,’’ facilities for ‘‘accumulating immense fortunes in a short time.’’ There one class lived splendidly, another in sharp poverty. This situation produced ‘‘alienation and hostility of feeling,’’ for ‘‘luxurious indulgence effeminates and corrupts one class, and want and indignity debase and make desperate the other.’’ Such words were, doubtless, aimed at Paris and London, at New York and Boston, but they were also reproaches to the cotton nabobs of Natchez and the lordly planters of Charleston. Indeed, Wiley was at pains to distance himself from both North and South. North Carolina was ‘‘a land between extremes; it knows not the rigours of a Northern winter, and it is free from the tornadoes and earthquakes of the South. Equally exempt it is from the gloomy fanaticism and chilling selfishness of the north, and from the bloody scenes and blazing passions of the South.’’ 27 Animosity between Southern states was not small during the antebellum years. Even Andrew Jackson noticed it: the social diversities of the different states, he once told Congress, were ‘‘greatly exaggerated by jealousies and that spirit of rivalry so inseparable from neighboring communities.’’ ‘‘Louisiana is not my country,’’ John Randolph observed firmly in 1814. ‘‘I respect as much the opinions of the people of London as of the Western States.’’ His protégé, Beverley Tucker, was less polite, in observing that a Virginian ought not to share the honor of George Washington with ‘‘the French of Louisiana,’’ let alone the ‘‘Dutch of New York, and the renegades from every corner of the earth, who swarm their great commercial cities.’’ 28 North Carolina was especially despised. Grigsby felt free to tell David Swain ribald jokes about the barbarities of Pittsylvania County: ‘‘You will only laugh at a remarkable affair which [is given] of a jolly planter in your state who rushed naked from the river, and to punish his wife who with a pretty girl had in fun hid his clothes, threw her down in the midst of a large company of men and women, and cohabited with her in their presence; threatening the young girl as he rose 27. Ibid., 86, 88, 89. 28. ‘‘Second Annual Message,’’ 6 December 1830, in James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, 10 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896–99), 2:513; John Randolph to Francis Scott Key, 2 March 1814, quoted in Hugh A. Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1850), 2:33; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, Intended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1845), 371.

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from the altar of Venus, that ‘next time he’d serve her in the same way.’ ’’ So established was this condescension that Francis Walker Gilmer was at pains to reassure Weldon Nathaniel Edwards in 1817 that not all were thus uncharitable: ‘‘Let us destroy local prejudices. Let us learn to love one another. I can assure you, this is the spirit of all intelligent men in Virginia. You say they are boastful. They will never complain if you become equally so. It is not boasting of ourselves, but abusing our neighbours which makes ill blood in society. North Carolina is destined (I speak of the upper part of it) to become a very important section of the union.’’ But a South Carolinian like David McCord, nonetheless, sniffed at North Carolina as ‘‘that modern Boeotia.’’ ‘‘As for North Carolina, her want of every thing like patriotism, her sluggishness, and an attention only to her own immediate and local interests, will be notorious, until as a State, she becomes defunct,’’ Thomas Furman, writing from Charleston, hazarded. But even a South Carolinian might need reassurance of respect, at least from Virginia. John Holmes Bocock told Thornwell in 1860, ‘‘Your state is more beloved & really respected by many here than she is probably aware of.’’ 29 Other states were scorned, for differing reasons. An old student from Georgia urged Thornwell to venture a visit, which ‘‘would go far to remove some of your singular prejudices against the greatest state in the South.’’ 30 George Cooke of Virginia traveled to the Appalachian portion of Georgia for the Southern Literary Messenger in 1840 and described it as a ‘‘terra incognita,’’ and then moved on to Athens where, he felt obliged to observe (contrary to Virginian opinion), one’s health was not at risk. Josiah Nott of Columbia went to live in Alabama and reflected: ‘‘I think we bragged rather too loudly in Paris of the United [States]—there are more rascals north of the Potomac & south of the Savannah than in all the rest of the world beside—honesty is no longer good policy.’’ Migration and politics occasioned most of these opinions, and class hostility much of the rest. As Joseph Glover Baldwin observed, ‘‘The citizens of an old country are very prone to consider people of a new settled State or Territory as greatly their inferiors. . . . It is a very natural 29. HBG to David L. Swain, 20 August 1857, David L. Swain Papers, SHC; Francis Walker Gilmer to Weldon Nathaniel Edwards, 20 August 1817, Weldon N. Edwards Papers, DU; David James McCord to Stephen D. Miller, 1 January 1833, McCord Mss, SCHS; Thomas F. Furman to Ann M. Armstrong, 2 January 1833, Thomas F. Furman Papers, EU; John Holmes Bocock to JHT, 22 December 1860, JHT Papers, SCL. 30. M. J. Williams to JHT, 19 August 1853, JHT Papers, SCL. See also the postbellum anecdote in Melissa Walker Heidari, ‘‘Grace King in Her Journals, 1886–1910’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1990), 224–25: ‘‘Two men travelling on the cars got very sociable talking—the one, the Indianian, immensely pleased with his new friend said, ‘Why you must be from Indiana.’ ‘No!’ screamed the other. ‘I’m not well, that’s the reason I look so badly— I’m from Kentucky!’’’

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sentiment.’’ A gentleman from Virginia might meet ruffians in Mississippi and deduce a comparative analysis: ‘‘I have been . . . candidly disgusted—in the society of the interior of this country. I had hoped to find blackguardism and vulgarity confined here as in older states to prescribed classes of the community. But here all society seems to participate in one common degeneracy. All seems ignoble, low, rowdy to the last extreme.’’ Alexander H. Pegues wrote to Thornwell in 1855, ‘‘For instances of daring villany [sic] & deep moral depravity the world can furnish no parallel to the [Mississippi] Valley.’’ 31 The western South was scarcely unaware of such opinions, nor lacking in its own contempts. Oscar Lieber went geologizing in Alabama in 1851 and wrote back to his mother of an encounter: ‘‘S.C. has, I am sorry to say not for the cause, but for the state, not many admirers here. The other day a blacksmith accosted me, ‘Capt. I say, now you’se from Sou Calina, is you? Well maybe you can tell me vot she’s a kicking up such a dust about? Seem’s to me as long as I can remember, an I aint young nether, she’s bin a kicking up about some G- d- thing or other. Now you see I’s a unedicated man stranger. I cant read a d- lick, to save my life, but my daughter can, and she reads the bible to me pretty near all day, be Gad. &c &c I believe as how God has some respect for unedicated people.’ ’’ But the educated could feel the same. Daniel R. Hundley of Alabama, the University of Virginia, and Harvard, once observed a Charlestonian speaking to the landlord of a Richmond hotel, and set down an acid rendition of what was said: ‘‘ ‘Now, you see,’ said he, ‘I desire to give a very select pawty, ye kno’, and I want it to be just the thing. Do you think it would be altogether recherché, proper, and the thing, to have it in the Ladies’ Ordinary? Aw, now? Would that be distingué enough, my deah sir? You see, I live a mile or two out of Chawlston, South Cawolina—have a very nice, recherche, and elegant Bachelors’ Hall there, in which I entertain my friends in the most distingué style two or three times every week, when I’m at home, ye kno’; and I would not like to hive a pawty here in Wichmond, that was not just the thing. We Cawolinians must keep up the weputation of our gallant Commonwealth, ye kno’—the land of the chivalwig, ye kno’.’’ 32 After the Civil War, reminiscing about public men in Alabama in the preceding thirty years, William Garrett remembered the tenacity with which set31. George Cooke, ‘‘Sketches of Georgia,’’ SLM 6 (November 1840): 775, 777; Josiah C. Nott to James M. Gage, 28 July 1836, James M. Gage Papers, SHC; Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853; reprint, New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), 163; [?] to Langdon Cheves Jr., 31 December 1836, Langdon Cheves Papers, SCHS; Alexander H. Pegues to JHT, 25 September 1855, JHT Papers, SCL. 32. Oscar Lieber to Matilda Lieber, 16 July 1851, FL Papers, SCL; Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, ed. William J. Cooper Jr. (1860; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 178.

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tlers from the older states had brought their native ideas with them. Traits, he observed, peculiar to each state could be discerned in the communities that they formed. Politicians, being often lawyers, leaned towards the familiar legal traditions of their old country. ‘‘The man from Georgia,’’ for example, ‘‘was very apt to inquire for Prince’s Digest, and was altering the law so as to introduce some change in unison with the statutes of that State.’’ South Carolinians wanted to ban divorce, Tennesseans to enforce ‘‘the Tennessee law for the redemption of real estate.’’ Virginians were especially obdurate and looked to ‘‘the improvement of the laws of Alabama by engrafting the provisions of the Virginia Code, which had, in part, the sanctity of a hundred years.’’ One such Virginian, a Colonel Gibbs, was once appointed foreman of a grand jury. ‘‘After the Judge had charged the jury, and before they retired, Col. G. addressed the Court with much gravity, and inquired whether they were to be governed by the ‘Virginia Revised Code of 1819’; and being informed that they were not, he seemed greatly puzzled as to how the jury would get along.’’ 33 In fact, there were relatively few occasions for states to come into formal competition, except in Washington. This was not the case for intrastate conflicts, the subregionalisms that confirmed themselves or developed in these years.The vexed and crucial matters of Tidewater, lowcountry, and upcountry were places and identities of great importance, the more so as they were the currency of state politics, of elections and representation, as well as of landscape and the patterns of society that were thought to arise from landscape. But the idea of subregions (the word itself was not yet in use) was not as highly developed as it became in the late nineteenth century, when local color novels reified the fluid identities that existed before the Civil War. Still, the 1808 constitution of South Carolina was posited upon the divergence of interests between a ‘‘lower division’’ and an ‘‘upper division,’’ 34 and the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30 was dominated by the struggle between the eastern part of the state and the West. Men were marked as being from one 33. William Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama for Thirty Years: With an Appendix (1872; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1975), 34–35: my attention to this passage was drawn by its usage in Clement Eaton, ‘‘Social Structure and Social Mobility in the Old Southwest,’’ in The Americanization of the Gulf Coast, 1803–1850, ed. Lucius F. Ellsworth (Pensacola, Fla.: Historic Pensacola Preservation Board, 1972), 54. For a study of how these tenacities worked in Kansas, see Nicole Etcheson, ‘‘‘Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honors’: The Kansas Civil War and the Revolutionary Tradition,’’ American Nineteenth Century History 1 (Spring 2000): 62–81. 34. Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 106. In this, the new constitution reiterated that of 1790, though the line fell in a different place.

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subregion or another, and the statesman might seek to transcend such tribalisms. Littleton Waller Tazewell, attending the Virginia convention, chatted sententiously to his acolyte, Hugh Blair Grigsby, on these matters. ‘‘In allusion to what I observed about his popularity in the West,’’ Grigsby wrote in his diary, ‘‘he said that while in the Congress of the U. States, he regarded Virginia as a whole, no such thing as western, or middle, or tidewater interest ever crossed his imagination. The honor and glory of Virginia was his maxim.’’ Still, even the statesman was not above subregional stereotypes, for ‘‘[i]n the course of the conversation, he gave a very humourous account of a posse of western men surrounding him at the dinner table, and then inviting him to one of their rooms, where he beat them off, and silenced them all in proper fashion.’’ Even the academic politician, like Lieber, had to keep a wary eye on subregions. In 1855, he wrote to Dorothea Dix, ‘‘Dr. Thornwell has resigned the presidency again—his resignation to take effect on January 1st 1856. Now, strange enough, all the papers of the Up-Country and Middle Country have come out most vociferously for me as President. I am utterly and absolutely passive. I do not move a finger.’’ 35 But nomenclature was fluid. There were east and west, but also Tidewater and backcountry, or Tidewater and western country, or lowcountry and west, or upland and lowland, or the middle country.36 A piece by Benjamin Franklin Perry, the tribune of the South Carolina upcountry, in 1847 shows this vagrancy of language; in three opening sentences, he was to use three terms. ‘‘In all the Histories which have been written of the Revolutionary War in SouthCarolina, great injustice is done the upper country. . . . The Western part of the State, during our Revolutionary struggle, produced a host of brave and gallant men. . . . That the upper part of South-Carolina should have been so imperfectly known. . . .’’ The old usage of backcountry, common in the eighteenth century, had begun to be superseded in the 1790s, but Basil Manly could refer to a ‘‘back-country use of [a] phrase’’ as late as 1834, and Benjamin Watkins Leigh spoke variantly and darkly at the Virginia Convention in 1829 of the ‘‘Back-Woods vote.’’ 37 Calhoun, recommending the 1808 South Caro35. Entry for 16 October 1829, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; FL to Dorothea Dix, 5 February 1855, FL Papers, HEH. 36. Cf. William H. Fitzhugh: ‘‘He has presented to us every variety of interest, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern, upland and lowland, and has called on us of the middle country, especially to look to our own immediate interests on this subject’’; Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, of 1829–30 (Richmond: Samuel Shepherd, 1830), 221. 37. Benjamin F. Perry, ‘‘The Revolutionary History of South-Carolina,’’ SQR 11 (April 1847): 468; BM to J. L. Reynolds, 2 April 1834, Manly Family Papers, UA. See Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 7, on usages. For Leigh, see Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 156.

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lina constitution in his Discourse, used the terms ‘‘upper country’’ and ‘‘lower section.’’ 38 Yet John Drayton’s View of South Carolina (1802) had split the state into three, ‘‘lower, middle, and upper,’’ with the lower extending ‘‘from the sea to the sand hills,’’ the middle from the sand hills to ‘‘the falls of the rivers,’’ the upper from the falls to ‘‘the north western mountains.’’ 39 But even such divisions were broad and often subdivided, or never aggregated. David Flavel Jamison penned verses ‘‘To Julia’’ that read ‘‘Adieu, adieu, my native land, / The parting hour is come; / No more I’ll see your hills of sand, / Nor hear the pine trees’ hum.’’ When Thomas Cooper was expelled from the Presidency of the state college, he complained that he and his family were being turned out ‘‘in the inclemency of the Season, to a scanty residence on the sand hills.’’ And the sea islands were yet another country. Reviewing William Elliott’s Carolina Sports, William J. Grayson of Beaufort declared that ‘‘that part of Carolina, which lies between Charleston and Savannah’’ was a region to itself, ‘‘a region of flowers, and magnificent forest trees,’’ of crabs and moss, fig and pomegranate, a place unsurpassed and content.40 Wiley’s North-Carolina Reader, similarly, divided his state into small chunks: the Albemarle region, Nag’s Head, a vague ‘‘region south of Albemarle,’’ the Pamlico country, the Cape-Fear country, the Upland regions, the midland districts, the mountain region. All Southern states, especially the older ones, had these nuances, tending to diminish to the west only, because there the states were so recently settled that such tribalisms had yet to refine. The term Delta, for example, though it gave a name to a New Orleans newspaper, seems to have been little in use before the Civil War except among geographers, surveyors, and members of college fraternities, and even a newspaper’s title might have as much to do with the Greek alphabet as with alluvial plains.41 As for counties and parishes, they had some force as sites for loyalty. They too might denote a place, even a people. ‘‘I began my ministry among the Edgefield people in Carolina,’’ Manly wrote in 1848. In Virginia, where counties were of administrative significance, they mattered a great deal. Writing 38. JCC, The Works of John C. Calhoun, vol. 1, A Disquisition on Government and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, ed. Richard K. Crallé (Columbia, S.C.: A. S. Johnston, 1851), 402–3. 39. John Drayton, A View of South Carolina, as Respects Her Natural and Civil Concerns (Charleston, S.C.: W. P. Young, 1802). 40. David Flavel Jamison, ‘‘Stanzas,’’ David Flavel Jamison Mss, DU; TC to Warren Davis, 3 January 1834, TC Papers, SCL; William J. Grayson, ‘‘Carolina Sports,’’ SQR 12 ( July 1847): 74–75. 41. See, for example, William Dunbar, Description of the River Mississippi and Its Delta, with That of Adjacent Parts of Louisiana (Philadelphia: The Society, 1809); Charles Ellet, The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers Containing Plans for the Protection of the Delta from Inundation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853).

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from Naples in 1843, after a trip through the Middle East, William Boulware observed to Benjamin Dew, ‘‘I would rather shake by the hand at present a sturdy democrat of old King & Queen [county] than to make my bow in the presence of any monarch, Pashaw or Sultan of the world.’’ ‘‘How often have I wished to be placed on the old barren red Hills of Lunenberg County to spend the remainder of my short days even in sweat & toil,’’ A. G. Ellis wrote from Oxford, Mississippi, to George Frederick Holmes in 1849. A man might be of this county or that, and it marked him. John R. Thompson, identifying a pseudonymous contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, would write: ‘‘ ‘Nugator’ is St. Legere Landon Carter of King George County.’’ ‘‘I am a tobacco planter on the lesser Roanoke in Charlotte County, Va,’’ Grigsby wrote of himself. J. G. M. Ramsey was ‘‘of Mecklenberg County’’ in Tennessee, and introduced to distant gentleman as being such: ‘‘He is a native of this county, honest, intelligent and highly esteemed.’’ When the Columbia Temperance Advocate referred to a recent article in the Southern Quarterly Review, it was cited as being by ‘‘David J. McCord, Esq., of St. Mathew’s Parish.’’ 42 This could mean much and might have ancient English resonances, or it could mean little beyond a postal address. Grigsby was careful to say, when describing himself as of Charlotte County, that ‘‘during the summer [I] live on my estate,’’ but that ‘‘[a]s the winter draws on, I come with my wife and child to Norfolk, where we have a house of our own, where my books now are.’’ 43 For certainly the seasonal migratory habits of planters weakened this form of identity, even as it provided occasions for its expression, for in the drawing room a man or woman might often be introduced as being ‘‘from Horry’’ or ‘‘from Ascension Parish.’’ At state colleges, students came from counties, rather as in medieval universities, in which undergraduates had a natio. Sitting down to begin his commonplace book in Columbia, Francis Peyre Porcher wrote on the flyleaf, ‘‘St. Johns Berkeley Parish.’’ And counties sometimes and haphazardly supported a kind of communal life, which might engender intellectuality, especially in the form of agricultural societies. But it was rare that a county was a focus for writing, far less so than in the twentieth century. But it did happen, most remarkably in a piece written by Frederick Porcher for the Southern Quarterly Review in 1854. His ‘‘Historical 42. BM to ‘‘Brother,’’ 5 February 1848, BM Papers, FU; William Boulware to B. Franklin Dew, 3 August 1843, Dew Family Mss, WM; A. G. Ellis to GFH, 18 August 1849, GFH Papers, WM; JRT to Rufus W. Griswold, 2 April 1850, JRT Papers, UVA; HBG to Robert C. Winthrop, 12 June 1857, HBG Papers, VHS; [Hugh Lawson?] White to James Hamilton Jr., 27 October 1828, J. G. M. Ramsey Papers, SHC; clipping from the Columbia Temperance Advocate, 11 June 1846 (presumably by FL), entitled ‘‘Communication on An Article in the last number of the Southern Quarterly Review, by David J. McCord, Esq., of St. Mathew’s Parish,’’ FL Papers, HEH. 43. HBG to Robert C. Winthrop, 12 June 1857, HBG Papers, VHS.

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and Social Sketch of Craven County’’ 44 is the ancestor of the Yoknapatawpha novels and the Ode to the Confederate Dead, just as it is the descendant of Tom Jones. It was, like most local history, an affectionate elegy written from somewhere else.45 The city dweller looked back on the countryside of youth and pronounced it better than the anomie of the boulevards. ‘‘Local attachments are strongest among the inhabitants of the country,’’ Porcher began. The metropolitan might be proud of his city, ‘‘but he has no love for it,’’ for he is but ‘‘a very insignificant atom in the vast mass of humanity which surrounds him.’’ It was different for the ‘‘rural citizen’’ or the villager. ‘‘No throng of uninterested spectators ever torments him with a consciousness of his own littleness. He feels that he is a man of note . . . and he rewards, with the devotion of his whole heart, the spot which confers such importance upon him.’’ So Porcher remembered landscape, the pine forests of ‘‘sublime loneliness’’ speaking with ‘‘a low and melancholy murmur,’’ the tapping of the woodpecker, ‘‘the hoarse croaking of the crow,’’ the grey squirrel pausing in astonishment at human intrusion. In this landscape, one came across vestiges of humanity, in the mansions, villages, churches, club-houses, now decayed into ‘‘a city of the dead.’’ The parish church of St. Stephen most forcibly ‘‘tells a story of former grandeur and of present desolation,’’ around it graves, decayed, mouldering, broken, seeming to melt into the woods. ‘‘Here, then, lie the dead of Craven County—here lie those whose taste planned, and whose energy reared, this elegant temple; and here, too, lie those who, but yesterday, gazed like us upon this strange scene, and experienced the same emotions which now overpower our minds. Here, all is past. To them, the present is an impossibility.—The father and the son, the old and the young, the long forgotten, and the recently loved, all lie here together in one common past, and link it strangely and fearfully with the future!’’ 46 It was Porcher’s purpose to revive the dead. He lovingly traced the origins of his place and ruminated among old, unsatisfactory documents. He introduced families, and dilated on the Huguenots and their venture to assimilate, 44. Frederick A. Porcher, ‘‘Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County,’’ SQR n.s. 9 (April 1854): 377–428. The essay was occasioned by the publication of WGS, The Golden Christmas: A Chronicle of St. Johns Berkeley. Compiled from the Notes of a Briefless Barrister (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Richards, 1852). 45. Porcher came from a large plantation called Cedar Spring, owned by his father George, in St. John’s Berkeley Parish, but his family spent each summer in Pineville. He was educated at first mostly by Yankee tutors, then at a school in Vermont, then at Yale. For several years, he was a planter and, more briefly, a state politician, but gave up the life to become in 1848 Professor of History and Belles Lettres at the College of Charleston, which he did for much of the rest of his life. (This is drawn from Porcher’s memoirs, published serially in the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 1943–46, and discussed later in this book.) 46. Porcher, ‘‘Craven County,’’ 378–82.

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while noting vestiges of their customs, food, and odd pronunciations: ‘‘The pillau is a common dish upon their tables, and I believe that in every Huguenot house on Santee, that cake, which the English know as the waffle, is called the gauffre.’’ He explained the constitutional history of the region and narrated worthies. There was Thomas Walter, who married Miss Peyre, whose ‘‘book, the Flora Caroliniana, which was printed in London, in 1789, is dated ad Ripas Fluvii Santee.’’ There was Francis Marion, to whom other parishes had a better claim, who appeared, less as the Revolutionary hero, more as the husband of his widow, who lived on into Porcher’s childhood and lectured the child (and anyone else who cared to listen) on the iniquities of Marion’s ‘‘reverend biographer,’’ the odious Parson Weems. There was Colonel Hezekiah Maham, who had ‘‘a certain skill in the art of reducing fortified places’’ and who once forced the server of a writ for debt to swallow the offending document, though he courteously offered him ‘‘good liquor’’ to wash it down.47 Porcher moved on to a description and evocation of the county’s metropolis, Pineville. He numbered its Academy’s school teachers and remembered (from his own time) ‘‘Mr. Yorick Sterne Gordon,’’ who came ‘‘with credentials from the highest authority in New England,’’ who was a stern master. Each day he had retired to his dwelling, and then would ‘‘approach the schoolhouse by zig-zag lines,’’ which the boys took to be occasioned by the need vigilantly to stare into the classroom, for discipline’s sake. But three months and a bit later and he was dead of delirium tremens, ‘‘and his assistant declared that he had not been sober a single day since his arrival.’’ From this, Porcher went on to the library of a thousand books, now lost and destroyed. He described services in the church, rectors and bad singing, and enthusiastic singing-masters. He characterized the inhabitants, their unity and equality, their simplicity and unaffectedness, for they ‘‘were all planters.’’ He stressed isolation, the more so because, the town being regarded as healthy in the summer and the rest of Carolina as perilous, the residents ‘‘regarded their village with a sort of superstitious affection, and viewed as a calamity any accident which might make it necessary to spend a single night elsewhere.’’ He celebrated the air of the place, he talked about dinners and siestas, manners of dress, customs of hospitality and visiting. He spent a good deal of time upon dancing, the old balls of Pineville; he remembered tunes and reels, cotillions and the Boulanger. He recalled afternoon visits to plantations, in which young people had set out in gigs. He described the horse races and did a little set-piece description of a wedding; he took the reader from the buying of the trousseau in Charleston, to the ceremony, and the supper, and the morning after, when gentlemen went hunting to clear their heads. He returned to 47. Ibid., 386–95 (quotations on pp. 386, 389, 390, 391, 395).

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worthies: Peter Gaillard, James Macbride, John J. Couturier, Charles Stevens, Samuel Porcher, Robert Marion, and John Wall. Each was given a history, a character, a story.48 Porcher ended at his beginning, with elegy. For Pineville, famous for its health, was to be depopulated by an epidemic in 1836. Mentioning this led Porcher to discourse on country fever, yellow fever, and ‘‘the myrtle fever, of Sullivan’s Island.’’ He told of how Mr. John Ravenel sickened and died in the autumn of 1833, how the fever returned in 1834, how in ‘‘the two succeeding summers, it continued its ravages, until the most sanguine became desponding, and the village was almost totally deserted.’’ Though some had returned, it was to a different place, for the world had moved on, modernity had intruded upon this little, comforting world. ‘‘While other villages flourish in its neighbourhood, and the communication with Charleston has become more easy, the sense of isolation, which once gave its people a peculiar characteristic, no longer is felt, and they have become cosmopolitan.’’ With this, a society had died. ‘‘The old times have gone, never to return.’’ Only memory remained.49 Porcher was skeptical of the city. In this, he was not as typical of Southerners as modern opinion, fed upon a more dramatic relationship between town and country, has had it. Everyone could quote ‘‘O fortunatos nimium’’ and some even believed it, but the imagery of Vergil’s Georgics, the contrast of the farm and Rome, led more into benign celebrations of the rural, fewer into assaults upon the Southern city.50 For, with the great exception of New Orleans and the partial one of Charleston, no city was large enough or sufficiently insulated from the life of its countryside to generate the sharp differentiations of city and country found in European discourse, ancient and modern. The Southern city was full of country people, the country full of city people, and the contrast was a differentiation within the experience of a migratory individual, less often between two opposed groups of people who never met. Indeed it was more common, among Southern intellectuals, to find assaults upon the tedium of rural life or small towns. Isaac Harby spent time on Edisto Island in 1809 and was to complain of ‘‘the gloomy, pine-barrens, and insipid society of Edisto.’’ Working as a tutor for a planting family in Hardeeville, South Carolina, in 1861, Henry Timrod groaned in the summer heat: ‘‘I cannot live altogether without society, and in this stupid place, there is literally 48. Ibid., 396–422 (quotations on pp. 398, 403, 404–5). 49. Ibid., 422–28 (quotations on pp. 424, 428). 50. But see William J. Grayson, The Country (Charleston, S.C.: Russell and Jones, 1858). Yet even he says: ‘‘The description of city life, here given, applies to the great cities only of the United States and Europe.’’ (In unpaginated ‘‘Notes’’ following p. 53.)

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none at all. It is true that I am not far from Bluffton, and if I choose, I can betake myself thither, and meet very nice people; but a ride even of a few miles, in this weather requires more physical energy than I am blessed with; and day after day, I order a horse, look at the thermometer, and remain at home.’’ 51 In this, the South was the inheritor, not only of immense acres ripe for agricultural exploitation, but of a European tradition that celebrated the civic. Athens, Rome, Paris, Venice were models and warnings. Almost no one aspired to duplicate London, William Cobbett’s Great Wen, but Edinburgh, with its modern intellectual achievement, was another matter. Every three months, a new copy of the Edinburgh Review would show up to remind everyone what an energetic provincial city might accomplish. So a city could offer a powerful instinct of identity. ‘‘I was a Charlestonian first, Carolinian next, and then a southerner,’’ noted Basil Gildersleeve, remembering the hierarchy of his antebellum loyalties. ‘‘I am the daughter of the Revd. Dr. Palmer of Charleston, and first cousin of the Revd. Mr. Palmer, of your city, whose house will be my home during my stay there,’’ wrote Mary Dana when she came to Columbia, by way of introducing herself to Lieber. ‘‘We learned yesterday that Joe Nott of Mobile was suffering under the yellow fever with the chances of recovery against him,’’ Preston wrote to Waddy Thompson in 1837. J. C. Thompson subscribed his article on Butler’s Analo in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1854, ‘‘J. C. T., Nashville, Tenn.’’ A city was a community, for good or ill, a comfort or a threat. There the intellectual might feel opposed, trapped among Philistines. ‘‘You ask me to send you a list of new publications which may appear in this city,’’ George Bettner wrote to David Bailie Warden in 1838. ‘‘This I shall cheerfully do should any thing of that kind come out, but we are not a literary community, & the whole population in our city is absorbed in considerations of cotton, pork & produce.’’ Likewise, a reviewer of Martin Chulewit lamented in 1844, ‘‘The vices of the commercial communities have been growing upon us, under the stimulating and wide-spreading influence of commercial institutions.’’ Or the intellectual might also feel belonging, even influence. Robert Lewis Dabney hazarded in 1847 that the Presbyterian minister William S. Plumer ‘‘filled a splendid sta51. Quoted in Gary Phillip Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788–1828: Jewish Reformer and Intellectual (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 40; Henry Timrod to Rachel Lyons, 9 June 1861, Henry Timrod Papers, UA, reprinted in William Fidler, ed., ‘‘Unpublished Letters of Henry Timrod,’’ SLM 2 (October 1940): 533. Timrod was an urban man. His grandfather was a German immigrant who had begun his South Carolinian life in 1765 as a merchant tailor and (perhaps) shoemaker before buying a plantation at Parker’s Ferry on the Charleston Neck. His son, William Henry, was offered the usual chance to be a planter-lawyer but refused it and preferred instead the smell of leather and volumes of Shakespeare, ‘‘his favorite companion.’’ So he ran a bookbindery in Charleston, at 25 Broad Street. On this, see Edd Winfield Parks, Henry Timrod (New York: Twayne, 1964), 17–19.

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tion in the eye of the community of Richmond. His intellectual superiority was acknowledged there, over all classes of talent, secular and clerical: and his influence was known & felt throughout the State.’’ 52 The dispersion of culture across so vast a territory as the South seemed to pose a problem, even as it suggested a mission for the city. Could the city’s culture be strong enough to lead and direct the countryside? Or would its voice be lost in the voiceless tracks, the bayous, the coves? The Society for the Advancement of Literature and Science in the State of Tennessee thought that such a mission might succeed, at least as far as the smaller cities. When the Society was planning itself in Nashville in 1836, it proposed that there should be a parent association in Nashville, which would encourage auxiliary societies in other Tennessee towns, perhaps thirty of them being large enough to support a literary society. Thus ‘‘we should present, in a short time, a regularly organized literary community, embracing the very extremes of the state, all embarked in the great cause of knowledge, and consequently, of virtue and liberty—a society strengthened and supported by union and concert, diffusing its silent but real and uncalculated blessings over the face of the land.’’ Edward Johnston gravely doubted this. He thought that ‘‘the continual flow of emigration from the Atlantic States to the West’’ impoverished ‘‘intellectual improvement’’ by the dilutions of ‘‘each new wilderness.’’ In ‘‘thinly peopled communities’’ there was too little a ‘‘spirit of society . . . to give grace and elegance to the understandings that it controls.’’ Hence, ‘‘a separate class . . . cannot be found, that occupies itself with letters alone; nor is it possible that we should possess, in such a state of things, a single one of those more determined scholars, patient and quiet toilers in the mine of thought, who obscurely dig out for others the deep treasures of the intellect.’’ 53 In short, there was no one to talk to. Writing from Aiken in 1860, Paul Hamilton Hayne confirmed this analysis by grumbling, ‘‘I live in a community, the members of which despise Art, with but few companions, and hardly any true sympathisers. My existence is remote, & lonely.’’ Newly arrived in 52. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, ‘‘Formative Influences,’’ in Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War, ed. Ward W. Briggs Jr., Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 35; Mary S. B. Dana to FL, 3 December 1846, FL Papers, HEH; WCP to Waddy Thompson, Saturday 4th (1837?), WCP Papers, SCL; J. C. Thompson, ‘‘Butler’s Analogy,’’ SQR n.s. 10 ( July 1854): 220; George Bettner to David Bailie Warden, 20 June 1838, David Bailie Warden Papers, LC; ‘‘Critical Notices— Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit,’’ SQR 6 (July 1844): 262; [Robert Lewis Dabney?] to William Henry Ruffner, 16 January 1847, Ruffner Family Papers, PHS. 53. Entry for 26 December 1836, in Minutes of the ‘‘Society for the Advancement of Literature and Science in the State of Tennessee,’’ manuscript in notebook, bearing the title ‘‘Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts &c of the Tennessee Hist. Society,’’ Tennessee Historical Society Papers, TSLA; Edward W. Johnston, ‘‘American Literature,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 443–44.

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Tuscaloosa in 1838, Basil Manly wrote back to James C. Furman in Charleston: ‘‘Would that we were nearer together.—The prominent feeling of a man newly arrived here is that he is on the far off edge of the world, very near sundown; and that intercourse with the rest of the world is nearly cut off.— Having travelled over that vast wilderness once that intervenes between me & you, the task of returning seems almost utterly hopeless.’’ 54 Later, Manly getting used to the place, Tuscaloosa expanded in his mind and became the center of his own Alabamian world, not the edge of South Carolina’s. Curiously, the city was more often a place for discourse, less often the subject of it. There are, to be sure, any number of orations to city organizations, or epistles to the city as a political constituency, or histories of churches within a city, or city directories. But the city tout court was less often a discrete focus of formal literature than one might imagine. Simms published The Charleston Book in 1845, with selections from fifty-eight authors associated with the city, but none of the pieces concern themselves with Charleston itself. Still, there were things, here and there. There are memoirs, like Charles Fraser’s Reminiscences of Charleston (1854) and Theodore Clapp’s Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections, During a Thirty-Five Years’ Residence in New Orleans (1857), though nothing like the torrent that defeat would bring. There was a handful of books of impressions by Southern tourists, as with Albert J. Pickett’s Eight Days in New Orleans (1847), but a pittance compared to the tramping hordes of the twentieth century, and little enough even compared to the rapid chapters on cities in general books written by foreign travelers before 1861. There were a very few histories: John Peyton Little published a brief Richmond, the Capital of Virginia, Its History in 1851, while Samuel Mordecai put out the first edition of his Richmond in By-Gone Days in 1856.55 But almost all of the histories of Southern cities are postbellum; the earlier years show little to compare to the bittersweet elegancies of Grace King’s New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895) or its companion, Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel’s Charleston: The Place and the People (1906), both in a series commissioned by the Macmillan Company. There were some antebellum guides, as with Norman’s New Orleans and Environs (1845), and 54. PHH to Horatio Woodman, 5 July 1860, PHH Papers, SCL; BM to James C. Furman, 14 April 1838, BM Papers, FU. 55. WGS, ed., The Charleston Book: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse (1845; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1983); Charles Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1854); Theodore Clapp, Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections, During a Thirty-Five Years’ Residence in New Orleans (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1857); AJP, Eight Days in New-Orleans in February, 1847 (Montgomery, Ala.: A. J. Pickett, 1847); John Peyton Little, Richmond, the Capital of Virginia, Its History (Richmond: Macfarlane & Fergusson, 1851); Samuel Mordecai, Virginia, Especially Richmond, in by-Gone Days; with a Glance at the Present: Being Reminiscences and Last Words of an Old Citizen (1860; reprint, Richmond: Dietz Press, 1946).

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John C. Gobright’s The Monumental City, or Baltimore Guide Book (1858).56 And novelists liked, sometimes, to set their stories in cities. Though Simms’s mind seemed more often to run to states and rivers, as with The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (1835), or Mellichampe: A Legend of the Santee (1836), or Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi (1840), there is the short story The Prima Donna: A Passage from City Life (1844), the two pamphlets collected as Charleston and Her Satirists. A Scribblement (1848), and Marie de Berniere: A Tale of the Crescent City (1855). Then there are things like A. Oakey Hall’s The Manhattaner in New Orleans: Or, Phases of ‘Crescent City’ Life (1851), which is by a New Yorker who briefly studied law under Slidell.57 On the whole, however, it is more striking that Southern writers, sitting in their town houses, walking to their law offices, resting on their piazzas, coming home from their literary clubs, seldom bothered to narrate what surrounded them but looked past the city to the valley of the Shenandoah, or to Swallow Barn, or to rustic taverns where men’s eyes were gouged out.

56. Grace King, New Orleans: The Place and the People (New York: Macmillan, 1895); Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel, Charleston: The Place and the People (New York: Macmillan, 1906); Benjamin Moore Norman, Norman’s New Orleans and Environs: Containing a Brief Historical Sketch of the Territory and State of Louisiana, and the City of New Orleans . . .: Presenting a Complete Guide to . . . the Southern Metropolis (New Orleans and New York: B. M. Norman; D. Appleton, 1845); John Christopher Gobright, The Monumental City or Baltimore Guide Book, Being a Reliable Directory for Citizens and Strangers to the Prominent Objects of Interest (Baltimore: Gobright & Torsch, 1858). 57. WGS, The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835); WGS, The Prima Donna: A Passage from City Life (Philadelphia: Louis A. Godey, 1844); WGS, Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1840); WGS, Charleston and Her Satirists: A Scribblement (Charleston, S.C.: James A. Burges, 1848); A. Oakey Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans: Or, Phases of ‘‘Crescent City’’ Life, ed. Henry A. Kmen (1851; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

Chapter Nine

Our Fictitious Social Scale

As sharply as any Americans, Southerners knew that the world had its social distinctions. But they were clearer about how class worked than how it might be defined, for they inhabited a world of fluidity that crowded many categories into their minds. Race and gender seemed to have some fixity, indeed seemed to gain in focus as the century progressed. Ethnicity was looser, as was locality, for people might intermarry and migrate. But social status was most unclear, was most profligate of confusions. The word class itself offered little hope of clarity, for it meant little more than classification, in a world with many overlapping component parts. A class might be any group of people who shared something. It was used, for example, in connection with academic rank, as in the ‘‘senior class’’ of a college. It was used to denote shared interests, as when John Pendleton Kennedy spoke in 1849 of ‘‘a large class of readers’’ who were interested in religious topics. Or it might indicate a political grouping, as when R. B. Brashear of Louisiana told J. D. B. De Bow in 1856 that some friends ‘‘condemned much of the Southern excitement as artificial, as belonging to the class of editors & politicians rather than to the sober minded merchant or planter of the South.’’ It might even indicate a race. When Moses Ashley Curtis was in Virginia in 1831, he shuddered at news of the Nat Turner revolt and observed: ‘‘No class of beings I ever heard of take such vile advantage of favors as the blacks.’’ 1 Title from Thomas C. Reynolds to James Johnston Pettigrew, 9 October 1858, Pettigrew Family Papers, NCSA: ‘‘It is but natural that men should stand by their interests and their ‘class,’ whether high or low in our fictitious social scale.’’ 1. JPK to Alexander Randall, 9 April 1849, JPK Papers, PLB; R. B. Brashear to J. D. B. De Bow, 8 February 1856, J. D. B. De Bow Mss, DU; entry for 23 September 1831, MAC Diary, MAC Papers, SHC.

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A reluctance to reify the idea of social class was partly an inheritance from the late eighteenth century, which had spoken of eclectic social divisions. John Day of Philadelphia in 1774, for example, in his Remarks on American Affairs, had divided the population of the colonies into six classes: (1) those ‘‘who possess the greatest share of property, unconnected with commerce’’; (2) commercial men; (3) ‘‘practitioners of the law’’; (4) the clergy; (5) ‘‘the yeomanry and peasantry’’; and (6) those ‘‘very inconsiderable in point of property, number, consequence, or virtue to the whole community,’’ which embraced ‘‘sailors, porters, fishermen, and other appendages to the large commercial towns.’’ 2 Later, Southerners would be equally miscellaneous, mostly because they were caught by the conflicting usages of various discourses, historically layered in their minds. First, they had inherited from early modern England the conception of ‘‘orders,’’ which had itself supplanted the medieval conceptions of ‘‘estates.’’ To be sure, they no longer spoke of ‘‘sorts of men,’’ or of ‘‘degrees,’’ and all manner of English ranks had disappeared: cottagers, burgesses, husbandmen, hirelings.3 But ‘‘freeholder’’ and ‘‘freeman’’ remained, as did ‘‘gentry’’ and ‘‘gentlemen’’ and ‘‘ladies.’’ The term that most powerfully survived was ‘‘master,’’ so much so that its old referent, ‘‘servant,’’ was transmitted to those who were more than servants, being slaves. (‘‘Servant’’ was the usage of the domestic realm, ‘‘slave’’ of the public realm.)4 But piled on these terms, second, was the neo-Harringtonian language of ‘‘interests,’’ much sharpened by the political economy of Adam Smith, which suggested that society was di2. Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8–9. 3. William J. Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave, Chicora, and Other Poems (Charleston, S.C.: McCarter, 1856), uses the former term, but to describe wage laborers not in Southern society. 4. It will become apparent that I see the antebellum Southern social structure as being more fluid than most modern interpreters, who (as Wayne Flynt has summarized the view) claim, ‘‘White society was divided into at least three major groups: planters, yeomen farmers, and poor whites.’’ (Flynt, ‘‘Social Class,’’ in Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989], 1383.) My own belief is that this is an anachronistic translation from the modern class structure of upper, middle, and working class, and bears little relationship to how most antebellum Southerners experienced and defined social division and status. I am obliged to Keith Wrightson for guidance on the early modern conceptions of social order in England: see Keith Wrightson, ‘‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,’’ in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 177–202; Keith Wrightson, ‘‘Estates, Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England,’’ in Language, History, and Class, ed. Penelope J. Corfield (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 30–52; Keith Wrightson, ‘‘ ‘Sorts of People’ in Tudor and Stuart England,’’ in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (London: Macmillan, 1994), 28–51.

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vided into groups driven by shared economic needs. So Beverley Tucker observed in 1844: ‘‘It is not until the progress of society has distributed mankind into different classes, having distinct and conflicting interests, that the political action of Government commences, and the wisdom of its political structure is put to any test.’’ 5 But this conception was much influenced by the notion of professions and pursuits: a poor lawyer and a rich one, a wealthy planter and an indigent farmer, a bishop and an itinerant preacher might share a class, even if they did not share an income. Third, by the late 1840s, there began to develop the Victorian conception of a threefold, horizontally divided class system (upper, middle, lower), in which the middle class was regarded as possessing moral primacy, by being urban, respectable, and the chief guarantor of social order and progress.6 Little wonder, then, that critics might run discourses together. When Thomas C. Reynolds wrote to James Johnston Pettigrew in 1858, he used language that was simultaneously early modern, Harringtonian, and modern, and indeed hinted at the postmodern: ‘‘It is but natural that men should stand by their interests and their ‘class,’ whether high or low in our fictitious social scale.’’ Nonetheless, one can see some patterns. There was a tendency towards defining a social continuum from high to low, which was often broken sharply in the middle. In 1855, a writer in the Southern Literary Messenger, speaking of the heritage of the colonial period in Virginia, explained: ‘‘The white population of the South as elsewhere, was divisible into two classes: an order of proprietors who owned the larger and more valuable estates, which were cultivated by slaves, and a much more numerous class who owned few or none and derived their support in part or wholly from the labour of their own hands in the field or the workshop.’’ This twofold division could be explained, as here, solely upon economic terms. But others saw moral issues, if one reasoned that prosperity encouraged probity and poverty taught crime. In this case, the continuum was severed, because the division between virtue and vice, productivity and idleness, respectability and meanness, was thought to be abrupt, not gradual. Evangelicals, especially, endorsed this standpoint, which might reprobate the high as well as the low. So the aspirant minister Moses Drury Hoge, teaching school in Granville, North Carolina, in 1837 could write the following to his mother: ‘‘I have had an opportunity of mixing a good deal with a class of people that I would not be apt to meet with again—& who 5. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘‘An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave,’’ SLM 10 (August 1844): 472. 6. On this, see Jonathan Daniel Wells, ‘‘The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: Literature, Politics, and Economy, 1820–1880’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1998).

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before only knew by heresay [sic]. Religion in this part of the country is unpopular—not in fashion—The aristocracy—‘the first families’ are patrons, and leaders in all the fashionable vices of the day.’’ 7 But representatives of such families had their own, self-flattering version of this economic and moral differentiation. Francis Kinloch noticed in 1819 ‘‘the lower orders of people’’ in Virginia who were ‘‘idle,’’ and contrasted them with ‘‘persons of fortune’’ who were not.8 John Pendleton Kennedy, in his diary in 1830, saw and regretted this division: ‘‘I am disgusted with the glaring meannesses of the time and the perpetual struggle to create distinctions between lower and higher orders of the people.’’ Others were less troubled. William Henry Holcombe, more than two decades later, was to complain to his own diary that homeopathy (his speciality) was making slight progress in much of society: ‘‘Ignorant, vacillating, prejudiced, and surrounded always by vulgar, meddling, prating neighbors— it is scarcely to be expected that the lower orders of society will appreciate and support through all opposition a system of medicine, based upon nature’s most wonderful and subtle operations, and entirely above their comprehension.’’ 9 If one follows this continuum from high to low, however, one encounters many contradictory perceptions. There was, to start with, a widespread notion that there was a Southern ‘‘aristocracy,’’ though Northerners tended more frequently to believe in this. For Southerners themselves, the construct was becoming tenuous and ironical, allusive rather than definitive. The South had no House of Lords, no orders of chivalry, no formal legal differentiations, no primogeniture, none of the rules that marked genuine aristocracies from the Urals to the Algarve. All these had been proscribed by the American constitution, endorsed by its Southern and Northern drafters alike. In London and Parisian salons, rich Southerners tended to feel discomfited by liveried servants and armorial markings emblazoned on carriage doors. In the South itself, there was a marked reluctance officially to certify and measure rank. There was no Southern Debrett, not even, significantly, an equivalent of the listings of best families that began in New York in these years. So Francis Lieber, a Prussian acquainted with the European meaning of aristocracy, was 7. ‘‘The Black Race in North America: Why Was Their Introduction Permitted?’’ SLM 21 (November 1855): 683; Moses Drury Hoge to Mrs. Elizabeth R. Hoge, July (1837), Hoge Family Papers, PHS. 8. Francis Kinloch, Letters from Geneva and France Written during a Residence of between Two and Three Years, in Different Parts of Those Countries, and Addressed to a Lady in Virginia. By Her Father, 2 vols. (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1819), 1:92. This is in a footnote to Letter XVII, added in this edition to the version first published in The Port Folio 5 (21 May 1808): 322. 9. Entry for 21 September 1830, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; entry for 3 February 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC.

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right to observe pointedly of wealthier Southerners, ‘‘They are arrogant indeed but not aristocrats.’’ 10 The political language of the American Revolution powerfully militated against candid pretensions of rank. As James V. Jones of Macon contended in 1839, a blacksmith ought to be as well regarded as anyone else, for ‘‘a proper appreciation of these pursuits is the true spirit of a republican people—and so soon as these fall into disrepute, men then begin to degenerate from a republican to an aristocratic government.’’ This opinion, in rhetoric if not practice, was a consensus. In the language of Jacksonianism, aristocracy was a lively target. But so it was in the language of Whiggery, which aimed its arrows at ‘‘King Andrew.’’ So almost everyone abused aristocracy and very few identified with it. As George Fitzhugh put it in 1859, ‘‘In America everybody is ashamed of low ancestry because it is low, and everybody, almost, ashamed of respectable parentage, and afraid to acknowledge it, lest he should be slandered and abused as a ‘rich aristocrat.’’’ The exceptions were those who lamented aristocracy’s disappearance as a reproach to a leveling democracy, people safe in the knowledge that what they admired was no longer available. In 1838, Beverley Tucker wrote from Williamsburg to Littleton Waller Tazewell about his hopeless task of educating young people, who were destined to serve the people and to be thereby ‘‘tainted.’’ Once there had been a class, ‘‘the ancient aristocracy of Land-holders,’’ who had transcended such pollution, but this order had been ‘‘effectually broken down,’’ since ‘‘the admirable colonial constitution, which we had the sense to retain with none but indispensable alterations, we have since treated as a boy treats his watch, which he pulls to pieces to find out the secret of its movement.’’ 11 What there was, rather, was not an aristocracy, but rich people with powerful kinship networks, who owned many houses, slaves, and oil paintings by Thomas Sully, who wore new fashions from Paris and Savile Row, who poured their China tea from delicate silver into fine porcelain, and who walked on Persian carpets. Such people lived much apart. Caroline Gilman wrote to a Boston friend in 1821: ‘‘Mr. Gilman’s [Unitarian] Congregation ranks about where Mr. Lowells does in Boston, highly respectable, but engrossing little of the fashion of aristocracy of the place.’’ In Charleston, the Episcopalians 10. FL to ‘‘Dear Sir,’’ 26 July 1862, FL Papers, SCL, quoted in Michael Sugrue, ‘‘South Carolina College: The Education of an Antebellum Elite’’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1992), 298–99. It is worth remarking that, after his removal to the North and as part of his war effort, Lieber published a pamphlet that speaks of the yeomanry, though it is not a phrase I have seen in his antebellum writings, published or unpublished: see FL, Slavery, Plantations, and the Yeomanry (New York: C. S. Westcott, 1863). 11. James V. Jones to Joseph B. Jones, 28 April 1839, Joseph B. Jones Papers, EU; GF, ‘‘Ancient Families of Virginia, Maryland, Etc,’’ DBR 26 (May 1859): 490; Beverley Tucker to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 8 January 1838, Tazewell Family Papers, LV.

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felt ‘‘a slight feeling of contempt’’ for Presbyterians and Congregationalists. A Unitarian might, with forethought and pretension, have fared better. ‘‘Had we come on in a carriage & pair, & taken a smart house there is no saying, with the letters which Mr. G. brought, how much we might have been courted, but our comparatively humble style of living made us forgotten by the great, & the warm burst of generous attentions from those of our church made us forget them.’’ Samuel Gilman himself was not sure of this; indeed, in the letter, he had added to his wife’s observations, ‘‘I doubt it. S. G.’’ And his wife had not written in anger, or so she said. For ‘‘I think our situation is precisely that, which is calculated to afford most happiness. I fear if we had been sought after by the gay & fashionable of a higher station, we should have given cause for jealousy, & neglected some of those duties which now render Mr. Gilman so eminently useful.’’ There was a moral value to being middling. ‘‘At present, we associate with just enough fashion to keep us animated in society, just enough mental cultivation to preserve a literary taste, just enough riches & display not to regret that we are limited, & receive just enough attention to make us satisfied with our influence.’’ 12 Not a few among ‘‘the gay and fashionable’’ confessed a pride in their superiority. William Gilmore Simms suffered much from this, from people like Charles Woodward Hutson who wrote comfortably to his mother: ‘‘Charley does not seem to be much enchanted with the personal attractions of W. Gilmore Simms, the pseudo-novelist. I should be sorry if he were, for as an author he is the veriest humbug, that ever pretended to a seat among the illustrious fellowship & I shall be strongly tempted to cut him up one of these days for his presumption.’’ Philip Pendleton Cooke told his brother in 1840, ‘‘It is lamentable to see the old families of the land, the first in gentility & caste, reduced; to see their descendants gradually sinking by marriage & association into humbler classes; and to see mine thus would break my heart.’’ 13 Nonetheless, it was widely acknowledged that good manners might exist independently of high caste and that arrogance and bad manners could disfig12. Caroline Gilman to Mrs. Harriet Fay, 4 March 1821, Caroline Gilman Mss, SCHS. 13. The Cookes came from first from Martinsburg, then from Winchester, Virginia, where John Rogers Cooke, the father of Philip Pendleton Cooke the poet and John Esten Cooke the novelist, was a lawyer. The father came to own an estate called Glengarry, where his children spent part of their time; later, the plantation burned, the family fortune was lost, and the father moved to Richmond. His son Philip mostly lived in Virginia by being a lawyer, but he also married well. The other son, John, was educated in Richmond, also becoming a lawyer there; after the Civil War he too married well and moved to an estate in western Virginia. See John Esten Cooke, manuscript biographical sketch of Philip Pendleton Cooke, ca. 1850, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU; John D. Allen, Philip Pendleton Cooke (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), and John Owen Beaty, John Esten Cooke, Virginian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922).

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ure the reputation of even the lofty. Paul Hamilton Hayne used to know a son of John C. Calhoun and sometimes slept at Fort Hill. The elder Calhoun was no aristocrat, but the son of a backcountry, Scotch-Irish settler called Patrick, who (to be sure) had left a personal estate in the upcountry valued at $9,000 and twenty-eight slaves, but only a small frame house.14 By the cultural logic of the upcountry, this did not make an aristocrat, for the style was missing. Still, John C. Calhoun was a great man. Hayne, being of a ‘‘better’’ Charleston family and knowing the contrast of their gentilities, paid the compliment of praising Calhoun’s simple, republican manners: ‘‘There is no assumption of that chilling dignity, which the Great so frequently exercise towards inferiors, but with an intuitive perception of courtesy founded on real benevolence of heart, Mr. Calhoun adapts his conversation to the peculiar pursuits of the individual with whom he speaks & always leaves on the mind of his hearer a favourable opinion of his character—as a gentleman of tact & discernment.’’ Still, Hayne was young enough and vain enough, when writing to a lady cousin, to be ‘‘surprised’’ at this.15 Hence caste was informal and, so, was not caste. This only partially served the interests of the socially mobile, for it made social distinctions not unimportant, only subtle. Insiders could judge, approve, or reprobate the quality of the parvenu by the skill with which the aspirant learned the arcana. A reviewer in the Southern Quarterly Review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America outlined the rules of the game. In Europe, there was ‘‘a standard of approbation into which the ingredient, riches, enters to a less extent than it does in the United States.’’ Since wealth was quickly acquired in the latter and society was marked by ‘‘frequent changes,’’ it followed that ‘‘the probation of every individual advancing claims to be admitted a member of it, is shorter than elsewhere,’’ even when moving from the lowest to the highest rank. With the qualification of money, ‘‘you are not very likely to find yourself opposed in your pretensions, by others possessing claims of a different nature, such as birth, official or professional rank, or the mere ideal qualities of gentility or fashion, which are more beyond the reach of ambition.’’ 16 So families got most points for being wealthy, especially if wealth was expressed conspicuously but not vulgarly. One got a few points for having longevity of affluent residence in a state, but the Old South was not much inter14. Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 36. 15. Charles Woodward Hutson to Mother, undated, Charles W. Hutson Papers, SCL; Philip Pendleton Cooke to John R. Cooke, 29 December 1840, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU; PHH to Susan B. Hayne, 20 September 1848, PHH Mss, DU. Hayne was the son of a naval officer: see Rayburn S. Moore, ed., A Man of Letters in the Nineteenth-Century South: Selected Letters of Paul Hamilton Hayne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 11. 16. ‘‘Democracy in America,’’ SQR 4 (July 1843): 65–66.

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ested in genealogy, not entirely from indisposition, mostly from the lack of the antiquarian infrastructure necessary for the hobby’s pursuit.17 Sustained habitation of a particular house or plantation meant very little, indeed was uncommon enough to be notable. There was a presumption of mutability. So Philip Barbour observed to the Virginia State Convention in 1829: ‘‘Those who have lived but for a few years, may see, from an inspection of the map of Virginia, how fleeting are all human possessions. The wheel of fortune never stands still, but is in a state of perpetual revolution. He who was at the summit yesterday, may be at the bottom to-day.’’ 18 Hence few thought the worse of William Campbell Preston for migrating from Virginia to South Carolina or Josiah Nott for moving from South Carolina to Alabama, for migration was the norm. Indeed, Hugh Legaré once complained of this indifference to place: ‘‘We have no local attachments, generally speaking—nothing bears the pretium affectionis in our eyes. If an estate, a residence in town, a country seat, rises a little beyond what we are accustomed to think its value, it is sold without any hesitation.’’ 19 Legaré was from South Carolina, whose residents were perhaps more casual about these matters than Virginians, the only Southerners who went in for proprietary titles, as with John Randolph ‘‘of Roanoke’’ and John Taylor ‘‘of Caroline.’’ But, in this, South Carolinians were the norm and even in Virginia such flourishes were uncommon. Good blood lines might forgive a small shortage of ready cash, but not for very long, while a great amount of money excused almost any amount of obscure birth, as long as the new man acquired some taste. Singleness of ethnic origin mattered little. Having a famous member in a family helped; politicians were acceptable (if they were successful), but Founding Fathers were best. Merchants were fine, though planters were a touch better, while having both in a family was advisable, as insurance. Professionals varied in standing: lawyers were respectable, doctors were very little so, while ministers were, only if their denomination had status. For religion was of some consequence, though there was little sense in the higher reaches of society that a family was required to pray together. As Caroline Gilman indicated, there was a pecking order for Protestant denominations, which was, in descending order, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and then assorted evangelical sects. (In Louisiana, the prevalence of Roman Catholicism changed these rules.) Early in the century, a casual indifference to religion was something of a mark 17. A late exception to this is George Fitzhugh. See, for example, GF, ‘‘Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia,’’ DBR 26 (February 1859): 121–35. 18. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, of 1829–30 (Richmond: Samuel Shepherd, 1830), 97; there is a strikingly similar sentiment from Charles F. Mercer, p. 177. 19. ‘‘Spirit of the Sub-Treasury,’’ in Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:301

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of social elevation, but by 1860, as evangelicalism colonized the heights of society, this had abated. Still, even in 1857, Basil Manly the Baptist minister felt a distance in Charleston from lofty people like William J. Grayson: ‘‘His mother, & many of his relations were baptists—very well known to me. He used to know me very well, too.—He belongs to a class of men, very respectable, whom I never seek out. If they fairly come up to me in my walks, I treat them with whatever of civility I learned, & retain. . . . He has property (his wife’s I judge) on which he appears to live comfortably; enjoying the ‘otium cum dignitate.’ ’’ 20 Such lofty people, if of Federalist instinct, spoke freely of ‘‘the mob.’’ Beverley Tucker wrote to James Henry Hammond in this vein: ‘‘In the North the people proper have surrendered their authority to the mob on compulsion. With us it was done in compliance with the theories of visionary politicians. There was no power here to extort the concession, because the great body of the disfranchised were slaves. The lower class of whites and they could not make common cause.’’ But such language could be heard lower down in the social scale, for it only marked off those who thought themselves independent and well-behaved from those deemed to be indisciplined and malleable. So Kennedy could write in 1829, when he was still a Jacksonian and was not yet a prominent man in Baltimore: ‘‘I found [Roger] Taney in great agitation about the election concerns; it is a passion with him—In my judgment it rather speaks a little mind to jump so much with the humour of the mob.’’ In 1856, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, exiled from North Carolina for his sympathies for the Republican Party, noted to his wife, ‘‘It would not be safe for me to return to Carolina now, as Holden might take advantage of my presence to get up a mob. If he thought he was safe, he would get a negro or two to help out.’’ 21 But who were these people, this mob, whom all political theory since Aristotle took to be an ominous problem? In the South, there were few of the urban poor that so shocked Albert J. Pickett in New York: ‘‘Since I have seen the splendor, the meanness, the selfishness & the ridiculous moneyed aristocracy of the North on the one side, & the poverty distress & destitution of the lower classes on the other I am content to live in Alabama the ballance of my days & never to go out of it.’’ 22 In Montgomery, there were no beggars on 20. BM to A. Bowie, 4 February 1857, Manly Family Papers, UA. 21. Beverley Tucker to James Henry Hammond, 17 February 1836, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker Mss, DU; entry for 7 October 1829, JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; Benjamin S. Hedrick to Mary Ellen Hedrick, 17 November 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC. (William Woods Holden was editor of the Raleigh Standard and prominent in writing editorials against Hedrick.) 22. AJP to Absalom Jackson, 7 March 1851, AJP Papers, ADAH.

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the streets. No Southerner had reason to fear a jacquerie of the dispossessed (slaves were another matter). Since unemployment was very scarce, this mob had jobs, yet its members were not known as the working class,23 and very seldom even as the laboring class or laboring classes.24 When in 1845 Simms used the term ‘‘working classes,’’ he meant slaves, and they lay in apposition to ‘‘the wealthy proprietors of the soil.’’ 25 Rather, Southerners spoke of the ‘‘lower classes’’ or ‘‘lower grades’’ or ‘‘lower orders’’ or ‘‘the common people.’’ They were the Paddies who dug ditches for railroads, or the stevedores who lifted cargoes, or the tavern keepers who dispensed whisky, or the men who shifted dung in public stables, or the white prostitutes who wore rouge, or the women who did laundry. The mob extended to those who did not fit in, the women who had bastards, the petty thieves, the destitute widows, the mad, the sick, those who were drunk in public; those who lived in back streets, or in the Poor House, or in the Asylum. The lower classes were those from whom gentility recoiled, those who dressed badly, smelled worse, spoke in obscenities, fought with their bare hands. These were never numerous in the Old South, but their numbers grew with urbanization. Since Southern cities followed the old pattern in being unsegregated by class, rich and poor lived cheek by jowl and saw each other constantly. The genteel person abroad had constantly to keep a handkerchief to a nose. Habits of condescension were a means of moral insulation, when physical isolation was hard to achieve. A complication was that slaves mingled in this landscape; they too (it was thought) smelled, whored, or drank, were illiterate, sullen, or improvident. In cities, blacks might literally intermingle with the poor, in taverns or back allies. In the countryside too were lower classes, differently estranged. They were 23. The only time I have encountered such a phrase in Southern discourse is in Gerard Troost’s 1833–36 notebook, where he remarks: ‘‘We have remarked above that establishments for the preparations of luxuries and fabricks of fine stuffs could only prosper in large towns where the collection of a larg [sic] number of individuals offers many resources which would be unatainable [sic] else were [sic]. But how dearly are those advantages bought by the inconveniencies which every where attend the collection in towns of large numbers of the working class.’’ The next passage discusses Europe. See Gerard Troost Notebook, TSLA. 24. See George Tucker to HBG, 23 November 1860, in HBG Letterbook, 1834–1861, HBG Papers, VHS: ‘‘I now look upon slavery as the condition best suited to our negroes, and that they are as happy as the laboring class of any country.’’ See also Zephaniah Kingsley, A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of Society (1828), reprinted in Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley, ed. Daniel W. Stowell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 41, which in its opening pages speaks of ‘‘the whole seaboard laboring working population,’’ which seems to embrace almost everyone, but then of ‘‘the lower orders, who are exposed to the weather,’’ and of ‘‘the working classes of whites.’’ 25. ‘‘Caloya; or, The Loves of the Driver,’’ in WGS, The Wigwam and the Cabin (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 410.

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those in the hinterland, away from the great commercial zones of Southern agriculture. They lived in coves, in the ‘‘back country,’’ amid clay hills, in swamps, in a quasi-mythical Lubber Land. They fished, lived off their own pigs, made their own candles, were troublingly remote, in need of annexation to a world that might integrate and civilize them. Charles Campbell worked as a young man as a surveyor for a proposed railroad through the region of the Great Dismal Swamp.26 He wrote to his sister in 1834, ‘‘The country here is miserably flat dull & destitute of picturesque. The population is meagre & devoid of intelligence. Have seen few young ladies—there were 3 here last night—one rather comely but all incapable of conversation. If you see one farm—one farmer & one farmhouse—you see all—on the whole line—75 miles—there is nothing of interest.’’ A lady friend firmly advised him back, ‘‘I dont see the use of making a rail road through such a country as that—for from all I can learn the whites are not much better than the blacks.’’ 27 The power of this vision of upper and lower classes meant that the Old South had an impoverished conception of a middle class or middling classes.28 In the South, there were those lower than the higher, higher than the lower, but few who were explicitly middling.29 This omission was not unusual. England in the early modern era had been innocent of the idea. From the 1790s 26. Campbell was the son of John Wilson Campbell, a not-prosperous bookseller in Petersburg, Virginia. Charles was educated at Princeton, studied law with Henry St. George Tucker in Winchester, but gave it up in 1833 to become briefly (as noted above) a surveyor. For several years afterwards, he wandered through the West (Michigan, Illinois, Indiana), mostly teaching school in Alabama and Tennessee. The wife he acquired in Alabama he lost in childbirth in 1837, whereupon he returned to Petersburg; there he spent the rest of his life, taught school, and edited a newspaper called the American Statesman. For this, see S. L. Campbell to J. W. Campbell, 18 April 1827, CC Papers, WM; Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 208; Edward A. Wyatt IV, Charles Campbell: Virginia’s ‘‘Old Mortality,’’ Southern Sketches, no. 5 (Charlottesville: Historical Publishing, 1935). 27. CC to Elizabeth Campbell, 4 January 1834, CC Papers, WM; Lavinia McPheeters to CC, 27 January 1834, CC Papers, WM. 28. For a contrary opinion, see Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 29. It will seem curious to many that a society can get along without a notion of the middle class. But cf. Wrightson, ‘‘‘Sorts of People’ in Tudor and Stuart England,’’ 44: ‘‘The concept of a ‘middle sort of people’ held few attractions as a mode of social description in the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. Perhaps it was usually not needed. Contemporaries were certainly aware enough of the existence of a middle range of people in the social distributions of wealth, status and authority—who else were the yeomanry of the countryside and the citizens and burgesses of the towns? But if such people had an economic and social identity, and in many places an institutional identity (by virtue of their prominent participation in the affairs of manors and parishes, guilds, wards and city companies) it may have been the case that they lacked the distinctive political identity which might have given them greater social structural salience and recognition in Elizabeth and Stuart England.’’

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to the 1820s, it came falteringly into use, but was often refused and thought to be inapt. Much hinged on the response to the French Revolution and, later, on attempts to comprehend the coming of industrialism. Edmund Burke began to argue that a middle class was a bulwark against Jacobin excess, and Karl Marx hazarded that it might be the vanguard of social transformation.30 However, the South, feeling relatively little pressure on its class structure— its Peterloos concerned slavery, not class—felt little need to develop such a conception. It had other terms of reference. By the late 1840s, however, there is some evidence that a quasi-Victorian idea of a middle class was beginning to develop, such a class being defined as urban, respectable, and the chief guarantor of social order and progress.31 But this was much inhibited by the porousness of the distinction between rural and urban in the South, and also by the prevalence of ideas of gentility, which spoke of gentlemen and ladies, and hence bound this proto-bourgeoisie to the South’s protoaristocracy, making them lower and higher parts of the same class. ‘‘In this country every man considers himself a gentleman, no matter what may be his social status,’’ Daniel Hundley was to complain. For, in theory, anyone who showed manners and courtesy might be a gentleman or lady. In practice, the language of gentility was shot through with ranking, for it was a republican society’s way of legitimating distinctions of status. As William Grayson was to note in 1853, the concept of the gentleman was ‘‘the offspring of popular institutions.’’ 32 It illegitimated aristocracy, but retained rank.33 In 1829 Thomas Dew suggested that it was the ‘‘moral disadvantage’’ of manufactures that ‘‘they have a tendency to divide society into two distinct classes, capitalists and labourers, who are separated at too great a distance from each other,’’ and that ‘‘there is no middle class to form the link between the highest and the lowest, and whose example and instruction always operate most beneficially on the latter, and exert, too, a very salutary influence on the former.’’ This was close to the mid-Victorian moral ideal of the middle class, 30. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 31. On this, see Wells, ‘‘Origins of the Southern Middle Class.’’ 32. Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, ed. William J. Cooper Jr. (1860; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 77; William J. Grayson, ‘‘The Character of the Gentleman,’’ SQR n.s. 7 (January 1853): 55. 33. Tocqueville misunderstood this: ‘‘Thus if we follow the mutations in time and place of the English word ‘gentleman’ (a derivative of our gentilhomme), we find its connotation being steadily widened in England as the classes draw nearer to each other and intermingle. In each successive century we find it being applied to men a little lower in the social scale. Next, with the English, it crosses to America. And now in America it is applicable to all male citizens, indiscriminately. Thus its history is the history of democracy itself ’’: Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1856; reprint, London: Collins, 1966), 109.

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but Dew was not describing anything around him in Virginia; indeed, he was arguing that even modern industrial societies lacked such a body of people. In his Southern world, there were other terms of reference. It was customary, for example, to refer to ‘‘plain, humble, unpretending people,’’ a term that might be rural or urban, since it denoted a quality of behavior, though also a modest standard of comfort and diligence.34 In Frederick Porcher’s memory, one referred simply to ‘‘the others,’’ if one was of the planter class. Early in the century, there were marked distinctions of dress: the greater were ‘‘men, whose blue cloth coats, knee breeches, high boots with tassels hanging down the front, distinguished them from the people of the parish in a humbler walk of life and the queue which gently flapped the collar of the coat gave them an appearance of respectability in strong contrast with the closely cropped hair of the other people.’’ 35 These ‘‘other people’’ paid their bills at the local merchant, went to church and sat near the back in the cheaper pews, had a few items in their homes that showed a respect for gentility, not a pianoforte but a few pieces of lace. They might or might not own slaves, but they always owned some property. They were distinguishable because, being respectable, they might mix with their betters, who granted them hospitality, though not without congratulating themselves upon their latitude. In 1854, Edmund Ruffin paid a call on former president John Tyler. He found himself in a party of Tyler, his young wife, an ex-judge, and ‘‘a plain neighbor.’’ ‘‘To a foreigner it would have appeared remarkable, that such perfect equality should have been among us,’’ Ruffin noted with complacency.36 Plain folk were thus valuable proof of the probity of republicanism.37 Such plain folk might become less plain. Two slaves might become eight. The husband still needed no overseer and still worked in the fields, but not with his own hands, or only rarely. A pianoforte might appear in a drawing room, the wife would withdraw from farming and candlemaking, a son might even go to college or consider the ministry. Who were these people? Southern 34. Thomas R. Dew, Lectures on the Restrictive System Delivered to the Senior Political Class of William and Mary College (1829, reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 146; JHT to Nancy Thornwell, 29 May 1851, Anderson and Thornwell Family Papers, SHC. 35. Samuel Gaillard Stoney, ed., ‘‘The Memoirs of Frederick Augustus Porcher: Chapter I: A Rural Homestead,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 44 (April 1943): 80. It is worth noting that Porcher had an unusually developed notion of ‘‘the planter class,’’ references to which were far from common before 1860; his own discussions are, however, mostly postbellum. He was to observe, ‘‘In one respect his [planter’s] influence was fatal; it repressed all industrial pursuits; hence when war came upon us there was no middle and industrial class which in every country constitutes the bone and sinew and nerve of war. Our army was composed of cavaliers, and when it was cut down there was no one to take their place.’’ See Frederick A. Porcher, undated clipping, Frederick Adolphus Porcher Mss, SCHS. 36. Edmund Ruffin to Jane M. Ruffin, 21 March 1854, John Tyler Papers, WM. 37. On the chances for class warfare, see Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 283.

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society did not really have a name for them, except the ‘‘respectable,’’ those with ‘‘respectable pursuits.’’ So Basil Manly, pondering a job in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1821, noted to his father, ‘‘There is a Baptist church in the place composed of few, but very respectable and influential members, who want a preacher.’’ But respect was an amorphous quality that could move around the social scale. For Manly, ‘‘respectable’’ covered much territory: ‘‘There is a Baptist church in the place of 15 to 20 members of respectable & pretty influential well informed people, that is the heads of them—One of them is the Secretary of the Board of Trust & a man of character & business—another is Prest. of the branch Bank a rich and a fine old farmer.’’ 38 Respectability might blend into gentility, the quality of being a gentleman. In theory, anyone who showed manners and courtesy might be a gentleman. In practice, one had to be very well off to earn that respect. One of ‘‘the other people’’ was almost never gentle, one of middling rank might be, a person of the best society more or less had to be, if place was to be honorably sustained. The cynical truth of this some understood, some denied. Francis Lieber affected not to understand. In 1846, he gave a speech, subsequently published, to the students of Miami University in Ohio on ‘‘The Character of the Gentleman.’’ His was an ideal portrait, the stuff of commencement addresses. The gentleman had ‘‘strict honour, self-possession, forbearance, generous as well as refined feelings and polished deportment.’’ He lacked emotions of a particular kind, ‘‘meanness, explosive irascibility and peevish fretfulness,’’ while possessing those of another, ‘‘veracity, courage, both moral and physical, dignity, self-respect, a studious avoidance of offending others, and liberality.’’ Indeed, these qualities were so numerous as to seem improbable to someone less enchanted than Lieber. William Grayson, reviewing an enlarged edition of this disquisition, smiled at Lieber’s earnestness. There was, after all, scarcely a principle ascribed to this cardboard figure uncontradicted by experience. What was honor? ‘‘Nothing is more common, both here and in Europe, than for men of honour to contract debts without intending to pay for them.’’ Veracity? There were ‘‘the falsehoods of gallantry, or courtly flattery, or intrigue, or diplomacy, [which] are sometimes matters of triumph with honourable men.’’ Morality? ‘‘Swearing, gambling, drinking, and libertinism, are not incompatible with the character of a man of honour.’’ Religion and peace? Gentlemen took to the field ‘‘to shoot one’s neighbour . . . in the ceremonious form of a regular duel.’’ Courtesy? A gentleman was ‘‘very often arrogant, insolent, and overbearing . . . as destitute of manners as of morals.’’ So what was honor? As William Paley had observed, it was the obser38. BM to John Basil Manly, 9 July 1821, and BM to Iveson Brookes, 25 July 1821, Manly Family Papers, UA.

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vance of ‘‘the conventional code by which men of the world seek to regulate their conduct.’’ The acknowledged gentleman revolved around, rather than embodied, this Protean quality. After all, as Paley had been careful to say, these were ‘‘men of the world.’’ One was supposed to do one’s best, but lapses did not disqualify, if here and there a respectable number of these demands were met and a few were not. Gentlemen, who ratified each other’s standing, understood this laxity. Honor understood the fallibilities of dishonor.39 So the Southern social structure had its peculiarities, its own language, though nothing that a stranger who had been in London or Boston or Cincinnati would have found unintelligible. As Hugh Legaré observed of the modern world, ‘‘When we read a foreign author of our own day, we occasionally, indeed, remark differences in taste, in character and customs; but, in general, we find ourselves en pays de connaissance.’’ 40 Still, things were afoot in Friedrich Engels’s Manchester that were barely visible from the ground of Alabama. Laboring classes were becoming proletariats, middling ranks were becoming a middle class, ‘‘capitalists’’ were being freshly described. European books and articles came into Southern culture, which, as a result, sometimes saw itself with foreign eyes. The new discipline of political economy, written in the wynds of Edinburgh, or the arrondisements of Paris, or the cloisters of a Cambridge college, was seeking to make sense of society and thereby came to reify concepts of class even for societies whom Smith, Sismondi, and Malthus never saw and little imagined. Indeed, it was in commentaries on such writings that Southerners came closest to the new view of the matter. James Harvey Smith in 1829, in a review of the second edition of Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population (1827), spoke freely of capital and labor, and of British capitalists as a unit, and of the dangers of the new order. He wrote that, even amid modern prosperity, ‘‘the capitalists find themselves around the crater of a boiling volcano.’’ However powerful in commerce, they had to ‘‘surround themselves with an armed force to protect their persons and property from the lawless violence of licentious mobs, from the very power they must employ to produce their wealth, and to guard against those deeper convulsions . . . which are the more dangerous, because they proceed from misery, hopeless and irremediable.’’ But Smith’s language was mixed. There were ‘‘capitalists,’’ but not yet capitalism; there were mobs, but also ‘‘labouring classes.’’ When Samuel Prioleau reviewed a modern French memoir in 1830, he noted the emerging theory that the French Revolution had something to do with the frustrated 39. FL, The Character of the Gentleman: An Address to the Students of Miami University, Ohio, on the Evening before Commencement Day, in the Month of August, 1846 (Cincinnati: J. A. James, 1846), 6–7; Grayson, ‘‘The Gentleman,’’ 58–59. 40. HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ 39.

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emergence of a middling sort: ‘‘The middle rank of society had arisen from the lower, and shared in their disabilities; to them the gates of honour were closed, and though they gradually had become intelligent and wealthy, their political condition remained the same.’’ Thomas Cooper, not surprisingly, thought most in these terms. Indeed, he had been one of the English pioneers in imagining a middle class, and as early as 1792 when replying to Burke, had written of ‘‘the middling classes.’’ During his South Carolinian days, in a commentary on the social history of France and England between 1660 and 1789, he deprecated an author’s failure to understand the complexity of modern social structure: ‘‘The information here presented, of the modes of thinking, the modes of living, the dress, the habits and manners of the great mass of society, from the class of wealthy men of leisure, without title, at the upper end of the scale, to the respectable and opulent mechanic at the lower end—comprehending fully what may be called the middle classes—is very meagre. . . . [T]he separation of the middle classes in England from those of titular dignity, until after the French revolution, was marked and complete; nor was there any obliteration of the line that separated in France the bourgeoisie from the titled noblesse, even of the most inferior orders.’’ 41 But here, too, language was mixed. When using ‘‘bourgeoisie,’’ Cooper intended its early modern French meaning, as dramatized in Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, a work well known to Southerners.42 On the other hand, when speaking of ‘‘the middle classes,’’ Cooper edged very close to the Victorian definition of a class distinguished by ‘‘talent, knowledge, virtue and industry.’’ ‘‘The middle classes every where,’’ he announced, ‘‘are industrious, worthy, honest, conjugal people. It is their interest, upon the whole, to be so.’’ 43 But this, too, had been how he had seen the matter in the 1790s, in Manchester. Few Southerners, in fact, ever wrote in a concerted way about social structure. They produced reams about race, gender, politics, and religion, but class did not often seem worth a sustained analysis. The great exception was Daniel R. Hundley, who published in 1860 a book called Social Relations in Our Southern States. Hundley himself is a figure of some obscurity. It is known that he was born in northern Alabama in 1832 to a Virginian father called John 41. James Hervey Smith, ‘‘Sismondi’s Political Economy,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 270; Samuel Prioleau, ‘‘Memoires d’un Pair de France,’’ SR 6 (August 1830): 64; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 79–80; TC, ‘‘Social Life in England and France,’’ SR 6 (November 1830): 380. 42. Cf. HSL, ‘‘German Diaries,’’ in All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse in the Old South, ed. Michael O’Brien (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), 115; HSL, ‘‘Roman Literature,’’ SR 1 (May 1828): 385–86; Basil Gildersleeve, ‘‘Necessity of the Classics,’’ SQR n.s. 10 ( July 1854): 167; WBH to the President of the United States [ John Quincy Adams], 12 April 1828, WBH Papers, DU. 43. TC, ‘‘Distribution of Wealth,’’ SR 8 (November 1831): 187; TC, ‘‘Social Life,’’ 408.

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who was a farmer, a Baptist minister, and a physician. His mother, Malinda Robinson, was also a Virginian. In 1850 the son graduated from Bacon College in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, a minor Baptist college. He studied law for a year at the University of Virginia, then for another at Harvard, which awarded him the LL.B. in 1853. He married a Virginian cousin, Mary Ann Hundley, whose father, Elisha, had business interests in Chicago, to which the sonin-law migrated. Little is known of what he did there, except mishandling his father-in-law’s affairs and supporting Democrats like Stephen Douglas. When war broke out, he joined the 31st Alabama Infantry, saw much action, was captured, and after the war published a book about his hungry prison experiences. It seems he went back to live on the family land in Alabama, practiced a little law and journalism in Huntsville, was much ill, and died in 1899. His later years seem to have been bitter, a mood very far from the jaunty good humor of his antebellum book.44 That Social Relations is a satire—somewhat in the mode of Longstreet, Hooper, and Baldwin—has led to some misunderstanding. It is a very funny book, full of nice, telling stories that observe the texture of the Southern social landscape. But Hundley intended a serious analysis, however clothed in amusement. Hundley divided the Southern world into eight classes, all of them defined by males: Gentlemen, the Middle Classes, Southern Yankees, Cotton Snobs, Southern Yeomen, Southern Bullies, Poor White Trash, and Negro Slaves. Several of Hundley’s categories—middle classes, Southern Yankees, yeomen, bullies—were very little to be found in antebellum discourse.45 ‘‘Poor white trash’’ was very unusual, though less abrupt versions occur in the late antebellum years when rapid economic growth exacerbated social tensions; thus, Hore Browse Trist wrote in 1856 of ‘‘the poor white man,’’ and Mary Ellen Hedrick in the same year spoke of ‘‘the poor white folks.’’ At one level, this means that Hundley is a very unreliable guide to how antebellum Southerners saw their world. At another, it suggests that contemporary usage was so unfixed that categories might be invented, ad libitum, in an attempt to freeze the fluidity of things. Hundley himself, beginning his book, was troubled by this, for he wrote of the South: ‘‘Spreading over a vast area of country, and boasting but few large cities or great commercial centres, the different phases 44. William J. Cooper, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Hundley, Social Relations, xiii–xxiv. 45. The pertinence of the terms ‘‘yeoman’’ and ‘‘yeomanry,’’ though abundantly used in modern historical literature, has modest sanction from antebellum sources, though they were not unknown. Calhoun in 1814, for example, observed of the Republican Party that ‘‘it is our boast that the yeomanry, the substantial part of our population, are on that side of the question to which we belong.’’ See ‘‘Remarks on the Form of Subscription to the Bank,’’ 21 November 1814, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Robert L. Meriwether et al., 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959–2003), 1:269.

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presented by Southern society are almost as various as the extent of her territory is diversified.’’ 46 But he was acutely aware that the South had its own way of thinking about these matters, that books about the South by strangers were unhelpful. Hundley’s categories fell, more or less, into pairs, in which one was bad, another good.47 In the upper reaches of wealth, there was the Gentleman; he was shadowed by the parvenu Cotton Snob. In the middling, there were the good middle classes and the crass Southern Yankees. At the bottom, there were worthy yeomen and (here things doubled up), bad bullies and poor white trash. Beyond the bottom were the slaves, an undivided mass with almost no good qualities. What distinguished these pairs were morals and manners, ancestry and physiognomy, issues profoundly connected in his imagination.48 For Hundley, virtue was not arrogated exclusively to any one class. This judgment distinguished him from those nineteenth-century social commentators who exalted the virtue of the middle class and complained about the upper and working classes, or, for that matter, those socialists who exalted the working and damned the middle and upper class. For Hundley, there was a line, sweeping vertically downwards in society, itself horizontally segmented, which divided the moral from the immoral. Hence he was remarkably uninterested in class antagonism; his classes sat next to each other, with a curious detachment. In this, he sat squarely in an American tradition; Jacksonians especially had argued that one might have classes, without class warfare. In Hundley’s account, the Gentleman had virtuous qualities: grace, ease, family pride, honesty, dutifulness, dignity; he was ‘‘bold, self-reliant, conscientious.’’ But he had these qualities for physical reasons. He had ‘‘pedigree,’’ he was ‘‘of good stock,’’ usually aristocratic. In Virginia, his ancestors were Cavaliers, ‘‘after whom succeeded the French Huguenots and Scotch Jacobites’’; in Maryland, he came from the retainers of Lord Baltimore; in South Carolina, from ‘‘the better class’’ of Huguenots; in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, from ‘‘chiefly Spanish Dons and French Catholics.’’ Being of good stock, like a horse, the gentleman had a ‘‘faultless physical development.’’ Hundley was very specific about this, for he was extraordinarily sensitive to 46. Hore Browse Trist to Bringier Trist, 11 June 1856, individual item, HNOC; Mary Ellen Hedrick to Benjamin S. Hedrick, 26 November 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC; Hundley, Social Relations, 9. 47. John Shelton Reed, Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy: Native White Social Types (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 24–47, however, sees them as falling roughly into triples, with each embodying a hero, a villain, and a fool. I find this unpersuasive, partly because Reed wishes to use Hundley as a starting point for analyzing modern Southern social types, for which purpose I doubt Hundley’s value. 48. Cf. Reed, Southern Folk, 25: ‘‘If we can ignore Hundley’s theories about the genealogies of these different groups (and I think we can). . . .’’

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the physical, to bodies, smells, gestures: it is one reason he was an accomplished satirist. So, ‘‘[The gentleman’s] average height is about six feet, yet he is rarely gawky in his movements, or in the least clumsily put together; and his entire physique conveys to the mind an impression of firmness united to flexibility.’’ Such a body explained its usage, a good seat when riding, a gift for field sports, a ‘‘natural dignity of manner.’’ 49 The Cotton Snob, by contrast, was worse off for ancestry, manners, and body. Instead of being descended from aristocrats, he was the child of rural parents marked by ‘‘penuriousness and ignorance.’’ He was ill educated, crudely imitative of manners which he did not understand; he drank, whored, and gambled too much; he talked crudely of ‘‘my niggers,’’ which no gentleman would; he went in for vulgar display, ‘‘costly houses, splendid furniture, rich plate, magnificent dresses, dazzling jewelry’’; he affected ostentatious carriages with ‘‘obsequious footmen and outriders.’’ Compared to the gentleman, the Snob was a shrunken, pale thing, degenerated by nature and debauchery. He reminded Hundley of ‘‘those pretty little coxcombs to be seen in all our large cities—those degenerate sons,’’ with ‘‘dwarfish dimensions.’’ 50 First of the second pair were ‘‘the middle classes.’’ Hundley was very conscious that, in adopting this phrase, he was violating how Southerners themselves saw the matter, how they muddled together the upper class qualities of the gentleman with the middling qualities of respectability: ‘‘We shall have to tread rather gingerly, for fear we squelch some neighbor’s corns, owing to the false and ridiculous notions of respectability, which unfortunately prevail throughout the whole extent of the United States. In this country every man considers himself a gentleman, no matter what may be his social status.’’ 51 This trait—a member of the middle classes thinking himself a gentleman— Hundley found extremely irritating, because it did not fit his analysis. ‘‘In other countries,’’ he protested, ‘‘such individualism together with the great mass of well-to-do citizens of less note and wealth, constitute what are called the middle classes.’’ In this, other countries were being very sensible, in thus calling ‘‘a stone a stone.’’ 52 These middling sorts were plural, not singular, ‘‘classes,’’ not a ‘‘class’’: ‘‘They belong to many different callings, professions, and trades . . . among 49. Hundley, Social Relations, 63, 27, 28, 70. 50. Ibid., 164, 170–75. 51. Ibid., 77. One should note, as an aside, that Hundley is as much a critique of the American social structure as of the Southern. Writing in Chicago, he was acutely aware of the comparative dimension; what is special to the South, what is shared with other Americans, what is peculiar to the North. His Cotton Snob, for example, is called only a regional variant of a national phenomenon: ibid., 164. 52. Ibid., 79.

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them farmers, planters, traders, store-keepers, artisans, mechanics, a few manufacturers, a goodly number of country school-teachers, and a host of half-fledged country lawyers and doctors, parsons and the like.’’ Most were agricultural, but many were urban. If rural, a middle class person ‘‘is usually a slaveholder, owning from five to fifty negroes (sometimes more,) and generally looks after their management himself. If he does employ an overseer, the latter habitually eats at the table of his employer, and in many cases it is difficult to distinguish employer from employé, so similar are they in every respect—dress, manners, speech, and tout ensemble.’’ If urban, he might be a clerk or a storekeeper, who kept on his shelves ‘‘a miscellaneous assortment of goods, groceries, hardware, cutlery, hats, caps, shoes, agricultural implements, and, in fine, almost any thing you can name.’’ These might own no slaves at all, or only a few.53 They might be humble mechanics, ‘‘carriagemakers, leather-dressers, harness-makers, hatters, cabinet-makers, cobblers, iron-workers, engine-builders, trunk-manufacturers.’’ Or they might be manufacturers, ‘‘who bear a strong family resemblance to the various classes of storekeepers, and even sometimes to the more refined and intelligent city merchants, who are pretty much the same in the south that they are in the North.’’ Being plural, the middle classes might resent one another; the storekeeper might look down on the artisan or think the farmer a clod.54 As with Gentlemen and Cotton Snobs, the middle classes had ancestry, moral qualities, and physiognomy: ‘‘In the remote times of English history, their ancestors were, doubtless, sturdy Saxon thanes and franklins, freemen and landholders, but boasting no alliance with baronial or ducal houses; plain men, indeed, ignorant of courts and bearing no knightly insignia, but famous for skill with the cross-bow and the old English pike.’’ 55 Oppressed by the Normans, then by Cavaliers and Anglicans, they sought asylum in America. There they were joined by their equivalents, ‘‘the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, the daring Covenanters of Auld Reekie, and the English Baptists who settled in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, as well as the humbler classes of Huguenots.’’ 56 Their posterity, ‘‘far outnumbering the descendants of the Cavaliers, and greater in numbers indeed, than any other class of whites in the whole South,’’ were much responsible for the place’s material advancement, ‘‘owing to their industrious and frugal habits, the general pureness of 53. Ibid., 104, 80, 84–85, 101, 104. 54. Ibid., 120, 117–18. 55. Ibid., 81. It is interesting that here Hundley flows over in a description of what, in English society, were regarded as yeomen, that is, those who bore the cross-bow and the pike, and were organized into companies of yeomen. 56. Ibid., 82. In Hundley’s account, the Huguenots (like the English) have their class differentiations; other ethnic groups seem to be singular.

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their morals, and their strict religious principles.’’ In physical appearance, the ‘‘middle-class planter’’ was ‘‘of all sizes, from the most diminutive and bandylegged runt, to the coarse, large-featured, awkward, and bony seven-footer; but most usually is above medium size, with broad shoulders, and angular outline in general.’’ He was less polished and graceful than the Gentleman, but blunter, ‘‘bold and open’’ almost to the edge of boorishness.57 The evil twin of the middle class Southerner was the Southern Yankee. As Hundley saw it, he was not a Northerner transplanted to the South, but a Southerner who shared the immoral qualities familiarly associated with the Yankee, ‘‘a shrewd, sharp, chaffering, oily-tongued, soft-sawdering, inquisitive, money-making, money-saving, and money-worshipping individual.’’ Though such people were a national phenomenon, the Southern version existed against the grain, because the Southern climate discouraged the creation of such people: ‘‘the very air he breathes excites to warm-heartedness, relaxing the cold fist of more Northern latitudes into the proverbially open palm of the generous-hearted South.’’ And they were a new thing, unknown before the last fifty years, which helped to explain why Hundley had no genealogy for them, no medieval English antecedents; they were but the middle classes, corrupted. Hundley was unsure why they had gone to the bad, though he hazarded that the invention of the cotton gin and the Louisiana Purchase had released acquisitiveness by bestowing ‘‘sudden wealth,’’ 58 and he believed that the Southern Yankee—cruel, conscienceless, irreligious, inhumane, cold to his family—flourished most in the Gulf states, least in the border states. In the former place he lived crudely, sometimes not unlike his own slaves, in a log cabin.59 He speculated like a Wall Street trader, unscrupulously, dishonestly. He might be a storekeeper, but a cheating one, who drove a hard bargain for credit given. He might, worse, be a slave trader, ‘‘preéminent in villainy and a greedy love of filthy lucre . . . in every respect as unconscionable a dog of a Southern Shylock as ever drank raw brandy by the glassful, or chewed Virginia tobacco, or used New-England cowskins to lacerate the back of a slave.’’ Such a person ‘‘is, outwardly, a coarse ill-bred person, provincial in speech and manners, with a cross-looking phiz, a whisky-tinctured nose, cold hardlooking eyes, a dirty tobacco-stained mouth, and shabby dress.’’ In Georgia, ‘‘they grow to enormous size, and seldom stand under six feet in their stock57. Ibid., 82, 84. 58. Ibid., 130, 131. 59. Hundley is anxious, however, not to disparage the log cabin. Inconsistently, he insists that ‘‘you will find in many a log cabin in all the South-western States as perfect gentlemen— gentlemen of the first breeding and education—as in most of the mansions on Fifth Avenue’’: ibid., 135.

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ings, often, indeed, reaching six feet and a half . . . muscular, heavy-jawed, beetle-browed, and possessed of indomitable energy.’’ 60 Lower down the scale came ‘‘the common people,’’ whom Hundley was disposed to praise as hard-working and honest. Among these the Yeomen were most deserving, people ‘‘with hearts of oak and thews of steel, crouching to no man and fearing no danger.’’ These were ‘‘the industrious poor whites of the South.’’ Hundley was insistent on their poverty—they were ‘‘nearly always poor’’—though, as with the Gentleman, he was expansive about what this might mean, to the point of its meaning very little: ‘‘As a general thing they own no slaves; and even in case they do, the wealthiest of them rarely possess more than from ten to fifteen.’’ They were notoriously lenient masters, who worked alongside their slaves in the fields. Indeed, Hundley saw comity between the races as a defining characteristic. In North Carolina, ‘‘you will frequently see black and white, slave and freeman, camping out together, living sometimes in the same tent or temporary pine-pole cabin; drinking, the darkeys always after mas’r, out of the same tin dipper or long-handled gourd their home-distilled apple brandy; dining on the same homely but substantial fare, and sharing one bed in common, videlicet, the cabin floor.’’ In the evening, they sing together around the campfire ‘‘Ole Virginny reels.’’ 61 Yeomen were so ‘‘thorough English in fact, in both physical heartiness and dogged perseverance,’’ that they were ‘‘seldom troubled with dyspepsia, or melancholy, or discontent with his humble lot—evils which in most cases have their origin in a disordered stomach.’’ However, beyond this, Hundley had no specific genealogy for them, since he had already allocated the English yeoman as ancestors for the middle class Southerner. Still, the Southern yeoman was not unlike the English version, for the former was a doughty sportsman and able soldier, the backbone of American armies at King’s Mountain, New Orleans, Buena Vista, and seemed to wield the rifle as the bow was used at Agincourt. In morals, he was like a middle class person, as intelligent and knowledgeable about public affairs but poorer in means and less educated, as religious but evangelical. Curiously, Hundley had kind if ambivalent things to say about overseers, who he believed were furnished from the yeoman class. True, some were drunk, libertine, and brutal. But others of this ‘‘very useful and important class of persons’’ were ‘‘men of sterling worth and incorruptible integrity—good citizens, intelligent managers, kind disciplinarians, and even sometimes . . . gentlemanly instincts, though but little polished in speech and manners.’’ Socially, yeomen were gregarious, hospi60. Ibid., 139–40, 157. 61. Ibid., 192, 195–97.

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table, communal in their corn-huskings and, for women, ‘‘the everlasting quilting.’’ 62 For poorer whites, Hundley concluded with two classes of villains, one urban, the other rural. The first were the Bullies, ‘‘whose chief delight is to hang around the doors of village groggeries and tavern taprooms,’’ and to gamble on vulgar sports. In cities, in the ‘‘gilded saloon, or tempting bar, or polka-free-concert-and-free-cyprian Bier Keller, or reeking groggery,’’ were to be found ‘‘wharf-rats, thieves, burglars, pimps, pickpockets, policemen, ward politicians, free negroes, and (alas! alas!) those Pariahs of our civilized society, those poor outcast wantons, whose miserable lives of crime and blasphemy, of lust and sottishness, are so harrowing to every honest man’s soul to contemplate.’’ This seems to be more a description of Chicago, where Hundley was writing his book, than of Macon, though it might pass for an image of New Orleans or Charleston. In fact, Hundley concentrated on the mini-version of this world, ‘‘the village groggeries’’ and their keepers, who sponsored their own share of ‘‘villainy and soul-murder,’’ but catered little to ‘‘pimps, thieves, pickpockets, degraded females.’’ The Bully, too, had a physiognomy: matted red hair, coarse but luxuriant beard, foul breath, and obscene speech. For this, Hundley offered the faint suggestion of an ethnic origin: this hair was said to be ‘‘of the Saxon peculiarity, that is, either red, or flaxen, or carrot-colored, or sandy,’’ but he did not develop the idea.63 The Bully’s country cousin was the ‘‘poor white trash’’ who did have an origin, the peasants of medieval Europe, who became the ‘‘shiftless prolétaires and starving sans culottes’’ of more modern times, when serfdom was abolished. They came to America as convicts, paupers, and indentured servants, and dispersed into the rural corners of the South, to ‘‘hilly and mountainous regions’’ where they acquired various opprobrious names: in the Southwest, they were ‘‘Squatters’’; in the Carolinas and Georgia, ‘‘Crackers or Sandhillers’’; in Virginia, ‘‘Rag Tag and Bob-Tail’’; in Tennessee, ‘‘People in the Barrens’’; ‘‘but everywhere, Poor White Trash, a name said to have originated with the slaves, who look upon themselves as much better off than all ‘po’ white folks’ whatever.’’ Like the Bully, their appearance was ‘‘lank, lean, angular, and bony, with flaming red, or flaxen, or sandy, or carroty-colored, sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.’’ If anything, the women ‘‘after the first freshness of their youth is lost,’’ were worse than the men. Their religion was degraded into superstition, they ‘‘being firm believers in witches and hob-goblins,’’ fortune 62. Ibid., 203, 216. 63. Ibid., 226, 289.

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telling, and coffee grounds. Like the Bully, they drank too much, but they were lazy, inert, minimal.64 Hundley ended with the slaves. He made some attempt to describe their behavior and beliefs, which were marked by superstition, a propensity for poisoning, a taste for hunting possum, a variety of religious and love songs, an abundance of festivals, and an indifference to freedom. But all this was done carelessly, with little of the intimate verve with which he described his whites. Hundley was more interested in refuting and complaining about abolitionists. But he did talk a good deal about the slaves’ origin in Africa, the ubiquity of its indigenous slave trade, and quoted David Livingstone at length about the Bechuanas. This paralleled his discussions of Saxon thanes and the like for his European migrants, though he was far more detailed on Africa, more ethnographic. Oddly, what he did not parallel was any consideration of African physiognomy, doubtless because he assumed that everyone knew. This silence obscures one of the driving forces of Hundley’s analysis. By considering whites and blacks together as social types, the established proposition that slaves were explained by origin and appearance doubtless accelerated a tendency to explain whites similarly, though it will be evident that he could not consistently find the right physiognomies or ancestries for his white social types.65 This respect for the body, for the ancestral, marks a gulf between Hundley’s time and our own. Modern sociologists and historians see social behavior as contextual. Biology is little, because we have learned to fear those for whom it is much. Not knowing of Auschwitz, Hundley, though he lovingly described behavior, did not usually explain society by circumstances but by physique. At one point, when he had been invoking the horrors of the French Revolution, he asked, ‘‘Why the strikes, trades-unions, socialist and communistic tendencies of the times?’’ Groping, he offered the following explanation, while being conscious that there were others ‘‘of a contrary mind.’’ ‘‘There is a great deal in blood. Who ever yet knew a Godolphin that was sired by a miserable scrub? or who ever yet saw an athletic, healthy human being, standing six feet in his stockings, who was the off-spring of runtish forefathers, or of wheezy, asthmatic, and consumptive parents? And do you suppose, Sir, or Madam, the heroes of our Revolutionary history ever would or could have sprung from the loins of a dissolute aristocracy on the one hand, or a down-trodden and servile race of villeins on the other?’’ 66 64. Ibid., 251, 258, 257, 264. 65. Ibid., 284–367. 66. Ibid., 251–52.

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This language of blood, which has now dwindled to unfelt metaphor, was vivid to Southerners; it explained many things. William Cabell Rives once spoke of Judge Pendleton as a man of imposing dignity and ‘‘good blood.’’ James Warley Miles wondered to Lieber, when discussing Napoleon III, ‘‘Does not Keltic blood predominate in the French? If so,—they must be governed by a strong hand; it is a want which their instincts require and will have, in some shape or other.’’ In the same vein, grumbling from his ministerial post in Turin, John Moncure Daniel hazarded that ‘‘all the Latin Races of Europe’’ have no conception of individual right: ‘‘They dont grasp our idea at all— can’t do it—tisn’t in the blood.’’ So Grigsby saw people on his Southern travels: ‘‘When I see a handsome Carolinian, I am apt to enquire if he thinks he has any Scotch blood in his veins.’’ So Johnson Jones Hooper hated Northerners: ‘‘I hate them instinctively—I hate the race and the blood from which they spring—from Oliver Cromwell down to Ward Beecher, I regard them as one of God’s punishments for a sinful world.’’ 67 Hundley’s question, ‘‘Who ever yet knew a Godolphin that was sired by a miserable scrub?’’ offers a partial explanation for this instinct. The South was a culture that bred horses and studied pedigrees, for both stallions and mares; this was culture that examined a slave’s teeth when buying. Blood was a part of class understanding. In the multifarious categories of social groups, it was not clear that those who gave much of their lives to refining and expressing thought yet constituted a separable group, designated by themselves or others. The phrase ‘‘intellectuals’’ did not yet exist, nor ‘‘the intelligentsia.’’ But the noun ‘‘intellect’’ and the adjective ‘‘intellectual’’ did. By the late eighteenth century, the adjective denoted a quality roughly equivalent to ‘‘rational’’ or ‘‘pertaining to the understanding’’; it was often used by those influenced by the psychological categories of Scottish commonsense philosophy. Thus Hugh Blair Grigsby might write in his diary for 1828 that a debating society was ‘‘well designed to whet the intellect and amuse the fancy of those who composed it,’’ and thereby he distinguished separable components of the mind. Professions thought peculiarly to require rationality, especially the law or the academy, were distinguished by a larger admixture of such intellect. By extension, a country might have an intellect, that is, a significant quality of rationality in the conduct and comprehension of its affairs. Frederick Grimke in 1838 asked Hugh Legaré about matters of the mind in Germany and, in so doing, showed 67. William Cabell Rives to John Esten Cooke, 22 June 1857, John Esten Cooke Papers, LC; JWM to FL, undated (folder suggests ca. 1853) FL Papers, HEH; John Moncure Daniel to W. W. Crump, 24 January 1855, John Moncure Daniel Papers, VHS; HBG to David L. Swain, 20 August 1857, David L. Swain Papers, SHC; Johnson Jones Hooper to John DeBerniere Hooper, 25 December 1860, John DeBerniere Hooper Papers, SHC.

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the way his contemporaries thought about intellect: ‘‘Is Germany from top to bottom, devoted to philosophical speculation. And what estimate have you been able to place upon the intellect of that country. What is the reputation to which Kant is entitled; whether he should be classed with Aristotle, as a really profound thinker, or with Baron Swedenborg as a dreamer, is a problem which does not seem to be settled.’’ The South being increasingly regarded as a cultural nation, it too might have such an intellectual quotient. So in October 1847, a writer in the Southern Quarterly Review spoke of ‘‘the activity of Southern intellect.’’ In 1858 James Johnston Pettigrew, in the approved Romantic manner, could say that ‘‘the intellect of the south is like its land.’’ 68 It became arguable that intellect mattered in the directing of society. In 1854, for example, Oscar Lieber observed to his father that graduates of the South Carolina College were ‘‘above the average of intellect of the country,’’ a good thing since such graduates would come to form the state’s elite. Similarly, in 1859 Basil Manly argued that cities were peculiarly important because in them congregated ‘‘more of the living, controlling intellect of the land.’’ 69 Hence there were increasingly frequent attempts to understand the characteristic pattern of Southern intellect, to sketch a class differentiation that spoke about readers and authors. In 1849, Calvin H. Wiley was aware of the ‘‘sedate, moral & reading class of citizens.’’ The assumption grew of the value of a cultured class, which might be an influence upon a world necessarily segmented. Basil Manly in 1850, at least, believed that ‘‘there must be a learned class—and that the separation of men into permanent classes is a necessity of our being which no possible state of the diffusion of knowledge can countervail.’’ 70 In later years Southerners came to insist that the Old South had despised the thinker. The cases of William Gilmore Simms and Edgar Allan Poe were often adduced as evidence. And it is true that both of these suffered indignities from the snobbish. Yet they suffered, less for being writers, more for being socially awkward. Poe drank too much and tended to fall on the floor. Simms talked too much, not always with as much knowledge as impetus, which was a fault of his writing too. Alexander Baron Williman once told Mitchell King of a dinner party for Simms in Norfolk in 1857, where Simms and G. P. R. James contested volubilities: Simms was ‘‘almost as great a talker 68. Entry for 22 November 1828, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; Frederick Grimke to HSL, 18 May 1838, HSL Papers in the Harry L. and Mary K. Dalton Collection, DU; ‘‘Critical Notices—Presbyterian Review,’’ SQR 12 (October 1847): 535; James Johnston Pettigrew to James C. Johnston, 3 June 1858, Hayes Collection, SHC. 69. Oscar Lieber to FL, undated (folder suggests 1854), FL Papers, HEH; BM Jr. to Charles Manly, 7 January 1859, Manly Family Papers, UA. 70. Calvin H. Wiley to Griffith John McRee, 2 March 1849, Griffith John McRee Papers, SHC; BM to BM Jr., 11 June 1850, Manly Family Papers, UA.

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as our . . . man, so you may suppose that a dinner table entertainement where both were present resulted in a large flow of words.’’ Nathaniel Russell Middleton, two years later, witnessed a similar scene at dinner: ‘‘Simms was the spokesman and it was most amusing, right constantly in theory he was all wrong in facts, and as John & Williams [Middleton] are always posted up in the latter and are very apt to be out of the way in the former, there was continually a collision and misunderstanding, he driving at one thing, and they stumbling over another. . . . I was amused at the collision between his overwhelming and unconscious coarseness and Mrs. M’s unconquerable fastidiousness.’’ 71 In general, there was nothing vulgar about being a writer; it was a fairly neutral condition, which neither gave nor detracted from status. Hugh Legaré was no less acceptable or unacceptable for being an essayist, or Louisa McCord for being a poet; no one would drop them from a dinner party or decline to marry off a daughter or son to them, because they had published. Simms was of the party at Williams Middleton’s for two reasons: he was a plantation owner of some means, but also a man of letters, which made him of interest, though perhaps of no more interest than if he had been a politician (which he was briefly) or a preacher or a racehorse owner. That is, writers were not accorded a special, exemplary social standing. The modern notion that writers are a breed apart, usefully unaccountable to ordinary behaviors, little existed in the Old South, though it was beginning to be available; they admired and knew about Coleridge, after all. Simms himself especially knew that men of letters, elsewhere, were often thought to be marked by genius, the reputation for which might earn them the delicious sensualities of being lionized. The fleeting meteoric passage of Charles Dickens through Virginia alone displayed the mouth-watering prospect. But Byron, the exemplum, was a suspect model and Hugh Legaré, if with complicated regret, had delivered the verdict of his culture by insisting that Walter Scott was a genius, too, but also a gentleman, admirable in his probity and regularity of habits.72 So, if a writer was anything socially, he or she was usually supposed to be a gentleman or lady. Much thought was given to this business of being gentlemanly, since it was thought that to be learned and thoughtful required qualities that overlapped with gentility. Not all gentlemen were intellectual; indeed, as Southern writers did not tire of complaining, far too few were. Porcher remembered these deficiencies of his childhood home: ‘‘Whatever might be the character of the boy at school or college, however aspiring there 71. Alexander Baron Williman to MK, 28 February 1857, MK Papers, SHC; Nathaniel Russell Middleton to Anna Elizabeth DeWolf Middleton, 1 June 1859, Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, CC. 72. HSL, ‘‘Lord Byron’s Character and Writings,’’ SR 5 (May 1830): 465–66.

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after literary honours, as soon as he reached the charmed circle of Pineville he laid aside his books and his pen, he sought reputation only as a planter; he fostered and cultivated a taste for field sports; and seemed desirous of forgetting and of having forgotten that he had ever been greedy of academic honours.’’ 73 And to be intellectual and ladylike was often thought to be antithetical. Nonetheless a thinker was believed to need qualities also necessary for gentility, so it was common to see gentility adduced as evidence of intellectuality, and vice-versa. When Francis Lieber grieved, in a letter to Charles Sumner, for the death of Henry Junius Nott, he wrote: ‘‘Only so much I will say, that I stood nearer to Nott than to any other professor, that with him alone I had what began to approach to intimacy. He had been long in Europe, he was a gentleman, he had read much—we could chat with each other.’’ In 1853, John Pendleton Kennedy wrote a letter of introduction to Washington Irving for the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, John R. Thompson, whom he described as ‘‘a very worthy gentleman, and a man of fine literary talent and acquirement.’’ Recommendations, of course, ritually invoked gentility, whether written by Northerners or Southerners. Indeed it was an international standard, ‘‘a kind of society throughout the world, like that of Free-masonry or Odd-fellowship,’’ as Grayson précised Lieber’s description. Edward Everett of Boston introduced Thomas Dew of Williamsburg to William Whewell of Trinity College, Cambridge, as ‘‘a writer of celebrity in this Country & well known to me by reputation as a gentleman of distinguished talent.’’ But, among themselves, Southerners used the same language. ‘‘We found Mr. Fitzhugh, as we anticipated, a genuine Virginia gentleman; conservative, talented, refind [sic],’’ a visitor to Port Royal asserted. This person was ‘‘a gentleman of science,’’ that one ‘‘a gentleman of talent and fine attainments.’’ Beverley Tucker was ‘‘the quintessence of a Virginia gentleman,’’ who was notable for ‘‘chaste, interesting and amusing conversation.’’ George Frederick Holmes was a ‘‘gentleman and scholar,’’ a person of ‘‘manly intellect and sound scholarship, as well as experience and true judgement.’’ 74 Learning did not automatically confer gentility; these were overlapping, not identical categories. A college professor might be a gentleman, and it 73. Samuel Gaillard Stoney, ed., ‘‘The Memoirs of Frederick Adolphus Porcher: Chapter IV: Reminiscences of Persons,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 45 (April 1944): 80. 74. FL to Charles Sumner, 23 October 1837, FL Papers, HEH; JPK to Washington Irving, 22 September 1853, JPK Papers, PLB; Edward Everett to William Whewell, 20 May 1846, Dew Family Mss, WM; handwritten copy of article or letter from New York Times, 1856, copied by a granddaughter (Mrs. Charlie W. Bapty), George Fitzhugh Tribute, SHC; Henry Ruffner to WCP, 2 July 1842, Preston Family Papers, VHS; James Lyons to John N. Tazewell, 5 July 1847, Tazewell Family Papers, LV; [?] to ‘‘Dear Friends,’’ 27 November 1836, Wirt Family Papers, SHC; FL to Trustees of William and Mary, 29 January 1847, GFH Mss, DU.

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helped as a qualification for election. Edward Johnston, angling for a chair at the University of Virginia, thought it helpful to announce that ‘‘I am a gentleman, not a learned blackguard.’’ But not all professors earned the grade. M. J. Williams of the South Carolina College thought ‘‘that the opinion seemed to be current in S C that a Mathematician could not be a gentleman. . . . [T]he historical facts of his chair tended to confirm the opinion—Hankel was a gentleman but no Mathn.—Blackburn, Wallace and Twiss were mathematicians but &c &c.’’ Even those not mathematicians could fail the test. Obadiah Wise, who was secretary to the American Embassy in Berlin, could be judged as ‘‘a man apparently of talent, a hard student, and probably calculated to do the business part of his office well [but] . . . no very good representative of a Southern gentleman—i.e. he looks and acts like one brought up in the backwoods of America.’’ 75 But failing to be a gentleman and refusing to be one were clean different things. Many failed, but very few tried to fail, in order to prove that they possessed intellectual and moral originality superior to the pedestrian and the genteel. Still, intellectuals were deeply committed to the idea of differentiation, hierarchy, and rank. Being more learned, wiser, shrewder, and so better was what justified them. So Mary Ellen Hedrick, reading Bulwer Lytton’s My Novel in 1853, offered this criticism: ‘‘The plot is kept up very well & shows many of the higher & nobler orders of intellect. . . . At times one would feel themselves raised, elevated above the common mass & again the secret workings of some malicious being would make us feel how degraded is man.’’ 76 Intellectuals were, certainly, above ‘‘the common mass,’’ but each dwelled in that part of the uncommon empyrean which their broader social status conferred. Some resented this, most did not. But, being so firmly in society, they were partly formed by the structures of society, which not only suggested ways to classify men and women, but prescribed how it might be possible to talk, write, and publish.

75. Edward W. Johnston to Richard K. Crallé, 30 April 1841, Richard K. Crallé Papers, CU; M. J. Williams to JHT, 22 April 1854, JHT Papers, SCL; Henry Young to Robert M. Gourdin, 6 November 1853, Gourdin-Young Papers in the Keith Read Collection, GHS. 76. Mary Ellen Hedrick to Mrs. Rankin, 8 April 1853, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC.

book three


Volley of Words

Chapter Ten

A Murmurous Sea of Conversation

Much in intellectual life depends on how people talk to one another. To converse at dinner, to stop in a bookshop, to pause on a walk, to discuss in the parlor were counterbalances to much that is solitary in the life of the mind. Writing is usually done alone, but thinking can be collective; Hegel, indeed, believed rationality itself was but a dizzying conversation of many minds. Yet little is harder to reconstruct than talking. However imperfect the answer, the question is worth asking. How did Southern thinkers converse? The South had many millions of acres and relatively few people, still fewer intellectuals, so the problem of solitude and society was important to it. In modern urban societies, alienation is a rational means of defense against the press of bodies and minds. But antebellum Southerners’ difficulty was the other way, so they were inclined to disparage solitude. An undergraduate would be taken aside by a concerned professor and asked ‘‘why I was so taciturn & reserved Why so retiring,’’ why so eccentric as to spurn company. Yet fleeing solitude and embracing urban complexity could occasion difficulty. Even a Charlestonian like Paul Hamilton Hayne was alarmed at the invigorating prospect of a denser place like New York: ‘‘I am sure that citylife wd kill me in 6 months. I could never muster up the moral strength to resist its manifold temptations.’’ ‘‘I am lonely in this crowded place,’’ John Young Bassett wrote from Paris, ‘‘and surrounded by scenes of grandeur, where temples & towers, & castles & cathedrals meet the eye in every quarter, and statues of the first masters are almost as common as stump. I long Title from PHH, Ante-Bellum Charleston (1885; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: Southern Studies Program, University of South Carolina, 1978), 20: ‘‘I can hear [Simms’s] voice, rolling in jovial thunder above a murmurous sea of conversation.’’

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to be where they are not, where the rocks are un poluted by the chizzel & the forest remains uncultivated & where I honestly believe the human heart is purer.’’ 1 Sometimes moralists might urge the value of solitude. Alicia Hopton Middleton instructed her son, Nathaniel Russell Middleton, in 1827 to ‘‘try to accustom yourself to being alone—A man can not be comfortable unless he is independent of society for all his highest enjoyments.’’ There were puritans who saw solitude as proof that the world’s temptations might be resisted. Basil Manly turned this into a political doctrine, when arguing with Northern Baptists in 1844: ‘‘We will not beg any set of men to allow us to remain in their society. If we can be admitted on equal terms—& can avoid impeachment & annoyance—we shall be pleased to remain in the fellowship of well-doing: if not, we must be content to labor & suffer alone.’’ But there was little pleasure in such loneliness, only virtue. Of an earlier dispute, Manly had written, ‘‘We stand alone on this waste—and except as to division & schism, in a condition I fear not much better than our neighbours—cold-cold-indeed.’’ Perhaps only Adrien Rouquette, who wrote from the ancient Catholic tradition of asceticism, formally praised ‘‘la vie solitaire et contemplative,’’ but did so in the knowledge that he was surrounded by its ‘‘détracteurs’’ who preferred bustling life and saw no point to cloisters and monasteries, to melancholy, prayer, sadness, good works and ‘‘les mortifications volontaires.’’ ‘‘Give me a desert or a cave / The Hermit’s grot—the friar’s cell,’’ Richard Henry Wilde once wrote in verse, but he did not live that way. Southern coenobites and Trappists were unknown.2 It was far more common to fear loneliness, the nakedness of ‘‘silence and solitude—with no human heart to sympathize with me and no eye to see save the author of my being.’’ Being alone, when you knew that God was looking, was disturbing. ‘‘I will now imagine myself before the tribunal of Christ,’’ Minerva Hynes Cook told her diary, near Vicksburg. ‘‘God, at this moment beholds me as if I were alone in the world, or rather he is within me as an eye infinitely enlightened which observes me attentively, and which nothing can escape. He sees me as clearly as he comprehends himself, and with as 1. Entry for 21 January 1845, in Robert Hardin Reid, ‘‘Diary and Lecture Notes,’’ Reid Family Papers, PHS; PHH to Richard Stoddard, 23 July 1855, PHH Mss, DU; John Young Bassett to Mrs. Indiana Manning, 7 June 1836, John Young Bassett Papers, ADAH. 2. Alicia Hopton Middleton to Nathaniel Russell Middleton, 20 October (1827), Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, SHC; BM to BM Jr., 22 November 1844, and BM to J. L. Reynolds, 21 July 1834, Manly Family Papers, UA; Adrien Rouquette, La Thébaïde en Amérique, ou apologie de la vie solitaire et contemplative (New Orleans: Imprimerie Méridier, 1852); Edward L. Tucker, Richard Henry Wilde: His Life and Selected Poems (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), 135.

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intense application as if he ceased to contemplate himself in order to study me.’’ 3 James Henley Thornwell once hazarded that God himself did not like to be alone, and this explained the existence of the Trinity, which was a sort of society: ‘‘Absolute solitude of Being is wholly incompatible with the actual exercise of moral qualities. Society is the element of virtue, and hence I turn with delight to those representations of the Scriptures in which it is implied that God is necessarily social as well as holy—that such is the nature of His essence that while absolutely one it exists eternally in the threefold distinction of Persons.’’ 4 If God feared loneliness, how much more did humans? Thornwell himself suggested that a ‘‘capacity of society and converse seem to be involved in the very nature of personality.’’ When Mitchell King visited Preston in 1854, when the latter had been cut off from society by illness, he noted in his diary, ‘‘Leave Preston much depressed I mourn his solitude.’’ Lieber felt himself much alone in Columbia, and grieved for it. Hillard thought that Lieber’s gifts in ascending order were his writings, his letters, and his conversation: ‘‘First of all, I put your conversation, which I consider the most vigorous and suggestive of any person’s I have ever known.’’ So Lieber’s alienation in South Carolina seemed an especial misfortune. ‘‘You would have been cheered and refreshed by a visit . . . in your solitude,’’ Longfellow once commiserated. ‘‘Ah, that solitude, Lieber; and for you to be condemned to it, who were born to give such impulse to other men’s minds by the living word in social life!’’ 5 So they reached out to one another. The historians of Virginia lived far apart, Grigsby in Norfolk and Charlotte County, Campbell in Petersburg, Howison in Richmond, and they pined for conversation. ‘‘I hope you will write, for I would be glad for someone to talk to,’’ Campbell told Howison in 1846. ‘‘I have enjoyed scarce any advantage of this kind & have often regretted the want of it.’’ Grigsby was off to the commencement exercises of William and Mary in 1858 and urged Campbell to come over ‘‘and talk over historical matters.’’ ‘‘You have long promised me a visit: make it now,’’ Edward W. Johnston reminded Richard K. Crallé from Botetourt Springs. ‘‘Come up, 3. Undated opening entry, Minerva Hynes Cook Journal, MDAH; MK to Kirkwood King, 25 October 1856, MK Papers, SHC. 4. ‘‘The Necessity of the Atonement’’ (1845), in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, ed. John B. Adger et al., 4 vols. (1871–75; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 2:234–35. See there also ‘‘The Personality of God,’’ 1:511: ‘‘Solitude may be enjoyed for a while, but it is imprisonment and death if made permanent. Hence, there is a deep philosophy in the doctrine of the Trinity.’’ 5. ‘‘Miracles’’ (1857), ibid., 3:252; entry for 5 December 1854, MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC (hereafter, in this chapter, King Memoranda); George S. Hillard to FL, 30 September 1846, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to FL, 8 April 1848, FL Papers, HEH.

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and pass a week or two with me. You shall look through my books; we will talk history, Politics, and even Swedenborgianism.’’ 6 Hence good talkers with ideas were a prized possession, while those who lacked the gift were deprecated. Calhoun, even his admirers admitted, was deficient here. ‘‘He exhibited no sparkling wit, no keen retort, none of that liveliness of fancy which so delightfully season and refine familiar conversation,’’ Hammond remembered. ‘‘Nor was he anything of a raconteur. . . . The conversation in which he really shone was but a modified species of Senatorial debate.’’ Rhett was blunter: ‘‘In conversation, he failed—that is, he failed for such a mind—because his conversation was reasoning.’’ Louise Preston was more pointed: ‘‘As thus during Nullification times if he had asked how your family were, and you had answered (with that disposition to be sympathized with that we all have under suffering) one of the children is ill; Mr. Calhoun would have exclaimed—‘Ah, but as I was saying, the concurrent majority,’ etc., etc., & neither you or yours would possess his ear or heart one minute.’’ 7 Conversely, the words of the gifted were often eagerly recorded. James Louis Petigru, Littleton Waller Tazewell, John Randolph, these and others published little, but were famous for their conversation, which was regarded as an influence on Southern thought. Hugh Blair Grigsby, especially, liked to set down table talk and acted the Boswell in his diary for more than one Johnson. In October 1828, he spent a morning with Tazewell and his son John.8 They talked of a new edition of Blackstone: the elder Tazewell said ‘‘that Blackstone was so clear and beautiful that it rendered even lectures superfluous—he said the stile of Blackstone was elegant. . . . That Blackstone was not distinguished at the Bar, that he succeeded well where he could have time to write an argument.’’ Then they talked of old and new practices of training lawyers in Virginia, then of John Quincy Adams. ‘‘He said that Mr. Adams would never have succeeded at the bar; he has too much vanity, and the law requires nothing done anew, but that an old thing must be done anew in an old way, and Mr. Adams’ vanity would not rest contented with doing a thing as it ought to be done, but would inevitably overdo it, that is fail to do it right.’’ 6. CC to R. R. Howison, 3 April 1846, and HBG to CC, 27 June 1858, CC Papers, WM; Edward W. Johnston to Richard K. Crallé, 20 April 1841, Richard K. Crallé Papers, CU. 7. J. P. Thomas, ed., The Carolina Tribute to Calhoun (Columbia, S.C.: Richard L. Bryan, 1857), 322, 373; undated entry, ca. early 1838, in Louisa Penelope Davis Preston Diary, Mrs. William Campbell Preston Papers, SCL. 8. He was the son of Henry Tazewell, a judge and U.S. senator; the former was born in Williamsburg and educated at William and Mary, but lived most of his life in Norfolk, where he was deeply involved in merchant, banking, and naval interests, though he also owned extensive plantations. He rose to great office in Washington (he was senator, 1825–32) and in his state (he was governor, 1834–36). See Norma Lois Peterson, Littleton Waller Tazewell (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983).

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Littleton Waller Tazewell (Courtesy Library of Virginia, Richmond)

Matters moved on. ‘‘He then talked of Wickham’s speech in the case of Burr, which he said was an astonishing production, and entirely original—it would be new even in England—We then talked of his false style—he had taste prevalent in America—that there was not a page in Adams’ Rhetoric which was not subject to the utmost critical severity. I said that his writings have no point; he said they had point; but it was in a round about way. His illustrations were such that it were difficult to determine whether he were more learned or more foolish.’’ From Americans, they reverted to Scots. ‘‘He said that Hume’s stile was good; that a good stile consisted in expressing oneself in as few words as possible. He mentioned the striking contrast between Canning’s and Adams’ correspondence. Mr. Canning wrote as a business man; Mr. Adams like a pedant. Mr. Canning could have written 50 such letters between breakfast and dinner; Mr. Adams probably pruned his for weeks. Read Canning’s letter once over, and you know what he means; read Adams’ once over, and you are almost as much in the dark as if you had not read it at all.’’ He said, he talked, I said, all moving swiftly along, ‘‘rich, various, and overflowing.’’ 9 9. Entry for 6 October 1828, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; HBG, Discourse on the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell (Norfolk: J. D. Ghiselin, Jun., 1860), 91.

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On the steamboat Norfolk a year later, on their way to the Virginia Constitutional Convention, Tazewell was still holding court. ‘‘In the afternoon, he gave Mr. Upshur, convention delegate from Accomack, a complete account of his county from the beginning of the world. At night he conversed about the Siamese Boys, and delivered the opinion of Dr. Hosack of New York, to the effect that the said boys were formerly apart, but united by original excoriation and inflammatory process.’’ He spoke of ‘‘the inimitable feat of activity which he witnessed in New York,’’ a man walking sixty yards with his head downwards and feet to the wall. ‘‘This feat he explained by supposing the fellow to have hooks in his shoes which he inserted in the holes prepared to receive them.’’ From this, not quite illogically, Tazewell moved to physics. ‘‘He also spoke of Cuvier’s exposition or application of Condier’s theory of central heat, and showed that it explained a number of hitherto insoluble phenomena.’’ Edmund Ruffin, when he heard of Tazewell’s death in 1860, set down a verdict that both celebrated and limited the achievement of such a man: ‘‘His was one of the greatest minds that any resident of Va. ever had—& I doubt whether it was not more powerful than would be the combined intellects of all the public men now in the service of this state.’’ But, in his later years, Tazewell had lived retired, scanty even of conversation save with those ‘‘few who rarely intruded on that seclusion which his own habits so clearly showed that he preferred.’’ To come to deny the responsibilities of public life was one crime, to deny those of society was another, perhaps as great. ‘‘His life, in all this time, has been of no benefit to mankind, of gratification to his friends, nor, as I would suppose, of pleasure to himself.’’ 10 But that was not the Tazewell that Grigsby had known in the 1820s and eulogized with more indulgence and evidence. Then there was John Randolph, whose manners and talk were famously vigorous. In 1831, Grigsby happened to be in New York, there to hear of a conversation between Randolph and Major Yancey of Buckingham County, Virginia, ‘‘whose eyes never before rested on any object north of Mason’s and Dixon’s line.’’ ‘‘The major amused me very much with a description of his visit to Mr. Randolph a day or two since,’’ Grigsby noted in his diary. The conversation went like this:11 Randolph: How are the crops, major? Yancey: The wheat crop is bad, sir. Randolph: Sorry for that, sir. 10. Entry for 4 October 1829, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; entry for 10 May 1860, in William Kauffman Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–89), 1:419. 11. I have adapted Grigsby’s account into direct speech.

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Yancey: But the corn crop is good, Mr. Randolph. Randolph: Thank God for that, sir. Yancey: We are nearly out of debt, Mr. Randolph, and the lawyers have nothing to do. Randolph: I hope they may starve, sir; I hope the doctors may starve, sir; I hope the parsons may starve, sir. I wish every man, sir, to feed out of his own crib. Yancey: I have just left the Anti Tariff Convention. Randolph: That is a weighty business, sir, weighty business. You may thank yourselves for that; you will buy their goods; I have not used a single sixpence of their goods since 1816. There is abroad a system of knavery and fanaticism. Yancey: Do you include the tariff? Randolph: That, sir. is a part of the knavery. What are the opinions of the people about the [. . . ?] of the late Cabinet? Yancey: Why, the people think the old man made a false step in the beginning; and has recovered himself by dismissing the gentlemen. Randolph: I think so too, I think so too.12 Grigsby admired both men, Tazewell and Randolph, but he saw the difference in their speaking talents. Tazewell’s ‘‘voice was a volume of sweet, full, natural sound, unmarked by any artistic training or modulation,’’ and his gestures were spontaneous. This lack of study was ‘‘an obvious contrast to the manner and action of his friend Randolph, whose every attitude, the slightest motion of whose finger, the faintest intonation of whose voice, whose every smile and frown, natural as they seemed, were the deliberate reflection of the closet.’’ 13 Petigru had no such talented Boswell.14 His reputation was for sarcastic wit, softened by kindliness of demeanor. For example, there was the occasion when William Henry Trescot came late to a meeting of the South Carolina 12. HBG to John N. Tazewell, 15 October 1831, Tazewell Family Papers, LV. Cf. entry for 11 November 1857, in Scarborough, Ruffin Diary, 1:122, about a visit to John Tyler: ‘‘We agreed . . . as to the gigantic intellect & argumentative power of Tazewell, the wonderful mind of Randolph, as profound as it was brilliant.’’ 13. HBG, Littleton Waller Tazewell, 69–70. 14. Now he has two: see William Henry Pease and Jane H. Pease, James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). Petigru began life in the upcountry on a small isolated farm of 300 acres with two slaves, but moved at his father’s death to the larger estate of his mother’s family, the Giberts. He attended the Willington Academy and South Carolina College and later made his career as one of Charleston’s most successful lawyers and most adamant Unionists. He dabbled in planting as a decorous hobby.

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Thomas Sully, James Louis Petigru (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

Historical Society, held at the Charleston Library Society. Petigru, who was presiding, happened to be close to some stairs. He gestured that the young man should sit on them. As Trescot did so, Petigru said in a stage whisper, ‘‘That’s the place for a rising man.’’ Petigru’s remark that South Carolina was too small to be a nation but too large to be an insane asylum has, rightly, passed into legend. His mock-expostulation, when hearing of the secession of Louisiana, deserved a similar fate for its succinct command of the illogicalities of constitutionality: ‘‘Good Lord . . . I thought we bought Louisiana.’’ 15 Mitchell King was a duller man, with little wit but much knowledge, more the learned questioner than the adept conversationalist. Yet one can see from his memoranda how often he must have pushed a thought a little further by his earnest talking. ‘‘Long talk with Col Huger & Mr. Izard ( Jos Deas) on the physical history of the world—Meet at Library Dr. Lynch—English Grammar’’ is an entry for 1852. A year later, he calls upon James Warley Miles: ‘‘long talk with him—Reading his article on Oriental Studies.’’ In 1856, ‘‘Call on Fraser Long talk on Plato’s Phaedo—Addison’s Cato’s Soliloquy.’’ And, ‘‘Talk in evening with Preston on social contract He attacks & denies it—I defend & adopt it.’’ In 1859, ‘‘Long talk with Preston on progress of civilization— 15. William James Rivers, ‘‘Anecdotes About Our Literary Men,’’ p. 9, William James Rivers Papers, SCL; George S. Bryan to JPK, December 1860, JPK Papers, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, quoted in Pease and Pease, James Louis Petigru, 156.

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How far does the language of a people affect their freedom Do words produce things No Things create words.’’ 16 Even writers might be good conversationalists or compelling monologists. In the older generations, Thomas Cooper was notable enough that David McCord felt impelled to write his words down in a notebook, where there are stories of Cooper’s days during the French Revolution, of Brissot and Robespierre, and of those who dined with Pitt and endured ‘‘the vacant stare of genius.’’ ‘‘Dr. C. speaking of the time he lived at Sunbury, Northumberland, Pa., he said it was a complete blank in his life. P. observed that he was then in hot water. Yes, but I have forgotten nearly everything in connexion with those matters. It got me in jail, where I stayed six months (in Philadelphia). But I there had good company every day and night. They all called on me. Everything that was good was sent to me—wine—claret, Madeira, port, cider—everything came, God knows how or from where, and cost me nothing. However, I had to pay $400.’’ Judgments, with Judge Cooper, were crisp. Boswell ‘‘was the greatest fool I ever knew. He was a real idiot.’’ ‘‘Petion was a clever fellow, and more like an Englishman than any Frenchman I have ever seen. Good, candid fellow, on whom you might rely.’’ Burke was ‘‘the most excessive talker he ever knew, and, at times, very tiresome.’’ Yet such peremptoriness did not preclude a more discursive cunning, embodied in advice that Cooper handed staccatolike to McCord. ‘‘During the evening he said to me, when you become a member of the legislature, take my advice, conciliate the fools; for they are always the majority. Be kind to them. Give them your ideas. Let them use them. Do their business for them. Write for them. Draw their bills and resolutions. Make one good speech during the session, and hold your piece. By that means you will gain them. Take my advice. Pursue it. It prescribes the course that Legaré should have taken, but he chose the opposite. Sense, eloquence, speeches wont do. You must work into their favor.’’ 17 In a later generation, Simms seems to have had a similarly hypnotic effect, at least on his literary juniors. Older people could find him a self-important blowhard. In 1857, the novelist was in Norfolk to lecture, where at another dinner he collided with G. P. R. James, the English novelist and resident alien. ‘‘This one is almost as great a talker as our . . . man,’’ Alexander Baron Williman reported to his father-in-law, Mitchell King, ‘‘so you may suppose that a dinner table entertainement where both were present resulted in a large flow of words. Simms has great superiority over James in the oratorical de16. Entries for 20 February 1852, 16 May 1853, 17 May 1856, 10 October 1859, King Memoranda. 17. David James McCord, ‘‘Memoranda of Table-Talk of Judge Cooper,’’ in Cyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856), 2:332–33.

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partment, possessing more varied humour and an intense degree of self consequence.’’ James Henry Hammond’s verdict in 1841 was more ambivalent: Simms was ‘‘a good fellow’’ with ‘‘a strong active mind,’’ ‘‘a most incessant talker’’ who ‘‘talks pretty well,’’ but ‘‘not however refined in manners or sentiment’’ with ‘‘not the delicacy of a thorough bred man.’’ 18 Yet there is abundant evidence that, for the likes of Hayne and Timrod, Simms was a fascination, a model and an inspiration. His attraction extended even to Virginia, for John Esten Cooke felt it. ‘‘Simms writes me a hearty, impulsive letter—just as he always talked with me,’’ he wrote in 1858, ‘‘—scheming out a ‘tramp’ as he calls it’’ through the Tidewater of Virginia and back to visit from his home at Woodlands. ‘‘Simms is a hearty, cordial, openhearted man—a capital companion, and true as steel. It is refreshing to meet now and then such a ‘high pressure steamboat’ as he is—it stirs my languid pulse, and wakes me from my indolence, and reveries.’’ James Warley Miles, not a man given to warmth, once said, ‘‘Mr. Simms is one of the noblest natures—, one of the most faithful friends, one of the truest geniuses we now possess.’’ But Hayne has left the most appreciative memory of Simms’s talk. There was no wit in it, Hayne remembered, but an abundance of humor, ‘‘bold, bluff, and masculine—with a touch of satirical innuendo and sly sarcasm.’’ He gestured frequently, without restraint, in a way ‘‘almost grotesquely emphatic.’’ He told stories, often at great length, and was good at mimickry. He liked to drink, he called young men ‘‘my boy’’ amiably. ‘‘At dinner he talked a great deal, joked, jested, and punned, like a school-boy freed from his tasks.’’ On grave matters, he ‘‘would often declaim a little too dogmatically,’’ which verged on the dictatorial. But always he was genial, kindly. ‘‘I can hear his voice,’’ Hayne wrote in postbellum days, when the old man had been all but forgotten, ‘‘rolling in jovial thunder above a murmurous sea of conversation, or pitched to a low, expostulatory growl because some favorite paradox—and he was full of ‘whimseys’—had doubtless been assailed.’’ 19 He was, in short, an informed version of Captain Porgy, the Falstaffian figure of his own revolutionary novels. Conversation has a social context; it can be encouraged or inhibited by patterns of interaction, of when people meet or are kept apart. The habitual pattern of a Southern day usually began with breakfast. It was most unusual for any visiting to take place before then, although Calhoun liked to walk in the 18. Alexander Baron Williman to MK, 28 February 1857, MK Papers, SHC; entry for 30 March 1841, in Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, ed. Carol Bleser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 49. 19. John Esten Cooke to Edward Saint George Cooke, 12 May 1858, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU; JWM to Anna Rebecca Young (ca. October–November 1858), beginning ‘‘Many thanks, my dear Friend,’’ JWM Papers, DU; PHH, Ante-Bellum Charleston, 11–20.

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early morning and to have company.20 Breakfast itself was not usually a time for visitors, except for very close friends or relatives, or when someone was staying in a hotel and eating publicly. (The inviting of strangers or acquaintances to breakfast, as a business matter, was more the custom in England and France, which is the reverse of twentieth-century practice.)21 The breakfast hour varied from family to family, and from country to city. The Selma plantation diarist breakfasted at nine, though she complained that this was late, and Ann Hardeman even thought that breakfast was ‘‘very late at 8 oclock.’’ The Cook family’s was as early as seven. But all of these were plantation families. A Baltimorean breakfast might not start until nine and not be late. In Kennedy’s diaries is the entry, ‘‘Breakfast—newspapers &c.—until 10.’’ What followed, for an writer, was usually reading or writing. ‘‘Literary occupation with my pen from 10. till 2,’’ notes Kennedy. But the morning was often a time for visitors. ‘‘Edwd W. Johnston from Washington calls to see me and spends the greater part of the morning’’ is also a Kennedy notation.22 Dinner too varied in its hour and was drifting backwards in time as the nineteenth century progressed. (The term ‘‘lunch’’ was in very little use and seems to have been associated only with traveling.)23 As an afternoon affair, dinner might be as early as one in the country or as late as four in the city, though three was normal. This was the most sociable event of the day, with the most food and drink, and could swell to large numbers or to formal cele20. ‘‘Mr. Calhoun tapped at my door this morning for me to take a long walk with him before breakfast. Fortunately I was awake & soon dressed for I enjoy of all things a walk with him. We discussed the French revolution, its probable effects upon all Europe, the destination & final settlement of the royal family &c &c—then by a strange transition, we talked of house keeping & he gratified me by saying that of all things in the world he disliked an over-fastidious house-wife, nothing to him was half so annoying. We walked about an hour & returned with keen appetites for breakfast & fine color in my cheeks’’; addition of April 1 in Amelia Gayle to Sarah Crawford, 29 March 1848, Gorgas Family Papers, UA. 21. See various invitations for breakfast in Edward Everett to FL, 20 April 1844; John G. Lockhart to FL, 1 May 1844; FL to Matilda Lieber, 18 May 1844, all in FL Papers, HEH. For instances of guests at breakfast, see Anne Lewis Hardeman Journals, entries for 1 June 1851, 20 and 21 January 1858, in An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67, ed. Michael O’Brien, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 233, 280. 22. Entries for 12 December 1836, Selma Plantation Journal, and 13 June 1860, Hardeman Journal, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 131, 307; entry for September 1857, Minerva Hynes Cook Journal, MDAH; entry for 7 January 1844, in JPK Autobiography, and for 17 April 1857, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB. 23. Entry for July–August 1857, Minerva Hynes Cook Journal, MDAH: ‘‘We went to Mt. Vernon, Washington’s tomb, his burying ground. We saw at Fort Washington where they kept the Cannon, we saw his house, his garden and we had a nice lunch that we carried with us there and eat it under the most lovely shade trees in his lovely yard.’’

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brations. It was a custom, for example, to give grand dinners to visiting dignitaries, which could last well into the evening. But extensiveness could happen on less pompous occasions. Alfred Huger, a man of enthusiasms, remembered the melancholy James Warley Miles, after dinner at Robert Gourdin’s, swelling into long discourse: ‘‘For four hours, the conversation never flag’d or fail’d! an incessant stream pour’d forth from the natural richness of his powerful intellect! & if at one moment he would go a little farther than his hearers could follow—at the next, he made every thing clear & transparent by that brilliant but ‘revolving light,’ which true Genius seems to keep, not for itself, but for the vast Ocean on which the whole human Mind is now floating!’’ 24 A dinner en famille might be brief, in which case it might be succeeded by a sociable tea party, held at around six o’clock, when visitors were common. This was, though not often, sometimes called ‘‘supper or tea,’’ especially by Virginians.25 But the term supper was more usually confined to a brief meal, taken just before bedtime, which was ordinarily a private thing. However, a group like the Charleston Conversation Club ate after their meeting, and J. G. M. Ramsey referred to this as ‘‘the table at supper.’’ On the occasion of Ramsey’s talk to the club, he had gone to Mitchell King’s for tea at 6, then walked to Samuel Dickson’s house, then had read his paper and held its discussion, and then eaten; this would have put supper at later than nine o’clock.26 Beyond all this, of course, were evening parties or, more grandly, balls. But the latter tended to be marriage marts overpopulated by the young, and so avoided by the older and more serious, except as parents and custodians of morals.27 Men of letters often gave thought to the division of their time. Jefferson had famously done so and dispensed advice. Kennedy too mused on it: ‘‘I find it daily more important to methodise my time. How will this do—during my sojourn at home, at least? Breakfast—newspapers &c.—until 10. Literary occupation with my pen from 10. till 2. Two hours reading before bed. Bed at 11: Two hours reading to be historical—To read one book at a time—that is until it is finished. Light reading when I can. Saturdays.—correspondence. Sundays. Theology. Try that.’’ Grigsby in 1829 debated these matters with the 24. Alfred Huger to MK, 12 October 1853, Alfred Huger Papers, DU. 25. Entry for 8 July 1850, Hardeman Journal, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 222 (where it is at four). Grigsby habitually refers to supper. 26. J. G. M. Ramsey to Margaret B. C. Ramsey (ca. 1852), J. G. M. Ramsey Papers, Special Collections Department, James D. Hoskins Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; MK to J. G. M. Ramsey, 7 December 1852, J. G. M. Ramsey Papers, SHC. 27. On this, see William Porcher Miles, ‘‘American Literature and Charleston Society,’’ SQR n.s. 7 (April 1853): 409.

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son of Philip P. Barbour, whom he had just met at some book auctions: ‘‘We talked of the division of time, and I stated that the Germans invariably spent 14 hours out of the twenty four in study, and I observed that as six were sufficient in the opinion of physicians for the purposes of repose to the animal system; and four for exercise; fourteen the remainder, might be easily enough devoted to studious pursuits.’’ William Henry Holcombe tried to use his horse riding as a time for serious meditation, if unsuccessfully: ‘‘I do sometimes compose a poem or draw out a train of medical or theological argument, but the general tenor of my meditations is trivial, loose disjointed and too much of the castle-building species.’’ 28 In all these gatherings, there were complicated gender dynamics. Men and women ate dinner together, but separated once the eating was done and the men fell to liquor and cigars. Tea was a womanly affair (no man dispensed tea), briefer and more genteel. Husbands might be there and other men sometimes came, usually with a sense of visiting a separate sphere. ‘‘I am going to take tea at niece Madeleine’s with a few literary friends—a scarce sort of article here,’’ Henry Ruffner noted on a visit to Louisville in 1849. ‘‘I believe I did not tell you that at Charlottesville we saw Monticello and the University, and also Mrs. Tucker with whom we took tea on Sunday evening,’’ commented Kennedy in 1830. ‘‘Mr. Poinsett called one evening, & took tea with us, so did Mr. Bee,’’ wrote Alice DeLancey Izard from Charleston in 1816. It was not uncommon, after tea, for the ladies to go visiting. ‘‘I frequently go out after tea and pay sociable visits—no I ought not say frequently but now and then,’’ wrote the wife of William Hooper from Columbia in 1841. ‘‘I have spent two evenings at Mr. Henry’s in this way lately and Mrs. Thornwell is very sociable—but Mrs. Leber [sic] and I have merely exchanged calls she devotes her time very much to her two little boys.’’ 29 So, during an ordinary day, men of letters in the city might have a series of opportunities to talk (at morning visits, at dinner, at evening parties, at clubs), while women had fewer, but there were few sustained occasions for men and women who did not share a household to talk together, and almost none that can be said to have been formally dedicated to intellectual discourse, except for the sermon in church. Even at evening parties, men and 28. Entry for 7 January 1844, in JPK Autobiography, JPK Papers, PBL; entry for 22 October 1829, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; entry for 17 February 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC. 29. Henry Ruffner to ‘‘Mrs. Professor Dabney,’’ 29 May 1849; Ruffner Family Papers, PHS; JPK to Elizabeth Kennedy, 21 May 1830, JPK Papers, PLB; ADI to MIM, 7 January 1816, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; ‘‘Mother’’ to Mary Hooper, 4 February 1841, John DeBerniere Hooper Papers, SHC.

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women tended to drift into separate groups, except when the exigencies of flirtation or courtship were uppermost.30 This was an old problem. As early as 1812, Nathaniel Heyward, back from Europe, had complained of such arrangements, his views summarized by Margaret Izard Manigault: ‘‘He abhors smoaking, & long sittings after dinner, & clubs, &c & likes rational & mixed societies. He thinks with me that men & women when well bred, improve each other in their intercourse. Men when alone, I have heard, are apt to be rough & sometimes coarse. Women are very generally when by themselves trifling.’’ 31 A consequence was the absence in the South of a great institution of intellectual life, the salon. Women of mind and social presence, who might otherwise have presided over such an institution—Louisa McCord, Susan Petigru King, Mary Chesnut—fared otherwise, were called masculine or fast when they hazarded strong and informed opinions in the company of men. This concerned them, but even some men worried about it. Thomas Dew, in writing about the French Revolution, talked of salon society with marked enthusiasm, as a strange and gilded phenomenon: ‘‘Madame de Stael tells us that French society was never so brilliant and serious as during the first three or four years of the revolution, reckoning from 1788 to the end of 1791. . . . The highest questions to which social order can give rise, were the fruitful themes. In France, the social discussions on politics were softened by the influence of the ladies, who, in that country, always take the lead in conversation at their houses, and enliven it with the kindest and most lively pleasantry.’’ 32 It was not so in his Williamsburg, which will explain why Dew’s account was so inadequate.33 Nor was it so in Charleston, on the account of William Porcher 30. Entry for 27 January 1848, JPK Journal, JPK Journal Papers, PLB, has: ‘‘Our young people here are sadly deficient in the qualities of good society. There seems to be no standard of manners by which they might study what is requisite for elegant intercourse, and the consequence is a marked want of ease and agreeable accost. Every one seems to be at a loss to know what to do. No body talks yet all laugh and run about to seem to be interested in something. The dancing relieves them a little, but not much. Our society too is just in the phase when the people do not seem to know each other. The truth is, both young men and young women are very deficient in education and appear to care very little about learning any thing. One would suppose that good society has become obsolete.’’ 31. MIM to Charlotte Georgiana Izard Smith, 21 September 1812, Manigault Family Papers, SCL. 32. Thomas R. Dew, A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations (New York: D. Appleton, 1853), 608; see also his comments on Staël’s emigrés’ gathering at Norbury (p. 609) and the salon of Madame Tallien (p. 653). 33. Cf. Elizabeth J. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 39: ‘‘An essential difference between the salons and the court, however, was that in the salons the role of metteur-en-scéne was played by women. Women determined what behavior was acceptable, women were ‘the arbitrators

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Miles. In 1853, he was reviewing a book by Philaret Chasles of the Collège de France, on Anglo-American Literature and Manners. Chasles had been displeased with American men and women, for lacking ‘‘those elements of intellectual curiosity with which Europe is filled.’’ Rather, the men thought only of ‘‘eating, drinking, and becoming millionaires and bankrupts [or politicians],’’ while the women thought only of a quick marriage, having ‘‘numerous children,’’ and dying ‘‘with a mind enfeebled by a constant repetition of the same half-servile duties, and the same objectless amusements.’’ Miles read this and felt a shock of recognition. ‘‘We are tempted to exclaim, ‘has M. Chasles then lived in Charleston?’ Is it not a picture drawn from life?’’ 34 But many men, who preferred their women to seem frivolous, were not worried. Even Southern men who in France would have presumed the capacity of a woman for erudition might act otherwise in America. When she was young, Louisa Cheves and her sisters went to the gallery of the House of Representatives. Hugh Legaré entered with some ladies. ‘‘He was a fine French scholar and liked to show it,’’ Louisa McCord’s daughter was to relate, ‘‘so he turned to his party and in very fluent French began to comment on the very ‘gauche’ young ladies next them, making quite uncomplimentary remarks.’’ In response, the young and angry Miss Cheves, who ‘‘recognized Mr. Legaré perfectly,’’ began a conversation in French, ‘‘referring several times to their father.’’ 35 Such condescension was occasioned partly by male notions of female incapacities and sexualities. The implication that sexuality was better if closeted overlapped and reinforced those Southern puritans who feared that free intermingling of men and women necessarily led to scandal. The French experience, on this score, was not reassuring. Alice Izard had lived in Paris, had experienced the salons of the late eighteenth century at first hand, and thought she knew how it stood, better than Dew would later. ‘‘I admire Made de Stael’s literary acquirements,’’ she told her daughter in 1815, ‘‘& wish the sublime morality she so well describes were extended to her private conduct. What a pity it is that such talents should be debased by profligacy.’’ By this logic, vice came from the male side of humanity, even when practiced by of taste and language.’. . . Within the closed realm of the salons women could create literary works (portraits, maxims, conversations), judge the works of others, and of course construct entirely new rules for social interaction and linguistic precision. Rather than being isolated at home, under the authority of their husbands, these women gathered together and developed their own authority and their own intellectual sphere.’’ 34. William Porcher Miles, ‘‘Charleston Society,’’ 401. 35. Louisa McCord Smythe, ‘‘Recollections of Louisa Rebecca Hayne McCord,’’ SCL, quoted in Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography, Letters, ed. Richard C. Lounsbury, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 425.

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women. Later she added, ‘‘If I did not know her character I should suppose her one who did great honor to our sex; but with manly abilities, & manly learning, she has, by all accounts, adopted manly vices.’’ In 1818, she thought a reading of the memoirs of Madame D’Épinay was safer. ‘‘They will not give accounts of so brilliant, so scientific a career as that of Made de Stael; but they will be more femininely worthy, & more deserving of imitation.’’ 36 Debauchery was the price of salon life, or so it was thought. Most Southerners, men and women alike, concluded that in abjuring the salon what was lost in female brilliance and influence was compensated for in female virtue. This had been Jefferson’s opinion, too, despite or because of his flirtations with Maria Cosway. It was further presumed that, by reducing women’s social and intellectual range, their enhanced virtue would improve the men. Even when the men were alone, Grayson testified, they were better in 1850 than in 1780, when ‘‘it was customary to lock the door at dinner parties in the city. No man was permitted to leave the room. The close of the feast found the weaker vessels under the table. The stronger heads staggered or where [sic] assisted home.’’ Being blind drunk, Grayson thought, had not enhanced understandings. ‘‘The men were more jovial and talked louder as they drank deeper. There was much singing of songs. They gave toasts and indulged in a noisy vivacity. But the wit was of no high order.’’ Knowing this history, little wonder that stern evangelicals like Thornwell might decline dinner invitations altogether. ‘‘I attended to the speaking last night according to your request,’’ he wrote to Preston when the latter was his college president, ‘‘and will cheerfully do any thing else that you desire, except dine with you. . . . [M]y principles are fixd in regard to the expediency of ministers of the Gospel taking part in entertainments of the kind unless upon extraordinary occasions.’’ 37 So there were barriers to talking. As for the sounds, the accents, the words, the rhythms of speech which a listener might have heard, it is very hard to reconstruct. One can get some sense from Southern fiction, though its evidence is slippery and partial. Earlier novels have very little dialogue. There is almost none in The Letters of a British Spy (1803), which is consistent with eighteenthcentury Southern practice. The diaries of William Byrd contained no voices, and there were not too many even in Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s writings, despite his being the recorder of a club of talkers. Indeed, the emergence of 36. ADI to MIM, 28 September, 5 October 1815, 21 July 1818, Manigault Family Papers, SCL. 37. Richard J. Calhoun, ed., Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 61, 66; JHT to WCP, undated, Preston Family Papers, SCL.

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voices in Southern writing, the growth of dialogue as a way of telling stories and conveying meaning until in William Faulkner there came to be little else, is one of the crucial themes of the South’s literary history. In George Tucker’s The Valley of the Shenandoah (1824), the case is middling. To the modern ear, the talk seems stilted, too conscious of titles, too precise in its diction and subclauses. The first sustained conversation reads: ‘‘Have you not grown very much, Miss Grayson, since I had the pleasure of seeing you in Richmond? I think you about two inches taller.’’ ‘‘Perhaps so, sir; I had an attack of the ague and the fever last autumn, and it is said sometimes to increase the stature of those who but for that had attained their growth,’’ replied Louisa, not availing herself of the implied compliment he intended to her age. ‘‘Your looks give indications of any thing but ill health, Miss Grayson.’’ ‘‘ ’Tis true, sir, ever since my recovery, my health has been unusually good,’’ said Louisa, either not perceiving the intended flattery, or not finding it palatable. This was a very formal quadrille. For Tucker, these were words intended by the young people ‘‘to make themselves agreeable to one another.’’ His characterizations of talking are full of words like ‘‘congenial,’’ ‘‘easy,’’ ‘‘agreeable,’’ ‘‘pleasure,’’ ‘‘good natured.’’ Vocatives are very important, a formal reminder of constant identity, and oratio obliqua abounds. There seems little reason to doubt that, though modern critics have reproved Tucker for stiff incompetence, this was probably an accurate rendering of how Virginians of 1820, of a certain class, spoke. That those of other classes, including slaves, spoke similarly is a different, more plausible reproach. In Tucker, exuberance in talking was gently deprecated, regarded as almost sinister. ‘‘But, mamma, I have often heard you say, that nothing was more important than good humour in making those around us happy.’’ ‘‘True, my child, but there is a wide difference between the good humour which is the result of a mild temper and contented mind, and the mere exuberance of animal spirits united with a sprightly fancy. . . . This [latter] quality can easily be associated with a very cold heart and great selfishness of feeling.’’ This is one reason why, in Tucker, only the language of the poor and ethnic possess exclamation marks. For the poor, being ill-educated, were passionate, more heart than head. In Jefferson’s ‘‘dialogue between my head & my heart,’’ written as a letter to Maria Cosway in Paris in 1786, only the heart was permitted to say, ‘‘Oh, my friend!’’ and ‘‘Oh! it was the most superb thing

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on earth!’’ 38 Reason does not exclaim. And, in early Southern fiction, voices were seldom permitted to force the pace or to give meaning: the author’s narrative established the pace, which no single voice was allowed to disrupt, but only to illustrate. Evenness was all. This was no mere literary convention, but a reflection of how higher culture saw conversation, as a reconciling thing, a matter of courtesy, a flowing outward from what was already decided, which was a person’s character. To speak without knowing who you were was, if not unimaginable, undesirable to a Southern mind formed much before 1820. By Simms’s day, everyone had exclamation marks. ‘‘ ‘My poor fellow,’ said Porgy, ‘you must speak now or never! Your last chance is before you. If you go up again, you only come down to make a full confession, or you come down a dead man! You hear what I say? I am in earnest!’ ’’ There was among the voices a widening differentiation, denoted by a growth of dialects. George Tucker had inclined to give his slaves better English than his Germans, for the former often spoke like gentlemen and ladies. An old slave woman could say: ‘‘It was in the time of the great Lord Botetourt, whose image they afterwards had all cut out of marble. And my old master, my mistress’s grandfather, was a such a grand gentleman, with his great rich chariot and outriders, and his gold laced waistcoat that reach down to the knees.’’ For Kennedy in the 1830s, an old male slave who played ‘‘Jim Crow’’ on the banjo might still be a gentleman: ‘‘ ‘God bless you, master Harvey, and young masters all!’ cried the old groom, as he retired with a repetition of many formal bows.’’ By the revised edition of 1853, he is made to add, ‘‘Good night, gemmen.’’ Certainly, in Simms, dialect became full blown, diminishing and differentiating. ‘‘ ‘Hi, missis, hi! Da me! Da Jinney! I jis’ want for know od dem black people gone.’ ’’ 39 As for white people, there was a careful calibration of grammatical manglings, growing as one sank in the social scale or ventured into marginal ethnicities. As with all renderings of dialect, there were necessary compromises between those represented and readers, for there needed to be intelligibility, a more urgent obligation than verisimilitude. Edmund Botsford, the Baptist preacher, published in 1808 Sambo and Toney: A Dialogue in Three Parts, being 38. George Tucker, The Valley of the Shenandoah, or, Memoirs of the Grayson (1824; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 5, 80; Thomas Jefferson, ‘‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’’ in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 867, 868. 39. WGS, Woodcraft, or, Hawks about the Dovecote: A Story of the South at the Close of the Revolution (New York: Redfield, 1854), 160; Tucker, Valley of the Shenandoah, 1:83, 65; JPK, Swallow Barn; or, a Sojourn in Virginia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832), 1:113; JPK, Swallow Barn: Or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1853; reprint, New York: Hafner Publishing, 1962), 103. See also Poe’s rendering of black English in ‘‘The Gold Bug’’: Patrick F. Quinn, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 562.

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an allegory about the Christianization of slaves. He was much troubled about how to put black speech into print, and got conflicting advice from Richard Furman: ‘‘Since receiving your letter have concluded to print it in much the same stile as that part you saw. Sambo, Toney, his wife & Titus are made to speak something more in the Negro stile. Davy who is represented an old professor, & one who can read & having conversed frequently with ministers, his stile much as the piece you saw.’’ Masters needed reassurance that, buried in obscure dialect, might be nothing subversive. Moreover, there were readers beyond the lowcountry for whom the dialogue needed to make sense: ‘‘The master will see our intention of communicating nothing that can have a tendency to make his servants worse. Perhaps the language will suit the whole state at large better than strictly the low country lingo.’’ As complicating was a lack of uniformity in black speech itself. ‘‘I perceive by your observations, your sample, & by my acquaintance with the Negroes there is a great diversity in their manner of expressing themselves. Many words they will pronounce their own way, let them be spelt as they may. Those of them who can read, learn to read by our common spelling, & would be at a loss to read their own lingo as we would spell it.’’ Certainly, a few years later, Francis Walker Gilmer of Virginia could not understand much of the same slaves’ speech: ‘‘They cannot speak English intelligibly to one unacquainted with their barbarisms.’’ 40 The amiable hauteur of writing dialect, implicit and evident in Simms and others, served to diminish what might otherwise be regarded as a growth of ‘‘realism’’ in representation. For there is no reason to doubt but that the South was, in Simms’s day as it had been in Tucker’s, alive with different voices, multiple accents, patois, and one can understand this more fully in Simms’s fiction than in Tucker’s. The eighteenth-century South had been a congeries of early modern, undisciplined languages and dialects, of Mandingo, lowland Scots, Fenland, Acadian French, and Cherokee. In the seventeenth century, in the Anglophone world, there had been little disposition to standardize grammar, pronunciation, or spelling, though rather more (after Richelieu’s foundation of the Académie Française) in the Francophone. In Britain, this began to change by about 1760, with teachers of elocution like Thomas Sheridan making a tidy living by erasing Scottish and Irish accents. One of the more popular works, extensively reprinted in America, was John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language, ‘‘in which . . . the sound of every syllable [is] distinctly shown . . . and the preferable pronunciation is pointed out . . . [and] the influence of the Greek and Latin ac40. Edmund Botsford to Richard Furman, 15 October 1808, Edmund Botsford Papers, FU; Francis W. Gilmer, ‘‘Pocket book, 1815–23,’’ individual item, DU. See Edmund Botsford, Sambo and Toney: A Dialogue in Three Parts (Georgetown, S.C.: Francis M. Baxter, 1808).

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cent and quantity, on the accent and quantity of the English is thoroughly examined,’’ and rules were laid down for ‘‘the natives of Scotland, Ireland, and London, for avoiding their respective peculiarities.’’ 41 Such manuals and books of grammar, for those with access or interest in formal education, conducted a long siege against the premodern Babel. Indeed, as Walker’s work indicated, one of the justifications for learning Latin, even Anglo-Saxon, had been its utility in putting a grammatical backbone into English, unhappily deemed random and lax compared to Cicero.42 In time, there would be the order of the Oxford English Dictionary.43 Some of these impulses for order drifted to the South. Certainly, grammar came to be much studied, both in schools and college. The schools, however, were often haphazard. Basil Manly complained of Alabama in 1838: ‘‘The grammar schools are lower than might be supposed possible, considering the general wealth of the Inhabitants. . . . [A]s for English Grammar and Geography, these are left to grow up in the mind the natural way, without implantation or culture. It is presumed, of course, that every body, with or without teaching, must be acquainted with things like these.’’ 44 So the colleges, not infrequently, took up the slack. Porcher lectured on English grammar at the College of Charleston, and indeed took a marked interest in linguistics and the history of the English language.45 ‘‘Mr. Dabney is very particular to our spelling and style. The slightest error, either in spelling or in grammar, he notices at once,’’ John Coles Rutherfoord observed of his time at Washington College in 1840. There was a sense that republicans needed such discipline. Thornwell began some remarks on Phillip Buttman’s Greek Grammar with the observation, ‘‘Our coarse, republican habits are very unfavourable to philological pursuits.’’ 46 41. John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language, 20th ed. (London: A. Wilson, 1819), title page. 42. See Gessner Harrison to Peachey Harrison, 12 September 1825, Tucker-Harrison-Smith Papers, UVA: ‘‘It is truly delightful to listen to the remarks he [George Long] makes occasionally on the derivation of English from Anglo Saxon and the close relations the one bears to the other—It seems to me that the Anglo Saxon, as he says, is the true and only safe road, to the acquirement of English Grammar, judging only from the remarks he has made on this subject.’’ 43. On this, see Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), and John Willinsky, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 44. BM to David L. Swain, 23 March 1838, David L. Swain Papers, SHC. 45. Various Mss of Porcher’s writings, including essays on ‘‘General Grammar,’’ ‘‘Grammar,’’ ‘‘History of the English Language,’’ ‘‘Language,’’ ‘‘On the Present State of the Science of Linguistics,’’ and ‘‘Philology or the Modern Science of Linguistics,’’ Frederick A. Porcher Papers, CC. These are undated and some may be postbellum. 46. John Coles Rutherfoord to John Rutherfoord, 9 December 1840, John Rutherfoord

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However, correctness of grammar was more prized than pronunciation. In 1844, the sophomores of South Carolina College were doing elocution exercises once a week,47 but it seems likely they studied distinctness more than accent. The great guide, Hugh Blair, when giving advice on pronunciation, intended mostly to instruct in matters of emphasis, pausing, audibility, pace, and modulation. Scot that he was, he was wary about reeducating accents: ‘‘Nothing can be more absurd than to imagine, that as soon as one mounts a pulpit, or rises in a public assembly, he is instantly to lay aside the voice with which he expresses himself in private; to assume a new, studied tone, and cadence altogether foreign to his natural manner.’’ Rather, in speaking English one should ‘‘follow nature.’’ To speak French aright, on the other hand, was a matter of great importance. ‘‘My French master has undertaken to procure me a situation in an agreeable family where they speak the Language correctly,’’ Henry Cumming wrote from Paris. At home in Badwell, Jane Porcher worked at it: ‘‘Cousin Caroline still continues to give me French lessons, I am to take them on Saturday and every day but Sunday. . . . [She] finds my pronunciation barbarous, but I hope it will improve.’’ 48 Pronouncing English with as much precision and uniformity was of lesser moment. Or, at least, among Southern whites, there was a degree of toleration. Outsiders were another matter. For one should strive to speak differently from slaves (who were seen as resident aliens), which was not always easy, given their proximity, especially in childhood. (Some Sea Island planters spoke Gullah before they spoke English, or so it was said.) Minerva Hynes Cook of Mississippi was firm on this issue to her journal: ‘‘I . . . stopped for a short time at the quarters to see a few of the Servants. I do not think it is a good plan for any one who is civilized to ever have a word to say to Negroes. Their language is so horrible and vulgar and is certain if young children associate with Negroes they will be ruined.’’ Equally, one might be glad to sound distinct from Yankees. Elizabeth Ruffin, summering in the North, with her usual laconic humor, noted in 1827: ‘‘The Virginians are unusually scarce here this season nothing but Yankees scarcely who have almost taught me to speak like them, they are vastly agreeable for all that.’’ Or one might notice when inhabitants of Southern culture had foreign accents. ‘‘Altho’ Dr. Lieber speaks Papers, DU; JHT, review of Phillip Buttman’s Greek Grammar (New York, 1833), JHT Papers, PHS. 47. Maximilian LaBorde to Robert Henry, 8 May 1844, Maximilian LaBorde Papers, SCL. 48. Hugh Blair, ‘‘Lecture XXXIII: Pronunciation or Delivery,’’ in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 14th American ed. (1783; reprint, New York: James and John Harper, 1826), 334; Henry H. Cumming to Thomas Cumming, 22 February 1819, Hammond-Bryan-Cumming Families Papers, SCL; Jane Porcher to Louise Petigru Porcher, August 1852, Porcher-Ford Papers, SCL.

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english decidedly better than almost any foreigner I have ever met, yet you must be aware that he has a foreign accent which is quite perceptable,’’ a South Carolinian observed when the Berliner was being considered successfully for his chair at South Carolina College. ‘‘Went to the Capitol & heard Mr. Soulé on the fishery question,’’ Jane Caroline North wrote in her journal in 1852. ‘‘He is too inflamable in matter, but an energetic interesting speaker, full of animation & lively gesture—his enunciation is slow & deliberate, the French accent very strong.’’ 49 Few doubted there was a group of Southern pronunciations, though no correct one. As early as 1795, James Carrol had written: ‘‘The pronunciation of the southern states of English America is almost as different from that of the New-England states, even among the learned, as any two dialects of the language of any illiterate nation can be supposed to be.’’ But this involved no obligation to standardize sounds or repress idiosyncrasies within Southern usage. Alexander Stephens, giving long advice to his younger brother on the urgent matter of rhetoric, never thought to mention pronunciation. Grigsby looked through Sheridan’s lectures on reading and pronunciation in 1829 and indifferently noted, ‘‘[R]ate them very lowly.’’ Equality of accents was accepted as between places. Caste and class in a specific place was a different matter. Louisa McCord, who reproved Harriet Beecher Stowe for making her characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin speak like New Englanders, in contradistinction to ‘‘the idioms of our Southern tongue,’’ confined her remarks to ‘‘Southern language in select society.’’ Moreover, she made such subregional and class distinctions as to be conscious that ‘‘[t]he woman (Mrs. Stowe I mean) has certainly never been in any Southern state further than across the Kentucky line at most, & there in very doubtful society.’’ 50 So there was a sense of ‘‘Southern’’ as a collection of words, with a usage distinctive from New England or other parts of the United States. This sense was articulated in the debate over Americanism in language. Some Southerners, notably John Randolph and William J. Grayson, were anxious to preserve as a standard for American speech the language of the period from John 49. Entry for January 1857, in Minerva Hynes Cook Journal, MDAH; James L. Petigru? to [?], 1 April 1835, FL Papers, HEH; entry for 12 August 1852, Jane Caroline North Journal, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 189. 50. James Carroll, The American Criterion of the English Language (New London, Conn.: Samuel Green, 1795), iii, quoted in David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 105; Alexander H. Stephens to Linton Stephens, 20 March 1842, Alexander H. Stephens Papers, EU; entry for 16 October 1829, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 260, 261; LSM to Mary C. Dulles, 9 October 1852, McCord Mss, SCHS.

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Dryden to Oliver Goldsmith. ‘‘Nothing is so good as the pure strong unmixed English language, for either rhyme or reason, fancy or sentiment,’’ as Grayson put it. George Tucker worried that American society had a tendency to corrupt ‘‘a pure and manly species of writing,’’ which he identified with the English eighteenth century. As James Waddell Alexander put it in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836, thinking both of American and recent British degenerations, ‘‘Nothing but the appeal to a standard of former golden days of literature and classic taste, can save the noble tongue of freemen from becoming an unwieldly, cacophonious, inconsistent mass of crudities.’’ This standard was necessary, not to prevent Americanism, but to preserve American society against the centrifugal provincialisms of language: ‘‘How much more is there danger, lest the other party, by encouraging unauthorized and American inventions in language, lay the foundations for provincial dialects, which shall hopelessly diverge from one another, until the Mississippian and the Virginian shall be as diverse as were the Athenian and the Macedonian.’’ 51 Such sentiments proceeded from the party of order, the neoclassical school of language. On the side of disorder and inventiveness had been Thomas Jefferson in his day, William Gilmore Simms and Alexander Beaufort Meek in theirs. For Simms, vitality in language emerged from social mobility. Though he was conscious that incessant westward expansion involved dangers to social stability, he believed that the difficulties were transient and the long-term cultural gains enormous: ‘‘The social disruptions occasioned by the wandering habits of the citizen, result invariably in moral loss to the whole. Standards of judgment fluctuate, sensibilities become blunted, principles impaired, with increasing insecurity at each additional remove.’’ But such flux involved no distress. These were ‘‘symptoms of [an] independent intellectual working, simultaneously, in remote regions of the country.’’ One must cultivate the indigenous. For ‘‘to write from a people is to write a people.’’ 52 Like Simms, many Southerners were happy to endorse Noah Webster’s campaign for Americanism in language, to license ‘‘labor’’ rather than ‘‘la51. William J. Grayson, ‘‘Carolina Sports,’’ SQR 12 ( July 1847): 71; George Tucker, ‘‘Style,’’ in Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan, 1822), 166; James Waddell Alexander, ‘‘English Language in America,’’ SLM 2 ( January 1836): 111. This last article is signed ‘‘Borealis,’’ but it is ascribed to Alexander in David K. Jackson, The Contributors and Contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger (Charlottesville, Va.: Historical Publishing Company, 1936), 12. One might note that Simms’s foisting of the ‘‘Queen Anne’’ theory onto antebellum Southern culture is mixed up with his participation in this debate. 52. WGS, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction: First Series, ed. C. Hugh Holman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1962), 11–12.

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bour,’’ ‘‘center’’ over ‘‘centre,’’ ‘‘public’’ over ‘‘publick,’’ or ‘‘traveled’’ rather than ‘‘travelled.’’ They happily used new coinages like ‘‘improvement’’ and ‘‘demoralize’’ as a way of cocking a snoot at English Toryism.53 And, like many Americans, many Southerners (and many printers) forgot that this was a political issue or wavered in their usages. In 1825, Grigsby wrote to his fatherin-law, ‘‘I am one of those who side with Adams—and firmly believe that he will fill the chair with more credit to himself & honour to the nation than Jackson or Calhoun, Crawford or Clay,’’ and, in the same letter, ‘‘Among those who shine in the world, very few received the highest honor at Yale.’’ 54 Grayson, for all his neoclassicist passion, has ‘‘laborer,’’ in the third line of The Hireling and the Slave, but ‘‘honours,’’ in the second of The Country. It was controversial where any Southern distinctiveness of language might fit in. In theory, Noah Webster himself had been suspicious of localism: ‘‘The principal business of a compiler of a grammar is, to separate local or partial practice from the general custom of speaking; and reject what is local, whether it exists among the great or the small, the learned or ignorant, and recommend that which is universal, or general, or which conforms to the analogies of structure in a language.’’ Still, localism seemed a stubborn fact, though one hard to locate. Alexander, like many in the postbellum years, hinted at Southernisms as a survival of purer English usages: ‘‘We have known a New Englander laugh at the Southern use of the word clever; ignorant utterly that the latter is the only English acceptation. And in like manner we knew a vagrant word-catcher to have in his list of Virginianisms Good bye t’ye, a phrase purely Shakspearian.’’ So Noah Webster had been reproached for mistaking New Englandism for Americanism, and not only Southerners had complained of this.55 By this logic, Southern dialect was merely the persistence of an older, correct English usage. But others saw Southernness of speech as one among many American divergences from English usage, not a reinforcement of a classical standard but an inventive defiance of The Spectator. Even Hugh Legaré, a man fond of Palladian porticoes, once calmly and presciently observed: ‘‘At the end of yet another half century, it will be said of England, with truth, pars minima est ipsa sui. Her language will become a dialect. . . . The adoption into good use in England of very many words, but the other day rejected and ridiculed as Americanisms, shews already what is the inevitable tendency of things. 53. On the general issue, see Simpson, Politics of American English. 54. HBG to Dr. Nathan Colgate Whitehead, 16 February 1825, HBG Papers, VHS (my emphases). 55. Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (1789), ix, quoted in Simpson, Politics of American English, 102; Alexander, ‘‘English Language,’’ 111.

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And, after all, what does it signify to us whether that language shall be intelligible and agreeable or not to a foreign ear.’’ Edmund Ruffin, no neoclassicist, was equally relaxed about the issue in 1860: ‘‘Finished reading ‘Vocabulary of Americanisms’—from which I learned much that I did not know before—& especially that sundry words that I use in writing are not good English. But the much greater number of the words which the author enumerates as being improperly used in the U.S. are merely Yankee provincialisms, or vulgarisms, never used in the southern states.’’ 56 In general, there was a marked gulf between the English spoken and written in the Southern United States. The prose and poetry of the South were broadly similar to those written in Boston or London in style, grammar, and tone. The eighteenth century had worked very hard to make this evenness seem desirable. The sound of Southern voices may have been different, but few yet imagined that the vernacular should structure written expression. But this bifurcation was then the familiar condition of the English-speaking writer; what came out of a mouth and what issued from a pen were different things. Coleridge had a broad Devonshire accent, but did not strive to embody this in his writings, for all of the brave words in the preface to his and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads about the language of every day. All Southerners presumed there were standards of correctness, even when (especially when) the vernacular was being portrayed. In the first edition of Georgia Scenes, Longstreet skittishly reinforced this point, that the reader should not take amiss ‘‘the coarse, inelegant, and sometimes ungrammatical language, which the writer represents himself as occasionally using; that it is language accommodated to the capacity of the person to whom he represents himself as speaking.’’ This was the same Longstreet whom Oscar Lieber saw sitting on his porch, while sucking a pipe in his shirt sleeves, the same person whom Preston called ‘‘a genial hearty old cock.’’ 57 And Longstreet’s case points a moral. The moral weight of the intellectual society, when it came to matters of language, lay with propriety, which was a recent and hard-fought possession, like the gentlemanly status of authors. The naturally folksy, like Longstreet, pretended to be mimicking the vulgar, in a double bluff that asserted gentility. In later times in the South, 56. HSL, ‘‘Hall’s Travels in North-America,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 323; entry for 27 May 1860, in Scarborough, Ruffin Diary, 1:423. This is probably John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States (New York: Bartlett and Wilford, 1848); a second, enlarged edition was published in 1859. 57. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (1989; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 25; David Rachels, ed., Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes Completed: A Scholarly Text (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 3–4; Oscar Lieber to FL, 24 April 1858; WCP to FL, 28 April 1858, FL Papers, SCL.

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Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (Courtesy Methodist Collection, Drew University Library)

the balance was to shift, such that the genteel came to pretend that the folksy was natural to them.58 Viewed from the standpoint of slaves, free blacks, and those like Frederick Douglass who had freed themselves, the matter of language was more complicated. It seems the case that the closer a slave was to the household of masters and mistresses, the more they were obliged or wanted to speak ‘‘correct’’ English. The gentlemanly accents of slaves in Tucker and Kennedy might well not have been inaccurate transcriptions. Frederick Douglass, when he was speaking to abolitionist meetings in the North, felt and resented the marked pressure on him to speak as Northerners presumed a slave would speak. Parker Pillsbury told him that it was better to ‘‘have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not,’’ and Garrison worried that ‘‘people won’t believe you were ever a slave.’’ For the reformers, the moral authority to speak paternalistically about the crime of slavery was reinforced by (what they thought were) the manglings they heard in black English. For Douglass, the wanting to be more than an ex-slave flowed from his command of a purity of English, which would register his membership of a greater, intellectual 58. For an example, see Michael O’Brien, ‘‘An Episcopalian Imagination,’’ Southern Cultures 7 (Spring 2001): 13–20, which sees John Shelton Reed in this light.

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community. Besides, as he said, he had grown up more with white children than field hands and his English was less Creole than his Northern audience imagined.59 Like any parvenu, he was often obliged to speak better than those whose world he was joining, to prove his worth. For free blacks in the South, it seems likely that a similar logic applied. Not all talk was informal. There were, for example, the debating societies that were common in Southern towns, a form of talking that was a rite of passage. Young men went off to college, where they grew used to the flickering stimulation of its debating societies. They graduated and wandered home, homesick for the other place. They drifted into a profession, usually the law or medicine, but had much time on their hands, in inverse proportion to the paucity of their clients. So they gathered together in upstairs rooms and formed debating societies, in an ephemeral effort to extend their youth and their oratorical training for public careers. They did this in Norfolk, in Savannah, in Pittsboro, in Yazoo City, in Plaquemine, everywhere and nowhere, though it was more common in lesser places. To these ends, constitutions and manifestos of intent were drawn up. ‘‘Whereas it has been found,’’ the opening pages of the minutes of the Demosthenian Debating Society of Barnwell County, South Carolina, proclaim, ‘‘that Debating and Lyceum Societies conduce to the extension of knowledge and improvement in public speaking; and whereas these societies by bringing the people of a neighbourhood frequently together contribute much to cultivate those civilities and courtesies without which Society looses [sic] most of its pleasures; therefore we the undersigned’’ formed this society. ‘‘We aspirants to knowledge and to the acquisition of elocution,’’ the young men of Plaquemine, Louisiana, reflected, ‘‘think it best in order to reach our aim to form this Association which we style the Calhoun Debating Society.’’ ‘‘Several gentlemen, of Petersburg Virginia, actuated by a desire of improvement, as it regards their minds and morals, or in relation to all those endowments by which our Creator has distinguished man from every other being that exists in the world; having agreed to join in an association, the exercises of which to consist of composing and debating; and having determined to hold a meeting for the purpose of organizing such an institution, met at the store of Mr. Allen James, in a room procured for the purpose, on friday evening the 21st. September 1821.’’ 60 A sense of how this falteringly worked can be gleaned from a letter, writ59. James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 138; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 438–39. 60. Minutes of the Demosthenian Debating Society, SCL; Calhoun Debating Society Minutes, DU; Minutes of the Petersburg Franklin Society, 1821–24, DU.

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ten in 1846 by B. Christian to William Henry Ruffner from Walnut Hills, near Greenville in Augusta County, Virginia. Christian was living at home in the country, hunting, and going to church. ‘‘Have a vague impression that I am reading History of England—recollect something about Cromwell— Pym—Hampden &c &c,’’ he told Ruffner, laconically. ‘‘Am also supposed to be studying law—over two months ago—I procured a copy of Blackstone— read title page—have since read preface & life of Sir Wm Blackstone Knt. find it very entertaining—There stands the book now—looking down upon me with all the ‘nursed wrath’—belonging to the ‘insulted majesty of the Law’—or it is rather an imploring—pitiable aspect.’’ Of a piece with this, he noted, ‘‘Have also no less than three debating societies in ‘striking distance’ of me—Enjoy myself finely at them—Am frequently appealed to [as] ‘the gentleman who is studying law.’ (!!!) to decide some ‘knotty question’—I of course always do it with a gravity that would do honor to the Judge of the Supreme court—tace—Heard a very interesting debate last week in which ‘Dem-mos-theen’ ‘Thucy-dides’—‘Xerxes the king of Greece & Rome’ &c &c were eloquently alluded to.’’ That such debates were often callow is confirmed by Emma Mordecai, who formed part of the audience for the Richmond Hill Debating Society in March 1838: ‘‘We were sufficiently amused with the proceedings of the evening which looked more like boys play than any thing I ever saw sober men engaged in.’’ 61 Southern young men were supposed to aspire to gentility and propriety. This marked their societies off from the debating societies which had crowded the gin-sodden, sawdust-bestrewn public houses of London in late eighteenth century, into which all manner of men and women had jostled, from a ‘‘noble Lord’’ to ‘‘bar-maids or Strand girls’’ and ‘‘even men in women’s clothes,’’ who had resolved themselves into ‘‘the School of Oratory’’ or ‘‘the Robin Hood Society’’ or ‘‘the University for Rational Amusements.’’ In Yazoo, there was nothing to compare in exuberance to the ‘‘Temple of Taste,’’ the ‘‘Female Inquisition,’’ and the ‘‘Female Lyceum,’’ which attempted ‘‘to combine music, poetry, [and] acrobatics with female participation in debate.’’ 62 Rather, Southern debating societies were a training for oligarchy, closer to the old world of Jeffersonian caucuses where gentlemen debated behind closed doors, than to the new world of the Jacksonian hustings. They presumed election and looked forward to the debating chambers of Richmond, Milledgeville, and Washington beyond. Characteristically, a day and hour were assigned for meetings, a limit was 61. B. Christian to William Henry Ruffner, 28 January 1846, Ruffner Family Papers, PHS; Emma Mordecai 1838 Diary, Mordecai Family Papers, SHC. 62. Donna T. Andrew, London Debating Societies, 1776–1799 (London: London Record Society, 1994), vii–xii.

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set to the length of speeches, the number for a quorum was fixed, fines were specified for unparliamentary behavior, essays might be required from members, and the election of officers was prescribed. Sometimes honorary members were solemnly nominated, elected, and noted in the minutes, and documents were printed to be sent to little-flattered celebrities. In 1858, President James Buchanan should have received a certificate from Plaquemine, Louisiana, informing him of his new status as an honorary member of the Calhoun Debating Society. Bored secretaries would strive to give some ironic life to minute books. When a member offered use of Michel Hébert’s hall for future meetings of the Calhoun Debating society, the minutes were made to read: ‘‘This agreeable favor from Mr. Marcot is truly a brilliant addition to the laurels that his energetic & persevering spirit have won for him in this Society.’’ 63 The subject matters of debate seldom touched on very local matters, nothing municipal and little practical, though the Yazoo Library Association did wonder whether ‘‘the issuing of Post Notes by the Miss. Banks [had] been beneficial or injurious to the state.’’ Debates were intended to extend minds beyond the immediate sphere of the eight or fifteen young men gathered ‘‘at the store of Mr. Allen James, in a room procured for the purpose.’’ So they spoke often about national or international politics. ‘‘Whether the commercial or agricultural interest of the United States would suffer most by a War at this time with great Britain?’’ was on the mind of Yazoo on 28 March 1842. In 1857, the Pittsboro (N.C.) Debating Society was puzzled whether, if the North were to propose to the South to buy their slaves and emancipate them, ought the South to agree to it? (They thought not.) They were much preoccupied with judging history, ancient and modern. ‘‘Was Alexander or Caesar the greater general?’’ was an issue for the Petersburg Franklin Society on 21 November 1822. ‘‘Was the career of Napoleon in its consequences a benefit to his country?’’ was a problem for Yazoo in 1838. Should Charles I have been executed? The death of Mary, Queen of Scots, was a great favorite. The Creoles of Plaquemine ruled in 1858 that Ferdinand and Isabella were not justified in expelling the Moors from Spain.64 The controversies of the present day were not shunned, they being the lifeblood of vigorous debate, and even slavery was discussed. The debaters of western Virginia, for example, as befitted the citizens of a border region, were skeptical about the institution. That, in 1816, the Franklin Society of 63. Entries for 27 October, 30 September 1858, Calhoun Debating Society Minutes, DU. 64. Entries for 7 January 1840, 28 March 1842, 12 November 1838, Yazoo Library Association Minute Book, MDAH; preface and entry for 21 November 1822, Minutes of the Petersburg Franklin Society, 1821–24, DU; Record of the Pittsboro (N.C.) Debating Society, 1857, in Matthias M. Marshall Papers, SHC; entry for 28 October 1828, Calhoun Debating Society Minutes, DU.

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Lexington affirmed by seven votes to one that the Virginia legislature ought to pass laws for gradual emancipation may occasion little surprise. But, even in 1849, twelve of thirteen debaters affirmed that the ‘‘present inferior position of Virginia’’ was due to slavery, and a year later the motion, ‘‘Is the existence of slavery indispensable to the southern states?’’ was refused by margin of nine to five. More controversial than slavery was sectarian religion, which was generally avoided, though morality was everywhere debated. Norfolk was unusual in having a debating society devoted to both theological and secular matters. Grigsby was a member of it and his diaries chronicle its debates on questions such as whether man could attain a knowledge of God without Revelation, and whether nature declared the existence of a God, but also whether consolidation of the states was beneficial. This was a delicate balance. As another member of the society reported to Grigsby in 1829, ‘‘As to our Society we are getting full of Methodist Preachers some three or four of them joined us last two nights—I was compelled the last night to stop some of them. For they seem to be disposed to embrace any circumstance that will give them an opportunity to attack and revile the faiths of others[.] I almost fear the spirit will cause our downfall.’’ Indeed, so unusual was this society that it skirted not religion but politics. In general, topics were conventionally scripted, so much so that even the free blacks of Charleston, when they formed the Clionian Debating Society, adhered doggedly to the usual routine and scarcely registered the peculiarity of their social condition and proceedings.65 But, for them, ordinariness was an accomplishment, which demonstrated their distance from field hands, and erected a defense against white suspicions of intellectual subversion and resistance. For whites in debate, the moral issues that affected a young man’s career were prominent, naturally so. ‘‘Is a lawyer justifiable in defending a bad cause?’’ Pittsboro wanted to know and unsurprisingly (in view of the contraction of business involved in answering in the negative) decided in the affirmative. ‘‘Which is more desirable for a young man an Education or a fortune’’? asked others of what they had and what they desired. ‘‘Which is the most laudible incentive—the love of Gain or ambition?’’ The looming prospects of domesticity were seldom far from their minds, since they were not far from being children and close to being parents. Which has more influence upon society, the father or mother?, the Franklin Debating Society of Richmond wondered in 1845. This was more common that abstract philosophical issues, though Yazoo did wonder ‘‘[w]hether . . . the romance of Don Quixotte or 65. Charles W. Turner, ‘‘The Franklin Society, 1800–1891,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 66 (October 1958): 444; entries for 9 May 1829, 12 May 1829, 3 April 1830, in HBG Diary, and Charles Reid to HBG, 30 January, 15 February 1830, HBG Papers, VHS; Clionian Debating Society Minutes, 1851–58, DU.

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Locke’s Essay on the understanding [has] done most for the improvement of mankind.’’ 66 Such societies seldom lasted long. The Franklin Society of Lexington, Virginia, was unusual in its duration, running from 1800 to 1891.67 This was, in part, because it combined the function of a library society, drew in members of the local community, and (because of its proximity to Washington College and the Virginia Military Institute) attracted from their faculty a steady supply of older debaters. Thus Henry Ruffner and ‘‘Stonewall’’ Jackson were both members, as were Matthew Fontaine Maury and William Alexander Caruthers. In general, however, very few mature Southern intellectuals had much time for debating societies. In their papers, one can find any number of speeches and essays, written for college debating societies, but the best of them disdained such organizations after graduation.68 Instead, they tended to find their way into ‘‘conversation’’ clubs, a specialized division of an abundant landscape of Southern clubs, male and female, by which persons gained amusement, society, and instruction. There were jockey clubs, hunting clubs, agricultural clubs, sewing circles. In olden days, as Grayson remembered, such gatherings when masculine had been determinedly drunken, for the ‘‘men of the revolution . . . were a jovial and somewhat rough race, liberal, social, warm hearted, hospitable, addicted to deep drinking, hard swearing, and practical joking and not a little given to loose language and indelicate allusions.’’ 69 But clubs came to admit grave pastors and temperance advocates, and some of them acquired ambitions of serious discourse. In Charleston in about 1807, Stephen Elliott, Thomas Grimké, and William Crafts founded the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina, a club dedicated to intellectual discussion, modeled on the American Philosophical Society and its numerous eighteenth-century companions. It lasted until about 1836, when it seems to have lapsed.70 Of its proceedings there is little evidence, except that it varied between public lectures and 66. Entries for 17 August, 11 April, 1 May 1857, Record of the Pittsboro (N.C.) Debating Society, in Matthias M. Marshall Papers, SHC; entries for 28 February, 14 March 1842, 21 January 1839, Yazoo Library Association Minute Book, MDAH; entry for 17 October 1845, Franklin Debating Society Minutes, in John Esten Cooke Mss, DU. 67. Henry Ruffner, Judith Bensaddi, a Tale: And Seclusaval, or the Sequel to the Tale of Judith Bensaddi, ed. J. Michael Pemberton (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 11. 68. For example, J. G. M. Ramsey, ‘‘Two Speeches’’ (1815), J. G. M. Ramsey Papers, SHC; BM, ‘‘On the Emancipation of Slaves’’ (April 1821), BM Papers, FU. 69. Calhoun, Witness to Sorrow, 59. 70. Samuel Gaillard Stoney gives 1835 as the date of its lapsing, but Manly delivered his ‘‘Lecture on Ants,’’ to the Society in July 1836. See A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 106.

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papers given in private. Some of these were to find their way into the pages of the Southern Review, some into pamphlets, and others remained unpublished.71 It was revived, more informally, by Mitchell King in about 1842 and survived until the Civil War, during which time it was known as the ‘‘Conversation Club’’ or the ‘‘Charleston Literary Club’’ or, more simply, ‘‘the club.’’ 72 There were many such organizations on the Southern and American landscape. They formed part of the characteristic experience of traveling men of letters, for such clubs made it their business to entertain interesting strangers. Thackeray made his way from one to another on his American rounds. John Pendleton Kennedy was a great believer in such institutions. He founded the Monday Club in about 1831 as ‘‘a little weekly meeting or reunion of the gentlemen of Baltimore . . . [whose] object . . . was, by this periodical concourse, not only to cultivate intimate acquaintance and friendship amongst the members, but also to afford strangers who might casually be in the city an opportunity to gain some knowledge of our Society.’’ 73 Himself a stranger in Philadelphia, Kennedy was to meet other traveling luminaries, Longfellow and Sumner, when in 1841 he went to the Wistar Club, which Benjamin Hedrick was later to describe as a group of literary and scientific gentlemen who met regularly at each others’ homes. Emerson and others in the vicinity of Boston too found the institution of utility, for in 1836 they founded the Transcendental Club to discuss the ramifications of their philosophy.74 The Charleston Conversation Club had a formal membership, to which one had to be elected, although guests were habitual and expected. Women 71. Stephen Elliott, An Address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of South-Carolina: Delivered in Charleston, on Wednesday, the 10th August, 1814 (Charleston, S.C.: W. P. Young, 1814); BM, ‘‘Lecture on Ants,’’ Manly Family Papers, UA. In 1823, Elliott seems to have run a lottery on behalf of the South Carolina Academy of Fine Arts and the Literary and Philosophical Society: see the four lottery tickets signed by Stephen Elliott, dated 8 January 1823, Timothy Ford Mss, SCHS. 72. ‘‘Charleston Literary Club’’ is the title given it in the dedication of Samuel Gilman, Contributions to Literature; Descriptive, Critical, Humorous, Biographical, Philosophical, and Poetical (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856). 73. Quoted in Charles H. Bohner, John Pendleton Kennedy: Gentleman from Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 69. See JPK, ‘‘Monday Club: Private Journal of certain public events’’ (18 March 1835–26 October 1840), JPK Papers, PLB; there is a transcription of this in William D. Hoyt, ed., ‘‘The Monday Club,’’ Maryland Historical Magazine 49 (December 1954): 301–13. 74. Entry for 30 January 1841, in JPK Autobiography, JPK Papers, PLB; Benjamin S. Hedrick to Mary Ellen Hedrick, 2 November 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC. Margaret Fuller, who had been the only woman admitted to the deliberations of that club, in 1839 began a series of ‘‘Conversations’’ with intellectually inclined women (later men were admitted), but these were more like didactic lectures given by Fuller exclusively, which were followed by discussion, for which an admission price of ten dollars was paid for the thirteenweek series: on this see Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 182, 290–306.

James H. McCulloh, The Delphians at the Hall of the Flamen (Courtesy Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

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were forbidden even as guests, though it seems that meetings might be held in a house presided over by a hostess, for once it met ‘‘at Mrs. Rutledge’s’’ (though she may have acted as hostess in absentia). Hence David McCord might attend as a guest, but his wife, Louisa, might not; Mary Elizabeth Lee might be honored by Samuel Gilman reading a memoir of her at the club, but in her lifetime she would have been refused entry. With no surviving records, it is uncertain how many members the club had, but Frederick Porcher estimated that its voluntary attendance could run as low as five and as high as ‘‘more than forty,’’ which (allowing for guests) would suggest the upper limits of its attendance.75 Porcher’s own memoirs mention thirty-seven names, which he designated as being ‘‘most’’ of the members, and one can add a few more from other sources.76 Since admission was by consensus, membership tended to eliminate the awkward and difficult man. So Simms was not a member, nor was Petigru, nor were Young Turks like Trescot and Hayne. ‘‘It was the fashion,’’ Porcher remembered, ‘‘among a certain set of men to laugh at the Club as a stiff-starched assembly of old fogies.’’ Certainly, members tended to be older men, with the young and promising attending first as guests, before advancing to admission. (A limiting consideration was the periodic obligation to offer hospitality to what might be a numerous assembly.) The sifting involved in election was decorous, as can be seen from a letter from King to Smyth, in which the candidacy of [Franklin?] Elmore was being deliberated: ‘‘Mr. Elmore, I am persuaded would make a very good member of our club, and would be quite acceptable to me. But I am not sure that our other members would feel as you & I do on this point. We owe it to them to try and ascertain quietly what the general views would be. There are certain reminiscences of which you may be unaware—or may have overlooked that might indispose some of our friends.’’ 77 75. Entry for 22 May 1850, King Memoranda; Samuel Gaillard Stoney, ed., ‘‘The Memoirs of Frederick Adolphus Porcher: Chapter XIII—Continued: The Conversation Club,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 47 (October 1946): 227. 76. Mitchell King, Daniel Ravenel, Charles Fraser, Samuel Gilman, Samuel Dickson, John Bachman, James Moultrie, Thomas Smyth, Henry Frost, Thomas Prioleau, John James M’Carter, George S. Bryan, James H. Taylor, John Adger, Daniel Elliott Huger, James Smith Rhett, William Gregg, A. Barron Williman, Christopher Memminger, Thomas J. Young, Peter C. Gaillard, George Trenholm, John Winkler, Thomas Lynch, A. Sachtleben, W. C. Tustin, Nathaniel Russell Middleton, Eli Geddings, Dr. Holbrook, James Gadsden, James Wilkinson, C. C. Pinckney, William James Rivers, John Barnwell Campbell, William Lawton, Bartholomew Carroll, and Porcher himself. King’s memoranda, in addition, mention a ‘‘Torry,’’ Mr. Lesesne (presumably Henry Deas Lesesne), and Col. Alston. Griswold claims to have been a member in 1846, according to Rufus W. Griswold to JPK, 3 February 1846, JPK Papers, PLB; but it seems likely that he misconstrued visiting status for membership. 77. Stoney, ‘‘Porcher Memoirs: Conversation Club,’’ 214; MK to Thomas Smyth, 2 April 1842, Thomas Smyth Papers, PHS.

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On the whole, members were planters, merchants, and professional men (lawyers, doctors, ministers, professors). Of these, some made a habit of publishing thoughts aired before the club; Porcher, Gilman, Dickson, Bachman, Holbrook, Smyth, and Rivers were among these. Many others, including King himself, published only occasionally. But some members never hazarded print; this silence mattered less then. Southern society in 1850 was closer to that losing world where it had been as important to know as to do something, where the term ‘‘scientist’’ had been as freely granted to those who read about science as those who performed its experiments. Still, even by such standards, there were members of the club who were amiably below the intellectual salt, for they not only wrote nothing but said little. So it is evident that the rota needed some padding with amiable hosts. Membership itself conveyed, as Smyth put it, ‘‘a means of social recognition and public favour.’’ 78 But no Charleston grandee needed to join to ratify his social standing, and the club’s membership was notable for successful parvenus and semioutsiders. King was a Scottish immigrant who had married well, Gilman a Unitarian Bostonian, Smyth an Ulsterman, Sachtleben a German, and Memminger an orphan; these stand out energetically among the established names of Ravenels, Prioleaus, Alstons, and Pinckneys, who tended to be among the more somnolent members of the group. Their procedure was unvarying. During the season, which ran roughly from November to May, each week, sometimes each fortnight, a club member would act as host. A subject was announced at the preceding meeting, so that members might, if they wished, read up about a topic. Unless a guest was speaking, the host himself gave the paper, but the proceedings were presided over by a separate moderator chosen by the host. Discussion ensued, the whole taking about two hours, whereupon the gathering adjourned to ‘‘an elegant but not expensive supper.’’ Such moderation was characteristic of such clubs, which denoted their fear of eighteenth-century excess. The Monday Club in Baltimore struggled to be spartan, though their black broth ran to stewed oysters, turkey salad, and ice cream. Nonetheless, discussion might carry on until late: Smyth, at least, gave up attending in 1857 ‘‘when health seemed to require absence on account of very late hours.’’ It is unclear whether any formal records were kept of these proceedings or if the club had any officers other than the evening’s moderator. King did, in one place, refer to ‘‘our minutes,’’ but if they existed, they have disappeared.79 78. Annotation by Thomas Smyth on MK to Thomas Smyth, 5 September 1843, Thomas Smyth Papers, PHS. 79. Stoney, ‘‘Porcher Memoirs: Conversation Club,’’ 214; Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 69; annotation by Thomas Smyth on MK to Thomas Smyth, 5 September 1843, Thomas Smyth Papers, PHS; MK to James McCarter, 22 September 1856, MK Papers, SHC.

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Topics were various; political, moral, economic, and historical. Porcher observed that the club avoided religion and politics, though judging from what is known of their topics, by this he seems to have meant partisanship and sectarianism. In 1842 phrenology was the topic, for Gilman invited the young William Porcher Miles along, discouragingly, to this ‘‘rather . . . stale’’ subject. In February 1846, they were debating ‘‘whether Slavery be an evil.’’ On this occasion, Rufus W. Griswold, who was attending as a guest, gave to Kennedy a cool assessment: ‘‘There is a club here, which meets every week at the houses of the members, into which I have been elected. It comprises the chancellors, judges, clergy, etc. and discusses questions in philosophy and literature. To-night, at Attorney General Baileys it will decide whether Slavery be an evil, and I promise myself gratification in hearing the opinions of the best men of South Carolina upon this question.’’ 80 In 1847, Thomas Smyth was discoursing on the controversy about the Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence, and arguing that both the Mecklenberg Declaration and that of 1776 were ‘‘derived from the Puritans of Scotland, who for religious & political freedom migrated not only to New England but to different parts of America.’’ Further, he contended that ‘‘Mecklenberg was colonized by the Puritans—that Dr. Brevard was a Puritan, & that many of the expressions in that declaration are purely derived from the creed correspondence & declarations of that sect, particularly the words ‘We pledge our lives, our fortune & our sacred honor.’ ’’ Smyth added that Jefferson was trained by a Puritan clergyman from Scotland, Mr. Douglas, then by William Small, both at William and Mary, and quoted Jefferson on having consulted Scottish precedents.81 This interpretation, according to Joseph Johnson, ‘‘met with a liberal opposition & discussion at that meeting. Mr. Jefferson had his opponents from various motives & feelings, & his right to credit for drafting the National Declaration was denied, & the credit all given to Dr. Brevard, attended with inferences & reflections against the candour & character of Mr. Jefferson.’’ But Jefferson also had his defenders. George S. Bryan read from Jefferson’s writings, which showed that the Founder had thought these matters through before Brevard’s Mecklenberg draft.82 In the 1849–50 season, about which there is more consistent information, 80. Samuel Gilman to William Porcher Miles, 18 May 1842, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC; Rufus W. Griswold to JPK, 3 February 1846, JPK Papers, PLB. Henry Bailey (1799– 1849), who had been a student of Petigru, was attorney general of South Carolina from 1836 to 1848: see John Belton O’Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina, 2 vols. (1859; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1975), 2:38–44. 81. The reader will recognize part of the argument of Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Random House, 1978), though Wills gives credit, not to Scottish puritans, but to Scottish philosophes. 82. Joseph Johnson to David L. Swain, 19 April 1847, David L. Swain Papers, SHC.

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there were sessions on the unity of the human race, the Dorians, the sources of South Carolina history (by William James Rivers), and on ‘‘Inspiration’’ (by John B. Adger).83 The next session, 1850–51, which ran unusually into July, provided Gilman’s memoir of Mary Elizabeth Lee,84 Adger talking about Mohammed, Porcher discussing ‘‘draining the swamps of Carolina’’ (he had an interest in canals), and Frost hazarding whether authorship should be a profession.85 Later, Memminger spoke about immigration (a topic that recurred at Charles Fraser’s in the summer),86 Dr. Gaillard considered the relationship between health and drainage, McCarter reviewed the topic of John Randolph (Garland’s life had just been published),87 Dr. Moultrie (and/or on another occasion Dr. Holbrook) spoke on ‘‘instinct,’’ 88 Gilman talked about oratory by way of reviewing Edward Everett’s speeches, and lastly Bachman conjectured ‘‘what new agricultural products may be advantageously cultivated’’ in South Carolina.89 Along the way, Albert James Pickett came in from Montgomery and gave a paper on the history of the Southern states.90 These offerings show that much aired in the club found its way into print; it functioned as a proving ground for and antechamber to public discourse. In 1849, when he spoke to the club, John Bachman was deep into the controversy over polygenesis and writing his Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science, published in 1850, the same year that Rivers was to publish his Topics in the History of South Carolina.91 In 1851, Gilman contributed a prefatory memoir to The Poetical Remains of the Late Mary Elizabeth Lee, and in April 1851 published his views on Everett’s oratory in the Southern Quarterly Review.92 83. John B. Adger to Lewis R. Gibbes, 29 September 1849, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC; entries for 5 December 1849, 17 April, 15 May 1850, in King Memoranda. 84. Entry for 18 December 1850, in King Memoranda; this was subsequently published as Mary Elizabeth Lee, The Poetical Remains of the Late Mary Elizabeth Lee, biographical memoir by Samuel Gilman (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & Richards, 1851). 85. Entries for 5 February, 5 March, 12 March 1851, King Memoranda. 86. The context in the entry for 19 March, King Memoranda, suggests this was on March 26. On Fraser, see entry for 30 July 1851, King Memoranda. 87. Entries for 2 April, 30 April 1851, King Memoranda. 88. Entry for 14 May 1851, King Memoranda, says Moultrie, while Samuel Gilman to Dorothea Lynde Dix, 14 April 1851, Dorothea Lynde Dix Papers, HU, says Holbrook, unless there were two sessions. 89. Entry for 30 July 1851, King Memoranda, indicating a meeting in two weeks time. 90. Samuel Gilman to Dorothea Lynde Dix, 14 April 1851, Dorothea Lynde Dix Papers, HU; entries for 30 July, 23 April 1851, King Memoranda. 91. William James Rivers, Topics in the History of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C.: Walker and James, 1850); John Bachman, The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science (Charleston, S.C.: C. Canning, 1850). See William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 224, n9. 92. Lee, Poetical Remains; Samuel Gilman, ‘‘Edward Everett’s Orations and Speeches,’’ SQR n.s. 3 (April 1851): 456–99, reprinted in Gilman, Contributions to Literature, 231–83.

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In the same year, Pickett’s History of Alabama was published. The same pattern can be seen in later club meetings.93 No doubt the civilities of society often muffled sharpness of debate, and the civic diversity of the members precluded some technicality of discussion. This was an urbane intelligentsia, not a workshop of experts, with a professional jargon.94 Still, the club encouraged modest dissent and often structured proceedings to generate debate. When in 1847 the club discussed polygene93. A survey of the subsequent topics discussed in the club yields the following topics, with the speaker, if known. 1851–52: Milton (George S. Bryan); Social Systems (Christopher Memminger, with Edmund Ruffin as a guest); political machinery (James McCarter); Kossuth (Samuel Prioleau); fossil animals (Michael Tuomey); Ragged Schools (Thomas Smyth); manufactures (William Gregg); the moral responsibility of man (John Bailey Adger); immigration (Charles Fraser). 1852–53: woman’s rights (Mitchell King); Ramsey’s History of the State of Franklin (at Samuel Dickson’s, with J. G. M. Ramsey as speaker); Judaism (Drs. Meyer & Jacobs seem to have been the speakers); Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Charles Fraser); penitentiaries (King); Richard Chevenix Trench on words (Torry); causes and remedy of juvenile depravity (Memminger); copyright (M’Carter, though meeting held at Bryan’s). 1853–54: spiritual rappings (Taylor); Sir Hudson Low (Dickson); might is right (McCarter); expediency as a principle of action (Ravenel); civilization and policy of South Carolina (Frederick Porcher). 1854–55: Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (John Edwards Holbrook); poetry (evidently James Moultrie Jr., reading his own); Parish Representation (Porcher, with ‘‘Mr. Massey of Virginia’’ giving ‘‘a good speech’’); representation (Memminger); Grayson’s The Hireling and the Slave (Bryan); destiny of negroes in the South (M’Carter); Pickering Dodge’s life of Louis Napoleon (Samuel Gilman); Marriage and the Mormons (Taylor); Bank of England (George A. Trenholm); Ancient Oracles (Campbell); Right of Property (Lesesne); law forbidding the education of slaves (Bryan’s, but with William Elliott speaking). 1855–56: the Immutableness of Virtue (Campbell); Insurance (Trenholm); Fugitive Slave Law (King); ‘‘the Carrier Ships of Commerce’’; ‘‘The Pulpit and the Age.’’ 1856–57: Irving’s Washington (Gilman); taxation (McCarter, with William Campbell Preston as guest); right of secession; civilization (at Alston’s, with essay by Porcher); currency (at King’s, but essay by Ravenel); slavery in classical times (Porcher); instinct (Moultrie) 1857–58: the social systems most conducive to human happiness. 1858–59: the commerce of Charleston. And, on February 28 of an undated year, ‘‘secret societies.’’ For evidence of all this, see King Memoranda; J. G. M. Ramsey to Margaret B. C. Ramsey (1852), J. G. M. Ramsey Papers, Special Collections Department, James D. Hoskins Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Samuel Gilman to ‘‘My Dear Child,’’ 2 April 1856, Samuel Gilman Papers, SCL; Christopher Memminger to William J. Rivers, 5 November 1857, William J. Rivers Papers, SCL; MK to Lewis R. Gibbes, 2 March 1859, and Thomas Smyth to Lewis R. Gibbes, undated, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC. 94. On these issues, see Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginning of Our Own Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

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sis, Adger explained to Lewis Gibbes how matters would go: ‘‘I shall introduce the discussion with a brief defence of the commonly received views & Dr. Bachman will follow at length & in detail on the same side—and as the question has of late occasioned a good deal of conversation about town, it is hoped gentlemen of the opposite side will be present and favour us with their objections to Dr. B’s arguments. I hope I may count upon your presence and that if agreeable to yourself, you will favour the club with your views whether on the one or other side.’’ Nonetheless, King and others sought an agreeable evening; sharp views were expected to be expressed in soft voices. In 1856, an editorial in the New York Evening Post by Jacob Bigelow made reference to an acrimonious meeting of the club, in which slavery had been discussed and ‘‘rudeness and insult’’ shown to a Northern guest, who seems to have been Rufus W. Griswold, attending in 1846. King was astonished at the charge when it was brought to his attention. He was, first, surprised that so private an institution should have been discussed in so public a place, but he was outraged at the suggestion that his club might tolerate incivility. ‘‘Tho I do not specially remember the meetings mentioned in the extract,’’ he told McCarter, ‘‘I have the deepest conviction that had such a discussion, with the accompaniments of ‘rudeness and insult’ which it describes, taken place in my presence, I could not have forgotten that discussion—rudeness and insult never were, and never would be tolerated in our society—From its organization—now nearly 46 years ago—until this day I have been a member of it— and generally a regularly attending member—and never have I witnessed in it the slightest approach to discourtesy in any of the members either among themselves, or to any of their guests.’’ King struggled to reconstruct how such a misunderstanding might have occurred, and unsurprisingly was inclined to think that the error lay with the Northerner. ‘‘On one occasion, I well remember a gentleman from the North, brought into the discussion the subject of slavery—which was not at all connected with the topic before the Club and made several remarks on it which were exceedingly misplaced, and which had he thought of what was due to himself he certainly would not have offered and he was listened to and answered with as much urbanity as if he had observed the strictest rules of politeness.’’ Abolitionists were, he hazarded, somewhat touchy. ‘‘The answers made to his remarks—however called for by them— and couched in the politest language, may have wounded his self esteem, and caused him to give a construction to them, neither warranted nor intended. The fanaticism of abolitionism is as much offended by a correction of mistakes and misstatements, and by a refutation of erroneous arguments—as by any mere rudeness—and is very apt to consider a strong difference of opinion however politely expressed, as a personal insult.’’ But certainly, defining the limits of his club’s capacity for worldliness and dissent, King was anxious

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that it be kept away from the rough sphere of electioneering. ‘‘The editorial is probably a mere electioneering finesse—and we might be playing into the hands of a party by calling attention to it, agitation is usually necessary for the promotion of party purposes—and I should abhor to see our peaceful Club or the names of any of us, involved in the unscrupulous, profligate contentions of political warfare.’’ The club seems to have discussed the matter and King’s diary entry is decisive: ‘‘McCarter’s act Bigelow—Goodrich—Griswold—an invention—a lie.’’ 95 Porcher has left the best evocation of the club and its habitués, a portrait both severe and affectionate. King he described as parvenu, a big-boned, hefty man with an ineradicable Scottish burr, ‘‘a man of literary tastes and some poetical ability and . . . a large share of literary vanity,’’ with a fastidiously chosen library that some thought he never read, but which Porcher shrewdly thought led to reading that clogged King with information. King’s manners were ‘‘overacted’’ to the lofty, patronizing to the lowly, too fulsome to those who spoke to the club. ‘‘The younger members of the club used to say that he generally slept while he (the host) was reading and that the depth of his slumbers could always be inferred from the extravagance of his praises.’’ Next was Daniel Ravenel, an intelligent and philosophical banker of proud Huguenot descent, austere, passionate, pious if ‘‘in practice an antiCalvinist,’’ a man who while ‘‘of great urbanity and benevolence . . . could at the same time exhibit great bitterness.’’ In the oldest generation was Charles Fraser, the exquisite miniaturist, but an ungainly man, an awkward conversationalist, who when called upon would deliver ‘‘an excellent and well prepared essay,’’ but who frequently dozed off; ‘‘He used to say that to sleep was no bad compliment to an orator for it was a sign that everything was going smoothly and well.’’ There was Gilman, very handsome, a middling Unitarian, whose admirers thought learned ‘‘but he really was not.’’ ‘‘There is no doubt that he possessed a great deal of general information, but I do not think he understood what are the limits of the powers of the human mind, and would sometimes lose himself by attempting to go farther than he could soar.’’ He was a freethinker who, in the modern Boston manner, ‘‘believed in the perfect ability of humanity,’’ and in ‘‘the doctrine of spiritual manifestations.’’ These extravagances, no doubt, often brought him into conflict with bleaker Christians like Smyth, in whose presence he once remarked of the Bible that ‘‘he had no idea a book written 1800 years ago was intended as a directory in the present advanced, & advancing sentiment of mankind.’’ Dickson, the physician, was suave, intellectual, a little vain, but gracefully so. 95. John B. Adger to Lewis R. Gibbes, 29 September 1849, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC; Rufus W. Griswold to JPK, 3 February 1846, JPK Papers, PLB; MK to James McCarter, 22 September 1856, MK Papers, SHC; entry for 12 November 1856, King Memoranda.

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Charles Fraser, Self-Portrait (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

Bachman, the Lutheran naturalist, was ‘‘rather heavy in conversation,’’ but capable of being jolted into laughter. He abhorred drinkers, ‘‘anyone who doubted the unity of the human race,’’ and spiritualists. Personally genial, he was bitter in public controversy, a paradox that Porcher reconciled by observing that ‘‘parsons [being] accustomed to preach without interruption acquire thereby a habit of being dictatorial and do not know how to brook opposition.’’ Dr. James Moultrie, professor at the city’s medical school, was both learned and clever, but from reading German philosophers was inclined to coin words and lose his way in metaphysical befuddlement. ‘‘Sometimes the simplest thought would be enveloped in a cloud of words, so that it was difficult to unravel its meaning, and his language was obscure from the confusion with which he constructed his sentences, involving clause within clause, until its meaning was inexplicable.’’ He was, in short, a man it was better not to be obliged to comment upon. Smyth was pleasant enough, but garrulous, digressive, un-self aware, with a reputation for learning overestimated by the immensity of his library: ‘‘I was soon convinced that he was a very ignorant man . . . who did not know the use of the knowledge which he possessed.’’ On one occasion, speaking nonsense about Plato and challenged for it, he referred his listeners to a biographical dictionary. Trescot, present as a guest, discerning the problem, blurted out: ‘‘He accidentally turned over two pages instead of one and read the life of Pythagoras instead of Plato’’ and could not

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Henry Bounetheau, Samuel Gilman (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

tell the difference. This blunder the club silently understood. Henry Frost, another doctor, was modest, diffident, taciturn, who ‘‘when he read an essay, it was so rigidly done that I used to feel an almost uncontrollable desire to snatch the paper from his hands and read it.’’ M’Carter the bookseller was amiable, practical, disillusioned, and unusually had ‘‘the appearance and bearing of a very happy man.’’ George Bryan was clever and tasteful, a political partisan of the Whig and Unionist persuasion, a young man on the make socially, inordinately vain. But, as Porcher shrewdly observed, ‘‘all very vain persons are amiable, for the approval of the world is necessary to their enjoyment and they perhaps unnecessarily cultivate popular manners.’’ All these Porcher described and, more briefly, many others: Daniel Elliott Huger ‘‘inclined to lose himself in psychological intricacies,’’ James Smith Rhett the Kantian ‘‘very amiable under a frowning exterior,’’ the Rev. John Winkler one of those Baptist preachers with the occupational hazard of ‘‘fancying they are talking when they are only stringing words together,’’ Sachtleben the German who came from a happy home and ‘‘frequently spoke of the habits and manners of his father and mother.’’ 96 96. Stoney, ‘‘Porcher Memoirs: Conversation Club’’; for Gilman’s remark to Smyth, see Thomas Smyth, ‘‘Notes on Temperance in Charleston,’’ in Mss Volume 1 (pp. 113–114), Thomas Smyth Papers, PHS.

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No one was more aware than Porcher of the shortcomings of these men and their gatherings: being candid, he was often uncharitable, but clear. To see his menagerie in a single room is to envision King and Fraser dozing, Dickson and Bryan posing, Smyth gabbling learned nonsense, Moultrie disappearing into his Germanic clauses, Frost frightened, and Sachtleben nostalgic. But Porcher knew that human frailty and pretension did not prevent or vitiate useful conversation, and in its own way the club contributed to the life of the mind, even as it served exclusivity. Of the two possible qualifications for membership, learning and geniality, only the second was indispensable. As Porcher rightly observed, ‘‘The Club did not require learned men, or eloquent men but it did require genial men, social men, men who would take an interest in it.’’ But learning was, for all that, not infrequent, intelligence scarcely less so, and seriousness a purpose. Porcher’s general verdict was grateful: ‘‘The constant intercourse with men of high intelligence on all sorts of subjects gave an activity to thought which was a great advantage to one whose course of life had hitherto been so sluggish, and I gradually and imperceptibly acquired the power of expressing myself freely and without embarrassment. It was a great advantage to be brought continually into social contact with men of the best calibers in the city and to measure myself with them.’’ 97 And, he might have added, with intellectual strangers and sojourners, such as Agassiz, Thackeray, Kennedy, and Ruffin.

97. Stoney, ‘‘Porcher Memoirs: Conversation Club,’’ 220–21, 214.

Chapter Eleven

Private Impartments

If a historian were given the choice of saving the printed words or the manuscript letters and diaries of Southern intellectuals, and only one could be preserved from incineration, she or he might hesitate long over which would entail the greater loss. As a mobile people, Southerners were often physically divided one from another by political service, commerce, education, or migration. Their great medium of connection was the excellent and cheap postal service that even a zealous states righter might agree gave some justification for the existence of the federal government. To write a letter was one of the most common, sometimes more intellectually exacting obligations that fell to a literate Southerner. They came to be good at it. John Pendleton Kennedy, indeed, thought that, next to political writing, Southerners were better at the epistolary arts than anything else and this ought to be represented in any anthology of Southern literature.1 Certainly they had gifts in the composition of diaries. Letters, and the concomitant exchange of manuscripts, had once been a prime medium of discourse between intellectuals in the early modern period in both Europe and its colonies. The ‘‘republic of letters’’ had been precisely that, a community that exchanged letters and that, further, bore letters of introduction from one savant to another when someone undertook the voyage littéraire. For many, this ‘‘manuscript culture’’ was not merely a proving Title from George Henry Calvert to Hiram Powers, 28 November 1846, Calvert Papers, ColU: ‘‘I thought it hard that such valuable comments [about the Apollo Belvedere] should be bestowed on one favored individual, and a few of his friends, and if I were not so scrupulous about private impartments I should have sent it to some journal for the public benefit.’’ 1. JPK to JRT, 15 June 1851, JPK Papers, PLB.

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ground for ideas that might find their way into print, but was itself a means of discussion that made print superfluous. Print was often regarded as vulgar and uncontrollable—for who knew into what soiled and ignorant hands a book might fall?—while manuscripts might be contained within the charmed circle of cognoscenti and friends and so remain a sociable and not a public thing. Such men and some women saw themselves as in a separate realm, there equal to one another but above locality and the petty obligations of church and state. A remarkable number of the chefs d’oeuvres of what is now called, anachronistically, colonial Southern literature remained in manuscript (as their authors wished) until the modern era, which finds such inaccessibility an affront to the suzerainty of print.2 Among these can be numbered the diaries of William Byrd, not published until the 1940s, and Alexander Hamilton’s History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, issued only in 1990.3 That William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina was first published by Edmund Ruffin in 1841 shows that the impulse to turn colonial manuscripts into American print commenced in the antebellum years.4 By the mid-nineteenth century, belles lettres had all but abandoned itself to print culture; for a thought not to be printed came to seem a mark of a thought’s marginality. But letters and correspondence stood as they once had. Thomas Jefferson, who published only one book in his lifetime, exerted much of his intellectual influence and spent most of his waking hours, especially in retirement, in the writing of letters. Thereby, he did not think he was contributing the less to the life of the mind than he had by publishing his Notes on the State of Virginia. As with conversation but more readily, letter writing was much driven by the scattered isolation of the intelligentsia. David McCord, in later years, lived much on his plantation, alone with his wife, and his accounts of it are strained: ‘‘I correspond with no one in the State. Indeed such is the spirit of the day, that I seem no longer to belong to the community. My only companion is my wife, whose opinions, taste, reading, and prejudices are all in my own line.’’ ‘‘We have had a most wretched cold winter and I have scarcely left the plantation,’’ he told Abraham Watkins Venable in 1852. ‘‘We have however 2. Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). On colonial American manuscript culture, see David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 6–7. 3. Louis B. Wright, ed., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712 (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1941); Alexander Hamilton, The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, ed. Robert Micklus (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 4. William Byrd, The Westover Manuscripts; Containing the History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, a Journey to the Land of Eden, A.D. 1733, and a Progress to the Mines Written from 1728 to 1736, and Now First Published (Petersburg: Edmund & Julian C. Ruffin, 1841).

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finished planting corn. Let us hear from you now and then. Butler and I pass a few letters between us, but I have no other correspondent at Washington. I have received no documents from our members this winter and to a man living on a plantation every thing of the kind is welcome.’’ Scientists had long since developed ways to remedy these immurements, and had done so even in early modern Europe by fashioning an insistent and cosmopolitan tradition of epistolarity, with learned societies encouraging ‘‘correspondents.’’ The elder Stephen Elliott was in this mode, but so were his Southern successors. ‘‘I feel greatly obliged to you for these favours & also for the very prompt & kind manner in which you have replied to my letters & furnished me with the information desired,’’ Henry W. Ravenel wrote to Moses Ashley Curtis in 1846, from Black Oak, South Carolina. ‘‘There are so few persons who take an interest in any of the natural sciences, that when one becomes engaged in them, he is isolated & labours alone, & it is quite encouraging to communicate with those who are engaged [in such] pursuits. This is so especially in the country, as no doubt you have experienced. I assure you, your letters have [restored] my zeal & given me courage to go on.’’ Michael Tuomey, the geologist, visited Boston in 1847 and felt a contrast: ‘‘I was constantly reminded of the privations of us poor fellows buried in the woods without a book or a man to turn to for sympathy or assistance.’’ But poets and other authors too could be isolated. When John R. Thompson gave Mary Bryan useful criticism of her poetry by letter, she replied: ‘‘I am most grateful for such a friend as I have found in you, and I will try to deserve your good opinion, and you shall be ‘my public,’ when I am in my lonely, far away home.’’ 5 To write letters and get replies was, in little or large, to effect a sense of membership in the wider community of mind. The most avid correspondents were often those most insecure about their intellectual standing, people who needed the reinforcement that a letter provided, a physical reminder that the recipient belonged somewhere on the landscape of ideas. A letter admitted distance, but built a bridge.6 The Old South stood at a distinctive moment in the history of correspondence. The form was, of course, ancient. Unusually in antiquity, Cicero’s letters began to be published soon after his death (43 b.c.), and his correspondence, especially his familiar letters to Atticus, were a standard part of 5. David James McCord to WCP, 8 May 1842, Preston Family Papers, VHS; David James McCord to Abraham Watkins Venable, 19 March 1852, Abraham Watkins Venable Papers, SHC; Henry W. Ravenel to MAC, 24 November 1846, and Michael Tuomey to MAC, 3 August 1847, MAC Papers, SHC; Mary E. Bryan to JRT, 28 June (ca. 1850) JRT Papers, UVA. 6. I adapt from Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 13: ‘‘Given the letter’s function as a connector between two distant points, as a bridge between sender and receiver, the epistolary author can choose to emphasize the distance or the bridge.’’

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a Southern education. The Middle Ages had treatises on the art of the letter, and bishops and popes specialized in them as instruments of government and God’s order. The Renaissance had seen a marked revival of interest in the form, which only then began regularly to be published. Petrarch’s letters first appeared in 1492, and Erasmus in the De Conscribendis Epistolis (1522) had argued that letters should be free to express individuality.7 By the late seventeenth century into the eighteenth, the new intimacies of the private letter had become a literary fashion, not only by the publication of its supreme exponent, Madame de Sévigné, but by the invention of the epistolary novel, of which Richardson’s Clarissa and Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses were late examples. As usual, the demand for freedom had created a desire for order. In 1568 the first French epistolary manual, that by Gabriel Chappuys, was published, many others followed in English, and correspondence became a formal part of education, not only in schools.8 To learn how to write a letter was one of the more urgent tasks of growing up in a household, since everyone understood that letters from parents to children, from aunts to nieces, from husbands to wives helped to hold domesticity together. In 1831 Alicia Hopton Middleton advised her son Nathaniel Russell Middleton that his letter writing was a disappointment: ‘‘Izard observes, I don’t think Russell writes letters as well as he does other things there is nothing in them. . . . Stir up—stir up & write most particularly—I am tired of making apologies for you.’’ 9 To help, there were letter books that told a student how to go about salutations, subscriptions, paragraphing, tone, vocabulary, and sensibility.10 So to grow up and write letters in the early nineteenth century was to inherit a complicated, self-conscious tradition whose instructed essence lay in its being poised between the public and private realms. The fiction was that a letter was a private thing, a confidentiality sent from one person to another. As Bussy-Rabutin had said of his letters, they were ‘‘une histoire de moi si véritable et si particularisée que je la pourrais appeler ma confession générale.’’ 11 Correspondents were also, usually, conscious of writing for more than one eye, because letters were characteristically shared within a household and were read out as often as the epistolary novels formed from letters. But a let7. John W. Howland, The Letter Form and the French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 18–19. 8. Howland, Epistolary Paradox, 2: Chappuys’s title was Le secrétaire, comprenant le stile et méthode d’escrire en tous genres de lettres missives, extraits de plusieurs sçavants hommes. 9. Alicia Hopton Middleton to Nathaniel Russell Middleton, 26 August 1831, Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, SHC. 10. Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 267, cites many of these. 11. Howland, Epistolary Paradox, 24.

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ter writer engaged by the life of the mind wrote with a still sharper sense of watching eyes, because there was the potentiality of print. Here the range of options was great. Most publicly, there was the genre of the letter on current controversies. This might be only incidentally a letter to someone in particular, as with Calhoun’s Fort Hill letter, technically addressed to Frederick W. Symmes, the editor of the Pendleton Messenger. Or a letter might have a very specific, necessary destination, as with Hammond’s Two Letters on the Subject of Slavery, Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, Esq. (1845). Such a form varied only from a conventional publication about public affairs by being brushed with the sense, thought to be inherent to a letter, that the author was speaking with more candor, was revealing more of his or her private mind, and was in turn hoping to reach the private sensibility and convictions of the recipient. By a polite fiction, the public letter suggested that print was only passed through as ideas traveled from one private sensibility to another, that the reading public was but an interested eavesdropper, accidentally engaged by a purloined thing. Next were travel letters. Anyone who traveled was expected to report back to those at home, who would read out the exotic missives in open parlor. Such letters were conventionally an aide-mémoire to the traveler himself, to be read through in later years, a literary equivalent of the photographs that choke the drawers of modern travelers, and like them often pleasantly redundant. Southern archives are jammed with such letters, for Southerners traveled incessantly. But it was very common for these to be handed over to local printers or newspaper editors, not always with the knowledge and consent of the author. This unhappy tradition was, rightly, later to become the occasion for Mark Twain’s satire in The Innocents Abroad. It was common for the traveler to publish a volume, in which the epistolary form was preserved, as with Randal McGavock’s A Tennessean Abroad, or Letters from Europe, Africa, and Asia (1854). Such books might not only be reports from Southerners abroad, but might be reports from within Southern culture: Anne Royall’s Letters from Alabama (1830), in theory written from Huntsville to a correspondent in Virginia, is an example. Within the form of the travel letter was the genre initiated by Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. In this, as Henry Nott explained in 1831, ‘‘under the mask of a foreigner, a satirical view is given of the manners and customs of a country.’’ 12 The Southern prototype was Wirt’s Letters of a British Spy, quickly emulated by George Tucker in Letters from Virginia, Translated from the French (1816) and softened into eulogy by Grigsby in the Letters of a South-Carolinian (1827). But the genre is still alive with Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The Sunny South 12. Henry Junius Nott, ‘‘French Novels,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 346.

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(1860), which effected to be letters from a Northern governess on a Tennessee plantation. Of these various forms, this last was probably the least common. Next in self-consciousness were letters which, though private, were written with an awareness that their words might eventually be lodged in print. By the early nineteenth century, the posthumous publication of letters was a long-established genre, as well as a mark of celebrity. Byron’s correspondence, published in Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), set the new standard, which moved things from the sententious moral traditions of Sévigné and Chesterfield to something freer, more irresponsible, more seductive. Legaré’s reaction to Byron’s letters showed how their publication had changed and relaxed things: ‘‘They fully rival the best [letters] in spirit, piquancy, and we venture to add, wit, while, like the epistles of Cicero, they not unfrequently rise from the most familiar colloquial ease and freedom into far loftier regions of thought and eloquence. . . . We scarcely read one of them without being surprised into a smile—occasionally into a broad laugh—by some felicitous waggery, some sudden descent from the sublime to the ridiculous.’’ 13 But Byron complicated literary life. It was the promise of Moore’s edition that the letters’ casual and exuberant intimacy showed to the public what had been the private, the real Byron. It followed that, in writing intimately but with a premonition of fame, a writer might hope to structure posthumous understandings, might trick those who felt that the formal things (poetry, fiction, philosophy) might be understood through the informal, the letters. Some of Legaré’s own letters were published in the posthumous 1845–46 edition of his Writings, and it is doubtful that Legaré did not anticipate such an action. Richard Henry Wilde, reading them in New Orleans, discerned this complexity of awareness; ‘‘Legaré I should judge by his Diary, letters, Reviews &c understood & appreciated the animal [democracy] better than most of our countrymen,—at least he let more of his opinions about the many headed monster out; though even he it is obvious put great restraint upon himself.’’ 14 The antebellum years see Southerners beginning to edit the letters of other Southerners. But this tradition applied more to politicians than to novelists and poets, and usually only to writers when they had also been politicians, even statesmen. Many of the letters of the Revolutionary generation were, most notably, put into print in these years, although all of them had seen some of their correspondence, often with their own connivance, printed in their lifetimes. But more scholarly editions were done later of Jefferson, first 13. HSL, ‘‘Byron’s Letters and Journals,’’ SR 7 (May 1831): 2. 14. Richard Henry Wilde to ‘‘Mason,’’ 27 August 1846, individual item, SHC.

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by Thomas Jefferson Randolph in 1829 as a family matter, secondly by Henry Augustine Washington in 1853–54 with the commission and subvention of the United States Congress. At the behest of the Virginia Historical Society, William Cabell Rives undertook a biography of James Madison, which was published between 1859 and 1868, with an edition of Madison’s papers delayed and complicated by the war and issued in 1865. But some of his letters, as well as his notes on the Constitutional Convention of 1787, had been published in 1840, with a volume devoted only to his letters between 1813 to his death in 1853. The Writings of George Washington were published in the 1830s, but Jared Sparks had published twelve volumes of The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution in 1829, which contained letters by many Southerners like Ralph Izard and Henry Laurens. Between 1840 and 1843, Charles Campbell published the papers of Theodorick Bland. Of a later generation, pickings were thinner, since many were not yet dead in 1861. Soon after his death, the Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative (1834) were published, and many of his letters formed the backbone of Hugh Garland’s biography in the 1850s.15 So, on the whole, politicians were more vulnerable to this posthumous rifling, because they commanded a greater celebrity in the culture than ‘‘authors.’’ Wirt wrote of Patrick Henry and used his letters, and Wirt’s ‘‘life and letters’’ was in turn written by Kennedy, whose own letters were liberally scattered through Henry Tuckerman’s 1871 biography of Kennedy himself. This denoted a canon and a tendency. Henry was only a politician; Wirt was a politician who ventured authorship; Kennedy was an author who tried politics; and Tuckerman was only a writer. Notably, several books that might be expected to have republished letters 15. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, ed., Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 4 vols. (Charlottesville, Va.: F. Carr, 1829); Henry Augustine Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private. Pub. by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State, 9 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury; J. C. Riker, 1853); William C. Rives, History of the Life and Times of James Madison, 3 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1859–68); Henry D. Gilpin, ed., The Papers of James Madison, Purchased by Order of Congress; Being His Correspondence and Reports on Debates during the Congress of the Confederation, and His Reports on Debates in the Federal Convention, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Langtree and O’Sullivan, 1840); Jared Sparks, ed., The Writings of George Washington Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published from the Original Manuscripts; with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, 12 vols. (Boston: American Stationers’ Company, John B. Russell, 1834–37); Jared Sparks, ed., The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, 12 vols. (Boston: N. Hale and Gray & Bowen, 1829); CC, ed., The Bland Papers: Being a Selection from the Manuscripts of Colonel Theodorick Bland, Jr. . . . To Which Are Prefixed an Introduction, and a Memoir of Colonel Bland, 2 vols. (Petersburg, Va.: E. & J. Ruffin, 1840–43); John Randolph, Letters of John Randolph, to a Young Relative Embracing a Series of Years, from Early Youth, to Mature Manhood (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1834); Hugh A. Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1850).

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by authors did not: among them, the Miscellaneous Writings of William Crafts and Isaac Harby. And many more, who were theoretically available to the Thomas Moores of the South, were left alone, often to our loss, since some had papers that war and families and mishap were later to destroy; most of Thomas Cooper’s papers, for example, were burnt in a fire in Mobile in the 1870s.16 Though no one hesitated to read Moore’s Byron, few wished to emulate him. And this meant that, through published letters, antebellum Southerners as readers knew their writers with less intimacy than did the English, French, or Scots. Before sketching the landscape of correspondents, it will be helpful to say something about epistolary conventions, observed by ordinary and intellectual Southerners alike. These changed a little, though not drastically, between 1800 and 1860. One change of consequence was physical. Until the late 1810s it was customary to write on a single large sheet of paper, which was folded first into half, giving the writer four pages to fill. The middle section of the fourth page was left blank so that, when the sheet was further folded, the address of the recipient might be entered, before the whole was sealed. It was possible, but inconvenient and hazardous, to insert further sheets (the seal would be put under pressure and the enclosures might be lost), so that there was a natural limit to the length of letters. When envelopes come into general use, this limitation was removed and letters could become as discursive and long as the writer wished, which matched in the private realm the blowsiness that cheap printing brought to published prose. The business of superscriptions and subscriptions did not change much, though a little. In 1810 as in 1860, the address of the writer was placed at the top right-hand side of the first page and, by our standards, was inexplicit. Alice Izard was unusually precise in addressing her letters to her daughter Margaret as ‘‘Mrs. Manigault, Meeting Street, near So. Bay, Charleston, So Carolina.’’ 17 Mail was usually collected from post offices and each town or rural area had but one, so it was necessary only to signify ‘‘Charleston, S.C.’’ or ‘‘Charlotte C.H.’’ (court house). Occasionally, a planter might give the name of a plantation as David McCord would write ‘‘Langsyne,’’ but often not; his wife usually wrote ‘‘Lang Syne Fort Motte,’’ but ‘‘Fort Motte’’ would have sufficed. So almost no one gave a street, and houses did not have numbers. This generality of location, though logistical in origin, fittingly accorded with the sense of collectivity with cities and counties that later years, later individualisms, later overpopulations with growing literacies, were to erode and limit. As to terms of address, there was a modest decline in formality. Many early letters began, ‘‘My Dear Son,’’ or ‘‘Dear Sir,’’ but it was not uncommon to 16. Colyer Meriwether to Mrs. L. C. Welch, 3 October 1898, TC Papers, SCL. 17. For example, ADI to MIM, 23 December 1810, Manigault Family Papers, SCL.

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begin as though writing an essay, in which the name of the correspondent was elegantly enfolded into the narrative. ‘‘By the time this can reach my dear Saml, he will begin to wish to hear from home,’’ is how an 1814 letter from Rachel Mordecai to her brother begins. Another, two years later, does not mention him until four lines have all but elapsed: ‘‘Behold me on entering the breakfast room presented with your anxiously expected letter, and on breaking the seal and finding the enclosure, stopping not even to read the kind and considerate entreaty with which it commences. What my dear brother could be more polite. . . .’’ Likewise, subscriptions were often made to flow from the final sentence. In the same 1816 letter, Rachel Mordecai ended, ‘‘Every body is well and asleep—so shall I be in a very few minutes after having [told] you how truly I am your affectionate R.’’ 18 This was a self-consciously literary device, which Rachel Mordecai would have learned from authors like her beloved Maria Edgeworth.19 Jane Austen’s unpublished Lady Susan, written ca. 1793–94, which is the fragment of an epistolary novel, varies in its salutations. By 1860, this eighteenth-century art of inviting the recipient into the continuous flow of talk had declined, especially at the beginning of letters, and the modern stiff routine was more common, in which recipient, narrative, and author are more rigorously separated and punctuated. In signing herself ‘‘R,’’ Rachel Mordecai was unusual. By modern standards, signatures were formal, not only between strangers but between family members, even husbands and wives. Letters took care to denote a precise relation. ‘‘I am My Dear Daughter your truly affecte Mother Alice Izard’’ betrayed no coldness, but a sharp awareness that Alice Izard and Margaret Manigault had bonds of affection mediated through their formal roles as mother and daughter. ‘‘Dear Brother,’’ begins an 1858 letter from Louisa McCord to Langdon Cheves Jr., and she signs herself ‘‘Most affectionately Yr Sister Louisa S. McCord.’’ 20 To modern eyes, this is odd, as though she thought he might forget she was his sister, that they were so strange that she needed a surname. In fact, none of these implications were relevant. The individual that was Louisa McCord was not stripped down to a bare, singular ‘‘Louisa,’’ but her reality was associated with her surname and hence her marriage, and with the registering of her relationship of ‘‘sister’’ with Langdon. 18. Rachel Mordecai to Samuel Mordecai, 24 April 1814, 26 September 1816, Mordecai Family Papers, SHC. 19. See, for example, Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies: To Which Is Added, an Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (London: J. Johnson, 1795), which follows this style. 20. ADI to MIM, 5 May 1811, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; LSM to Langdon Cheves Jr., 4 April 1858, in Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography, Letters, ed. Richard C. Lounsbury, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 340.

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But the use of Christian names in salutations was not uncommon, early as well as late, especially when addressing the young, but it was decidedly rare in signatures. Langdon Cheves Jr. is ‘‘Dear Lang’’ in 1839, when he was in his twenties, but she was not ‘‘Louisa’’ in subscription, but still ‘‘Your affectionate Sister Louisa Cheves.’’ Still more rare were nicknames and diminutives, despite their use in the spoken language. One might write in a journal, ‘‘She gave me this morning the prettiest straw basket which Uncle Jim had sent from Madeira,’’ but Jane Caroline North would not have addressed James Heyward North in a letter in such a manner. And ‘‘Loulie darling’’ is startling in an 1866 Louisa McCord letter to her married daughter, Louisa McCord Smythe, though such laxity grew more common in the later years.21 In general, relationships and surnames mattered most, Christian names least, and initials were stubbornly important. Hugh Swinton Legaré was, habitually in letters, ‘‘Hugh S. Legaré,’’ even to his mother and sister, occasionally ‘‘H. S. Legaré,’’ but never ‘‘Hugh’’ alone. There was, indeed, sometimes more familiarity in the use of a surname or initials alone. William Gilmore Simms’s first letters to James Lawson were often signed ‘‘W. Gilmore Simms Jr.,’’ but, in time and with growing intimacy, he became only ‘‘Simms,’’ 22 until in later years he tended to settle upon ‘‘W.G.S.’’ or, more usually, ‘‘W. Gilmore Simms.’’ Thomas Grimké, in 1808, was eccentric in writing to James McBride as ‘‘Dear James,’’ and still more so in objecting to the salutation ‘‘Dear Sir’’: ‘‘One of the Gentlemen to whom I write, begins his letters with ‘My Dear Sir.’ Perhaps it is a weakness, if such, I know you will find its apology, but really this has an effect upon me. I cannot unfold my thoughts so freely to him; because I know not, whether he intends me to look upon him, as a friend, or as one of a higher order of acquaintance.’’ 23 Even so, the same letter is subscribed ‘‘T. S. Grimké.’’ This was something of a pattern: recipients of letters were allowed more informal names than the writers of letters, on those occasions when informality was allowed to intrude. Paul Hamilton Hayne would begin a letter to his wife with ‘‘Dearest Minna,’’ but end, ‘‘P H Hayne.’’ 24 But he also would sign himself ‘‘Hamilton.’’ This will seem curi21. Louisa Cheves to Langdon Cheves Jr., 7 October 1839, and LSM to Louisa McCord Smythe, 16 September 1866, in Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 269–79, 377; entry for 7 August 1852, Jane Caroline North Journal, in An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67, ed. Michael O’Brien, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 187. 22. Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952–82), 1:43. 23. Thomas S. Grimké to James McBride, 19 October 1808, James McBride Papers in the Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC. 24. Rayburn S. Moore, ed., A Man of Letters in the Nineteenth-Century South: Selected Letters of Paul Hamilton Hayne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 40–41.

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ous, for it suggests that it was easier to claim intimacy than to concede it, that a reader was a more informal creature than a writer, but in this case gender was of consequence, for a man might claim rights of intimacy with a woman with more freedom than the reverse. As to the functions of letter writing in intellectual life, they were manifold. They dealt with business, with authors writing to editors and others of their ilk, which kept the great fabric of print moving. ‘‘I submitted my manuscript several weeks since to the Editor of the Republic,’’ Iveson Brookes explained to a fellow Christian. They exchanged information, the bringing of news from the frontiers of knowledge. ‘‘If you recollect upwards of 12 months ago I advanced an hypothesis that the mind cannot in any circumstances be diseased,’’ Samuel A. Cartwright wrote from Lexington to a friend in Alabama in 1822. ‘‘Caldwell has taken up this idea also & has given several lectures on his new doctrine, calls it Phrenology,’’ and then proceeded to explain these new doctrines. ‘‘My letter to you conveying the information which I received from the Feulah Tom (Sali Ben Alli) is, as I have before said, entirely at your disposal,’’ J. Hamilton Couper told William B. Hodgson in 1844. ‘‘If you deem it of sufficient importance to place it before the New York Historical Society, such a disposal of it will be very acceptable to me.’’ Ideas were, in turn, sought. So Frederick Grimke asked Legaré: ‘‘As you have spent so much time in Europe I should like to know something of the state of society and of learning there.’’ 25 More often, letters bantered trivial, friendly, or malicious gossip about ideas or people, which bounced backwards and forwards across the landscape. This was what Samuel Gilman once called ‘‘all the juice of information and opinion.’’ George Hillard sent down letters from Boston to Lieber, to say that he had read Bancroft’s third volume, but ‘‘I dont altogether like it,’’ because his ‘‘style is pert and melodramatic—aiming too much at point, dazzle, and effect, and he is perpetually dragging in his vile loco-focoism and flattering the sovereign people.’’ But Prescott was ‘‘going on quietly and diligently with his work’’ on Mexico and Emerson had published his essays, ‘‘unlike anything else that ever was written: full of beauty of expression and originality of thought, but defaced with much that is affected, absurd, nonsensical and mischievous.’’ Lieber sent gossip back: ‘‘We have just elected our 4 representatives for the state legislature, and the one who has received the largest vote is a Mr. Treadwell, who in consequence of drunkenness has been once in the asylum and often in the gutter—I speak literally—who has committed all 25. Iveson L. Brookes to ‘‘Bro. Slade,’’ 20 March 1849, Iveson L. Brookes Papers, SHC; Samuel A. Cartwright to Francis John Levert, 13 December 1822, Levert Family Papers, SHC; James Hamilton Couper to WBH, 9 June 1844, WBH Papers, DU; Frederick Grimke to HSL, 18 May 1838, HSL Papers in the Harry L. and Mary K. Dalton Collection, DU.

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sorts of outrages and immoralities openly and shamelessly.’’ Others reflected on Lieber. Matthew J. Williams wrote to Thornwell in 1855 that the thought of Lieber becoming president of the South Carolina College was ‘‘ludicrous,’’ though it was ‘‘an object for which he has toiled and schemed as only a cool, calculating selfish German could or would toil & scheme.’’ In kind, Lieber complained about Thornwell: ‘‘Mr. Preston has resigned and Mr. Thornwell has been made president and—I feel somewhat like a man walking about in the catacombs.’’ Elsewhere, in a letter to Lieber, Joseph Story had praised Preston and his eulogy of Legaré: ‘‘It is worthy of both—Laudatus—a laudato viro.’’ The same Preston was, in turn, friendly to Mary Legaré about the literary obsequies of her brother: ‘‘In regard to the memoir I think the casting of it had best be confided to a single hand, the materials being contributed from any variety of sources—and that single hand accustomed to literary work. William E. Johnston of Washington City or such a man would draw it up in a very finished style.’’ But she, a year before, had complained about Preston’s eulogy: ‘‘This I say because I know, Mr. P [Petigru] feels as I do, on the treatment my brother has always received in Charleston; by those too who were boasting of him at his death, as their distinguished townsman &c &c & are about to reproach themselves by eulogizing him!’’ This sentiment she would have reinforced, though she knew the half of it, if she had seen one of Preston’s letters in 1842, when Legaré was still alive: ‘‘The war between Tyler and the Whigs is unremitted and like to be a kilkenny affair. . . . the Van Buren Democrats refuse all connection with him, while on the other hand Calhoun coquets with him and there that base pimp Legaré is supposed to have had illicit intercourse.’’ 26 Further, letters gave advance knowledge of books or decoded intentions and opinions, masked in print. William Porcher Miles transmitted to Charles Eliot Norton copies of Southern Quarterly Review articles on Marcus Aurelius written by his brother James, as well as a piece by himself: ‘‘You will observe that I have made no comment upon Mr. Bristed’s book. It abounds, me judice, in flippancy, conceit and slang—and slang too of the worst sort—the slang of the New York ‘fast man’—But as my object was merely to draw attention to some of the imperfections of our College system of examinations and to shew how much more thoroughly they manage such matters in the old 26. Samuel Gilman to Dorothea Dix, 26 June 1851, Dorothea Lynde Dix Papers, HU; George S. Hillard to FL, 5 May 1841, and FL to Dorothea Dix, 14 October 1852, FL Papers, HEH; M. J. Williams to JHT, 23 February 1855, JHT Papers, SCL; FL to Dorothea Dix, 12 January 1852, and Joseph Story to FL, 12 January 1844, FL Papers, HEH; WCP to Mary Swinton Legaré, 25 November 1844, WCP Papers, SCL; Mary Swinton Legaré to John S. Reid, 12 August 1843, HSL Papers in the Harry L. and Mary K. Dalton Collection, DU; WCP to Waddy Thompson, undated [1842], WCP Papers, SCL.

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country.’’ ‘‘How come on your literary ventures?’’ Meek asked Simms. ‘‘The papers say you are about to bring forth a book? What is it? History, Poetry, or Romance? for Prospero waves his wand over three realms. Whatever it be, I trust you will safely pass the Poe, that most unnavigable of critical rivers for slender barques.’’ Or letters admitted failures, confessed to hopes, or solicited puffery. ‘‘I did my best in preparing it, but sickness, the heats & interruptions I feared would make it a failure, as regarded arrangement, style & diction all of which though secondary are important in a speech,’’ Hammond confessed to Miles in 1858. ‘‘If you have read it twice, I ought to give you my hat for I have never read it over once continuously.’’ ‘‘For this I venture to request some kind notice from your pen,’’ Susan Archer Talley asked Grigsby. ‘‘I am aware of its numerous defects—but as there will be plenty to censure these, I hope for your more lenient criticism. I have the promise of favorable notices from my friends, the Rev. Mr. Edwards, Minnegorde & others—but shall value none more highly than one from your own pen.’’ 27 To be sure, there were those who seem to have had no gift for or interest in the genre. George Tucker’s letters are brief, laconic, and functional, as are those of Thomas Dew, who seems mostly to have written letters about his business affairs, not unfittingly for a professor of political economy. Mary Chesnut destroyed many of her letters, but those that survive show little aptitude and it may be that diarists—for the same is true of Edmund Ruffin and Henry Hughes—used up their energies elsewhere. Petigru’s letters seldom run past a page, unless they are legal opinions, and show little of his wit. Though there are many letters by William Elliott and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, sufficient to have been edited by modern scholarship, neither wrote letters of marked talent. Poe, being harried and wary, was brief, selfserving. Like most politicians with great power, who were harassed by office seekers, Calhoun tended to be pointed, businesslike, and lofty. De Bow seems to have corresponded little, which is odd for an editor, a fact that has much handicapped the understanding of his periodical. For scantiness, the same is true of Stephen Elliott, though what we have is thoughtful. John England seems not to have inherited his medieval predecessors’ capacity for diocesan correspondence: what we have is brief and bitter. Indeed, many of the Charleston clergy are uninformative in their letters: Adger has some interesting ones from the Middle East but little else and Smyth is silent (not his usual quality). Bachman is scraps, Bledsoe intermittent, Fitzhugh nearly in27. William Porcher Miles to Charles Eliot Norton, 24 October 1852, Charles Eliot Norton Papers, HU; Alexander Beaufort Meek to WGS, 16 September 1845, Alexander Beaufort Meek Papers, ADAH; James Henry Hammond to William Porcher Miles, 17 November 1858, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC; Susan Archer Talley to HBG, 19 October 1859, HBG Papers, VHS.

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visible. Thomas Grimké was, as a young man, garrulous and sententious, but the older he grew the more absorbed in business and orations. Gayarré, whose postbellum letters become insistently maudlin and extensive, was before 1861 almost too vain to share his thoughts with correspondents. Kennedy, though he wrote letters with the assiduity with which he did everything, had no talent for it. The epistolary voice of many others was or became, either through their uninterest or the loss of their papers, all but mute: William Crafts, Samuel Dickson, Charles Fraser, Samuel and Caroline Gilman, Robert Henry, Mary Elizabeth Lee, Augusta Evans, Frederick Porcher, and Henry Nott. But many others, too many to survey though not to sample, have substantial bodies of intellectual correspondence, which are sometimes the better for not being very intellectual. For esprit, there are the letters of Trescot to his contemporaries, which strike a tone at variance with the cold, precise, and analytical manner of his published writings, and show what pleasure there was in being young and clever, loose among the ladies and the folios, telling jokes about cuckolds and vaginas, and worrying about the Whigs. For an understanding of a working evangelist’s life in town and country, there are those of the elder Manly, often sententious, but not without humor and showing an awareness of the tricks of his trade, but also with a passionate commitment to his religion and his South, which were not always much distinguishable to him. Among historians, Grigsby’s correspondence shows the deepest care for the details and shape of historical knowledge, plots best the aging process from wide-eyed student days to stubborn old age, not least for the anxious letters that passed between him and his often-ill wife, for whom he showed a sensitive if bewildered care. Louisa McCord’s letters have little of the qualities of her published writings—violence, bitter irony, passion—but show other sides, her anxious vulnerability and marked competence, best revealed in the remarkable cycle of letters to her brother, occasioned by the fearful senility and death of her father. Of them all, Lieber and Simms were preeminent for the scope of their correspondences. Both were ambitious men who craved company and influence, who wanted to place themselves at the center of things. This was easier for Simms, though he did not think so; as editor, as man of letters, as a mediator between Southern and Northern writers, as the guru of young writers, as a dispenser of hospitality, he flung out letters the way he did everything else, profligately. As Hayne suggested (and he intended a backhanded compliment), Simms did things best when he gave little premeditation to it, and letters fell into this category. Sitting at the center of his web, which kept breaking, he span and span; mostly he kept cheerful and dispensed cheer. ‘‘It gives me pleasure to mention that in a recent letter from Hon. B. Tucker

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of Virginia, he spoke in language of high compliment of the last article of Mrs. McCord,’’ he told David James McCord in 1850, which helped to keep two of his Southern Quarterly Review contributors happy. Simms’s were letters for the moment, quick and temporary, urgently presentist. They were preeminently business letters, sending manuscripts, asking for books, soliciting advice, giving it, asking for favors, and carrying out commissions. But they own up to moods and fallibilities, they gossip, they talk about his children. ‘‘The baby walks & begins to talk a little. She has half a dozen teeth—is 14 months old, but is still at the breast, the mother persisting to nurse.’’ Along the way, they tumble out his experience, his hopes and fears, often rendered melodramatically. (If he had been an actor, Simms would have been a ham, more Donald Wolfit than John Gielgud.) And he corresponded with so many people, North and South, young and old, to each of whom he turned a slightly different face, that his range was very great. Among his correspondence was probably the largest cast of characters of any body of Southern letters, though Simms was a man’s man, and there are almost no letters to women among his papers. He barely noticed his wife, until she died. But his are the least mannered of letters, which seem always to plunge in medias res. ‘‘I am now busy closing rivets up,’’ begins one to Lawson in 1851, about sending an issue of the Southern Quarterly Review to the printers.28 It is conventional to say that Simms was the South’s first professional man of letters. Whatever the merits of that claim, and it is dubious, it is true that he worked at the life of the mind, from day to day, from year to year with barely wavering commitment, and knew how the machinery of his business worked. More, on the whole, he knew himself. He knew what he was good at, where he was weak, and did not much care who else knew it. Indeed he seems to have thought it was more honest, perhaps preemptingly shrewd, to own up to accomplishment and failing alike. He wanted to be liked, hoped to be respected, strove ceaselessly to make himself matter, and (mistakenly) thought this would be best achieved by essaying everything. At one level, his gifts were at war with his ambitions. For he wanted to survive, to have a literary posterity, to be timeless as he imagined genius had to be. But he was so sensitive to the moment, so fluid and chattering, that his works only make sense to those who care for his moments or those of his culture. These people are more numerous than he feared, when he died impoverished and neglected. But in letters, preeminently, posterity agrees to immerse itself in past moments. Though he tried least to capture the future by his correspondence, there he probably succeeded best. 28. WGS to David James McCord, 15 January 1850; WGS to James Lawson, 25 January 1850, 14 July 1851, in Oliphant, Simms Letters, 3:4, 5, 135.

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Lieber’s letters were very different. Simms sat, like the thinking man’s Mr. Pickwick, in the middle of a world he had made and belonged to, however much he grumbled that he was alienated; his letters are a weekend party at Woodlands. But Lieber sat, more than a little alone, as the emissary of a foreign world, with which his letters maintained a connection vital to his sense of self-esteem. He was the stranger, somewhat reserved to those around him. Indeed, before he moved to Columbia, he had published The Stranger in America (1834), which took the form of letters to a friend in Germany. This sense of distance was natural to one who complained of American familiarities: ‘‘All of us live, in the U.S. in a glass coach. . . . ‘How much salary do you get?’ I have been asked by railway acquaintances in the car. In this, as in a thousand other things, we and the Germans are in the opposite extremes. In Germany people are as sensitive as eggs without a shell may be supposed to be. Here people are treated as if they all belonged to rhynoceros tribe. Put a book, for a moment by your side, on board a steamboat, and ten to one, some one takes it up, so that if you wish to continue your perusal, you have to ask for it.’’ But, in fact, Lieber liked company, which is why Columbia was such a trial to him. A few there he came to trust; Henry Nott, Preston, David McCord (but not Louisa), the young Charlotte McCord. And, though he made little of it, Lieber not infrequently corresponded with Southerners, usually politicians who might support his various causes. But mostly he stuck to his wife and family, his students, his library, his writings, and his letters to friends in the North and Europe. My letters are my conversation, he told Hillard in 1853, at a bleak moment: ‘‘I never felt lonesome in prison, but I do feel so in the midst of men here. I walk about with my lantern not to find a man but a soul. Nay more—I have been walking about for years, and now I have blown it out and hung it up.’’ Yet he was fascinated by what was around him, which is evidenced by his careful notebooks about slavery and other matters, but also by his letters. Lieber had a systematic mind, but also a talent for minute observation, and in his letters these gifts achieved some balance. His publications sometimes suppressed the latter, to their loss, which is why Hillard thought them inferior to Lieber’s conversation and correspondence: ‘‘Your published writings, which admirable as they are on many accounts, are somewhat wanting in that energy, point and vividness which so eminently mark your conversation.’’ But even Lieber’s writings had anecdotes, often drawn from his own experience. This, from his Political Ethics, is telling in its humanity. He had once traveled through Geneva, where he had encountered a former member of the French Constituent Assembly during the Revolution, who had been a supporter of ‘‘poor Robespierre . . . the virtuous man.’’ Lieber had quizzed him about the Terror, when the old man had spoken of liberty. ‘‘When I suggested that surely for the priests who were slaughtered there was no liberty, he

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answered, that it was believed they conspired with the foreign armies. When I repeatedly urged the question, whether they really did conspire, whether there was any proof, he would only shrug his shoulders and say: On le croyait, mon cher. This On made a very deep impression upon me, which time has not effaced; and has repeatedly recurred to my mind in meditating upon politics and history.’’ 29 As a cosmopolitan, Lieber’s strength was a wideness of vision, which he worked hard to sustain by his traveling. Simms, by comparison, knew no one beyond the boundaries of the United States and his letters are studies in the Americanism he espoused. Not only are Lieber’s letters from the South, but to it, for he wrote back to his family and friends in South Carolina, when he was in Boston, or Paris, or London, or Berlin. So his angle of vision was constantly shifting and his letters are crowded with people unaccustomed to sharing a literary space, Tocqueville and Calhoun, Preston and Sumner, Frederick William IV and a slave called Betsy. Though he wrote most to men and many of his letters are like overhearing someone at the Atheneum or the Cosmos Club, he was unusual in writing to women with freedom, and with only a little condescension, despite having no time for new-fangled feminisms. His correspondence with his wife Matilda is as good as anything else he wrote, which is rarer among husband and wife exchanges than one might imagine or hope. But he also corresponded much with Dorothea Dix of Boston, Sarah Austin of London, Theodora Bunsen of Heidelberg, Frances Calderon de la Barca (wife of the Spanish ambassador to the U.S.), Charlotte McCord Cheves before and after her removal to a plantation near Savannah, and Fanny Appleton Longfellow, the poet’s wife and Matilda’s friend. Like many men of his time, Lieber was fairly oblivious of weather, clothes, flowers, landscape, but he saw people clearly, both as types and as individuals. Like Simms, he had enormous vivacity, though a greater calculation, an awareness of his correspondents’ needs and usefulness, which was a natural thing for a man between worlds, wanting escape, worried about survival. ‘‘I teach my Political Ethics with a veil over my soul, and every sentence I utter, in my lecture room, I hear a voice call: Eh!’’ he confessed to Hillard in 1852. Consistent with his vivacity, he liked to tell a story and to gossip. ‘‘Cogswell told me at Astors dinner that Mrs. E. had said that Johnston (their enemy) had been obliged to leave Columb. on account of dishonnest [sic] acts, and that he could not possibly show himself there. I said if a gentleman had said 29. FL, The Stranger in America or, Letters to a Gentleman in Germany: Comprising Sketches of the Manners, Society, and National Peculiarities of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1835); FL to Dorothea Dix, 12 January 1851, FL to George S. Hillard, March 1853, and George S. Hillard to FL, 30 September 1846, FL Papers, HEH; FL, Manual of Political Ethics, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1839), 2:5.

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this I should unhesitatingly declare it foul slander, although I had nothing to do with Johnston. These Ellets are perfect vipers.’’ Inconsistent with his manipulativeness was his liking for slamming down an opinion, showing where he stood. ‘‘Camp meetings are unfit for women; indeed for any one; they are places of religious or rather irreligious riot and revelling. I detest them.’’ ‘‘Mrs. Hayne told me that Elliott gave his whole salary in alms. I told her, she was probably very much mistaken indeed. Nonsense!’’ 30 Such bluntness drew lines in the sand, indeed helped to explain why he was isolated, for he was often prickly and tactless, without quite knowing how. This was a strength for his letters if not his life, for he could seldom hide his moods, which fluctuated between blank depression, cool analysis, and wide smiles. In short, letters were the means by which writers confessed their humanities, sought out those of others, realized the personal realities behind the formalities of cold print. Letters made context, which is why historians so like them. In that sense, they cemented a sense of communities, for they created and ratified patterns of friends and enemies across a landscape broader than physical contact alone could sustain. As a clergyman once said, ‘‘Really it is well in a time of peril to know who are our friends & who are our foes.’’ 31 For some, these epistolary exchanges were one among many intellectual connexions; they paralleled clubs, dinner parties, periodicals, and bookshops. This was so with Simms; letters were business, but also an extension of his ebullience and need for company. For others, solitary either by temperament or location, they were close to being intellectual connection itself. George Frederick Holmes, awkward and rusticated for many years in the Virginia mountains, lived much through his letterbooks, as did James Warley Miles, who palely loitered in Charleston and Berlin. Yet correspondence achieved social connection only unevenly. In descending order of scale and intensity, the landscape of intellectual correspondence was dominated by, in the white community, men writing to other men, then by women writing to other women, lastly (by a considerable distance) by men and women exchanging letters. Blacks and whites almost never corresponded, except as masters and slaves, and a proslavery intellectual would never have written to a fugitive slave like Frederick Douglass, only to an abolitionist like Thomas Clarkson. Though much has been lost or misplaced, there are remarkably few sustained adult and intellectual correspondences between men and women, except rarely as husbands and wives, more often as parents and 30. FL to Matilda Lieber, 20 September 1842, 21 August 1841, 31 June 1841, FL Papers, HEH. 31. Samuel B. Wilson to William Henry Foote, 22 July 1837, Samuel B. Wilson Papers, PHS.

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children. There are no Horace Walpoles and Madame du Deffands in the South. More strikingly, there are relatively infrequent instances of accomplished love letters. One can find a few written during courtship or flirtation, almost none outside the bounds of marriage, but more by those who managed to sustain love after the wedding. In the last category, the letters of Sarah with John Gayle, Francis with Matilda Lieber, and Basil with Sarah Manly are notable. As has been observed of the epistolary novel,32 letters were a form without closure, which dealt in fragments of reality, and their importance to this culture says something—more clearly than print culture—about its willingness to tolerate, even rejoice in fragmentary pieces of knowledge about people and ideas, tossed backwards and forwards between times and places. Letters were, above all, a form that dragged the known past and the imagined future into the present moment. Since this culture much wished to move towards order and closure, of mastery and mistresshood, letters written by intellectuals tended sometimes to function as prolegomena, as places to scout and test ideas, many of which, being untidy and awkward, were later lost or repressed in published works. Because often the best of a culture is found in its disorder, in the South’s letters can be found much of what is freshest in it. But, conversely, there is little of its darkest side, the brutal matter of slavery, the institution whose inhabitants flit palely through Southern letters only as ‘‘servants.’’ The diary came much into vogue in the nineteenth century and was thought to be one of its characteristic forms, being introspective and private. In the world of print, the epistolary novel began to die, to be replaced by the sundry published diaries of ennuyées, country parsons, blasés, and itinerant actresses. Yet for a while, in the realm of private discourse, letters and diaries were inclined to serve similar functions. Both could be public things, to be read out in the parlor or placed on a table for family viewing. Young people were urged to venture both, for the sake of discipline of mind, clarity of observation, and accessibility of expression. A series of travel letters might, as easily and often, take the form of a travel diary.33 In theory, the diary acquired fixed conventions: the affixing of a date, the rehearsing of recent events, the interrogation of the self. In practice, it was often formless. Diaries might be only journals, a daily record to keep bare 32. Elizabeth J. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–15. 33. A modern critic has argued that epistolary novels and fiction cast as diaries differ only slightly, for both presume an addressee, if only (in the case of the diary) a self: see H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 9–10.

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track of the weather, the crops, or the beaux. (Indeed, however introspective or discursive a diary might become, it was far more common for it to be called a journal than a diary.) Diaries often got tangled up with letterbooks, or commonplace books, or ledgers, or lecture notes. James Johnston Pettigrew’s European diary of 1850 has, at the back of the volume, a list of all the concerts and operas he attended, with the individual pieces listed, and then quotations, which are mixed up with later diary entries back in the United States. It was fairly common to use a diary as a record of reading. The Rev. Moses Waddel kept two diaries in the 1820s, when he was president of Franklin College in Georgia. Their very brief entries record items of college business, visits, purchases, odd bits of gossip (‘‘heard unexpectedly of a female Deist in town’’), the subject matter of his classes (‘‘heard Seniors on Seduction’’), but also his reading in the Bible, theology, and contemporary political affairs. The habit descended to his son, James Pleasants Waddel, who taught the ancient languages at the same college and who kept his own diaries during the 1840s, whose brief annotations mention people met, the weather, his leading of the choir (he was a Presbyterian), academic meetings, and attention to his flowers. But the son took care to log his books, which were mostly contemporary novels, often read in bursts of interest in a particular author: Kingsley, Willis, Dickens, Scott, Sue, Simms, and the like. Indeed, clerical gentleman seem often to have liked the diary form: it helped them keep track of sermons, pastoral visits, and parishioners. Thomas J. Young, the Charleston Episcopalian, has one from 1850, as does the Presbyterian Benjamin Morgan Palmer for 1857 in New Orleans; in both cases, the entries were made in small, commercially produced notebooks.34 Not infrequently, the godly wanted more from a diary than a log. It was an old Puritan tradition to use the journal as a way of studying one’s relationship to God and man, which might be used as an affidavit for church membership.35 Thornwell briefly ventured one in 1836, when he was pastor at a church in Lancaster; it begins, ‘‘I have this day commenced to keep a journal of my personal history with a view chiefly to my growth in grace.’’ Subsequent entries are partly an account of ministerial visits, meetings, and Bible classes, but they also scrutinize his sinfulness, in matters major and minor. ‘‘The day is closed; I look back upon my thoughts & conduct and see much 34. James Johnston Pettigrew, European Diary, Pettigrew Family Papers, SHC; entries for 2 February 1824, 23 March 1825, in Moses Waddel Diaries, Waddel Family Papers, PHS; James Pleasants Waddell Diary (1845–47), UGA; Thomas J. Young Diary (1850), SCL; Benjamin Morgan Palmer Diary (1857), Benjamin Morgan Palmer Papers, PHS. 35. On this, see John Owen King III, The Iron of Melancholy: Structures of Spiritual Conversion in America from the Puritan Conscience to Victorian Neurosis (1983; reprint, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).

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which assures me that I am vile; but I thank God that I can rest upon the selfsufficiency of his Son,’’ he observes after two days. ‘‘For the last day or two I have experienced a great deal of inconvenience from the want of tobacco,’’ he notes on May 26. ‘‘I have been almost tempted to resume the habit of chewing. The truth is, I could abstain in reliance on Divine grace, if I could only obtain the consent of my heart to do so; but the great difficulty is, in making the resolution. I cannot agree to part with it. Shall I regard any matter of the flesh as so important to my comfort and happiness that I cannot abandon it? But I have learnt much in my efforts to abstain from tobacco of the deceitfulness of the heart; and the pleas which we are disposed to make in favour of a particular lust.’’ Worse, he was troubled by lusts: ‘‘Inordinate affection— evil concupiscence besets one fearfully—I have made resolution after resolution on this subject—but my strength is perfect weakness. My soul is chained down to sensual gratification. My sinful heart cheats me with a belief that my indulgences are lawful—tempts me to taste and then leaves me to the stings and wounds of conscience.’’ 36 Thornwell was a young man when he ventured a diary. Letters belonged to all ages, even to children, but diaries were usually a rite of passage for the young. Ella Gertrude Clanton began hers when fourteen, and her daughter in turn when twelve. Young women alone on plantations like Elizabeth Ruffin, young men on their travels like James Johnston Pettigrew, students in college like Thomas Miles Garrett, all took up diaries as a means of polishing their education, of examining what was peculiarly fascinating and fluid (themselves), and of pleasing their friends and relatives. ‘‘I have long had the idea of keeping a journal or diary,’’ Garrett started, when nineteen years old and a student at Chapel Hill. ‘‘This was suggested to me by a lady of my acquaintance in Hertford County who related to me the history of an old man who once lived in Murfreesboro and the immense advantage he derived from his journal and what advantage it happened to be to the citizens of that place.’’ But for this ‘‘binding obligation of promise,’’ Garrett admitted, ‘‘I might allow my disinclination to get the better of my will.’’ 37 Changes in attitudes towards the nature of youth, especially a belief in its specialness and evanescence, encouraged an impulse to set down memories, which might be available later to be hugged to the diarist’s old or middleaged breast. ‘‘How rapidly time flies!’’ Clanton wrote in 1851 when she was seventeen. ‘‘I can look back and it appears but a little while since I was six36. Entries for 2 April, 4 April, 26 May, 19 July 1836, in JHT Journal (1836), JHT Papers, PHS. 37. Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 22; entry for 13 June 1849, in John Bowen Hamilton, ed., ‘‘Diary of Thomas Miles Garrett at the University of North Carolina, 1849,’’ North Carolina Historical Review 38 (January 1961): 76.

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teen. How sad the thought makes me. To think that I am borne so rapidly, so very rapidly upon the wings of time.’’ Further, youth was felt to be peculiarly subject to temptation, to taking a fatally wrong step, and a diary was a moral aid. Robert Hardin Reid, when at South Carolina College in 1845 and under the tutelage of Thornwell, used his diary to set down resolutions. He would be attentive in religious exercise, ‘‘grow in grace’’ like his mentor, rise early, read a chapter in the Bible before bed, do his lessons well, commit ten lines of poetry to memory every day, and make a speech to every meeting of his debating society. He would read books during the year, duly specified: among the historians, Milman, Carroll on South Carolina, Bancroft, Rollin, Josephus, Gibbon, Plutarch, Hume, and Alison; among poets, Milton, Shakespeare, Campbell, and Thomson; of periodicals, the Ladies and Gentlemen’s Magazine, and the Southern Quarterly Review. He would take notes on this reading and, lastly, he would write his journal before going to bed.38 Especially in their early pages, diaries are soaked in such earnestness, not infrequently mingled with prayers. Keeping the diary itself required discipline, regularity, and so virtue, which might spill over into the rest of a life. But the official obligation to be virtuous necessarily kept the matter of vice much on young diarists’ minds. As a result, diaries are among the best ways to enter into the minds of young Southerners. Although it was, in practice, the case that diaries were often intended to be read by other eyes, this was at the discretion of the diarist, who might choose privacy or, when writing, forget the distant prospect of publicity. And the rhetorical form of a diary, which often compelled the writer to talk to himself or herself, eased the way into confessional. This usually stopped far short of intimacy. Diaries dealt in venial, not mortal sins. Henry F. Jones, a youth jauntily disdaining the advantage of a Chapel Hill education in 1857, is atypical only in his ill-spelled candor: ‘‘Greatly to our Satisfaction there wasnt any prayers again this morning. . . . Having prayers dont come to any good end here no-how. It only causes the Students to Snapp and those that dont snapp it just make them utter all kinds of epithets against the Faculty for having them. I have never seen the good it came to yet—in fact I dont think it will ever do any good, although I approve of it. I can say for myself it makes me get up, for if there wasnt any prayers I never would get up.’’ 39 Graver matters, especially of sexuality, are touched upon only in repressed allusion and codes, often now impenetrable. Miscegenation, brothels, murder, and bigamy are seldom the subject matter of diaries (and homosexuality never), even those written by adults, except sometimes when it was an experi38. Entry for 4 April 1851, in Burr, Secret Eye, 84; entry for 4 January 1845, in Robert Hardin Reid, ‘‘Diary and Lecture Notes,’’ Reid Family Papers, PHS. 39. Entry for 21 February 1858, in Henry F. Jones Diary, SHC.

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ence someone other than the diarist had had.40 ‘‘A day of election is here a day of revelry,’’ Curtis has in his 1832 diary. ‘‘At night the brothels are thronged, & men of wealth, who maintain the highest standing in society visit them. The town of Raleigh differs very little from this. It is said to be worse, & prostitutes more numerous.’’ Madaline Edwards, who kept a diary in New Orleans in the 1840s when she was in her twenties, had lived a life which sharply invited confession. Divorced parents, marriage at fourteen, four dead children, one separated or divorced husband, a possibly bigamous marriage, an affair in Vicksburg, a lover and patron in New Orleans, illness and literary ambition, all might suggest intimate self-reflection. But her diaries are discreet, oblique, allusive. Her lover came and went, she made note of what was said and what gifts he brought, but the hours or minutes of their essential relationship, the welcome sexuality of their traffic, is a silence.41 Yet diaries could license honesty, which letters often did not. The latter had an immediate audience and response, a fact that mandated a certain wariness. But a diary’s opinions about people, books, and events could be decisively expressed and so provide a pleasant release, for the diarist need not worry that a professor or a mother or a wife might promptly read it and demur. Henry Jones was laconically blunt: ‘‘The Gov [David Swain] came back to day. He looks as ugly as ever I dont know how the people here did take such a fancy to such a man.’’ Yet diarists were less able to be honest with themselves. The danger of prying eyes was a valid excuse for stopping short, but there was a deeper dissimulation. Ella Gertrude Clanton was typically confused on this point: ‘‘A Journal—Defined to be a book in which one writes their thoughts and actions. If such be the case this volume of manuscript will only have partially have accomplished the purpose of a journal. My thoughts! Write those! and yet—Is it because I fear to write them? And yet is it pleasant to have our very inmost thoughts exposed to the eye of a careless critic? for how am I [to] know by whose eye this page may be scanned. No! I will continue as I have begun. And yet the temptation sometimes to write the feelings which agitate my heart is almost irresistible.’’ 42 Almost, but not quite. Mostly diarists managed it, the not-writing of ‘‘very inmost thoughts.’’ So the diary, when written by the young, was a formative thing, which as40. An exception is James L. Dusenberry. ‘‘Liber Carminum et Fragmentorum,’’ James L. Dusenberry Papers, SHC, which has sprightly accounts of student revels, fights, women (several in mock-biblical style, usually when he is talking about visiting ‘‘harlots’’), and possum hunts directed by a black named Bowman, and is unusually frank about women and sex. 41. Entry for 13 August 1832, in MAC Diary [1830–36], MAC Papers, SHC; Dell Upton, ed., Madaline: Love and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans: The Private Writings of a Kept Woman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 42. Entry for 7 October 1857, Henry Jones Diary, SHC; entry for 7 March 1852, in Burr, Secret Eye, 100.

David Hunter Strother, ‘‘The Student’’ (From Porte Crayon [David Hunter Strother], Virginia Illustrated [1857])

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sisted a degree of self-invention. Most of them had ambitions for self that were modest: prosperity, happiness, piety, erudition, little more. The culture of slavery might encourage such a sense of limitation. But the South was a fluid, imperial culture in an American society not lacking in millennial expectations, which could lead to greater extravagance. The diary of Henry Hughes, the Mississippian proslavery writer, is a perfectly formed Romantic (even Nietzschean) document, written to prove a sense of destiny. He began it in New Orleans on Saturday, 1 January 1848, at ten o’clock in the evening, an inception carefully set down for posterity. He was a few months short of nineteen. ‘‘This record is dedicated to my soul and to Fame,’’ he started, invoking what was inward and outward, self and the world. ‘‘Wherever I may be during the present year, a portion of my time shall be unfailingly devoted on the sacred night of every week, to the purpose of recording my meditations, emotions, aims, and circumstances; examining these pages, the future biographer will read my thoughts, & learn my history.’’ This was said with a prayer. He then recapitulated his family, very briefly, before displaying his reading in the law and proving his academic credentials, and mentioning some of his mundane habits. Nameless sins were invoked, the sweeter for being contemplated on a Sunday: ‘‘Unhallowed desires have filled & delighted my mind. This is a day sacred to elevated, refined pleasures. My thoughts seek diversion, and imagine forbidden things. Deeds may hereafter realize them.’’ Pleasures, woes, enjoyments must come to teach him control and give him ‘‘resistless power’’ over the multitude. ‘‘Thus Byron,’’ he said enigmatically. But Hughes preferred that such intoxications harm no one, but rather he should devote himself to ambition, knowledge, and fame. ‘‘May I be, for the allotted period a sole, pure, powerful intellect turning every thing I touch into imperishable treasure.’’ One day he was happy, but there was a shadow, ‘‘a mournful assurance that in the unceasing mutations of existence, prosperity will harbinger adversity, may usher in grief, success precede failure. . . . The past is happy— the present is happy—the future, alas,—the future—’’ 43 In this maelstrom, occasionally ordinary events happened. His sister visited, he worried about his eyesight, he studied the law. But mostly Hughes caught at his identity and its future. ‘‘Day after day, I become more firmly convinced that there is a Destiny, which shapes my ends. I believe in the Christian religion.’’ What will he be? Nothing small. ‘‘I will place myself upon a throne from which I can look down on Alexander, Caesar, Cicero, Bonaparte, Washington.’’ ‘‘I will be the President of America and Europe.’’ Such a demigod would ‘‘unite the great powers of the earth in one Republic, to abolish slavery, and to reform the system of human laws and human philosophy.’’ Military 43. Henry Hughes Diary, pp. 1, 3, 4, Henry Hughes Papers, MDAH.

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power would unite with science, under the blessing of God, to achieve his ambition. He would improve himself physically for the task, for ‘‘bodily strength is an element of the supreme hero.’’ He needed to train his mind, so he was to study philosophy (Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Locke on the Understanding), the civil and common law (Pothier, Blackstone), history (Gibbon, Macaulay), political economy (Mill, Fourier), belles lettres (Hawthorne, Tennyson), this and much more, for the task was exacting. Sometimes he was convinced that all was well, that he understood and made progress. ‘‘I have, I think, this week arrived at the long sought identity of time and motion.’’ ‘‘There are few sciences with whose general principles I am not now conversant.’’ But he admitted there were obstacles, which might only serve to emphasize his eventual triumph. ‘‘I am so poor that I have not without borrowing money to buy a pair of shoes.’’ Later, ‘‘I am poor but I am God’s young raven, God will feed me when I cry, & he will change me to his eagle.’’ But sometimes he was unsure. ‘‘I grow childish with passion’’ or ‘‘my confidence in God wavers.’’ He questioned himself: ‘‘Why have I such a passion for War. Why does a soldier’s life seem my coming destiny. / What of spiritual-rapping, and coming revolution? / what of marriage civil & religious? what is best? / Power, Power. What else? Something to clutch: that is the necessity.’’ He arrived at some understanding, half rhapsodic, half skeptical. ‘‘I am a strange man: wicked, religious, egotistical, virtuous, vain, haughty, modest, manly, boyish.’’ 44 Such a diary was unusual, though not for its search for ‘‘something to clutch,’’ only for what was clutched. Few young Southerners aspired to be Napoleon, Fourier, and Byron all at once—perhaps none but Hughes. On the whole, the imaginations of young Southerners were delicately entrapped within ambitions not meant to shatter worlds: to be a graduate, a lawyer, a president, a mother, a saved soul. In using a diary to probe and make a self, Hughes was conventional enough. However, once a self was made, it was common to stop keeping a diary, since the task was either done or, if undone, too exasperating to complete. Very few kept up the habit. Here there is a fissure. Like the letter, the diary was a democratically available literary form. Elizabeth Ruffin, Ann Hardeman, Thomas Miles Garrett, Ella Clanton Thomas, and many others survive only for their diaries, which stand alone as their contribution to the written word. More than a letter, however, the diary intimated a more concerted interest in posterity; it often staked a bashful claim to the attention of those who would come later. Letters were private manuscripts first, and only secondarily might they be intended for print. But the diary worked the other way. It had first appeared to young Southerners as a printed thing, as literature, before they ventured it as a pri44. Ibid.

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vate manuscript, kept in the desk drawer. So the diary was, in many ways, a literary form for those who wanted to be famous but were diffident, they having more pain or vanity than they liked the world to see. This may explain why most who went on to sustained intellectual careers and produced the South’s social philosophy or belles letters seldom kept a diary, or few that survive. Nonetheless, there are diaries by the South’s literati. Hughes went on to write an eccentric work of social philosophy, which built on the reveries of his diary. Like him, several kept diaries at the usual youthful time, then abandoned them for other, more public forms: Francis Peyre Porcher, Moses Ashley Curtis, James Johnston Pettigrew, Samuel Mordecai, Charles Gayarré, these and several others. A few more kept up a lifetime’s habit: Grigsby, Kennedy, King, Hentz. Still fewer, most notably Ruffin, took up the habit in later years. Many of these have marked value, too great and diffuse for description here. The usefulness of Kennedy and King’s journals are mostly for their faithful, if not very imaginative logging of the minute trafficking of Southern intellectual networks: what was read, who dined with whom, what was published, who wanted what job. Kennedy, on the whole, was too interested in being urbane to be greatly self-aware, which was a venture too risky for a cautious Whig. King’s jottings were, more strictly, memoranda, like an accountant’s books; only when he grew old did they become sharply self-conscious. Grigsby’s diaries may, indeed, be the richest of them all, for their sustained (they run from 1827 to 1832, then lapse and resume from 1842 to 1852) and anxious balance between self, family, writing, and observation. The Norfolk historian was, in later years, very deaf, unhappy in his marriage and family life and so somewhat enclosed. Spared any sense of self-importance, he stood towards his Virginian world, for which he cared insistently, like a youngest child, an afterthought, little noticed and so free to watch what the grown-ups did and, in the Virginian past, had done. But the liveliest of Southern diaries may be those of William Henry Holcombe of Natchez, which are mostly confined to 1855, when he was thirty, married, with a small baby. Doctors, like ministers, often kept diaries, and Holcombe was in part following their custom by reviewing his patients. But Holcombe was no ordinary doctor but a homeopath, a Swedenborgian, the son of a Virginian antislavery man, nothing if not different.45 His diary is, by 45. He came from Lynchburg, Virginia. His grandfather, Colonel Holcombe, was a bankrupt; his father became a Methodist, then antislavery, then a migrant to Indiana. His brother James P. Holcombe was a lawyer, in 1847 in Cincinnati, and in the late 1850s he taught law at the University of Virginia, where another brother (Thomas) was the librarian. See Harry Clemons, The University of Virginia Library, 1825–1950: Story of a Jeffersonian Foundation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1954), 30; entry for 9 December 1847, MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC: ‘‘Saw M r Jas. P Holcombe of the Cincinnati bar.’’

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turns, learned, breezy, modest, funny, unafraid of being judged. He seems to have been at ease with himself, happy in his eccentricity of standpoint, and self-aware. ‘‘Critically speaking of myself, I am of that medium constitution between the Pegasus and the heavy dray-horse, which may get along very comfortably but not very brilliantly in the world.’’ He saw himself as having ‘‘address enough to win the confidence of men but not the genius to enforce their admiration.’’ He was prone chronically and unreformably to ‘‘that spasmodic movement of the mind—that mental chorea, in which we do the things we would not and cannot do the things we would.’’ Knowing this, he decided to ‘‘eschew all plans, schemes, proposals, protestations, and selfpromises of reform,’’ which for thirty years had done him no good. Rather, he would ‘‘move along as best I can through this busy world with all my aboriginal nature—a curious mixture of transcendental etherality, with that Scotch shrewdness which busies itself quite contentedly in ‘making the pot boil.’ ’’ 46 The early entries were much about his reading, which he did in the evenings; he liked poetry, where his tastes were partly conventional (Shakespeare and Dante), partly idiosyncratic (Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Jonson). Holcombe was content to wander, as fancy took him. ‘‘I passed from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Swedenborg, from one of Mr. Weller’s very excellent sermons in the ‘Crisis’ to some of Coleridge’s religious criticisms.’’ ‘‘Read to-day Macaulay’s criticism on Dryden—Talfourd’s on Hazlitt, several sketches from Lamb’s Dramatic Poets—and Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Monsieur Thomas’—the latter upon the recommendation of Coleridge— although really I found it merely a pleasant, readable comedy of entirely mediocre qualities.’’ This reliance upon literary critics was self-conscious; his New Year’s resolution had been to read one drama and one critic a week. ‘‘Read to-night De Quincey’s fine essay on Alexander Pope. If this is a fair specimen, De Quincey must be the prince of philosophic critics. For subtlety, originality and depth of thought it quite surpasses Macaulay—while in strength, novelty and spicedness of style it reminds one of Carlyle.’’ Seeing a good performance of Shakespeare could be valuably enforced by reading, for ‘‘the science of Criticism (for it has really become a science) can enrich our knowledge and enhance our enjoyment of the great master-spirits of literature.’’ 47 As time went on, Holcombe’s baby grew noisier, and ‘‘the pill business’’ more exhausting. ‘‘I am writing this immediately after supper instead of the last thing before bed-time as usual. I feel bound however to finish Massinger’s Bondman to-night, after which I shall probably let off my paternal excita46. Entry for 17 January 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal (1855), William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC. 47. Entries for 21 January, 22 January, 10 February, 30 January 1855, ibid.

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bilities in some ‘baby-talk’ to Alexander, and then retire, as I am desperately tired and sleepy.’’ So his reading diminished, but his entries, if anything, grew more spirited. In March, he visited New Orleans: ‘‘Walked, ran, rode, on foot, in cabs, and on railroads, bought books in my character of a bibliomaniac, and presents for Rebecca in the exuberance of my marital uxoriousness, talked, stammering or not, all day, ate some delicious oyster soup and strawberry creams, saw lots of pretty women and gave Rebecca and that boy a mental kiss every time I looked at one, and finally got out of New Orleans after 22 hours persistence therein, a little out of breath and considerably out of pocket.’’ In May, ‘‘I have got the tooth-ache, my wife has rising breast, the baby is grunting with colic, the nurse is stupid and sleepy, the weather is despicably cold and dusty, the carpet is full of fleas, the pauper business today has been immensely vexatious, and every thing in general and particular has rubbed against the grain.’’ He knew the diary was faltering in its discursive virtues. ‘‘If any body supposes after this preliminary confession that I can write a readable diary—just let him get himself into my stand-point as quickly as possible—take up the pen and try it himself.’’ And, ‘‘None but an amateur literatus should pretend to keep a diary. Here I am almost tired to death by a laborious practice in the hot sun—just about to return to my old Methodist lady for the night—and how can I be expected to dabble in literary amusements?’’ 48 But, along the way, the diary scattered breezy experiences and eccentric standpoints, not always amiably. In June, he talked to a Presbyterian elder, ‘‘whose advocacy of Homeopathy is the only liberal effort of mind he was ever guilty of in his life. He stood stoutly for the old blasphemous doctrine of Calvin that God really did, at a time when it was optional with him to create or not create, choose to create certain men to be saved and others, to be damned, irrespective of the future conduct or strivings of the parties thus predestined to life or death. I went the length of denouncing it not only as an inhuman but as a devilish dogma.’’ Earlier in the same month, he was out on the road, encountered Joseph Davis in a buggy, paused to discuss the New Church, and promised to send on Swedenborgian reading: ‘‘On the way, met an overseer driving three runaway negroes home—They were chained together and their feet manacled. Mr. Davis remarked that if those creatures were his, he would sell them, rather than subject them to the torture necessary to ‘break them in’—They belonged to his brother [ Jefferson Davis]. Since I have been in Natchez, I have several times seen men on horseback leading a negro on foot by a rope fastened around his neck. They are no doubt intractable rascals who are subjected to this treatment—but for all that, the spectacle is to me exceed48. Entries for 17 February, 15 March, 10 May, 14 May 1855, ibid.

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Slaves in front of the library at Joseph E. Davis’s plantation (Courtesy Old Court House Museum, Vicksburg)

ingly revolting.’’ But Holcombe was no abolitionist, and not a little snobbish. In February, he had noted that homeopathy made slight progress among the poor, and had an unflattering explanation for it: ‘‘Ignorant, vacillating, prejudiced, and surrounded always by vulgar, meddling, prating neighbors—it is scarcely to be expected that the lower orders of society will appreciate and support through all opposition a system of medicine, based upon nature’s most wonderful and subtle operations, and entirely above their comprehension.’’ In June, he treated some free blacks. ‘‘I am a great favorite with the free negroes and they show it by burdening me with professional responsibilities. They have all heard that my father liberated his negroes and presume that I have inherited a mania for African emancipation—a very great error—for I think that Cuffy Jrs and Srs well-dressed, well-fed, hoe in hand in a cotton field with the driver behind them—make one of the prettiest pictures of civil and social life.’’ 49 In diaries as in fiction, the Southwest bred a certain freedom of expression. Holcombe’s effort was paralleled, if not quite matched, by several others, written by breezy men knocking around the hinterland, ‘‘far from the haunts of men, where [one] can lead the life of a hermit, commune with my God, 49. Entries for 9 June, 2 June, 3 February, 4 June 1855, ibid.

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woo the Maids.’’ 50 There are the notebooks of Henri Masson, a French emigré, who taught at various academies in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Missouri. There is the journal of George D. Alexander, or (as the title page has it) the ‘‘Journal of The Life, Correspondence and Private Transactions of George D. Alexander A.B. Continued From the 1st May, 1844 and Commencing On the Fifth Day of October 1846. During His residence In Salem, Tippah County and state of Miss. Whilst he was Principal of Salem. M. Academy. Sic Fugit Irrecoverabile Tempus.’’ Like Holcombe, Alexander was a migrant Virginian, a devotee not of homeopathy but phrenology. He was, on the whole, more staid than Holcombe, more guilty about heterodoxy. But he could be as direct. By 1848, he was teaching in Camden, Arkansas, ‘‘this miserable hole,’’ where he sat and read Voltaire, and frightened himself with German poetry, ‘‘until my head began to swim, and I saw visions of the ‘incarnate’ rising up in terrible looks, enough to fright the ancient dead.’’ 51 It was not only good to be shifty in a new country, but to keep diaries. Back in the old country of Virginia, Edmund Ruffin looked very differently on the world, which to him was not new and had no joy in it. He began a diary in 1856, when he was sixty-two and had just given over the ownership of his plantations to his children and so found time more on his hands. ‘‘Occupation is necessary to me—& (as my children feared for me in this change,) if idle entirely, I should be miserable. . . . Writing, & especially to describe or discuss agricultural subjects, was designed to be made one of the means of passing my time.’’ Ruffin’s diary has been most used, and not incorrectly, for its insight into the mind of a secessionist, and the cumulating drama that led to Ruffin’s firing upon Fort Sumter and his bitter suicide in 1865, after having written a letter of defiance to the Yankees. It has equal value as the anatomy of a seasoned older mind, coping with ‘‘degenerate times.’’ 52 Edmund Ruffin was not a worldly man and inept at diplomacy, quick to judge, someone who wore his passions on his sleeve. He had long wanted influence, but had been disappointed and concluded that his learning had borne some responsibility for this. Among his early diary passages are Henry Adams–like meditations on the differing political fates of the uneducated and educated man. The former pressed on, possessed by ‘‘greedy ambition, great self-appreciation, & the boldness of impudence without limit.’’ Success bred further confidence, a contempt for ‘‘all learning . . . as mere useless theory & pedantry.’’ He was ‘‘not insensible of the value of every such new acquisi50. Entry for 1 December 1846. George D. Alexander Journal, MDAH. 51. Henri Masson Notebooks (1831–55; 1860), Henri Masson Papers, SHC; entries for 26 September 1848; 10 December 1848, George D. Alexander Journal, MDAH. 52. William Kauffman Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–89), 1:7, 30.

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Edmund Ruffin (Courtesy Valentine Museum, Richmond)

tion’’ of useful knowledge. But he did not see anything beyond that which he has already come to know: ‘‘While each new step compels him to admit that he was mistaken before, in supposing he had reached the height of useful knowledge, he is then sure that he is now at the top, because his ignorance, & self-conceit prevent his seeing, or even suspecting, the value of the knowledge he does not possess.’’ The educated man, on the other hand, found knowledge to be a different school. ‘‘However great his attainments in learning, he would also learn to see, at every step of his upward progress, the greater & greater heights of knowledge above him, which he had not reached, & could never expect to reach. Thus the greatest measure of learning, by showing more strongly his still existing deficiencies, would nourish & increase his modesty.’’ 53 In fact, Ruffin was not a modest man. He was conscious of having done important things, and of knowing important people. At the end of his life, he summed up his achievements and pronounced them good. But he was acutely conscious of a gulf between learning and action, in which self-knowledge 53. Ibid., 30–32.

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was a mixed blessing. This helps to explain the broad shape of the diary. Until 1861, it was mostly an interior document. It documented his reading and thoughts about books, referred to his writings and travels, and discussed public events. Ruffin was on the utmost fringes of power (he had to travel to get even there) and very unsure that public events would move his way, the way of a Confederacy. Because Virginia seemed timidly Unionist and South Carolina most likely to act, he moved towards the latter like a moth to a flame. Until 1860, that is, his was the diary of un emigré de l’intérieur, habituated to being partly ineffectual. Thereafter, it became an almost exclusively public document, as he observed with excitement and passion the crushingly swift events that turned Virginia from an irrelevance to a battleground. But the Ruffin of earlier years, though never at ease, was an energetic observer, an analytical busybody, constantly reading, thinking, watching. Judgments were crisp, those of an old hand used to forming a critical opinion. He reread Macaulay, of whom he thought well, only to decide that the historian was little a Christian. This led to a firm generalization: ‘‘I believe that there is, from the nature & manner of their studies, & habits of investigation, a tendency of the most profound historians to skepticism. . . . the historians who closely scrutinize, & weigh the probability of every recorded fact, & admit or reject them according to the rules of evidence, & upon sound reasoning. They thus learn to judge of sacred or religious history by the same rules of evidence by which they would test the alleged incidents of profane history.’’ He ran over the evidence of his long reading (Robertson, Gibbon, Hume, Prescott, Voltaire) and decided it held up, though he admitted that Guizot ‘‘is understood to be a Christian.’’ He read Pepys and was bored: ‘‘most of it is uninteresting & tedious.’’ He finished Little Dorrit and concluded that it was interesting, ‘‘but like most of Dickens’ novels, there is a great deal of wretched poor stuff,’’ but cut this away to find ‘‘the best thing in the book,’’ which answered to his own experience, ‘‘an admirable picture drawn in the Dorrit family of the combination of pauperism & pride (or rather self-esteem & conceit) of abject meanness & ridiculous pretension, & with utter worthlessness, which I have seen in one real family.’’ He liked The Scarlet Letter, ‘‘a strange book, by a powerful writer.’’ 54 He read Fitzhugh, ‘‘a profound thinker, though a careless writer. . . . He is so deficient in method, that sound & forcible [as] are many of his positions, & conclusive as reasoning, yet he jumbles together his major & minor, his premises & conclusions, without regard to priority or separation.’’ This pattern—the description, the judgment, the generalization—was habitual for Ruffin and applied as forcefully to those whom he met as to the political events he monitored. He went to Jewish services in Charles54. Ibid., 162.

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ton and reasoned out an analysis of the assimilative tendency of American society upon successive generations. He sat down with John Tyler on a visit to Sherwood Forest and then offered a long, impromptu assessment of the experience.55 One of Ruffin’s objects of curiosity was himself, but not as in a young man’s diary, where self was thought to be plastic. Ruffin’s self was long made, intractable, resigned. He knew, for example, how he wrote. ‘‘In general, the copying of my own writing is much slower, laborious, & less agreeable, than the first composition. . . . Alterations suggest themselves to my mind, & they are written, & I soon am no longer copying but re-writing the same matter in different form—& often find that the new form is no improvement.’’ He knew that certain kinds of writing were now impossible, however desirable. ‘‘I wish that I could undertake some long & laborious & engrossing writing, which, though promising completion, would not be finished during my life. Yet I have no inclination to attempt any such extensive work—but only articles, which though too long for newspapers, are too short to occupy me more than a few days, or, at most, a few weeks.’’ 56 Indeed, the problem was not only that his self was made, but that it was beginning to slip away. Old books were reread and Ruffin’s recent self understood them differently: ‘‘Have tried, & cannot read Burnett’s [sic] History. Yet 25 years ago, when I first saw some odd volumes of the work, I read them with much interest.’’ The surrender of his property and the beginning of his diary were, in their own ways, a preparation for death, not imminent but understood as coming. He saw that his hands now trembled: ‘‘This infirmity has greatly increased in late years, & has become a permanent affection. If I drank intoxicating liquors at all, & even so moderately, my trembling hands, & red face, would cause many strangers to suppose I was a drunkard.’’ His memory had begun to fail: ‘‘I forget almost as fast as I read.’’ This fumbling quality was important because it helps to explain the later, Confederate diary. Secession and nationhood gave Ruffin and Virginia back a purposeful self. This exoskeleton held him together until 1865, when he knew that the public world had brutally failed him and he was left with little private self with which to survive, no longer the Ruffin of 1856 with resources of resilience, with nothing left to give. At the end, he had only his diary, the shred of self, in which to set down his final testimony and write, ‘‘The End.’’ 57

55. Ibid., 46–47, 48, 89, 162, 215–16, 71–72, 122–23. 56. Ibid., 41, 327. 57. Ibid., 3:946.

Chapter Twelve

Chaotic Order of Books

There is a cycle in the creation and dissemination of the printed word. A reader becomes an author, his or her books are printed and sold, readers then read, and some in turn become authors. One can break into this circle at any point.1 It is wrong to privilege the author as the originating agent, some authors self-deprecatingly assure us. Nonetheless, in the life of any intellectual, reading precedes authorship. So three topics serve as a necessary prolegomena to understanding the ways in which a manuscript passed from an author to a publisher: how books were sold, how they were accumulated in private collections, and how libraries worked. If one lived in a major city, it was easy to buy print, but more inconvenient for those who lived in unrelieved ruralness. John Randolph once sardonically narrated to Andrew Jackson that he was obliged to travel twelves miles ‘‘on a very bad road’’ from his plantation to Charlotte Court House to fetch his letters and the newspapers. There had been some thought of establishing a post office closer: ‘‘But mortifying to relate, out of four families who live clustered around the spot which is a publick House and where once was a considerable store, there is not one person who can read and write! and therefore no one to officiate as Post Master! So much for the march of Intellect.’’ Thus isolated, an unadventurous reader (which Randolph was not) depended greatly upon Title from FL to Dorothea Dix, 25 January 1851, FL Papers, HEH: ‘‘Yester-day she [Matilda Lieber] paid me the first visit in my library and confessed that for once my chaotic order of books on the table, ground, sill and every where did her heart good, ‘for it is through and through Frank.’ ’’ 1. On this, see Robert Darnton, ‘‘What is the History of Books?’’ in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 107–35.

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colporteurs and book agents, those most diligent, unreliable, and unfortunate of men. They trundled along rutted, muddy roads with carts or buggies freighted with popular books; they stopped at farms, approached plantations, peddled at railroad depots, called upon bookshops, sold periodicals and tried to collect money for them, dispersed Bibles, tracts, and novels, sometimes with a shrewd eye to what the market would bear. Parson Weems was their model. After 1791 he had worked a circuit, mostly on behalf of Matthew Carey, the Philadelphia publisher, mostly between Maryland and Savannah, though chiefly in Virginia. He zigzagged from here to there to be in attendance at community gatherings, like agricultural fairs, weddings, and assizes. He might do badly: for selling a ‘‘varied box of Carey imprints’’ to a bookstore in Richmond for $300, he made a commission of 5 percent, or $15, out of which his expenses ($10 for a stagecoach, $5 for lodging and meals) absorbed all. Then again, he might do well, especially when he could travel faster and cheaper by water. He did best in the Savannah River area, where there were in 1804 few competing stores and many planters of wealth interested in buying. As he remarked, ‘‘The Gentry of this Country are scatter’d abroad like sheep without a shepherd. . . . in Winter they are all in their towns thick as Bees, and merry as Crickets, with every man his pocket full of dollars from the sale of his Cotton bags & rice barrels.’’ 2 Weems’s heirs continued to ply his trade, though later they had more competition from urban bookstores. Increasingly, peddlers came to ply the hinterland, when once Weems had used the cities as a base and undertook only forays into the backcountry. In the spring of 1851, for example, a colporteur called D. J. Bigelow—a thirty-one-year-old New Yorker who lived in a Vicksburg boarding house—showed up at the Mississippi plantation of William Hardeman, which was near Jackson. The latter bought for his spinster sister Ann a copy of Louisa Mary Barwell’s Remember, or, Mamma’s Birthday and Grace Aguilar’s Women of Israel: or, Characters and Sketches from the Holy Scriptures, Illustrative of the Past History, Present Duties, and Future Destiny of Hebrew Females, as Based on the Word of God; both were recent publications, the former probably intended for the children of the household, the latter for the pious single woman. In the fall, Bigelow was back and he stayed for two nights, since he needed repair, having ‘‘had the misfortune to have the end of his middle finger torn off by the rein of his buggy harness.’’ 3 So a peddler could 2. John Randolph to AJ, 3 January 1832, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926–35), 4:395; Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 38–49 (quotation on p. 48). 3. Entries for 9 May and 1 September 1851, Ann Hardeman Diary, in An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67, ed. Michael O’Brien, Publications of the

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be a sort of guest, for even on his first visit (with digits intact) Bigelow had stayed overnight. And certainly such men could be more than servants, dismissed peremptorily. Dealing with books, they might be thought responsible for ideas. In 1848, John Pendleton Kennedy was visiting his relatives in Bath, Virginia, when a colporteur showed up. ‘‘A colporteur is here distributing tracts,’’ he noted in his diary. ‘‘He and I have a long argument upon the Old Testament as a Book to teach morals—which I contend, it is not, and therefore ought not to be made a school book for children. The Colporteur is a Presbyterian, and thinks me little better than an infidel.’’ 4 These itinerants were so common, that Lieber discerned a prejudice against them. He told Samuel A. Allibone in 1855: ‘‘In our thinly settled country . . . there is the strongest anti-pedlarism and anti-book-agent disposition. We are here so pursued with agents, and people have been so often deceived in books or maps, for which they had subscribed, that they will no longer nibble at the fly.’’ Hammond saw it much the same way; he observed to De Bow in 1849 that it was hard to sell a subscription to a Southern periodical, because ‘‘our people . . . are seduced by agents of all sorts of trashy publications who throng the country into subscriptions which exhaust their means, & abuse their confidence to an extent that makes it extremely disagreeable to ask one’s neighbour to take another.’’ However, others complained that these thronging agents were hard to find. Even from Charleston, improbably, Benjamin R. Stuart protested to the publishers of the Southern Quarterly Review in 1857 that he had sought, in vain, conveniently to pay his subscription to an agent: ‘‘The habits of our planters and of the Southern people generally are such, that an agent must call & collect dues. I, for instance, have been a subscriber ever since Dr. Thornwell has edited the Review, have been perfectly willing to pay down the money to the agent, if I could find him without wasting a morning’s valuable time, and have received but the first copy April year, and cannot find the Review, though I have twice tried to do so at the four first book-stores in town. I know that I am not the only case of the sort.’’ Further, there is evidence that agents illicitly pocketed some of the money they had collected. In 1854, a Mr. Holley had drummed up 300 subscribers for the Southern Quarterly Review, to the tune of ‘‘some $1000 or $1500,’’ but neglected to give most of them copies of the periodical. Such ‘‘misconduct’’ was habitual, Simms seemed to think: ‘‘This sort of game has been so frequently played by NorthSouthern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 232, 236, 426 n21. (I now think Barwell’s book a more plausible ascription than Mamma’s Birthday, or, The Surprise; A Comedietta, Adapted from the French [London, 1851], which I first surmised.) On the northernness of agents, see Thomas Railey Markham to Henry M. Smith, 17 October 1855, Henry M. Smith Papers, PHS. 4. Entry for 18 June 1848, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB.

Agents for the Southern Review (From back cover of Southern Review [November 1828])

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ern agents upon the South that the people regard each new comer only as a plausible swindler.’’ 5 Yet there seems little reason to believe that Southern agents were any less ingenious in their pilferings. On the other hand, agents were not always enchanted with the honesty, good humor, or competence of their customers. S. Craig Martyn worked as an agent for De Bow for several years. In 1853, Albert J. Pickett refused to see him, ‘‘stating at the same time that he was not friendly to the Review, and had given orders to his merchant to have it discontinued as soon as his sub: ran out. He declined to give any reason—merely remarking that he had his reasons & that was sufficient—he was as cross as a she bear without her cubs.’’ In 1856, Martyn wearily explained why an agent’s life was seldom happy or profitable. For six years, he had labored for De Bow’s, even spending his own money ‘‘freely and without stint,’’ during ‘‘the best years of my life.’’ What was the result? He was ‘‘pennyless, yes, utterly Pennyless—without a cent in my pocket, and what is my return! Every hope destroyed! all promises neglected! and every avenue of relief completely shut up.’’ 6 In short, the relationship between peddler and reader was not a satisfactory one, though in a thinly settled place like the South, it was grimly necessary. In the towns, there were bookshops. These tended to take two forms: the specialist bookshop-cum-stationer which sometimes became a publisher; and the general store which sold the latest popular literature on the side. The former did not necessarily appear in proportion to a town’s population; Nashville in the 1850s had five specialist stores, which was the same number as Natchez, but New Orleans had but seven. General stores, however, were ubiquitous: it has been estimated that between 1804 and 1824, New Orleans had ‘‘at least fifty-six different persons or firms . . . concerned with bookselling.’’ 7 So bookselling was an unstable business. Both sorts of stores usually placed advertisements in local newspapers to inform the public of newly available books and pamphlets. (Publishers did not 5. FL to Samuel A. Allibone, 30 November 1855, FL Papers, HEH; James Henry Hammond to J. D. B. De Bow, 4 May 1849, J. D. B. De Bow Mss, DU; Benjamin R. Stuart to the Publishers of the SQR, 4 June 1857, JHT Papers, SCL; WGS to James K. Paulding, 28 November 1854, in Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952–82), 3:335. 6. S. Craig Martyn to J. D. B. De Bow, 14 February 1853, 24 May 1856, J. D. B. De Bow Mss, DU. 7. David Marshall Stewart, ‘‘William T. Berry and His Fabulous Bookstore: An Early Nashville Literary Emporium without Parallel,’’ Tennessee Historical Quarterly 37 (Spring 1978): 44; Walton R. Patrick, ‘‘Reading Tastes in Louisiana, 1830–60,’’ in Studies for William A. Read, ed. N. M. Coffee and T. A. Kirby (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940), 290; Roger Philip McCutcheon, ‘‘Books and Booksellers in New Orleans, 1730–1830,’’ Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20 (July 1937): 609.

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yet advertise on their own account.) In these, the specialist bookshop might be very specific about titles, authors, prices, and bindings, while the general store might—as did the shop of T. C. Brown in Woodville, Mississippi, in 1836—speak only vaguely of ‘‘a small lot of new novels.’’ So, the Georgia Christian Repertory on 15 December 1831 listed about 700 titles available from Ellis, Shotwell & Company of Macon. The Charleston Courier of 20 July 1849 contained no fewer than 156 advertisements from a large number of booksellers, but most notably from W. R. Babcock, Samuel Hart, D. W. Harrison, George Oates, and John Russell.8 By comparison with modern techniques of marketing, which tends to privilege a few favored titles, these older advertisements were eclectic and undifferentiated. The latest novel from Southworth or Dickens might occupy no more space than an edition of Cicero, a law journal, or a school primer. The shelves and tables of the bookshops themselves were similarly serendipitous.9 The average bookshop might carry the work of local and Southern printers, but mostly the numerous products of Northern houses like Matthew Carey. A few luxuriant stores carried imprints from London and Paris. About a third of the books advertised by John Russell of Charleston were imported from Europe; he was, according to the stationery of his accounts in 1847, an ‘‘importer of foreign books,’’ procured ‘‘to order by the single copy, or in larger quantities, on favorable terms.’’ William T. Berry, who ran Nashville’s largest bookshop after 1835, was especially interested in importing London and Edinburgh imprints and, on several European trips, purchased ‘‘rare and treasured items’’ for resale.10 One can get some sense of how the minor stores operated from the business records of Richard Elward of Natchez. He had during the 1830s worked for Prescott and Fleming, who were bookbinders, blank book manufacturers and stationers in Natchez; he had been their store clerk for $15, later $18 a week. He was the postmaster of Natchez in the late 1840s and 1850s, and in the early 1850s was the editor and proprietor of two Natchez newspapers, the Mississippi Free Trader and the Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette: these were weekly and semiweekly. Between 1845 and 1847, he ran his own store and kept a daybook. It shows that, mostly, he sold stationery and sundries, that is, 8. C. H. Cantrell, ‘‘The Reading Habits of Antebellum Southerners’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1960), 279ff., on which I largely draw here. But see also ‘‘School and Other Books Advertised, 1800–1840,’’ in Charles L. Coon, North Carolina Schools and Academies, 1790– 1840; a Documentary History (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards & Broughton, 1915), 765–800. 9. Zboray, A Fictive People, 147–55. 10. Thomas Smyth, Account with John Russell, 1 July 1847, Smyth-Stoney-Adger Collection, SCHS; David Marshall Stewart, ‘‘William T. Berry,’’ 44.

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pens, quills, blank books, paper, ink, inkstands, candles, boxes, cigar cases, and the like. But he also sold books and periodicals, as well as providing the facility to have them bound. His records open in 2 January 1845, when Miss Elizabeth Morrison purchased Joseph Worcester’s Elements of History, Ancient and Modern for $1.25, and close on 15 January 1847, when a copy of Edward Hazen’s Grammatic Reader was sold for 65 cents. In the interim, about a hundred people are listed as having bought books or periodicals, or having them bound. About a fifth of these were women, and of these only five were married. This seems an odd disproportion, both as between male and female and young and old, but Elward seems to have sold few novels (which women tended to favor) and somewhat specialized in elementary textbooks. Most of the purchases by unmarried women were books like John Lee Comstock’s System of Natural Philosophy, which was a schoolbook guide to physics, Richard Green Parker’s Progressive Exercises in English Composition, and Frederick Emerson’s The North American Arithmetic, all books purchased by a Miss Mayrant. Indeed, it is probable that many of the young ladies were in school together, for on 21 January 1845 no fewer than six of them trooped into the store to hand over $1.50 each for a copy of Peter Fredet’s Modern History from the Coming of Christ and the Change of the Roman Republic. It seems not unlikely, too, that their teacher was G. S. Taintor, who ten days later was procuring his own copy of Fredet and soon bought three copies of Hugh Blair’s Rhetoric, and subsequently showed a marked interest in encyclopedias, grammars, and works on mythology. By the same token, Joshua Pearl was probably also a schoolteacher, since he went in for multiple copies of McGuffey’s Spelling Books and Hazen’s Grammatic Readers. The schoolgirls themselves also purchased more complex works, whether for their studies or not is unclear: Miss Mayrant bought Fénelon’s Telemaque, Miss Marshall was interested in Voltaire’s Henriade, and Miss Jane Morrison purchased Blair’s Rhetoric for $2.75.11 Natchez was full of Roman Catholics, whom Elward supplied with devotional works. His best customer was John M. J. Chanche, the bishop of Natchez between 1841 and his death in 1853, and the builder of the city’s cathedral.12 The bishop bought missals, Catholic and Ursuline manuals, Christian guides, editions of Bossuet and Thomas à Kempis, studies of Henry VIII and Bloody Mary to keep himself informed on the horrors of the Reformation, and John Lingard’s History of England. Similarly, the Reverend William Blenkinsop bought his own copies of an Ursuline manual and a Christian 11. Richard Elward Daybook (1845–47), DU. 12. D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 243–44.

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manual and, for amusement, William Carleton’s Valentine M’Clutchy, the Irish Agent. Edward L. Leonard, perhaps also a priest, paralleled much of his bishop’s purchases, with an extra interest in the Council of Trent, John Milner’s Letters to a Prebendary: Being an Answer to Reflections on Popery, and Joseph Reeve’s History of the Holy Bible; Comprising the Most Remarkable Events in the Old and New Testaments, Interspersed with Moral and Instructive Reflections, Chiefly Taken from the Holy Fathers. And then there were the professionals. Richard M. Gaines, at one time attorney general of Mississippi, bought the proceedings of Congress, Archibald Alison’s history of modern Europe, as well as periodicals to keep up, such as the Democratic Review and Niles’ Register; in addition, he had Elward bind a law book and two volumes of Thomas Loraine McKenney’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America. Volumes on the laws of Mississippi were acquired by assorted lawyers, to help them practice; William T. Martin, who was the attorney for the Natchez mulatto barber William Johnson, had them bound, as well as two volumes of Blackwood’s Magazine.13 Sergeant S. Prentiss had the Civil Code of Louisiana bound for $4.50. A doctor, F. Chappellier, bought medical journals and works on surgery, and had four volumes of The Lancet bound. Elward, in addition, had a little institutional business, from the City Court and the Natchez Institute, the local school. As for binding, the most popular items were musical. Women’s orders were almost exclusively confined to these, with a sideline in ‘‘lady’s books.’’ Men too had music and ladies’ books bound, perhaps seldom for themselves. Otherwise trade was eclectic; a volume of Travels to Russia, an atlas, pamphlets, Smollett’s History of England, Lockhart’s biography of Scott, an American almanac, dictionaries, a ‘‘Flower Book,’’ Vergil, poetry, novels from Cervantes to Scott. Periodicals were frequently bound. These ran a gamut; of foreign ones, Blackwood’s and the ‘‘French Courier,’’ presumably the Courrier Français from Paris; of Northern, Graham’s Magazine, the American Review, the Democratic Review, Nile’s Register, the National Magazine,14 the American Farmer; several Masonic magazines, including one for a ‘‘Mr. Miller, plasterer.’’ Of major Southern periodicals, only the Southern Literary Messenger appears. Many ladies’ journals are mentioned, though imprecisely; Elward perhaps thought them too insubstantial to be specified. But it is likely that ‘‘Lady’s Book’’ conceals Godey’s Lady Book, which makes several appearances, including one when the historian John Wesley Monette came in from the nearby hamlet of Washington to have two copies bound. 13. Ibid., 177. 14. This may be either The National Magazine and Industrial Record of New York, or the Ladies’ National Magazine of Philadelphia.

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Elward was in a small town, which numbered only 4,680 people in 1850, including slaves. He sold ordinary books in small numbers, nothing unusual, nothing rare, and his business did not survive for long. More ambitious was someone like William T. Berry in Nashville, whose shop lasted for forty years (from 1835 to 1876) and whose finances were better arranged. He had several investors, most notably Berry’s father-in-law and former employer, Wilkins Tannehill, who was a merchant, printer, and author. Berry also had a steady income from institutions: schools, colleges, the State Library. The store had a prime downtown location and was handsomely appointed, with a well-furnished room that served as a circulating library and a sort of gentleman’s club; briefly, the Tennessee Historical Society met there. It stocked not only the usual books, but expensive editions, since Berry liked fine printing, having been apprenticed to the trade. He had the means to travel to the eastern United States and to Europe, there to acquire stock. And he was more than a salesman, but had intellectual preferences of his own. He was, for one thing, a marked enthusiast for Emerson (he died with a lithograph of Emerson staring down on him), and wrote anonymously for local newspapers on contemporary issues.15 On the side, he did a very little printing; for example, his father-in-law’s Master Mason’s Manual (1845), an address delivered by William Dix at the new University of the South at Sewanee in 1859, and, most ambitious, several volumes of the works of Philip Lindsley, president of the University of Nashville.16 Berry’s combination of bookselling, librarianship, and printing was not uncommon. Sometimes, as with Joseph Gales in Raleigh, to these pursuits were added the publishing and editing of newspapers. Entrepreneurs of Berry’s ambition and ilk were a focus for the various aspects of the printed word, aspects which a later, more specialized culture would disperse to various industries. Indeed, it was common for booksellers to be printers and, hence, rudimentary publishers, a pattern that made the South’s publishing trade closer to the world of Edmund Curll and Alexander Pope than to our own. A bookshop that exemplified aspects of this synergy was that of John Russell in Charleston, whose proprietor also sponsored periodical publishing, 15. James, Antebellum Natchez, 164; David Marshall Stewart, ‘‘William T. Berry.’’ 16. Wilkins Tannehill, The Master Mason’s Manual, or, Illustrations of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason, with the Ancient Ceremonies (Nashville: W. T. Berry, 1845); William Giles Dix, The University of the South. An Address, Delivered at Beersheba Springs, Tenn., August 19th and 22d, 1859, and Also, by Invitation of the Historical Society of Tennessee, at the Capitol, Nashville, Sept. 8th, 1859 (Nashville: W. T. Berry, 1859); Philip Lindsley, The Works of Philip Lindsley D.D., Late President of the University of Nashville, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott; Nashville: W. T. Berry, 1859).

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acted as an editor, and (less unusually) acted as an agent for periodicals like De Bow’s Review and Evert Duyckinck’s Literary World. Russell had been born in Charleston in 1812. His father had died when the son was very young and his mother, Rachel, thereafter remarried. He worked as a young man in the bookstore of John P. Beile, himself a notable bibliopole who was in Paris in 1839 seeking help from David Bailie Warden and ‘‘precious information concerning the more important literary & scientific French publications.’’ 17 Russell went on, briefly, to be an accountant and auctioneer, before working as the chief clerk in Samuel Hart’s bookshop and then setting up his own ‘‘literary emporium’’ in 1846. This shop migrated up and down King Street but was most famously settled at No. 251, where the customer encountered an ‘‘ample entrance and handsome plate-glass windows.’’ He seems never to have married and, at his death, his step-sister Eliza Catherine Jones was his sole heir; she inherited a stock of books, once valued at $20,000, but in 1871 only worth $2,500.18 But, even before the war, Russell was not a very efficient businessman, but someone with the bad habit of not answering letters (or so David James McCord complained). Certainly his financing of Russell’s Magazine in the late 1850s was more optimistic than munificent. Paul Hamilton Hayne, who suffered from this, diplomatically remembered Russell as ‘‘in business affairs . . . generous to a fault,’’ but also more bluntly called him ‘‘careless,’’ a man who lacked ‘‘ballast.’’ 19 Nonetheless, Russell provided Charleston with a remarkable service. It would not be too much to say that, at Russell’s, the Charlestonian could eventually find almost whatever modern book he wished, whether American or European, for if a volume was not in stock, Russell would undertake to secure it. Naturally, he carried all the recently fashionable books, but he was notable—in response to the scholarly tastes of his community—for having many erudite texts. One can get some sense of this from the diaries of Mitchell King, who kept an intermittent log of his incessant bookbuying. In the spring of 1846, King bought from Russell a thirteen-volume edi17. John Russell to J. D. B. De Bow, 26 July 1854, J. D. B. De Bow Mss, DU; WGS to Evert Duyckinck, 25 February 1847, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:271; J. P. Chazal to David Bailie Warden, 16 May 1839, David Bailie Warden Papers, MHS. 18. Madeleine B. Stern, ‘‘John Russell: ‘Lord John’ of Charleston,’’ North Carolina Historical Review 26 ( July 1949): 285–99; PHH, Ante-Bellum Charleston (1885; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: Southern Studies Program, University of South Carolina, 1978), 23; Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:150. 19. David James McCord to William Porcher Miles, 27 December 1846, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC; entry for 3 March 1846, in MK Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC; PHH, Ante-Bellum Charleston, 26; PHH to John Esten Cooke, 5 April 1858, in Rayburn S. Moore, ed., A Man of Letters in the Nineteenth-Century South: Selected Letters of Paul Hamilton Hayne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 52.

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tion of Maria Edgeworth’s works for $13, paid $6 for William Beattie’s The Waldenses, or, Piedmont and Dauphiny, as well as $3.50 for Samuel Roffey Maitland’s Facts and Documents Illustrative of the History, Doctrine, and Rites of the Ancient Albigenses and Waldenses; evidently, these last were subjects that interested King, who was broadly drawn to religious history, for in 1851 he was to buy Pierre Allix’s Some Remarks Upon the Ecclesiastic History of the Ancient Churches of Piedmont. In 1847, King bought something on or by the English lawyer Sir Samuel Romilly, and Thomas Hutchinson’s History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774. In March 1847, he was settling accounts for Thomas Fuller’s History of the University of Cambridge, an unstated number of the Valpy Classics, William Falconer’s edition of Strabo’s Geography, four volumes of Friedrich von Savigny (presumably on medieval law), three of Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, and three of Honoré Mirabeau’s Lettres à Sophie. A year later there was Martin Joseph Routh’s Reliquiae Sacrae, which chiefly concerned the history of Christianity in the second and third centuries, especially the Council of Nicea. In 1848, King was buying Jeremy Bentham’s Church-of-Englandism. In 1850, he added Thomas Dew’s dissertation on slavery, a discourse by François Guizot, J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, seventeen volumes of Hobbes, the Lexicon of Saint Photius, Bulwer Lytton’s Confessions of a Water Patient, and Hugh Miller’s Foot-Prints of the Creator, which concerned geology. In 1851, he procured a copy of Louisa McCord’s verse drama Caius Gracchus, a volume on the Reformation in Germany, four volumes of John Witherspoon’s Works, Milton, Vasari, and the poetry (in English and Latin) of Vincent Bourne. In 1852, there was Richard Chevenix Trench’s Hulsean lectures on The Fitness of Holy Scripture for Unfolding the Spiritual Life of Men. In 1853, King bought Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England in several volumes, John Bachman’s Defence of Luther and the Reformation, a pseudonymous novel by Ben Shadow called Echoes of a Belle, or, A Voice from the Past, a volume of the North British Review, Thomas Wright’s Early Mysteries, and Other Latin Poems of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, something by William Palmer on Mormonism, a 1774 Edinburgh edition of State-Papers and Letters Addressed to William Carstares, Confidential Secretary to K. William During the Whole of his Reign, John Evelyn’s Diary, William Taylor’s 1845 History of the University of Dublin, Simms’s novel Marie de Berniere: A Tale of the Crescent City, and a medical textbook by Robley Dunglison. Fittingly, along the way, King bought F. Somner Merryweather’s Bibliomania in the Middle Ages: or Sketches of Bookworms—Collectors—Bible Students—Scribes—and Illuminators, from the Anglo Saxon to the Norman Periods.20 20. This evidence is drawn from the King Memoranda.

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The broad erudition of this is, for the moment, not at issue. What matters is that John Russell provided Mitchell King with Charleston imprints, American publications, and works from European publishers. He furnished novels, theology, periodicals, philosophy, history, natural science; cheap books, expensive morocco-bound editions; the modern and the antiquarian. He provided, as his catalog proclaimed, ‘‘rare, curious, and useful books.’’ To be sure, the service was not omnicompetent, for King bought elsewhere in Charleston, but also from Philadelphia and, occasionally, directly from Europe. In 1860, for example, he bought 185 volumes of Valpy’s Delphin Classics from Henry George Bohn, the London publishers, evidently for presentation to the University of North Carolina (they were captured by the U.S. blockade of Charleston and carried as a prize to Philadelphia).21 This range was not a peculiarity of King’s. The library catalog of James Warley Miles, compiled in 1854, shows old and new imprints from far and wide, from obvious places like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, London, Edinburgh, and Paris, but also from most of the German cities (Leipzig, Halle, Jena, Frankfurt, Bonn, Dresden, Tübingen, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Breslau, Göttingen, Berlin, Hamburg, Berlin), the Austrian Empire (Vienna, Prague), Denmark (Copenhagen, Kiel), Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome, Turin), Switzerland (Basel), the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht), Spain (Madrid), Portugal (Lisbon), plus Ratisbon, Ghent, and Calcutta. They vary in dates from 1491 (a psalter from Vienna) to Miles’s own day. There is a scattering from before 1700, a substantial number from the eighteenth century, but most from the nineteenth. To be sure, Miles was one of the South’s great scholars, and rightly observed of his collection, ‘‘Many of these books are of great value, and comparatively rare in our region—, some few are positively rare.’’ The point is not the speciality of Miles’s tastes, but that Charleston made it possible for these eruditions to be realized. For in 1854, Miles had not been to Europe (or only fleetingly on his way to the Levant), unlike Hugh Legaré who had spent several years in France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Scotland, and whose posthumous library catalogs of 1843 and 1848 show a similar, learned pattern.22 Miles himself, however, was sharply aware, not of adequacy, but of inadequacy. Though he was convinced that Southern schools and colleges were equal to any in the Union, he did think (at least in 1853) that it was ‘‘a discouraging fact, that even in one of our principal Southern seats of refinement and intellectual culture—the city of Charleston—any 21. The first page of the only extant catalog, undated, is reproduced in Stern, ‘‘ ‘Lord John,’ ’’ 287; Henry George Bohn to MK, 4 September, 3 October 1860, MK to David L. Swain, 17 August 1861, MK Papers, SHC. 22. Catalogue of the Library of the Hon. Hugh S. Legaré (Washington, D.C., 1843); Catalogue of the Rare and Valuable Private Library of the Late Hon. H. S. Legaré (Washington, D.C., 1848).

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man who was devoted to the pursuits of scholarship and learning, would find no library furnishing, in only a moderate degree, the necessary apparatus for his investigations; and no learned society or association to sympathize with, and aid him, in his peculiar avocations.’’ 23 Russell’s shop was a place where fashionable society of the younger set liked to be seen, where (as Hayne remembered) ‘‘a good deal of love-making, à la mode, was carried on.’’ Russell was a presence of mixed beneficence, ‘‘a man of quick, bright mind, of much native shrewdness, and acquired information; a clever, and occasionally even an instructive talker . . . [with] a kind heart.’’ But he was also seen as conceited and dogmatic, too conscious of his importance as ‘‘the Moxon, or the Murray . . . of this Ilk.’’ 24 Nonetheless, he or others made his shop a focus of intellectual life. There were, of course, chance meetings over the tables and shelves. King’s diaries have, for example, this entry for 16 July 1852: ‘‘Russell meet Trapier seeking Strauss,’’ that is, in the bookshop he had met Paul Trapier, the Episcopal minister, looking for David Strauss’s life of Jesus. Further, Russell seems to have acted as a messenger between his customers, even as an address poste restante.25 Simms’s letters incessantly advise his correspondents to send replies ‘‘to Russell.’’ Most famously, a group began regularly to meet at the store, in its back room. There Simms presided over the younger generation of poets and novelists like Hayne, Timrod, and Gildersleeve, but Petigru was often there with older men like William Grayson, Samuel Dickson, Alfred Huger, and King, while the Miles brothers, Trescot, Frederick Porcher, and Father Lynch dropped in. Meetings in the store often spilled over into debates in private homes, especially that of Simms. Out of this developed Russell’s Magazine, which ran from April 1857 to March 1860. Hayne was its editor, but Russell himself was its financial backer, publisher, and organizer; indeed, after a few issues, he became an assistant editor, when William B. Carlisle of the Charleston Mercury withdrew.26 This periodical was a logical extension of Russell’s established role as a publisher, which had begun with a volume of Simms’s poetry, Areytos, or, Songs of the South, in 1846. Thereafter he published things like Smyth’s Pattern of Mercy and Holiness (1849), Fraser’s Reminiscences of Charleston (1854), James 23. George Walton Williams, ed., Catalogue of the Library of the Reverend James Warley Miles (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1955); JWM to Robert Newton Gourdin, 1 April 1857, Robert Newton Gourdin Papers, DU; Legaré Catalogue: 1843; Legaré Catalogue: 1848; JWM, ‘‘Oriental Studies,’’ SQR n.s. 7 (April 1853): 273. 24. PHH, Ante-Bellum Charleston, 24, 26; Moore, Man of Letters, 52. 25. ‘‘Send me a scrawl of consolation & direct to me at Charleston (for the present) ‘care of John Russell, Bookseller’’’: WGS to James Henry Hammond, 20 May 1846, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:168. 26. Sam G. Riley, Magazines of the American South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 194.

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Warley Miles’s Philosophic Theolo (1849), Frederick Porcher’s Eulo on the Late Hon. John C. Calhoun (1850), Simms’s Lays of the Palmetto (1848), John Holbrook’s Ichthyolo of South Carolina, and several volumes of Grayson’s poetry, including The Hireling and the Slave (1854).27 Occasionally, following a common practice, a book published elsewhere would also be issued under his additional imprint; this happened with Simms’s Poems, Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary and Contemplative (1853), which was primarily done by J. S. Redfield in New York.28 For the most part, Russell was publishing his customers, for he very seldom ventured beyond Charlestonians and South Carolinians. An exception was J. G. M. Ramsey’s Annals of Tennessee (1853), though a partial one, since Ramsey had long cultivated relations with the Charleston intelligentsia.29 Russell’s Magazine, by contrast, though it essentially published the Charleston set, drew upon contributors more widely dispersed, even to the North. Russell was following a well-established pattern for Southern booksellerscum-publishers. J. W. Randolph, for example, who sold books from 121 Main Street in Richmond, published several score imprints, books, and pamphlets, many of them canonical works by Virginian authors; he reprinted Dew’s Essay on Slavery in 1849, the fifth edition of Ruffin’s Essay on Calcareous Manures in 1852, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in 1853, as well as Hugh Blair Grigsby’s The Virginia Convention of 1776 in 1855.30 When John Pendleton Ken27. WGS, Areytos, or, Songs of the South (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1846); Thomas Smyth, A Pattern of Mercy and Holiness, Exhibited in the Conversion and Subsequent Character of Col. William Yeadon, Ruling Elder in the Second Presbyterian Church, Charleston, S.C.: A Discourse (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1849); Charles Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1854); JWM, Philosophic Theolo; or, Ultimate Grounds of All Religious Belief Based in Reason (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1849); Frederick A. Porcher, Eulo on the Late Hon. John C. Calhoun, Delivered before the Cliosophic and Chrestomathic Societies of the College of Charleston, on Thursday, July 6th, 1850 (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1850); WGS, Lays of the Palmetto: A Tribute to the South Carolina Regiment, in the War with Mexico (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1848); John Edwards Holbrook, Ichthyolo of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1855); William J. Grayson, The Hireling and Slave (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1854); William J. Grayson, The Country (Charleston, S.C.: Russell and Jones, 1858). 28. Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 3:144n; Mary Swinton Legaré, ed., Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), in fact, bears four imprints: primarily that of Burges & James in Charleston, but also Thomas, Cowperthwait of Philadelphia, Appleton in New York, and James Munroe in Boston. 29. J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century Comprising Its Settlement, as the Watauga Association, from 1769 to 1777; a Part of North Carolina, from 1777 to 1784; the State of Franklin, from 1784–1788; a Part of North-Carolina, from 1788–1790; the Territory of the U. States, South of the Ohio, from 1790 to 1796; the State of Tennessee, from 1796 to 1800 (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1853). 30. Thomas R. Dew, An Essay on Slavery (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1849); Edmund Ruffin, An Essay on Calcareous Manures (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1852); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1853); HBG, The Virginia Convention of 1776 (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1855).

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nedy was passing through Richmond in 1856, he took care to buy a ‘‘large number of books’’ on the history of Virginia at Randolph’s. The difference between Russell and Randolph was that the latter published music, even pirating Donizetti—pirating was the mark of the more ambitious American publisher—and, being located in the state capital, had access to the volumes generated by the law, politics, and religion. By comparison, Russell was a fastidious publisher only of small quantities of belles lettres. Columbia, not Charleston, handled most official publications in South Carolina. These were the mother lode of publishing in all states. To look, for example, through the modern bibliography of New Orleans imprints between 1764 and 1864 is to wander through a dismal landscape of law reports, constitutional enactments, political speeches, proceedings of synods and conventions, rule books of Free Masons, civic regulations, and corporate reports, all of which is broken only fitfully by odd volumes of poetry or a reprint of The Vicar of Wakefield.31 As far as quantity went, the literary accomplishment of a community was a minor consideration compared to its legal, economic, or political centrality to a region. While many Southerners bought books in the urban centers of the South, they also bought from stores in the North, and (less often) directly from Europe. Mitchell King bought from John Penington’s, who had a store at 169 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia; so did Grigsby, who also did business with Edward D. Ingraham in the same city. Charles Colcock Jones Sr. used Samuel B. Smith (later the partnership of Smith & English), who had a store at the corner of 4th and Mulberry Streets, also in Philadelphia.32 Pickett used Bartlett & Welford in New York.33 But he could as readily have heeded J. C. Morgan of New Orleans, who was advertising in the Planters’ Banner in 1846 that he could furnish periodicals and ‘‘all foreign and american works of merit as soon as they issue from the press,’’ and that ‘‘planters and others residing in the country, and in neighboring states, who, under ordinary circumstances, are for the most part denied ready access to the current literature of the day, can have every work they require promptly forwarded to them.’’ Indeed, Pickett did use Russell in Charleston. If one lived far from a very good 31. Entry for 25 April 1856, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; Florence Jumonville, Bibliography of New Orleans Imprints, 1764–1864 (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1989). 32. Clipping about imported books from John Penington, November 1847, King Memoranda; HBG to Mary Grigsby, 11 March 1848, Edward D. Ingraham to HBG, 25 December 1845, HBG Papers, VHS; Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, vol. 3, The Night Season (1865–1868) (New York: Popular Library, 1972), 1,680. 33. See AJP to William Bacon Stephens, 5 July 1847, AJP Mss, DU, which lists about sixty books ordered from Bartlett & Welford; see also Bartlett & Welford to AJP, 23 March 1848, ibid.

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bookshop, as Pickett did in Montgomery, it did not much matter whether a book was procured from Philadelphia or Charleston or New Orleans. George Fitzhugh was to complain that this equality had ill effects: ‘‘The New-York merchants send out catalogues of their complete assortment of books . . . to all quarters of the Union; and the man who wants a book, being charged no more postage for writing to a house in New-York than to one in his neighborhood, is sure to send to New-York for it, because his neighboring bookseller may not have it, or, if he has, the iniquitous post-office laws charge him as much for remitting the book twenty miles as they charge the New-York merchant for sending it three thousand miles.’’ 34 It was an old tradition to import from European booksellers. In this, as in much else, John Randolph was determinedly old-fashioned. Watkins Leigh sent Hugh Blair Grigsby in 1848 ‘‘a copy of a memorandum that I found in Mr. Randolph’s almanac for 1828, containing a list of the books he imported from Van Tetroode’s bookstore in Amsterdam; which books consisted chiefly of the ‘Elzevir Republics,’ now in your possession.’’ There were, he added, ‘‘among Mr. R’s papers, a great many more booksellers bills—both foreign & American.’’ At least some of these bills have survived and show receipts from Samuel Pleasants in Richmond, Thomas Edgerton in London, William Duane in Philadelphia, Thompson and Howard in Washington, D.C., Longman’s in London, as well as Van Tetroode. Occasionally intermediaries were employed. Charles Gayarré used a M. Foucher as a book agent, but also, when he was Secretary of State of Louisiana and attempting to improve its literary facilities, Hector Bossange, who grandiloquently dubbed himself ‘‘agent de la Bibliothèque de l’Etat de la Louisiane à Paris.’’ When he was Corresponding Secretary of the Maryland Historical Society, Brantz Mayer used Nicholas Marie Alexandre Vattemare to collect and send books from Paris.35 An intellectual Southerner abroad naturally found a way to bookshops. John Randolph bought many ‘‘at retail especially at stores in London where he found a great many excellent books at extremely low prices. One of his chief occupations & greatest pleasures while he was in London (& he made seven or eight visits to that modern Babylon) consisted in wandering about from store to store hunting for curious & rare works.’’ Grigsby, a young man loose in New York in 1831, reported to a friend that he had bought well, volumes 34. Planters’ Banner, 9 July 1846, quoted in Patrick, ‘‘Reading Tastes in Louisiana,’’ 290– 91; WGS to AJP, 4 December 1847, AJP Papers, ADAH; GF, ‘‘Uniform Postage, Railroads, Telegraphs, Fashions, Etc,’’ DBR 26 (June 1859): 658–59. 35. Watkins Leigh Jr., to HBG, 29 October 1848, HBG Papers, VHS; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790–1830 (1964; reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), 111; various letters from Hector Bossange to CG, from December 1850 to September 1852, CG Papers, LSU; Nicholas Marie Alexandre Vattemare to Brantz Mayer, 29 January 1846, Mayer and Roszel Papers, MHS.

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that included Adam Smith’s complete works, Bolingbroke ‘‘in 6 ponderous octavos,’’ Plautus, Arrian, and Aristophanes: ‘‘I have travelled 20 miles a day over the city in search of the receptacles of old books; and here purchased standard works London editions for mere songs.’’ Back in New York again in 1831, he bought at auction part of ‘‘the library of the late Bishop Hobart,’’ which came to ‘‘seventy vols, great & small; among which was the Encyclopedia Britannica.’’ He also ‘‘obtained there Robertson’s works complete in 6 volumes Edinburg edition, the AntiJacobin Review, the entire works of Massillon, and some other works of considerable value.’’ On the whole trip, he picked up ‘‘one hundred & seventy, which were safely landed in Norfolk and duly placed upon the shelves of my library.’’ Legaré, when a student in Edinburgh in 1818, used the city’s many bookshops, especially Laing’s. Later, when American chargé in Brussels, he bought much at Summerhauzen’s on the Rue de la Madeleine and brought back about 400 volumes to Charleston.36 Lieber, on his many Northern and European travels, much expanded his Columbia library, in which books lay chaotically ‘‘on the table, ground, sill and every where.’’ 37 The net result of this was that the South was a place into which torrents of print poured. Hence some intellectual Southerners had private libraries of considerable scope. The tradition of ‘‘public’’ libraries being relatively weak though not negligible, the acquisition of such a personal collection was almost necessary, but certainly expected.38 These varied greatly in size and quality. Thomas Jefferson, in his day, had set the standard of Southern bibliomania. The volumes he gave in 1815 to found the Library of Congress consisted of 6,487 volumes. Upon his death, a further thousand were willed to the University of Virginia.39 Subsequent generations matched and, sometimes, overmatched this passion. The greatest collection was that of Thomas Smyth, whose library at its peak consisted of about 20,000 volumes, housed in three large rooms on the 36. Watkins Leigh Jr., to HBG, 28 November 1848, HBG Papers, VHS; HBG to John N. Tazewell, 15 October 1831, Tazewell Family Papers, LV; HBG Diary (12 May 1830–27 January 1832), pp. 152–53, HBG Papers, VHS; Michael O’Brien, A Character of Hugh Legaré (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 30, 209. 37. FL to Dorothea Dix, 25 January 1851, FL Papers, HEH; see also FL, large volume, marked on flyleaf ‘‘Catalogue, kindly made by Matilda and Norman Lieber, in the spring of 1859,’’ cataloged as LI123, FL Papers, HEH; Lieber added, ‘‘It has already proved a real blessing to me. How large would be the catalogue of those books which I have lost during my changeful life? New-York, July 1859.’’ 38. Strictly speaking, there were no ‘‘public’’ libraries in the Old South, since all required membership of some sort. 39. Harry Clemons, The University of Virginia Library, 1825–1950: Story of a Jeffersonian Foundation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1954), 8.

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third story of his Spring Street house in Charleston. ‘‘In all his travels,’’ his memorialist observed in 1873, ‘‘in America and Europe, he was in quest of books, often spending whole days in stores and antiquarian stalls; and, for years, consuming the greater part of his salary in the purchase of books.’’ His wife seems to have found this obsession, which extended to maps and pictures, both a physical and fiscal inconvenience. Writing to him when he was away and so, she knew, likely to be accumulating, she wearily reminded him ‘‘not to involve yourself too deeply or inextricably in debt by the purchase of new books and pictures; of the last, with the maps, we have enough now to cover all the walls, even of the new rooms; and the books are already too numerous for comfort in the study and library.’’ Smyth knew his was an unreasoning appetite, ‘‘a blind chase . . . impoverishing and infatuating,’’ but also that it served practically as ‘‘a large, systematic, Presbyterian, Theological and Literary Library, as an armory for our ministers and churches in Charleston.’’ 40 At the urging of Thornwell and Adger, he sold 11,000 of them—‘‘English and Foreign editions, in substantial and many of them elegant bindings, and in excellent condition’’—to the Columbia Theological Seminary in 1856 for $15,000, at (what he claimed was) the bargain price of $1.36 a volume, which he reckoned was about half what he had spent to acquire them.41 This would suggest that, over his life, Smyth spent about $54,000 on his library. But he doubtless exaggerated his generosity and expenditures. The average price of a book in 1850 is usually estimated at about a dollar, though the average cost of the books in Brantz Mayer’s scholarly library has been estimated at $1.97 a volume. But Smyth was a man of means, who provided the seminary with an endowment of $10,000 to maintain the collection intact, another $10,000 to endow a lectureship in his own name, and elsewhere bequeathed a third $10,000 to fund the publication and dissemination of his collected works.42 Next in size was probably the private library of Simms. In 1860, when financial exigencies obliged him to sell off several thousand volumes, he estimated his collection, which had accumulated over 30 years, at about 12,000 40. G. R. Brackett, ‘‘The Christian Warrior Crowned: A Discourse Commemorative of the Life, Character and Labors of the Rev. Thomas Smyth,’’ in Complete Works of Rev. Thomas Smyth, D.D., ed. J. William Flinn, 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan, 1909–12), 10:782–83; T. W. Street, ‘‘Thomas Smyth: Presbyterian Bookman,’’ Journal of Presbyterian History 37 (1959): 8–9. 41. Undated clipping, in Mss Volume 3, Thomas Smyth Papers, PHS: this says it is ‘‘nearly forty years since Dr. Smyth commenced the work which has been to him one of love, as well as of great labor and expense,’’ so this perhaps dates from the late 1850s (all the surrounding documents are from this period); Thomas Smyth, various documents on sale of his library, in Mss Volume 3, pp. 182ff., Thomas Smyth Papers, PHS. 42. Zboray, A Fictive People, 144; J. L. Yeatman, ‘‘Literary Culture and the Role of Libraries in Democratic America: Baltimore, 1815–1840,’’ Journal of Library History 20 (1985): 348; Street, ‘‘Presbyterian Bookman,’’ 1.

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volumes. It is not impossible that Mitchell King equaled this. In 1860, King complained to John Penington, ‘‘My Library has almost overgrown my means of accommodating it. My books are rife in every nook of my house—so piled one upon another that I am often as long detained in searching for the one that I may want as ought to have sufficed for consulting it.’’ No estimates or catalogs seem to survive, though he did bequeath several thousand volumes to the College of Charleston in 1862.43 From these, size runs down from the large to the minor. When he died in 1843, Legaré’s library was about 6,000 volumes.44 Grigsby’s was in this range and was large enough to require housing in a separate building. As to Kennedy, in 1848 he observed of his collection that he had many valuable books, worth five to six thousand dollars, ‘‘selected with great care,’’ and (inaccurately) surmised that ‘‘no library of its size in the country is better.’’ Much later, there was to be a catalog that listed 5,188 volumes. Francis Lieber eventually had around 5,000 volumes, though this included some accumulation after his departure for New York in 1857, so perhaps 4,000 is a conservative estimate for his Columbia days. John Holt Rice had some 3,200 titles, more in volumes, which were bequeathed to the Union Theological Seminary in 1832. Kennedy’s friend Brantz Mayer twice cataloged his own books, in 1855 and 1863; on the first occasion, he calculated 1,748 volumes, on the second, 2,395. The ‘‘Catalogue of Books in Dr. Cooper’s Library’’ compiled in 1838 shows about 2,400 volumes. Edmund Ruffin bought about a book a week and his library, at his death, amounted to about 2,000 volumes. That of James Warley Miles, by 1857, had grown to about 1,600. When Gayarré listed his books in 1829, they came to 875 titles, which had increased by 1861 to 1,355.45 For some, much had been inherited from the eighteenth century or from reading forebears. Libraries were organic growths. In 1826, for example, 43. WGS to John Esten Cooke, 14 April 1860, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 4:215; MK to John Penington, 20 August 1860, MK Papers, SHC; J. H. Easterby, A History of the College of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: College of Charleston, 1935), 128, 151. 44. Winfield Scott to WCP, 18 July 1843, Preston Family Papers, VHS. The published catalogs list fewer, but doubtless excluded works retained by his sister or items too common to merit sale. 45. Richard Beale Davis, Jefferson’s Virginia, 117; entry for 13 November 1848, JPK Journal, and ‘‘Catalogue of the library of the Hon. John P. Kennedy,’’ JPK Papers, PLB; Frank Friedel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal (1947; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968), 147; Richard Beale Davis, Jefferson’s Virginia, 107, citing (what appears to be) Catalogue of the Library Belonging to the Union Theological Seminary in Prince Edward, Virginia (Richmond: J. MacFarlan, 1833); Brantz Mayer, ‘‘Library Catalogue’’ (1855–63), Brantz Mayer Papers, MHS; ‘‘Catalogue of Books in Dr. Cooper’s Library 1838,’’ TC Papers, SCL; David F. Allmendinger, Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 225, n15; JWM to Robert N. Gourdin, 1 April 1857, Robert N. Gourdin Papers, DU; CG, ‘‘Bibliotheque,’’ CG Papers, LSU; CG Notebook, CG Papers, TU.

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Bookplate of Charles Izard Manigault (Courtesy South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston)

Charles Izard Manigault inherited from his mother Margaret and bought from the other heirs a library of 2,122 books, about a third of which were French. By 1840, this has grown to 2,762 volumes and, by 1860, to about 3,000 volumes, which were kept at No. 6 Gibbs Street in Charleston. As for John Randolph, who had about a thousand volumes, ‘‘a large part of his library,’’ according to Watkins Leigh, ‘‘he inherited from his brother Dick Randolph.’’ 46 In turn, Grigsby acquired part of the Randolph collection, when it was auctioned. By itself, the size of libraries means little. That Smyth, Legaré, and Simms had large collections was significant, since the consequences of their possession can be traced in their writings. But a library need have no consequence 46. Charles Izard Manigault, ‘‘Catalogue of library’’ (1826), Charles Izard Manigault Papers, SCL; ‘‘In the Library’’ (27 June 1826), Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Watkins Leigh Jr., to HBG, 28 November 1848, HBG Papers, VHS; Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 36, estimates a thousand, while Richard Beale Davis, Jefferson’s Virginia, 110, says, ‘‘surely several thousand volumes,’’ though does not explain why ‘‘surely.’’

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other than the pleasure of the reader or the vanity of the property owner. One of the South’s largest libraries was that of Alexander Augustus Smets (1795–1862), a Savannah merchant and lumberman, originally from Nantes, who had served in Napoleon’s army and emigrated to the United States after 1814. By 1860 he had acquired a collection of between 5,000 and 8,000 volumes, an assembly of sufficient celebrity that visitors called to examine it.47 It was, indeed, remarkable. The bulk was of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imprints, mostly belles lettres, but also many travel accounts and works on the fine arts and antiquities. Smets had, for example, the twenty-threevolume Description de l’Ept (Paris, 1809–13), the official record of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, printed by his Imperial Government and distributed as gifts; Smets’s copy had belonged to the Marquis de Fortia. Seventeenthand sixteenth-century imprints from England, France, Italy, and Germany were frequent in the collection, and there were not a few incunabula, among them Bernard de Breydenbach’s Des Sainctes Perigrinations Jherusalem (Lyon, 1488), Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job (Venice, 1488), a 1494 London edition of Boccaccio printed by Richard Pynson, a Nuremburg Chronicle printed by Anthonius Koberger in 1493 (as well as Koberger’s Bible of 1478), William Caxton’s printing of The Polychronicon (London, 1482), a Speculum Vitae Humanae (1468) printed by Ulric Zell in Cologne, and Johannes de Thurocz’s Chronicon Regum Hungariae (Augsburg, 1488). Smets also owned Oliver Cromwell’s copy of a 1619 Bible, which had come to him by way of the Woburn Abbey library of the Duke of Bedford. In addition, he had illuminated manuscripts: among these, a ninth-century copy of Gregory’s Moralia in Job, on whose fly-leaf was written a prayer for the soul of Charlemagne; a fourteenth-century Roman de la Rose; a bull of Innocent III, issued in Rome in 1212; and various medieval missals, rolls, charters, and deeds. Further, he seems to have had assorted modern literary manuscripts, including those of Joseph Addison, Laurence Sterne, and Walter Scott. Yet the existence of Smets and his books need little trouble the intellectual historian, for it is not clear how much he read his possessions. Many of the books and periodicals, listed in his catalog, have the bleak notation, ‘‘in parts, uncut.’’ 48 It is more instructive to study the proportions of libraries, what categories 47. ‘‘A. A. Smets, Esq. of Georgia,’’ DBR 13 (July 1852): 97–98, gives a brief account of the library, as well as of Smets; see also ‘‘A Library,’’ SLM 17 (November 1851): 630–36, which discusses the library’s contents. For general awareness of Smets, see Mrs. Mary Jones to Charles Colcock Jones Jr., 25 June 1856, in Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, vol. 1, Many Mansions (1854–1860) (New York: Popular Library, 1972), 224. 48. Catalogue of the Private Library of the Late Mr. A. A. Smets, Savannah, Ga. (New York: Bradstreet Press, 1868).

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of books were thought pertinent. Self-evidently the shape of a library was most governed by the tastes of its owner. The inventory of Saint George Tucker’s small collection shows 350 titles, of which 90 were law books.49 John Holt Rice’s library was predominantly theological, as was much of Thomas Smyth’s. Legaré lent to the classics, Miles to the Oriental and the Germanic. There is no catalog of Randolph’s books but Grigsby’s plantation was adjacent to Bizarre, Randolph’s seat, and the historian browsed in its library between 1840 and 1845, after Randolph’s death, and in 1854 published a short article upon it. The library—Randolph’s second, for the first was destroyed in a fire—was marked by ‘‘richness in the department of history, and that of Virginia especially, and in old English literature.’’ It had an abundance of the political tracts of the eighteenth century, including those of the Commonwealth tradition like Cato’s Letters. It had Jeremy Taylor and Robert South but not Hooker, Pascal and Bossuet but not Massillon. Near the bed were two small bookcases, where Randolph kept especial favorites: a ‘‘splendid edition of Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Writings’’ in five volumes, a 1727 edition of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, Montaigne in three volumes octavo in English translation, Guicciardini, Bolingbroke, Chaucer, Machiavelli, and Hume. Elsewhere were volumes that spoke to Randolph the sportsman, shelf upon shelf of the British Sporting Magazine and the British Stud Book in ‘‘scores of volumes.’’ There were classics, mostly Latin but some Greek, that included fifty volumes of the Elzevir ‘‘republics.’’ There were dictionaries and grammars, ancient and modern. There were maps and prints, volumes of the drama and of parliamentary eloquence, and many medical treatises in folio from Venetian presses of the seventeenth century, for Randolph was a famous hypochondriac. It was not a library that paid much attention to the literature of the nineteenth century, but there were some modern periodicals.50 However, as Grigsby observed, Randolph was ‘‘skittish of Northern editions, and instead of the American reprints of the Edinburg or the Quarterly, he had complete sets of the British originals bound in Britain.’’ 51 A little can be learned from the libraries of men—we have less evidence from women—who strove to be eclectic. No one was more encyclopedic than Thomas Cooper and there is a catalog of his books, made in 1838. It shows (using Cooper’s own categories) 104 titles on history; 22 biographies; 114 on voyages and travels; 111 in theology; 39 different periodicals; 80 works on American history and politics; 211 on science and art; 206 of the classics; 32 49. Richard Beale Davis, Jefferson’s Virginia, 94. 50. Ibid., 112–13, however, notes that Randolph read Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Madame de Staël. 51. HBG, ‘‘The Randolph Library,’’ SLM 20 (February 1854): 78.

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on political economy; 42 on metaphysics and philosophy; 217 of belles lettres; and 30 assorted encyclopedias, dictionaries, and works of reference. But many of these were multivolumed works and, in total, there were about 2,400 volumes, plus a large quantity of unbound periodical numbers. If one excludes the works of reference and periodicals, there are about 1,139 titles, which break down roughly into the following percentages; history 9%, biography 2%, travels 10%, theology 8%, Americana 7%, science 18.5%, classics 18%, political economy 3%, philosophy 3.5%, fiction and poetry 19%. Translating Cooper’s divisions into roughly cognate categories, one has history, biography, and Americana 18%, science, travel, and economics 31.5%, classics 18%, belles lettres 19%, philosophy and theology 11.5%. Again excluding periodicals, reference works, and also manuscripts, one finds in Brantz Mayer’s library 1,547 titles, which stood in the following proportions: history, politics, and biography 34%, travel and science 18%, belles lettres 42%, theology 4%. Mayer had no separate category for the classics, which he distributed, with Livy among the historians, Horace among the poets, and Cicero with the moralists.52 Compare this, in turn, with the catalog that Stephen Elliott devised for the Charleston Library Society in 1826, which had a sixfold division: (1) metaphysics and logic, (2) theology, (3) ethics, (4) government, politics, and jurisprudence, (5) ‘‘the pursuits, the improvements and discoveries of man in society’’ (which combined belles lettres and science), and (6) ‘‘the history of man in society.’’ There were 5,057 titles and many more volumes, of which 85 were periodicals. Splitting this down into categories comparable to the above, roughly there were 1,582 titles in history, government, and law, or 32%; 1,445 in belles lettres, or 29%; 1,254 in geography and science, or 25%; 479 in philosophy, theology or ethics, or 10%.53 For the 1839 catalog of the Savannah Library Society, there are only slightly different proportions, perhaps explicable by the lapse of another decade; 34% for historical works, 34% for belles lettres, 26% for science, 5% for the philosophical.54 52. ‘‘Catalogue of Books in Dr. Cooper’s Library 1838,’’ TC Papers, SCL; Brantz Mayer, ‘‘Library Catalogue’’ (1855–63), Brantz Mayer Papers, MHS. 53. A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Charleston Library Society (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1826). 54. Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Savannah Library Society (Savannah, Ga.: Thomas Purse, 1839). The cataloger divided books into the following categories, after which I have placed the total number of items (not volumes). Arts and Sciences Belles Lettres and Criticism Biography Ethics, Logic, and Metaphysics


   

.% . %
.% . %

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Thomas Cooper read more science than most people, he being a chemist and, as a skeptic, a man who liked to read theology. Brantz Mayer was a great traveler, with an unusually thorough taste for poetry, and a less-than-usual indifference to philosophy and the classics. Stephen Elliott, who was president of the Charleston Library Society for a decade, doubtless augmented its holdings in natural science, though the Savannah numbers suggest by not much. So, adjusting crudely, one might hazard that the ordinary secular intellectual spent about a third of his time on history, politics, and the law; somewhat less than a third on fiction, poetry, and rhetoric; an eighth on philosophy and theology; about a fifth on science, embracing travel and geography. Among these, the classics distributed among these genres probably accounted for about 15 percent, perhaps a little more, perhaps less.55 As to where these books came from, one can get some idea from the Charleston Library Society catalogs of 1826 and 1845. The first may be said to summarize the legacy of the eighteenth century and the first fifty years of American independence. The second provides a brief snapshot of the midGeography and Commerce History Law and Political Science Miscellaneous Natural History Novels and Romances Periodicals Poetry and Drama Theology Travels and Voyages Dutch books French books German books Greek books Italian books Latin Books Latin Medical books

 

       
      



. % .% .
% . % . % .% .
 %  . % .%
.  % . % . % .
% . % .
% .  % . %

To arrive at the figures given in the text, I have added together as historical the categories of biography, history, law and political science; for belles lettres, those of belles lettres and criticism, novels and romances, poetry and drama; for science, those of arts and sciences, geography and commerce, natural history, travels and voyages, and Latin medical books. This makes a total number of 1,265 items. I have presumed that foreign language books, otherwise, fall fairly evenly into the other categories, and excluded periodicals and the miscellaneous. It is arguable that putting geography and travel with science somewhat overstates the scientific category. 55. This seems to accord roughly with the distribution in the catalog of the New York Society Library of 1850, with the exception that belles lettres is a smaller proportion in the New York collection; see Zboray, A Fictive People, 202–10.

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antebellum decades. They show, as one might expect, a marked shift. In the 1826 catalog, of its 5,057 numbered items, 2,907 were English in origin, or about 61 percent of the 4,737 imprints of readily discernible provenance.56 Most of these were from London, with the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge providing a respectable number, and then a scattering of provincial cities like Bath, Warrington, Newcastle, and Norwich. American imprints accounted for 1,233 items, or about 26 percent. Most of these were from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with very little from anywhere in the South other than Charleston. France provided 272 items or nearly 6 percent, almost all being Parisian imprints. Scotland counted for 154 or just over 3 percent, mostly from Edinburgh with the occasional item from Glasgow and Dundee. The Netherlands had 60 or a little more than 1 percent, many of them classical editions (Elzevirs and the like) from Leyden or Amsterdam. Thereafter things dwindled further, with percentages below one: Italy 31, Ireland 29 (the eighteenth-century publishing pirates of Dublin), Germany 27, Switzerland 10, Spain 6, India 3 (Orientalists in Calcutta), Belgium 2, and one apiece from Russia, Jamaica, and Saint-Domingue. These numbers need interpreting. The English share much exaggerates the influence of English culture, since London was a great literary entrepôt and a significant amount of its publications were of Continental origin or were editions of classical texts. For example, of the five editions of Homer’s Iliad listed, three were London imprints, one was from Oxford, and the other from Cambridge. Similarly, of the five editions of Vergil, three were from London, one from Glasgow, and one from Paris. Likewise, the works of Renaissance writers like Tasso, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini came from London, not Florence. (Most of the few Italian imprints concerned the classics or the fine arts.) Further, many Scottish intellectuals were published south of the border. Of David Hume’s works, the library had no Scottish editions, but only those from London; the Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1788); the Correspondence (1820); the eight-volume History of England (1792); and four volumes of the 1759 edition of the same. On the other hand, the library society did have two Edinburgh editions of Ossian (1792, 1805), and the 1785 Edinburgh edition of Adam Ferguson’s Institutes of Moral Philosophy. Likewise, of Madame de Staël’s various works, the library’s copy of the Ouevres complètes was the five-volume Paris edition of 1821, but their English translation of the Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution was published in New York in 1818; their Memoirs of the Private Life of M. Necker came from London, 56. These numbers should be treated with caution, because it is easy to miscount when a brain is numbed, but they are unlikely to be far off. The discrepancy between numbered items and calculated imprints results from some items not being provided with a place of origin.

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1818; Ten Years of Exile was New York, 1821; and the society had two editions of De l’Allemagne, the Parisian of 1813 and an English translation published in New York in 1814. In fact, of course, all of the New York editions of her work were pirated from London publishers. And this, in turn, compromises the figure of about a quarter of all imprints being American. Although in 1826 American publishing had not gone into high gear in purloining foreign imprints, it seems safe to estimate that about a third of these American imprints were not, in origin or culture, American. Such an adjustment would reduce the American cultural presence to about 18 percent of the reading available to the Charlestonian library user. Things look very different for the imprints that found their way into the library between 1826 and 1845.57 The American presence had grown, and the English had dwindled dramatically. Of 1,773 imprints, 1,392 or about 78 percent were American, most of them Northern but more Charlestonian and some (though not many) Southern. England accounted for 284 or 16 percent, compared to the 61 percent of 1826. France was still third and not much changed, having gone down to 58 imprints or about 3 percent. Scotland, on the other hand, was much reduced, from 3 percent to less than 1 percent (13 imprints). The rest were trifling: the Netherlands 7 imprints, Italy 5, Ireland 5, Germany 4, Jamaica 4, Switzerland 1. In these raw numbers is evidence of how the publishing world had changed. The American trade was now at full throttle and, even if one discounts a third of its imprints as pirated from Europe, this still left a very great growth in the representation of American print culture.58 Scotland was lessened, its intelligentsia assimilated to London. The eighteenth-century Irish pirates were gone. The abolition of censorship in France had curtailed the Swiss and Low Country publishers, who had once offered refuge to Voltaire. Moreover, the 1845 catalog shows an great increase in the number of pamphlets. Indeed about a third of the items were pamphlets, almost all of them American, since they were political speeches, sermons, and government documents. What libraries own and what readers borrow are, notoriously, different things. The former expresses what a culture wishes itself to be, the latter what it is. The records of the Savannah Library Society help in understanding the 57. A Catalogue of the Books of the Charleston Library Society Purchased Since 1826, with a List of Present Officers & Members: Volume 2 (Charleston, S.C.: Miller & Browne, 1845). 58. According to George Palmer Putnam, speaking to the Association of New York Publishers in 1855, American publishers issued between 1842 and 1855 a total of 1,115 books, of which 429 or 38.47 percent were foreign reprints. Quoted in Zboray, A Fictive People, 3.

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gulf. In 1839 the librarian William Morel calculated that, from its foundation in 1809, the society was supposed to have accumulated 3,799 volumes, though he could find only 3,304. He devised his categories for them, different from those in the published catalog, but also usefully listed how many volumes were, at the time of his report, checked out or missing. Morel’s numbers look like this, giving the total for each category and the absent volumes in parenthesis: agriculture 18 (3); astronomy 3 (0); biography 254 (58); chemistry and physics 45 (7); drama and poetry 272 (32); geography and ethnography 62 (3); history 254 (58); law 73 (9); mathematics 7 (0); medical science 88 (2); miscellanies 571 (178); natural history 76 (18); pedagogy 5 (2); periodicals 379 (347); philology 50 (4); philosophy 59 (5); physical science 123 (28); political science 64 (7); rhetoric 42 (0); romance and novels 571 (203); technology 18 (0); travels 270 (16). From these numbers, it is possible to calculate what percentage of the library’s holdings in each genre was in the hands of readers. These turn out to be in descending order: romance and novels 42%, pedagogy 40%, natural history 24%, biography 23%, history 23%, physical science 23%, agriculture 17%, chemistry and physics 16%, law 12%, drama and poetry 12%, political science 11%, philosophy 8%, philology 8%, travels 6%, geography and ethnography 5%, medical science 2%, and then astronomy, mathematics, rhetoric, and ‘‘technik’’ at zero.59 One might safely discount the near preeminence of volumes in pedagogy, since the library’s holdings were very small and so liable to distortion by a single reader or larcenist. Otherwise, the list has aspects that are expectable, others not. That four out of every ten novels in the library’s possession should be absent seems plausible, given the growing popularity of the genre. History, biography, and agriculture seem to command a conventional interest. But physical science seems higher than one might expect, while poetry, travel, and medicine are lower. These are raw numbers. One can get a more sensitive understanding from the Savannah Library Society ledgers, of which that between 1822 and 1826 has survived, which shows what individual readers were borrowing. In them are 131 different names, of which seven seem to be women (the handwriting is often opaque). It is unclear whether, formally, women were excluded from the library. The Society’s 1838 rules said nothing about gender and stated that ‘‘any person who shall pay into the Treasury Twenty-Five Dollars, and sign the Rules of this Society, shall be entitled to a share in the Library, and shall in every respect, be considered a member of the Society.’’ But the various lists of the Society’s shareholders show no female names, so one infers the exclusion was informal, presumed, and decisive, but women were permitted to 59. I have rounded out the numbers.

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borrow as a courtesy, as the wives, daughters, or friends of shareholders. Not infrequently, a shareholder’s entry denotes something thus borrowed; Robert Habersham, for a while, seems to have borrowed things for a Miss Maxwell, and much of George Glen’s items were for a Miss Hunter.60 Over five years, these 131 people checked out 3,890 items. This means the average reader checked out about six items a year. But, as one might expect, discrepancies in frequency of reading habits was very great. Fifteen people used only one item over the five years, while the library’s greatest user, Archibald Smith, checked out no fewer than 225. No one else used more than 200, but seven readers exceeded the century, eighteen were between 50 and 99, fifty-six between 10 and 49, forty-nine below 10. It would be possible to undertake a systematic analysis of the whole ledger, but a sampling will have to serve. For his preeminence, Mr. Smith deserves a look. Over the years, he read (or, at least, borrowed) about twenty different works of history and biography. On European matters, he read Gibbon, several works on the Napoleonic Wars, lives of Fénelon, Peter the Great (by Voltaire), George III, Sir William Jones, William Cowper, and Elizabeth Carter, plus the memoirs of the Comte de Ségur and Thomas Raffles’s history of Java. On American matters, there were lives of Nathanael Greene, James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Andrew Jackson, plus Henry Lee’s Revolutionary history and John Sanderson’s Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Smith borrowed about the same number of novels, a few eighteenth-century titles but mostly contemporary ones. There was Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Cecilia, but also several by Scott (Waverley, Peveril of the Peak, Guy Mannering, and Woodstock). In fact, Smith seems to have had a taste for Scottish literature, since he was also reading John Galt’s The Ayrshire Legatees and The Entail, as well as Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and Ann McVickar Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady. The only poetry he borrowed was by Scott (Marmion and The Lady of the Lake) and Burns. As for the Irish, there was Maria Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life and Lady Morgan’s The Princess. These were canonical writers, but Smith also read minor British writers: Thomas Gaspey’s The Lollards and Horace Smith’s Gaieties and Gravities were among his borrowings. As for the Americans, there were Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot, and Catharine Sedgwick’s Redwood, plus the anonymous Tales of an American Landlord; Containing Sketches of Life South of the Potomac. (It is well to remember that these ledgers come 60. Bound manuscript volume that lists, by name of shareholder, books withdrawn from the Savannah Library Society between 1822 and 1826, pp. 17, 32, Savannah Library Society Papers, GHS.

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very early in the growth of American literature.) About fifteen titles concerned travel, which covered most of the known globe except Asia: Sir Robert Porter’s Travels in Russia and Sweden, Francis Hall’s Travels in France, Charles M. J. B. Mercier Dupaty’s Travels Through Italy, Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton’s Travels in Africa, and Sir John Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Polar Sea were by European authors; Timothy Dwight’s Travels in the United States, James K. Paulding’s Letters from the South, and Joel Poinsett’s Notes on Mexico were by Americans. Smith seems to have read almost no science; Alexander Wilson’s American Ornitholo was it. He read a little more theology; volumes of sermons by Samuel Davies and J. W. Cunningham, plus the Works of Jonathan Edwards, all Americans, and Thomas H. Horne’s Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, (obscurely) ‘‘Dr. Murdoch on Atonement,’’ Edward Irving’s For the Oracles of God, Four Orations: For Judgment to Come, An Argument, in Nine Parts, Conyers Middleton’s Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers Which Are Supposed to Have Subsisted in the Christian Church, and Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ. But, in fact, more than half of Smith’s reading was in periodicals, a taste that grew in scale (and in religiosity) during the four years of the ledger, which seems to indicate that he, or someone in his family, was then growing more fervent. At first, he looked mainly at the secular journals, the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review from Britain, the Port Folio, North American Review, the Atheneum, the Literary Gazette, and the New Monthly Magazine from the United States, with only one Southern periodical, the Southern Intelligencer. But, after a while, American and British religious periodicals mingled with these, proliferated, and then came close to dominating: the Pulpit, the Christian Magazine, a Sunday school magazine, a Baptist journal, the Home Missionary Magazine. These were of no very fixed denominational abode. In general, however, the intensity and omnivorousness of Smith’s religious reading was fairly unusual among the society’s readers. The nearest competitor to Smith, among the few women, was a Mrs. McQueen, who ranked eighth among all the borrowers, with 115 items. On the whole, she read more novels and fewer (though more secular) periodicals than Smith, but she had a broader range of interests. For, unlike him, she read philosophy, the classics in translation, and Continental works. In history, she borrowed Livy, Hume’s History of England, several court histories of Elizabeth I and James I, and (like Smith) Henry Lee’s volume on the Revolution in the South. She was less drawn to biographies of notable political Americans, but she did read The Federalist Papers and Wirt’s life of Patrick Henry. Lives of Ann Boleyn and Lady Hamilton, Mozart and Haydn (the last probably that by Stendhal) were to her taste, which a prejudiced mind might then have thought characteristic of her sex, but Goethe’s memoirs perhaps were not, nor her

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apparent indifference to all poetry except Mary Tighe’s Psyche. Some of her fictional interests overlapped with Smith: Scott’s Rob Roy, Burney’s Evelina, Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life, Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné, Morgan’s The Princess, Cooper’s The Pilot, Sedgwick’s Redwood, The Tales of an American Landlord. But, in concert with her interest in Goethe, there was Motte-Fouqué’s Undine and Madame de Staël’s Delphine. She read Richardson’s Pamela, which was old, but also Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, which was brand new, as was Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, her thinly disguised novel about Byron. There was, perhaps, rather more popular fiction in her selections, more things written by women, like Jane West’s A Tale of the Times, Susannah Gunning’s Delves: A Welch Tale, Catherine Hutton’s Oakwood Hall, Barbara Hofland’s Patience and Perseverance, Adelaide O’Keeffe’s Dudley, and Ann Taylor’s Retrospection. There was less travel literature and a little less theology, though she too was reading Dwight’s American travels, Irving on Judgments to Come, Horne on the Scriptures, and Jonathan Edwards, plus Thomas Erskine’s Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion. She also had out Isaac Watts’s Logic. As far as secular periodicals went, she read much the same as Smith, with the great exception of almost no religious journals. The books removed by the other six women show various patterns. Ellen Lewes (twenty-one items) was, like Mrs. McQueen, interested in Lady Hamilton, Elizabeth Carter, Isaac Watts’s philosophy, and Burney’s Cecilia. But she was more taken with American history, since she was reading Jeremy Belknap’s American Biography, David Ramsay’s history of the American Revolution, and William Bartram’s Travels. She read very few novels, did not seem to be au courant, and her tastes seem to have been more firmly eighteenth century: there are Lord Chesterfield’s letters, John Wesley’s life, Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield and The Citizen of the World, Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton. A Miss Roe was responsible for eight items, including Scott’s Kenilworth, Bridget Bluemantle’s novel Monte Video, or, The Officer’s Wife and Her Sister, the third volume of Boswell’s Johnson, and Jane Porter’s The Pastor’s Fireside. Mary W. Howard (eleven items) had more novels, plus James Sloan and Theodore Lyman’s Rambles in Italy, a life of Frederick the Great, and George Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets. Miss Eliza White (eleven items), who borrowed on the account of Alexander Telfair, had some popular novels, but also two volumes of Molière, William Robertson’s History of Scotland, and Mungo Park’s voyages. Miss Early (four) was also interested in Robertson on Scotland, but twice got out William Roscoe’s life of Leo X, and once a periodical called the Harmonica. Mrs. Caruthers troubled the bookkeeper only once, for a copy of Plutarch. All this evidence seems to suggest that, in the mid-1820s, save for some tendency for ladies to be drawn towards popular fiction written by other women, gender was not greatly important in the dis-

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crimination of readers.61 In this, however, cultural pressures may have been of significance. A woman entering an institution like the Savannah Library Society was intruding upon a male world, with books selected with an eye, mostly, to male tastes, and it would not be surprising if such a woman was unusual among her sex. The growing frequency of ‘‘Female Libraries’’ suggests a desire for a separate sphere. Yet, in a mirror image of the Savannah Library Society, in these the boundaries of gender were not always rigid. Some female libraries (like the Edgefield Female Library Society) included ‘‘several men.’’ 62 Equally, the Pendleton (S.C.) Library Society, formed in 1828, elected ‘‘Mistress E. P. Huger’’ as its first president and kept a custom of having a woman as its presiding officer, with a man as the secretary-treasurer.63 Looking through the whole Savannah ledger, one gains the impression that the society’s members read mostly British and American fiction, history, and biography; even the not infrequent studies of European culture and history were usually written by English speakers. There was surprisingly little poetry read, not even Byron, and almost no drama. (Of course, these might have been important enough to purchase.) Travel literature was extensive and a Savannah reader did not seem much to mind whether the travelers in Egypt or the Arctic were English, American, or French. Almost all reading was modern, though readers often went back to the mid-eighteenth century, which was, after all, in 1825 still modern. But they seldom ventured earlier. The medieval was almost completely absent, which may be a measure of the Enlightenment’s successful erasure of l’infâme, but was mainly a measure of the pace of change. As John Pendleton Kennedy observed in 1850 when trying to explain why no one read William Wirt’s Letters of the British Spy any more: ‘‘The overteeming press pours forth its stream with such torrent-like rapidity and fullness, that the current has well nigh swept away the light craft of the last generation—even such as were supposed to be most securely moored.’’ 64 About 7 percent or 272 of the items in the borrowing ledger were written by authors not English-speaking. Such a statistic understates the curiosity of Savannahians about the further world, since they often read books about France or Italy written by Americans and the British. But, even so, this 61. Zboray’s analysis of the reading of a brother and sister, who borrowed from the New York Society Library between 1854–56, however, supports the conclusion of a ‘‘lack of gender differentiation’’ even more strongly; Zboray, A Fictive People, 170–73. 62. Frances L. Spain, ‘‘Libraries of South Carolina: Their Origins and Early History, 1700–1830’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1944), 142, quoting Robert Mills, Statistics of South Carolina, Including a View of Its Natural, Civil, and Military History, General and Particular (Charleston, S.C.: Hurlbut and Lloyd, 1826), 531, 578. 63. Spain, ‘‘Libraries of South Carolina,’’ 115. 64. JPK, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney-General of the United States (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849), 1:111.

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was not a contemptible proportion, probably no worse than Anglo-American libraries would muster now, but neither was it impressive. Most of these works were in translation; in 1839 the library owned only 46 Latin works, 33 French, 13 Greek, 3 German, 3 Italian, and 2 Dutch. So reading in foreign languages was relatively rare. On the other hand, Savannah made no formal distinction between English and non-English books in the length of borrowing, unlike the Charleston Library Society whose rules, with gloomy implicitness, acknowledged a decline in linguistic facility. In the eighteenth century, Charlestonians were expected to read Latin, English, or French with equal speed. Under the 1828 rules, ‘‘Books in dead languages may be detained treble . . . and books in foreign modern languages may be detained double the time of English books.’’ 65 Of these alien works in Savannah, thirty were by ancient Greek authors: Plutarch was taken out 9 times, Xenophon 6, the apochryphal letters of Anacharsis 4, Herodotus 3, Josephus 3, Aristotle and Thucydides twice each, and Demosthenes once. The Romans did less well, twenty-one items by six authors: Tacitus 6, Vergil 5, Livy 4, Cicero 3, Pliny 2, Caesar once. The Italians had twenty-three items and seven authors. Boccaccio’s Decameron was most popular, being checked out on ten occasions by men, doubtless for its erotic qualities. In an odd category of its own was Carlo Botta’s history of the American Revolution, in Otis’s English translation, which was taken out four times. There was then Petrarch on three occasions, all of them his View of Human Life, Ariosto twice, Mestastasio twice, with Dante and Tasso one each. German authors were a little more popular than Italian, with twenty-eight items and eleven different authors. Goethe predominated with twelve borrowings, seven of them being his newly published autobiography and two the Sorrows of Young Werther.66 Motte-Fouqué’s popular novel Undine was checked out four times, August von Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature three, and then there were single borrowings for Klopstock’s Messiah, Mosheim’s ecclesiastical history, Pufendorf ’s legal treatise on international law, Schiller on the Thirty Years’ War, the autobiography of the Baron Friedrich Trenck, Anthony Willich’s Lectures on Diet and Regimen, Johann Zimmerman’s Essay on National Pride, an anthology of drama by modern German playwrights, and a periodical called the German Museum. As for other nationalities, apart from the French, only three authors were borrowed more than once: the Portuguese for Camoens’s Lusiad in Mickle’s translation four times, the Swiss for Johann Casper Lavater’s lectures on physiognomy the same, and the Swedes for Lin65. Spain, ‘‘Libraries of South Carolina,’’ 61. 66. The former is not the complete Dichtung und Wahrheit, but an English translation of Aubert de Vitry’s French version of its first fifteen books, which had been published in Germany by 1824.

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naeus three. There were single borrowings for Swedenborg, Don Quixote, the Koran, Ali Bey’s travels in North Africa, and the memoirs and travels of the Polish aristocrat, Maurice Auguste Benyowsky. With 151 borrowings and forty-three authors, French literature preoccupied somewhat over half the non-Anglo-American quotient. The favorite was the Comte de Las Cases’s account of Napoleon on St. Helena with twelve borrowings, which was a bestseller of the day. Tied for second with eleven were Voltaire and Madame de Staël: almost all the ledger entries for the former are vague, except three borrowings of his life of Peter the Great, but the latter’s share was composed of Delphine six items, the Considerations on the French Revolution four, and Germany once. (Oddly, the library seems not to have owned Corinne.) Then two sets of memoirs were favored: those of the Comte de Grammont eleven times,67 those of the Comte de Ségur nine. Indeed, French memoirs were notable for their popularity; those of Frédéric-Melchior, baron de Grimm, were taken out 6 times, followed by those by Cardinal de Retz 5, Sully 4, and Lafayette 4. There were nine entries for Rousseau: Emile 4 times, the Confessions 4, the Nouvelle Héloïse once. Charles Rollin, whose history was so ubiquitous in the eighteenth century as to be regarded almost as English, had eight. The travels of Dominique Vivant Denant in Egypt (he was among the savants who accompanied Napoleon’s invasion) was borrowed on five occasions, the same as Volney (four for the Ruins, one for his lectures). The other multi-borrowings were, four times, Montesquieu, Fénelon; three times, Buffon, Le Sage’s Gil Blas, Madame de Sévigné, Fontenelle, Charles M.-J.-B. Mercier Dupaty’s various travels; twice, Cuvier, Charles Dupin’s Great Britain, Molière, Claude Etienne Savary’s Letters on Greece, and François Le Vaillant’s Travels into the Interior Part of Africa. There was then a scattering of about eighteen individual authors: D’Alembert’s eulogy of (presumably) Montesquieu, Louis-Pierre Anquetil’s Universal History, Augustin Calmet’s Dictionary of the Holy Bible, Chantreau’s Travels in Russia, Chateaubriand’s Recollections, Condorcet’s Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, something by Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon (the eighteenth-century dramatist), ‘‘Dessault on surgery,’’ 68 a volume of the Encyclopedia, the memoirs of Madame de Genlis, P-Etienne Herbin de Halle’s Conquêtes des Français en Epte, the voyages of the Comte de la Pérouse, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s work on chemistry, Conrad Malte-Brun’s Geography, Jean-François Marmontel’s Italy, Racine’s letters, and Raynal’s Indies. It will be little astonishment, especially considering the earliness of this ledger, that very few items were about or by Southerners. About eighty-six 67. In fact, this was a novel by an English author masquerading as a French memoir. 68. This is presumably Pierre Joseph Desault, The Surgical Works, or Statement of the Doctrine, and Practice of P. J. Desault . . . by Xavier Bichat, trans. Edward Darrell Smith (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1814).

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such items are apparent, with twenty-two different titles, barely over 2 percent of the borrowings. David Ramsay was the most broadly read of these authors with eleven: the Universal History 3, the American Revolution 3, the History of South Carolina 3, the life of Washington 2. But Margaret Bayard Smith’s A Winter in Washington accounted for more borrowings (13), and the anonymous Tales of an American Landlord; Containing Sketches of Life South of the Potomac for ten. At seven were tied Poinsett’s Notes on Mexico, Paulding’s Letters from the South, and Henry Lee’s account of the Revolutionary War in the South. In a partially Southern category, one probably ought to count John Sanderson’s book on the lives of the Signers, at six. Biographies were notable: Wirt’s Patrick Henry 4, Eaton’s life of Andrew Jackson 4, and John Marshall’s Washington 3. The Federalist Papers were consulted three times, as were the sermons of Henry Kollock of Savannah, who had been among the Society’s founder members. William Drayton’s South Carolina was the only Southern item checked out twice. Single borrowings were of Bartram’s Travels, a volume of Washington’s letters, another of debates in Virginia, and Jefferson’s Notes. Two periodicals were clearly Southern, the Southern Centinel (from Augusta in 1793), and the Southern Intelligencer, a contemporary evangelical journal from Charleston. But it is probable that this understates Southern journals, which must often have been read in situ and borrowed casually. Still, the situation in the 1839 catalog was not much different; about sixtyfour titles had some connection with Southern culture, which was just over 4 percent of the total. A comparison with the 1845 catalog of the Charleston Library Society suggests that, in this, Savannah was less interested in Southern matters than the port to its north. Of the whole Charleston catalog which, it may be remembered, documented the 1,773 imprints accessioned after 1826, 307 had a marked connection with the South, which was 17 percent of the total. But this figure exaggerates the situation, since 527 of the imprints were pamphlets and, not surprisingly, Southern ones were 36 percent of these. Of books, maps, and periodicals, the Southern proportion was slightly over 9 percent. The difference between Charleston and Savannah might be accounted for in various ways, but the clearest would be the greater density of indigenous intellectual life in South Carolina—Henry Kollock seems to be the only local author among the Savannah borrowings—and the state’s more controversial engagement in national political life, all of which generated discourse and so printed words. The Charleston Library Society was a healthier, wealthier institution than its Savannah counterpart and better able to keep up with the expansion of Southern culture. It will be useful to look beyond the numbers to the institution, by way of commencing a discussion of the landscape of Southern libraries. The Savannah Library Society was founded in 1809, with a charter from the state and

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with eighty-one founders from among the city’s great and good. Its chairman was John Cumming, its treasurer Curtis Bolton, and its librarian Augustus G. Oemler. The first page of its minutes book proclaimed its good intentions: ‘‘The advantages which arise from Public Libraries when formed on liberal and judicious principles are many and important, and these are so generally admitted, that it would be an insult to common understanding or good sense to enumerate them. Such an institution or association has been very much wished for in this city, and from the encouragement already afforded, there is little doubt of its being speedily completed.’’ It was a public library, however, only in a limited sense. It was, like its Charleston predecessor, a corporation into the membership of which members of the public might enter, upon the purchase of a share and the payment of an annual subscription; under the rules of 1838, these were fixed respectively at $25 and $3, paid semiannually. In origin, it was very much an association of gentlemen. Its 1809 rules state that it was to be governed by a ‘‘committee of 5 gentlemen,’’ and that ‘‘when a member speaks he shall address the Chairman standing, with his hat off, and for ungentlemanly or disrespectful behavior he shall be expelled the Society if two thirds of a quorum agree thereto.’’ By 1838, this rule was gone. But gentility in learned bodies remained common. Article 25 of the 1837 constitution of the Charlottesville Lyceum, an institution founded to encourage debate and discourse, stated this, firmly: ‘‘The practice of expressing approbation by what is called clapping or applause, being unworthy of any assembly convened for intellectual purposes; being in the highest degree conducive to fatal disorders; and, by its repeated introduction even into the halls of legislation, having become especially of fearful omen to a country whose institutions rest solely upon a love of order among its people, that practice is hereby strictly prohibited.’’ 69 In Savannah, the length of borrowing privileges was defined, quaintly but conventionally, by the size of the book: one could have a folio volume for four weeks, a quarto for three, an octavo for two, a duodecimo for one. By 1838, this had been altered to a folio or quarto for four weeks, and ‘‘two octavo, or four duodecimo, or smaller volumes being of the same set’’ for two. ‘‘Country members,’’ however, were permitted double the time. There were fines for writing in a book, being the cost of replacement and suspension of membership for a year. There was supposed to be an annual oration by a society member. It was expected (and it sometimes happened) that members would donate books, but also decorative and useful things. In 1811, James Oglevie gave $250 and, in 1816, William Gaston sent along a bust of Lucius Junius 69. Minute Book, 1809–1838, of the Savannah Library Society, p. 1, Savannah Library Society Papers, GHS; W. Edwin Hemphill, ed., ‘‘The Constitution of the Charlottesville Lyceum, 1837–1840,’’ Papers of the Albemarle County Historical Society 8 (1946–47): 59.

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Brutus, ‘‘that noble Roman,’’ which he had recently acquired from his friend ‘‘Mr. Morton of Bordeaux.’’ In 1833, Thomas S. Grimké gave several books and pamphlets. In 1838, Samuel Philbrick gave busts of Milton and Locke, William K. Gaston a statue of the Venus de Medici, and William B. Stevens an imprescient ‘‘Beecher on Intemperance.’’ In 1851, Justice Wayne gave busts of Calhoun and McDuffie, and William B. Hodgson the local Orientalist a ‘‘map of the world on rollers.’’ 70 The collection grew with some steadiness: 690 volumes at the end of 1810, 1,198 in 1813, 2,500 in 1821, 3,304 in 1838. This was modest growth, at a rate of about one and a half books acquired each week. But this was what the economics of the society permitted, remembering the expense of periodicals and newspapers, as well as the cost of renting the society’s quarters. There were usually about a hundred members, whose annual dues ought to have come to $600, but many did not pay. In addition, there was the salary of the librarian, who doubled as treasurer; he was paid $200 in 1811, which was raised to $250 in 1817, then reduced to $150 in 1827. This last action seems to have been illadvised. In 1832, the minutes plaintively noted the difficulty of collecting dues and observed that ‘‘multifarious resolutions . . . have been productive of no good effect.’’ The committee noticed, too, in explanation of noncollection of dues, that ‘‘the Treasurer for years past has collected but little more than enough to pay his own salary, & when that object was effected appears to have given himself little concern for any further collections.’’ A resolution was passed to have members sign a formal undertaking to pay dues. This, in turn, did little good. The year 1838 saw a general reform; the minutes of 13 February note that the library was being little used, with only an average of fifteen volumes a week having been borrowed in the previous year, ‘‘because the room was not kept open according to law.’’ (In fact, this was no different from the rate of 1822–26.) The society owed the librarian $487.59 and was, in turn, owed $730 by its members. ‘‘Your Committee have been met every where during the progress of their inquiry with the discouraging fact that little or no interest is felt either by share holders in the Library or by the public generally in the concerns of the institution.’’ Reasons for this were sought. It was concluded that the library was inconveniently located, open too little, had not been kept up; there was a ‘‘want of addition to the Library of new Works of taste and standing.’’ All around, there was little efficiency, a neglect by the society’s officers. It was recommended that there be a removal to a new room nearer the Bay, that the reading room be established with a responsible officer, and that it be kept open every day except Sunday in ‘‘usual business hours.’’ In Savannah, 70. William Gaston to John M. Berrien, 16 December 1816, in Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Savannah Library Society, 57; entry for 17 April 1851, in Donation Book of the Savannah Library Society, 1813–1851, Savannah Library Society Papers, GHS.

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this meant ten to one o’clock and four to seven o’clock from April through October, and nine to two o’clock and three to six o’clock during the winter, on every day except Sunday. Above all, dues needed to be collected. So a carrot was substituted for a stick and the librarian’s salary was increased to $500 with a 5 percent commission on all dues procured, and he was allowed $100 to pay an assistant. In the long run, this did not help. By the late 1840s, the library was merged with a younger, more energetic organization, the Georgia Historical Society, which is why today the former’s records lie in the archives of the latter. As far as libraries went, the Savannah Library Society was following the old, eighteenth-century model. It had many peers, in the South and elsewhere. In South Carolina, at least 41 society libraries were founded between 1748, when the Charleston Library Society was founded, and 1837, when the James Island Library Society appeared, all but three being started after 1800. In Kentucky, seventy-nine of them from before the Civil War have been counted.71 Very few developed anything approaching a corporate life or an intellectual energy. In small places they testified to a community instinct: rules were drawn up by well-intentioned citizens, a room was found, a few hundred books put in it, and the society library drifted into desultory existence or extinction, to be removed usually by neglect or debt, sometimes by Sherman’s march. Even the best of society libraries could be thought, by the skeptical, to be deficient. The unpreoccupying vagaries of Frederick Porcher’s life left him much in Charleston in the late 1830s, especially in the summers. He took to spending his mornings in the Charleston Library Society. From his memoirs, one can see how such an organization might work well, and how badly. The institution did not have an agenda, seminars, a lecture series. There were the books, many of them, and comfortable seats in which to read them. In the summer heat, such aimlessness might be debilitating or instructive, as the mood went. As Porcher remembered, ‘‘I skimmed along from book to book in a very desultory way, sometimes in a half sleepy way, and if I acquired no knowledge of anything particular I think I got an insight into many things in general.’’ Others would come in, conversations would start, for the library inherited the habits of the eighteenth century and so was still a place where silence was unnecessary and gentlemen were encouraged to be clubbable. The affairs of the day were bantered, with insight or not, as gossip or not. Anecdote, knowledge, and ignorance were thrown about. The habitués of the library shared one commodity, leisure. They were not bustling factors or dili71. Spain, ‘‘Libraries of South Carolina,’’ 174–75; ‘‘Appendix of Social Libraries Founded in Kentucky before the Civil War,’’ in H. McMullen, ‘‘Social Libraries in Antebellum Kentucky,’’ Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 58 (1960): 119–28.

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gent Baptist preachers doing their pastoral rounds, but people like Porcher, ‘‘unoccupied planters who made this city their summer residence.’’ 72 As Porcher remembered them, the regulars were various. There were the Harvard graduates. First, there was Allard H. Belin, ‘‘a wealthy rice planter on the Peedee,’’ enterprising in business, ‘‘very intelligent’’ and ‘‘a great talker’’; ‘‘It was difficult to edge in a word when he took the start.’’ There was Frank Quash, a planter from St. Thomas Parish, who ‘‘had the reputation of being smart,’’ but whom Porcher found illogical, an ambitious person who spoke often in the legislature but ‘‘seldom . . . to the point.’’ There was J. Berkeley Grimball, an unsuccessful planter from St. Paul’s, ‘‘very intelligent but very modest and even diffident,’’ who ‘‘seemed always better pleased to think well rather than evil of all men,’’ which made him distinctive.73 Most famously, there was Thomas Bee. He was the son of Judge Bee, a famous man and a revolutionary, and ‘‘of course his social position was very high.’’ Thomas had been educated in England, which gave him éclat and ‘‘a reputation for almost illimitable learning.’’ Being thus important, he declined the professional tasks of the academy or the bar. Instead he pronounced dogmatically and rudely, and people listened to him more than they ought, they being too often persuaded that he was learned and great. Then he made a mistake. He published a book, an Omnium Gatherum, ‘‘a small tract of miscellaneous matter.’’ It was a bad, silly book. For a brief moment, his standing stilled criticism. But ‘‘a young man, scarcely known,’’ broke the embarrassed silence by publishing a satirical refutation, an Omnium Botherum. People laughed, and by their mockery ‘‘Mr. Bee’s star set forever.’’ His spirit was broken, even as his body lived on. He became indigent and was sustained ‘‘by the contributions of a number of gentlemen,’’ many of them members of the library society. ‘‘Still he was regarded as a sort of literary glutton who devoured books,’’ and Porcher would listen to his dogmatic pronouncements, stuck in the thrall of English opinion. ‘‘I have seen him at the Library, when the new reviews, etc., were received, take up one to read and unhesitatingly cram the others into his pockets utterly regardless of the fact that others were there who would like to see them.’’ He died alone in Jones’s Hotel, his door locked against the world, so that they had to break it down to find his corpse.74 Then there was a grandson of John Rutledge, Frederick Kinloch, who had been educated in Europe, then married, prospered, went mad, and lost his prosperity. In his ‘‘lucid intervals’’ and away from the scrutiny of guardians, 72. Samuel Gaillard Stoney, ed., ‘‘The Memoirs of Frederick Adolphus Porcher: Chapter XI: At Home Again,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 47 ( January 1946): 44, 45. 73. Ibid., 45. 74. Ibid., 46.

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he persisted in extravagance and, to make ends meet, he gave music lessons. He played the guitar ‘‘and possessed a rich and sweet voice.’’ Knowing Kinloch was an education in navigating the boundaries between sanity and lunacy. ‘‘There was always a wildness about him. . . . His conversation was eccentric and erratic, but always interesting.’’ He liked to scoff at religion as it was ‘‘generally taught by the parsons,’’ did not hesitate to refer to the Patriarch Abraham as ‘‘a damned old jew,’’ and like ‘‘all persons I ever knew who had been educated in Europe . . . had no respect for anything American, never read an American book, never trusted or recognized an American authority in Literature.’’ When seized with madness, his actions were not dangerous: ‘‘During his excited state he would frequently sing most touchingly about the streets.’’ In later years, hopelessly, he offered his services as librarian and young rivals made fun of ‘‘old Kinloch, a fixture in the Library, [who] has signed the Temperance pledge, and boldly asserts that nothing but the pure element shall ever pass his lips.’’ 75 As for John Tucker of Waccamaw, he went to the library ‘‘after company’’ and did not trouble himself with books at all. ‘‘He used to say that he was too old to read except now and then for amusement. He read so as to save his soul, but he cared nothing for books.’’ Planting, the intricacies of rice paddies, ‘‘was the first and last thought of his mind.’’ He had ‘‘an exquisite taste in wines,’’ stocked the best Madeira, went to the Episcopal Church devoutly as the only true road to heaven. ‘‘He was on the whole a good man, and an honest man, and a happy man, in his own way.’’ 76 So the mad, sane, dull, and interesting came in and out. Books and conversation intermingled. Porcher inhabited the library in its dog days, when most of Charleston was away on summer excursions. In the winter, no doubt, things were brighter, or at least busier. Mitchell King would bump into Father Lynch and talk of English grammar, or into the Reverend John Forrest and discuss Mary, Queen of Scots, or into Nathaniel Russell Middleton and speak of ‘‘De Choiseul—Dubois—Greek manners.’’ King could note in his diaries, gnomically, in May 1851: ‘‘Meet in Library. Forrest Gilchrist Hawkesworth Porcher Kinlock—Celts—Gael—Kelts—Iberians.’’ Many of these meetings, perhaps, involved idle, malicious, or purposeful gossip. Stories of a failing planter, a scandalous lady, a lost shipment, an offensive abolitionist, were exchanged with a nudge and a wink. Some Charlestonian intellectuals never went there. Simms told Pickett in 1847, ‘‘Though a shareholder in the Library I have scarcely looked upon its shelves for the last two years.’’ 77 But many did, 75. Ibid., 47; Sedgwick Simons to ALT, 24 March 1850, ALT Papers, DU. 76. Stoney, ‘‘Porcher Memoirs: At Home Again,’’ 47. 77. Entries for 20 February, 25 March, 12 April 1852, and 3 May 1851 in King Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC; WGS to AJP, 14 April 1847, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 5:393.

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and some learned from it. Porcher himself was partly made by the listless, informative, cranky experiences it offered. In time, the corporate pattern of the society library proved insufficient, because too narrow and too genteel. Matters diversified. Southern cities and small towns acquired libraries aimed at specific constituencies: an Apprentices’ Library Society, a Mercantile Library Association, a college library, a college society library, a legislative library, a Female Library, a historical society library, a denominational or Sunday School library, a medical library, an educational and scientific library. Even fire companies, like the Invincible Fire Engine Company No. 5 of Memphis or the Deluge Fire Company No. 1 of Clarksville, could acquire chartered libraries to ‘‘elevate the mind and develop the intellect.’’ Or libraries might be founded for Odd Fellows, or Friendly Germans. In 1846 New Orleans acquired a ‘‘Public School Library,’’ which was aimed at and paid for by a levy upon those who attended the public schools of the city, and hence had many juvenile books among its 5,000 volumes.78 In addition, there were circulating libraries, which were commercial ventures. Baltimore had seven of them between 1800 and 1835. These, like library societies, were joined by annual subscription, but they catered to a much wider social audience; one need not be a gentleman to join and you might even be a lady, even a woman if you had four or six dollars a year. Unlike library societies, they stocked more resolutely popular works, and were usually owned by single proprietors. The largest of these in Baltimore was Joseph Robinson’s, which had over 17,000 volumes in 1839, and boasted a reading room ‘‘with a pianoforte exclusively for the ladies.’’ (Not all libraries preferred noise: the St. Louis Library Association, in its 1824 rules, required that ‘‘no other words shall be spoken in the Library room, but those necessary to address the Librarian for the purpose of delivering and receiving books.’’) Robinson’s was large for a circulating library: collections of 3,000 to 5,000 were more usual. That founded by Robert Wilson in Franklin, Louisiana, in 1847 grew to about a thousand volumes by 1850, partly by donations given by local planters.79 Very frequently, libraries shared premises with other institutions, with 78. Yeatman, ‘‘Libraries in Democratic America: Baltimore,’’ 362; Mrs. J. T. Moore, ‘‘The First Century of Library History in Tennessee, 1813–1913,’’ Publications of the East Tennessee Historical Society 16 (1944): 8; T. W. Rogers, ‘‘Libraries in the Antebellum South,’’ Alabama Historical Quarterly 30 (1968): 20. 79. Yeatman, ‘‘Libraries in Democratic America: Baltimore,’’ 351–52; Patrick R. Walton, ‘‘A Circulating Library of Ante-Bellum Louisiana,’’ Louisiana Historical Quarterly 23 ( January 1940): 131–40.

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which they might merge, to be transmuted into Atheneums or lyceums. For example, the New Orleans Commercial Library Society, which catered to clerks of ‘‘restricted’’ means, existed from 1831 to 1842. When it went bankrupt, its 6,000 books were bought by Benjamin Franklin French, who ‘‘made them available to the subscribers of his reading room.’’ In 1847, he sold them in turn to Alvarez Fisk, who had asked French to donate them to the public library that his brother Abijah had established in 1843 on Bourbon and Iberville Streets. The Fisks had hoped that their library might be subvented by the city government, a hope unrealized for several years. In 1853, the city ‘‘entrusted to the Mechanics Society the Fisk Free and Public Library,’’ with the books removed to the former’s new premises. After the war, the Mechanics Institute failed, the books went to the University of Louisiana, before being consolidated with the New Orleans Public Library in 1896. Such peregrinations were common enough. In 1871, an antiquarian examined a book that had been knocking around Louisville libraries for the preceding half century and found upon it the marks of seven distinct institutions. In this, the South was worse than some American regions. In New England, ‘‘social’’ libraries lasted on average for thirty-five years, while in the Midwest it was half that, and the South was certainly closer to the latter.80 Social libraries, like bookshops, were often fly-by-year affairs, not unacquainted with bailiffs, sheriffs, and auctions where duodecimos were fingered by alien hands.81 Table 1, drawn from the statistics collected in 1849 by Charles Jewett, the librarian of the Smithsonian Institution, will be helpful to indicate matters of scale. It lists the more notable Southern libraries and the numbers of volumes they claimed then to contain. This listing is as reliable as such evidence gets, which is not very, since many libraries lacked librarians or catalogs and merely guessed at their contents. Very many small libraries fell beneath Jewett’s notice and he omitted at least one large one, the legislative library in Columbia, S.C., which before its burning by Sherman in 1865 contained 25,000 volumes and might be estimated to have had about 20,000 in 1850.82 By comparison with the North, libraries in the South had begun to lose 80. McMullen, ‘‘Social Libraries,’’ 117, in part citing Jesse Hauk Shera, Foundations of the Public Library; the Origins of the Public Library Movement in New England, 1629–1885 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 73. 81. See H. L. Maestri, ‘‘New Orleans Public Libraries in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Louisiana Library Association Bulletin 15 (Spring 1952): 36, which notes that in February 1830, the sheriff sold 1,497 French volumes, 1,901 English books, ‘‘one pair of large globes and four bookcases’’ belonging to the defunct New Orleans Library Society (1806–30). 82. Elizabeth C. Welborn, ‘‘Libraries of South Carolina, 1830–1860,’’ Southeastern Librarian 9 (1959): 173.

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Chaotic Order of Books table 1 Southern Libraries in 1850 Library Georgetown College D.C. Charleston Library Society S.C. South Carolina College Columbia University of Virginia Charlottesville Library Company of Baltimore Md. Maryland State Library Annapolis Transylvania University Lexington Ky. Virginia State Library Richmond University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Franklin College Athens Ga. Public School Library New Orleans La. Mercantile Library Association of Baltimore Md. State Library Frankfort Ky. Apprentices’ Library Charleston S.C. Emory and Henry College Emory Va. State Library Nashville Tenn. Georgetown College Ky. University of Alabama Tuscaloosa Georgia Historical Society and Savannah Library Society State Library Baton Rouge La. Jefferson College Bringiers La. Oakland College Claiborne County Miss. Randolph Macon College Ashland Va. Centre College Danville Ky. College of William and Mary Williamsburg Va. St. Mary’s College Bardstown Ky. State Library Jackson Miss. Washington College Lexington Va. Episcopal Theological Seminary Alexandria Va. Columbia Theological Seminary S.C. Wake Forest College N.C. East Tennessee University Knoxville Union Theological Seminary Richmond Va. Cumberland University Lebanon Tenn. Medical College of Georgia Augusta Mercer University Macon Ga. Oglethorpe University Midway Ga. Shelby College Shelbyville Ky. Spring Hill College Mobile Ala. Maryville College Maryville Tenn. Female Institute Library Columbia Tenn. Louisville Library Ky.

Number of Volumes       

         





 

             

 

              

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Chaotic Order of Books table 1 Continued

Library St. John’s College Annapolis Md. St. Joseph’s College Bardstown Ky. State Library Raleigh N.C. Emory College Oxford Ga. Jackson College Columbia Tenn. Medical College of South Carolina Charleston College of Charleston S.C. State Library Tallahassee Fla. University of Mississippi Oxford Maryland Historical Society Baltimore Franklin Society Mobile Ala. Davidson College Davidson N.C. Virginia Historical Society Richmond State Library Austin Tex. Lyceum Library Little Rock Ark. Washington College Washington Miss.

Number of Volumes 
                

Source: Charles Jewett, Appendix to the Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Containing a Report on the Public Libraries of the United States of America, January 1, 1850, 31st Congress, 1st Session, no. 120, Miscellaneous (Washington, D.C.: Published for the Senate, 1850).

ground during the early nineteenth century. In 1849 the three largest libraries in the country were all north of Maryland. (It is hard to know what to do with the fourth largest, the Library of Congress, which sat on Southern soil and had at its core the library of a Virginian; in 1849, it contained 50,000 volumes, which tied it with the Boston Atheneum.) So a table that combines all the larger Northern libraries, with selected significant Southern and nonSouthern ones, will be helpful. In Table 2, each state’s largest library is included, and Southern libraries are in italics. It is clear that, at the top end of American public libraries, the South was growing disadvantaged. In 1830, things had been not good, but less marked. Then Harvard had 30,000 books, while the University of Virginia had 8,000, William and Mary 3,400, and South Carolina College somewhere between the last two. This placed them at a marked disadvantage to Harvard, but she was then unusually ahead of Northern and Southern colleges; she had begun to respond to George Ticknor, who, after returning from Göttingen—which in 1832 had perhaps 400,000 volumes—had complained of Harvard’s ‘‘closet-full of books.’’ In 1830 Princeton and Yale had much the same as Virginia, while Brown had 6,000 and Dartmouth only 3,500. Among social libraries then, the greatest was the Library Company of Philadelphia, which combined with the Logan-

515

Chaotic Order of Books table 2 American Libraries in 1850 Library Harvard College Cambridge Mass. Library Company of Philadelphia Pa. Yale College New Haven Conn. Boston Atheneum Mass. [Library of Congress Washington D.C. New York Society N.Y. Mercantile Library Association New York N.Y. Brown University Providence R.I. Georgetown College
Washington
D.C. Bowdoin College Brunswick Maine New York State Library Albany Dartmouth College Hanover N.H. Andover Theological Seminary Mass. American Philosophical Society Philadelphia Pa. Astor Library New York N.Y. Charleston Library Society
S.C. State Library
Columbia
S.C. South Carolina College
Columbia University of Virginia
Charlottesville American Antiquarian Society Worcester Mass. New-York Historical Society New York N.Y. Union Theological Seminary New York N.Y. College of New Jersey Princeton Library Company of Baltimore
Md. Maryland State Library
Annapolis Dickinson College Carlisle Pa. State Library
Richmond
Va. Transylvania University
Lexington
Ky. Amherst College Amherst Mass. Columbia College New York N.Y. State Library of Ohio Columbus University of Vermont Burlington University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill Franklin College
Athens
Ga. Public School Library
New Orleans
La. Nashville University
Tenn. State Library
Frankfort
Ky. State Library
Nashville
Tenn. University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa Georgia Historical Society and Savannah Library Society State Library
Baton Rouge
La. State Library Indianapolis Ind.

Number of Volumes

          ]    
      
    
 
 
 
       
 
  
 
     
 
 
 
  
 



 

516

Chaotic Order of Books table 2 Continued

Library College of William and Mary
Williamsburg
Va. Indiana University Bloomington State Library
Jackson
Miss. University of Michigan Ann Arbor University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia State Library
Jefferson City
Mo. East Tennessee University
Knoxville State Library of Illinois Springfield State Library of Wisconsin Madison College of Charleston
S.C. State Library
Tallahassee
Fla. State Library of Iowa Iowa City University of Mississippi
Oxford Missouri University
Columbia State Library
Austin
Tex. Lyceum Library
Little Rock
Ark.

Number of Volumes


 


   
 
   
 
  
 
 
 


Source: Charles Jewett, Appendix to the Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Containing a Report on the Public Libraries of the United States of America, January 1, 1850, 31st Congress, 1st Session, no. 120, Miscellaneous (Washington, D.C.: Published for the Senate, 1850). Note: Southern libraries are in italics.

ian Library had 43,884 volumes in 1835, probably triple that of the Charleston Library Society, its closest Southern equivalent.83 The record of the next twenty years was mixed. The Northwest did about as well or badly as the Southwest: Mississippi and Michigan, Alabama and Indiana, were much the same, despite their disparate social systems. In the Northeast, however, the Boston area developed into the richest concentration of printed matter in North America. Harvard College Library developed formidably; the Boston Atheneum grew apace; and there was also the Boston Library Society with 12,150 volumes, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 4,680, the Mercantile Library 7,059, the Massachusetts Historical Society 7,000, the Mechanics’ Apprentices Library 4,000, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Library 3,500, the Boston Society for Natural History Library 3,500, plus assorted others. As for Philadelphia, the Library Company had lost its old American preeminence while sustaining respectable growth, but otherwise the city had not kept pace, partly because its Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, had a comparatively pal83. Paul G. Buchloh and Walter T. Rix, American Colony of Göttingen: Historical and Other Data Collected between the Years 1855 and 1888 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), 16.

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try library, indeed had fewer books than the University of Alabama, a century its junior. Elsewhere, Brown University and Yale College had dramatically improved, although the latter’s numbers were a little deceptive, since of its 50,481 volumes, only 20,515 were in the college library proper (which was thus about the same size as that of South Carolina College), while the rest of Yale’s books belonged to its three literary societies, the Linonian, the Brothers in Unity, and the Calliopean, the last of which was a sort of Southern expatriate enclave. (This division between college and societies was not uncommon in the South, too: at Washington College and the University of North Carolina, the societies had larger holdings than the college libraries.)84 Elsewhere in the North, New York City had done well, if not so well as Boston, but Columbia College remained weak. Princeton had grown, but not astonishingly, a little less quickly than the University of Virginia. If one looks at the period from 1851 to 1859, however, the South’s record looks a little better, at least on the score of colleges. The number of books in its college libraries grew from 236,903 to 435,969, which was close to a doubling. The holding of college literary societies grew at much the same pace.85 This was respectable, but the 1850s were good years for the economy of the South. Many of the Northern improvements had come from a growing habit of philanthropy from alumni and business leaders. The administration of Harvard College itself had done little for its library; it contributed only an annual sum of $450 per annum from the Hollis and Shaleigh Funds. But there was an accumulating series of gifts and bequests from local worthies, of books or money for their purchase, of which the greatest gift was that by Christopher Gore of $94,888, a very large sum by the standards of antebellum libraries. In the early 1830s, Brown University sought and procured a capital fund of $25,000 for its library, and it received several further gifts, notably from John Carter Brown. When John Jacob Astor gave $400,000 for a library in New York, Boston responded by founding the Boston Public Library, to which Joshua Bates (a partner in Barings Bank) gave $50,000; in 1860, George Ticknor gave it 2,400 volumes from his private collection. Such philanthropy did not go unnoticed in the South. Even as early as 1829, Hugh Legaré had praised and sighed for ‘‘the liberality which Harvard has experienced from the opulent merchants of Boston.’’ As late as 1853, Thornwell was sadly observing that 84. Thomas S. Harding, ‘‘College Literary Societies: Their Contribution to the Development of Academic Libraries, 1815–76: I: The Golden Age of College Library Societies, 1815– 40,’’ Library Quarterly 29 (January 1959): 15. 85. Thomas S. Harding, ‘‘College Literary Societies: Their Contribution to the Development of Academic Libraries, 1815–76: II: The Decline of College Library Societies, 1841–76,’’ Library Quarterly 29 (1959): 97.

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the Northern colleges received most of their endowments from private liberality and wondered why ‘‘Southern wealth’’ was not similarly available. ‘‘Are we wanting in the love of knowledge, in the spirit of charity, and in zeal for the honour and prosperity of the State?’’ he asked and did not seem to know the answer. For ‘‘I cannot account for the remissness and apathy of our rich planters and merchants, and professional men, in any other way, than that this form of generosity has not been the habit of the country.’’ 86 So, by comparison, the South benefited less from private philanthropy, though it was not unknown. All or part of the private libraries of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Holt Rice, and Mitchell King ended up in public institutions. Christian Bohn of Richmond, the brother of the London publisher Henry Bohn, gave several thousand volumes to the University of Virginia in the mid-1830s. When Elisha Mitchell died in 1857, the University of North Carolina acquired his library, which numbered 1,897 volumes. The College of Charleston library, which had been relatively feeble, acquired 4,000 volumes by donation in 1853 from Dr. Lingard A. Frampton. To this, James Warley Miles added his own books, so that by 1857 Miles estimated the library to hold about 7,000 volumes. If he had but expired more promptly, the greatest antebellum munificence in the South would have been that of George Foster Peabody of Baltimore, the terms of whose will were discussed by John Pendleton Kennedy in 1857 on a visit to London. Peabody’s eventual death in 1867 released about $1.5 million and created the wrought-iron splendor of the Peabody Institute on Mount Vernon Place.87 Still, taken all around, antebellum Southern wealth little found its way on to public bookshelves. Too little capital was liquid, too much fixed in land and slaves. Rather, whatever modest strength developed on the Southern university library scene came from governments rather than private individuals. Indeed, the care of some Southern state governments may have tended to dissuade private donations, to the long-term detriment of university libraries. Transylvania University, for example, in 1820 received $5,000 from the Kentucky 86. Charles C. Jewett, Appendix to the Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Containing a Report on the Public Libraries of the United States of America, January 1, 1850, 31st Congress, 1st Session, no. 120 Miscellaneous (Washington, D.C.: Published for the Senate, 1850), 32–33, 57–58; David B. Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 208–12; HSL, ‘‘Hall’s Travels in North-America,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 348; JHT, Letter to His Excellency Governor Manning on Public Instruction in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: R. W. Gibbes, 1853), 13. 87. Clemons, University of Virginia Library, 25; Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 1, From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789–1868 (1907; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1974), 409; Easterby, College of Charleston, 115–16, 127; JWM, First Annual Report of the Librarian of the College of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans, 1857), 21; Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 370.

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state legislature for its new Medical Department, plus another $6,000 from the Lexington city government, all of which paid for Charles Caldwell’s trip to Paris for books and medical equipment; there were similar appropriations to the medical school in subsequent decades. But South Carolina and Virginia were the strongest cases. In both, there had been colleges from the eighteenth century which had been far outstripped by nineteenth-century foundations. The library at William and Mary grew very little between the time that Jefferson attended it as a student and the moment he died. George Tucker, impersonating an anonymous Frenchman in 1816, then observed that its ‘‘library contains about 3000 volumes tolerably well chosen; but . . . very deficient in modern authors.’’ Tartly but accurately, he added, ‘‘This College at present seems to be nearly as low as it can well be to exist at all.’’ But the Commonwealth of Virginia lavished money and attention upon the new, inland institution in Charlottesville, a care no little aided by Jefferson’s influence, which extracted from the legislature a library appropriation of $50,000 in 1823–24. Francis Walker Gilmer was sent to Europe, not only to seek faculty but books, so that when the university opened it already had a library of 8,000 volumes, which instantly placed it joint-third among American universities and nearly 5,000 ahead of William and Mary. Partly because of this initial generosity, for the next decade growth was slow and funding low, at about $250 to $500 per annum. But greater enrollments and state appropriations led to marked growth in the 1850s. The library, which had added about 10,000 volumes in its first quarter century, added another 12,000 in the decade before the war. Little of this came from philanthropy, apart from Christian Bohn’s donation and, in 1836, a bequest of $1,500 and 587 volumes from James Madison, but the former was mislaid for a while and a dilatory heir detained the latter until 1854.88 South Carolina College fared differently. The broad pattern was of remarkable appropriations; in its first fifty years, the college received nearly a million dollars from the state.89 Its library fared more unevenly. In 1805 the state put up $5,000, creating a very small library that the college’s first president, Jonathan Maxcy, did little to improve. Twice in the 1820s, the legislature appropriated $5,000 for books, many of them bought by Henry Nott on European expeditions. Thereafter matters languished, but the mid-1830s saw a marked revival, not insignificantly soon after the godless Thomas Cooper had been removed. In 1836 the legislature gave $45,000 for new buildings and $10,000 for repairing old ones, plus another $5,000 of special appropriation for 88. H. McMullen, ‘‘College Libraries in Ante-Bellum Kentucky,’’ Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 60 (1962): 118; George Tucker, Letters from Virginia, Translated from the French (Baltimore: Fielding Lucas Jr., 1816), 125, 129; Clemons, University of Virginia Library, 4–32. 89. Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina, vol. 1, South Carolina College (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 4.

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books. With these funds was constructed what was the first purposely built, free-standing college library in the United States.90 By 1838 the trustees and the legislature had resolved that, each year, between $3,000 and $4,000 would be spent on library accessions, of which $2,000 would come from the state, the rest from student fees and ‘‘other funds.’’ 91 By national standards, this was a marked generosity, partly fed by the adjacency of the college to the state capitol and its coffers, partly helped by the flattering care the college took to put politicians on its Board of Trustees, partly driven by the mystic belief in the state that the college diminished animosities between upcountry and lowcountry. If one looks at other universities around the country and the amounts provided to them by government appropriations or university administrations, none did better than South Carolina College at mid-century; indeed, hardly anyone came close. Bowdoin was spending $200 per annum, the University of Vermont $75, Wesleyan University $325, Yale $1,620, Harvard $450, Columbia College $200, Princeton $400, Dickinson $100, Georgetown College $350, the University of Virginia $590, Washington College $135, William and Mary $400, the Medical College of S.C. $120, Franklin College $600, the University of Alabama $200, the University of Mississippi $3,000 (but this included ‘‘apparatus’’), and Miami University $150.92 Even the Library of Congress was spending only $6,000, about twice South Carolina’s rate. Yet South Carolina College was still falling far behind Harvard, and the difference was philanthropy, not any willingness to devote state money or student fees to the needs of a college library. For all these reasons Columbia, South Carolina, was the richest place in the South to be placed for books. Nowhere else were there other than isolated collections, good, bad, or indifferent, jutting up into the landscape, singularly. In Columbia by 1860 the college library, the legislative library, the library of the theological seminary (after Smyth’s books were acquired) had accessions amounting to about 60,000 volumes. These were much used by those writers who lived in and near Columbia, by people like Louisa McCord and David James McCord. When the latter suddenly died, an obituarist observed that ‘‘the disease which terminated his existence struck him in the Library of the College, whither his tastes and habits led him habitually.’’ 93 If to Columbia 90. It now houses the South Caroliniana Library. 91. Jewett, Report on the Public Libraries, 155, says $2,000 p.a., but Hollis, South Carolina College, 136, confirms the larger sum. 92. Jewett, Report on the Public Libraries, 7, 16, 68, 71, 32–33, 94, 106, 108, 138, 143, 144, 148, 154, 156, 159, 161, 174. 93. ‘‘The Late D. J. McCord,’’ undated newspaper clipping (but soon after his death), Wagner-Cheves Papers, SHC. On Louisa McCord and the library, see Michael O’Brien, ed., All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse in the Old South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), 339.

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one added Charleston—for the cities were conjoined worlds—the region furnished libraries that held about 90,000 volumes, perhaps more. This density of printed matter, by itself, helps to explain why this area produced so much that was significant in Southern intellectual culture. Jewett was to observe that the South Carolina College library ‘‘is one of the best selected in the country . . . far more valuable than many twice its size.’’ Even Lieber, who liked to disparage Columbia, found it usually adequate to his purposes.94 The thinking that underpinned its later character can be seen in the report, written by the younger Stephen Elliott, then professor of sacred literature, who assisted Robert Barnwell in 1836 to effect an improvement. He began by observing that ‘‘the Library appeared to possess a very good collection of modern works particularly in the English Language.’’ In history, geography, voyages and travels, politics and the belles lettres, ‘‘its collection is if not compleat yet good,’’ but was deficient in ‘‘classical Literature, in works of all kinds in foreign Languages and in most of the departments of Science.’’ So the library committee had ‘‘ordered of every classical writer of antiquity that edition which secured most extensively the approbation of the learned and where the original work itself possessed distinguished merit, two different but approved editions have sometimes been procured.’’ To this, they had added treatises on ‘‘the manners, customs, arts, sciences, laws and religion of ancient nations.’’ Elliott presumed that the study of language was of importance, so works on philology, grammars, and dictionaries needed acquisition. Further, he stressed the significance of works on the civil law, considering ‘‘the profound wisdom of the Roman Law,’’ its ubiquitous use among many modern nations and its pertinence for maritime and international law: so ‘‘a compleat copy of the Corpus Juris Civili with all of its supplements, and a few, though a very few of its ablest commentators have been included.’’ In science, likewise, the college should have the best modern works on astronomy and mathematics, though Elliott (the son of a botanist) was conscious that the most important treatises on natural history were very expensive, often too much so. Lastly, he thought it right to buy ‘‘a small collection of the classic authors of France and Italy . . . [and] a number of Spanish writers . . . but in this language the works have been confined to those which relate to the discovery and early history of America.’’ In general, Elliott stressed that it was necessary to move beyond the constraints of a small undergraduate library 94. FL to Charles Sumner, 13 December 1835, FL Papers, HEH, observes, ‘‘The library is very good as far as it goes.’’ Later, though in a sycophantic document (FL to ‘‘His Excellency the Governor and the Board of Trustees’’ of South Carolina College, 25 April 1849, FL Papers, SCL), he said, ‘‘Our library is now of a magnitude and value, and annually increases by the liberality of our Legislature, at such a rate, that it is and bids fair to remain, one of the best and choicest in the whole South.’’

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to something greater: ‘‘It is an erroneous opinion that when there are more Books in a Library than even the most industrious student could peruse in his life time there must therefore be as many as he can have occasion to use.’’ Libraries were repositories of knowledge, available for the constant improvement of many minds.95 This was a half-step away from the Germanic idea of a research library, a step half-glimpsed, not yet taken. One reason for this failure of imagination was that books were more valued than librarians, who might plan and achieve great collections. ‘‘I was, in S. Carolina, considered much the best Bibliographer in the U. States,’’ Edward Johnston boasted in 1841 to Richard K. Crallé, after the former had given up being the librarian in Columbia. ‘‘The Library of the University (I have its catalogue) affords ample proof that they possess no one acquainted with the art of Collecting the best books & editions of books.’’ This, he observed, was a common fault. ‘‘They seem hardly any of them aware that a skilful Librarian is one of the most useful members of such foundations. It is he who must cater the material of knowledge for every body else.’’ 96 He was right, perhaps even on the score of vanity, for he had helped in Elliott’s reform and the annotated ‘‘classical bibliography’’ Johnston published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836 shows an informed discrimination.97 On the whole, library catalogs were haphazard or non-existent, classifications idiosyncratic. Thomas Jefferson took the system for Charlottesville from the categories of knowledge devised by Francis Bacon. Stephen Elliott made up his own in 1826 for the Charleston Library Society and based it upon a notion of moving from human understanding (metaphysics) to theology and ethics, thence to government and law, on to ‘‘the pursuits, the improvements and discoveries of man in society’’ (literature and natural history), then to ‘‘the history of man in society’’ (history, biography, travel). This elegantly posited a movement from the internal mind to the state, from human expression to attempts at historical objectivity. Elsewhere, the Savannah Library Society used two different systems, one for the librarian’s report, another for the published catalog; in the latter case, it divided the books first alphabetically (sometimes by authors, sometimes by titles, capriciously) and then further divided them by genres. Other librarians, in small collections, threw books 95. Stephen Elliott Jr., to Board of Trustees of South Carolina College, undated, Stephen Elliott Papers, SCL. 96. Edward W. Johnston to Richard K. Crallé, 30 April 1841, Richard K. Crallé Papers, CU. 97. Edward W. Johnston, ‘‘Classical Bibliography,’’ SLM 2 (October 1836): 677–84. The article says that it was ‘‘drawn up, a little while since, at the request of a friend, who is beginning to appropriate, out of his income, an annual sum to the forming of a private library’’ (677), but it seems likely that it was also, perhaps only, informed by acquisitions for the South Carolina College Library.

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on shelves with a vague sense of category or none and hoped for the best, which is how most museums, art galleries, and many libraries had worked in early modern Europe.98 Indeed, the Yazoo Library Association of Mississippi, established in 1838, managed to get along without any shelves at all until 1843, when its minutes laconically ‘‘resolved that the Librarian be requested to have a Book case fitted up in the library Room for the reception of the Books now owned by the Association.’’ 99 Moreover, in many libraries books were inaccessible. This was especially so in colleges, where suspicion of the young was deepseated. At Charlottesville, in the beginning, the Rotunda was open only an hour on each weekday, and on only one of those days could a student borrow anything, and then only with the written permission of a professor. Having keys to the building, faculty could do what they wished, and some did. Professor Blaettermann would write in the margins of books; when pressed on this vandalism, he argued that thereby he had improved them. At the University of Georgia there was no librarian at all; the books were ‘‘kept in some spare room in one of the college buildings and migrated around as necessity required’’: freshmen and sophomores were forbidden to borrow and their student elders were permitted only three volumes at a time. At Chapel Hill, it was unreliably said, David Swain kept the library in an attic and for twenty years never added to it. Thomas Miles Garrett, in fact, repaired to it in 1849 and even tried to read: ‘‘But presently some gentlemen had the room sounding and reechoing [to] the shrill note of their whistle. This is the kind of disturbance which I can in no wise bear. I could not request them to hush, for this they would deem impolite.’’ 100 Consequently, the wardens of these little empires, the librarians, were a sorry lot, sorry for themselves, underpaid, marginal, and indifferent. As already indicated, the librarian of the Savannah Library Society was offi98. When Legaré visited the Berlin art gallery in 1836, he was struck to observe ‘‘a new principle’’ of arrangement, devised by Christian Ludwig Tieck, where the pictures were ‘‘divided into a great number of different compartments, intended to illustrate the diversity of schools and the progress of the art—Venetian, Flemish etc.’’ See O’Brien, All Clever Men, 115–16. 99. Entry for 17 March 1843, in Yazoo Library Association Minute Book, 1838–1933, MDAH. 100. Clemons, University of Virginia Library, 14–15; E. Merton Coulter, College Life in the Old South: As Seen at the University of Georgia (1928; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973), 41; William D. Snider, Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 65; entry for 8 September 1849, in John Bowen Hamilton, ed., ‘‘Diary of Thomas Miles Garrett at the University of North Carolina, 1849,’’ North Carolina Historical Review 38 (July 1961): 390. It is worth observing that this inaccessibility was the usual pattern of medieval and early modern libraries, at least in England. On Cambridge college libraries, for example, see Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge. Vol. 1: The University to 1546 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71–75.

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cially treated as a lazy scoundrel and a cheat. By comparison, his compeer in Charleston did remarkably with a salary of $1,000 per annum, which put him on par with many college professors. But this munificence was singular. Colleges sometimes used recent graduates (as was the case with Edward Johnston) or, more often, professors who were paid a little extra for sitting in the library during the hours it was open. At Transylvania University in Lexington, the librarian was a faculty member or student, who, by the rules of 1823, could be fined between $1 and $100 for any transgressions occurring under his stewardship. In its early days, the position at South Carolina College was filled by Thomas Park, the professor of mathematics, who got $100 for his pains. Even so meek a man eventually rebelled at the meagerness of this, especially after he had been criticized in the legislature; eventually the stipend was increased to $400. But such wages enticed few but nonentities. For most of the antebellum years, the librarian in Charlottesville was William Wertenbaker, who when appointed by Jefferson had been a student paid $150. (This was the situation in Williamsburg in the same year, though there the student got $50.) Gradually, Wertenbaker’s salary and standing rose, so that by his retirement in 1857 he was getting $600. Even this was below a living wage for a gentleman, and he supplemented ingeniously by serving as Secretary of the Faculty, assistant to the Proctor, university postmaster, keeper of a student hostel, and manager of a bookstore. After putting together a written catalog in 1828, he did not trouble himself on that score again, since, after all, he had a good memory and students might ask him. Eventually, indeed, changing times forced him out. It was felt there should be a modern catalog, imitated from Jewett’s Smithsonian Institute. This being a venture beyond Wertenbaker’s capacities, the job was handed over to Thomas Berkeley Holcombe, a recent graduate whose salary as a reward for this new-fangled task was raised to $1,000. In general, however, such modernization was unusual. Only a few saw the need. In 1849 Lieber urged that South Carolina College to acquire a permanent librarian, to be paid $1,500 a year, to match the value of the books.101 He was not heeded. This is not to say that, occasionally, the job of librarian did not help an indigent intellectual through a bad patch. This was, after all, an old tradition. In the eighteenth century, Giacomo Casanova had kept the books of a sottish German aristocrat and, in the long interludes between someone using the library, wrote his memoirs. On the rare occasions that a librarianship promised fiscal sufficiency, writers stirred in their interest. The poet Augus101. Welborn, ‘‘Libraries of South Carolina,’’ 175; McMullen, ‘‘College Libraries,’’ 114; Hollis, South Carolina College, 45, 134; Ruby Orders Osborne, The Crisis Years: The College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1800–1827 (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1989), 354; Clemons, University of Virginia Library, 28–32; FL to ‘‘His Excellency the Governor and the Board of Trustees’’ of South Carolina College, 25 April 1849, FL Papers, SCL.

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tin Louis Taveau fancied the job at the Charleston Library Society in 1850, when it fell vacant. When the Peabody Institute was mooted, John Pendleton Kennedy found himself an object of solicitude from those who wanted the position as its librarian, notably John R. Thompson and Edward Johnston. The person most preserved by a librarian’s job was James Warley Miles. For years, the melancholy man drifted from pulpit to college classroom, from Charleston to Berlin, until neither he nor anyone else knew what to do with him. In 1851, when he was teaching at the College of Charleston, he thought about becoming librarian of the South Carolina College and wrote to David James McCord that ‘‘my highest ambition as to place, is a situation with access to books, and where my work will lie in the study—not in a position obliging me to exercise authority and discipline.’’ In 1852, Lieber was reporting on having asked Joseph Cogswell if Miles might not be under-librarian at the Astor Library: ‘‘All his ambition or rather his desire, for he has no ambition, is to find a place such as you will have soon to give away, and never to leave the library.’’ By 1853, Lieber was writing to George Ticknor, ‘‘This Rev. Mr. Miles feels very unhappy at Charleston, and all his ardent soul longs for is to have a humble place in some library, for which by the way he would fit most admirably.’’ 102 And, eventually, he did end up as librarian of the College of Charleston, a post he held from 1857 to 1865. So, the acquisition and accessibility of printed words in the South show a variegated pattern, fairly good for private individuals of ample means, less good for those who depended upon public institutions. Much depended on where in the South one lived, and as much on one’s social standing. An apprentice boy in New Orleans might pick from a few hundred volumes, whereas the son of a rich planter in Columbia might have access to a hundred thousand. As will be seen, the ability to move from being a reader to being an author was also an unstable and inconsistent business.

102. Sedgwick Simons to ALT, 24 March 1850, ALT Papers, DU; JRT to JPK, 4 June 1859, and entry for 18 March 1857, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; JWM to David James McCord, 24 April 1851, McCord Mss, SCHS; FL to Samuel B. Ruggles, 22 October 1852, FL Papers, LC; FL to George Ticknor, 14 March 1853, FL Papers, HEH.

Chapter Thirteen

The Honors of Authorship

There were many ways for Southern authors to give printed words to a reading public, Southern or otherwise. These included newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, and books, which might be done by local, Northern, or European publishers. None of these options was very satisfactory. But the means were sufficiently multiplied that mute inglorious Miltons did not have to remain silent in the South, if they could but summon the desire to publish. On the whole, newspapers were not very important for intellectual discourse. Most were broadsheets of four or six pages, of which more than half consisted of advertisements for property, for slaves who had run away, for new hats at the haberdashers. The rest consisted of reprinted items on local, national, or international affairs, of assorted financial news (such as the cotton prices in Liverpool), of reprints of political speeches, of letters (sometimes anonymous) to the editor on whatever took a reader’s and an editor’s fancy, of pieces of doggerel or satire. Perhaps only for political discourse were newspapers significant, for many a politician wrote letters to or published speeches in the local newspaper. But, for other forms of intellectual discourse, newspapers mattered little, being too brief and functional to provide a forum for historians, theologians, or novelists, except very incidentally. Next were pamphlets. These were usually emanations of local events: a Title from ‘‘British Reviewers and the United States,’’ SQR 13 ( January 1848): 193: ‘‘The fact that we are a youthful state, of course causes less of strength and polish in our literature, and, besides, the democratic nature of our government, by tending to give great license to the thoughts and actions of our people; the cheapness of printing, and other circumstances, all conspire to produce men, early in life, ambitious of the honors of authorship, and which induces a literature to flourish, rather as luxuriant and unpruned vines, than plants from which much fruit and a permanent existence may be expected.’’

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sermon, an effusion to a literary society, a Fourth of July oration to a patriotic organization, an address to the senior class of a college, a speech to an agricultural society, a congressional speech, the inaugural address for a professorship, or an intervention in a controversy. Hence such pamphlets were often the printed expression of the spoken word. Thought of the highest seriousness could take this form, though ubiquity had a way of disguising significance. As Lieber observed in the late 1830s, ‘‘In the United States . . . the country is deluged with pamphlets, but on a thousand different and very frequently wholly uninteresting subjects. The unfortunate fashion of asking every one that delivers some public speech or other for a copy, and to print it—a fashion, so common, that it is no longer any honor, while its omission conveys a reflection—deprives the American public of all courage to look at any thing issued in pamphlet form.’’ 1 The pamphlets of the historian William Henry Trescot are typical. In 1847, a few years after his graduation from the College of Charleston, he was asked to deliver an oration to the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, though he was by no stretch of the imagination a military man, a condition that perhaps little distinguished him from those who issued the invitation. The printed version of the oration was issued by Walker & Burke of 87 East Bay. After its title page is reprinted the following correspondence, whose niceties are characteristic. A letter, dated 13 March 1847, is addressed to Trescot by a committee of five gentlemen: Sir, At a meeting of the ‘‘Washington Light Infantry,’’ held in their Hall, Friday Evening. 12th March, 1847, the following Resolution was unanimously adopted: ‘‘Resolved, That the thanks of the Company be presented to wm. henry trescot, esq, for his very eloquent and patriotic Address delivered before them on 22nd of February, and that a committee of five be appointed to communicate these thanks to mr. trescot, and to request a copy of the Address for publication.’’ In accordance with the expressed wish of the Company, as well as their own feelings, the undersigned . . . have the pleasure of returning the thanks of their brother soldiers of the Washington Light Industry to mr. trescot, for an Oration, distinguished for eloquence and ability, and indulge the hope that he will yield to the wishes of the Company and furnish them with a copy of the same for publication. In turn, Trescot’s reply is printed: ‘‘gentlemen, I have received your very kind letter . . . and, in reply, ask that you will acknowledge to the Washing1. FL, Manual of Political Ethics, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1839), 2:471.

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ton Light Infantry my sense of the compliment conveyed. Accompanying this, I send the manuscript of the Oration, to be used as you see fit. . . . I am, Gentlemen, most respectfully, william henry trescot.’’ Such decorous mummery was to print what standing for election was to democracy, the fiction of a gentleman being dragged by others into public view.2 Two years later, unprompted by oratory or committees, Trescot published A Few Thoughts on the Foreign Policy of the United States, which was issued by John Russell. In 1850, he gave a Fourth of July oration to the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery: this was printed as a fourteen-page pamphlet by the ‘‘Steam-Power Press of Walker and James, No. 101 East Bay,’’ though without any antecedent pother about committees. Attracting attention, Trescot revised and lengthened his argument into a second pamphlet, now twenty pages, issued by the same printer and entitled The Position and Course of the South. During the 1850s, apart from writing for the periodicals, Trescot varied between publishing pamphlets on sundry political issues and delivering orations. In the former category were A Letter to Hon. A. P. Butler, United States Senator, from SouthCarolina, on the Diplomatic System of the United States, published in 1853 by Walker and James, now of 3 Broad Street, and An American View of the Eastern Question, published by John Russell in 1854. In the second were The Annual Address before the Calliopean and Polytechnic Societies of the Citadel Academy, issued in 1856 by Walker and Evans, ‘‘Stationers and Printers’’ of 101 East Bay, and the Oration Delivered before the South-Carolina Historical Society, published both as a pamphlet from James and Williams, ‘‘Printers, 16 State Street,’’ in 1859 and as a part of the third volume of the Historical Society’s Collections.3 In these ways, a profligacy of oratory occasioned paper and ink. The result was a hybrid form, since print bore the marks of speech. ‘‘Gentlemen of the Clariosophic and Euphradian Societies,’’ begins a printed 1859 address by Bishop Stephen Elliott; it ends, ‘‘Before I close this address, I would speak, if possible to the hearts of these young gentlemen who have done me the 2. William Henry Trescot, Oration Delivered before the Washington Light Infantry, on the 22d February, 1847 (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & Burke, 1847). 3. William Henry Trescot, A Few Thoughts on the Foreign Policy of the United States (Charleston. S.C.: John Russell, 1849); William Henry Trescot, Oration Delivered before the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery, on July 4th, 1850 (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & James, 1850); William Henry Trescot, The Position and Course of the South (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & James, 1850); William Henry Trescot, A Letter to Hon. A. P. Butler, United States Senator, from South-Carolina, on the Diplomatic System of the United States (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & James, 1853); William Henry Trescot, An American View of the Eastern Question (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1854); William Henry Trescot, The Annual Address before the Calliopean and Polytechnic Societies of the Citadel Academy, Charleston, S.C. (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & Evans, 1856); William Henry Trescot, Oration Delivered before the South-Carolina Historical Society, Thursday, May 19, 1859 (Charleston, S.C.: James and Williams, 1859).

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honor of bringing me here.’’ But conversely, most of these orations were written with an awareness that printing was to follow, for the orator who spoke extemporaneously and declined publication was rare. Most notable among these was William Campbell Preston, who, out of a singular cunning, seldom bothered to write out and publish his orations. As Alexander Porter observed to Jesse Burton Harrison in 1834, of a visit by Preston to New Orleans: ‘‘He is all together a very impressive speaker, his speech on the deposits question has not, & I suppose will not be published. He prefers to leave his reputation to the descriptions which are given of it, & I think he is right.’’ 4 Modern intellectual culture is, no doubt, as profligate of occasions for speech, and these too find their way into print. But pamphlets are now rare; the preferred media being the periodical and the volume of conference proceedings.5 The older form of the pamphlet was, by comparison, closer to the spoken word. In recent discourse, words are first imagined as print and then delivered as awkward oratory, but then words were first imagined as speech and then halfadapted to print. Above the pamphlet was the periodical, than which nothing was more fundamental to Southern intellectual life. As Thomas Dew observed, the ‘‘periodical press is now the organ of communication, and the potent engine that controls the popular will.’’ This was a highly specialized but very unstable world. A bibliography lists about 850 different periodicals as being established in the South between 1792 and 1860, with about 675 of them coming in the three decades after 1830.6 So there were periodicals for many tastes and interests: religious, professional, local, commercial, urban, rural, sporting, ethnic, foreign language. Somewhere, for a while, someone’s taste was catered to. In this world, one division was habitual, that between the secular and the religious. The periodicals of ‘‘high’’ culture were very wary of denominational factionalism. The prospectus of the first Southern Review, issued in September 1827, promised that ‘‘to Literature, to Science, to Agriculture, as well as to our national and local concerns, our attention shall be unremittingly applied,’’ but it pointedly said nothing of religion.7 And the subsequent four 4. Right Rev. Stephen Elliott, Annual Address before the Clariosophic and Euphradian Societies of the South Carolina College (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans, 1860), 3, 19; Alexander Porter to JBH, 2 April 1834, Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC. 5. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are, quaintly, two of the last places where the inaugural addresses of professors are still printed as pamphlets. 6. Thomas R. Dew, A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations (New York: D. Appleton, 1853), 148; Sam G. Riley, Index to Southern Periodicals (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986). 7. Prospectus, reprinted in Linda Rhea, Hugh Swinton Legaré: A Charleston Intellectual (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 238.

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years of its publication confirmed this indifference. Twenty-eight articles had seen daylight before Bishop John England wrote in November 1828 on the ‘‘religion of the aboriginal Americans,’’ though in a manner more anthropological than dogmatic. For the rest, the only articles that can be considered directly religious were those on Moses Stuart’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews in May 1829, on Bishop Reginald Heber’s sermons in August 1829, on Heber’s life of Jeremy Taylor in May 1830, and on Griesbach’s edition of the Greek testament in November 1830.8 That is, there were five articles concerning religion out of the 140 published during the periodical’s span. Such exclusion was implicit, not proclaimed. Not so, when the faculty at the University of Virginia had begun the Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, &c in 1829 with the proclamation that ‘‘Party Politics and Controversial Theology will be excluded; but such exclusions will not extend to religious or political topics, of a general character, discussed with temperance and ability.’’ Likewise, when in 1842 the old Southern Review was refounded as the Southern Quarterly Review and Daniel Whitaker enunciated his editorial policies, the omission was remedied. His review, he insisted, ‘‘will sustain and advocate the claims of no party in Religion, of none whatever.’’ Christianity, being ‘‘a religion of peace and love,’’ ought to have no parties. But, there being such, ‘‘there are other and better instrumentalities, vehicles and places where, and through which, each and all religious parties may maintain their own views freely and without hindrance, and combat those of their opponents,—we mean the Pulpit, the theological Reviews and the religious Newspapers.’’ His review, to the contrary, would be ‘‘devoted solely and exclusively to literary and political objects.’’ He would admit articles on matters such as ‘‘biblical literature . . . the being of God . . . the immortality of the soul’’ and so forth, if they were consensual and possessed ‘‘literary merit and ability.’’ ‘‘We mean to place this work on the most liberal basis, and to express no theological opinions in it, to which the most scrupulous Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, or Christian of any name or denomination can possibly object.’’ This policy seems to have been followed by subsequent editors, until in its dying years the periodical was taken over by James Henley Thornwell. Even the Presbyterian minister, however, abjured ‘‘sects or parties.’’ Still, he felt it his obligation to dispel ‘‘the prejudice against the supernatural, which operates unfavourably on the minds of many, in averting their attention from divine revelation. . . . We hope that 8. John England, ‘‘Religion of the Aboriginal Americans,’’ SR 2 (November 1828): 305–48; ‘‘Stuart’s Commentary on the Hebrews,’’ SR 3 (May 1829): 308–29; ‘‘Heber’s Sermons,’’ SR 4 (August 1829): 241–60; ‘‘Heber’s Life of Jeremy Taylor,’’ SR 5 (May 1830): 426–62; ‘‘Griesbach’s New Testament,’’ SR 6 (November 1830): 513–48.

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religion can be reconciled with science upon a safer and easier plan than the sacrifice of either.’’ 9 Certainly, Whitaker was right that there was no shortage of denominational periodicals, among whose pages the theologically engaged like Thornwell spent most of their intellectual careers. As a result of this gulf, in neither the secular nor the religious periodicals could a reader grasp the complicated range of Southern culture, since the former suggested too much skepticism, the latter too little. In general, the life cycle of a periodical looked like the following. An individual or a group of gentlemen would wish to vindicate a political, religious, or literary position. A group of founding subscribers was solicited, whose commitment might be formally expressed in shares, as though the periodical were a sort of joint-stock company. Then local or regional networks were solicited for annual subscriptions, which might begin encouragingly. (Not always, a very large number of periodicals perished after only a few issues.) An editor was appointed, who occasionally owned the periodical, but who usually was paid by the founders or the publisher, unless (as was common) his or her services were gratuitous. Agents were appointed to solicit and renew subscriptions, which were inclined to falter. Appeals were issued, patriotisms encouraged, the tide might turn, or it might not and the periodical died. So the Southern Review, the Southern Literary Journal, Russell’s Magazine, and the Southern Quarterly Review were born and died. Only the Southern Literary Messenger, the United States Catholic Miscellany, and De Bow’s Review lasted from their foundations until past the outbreak of the Civil War. Of major regional periodicals, one might focus on four as expressive of a range: the Southern Review (1828–32), the Southern Literary Messenger (1834–64), the Southern Quarterly Review (1842–57), and De Bow’s Review (1846–80). Among their pages can be found most of the region’s major intellectual figures and much of its significant discourse. The Southern Review was sponsored by a group of South Carolinian politicians and grandees, organized by Robert Young Hayne, in response to the crisis that would eventuate in Nullification and as an attempt to articulate and influence Southern opinion. It was intended as an imitation of the Edinburgh Review and, secondarily, of the North American Review in Boston. True to that format, it carried long, scholarly articles on matters of contemporary political and social interest, but also on natural science, classical scholarship, and philosophy. On average, it had about nine articles per issue, with each number having about 250 pages. It had three editors in succession, the elder Stephen 9. ‘‘Prospectus of a Literary and Scientific Journal,’’ Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, &c 1 (17 June 1829): 1; Daniel K. Whitaker, ‘‘The Newspaper and Periodical Press,’’ SQR 1 ( January 1842): 64–65; JHT, ‘‘Miracles,’’ SQR 2 n.s. 1 (August 1856): 348.

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Elliott until his death, then his son briefly, lastly Hugh Legaré. It only ever had one publisher, A. E. Miller of 4 Broad Street in Charleston. Relatively little is known of its financing or circulation, except that its annual subscription was $5. There is evidence that in 1831 selected people were asked to subscribe $30 annually by way of support; Calhoun, at least, did so.10 Stephen Elliott, just before its launch, calculated that the cost of its annual printing, distribution, and collection of subscriptions would amount to $2,500, which would have necessitated the acquisition of 500 subscribers for the venture to have broken even. If, as Thomas Cooper strongly advised him, contributors were to be paid $2 a page, this would have increased costs to $4,500 and the need for subscribers to 900. Since the periodical went out of business after four years, it is probable that this number was not reached, or at least that the number of paid-up subscriptions proved inadequate. There seems, however, to have been an initial underwriting, though on what scale is unclear; this was both financial and literary, in the sense that various people agreed to contribute money and others (sometimes the same people) to write essays. ‘‘We consider ourselves as having secured between Charleston and Columbia 32 for each of the two first years and we are very anxious to secure 12 more,’’ Elliott told his cousin, William Elliott. ‘‘We shall then have the chance of contributions from Virginia, N. Carolina, Georgia and the South Western States and some aid has been promised even from the North—and we have also many names on our list as casual contributors who may lend us occasional dissertations. These we consider as resources to meet failures which may occur among our more regular associates and to give us the advantages of selection and variety if the supply should exceed our regular demand.’’ This proved optimistic. Elliott himself donated his editorial services: ‘‘I consider myself bound to two or three years of gratuitous labour, with only a hope that this labour may be useful, and with a strong persuasion that some effort of this nature has become necessary to the welfare of the Southern States.’’ 11 So did his son and Legaré, in their turn. The Southern Review depended much upon a small stable of regular reviewers, willing to write or to be enlisted when other contributors failed to produce copy. For the Southern Review, these were Legaré, who contributed about twenty-five articles; Elliott himself, with between twelve and sixteen; 10. J. E. Bonneau to JCC, 2 September 1831, notes that Bonneau, on Calhoun’s behalf, had remitted thirty dollars (in the summary of Calhoun’s modern editors) ‘‘for an annual subscription to the Southern Review under the new plan, for the year beginning April, 1831.’’ See Robert L. Meriwether et al., eds., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959–2003), 11:465. 11. Stephen Elliott to William Elliott, 8 September 1827, Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, SHC.

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Thomas Cooper, twelve or so; and Henry Junius Nott, around ten. This small circle of friends contributed, that is, a little under half the essays. All of them had a marked range of interests and competence, with all but Nott dealing with politics. Otherwise, Legaré specialized in the classics, the law, and modern Anglo-American belles lettres; Elliott did natural science and travel; Cooper, geology, medicine, and ethnography; and Nott, modern French literature. Certain interests were a constant of the review’s brief. Politics, above all, had created it and sustained its most insistent debates. In the cacophony of South Carolinian struggles, though the periodical’s editors were Unionists, they took care to admit the voices of Nullifiers like McDuffie, Hamilton, Hayne, and McCord. (In this, they were less partisan than the Edinburgh Review.) For the rest, the occasions for reviews were miscellaneous. John England’s essay on the religion and customs of American Indians, published in late 1828, developed an interest first expressed in a lecture to the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina in January 1827.12 Legaré and Cooper carried on a public debate over the merits or demerits of legal codification, a matter then before the state legislature. New books forced their way upon a contributor’s or editor’s attention; Scott’s novels fell into that category, and a few travel books like those of Basil Hall that contained comments on South Carolina itself. But, on the whole, the periodical took the contemporary with some casualness. Many reviews dealt with books freshly off the press, but others might examine what was three years old, or ten, or twenty, if their discussion and relevance served an essayist’s eclectic purposes. In this, the Southern Review did not differ from the Edinburgh. The editors of the Southern Review were not, on the whole, typical of the genus. These usually came from the unstable world of journalism, which dwelled in the underside of the professional classes. Daniel K. Whitaker, who refounded Elliott and Legaré’s periodical as the Southern Quarterly Review in 1842, was a migrant New Englander, a Harvard graduate, who had come to South Carolina in the 1820s to plant rice and cotton, moved on to the law in Charleston, and ran the Southern Literary Journal for a while in the 1830s. John Milton Clapp, his successor, had been editor of the Charleston Mercury. De Bow came from a very modest Huguenot family. His father had failed in business in Charleston and died in 1826, to be followed ten years later by the mother, who perished in a cholera epidemic. For a while, James lived with a married sister and worked as a clerk ‘‘in the wholesale grocery concern of E. and J. B. Delano on East Bay Street.’’ From that, he went to the College of Charleston, qualified as a lawyer, and helped Whitaker for a while as an assistant 12. It is republished in Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds, ed., The Works of the Right Rev. John England, First Bishop of Charleston, 5 vols. (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1849), 4:454–84.

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editor of the Southern Quarterly Review, before trying his luck in New Orleans, where he founded De Bow’s Review in 1846. He never made a living at editing, but survived by various academic jobs, by practicing law, and by working as a statistician for the United States Census Bureau. The editors of the Southern Literary Messenger were, first, Thomas W. White (1836–43), the son of a tailor and himself a Richmond printer; second, Benjamin Blake Minor (1843– 47), who was from a notable Virginia family and a lawyer, but who later ran girls’ schools; third, John R. Thompson (1847–60), also a lawyer. Such people varied between being gentleman proprietors and hired help, but they experienced much instability. The Southern Literary Messenger was perhaps the most stable: its editor was also the proprietor (at least until Thompson sold out to his printer in 1853), it was always domiciled in Richmond, and it had only three editors over a span of twenty-four years. Still, its financing was eleemosynary. Thompson seems to have bought it for about $2,000, after John M. Daniel had offered $1,500 for it but would go no higher, having seen the accounts. Some thought $2,000 was a bad bargain for Thompson, a verdict in which he was obliged to concur by 1850, when he told Taveau that ‘‘I have sunk so far $5,000 in endeavoring to give the Southern people a magazine worthy of their fame and their intellectual standing.’’ 13 The Southern Quarterly Review, by contrast, had a byzantine history of ownership and publication. Over time, it had four civic bases: New Orleans for its first two numbers, Charleston from 1842 to 1854, Baltimore for the first six months of 1855, and lastly Columbia. It had seven different printers or publishers. And it had six different editors over just fifteen years: Whitaker (1842–47), John Milton Clapp (1847–48), William Gilmore Simms (1849– 54), Charles Mortimer (1855), William M. Bunwell (1855), and James Henley Thornwell (1856–57). At first, it seems to have been owned by Whitaker, who was then bought out by a ‘‘number of gentlemen of Carolina,’’ thirty-six of them, who then employed an editor. Simms was paid $1,000 per annum for his labors, or was supposed to be. In 1851, Edwin Heriot of Charleston purchased a third interest, though from whom is obscure. In the same year a committee of ‘‘friends’’ was gathered to augment subscriptions, though it is obscure whether this made them also proprietors.14 In 1853, these friends and 13. WGS, ed., The Charleston Book: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse, reprint, 1845 (Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1983), 451; WGS to Evert Duyckinck, 25 February 1845, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:271–72; Robert M. Bain, ed., Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 312–13; Ottis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 2–3, 69–80; Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 1:151n; Sam G. Riley, Magazines of the American South, 236; John M. Daniel to CC, 24 September 1847, CC Papers, WM; JRT to ALT, 11 May 1850, ALT Mss, DU. 14. Frank W. Ryan Jr., ‘‘The Southern Quarterly Review, 1842–1857: A Study in Thought and Opinion in the Old South’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1956), 463, gives

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gentlemen were superseded by Charles Mortimer of Virginia, who moved the periodical to Baltimore to save on printing costs. When his successor, Bunwell, in turn failed, it passed to Thornwell, who undertook the editing at the behest of Edward H. Britton, a printer in Columbia.15 In 1857, when matters began to fail, Thornwell wrote to Holmes: ‘‘A project is on foot to make it the property of a joint stock company, with a sufficient capital to sustain it adequately. One hundred stockholders, at one hundred dollars apiece, would put it on a firm foundation.’’ 16 The motives for being an editor were likewise mixed. The elder Stephen Elliott and Legaré were men of affairs and mind, people of high social and intellectual standing. For them, editing and writing expressed noblesse oblige. But they also had a passion for writing and filled their pages with their own words. This was a common motive. To edit was to guarantee oneself a forum. By contrast, De Bow needed to make a living, though he also had a messianic dedication to advancing commercial society by informed journalism. Thornwell took up editing as a public duty, Simms as a literary obligation (and the money was important, even if he complained that he was owed $3,000).17 For Thompson, it was ‘‘a congenial occupation,’’ something of a lark. But it may also have set the seal upon his family’s rise to gentility. His father had come originally from New Hampshire, and his mother from New York, and in Richmond they had run a hat, cap, and fur shop over which the family had at first lived, before moving to a house on Franklin Street. Thompson himself was educated at a school in East Haven, Connecticut, and then at the University of Virginia. He practiced law in Richmond for two years, before his father paid to acquire the Southern Literary Messenger in 1847. Since the son was born only in 1823, he was very young when he became a proprietor and editor—‘‘Little John Thompson’’ is what John M. Daniel called him—at a time when the journal was hemorrhaging subscribers at the rate of six hundred a year and Minor was anxious to bail out.18 Hayne was to remember Thomptheir thirty names; they include Alfred Huger, William J. Grayson, the Rev. Patrick Lynch, Robert Gourdin, and Frederick Porcher. 15. JHT to GFH, 8 January 1856, in Benjamin Morgan Palmer, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, D.D., LL.D. (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1875), 398. 16. Ryan, ‘‘Southern Quarterly Review,’’ 454–65; JHT to GFH, 8 January 1856, 28 February 1857, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 398, 409. 17. WGS to JPK, 13 February 1854, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 3:282. Lockhart, by comparison, was paid £1200 p.a. as editor of the Quarterly Review in 1825, plus payment for his individual contributions, plus £1,500 for extra work on the quarterly’s associated newspaper. But Jeffrey, at first, had only been paid £400. On this, see Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), 46, 79. 18. Gerald M. Garmon, John Reuben Thompson (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 14–15; see also Colo-

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son’s appearance in Charleston in 1849, as ‘‘a man partly litterateur, and partly dandy,’’ dressed ‘‘in the height of the prevailing mode, with light-twilled pantaloons, and a blue coat, brass buttoned,’’ a man who was a ‘‘radiant vision.’’ 19 Dandies did not customarily trouble themselves with balancing books, which was as well, for there was very little money in owning or editing a periodical. This does not mean that some did not become editors for the money, since it was a natural vanity to believe that one might outperform the incompetents. So motives might be economic or social, or both. There was a certain éclat in being the editor of a major regional periodical, but not enough that it was necessary to destroy many rivals on the way to an editor’s chair. Payment to contributors was fugitive. The Southern Review paid two dollars a page, though contributors like Legaré and Elliott probably gave their essays gratuitously. Still, Samuel Dickson, reminiscing to Thornwell in 1856, indicated that the old Review had been punctilious in its disbursals: ‘‘The plan of which you speak—of universal remuneration for articles accepted is that which was instituted & followed in the palmy days of the Journal while under the government of Elliott & Legaré.’’ Clapp at the Southern Quarterly Review paid a dollar a page and Thornwell, with the capitalist ethic of the Protestant, paid as much as three dollars, a generosity that may have had some bearing on his periodical’s demise. De Bow was giving Edmund Ruffin three dollars in 1857 for writings on ‘‘general agricultural subjects,’’ somewhat to the latter’s surprise, for ‘‘of course none of them (in the south) [‘political or commercial papers’] would pay anything for communications of this sort.’’ 20 But the arrangement was soon canceled and De Bow owed Ruffin money for about a year.21 Likewise, Simms played a deep, evasive game. He took contributions nel W. Gordon McCabe, ‘‘Oration on John R. Thompson,’’ undated newspaper clipping, JRT Papers, VHS; W. Gordon McCabe, ‘‘John R. Thompson [1823–1873],’’ in Library of Southern Literature, vol. 12, Tabb-Warfield, ed. Edwin Anderson Alderman and Joel Chandler Harris (New Orleans: Martin & Hoyt, 1907), 5227–33; JRT to B. B. Minor, 15 September 1847, JRT Papers, UVA; John M. Daniel to CC, 24 September 1847, CC Papers, WM. 19. PHH to Margaret J. Preston, 10 May 1873, in A Man of Letters in the Nineteenth-Century South: Selected Letters of Paul Hamilton Hayne, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 113. 20. Samuel Henry Dickson to JHT, February 1856, JHT Papers, SCL; Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 398; entry for 20 February 1857, in The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, ed. William Kauffman Scarborough, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–89), 1:29. 21. Entry for 18 January 1858, in Scarborough, Ruffin Diary, 1:146: ‘‘Called on De Bow by appointment & at last had a settlement of his debt to me.’’ This no doubt helps to explain Ruffin’s later bleak assessment of the review (entry for 21 July 1860, 1:443): ‘‘The long delays, & interruptions, of the publications of my writings heretofore, have offended me, & it is long since I sent anything to this Review, which is the only monthly periodical, or any other than newspapers, on the southern side, in this country. This is far from an able or well conducted work. But as it is the only one, it is used by the ablest men of the south, & it has an extensive

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without payment, if a writer did not ask for it, which most did not. Further, he would browbeat others into refusing payment, on the grounds that he could get free articles to fill any issue. If someone did make noises about wanting payment, he delayed and prevaricated. Eventually he might pay one dollar a page, as he did to Brantz Mayer and Lewis R. Gibbes. To others, he might even pay two dollars. To yet others, he denied that he paid anything to anyone. To George Frederick Holmes he wrote, when reluctantly conceding one dollar a page, ‘‘[Y]ou are requested not to give publicity to the fact that he pays at all.’’ Incessantly, patriotism was appealed to by editors. ‘‘As yet we cannot promise to pay contributors,’’ begins a typical letter from an editor to a contributor, ‘‘and we believe there is plenty of dormant literary talent in the South—men who [are] public spirited enough to write articles for one year without pay.’’ 22 As for the Southern Literary Messenger and Russell’s Magazine, the record is as mixed. Thomas White paid Simms twenty-five dollars for some poems in 1837, but in 1840 did not pay Charles Campbell for prose at all, ‘‘because I believed you did not stand in need of . . . money’’ and ‘‘because I did not know whether you were in earnest or not, when you mentioned the subject.’’ Pressed, White came up with a dollar and a half a page. Charitably, he observed, ‘‘I have never withheld remuneration from any one who I knew needed it,’’ which doubtless was intended to make an author feel soiled with indigence and avarice. Holmes in 1850 extracted one dollar a page for his contributions from Thompson, while mentioning that he would like some free books, to ease the sacrifice. Minor occasioned no little ill-will by paying some people nothing and expecting them to subscribe to the periodical as well. As Philip Pendleton Cooke complained in 1844, ‘‘If he means to ask me to write for the Messenger for nothing and in addition to this, to pay him $5 per ano for the work—he is stupid and a little mean.’’ Taveau was palmed off by Thompson with four extra copies of the periodical, with one of his poems in it. Russell’s Magazine once promised John Esten Cooke fifty dollars for each installment of his novel Estcourt, but Paul Hamilton Hayne’s publishers never came up with the money and said that nothing could be done until the periodical turned a profit. Like a gentleman, Hayne offered to assume the charge as a personal debt.23 On top of such indignities, to add labor to injury, editors list of readers. De Bow himself is a crafty & mean Yankee in conduct & principle, though a southerner by birth & residence, & in political [philosophy]. . . .’’ 22. John Caldwell Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 137; Ryan, ‘‘Southern Quarterly Review,’’ 474–75; D. Macaulay to AJP, 11 July 1847, AJP Papers, ADAH. 23. WGS to James Lawson, 20 August 1837, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 1:112; Thomas W. White to CC, 13 February 1840, CC Papers, WM; GFH to JRT, 13 August 1850, GFH Mss,

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often solicited the help of contributors as agents, to drum up local trade and subscribers.24 As Campbell once ruefully observed of the periodical as an act of entrepreneurship, ‘‘Editing is the only business in this country where the party sets up shop & calls upon all the qualified to assist him with their labors gratis. Oh reform it altogether. I should like to see a convention of the writers of the country & a strike entered into.’’ 25 In all of this, the South was like most of American publishing. Simms claimed to Gibbes in 1849: ‘‘The Publishers authorize me to say that they . . . will pay at the rate of $1. per printed page. This is a sorry trifle, it is true; but it is the same which is paid by the North American, and much more than is paid by 7 in 8 of the periodicals of the country. Few of them pay any thing, unless the Lady’s magazines. . . . But most of them deal only in promises.’’ Indeed, as Simms explained elsewhere, the North American Review gave that single dollar only to a few; ‘‘the rest are amateurs.’’ For quarterly reviews, this was probably true. For literary magazines of broader appeal, it was otherwise. Graham’s Magazine in the 1850s was spending $1,500 an issue on author’s fees and paid between $4 and $12 a page, while earlier James Fenimore Cooper had received $1,000 for a hundred pages of naval biography and Longfellow got $50 a poem. But only the contributors to Godey’s Lady’s Book did as well; Poe got $5 a page from it.26 In the traffic between editor and contributor, beyond the fugitive monetary exchange, it is not clear how much editors troubled themselves to edit, other than in discharging the task of assembling contributions. If the model was Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review, what was called for was an ‘‘impresario of men of letters,’’ that is, a sort of literary stage manager, and hence not someone who was obliged to tell actors how to say their lines or interpret DU; Philip Pendleton Cooke to John R. Cooke, 8 January 1844, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU; JRT to ALT, 11 May 1850, ALT Mss, DU; Moore, Man of Letters, 49–52. 24. For example, JRT to Thomas C. Reynolds, 12 March 1849, JRT Papers, UVA. 25. CC to John M. Daniel, 27 September 1847, CC Papers, WM. By comparison, the Quarterly Review paid handsomely. Both Scott and Southey got £100 for each article; the latter wrote four articles a year, which was the equivalent of $2,000 per annum at nineteenth-century exchange rates. But most did less well. In 1829, payments of contributors were as high as £800 per issue, but had dropped to £400 by the end of the 1830s. Payment was often by the sheet, or for each sixteen pages, and the average issue contained eighteen sheets. This meant that the average payments varied between about £2.15s.0d and £1.7s.6d a page, or between about $14 and $7 a page. Macaulay was in the middle range, since he got £30 a sheet, which was a little under $10 a page. On this, see Shattock, Politics and Reviewers, 95, 96. 26. WGS to Lewis R. Gibbes, 8 May 1849, and WGS to William Hayne Simmons, 1 May 1851, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:515, 3:113; Edward E. Chielens, American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 157–58; Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 304.

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the play, just someone who made sure that the actors turned up for the performance. Like Jeffrey, the Elliotts and Legaré for the Southern Review found reviewers and subjects, stayed alert for controversies, and filled a gap if one occurred. But there is less evidence of their arguing with contributors over matters of substance or style, little sign that they threw in (as Walter Scott put it of Jeffrey’s practice) ‘‘a few lively paragraphs or entertaining illustrations.’’ 27 Discrimination seems to have lain in soliciting contributors and braving whatever consequences flowed from giving patronage to an opinion; once asked for, since both editor and essayist were gentlemen, a contribution seems to have been printed automatically. The little we know of the editorial process comes from the correspondence within the Elliott family. ‘‘I wish when you have leisure moments you would sometimes think of the Southern Review,’’ the elder Stephen Elliott wrote in 1829 to William Elliott. ‘‘It becomes a burthensome tax on me to find or prepare matter for the work and from one so well qualified as yourself, I think I ought to claim some contributions. We are going on heavily with the next number although we shall have one or two learned articles—But reviews for general readers, articles of wit and humour we find it difficult to procure, and in these departments you might with ease do much.’’ Six months later, the younger Elliott likewise wrote to inquire after a promised review of Scott’s Anne of Geierstein: ‘‘The eighth number is not yet commenced. Materials are on the table, only the editor has been disabled. However the very best numbers have frequently been written under the lash.’’ A year later, the same editor was more jaundiced, more exhausted by an editorial responsibility, ‘‘at all times involving anxiety and demanding the strictest attention, but now increased tenfold by the youth of the editor and the bitterness of party strife.’’ ‘‘Were I to detail to you all the disappointments I have been obliged to bear,’’ he lamented, ‘‘all the contentions I have been compeled to struggle thro’, all the manouvring [sic] I have been obliged to exercise so as to carry my point, save my honour, and yet not offend my adversary, you could have some idea of the gratification with which I received an article from you, totally unexceptionable.’’ His vexations included Thomas Cooper having ‘‘stuck snugly away in the midst of an article on Geology, a most decided attack upon the authenticity of the Pentateuch, which put him ‘hors de combat.’ ’’ Further, ninety pages of manuscript had gone a-glimmering, with only a month to go. John Stuart had written ‘‘ten days before the publication of the number, that he really had not been able to please himself.’’ Judge Nott had died, which 27. ‘‘Memorials of a Man of Letters’’ (1878), in John Morley, Nineteenth-Century Essays, ed. Peter Stansky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 261; Walter Scott to Mr. Gifford, 25 October 1808, in Herbert John Grierson, ed., The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932–37), 2:104.

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made it impossible for his son Henry to undertake his usual last-minute contribution. So Elliott had turned to Legaré, though the latter had sworn off writing for the moment. But Elliott ‘‘persuaded him to dish up something to help me out & I chose his subject—the unconstitutionality of the tariff— and got my self into the awkward dilemma of having to reconcile the political opinions of Hamilton & Legaré!’’ The vexation of this put Elliott in a bad mood, so when ‘‘a little Philadelphian who had undertaken to translate Milton’s ‘Epistolae Familiares’ happen[ed] to cross my path, I seized the little charlatan and tore him all to pieces.’’ In the summer of 1831, there was this: ‘‘You are too much admired to remain idle. Legaré, Nott & yourself rank No. 1. I have sent to England for a large number of new works, & when they [come], they shall be distributed for review, & you must come in for your share.’’ 28 Holmes, who worked as Whitaker’s associate for a while, asserted that the latter did little editing: ‘‘He is much more out-door-clerk and beggar-boy than editor.’’ On the other hand, Simms was exceptionally interventionist. When at the Magnolia and in the mood, he rewrote both prose and poetry without the author’s consent. In this, he was unusual; not many editors had the energy or discourtesy to be such an abrupt, serviceable nuisance. James Warley Miles in 1858, therefore, may have been unnecessarily priggish when he insisted that anything of his taken by Russell’s Magazine should be wholly untouched: ‘‘I only request earnestly that the pieces be strictly anonymous, and that they be submitted to nobody’s judgment, inspection, or revision. . . . If anyone . . . touches a letter of my piece . . . I shall be seriously offended.’’ 29 More common was refusing contributions. Both Simms and Thompson, even Thornwell later, were willing to refuse articles. Nor would Thompson give even favored authors carte blanche. He took some of Taveau’s poetry, but turned down others.30 Indeed he was so deluged by poetry that he often did not reply to the aspirant. As he told Taveau, ‘‘The number of poetical contributions which assail us monthly is very great, that it is impossible that any answer can be given in every instance to the writer. You would undoubtedly form an exception to the rule, but I mention it to show that no disrespect is meant to authors by not apprising them of the rejection of their articles.’’ Southern culture was gripped, as William Henry Holcombe surmised, by ‘‘the 28. Stephen Elliott to William Elliott, 23 March 1829; Stephen Elliott Jr., to William Elliott, 25 August 1829, 27 July 1830, 20 July 1831, Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, SHC. 29. GFH to WGS, 19 February 1844, Prioleau Papers, SCHS; Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life, 139; JWM to Anna Rebecca Young, ca. 1858–59, letter beginning ‘‘Thanks for the loan,’’ JWM Papers, DU. 30. JRT to ALT, 5 July 1848, ALT Papers, DU, refuses a poem, as does JRT to ALT, 21 August 1848, ibid.; JRT to ALT, 11 May 1850, ibid., accepts another.

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William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘‘Savage Editor Preparing for an Onslaught,’’ done in Mobile and presented to Joseph W. Lesesne (Courtesy Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

cacöethes scribendi, which vulgarly interpreted means an itching finger for scribbling nonsense.’’ Few periodicals foundered for lack of available manuscripts. ‘‘I am literally overrun with copy,’’ Thomas White complained in 1839. ‘‘I have now before my eyes valuable M.S.S. which I have had on hand 18 months.’’ 31 The want was not quantity, but quality. 31. JRT to ALT, 6 October 1849, ALT Papers, DU; entry for 2 February 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC; Thomas W. White to CC, 20 July 1839, CC Papers, WM.

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The extent of circulations is hard to establish, though there is scattered evidence. Caroline Gilman in 1833 said that the Rose Bud, her children’s periodical, had 735 subscribers (of which 20 were in Massachusetts) and this constituted a flourishing condition.32 According to De Bow, the Southern Quarterly Review in 1845 had a print run of 3,000 copies at a cost of $4,000 per annum, and had 2,500 subscribers ‘‘in the different Southern & Western states,’’ of which 200 were in New Orleans, a decline from the 400 when the periodical had been published there. By 1846 it was down to 2,000 subscribers, which declined further to 1,700 in 1849, when Simms took over. It may have fallen still further to 800 in late 1853, but Simms claimed he had ‘‘greatly increased’’ its list, which was back up to 1,600 in July 1854. What is more clear, however, is that when the Southern Quarterly Review listed its paying subscribers in 1846, they numbered only 840 out of the larger total of those who received the journal. In 1848, De Bow’s Review listed 825 subscribers, of whom two-thirds were said to be in arrears. It seems probable that the Southern Literary Messenger had the greatest circulation, since its format was more diversified and appealed to a greater range of interests. Poe once boasted that he had raised its circulation to 5,000, but Poe was no stranger to hyperbole. It seems improbable that it ever reached more than 3,000 readers.33 By comparison, in New York Harper’s Monthly Magazine started in 1850 with a print run of 7,500. More headily, Graham’s Magazine in 1842, when Poe worked for it, was printing 40,000 copies a month. The comparable figures for British periodicals are somewhat more flattering to the South. The Southern Literary Messenger’s model, Blackwood’s, sold about 7,000 copies in 1817, 7,500 in 1838, 5,750 in 1849, and was back to 10,000 in 1860. The Edinburgh Review in its early days, when it lacked rivals, sold as many as 13,000 and almost sustained this into the 1830s, but shrank to a little over 4,000 in the 1840s, and in 1860 regained some ground to 7,000.34 Considering the disproportion of population between Britain and the South, remembering the severity of competition 32. Caroline Gilman to Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, 17 January 1833, quoted in Janice Joan Thompson, ‘‘Caroline Howard Gilman: Her Mind and Art’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975), 30. On the subscription history of the Rose magazines, see Cindy Ann Stiles, ‘‘Windows into Antebellum Charleston: Caroline Gilman and the ‘Southern Rose’ Magazine’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1994), 38–50. 33. J. D. B. De Bow to J. F. H. Claiborne, 12 September 1845, J. F. H. Claiborne Papers, MDAH; WGS to Carey & Hart, 12 April 1849, and WGS to Evert Duyckinck, 15 October 1854, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:501, 3:257; ‘‘List of Payments for 1846,’’ SQR 10 ( July 1846); Skipper, De Bow, 24. 34. Chielens, American Literary Magazines, 166; Silverman, Mournful and Never-Ending, 174; Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 7, 148; Marilyn Butler, ‘‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126.

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from ‘‘national’’ periodicals and cheap American reprints of British journals, and recalling differing literacy rates (higher in the North, lower in Britain), the circulation of Southern periodicals was not especially discreditable to the curiosity of Southern readers. In 1846 the Southern Quarterly Review tried to shame its delinquents by publishing a list of its subscribers, with their place of residence attached. From this, one can gain some sense of the geographical distribution of its paying readers, if not of those who had promised to pay. Of these 840 people, nearly 43 percent were in South Carolina, 17 percent in Alabama, 14 percent in Georgia, and nearly 8 percent in Louisiana. Tennessee, North Carolina, and Mississippi were all around 4 percent. Surprisingly, Virginia managed only 3 percent. Maryland shared with the Northern states about 1 percent. The rest dribbled away into four subscribers for the District of Columbia, and one apiece for Arkansas, Texas, and Kentucky. There were two foreign subscribers: an L. Gibbons of Paris, presumably an expatriate, and the Reverend John R. Beard of Manchester, an abolitionist divine evidently keeping an eye on the enemy.35 So the Southern Quarterly Review pointed more decisively to the Lower South than to the Upper, and it addressed the non-South hardly at all. This last fact seems to have been the case for the Southern Review, too. In 1828, William Henry Robbins had written to his protegé Thornwell that ‘‘I was much surprized to find—or rather not to find a copy of the Southern Review in Boston—& but one or two gentlemen who have read it at all.’’ The circulation figures for the Southern Quarterly Review, further, show a markedly urban audience. Thirty-nine percent of the South Carolinian subscribers were given as Charlestonian: indeed, they formed almost 17 percent of the entire readership. All of the Maryland readers were in Baltimore; 97 percent of the Louisianian readers lived in New Orleans; 72 percent of the Tennesseans were split evenly between Nashville and Memphis; 60 percent of the Virginians were in Richmond; just over half of the Alabamian readers were in Mobile; and 31 percent of the Georgians were in Savannah. However, such evidence of urbanity should be treated with caution. This was, after all, a list of those who had paid their bill, which often meant those whom the journal’s agents had reached. Economy of effort mandated that agents concentrated their energies in accessible cities, those on large rivers or by the sea. And many readers, with both urban and rural homes, doubtless gave a city address. Still, these numbers 35. In numbers of subscribers, this breaks down as follows: South Carolina 358, Alabama 146, Georgia 119, Louisiana 66, Tennessee 36, North Carolina 36, Mississippi 34, Virginia 25, Maryland 5, Northern states 5, Washington, D.C., 4, foreign 2, Arkansas 1, Texas 1, Kentucky 1. See ‘‘List of Payments for 1846’’; ‘‘Collections for the Year 1846, not Acknowledged in the Last Number,’’ SQR 10 (October 1846): these are unpaginated.

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convey a strong sense of how inadequately a journal like the Southern Quarterly Review reached into the deep countryside, as does a letter written from Sparta, Georgia, by Richard Malcolm Johnston to Simms in 1855: ‘‘I am anxious to devote a portion of my time to the cultivation of letters. Ours is a small village, and the Southern Quarterly Review is not taken at this office. Do you still edit it?’’ 36 Simms had not been the journal’s editor for a year and longer. These statistics parallel those for De Bow’s Review for 1848. Of its 825 subscribers, 307 or 37 percent were from Louisiana, 230 or 28 percent from South Carolina, 101 or 12 percent from Alabama, 72 or nearly 9 percent from Mississippi, 54 or 6.5 percent from Texas, 32 or nearly 4 percent from Georgia, and the rest are inconsiderable (Tennessee 11, District of Columbia 9, Missouri 5, Kentucky 2, Virginia 2). As with the Southern Quarterly Review, many of De Bow’s subscribers were urban; 63 percent of the Louisiana subscribers were from New Orleans, 45 percent of the South Carolinians from Charleston, though only 16.5 percent of the Alabamians were in Mobile.37 De Bow’s Review sat at the other end of the Deep South from the Southern Quarterly Review, which affected its market and shifted its center of gravity. For, evidently, a home base mattered much to both periodicals. The Southern Quarterly Review had 43 percent of its market in its home state, and De Bow’s 37 percent. On the other hand, the Southern Quarterly Review reached Louisiana far worse than De Bow’s reached South Carolina; the former had only 8 percent of its readers in Louisiana, where De Bow’s had 28 percent in South Carolina. This was, no doubt, affected not only by the robustness of South Carolina’s intellectual culture, but also by the fact that De Bow was himself a South Carolinian and his journal was, in many ways, part of that state’s cultural diaspora. In general, then, circulation was much influenced by geography. Unsurprisingly, the New Orleans journal reached the Southwest with more efficiency; it had 54 subscribers in Texas, whereas the Southern Quarterly Review had one; 72 in Mississippi, compared to 34. Alabama seems to have been fairly neutral ground, somewhat in favor of Charleston, with De Bow’s having 101 subscribers there, to the Southern Quarterly Review’s 146. Conversely, the Southern Quarterly Review did better in the eastern South: 119 Georgian subscribers compared to 32 for De Bow’s, 36 North Carolinians compared to none. Neither periodical did well in the Upper South, though the Southern Quarterly Review managed 36 Tennesseans to De Bow’s 11, and 25 Virginians to 2. Kentucky seems to have been a shared wasteland; De Bow’s had two subscribers and the Southern Quarterly Review one. There are no parallel numbers for the Southern 36. William Henry Robbins to JHT, 30 June 1828, JHT Papers, SCL; Richard Malcolm Johnston to WGS, 5 December 1855, WGS Mss, DU. 37. Skipper, De Bow, 24.

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Literary Messenger, but it seems plausible to extrapolate that its main market was Virginia, that it did far better in its former colony of Kentucky, probably fared much better in Maryland and North Carolina, also had a considerable market in South Carolina, but began to fade the further south and west one got, with Mobile and New Orleans forming small islands of readership. When the Orion was established in Athens, Georgia, in 1842, it justified itself partly by asserting, ‘‘The ‘Messenger’ is too remote from us to be the sole or principal organ of our literature.’’ 38 That is, periodicals had circles of influence, which overlapped in a few urban areas and most robustly in Charleston. But it is striking how incurious was Virginia about the region to its southward, which would eventually drag the commonwealth uncomprehending into secession and war. But what of authors in these journals? Almost all of the Southern Review’s contributors came from South Carolina. Thirty-six contributors can be identified. Twenty-three were South Carolinian by both birth and residence.39 Eight were South Carolinian by residence but not birth: these came variously from England, Ireland, Antigua, Germany, Florida, and New England.40 Five were non–South Carolinians: these were from Virginia, New York, and Maryland.41 Such statistics are powerful evidence of localism. A full 86 percent of the contributors were in the immediate orbit of South Carolina, nearly 95 percent were Southerners, and only about 5 percent were Northerners. In short, when the Southern Review’s editors looked up to find contributors, their gaze seldom went beyond the state, even beyond Charleston and Columbia, with a side glance towards Stephen Elliott’s native Beaufort. Hence this was a South Carolinian, not a Southern localism. There were only three contributors from other Southern states, being two from Virginia and one from Maryland. And one of those Virginians, George Tucker, was born in Bermuda and ended up living in Philadelphia. In fact, the Southern Review seems to have had 38. Quoted in Susan B. Riley, ‘‘The Hazards of Periodical Publishing in the South during the Nineteenth Century,’’ Tennessee Historical Quarterly 21 (December 1962): 368. 39. Hugh Legaré, Robert Y. Hayne, Stephen Elliott, Jacob Cardozo, Robert Henry, Henry Junius Nott, Thomas S. Grimké, Samuel H. Dickson, Samuel Prioleau, James Louis Petigru, Charles Fraser, James H. Smith, William Elliott, James Hamilton, Stephen Elliott Jr., Edward Johnston, William Drayton, David James McCord, George McDuffie, John A. Stuart, James W. Simmons, Thomas Bee, and Henry Cruger. I am relying here upon the attributions in Michael O’Brien, A Character of Hugh Legaré (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 283–96. 40. Thomas Cooper, James Wallace, John England, William Harper, Samuel Gilman, Jasper Adams, Robert Turnbull, and Edward Michaelowitz. 41. Jesse Burton Harrison and George Tucker of Virginia, a Dr. Nelson and John Griscom of New York, and the Rev. Mr. Annan of Maryland.

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no contributors from south and west of South Carolina.42 Indeed, if you lived in the North, or were a Northerner or foreigner living in South Carolina, your chances of finding your way into the pages of the Southern Review were decidedly better than if you lived in New Orleans or Mobile, and better even than if you lived in Virginia. For by birth there were four Europeans in the list, two from the West Indies, and four Northerners. Not for nothing, then, did Thomas Dew once refer to the periodical as ‘‘the South Carolina Review.’’ 43 Look a few years later at the Southern Quarterly Review and Charleston had tilted somewhat inward and westward. It is harder to analyze its contributors, since a far smaller number have been identified for a far more extensive series. Nonetheless, there are 109 names. These are some rough figures, based only on the usual state of residence of the author, a less subtle measure than that attempted for the Southern Review. There are 56 South Carolinian names, or about 51 percent; 44 names are from the rest of the South, or about 40 percent. Eight are from the North, or about 7 percent.44 These numbers underestimate diversity, especially that stemming from in-migration to the South from the North or Europe, and from the eastern to the western South. For example, Alexander Everett here was counted as a Northerner, though he taught for a while in Louisiana; Moses Ashley Curtis as a North Carolinian, though he was born in Massachusetts; Hugh A. Garland as a Virginian, though he came to live in Missouri. Even so, matters had changed. There has been a reachingout to the rest of the South. Some of this, no doubt, was deceptive. The South Carolinian diaspora had implications for intellectual life. Josiah Nott, though born in South Carolina, is counted here as an Alabamian because at the time of writing for the Southern Quarterly Review he was a resident of Mobile. De Bow likewise had moved from Charleston to New Orleans. Nonetheless, Virginian names can be found in greater abundance, like those of Beverley Tucker and Matthew F. Maury, as well as Georgians like Eugenius Nisbet. So the evidence suggests that between 1830 and 1850 state localism had been modified and regionalism strengthened. Whereas the Southern Review had 88 percent of its contributors that were of South Carolinian connection, it is doubtful that the Southern Quarterly Review ran as high as two-thirds. Self-evidently this was still localism, however diminished. On the other hand, though the numbers are too small to be significant, the proportion of Northern names in the Southern Quarterly Review had risen from 42. It is possible, of course, that some of the unattributed articles are from such states. 43. Thomas R. Dew, Lectures on the Restrictive System Delivered to the Senior Political Class of William and Mary College (1829; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 172. 44. I am drawing upon the attributions in Ryan, ‘‘Southern Quarterly Review,’’ and my own research.

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the days of the Southern Review. In fact, 7 percent was not unrespectable in an American intellectual world that, in both North and South, was locally organized. As late as 1856, when he had newly taken over the editorship, Thornwell wrote to George Bancroft, asking him to contribute to the Southern Quarterly Review and seeking his aid in finding as contributors ‘‘the best scholars of the country,’’ including those of New York and Boston. This was a pleasant gesture, though Bancroft was polite in return rather than forthcoming. A look at the list of contributors of the North American Review indicates that it never did as well as even the Southern Quarterly Review, since barely more than 1 percent of 448 contributors were Southerners. Indeed, before 1861 and during forty-six years of publication, just six people of Southern residence at the time of their authorship published an article in it. Two were Southern by birth: Joel Poinsett and George Henry Calvert. Four were born in the North but resident in the South: Henry Adams Bullard, Elizabeth Ellet, Samuel Gilman, and Philip Lindsley. Indeed, six names rather overstate the case, since Calvert was to leave Baltimore and take up residence in Newport, and Ellet left South Carolina in 1849 for her native New York.45 Indeed, the only contributor who was Southern by both birth and sustained residence was Poinsett, and he spent so much time in Washington that he might be said to have passed beyond the local. However, the North American Review was in New England, whose exclusitivities were well known.46 It would be a reasonable guess that a proportion of 7 percent of Southerners for a New York or Philadelphia periodical might be plausible and hence comparable to the modest hospitality offered to outlanders in periodicals in the South. Legaré, Holmes, and Simms all wrote for New York journals. Nonetheless the peregrinations of Edgar Allan Poe between Richmond, Baltimore, New York, and Boston were decidedly unusual. The case of the Southern Literary Messenger was more complicated. Unlike the Southern Review and the Southern Quarterly Review, it did not follow the model of the Edinburgh Review but of Blackwood’s Magazine. That is, it mingled reviews, lectures, articles, poetry, short stories, installments of novels, reminiscences, as well as much miscellaneous matter of very wide provenance. This much amplified its number of items and range of contributors, who ran into the many hundreds. A sampling indicates that, being Virginian—that is, somewhat poised between North and South—the Southern Literary Messenger drew on contributors who were local, regional, national, and even interna45. JHT to George Bancroft, 26 January 1856, George Bancroft Papers, MassHS; William Cushing, Index to the North American Review: Volumes I–CXXV, 1815–1877 (Cambridge, Mass.: J. Wilson, 1878). 46. On this, see James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1–20.

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tional.47 On the last score, it did much by way of reprinting odd pieces from eighteenth-century British authors like Blackstone, but also new ones like Bulwer Lytton and Thackeray. It also went in for translations of French, German, and (rarely) other Continental authors; indeed, it had a marked interest in French affairs and had a Parisian correspondent for a while. Otherwise, it not infrequently had Northern authors like James K. Paulding, James Fenimore Cooper, Matthew Carey, Sarah Hale, Robert Walsh, Cornelius Felton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Greeley, Henry Tuckerman, and others. Nonetheless, its bedrock was Virginia, for it was the house organ of the Virginian intelligentsia; so it carried all the expectable names, the various Minors, Carters, Cookes, Randolphs, and Tuckers, along with Poe, Matthew Maury, William Cabell Rives, John Tyler, Thomas Dew, Edmund Ruffin, Charles Campbell, Hugh Blair Grigsby, and many more. Further, it reached to the farther South, to Simms, Meek, Baldwin, Longstreet, Wilde, Calhoun, the Gilmans, Louisa McCord, although its attention seems to have flagged for anyone who lived too consistently in the western South; there was no Gayarré, for example, in its pages, no Wailes or Monette. Indeed, arguably, it was more attentive to the Ohio Valley than to the Mississippi Valley, since generations of Virginians had migrated into Kentucky and Ohio, to send back to Richmond poems on Cincinnati or reveries on the death of a student at Miami University. In 1870 Charles Dimitry of Louisiana put the matter of Southern periodicals harshly: ‘‘Their epitaph may well be written: Died of an indisposition to disburse, and of an infliction of immature intellect.’’ 48 This was a halftruth, on both accounts. In general, there were too many bad authors and too few good ones, who were appearing in too many periodicals, which were chasing too few readers, and still fewer paying subscribers. A disciplined literary order might have had one or two quarterly reviews, a few evangelical journals, perhaps two literary magazines, which would have adequately provided for the region’s talented authors and been comfortably sustained by the subscription base in the society, which was simultaneously (and sensibly) contributing to the sustenance of national and international periodicals. A Southern author’s payments might thereby have been more regular and generous. But the South did not have that sort of literary order, but an unorganized, pell-mell entrepreneurial one. For the alert reader, the effect was not so unhappy. What he or she needed to read or discover did appear, and could be found. But it was greatly diffused, scattered hither and yon. 47. I rely upon David K. Jackson, The Contributors and Contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger (Charlottesville, Va.: Historical Publishing Company, 1936). 48. Quoted in Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), 367, but without a source given.

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For a writer, this system had marked advantages and disadvantages. If you wished to make a living, it was more or less useless. Writing for the journals could make a peripheral addition to an income, but no more. Simms worked the system and himself to death, but could not have survived to a standard he wished without other income from books and, not insignificantly, the plantations he acquired upon marriage. Poe, who oscillated between the more munificent Northern periodicals and the Southern Literary Messenger, fleetingly made decent money, but usually did not. During the eighteen months between 1835 and 1837 that he contributed to the Southern Literary Messenger and worked as assistant editor to Thomas White, he made $1,300. In 1839–40, working for Burton’s, he got $10 a week for all the reviews and articles he churned out, plus $3 a page for fiction, and $5 a poem. A year or so later, for Graham’s Magazine (which had bought out Burton), at first he got much the same, but when the journal hugely increased its circulation, he soared to $1,200 a year. But between his departure from Richmond in 1837 and his attachment to Burton’s, when he had no editorial income, he made $150. It is no accident that, in the index of a recent biography of Poe, one finds under the entry ‘‘money,’’ the admonition to ‘‘see also begging.’’ 49 For those who were not editors and earned only by the page, matters were dismal. George Frederick Holmes was, perhaps, the most indefatigable of contributors to periodicals, mostly Southern. Between 1839 and 1861, he published 111 different articles; 46 for the Southern Quarterly Review, 28 for the Southern Literary Messenger, 8 for De Bow’s, 12 for the Quarterly Review of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, one for the Magnolia, and another for the Family Companion of Macon. He also did extra work for periodicals outside the South: 14 for the Methodist Quarterly Review in New York and one for the North British Review. This came to a total of 2,447 pages, which averaged about 106 pages a year. Even if he had received $2 a page for these, this would only have amounted to an annual income of $212. But we know he did not receive anything like this. He seems barely to have made half that. His biographer notes that Holmes made $508.40 from eight years’ service to the Methodist Quarterly Review, which came to $1 a page. He got $165 from De Bow’s over three years, which was a touch under a $1 a page. He received $315 from the Quarterly Review of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which was a very little over $1 a page. When the Southern Quarterly Review expired in 1857, he was owed $300.50 Naturally, many found this exasperating. As Joseph Dulles explained in 1857, when speaking of Russell’s Magazine: ‘‘[Its] circulation is too small to sup49. Silverman, Mournful and Never-Ending, 124, 152, 164, 174, 140, 552. 50. Neal C. Gillespie, The Collapse of Orthodoxy: The Intellectual Ordeal of George Frederick Holmes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 93; I work from Gillespie’s excellent bibliography on pp. 250–55.

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port a magazine and no good magazine can be sustained merely on voluntary contributions. To get good articles you must pay for them. You may get them from time to time but as a general thing they will not be well prepared unless paid for. . . . I despair of Southern Literature. I am afraid we will take it out as usual only in talk. Look at the Southern Quarterly—look at the Literary Messenger—what is their circulation here compared with that of Putnam & Harper?’’ But such complaints misunderstood the purposes of the system, if it was a system. It was not designed for professional authors, but for the convenience of readers and those authors for whom writing was an avocation, and so was intended for openness, not professionalism. The middle men, the publishers and editors, exploited free contributions to stake a place in a highly competitive literary and intellectual marketplace. They did not do this much for profit, but for a bare living, vanity, and some influence over ideas, over political ideology and aesthetic preferences. As an editorial in the Southern Quarterly Review said in 1849, the periodical was never ‘‘a means of profit,’’ but sustained ‘‘purely as an organ of opinion in the South—for the maintenance of Southern rights and institutions, and the due stimulation, into life and activity, of the tastes and intellect of the South.’’ (This proclamation would have had in it more truth than cant, but for the little word ‘‘purely.’’)51 It was, in that sense, not the oligarchical system that is naturally preferred by an intellectual elite, where the hoi polloi are excluded, where experts are well-rewarded, where ‘‘standards’’ are enforced, where the intellectual world is rendered small and manageable, a thinking man’s literary cocktail party. So, in the broader history of publishing, the Southern periodical world was a kind of Jacksonian world, with some nostalgia for Federalism. Many eighteenth-century periodicals, in Britain and the United States, had been open, pellmell affairs, inclusive to the point of being undiscriminating, ‘‘instalments of a continuous encyclopedia, recording the advance of knowledge in every field of human enterprise.’’ Everything had been packed in, with very little critical commentary and much quotation, such that the reader was abandoned to his or her own devices. The presumption was that it was broadly possible to lay before the public the complete range of human knowledge, and the reader could cope with this. The British Critic, for example, had carried as many as seventy-seven articles on different books and subjects in each issue. This tradition did not vanish, indeed carried over to the United States far into the nineteenth century. Simms spoke of it in 1844, with no little condescension. There are, he said, ‘‘numerous literary newspapers (so called) which furnish that strange melange—a sort of mental olla-podrida. . . . The taste of these publications is certainly none of the best,—wanting in congruity, and 51. Joseph H. Dulles to Griffith John McRee, September [1857?], Griffith John McRee Papers, SHC; ‘‘To the Patrons of the Southern Quarterly Review,’’ SQR 15 (April 1849): 1.

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jumbling together, in one mass, the most irreconcilable objects of study and reflection. But they are addressed to a poor people, who have just a sufficient appreciation of Literature to demand the commodity, and who have not yet reached that degree of literary acumen which prompts them to resolve upon quality in preference to quantity.’’ 52 It had been the accomplishment of the Edinburgh Review to establish a new form, founded upon new principles, to reform such tatterdemalion abuses. It was, as befitted a High Whig organ, oligarchical and paternalistic. It drastically cut back the number of books and articles; by 1810, there were about eleven or twelve articles per issue. As its opening announcement proclaimed, it wished ‘‘to be distinguished, rather for the selection, than for the number of its articles.’’ 53 In effect, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Henry Brougham said to the reader that the realm of knowledge was too large to be encompassed, that much of it was unworthy of serious attention, and that they would undertake to sift through the knowledge, find the gold, and discard the dross. What was left would be subjected to sustained, discursive analysis, undertaken by a small, self-selected, elite group of politicians, historians, clerics, and scientists, none of them exactly specialized, all of them men of affairs sensitive to eclectic concerns.54 As Walter Bagehot was to put it in 1855, ‘‘The modern man must be told what to think—shortly no doubt—but he must be told it.’’ Henry Cockburn, at least, insisted that such a task had been the Edinburgh’s accomplishment. ‘‘It taught the public to think,’’ he coolly asserted. Holmes caught this theme, more sententiously, in 1842: ‘‘From being the mere guide and director of the reading public, in the choice of books, the vade mecum of purchasers, it [the review] has risen to a higher position, and considers it to be now its duty to form and correct the taste, by pointing out beauties and defects, and by analysing the one and the other till the origin and nature of both are made apparent.’’ 55 These were the presumptions, too, of the Southern Review, which had still fewer articles than the Edinburgh Review, at about eight per issue. It also was oligarchical, paternalist, constricted, and presumed no small erudition in a reader. However, its successor, the Southern Quarterly Review, by expanding its base beyond South Carolina, notably weakened this tautness. More reviewers 52. Derek Roper, Reviewing before the ‘‘Edinburgh,’’ 1788–1802 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), 36–37; WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law,’’ SLM 10 ( January 1844): 16. 53. Advertisement in first number, following the table of contents, quoted in John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, 1802–1824 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 11. 54. I rely much upon Butler, ‘‘Culture’s Medium.’’ 55. ‘‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’’ (1855), in Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1911), 1:5; Lord Cockburn, Life of Francis Jeffrey, with a Selection of His Correspondence, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1852), 1:300; GFH, ‘‘Bulwer’s Zanoni,’’ SQR 2 ( July 1842): 178.

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of different social origins, of different locality, of more dispersed intellectual interests, presented a fuzzier image of Southern culture; under Simms, who was an autodidact, the commitment to erudition palpably weakened. In the Southern Literary Messenger, things were still murkier; it offered many more voices from within and without the South, speaking in more various genres. In these ways, the reader was given more of the freedom that had been natural in the eighteenth century and falteringly snatched away in 1830. Certainly, in the immense swirling world of periodicals, no one journal could command an authoritative hearing. In all this, the role of the contributor was significant. The system, in a real sense, existed for his or her convenience. When journals were too lofty and too constricted, the average writer was excluded and disdained. Yet the evidence is abundant that Southerners liked to write. They poured out lectures, sermons, poetry, reviews, and political commentary. A region cannot found 850 periodicals in somewhat over half a century without writing being a popular hobby. Such writers expected access to the media of expression. They did not mind that the further up the scale one went, there might be rejections. These were not so frequent, nor so brutal, as to be seriously incommoding. There were always journals ready to take words that came free, and, if John R. Thompson rejected one’s poetry, it gave the later moment of acceptance a certain frisson. These presumptions were explicitly democratic. It was the pious sentiment of the age that the press was the medium of a democratic culture, a means of education, but it was a sentiment that came close to a reality, and this not by accident. Voices were raised, words were printed, people read, discriminations were made. In general, everyone expected the right to be printed and to be heard. They did not expect a committee of scholars and experts to rule that a mind was too incompetent to be allowed articulation. Caroline Gilman once learned of a proposal floated in the London and Westminster Review in the late 1830s that there be ‘‘an organized co-operation among the leading intellectuals of the age for the purpose of pronouncing judgment on all unpublished works.’’ Of this she asked, ‘‘Who shall specify, appoint, authorize, and acknowledge these ‘leading intellects’?’’ In an age of freedom, who would promote ‘‘close corporations in literature’’? 56 So a lady or a young man might write poems about nightingales, the cleric might denounce German skepticism, the planter might advise on how best to plant sugar, the classicist might construe a line of Homer; all these were not created equal, because readers made their discriminations, but they were allowed to sit in their libraries, 56. In the Southern Rose Bud, volume 5, quoted in Thompson, ‘‘Caroline Howard Gilman,’’ 176.

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write down their words, take or mail them to an editor, and sit back and wait for the printed word to appear. This ideology of accessibility had variously arisen. There was the old republican presumption that the citizen had the right of independence, hence of thought, and hence too of expression. One might write an article or publish a pamphlet, and damn the consequences. On the other hand, there were Jacksonian presumptions. There were entrepreneurial opportunities in the printed word, careers and pages should be open to the talents, and print might, as De Bow always insisted, offer invaluable advice to the go-getter. Some would rise, some would fail, but all ought to have the chance to try, to gain the spoils. Hovering around this matter of openness lay the matter of authorial anonymity, which shifted ground as the system grew less Federalist and more Jacksonian. For the Southern Review, in imitation of the Edinburgh, all contributions had been unsigned. This was a mild variation on the habits of early generations. In the eighteenth century most British and American reviews had published anonymous contributions, but they had also been fond of pseudonyms: these were sometimes neoclassical, as with ‘‘Publius’’ (Madison’s disguise in the Federalist Papers) or ‘‘Appius’’ or ‘‘Phocion’’; sometimes historical, as with ‘‘Hampden’’; sometimes generic, as with ‘‘A Member of the Old Congress’’ or ‘‘A South Carolinian’’;57 sometimes descriptive, as with ‘‘Craftsman’’ or ‘‘Plain Truth.’’ 58 These subterfuges disguised the writer’s body and name, but retained a form of identity that was allusive. There was also a playfulness in the custom, something Augustan, that wore the knowing smiles of Pope, Swift, Addison, and Steele. That Dr. Alexander Hamilton wrote The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club of Annapolis during the 1750s under the pseudonym of ‘‘Loquacious Scribble’’ spoke much to this tradition, for the members of the club had all taken whimsical names—Quirpum Comic, Huffman Snap, Jealous Spyplot, Prim Timorous, and the like. Pseudonyms were part of a male, clubbable tradition, which was to find a further expression in the names assumed in undergraduate societies. ‘‘Light Horse’’ Harry Lee, when an undergraduate at Princeton and a member of the Cliosophic Society, was known as ‘‘Hannibal.’’ 59 57. Sketches of French and English Politicks in America, in May, 1797, by a Member of the Old Congress (Charleston, S.C.: W. P. Young, 1797); Short Review of a Project for Uniting the Courts of Law and Equity in This State, by a South-Carolinian (Charleston, S.C.: Duke & Browne, 1823). 58. I cite various pseudonyms mentioned in the index of George C. Rogers Jr., Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of South Carolina (1758–1812) (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1962), 432. 59. Dr. Alexander Hamilton, The Tuesday Club: A Shorter Edition of The History of Ancient and

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Like the Edinburgh Review, the Southern Review broke from this whimsy, though it continued to respect a major reason for pseudonymity, the hope that it eased freedom of speech, especially for the scathing and witty. Edinburgh and Charleston were both small worlds, where reviewers and the authors they reviewed lived in adjacent streets, frequented the same clubs, met in the law courts and in political endeavors, and were even intermarried. Under these circumstances, anonymity could rarely offer an invincible disguise, though that many of the Southern Review’s contributors are still unknown indicates that anonymity was not always a failure. ‘‘Judge T. is not the author of ‘Young England,’ ’’ Benjamin Blake Minor of the Southern Literary Messenger told a curious correspondent in 1845. ‘‘It came to me from Washington, thro’ Ed. Wm. Johnston, but he was not the author. I am not at liberty to tell who is.’’ 60 Editors were supposed to be thus discreet, though most were not, not the younger Elliott and certainly not the loquacious Simms. Precisely because Charleston and Richmond were small worlds, disclosure was common and to be expected, at least was never a surprise. An editor, possessed of so much delicious knowledge, could not often refrain from gossiping, especially when there were so few other benefits of office. Under these circumstances, anonymity was less a disguise, more a gesture, a way of deflecting blunt confrontation. The enthusiasts of William Crafts probably knew that the scathing review of Crafts’s posthumous writings in the Southern Review was by Legaré, they could gossip with agitation about it, but it would have been impolite to beard Legaré in public; his intimates could talk to him of it, but those with more distance were mandated to keep that distance. As Thornwell once put it, ‘‘[T]he rules of courtesy do not require that anonymous [essays] be answered.’’ 61 But people felt free to speculate and liked to do so. Paul Trapier’s mother, when he was away in college, wrote to him in 1828 from Charleston, ‘‘I am glad that you are pleased with the Southern Review—I will in my next inform you who the Authors are of the differHonorable Tuesday Club, ed. Robert Micklus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xi, xvi; James McLachlan, ‘‘Classical Names, American Identities: Some Notes on College Students and the Classical Tradition in the 1770s,’’ in Classical Traditions in Early America, ed. John W. Eadie (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1976), 81–98. 60. Benjamin Blake Minor to [Lucian Minor?], 10 January 1845, Benjamin Blake Minor Papers, LV. 61. ‘‘Romanist Arguments for the Apocrypha Discussed’’ (1845), in John B. Adger et al., eds., The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, 4 vols. (1871–75; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 3:413. The original reads, ‘‘[T]he rules of courtesy do not require that anonymous letters should be answered,’’ but ‘‘letters’’ refers to published letters, written in refutation of an earlier Thornwell publication; Thornwell himself said of them that, ‘‘though in the form of letters, they are really essays’’ (280).

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ent pieces.’’ Charles Fraser once met a Boston nephew who had been asked by James Bowdoin the names of those who had written for the Southern Review, and Fraser responded with amicable indiscretion: ‘‘He feels pleased that you take so much interest in the Literature of the South as to wish to be informed of the writers in the review. He has therefore given me the names of the authors of several of the leading articles—from their first publication.’’ 62 As Sir George Murray had observed in 1838, when he was reviewing the dispatches of the Duke of Wellington, anonymity conferred ‘‘a sort of nominal incognito by the absence of any direct acknowledgment of authorship.’’ 63 It was said of the Edinburgh Review that, for those who wrote and belonged to the professions, writing was faintly disreputable and anonymity protected a reputation from the taint of Grub Street. At the beginning, this may have been so but the celebrity of the Review became so great and its influence so marked that few authors were deeply pained, other than by way of gentlemanly affectation, for any chance discovery of their contribution and hence of their critical importance. Much the same was true in the South. Authors would happily disclose their own identity. ‘‘In the last Southern Review, I have the first part of a Review on Higgins on the Druids,’’ Cooper told an English friend. ‘‘ ‘Living Novelists’ in the Messenger are mine,’’ Philip Pendleton Cooke wrote to a relative in 1847. These confessions might be in prospect, not merely retrospect. James Warley Miles kept David McCord apprised of his work-in-progress for the Southern Quarterly Review in 1851. Indeed, now and again during the 1840s, the Charleston Courier, in noting a new issue of the Southern Quarterly Review, would suggest the names of authors. In 1849, it and the Charleston Mercury concurrently published a list of attributions for the old Southern Review.64 It was, too, a pleasant game to guess at contributors. Readers wrote to flatter nominally incognito authors. ‘‘Allow me to take the liberty of expressing the delight with which I read the very spirited and beautiful article on Scott’s last novel which is attributed to your pen,’’ John Gadsden wrote confidently to William Elliott in 1829. Someone congratulated Thornwell on the first issue of the Southern Quarterly Review under the latter’s editorship, by way of boldly fishing for information: ‘‘I thank you for the Article on ‘American Colleges’ (It will do great good) the ‘Memoir of Dr. Henry’ & the Article on ‘Slavery 62. Sarah Alicia Trapier to Paul Trapier, 6 March 1828, Trapier Family Papers, SHC; Joseph A. Winthrop to James Bowdoin, 31 July 1829, Winthrop Papers, MassHS. 63. Quoted in Shattock, Politics and Reviewers, 18. 64. TC to Joseph Parker, 21 February 1829, TC Papers, SCL; Philip Pendleton Cooke to John R. Cooke, 16 September 1847, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU; JWM to David James McCord, 24 April 1851, McCord Mss, SCHS; Charleston Courier, 8 February 1849; Charleston Mercury, 9 February 1849.

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& Freedom.’ The first two are exclusively yours. And in the last I recognize a paragraph, the one which disclaims any previous perusal of the Southern Lit. Mess., which was written or remodelled by you. But the crowning gem is the ‘Theory of the Beautiful.’ Its peculiar clearness, and the quotations from Milton, seem to stamp it as yours.’’ But a reader could be unsure, or get it wrong. Even Simms, that most knowledgeable of literary gossips, was uncertain about a review of his poetry in the Southern Literary Messenger: it was ‘‘the work, I suspect, of Rev. Professor Miles.’’ Griffith John McRee seems to have thought that Joseph H. Dulles had written something in Russell’s Magazine, but Dulles had to disabuse him: ‘‘I have long long since abandoned the pen and forsaken what was the joy of my life and the only pursuit in which I am sure had I continued I might have attained distinction—that of Literature. Dear delicious dream of boyhood! it has vanished never—never to return.’’ And it was sometimes necessary to repudiate an identification. ‘‘Do not give me the credit of the article on American Literature, as I do not desire, nor, perhaps, deserve the honor,’’ the younger Stephen Elliott told William Elliott.65 And not all readers lived in the next street to authors. The curious planter who subscribed to the Southern Review and lived in the hill country of Georgia or in the far Delta might not know the gossip and could not guess at the names. Even the intellectually notable could be ignorant, if they were distant. When Grigsby was attending the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829– 30, he mixed much with Littleton Waller Tazewell. Once the former called upon the old man after breakfast, ‘‘where he read nearly the whole of the review of Cicero de Republica, in the Southern Review of August in the present year, which, he said, contained opinions precisely similar to his own.’’ Neither Tazewell nor Grigsby knew that this article was by Legaré. Edmund Ruffin got his copy of De Bow’s Review in November 1857, wherein he found ‘‘a strong & eloquent article in favor of separation of the union, from a Whig & until a late visit to the north, always a Union man. I should like to know who is the writer.’’ So words could come impersonally, as abstract opinions, dispassionately asserted, without egotism. Or that was one of the possible illusions of anonymity. It was, to be sure, an ethic asserted often against the interests of editors who knew that controversy between known authors might sell copies. When matters grew heated between Nott and Curtis over the unity of the races, the then-editor of the Southern Quarterly Review inserted a worried preface to Nott’s reply to Curtis’s review: ‘‘The parties engaged are of the highest 65. John Gadsden to William Elliott, 17 November 1829, Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, SHC; R. Stuart to JHT, 5 June 1856, JHT Papers, SCL; WGS to Evert Duyckinck, 6 December 1854, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 3:342; Joseph H. Dulles to Griffith John McRee, September (1857?), Griffith John McRee Papers, SHC; Stephen Elliott Jr., to William Elliott, 31 August 1831, Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers, SHC.

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literary reputation. In the opinion of the Editor, they are eminently qualified to conduct the discussion, notwithstanding their mutual accusations to the contrary. In the pursuit of truth, and in the advancement of science, the Southern Review ever opens its pages to them. Science must be pursued for itself. It must be discussed calmly and dispassionately. It must lose sight of personalities as irrelevant and intrusive, and be occupied alone with its own high themes and conceptions.’’ 66 And, so, on with the fight. In the days of Grub Street, anonymity had disguised the profligacy with which needy authors had spun prose by the yard. This too, in a more modest way, served the interests and reputation of the quarterly. During one period, Jeffrey wrote seventy-nine articles in twenty-six numbers of the Edinburgh Review, or one article a month, and John Gibson Lockhart did between one and four per issue of the Quarterly Review. Likewise, it would have looked impoverished if a candid table of contents had revealed—as was the case with the August 1828 issue of the Southern Review—that three of its nine articles were by Legaré, and perhaps another three by the elder Elliott. Anonymity thus gave editors a certain freedom from scrutiny, some leeway in the scramble for contributors, and might disguise narrowness of authorship by highlighting, rather, breadth of subject matter. Indeed for books, anonymity was often thought to be a good selling ploy: Charles Campbell once toyed with publishing a book in this way to ‘‘increase the curiosity to read it.’’ 67 It will seem odd that some, who were members of a Romantic generation, should have opted for anonymity, when the tradition made so much of the voice of the original author, who so often spoke confessionally. Yet Wordsworth and Coleridge had published the Preface to Lyrical Ballads anonymously, and famously Walter Scott ‘‘the Great Unknown’’ had disguised his authorship of Waverley. In the United States, neither Irving nor Cooper put their names on their title pages until the 1840s. This partly arose from gentility, but there was a more subtle side to it. In an age that mingled gentility with self-absorption, anonymity could liberate the confessional mood. When in the pages of the Southern Review Legaré mused on Byron’s club foot, he could speak of his own deformity without the glare of abject publicity. This was the more compelling, because of the other impulse of anonymity, its desire to establish the voice of authority. The anonymous voice spoke, not for himself or herself alone, not merely for the poor, shrunken body of Hugh Legaré, but for the review, the times, and the domain of literature. There was an imperial ambi66. Entry for 22 October 1829, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; entry for 2 November 1857, in Scarborough, Ruffin Diary, 1:119; ‘‘Note,’’ prefacing Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘An Issue with the Reviewer of Nott’s ‘Caucasian and Negro Races,’’’ SQR 8 ( July 1845): 148. 67. Shattock, Politics and Reviewers, 80; CC to Rev. James W. Alexander, undated, CC Papers, WM.

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tion in the use of the word ‘‘we.’’ ‘‘We Americans’’ were the first two words of the first article in the Southern Review, which was written by Legaré. ‘‘We must needs consider it as such’’ enters into the second sentence. ‘‘We take up all questions de novo’’ begins the third sentence. And the second paragraph began, ‘‘We have thought it advisable to premise thus much, at the very outset of our critical labours, by way of preventive apology, so to speak, for the manner in which we shall find ourselves constrained to examine many matters that are considered in other countries as quite settled.’’ 68 This was not idiosyncratic to Legaré. The second article, by Thomas Cooper on the ‘‘Principles of Agriculture,’’ commences, ‘‘From the time of the ancient Romans to the book of Jethro Tull, we know of little that has been added to the theory or practice of Agriculture, that deserves to mark an era in its history either as an art or a science.’’ The third article by Robert Hayne asserts, ‘‘We do not propose to become umpires between these literary combatants.’’ Later in the same issue, the elder Stephen Elliott, writing of Scott’s life of Napoleon, begins, ‘‘The French Revolution, the great wonder of our age, has passed away,’’ and goes on to speak of ‘‘our author’’ and ‘‘our readers.’’ By this voice, the individual grew into a collectivity, with all the authority of the group. Hayne’s letter announcing to other Southerners the imminence of the Southern Review was purposely full of ‘‘we’’ and ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘our’’: ‘‘In looking at the condition of the Southern States, no one can fail to be struck with the obvious fact that our resources have never been fairly and fully called forth. In possession of all the advantages of soil and climate necessary to make us great and prosperous, we have made small advances towards that elevated station to which we have a right to look, and to which well directed, persevering efforts, will assuredly lead us.’’ 69 In fact, however, the identity of ‘‘we’’ was unclear, and was often left to the imagination or prejudice of the reader to interpret. In these articles, ‘‘we’’ might be the Southern Review collectively, or it might mean South Carolina, or the South, or the United States, or the times, or Western culture. But whatever was meant was intended to be authoritative, even when the sentiment was obviously personal; it conveyed a sense that the personal had a transcendent significance. ‘‘We’’ placed the critic above the criticized, who was not one of us. When Elliott denoted his possession of both ‘‘our author’’ and ‘‘our 68. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 293; HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 1–2. 69. TC, ‘‘Principles of Agriculture,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 49; Robert Young Hayne, ‘‘Execution of Colonel Isaac Hayne,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 70; Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Scott’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 159, 162, 164; Robert Young Hayne to Warren Davis, 25 September 1827, Robert Young Hayne Papers, SCL.

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readers,’’ he was careful (if oddly) to say that Walter Scott himself (the man reviewed) was singular, not one of a group, but only ‘‘an Englishman, a tory and an individual.’’ 70 Yet anonymity did proclaim a distance from the profession of authorship, because it abjured advertisement. Robert Henry once observed, apropos of the Letters of Junius, ‘‘To admire an anonymous author, is like falling in love with a ghost; it has form and seeming, but we cannot touch it; it wanders through an undefined vacuity, alarming us in its windings, but we cannot fix it; it utters its chill warning, but we cannot trace its direction.’’ Anonymity liked to imply that opinion mattered, but not the opinion maker, the person who freely sent views out into the world, unpossessed of self. And, in truth, there was no particular reason why a lawyer, a doctor, a minister, a plantation mistress, or a professor needed to placard a name. He or she got little money for writing, wanted little more, because he or she lived off a profession, land, or slaves. George Frederick Holmes always declined to have his periodical contributions assigned to himself. Once a New York editor tried to talk him out of this modesty, by making the case for a personal bond between author and reader, which anonymity prevented: ‘‘The best men among us are decided against the practice of incognito articles. They desire to know, to form a mental acquaintance with, to feel a personal interest & a real gratitude towards, the man who warms, amuses or instructs them.’’ Why refuse the credit? ‘‘Why should not the real value arising from the verdict of your readers accrue to you personally as well as the pecuniary avails.’’ 71 To this, the answer was that intellectual understandings were things beyond personal credit and were belittled by the prying intimacy demanded by such a reader. In this, gentility was certainly involved.72 Professional authors like Simms might resent the hegemony of gentlemanly amateurs, but the struggle of Francis Jeffrey’s generation had been to turn authors from being thought the natural companions of pimps into being regarded as gentlemen, rather as Henry Irving and Mrs. Patrick Campbell were later to elevate actors from the status of cads and whores into that of knights and ladies, eventually by Laurence Olivier’s day into peers. This view of things was never unanimous. The newer logics of Roman70. Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Scott’s Life of Napoleon,’’ 163. On the use of ‘‘we’’ in the Edinburgh, see Shattock, Politics and Reviewers, 92–93. 71. Robert Henry, ‘‘Waterhouse’s Junius,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 487; Daniel Denison Whedon to GFH, 15 September 1856, GFH Mss, DU. 72. Cf. WGS to James Henry Hammond, 20 May 1845: ‘‘As for the reluctance to publish that which you have deliberately written, and which is wholly without its use unless put in circulation, that, permit me to say, is one of your little affectations which do not become you. You are too much a genuine man to indulge in such pettinesses’’ (Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:64).

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ticism did demand self-regard, prized originality, and invited sympathy. In 1847 a defender of the absorbing interest of Goethe’s autobiography put the case for intimacy. To judge authors fairly, readers must ‘‘place themselves in their circumstances, take their position, their standpoint, as the Germans have it.’’ Knowing ‘‘the long series of circumstances which have brought the literature of a nation into a certain state’’ made judgment possible and might be liberating to genius: ‘‘We are more than half dead till we have thrown off the heavy fetters of conformity; till we think, and speak, and act from within, from our own active, enquiring, living souls; till we give up our convulsive adhesions to mere institutions and prevailing modes of thought.’’ 73 More usually, authorship was valued because it conferred a species of fame, which was its own currency.74 Interest in celebrity did grow and began to affect how anonymity was preserved or abandoned. The Southern Literary Messenger was much more muddled on the question of authorship and voice than the earlier Southern Review. Some of its contributions were anonymous. Some were pseudonymous, as with St. Leger Landon Carter, whose prose and poetry in the first issue was signed ‘‘Nugator,’’ and Philip Pendleton Cooke, who preferred ‘‘Larry Lyle.’’ Some were signed with initials, as ‘‘H. M.’’ Some had initials with a place name, as ‘‘E. A. S., Lombardy, Va.’’ Or a pseudonym might be specified as belonging to a place, as with ‘‘Agricola, Albemarle.’’ George Henry Calvert signed one piece as the translator of Don Carlos and the author of Herbert Barclay. Some were plainly signed; so M. S. Lovett owned up to being the author of ‘‘I Met Thee by Moonlight Alone.’’ Poe signed some things, declined to sign others, and gave initials for yet others.75 It would seem that the editor took no position on these matters and allowed contributors freedom to represent themselves as they wished. But a literary magazine was more playful, more random, and carried less authority than a quarterly review. When the Southern Quarterly Review was started in 1842, it took up where the old Southern Review had left off, with firm anonymities. Yet, very quickly, this policy began to weaken. It slipped only modestly in April 1843, when two articles were signified as being by ‘‘A famous Virginian.’’ (This was Abel P. Upshur.) Then, oddly, in July 1843 an article on the ‘‘Progress of Civilization’’ was abruptly signed ‘‘D. F. Jamison, Orangeburg, May 30, 1843,’’ and another on a ‘‘Memoir of Tristan Burges’’ was also 73. ‘‘The Auto-Biography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry from My Life,’’ SQR 11 (April 1847): 443, 444, 445. 74. On Wirt asking the advice of Judge Carr about whether authorship would hinder his professional advancement, see the letter of 31 March 1813, in JPK, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney-General of the United States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849), 1:342– 44. 75. All these are from Volume 1, August 1834–September 1835, as identified in David Jackson, Southern Literary Messenger, 1–11.

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signed, this time only as ‘‘E. D.,’’ which half-concealed Edwin DeLeon. No other contributors were to be accorded their names for several years, but initials began to appear with some regularity. In 1845, the editor offered a laconic explanation, to the effect that he had given the initials of some contributors ‘‘by permission.’’ Loftily, he added: ‘‘We do not bind ourselves, always to give these, but would like our contributors to give us the power, to do it or not at our pleasure.’’ In general, the editor, if thus licensed, would give the initials, but no more than this, for ‘‘the reader . . . must be satisfied with an initial letter in the work, which will give him a clue.’’ 76 Why the reader should be thus puzzled was left unexplained. Still, most articles remained anonymous, until the October 1849 issue (Simms by then was editor), in which nine out of eleven articles were subscribed by initials. Thereafter the practice grew increasingly common, even usual. In July 1853, in an advertisement, the periodical gave a list of its ‘‘able list of contributors, numbering besides many others, the following wellknown names.’’ Attached were fifty-eight of them, all of them attributed to their states, arranged in no particular order. Then, abruptly, in the January 1854 issue, the table of contents gave the full name of the author of each article. Simms was then still editor, but the periodical had recently been bought by Charles Mortimer, which may explain the change of policy. Yet Simms’s letters, which refer to this issue, make nothing of it. That the next issue reverted to the old mixture of initials and anonymity (more the former than the latter) would seem to suggest that the policy had been contested, or perhaps a printer’s blunder. Throughout the conjoined suzerainty of Simms and Mortimer, the former was to complain that the latter was interfering, would reject articles that Simms liked, and publish others that Simms had refused. Yet the fact that the January 1855 issue, the first after Simms’s resignation and the only issue edited by Mortimer alone, reverted to a crystal anonymity would suggest that the former change had not been Mortimer’s idea. Thereafter, under Bunwell and Thornwell, all was again silent about the identity of writers, which Grayson in 1860 was to assert was ‘‘the right plan in a Periodical.’’ 77 So, across the landscape of Southern periodicals, there was much inconsistency. The Southern Presbyterian Review and Russell’s Magazine were rigorous about anonymity, but De Bow’s wavered. The history of an essay by Thornwell in the 1840s shows, moreover, how little control there might be in the process, especially by authors. In 1841 Thornwell wrote a piece on ‘‘the Claims of the Apocrypha to Divine Inspiration,’’ which ‘‘was printed anonymously 76. ‘‘Editorial Notices,’’ SQR 7 (January 1845): 260. 77. Ryan, ‘‘Southern Quarterly Review,’’ 460; William J. Grayson to J. D. B. De Bow, 25 July 1860, J. D. B. De Bow Mss, DU.

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in the Baltimore Visitor. . . . From the Visitor it was copied into the Spirit of the Nineteenth Century, some time during 1842 . . . [then] was transferred, by the editor of the Southern Chronicle . . . to his own columns, and, without consulting me or in any way apprising me of his design, he took the liberty, having ascertained that I was the author, to append my name to it.’’ Thereafter Thornwell in 1845 published it under his own name in New York.78 All this is evidence of marked ambivalence about authorship. John Minor thought that ‘‘the author should not be seen in his book, any more than the wire-worker of Punch & Judy.’’ In 1851 the Charleston Conversation Club discussed whether ‘‘authorship [ought] to be a profession’’ and it seems doubtful that they thought it should. Yet Simms, elsewhere in the city, was an energetic proponent of the profession of letters. Indeed, he liked to argue that literary skill required specialization, even to the extent that authors should concentrate on a single genre. Conscious that he himself dissipated among many forms, he pleaded that in America, writers were obliged to be jacksof-all-trade, just to get by, and this would be so ‘‘until literature shall arrive at the dignity of a profession among us.’’ But he knew the old Ciceronian argument, which Legaré had urged and which did not lack for force. This held that the writer should mix with the world, know its affairs, enter politics, know about money, and gain the wisdom that experience alone might give. Only to be an author gave the writer nothing but rhetorical adeptness, and so little to say. A century later, Allen Tate would complain that Southern letters in the early nineteenth century had been impoverished, because thinkers had been drawn into politics.79 For many antebellum Southerners, this would have seemed obtuse. Authorship and the public realm needed one another. Indeed, the public realm, remarkably in a republic notorious for its stinginess, habitually acknowledged an obligation to extend patronage to authors, for this very reason. Consulates, embassies, customs houses, post offices, and naval departments were much peopled by writers, who expected to be enriched by the experience, in the pocket, but also in the mind.80 For many, being an author was to be ‘‘celebrated,’’ to share however modestly in the great benison of fame. ‘‘Of books that are written merely to gratify 78. JHT, The Arguments of Romanists from the Infallibility of the Church and the Testimony of the Fathers in Behalf of the Apocrypha, Discussed and Refuted (New York: Leavitt, Trow, 1845); this account of its publishing history is in the preface, reprinted in Adger, Thornwell Writings, 3:280. 79. John Minor to CC, 23 March 1845, CC Papers, WM; entry for 12 March 1851, in MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC; WGS, ‘‘Writings of Cornelius Mathews,’’ SQR 6 (October 1844): 310; Allen Tate, ‘‘The Profession of Letters in the South,’’ Virginia Quarterly Review 11 (April 1935): 161–76. 80. ‘‘I estimate that from 1800 to 1870, from 60 to 70 per cent of all male American writers who even approached professionalism either held public office or tried to get it’’: Bruccoli, Profession of Authorship, 294–95;

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the itch of authorship, we have already more than enough,’’ Benjamin Morgan Palmer once observed. Octavia Le Vert of Mobile drank deeply of these vanities. When her Souvenirs of Travel appeared in 1857, she noted with unblushing satisfaction that ‘‘a stream of letters is flowing to me, day after day from distinguished statesmen, learned scholars, and celebrated authors, all filled with beautiful expressions of approbation, and congratulations upon the entire success of the work.’’ To be Judge Longstreet was one thing, to be ‘‘the author of Georgia Scenes’’ was something else, mostly better. On the other hand, it might be worse, for the sins of the author might impugn the man. Charles Dickens’s harshness in his American Notes raised this possibility. ‘‘We may still continue to admire the genius of the author,’’ a reviewer noted, ‘‘but we cannot soon forgive the man for the wrong he has done us.’’ It was natural, therefore, that many feared a loss of identity and control when the man was confused with the author. Still more was often feared for the woman, who was supposed to require seclusion and closeting. ‘‘If women that are authoresses &c are exceptions, so are men that are authors,’’ Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick once told his future wife, more or less encouragingly. ‘‘And I wonder who is going to undertake to prove that men who become authors are all out of their ‘proper sphere.’ ’’ This seemed an invitation to write. But a doubt followed, for both genders. ‘‘Authoresses as well as authors are too apt to be so much of the author that they are nothing else. The man or woman is lost in the occupation.’’ 81 And who would wish to lose themselves? Worse, celebrity might be notoriety, and so bring humiliating criticism. Jefferson, who wrote much in his lifetime and published little, long ago gave this as his motive for reticence. ‘‘My great wish,’’ he wrote in 1789, ‘‘is to go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty; to avoid attracting notice and to keep my name out of newspapers, because I find that the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.’’ ‘‘Happy indeed is the author if he never has suffered martyrdom in the press,’’ Caroline Lee Hentz later observed, not only of a ‘‘he.’’ Worse even than this, an author might risk moral imperilment: ‘‘Fiction stands naturally opposed to fact,’’ the same reviewer of Dickens once insisted, ‘‘and storytelling, in popular estimation, is only another name for deceit, and the moral influence of such compositions we believe, is, to a certain extent, prejudicial both upon the tone of thinking and feeling of authors, and upon the public at large, by presenting exaggerated representations of life and manners.’’ So 81. Benjamin Morgan Palmer to J. M. Wilson, 17 May 1855, Benjamin Morgan Palmer Mss, DU; Octavia Le Vert to William Warland Clapp, 24 September 1857, cataloged as ‘‘bMS.Am.1518.1,’’ HU; Oscar Lieber to Francis and Matilda Lieber, 14 December 1851, FL Papers, SCL; ‘‘Dickens’ American Notes,’’ SQR 3 (January 1843): 171–72; Benjamin S. Hedrick to Ellen Thompson, 6 April 1852, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, DU.

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it might be wise for even a professed author to be unobtrusive, since this reticence might mitigate the inward perils of dishonesty and deflect the outward blows of critical hostility. A wise prudence might see being a name on a title page as danger enough. For certainly putting yourself in a narrative was a risk, for yourself, for others. Byron had put himself ‘‘in his book,’’ and had abandoned his wife, kept mistresses and monkeys in Venice, and boys in Greece, much of which could be learned in Thomas Moore’s biography. A young lady in a Charleston library, when Byron was read aloud to her, was tremulous with alarming sensuality because of this public knowledge of Byron’s private self: ‘‘Last fall I was sitting in a large library with a young man and another lady. he was sharing me some of Byron’s beauties, and while leaning over my shoulder he repeated a piece of poetry out of Don Juan and asked me if I ever saw it, and when he asked me he looked into my face intently to see if in sayin[g] no I blushed, for then he would know directly that I had read the work.’’ 82 Many feelings about authorship were focused by the debate over copyright, which flourished most in the late 1830s and early 1840s, partly because the Panic of 1837 had thrown the book trade into crisis. The United States had its own copyright laws, which protected the interests of American authors publishing at home. But foreign authors were not extended the same protection, so a great piracy fattened the profits of American publishers who took the latest Scott or Dickens novel, which sold for $5 in London but might be peddled in Poughkeepsie for $2 or less. In the scramble, a cheap Dickens novel squeezed out an expensive, copyrighted romance by John Pendleton Kennedy, or, more to the point, Kennedy was obliged to take a profit near to that of Dickens in America, that is, none. The most famous of American authors, like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, could ride above the storm, but the more marginal could be driven to the wall. To remedy this situation, lobbies converged on Washington: the large one of the publishers and the small one of the authors appeared, while the public, which benefited from such systematic cheapness, looked on with indifference or a preference for the present order. Various Southern writers and politicians were interested in the problem. As Harriet Martineau reported to Lord Brougham in 1836, ‘‘Mr. Webster and Col. Preston moved for a copyright law in the Senate the winter I was at Wash82. Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, 13 March 1789, quoted in Douglas L. Wilson, ‘‘Jefferson and the Republic of Letters,’’ in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 54; Caroline Lee Hentz to J. Tomlin, 1 June 1843, C. E. French Collection, MassHS; ‘‘Dickens’ American Notes,’’ 172; Carry to James Shoolbred Gibbes, 8 May 1841, James Shoolbred Gibbes Correspondence, Charleston Library Society, Charleston, S.C.

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ington [1835–37].’’ Henry Clay introduced four bills between 1837 and 1842, all unsuccessful. Kennedy chaired a House committee in 1842, to which Dickens had directed his lobbying.83 Lieber was active in pressing Clay and Preston in 1839 and writing in 1840 a pamphlet, cast as a letter to Preston.84 John M. Berrien of Georgia, on the other hand, helped to kill Clay’s measure in 1842,85 and many Southerners were affected by the arguments that were to defeat international copyright. These were that the public was served well by getting its literature cheaply rather than expensively, that the publishing trade employed many workers who would suffer if copyright enforcement contracted business, and that no true-blooded American would want to line the pockets of the condescending British, anyway.86 Moreover, in the landmark Supreme Court decision of Wheaton v. Peters of 1834, American law had ruled that an author’s interests were only protectable so far as they did not conflict with the public interest, that when it came to ‘‘instruction or entertainment,’’ the individual’s copyright was inferior to society’s need for the free circulation of ‘‘the ideas it [a book] communicates.’’ 87 Simms entered this argument with conflicted motives. He had extensive links with New York publishers, he was anxious to elevate the profession of authorship, he was Anglophobic, and he was one of the marginal American authors whom the Depression of 1837 had severely hit. He joined the Copyright Club, an association lobbying for a new law, which was presided over by William Cullen Bryant and whose committee included Evert Duyckinck, Simms’s old friend.88 In 1844, Simms published four articles on copyright in the Southern Literary Messenger, ostensibly as letters to his congressman, Isaac Holmes. As a practical intervention, this was missing the boat, which had foundered a year or more earlier. But Simms’s letters provide an acute insight 83. James J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815–1854 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 60, 62–71, 76–77. 84. See Henry Clay to FL, 19 June, 28 December 1839, and WCP to FL, 8 April 1840, FL Papers, HEH; FL, On International Copyright, in a Letter to the Hon. William C. Preston (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1840). Preston himself seems to have wavered in his commitment: ‘‘My support for copyright has been staggered by reading an essay by Augustin Charles Revanand [?] of Paris in the American [ . . . ?] for October 1839, which agrees with Kant that an author is entitled to just compensation, ‘but that this can be received only by positive law’ ’’; see WCP to FL, 30 April 1840, FL Papers, HEH. On Kant’s notion of copyright, see David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright (London: Routledge, 1992), 109–15. 85. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians, 77. 86. Philip Holbrook Nicklin, Remarks on Literary Property (Philadelphia: P. H. Nicklin & T. Johnson, 1838), 40, quoted in Saunders, Authorship and Copyright, 160, where it is estimated that 200,000 people were employed by the American book-publishing industry, a fourth of whose business involved reprinting of uncopyrighted foreign books. 87. Quoted in Saunders, Authorship and Copyright, 152. 88. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians, 78.

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into how he saw the matter of authorship. Indeed the letters are, in some ways, his most considered history of American literature. The letters were fiercely nationalistic, anxious to foster American literature and diminish the influence of foreign ideas, especially the British: ‘‘A people, who receive their Literature exclusively from a foreign land, are, in fact, if not in form, essentially governed from abroad.’’ Only in recent decades had American literature awakened to itself, despite the handicap of sharing a language with perfidious Albion: ‘‘The enemy approaches us with the smooth and insidious utterance of our mother tongue, and we are naturally slow to suspect hostility in any such approach.’’ 89 Insofar as Simms thought a foreign literature relevant to the American experience, it was the German to which he pointed, for the sake of its recent liberation from French intellectual tyranny. He pointedly quoted passages from Johann Georg Zimmerman on the value of shedding that infatuation with the alien which created ignorance of the indigenous.90 Further, Simms was adamant about the vices of literary amateurism and the merits of the professional. He spoke scathingly of ‘‘the Sackvilles, the Rochesters, the Carews, the Sucklings, et id omne genus—the tribe of clever gentlemen about town,’’ who were so feeble compared to the dedicated writers, Shakespeare, Jonson, Pope, Dryden, Johnson. Until 1834, he argued, American literature was the domain of such literary amateurs, who wrote ‘‘at leisure hours, as a relief from other labors, or while preparing himself for other avocations,’’ men who were content to publish small editions at their own expense or for ‘‘a trifling gratuity.’’ Briefly, Simms thought, American literature had struggled into hopeful life, only to be stunted by the cheap foreign reprints and the self-interest of American publishers, which ‘‘would seem to lie in discouraging as far as possible, the pretensions of the native author.’’ So he described a betrayal, for he imagined that it had been the rise of American literature which had created a taste for reading in the American public, which in turn had been improperly directed into a taste for cheap foreign books: ‘‘It is the influence and the example of the native intellect that creates a demand for the foreign.’’ 91 Simms was painstakingly acquainted with the economic facts of American publishing and his letters were (and are) a good introduction to how things then worked: the prices in London and Philadelphia, the different kinds of paper and binding, the techniques of stereotyping, the size of editions, and 89. WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law’’ (January 1844): 7, 9. 90. Simms was quoting from Zimmerman’s essay on national pride, Von dem Nationalstolz (1758), composed during the Seven Years War and translated into English in the late eighteenth century. 91. WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law’’ (January 1844): 13; WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law,’’ SLM 10 (March 1844): 137, 140, 142.

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the significance of these conditions for the parties involved, the English author and publisher, the American writer and book trade, the bookseller, and the reader. Indeed, he seems to have regarded his letters as a contribution to ‘‘the trading history of Letters in this country.’’ 92 But, mostly, he wanted to reform a system that he regarded as hurtful to everyone but the American publisher, and that perhaps damaged even him. By this status quo, the American reader lost a native literature and was corrupted by the alien, the American author lost a living, the foreigner lost an income. As bad, eyes were damaged and taste corrupted by cheap paper and microscopic print. Simms was much conflicted that he was arguing British authors should be paid American money and, further, that international copyright would serve as protectionism for an American domestic industry. For he was an energetic free trader and an Anglophobe, so this combination caused him no little difficulty. ‘‘The word ‘protection’ here is not that sort of protection which the manufacturer desires,’’ he ventured. ‘‘While the latter would exclude foreign goods, or only admit of their entry upon hard conditions, it is the prayer of the American author, that his foreign competitor should be put on the very same footing with himself—should come into the market free of duty—on the same terms with the native,—the latter asking nothing more than a fair field and no favor.’’ In truth, however, he was staking his case upon something that transcended nationality, even society. ‘‘It is an error to say, or to suppose that the object of Government is the greatest good of the greatest number,’’ he asserted against the Utilitarians. ‘‘Were this so, no man would enter society at all. Society would be fatal to his individuality.’’ No, government’s only object was ‘‘the security of the individual man.’’ Without this principle, the large would always prey upon the small, the majority upon the minority: ‘‘It is individual life and property which needs and claims protection.’’ And copyright was, for the author, what the legal guarantees of property were for the citizen, the participant in the social compact: ‘‘His right is based upon the peculiar and personal labor and skill by which his books have been made. They are emphatically his works. They are not yours.’’ 93 In this, Simms was driving away the view of the author, as just one artisan among many, which had been current in early modern Europe. A German lexicon in 1753, for example, had defined a book as a physical object: ‘‘Many people work on this ware before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the papermaker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the book-binder, sometimes even the gilder and the brass-worker, etc. Thus many mouths are 92. WGS to Thomas Caute Reynolds, 26 January 1844, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 1:398. 93. WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law,’’ SLM 10 (August 1844): 461, 454, 455.

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fed by this branch of manufacture.’’ 94 Simms was dismissive of this demeaning, cooperative vision. ‘‘Nobody understands the type metal, the printer’s ink, or manufacturer’s paper, white or brown, though brought together in active, mechanical combination, as meaning the book or the book-maker. . . . These are all so many agents, merely, which the book summons into existence.’’ Rather, the book was ‘‘a work compounded of consistent ideas, harmonizing to a preconceived conclusion;—not a thought, but a building made up of thoughts—a structure betraying quite as much design as the cathedral or the castle—employing quite as much time in the erection—frequently impoverishing, and sometimes destroying the very life of the builder.’’ For Simms, as for many who sympathized in the Romantic project, The right of the author to the property in his productions, so far from being questionable, is really superior to that of all other producers. His works depend less upon extraneous assistance. They do not result from the application of his industry to physical substances—such as ores, lands, clay or lumber—things, which in the possession of any artist, may be fashioned into peculiar forms, showing the hands of the maker, and which he thus converts into a means of profit. He is, under God, their sole creator, almost without agent or implement of any sort. They spring at his bidding from sources of which no man may obtain the control—of which no man suspects the abundance. The fountain of their being is in himself—never was, and never could be, in the possession of any but himself, of which no man can have been despoiled—of the very existence of which none but himself has any knowledge. He is as peculiarly the thing he makes as the spider is of his web of gossamer; spinning from his brains and his sensibilities, as the latter from his bowels, the structure which he endows and inhabits. Thus then, above, we find him the sole proprietor. So, to add to the ordinary rights of property and ‘‘the author’s inherent right to the productions of his own pen and intellect,’’ there was the further consideration that this property-owner was a demigod of originality.95 These arguments were a powerful mix. Simms was a Jacksonian democrat,96 and he appealed to the logic of the age, by speaking of the rights of 94. Allgemeines Oeconomisches Lexicon (1763), 442, quoted in Martha Woodmansee, ‘‘On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,’’ in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriations in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 15–16. 95. WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law,’’ SLM 10 (June 1844): 344; WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law’’ (August 1844): 456, 459. 96. ‘‘I am a Democrat of the Jackson School, a State rights man, opposed to Tariffs, Banks,

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property, the compulsions and benefits of competition and struggle, the suspicion of the Old World and the intoxicating promise of the New. Above all, he made society and government into the creature of the acquisitive, possessive individual. But this individual was an author, a mystical original, a thing ‘‘above,’’ a little less than God but more than man. He was the alchemist, who may ‘‘convert his genius and industry into a means of support.’’ Of his intellectual property, ‘‘He is its creator, and he sends it abroad, even as God sends light, and air, and sunshine, for the benefit and the blessing of mankind.’’ 97 Such contentions were further than many in the South were willing to go. A Southern Quarterly Review reviewer of Francis Lieber’s pamphlet on copyright was sympathetic to some of Simms’s case, if less enthusiastic about Germans, especially this German. It was often said, the reviewer correctly surmised, that no one could own an idea: ‘‘the mind is spirit, not matter, and thoughts are spiritual, intangible, uncontrollable, outgoing, and spreading every where, without limit, and we cannot reach them, grasp them or bind them down to any single spot of earth, as we can our lands and negroes and merchandize, and say, This is our property, or any man’s property, and it is not lawful to touch it.’’ Still, even so, though all this be true, the spirituality of thought was daily controlled, ‘‘appropriated and bound down in books, till it becomes tangible and material property . . . and when it is done, the author has, or ought to have, as complete property in the books which he has produced . . . as the day-laborer, who works with his hands, has, or ought to have, in the wages of his labour, as complete a property as any man has, in the house he lives in, and for which he has paid down the last fraction.’’ 98 This was helpful for the likes of Simms, but insufficiently rapt. Simms was not, in his own view, a day-laborer, but a Prometheus entitled to a decent living for bringing fire from heaven. Simms always felt that, in these matters, he was solitary in the South for standing up for the dignity of the profession of letters. That it should be ‘‘dignified’’ mattered much to him, for his Romanticism was never Bohemian. He once counseled Poe ‘‘to cast away those pleasures which are not worthy of your mind, and to trample those temptations underfoot, which degrade your person, and make it familiar to the mouth of vulgar jest.’’ 99 But, in general, Simms thought the Southern case was but an exaggeration of the national Internal improvements, American Systems, Fancy Rail Roads, Floats, Land Companies, and every Humbug East or West, whether of cant or cunning. I believe in the people, and prefer trusting their impulses, than the craft, the cupidity & the selfishness of trades & Whiggery.’’ WGS to James Lawson, 29 December 1839, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 1:167. 97. WGS, ‘‘International Copyright Law’’ (June 1844): 344, 345. 98. ‘‘Critical Notices—Lieber on International Copyright,’’ SQR 1 ( January 1842): 255. 99. WGS to Edgar Allan Poe, 30 July 1846, in Oliphant et al., Simms Letters, 2:175.

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situation. In an earlier piece on copyright, he had observed that Charleston was little concerned in these problems: ‘‘She constitutes a small portion of the American book-reading public. We have no great publishing houses here, and but few authors. Newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets make up our principal literature.’’ 100 By authors, he meant professionals. When he put together The Charleston Book in 1845, an anthology of his city’s writers, his introduction expressed sentiments that elsewhere had been more bluntly condemnations: ‘‘The sources of this compilation are not those of professional authorship. The writers of the South are persons, generally, of other professions and pursuits. What is done, among us, in a literary point of view, is the work of the amateur, a labor of stealth or recreation, employed as relief from other tasks and duties.’’ 101 Nonetheless, many of the arguments deployed in the copyright debate were transferable from the Anglo-American cultural controversy to the dispute between Northern and Southern society. The South too felt itself flooded by the cheap imprints of an alien culture, thought its nativity stunted, and imagined its originalities were denied. Simms moved from one argument to the next, from London as the enemy, to New York, while scarcely missing a beat. The problem might affect all generations, but those who were thought to be most vulnerable were schoolchildren. (The antebellum South lived in the age which began to trouble itself about the culture of children.) In 1842, in the midst of the copyright controversy, the Southern Quarterly Review regretted that so many books used in Southern schools came from the North, ‘‘containing not only inuendoes, but oftentimes open declamation against the South and Southern institutions.’’ Spelling books, reading books, rhetorical manuals, all must be policed, for the young mind was easily swayed: ‘‘When arrived at maturity, we care not how much they read and hear from those opposed to our peculiar institutions, because we feel confident that no one can be raised upon the soil of the South, without being conscious, that such institutions are essential and highly beneficent, but with children the case is very different.’’ 102 Calvin Wiley climbed opportunistically upon this bandwagon in the decade—the 1850s—which grew most interested in the venture of censoring the alien and promoting the indigenous.103 ‘‘It is my purpose to make a series of 100. WGS, ‘‘International Copyright,’’ SQR 4 (July 1843): 1–46. The attribution for this article is conjectural: WGS, ‘‘Cornelius Mathews,’’ 307, observes, ‘‘His [Mathews] papers ‘on Copyright,’ and his ‘Poems on Man,’ have both been the subject of our elaborate consideration.’’ Mathews is discussed in this article. But, of course, ‘‘we’’ might mean the review, not the author. 101. ‘‘Advertisement,’ in WGS, Charleston Book, iii. 102. ‘‘Critical Notices—School Books,’’ SQR 1 (January 1842): 265. 103. But cf. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, In-

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Southern readers,’’ he announced in 1851. In the same year, Simms and then John R. Thompson gave serious thought to an anthology of Southern literature; the latter sought Kennedy’s advice on the matter.104 In 1852, De Bow’s Review published an article that passionately advocated the marginalization of textbooks that ‘‘originate in the North’’ and the substitution of publications that reflected ‘‘southern life, habits, thoughts and aims.’’ 105 By 1853, Southern commercial conventions began to have similar opinions, which became a piety by the late 1850s.106 Some of this resentment was the bitterness of those who disliked competition. When the Southern Literary Messenger was in one of its sloughs in 1850, Thompson grumbled to Taveau on this score, that the death of the Messenger would be a blow to ‘‘Southern pride.’’ ‘‘The Messenger was started by Virginia enterprise and has ever since been upheld by Virginia labour. No imported New Englanders have ever conducted it, appealing to the South, as a Yankee speculation.’’ This was a slur on Whitaker as editor of the Southern Quarterly Review. Rather, it had been run by ‘‘men born under a Southern sky, and zealously defending the rights and institutions of our section of the Union.’’ Should not Southerners rally to save it, ‘‘while thousands of dollars are sent by Southern men to pay Northern magazines to abuse them’’? 107 Such animosities or hopes led to some action, but not much. The facts of publishing were stubborn. When a Southern author wished to publish a book, juvenile or adult, a Northern publisher was usually the better of two bad choices. This was not because the author usually made more money in the North, but because on balance a book published outside the South reached more readers, perhaps even in the South. As Holmes put it, ‘‘the Northern Publishers either take all the profits to themselves or suffer none to be made— and the Southern Publishers are without the machinery for pushing their publications into market.’’ So one could publish in the North, have more readers, and be indigent, or one could publish in the South, have fewer readers, and still be indigent. Vanity tended to dictate the former option, even if patriotended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1845), 416; this is a reprint of an essay first published in 1841. 104. Calvin H. Wiley to MAC, 28 October 1851, MAC Papers, SHC; JPK to JRT, 15 June 1851, JPK Papers, PLB. 105. ‘‘Southern School-Books,’’ DBR 13 (September 1852): 259, 260. The article in unattributed, but reads like Wiley. 106. ‘‘Southern Authors—School Books and Presses,’’ DBR 21 (November 1856): 519–23 (ref. to 1853 Charleston convention on p. 522). See also ‘‘Southern School Books,’’ DBR 25 ( July 1858): 117–18. 107. JRT to ALT, 11 May 1850, ALT Mss, DU.

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tism might urge the latter. (Vanity is usually the stronger force for an author.) In the choice of Northern venues, Boston was least common, not only for its abolitionist tendencies, but for its introspection. When Charles Campbell was thinking in 1839 about publishing an edition of Theodorick Bland’s papers, he asked the advice of Jared Sparks of Harvard College, who answered that Harper Brothers in New York and Carey & Lea of Philadelphia were the most active publishers. ‘‘If you will write to them, stating the character and probable extent of the work, they will doubtless inform you on what terms they will publish it. There is much publishing done in Boston, but as the sale of this book will be principally at the South, it is probable that better terms will be offered in Philadelphia or New York.’’ 108 New York was the greater publishing center. Simms preferred it to such an extent that he became a morethan-honorary member of its literary set—there were not many New Yorkers in New York—to the extent of sharing their animosity towards Boston.109 But Philadelphia was the more sympathetic to Southerners. Only the most marketable of writers could expect even mildly favorable terms. For a book in which they had some confidence, publishers might agree to share the profits. This was the case with John Pendleton Kennedy’s 1832 agreement with Henry C. Carey, which called for an edition of 2,000 copies of Swallow Barn. By February 1833, Carey had sold 1,424 copies in the United States, while 70 were on consignment abroad, 25 had been given to editors, 2 sent to London, and 479 were unsold. Revenues came to $1,867.02. It had cost $1,245.14 to print the 2,000 copies, so the profits then were $601.88. Kennedy was entitled to half, that is, to just over $300. By 1835 and Horse Shoe Robinson, he had advanced to an outright payment of $1,200 and an edition of 3,000, which he thought ‘‘a small sum considering its success.’’ By 1839 and Rob of the Bowl, he was getting $1,850. Less favorably, in the same year Simms got $1,000 from Lea & Blanchard of Philadelphia for an edition of 3,000 copies of the Damsel of Darien. But many made little or nothing. When Henry Augustine Washington was directed with a letter of introduction towards Harper and Brothers, his correspondent observed: ‘‘With the Harpers (alias sharpers, alias harpies) I wish you a successful & advantageous arrangement. It is however what has fallen to the lot of few.’’ 110 108. GFH to John B. Floyd, 20 April 1850, GFH Papers, WM; Jared Sparks to CC, 10 September 1839, CC Papers, WM. 109. Edd Winfield Parks, William Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961), 5. On this, see also Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), and Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginning of Our Own Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 110. Henry C. Carey to JPK, 8 February 1833, and entries for 26 September 1835, 17 December 1839, JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB; WGS to James Lawson, 3 January 1839, in Oliphant

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The great exceptions to the rule of poverty were some of the lady novelists of the South, who often did nicely. It was an empirical fact, which famously irritated men like Hawthorne and Simms, that women came to engross more and more of the landscape of fiction, from about a third of it before 1830, to half in the 1850s, to three-quarters in the 1870s. E. D. E. N. Southworth, who was born in Alexandria, Virginia, grew up in Maryland, and lived mostly in the District of Columbia in her antebellum writing years, was preeminently successful, not only among Southerners but all American writers. Her fiction was sensational but accomplished, full of ‘‘multiple mysteries, innumerable coincidences, and moments of suspense,’’ and so popular that she earned, at her peak, about $10,000 a year. Augusta Evans’s Beulah (1859) sold 22,000 copies in its first nine months. Caroline Lee Hentz’s Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850) had thirteen editions in three years. And others did well, writers like Caroline Gilman, Maria McIntosh, and Mary Virginia Terhune.111 Below the likes of Southworth, below the lesser likes of Simms, things were tougher. And the descent depended much upon one’s genre. Novelists were best off, travel writers got by, scholars fared badly, and poets (on the whole) were lost souls. As Jared Sparks believed, publishers acted ‘‘on no particular rules’’ and drove ‘‘hard bargains.’’ So Augustin Louis Taveau contracted with James Munroe of Boston in 1854 that the latter would publish The Magic Word in an edition of 1,000 copies, for which the former would pay on its day of publication half of the expenses, estimated to be $271.60. Munroe undertook thereafter to pay the author for half of all the copies sold ‘‘at the rate of one third discount from the retail price,’’ and assign the copyright to Taveau. William Henry Trescot was put heavily into debt by the publication of his Diplomatic History of the Administrations of Washington and Adams (1857), which was done by Little, Brown of Boston. Paul Hamilton Hayne published his Sonnets in 1857 with Harper & Calvo of Charleston; these were printed at his own expense, in an edition of 300, of which he still had 100 copies in his library in 1859.112 et al., Simms Letters, 1:139; M. I. Smead to Henry Augustine Washington, undated, Henry A. Washington Papers, WM. 111. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 2, 51–52; Elizabeth FoxGenovese, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Beulah, by Augusta Jane Evans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), xiv; Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 11. 112. Jared Sparks to CC, 25 February 1846, CC Papers, WM; memorandum of agreement between ALT and James Munroe & Company, 24 November 1854, ALT Papers, DU; Robert Nicholas Olsberg, ‘‘A Government of Class and Race: William Henry Trescot and the South Carolina Chivalry, 1860–1865’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1972), ix; PHH to Richard Stoddard, 28 August 1859, PHH Mss, DU.

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Image Not Available

Washington Allston, The Poor Author and the Rich Bookseller (Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, bequest of Charles Sprague Sargent, reproduced with permission, © 2002 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, all rights reserved)

The alternative was to collect subscribers, who paid for the book in advance, a practice that went far back in publishing history. Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1794), for example, was published in England by this method and among its original 321 subscribers was the young Thomas Cooper, then of Manchester. This was a system that warred with gentlemanly instincts even as it called upon the network of gentlemen. Charles Campbell, for one, found the process distasteful: ‘‘The soliciting [of ] subscribers, presents one

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rather too much in forma pauperis before the public.’’ John Wesley Monette of Mississippi, publishing his History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi (1846) with Harpers, found it not only disgruntling but exhausting. He had not only to write the book—no small labor or expense— but collect the names of the subscribers, write and print a circular, prepare notices for newspapers and periodicals, distribute them, send copies to his publishers (not the other way around), travel to New York to superintend the printing and proofreading, and employ an agent to peddle the book (who seems to have run off with some of the money). For the absence of these services, Harpers received half the book’s profits, and neglected to keep track of what ought to have been paid to Monette from both the first and second editions. Still, the practice of subscription was common enough. It was, in its own way, the last faint, cheap vestige of aristocratic patronage, for subscribers could flatter themselves that, by laying down two or three dollars, they were advancing the cause of literature. This language of patronage was explicit. ‘‘I should feel highly gratified to know that you approve the work when complete,’’ John Wesley Monette told a subscriber for his book, ‘‘& will give it your patronage & influence to assist its circulation in the west.’’ 113 Similarly, editorials were often addressed to the ‘‘patrons’’ of a journal.114 Robert Young Hayne, in drumming up support for the Southern Review, could write, as he did to Tazewell and Edward Everett, that the venture stood ‘‘in need of further patronage.’’ So readers drifted between the old world of aristocratic obligation and the new one of bourgeois consumption. William Elliott expressed this conundrum when, in his 1829 review of Anne of Geierstein, he spoke of readers as simultaneously ‘‘patrons and consumers.’’ 115 A few border-state authors like Kennedy published exclusively in the North. His earliest book came out in Philadelphia: Swallow Barn (1832) and Horse Shoe Robinson (1835) with Carey and Lea; Rob of the Bowl (1838) with Carey, Lea and Blanchard; Quodlibet (1840) with Lea & Blanchard. Those which had a second edition came later from G. P. Putnam of New York. But the record of 113. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, edited, with an introduction, by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), xv; Jared Sparks to CC, 10 September 1839, CC Papers, WM; CC to HBG, 19 January 1859, HBG Papers, VHS; John Wesley Monette to Harper & Brothers, 27 September, 25 April 1845; Monette to C. C. Preston, 27 February 1846; Monette to Rev. Charles Elliott, 27 September 1845, all in John Wesley Monette Papers, MDAH. 114. For example, ‘‘To the Patrons,’’ 1; ‘‘To the Friends and Patrons of the Review,’’ SQR n.s. 10 (October 1854): 1; ‘‘Address to the Patrons of the Messenger,’’ SLM 9 (August 1843): 449; ‘‘The Editor to His Patrons,’’ SLM 13 (November 1847): 641. 115. Robert Young Hayne to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 4 August 1829, Littleton Waller Tazewell Papers, DU; Robert Young Hayne to Edward Everett, 4 August 1829, Edward Everett Papers, MassHS; William Elliott, ‘‘Anne of Geierstein,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 518.

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others is very eclectic. Simms’s first books had Charleston imprints, then in the 1830s he mostly used Harpers of New York, with the odd foray to Philadelphia, which became a more marked preference in the late 1830s and early 1840s. But the retrenchments in publishing led him back to Charleston before he resumed relations in New York and settled in the 1850s, with some consistency, upon J. S. Redfield. This was something of a pattern for novelists; in good times, they went North, in bad they stayed closer to home. Caruthers used Harpers for The Kentuckian in New York (1834) and The Cavaliers of Virginia (1835), but The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe (1845) was done by Charles Yancey of Wetumpka, Alabama. Other kinds of authors, with less hope of popularity, wandered hither and yon. John Taylor, in the 1790s, had used Philadelphia publishers, but his later works were done more locally, in Petersburg, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. George Tucker’s Letters from Virginia (1816) was done in Baltimore; the Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals and National Policy (1822) in Georgetown, D.C.; The Valley of the Shenandoah (1824) and A Voyage to the Moon (1827) in New York; The Law of Wages, Profits and Rent Investigated (1837), the Life of Thomas Jefferson (1837), and his History of the United States (1856–58) in Philadelphia; and the Theory of Money and Banks Investigated (1839) in Boston. Thomas Dew’s Lectures on the Restrictive System (1829) was issued by Samuel Shepherd of Richmond, his 1832 pamphlet on slavery by Thomas White in the same city, but the posthumous Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations (1853) was by Appleton’s of New York. Thomas Grimké used Hezekiah Howe of New Haven. David Ramsay’s history of South Carolina (1809) used a Charleston publisher, while his History of the United States (1816–17) and the Universal History Americanized (1819) was published in Philadelphia and the 1807 life of Washington in New York. Caroline Gilman preferred New York, while her husband went to Boston. Louisa McCord gave her poetry to Philadelphia and her drama to New York. Caroline Lee Hentz was mostly inclined towards Philadelphia, with one early venture in Cincinnati, while Augusta Evans published in New York until the war led her to take Macaria (1864) to Richmond. Gayarré’s early French writings were published in New Orleans, but his later historical works in English were done mostly in New York. Just to confuse the issue further, many books were published simultaneously in different cities by different presses, though the first named indicated the originating publisher. So Hugh Legaré’s Writings (1845–46) was published by Burges and James of Charleston, but also by Thomas and Cowperthwait of Philadelphia, Appleton of New York, and James Munroe of Boston.116 In general, unsurprisingly, the more local the topic, the more likely an 116. On this, see Bruccoli, Profession of Authorship, 40–44.

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author was to resort to a local publisher. But what defined ‘‘local’’ was often idiosyncratic, since some local topics were thought to transcend locality. Simms published his History of South Carolina in Charleston, but Campbell his History of Virginia in New York. Simms was by far the more notable figure, but South Carolina occupied a more provincial place in the national imagination than the Mother of Presidents. Many random considerations also affected the choice of a publisher. Grimké’s liking for New Haven was, no doubt, a legacy of his days as a Yale undergraduate, just as Samuel Gilman, the Harvard man, lent to Boston. George Tucker ended with Philadelphia publishers, because he moved there. Those who went north to read proofs naturally preferred Philadelphia or New York to Boston, because it was a shorter and cheaper journey. Caruthers’s Alabama publisher was a transplanted Virginian, originally from Petersburg, and Caruthers too was a Virginian.117 Much depended on chance knowledge, friends, stray meetings, fleeting reputations. How far social ideology structured the access of Southern authors to Northern publication or determined them to refuse the opportunity is unclear. In the early days of American publishing, in Parson Weems’s day, the Southern market was of great consequence, especially for Philadelphia publishers, who treated the South with consideration. Even as late as 1845, a publisher in Philadelphia excised antislavery poems from a collected edition of Longfellow, lest the South be offended. But the depression of 1837 had hurt the South badly, led to the cancellation of many debts, some of them owed by Southern booksellers to Northern houses. So the latter grew wary. More important than ideology, however, was economics. The development of a railroad system, which reached the Northeast and Midwest with more efficiency than the South, deepened a growing sense that the Southern market was dispensable, that one could make very tidy sums of money without it. In 1856, Ticknor and Fields sold $22,203 worth of books to the Northwest, but only $5,070 to the South.118 The success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, moreover, intimated that anti-Southern books might be a positive advantage on a publisher’s list. This had come as a surprise. A Boston publisher had refused the book, because it was thought it would not sell in the South. It did, of course, precisely for being scandalously hostile. So Putnam’s Magazine was happy to have, as Hayne put it, ‘‘a studied contempt for everything Southern,’’ being safe in the knowledge that it sold more copies in Ohio than in the whole South.119 The Methodist Quarterly Review of 117. Charles Yancey to CC, 27 July 1845, CC Papers, WM. 118. Warren S. Tryon, ‘‘The Publications of Ticknor and Fields in the South, 1840–1865,’’ Journal of Southern History 14 (August 1948): 309, 315. 119. Bruccoli, Profession of Authorship, 300–1; Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum

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New York, while happy enough to publish Holmes when it was edited by John McClintock, changed its tone when the Rev. Daniel Whedon took over and started reprobating Holmes in letters for being proslavery. The connection was only sustained by the stoicism of Holmes and by Whedon’s unwillingness to lose a valuable contributor. ‘‘I abjure you as a Pro-slavery Man, I admire you as a man of genius. . . . I still desire you as a contributor’’ was Whedon’s final verdict. James T. Fields of Boston, as early as 1849, stopped sending review copies to the Southern Literary Messenger. Still, Fields did not stop selling books in the region; indeed these sales increased in the 1850s. When it started selling in 1844, the company sold $49.20 worth of imprints in the South. In 1850, this grew to $992, in 1855 to $5,171, in 1859 to $10,462, before dipping to $9,063 in the year of Lincoln’s election.120 This was healthy growth, just less healthy than elsewhere. What did happen, however, is that the firm screened their lists and tried to remove any possibly offending books from shipments to Southern booksellers. They also wrote soothing letters of oleaginous dishonesty to Southern writers. In 1856 J. B. Morey of Jackson was assured that ‘‘Boston is not as much an abolition city as is New York. . . . If you form your opinions from politicians and political newspapers, you are in a dangerous way. Order a good supply of Ticknor & Co’s books and all will be well.’’ 121 For the most part, though, the more aggressively ‘‘Southern’’ a book was, the less likely it was to be published in the North.122 This was partly a matter of self-selection. A Southern writer who wanted intellectual autarchy was likely to disdain non-Southern readers and Northern publishers. So most proslavery writing was locally published. The proslavery expositions of Thomas Dew, William Harper, Thornton Stringfellow, James Henry Hammond, and George Fitzhugh all were issued by presses in Richmond, Charleston, and Columbia. The two canonical proslavery anthologies, The Pro-Slavery Argument of 1852 and Cotton Is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments of 1860, were issued in Charleston and Augusta, respectively. But the rule was not universal. Lippincott’s of Philadelphia was markedly hospitable to such books; they published Albert Taylor Bledsoe’s Essay on Liberty and Slavery, Henry Hughes’s Treatise on Sociolo, and George Sawyer’s Southern Institutes. This friendliness was, no Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12–14; PHH to Richard Stoddard, 3 October 1856, PHH Mss, DU. 120. Daniel Whedon to GFH, 25 March 1857, cited in Gillespie, Collapse of Orthodoxy, 96–97; Tryon, ‘‘Ticknor and Fields in the South,’’ 309. 121. Ticknor & Fields to J. B. Morey, 24 October 1856, quoted in Tryon, ‘‘Ticknor and Fields in the South,’’ 312. 122. See Richard J. Calhoun, ed., Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 162, on being dropped by a Northern publisher.

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doubt, related to the fact that more than half of Lippincott’s business was in the South and, upon the publisher’s own testimony, came to ‘‘hundreds of thousands of dollars.’’ But there were other Northern hosts: David Christy’s Cotton Is King (1855) was published in Cincinnati, though this was barely in the North. And there was, of course, a not inconsiderable body of proslavery writing by Northerners, as with Nehemiah Adams’s A South-Side View of Slavery (1854), which was published by T. R. Marvin of Boston, and Samuel Seabury’s American Slavery (1861), which came from the Mason Brothers of New York. As late as 1859, Edmund Ruffin, scarcely the most moderate of Southerners, though also not the most worldly, thought it possible that Lippincott’s might publish a projected volume of his: ‘‘I think (as do the poorest writers of the poorest works,) that my matter will make a valuable & interesting book—& that its publication & sale will be a perfectly safe, if not also a profitable operation, to a bookseller having the facilities for circulating & selling his publications—& which no one in the Southern states has.’’ 123 Indeed, one should not make too much of a Northern imprint as evidence of a connection to Northern culture. Often a publisher like Lippincott’s took manuscripts from Southerners and returned them to the South as books, without making a significant connection with Northern readers; in that sense, that Lippincott’s was in Philadelphia might be incidental. This was true even for Ticknor and Company, as it was in 1848, when they published James Legaré’s volume of poems, Orta-Undis, in an edition of 500 copies, which cost the author $105 to subvent. Fifty copies went to Boston, the same to New York, but 300 went to Augusta (Legaré’s home) and Charleston.124 Still, publication in the South made it very difficult to reach Northern readers and so diminished an author’s slim chance for money and fame. Poe saw this, as did John R. Thompson. As the latter remarked, with bitterness, to Rufus W. Griswold in 1851, ‘‘The ‘Scarlet Letter’ hailing from Charleston would have lined portmanteaus.’’ If a Southern Defoe should ‘‘emerge from the pine-barrens of carolina, with a Robinson Crusoe under his arm, he would find an Edmund Curll in every book shop of Northern publication houses,’’ that is, someone to cheat him. A New England Defoe, on the other hand, would do better. ‘‘Why did I. K. Marvel’s Reveries, first and second, excite 123. James Cephas Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books and Publishers (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1884), 387, quoted in Tryon, ‘‘Ticknor and Fields in the South,’’ 307; Edmund Ruffin to CC, 15 June 1859, CC Papers, WM. 124. Tryon, ‘‘Ticknor and Fields in the South,’’ 326–27. In 1900, Alexander Salley came across ‘‘at least a hundred’’ copies of Orta-Undis in a used bookshop in Charleston; he and Yates Snowden ‘‘helped themselves.’’ (Curtis Carroll Davis, That Ambitious Mr. Legaré: The Life of James M. Legaré of South Carolina, Including a Collected Edition of His Verse [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971], 81.)

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no remark when first published in the Messenger? Because the Messenger is Southern and for no other reason in the world. God help us!’’ And Poe, back writing for the Southern Literary Messenger in 1849 and excoriating James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics, was characteristically blunt: ‘‘It is a fashion among Mr. Lowell’s set to affect a belief that there is no such thing as Southern Literature. Northerners—people who have really nothing to speak of as men of letters,—are cited by the dozen and lauded by this candid critic without stint, while Legaré, Simms, Longstreet, and others of equal note are passed by in contemptuous silence. Mr. L. cannot carry his frail honesty of opinion even so far South as New York. All whom he praises are Bostonians. Other writers are barbarians and satirized accordingly—if mentioned at all.’’ Paul Hamilton Hayne fumed in 1856 to Richard Stoddard, when something of his had been rejected by Putnam’s, ‘‘As for Putnam I nurse a very pretty hatred against the entire concern. It began with loud professions of nationality; it ends with abolitionism, & a studied contempt for everything Southern. Pray, is Mr. Geo. Curtis still the Editor? His late tirade against the manners & morale of the Southern people was a piece of antithetical stupidity.’’ 125 On the other hand, Hayne could swing the other way and pine for what at a distance seemed like the literary hospitality of Boston. (Closer up, Thoreau had little reason to feel welcome in Boston, for he had as many unsold copies of his books as Hayne did of his own.) Lowell, Poe’s bête noire, complimented Hayne in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859 and Hayne, disillusioned by the experience of editing Russell’s, rolled over like a young puppy in pleasure and cultural self-deprecation: ‘‘Pray do not think me an unworthy son of the soil that bore me, because I have partially confessed to the justice of your remark in regard to the unliterary character of the Southern People. But ah! Sir, to a young literary aspirant, it is very hard to know that his very profession is looked upon with contempt, or, at best a sort of half-pitying patronage by those he would fain delight, and satisfy. And yet such is the fact, a fact that cannot be denied.’’ 126 Beyond the North, the last possible stop was publication or republication in Britain, France, or Germany. Such European dissemination happened to very few Southerners, and almost all of these were first published in the North, where publishers had established links with the Continent. Though no American publisher was obliged to pay anything to a British publisher for the republication of a British book, many of the former did pay for advance 125. JRT to Rufus W. Griswold, 2 December 1851, in ‘‘17 letters, 1848–1851,’’ JRT Papers, UVA; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘A Fable for Critics,’’ SLM 15 (March 1849): 190–91; PHH to Richard Stoddard, 3 October 1856, PHH Mss, DU. 126. PHH to James Russell Lowell, 28 December 1859, PHH Mss, DU.

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proofs of new works, as a way of beating their American rivals to the act of piracy. Thereby American houses acquired regular links with London, which might express itself in the British reprinting of an American text. Technically, to be eligible for copyright in Britain, an American author had to be physically on British soil at the moment of publication, which needed to be simultaneous in both countries. He or she, therefore, would have to take off for Canada for this purpose, or arrange to be in Britain, or more rarely venture to the British West Indies. With the British reception of American books being often uncertain, this was seldom worth the trouble. Even without this guarantee, indeed because of it, British houses sometimes bought American and Southern books. Kennedy’s Swallow Barn and Horse Shoe Robinson were both reprinted by Richard Bentley of New Burlington Street, who specialized in American authors, having printed Cooper and Irving. (In time, Bentley would handle Melville.) In both of Kennedy’s cases, the legal niceties were not observed. As Bentley regretted to him in 1835, Kennedy had not arranged to have publication in Britain and the United States on the same day, which ‘‘is necessary to secure any copyright here.’’ Bentley was worried that copies might be pirated by others, which would cut down on the London house’s sales. This seemed to prove prescient, at least for Horse Shoe Robinson. ‘‘I regret to say that, owing to the circumstance which you yourself have anticipated,’’ Bentley reported in 1836, ‘‘namely, the anti-Anglican feeling pervading the work, the publication of ‘Horse Shoe Robinson’ in this country has been a total failure, leaving me with a loss of about £150.’’ But, in fact, the book was not such a failure that the London publishing pirates went untempted. In 1847, Kennedy was in Quebec City and came across an unauthorized edition, printed in London in 1845: ‘‘I find it to be wretchedly garbled, and cut down with a view to bring it into the compass required by the publishers. Besides this it abounds in ridiculous typographical errors.’’ Such books found their way even to Baltimore. Brantz Mayer hurriedly told him of this in 1848: ‘‘Do you know that there are rascally publishers who are pirating your Horse Shoe Robinson? You will see a copy in the window of the hut alongside of Taylor’s bookshop, where, with a number of other books, it is offered for sale at a shilling a volume! / The title page professes to come from London. It is, doubtless, a Yankee speculation!’’ 127 Bentley published about six American titles a year. He reprinted Lieber’s On Civil Liberty and Self-Government in 1853, for example. But other London publishers tried their hand, notably John Murray, William Blackwood, 127. Saunders, Authorship and Copyright, 150; Bruccoli, Profession of Authorship, 71–83, 194– 271; Richard Bentley to JPK, 6 February 1836; entry for 11 June 1847, JPK Journal; Brantz Mayer to JPK, 7 January 1848, all in JPK Papers, PLB.

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John Miller, John Chapman, Sampson Low, Henry Bohn, and Routledge, with varying degrees of respect for the pockets of the American author. As in America, there was a cheap market for popular literature, for ‘‘Railway Libraries’’ and the like, and, as in America, it was useful not to pay royalties. Bohn and Routledge were especially culpable, and they grew embroiled in complex litigations with other London publishers.128 A few American publishers had both an American and a London imprint. This carried a number of Southerners across the Atlantic: Caroline Gilman’s Oracles from the Poets (1844), George Henry Calvert’s English translation of the Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe (1845), Simms’s Views and Reviews in American Literature (1846), John James Audubon and John Bachman’s Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1847), Calvert’s Scenes and Thoughts in Europe (1848), Brantz Mayer’s History of the War between Mexico and the United States (1848), all by Wiley & Putnam, with Joseph Glover Baldwin’s Flush Times (1854) done by Appleton. Lippincott did some copublishing with Trubner of Paternoster Row; this accounted for Josiah Nott’s Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857) and his Types of Mankind (8th ed., 1860). But Trubner had alliances with other American publishers. Indeed, one of the rare instances of copublishing that bypassed the North was David Flavel Jamison’s Life and Times of Bertrand Du Guesclin (1864), which Trübner did with John Russell, significantly, during the war. In fact, Jamison’s book was unusually cosmopolitan, since there was also a French translation, published in Paris, Bertrand Du Guesclin et son époque (1866).129 But Jamison was not quite alone in bearing both a Southern and a European imprint. The second edition of Thomas Cooper’s Elements of Political Economy (1831) came from both M’Morris and Wilson of Columbia and Rowland Hunter of London, while Adrien Rouquette’s Les Savanes, poesies Americaines (1841) was done in New Orleans by Alfred Moret and in Paris by Jules Labitte. However, the majority of Southerners published in Europe were picked up from Northern publishers and issued under a single imprint. Carey & Hart did Crockett’s Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834) in Philadelphia and New York, though a reprint was done by John Limbird of London alone. Helper’s Impending Crisis (1860) was issued by A. B. Burdick in New York, but Sampson Low in London. Thomas Cooper’s On the Connection between Geolo and the Pentateuch (1845) was published by James Watson in London and Abner Kneeland in Boston. Further, London publishers handled the following books: Caruthers’s Cavaliers of Virginia (A. K. Newman, 1837), Crock128. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians, 153–76. 129. David Flavel Jamison, Bertrand Du Guesclin et son époque / par D. F. Jamison; traduit de l’anglais par ordre de s. Exec. Le Marichal Comte Radon, Ministre de la Guerre par J. Baissac (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1866).

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ett’s Sketches and Eccentricities (twice, in 1834 from Obadiah Rich and in 1836 from Limbird), De Bow’s Encyclopedia of the Trade and Commerce of the United States (Trubner, 1854), Robert W. Gibbes’s Monograph of the Fossil Squalidae of the United States (A. B. Dulau, 1849), and Caroline Gilman’s Curiosity, Indulgence, and Affectation (Edward Lacey, 1844). At least a dozen of the historical novels of Joseph Ingraham were published in London,130 one edition of Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) and three of Horse-Shoe Robinson and Rob of the Bowl, respectively,131 Lieber’s Manual of Political Ethics (W. Smith, 1839) and On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (Richard Bentley, 1853), Henry Nott’s Thomas Singularity (Simpkin, Marshall, 1835), about nine or so of Simms’s novels,132 several of Southworth’s,133 Wirt’s British Spy (Sharp and Hailes, 1812), Allston’s Monaldi (Edward Moxon, 1842), Wiley’s Adventures of Old Dan Tucker (Willoughby, n.d.), and George Tucker’s Life of Thomas Jefferson (C. Knight, 1837). In London, Brantz Mayer’s Captain Canot (1855) was done by Routledge; later in Paris it was picked up from the second edition by Amyot as Capitaine Canot: vingt années de la vie d’un negrier (1860). Almost singular in its method of trans130. Captain Kyd; Or, the Wizard of the Sea. A Romance (London: T. L. Holt, 1839); The Pirate: Or, Lafitte or the Gulf of Mexico (London: T. L. Holt, 1839); The Quadroone; Or, St. Michael’s Day (London: Richard Bentley, 1840); The Throne of David; from the Consecration of the Shepherd of Bethlehem, to the Rebellion of Prince Absalom, new ed. (London: Routledge & Sons, 1840); Captain Kyd the Buccanier; Or, the Wizard of the Sea. A Romance (London: A. K. Newman, 1840); Quebec and New York, Or, the Three Beauties. An Historical Romance of 1775, 2d ed. (London: A. K. Newman, 1843); The Steel Belt: Or, the Three Masted Schooner (Glasgow and London: Cameron and Ferguson, 1844); Captain Kyd: Or, the Wizard of the Sea. A Romance (London: J. S. Pratt, 1846); The Dancing Feather, Or, the Amateur Freebooters to Which Is Added the Scarlet Feather (London: J. S. Pratt, 1849); Nobody’s Son; Or, the Life and Adventures of Percival Mayberry (London: R. Bentley, 1851); The Pillar of Fire: Or, Israel in Bondage (London: Gall and Inglis, 1859); Pillar of Fire: Or, Israel in Bondage (London: Routledge & Sons, 1859). 131. Swallow Barn; Or, a Sojourn in Virginia. An American Tale (London: A. K. Newman, 1832); Horse-Shoe Robinson (London: T. L. Holt, 1839); Horse-Shoe Robinson (London: J. Cunningham, 1839); Horse-Shoe Robinson (London: J. S. Pratt, 1845); Rob of the Bowl, a Romance of the Days of Charles II (London: R. Bentley, 1839); Rob of the Bowl: A Romance (London: J. Clements, 1839); Rob of the Bowl; a Romance (London: T. L. Holt, 1839). See also On the Probable Operation and Effect of the Repeal of the Duties on Foreign Corn to the Manufacturing Operatives, the Agricultural Labourers, Farmers, and Landlords of the United Kingdom (London: R. & T. Lee, 1840). 132. The Tri-color; Or, the Three Days of Blood, in Paris (London: Wigfall & Davis, 1830); Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal (London: J. Limbird, 1834); Guy Rivers, the Outlaw. A Tale of Georgia (London: J. Clements, 1841); Confession, Or, the Blind Heart: A Domestic Story (London: J. Cunningham, 1841); Beauchampe: Or, the Kentucky Tragedy (London: N. Bruce, 1842); The Yemassee. A Romance of Carolina (London: N. Bruce, 1842); Beauchampe: Or, the Kentucky Tragedy. A Tale of Passion (London: Bruce and Wyld, 1843); The Damsel of Darien. A Tale of the Early Conquest of Peru (London: N. Bruce, 1843); Views and Reviews in American Literature: History and Fiction (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846); The Wigwam and the Cabin (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1846). 133. The Curse of Clifton: A Tale of Expiation and Redemption (London: Clarke, Beeton, 1852); The Lost Heiress (London: Milner, 1854); Old Neighbourhoods and New Settlements (London: C. H. Clarke, 1853).

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mission, however, was James Warley Miles’s Philosophic Theolo, which was first published by Russell in Charleston in 1849. James Johnston Pettigrew, Miles’s friend, took a copy with him to Berlin and gave it to the theologian, Johann Neander. Impressed with it, Neander arranged for a German translation, which appeared in Leipzig in 1850 as the Philosophische Theologie.134 In a somewhat different category were those Southerners who were expatriate and dealt directly with European publishers. Washington Allston’s Sylph of the Seasons (1813) was published by W. Pople of London during one of the painter’s English sojourns. The same was true of John Izard Middleton’s Grecian Remains in Italy (1812), issued in London by Edward Orme. Henry Lee’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1837), as a variant on Anglo-American copublishing, was published in London by Boone and in Paris by Galignani, when Lee was living in disreputable exile. Adrien Rouquette arranged the Parisian publication of Les savanes during one of his Parisian stays, while his brother Dominique did likewise with his own verse, Meschacebeenes, poèsies, which came from the Librairie de Sauvignat in 1839.135 Thomas Smyth did several books in Edinburgh and Glasgow, arranged on his frequent visits.136 On a smaller scale, several of Thornwell’s essays for the Southern Presbyterian Review were republished in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, as he was pleased to discover on a visit to Scotland in 1860.137 However, only a few Southern authors might be said to have ascended, or descended, to cosmopolitan standing and reached beyond two cultures. In the earliest generation, there had been David Ramsay, who of all Southern authors probably reached the furthest. Most of his books were published in London, even his Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay (1815). But the History of the American Revolution was also pirated in Dublin, and published in Dutch and German translations, in Campen and Berlin, both in multivolume editions.138 His History of the Revolution of South Carolina was translated 134. On this, see Ralph Luker, A Southern Tradition in Theolo and Social Criticism, 1830–1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Warley Miles, William Porcher DuBose and Edgar Gardner Murphy (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), 47–49. The full title was JWM, Philosophische Theologie, oder die Letzen Grunde Alles Religiosen Glaubens in der Vernunft Beruhend, trans. W. A. Lampadius (Leipzig: Friedrich Brandstetter, 1850). 135. Dagmar Renshaw Lebreton, Chahta-Ima: The Life of Adrien-Emmanuel Rouquette (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), 86, 122, 123. 136. The Exodus of the Church of Scotland: And the Claims of the Free Church of Scotland to the Sympathy and Assistance of American Christians, 2d ed. (New York and London: Leavitt, Trow; Wiley & Putnam, 1844); Presbytery and Not Prelacy: The Scriptural and Primitive Polity, Proved from the Testimonies of Scripture (Glasgow: William Collins, 1844); Union to Christ, and to His Church: Or, the Duty and Privilege of All to Believe in Christ, to Confess Christ, and to Become Communing Members of the Church of Christ (Edinburgh and Glasgow: W. P. Kennedy; D. Bryce, 1846). 137. JHT to General James Gillespie, 21 July 1860, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 454. 138. Geschiedenis Van de Noord Amerikaansche Staatssomwenteling, 4 vols. (Campen: Drukkerye

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into French in 1796 by no less a figure than the elder Mirabeau, a venture arranged by Jefferson.139 Further, a French version of the life of Washington was issued in Paris in 1809.140 More eccentrically, it was published in Paris in a Spanish version in 1819 and again in 1825, was then reprinted (still in Spanish) in New York in 1825, in Philadelphia in 1826, until it finally and more fittingly was published in Barcelona in 1843.141 George Tucker’s The Valley of the Shenandoah was, perhaps, translated into German.142 Joel Poinsett’s Notes on Mexico was published in London in 1825, but several of his polemical and diplomatic writings came out in Mexico City in the late 1820s.143 Audubon’s Birds of America was published in London by the author in 1827, and his Scenes de la nature dans les États-Unis et le Nord de L’Amérique in Paris in 1857 by P. Bertrand. Next to Ramsay in reach and influence, however, was probably Poe. His works were routinely pirated in London, but in Paris the indefatigable partisanship of Charles Baudelaire was to make Poe seem the preeminent American romantic for the French. While the British had come to know Poe in the early 1840s, France had to wait longer, although an unattributed translation of ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ appeared in a Parisian journal in 1845, and another of ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’’ rendered as ‘‘Un meurtre sans exemple dans les fastes de la justice,’’ ran in the newspaper La Quotidienne in June of 1846, but in the later case the story was unattributed and hacked about. Thereafter many Poe stories, translated more respectably by Emile Van J. A. de Chalmot, 1792–94); Geschichte der Amerikanischen Revolution Aus Den Des Congresses der Vereinigten Staaten, trans. Gunther Karl Friedrich Seidel, 4 vols. (Berlin: In der Vossischen Buchhandlung, 1794–95). 139. Histoire de la Revolution d’Amèrique / par rapport a la Caroline Meriodionale; par M. David Ramsay . . . Par Jean Lord Sheffield; traduites de l’anglais par Mirabeau, 5 vols. (Paris: Chez Moutardier, 1796). On this, see ‘‘Foreword,’’ to David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen (1789; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990), 1:xxv. 140. Vida de Jorge Washington: General en Gefe de los Exercitos y Presidented de la Republica de los Estados-Unidos de America Setentrional (Paris: Impr. de Stahl, 1819). 141. Spanish publication in Paris also happened to Frederick Grimke, a little after the Civil War, when his major work was metamorphosed into Frederick Grimke, Ciencia y Derecho Constitucional Naturaleza y Tendencia de las Instituciones Libres (Paris: Rosa y Bouret, 1870). 142. At least, according to Louise Manly, Southern Literature from 1579–1895: A Comprehensive Review, with Copious Extracts and Criticisms (Richmond: B. F. Johnson, 1895), 140, but I have been unable to verify this. 143. Joel R. Poinsett, Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of 1822: Accompanied by an Historical Sketch of the Revolution (London: J. Miller, 1825); Joel R. Poinsett, Esposicion de la Conducta Politica de los Estados-Unidoes, para Conlas Nuevas Republicas de America (Mexico: Impr. en la Exinquisicion, a cargo de M. Ximeno, 1827); Joel R. Poinsett, Contestacion del Ministro Americano a la Escritiva de la Legislatura del Estado de Mexico (Mexico: C. C. Sebring, 1829); Joel R. Poinsett, Discursos Pronunciados en la Camara de Representantes de los Estados-Unidos de America (Mexico: C. C. Sebring, 1829).

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Forgues, Isabelle Meunier (an Englishwoman married to a French Fourierite), and Alphonse Bourgers, appeared in periodical and newspaper form. But Poe’s books had to wait until the 1850s. Then the Parisian could read Le puits and le pendule (1852), the Nouvelles choisies d’Edgard Poe: le scarabee d’or, l’aeronaute Hollandais (1853), the Histoires extraordinaires (1856), the Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (1857), the Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym (1858), Eureka (1863) and the Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (1865), the last five in translations by Baudelaire. And to Baudelaire, more clearly than even to Poe himself, Poe was a Southern writer, for the former wrote of this ‘‘aristocrate de nature plus encore que de naissance, le Virginien, l’homme du Sud, le Byron égaré dans un mauvais monde.’’ 144 Once Baudelaire went to call upon a writer who was visiting Paris and staying at a hotel in the Boulevard des Capucines and who had known Poe. The American proved obtusely indifferent to Poe’s genius and, preoccupied with buying new shoes, would only observe that Poe had ‘‘un esprit bizarre’’ and was a man whose conversation was not ‘‘conséquioutive.’’ Outraged, Baudelaire left and, in jamming on his hat, cried out, ‘‘Ce n’est qu’un yankee.’’ That this American was a Southerner, indeed was John R. Thompson, only amplifies the evidence for Baudelaire’s discrimination of regional types, for to call a Southerner a Yankee was to offer an insult of some exquisiteness.145 Baudelaire was unusual among Europeans for being sensitive to local distinctions among American writers. Except when slavery was directly at stake, the English, French, and Germans tended to muddle Americans into much of a muchness. Indeed, the Leipzig publisher Tauchnitz ran even English and Americans together. To these Germans, at least, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were British authors, and so had little chance of being Yankees distinguishable from Southerners. Partly this was obtuseness, ignorance, and indifference. In the Southern case, it arose partly because the representation of Southern culture finding its way eastward across the Atlantic was severely filtered. A Southern author usually needed to be waved through by several cultural gatekeepers in Charleston, New York, London, or Paris, before he or she could land on a European library table. Such filtering tended to export the softer side of Southern culture in its fiction, though also the racial theory so congenial to European tastes. But the process excluded the 144. Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1954), 14, 67–70, 98–106; Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, l’art romantique et autres ouevres critiques (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1962), 623. 145. See Patrick F. Quinn, French Face, 88, which oddly has the American as a Northerner. The original anecdote, which identifies Thompson, can be found in Charles Asselineau, Charles Baudelaire, sa vie et son ouevre (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1869), reprinted in Jacques Crépet and Claude Pichois, eds., Baudelaire et Asselineau (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1953), 94–95.

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South’s proslavery sentiment and permitted little even of its political theory. William Harper, Thomas Dew, and George Fitzhugh all had no European reception, and even Calhoun was seen as a politician, not a thinker, at least until Lord Acton noticed him.146 But Poe made it triumphantly over these divides. To be sure, he was in part preferred because he was, in many ways, a postcolonial writer and cast his themes in a rhetoric that seemed invitingly a mix of the strange and familiar. For his scenes were set in ‘‘a misty-looking village of England,’’ ‘‘at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre,’’ ‘‘in the dreary district of Lofoden,’’ amid ‘‘a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo,’’ and only infrequently ‘‘near the western extremity, where Fort Moutrie stands, and where some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found.’’ 147

146. See especially ‘‘Political Causes of the American Revolution’’ (1861), in John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, vol. 1, Essays in the History of Liberty, ed. J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 216–62. 147. ‘‘William Wilson,’’ 338; ‘‘The Murders in Rue Morgue,’’ 400; ‘‘A Descent into the Maelström,’’ 433; ‘‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’’ 494; ‘‘The Gold-Bug,’’ 560, all in Quinn, Poe: Poetry and Tales.

book four


he Shape of a History

Chapter Fourteen

Retrospective Glances

The Qualifications and Duties of an Historian 1 In the first half of the nineteenth century, historical literature grew in force as a species of knowledge deemed to explain the human experience and, in its ubiquity, came then to engross a greater share of Southern culture than before or since. In the United States broadly, historical works formed about a third of all best-sellers sold between 1800 and 1860, which was about the proportion such volumes formed in the 1826 catalog of the Charleston Library Society.2 For the genre was thought peculiarly to have a resonance for people of all ages; this had, indeed, been the opinion of the ancient world.3 As such, Title from ‘‘Dickens’ Novels,’’ SQR 3 (April 1843): 437: ‘‘We love the lingering records of bygone days, and, although we are yet young, we had rather wander back and study the realities of life from retrospective glances at past associations, than employ our time in anticipating events of the visionary future.’’ 1. From the title of MK, A Discourse on the Qualifications and Duties of an Historian; Delivered before the Georgia Historical Society, on the Occasion of Its Fourth Anniversary, on Monday, 13th February, 1843 (Savannah, 1843). 2. George H. Calcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 31–32; A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Charleston Library Society (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1826). 3. Cf. ‘‘The Library of History,’’ in Diodorus of Sicily, trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols. (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), 1:7–9: ‘‘For this reason one may hold that the acquisition of a knowledge of history is of the greatest utility for every conceivable circumstance of life. For it endows the young with the wisdom of the aged, while for the old it multiplies the experience which they already possess; citizens in private station it qualifies for leadership, and the leaders it incites, through the immortality of the glory which it confers, to undertake the noblest deeds; soldiers, again, it makes more ready to face dangers in defence of their country because of the public encomiums which they will receive after death, and wicked men it turns aside from their impulse towards evil through the everlasting opprobrium to which it will condemn them.’’

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history was read by children, sometimes with pleasure: ‘‘Dear Mamma I am reading the Roman History I followed Greece to where it became a Roman province Aunt H says I am fonder of those grim old warriors than of my pretty smiling doll, she says it is because I have not to make them clothes, but it is not, it is because it has life and spirit in it.’’ College students were given tedious details. One groaned: ‘‘Consider how much valuable time is thrown away in learning by rote & repeating for a single occasion the names of the obscure, foul, degraded, filthy, abominable monsters of Rome. What a chaotic mass of names and dates!’’ A young man newly from college might keep up the habit, if negligently: ‘‘Have a vague impression that I am reading History of England—recollect something about Cromwell—Pym—Hampden &c &c—Am also supposed to be studying law.’’ Aspirant public men were much enjoined that the past was inspiring: ‘‘I think that history excites an ambition in us to excell, by shewing us the regard and praise that has attended great and good men, in the times in which they have lived, and, I think, the Roman history shews us more examples of that kind, than any other.’’ 4 Yet history’s standing was not unmixed. It was thought, by some, to flirt with the trivial. ‘‘A regular course of History should constitute much of your light reading, beginning with antient history and then pursuing it down to modern times,’’ a lawyer advised his son about this ‘‘pleasant mode.’’ As an undergraduate, James Henley Thornwell read philosophy in his serious hours, but ‘‘Saturdays I amuse myself with history.’’ Gender intruded on these estimates. What for gentlemen might be lowering was, for ladies, often regarded as elevating. Old men instructed young women to acquire historical knowledge, as one might learn the piano and drawing: ‘‘Study History, Geography and some of the best ethical writers—with care and attention—this will greatly add to your stock of ideas, and enable you when occasion serves, to take part in a rational conversation, for nothing is so insipid as some ladies I have seen, they have been asked to sing & play on some instrument, or to exhibit their drawings to the visitors after doing which they retire to their seats and sit mumchance, until some dandy of a beau sidles up to them and talks of the weather, the last ball or some such frivolities.’’ 5 Far too much history was written by Southerners to bear analysis here in 4. Harriott Horry Rutledge to Rebecca Motte (Lowndes) Rutledge, 17 September 1841, Harriott Horry Rutledge Papers, DU; M. J. Williams to JHT, 22 April 1854, JHT Papers, SCL; B. Christian to William Henry Ruffner, 28 January 1846, Ruffner Family Papers, PHS; Philip Pendleton Kennedy to JPK, 2 October 1824, Kennedy Family Papers, VHS. 5. Littleton Waller Tazewell to John N. Tazewell, 25 April 1824, Tazewell Family Papers, LV; JHT to W. H. Robbins, 14 November 1830, in Benjamin Morgan Palmer, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, D.D., LL.D. (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1875), 73; Marcus Cicero Stephens to Mary Ann Primrose, 7 November 1841, Marcus Cicero Stephens Papers, SHC.

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sustained detail. A decent if insufficient range, however, can be established by a look at how Southerners defined the canon of historical literature, how they explained the philosophy of history, how they organized the infrastructure of historical research, and then by an examination of how Southerners wrote its various forms, which can be taken to encompass history, biography, and autobiography. First, the canon. This was still in the shadow of eighteenth-century tastes. Of course, one still read the ancient historians. Among the Greeks, Thucydides was most common. Gessner Harrison, in attendance at the University of Virginia, reassured his father: ‘‘I can almost venture to say that Thucydides will be my favorite among the Greek writers. . . . I have been, as no doubt you have been also, prejudiced in his favor by the commendations of men qualified to judge.’’ Later, he admitted that ‘‘Thucydides is tough,’’ though more for the construction of the Greek than the moral of the narrative. For the rest, Herodotus was standard and Xenophon more usual than might be expected, being ‘‘amusing & by no means difficult,’’ but Polybius was rare. Of the Romans, Livy was something of a civic duty; as William Campbell Preston observed to Washington Irving after visiting Rome, ‘‘I believe the Americans from their republican sympathies are more interested in the history of Rome between the two Brutus’s than any other people, and therefore we would visit the remains of that period with deeper feelings.’’ But, in truth, Livy was little relished beyond the collegian’s obligation. Of the other Roman historians, Suetonius was a closet taste because scandalous, Sallust uncommon, Josephus mined by the pious. But Tacitus was thought insistently relevant by those republicans wary of decline and of the savagery of human nature, if considered difficult for his ‘‘dark, pregnant and startling’’ style.6 He was disproportionately read for the fragmentary Germania, which much nourished the discourse of race.7 As for medieval historians, almost none were studied. Even the Venerable Bede seems to have been read by no one beyond Thomas Grimké, who liked to rummage among the origins of vernacular nations and there came across Geoffrey of Monmouth.8 In view of their importance to classical republican theory, one might expect a fair representation of the Italian historians of the Renaissance. Niccolò Machiavelli does make a fair showing though more for The Prince than the history of Florence and almost never for the Dis6. Gessner Harrison to Edward Tiffin Harrison, 26 February 1827, 9 April 1827, TuckerHarrison-Smith Papers, UVA; David May to Richard K. Crallé, 11 May 1818, Richard K. Crallé Papers, CU; WCP to Washington Irving, 16 March 1818, Preston Family Papers, VHS; GFH, ‘‘History of Literature,’’ SQR 2 (October 1842): 514. 7. For example, Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘Unity of the Human Race,’’ SQR 9 (January 1846): 37. 8. Thomas Smith Grimké, ‘‘Origin of Rhyme,’’ SR 3 (February 1829): 162, 191.

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courses on Livy, but Francesco Guicciardini was uncommon; only Hugh Legaré seems to have been markedly absorbed.9 Matters only began to pick up with the English historians of the early modern period. Nathaniel Russell Middleton seems to have read William Camden’s Britannia, but in this he was singular, doing so in the 1850s when the Chaucerian and the Elizabethan were becoming more fashionable. In general, the canon of English historians began with Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon—‘‘I am pleased with this old book,’’ Alice DeLancey Izard observed in 1816 of his history of the English Civil War. More rarely, for the persistent reader, there was Gilbert Burnet, ‘‘the prying credulous garrulous honest conceited old Bishop,’’ for his study of the English Reformation.10 But these were old and musty, superseded by the elegant discursiveness of the British historians of the eighteenth century, by David Hume, William Robertson, and Edward Gibbon, who were ubiquitous and even enjoyed. Below these, Tobias Smollett, Adam Ferguson, John Gillies, Alexander Fraser Tytler, and Oliver Goldsmith were read as popularizers of history, ancient and modern. For the rest, William Russell the historian of Europe was common but little-regarded, and Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke was (though lofty) a more specialized taste. By the late 1820s, however, others had become quickly conventional, notably James Mackintosh and Henry Hallam for the View of the State of Europe in the Middle Ages (1818) and the Constitutional History of England (1827). Among French historians, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681) was known if unusual, but Voltaire was standard, mostly for his lives of Louis XIV and Charles XII and despite his ‘‘infidel notions,’’ ‘‘amazing profligacy,’’ ‘‘outrageous indecency,’’ and ‘‘impudent sophistry,’’ which were less in his biographies than in his other works. The French had an abundance of accessible narrative historians, who had written about more than France, such as (in descending order of popularity) Charles Rollin the ancient historian, ‘‘a pretty writer . . . greatly more entertaining than I had anticipated’’; Paul de Rapin de Thoyras, the Huguenot historian of early modern England; René Vertot, the historian of Roman revolutions; and François de Mézeray, the historian of France, who all in multiple English translations lingered a century and more past their day. Otherwise, it is surprising how little 9. For a late example, see ‘‘Machiavelli—The Prince,’’ SLM 12 (November 1846): 641–50; for a conjoining of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, see Charles Fraser, ‘‘The Fine Arts,’’ SR 4 (August 1829): 72. On Legaré and the Italians, see WCP, Eulo on Hugh Swinton Legaré: Delivered at the Request of the City of Charleston (Charleston, S.C., 1843), 11. 10. Booklist, undated (but no books from later than 1857 are listed), Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, SHC; ADI to MIM, 7 January 1816, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; entry for 22 May 1853, in MK Book of Memoranda, MK Papers, SHC.

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French historical literature was read, unless one counts Montesquieu. But, on the other hand, Southerners read French historical memoirs with great avidity and so may be said to have bypassed the secondary literature. As for German historians, very few before Barthold Niebuhr made it into the Southern canon, except Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, the ecclesiastical historian of Göttingen, upon whom Legaré took careful notes, and those students of the ancient world like Christian Gottlob Heyne and Johann David Michaelis, who were more philologists than historians.11 Any single reader, of course, could and did read beyond this canon, but these were the currency, the common knowledge that dwelled in curricula, in reading lists, in cautionary letters sent from parents to children. In addition, there was a small canon of American historians, who were little part of curricula, but were read privately. As John Minor observed to Charles Campbell even in 1845, it was a curiosity that Virginians knew more of European than Virginian history. Or, as Grigsby put it in 1854, ‘‘The Virginian, old and young, knows less of George Mason and Edmund Pendleton, than he does of the statesmen of Greece or Rome.’’ But there were historians from the colonial period, who were sometimes read. In Minor’s dismissive summary of Virginian historians, these were John Smith himself, whose work was ‘‘only a collection of pamphlets’’ in then-archaic language, dealing only with the first sixteen years of the colony; Robert Beverley’s work, which was only an introduction; and William Stith, who had been cut off in the middle of his work by death. Jefferson’s Notes contained history of a kind and was habitually read, though Jefferson had been, if anything, still more dismissive of his predecessors: to him, Smith was honest but ‘‘barbarous and uncouth’’ in style; Stith was ‘‘inelegant . . . and his details often too minute to be tolerable, even to a native of the country’’; Beverley, by contrast, was too rapid.12 Forgotten by both Minor and Jefferson were Hugh Jones’s Present State of Virginia (1724). Colonies other than Virginia were even less well off: there was John Lawson’s History of North Carolina (1709–14) and Alexander Hewat’s Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia (1779), both published in London. Such colonial works were, in fact, hard for Southerners to read, being rare and not reprinted until a more modern generation managed some interest in 11. Robert Lewis Dabney to Moses Drury Hoge, 27 June 1843, Hoge Family Papers, PHS; entry for 2 August 1854, in Adolphus Williamson Mangum Diary, Mangum Family Papers, SHC; notes on Mosheim (1822), HSL Papers, SCL. 12. HBG, The Virginia Convention of 1829–30: A Discourse Delivered before the Virginia Historical Society (Richmond: Macfarland & Fergusson, 1854), 3; John Minor to CC, 23 March 1845, CC Papers, WM; Thomas Jefferson, ‘‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’’ in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 303.

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its predecessors.13 Even more peripheral were the Northern historians, such as Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts and Jeremy Belknap of New Hampshire. More common were the first historians of the new republic. For his dull biography of George Washington, John Marshall was more honored than valued, but he was sometimes read; as Grigsby put it evasively in 1827, ‘‘Virginia chuckles in glorious self-conceit, when she contemplates the massive volumes of her Marshall.’’ More candidly, in 1860, Grigsby was to admit that it had been ‘‘the fashion of the young democrats of my day to laugh at [it] for the grammatical blunders and inverted English that marred the first edition.’’ 14 John Daly Burk’s history of Virginia was racier, but most thought too Irish to be convincingly Virginian; nonetheless William Alexander Caruthers and Edmund Ruffin, at least, used him extensively.15 For most, however, David Ramsay’s works were American history, since he had written the best account of the American Revolution and his history of South Carolina was certainly the best colonial and state history. By comparison, Hugh Williamson’s History of North-Carolina (1812) and Hugh McCall’s History of Georgia (1811) were poor competitors. With the possible exception of Ramsay, however, no educated Southerner in 1820 or so would have been regarded as uneducated who had read none of these American works, whereas not to have read Thucydides, Hume, and Gibbon would have been reprehensible. It followed that the Southern historical consciousness had a powerful sense of connection with times and places far beyond itself. Ancient, medieval, modern, European, colonial, American—these were terms that made a succession, offered a sense of place, and ventured an explanation of a social self. In this process, the non-American crowded out the American, let alone the Southern. It was to require much effort to disrupt and reverse this succession, and thereby to create the South as no longer the last and minor stopping point for history, but its beginning. ‘‘The usual course pursued by our academic and collegiate institutions, has been, to commence with antiquity and travel down from age to age, and from country to country, till we reach our own coun13. See, for example, CC to J. W. Randolph, 28 May 1854, CC Papers, WM, on republishing Robert Beverley; this produced Robert Beverley, The History of Virginia in Four Parts, introduction by CC (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1855). 14. HBG, Letters of a South-Carolinian (Norfolk: C. Bonsal, 1827), 42; HBG, Discourse on the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell (Norfolk: J. D. Ghiselin, 1860), 17; see also HBG, Virginia Convention of 1829–30, 18–20. 15. On Caruthers and Burk, see Curtis Carroll Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers: A Life of the Virginia Novelist Dr. William A. Caruthers (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1953), 147–53; for Ruffin, see Edmund Ruffin, ‘‘Sketch of the Progress of Agriculture in Virginia, and the Causes of Its Decline: An Address to the Historical and Philosophical Society of Virginia,’’ Farmer’s Register 3 (April 1836): 748–60, reprinted in Edmund Ruffin, Nature’s Management: Writings on Landscape and Reform, 1822–1859, ed. Jack Temple Kirby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 14–44, 349–52, which clearly shows Ruffin’s reliance on Burk.

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try and come to modern times,’’ someone observed in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1843 before going on to express a heterodoxy. ‘‘Let the American boy . . . be first taught the history of his native State; then of the several States which form the Union; then of foreign countries. Modern times,—his own age,—recent ages,—should occupy his attention, and then remoter periods, stretching back from century to century, if time permit, to time’s beginning. We deal too much by far with the dead . . . dead nations, dead institutions, dead customs, dead languages.’’ 16 The familiar presumptions of the Enlightenment had seen history as, in Bolingbroke’s famous paraphrase of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, philosophy teaching by example. Human nature was thought to have some stability across time and space. By turns, men were ambitious, avaricious, charitable, worthy, and ignoble, and history was ‘‘the register of the crime, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,’’ but also of human accomplishments.17 Historians told the stories that clarified the lineaments of this mixed human nature, and thereby showed what was possible, what was likely. Hence Thucydides, Livy, and Machiavelli told historical tales of transhistorical significance, whose value was to encourage the morally great and to warn against the immorally forceful, to help populate the world with more Antonines and fewer Sullas, to balance philosophy against experience, to construct institutions and elaborate ideas that might maximize happiness and minimize misery.18 It was, in that sense, a guarded discipline of modest confidence in human progress. Gibbon wrote of ‘‘the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases. the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race,’’ but there was much hesitation and irony in that ‘‘perhaps.’’ A progression in virtue was harder to prove than an accession of knowledge, but even the skeptic tended to grant that Christianity had had some role in clarifying virtue’s meaning. In this spirit, for example, Francis Kinloch ended his letters from France and Geneva, with thoughts on the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, that echoed Gibbon’s standpoint. After ‘‘the degradation of every art and science to the purposes of tyranny and oppression, the downfall of nations, and the waste of human life,’’ which had seemed to return Europe ‘‘to the ignorance and ferocity of the 16. ‘‘Critical Notices—the History of South-Carolina,’’ SQR 4 (July 1843): 247, 248. 17. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1909), 1:84. 18. Cf. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 38: ‘‘[The] peculiarity of the ancients’ way of viewing things [is that] it does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes. Its formulation of problems is not concerned with historical developments either intellectual or material, but with ethical judgments.’’

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earlier ages,’’ now ‘‘reason and religion have reassumed their sway, the crimes and errours of the past seem expiated, and the experience of all mankind now vindicates the ways of God.’’ 19 So the American philosophe, whether David Ramsay or Thomas Jefferson, the Federalist or the anti-Federalist, concurred in seeing the American Revolution as a decisive improvement in the human prospect. Yet both had seen Americans as connected in tension to the wider human condition, discernible in historical evidence from Rome, Florence, and Westminster. The idea of exceptionalism, the premise that Americans and Southerners had leapt free of this connection of flawed human experience was, under these intellectual circumstances, hard to establish, but not impossible. Historicism, the self-designated revolution of historical thinking that began with Johann Gottfried Herder and a rediscovered Giambattista Vico, changed much in this. New principles were intimated. It became arguable that human nature was not stable but assumed different forms in different times and places, that man was ‘‘an active, mobile, and progressive being’’ and hence it was proper to be skeptical of natural law. Human personality and behavior was largely formed by membership in a nation or race, by being ‘‘an integral portion of a peculiarly constituted society, living in it, acting for it, and applying his faculties to the ordering of particular circumstances.’’ To this society, individuals owed a primary moral responsibility, since ‘‘national and individual character referred to genetic influences’’ was part of God’s progressive and hierarchical order, ‘‘the long chain of human civilization.’’ Philology and literary analysis captured ‘‘the changes of literature in connection with the changes of national character and institutions,’’ and so enabled students to see ‘‘the fleeting images of each passing age’’ and grasp the inner essences of such communities, ‘‘the impress of the intellectual character of each period.’’ 20 In this way, historians were thought to possess a critical method that was scientific but distinct from natural science, because historical composition required an act of sympathy and imagination. It came to seem that there were no values outside of history, though many that God had placed within the stream of history.21 Beyond these beliefs, historicists differed widely. Some stressed 19. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 4:181; Francis Kinloch, Letters from Geneva and France Written during a Residence of between Two and Three Years, in Different Parts of Those Countries, and Addressed to a Lady in Virginia. By Her Father, 2 vols. (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1819), 2:319. 20. GFH, ‘‘Herder’s Philosophy of History,’’ SQR 5 (April 1844): 274, 288, 292; GFH, ‘‘History of Literature,’’ 478, 473. 21. The literature on this is, of course, vast, but valuable are Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed., reprint, 1968 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983) and, more eccentrically, Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, with a foreword by Isaiah Berlin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). I use Meinecke’s definition of ‘‘natu-

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the state as the fulfillment and expression of history’s progress and purpose, others resented the state as a tyrant; some dwelt upon the people’s united will and destiny, others saw society as a collectivity of myriad individual biographies; some thought race transcended national boundaries, others treated nations as races; some stressed inner biological compulsions, others a dialectic between nature and nurture. But, however the paradigm was manipulated, the intellectual tendency was to split time and humanity into fragments, though each fragment was deemed to have its own coherence. In time, Romantic historicists would become condescending towards the eighteenth century and exaggerate the immobility of its historical understanding. ‘‘In the highest functions of the historian, what are Hume and Robertson to Michelet, Thierry and Guizot?’’ George Frederick Holmes asked in 1844 and was confident of the answer. But even more cautious Southerners thought themselves in the midst of a promising transformation. In 1843 Mitchell King, for example, delivered before the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah ‘‘A Discourse on the Qualifications and Duties of an Historian’’ that is an intermediate statement of the problem. To King, history was the science of experience, telling us what we have known, what we have yet to learn. As a science, it had progressed in recent years and promised continued improvement. Historians like Barthold Niebuhr and Arnold H. L. Heeren, and archaeologists like Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young, had by their industry, learning, and sagacity ‘‘thrown a flood of light on ancient history.’’ By the same token, the investigations of Montesquieu, Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus, as well as ‘‘the experience of new forms of government, and of the manner in which they grow out of, and act on society,—furnish the philosophical inquirer of the present day, with more enlarged and accurate means of sifting and testing the truth of both ancient and modern history, than were possessed by his predecessors.’’ Institutions like the Georgia Historical Society were the laboratories of this moral science, which should strive to offer ‘‘an account of the actions of men, forming separate societies, and bearing certain relations to others. When we speak of writing history, or of studying history, we mean the history of a people, state, or nation.’’ 22 So King urged that one should study a nation’s habits, manners, and ral law’’: ‘‘It was the prevailing concept of Natural Law, handed down from antiquity, which confirmed this belief in the stability of human nature and above all of human reason. Accordingly, it was held that the pronouncements of reason, though they could certainly be obscured by passions and by ignorance, did nevertheless, wherever they could free themselves from these hindrances, speak with the same voice and utter the same timeless and absolutely valid truths, which were in harmony with those prevailing in the universe as a whole’’ (lvi). 22. GFH, ‘‘Herder’s Philosophy,’’ 267; MK, Qualifications and Duties, 5–7.

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Mitchell King (Courtesy Special Collections, College of Charleston Library)

morals; its pursuits ‘‘pastoral, agricultural, manufacturing or commercial’’; its literature, philosophy, religion, and laws. This history should not be elitist. Indeed, King’s rationale for studying laws was that historians were too easily dazzled by the record of regal pomp, war, and cabals. But laws were ‘‘the recorded opinions and judgments of the people, and give more insight into their moral and intellectual condition, than any other source of information.’’ While history was the record of the important, the consequent, the commemorable, such importance could flow from both high and low, from a president and ‘‘the humblest citizen, who drives his own wagon to market.’’ Nonetheless, one must know great men, good and bad, St. Paul and Henry VIII, because ‘‘the leading, the authoritative minds of an age, conduct its affairs, and form its history.’’ Indeed, to study these was to undertake a theodicy, because ‘‘[e]very great mind appearing on the earth, is an immediate emanation of the Deity, the divine source of all existence.’’ By such means, God initiated changes in the world.23 So the historian must study economic conditions, literature, and philoso23. MK, Qualifications and Duties, 8, 10, 18, 13, 11.

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phy, while commemorating contributors to the welfare of mankind, men like James Watt, Richard Arkwright, and Humphrey Davy. But things must be kept in perspective. Studies of the state of the arts and sciences were deserving, but only in a subordinate capacity: ‘‘They ought to be no further prominent, than as they belong to the nation, and are exponents of its character.’’ Disquisitions on grace and beauty, architecture and music, were all very well. ‘‘But they must not assume a rank to which they are not entitled. Character, virtue, goodness, ought above all things else to be dearest to a people, and to claim their first, their deepest, their last devotion.’’ The chasteness of truth mattered more than the ‘‘trophies of art.’’ After all, Athens was eminently endowed with art and philosophy when her civic corruptions were at their height; art had not saved her from Macedon and Rome. By the same token, Rome was most virtuous when she had little art of which to boast, and most splendid in art when ‘‘virtue [had] ceased to direct and govern her.’’ Rather, the historian must study chains of cause and effect, the dependence of future upon past: ‘‘This is the prime,—the crowning glory of history. . . . He who has rightly spelled the lessons of this school,—who has mastered the truth which it unfolds and the wisdom which it teaches, has fitted himself to be an instructor and leader of mankind.’’ Such have been statesmen like Oxenstierna, Ximenes, Richelieu, Burghley, Chatham, Burke, and the Founding Fathers.24 These were the subject matters of the historian, but his qualifications were another matter. (Her qualifications did not occur to King.) First, there needed to be self-knowledge. By this, King meant that being a historian was a lot of work and the aspirant should ‘‘estimate his own strength.’’ For one had to go to public archives and private collections, examine both ephemeral and enduring literature, travel to view sites. Second, the historian needed to learn and command an immense body of knowledge—philosophy, morality, the law—before even beginning the task of research. Geography, chronology, and style, all these had to be learned prior to hanging up one’s shingle as a historian. The last of these, style, should be learned by a study of the great historians: ‘‘Imitate their beauties and avoid their faults.’’ King’s stress on the importance of chronology may seem less obvious, but one of the accomplishments of modern historical literature had been chronology, the collation of a multitude of incommensurate and local calendars into a single system of comparable time. As King rightly put it, ‘‘To fix the precise dates of interesting events has . . . become almost a science by itself, and requires the utmost care and research. Indeed, without a strict observance of its rules, there can be no history, properly so called,—that is, a record of events in their natural 24. Ibid., 20–21, 17–18.

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order, as the one followed or grew out of the other.’’ Thomas R. Dew shared King’s sense of the significance of this; his Digest contains a discussion of the ‘‘measurement of time’’ by way of a discussion of Isaac Newton’s ‘‘correction of ancient chronology.’’ 25 Because history was ‘‘a store of moral experiments,’’ a technique of narration by which evidence engaged and inspired the emotions of virtue, the historian must have ‘‘a love of truth, a devotion to it, which no fear can shake, no predilection warp, no favor bribe.’’ God, as well as man, was watching the historian’s honesty. Still, truth need not be unrestrained. Dignity and tact required that the historian need not record every petty event or deliver hectoring sermons on every trifling malfeasance. Indeed, the historian should stand aside from sectarianisms, political and religious, and be free of undue prejudice. As Machiavelli had prescribed, he should be ‘‘of no religion and of no country.’’ Or, at least, the historian should regard his own and others’ creeds and loyalties with toleration and sympathy. Patriotism did not require the hiding of a country’s faults, piety did not excuse a religion’s ill effects. ‘‘Happily,’’ King believed, Christianity was so perfect that this latter problem did not occur, it being a religion ‘‘which, even the sceptic will admit, could our frail nature obey it perfectly, might make this earth a paradise, and is fitted to govern the angels in heaven.’’ Prejudice, then, must be eschewed, because it could violently or gently distort. The History of England of David Hume, the Tory and skeptic, was an awful example of prejudice given free rein: in it, the Stuarts were uncritically defended, the Puritans unmercifully assaulted. Gibbon too was marred by his hostility to Christianity, marred too by pride in himself: ‘‘If Christianity be true, Gibbon was wrong, and the reputation of the historian was pledged to show that he was right.’’ 26 All this added up to a formidable list of qualifications, more taxing than anything Samuel Johnson had in mind, when he observed to James Boswell: ‘‘Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to hand so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree, only about as much as is used in the lower forms of poetry.’’ Mitchell King, on the other hand, was insistent that historians had, by convention, been placed far too low on the rung of literature. Great histo25. Ibid., 9–12; Thomas R. Dew, A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations (New York: D. Appleton, 1853), 85–90. Twenty years ago, such a sentiment might have seemed too obvious to notice, but in this postmodern age, whose methodologies are unimpressed by chronology, King’s emphasis is freshly apparent. On the birth of chronology and its contribution to historical literature, see Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 26. MK, Qualifications and Duties, 13, 7, 12, 14–17.

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rians were rare, because their task was so difficult, so exacting. The fact that history had been written for so long, by so many cultures, and yet the list of its eminent practitioners was so short was alone evidence to show the loftiness of the venture. This was a flattering verdict shared by Hugh Blair Grigsby: ‘‘A great speech, a well-reasoned State paper, a fine poem, may be struck off from the impulse, or under the inspiration, of the moment; but to write history requires other and more complicated qualifications; qualifications which cannot be conjured up for the nonce, and which are so rare, that, while the number of histories is legion, the names of the great historians, like those of the great epic poets, may be written on a nutshell.’’ 27 King was a serious Presbyterian, on moral duty at his podium and so more priggish than most Southern philosophers of history. And he was no preacher of a pure historicism, with its central doctrine of the separateness of times and places, its tendency to remove the philosophical historian from a skeptical perch above history and plunge him into the complicit rivers of time. True, King was anxious to praise historians like Niebuhr, who can safely be regarded as historicists. But there was a stronger whiff of Edinburgh and La Brède, than of Weimar and Bonn, about King. In this, he was behind his Southern times, which were moving rapidly in the 1840s towards a fulldressed historicism. Preeminently George Frederick Holmes, though among others, documented and criticized those who had changed matters: Vico, Herder, the Schlegels, Niebuhr, Guizot, and Michelet.28 But the historicisms of Herder and Niebuhr, at least, were themselves closer to the Scottish Enlightenment than to Nietzsche. For the likes of Niebuhr, the past might be different, but it was knowable, capable of reinvigoration by means of a human imagination. By 1820 skepticism had moved far enough to demolish Hume’s easy assumption that human nature was universal, but not so far as to assimilate Hume’s difficult proposition that reliable knowing was impossible.29 And 27. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 304; MK, Qualifications and Duties, 7–8; HBG, Virginia Convention of 1829–30, 18. 28. See, for example GFH, ‘‘Homer’s Iliad,’’ SQR 10 (July 1846): 1–45; GFH, ‘‘Herder’s Philosophy.’’; GFH, ‘‘Schlegel’s Philosophy of History,’’ SQR 3 (April 1843): 263–317; GFH, ‘‘Niebuhr,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 7 (October 1855): 530–57; GFH, ‘‘Whewell on the Inductive Sciences,’’ SQR 2 (July 1842): 193–231; GFH, ‘‘Rome and the Romans,’’ SQR 6 (October 1844): 269–306. 29. Isaiah Berlin, ‘‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought,’’ in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 70–90. I mention Hume on the stability of human nature, because his views on this matter were well known to Southerners, not because the notion was original to him. As Meinecke stresses, it was an ancient opinion. It was a matter much at issue, for example, in the so-called Battle of the Books in its English form. See Meinecke, Historism, lvi; Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 35.

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so Niebuhr was a metaphysically safe model, a man praised not for deconstruction, but for reconstruction. Like others, Southerners always recurred to this gift of vivification. Hugh Legaré described Niebuhr as a necromancer, who raised the dead: ‘‘It is thus that he has rebuilt, with fragments picked up here and there where they lay scattered about, as by a tempest, over the whole surface of ancient literature, the sacerdotal and patrician City of the Kings, in its old Cyclopean strength and massiveness, and the awful forms of Tuscan mystery and superstition.’’ 30 Barthold Niebuhr was peculiarly important in influencing Southern historical literature, far more influential than Leopold von Ranke or Jules Michelet. This standing was, partly, the natural respect from an intellectual culture where antiquity remained a crucial moral and cultural point of reference, and readers tried to keep up with the exponents of ancient history. But respect for Niebuhr ran deeper than this; he was thought to have commenced the consummation of historicism, to have opened ‘‘a new era for all history.’’ His name was scarcely ever mentioned without an accolade that stressed his centrality to the philosophical and practical accomplishments of historical literature since Gibbon. Robert Henry, for example, in 1828 reviewed an English translation of Niebuhr’s Roman History for the Southern Review and commented on how much the style of history had changed in the preceding sixty years, by observing that, once, it had been little more than an entertainment: ‘‘It certainly did not abound in parallels applicable to the government of modern States. Nor could it well be otherwise. Those ‘leges legum,’ as Lord Bacon styles them, and which political economy alone has developed, were almost wholly wanting, and consequently history remained without aim or object; a romance that had been enacted, and, in truth, not much superior to other romances.’’ 31 Henry had in mind the modest certainties offered by Adam Smith or Dugald Stewart. Later Southerners had more intoxicating promises to believe. C. C. S. Farrar, writing on ‘‘The Science of History’’ in De Bow’s Review for 1848, had Victor Cousin, who promised that by the new history, once ‘‘lawless and arbitrary . . . the complex phenomenon of human societies will be exposed and better understood; and unity, philosophical efficiency, and a common relationship between the various physical and natural sciences, will be established.’’ 32 But even Robert Henry had seen history as offering advice on how to control society: ‘‘It is because past authentic history furnishes the 30. ‘‘The Origin, History, and Influence of Roman Legislation’’ (1839), in Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:506. 31. GFH, ‘‘Niebuhr,’’ 547; Robert Henry, ‘‘Niebuhr’s Roman History,’’ SR 1 (May 1828): 337. 32. C. C. S. Farrar, ‘‘The Science of History,’’ DBR 5 (January 1848): 58.

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only means by which we may predict the future, that it becomes indispensable for regulating the conduct of mankind upon important occasions.’’ 33 And Mitchell King had compared the possible power of the historian to that of the natural scientist (but also the slaveholder): ‘‘The laws of the physical world are altogether independent of men. . . . Yet, in numberless instances, he can call them into action, and control them, and apply them to his purposes, and make them his servants, his slaves, to perform his will, and do his bidding.’’ 34 The importance of control in a slave society helps to explain the pertinence of Niebuhr for Southerners.35 For he was a Prussian conservative, one of the many who were trying to put the genie of the French Revolution back in the bottle.36 As Holmes put it, ‘‘[N]otwithstanding his liberal tendencies and his ardour in the cause of well-regulated freedom, he was not seduced by the Utopian dreams but licentious plans of the Prices, Priestleys, and Horne Tookes.’’ 37 But it was more than that. Niebuhr seemed to prove that human intelligence could establish control, create order, from the most refractory of materials, from even broken columns and crumbling palimpsests.38 Above all, he was thought to have reconciled imagination and science, while according to each its own sphere. It was for this that Guizot, too, was praised. His erudite imagination pierced ‘‘the dim mists that shroud the events of the past,’’ and thereby revivified its sleeping concepts as modern truths, while his spell could ‘‘reanimate dead institutions, and . . . set before modern eyes, both their example and their authors.’’ 39 Historicism killed the past, as a necessary prelude to raising its dead. It was a central paradox of the historicist revolution that what began as Christian, utilitarian, and conservative in both metaphysics and politics 33. Henry, ‘‘Niebuhr’s Roman History,’’ 320. The phrase ‘‘past authentic history’’ is probably an allusion to Samuel Johnson’s remark, recorded by Boswell: ‘‘We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real authentick history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture.’’ See Boswell, Life of Johnson, 628. 34. MK, Qualifications and Duties, 6. 35. This theme has been most explored by Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 36. Not completely back, however. One of his political heroes was Mirabeau, a copy of whose bust by Houdon was kept in Niebuhr’s Bonn home: see the Chevalier Bunsen, The Life and Letters of Barthold Georg Niebuhr: With Essays on His Character and Influence (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), 527. 37. GFH, ‘‘Niebuhr,’’ 543. 38. This assessment of Niebuhr’s accomplishment was not confined to Southerners. Brandis, a colleague at Bonn, observed: ‘‘His claim to be a pioneer of a new path in science, rests upon the fact . . . that from the scanty and unconnected details belonging to history, he was able to draw clear and correct outlines, by displaying their relation to each other.’’ See Bunsen, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, 535. 39. GFH, ‘‘Niebuhr,’’ 550; ‘‘Oeuvres de Vico,’’ SQR 2 (October 1842): 405.

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ended up as agnostic, aesthetic, and radical.The early historicists, like Herder, began to see the past as another country and, in time, this broke the link between past and future, whose manipulation people like Mitchell King saw as the crowning accomplishment of the historian. But human nature itself broke into shards, for some beyond even imaginative recreation, for many beyond utility. The frankly utilitarian disciplines like economics, sociology, even anthropology drifted away from history, when historians could no longer confidently assert that things in the past could be known and then deployed in the engineering of the future, in what Robert Henry called ‘‘regulating the conduct of mankind.’’ As we shall see, male Southerners from Thomas Dew to William Henry Trescot went further along in this journey than has been recognized, but not all the way. Mary Chesnut was to know more, but then she lived through a great war which shattered the illusion of control.

Of Ancient and More Modern Times 40 Thomas Dew fashioned the best sustained account by a Southerner of the wide scope of human history, for each year he gave lectures to the undergraduates of the College of William and Mary on matters since the Creation. These were printed privately for the use of his students but otherwise unpublished until after his premature death, when Henry Augustine Washington arranged for their issuance as A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations (1853). Only its section on the French Revolution was published by Dew himself, in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1844.41 Internal evidence suggests that the lectures were completed, insofar as they were completed, in about 1841 or 1842, though many passages were almost certainly written earlier.42 Hence, because of the circumstances of its composition and publication, the Digest is a rough-hewn book, whose contents vary from telegraphic notations to sustained passages of urbane prose. Its structure, however, is decided. It is divided into two sections, one upon ancient history, another upon modern history, with the transition coming at the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism. The ancient world is discussed in eight chapters, although the first six—upon antediluvian, post-diluvian, ‘‘monumental,’’ Egyptian, Asian, and ancient European history—are very brief and 40. ‘‘[Your work] abounds with the fruits of critical research and information; and the views advanced as to the distinctive characteristics of the various celebrated historians, both of ancient and more modern times, and as to their comparative merits, eminently discriminative and just’’: W. J. Garrett to AJP, 5 October 1854, AJP Papers, ADAH. 41. Thomas R. Dew, ‘‘The French Revolution,’’ SQR 5 (January 1844): 1–102, which is in Dew, Digest, 572–662. 42. See the comments on John Tyler’s accession to the presidency ‘‘lately’’: Dew, Digest, 617.

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fragmentary, occupying a mere thirty-eight pages, before Dew settled to two long chapters on the Greeks and Romans. The section on modern history has nine chapters: on feudalism, chivalry, the rise of Christianity, urban development, the revival of literature, the growth of royal power, the Reformation, the development of the English constitution up to 1688, and the French Revolution. Dew’s earliest pages are respectful towards the biblical account of creation, though briefly, with moments of skepticism, and most committed to Christian belief when non-Christian cosmogonies and science lent support to Moses. So Dew gives the ages of the patriarchs with exclamation marks: ‘‘Methuselah, the oldest man on record, lived 969 years; Adam lived 930!’’ And he is careful to indicate that modern geology cast doubt upon the Mosaic story of man’s creation, as well as the dating of the Flood, if not its reality. In this, he was most influenced by the Neptunian school of geology that flourished before Charles Lyell and, on several occasions, he cites William Buckland, the school’s advocate. Otherwise, Dew gives an account of ancient tribes rooted in the discoveries of modern ethnography, which he defined as ‘‘the study which groups nations according to languages.’’ He is quietly dismissive of polygenesis, preferring to insist upon man’s common origin, not because Moses was decisive as a historian, but because modern scholars of language (Wilhelm von Humboldt and Thomas Young are cited) seem to have shown that all languages had diverged from a common root. Nonetheless, Dew gives a short account of the ancient Jews, with an emphasis upon their tribal divisions and patriarchal system of governance, and with marked praise of their literary accomplishment as (in Herder’s way) ‘‘purely national.’’ As to Egypt, his estimate is polite if unpreoccupied, reliant upon Heeren, and mostly anxious to deny Herodotus’s awkward claim that the Egyptians were negro and to conclude that there had been ‘‘different races in Egypt, and that [the] one approaching to white was the ruling race, while negroes were always subjects and slaves.’’ As to ancient Asia, he followed the standard modern line that it was a land of despotisms and nomads. He gives longer consideration only to Babylon and Phoenicia, with very little mention of China or India. Out of these, the Phoenicians receive the greatest praise, for inventing the alphabet, but also for dispersing a peaceful civilization by means of trading and colonization, and (this had been Connop Thirlwall’s opinion) doing ‘‘more than all other nations for the infant civilization of Greece.’’ 43 In general, Dew makes a bald case for European superiority and expansion from ancient to modern times, as one might expect of a Southerner whose culture was itself imperial. In his view, the ‘‘grinding despotisms’’ of Asia 43. Ibid., 2, 9, 14, 24, 36.

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could not compete with a ‘‘Europe, always struggling for liberty,’’ for the former preferred simplicity and limited the use of innovation, while the latter encouraged complexity of mind, released to action. But Dew’s distinction was also racial: the ‘‘Caucasian or the white race inhabiting Europe seems to be a superior race . . . and other races seem intellectual in proportion to likeness to European, e.g., races of Asia and Africa.’’ To race was added climate, the temperateness and fertility of Europe, as well as the fact that Asia was polygamous while European cultures preferred monogamy. This last was an idiosyncratic theme of Dew, who was much preoccupied with gender. He believed that polygamy, or any system that tended to make women into dependent slaves, meant that the necessary influence of women upon civilization was lost, and that patriarchal despotism created men unfit for free government and rational liberty. This was a transposition of the familiar Jeffersonian objection to slavery, that it was ‘‘a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’’ 44 Dew’s approach to the Greeks was sympathetic, anthropological about their religion, and inclined to Hume’s contention that their myths were a function of fears and primitive irrationalities. As a matter of first principle, Dew believed that polytheism was natural to early societies, but he was also conscious that Greek religion (unlike the Egyptian) had not been the exclusive possession of priests and this quasi-openness had encouraged a sense of humanity. Still, Dew was careful to insist that monotheism was superior, if difficult to grasp, for ‘‘only the large philosophical mind’’ could see ‘‘amidst the apparent contradictions and elemental strife of nature’s parts, a unity and harmony which demonstrate existence of but one architect for the whole system of the universe.’’ And he was very careful to ensure that his enumeration of the multiplicity of ancient cosmogonies should not incline his undergraduates to relativism. Rather, he insisted that underlying all religions were some commonalities: these consisted in ‘‘a system of rewards and punishments either here or hereafter; in the belief of a Tartarus or Elysium; in the belief of a first great cause, or a number of superhuman intelligences, who order and govern the universe.’’ 45 The main ground of Dew’s sympathy for the Greeks, whose exposition begins to state the theme of the Digest, was their decentralization of governance, which had created disorder but also nurtured vitality. As was common among the Romantic historians—Dew relied upon William Mitford, Connop Thirlwall, and Arnold Heeren—he deprecated the Spartans for their 44. Ibid., 36–37; Jefferson, ‘‘Notes,’’ 288. 45. Dew, Digest, 55, 59.

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rigidity and praised the Athenians for their democratic proclivities. Unlike his authorities, however, Dew was relatively sanguine about the beneficial consequences of slavery, even in Sparta, and noted with satisfaction that even ‘‘Heeren admits that without slaves in Greece the upper classes would never have obtained great mental pre-eminence.’’ Doubtless Athens had been unstable, but ‘‘in midst of disorder and insecurity of both persons and property, there were some advantages. Such a government produces exuberance of energy, genius, and real greatness.’’ This, in the long run, helped the Greeks to defeat the Persians, for in a contest between despotism and liberty, the latter would eventually prevail. However, it was also true that this contest had created a discipline among the Athenians which eventually bred Athens’s own imperialism over other Greeks. Nonetheless Athens was a shining moment for liberty and republicanism. Its culture found imperishable words that expressed ‘‘the mighty difference between the man who fights for his freedom and his country, and him who fights for a master.’’ For Dew, country and liberty were conjoined ideas. From the contemplation of Marathon and Thermopylae came exhortations which ‘‘have been consecrated to the cause of free institutions everywhere, until they have become the very watchwords of liberty and independence throughout the world.’’ So Athens had partly made Virginia.46 Dew on the Greeks mingles several intellectual influences. There are his Romantic themes. He believed, for example, that the Greeks had more imagination and less reason than the moderns, a more sensual and tactile sense of materiality, which expressed itself in the crude licentiousness of their drama. But Dew was never more than a half-hearted Romantic and retained much of an Enlightenment sensibility. In this, he was like Hugh Legaré, whom he occasionally quoted and much praised as ‘‘one of the most accomplished Greek scholars in this country.’’ 47 Dew was as likely to cite Voltaire and Hume, Ferguson and Millar, as he was to quote the Schlegels and Mitford. Thus he often alluded to the Scottish stage theory of social development. Likewise, despite his deference to monotheism, he praised Socrates for separating philosophy from religion, an accomplishment that would have been impossible in an Eastern despotism, where ‘‘philosophy is the slave of religion.’’ Philosophy ought to be free to attack religion, as was demonstrated by the case of Galileo. ‘‘Socrates threw off these shackles; he investigated man as a social 46. Ibid., 81, 84, 102. 47. Ibid., 132, 136, 188, 189, 205–6, 209 (quotation on p. 209). Dew was quoting from or paraphrasing the following: HSL, ‘‘The Roman Orators,’’ SR 2 (November 1828): 514, 531; HSL, ‘‘The Public Economy of Athens,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 294, 296; HSL, ‘‘Constitutional History of Greece,’’ in Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:439.

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being, and deduced his conclusions from the principles of nature, and not from arbitrary dogmas of absurd religion.’’ Moreover, Dew displays a restless sense that social forms have a transhistorical significance. In his narrative, one could jump from Attica to modern America, from the Agora to modern Italian music, and usefully compare Phillipp Melanchthon with James Madison.48 Dew was very conscious of the accusation, which was much later to harden into an orthodoxy, that his own cultures, Virginia and the South, were too much preoccupied by politics to attain philosophical eminence. He was anxious to deny the logic, indeed passionately to assert the contrary. It was ‘‘generally supposed in republican governments that men are too much engrossed by politics to cultivate philosophy.’’ This was ‘‘a great mistake,’’ for philosophy was ‘‘most frivolous where it dares not penetrate into institutions which surround it.’’ Rather, ‘‘when thought may be the forerunner of action, when happy reflection may be transformed into a beneficent institution, then do speculations of [a] man of genius ennoble philosophy.’’ Hence the Greeks were wise ‘‘to blend together military, legislative, and philosophic pursuits’’ and thereby produce ‘‘intense mental activity, and great improvement.’’ 49 So, like Legaré, Dew was keen to ponder the nature of ancient eloquence and relate it to political institutions, to reason out the old problem of Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, and Patrick Henry, and to consider what the election of 1840 meant.50 Unusual, however, is Dew’s preoccupation with the historical role of women. In one sense, this arose from his interest in social and economic history, and (one might surmise) was partly inspired by the various dissertations on the ‘‘progress of the female sex’’ to which the Scottish Enlightenment was prone.51 Dew’s book has long discussions of the role of eating, of dinners and breakfasts, the rhythms of an ancient day, just as (what was natural for a political economist) he spent much energy upon considering taxation systems and economics. The section in which he dealt with gender is headed ‘‘Women, 48. Dew, Digest, 121, 135, 148ff., 445. 49. Ibid., 124. 50. See HSL, ‘‘Constitutional History of Greece,’’ New York Review 7 (July 1840): 1–85, and HSL, ‘‘Demosthenes, the Man, the Statesman, and the Orator,’’ New York Review 9 (July 1841): 1–70. 51. See, for example, ‘‘Progress of the Female Sex,’’ in Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 3 vols. (1774; reprint, Edinburgh: William Creech, 1807), 1:404–80. On this, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought,’’ in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 242.

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Manners, Meals &c.’’ But the matter of sex ran deeper than this. Dew was insistently restless at the thought of an exclusively male world. The Greek drama, for example, he felt was the less for the subordinate role it ascribed to women: ‘‘[I]t is all men, all business, all public matters.’’ This attitude marked Dew as a modern, for Legaré had observed that what marked out the ancients was their lack of a private sphere, their dwelling always in the public realm. Greek wives, Dew suggested, had been secluded and chaste, but this was a virtue created by a mistake. Immurement had made them ‘‘too uninteresting to be objects of desire.’’ For ‘‘seclusion is but a sorry substitute for intelligence and liberty.’’ A lock and a key could not guarantee female chastity, but only ‘‘virtuous principle, fortified by mental culture,’’ and the situation when ‘‘woman, the equal of man, enjoys his entire confidence and love, in possession of a full liberty, which but the more attaches her to her family and fireside, where she feels she is the true divinity.’’ Better to risk cuckoldry, Dew seems to suggest, than to have a pale prisoner for a wife.52 Indeed, Dew was deeply interested in the power of sex. The young men of Williamsburg must have leaned forward in their desks when their college president launched into a long disquisition on Greek courtesans, wherein he happily dwelt upon how their corruption had been matched by their allure and intelligence. The splendor of Aspasia, who lived beyond the conventions of Greek marriage, was ‘‘a melancholy memorial of that corruption which must ever result from that injustice to woman which would systematically degrade her, by neglecting her mental culture.’’ 53 More broadly, Dew offered an explanation for the decline of Greece, which self-evidently mirrored his American prognostications. Athens, he argued, had too greatly restricted the franchise, had made citizenship into a caste, and so become too much the tyrant of Hellas. Further, Greece was plagued by a racial division. Athens came to lead the progressive and democratic Ionians, Sparta the conservative and aristocratic Dorians, and between the two no reconciliation proved possible. Hence the tragedy of the Peloponnesian War. In general, though Dew does not cite Benjamin Constant and perhaps worked through intermediaries like Legaré, Dew’s view of the ancient world was much influenced by Constant’s contentions that the problem of antiquity was the overweaning power of the state and that, secondly, the distinctiveness of modernity was the primacy it gave to the individual.54 As Dew put it, 52. HSL, ‘‘Roman Literature,’’ SR 1 (May 1828): 385–87; Dew, Digest, 162. 53. Dew, Digest, 165. 54. Cf. ‘‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,’’ an 1819 speech given at the Athenée Royal in Paris, reprinted in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307–28. Dew does quote from Benjamin Constant, Commentaire sur l’Ouvrage de Filangieri (Paris: P. Dufart, 1822–

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‘‘The state was every thing—the individual only became important through the state. The ancients started with the state and deduced all individual relations from that point. The moderns start with individuals, and deduce the state from them.’’ 55 Liberty in the ancient world ‘‘consisted principally in the share a man had in the government, not freedom from its action. Perfect equality was perfect liberty.’’ Though a government be a despotism, if each citizen shared in that power, ‘‘then he had liberty.’’ It was different with ‘‘the moderns.’’ ‘‘We regard freedom as personal restraint and security of property as the great essentials of liberty.’’ 56 From this flowed Greece’s incessant warfare, its absence of gentility, its abrupt ostracisms and confiscations. Like Constant, Dew made some exception for Athens, which never acquired modernity but whose democracy mitigated the stifling implications of state power. For Dew stressed the value of risk: ‘‘a short but crowded and energetic life is preferable to an age of noiseless slavery.’’ Better a turbulent Greece than ‘‘all the barren annals of Chinese history for thousands of years past.’’ 57 The trick was to find a middle ground between the ancient and the modern. This, too, had been Constant’s liberal message, which in Dew’s Virginia translated itself into a modern Whiggery keen to navigate a passage between the Scylla of Jacksonian democracy and the Charybdis of proscriptive aristocracy. For the Virginian student, the value of Greek history was its offering of a laboratory in which to study the varieties of political experience: in this opinion, Dew echoed Legaré. One could learn ‘‘the true value of democratic principle, and acknowledge its energizing influence, whilst he sees its corrupting tendency when not restrained,’’ and also contemplate the usefulness of representative institutions and independent judiciaries. Above all, one could see the value of balancing energy against order, by giving small commonwealths the freedom to create innovation and a federal government the power to keep the peace and restrain anarchy. Concomitantly, state power could prevent ‘‘the evil of consolidation, which extinguishes individual energy and greatness of soul.’’ And, one could further conclude that, even if the Union should fail, there would be some consolation in the thought that Greek his24), in Thomas R. Dew, Lectures on the Restrictive System Delivered to the Senior Political Class of William and Mary College (1829; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 8, and offers an unattributed quotation from Constant on women in Thomas R. Dew, ‘‘Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences between the Sexes, and on the Position and Influence of Woman in Society,’’ SLM 1 (August 1835): 673. However, Dew nowhere cites Constant’s essay on the liberty of the ancients, which is why I hazard the conjecture of intermediate influence. 55. Dew, Digest, 202. 56. Ibid., 203. This, of course, intimates Isaiah Berlin, in turn influenced by Constant. On this, see John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 20, citing Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 127. 57. Dew, Digest, 207.

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tory proved that ‘‘bad as is the system of small, divided, and hostile states, it yet produces a compensating energy.’’ 58 Dew made less of the Romans than he did of the Greeks: the latter got 172 pages, the former only a little over a hundred. This diminution mirrored a growing tendency, common in European and Southern thought, as was Dew’s disposition to make more of the complicated tribal origins of the ‘‘early Italian races.’’ After Niebuhr, Heeren, and Thomas Arnold, Dew stressed the wise process by which the governing oligarchy of Rome had admitted into citizenship ‘‘the original Roman plebs, or commons, as a robust, industrious, warlike yeomanry’’ and so saved the early republic by gradual reform. Only later, when the plebs were excluded and reduced to a dependency, did they become the feared rabble of legend, at which time an impassable and ominous gulf developed between patrons and clients, a gulf unmediated by a middle class, and thereby Rome became subject to ‘‘continual convulsions.’’ For Dew, Rome acted most wisely when it assimilated strangers and lost distinctions of race, most unwisely when it insisted upon rank and exclusivity. Nonetheless, Rome was able to gain an empire upon the basis of the peculiar force and coherence of her political system, though that empire in turn brought both an enlarged civilization and the temptations of imported vices. For Dew thought that one should only judge Rome’s probity at the expansive moments when it was seriously tested, not when in narrower republican times it had been secluded. This argument echoed his theory about Greek women. Hence, ‘‘the introduction of the scandalous Bacchanalia . . . shows how easily great vices may creep in among a people who are only indebted for their morality to their ignorance.’’ 59 On the whole, Dew’s account of Rome is a straightforward chronological survey of its battles, conquests, constitutional struggles, and civil wars, in which he found little to admire. Strikingly absent is that consideration of society, of women, of manners and meals which he had lavished upon the Greeks. After all, the Romans too had not lacked for courtesans, but Dew omits Volumnia Cytheris. Mostly, he does not praise Rome. Even the Antonines, whom Gibbon had invited the world to admire, are given only a grudging approval, Dew noting the Empire’s prosperity then but also its moral littleness. Certainly, unlike Gibbon, Dew did not blame Christianity for the fall of Rome, but then its continuance mattered less, if one did not admire the Empire. Though he laughs with Gibbon at St. Simeon Stylites, ‘‘the most ingenious of all fanatics . . . this aerial saint,’’ Dew’s remarks on the immediate effect of Christianity are cautious: its value was ‘‘as the vehicle by 58. Ibid., 210, 211. 59. Ibid., 211, 222, 268, 251.

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which civilization made its way among the rude nations that now appeared on the scene,’’ more than ‘‘the means of improving the manners and morals of the Roman world.’’ 60 For most of its thousand years, Rome seemed to Dew to be a despotism, which invited no sympathy and gave no lessons beyond what Greek history had already offered to the young American. Dew was not without the Enlightenment’s mistrust of the Middle Ages, which he consented to call ‘‘dark.’’ He debates, for example, in what medieval century one should locate the nadir of European history and offers as alternatives Hume and Robertson’s claim for the tenth century, but also Hallam’s and Guizot’s preference for the seventh. Dew is savage towards medieval literature, whose depressive effect on the human mind ‘‘almost exceeds belief.’’ Nonetheless, Dew does not locate the origins of modernity in the Renaissance, as Jacob Burckhardt would later do, but in the Middle Ages. No doubt it was a period of ‘‘anarchy and confusion and individual oppression,’’ but it also saw the emergence of chivalry, the Crusades, the vernacular languages, and modern literature and manners. In the aristocracy, the carriers of the idea of liberty, there had begun to be a concept of individualism which in time would trickle down to ‘‘the whole mass.’’ Recurring to his central theme, Dew argued that ‘‘the feudal system destroyed centralization and broke Europe into a number of political elements, which slowly coalesced into the civilized kingdoms of modern times.’’ Rome had asserted a quasi-Asian despotism, a ‘‘principle of immobility,’’ and this was shattered by feudalism.61 In the book upon which Dew much relied, Henry Hallam had observed ‘‘the partiality of modern writers’’ to the subject of chivalry. Dew, too, gave chivalry much prominence, by seeing it as a reformation of manners, whose essence lay in the ‘‘love of arms, romantic spirit of adventure, courtesy of manners, the point of honor, and devoted and respectful attention to the female sex.’’ He was conscious that there could be mincing follies attendant in the courts of love and arms and, worse than that, dissoluteness, but (after Hallam) he enumerated significant advantages in the encouragement of the virtues of loyalty, courtesy, liberality, and justice. Though the specific forms of chivalry were swept away by the military transformations that rendered the knight a vulnerable anachronism and by the economic changes that made commercial professions a locus for different exertions, chivalry’s spirit survived in ‘‘the character of the modern gentleman,’’ in a civilizing elevation of women, in the mitigation of the laws of war, in ‘‘sensitiveness on the point of honor and the modern practice of duelling,’’ and in modern manners and politeness.62 60. Ibid., 381, 306. 61. Ibid., 326, 330, 328, 340. 62. Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, 6th ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), 509; Dew, Digest, 342–43, 348–49, 351, 350, 355.

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Notable, too, is that Dew located the significance of Christianity, not in the story of the ancient world, but in the birth of the modern; he narrated its rise after he had spoken broadly of medievalism. He did this, at first, in the spirit of studying comparative mythologies and not without some sense that other religions, even polytheism, had merits foreclosed to Christianity. The experience of having many gods, none too remote or awful, might promote a sense of accessibility and materiality: ‘‘It is a law of our nature that the affections should quickly entwine themselves about material objects, which then gradually become interwoven with all out feelings and emotions.’’ That Christianity’s lofty spirituality had been mitigated by a pagan inheritance, which had created saints, icons, even Christ the intermediary, had been for the good, for it had given men something more homely to confront than ‘‘the infinite majesty of the Almighty.’’ 63 In this attitude, Dew was most an Episcopalian, someone committed to the relevance of the Catholic tradition, however reformed. The structure and creed of Roman Catholicism, indeed, he narrates without evangelical indignations and with a marked desire to give it the benefit of the doubt, even if its merit was mostly that of creating discipline for a disordered age. Nonetheless, even monks had their virtues. The Crusades feature largely in Dew’s account of the origins of modernity, though ambivalently. They had been brutal, an education in massacre and persecution, and thereby Europe had been coarsened. But the Crusades had taken Europe out of itself and so promoted eventually an understanding of the non-European world. Also, oddly, these wars were eventually to produce a spirit of nationality. For the city states of Italy, which (after Sismondi) Dew saw as vital sponsors of commercial modernity, had been much encouraged by the trade instigated by new links with the Levant. And it was in medieval Italy that Dew saw the conditions of ancient Greece reborn: smallness of scale, turbulence, initiative, and energy: ‘‘There were movement and action throughout [the] whole of these little commonwealths, all was life and bustle within, every man felt his importance and called forth all his energies.’’ Again, he argued (not very clearly), the great change from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries had been the shift from the merely local to the national. More, the cities had impelled the emancipation of the serfs, which Dew saw as an advance. This assertion was, of course, an awkward insight for a slaveholder, so Dew had to make his distinctions, of which the greatest was that modern Southern slaves (unlike Renaissance serfs) were of a different race. Moreover, he argued that the economic expansiveness of the Italian cities had enabled them to absorb the emancipated serfs, which was not the American situation, and that the European climate had not required a labor force peculiarly fitted for subtropical conditions. But the Italian republics in time made 63. Dew, Digest, 361, 362.

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the errors of ancient Rome; they expanded, they conquered, they sought control, their citizens learned supine acquiescence to an overweaning aristocracy and so, in ‘‘the strong language of Sismondi, Italy appears struck by the hand of death’’ by the seventeenth century.64 The implications of this for a South, itself expanding and seeking control, were necessarily troubling. As one might expect, Dew made much of the growth of the vernacular languages, but also of their cross-fertilization with the rebirth of classicism. He was conscious that many, including Immanuel Kant, had argued that neoclassicism had been a misfortune, ‘‘that literature ought always to be [the] expression of the character of the age.’’ But Dew decided, on balance, that so much of the thought of the ancient world was still superior to that of the late medieval that it had been needful to sustain the classical tradition, at least until ‘‘the European had raised himself to the intellectual level of the ancients; then alone could the scaffolding be thrown aside.’’ 65 Dew’s ideas on nationality begin to be clarified in his sixth chapter on modern history. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Guizot had suggested, the essential political dynamic of modernity had been fashioned: ‘‘We have homogeneous governments every where acting over large masses of people, and the people again reacting upon the government. It is this reciprocal action which constitutes [the] internal history of modern European nations—the nobility, the clergy, the commonalty.’’ The particularist divisions of the premodern, ‘‘all those distinct classes, those special and individual powers . . . have all been absorbed and melted down.’’ At first, the power of royal government being so great, this centralization had been debilitating, the more so for having been backed by standing armies. But, before discussing how the power of the people began to countervail and correct this power, Dew turned to the Reformation, which for the Protestant Romantic was conventionally understood to be a major source of modernity. Though Dew narrates the theological details of Luther’s heresy, it is notable that the Virginian tends to diminish the specifically Protestant content of the Reformation and to make it of a piece with humanism; both are seen as ventures that liberated intellectual inquiry, at a time when the invention of the printing press and the voyages of discovery unraveled the tight authority of the medieval Church. Still, Dew was in no doubt that Protestantism had marked an advance, observable in the material progress of Protestant countries, compared to the laggard enervation of Catholic ones. In Germany and Switzerland, the modern traveler constantly passed from one religious zone to another; ‘‘mud cottages covered with thatch, fields badly kept, wretched, rude peasants and 64. Ibid., 405, 408. 65. Ibid., 426.

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beggars, betoken the catholic country—neat houses, well cultivated fields, energetic enterprise, mark the influence of the protestant religion.’’ 66 Dew next turns to the two great political traditions of modern Europe, the British and the French, the one leading to 1688 and 1776, the other to 1789. His history of the English constitution is conventional, except in leaning towards the proposition (intimated earlier) that the origins of English liberty had lain less with Anglo-Saxons, more with the Anglo-Norman aristocracy that had evolved an alliance with the people as a means of resisting the monarchy. (This was not how Thomas Jefferson had seen the matter.) The evolution of parliament is central to Dew’s account—it is even put before the development of the common law—and he especially highlights the process by which parliament acquired complexity and depth of representation. But Dew the political economist was under no illusion about the central dynamic: the ‘‘main object of calling burgesses and even knights was to get money of them, and as different interests would give differently, so they acted apart. But it is in the nature of such bodies when called together to increase gradually the sphere of their action.’’ Rather, he argues that parliament brought together diversity without consolidating them into a single power. Further, he stresses the inexclusive character of the English aristocracy, its minimal exemption from the ordinary processes of the law and its relative openness. Liberty had been achieved by vigilance, frequent if never constant: ‘‘the struggle against the royal prerogative was like that of the waterman against a rapid stream—the slightest relaxation of exertion and the fruit of years of labor would be swept away.’’ And, again, the economist in Dew was cynical about the role of money: ‘‘It has been said that English liberty has been purchased with blood. . . . [but] some of [the] best laws of England, with Magna Charta itself, as confirmed by Henry III, were literally purchased with money.’’ In general, though Dew discusses Wat Tyler’s rebellion, he sees popular uprisings as evidence of English social changes, especially the growth of cities and the end of serfdom, rather than as explanatory of political revolution. Even for the great changes of the seventeenth century, he argues that the ‘‘spirit of liberty . . . only existed among men of property and intelligence; it had not yet descended to the lower orders.’’ Indeed, he suggests that the populace had been usually conservative, even prone to the support of legitimacy. Further, he argues as a general principle that ‘‘the great revolutions of modern times have been brought about principally by the agency of the propert[ied].’’ 67 Dew was more impressed with a religious explanation for the English Civil Wars: the Puritans under Charles I were ‘‘in many respects ridiculous and un66. Ibid., 427, 457. 67. Ibid., 482, 485, 487, 520, 564.

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amiable’’ but also zealous, persevering, courageous, and cool in council. Indeed, he inclined to think that only religion had persuaded ordinary people to give even a minimal support to the Parliamentarians. Otherwise his narrative is markedly contingent, a careful tracing of cumulative events, mistakes, boldness, and unintended consequences. He is, here more than elsewhere, acutely conscious of the historiographical debate. He is not enthusiastic for the older Whig historians: John Oldmixon and Catharine Macaulay are condemned as partisans, with ‘‘more zeal than either candor or skill.’’ But the Tory historians, from Clarendon to Hume, are even more resisted. Clarendon was ‘‘always able, stately, and dignified,’’ but was a man of ‘‘numerous prejudices and errors.’’ Hume, above all, was the enemy, the more so since ‘‘his exceedingly fascinating narrative . . . is known to all; hundreds, perhaps thousands, have formed their opinions exclusively from a perusal of it.’’ But Hume had culpably favored the Stuarts and ‘‘hated the liberty of this period, because it allied itself with an austere and canting religion.’’ For a more balanced view, one needed to look later, to Millar, Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay. Dew was writing before Macaulay’s history had been published, but relied rather upon ‘‘the masterly articles of this writer, in the Edinburgh Review, [which] are perhaps the ablest and most interesting which have ever been written on this subject, and have gone very far to settle the question of right between the two parties.’’ 68 To trust Macaulay was to be Whig. Dew’s version of Whiggery was practical, businesslike, and Victorian in tone. The constitutional adjustments of 1688 were doubtless important for liberty, but they had been more significant for fashioning a workable balance between King, aristocracy, and the Commons. Less usual was Dew’s insistence that this fashioning was not completed in 1688, but continued under the first two Hanoverians, even under Sir Robert Walpole, who had killed off the essential power of the monarchy and reduced it to ‘‘a mere state pageant.’’ Indeed Dew skips over 1688 in barely a page, benign but unpreoccupied. His essential argument is that the propertied people sorted things out in a middling fashion: ‘‘Property is always opposed to excesses; it countenances no violent innovations; it opposes proscriptions; it supports order and regular government.’’ This claim was, of course, Burkean. Unlike Burke and Macaulay, however, Dew found much to admire in Oliver Cromwell, whose ‘‘protectorate constitutes one of the most brilliant periods in British history.’’ 69 This praise is significant, for it exposed a tension. In much of his narrative of English history, Dew had tended to lose touch with his heritage as a Virginian republican, but in this regard for Cromwell, he recovered himself. 68. Ibid., 522, 558, 559. 69. Ibid., 560, 565, 569.

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Dew’s version of English history was fashioned in the light of the French Revolution, as most modern accounts were. Indeed his understanding of the American Revolution, which he did not dwell upon in the Digest, might be said to have arisen from weighing French against English history and putting the American experience on the English side of the ledger. Upon this logic, unlike the French, the English had had an experience of contingent liberty and, undeluded by abstract theory, had found no temptations in agrarianism. Legaré had argued this too, also being influenced by Burke.70 Still, Dew did not find most modern accounts of 1789 satisfactory. Walter Scott and Archibald Alison were too Tory. The French, especially François-Auguste Mignet and Adolphe Thiers, had done better, because they had been less prone to the cheap hysteria that gripped the English imagination when contemplating events over the Channel. But no one had done better, according to Dew, than Thomas Carlyle (despite his ‘‘miserably affected style’’) for capturing the confusing hurly-burly of events.71 Considering all that had gone before in the Digest, Dew’s version of the French Revolution is unsurprising. His ancien régime personifies corrupt centralization; his revolutionaries demonstrate the temptations of radical liberty. He speaks of the rise of the middle class and its thwarting, the revolution being at first ‘‘truly an insurrection of the unprivileged against the privileged property, and not a war of those who have, against those who have not, as has been too often represented.’’ He stresses the role of the philosophes, as impractical men of utopian disingenuousness, whose ‘‘abstract speculations were like theoretic mechanics, who sit in their closets and contemplate diagrams and figures, representing levers, pulleys, &c., with all the accuracy of mathematic precision, and never reflect that, in applying them to practice, it is necessary to allow for friction and resistance.’’ That is, they had had no historic ballast to steady them in the crisis. They had known no parliamentary procedure, and no more than the people had they been used to the transaction of public business. So both the philosophes and the people blundered into becoming mobs, driven to swift and drastic action. Arguing this, naturally Dew favored the Comte de Mirabeau, the perennial candidate of the Whig sensibility, and abominated both the Abbé Sièyes, that ‘‘light, thin man,’’ and Robespierre.72 Still, Dew did not go all the way with Burke: ‘‘The national assembly, in spite of all the denunciations of Burke, and the assertions of his more shallow disciples, represented the enlightened classes which first awoke in France and cried out against power, and the extent to which the assembly pushed re70. Notably in the exordium to HSL, ‘‘Cicero de Republica,’’ SR 4 (August 1829): 175–76. 71. Dew, Digest, 573. 72. Ibid., 583, 587, 595, 598.

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form, marked the extreme limits to which those classes were willing to go.’’ Unfortunately, this had not been enough: Lafayette and Mirabeau could not control events, they stopped too short in reform, though it was unclear to Dew whether they could have gone further, the tension between the people and the ‘‘enlightened classes’’ growing so violent. The tragedy of France had been that ‘‘a middle course, with a constitutional government, headed by an executive . . . was utterly impracticable’’ because of the exigencies of France’s war with the enemies of the revolution. Social divisions had grown intolerably sharp, the aristocracy and others came to emigrate, and little was left but government by violence and tyranny, economic as well as political. For Dew made much of the Jacobins messing up the economy, by failing to see ‘‘the danger of substituting the wisdom of man for the self-sustaining laws of trade.’’ But, more conventionally, he dwelt on the atheist cult of Reason and on the reforms of the Church and the calendar, as foolish attempts to substitute human inventions for the rhythms of tradition. More broadly, he argued that ‘‘every set of statesmen, until the time of Bonaparte, failed the moment they had a system to defend.’’ Each system had been too exclusive and so had failed, to be succeeded by another, equally inadequate. What France had lacked was the Anglo-American web of mixed influences, the pressure of ‘‘constitutional checks,’’ ‘‘prescribed forms of law,’’ and ‘‘the peaceful action of a sound, temperate, public opinion.’’ 73 Nonetheless, amid this complacency, Dew did acknowledge the instructive value of the French Revolution, for having provided a compelling modern reenactment of the ancient lesson of Greek history, which was that a polity needed to find the middle ground between liberty and anarchy, diversity and centralization. This précis does not do justice to the complexity of the Digest. For one thing, it is almost best for its Tocquevillean gift for small but instructive details, and its un-Tocquevillean fondness for humane anecdotes. There are hundreds of such shrewd stories in the narrative. One will have to suffice, the footnote where Dew observes ‘‘that in an absolute monarchy, like that of France antecedent to the revolution, the mistresses of the king often, in some measure supplied the place of a deliberative body, and became often the means of effecting changes in the government. . . . [Hence] the Choiseul ministry was put in by Pompadour and was put out by Du Barri.’’ 74 For all that, the Digest is notable also for its ability to sustain an interpretation over a large canvas. To read Dew is to be told that history makes sense and has lessons, but not always the lessons habitual to the moderate Whig-cum-bourgeois tradition, to which he essentially belonged. His libertarian argument was sufficiently emended 73. Ibid., 605, 617, 634, 658. 74. Ibid., 578.

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by his preoccupation with the problems of centralization and property, and both by his concern with the status of women, to make Dew more than just a rehash of Niebuhr, Hallam, and Macaulay. For Dew was interested in more than the constitutional problem of political society. Partly this arose from his training as a political economist, but he went further than his eighteenthcentury exemplars (like John Millar) in worrying out the problem of society, in trying to see some relationship between how men were governed and how they lived. Certainly, as a slaveholder sympathetic to racial theory, Dew added touches alien to Bonn and London. On the whole, however, it is striking how little the Digest made of slavery’s role in history, not how much. Dew seemed to stir himself to discuss slavery and race only when he knew the thought of their relevance would have arisen irresistibly in the mind of his readers. In the Digest’s version of history, in marked contrast to Dew’s review of the Virginia emancipation debates of ten years earlier, slavery was treated as too fugitive an institution to make the centerpiece of a broad explanation for human events. Dew was now for bigger, less local game.75 Slavery, in 1842 as in 1832, was subject to the criterium of practicality: if it worked, it lived; if it failed, it should die with little need for remorse. Slavery was but one facet of the great drama of liberty and centralization, the struggle between risking freedom and needing order.76 For his Southern times, Thomas Dew’s Digest was the most sustained account of the scope of human history, but it was not singular. Antebellum Southerners wrote much about the history beyond their corner of the world. David Ramsay gathered a Universal History Americanized, though it was hack work, published posthumously in 1819; of its twelve volumes, three were reserved to the United States, but nine for everyone else in Asia, Africa, and Europe. There was a large body of contextualizing history in the periodicals, indeed to the point of repetitiveness. Hugh Legaré once made fun of this habit, even when writing an essay that commended classical learning: ‘‘No one . . . can address the American public with effect, who is not himself patient enough to begin at the very beginning.’’ 77 But, while much of this 75. Cf. Thomas R. Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond: T. W. White, 1832), 9–10. 76. For a different reading of Dew, see Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 13–20. 77. Arthur H. Shaffer, To Be an American: David Ramsay and the Making of the American Consciousness (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 97, 252–54; HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 2.

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was lame, no little was competent. There is substance to John Izard Middleton’s Grecian Remains in Italy (1812), Henry Lee’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1837), Richard Henry Wilde’s Torquato Tasso (1842), Thomas R. R. Cobb’s An Historical Sketch of Slavery from the Earliest Period (1858), and David Flavel Jamison’s The Life and Times of Bertrand du Guesclin: A History of the Fourteenth Century (1864).78 Middleton, Lee, and Wilde undertook original research on the European scene, but most Southern writers about the world’s history were (naturally) rehashing the secondary accounts of others. Such writing was, in a real sense, an extension of college educations, where one sat in classrooms and heard of Thermopylae and the Spanish Armada.79 American history, on the other hand, was little a matter for colleges. When Ramsay published his History of the American Revolution in 1789, there was no chair of history in the single Southern college, no historical society anywhere in the United States, few archives, certainly no profession of history. Though history was taught in colleges, and had been so since the beginning of higher education in North America in 1643, the first chair of history in the South was created at the University of Maryland only in 1813. Reuel Keith was to hold a similar post at William and Mary in 1821, where he taught the first course ever given at an American college on American history.80 But history in colleges was usually commingled with belles lettres, or the classics, or moral philosophy. And, even when released from these affiliations, it was often only to proclaim a fresher attachment to political economy. Francis Lieber, for example, became Professor of History and Political Economy at South Carolina College in 1835. But teaching history and writing it need not be related activities, indeed usually are not. Most of those in the South who instructed adolescents in history did not trouble publishers or printers. But Lieber, though he saw himself as a political philosopher, took history to be essential to the practice of such philosophy and so mingled much history in his writing on political ethics. 78. John Izard Middleton, Grecian Remains in Italy, a Description of Cyclopian Walls, and of Roman Antiquities. With Topographical and Picturesque Views of Ancient Latium (London: Edward Orme, 1812); Henry Lee, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Down to the Peace of Tolentino and the Close of His First Campaign in Italy (London: Thomas and William Boone; Paris, A. and W. Galignani, 1837); Richard Henry Wilde, Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso, 2 vols. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1842); Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America. To Which Is Prefixed, an Historical Sketch of Slavery. Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnston, 1858); David Flavel Jamison, The Life and Times of Bertrand Du Guesclin: A History of the Fourteenth Century, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1864). 79. Both are used in a textbook, done by Lieber at South Carolina College: see FL, Great Events, Described by Distinguished Historians, Chroniclers, and Other Writers (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1840). 80. Calcott, History in the United States, 59–60.

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At William and Mary, Dew taught history, but also an assortment of courses on metaphysics, law, and political economy. William James Rivers published, while at South Carolina College, his Sketch of the History of South Carolina (1856).81 William Bacon Stevens held a chair of belles lettres and rhetoric at the University of Georgia when the first volume of his History of Georgia came out in 1847, though he soon after left for an ecclesiastical career in Pennsylvania.82 Still, most history written in the Old South was done outside the academy.

To Discover, Procure, Preserve, and Diffuse 83 Before looking at such writing, it will be pertinent to indicate the institutional structures that underpinned historical literature. These were not impressive. The first American historical society was begun by Jeremy Belknap in Massachusetts in 1791. The South had no such organization until John Haywood founded the Tennessee Antiquarian Society in Nashville in 1820, which elaborated for itself five objectives: first, ‘‘to procure and preserve historical facts relative to the early history of Tennessee, the settlement, and the conflicts of the first settlers with the Indians’’; second, ‘‘to institute enquiries into the remains of antiquity in the western country, and particularly in the state of Tennessee’’; third, ‘‘to procure and preserve topographical descriptions of the different sections of the state of Tennessee’’; fourth, to collect ‘‘whatever else may relate to its natural and civil history’’; and fifth, to acquire ‘‘whatever may tend to a knowledge of the different systems of general education adopted in Europe and America, the secret of those systems, a detailed account thereof, with reference to their usefulness, and economy in their operation.’’ In short, the Society combined the functions of a historical with that of an archaeological and anthropological society, with a dash of interest in zoology and geology, seasoned with the uplift of an educational reform movement. Papers were read on the discovery of pygmy bones in White County, members were enjoined to collect the vocabulary of Indian tribes, and debates were held on whether ‘‘climate, or moral causes,’’ has had ‘‘the greater effect in accelerating the progress of knowledge.’’ John Haywood himself delivered a communica81. William James Rivers, A Sketch of the History of South Carolina to the Close of the Proprietary Government by the Revolution of 1719 (Charleston, S.C.: McCarter, 1856). 82. On Stevens, see E. Merton Coulter, College Life in the Old South: As Seen at the University of Georgia (1928; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973), 39. 83. ‘‘To discover, procure, preserve and diffuse whatever may relate to the natural, civil, literary and ecclesiastical history of the State of Alabama, and of the States in connection with her’’: Constitution of the Alabama Historical Society: Organized at Tuskaloosa, July 8th, 1850 (Tuskaloosa: M. D. J. Slade, 1850), 3, cited in Leslie W. Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 1790–1860 (1944; reprint, Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1974), 137.

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tion on ‘‘a petrified Sea Turtle found in a cave near Huntsville, in the State of Alabama.’’ 84 In time other historical societies emerged, all being enterprises of gentlemen, for women were deemed to have no stake in any history that merited an organization. These societies varied greatly in scope, robustness, and permanence, but all concerned themselves with collecting the historical records of their state. A few had connections with state governments, though most did not. Several, notably Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina, published documents, sometimes after emissaries had been sent to catalog the sources available in Britain. In each case, there was a vague but motivating sense that such societies were of civic usefulness and might be not so much reflections of state pride as its creators. And there was a marked sense that, in this, the South had catching up to do. In an 1843 review of the first volume of the Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, it was noted that the Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society ‘‘has but a nominal existence,’’ while ‘‘in each of the New-England States there exist Historical Societies, all of which are in efficient organization.’’ Such organizations were necessary as agents to prevent the destruction and dissipation of records ‘‘with all their lessons of warning or example,’’ while in turn they were a stimulus to research and ‘‘the progressive spirit of inquiry.’’ 85 The weakest historical societies were those in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina. That in Mississippi was created in November 1858 by B. L. C. Wailes, who assiduously collected documents for a year and then turned up to deliver his presidential address in Jackson in 1859, only to find that the meeting had been held two days earlier, called by a vice president who had not failed to deliver his own discourse ‘‘to frequent rounds of applause.’’ Only three subscriptions of one dollar apiece having been paid, Wailes understandably lost interest, and that was that.86 The Alabama Historical Society, instigated by Basil Manly in 1850, had done a little better. It managed to meet annually at the commencement of the University of Alabama, of which it was something of an adjunct. It had sixty-four members in 1853, who paid five dollars annually or fifty dollars for life. Its objects were officially ‘‘to discover, procure, preserve and diffuse whatever may relate to the natural, civil, literary and ecclesiastical his84. Proceedings of the Tennessee Antiquarian Society, 1 July 1820, bound volume, TSLA. 85. ‘‘Collections of the Georgia Historical Society,’’ SQR 3 (January 1843): 40–42. 86. Charles S. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region: Benjamin L. C. Wailes (1938; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), 234–58. There had been a Mississippi Society for the Acquirement and Dissemination of Useful Knowledge, founded by William Dunbar and others in 1803, which survived to, at least, 1813: see Sydnor, Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, 125.

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tory of the State of Alabama, and of the States in connection with her.’’ It was intended to gather every book or newspaper published in the state and ‘‘all documents illustrative of the history of the United States,’’ so its purposes were not exclusively local. But its organization was feeble and its collections, which consisted only of current newspapers, ‘‘a few old books of no great value, and a small collection of fossils and Indian relics,’’ languished in the law office of its secretary. The Florida Historical Society was started in St. Augustine in 1856, required an annual fee of two dollars, planned a library and publications, but did nothing before war broke out. The Kentucky Historical Society was founded in Louisville in 1838, with a brief for ‘‘the collection and preservation of whatever may relate to the Antiquities, the natural, Civil, Literary, and Ecclesiastical History of this country, but more particularly the State of Kentucky and the Mississippi Valley.’’ By 1842, it had a library of 820 books, 5,000 pamphlets, 68 volumes of newspapers, plus some small collections of manuscripts. In theory it had forty-seven members, but it was often hard to get a quorum of seven together. Thereafter moribund, it was given some infusion of life in 1846 and got together 3,000 volumes, but it was never conspicuous. The Historical Society of Louisiana commenced in New Orleans in 1835, met a few times, disappeared, then was reorganized in 1846 as the Louisiana Historical Society, with two judges (François Xavier Martin and Henry Adams Bullard) as its first presidents and Charles Gayarré as one of its progenitors. De Bow visited Northern historical societies (he was anxious to emulate the ways of the Massachusetts Historical Society) and, in 1847, the state legislature gave $2,000 to procure original documents from Spain. But, by 1854, when Lyman Draper asked Gayarré whether the society was ‘‘doing anything,’’ the historian was obliged to answer that it was ‘‘defunct.’’ The Missouri Historical and Philosophical Society was organized in the Senate chamber in Jefferson City, the state capital, in 1844. The government provided a room and appropriated modest sums for furniture and shelving. Perhaps thinking that such munificence would make subscription little necessary, the annual fee was set at only one dollar, which produced 102 members by 1848, but little else of consequence, since further largesse was unforthcoming. More eccentric was the North Carolina Historical Society, which was chartered by the state legislature in 1833, when David Swain (himself a historian) was governor. But nothing seems to have followed from this, until in 1844, when Swain had become president of the state university, he created something called the Historical Society of the University of North Carolina.87 87. Swain was born in Buncombe County, near Asheville. His father, George, was a New Englander who had migrated at first to Georgia, where he had worked as a hatter, then a farmer; he had moved to the North Carolina mountains for his health and there married Caroline Lowry, a widow, barely literate but pious. (The family was Presbyterian.) They had seven

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Its mandate was as broad as was usual; to obtain documents from England, to collect printed material relative to the state’s history, and, in particular, to find records ‘‘within the State that may tend to elucidate the history of the American Revolution.’’ But all these were to be preserved ‘‘at the University,’’ and such lecturing as was done before the Society was done at commencements at the invitation of the university’s faculty, while many of its publications were found in the pages of the North Carolina University Magazine, founded in 1852. Indeed it seems to have had little formal existence, with no members except by association with the university. Kemp Battle was to refer to it, with irritation, as ‘‘this mythical Society.’’ Nonetheless, many documents were accumulated on its behalf, some of which were sold by Swain’s widow after his death, under the impression that they were now her personal property.88 Virginia’s case was more complicated. As early as 1772, the Virginian Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge had been founded in Williamsburg, among whose purposes was the discussion of American history; it lasted but a year before being displaced by a Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, which did not survive the Revolution. Not until December 1831 was the Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society organized in the hall of the House of Delegates with opening remarks by George Tucker; it was legally chartered in 1834, though in the same year the legislature refused any appropriation or use of the State Library. Nonetheless, John children and little to offer by way of inheritance; their son studied at a local academy and persisted only until his junior year at Chapel Hill, before reading law under Chief Justice John Louis Taylor in Raleigh. He became president of the University of North Carolina in 1835, a position he held until he was forced from office in 1868 by Radical Reconstruction. He married well to Eleanor White, a granddaughter of Governor Richard Caswell and a daughter of the state’s Secretary of State. They prospered and, indeed, even after the depredations of the Civil War, their estate was still valued at $60,000. At different times, he invested in railroads, held bank stock, and owned several plantations. For evidence of the mother’s illiteracy, see, for example, Caroline Swain to David L. Swain, ca. 1822–23, David L. Swain Papers, SHC: ‘‘O david what have you to do with partes? Have you any time to spair? Then think what you are a poor blind naked rebel, an enemy to god and hair of hell. It ma be you are reddy to say why mother you are shurely mad. No my child but these are weighty matters and iwish to be plain.’’ On Swain, more generally, see William D. Snider, Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 54, 73; Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 1, From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789–1868 (1907; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1974), 534, 536. 88. Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 137–38, 146, 157–60, 179, 192–93; Ottis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 39, 66; Edward M. Socola, ‘‘Charles E. A. Gayarré: A Biography’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1954), 336; Battle, UNC, 1789–1868, 485–87; Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 2, From 1868 to 1912 (1912; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1974), 105–8.

David Lowry Swain (Courtesy North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

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Marshall had accepted election as its president, with the first meeting being held in January 1833, when it had sixty-two members. The society was commissioned ‘‘to patronize and advance all those sciences which have a direct tendency to promote the best interests of our citizens,’’ which included both the moral and natural sciences. Its moving spirit was Jonathan Peter Cushing, president of Hampden-Sydney College, an immigrant from New England, who with John Holt Rice had founded a Literary and Philosophical Society at that college in 1824; the new organization was, in a real sense, an extension of this to the state. Membership was by election, not subscription, which meant it functioned like a gentleman’s club, with a room (eventually) in the Richmond Athenaeum; as in Charleston’s Conversation Club, the members would meet for dinner in private homes. A volume of Collections, ‘‘a brief unassuming paperbound booklet of eighty-seven pages,’’ was published in 1833 and anniversary discourses appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, whose columns were donated gratis by Thomas W. White. Between 1838 and 1846, the society rested, as White put it, ‘‘in a state of suspended animation.’’ Revived with William Cabell Rives as its new president, it met with regularity, acquired an endowment of over $4,000, accumulated manuscripts, portraits, Indian curiosities, and minerals, and started a program of publications. Alone among the societies, it ran a periodical, the Virginia Historical Register, which published six volumes between 1848 and 1853 under the editorship of William Maxwell, the Society’s ‘‘general agent,’’ the chaser of the 350 subscribers, the raiser of money (for which he received a 15 percent commission), and the recipient of a salary of $400 per annum. When Maxwell retired exhausted, the periodical was supplanted by a more limited annual, the Virginia Historical Reporter, which contained only the addresses to and proceedings of the Society.89 Belated but showing signs of energy was the South Carolina Historical Society, chartered by the state legislature in 1855. The society had some antecedents. In 1829 Henry Cruger, then of Charleston, was dispatched by the state legislature to collect documents in London that might bear on the history of Carolina to 1729, then of South Carolina to 1783. It is unclear whether the mission produced anything of consequence. In 1833 the Charleston Library Society appointed a committee charged with collecting worthy records and acquired a good many from the Revolutionary period. When a historical society proper was created, the legislature appropriated $1,500 over three years to 89. John Melville Jennings, ed., ‘‘A Letter Addressed to the Virginia Historical Society by One of Its Members in 1834,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 63 (October 1955): 440– 42; Virginius Cornick Hall Jr., ‘‘The Virginia Historical Society: An Anniversary Narrative of Its First Century and a Half,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 90 (January 1982): 3– 4, 10, 21, 23–24; ‘‘History of the Virginia Historical Society,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 39 (October 1931): 292–446.

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defray the expenses of publishing three volumes of Collections, and the society first met in 1857.90 The most successful and energetic of the state historical societies were those of Georgia and Maryland. The Georgia Historical Society was incorporated by an act of the legislature in 1839 as ‘‘a society in the city of Savannah for the purpose of collecting, preserving, and diffusing information relating to the History of the State of Georgia in particular, and of American history generally.’’ Its antebellum presidents were John M. Berrien (1839–41, 1854– 56) and James M. Wayne (1841–54, 1856–62), both of whom as judges helped to authorize its civic legitimacy, but its most important figure was its corresponding secretary, Israel Keech Tefft, who served for almost all the antebellum years. He was, as William A. Caruthers explained to Charles Campbell in 1845, the cashier of the state bank, ‘‘a very amicable and excellent man’’ who could ‘‘scarcely be called a literary or an educated man, but [who] has the greatest passion’’ for the society.91 Tefft’s own interest in history grew from being an autograph hunter, whose collection may have been the most important then in private American hands.92 Fredrika Bremer, hyperbolically, thought him ‘‘the greatest autograph collector in the world.’’ Among his treasures was a complete set of autographs by the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, bound in a quarto of gilt-edged morocco, which ended up in the New York State Library after his collection was auctioned in 1867. It was Tefft who entertained lecturers, did the correspondence, saw to the raising of the contributions by which alone the Society survived.93 At the beginning, the Georgia Historical Society frequently invited lecturers to speak, in the manner of a lyceum, and took history tout court, not merely Georgian history, to be its province. These discourses were published as pamphlets: William Law (1840) on the early settlements and history of Georgia; Robert Milledge Charlton (1841) on Sergeant Jasper and again in 1845 on ‘‘the romance of life’’; William Bacon Stevens (1841) on the Revolution 90. Henry N. Cruger to Louis McLane (the American Minister in London), 1 December, 12 December 1829, 3 June 1830, Henry N. Cruger Papers, LC; Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 208. 91. ‘‘An Act to Incorporate the Georgia Historical Society,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 4 ( June–September 1920): 41–45; ‘‘Officers of the Georgia Historical Society: From Its Organization, June 4, 1839, to August 3, 1920,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 4 (June–September 1920): 132–38; William A. Caruthers to CC, 27 July 1845, CC Papers, WM. 92. On visiting Tefft’s collection, see Samuel Gilman, ‘‘A Week Among Autographs,’’ in Contributions to Literature; Descriptive, Critical, Humorous, Biographical, Philosophical, and Poetical (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856), 303–47. 93. Leonard L. Mackall, ‘‘The Wymberley Jones de Renne Georgia Library,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 2 (June 1918): 65–66; William A. Caruthers to CC, 27 July 1845, CC Papers, WM.

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in Georgia; Mitchell King of Charleston (1841) on (as discussed above) ‘‘the qualifications and duties of a historian’’; John Elliott Ward (1843) on Aaron Burr and again (in 1858) on the society’s nineteenth anniversary; William Alexander Caruthers (1843) on the current state of the American nation; Bishop Stephen Elliott (1844) on ‘‘A High Civilization, the Moral Duty of Historians’’; Samuel K. Talmage (1844) on education; Alonzo Church (1845) on the history of education in Georgia; and Charles Colcock Jones (1859) on Indian remains in southern Georgia.94 Almost all of these were residents of the state; the exception was King from Charleston. Only Stevens and Jones could be regarded as historians. Charlton was a poet and lawyer, Caruthers a novelist, Elliott, Talmage and Church were clergymen and educationalists, King a lawyer, Ward a politician and diplomat.95 This was not evidence of laxity about professional standards, since history was not then a profession, but rather a sign that historical matters were deemed to be broadly intermingled with the business of life. A committee of the society, consisting of a bank cashier, a diplomat, a doctor and chemist could invite a banker to speak about historical matters, in order to promote ‘‘the State interest and State pride.’’ As importantly, the Society published volumes of its Collections, three of them before 1861. Further, it successfully commissioned William Bacon Stevens to write a history of the state. A building was constructed in 1848, in which was deposited a library of about 5,000 volumes, half of which had been collected by the Society, half inherited from the Savannah Library Society. There is a catalog from 1858 which shows that it had a good, mixed collection of history both American and European, ancient and modern, of contemporary reviews, and literature, both prose and poetry.96 Perhaps even more robust was the Maryland Historical Society, which was founded in 1844 by assorted Baltimore literati, including John Pendleton Kennedy, Brantz Mayer, Charles J. W. Gwinn, Robert Gilmor Jr., and Severn Teackle Wallis, ‘‘to collect, preserve and diffuse, information relating to the Civil, Natural and Literary History of the State of Maryland, and American History and Geography generally.’’ Kennedy retrieved rotting colonial records from the State House, while Gilmor ‘‘asked members of old families for significant letters, which he placed in huge scrapbooks.’’ In 1845, it had formed an alliance with the Library Company of Baltimore, and (after 94. Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers, 265, 266. 95. On all of these but Charlton and Law, see the entries in Kenneth Coleman and Charles Stephen Gurr, eds., Dictionary of Georgia Biography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983). 96. WBH, Israel K. Tefft, Dexter Clapp, and John LeConte to Ambrose Baber, 11 December 1844, Baber-Blackshear Collection, UGA; Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 147–48; ‘‘A Catalogue of the Books belonging to Georgia Historical Society. made by Chas. A Grant, July 1858,’’ Georgia Historical Society Papers, GHS.

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raising $45,000 in only three months) constructed a new building to house itself, which it shared with the Mercantile Library Association. In 1858 the society absorbed the Library Company’s holdings of 11,000 volumes. It also procured documents from London, transcriptions of which were paid for by George Peabody. It published a little, notably the Journal of Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1845). For a historical society, it proved unusually popular. By 1858, it had a membership of 500, who paid ten dollars for the first year, five dollars subsequently. This success was partly because the society had a very active lecture program, which roamed freely in subject matter. In 1845, Kennedy addressed it on the character of George Calvert, but three years later Streeter spoke ‘‘on the affairs of the Argentine Republic.’’ Moreover, it seems to have taken aesthetic matters seriously. In 1845 it asked a young artist to paint portraits of the state’s historical worthies, and by 1850 it possessed an art gallery. Its annual dinner was something of an occasion, attended by celebrities, often available because of the proximity of Washington. In his journal for April 1851, Kennedy noted that the Society was inviting to its annual dinner the president and his cabinet; Sir Henry Bulwer, the British ambassador; Calderon de la Barca, the Spanish Minister; William Hickling Prescott; George Bancroft; Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution; Robert Montgomery Bird and William B. Reed of Philadelphia; and William Gilmore Simms from Charleston.97 From such diners came those who wrote, if not the history of the South, then at least the states that (some thought) made it up. In general, the men who began more systematically to write the history of their localities were the sons of the Southern governing classes, usually too wealthy to need a job, too retiring to venture into politics. Of these, Albert James Pickett of Alabama was fairly typical. In 1847 he decided to write a history of his state.98 He felt 97. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 234, 371; Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 163–64; entries for December 1845, in JPK autobiography, and for 2 November 1848, 10 April 1851, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB. 98. He was the son of William Raiford Pickett, who had migrated to Autauga County, Alabama, in 1818 from North Carolina, where he had been a county sheriff and tax assessor. There he took up planting and merchandising, and resumed politics. His son studied at various field schools in Alabama and a ‘‘literary school’’ in Virginia, and then diffidently studied to be a lawyer back in Alabama. In time, he inherited land from his father and became a planter of great extent and prosperity; at his death, he owned more than 4,000 acres in Autauga and Montgomery Counties, and (with his wife) over 160 slaves. However, he was a planter at some remove, for after 1837 he went to live in Pickett Springs, a village close to Montgomery, which is where he came to the writing of history, which coexisted with an involvement in Democratic politics and newspapers. See Frank L. Owsley Jr., ‘‘Albert J. Pickett: Planter-Historian of the Old South,’’ Louisiana Studies 8 (Summer 1969): 158–84.

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vaguely that ‘‘it was the duty of every man to make himself, in some way, useful to his race.’’ Planting did not engross more than a quarter of his time, he did not like to participate in politics, he had never studied for a profession, and so ‘‘I determined to write a History.’’ Pickett thought writing history ‘‘would serve to amuse my leisure hours,’’ that it would be an easy thing, ‘‘but,’’ he later confessed, ‘‘it has been the hardest work of my life.’’ He could not complain of not being warned about this exhausting reality. Another historian had told him: ‘‘No species of literary labour requires more patience— toil—industry singleness of purpose than that upon which you propose to enter,’’ Pickett was cautioned. ‘‘It taxes all the powers of mental endurance— calls out all the resources of knowledge—claims a part of our warm affections & demands that high aim & stern probity—that nothing can wrest us from or destroy.’’ 99 Out of his innocence, Pickett wisely wrote to various gentlemen interested or experienced in state histories, to announce his intentions, ask advice, and enquire about the location or existence of documents. De Bow replied that the new Louisiana Historical Society was too new to have many documents, and was only now arranging to collect sources in Europe; but he offered a few bibliographical suggestions, including articles in De Bow’s own Review that listed useful reading. Simms mentioned some books in South Carolina history and suggested the expediency of buying them from John Russell’s bookstore in Charleston. Gayarré shared his frustrations and answered Pickett’s inquiries, by noting that the Bishop of New Orleans insisted his own archives had nothing, that Natchez offered little but ‘‘a few vague traditions,’’ but that Gayarré hoped for better help from the American legation in Madrid. Jared Sparks of Massachusetts sifted through some of the secondary literature on Hernando De Soto and counseled: ‘‘Your facts should be derived from original sources; that is, from the earliest writers or manuscripts; and that you should not be in haste to finish your work. A task thus performed will require thorough research, patient examination, and time. But this labor in the preparation is absolutely requisite to stamp a durable value on any historical composition.’’ William Bacon Stevens of Georgia doubted that the Georgia Historical Society had much of use to Pickett, but offered to send the two volumes of the Society’s Collections, edited by Stevens himself, and offered too the run of his own library in Athens. As to procedure, he advised: ‘‘Your best plan is to collect 1st every book—pamphlet & document which will throw the least light upon your subject. 2nd acquaint yourself with the title of every99. AJP, History of Alabama and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi from the Earliest Period (1851; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1988), 10; William Bacon Stevens to AJP, 24 April 1847, AJP Papers, ADAH.

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thing that has been written upon Alabama from the days of Cabeza de Vacca & then knowing its existence seek it until you find it.’’ 100 By following such advice, writing history became a very expensive business, confined to gentlemen of means. Pickett had to ship off his money to Bartlett & Welford, booksellers in New York, and acquire old Spanish and French volumes. Little came free, though as a resident of Montgomery he had access to the (albeit disorganized) archives of the state government. But in 1847 Alabama had no historical society and so he had ‘‘to hunt up and buy books and manuscripts connected with the history of Alabama, and to collect oral information in all directions,’’ as Pickett glumly observed in the preface to his History of Alabama (1851). So he entered into a large correspondence with participants in Alabama’s history and their children, who sometimes wrote back evasively, sometimes lamented the loss of papers in a fire or boat wreck, sometimes provided lengthy reminiscences, and often suggested other people to whom to apply. Trusting to his gentlemanliness, correspondents would send him volumes and manuscripts. Francis Pickens of South Carolina dispatched a journal and some papers of his grandfather ‘‘by Mr. Harris, who is coming to Montgomery in a few weeks.’’ 101 Such a history was document-centered partly because documents—hard to obtain, expensive to buy, arriving often with a slim context—had a special gravity. Similarly, oral evidence tended to be trusted out of gentlemanly respect for the interlocutors who had condescended to share their memories. David Ramsay, for example, in researching his History of South Carolina (1809), used scanty public records, acquired from his widow the materials gathered by Thomas Lamboll, but most importantly tapped his own local friends and colleagues; his was ‘‘a public project,’’ discussed at the Charleston Library Society and elsewhere.102 Since history grew out of what gentlemen (very rarely ladies) were willing to share with each other, there was very little room for the tone of skepticism and subversion that is the standard trope of modern historical writing. Another reason for trust was the paucity of competing secondary accounts. Historiographical wrangling was a minor consideration; history was being written, not yet rewritten. To a degree perhaps surprising, histories like Pickett’s relied upon oral history. Indeed, a fellow aspirant historian of Alabama, Benjamin F. Porter, had 100. J. D. B. De Bow to AJP, 15 April; WGS to AJP, 4 December; CG to AJP, 13 November; Jared Sparks to AJP, 29 November; William Bacon Stevens to AJP, 24 April 1847, AJP Papers, ADAH. 101. Bartlett & Welford to AJP, 23 March 1848; W. Garrett to AJP, 28 August 1847; AJP, History of Alabama, 9; Mary G. Dinsmoor to AJP, 24 September 1847; Edmund P. Gaines to AJP, 17 August 1847; Francis W. Pickens to AJP, 30 September 1847, ibid. 102. Shaffer, To Be an American, 233.

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advised Pickett that history was best when it rendered ‘‘the thoughts, habits, conversations, and acts of the people individually and socially, rather than the acts of the government.’’ To effect this, the historian should be a sort of circuit rider. ‘‘I would, instead of consulting so many writers, . . . take my Horse and servant, and travel over every part of the State . . . and converse with the old men and women. And you will thus collect a vast amount of traditionary facts in regard to the early settlement of Alabama, her indian contests, &c &c which you have now no idea of.’’ True to this, Pickett’s History was liberally sprinkled with footnotes like this to a frontier skirmish in 1813: ‘‘Conversations with Colonel Girard W. Creagh, who witnessed the canoe fight, while standing in full view upon the eastern bank of the Alabama, and Colonel Jeremiah Austill of Mobile, one of the heroes.’’ Other state historians were doing likewise. In the 1840s, Charles Campbell of Virginia transcribed the memories of Isaac, a former slave of Thomas Jefferson, with a care attendant to dialect; and so elicited a picture of Jefferson, through the eyes of slave: ‘‘Mr. Jefferson was a tall strait-bodied man as ever you see, right squareshouldered: nary man in this town walked so straight as my old master: neat a built man as ever seen in Vaginny, I reckon or any place—a straight-up man: long face, high nose.’’ 103 Pickett and Campbell took to oral history because they had to, because of a lack of documentary evidence. But they had more mystical motives, evident from Alexander Garden’s Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War in America (1822), which was largely a collection of stories told to him. As Garden justified his omnium gatherum, the heroes of the Revolution were uniquely splendid in human history and thus ‘‘we cannot but deeply regret, that from the encroachments of time, perpetually removing, not only the actors in many a brilliant achievement, but even the witnesses of them, they will be in the course of a few years irretrievably lost.’’ 104 Those who had fashioned the fons et origo of the Revolution and those who had witnessed it offered memories that were almost sacred, but moving rapidly towards silence. Many of these writings therefore echoed with a breathless care for the true witness of the holy moment, even its minor episodes, even its canoe fights. All this led to rather haphazard research. A bookseller might or might not have the book the historian needed. It might be convenient to examine a library in New Orleans, or the inviting friend might be away at the Saratoga 103. Benjamin F. Porter to AJP, 2 August 1847, AJP Papers, ADAH; AJP, History of Alabama, 566; Rayford W. Logan, ed., Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840’s by Isaac, One of Thomas Jefferson’s Slaves (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1951), 21. 104. Alexander Garden, Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War in America (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1822), 1.

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‘‘The Canoe Fight’’ (From J. F. H. Claiborne, Life and Times of Gen. Sam Dale, the Mississippi Partisan [1860])

Springs. Copyists might be careful, or they might not. Such a process had marked characteristics and consequences. Despite Porter’s enjoinder that the historian travel, the sources of history came to the historian more than the historian went to the sources: research was centripetal. The scope and adequacy of the private library went far to define what history was possible to be written.105 ‘‘Such works with us who have no public libraries, and no depositories of letters, those Sybilline leaves of history, are very laborious,’’ Grigsby told Winthrop. ‘‘So antiquarianism with us is rather an expensive amusement; for I have to buy all my authorities.’’ 106 So the historian was, preeminently, a man of means alone in a study. As a result, historical writing attracted those who liked or could bear being much alone. As Charles Campbell once remarked of his labors, ‘‘These pursuits have been solitary.’’ Hence history in the Old South attracted more than its share of the shy and timid, who reached out for a sense of community and guild by means of letters to other historians and by reciprocal elections 105. And, in some cases, what is now impossible. William Gilmore Simms gathered together an unparalleled collection of primary sources in South Carolina, which was lost when his plantation was burned by the Union Army. 106. HBG to Robert C. Winthrop, 12 June 1857, HBG Papers, VHS.

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as corresponding and honorary members of state historical societies. Within the intellectual communities of cities and states, however, matters were often sour. Camaraderie flourished in inverse proportion to distance. Historians far from one another in location and subject matter were expressibly amiable. Historians sharing a state tended to be jealous and mistrustful. Alabama, for example, boasted several aspirant state historians in the late 1840s, and one of them, Alexander Beaufort Meek, felt little love for the others. He wrote cheerfully enough in 1847, to be sure, of his gladness that Pickett, too, was writing a history of Alabama, even ‘‘though I have been employed for some years in the same enterprize, and hope to issue my work in a few months,’’ for ‘‘the field is a wide one, and it will take all of us, to open its thickets and develop its resources.’’ But to Simms, Meek sniffed, ‘‘I do not think he [Pickett] has sufficient ability for the undertaking.’’ To his brother in 1850, Meek was incredulous that Pickett could finish his book: ‘‘It is all humbug about his having it ready for the press. I expect to anticipate him.’’ And when Pickett’s book came out, Meek was not slow to express outrage that the tortoise should have defeated the hare. To Simms, he spoke of Pickett’s ‘‘errors, blunders, fictions, and short-comings.’’ In similar vein, Simms was miffed when James Louis Petigru was elected the first president of the new South Carolina Historical Society and Simms offered only the vice presidency. As for Georgia, John J. Flournoy of Savannah fulminated to the secretary of the Georgia Historical Society that William Bacon Stevens would write a state history that would be but ‘‘third or second rate.’’ 107 Only the Virginians managed to make manners triumph over jealousy.

The Ancestral Mould 108 Of the men and no women who wrote such local history, perhaps the most knowledgeable and characteristic was Hugh Blair Grigsby. He fitted the usual pattern, with the exception that he seems to have inherited little, his father (a Presbyterian minister and missionary) having died in 1810 of the yellow fever 107. CC to John M. Daniel, 1 October 1846, CC Papers, WM; Alexander Beaufort Meek to WGS, 18 May 1847, 23 November 1851; Alexander Beaufort Meek to Samuel Meek, 31 October 1850, Alexander Beaufort Meek Papers, ADAH; WGS to William James Rivers, 13 June 1859, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952–82), 6:202–3; John Jacobus Flournoy to Secretary of the Georgia Historical Society, 24 June 1845, John Jacobus Flournoy Papers, GHS. 108. ‘‘Thus shall we earn a title to be remembered, when our ashes shall have mingled with the ancestral mould, by the sons and daughters of Virginia who may henceforth assemble in this hall to dwell upon the past, and to invoke upon future generations the untold blessings which we now enjoy’’: HBG, The Virginia Convention of 1776 (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1855), 195–96.

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when the son was three. He was cared for ‘‘up to my fourteenth year mainly by my pious Scotch grandmother,’’ Lilias Blair McPherson. His mother Elizabeth Blair Grigsby remarried when he was ten to the Norfolk physician and banker Nathan Colgate Whitehead, ‘‘the friend and guide of my youth and maturer years . . . the only father I have ever known.’’ 109 He does not, however, seem to have lived with his stepfather and mother, for the evidence suggests that, when not at school, he lived in the brick mansion owned by his grandmother on the corner of Catharine and Freemason Streets; indeed he did so until his own marriage in 1840. He was sent to Yale and then studied law, but practiced little after qualifying in 1829, partly because he became deaf when in his twenties, so much so that he was reduced in 1832 to the use of an ear trumpet. He was very briefly in politics, when he was elected in 1828 to the House of Delegates and then to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30, after the resignation of General Taylor, who was none too pleased to be replaced by a ‘‘beardless boy,’’ perhaps especially one who ‘‘never tasted a glass of grog of any kind in [his] life.’’ Grigsby was a Jeffersonian, then a Jacksonian, honored to meet the great general on his visit to Norfolk in 1829.110 Between 1834 and 1840, he owned and edited a Norfolk newspaper, the American Beacon, out of which he made ‘‘a competent fortune.’’ 111 Then he married late to Mary Venable Carrington, who brought him a large and valuable tobacco plantation in Charlotte County called Edgehill, ‘‘a fine estate and plenty of hands to work it.’’ But he was little engaged by planting: ‘‘I am no great planter. . . . not an active manager. . . . away too much,’’ mostly in Norfolk, sometimes on Northern visits. His marriage had complicated ups and downs: her family was distinguished but rancorous, and Mary Grigsby was often ill with gynecological complaints and became ‘‘an invalid for fifteen years,’’ someone who spent long periods with doctors in Philadelphia. 109. Entry for 22 November 1870, in HBG Diary, quoted in Fitzgerald Flournoy, ‘‘Hugh Blair Grigsby: A Virginia Boy during the War of 1812,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 66 (October 1958): 423; HBG to Henry Stephens Randall, 18 August 1856, in The Correspondence between Henry Stephens Randall and Hugh Blair Grigsby, 1856–1861, ed. Frank J. Klingberg and Frank W. Klingberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 61. See entry for 9 September 1828 in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS: ‘‘Settled with Dr. Whitehead about my father’s estate: gave me his and Santos’ note for $600, and his own for $200. I relinquished my legacy from Capt Blair.’’ 110. Flournoy, ‘‘Virginia Boy,’’ 426; entries for 12 January 1832, 11 November 1829, 10 July 1829, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; HBG to Henry Stephens Randall, 25 July 1858, in Klingberg and Klingberg, Randall and Grigsby Correspondence, 138. 111. HBG to Henry Stephens Randall, 11 June 1856, in Klingberg and Klingberg, Randall and Grigsby Correspondence, 52: ‘‘I have never been in a strict sense a business man, having only edited a paper for six years, a commercial paper in Norfolk.’’ On his editorship, see Lester J. Cappon, Virginia Newspapers 1821–1935: A Bibliography with Historical Introduction and Notes (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 134.

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Hugh Blair Grigsby (Courtesy Virginia Historical Society, Richmond)

They had children belatedly, a delay that he much regretted. He himself was ill, on and off, for much of his life: ‘‘Indeed but for a life of attention to little things, I should have been in my grave before my twenty fifth year.’’ 112 In this retiring and vexed life, Grigsby occupied himself with literary and aesthetic pursuits. He collected books which amounted eventually to six thousand volumes. He liked painting and sculpture, imported some from Italy, but also encouraged local artists and prodded the Commonwealth of Virginia to commemorate its worthy citizens by monuments.113 He conducted a large correspondence with fellow historians, North and South. Almost all of those interested in Virginian history came to regard him as a mine of willing information, which he dispensed with firm discrimination and technical skill. In their time and differing ways, Charles Campbell of Petersburg consulted Grigsby for his history of Virginia, David Swain of North Carolina over the Mecklenburg controversy, Henry Stephens Randall of New York for his life of Jefferson, George Bancroft for his history of the United States, and 112. HBG to Henry Stephens Randall, 25 July 1858, 11 June 1856, 28 May 1857, in Klingberg and Klingberg, Randall and Grigsby Correspondence, 136–37, 52, 92. 113. See C. B. Poindexter to HBG, 13 October 1849; Mary Eliza (Whitehead) Poindexter to HBG, 24 February 1850; HBG to Robert C. Winthrop, 30 March 1866, all in HBG Papers, VHS.

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Henry Adams after the war for his biography of Albert Gallatin.114 By the cognoscenti, Grigsby was much respected. On the eve of the Civil War, he was elected a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which was a modest tribute to his standing though also to his cautious Unionism; like most Virginians, his links with the North were better than with the Deep South. For all that, Grigsby wrote sparingly: a few articles, some reviews, a few orations, a little fiction, a youthful imitation of Montesquieu and Wirt, a eulogy of Littleton Waller Tazewell, and two brief studies of the Virginia Constitutional Conventions of 1776 and 1829–30, with a third upon that of 1788 that was published posthumously. He let others write general histories of Virginia, even though they were his inferiors in intellect and knowledge. ‘‘I write nothing that I am not compelled by some strong consideration of public or private interest to strike off,’’ he told Randall in 1858.115 No doubt he lacked the physical stamina that sustained historical composition required. Fragments suited him better. Nonetheless he had a theme. The obligations of a Virginian pietas came to define him. To be an intelligent Virginian of modest standing but lively historical awareness, born in 1806, was not easy. The world then was full of great men, whom many wished to render still greater, such that young men might feel incapacitated by the burden. Monticello was already a pilgrimage, a shrine where one might see Jefferson’s bed ‘‘in the precise state in which he died in it’’ and his grave, with ‘‘no stone to mark it,’’ only ‘‘a little pole or switch with a small piece of crape attached to it.’’ True, Norfolk itself was no epicenter; its great men were below the level of Madison and Jefferson, whose longevity haunted young men elsewhere in the Commonwealth. But, even in Norfolk, the issues of the Revolution were palpable, for the British were coming to burn things as late as Grigsby’s seventh year. Politics and the making of government was the Virginian pastime; a young man was supposed to learn the art of it. Grigsby seems to have done his best. He studied widely, learned the law, entered the legislature, and thought about putting pebbles in his mouth. But, like Henry Adams later, he lost the ambition of politics in the study of it. Grigsby became a sort of permanent younger son of Virginia, even in old age, someone who sat at the feet of the great, listened to their stories, tried to make sense of their personalities, and wanted to hold the tradition together so that it might be transmitted. Thereby he might belong to the procession and 114. See also William B. Hesseltine and Larry Gara, eds., ‘‘The Historical Fraternity: Correspondence of Historians Grigsby, Henry, and Draper,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 61 (October 1953): 450–71. 115. HBG to Robert C. Winthrop, 28 February 1861, HBG Papers, VHS; HBG to Henry Stephens Randall, 25 July 1858, in Klingberg and Klingberg, Randall and Grigsby Correspondence, 136.

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his ashes might be ‘‘mingled with the ancestral mould.’’ 116 Yet Grigsby was no slavish acolyte: he knew enough to distinguish between accomplishment and pretension. Indeed, he was notable, in his writing, for quietly noticing the clay at gentlemen’s feet. Still, he was a court historian, even if he knew that the court might have many lesser men, and more who were unscrupulous or incompetent. His first literary effort was the Letters of a South-Carolinian, a slim book published in Norfolk in 1827. That a Virginian should chose a South Carolinian as his Persian visitor was, by itself, a symptom of the times, an intimation later confirmed by Grigsby’s absorbed reading of new copies of the Southern Review that the southward state was showing signs of outstripping Virginia in intellectual originality and energy. The book consisted of brief studies of orators, for ‘‘Virginia is the land of orators.’’ 117 (Almost all of Grigsby’s histories were to begin life as speeches, as discourses before learned bodies.) The Letters begins a form of writing that would become habitual with Grigsby: the sketch of a man, his physical appearance, and his cast of mind. Portraits were offered of the politicians Littleton Waller Tazewell, John Randolph, William Branch Giles, General Robert Taylor, William Maxwell, Thomas Newton, George Loyall, and then of various preachers, John Holt Rice, Shepard Kollock, Dr. Staughton, Bishop John England, and a Mr. Russell. Almost all were Virginians, or if not (as with England) encountered in Virginia. These were mostly the middle-aged or younger men of Virginia, not the old and eminent. They were benignly assessed, implausibly so, in language that mimicked the eulogy of the anciently great. To Grigsby, Tazewell was always to be a hero, a forceful mind near at hand. The oddity of John Randolph was likewise to become a habitual fascination, though one heterodox in a Jeffersonian like Grigsby, but later deepened when Grigsby came to live next to Randolph’s plantation and acquired part of his library. The most interesting chapter of the Letters of a South-Carolinian is its last, ‘‘On the Literature of Virginia,’’ whose tone is muddled and uncertain. It begins by repeating skeptically the canard that in Virginia ‘‘polite learning has flourished less . . . than in those of any of her coeval states.’’ To this, Grigsby ambivalently objected; Virginia ‘‘has not reposed in entire indolence, but has contributed her full quota to the national stock, although the causes which most effectually tend to paralyze the progress of literature have been in active operation.’’ True, the euphoric predictions that freedom would beget genius—this had been Ramsay’s prediction—had miscarried. America was 116. Entries for 22 July 1829, 14 May 1830, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS; HBG, Virginia Convention of 1776, 195. 117. HBG, Letters of a South-Carolinian, 42.

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still young, raw, and absorbed by settlement. (With this opinion, Legaré was to agree two years later: ‘‘No country needs so many allowances to be made for any imperfections in its manners and institutions, as one actually engaged in felling its forests, laying out towns, and providing itself with the necessaries of life.’’) For Grigsby, the United States was still remote from its Elizabethan age, before which even England had produced but ‘‘ten men illustrious.’’ Politics still absorbed talent; literature was what one did when power failed.118 For literature to flourish, there must be density of population, diffused wealth, a living to be made from writing, colleges to function as the nurseries of intellect. Lacking these foundations, Virginia had not done well, except in political and state papers. Nonetheless, Grigsby thought that its production had been ‘‘very respectable,’’ but only considering the conditions, of which one was that Virginians had ‘‘exhibited a more eager desire of consuming the literary fabrics of other nations, than in rearing new ones of their own.’’ 119 Certainly this was Grigsby’s own practice: his diary shows his reading in the late 1820s. In December 1827, when he was preparing the Letters for the press, he was reading Blackstone, Locke, Godwin, D’Israeli, Stewart on Reid, Boswell on Johnson, Homer, Burke, Northcote’s life of Joshua Reynolds, but nothing Virginian. Given these imported riches, why should Virginians turn to the indigenous? After all, ‘‘No work, with a few exceptions, has hitherto appeared that was well calculated to whet the appetite of the state for native literature. The authors are either too prolix, too abstract, or too uninteresting to the generality of readers.’’ Laconically, Grigsby tried to catalog ‘‘the literary works of Virginia.’’ His list was brief: in history, John Marshall and John Daly Burk, plus Skelton Jones and Louis Hue Girardin, who between them had carried down Burk’s history to 1781; in political writing, John Thompson’s Letters of Curtius and John Taylor’s works; in ‘‘polite literature,’’ William Wirt’s British Spy and The Old Bachelor, the Mountaineer of Conrad Speece, Jefferson’s Notes, James Mercer Garnett’s educational essays, George Tucker’s Letters from Virginia and his Essays; in poetry, William Maxwell, Richard Dabney, and Daniel Bryan; in biography, Wirt’s Patrick Henry and Henry Lee’s revolutionary memoirs. ‘‘This list is very imperfect; but it is the best with which recollection 118. Ibid., 79, 81, 82; HSL, ‘‘Travels of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar,’’ SR 3 (February 1829): 195. 119. Cf. George Tucker, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1837), 1:100–101, which argues that ‘‘the present generation’’ of Virginians was not intellectually inferior to the Revolutionary one, but the reverse. ‘‘It may be safely said, that a well written newspaper essay would have then conferred celebrity on its author, and a pamphlet would have been regarded as great an achievement in letters as an octavo volume at present.’’

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can supply me at this moment.’’ 120 It was a small shelf, amid all the books Grigsby was eagerly buying and reading for his library. There was little in the Letters of a South-Carolinian to indicate confidence that the shelf would grow significantly, though an intimation that Grigsby himself expected to be disappointed of power and so driven to write a literature that he might try to make succinct, concrete, and absorbing. Further, there was little in the Letters to justify anything other than the writing of political history, which was the Virginian accomplishment. Grigsby’s intellectual career was to be made by his brief engagement with political power, when he was elected to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30. He went first as a spectator, traveling with Tazewell up river to Richmond. There he saw doddering James Monroe elected chair of the convention, his conduct ‘‘reprehensible enough’’ to oblige resignation. He sat in lodgings, while the eminent gossiped and argued around him: Tazewell, Barbour, Loyall, Taylor. But John Randolph was the especial fascination for Grigsby, a fantastic who ‘‘outstrips my imagination, calculation, logic,’’ a man ‘‘possessing singular coolness in debate.’’ The gossipers liked to tell Randolph stories, preferably those in which the loutish ignorance of Yankee politicians of ‘‘proper emphasis and prosody’’ in Horace was mocked. Tazewell remembered that Randolph, when thirteen, ‘‘was the most beautiful boy in Virginia; a lovely boy he was; his face was as smooth and delicate as that of Adonis—his eye was perfectly black, if possible, blacker than at present, his form a model of symmetry—not distorted as it now appears.’’ 121 At the convention, the Tidewater struggled against the west, and so the Norfolk people talked about the rough backcountry. Tazewell spoke of ‘‘the western men,’’ whose prejudices against were marked, though ‘‘they always took pains to invite him to their dinners.’’ In this civil strife, double agents were suspect. Tazewell mentioned ‘‘a certain gentleman as hating him sincerely, and that he would take his life, if it could be done with secrecy. He said that this gentleman was a dangerous man; that his object was to side with the west in state, and with the East in Gen. Government matters.’’ Tazewell rode his high horse on these matters and insisted that, when in Congress, ‘‘he regarded Virginia as a whole, no such thing as western, or middle, or tidewater interest ever crossed his imagination. The honor and glory of Virginia was his maxim.’’ Still, the Westerners were a matter for jest: ‘‘He gave a very humourous account of a posse of western men surrounding him at the dinner table, 120. HBG, Letters of a South-Carolinian, 85. 121. HBG, ‘‘Sketches of Members of the Constitutional Convention of 1829–30,’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 61 ( July 1953): 330; entries for 8 October, 25 October 1829, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS.

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and then inviting him to one of their rooms, where he beat them off, and silenced them all in proper fashion.’’ 122 Grigsby began a sketchbook of the members of the convention, whom he joined formally as an elected member on 8 November. Among his annotations were brief studies of the minor actors: among them, John W. Jones, whose ‘‘manners were bland and irresistibly conciliating’’ and who ‘‘limped a little’’; Mark Alexander, ‘‘fond of the ladies’’; Jacob Williamson, ‘‘an honest, sensible farmer’’; William Smith, ‘‘an ugly man, very.’’ But he also noticed the great and nearly great, with little illusion. So, John Marshall was intellectually vigorous and logical, tall, lean, ‘‘antique in his dress, and altogether negligent,’’ a bad voice, a man of grudges. John Tyler, who had dared to run against Randolph in 1827, was graceful, even handsome but for a big nose, yet a disconnected speaker of awkward gestures. James Madison was small, frightened to speak in an assembly, wearing a ‘‘snuff colored overcoat, rather the worse for wear,’’ with powdered hair, still lucid when given the time but ‘‘slow of action in the bustle of a crowded assembly of hair splitting politicians.’’ John Randolph, whom everyone watched, treated the convention like a teacher reprobating ‘‘a passel of schoolboys,’’ a man with a body like ‘‘that of a slim boy of ten years of age, who had been stretched on the bed of Procrustes full six feet.’’ 123 In all this spectacle, Grigsby was more drawn by the men, not the issues, to which he referred only glancingly. In the great constitutional dispute, however, he was a moderate conservative, who leaned towards the slaveholding oligarchs but understood the force of the western democrats. This was perhaps odd in a Jacksonian from a commercial city, but he was an Easterner and he was young, much under the sway of Tazewell near and Randolph afar; more, he was a student of the past, reluctant to break with it.124 The Virginian political tradition and the men who made it thereby became Grigsby’s great theme, though it was to be a quarter century before he published his discourse on the convention of 1829–30. There he returned to fuller portraits of Madison and Marshall, before descending to the lesser figures. Grigsby’s Madison is the urbane maker of the Union, the backroom boy whose voice did not carry but whose intelligence and stamina were crucial. Marshall is rough, self-made, solitary, robust. Insistently, Grigsby located meaning in personality. ‘‘The history of these names is the history of the 122. Entry for 25 October 1829, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS. 123. HBG, ‘‘Sketches of Members.’’ 124. Dickson D. Bruce Jr., The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829–30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1982), 25, 36, characterizes Grigsby as a conservative, who bowed to the inevitability of democratic reform, but regretted the destruction of Tidewater power. This seems to miss Grigsby’s Jacksonian loyalties.

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period,’’ he said of the period from 1789 to 1801, but he could have said this of any period or narrative of which he was capable of writing. By Grigsby, the reader is asked to pause, to look around the room of Virginian history, to note the men, to hear them talking, now in oratory, now in half-shadowed cabal. Fortunately, though he teetered on the edge of eulogy, Grigsby had the gift of distilling personality. To distinguish Madison and Marshall, the planter and the farmer, for example, he wrote: ‘‘If Madison had lived in a city, he would have dispatched every morning to market a well-dressed servant, with a tidy basket on his arm, and supplied his table through him. Marshall did his own marketing, and not infrequently brought it home with his own hands.’’ Madison leaned to the formal inutility of landscape gardening, but Marshall ‘‘had no opinion of a plant or a tree that did not bear something for the support of human life; and would have had a bed of fine cabbages or an orchard of delicious fruit.’’ Certainly, Grigsby knew that, when men gathered together, not all was republican virtue. ‘‘To bind together such a brotherhood,’’ he observed of the fusion of Jeffersonians and Federalists in the congressional session of 1811–12, ‘‘two things were indispensable; a common ground to stand on, and a common victim.’’ There had been much hatred, pettiness, and betrayal, for ‘‘politicians have long memories.’’ 125 It would be easy, amid the rush of personalities and anecdotes, to neglect that Grigsby had more general characterizations of the pattern of Virginian history. He had, it is true, small sense of social context, though now and again he noticed shifts in customs or remembered that there was a time, in his youth, when ‘‘to take a drive in a carriage, or to use an umbrella, was deemed effeminate by some of the wealthiest planters in Virginia.’’ He observes, at one point, of Philip Pendleton Barbour that ‘‘political economy and history were his delight,’’ but ‘‘not that history which Dr. Johnson defined to be the best, and which modern historians approve,—a history of morals or manners, but the political history of a country. Man in his political, not in his social, capacity was his study.’’ 126 Much the same might be said of Grigsby: the economics of tobacco, cultural changes, all these barely exist in his narrative, because they were to be found outside his rooms of hair-splitting politicians. Slavery is almost completely absent from his work. Still, he did see patterns and offered a periodization for the political history, at least, of the early republic: first was 1789 to 1801, the time of organization; second, 1801 to 1806, from Jefferson’s inauguration to the embargo that split his party, which saw the high water mark of Jeffersonian retrenchment and reform; third, from 1806 to 1815, when the struggle with Europe intensified, turned to 125. HBG, Virginia Convention of 1829–30, 13, 20–21, 26, 31. 126. HBG, Littleton Waller Tazewell, 16; HBG, Virginia Convention of 1829–30, 36.

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war, and occasioned the politics of crisis; fourth, from 1815 to 1829, when matters settled down and ancient disputes (as over the Bank) were inconsistently reconciled. On the whole, Grigsby states more than he explores the basic constitutional issues of 1829–30. He was anxious not to take sides and was pointedly generous to the Westerners. He wrote of the great divide in the state with regret, as ‘‘that mighty Ridge which has too long reared its icy barrier between hearts which otherwise would have been, and ought ever to be, united in the bonds of the strongest affection.’’ In striving for equanimity, he let his men speak and they were given the benefit of the doubt, but the collective pattern of their words and their sharp animosities were only glancingly stated. In this, Grigsby’s views seem to have grown more liberal between 1830 and 1854. Latterly he gave a warm tribute to Benjamin Watkins Leigh, but mostly for his intellectual clarity; he was at pains to distance himself from Leigh’s Virginian nostalgia. Leigh ‘‘was no fervid believer in human progress, and one would infer . . . that the country had rather retrograded than otherwise in knowledge since the Revolution, while the opposite opinion is unquestionably true.’’ Grigsby himself was acutely conscious and proud of progress: in his 1860 discourse on Tazewell there is a long and enthusiastic disquisition on the improvement in Norfolk between 1802 and 1860, the better-dressed slaves, the fuller churches, the more prosperous merchants, the fatter bank balances, the better communications. So Leigh’s enthusiasm for the intellectual stature of colonial Virginia was inexplicable to Grigsby. ‘‘Where are the evidences of this high intellectual culture? Where are the books, tracts, speeches, poems, of the ante-revolutionary epoch?’’ Grigsby asked in some bewilderment. He recurred to his bleak estimate of 1827, when he scratched around to find an adequate Virginian literature even after the Revolution. In truth, he said with a pointedness no white Virginian could mistake, Liberia had recently published more newspapers than all of Virginia from 1607 to the Stamp Act. Indiscriminate eulogists of the Virginian past had their idiosyncrasies: ‘‘Such opinions are in some degree conservative of what is valuable as well as what is worthless, and exercise an influence on affairs not to be despised, yet it is questionable whether they flourish most in minds of the highest order.’’ 127 This was close to saying that conservatives were stupid, or at least less intelligent than those influenced by Bacon, Locke, and Jefferson, the intellectual patrons of progress. The Virginia Convention of 1776 (1855) is a more substantial work than that on 1829–30. At a little over two hundred pages, it was twice the length and, not being a work of contemporary history and reminiscence, had more documen127. HBG, Virginia Convention of 1829–30, 72, 92–94; HBG, Littleton Waller Tazewell, 26–27.

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tary evidence upon which to draw. Nonetheless, in this book as in his other researches upon the convention of 1788, Grigsby felt hampered by a lack of sources. ‘‘Our public (state) records, such as they are, are not accessible, and I have always lived at least a hundred miles from their place of deposit,’’ he grumbled to David Swain in 1857. There were no secondary accounts, ‘‘while in this important respect the North abounds.’’ To help write of the Virginia Convention of 1788, he had ‘‘hardly a solitary life of any man who composed it, except Wirt’s life of Henry, which is to the last degree superficial, though a worthy and clever book, and nobly patriotic in its aims.’’ Grigsby was old enough to have met some of the actors of 1788, the ‘‘intelligent men who were present at the scene,’’ and had self-consciously for thirty years ‘‘saved many facts gathered in conversation’’ and he knew of ‘‘every thing in print that can shed any light upon my theme.’’ Nevertheless, this ‘‘work of great labor’’ encountered constant frustration, for ‘‘of many of my greatest men it is impossible to know from their friends and descendants the slightest particulars.’’ Moreover, he was conscious that, whatever their patriotisms, the citizens of Virginians knew relatively little of the particularities of their history. In 1861, he wrote of his book about 1776: ‘‘That work was like a revelation in Virginia. Utter oblivion seemed to have claimed some of our greatest names. The letters, which I received from some of their descendants who learned from my book for the first time who and what their ancestors were, were most touching.’’ And in the book itself, there is a rueful footnote that observes that, apart from a few brief things, there were then biographies only of Richard Henry Lee by his grandson, of Henry by Wirt, and of Jefferson by Tucker: ‘‘Not even Madison has a biographer.’’ ‘‘The truth is that the history of Virginia from . . . 1776 to the close of the war is yet almost wholly unwritten,’’ he lamented. ‘‘Glimpses, faint and casual, of the state of the parties may be seen in the text of Girardin and in his notes.’’ 128 The Virginia Convention of 1776 forcibly states many of Grigsby’s later preoccupations. On the meaning of the Revolution, it was conventional enough, for an admirer of Jefferson. While the Revolution of 1688 was miscalled, being but a dynastic shift, that of 1776 taught ‘‘a far more imposing lesson.’’ It legitimated the people as the source of power, made government a trust, validated personal worth over the hereditary principle, abolished primogeniture, and created freedom of religious conscience and practice. ‘‘A few sparse colonies on the eastern coast of the North American continent, mainly peopled by the Anglo-Saxon race, and dependent on the guardian care of a country that despised them’’ resisted tyranny, prevailed, ‘‘established free systems of gov128. HBG to David L. Swain, 20 August 1857, David L. Swain Papers, SHC; HBG to Charles Deane, 22 March 1861, Charles Deane Papers, MassHS; HBG, Virginia Convention of 1776, 132, 141.

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ernment’’ (the plural was significant if glancing), ‘‘opened their ports to the active, the enterprising, and the oppressed of every clime,’’ increased population, expanded to embrace a continent, and would grow ‘‘to judge the future by the stern statistics of the past’’ to 300 million. But Grigsby’s other themes are more idiosyncratic. He was scathing towards the Cavalier theory and those historians who romanticized ‘‘the acts of the beggarly governors who for a century and a half were sent over to fatten on the revenues of the Colony.’’ The events of 1776 could not have been born of the cavalier, for he was ‘‘essentially a slave—a compound slave—a slave to the king and a slave to the church. He was the last man in the world from whom any great elemental principle of liberty and law could come.’’ Rather, Virginia was created by those driven out by cavaliers and aristocratic oppression, was made by the plain folk, the ‘‘bone and sinew of that unconquerable people, whom, made up of the Britons, the Angles, the Danes, the Finns, the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Normans, we call, for the want of a better name, the Anglo-Saxons.’’ In addition, there were the Germans and the Scotch-Irish. Was not John Tyler descended from Wat Tyler, the people’s rebel, and from Huguenots? And Jefferson from the Welsh and a ‘‘plain planter’’? And Patrick Henry from the Scots? And Henry Tazewell from Huguenots? True, there had been many English in the colony, indeed a faction who had sought to duplicate English life, but these had been mostly self-made men. Those among them who had adhered to the banner of liberty—Washington, Mason, the Lees—had been English, but not ‘‘representative of the party to which by accident of birth he belonged.’’ On this matter, there was no equanimity in Grigsby. This was personal. Later, he spoke of James Blair, who shared Grigsby’s own Scottish middle name: ‘‘If I thought that I had a drop of blood in my veins kindred with his own, I would not exchange it for the blood of the proudest knight that ever won his spurs on the fields of Cressy or Poictiers, or who with the lion-hearted Richard had gathered trophies beneath the ramparts of the Holy City.’’ 129 So the cavaliers were a legend, in need of refutation. There were other myths, less onerous but worth notice. Grigsby was anxious, with diplomacy, to consider the difficult matter of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, which involved fierce matters of priority between Virginia and North Carolina. This issue had been, with growing passion, knocking around historical circles since at least 1819, when the Mecklenburg Resolves of 31 May 1775, had been republished.130 This document had given rise to the legend that eleven days earlier, on 20 May, the rebels of Mecklenburg had issued their 129. HBG, Virginia Convention of 1776, 147, 37, 40, 42, 44, 72. 130. Phyllis R. Abbott, ‘‘Mecklenberg Resolutions,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Southern History, ed. David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 806.

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own declaration of independence, long preceding that of Virginia in May 1776, and indeed to the claim that Jefferson had plagiarized North Carolinian language in drafting the American declaration of July 1776. The problem was that no one could find a copy of the original Mecklenburg declaration, though many started to look. It was thought that a record of the proceedings held in Charlotte had been kept by John McKnitt Alexander, it being a transcript of the declaration supposed to have been read by a Colonel Polk to the indignant citizenry of the county, newly enraged by word from the battle of Lexington. A copy of this transcript was said to have been sent in 1794 to Hugh Williamson, the historian of North Carolina. But, oddly, Williamson made no mention of the matter in his 1812 work, though it was true that he took his history only to 1770. Still, the silence was peculiar, and there was no manuscript to be found in Williamson’s papers. As to Alexander himself, his house had burned down in 1800, which was said to have destroyed the original transcript. All this Samuel Henry Dickson, the grandson of Alexander, explained to David Swain in 1845, after consultation with J. G. M. Ramsey, who had researched the matter long since: ‘‘When in Charleston in 1828 I ransacked the Library even to the old files of newspapers and pamphlets & found nothing that Gov. Swain will not find already in the files of N C Archives of State on that subject.’’ Certainly Swain thought it would be nice if such a declaration existed and in 1845 canvassed his state to find such, but to no avail. In 1847 Joseph Johnson of Charleston found the May 31 Resolves in ‘‘old newspapers in the Charleston Library,’’ and a year later Bancroft came across them in the British State Paper Office, in the form of a copy sent to England by Sir James Wright, governor of Georgia, in a letter of 20 June 1775. They were reprinted, he told Swain, in the South Carolina Gazette for 13 June 1775.131 Not everyone was convinced that, even if the Mecklenburg declaration existed, it much mattered. This was Jared Sparks’s opinion: ‘‘As to the Mecklenburg affair, it does not seem to me of much importance, historically considered, which way the question is settled. The Resolves are quite as strong, in their political character, as the Declaration, and afford as convincing a proof of the sentiments and spirit of the people.’’ But, then, Sparks was from Massachusetts. What did he know of Southern interstate rivalry? Francis Hawks of North Carolina, resident in New York, knew all about it, thought Bancroft and others were scanting the claims of Mecklenburg, and began to wage what 131. Hugh Talmage Lefler, ed., North Carolina History Told by Contemporaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 99–103; Samuel Henry Dickson to David L. Swain, 15 January 1845; Joseph Johnson to David L. Swain, 4 March 1847; George Bancroft to David L. Swain, 4 July 1848, all in David L. Swain Papers, SHC; David L. Swain et al., printed circular, 5 September 1845, Griffith John McRee Papers, SHC.

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ended as a vociferous campaign to establish the veracity of the Mecklenburg declaration. In 1852, he wrote to Swain in a letter boldly headed ‘‘Confidential,’’ to announce his intention of ‘‘speaking out here among strangers for the old North State,’’ especially Bancroft, who was ‘‘disposed to disparage her and do her wrong.’’ For Bancroft had ‘‘made great use of your name as authority for his opinions, and I found that with his characteristic caution he meant to shelter himself behind you, and with true yankee cunning meant to make a Carolinian seem to disparage Carolina.’’ This would be typical of his work, for ‘‘a more unreliable history was never written than his history of the U.S.’’ 132 Into all this, Grigsby had been drawn, in his usual capacity as the confidant of historians, but also as the historian of the Virginia Declaration of 1776. Later, after he expressed his views in the Virginia Convention of 1776, things grew more bitter. Hawks was unconvinced, preferring (as Grigsby thought) his own ‘‘tissue of sophisms so thin as hardly to deceive the eye of the most careless observer,’’ brazenly proclaimed in a speech in Mecklenburg itself, such that Grigsby felt obliged to reply in a paper to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in June 1857. ‘‘I have taken every inch of ground from under Dr. Hawks’ feet, and left him to dangle in the air,’’ Grigsby told Bancroft. ‘‘It is painful to me to add that I have been compelled to depart from that high tone of courtesy which I observed toward him in my speech on the Convention of 1776. His misrepresentations, and, I grieve to say, his bold, unscrupulous, and palpable falsifications of testimony, unintentional it may be, but not less unjustifiable, where certainty was within his reach, demanded, under all the circumstances of the case, a stern rebuke.’’ 133 But earlier, in 1855 and addressing Phi Beta Kappa in Williamsburg, Grigsby had tried to be more amiable and discreet, eager to proclaim ‘‘all honor to the patriots of Mecklenburg!’’ Nonetheless he was firm, his amiability close to patronizing. Where was the original manuscript? Why were there inconsistencies in the texts? Why was the contemporary record silent on what was claimed to have been so early and momentous a declaration? No, too much depended on the memory of old men, vague about dates and content. There was, of course, no trouble about the Resolves, authentic beyond doubt, marked by ‘‘superior skill,’’ ‘‘among the first compositions of the great era in which they appeared,’’ well worth a pat on the head.134 But the Resolves made no mention of a previous declaration, for the compelling reason that there had never been one. In this matter, many had been deceived by the worthiest 132. Jared Sparks to David L. Swain, 5 March 1845; Francis L. Hawks to David L. Swain, 18 December 1852, David L. Swain Papers, SHC. 133. HBG to George Bancroft, 29 May, 27 June 1857, George Bancroft Papers, MassHS. 134. HBG, Virginia Convention of 1776, 20, 26.

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of patriotic motives, which was a thing that happened. Reflect on Ossian. In fact, Hawks would have been better served to have used the declaration of the North Carolina legislature of 12 April 1776, a month before that of Virginia. The former instructed her delegates to the Continental Congress to concur in any declaration of independence from Britain. But Grigsby, sorrowfully, was obliged to point out the gulf between concurring, which was the timid position of North Carolina, and leading, which was that of Virginia. No, Virginia was foremost. Thus were the decks cleared of presumptuous rivals and Grigsby could settle to his task. Grigsby located the Virginian revolution in a class warfare between plain Anglo-Saxons and cavaliers servile to Church and State, a struggle that expressed itself not only in the tension between Virginia and Britain, but within the Virginian social structure itself. The Revolution was a civil war, Grigsby knew, better than Bancroft. Three parties in the colony were identifiable. First, there had been ‘‘the friends of British rule under all circumstances,’’ mostly ‘‘wealthy planters, who lived upon their plantations in a style of baronial splendor, who idolized British institutions’’; their leader was John Randolph, the attorney general. Second, there were ‘‘the friends of British rule when that rule did not infringe on the rights and franchises of the Colony,’’ mostly intellectual men, lawyers, physicians, and ‘‘aspiring young men, who . . . had studied history in the spirit of philosophy’’; their leader was Peyton Randolph. Third, there were the radicals, not yet openly demanding independence but fierce in resistance, ‘‘made up of a class of men, young, active, intelligent, and brave and, for the most part, in moderate circumstances, living mainly in the interior,’’ jealous of the colonial oligarchy and church hierarchy, resentful of growing taxes; their leader was Patrick Henry. So Virginian right had struggled with British power, and the issue might have gone with power but for the intervention of the French. Much was doubtful, many were fearful and hesitant. Grigsby was enough of a postrevolutionary man to understand this and to ask for understanding, even for Tories or timid Whigs, who had helped to keep together the fabric of society ‘‘when a civil war was raging in the land.’’ The lesson was reciprocal, from the standpoint of 1855 in Williamsburg. ‘‘The conservative influence of those men was of incalculable value to their country. Let those who are inclined to blame their caution in adopting radical changes in a time of extraordinary peril, and who approve of what are now called the peculiar institutions of the South, keep in mind that but for these very men those institutions might not have survived the last century.’’ Tucked into a footnote, at this point, was the frank confession ‘‘that George Mason, Wythe, Jefferson, Pendleton and others would have voted for emancipation is beyond a doubt.’’ 135 Radicals were not uniformly useful. By 1855, 135. Ibid., 62, 66, 67.

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Grigsby was approaching his fiftieth birthday and the instincts of old men were less inexplicable to him. At last, inevitably, Grigsby turned to his personalities. ‘‘Let me invite your attention . . . to a group of young men who are conversing with each other near the door leading into the lobby,’’ two tall, one short: Edmund Randolph, Henry Tazewell, James Madison. These were shrewdly, lovingly described. Then Grigsby turned to the numerous others, thin, fat, tall, short, ugly, handsome, all with their differing histories, perspectives, contributions for good or ill. His tone is rigorously respectful, kindly, as he inspects the room and its inhabitants. He was very conscious of the lapse of time, that life had moved on since 1770 or so. The nature of state papers, for example, had much changed. ‘‘Most of the papers of that day were written on the spur of the moment in a spirit of business, and were never revised by their authors; nor should it be overlooked that long state-papers written rather in the style of an eclectic professor than of a practical statesman, is wholly the growth of modern times, and, we may add, of recent American growth.’’ Brevity had been the British way and was the Virginian way then, not the modern penchant for ‘‘mawkish sensibility, meretricious ornament or artifice, the turn of a period or the beauty of an illustration.’’ 136 The moral heart of the book is Grigsby’s apostrophe to the Virginian Declaration of Rights of 12 June 1776. He did not blush to elevate it above the Declaration of Independence, which was ‘‘mainly a detail of wrongs sensibly felt as to justify a change of government, and therefore easily enumerated, which required as little argument as research, which, if badly told, might have made a slight impression on the age, has been adorned with all the graces with which genius could invest it.’’ Equally, it stood above its English precedent, the Petition of Right, which ‘‘simply enumerates the laws of the land which had been violated, and prays that the laws aforesaid shall henceforth be observed.’’ But the Virginian Declaration of Rights ‘‘lays down the principles on which all good government ought to rest.’’ The difference between John Somers, the drafter of the Petition, and George Mason, the author of the Declaration, was that between a house repairer and an architect ‘‘who prescribes the principles on which all structures should be reared and kept in constant repair.’’ Further, the Declaration was an exquisite act of concision, ‘‘the quintessence of all the great principles and doctrines of freedom which had been wrought out by the people of England from the earliest times . . . the history of England in miniature,’’ the more astonishing for being written by no lawyer but ‘‘thrown off by a planter hastily summoned from his plough to fill a vacancy in the public councils.’’ 137 136. Ibid., 75–76, 133. 137. Ibid., 165, 162, 163.

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In the book’s iconography, Patrick Henry is shown as great if misunderstood, Grigsby being careful to massage Henry’s flawed reputation into something more consistently admirable. Mason and Jefferson share the honors for being heroes, though this was easier with Mason, whose career had been brief enough to be unambivalently admirable. ‘‘If George Mason was the Michael Angelo who laid the foundations and prescribed the proportions of the new government, thomas jefferson was the Raphael who imparted to it its peculiar grace and effect.’’ As Grigsby saw it, there was nothing inevitable about the creation of a republican system embracing religious toleration, disestablishment, the abolition of primogeniture and entail. It was Jefferson’s accomplishment to engraft all these on to the new order, to make them seem in retrospect a natural accompaniment, though the hostility of many other Virginian revolutionaries to his ‘‘amendments of our colonial policy’’ showed that they were not. Grigsby’s admiration for Jefferson was profound, though touched with a sense that there was something precipitate in Jefferson’s reformism, an instinct useful in the Revolution when boldness was necessary, but of more dubious efficacy on other occasions. As a Norfolk man, Grigsby was most skeptical of the Embargo, though conscious that its alternative in 1806, a war with Britain, would have been hard to win. So his estimate of Jefferson is embattled, littered with sentences that begin, ‘‘It has been asserted that . . .’’ something or another was amiss in the Jeffersonian legacy or character. To defend Jefferson in 1855, even at William and Mary, was delicate work, the audience being knowledgeable and restless on the subject. Grigsby was anxious to displace Jefferson from party passions and move him into the quieter realm of analytical history. ‘‘We are old enough to remember when an allusion to the color of his breeches would excite a laugh.’’ What if Jefferson’s version of events in The Anas was now reprobated and doubted? ‘‘It is immaterial whether those records . . . be true or false; it is enough for the purposes of history to know that they were believed to be true, and were deliberately recorded and acted upon by the statesman who was the master-spirit of the time.’’ Or what if, ‘‘as Christians,’’ we know that Jefferson was no ‘‘believer in the divinity of our Saviour’’ and was a deist like many ‘‘prominent men in his era’’? The man had left his mark everywhere. Enter Washington and see the Capitol, walk through Williamsburg, go to Charlottesville, attend a Fourth of July celebration, travel to Louisiana: everywhere Jefferson was omnipresent, formative.138 In this tension, much nuance of understanding was created, nowhere more so than in Grigsby’s analysis of Jefferson’s prose style, which he saw as swift, unguarded, strong more than graceful, anxious for reason more than imagi138. Ibid., 168, 169, 183, 184.

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nation, but possessed of ‘‘the faculty of putting great truths into a nutshell, of compressing whole theories or doctrines into an adage’’ so that his ‘‘phrases became a part of the public mind.’’ Grigsby offered a sustained and illuminating comparison with the style and mind of Madison, in which the most telling observation is that ‘‘in the course of his life he [Madison] never dared to coin a word,’’ but Jefferson ‘‘as if disposed to assail the sovereignty of the English tongue as well as the sovereignty of the English sword, never hesitated to coin a word when it suited his purposes so to do.’’ 139 Throughout the book Grigsby’s Virginian patriotism vied with his historian’s skepticism. In so complex a story, with so varied a dramatis personae, it was possible to be critical. But Grigsby was too much committed to state pride, to the centrality of Virginia to the history of the nation, to do more than insinuate his doubts, which were confined to details, to this man or that, to this action or that. The wider pattern of history itself should be civic, inspiriting. These men were dead, but written history should serve to restore memory. ‘‘Let it be our pride to cherish their memory. Let us teach our youth to repeat their names, to recount their deeds, and to imitate their virtues. But let us not forget that, though they have passed away, our beloved Virginia is immortal,’’ a fertile mother of beauty and generosity to all her children. To honor her, Virginians should make of the state a more perfect family: ‘‘Shall we not seek by a mild and wise policy to undermine the loathsome jail and the fearful penitentiary, and rear on their reeking ruins the school-house, the college, and the church? Shall we not seek by physical means as well as moral, by the railway and the canal as well as by the school-house and the church, to connect in pleasant communion all the parts of our territory, all the children of one family?’’ 140 This was a kind of belonging, for a man who had lost his father, was not brought up by his mother, was separated from his wife, had quarreled with his in-laws, and could hear the world only through an ear trumpet.

The Unities of Biography 141 Hugh Blair Grigsby, the reader of Boswell and Plutarch, understood that biography was an ancient form that had commenced as the praise of famous men. But autobiography was a modern form, which had struggled to find a 139. Ibid., 180–81, 183. 140. Ibid., 194–95. 141. ‘‘When you resume your books, I would commend to your notice Masson’s ‘Life & Times of Milton.’ . . . Masson transcends the unities of biography, but the extraneous matter is so interesting that one can readily pardon the artistic fault, if it really be one’’: CC to HBG, 18 October 1860, HBG Papers, VHS.

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label for itself from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and had been puzzled to know whether old narratives like the Confessions of Saint Augustine, the Vita Nuova of Dante, or the Life of Benvenuto Cellini, let alone the essays of Montaigne, belonged to this newly self-conscious genre, which conflated ‘‘confessions’’ and ‘‘memoirs.’’ 142 To later generations, it came to seem self-evident that the forms of biography and autobiography were mutual, that someone might feel the value of telling the story of his or her own life, and that a biographer might strive to achieve an intimate portrait, which might make the reader see how a life had felt when lived. But that the genre of biography persisted for several millennia before anyone formally invented the genre of autobiography shows that no such mutuality is essential. Biography little needs autobiography, although biography must exist before autobiography can begin to be practiced. Southerners grew up with biography as a staple of their intellectual diet. Plutarch, as William Henry Holcombe observed in 1855, was an indispensable maker of youthful sensibilities: ‘‘I suspect that Plutarch’s Lives has had as much influence over the insensible development of human character and sentiment as any other single book—the Bible alone excepted.’’ To be sure, medieval lives of the saints meant little to Southerners and Giorgio Vasari little more, but James Boswell very much. ‘‘Boswell’s Life and Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson is the most fascinating book in the English language,’’ thought George Fitzhugh in 1860. By the time he was twenty-four or so, Grigsby had read Boswell on ten occasions, by doing so once or twice a year. Grigsby was especially immersed in biography. ‘‘You must be sure and read Lockhart’s life of Scott when you finish Waverley,’’ he told Elizabeth McPherson Whitehead in 1852. ‘‘The life of Scott is the most interesting drama, now comic, now tragic, that exists. Then Boswell’s Johnson, then Southey’s life by his son, then Byron’s life by Moore, then Campbell’s life by Dr. Beattie. These books will give you an impression of the literature and literary men of Great Britain for much more than a half century past; and when you have read these, I will have a foundation on which I can rely in recommending other books to you.’’ For biography was thought to teach humanity and, with such a mission, it might even risk the improprieties of candor. James G. Lockhart’s life of Walter Scott, hazarded William Hooper, ‘‘needs some expurgations before it will be a fit book to read to ladies.’’ Lockhart had ‘‘taken some such audacious liberties with decency that I have suspected him to be a man of free, convivial life, and rather intemperate habits, who ventures, before the public 142. John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 20–81; James M. Cox, Recovering Literature’s Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 14.

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eye, the licentious merriment which he has been accustomed to see received with bursts of applause over the bottle.’’ Such had been the dangers of Boswell: ‘‘Lockhart doubtless is emulating Boswell by giving us every particular of his hero, good, bad & indifferent.’’ 143 In general, however, biography as practiced by Southerners tended to the public and outward glance, though this tendency began to weaken in later antebellum years. That the genre commenced with lives of the Founding Fathers had encouraged this distance. Great men and greater deeds required formality, for the young were watching and were not supposed to see clay when looking at the feet of marble statues. If the marble was deficient, one was obliged to apply what William Wirt called ‘‘plaster of Paris’’ to restore the civic illusion. David Ramsay’s Life of George Washington was dedicated ‘‘[t]o the youth of the United States, in the hope that, from the example of their common father, they will learn to do and suffer whatever their country’s good may require at their hands,’’ just as Kennedy’s Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt was inscribed ‘‘[t]o the Young Men of the United States, Who Seek For Guidance to an Honorable Fame.’’ 144 Nonetheless, the genre of biography did mutate in the decades before the Civil War. The importance of understanding a childhood grew, character became an explanation for a life and no longer a commentary, domesticity became allowable, and eventually even the possibility of failure and madness was glimpsed. These developments are evident if one considers the sequence of Ramsay’s life of Washington (1807), Wirt’s biography of Henry (1817), Tucker’s life of Jefferson (1837), Kennedy’s life of Wirt (1849), and Garland’s biography of John Randolph (1850). Ramsay writes of Washington with the utmost formality, such that the man disappears into the public realm. In Ramsay’s account, Washington’s childhood barely occupies two pages, which are mostly on ancestors. There are polite sentiments about the mother, and a bare suggestion that Washington ‘‘in his youth . . . was grave, silent, and thoughtful; diligent and methodical in business, dignified in his appearance, and strictly honourable in all his deportment.’’ This brevity of narrative is explained by Ramsay as arising from an absence of evidence, the fact that Washington’s contemporaries ‘‘have not been able to gratify the public curiosity with any striking anec143. Entry for 31 January 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC; GF, ‘‘Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, Etc,’’ DBR 28 (April 1860): 414; HBG Diary (12 May 1830–27 January 1832), 103–13, and HBG to Elizabeth McPherson Whitehead, 12 February 1852, HBG Papers, VHS; William Hooper to John DeBerniere Hooper, 19 June (ca. 1838–40), John DeBerniere Hooper Papers, SHC. 144. JPK, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney-General of the United States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849), 1:5; David Ramsay, The Life of George Washington, Commander in Chief of the Armies of the United States, Throughout the War Which Established Their Independence; and First President of the United States (New York: Hopkins & Seymour, 1807), iii.

Giuseppe Ceracchi, George Washington (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

‘‘Firm as the Surge Repelling Rock’’: George Washington (From David Ramsay, The Life of George Washington [1818])

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dotes.’’ But there is little suggestion elsewhere that Ramsay would have been much drawn by the revelatory story. Rather, the narrative preferred to be a condensed history from the French wars to Washington’s retirement from the Presidency, all filched (as Ramsay’s detractors believed) from John Marshall’s life. In Ramsay’s pages, what the United States became and Washington was were little distinguished. As was the custom for biography, one as old as Plutarch, any summary of the subject’s physiognomy and character was left to the end. Only on page 328 is Ramsay’s reader told that Washington was ‘‘uncommonly tall,’’ strong, with a mind ‘‘more solid than brilliant,’’ a pursuer of ‘‘truth and utility,’’ wise in judgment under pressure, and so forth. After having established these private qualities, Ramsay could thereafter move to explaining the nature of Washington’s political principles and public service, before reaching an exordium that shows how Washington’s life afforded ‘‘the brightest model for imitation, not only to warriors and statesmen, but to private citizens; for his character was a constellation of all the talents and virtues which dignify or adorn human nature.’’ 145 Such severity was, perhaps, an intentional reproof to Parson Weems, who had rushed out his own life of Washington soon after the man’s death and had been untroubled by the absence of evidence, since invention could supply the deficiency. In principle, Weems made more of private life than Ramsay and intended to use it for homily’s purposes: ‘‘It is not then in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life, that we are to look for the man. Private life is always real life.’’ So Weems promised to portray Washington the son, the brother, the school boy, the widower. But, apart from inventing the story of the cherry tree, Weems did not deliver on his promises. There are insistent gestures towards vernacular vigor, as when he speaks of ‘‘little George,’’ and Weems had more fondness for anecdote than Ramsay.146 Yet their basic standpoint was little different and both ended with a homily on the connection between private and public virtue, in Weems’s case in three concluding chapters that focus alternately on Washington’s benevolence, industry, and patriotism. That is, nothing in the public and private realm was permitted to conflict, and it was public accomplishment that required private virtues, however much it was argued formally that the reverse was the case. This explained narrative structure. Deeds were narrated before character was explained, for the latter was but a gloss on the former. Many biographers later than David Ramsay have found trouble breathing 145. Ramsay, George Washington, 3, 328, 339. See Robert L. Brunhouse, ‘‘David Ramsay, 1749–1815: Selections from His Writings,’’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 55 (1965): 228–29, for reviews of Ramsay. 146. Mason Locke Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Peter S. Onuf (1809; reprint, Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 2, 6.

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life into so stiff a man as George Washington. Patrick Henry was a more complex opportunity for William Wirt, sufficiently so to test the latter’s patience and occasion his ‘‘despair.’’ 147 Evidence was scanty and contradictory, not all was glory, much was dull, more was insignificant. Indeed, St. George Tucker thought Wirt ought not to bother, that ‘‘American biography . . . is a subject which promises as little entertainment as any other in the literary world. Our scene of action is so perfectly domestic, as to afford neither novelty nor variety. Even the biographer of Washington [presumably Marshall] has been reproached with imposing upon his readers the history of a nation, instead of the life of an individual.’’ Most of the Virginians of Henry’s generation (Lee, Pendleton, Wythe) had ‘‘glided down the current of life so smoothly (except as public men) that nobody ever thought of noticing how they lived, or what they did.’’ Only the public realm mattered. Only Plutarch would serve, because no one had done anything scandalous enough to justify Suetonius. There were no murdered mothers, no sexual competitions with courtesans, no poisonings of husbands. And Wirt, in truth, did begin to find matters thus dull when he set about his task. ‘‘The incidents of Mr. Henry’s life are extremely monotonous,’’ he complained in 1815. ‘‘It is all speaking, speaking, speaking.’’ Sources were scanty. ‘‘From 1763 to 1789 . . . not one of his speeches lives in print, writing or memory.’’ Retailing the bare knowledge that a speech once existed was tedious. ‘‘To keep saying this over, and over, and over again, without being able to give any account of what the speech was—why, sir, what is that but a vast, open, sun-burnt field without one spot of shade or verdure? My soul is weary of it.’’ Worse, Henry had ‘‘ugly traits . . . and some pretty nearly as ugly blanks. He was a blank military commander, a blank governor, and a blank politician . . . as hopeless a subject as man could well desire.’’ 148 Why bother? Well, Patrick Henry had changed the world, or so all right-thinking Virginians believed. The justification of the public realm must carry the biographer over the pettiness of the private. Still, the private was awkward, so pressing that it needed addressing very early on, and could not be postponed to vague and posthumous eulogy. Wirt decided to make the best of a bad job, to admit the problem but explain it away. So, the young Henry was ‘‘coarse, his manners uncommonly awkward, his dress slovenly, his conversation very plain, his aversion to study invincible, and his faculties almost entirely benumbed by indolence.’’ This might seem hard to justify, but Wirt was equal to it. Rousseau offered a way out. 147. JPK, William Wirt, 1:337; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 78–94, has a good discussion of the biography, upon which I have drawn. 148. JPK, William Wirt, 1:352–53, 388–89.

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Henry ‘‘ran wild in the forest.’’ He was ‘‘a mere child of nature, and nature seems to have been too proud and too jealous of her work, to permit it to be touched by the hand of art.’’ Thus was genius undefiled by the artificiality of society or education, but instead was rooted in an untutored ‘‘consummate knowledge of the human heart . . . which enabled him, when he came upon the public stage, to touch the springs of passion with a master-hand, to control the resolutions and decisions of hearers with a power, almost more than mortal.’’ So Henry had ‘‘a natural propensity,’’ a ‘‘clear and simple style,’’ he offered ‘‘the echo of nature’s voice.’’ This proposition could be harnessed to a wider, more sincere thesis that Patrick Henry somehow embodied the natural movement of society from English thralldom to American liberty. ‘‘It was from the body of the yeomanry . . . that Mr. Henry proceeded,’’ and he came to free them from ‘‘tacit and submissive deference’’ by the ‘‘presumption of an obscure and unpolished rustic.’’ 149 Wirt had long been fascinated by the problem of eloquence and written his Letters of a British Spy partly to study it. At first, before he knew better, he thought Patrick Henry might furnish ‘‘a good text for a discourse on rhetoric, patriotism and morals.’’ But rhetoric proved easier to use than patriotism and morals. To be sure, Henry was thought to embody the sublime, as understood by Longinus. As Wirt quoted someone else, Henry was ‘‘the mountain torrent,’’ thunder and lightning, ‘‘that sublime species of eloquence also mentioned by Rollin.’’ As Wirt himself said, Henry was ‘‘a bolder stream,’’ ‘‘the headlong cataract,’’ ‘‘the angry ocean.’’ Thomas Jefferson, to whom Wirt submitted his manuscript, thought this was too much, was a younger generation’s poetic excess. But Wirt’s contemporaries liked that sort of thing, called it ‘‘beautiful ’’ and had their ‘‘eyes filled with tears of rapturous admiration,’’ so Wirt had retained such passages and muttered to himself that Jefferson was ‘‘too old and cold.’’ 150 In one sense, Wirt’s Henry breaks with the formality of David Ramsay. Much is conceded to human frailty, even culpability is admitted. The traditional concluding chapter on character is a mixed effort as a result and shows a delicate balancing act, leaning towards the generous. In Wirt’s account, Patrick Henry is morally strict, a good husband, father, and master. All this could be plainly said. That Henry was also penny-pinching is asserted only obliquely: ‘‘The love of money is said to have been one of Mr. Henry’s strongest passions.’’ Still, Henry is accused of being vain of his wealth and his fame, of over-charging his clients, of being mean-spirited towards his politi149. William Wirt, The Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817), 6, 10, 43, 44, 54. 150. JPK, William Wirt, 1:278, 2:24; Wirt, Patrick Henry, 250, 295.

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William Wirt (From J. P. Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt [1850])

cal opponents. Wirt politely casts doubt upon the reliability of such stories, but does observe that, even if true, these were but the ordinary frailties of human nature. (So the reader is not really expected to doubt the veracity of these accusations, merely to respect Wirt’s courtesy.) Only upon Henry’s laziness is a charge of guilty unambiguously rendered. But even this is used to point towards Henry’s quasi-literateness, which expedites the triumphant verdict that, unencumbered by learning, Henry had studied ‘‘the great volume of human nature.’’ 151 Further, it could be asserted that such common sense had been decisive in Henry’s reading of the political situation, which impelled the American Revolution. So, somehow, the creation of the republic rested upon Patrick Henry’s being too lazy to read. William Wirt, it is worth remembering, was a lawyer. His biography was a brief, he pled his case, he got his man off, more or less, because few wanted Henry to be found guilty. Yet, in another sense, Ramsay and Wirt were close in spirit. For both, public and private still marched together. Washington was all great in both realms. Henry was mingled good and bad in both. In neither case was there dissonance, for there could not be, if human nature was true all through and explained the world. This remained the standpoint for George Tucker’s 1837 life of Jefferson, which though published later than Wirt’s Henry is morally 151. Wirt, Patrick Henry, 402, 406.

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its elder, for Tucker had the even tone of the philosophe and little interest in evoking cataracts and impulses from vernal woods.152 Again, the public realm predominated. But Jefferson was a case middling between Washington, whose greatness no one doubted and whose private life was unexceptional, and Henry, whose greatness was dubious and whose private life was suspicious. No one doubted Jefferson’s greatness, but there was much dispute over his worth in the public realm, and his skepticism had bred doubts about his private character, especially for those godly who saw a necessary contradiction between morality and a man who edited out dispensable parts of the Scriptures. ‘‘It was the fate of Thomas Jefferson to be at once more loved and praised by his friends, and more hated and reviled by his adversaries, than any of his compatriots’’ is how Tucker’s biography begins, with the extra assertion that death had seemed only to have intensified feelings. Tucker’s solution was an ‘‘impartiality’’ of tone, was coolness and dispassion, which Henry Randall was to complain was but ice trying to understand fire. Mostly, Tucker almost completely ignored the private man. The first chapter begins, not with Jefferson’s ancestry and birth, but with an account of the colonial history of Virginia, the economics of tobacco, and the moral effects of slavery. The second chapter, it is true, narrates the childhood and schooling, even Jefferson’s first loves, but soon politics begins and continues more or less unabated until the end of the second volume. Chapter Three has an eight-line paragraph about Jefferson’s wedding, but then it resumes, ‘‘In 1772, the political calm . . . was interrupted by an occurrence in Rhode Island’’ and Martha Jefferson is not heard of again until she dies on page 158, and then she is mentioned only because her demise freed Jefferson to accept a political appointment and so mattered in the narrative. (There are, however, a few affecting words about Jefferson’s melancholy and Martha’s talents as a nurse.) As in Ramsay’s Washington, character is merely implicit throughout, and only at the end is it made explicit. So, Jefferson had ‘‘suavity of temper’’ and ‘‘warmth of benevolence.’’ Like Henry, he was ‘‘beloved as a parent, relative, friend, or master.’’ He was firm, decisive, courageous (though not all thought so), ‘‘prone to resentment for intended injury,’’ with a mind more just than quick, more bold than original. And so on, through a long list of virtues, with occasional concomitant defects. Above all, Jefferson had ‘‘impressed his opinions of government on the minds of the great mass of his countrymen.’’ 153 152. On the biography, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 122–30. 153. George Tucker, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837), 1:xi, xvi, 51, 159–60, 2:500, 501, 502, 507; for Randall’s opinion, see Robert Colin McLean, George Tucker, Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 44.

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Not everyone was convinced by this emollient attempt to deflect attention from the distractions of partisan politics to the larger movement of political culture in America, to make Jefferson safe for democracy. Francis Hawks of North Carolina, co-founder of a New York Review and a minister of religion, reasoned from Jefferson the private man and infidel to Jefferson the demagogue and saw a fearful symmetry. For Hawks, Tucker’s dressing up of Jefferson’s materialism as Unitarianism was nonsense, for from Monticello had issued forth a propagandist, who had declined to put the name of Jesus Christ in the Virginian Declaration of Religious Toleration, had disestablished the church, had sympathized with Frenchmen, and had ineffectually loaded down the University of Virginia with godless foreigners. Such a man, ‘‘who entertains doubts of the truth of Christianity, after honest and patient examination,’’ was, at best, ‘‘much to be pitied.’’ Worse, Jefferson was vain, touchy, mean-spirited, silly, absurdly visionary, and a plagiarist. (As noticed above, Hawks was a believer in the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.) Tucker replied, for once goaded into passion, that Jefferson was ‘‘as safe from the effusions of clerical hate as the fixed star from the influence of the earth’s noxious [exhalations].’’ 154 But it was not so, at least in the short run. With John Pendleton Kennedy’s life of Wirt, biography became an echo chamber and a succession. Wirt had written of Henry, and in turn Kennedy wrote of Wirt, just as in time Kennedy would be portrayed by Henry Tuckerman.155 Wirt and Kennedy were both lawyers, men of letters, politicians, inhabitants of Maryland and of Virginia, and so men much of a muchness. Neither was great, just notable, and so the anxiety that so troubled Wirt when undertaking his life of Henry palpably lessened for Kennedy trying to understand Wirt. Kennedy judged from the same altitude and felt free to take or leave, with no awful sense of consequences. Being of a type, Kennedy judged Wirt as a type, which was the American public man of letters. But here a certain tension emerged. Kennedy was a novelist, even a sentimental one, and was writing late enough to be interested in and unembarrassed by domesticity, even its random little details. This impulse humanized Wirt, made him one of the boys, someone with whom to break open a bottle. Indeed Kennedy and Wirt had been friends, though of differing generations. On the other hand, Kennedy was interested in Wirt as a professional specimen, as a model for how men of his sort began life, progressed, managed, and died. So Ken154. See Merrill D. Peterson, Jeffersonian Image, 127–30. The originals are Francis L. Hawks, ‘‘Character of Jefferson,’’ New-York Review and Quarterly Church Journal 1 (March 1837): 5–58 (quotation on 15); in reply, see George Tucker, Defence of the Character of Thomas Jefferson, Against a Writer in the New-York Review and Quarterly Church Journal (New York: W. Osborn, 1838). 155. Henry T. Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1871).

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nedy’s Wirt was both more personal than Wirt’s Henry, but also more abstract, for Henry had been a singular force of nature, while Wirt stood in a group daguerrotype. The humanity of Wirt is mostly conveyed in the many private letters reprinted by Kennedy. By using these, Kennedy was placing himself within the ‘‘life and letters’’ tradition of biography, itself an adaptation and transmutation of the history once written by antiquarians who had hugely reprinted documents in their narratives. To do this in a biography affected narrative voice, for it had the effect of dissevering author from subject. First one voice might speak, then another. The biographer does not need to comment on the subject’s voice, indeed often can use the documents as a way of evading commentary, though such a silence could also denote respect, a sense that the subject deserves an uninterrupted hearing, which has an authority beyond the biographer’s license. So a ‘‘life and letters’’ of William Wirt might denote both privacy and distance. Letters to his daughters show Wirt as an affectionate and chattering parent, latterly a sharply grieving one. So, ‘‘Yesterday morning I arose before day,—shaved and dressed by candle-light,—took my cane and walked to market.’’ Letters to Dabney Carr or Francis W. Gilmer display an amiable and nostalgic friend: ‘‘If you should chance to come in the Christmas holidays, you will find me at home here, when we shall be delighted to eat mince-pies and drink champagne with you.’’ David Ramsay’s George Washington had eaten no mince pies. But Kennedy’s Wirt worries, blunders, succeeds, schemes, while he drinks water, has a fondness for beef, and tells almost-funny stories. In justification of all this, Kennedy indulgently reasoned that trivial incidents ‘‘become useful exponents of human quality.’’ Further, ‘‘I hold it to be the biographer’s duty to turn the virtues of an illustrious man to the best account, by giving them a prominence which shall conciliate all regard. The faults of a good man are but transient blemishes, which quickly fade from view. His virtues are unchangeable, ever present and imperishable. He who has to speak of both should observe the proportion indicated by this truth.’’ 156 Professional behavior was more sternly judged, indeed was at the critical heart of the book, which was preoccupied with male rites of passage. ‘‘We have the young practitioner now fairly embarked upon the sea of his profession’’ is how Chapter Four begins. Wirt rises for the first time to address a judge and jury. The scene is generically described, any ‘‘shy and unpractised youth’’ confronting nervously the ‘‘multitudinous eyes’’ of any courtroom: ‘‘Such are the trials familiar to those whose professions compel them to encounter this discipline.’’ But Wirt is also individually judged: his enunciation 156. JPK, William Wirt, 2:131, 163, 391.

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was then defective, ‘‘confused and hurried,’’ but his voice when unhindered by timidity was ‘‘rich and melodious,’’ even if his person was ‘‘quite as unprepossessing as it was remarked to be in his later manhood.’’ Yet he comes through, makes a career, then an advantageous marriage. Then, as all did, he meets reverses, in particular the death of his first wife. ‘‘Adversity,’’ Kennedy firmly tells the reader, ‘‘. . . [is] the best tonic to brace the mind for those encounters in which virtue is proved and renown achieved.’’ Always there is the counterpoint of what happened to Wirt’s sort of man, and what happened in particular to Wirt. ‘‘The giving away a daughter’s hand, is a perilous and responsible office to a parent’’ precedes the observation that Wirt kept a certain boyishness and never quite obtained the gravitas of a parent.157 Most marked is the sense of men advising each other on the moves of life. Should Wirt migrate to Kentucky, where there was more money to be made for a lawyer? Friends across the mountains urged this, but Dabney Carr advised not. Littleton Waller Tazewell suggested shifting his practice from Richmond to Norfolk; Wirt agreed and moved. But these friends were also, usefully, rivals, ‘‘the competitors of his forensic struggles, men of established renown, and justly reputed for brilliant talents as well as professional accomplishment.’’ 158 This crosshatching of friendship and advice, professionalism and rivalry, advances throughout Kennedy’s narrative: Wirt becoming a chancellor, participating in the trial of Aaron Burr, going into politics, becoming attorney general, running for president. At each moment, Kennedy judges how well Wirt has played the game, shows how hard it had been to get it right, how many anxieties had been attendant. But it was the mix of public man and author that had attracted Kennedy to Wirt, so Wirt’s thoughts about American authorship are especially debated, above all his consideration of whether it was sensible to be an author, at all. In general, Kennedy’s admiration for Wirt the writer was cool. The modern reader ‘‘will express his surprise that the public judgment should have given such weight to a production so unlabored, and so desultory’’ is how Kennedy introduces the Letters of a British Spy. ‘‘The singular success of this little book’’ was indeed only intelligible because the American public was eager ‘‘to welcome any clever effort to contribute even the lightest donation towards the increase of our small stock of national authorship.’’ In truth, this was partly an echo of Wirt’s own opinion, that in the Letters the ‘‘disquisitions are too desultory, and the topics too lightly touched to contain much of the useful.’’ Wirt had greatly worried that authorship of this kind marred a lawyer’s career. So, ‘‘My friend Tazewell, here, does not approve of such engagements. He 157. Ibid., 1:57–58, 75, 91. 158. Ibid., 93–100, 124.

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says that it gives a man a light and idle appearance, in the eye of the world, and might, therefore, injure me in my profession.’’ Wirt incessantly sought reassurance on this score and partly moved towards his biography of Patrick Henry because it seemed so much more solid and civic a literary venture than the quasi-Addisonian jeu d’esprit of the British Spy. ‘‘I have been reading, Johnson’s Lives of poets and famous men, till I have contracted an itch for biography; do not be astonished, therefore, if you see me come out with a very material and splendid life of some departed Virginian worthy,—for I meddle no more with the living.’’ But, in the meantime, Wirt had written essays for the Old Bachelor, which Kennedy judged to be his best work, and even a play. Still, the worrying continued. Wirt asked St. George Tucker about the vexation and the latter returned a balanced estimate: ‘‘You ask . . . how far a discovery that you have entered the dramatic lists may affect your professional character. Belleslettres and the Muses have been too little cultivated in America, or cultivated with too little success by their votaries to enable us to judge.’’ John Trumbull had published M’Fingal; he was a lawyer ‘‘I think’’ and ‘‘that poem rather raised the opinion of his talents.’’ Timothy Dwight’s Conquest of Canaan ‘‘seems to have advanced him, in his own quarter of the Union, at least.’’ Joel Barlow’s epic poetry did little to advance his character, but ‘‘we now see him as an Envoy abroad.’’ So, in general, Tucker thought that the evidence indicated little risk in authorship, upon certain strict conditions: the author needed to be ‘‘a person who has inspired an exalted opinion of his talents, and the poem be given to the world in such a manner as to appear merely as a jeu d’esprit, the effusion of a leisure moment, and without any view to profit or emolument, or as an offering at the shrine of party.’’ 159 Jefferson was a more exalted censor than Tucker, for the great man had almost invariably refused publication and ‘‘despised the artificial canons of criticism.’’ It was with nervousness, then, that Wirt had submitted portions of his biography of Patrick Henry, with much pother about the ‘‘beggarly business’’ of publishing, with an insistence that nothing had been lost to his profession and that the time for composition had been merely snatched. As usual, Wirt offered a veto to his critic: ‘‘If you think the publication of the work, will do me an injury with the public, I beg you to tell me so, without any fear of wounding my feelings.’’ In return, Jefferson was fairly encouraging, though he could not resist commenting on Wirt’s anxiety to praise: ‘‘I can say, from my own knowledge of the contemporary characters introduced into the canvass, that you have given them quite as much lustre as themselves would have asked.’’ Later, he added, ‘‘You have certainly practised vigorously the precept of ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum.’ This presents a very difficult question— 159. Ibid., 109, 116, 121–22, 344–45.

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whether one only or both sides of the medal should be presented. It constitutes, perhaps, the distinction between panegyric and history.’’ But even panegyric might be a good read: ‘‘Those who take up your book, will find they cannot lay it down; and this will be its best criticism.’’ Still, Jefferson grimly predicted bad reviews, especially from the British. ‘‘By the Quarterly Reviewers you will be hacked and hewed, with tomahawk and scalping knife.’’ Wirt did not fail to notice both the reproof and the kindness. ‘‘The honourable Thomas has given me some flattering encouragement,’’ he told Francis W. Gilmer. ‘‘I can see, however, that he regards my book rather as panegyric than history, and has put his veto on almost all my favourite passages, as being too poetical for sober narrative—as calculated, indeed, to gratify the young, but to shake the confidence of the aged in the truth of my story.’’ 160 As for Kennedy, who seems to have reprinted these various letters with interested amusement, a mixed judgment was rendered on Wirt’s Henry. He faulted Wirt for excessive credulity: ‘‘The author has not sufficiently winnowed the improbabilities, not to say the impossibilities, of the story which has reached him through the excited popular imagination.’’ (Kennedy was, after all, a Whig who was happy to use the populus, but not to believe them.) Nonetheless, much was well written, the narrative was ‘‘pure and transparent . . . clear and unembarrassed,’’ even rising to the Ciceronian at the end. Still, ‘‘the Life of Patrick Henry has not added to the fame of Wirt.’’ Worse, ‘‘It is even to be regretted that he undertook the task.’’ The evidence was too scanty, ‘‘the magnificent idol of the temple is shrouded from view, by a cloud which has been penetrated only by these rare flashes of light.’’ Other reviewers, notably the one in the North American Review, had thought Wirt had spent too much time on the context of Revolutionary history, but Kennedy acquitted him on this score, if not of John Adams’s charge that Henry and Virginia had been elevated too far above Otis and Massachusetts, whose resistance had been precedent.161 Upon the broader matter of William Wirt, his life and character, Kennedy was equally mixed, despite his formal claim that he only documented the best in Wirt. In truth, Kennedy always aspired to smoothness, urbanity, a neat and tidy handwriting, a deadline met, an account kept. There was something in Wirt that irritated him. The man was too anxious, too confessional, too raw-boned. All this is suppressed in the exordium, because, for all his doubts, Kennedy had liked Wirt, his cheerfulness, his stories, his honesty, his competence, taken all in all. And if Wirt could not be praised, what hope would there be for Kennedy, in his turn, and young men seeking honorable fame in bookshops? 160. Ibid., 413, 408, 409, 2:15. 161. Ibid., 2:37–39.

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All of these biographies celebrated the civic virtues. In them, private character must be, finally, publicly useful. John Randolph’s life offered few such opportunities. Misanthropic, angry, sarcastic, perhaps mad, puzzlingly bachelor, Randolph was a man who refused membership and disdained comity, a man who could not be fitted in, even by someone who tried. On the whole, Hugh Garland took a way out that the intellectual culture of 1850 made possible.162 He turned Randolph into a Byronic, Romantic hero, the wise madman in the attic. And there was sanction for this from Randolph himself. ‘‘Madness, suicide or Piety—(perhaps both the first) in some of these must Lord Byron take refuge,’’ Randolph had written in 1818. ‘‘I think I see passages that shadow out my own story.’’ But Garland also wanted to plough the old furrow, to make Randolph conventionally Virginia’s ‘‘wisest statesman, truest patriot, and most devoted son.’’ 163 It was not clear that a biographer could have it both ways. But he could try. The book begins like Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, with a description of Randolph’s birthplace, by which is evoked an ancient but disused order of cavaliers and old retainers inhabiting decaying mansions, a world of melancholy occasioning nostalgia. But Garland was au courant. For him, childhood was the key to character and so to biography. Wordsworth, ‘‘a wise poet and philosopher,’’ was duly quoted on the child being father to the man. By such logic, ‘‘personal identity’’ (Garland uses this deceptively modern phrase)164 was continuous, not remade with the years, just shaped by youthful experi162. Garland was born in Nelson County, Virginia; his father, Spotswood Garland, was a slaveholder and perennially the county clerk; indeed his son was later, between 1839 and 1841, to be clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. Hugh was, at first, educated at home by his mother, then he went to Hampden-Sydney, whose faculty he joined soon after graduation to teach Greek. In 1826, he married Anne P. Burwell. In 1830, he went to the University of Virginia to study law, then moved to begin practice in Boydton, the seat of Mecklenberg County. (It did not go well, his wife being obliged to start a girls’ school.) By the mid-1830s, he was a Jacksonian member of the state legislature. By 1838, he was in Petersburg, with a farm, which he kept until he became bankrupt (he had dabbled in a mercantile enterprise) and moved in the winter of 1846–47 to St. Louis, where he started up again as a lawyer. Apart from writing his life of John Randolph, he was perhaps most notable for being the first lawyer for John Sanford, in the early stages of the lawsuit that would eventuate in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision; but, by then, Garland was dead. On this, most valuable is Marshall D. Hier, ‘‘Garland & Norris, Slaveowner Emerson’s ‘Dream Team’—Part I,’’ at http://www.bamsl.org/barjour/pastissues/fall99/hier.html. 163. John Randolph to Harmanus Bleeker, 10 October 1818, quoted in Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 265; Hugh A. Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1850), 2:375. 164. In fact, it was in use in, at least, 1751, when Lord Kames wrote an essay, ‘‘Of the Idea of Self and Personal Identity,’’ in his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion: on this, see Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 107.

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ences, and then persistently inescapable. Garland’s image for this was banal, but intense: ‘‘The outspreading oak that shades the venerable old man at its root, is but the gradual development of the little nut that lay concealed in the acorn, which in his childhood he carelessly planted there.’’ 165 But environment mattered too; good soil or bad weather could shape, bend, or wither a tree and a life. So the understanding of early influences lay at the heart of biography’s efficacy. But this was hard to do, because evidence from childhood was too fugitive. Further, there was a gulf between what men were and what they seemed. To know the public deeds of great men was not, necessarily, to know them. To look at ‘‘the outside alone’’ was only to see ‘‘the histrionic, the acted part of life,’’ little but ‘‘a masquerade, a succession of magnified and illuminated faces passing before the disk of a magic lantern.’’ This could be a deception, for a man might want ‘‘to seem what he is not.’’ So, for Garland, human nature was subtle and complex. Further, he saw ‘‘two kinds of history—the outward acted history, which is false, and the inner, secret history of causes and influences; this alone is true and worth knowing, and without it we know nothing; it matters not how learned we may be in facts and dates.’’ 166 All this was very far from the biographical principles of David Ramsay. Such a new-fangled attitude made biography fascinating, but also frustrating, for the biographer sought secrets always just beyond reach. Collaterally, the new premise offered a rationale for the autobiographer as the best guide to the secrets of a life, for he or she might by confession help out the biographer struggling vainly to decode the acted masquerade. In fact, Garland’s taste for real secrets was constrained. One obvious question about Randolph had long been, Why did such a man, so conscious of family, ancestry and posterity, never marry? Why was he a beardless man, thin-voiced, and angry? Garland explained that Randolph had loved a woman, but ‘‘many untoward events had prevented their union, and made it impossible,’’ and thereafter Randolph had settled for a Platonic passion, though she had not, eventually marrying elsewhere. Randolph worshipped her, anyway, would call out her name in feverish sleep, and had things ‘‘engraven on the inmost sanctuary of his heart.’’ ‘‘But why do we call up these things?’’ asks Garland dramatically. ‘‘Reader! there was a tragedy in the life of this man, more thrilling than romance.’’ What was it? The reader leans forward in his or her seat. Today such a reader would not be disappointed of the secret, real or imagined. Eighteen fifty in Virginia was not like that. ‘‘This is a subject not for us to deal with; we promised not to touch it more; let it 165. Garland, John Randolph, 1:8–9. 166. Ibid., 9–10.

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go down to the oblivion of the grave, and there sleep with those who, in life, endured its agonies.’’ 167 It was not that Virginia did not know the secret. Grigsby, for one, knew. It was, no doubt, talked of among the men, Garland included. Grigsby set it down discreetly. Among his papers is an undated memorandum, headed ‘‘Confidential and to be returned to me without a copy being taken.’’ It seems to have been written for the benefit of a Virginian writing on Randolph, so it may have been to Garland. It is worth extensive quotation: The case of John Randolph must be decided on physiological grounds. He was not integer homo—he was neither ‘‘vir’’ nor ‘‘femina.’’ It was proved by actual dissection that one diminutive testicle about the size of a small bean had descended into the scrotum, while the other did not descend but remained attached to the spermatic chord. He was a eunuch by nature, and possessed those peculiarities that pertain to that condition. An eunuch is placed as the guardian of the harem, not so much from his inability to violate his trust, as from the hatred with which he regards those who have the power. He loves and hates as intensely as other men; but he is a stranger to a sense of sexual desire. Here we have a fair explanation of Randolph’s affair with Miss Ward. The report of Mr. Randolph’s friends is that the mother of Miss W. insisted on a settlement being made upon her daughter before marriage; and that Randolph regarded the demand as a reflection upon his honor, and thus gave up the whole affair. But the absurdity of such a statement is obvious. If Mrs. Ward was keen enough to make such a proposition, she would have had sense enough to know that her daughter would be legally entitled on her marriage to a portion of her husband’s estate far exceeding what any marriage settlement would have made in her favor. The truth is that Randolph loved the lady, but found that, as he was incapable of a lawful marriage, it was time to break the connection. This knowledge of the physical condition of Randolph is indispensable to a full comprehension of the philosophy of his character. It is the key that opens all the eccentricities of his career, or most of them. All these considerations which I have given as necessary to a thorough conception of Randolph’s character may be introduced in a single word or line in proper places as modifying or qualifying your criticisms, and as showing that you have introduced into your estimate of character every element that the subject possesses or requires. You will then stand rectus in curia.168 167. Ibid., 254. 168. HBG, manuscript on John Randolph, HBG Papers, VHS.

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So, the dictum became: if the secret be too unsafe, be true to the mask. In his own clumsy way, Garland was. He showed Randolph in most of his moods, the man of Bizarre. He even flirted with the notion of Randolph being mad, when the latter was most solitary, sleepless, irritable, lovelorn, and imaginative: ‘‘Who can wonder that a man, with the temperament of John Randolph . . . should fling away all restraint, and should cry aloud in the anguish of his soul, and should so act and speak as to excite the astonishment of those around, and induce them to believe that he was a madman! In such a similar situation David was a madman; Byron was a madman; Rousseau—all high-souled, deep-feeling men of genius, in the eye of the world were madmen.’’ This had been the theme of Richard Henry Wilde’s Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso (1842). But Garland was some distance behind Wilde in subtlety and a long way from Dostoevsky, for Garland never quite connects this deranged Randolph with the public man, who is portrayed conventionally, if erroneously, as a steady Burkean conservative of states-rights persuasion, a proponent of ‘‘a wise and masterly inactivity,’’ a prophet of the resistance to ‘‘that centripetal tendency which was rapidly destroying the counterbalance of the States,’’ a man whose early religious skepticism was superficial and rightly replaced by a more natural religiosity.169 Rationality and madness live in different chapters and paragraphs of Garland’s biography; he could not conceive of a whole man simultaneously reasoning and raving. The nearest Garland comes to such a vision is his argument that solitude had most driven Randolph into madness, but in the public arena Randolph had been different, never exactly sober but less relentlessly misanthropic, because more conscious of being useful. This had not been, it must be said, the impression of those who shared the public arena with Randolph. Nor was it the impression of Beverley Tucker, who had grown up in John Randolph’s household, a Walker Percy to Randolph’s Uncle Will. One of Tucker’s last acts before death was to review Garland for the Southern Quarterly Review. On the surface, Tucker is dismissive of Garland’s book as clumsy, ill-researched, fanciful, blundering on crucial themes and periods of Randolph’s life. He especially dissents from Garland’s attempt to claim Randolph as Burkean from a very young age, and so wrongly marginalize a youthful Jacobinism. Above all, Tucker is scornful of Garland’s amiable optimism that Randolph’s political ideology was now mainstream even in Southern thought, and dismissive of Garland’s muddled desire to praise both Randolph and Jefferson. Nonetheless, Tucker and Garland shared a Romantic vision, with both reaching for the Byronic analogy. ‘‘The martyr of disease, of body and 169. Garland, John Randolph, 2:98, 363.

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mind, he was the victim of a destiny, inscrutable to himself and incomprehensible to others’’ is how Tucker begins to describe Randolph the ‘‘eccentric and portentous star, shot from another system.’’ ‘‘Who would not have been John Randolph?’’ Tucker asks. (To which the correct answer is, almost everyone.) ‘‘Could they who envied him have exchanged places with him, who does not shudder to think of the yell of despair which might have accompanied the first sense of that agony of body and of mind, which clung to him through all his splendid career?’’ So Randolph was a ‘‘mystery,’’ possessed of ‘‘innumerable particulars in which he was utterly unlike all other men.’’ But, unlike Garland, Tucker understood that Randolph’s gifts were of a piece with his vices. ‘‘Sensitive and fastidious, haughty and scornful,’’ Randolph was efficacious when others came to accept his originality in being ‘‘a marvel and a mystery,’’ whom ‘‘each man understood . . . according to his own measure.’’ So, it was not that Tucker and Garland disagreed over essentials, just that Tucker thought Garland inadequate to writing a Romantic biography of John Randolph. ‘‘He has done what he could,’’ Tucker said, patting Garland on the head. ‘‘His error was in supposing it possible to sound the depths of ocean with a fishing-line—to paint sun-light with yellow-ochre—or to give a just idea of a grand overture by piping it on a penny-whistle.’’ 170 So, Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony done on an upright piano.

As to My Self, What Shall I Say? 171 Beverley Tucker understood that the internal mattered most, though its preeminence might give rise to prying vulgarity. The impulse to plumb Randolph’s depths was ‘‘of the same nature [as] the demand for a biography of poor Byron, which gave currency to every thing that cupidity, malign folly or vanity could put forth.’’ Or the internal might be unknowable, however important it might be. Robert Barnwell Rhett, eulogizing Calhoun before the legislature of South Carolina in 1850, observed: ‘‘Our internal life, which is our real life, consists of thoughts, intentions, and emotions. This, no eye can see, no hand can write, but the eye and hand of Omnipotence; and it will only be read at the great day of account. Our external life consists of our conduct and services to other men, and to our country. These we can investigate, and from them, we may infer the hidden life, out of which flows all of our visible actions.’’ The autobiographer might be thought to have a greater chance of 170. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘‘Garland’s Life of Randolph,’’ SQR n.s. 4 (July 1851): 41, 42, 43, 45. 171. ‘‘As to my self, what shall I say?’’: CG to John Dimitry, 30 August 1894, CG Items in the John Minor Wisdom Collection, TU.

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plumbing this religious mystery. As Tucker put it, ‘‘The life of his mind, the thing that they really, though unconsciously wished to know, could only be written by himself; and in his own writings only do we find it.’’ 172 It took a long time in Southern thought for autobiography to achieve any legitimacy. Broadly, in European and American usage, it was a latecomer, whose naming was even uncertain.173 Only in 1786 in a preface had the adjectival form first appeared, when Ann Yearsley’s Poems were described as an ‘‘autobiographical narrative.’’ Robert Southey was using the term ‘‘autobiography’’ by 1809 and, concomitantly, Isaac D’Israeli was using the hyphenated form, ‘‘auto-biography,’’ while pressing his own coinage, ‘‘self-biography.’’ (‘‘Idio-biography’’ would have been more consistently Greek. In the early eighteenth century in Italy, Father Carlo Lodoli had coined ‘‘periautography.’’) The Germans had begun speaking of Selbstbiographien and Autobiographien by the late 1770s or early 1780s, and Friedrich von Schlegel was discussing the genre disparagingly in one of the Athenaeum fragments in 1798, when he hazarded that autobiographies were written by egocentric neurotics like Rousseau, self-loving artistic adventurers like Cellini, ‘‘born historians who regard themselves only as material for historic art’’ (by which he seems to have meant Gibbon), pedants, special pleaders, and self-deceivers anxious to leave the world with commentaries on themselves. As for the French, despite Rousseau, they took more slowly to the term autobiographie, which did not acquire much usage until the 1830s and was then regarded as an Anglo-American coinage, inferior to the indigenous les mémoires. But even in English and American usage, there was much overlap between memoirs and autobiography, with the distinction slow to develop that memoirs looked outward from the self towards the world experienced by the individual, while autobiography looked inward. Many works that subsequent times came to categorize as autobiography were then more familiarly called memoirs. So Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, now entitled in English translation The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was in 1840 customarily called his Memoirs and were so duly cataloged by many antebellum Southern librarians.174 172. ‘‘Rhett’s Oration,’’ in The Carolina Tribute to Calhoun, ed. J. P. Thomas (Columbia, S.C.: Richard L. Bryan, 1857), 334; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘‘Garland’s Life,’’ 44. 173. I draw here upon Robert Folkenflik, ‘‘Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography,’’ in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1–20. For the reference to Lodoli, see Sturrock, Language of Autobiography, 106. 174. Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1944), 4; entry for 30 June 1840, in Donation Book of the Savannah Library Society (1813–51), Savannah Library Society Papers, GHS; ‘‘Books deposited [written above: (Loaned)] in the Library of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: By M. Cross, 1837,’’ in Proceedings of the Tennessee Anti-

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That confusion existed between memoir and autobiography was largely because many early autobiographies were skittish about self-revelation. John Randolph himself had once said that ‘‘he was not in the habit of always talking of himself and of his own concerns,’’ though, in fact, he was. Even as late as the 1860s many such narratives were beginning, as did that of Paul Trapier, with words like: ‘‘I come now to reminiscences of my poor unworthy self, in inserting which in this book I have no intention of disclosing those inner workings of the soul, which should be reserved for God.’’ As William Grayson, with his Augustan taste for aphorism, put it for the gentleman: ‘‘Although the witness should be exact in saying what he knows, he must not say all that he knows.’’ 175 Even those more Romantic than Grayson, though (like Emerson) they talked much about the value of the autobiographical impulse, unaccountably never wrote one.176 Instead, many were inclined to write of the self as an author might write of others. This near-equivalence of the biographical and autobiographical can be seen in many places. It can be seen, for example, in a book published in Nashville in 1859, whose title page bears the inscription Life of William Capers, D.D., One of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; Including an Autobiography, and the author is given as William M. Wightman. The first 228 pages consist of what the running heads designate as Capers’s ‘‘autobiography,’’ but which Capers himself had designated ‘‘Recollections of Myself in My Past Life.’’ Since these recollections only extended to about 1820, the second part of the book is a biographical narrative by Wightman which completes the life. Wightman does acknowledge that, at the breaking point when Capers ceases to speak of himself and Wightman begins to write of someone other than himself, something changes. ‘‘The foregoing autobiography traces minutely, and with fidelity, the inner life as well as the outward circumstances of William Capers’’ is how the second part begins. ‘‘We are now to trace the incidents of a public life.’’ Still, it is clear that the first and second parts are thought to be equivalences, and, indeed, the verso running head in both sections reads ‘‘Life of William Capers.’’ One can see this attitude even in Kenquarian Society, TSLA. The 1846 New York translation of the Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Parke Godwin, is entitled The Auto-biography of Goethe. 175. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, of 1829–30 (Richmond: Samuel Shepherd, 1830), 833; George W. Williams, ed., Incidents in My Life: The Autobiography of the Rev. Paul Trapier, S.T.D., with Some of His Letters (Charleston, S.C.: Dalcho Historical Society, 1954), x; Richard J. Calhoun, ed., Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 37. 176. On the absence of autobiography in the ‘‘American Renaissance,’’ that is, Northern writing, see Lawrence Buell, ‘‘Autobiography in the American Renaissance,’’ in Autobiography in the American Renaissance, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 47–69. On Emerson, see Cox, Recovering Literature’s Lost Ground, 78–96.

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nedy’s Wirt. Wirt had left a few reminiscences and Kennedy used these to help the biographical narrative. There was, it is true, some sense conveyed that Wirt on Wirt’s life had a standing different from Kennedy on Wirt’s life, for Kennedy prefaced the inserted and edited reminiscences, with a reminder that they were written for Wirt’s children, and so were ‘‘homely,’’ to be read with indulgence. Nonetheless, Wirt was allowed to ‘‘speak for himself ’’ and this speaking did the same work as the biographer’s speaking.177 Indeed there came to be a genre, which oddly confessed this interchangeability. The South’s busy professional life came to demand biographical guides, just as its cities needed directories. Among these was John Belton O’Neall’s Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina, published in two volumes in 1859. Mostly it was a series of historical sketches of long-dead lawyers and judges, but when O’Neall came to someone living, he often let his subject write an autobiography in the form of a third-person narrative. In this, he was not unusual. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet in 1860, at Simms’s request, was to sketch himself for Appleton’s Cyclopedia. Likewise, Mitchell King wrote for O’Neall, if with marked reluctance. In so doing, the judge experienced the customary emotions of the autobiographer; ‘‘In reviewing the past & refreshing my memory from such memoranda as I have been in the habit of occasionally making, so far as they are now within my reach—reminiscences have been revived which time had almost obliterated—& the whole life of the old man is before me.’’ He edited down the most romantic incidents of his life (being taken by pirates in the Mediterranean was the gaudiest), because veracity would lead to a suspicion of ‘‘self-glorification & that to me would be unsupportable.’’ Indeed, he omitted much, lest ‘‘even a enemy, if I have any—could with a shadow of reason accuse me of ostentation or vanity.’’ This was, of course, a modesty endemic to the formalities of the culture. Calhoun once observed in a Senate speech, ‘‘I propose to give a very brief narrative of the scenes through which I then passed; not with any feeling of egotism, for I trust I am incapable of that, but to illustrate the truth of much I have said, and to snatch from oblivion not an unimportant portion of our . . . history.’’ As for King, ‘‘Throughout my sketch I have spoken of myself in the third person— as if it came from materials furnished to a competent editor, who formed these materials into a continuous narrative.’’ Even, or especially, when writing of his marriage, King ‘‘ventured as that Editor to say ‘We had the pleasure of knowing both his wives, & we have never known a man that seemed to be happier in his domestic relations.’’’ For King wanted ‘‘to appear as the writer as little as possible.’’ It was difficult, even impossible, to write directly 177. William M. Wightman, Life of William Capers, D.D. (Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1859), 11, 232; JPK, William Wirt, 1:17–19.

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of self, ‘‘to satisfy myself with the simplicity & moderation of my language consistently with a due observance of justice & truth.’’ So self-scrutiny was delimited by the awareness of others’ watching. In his turn, O’Neall edited these memoirs, adding things King was too modest to mention, so the final published version mingled autobiography and biography in a way unapparent to the reader.178 This intermingling of subject and object can be seen, in one of its earliest forms, in the Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay by David Ramsay, first published in 1811. This book was many things at once: a biographical character by Ramsay of his deceased wife, a reprinting of her correspondence, an edition of her religious exercises and diary, and an argument about the nature of the domestic sphere. Ramsay describes himself, in the preface to the second edition, as the ‘‘editor of the present Edition of these Memoirs,’’ but he did not merely contribute an introduction, but rather appeared and reappeared in the midst of her writings with commentary and narrative in the form of footnotes. As Ramsay himself explained, ‘‘The publication of these private papers was the original design, the publication of the life of their author only secondary and incidental, as an introduction to the effusions of her heart, which had been put on paper solely for her own private use.’’ She had written these things for herself alone, indeed (he said) had hidden their existence until near her death, when she instructed him about their location and suggested ‘‘that they might be kept as a common book of the family, or divided among its members.’’ It was Ramsay’s decision to publish them, which he took only after anxious consultations with local Presbyterian divines. For there was much in the papers that was deeply personal, showed weakness and anxiety, and evidenced financial and family troubles. But the manuscripts were also radiantly religious and Ramsay’s decision to proceed was an instance of a general truth, that then intimacy was most legitimate when most connected to piety. But Ramsay also had a quasi-secular rationale. Men belonged to the public realm, women to the domestic. It was justifiable to publish a woman’s life told by herself, for she was a heroine of another republican struggle. Martha Laurens Ramsay, her husband made clear, had selfconsciously prepared herself for her essential role, by reading, by prayer, by the acquisition of practical skills, by sustained experience. This justified publication, for she was as much an exemplum as George Washington. But it was also the intimacy of her papers that was important to Ramsay and to readers: 178. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to [?], 2 March 1860, Thomas Addison Burke Papers, GHS; Robert L. Meriwether et al., eds., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959–2003), 13:609; MK to John Belton O’Neall, 15 August 1859, MK Papers, SHC; John Belton O’Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina, 2 vols. (1859; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1975), 1:347–77.

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‘‘Her maxim was not to complain of God, but to God. To him she went with all her burdens and cares, and sweetly reposed on his Almighty arm. . . . The workings of her mind, under these pressures, as recorded in her manuscripts, prove her high attainments in the christian life, and were probably one cause of them. In all her distresses, the burden of sin lay heavier on her mind than the burden of outward troubles.’’ So the reader was given an opportunity to eavesdrop on this private dialogue with God, with Ramsay making intelligible those contextual matters not self-evident from the manuscripts, his own status as husband and widower clear but genteelly dissimulated.179 It has often been suggested that the purer form of autobiography began among the marginal, who were unencumbered by the civic inhibitions of public greatness, who had only themselves upon which to found significance. Self-designated outsiders like Rousseau half-iterate the point. Martha Ramsay’s case is here pertinent, in a double sense. It was her interior life as a woman that justified placing her private confessions before the world. Martha Ramsay had not made that decision herself (unless by stealth), but David Ramsay. For only one Southern white woman published a memoir or autobiography before the Civil War, stood squarely before the public, and asserted the importance of her own life, however often in the private narratives of diaries and letters such assertions were made. And Caroline Gilman did so briefly, with ambivalence: ‘‘I am asked for some ‘particulars of my literary and domestic life.’ It seems to me, and I suppose at first thought, it seems to all, a vain and awkward egotism to sit down and inform the world who you are. But if I, like the Petrarchs, and Byrons, and Hemanses, greater or less, have opened my heart to the public for a series of years, with all the pulses of love and hatred and sorrow so transparently veiled, why should I or they feel embarrassed in responding to this request? Is there not some inconsistency in this shyness about autobiography?’’ 180 Rather, poetry was women’s preferred confessional mode, and there they might be remarkably candid by the cloistered standards of their world. It was other with Southern blacks, male and female, though like Martha Ramsay their words were often mediated by white men. Nonetheless, as fugitive or rebellious slaves, autobiography was an essential form for them, an edited intimacy their political weapon. Since they were formally denied the public realm but were cruelly mastered by it, their private realm became public property, sometimes with their consent, often as a way of mastering their 179. David Ramsay, Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay, 3d ed. (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1812), ix, vii, iii, 49–50; on Ramsay’s consultations, see Shaffer, To Be an American, 206–7. 180. Caroline Gilman, ‘‘My Autobiography,’’ in The Female Prose Writers of America, ed. John S. Hart (Philadelphia: E. S. Butler, 1852), 49–50.

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selves. But they, too, though they lacked a formal public realm, did not lack concepts of community and belonging that interwove with self and mitigated intimacy.181 Yet black autobiography existed mostly in the specialized form of the emancipated or fugitive slave narrative, established as a genre from the mideighteenth century, encouraged by the antislavery movement as proof of slavery’s cruelty. The partial exceptions were the confessions of rebels like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, which contained the vestiges of an autobiographical instinct, though extracted in the shadow of the gallows and set down by white amanuenses. And there were a handful of memoirs by Southern free blacks, though none published in the antebellum South and only a few in the North, with most appearing after 1865. For the rest, the standard bibliography lists about a hundred book-length ‘‘autobiographical narratives and slave narratives dictated or written by persons of African descent’’ between 1760 and 1861, though these can be multiplied many-fold by the inclusion of briefer published or manuscript texts.182 Of these, many concern Europe, the Caribbean or the North; far fewer touch directly the South, though they include many that are notable. Of these, only one book was by a Southern black woman, the Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent, the pseudonym of Harriet Jacobs. It was common for slave narratives to be ghost-written or intrusively edited by white writers; such works were hence collaborative, a negotiation between what an ex-slave wished to say and what an abolitionist permitted to be said. But even those, like the works of Frederick Douglass and Jacobs, whose narratives were ‘‘written by himself ’’ and ‘‘written by herself,’’ were profoundly influenced by what a white readership expected, though this fact scarcely distinguished their works from those written by any American author, black or white. But the conventions of the form were very strict.183 There is an engraved portrait, intended to show a person of gravity and propriety. There are testimonials from white abolitionist patrons, which proclaim the veracity of the ensuing narrative. A first sentence begins ‘‘I was born’’ in a certain place, though at an uncertain time. Then parentage is vaguely specified, usually racially mixed, filled with rumor. The cruelties and incidents of slavery are described, with special stress upon the hypocrisy of Christian slaveholders, 181. William L. Andrews, ‘‘African-American Autobiography Criticism: Retrospect and Prospect,’’ in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 200–201. 182. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Slave’s Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 319–27; Willard B. Gatewood Jr., ed., Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), viii. 183. I draw here upon James Olney, ‘‘‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,’’ in Davis and Gates, Slave’s Narrative, 148–75.

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the viciousness and suffering of mistresses betrayed by lascivious husbands, the opposing strength of a single strong slave, often of pure African descent. Patterns of life—food, work routines—are narrated, including slave auctions and the wrenching separations of families. Then there is the escape, perhaps first unsuccessful then triumphantly sealed by the arrival in the North, the welcome of friendly antislavery people, the assumption of a new name and identity, and concluding general remarks upon slavery. Hence, though the particular experience of a slave was under reflective scrutiny, it was also the case that it was the generality of slavery that mattered. Charles Ball or William Wells Brown might disappear as utterly into the exemplum as George Washington vanished into the differing category of Father of a Country. Like a medieval morality play or Pilgrim’s Progress, people appeared as types—the slaveholder, the trader, the field hand—even when they had names. But this convention also had the effect of creating great narrative drive, for every small thing and event was pregnant with the larger story, the quest for the grail of freedom. For all that, in accomplished hands, the slave narrative came closer to intimacy than anything in Southern white discourse, and was more modern in its confessional scrutiny. The Southern white man assumed his self, had it freely conceded by all, and did not need to earn it. The slave had the task of selfinvention, against the odds. Calvin Fairbanks tells the story of sailing down the Ohio River and seeing ‘‘a strapping darky, an ax flung over his shoulder, jogging along on the Virginia bank.’’ ‘‘Halloo, there! Where are you going?’’ Fairbanks calls out. ‘‘Gwine chopping in de woods!’’ is the answer. ‘‘Chopping for yourself ?’’ is asked, to which the man replies, ‘‘Han’t got no self.’’ ‘‘Slave, are you?’’ Fairbanks, asks, taking the point. ‘‘Dat’s what I is.’’ In the slave narrative, small things mattered, the glance of an overseer, the sneer of a mistress, footsteps in a wood. Since it was hard to claim that God was on the slave’s side, except in a heaven or a society to come, easy pieties were less available, though sentimentality, even of a conventional Victorian sort, was not uncommon. The autobiographers were almost invariably honest, Godly, domestic, resistant to vice, even though surrounded by its pressure and temptation. But this sentimentality was acidly laced with a cold realism and, in general, it was a rule that passages of high-flown rhetoric in such narratives were the interpolating work of white editors. For Douglass, this realism led to a frank grappling with the relevance of violence to manhood; for Jacobs, with the dilemma of sexuality for slave girlhood turning into womanhood. At its best, the slave narrative was a triumph of the plain style, something forced upon it by the necessity to persuade by its veracity, but also self-consciously used. ‘‘I was born in Tuckahoe.’’ ‘‘The woman did not die, but it would have been the same if she had.’’ ‘‘Sometimes I woke up, and found her bending

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over me.’’ ‘‘I will now mention a few things, that I could not conveniently bring in, as I was going along with my story.’’ 184 Above all, the slave narrative rammed home the centrality of self, of the ‘‘I.’’ Everything was seen from the position of an observing, thinking, feeling self, who was not sure of what was to come, who was always poised and anxious, scheming and afraid. ‘‘I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag . . .’’ ‘‘I took his advice and kept quiet.’’ Public history mattered very little, other than the broad fact that the South was a slaveholding prison, the North and Canada a haven. Africa, the American Revolution, the idea of centuries, the term of a president, all these were unimportant. Landscape was irrelevant, except when it mattered to an escape. Architecture went unnoticed; New Orleans was a place with an auction block, not a filigree balcony. What mattered was grandmother, the master’s son, the lost child, the location of a jail, and voices that shaped events. So dialogue was very important. ‘‘ ‘They are going to give you hell.’ ‘Why?’ said I. He said, ‘This is a note to have you whipped, and says that you have a dollar to pay for it.’ ’’ 185 It is no paradox to observe that black autobiography, being rooted in the hardest of facts, was free to reach towards the techniques of fiction, the telling of moral tales. There was very little in the formal traditions of biography and history, as written by white Southerners, that could release the emotions necessary for slavery’s comprehension, if one understands understanding as predicated on the slave’s standpoint. For white Southern autobiography grew out of biography, and so kept a connection to the public realm so powerful that the invention of self was much inhibited. This may help to explain why there was relatively little white autobiography before the Civil War, and this little was usually familial, a thing addressed to relatives by men assured of their own importance and posterity. William Wirt set down reminiscences for his family. William Campbell Preston, who drafted his memoirs in the late 1850s, began: ‘‘I concur with you my Dear Kitty that when Preston grows up he should know something of the person he was named for; I therefore set down for him these short and simple notices.’’ One of Ruffin’s memoirs 184. Davis and Gates, Slave’s Narrative, xxx; Michael Meyer, ed., Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 18; Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northrup (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 214; Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagin Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 34; John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 689. 185. Meyer, Douglass: The Narrative, 41; Jacobs, Slave Girl, 101; Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 198.

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started, ‘‘I will write, as I hope some of my children will do, as if we were conversing with each other, & with the same freedom & scope as we could thus speak.’’ 186 But none of these bothered to publish these jottings. The same public silence was true of Thomas Jefferson, who sat down in 1821 ‘‘to make some memoranda and state some recollections of dates & facts concerning myself, for my own more ready reference & for the information of my family.’’ Subsequent times have labeled this his ‘‘autobiography,’’ but with no authority from Jefferson, and little from the text. It was almost entirely a record of his public life, beginning with only a bare few pages on his family, education, and marriage. Very soon he came to the excitement over the Stamp Act when he was a student at William and Mary, and quickly thereafter to the Revolution, especially his role as drafter of the Declaration of Independence, whose text he reprinted to show how Congress varied what he had first written. And so onward to his political role in Virginia, in its Assembly and as governor, with the laws he helped to draft with their various rationales. Then to his time in the Congress of the Confederation, and lastly (most discursively) to his period as American Minister in Paris, with a more lingering account of the French Revolution. The ‘‘memoranda’’ ended with his assumption of the position of Secretary of State in 1790. It was not that Jefferson expunged self. There was plenty of ‘‘I moved’’ and ‘‘I had provided for’’ and ‘‘I arrived at New York.’’ Nor was it that he lacked the ability to characterize. In fact, one of the text’s pleasures is his urbane and faintly malicious ability to describe his friends and enemies. So Patrick Henry was ‘‘the laziest man in reading I ever knew.’’ George Mason’s ‘‘elocution was neither flowing nor smooth, but his language was strong, his manner most impressive, and strengthened by a dash of biting cynicism when provocation made it seasonable.’’ Louis XVI’s ‘‘mind was weakness itself, his constitution timid, his judgement null, and without sufficient firmness even to stand by the faith of his word.’’ 187 Rather, it was that Jefferson’s actions as a public man were his self, and it was this which was deemed important to his family. No doubt, the greater the public man, the less a distinct private realm mattered. But even Ruffin’s ‘‘Incidents of My Life’’ said very little about himself and family (the latter usually mentioned when they fall ill or die, as though these were but seasonal incidents), but much about his crops and marling, which were his equivalences to governorships and legislation. The religious were traditionally more self-aware, in their own scripted way. 186. Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 1; Edmund Ruffin, ‘‘In Remembrance of Jane Dupuy, Formerly Ruffin,’’ in Incidents of My Life: Edmund Ruffin’s Autobiographical Essays, ed. David F. Allmendinger Jr. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 139. 187. Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 3, 9, 36, 80.

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Theodore Clapp’s Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections During a Thirty-Five years’ Residence in New Orleans (1857) is typical enough. His confessional quality had something to do with being from Massachusetts stock and his Calvinist childhood being a grim lesson from ‘‘beloved parents and venerable ministers’’ in the inexorability of original sin, his heart often filled ‘‘with unutterable feelings of desolateness and sorrow.’’ He wrote of fears, hopes, disappointments, ascetic study, and accidents that had shaped his life, as in the death of a friend and a chance encounter with Louisiana Presbyterians. After his early manhood and removal to New Orleans, his narrative disdains chronology, until he comes to the point where he had fallen ill late in life and then traveled in Europe: ‘‘Rather, the object before me is to trace a slight outline of those events and incidents only which reflecting persons can look at with pleasure, and I hope with profit, unconnected by the relations of time, or cause and effect.’’ This desire to be ‘‘edifying’’ structured self-description. Weaknesses exist only to be transcended with God’s help, sickness to be a lesson in humility, marriage to be a blessing, conversation to lead one into a more precise theology. The book’s master narrative is about how Clapp abandoned Calvinism for Unitarianism, how he came to like and admire New Orleans, how he accepted slavery. All but the last of these themes is about a movement from darkness to light, from tension to ease, from proscription to toleration of Catholics and even atheists. His book, like most autobiography, is a defense of his life, but also of the place he was ‘‘compelled’’ to inhabit ‘‘in defiance of my strongest wishes.’’ New England and the world had thought New Orleans to be sickly, profligate, superstitious, illiterate, cruel, a place that compounded the sins of the slave South with those of Catholicism. Clapp was anxious to disprove this, to show that his domestication there marked a spiritual progress, not a betrayal of his Massachusetts forebears. The pivotal moment comes when, ‘‘On the first Sabbath of July, 1834, I proclaimed distinctly from the pulpit, for the first time, my firm conviction that the Bible does not teach the doctrine of eternal punishment.’’ Clapp the renegade is not easy about this proclamation, as no New Englander could be. But he is insistent: ‘‘Yes, it was in the Crescent City, (and I can never forget it,) not in my native place, not in New Haven, Boston, or Andover, but in New Orleans, where I learned to take shelter from all the ills with which earth can assail us, under the brooding wings of Ineffable Goodness. . . . To me the mysterious problem of life was solved on the banks of the Mississippi.’’ 188 All this, no doubt, mitigates Clapp’s self-awareness. He was one of the South’s most remunerated preachers and he had the emollient, oily urbanity of such a man, one who consoled the wayward, tended the dying, saw the light, spoke ex tem188. Theodore Clapp, Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections, During a Thirty-Five Years’ Residence in New Orleans (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1857), 9–10, 23, 67, 161–63.

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pore from the pulpit to eager congregations, and pocketed his $5,000 a year, which somehow he did not fail to mention. God was a public realm for the godly. The skeptical had fewer reasons to adduce the private agonies of conscience. William Campbell Preston’s memoirs, being those of a middlingly significant ex-senator, were middlingly public. In them, a brief statement of his birth in Philadelphia in 1794 is succeeded by his public genealogy, by the family story that George Washington came to see him in his cradle, by the fact that ‘‘my father was a member of Congress and his father a conspicuous Whig of the Revolution.’’ A few more pages and he is past college and dining with the Madisons in the White House. But thereafter, he dwells on memories of the Grand Tour and then, like Jefferson’s memoranda, the memoirs stop abruptly. Certainly Preston had selfawareness, though he conveyed this glancingly. So, ‘‘The child next to me in age was Eliza, now Mrs. Carrington, a clever, grave and precocious child, always ahead of me in whatever we engaged,’’ which hinted at an old wound. He admitted to misbehavior, when a young lawyer in Richmond, but this fault was partly displaced upon his ‘‘set’’; ‘‘We lived fast, were much addicted to cards, and had an unceasing round of gaiety,’’ though his own vices were mitigated by ‘‘a constitutional incapacity for drinking, which is hereditary in my family.’’ Indeed, this was characteristic of Preston: his self-reflection was exact, candid, but social. Individual character explained events, but society explained character. So he found his relatives in Kentucky less urbane, with a ‘‘self-dependence not to say self-assertion, and ostentatious suppression of the smaller courtesies of life and minute observations of convention,’’ and this was explicable by the frontier and migration, for ‘‘an old state of society cannot be propagated in a new country.’’ Preston had a great gift for observation and anecdote, chosen with care and related with a lazy grace, and nowhere is there a better relation of the young male Southerner of privilege out in the world with his friends, meeting all hazards and people with an interested and skeptical smile. But ‘‘I felt comfortable and disposed to take mine ease’’ is as close to self-revelation as Preston was disposed to go, for it was what he wanted the world to think of him.189 Vulnerability was not a Southern ambition, at least for white men, at least before 1861. Much was to be released later. Later William Grayson, Frederick Porcher, Paul Trapier, J. G. M. Ramsey, these and many others felt the public realm disappearing beneath their feet as the Confederacy faltered and disintegrated. The old, neat congruence of self and society fractured, and it was necessary to ask what was left, what self might mean, in a world that could no longer propose a workable conjecture of order. 189. Yarborough, Reminiscences of Preston, 2, 10, 12, 108.

Chapter Fifteen

To Write a People

The Science of Criticism 1 Southerners were among those in the nineteenth century who began to accept the modern notions that there is something called the imagination, which expresses itself best in poetry and fiction; that such an imaginative literature is a distinct venture of the mind, to be understood as a commentary on the culture that produces it, but also as a justifying transcendence; and that hence it is plausible to speak of something called ‘‘Southern literature,’’ and even desirable to seek to write it. But there were many steps in the coalescence of these ideas, all of them contentious, many of them slow to be taken. Indeed, for most of the antebellum period, ‘‘literature’’ retained its old, eclectic meaning of the written word, not merely the novel and poetry. To understand this unfolding process, one must begin where Southerners themselves began, not only in their nineteenth century, but in their individual lives. For prescription began in youth with rhetoric, with those manuals that Southern colleges gave to young men, with those books that understood the idea of literature in its very broadest terms. Henry Junius Nott, for example, taught what we might now call ‘‘literature’’ at the South Carolina College, but Title from ‘‘Americanism in Literature’’ (1845), in WGS, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction: First Series, ed. C. Hugh Holman (1846; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1962), 12: ‘‘To write from a people, is to write a people—to make them live—to endow them with a life and a name—to preserve them with a history forever.’’ 1. ‘‘Any one who has ever noticed the new and valuable light cast upon one of Shakespeare’s plays by seeing it acted by great tragedians, can understand how the science of Criticism (for it has really become a science) can enrich our knowledge and enhance our enjoyment of the great master-spirits of literature’’: entry for 30 January 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC. The phrase comes originally from Lord Kames: see Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Millar, A. Kincaid, & J. Bell, 1762), 1:10–14.

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he held a chair in the ‘‘Elements of Criticism, Logic, and Philosophy.’’ His class reports for 1835 show that he understood the necessity of this breadth, which consisted in discussions of genre (epic, fable, drama), language (Latin, Greek, English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian), and logic. To assist his pupils, Nott used in his classroom the Elements of Criticism (1762) by Lord Kames, which was one of the many guides produced by the didactic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, works whose influence was immense, not least for contributing to the invention of the idea of English literature itself.2 Among these works, preeminence was shared between Kames’s Elements and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), though sometimes George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) was used, and more rarely Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790).3 These usually dealt most with the ancient authors, though sometimes became concerned with the moderns by way of contrast. In time, these works began to be displaced by the German school of Romantic literary criticism, though more beyond the classroom than in it. So it will be helpful to know what the more influential of these works said, for their premises were formative. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was once called ‘‘the most arrogant Man in the world’’ by David Hume, his intimate friend, or so at least James Boswell once reported upon the authority of Adam Smith. And certainly Kames took most human knowledge to be his domain. By training a lawyer, by patronage and merit a judge, he wrote variously on British antiquities, on the principles of morality and natural religion, on the laws of Scotland, on farming, and on the history of man. As a Scottish philosophe, he was much admired by his contemporaries and much feared, but he was also a clubbable man fond of port (he disliked claret) who helped along many a younger man (‘‘a succession of clever élèves,’’ as John Ramsay of Ochtertyre put it), among whom were John Millar, Adam Smith, and Hugh Blair. He was that fearsome and sometimes incomprehensible thing, the ‘‘metaphysical judge,’’ a phenomenon that alarmed even the cool Hume, who in 1759 wrote upon receiving a copy of Kames’s Historical Law-Tracts: ‘‘I am afraid of Lord Kaims’s Law Tracts. A man might as well think of making a fine Sauce by a Mixture of Wormwood & Aloes as an agreeable Composition by joining Metaphysics & Scotch Law.’’ Kames became something of a legend, a man 2. Henry Junius Nott to George McDuffie, 25 November 1835, Henry Junius Nott Papers, SCL; Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3. On the various American editions of these works, see William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810–1835 (1936; reprint, New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961), 29–31. Rather than use the first editions of Kames and Blair, which were seldom available to Southerners, I have used antebellum American reprints.

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whom Henry Cockburn was to memorialize as ‘‘an indefatigable and speculative but coarse man.’’ It is Cockburn who tells the story of Kames trying for murder a man called Matthew Hay, with whom the judge had often played chess. Upon the verdict of ‘‘guilty’’ being pronounced, Kames is said to have exclaimed, ‘‘That’s checkmate to you, Matthew!’’ Walter Scott, indeed, includes a portrait of Kames in Redgauntlet that captures Kames’s speech, which was broad Scots, the language descended from the Northumbrian dialect of the Angles: ‘‘ ‘What’s the matter with the auld bitch next?’ said an acute metaphysical judge, though somewhat coarse in his manners, aside to his brethren. ‘This is a daft cause, Bladderskate. First, it drives the poor man mad that aught it; then your nevoy goes daft with fright, and flies the pit; then this smart young hopeful is aff the hooks with too hard study, I fancy; and now auld Saunders Fairford is as lunatic as the best of them. What say ye till’t, ye bitch?’’’ 4 Kames’s Elements of Criticism is a more technical and ambitious work than Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The former is much more preoccupied with synthesis; indeed it is an example of the Scottish desire to establish a comprehensive social and moral philosophy, a ‘‘science of man,’’ the enterprise with which Adam Smith was later to be preoccupied.5 Moreover, it was a Scottish lawyer’s book, in that Kames believed from his experience as an exponent of the Civil Law that one should first establish principles and then apply them to the comprehension of experience.6 However, it was also a book much influenced by David Hume’s account of human nature and, more remotely, by Hobbes. (Like Hume, Kames got himself into trouble with the clerics, for his vision of human nature was mostly secular.) So the Elements of Criticism begins with definitions of how human ideas and emotions are structured, how the internal and the external are connected; hence this was ‘‘a work that professes to draw the rules of criticism from human nature, their true source.’’ (In George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric [1776], whose philoso4. Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 349, 380–81, 38–39, 75–97, 72, 132; David Hume to Adam Smith, 12 April 1759, in Adam Smith, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 6, Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (1977; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 34; Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, ed. Karl F. C. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 108; Walter Scott, Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century (1824; reprint, London and Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1894), 156. 5. Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 5–6. 6. This is the convincing argument of Ross, Lord Kames, 262–65, which roots Kames in Lord Stair’s Institutions. But see also David Lieberman, ‘‘The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames,’’ in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 203–34.

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phy was still more Humean, this venture was pushed so far that the philosophical problem of human nature all but pushed out the consideration of genre.) For Kames, literature was but one among the arts, which also embraced painting, architecture, and music, even gardening. All these share a logic: ‘‘It is required in every such work, that, like an organic system, its parts be orderly arranged and mutually connected, bearing each of them a relation to the whole, some more intimate, some less according to their destination.’’ So the critic has to discern, as the artist needs to know, how in art is embodied the means to achieve certain states of mind and feeling in a reader, listener, or viewer. The scope of emotions is wide: reason, passion, joy, sorrow, fear, anger, beauty, sublimity, laughter, dignity, and grace, with their ‘‘coexistent’’ combinations. But the leitmotifs are control, conscious intention, choosing between what is agreeable or disagreeable, ‘‘though instances can and shall be given, of painful passions that are agreeable, and of pleasant passions that are disagreeable.’’ One might weep or start back in wonder, but only because, as a human, one is capable of it and an artist has intended this reaction and learned the technique to achieve it. Since ‘‘with respect to the common nature of man, we have a conviction that it is invariable no less than universal; that it will be the same hereafter as at present, and as it was in time past; the same among all nations and in all corners of the earth,’’ it did not much matter to Kames when, where, or for whom an artist had performed. So a typical Kamesian argument, indifferent to time and place, runs: ‘‘This reasoning is confirmed by constant and universal experience. Let us take under consideration the meeting of Hector and Andromache, in the sixth book of the Iliad; or some of the passionate scenes in King Lear; these pictures of human life, when we are sufficiently engaged, given an impression of reality not less distinct than that given by Tacitus, in his description of the death of Otho.’’ Like most Scots, however, Kames had a sense of the evolution of society through stages and would elsewhere, especially in the Sketches of the History of Man (1774), make marked contributions to ‘‘philosophical history.’’ In the Elements, this evolutionary perspective was not central, but it does appear. For example, he writes, ‘‘Ridicule, which chiefly arises from pride, a selfish passion, is at best but a gross pleasure: a people, it is true, must have emerged out of barbarity before they can have a taste for ridicule; but it is too rough an entertainment for the polished and refined.’’ So ridiculing had been acceptable in Plautus among the earlier Romans, but condemned later by Horace in a more urbane age; now it was ‘‘banished from France, and . . . losing ground in England.’’ 7 7. Ross, Lord Kames, 266–67; Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 65–

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In general, Kames preferred the orderly to the disorderly: ‘‘There is no truth more universally known, than that tranquillity and sedateness are the proper state of mind for accurate perception and cool deliberation; and for that reason, we never regard the opinion, even of the wisest man, when we discover prejudice or passion behind the curtain.’’ Passions but give ‘‘a false light to all its objects.’’ Yet passions are facts of human nature, for they drive the will; ‘‘hence, in the conduct of life, it is of the utmost importance, that our passions be directed to proper objects, tend to just and rational ends, and with relation to each other, be duly balanced.’’ Order is possible, because man is ‘‘composed of many principles, which, though seemingly contradictory, are perfectly concordant.’’ There is variety, but also uniformity in nature, with each ‘‘happily adjusted to each other.’’ 8 Mostly, Kames was interested in the small matters of composition, in soliloquies and hyperbole, apostrophes and metaphor, allegory and comparisons. Only late in the book does he come to genre, epic, and drama, and to Aristotle’s three unities. Here the details of his views matter less perhaps than his tone, which was supremely self-confident. Kames is profligate of words like ‘‘general,’’ ‘‘universal,’’ ‘‘rule,’’ ‘‘principle,’’ ‘‘certain.’’ His book does not invite dissent and presumes a ‘‘we’’ who share presumptions. In an important late chapter, he interrogates the proverb ‘‘that there is no disputing about taste’’ and finds a way to assert that there are firm canons of discrimination, ‘‘that there is less difference of taste than is commonly imagined,’’ but there are decisive principles to settle controversies. On the whole, in Kames’s world, literature exists to create a polite civil society, which wishes to be edified, improved, and moved. Moreover, Kames writes mostly from the standpoint of the reader, not the author, or at least he presumes that reader and author are morally committed to a partnership that fosters civilization. It is little surprise, therefore, to learn that he was a Unionist and not a Jacobite, and a man devoted to the value of patriotism.9 Hugh Blair’s book was different, partly from his being a very different man. Though Blair (1718–1800) was Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh and perhaps the most famous preacher of his day, who held forth at the fashionable High Church of St. Giles, he was somehow always a secondary man, a useful but not a charismatic figure. When Lord Kames entered a room, he was the focus of attention. He was, for one thing, extremely tall and once thought to enlist in the Prussian Guards of 74; Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2d ed., ed. Abraham Mills (1763; reprint, New York: E. J. Huntington and Mason Brothers, 1854), 23, 58–59, 468, 54, 62. 8. Home, Elements of Criticism, 83, 96, 98, 163. 9. Ibid., 466–73; Lieberman, ‘‘The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames,’’ 222.

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Frederick the Great. But when Hugh Blair entered, he seemed always to be worrying whether his wig was awry. One of Hume’s editors was to call him ‘‘a vain, timid, fussy, kind-hearted little man that everybody liked.’’ Alexander Carlyle thought him ‘‘most naïf,’’ humorless, unambitious, afraid of the world, though he did ‘‘wish . . . to be admired as a preacher, especially by the ladies.’’ But, this conventional ambition aside, Blair had ‘‘not the least desire to shine’’ and lacked the vice of envy. This timidity affected his sermons, lectures, and publications. Being a moderate man, he wished to alarm no one, lest in their indignation they turn upon him. In his preaching, no one was troubled into piety by lacerating visions of God’s scarifying vengeance, but left the kirk with a warm glow arising from the reassurance of God’s comforting love and kindness. Such a man did not aspire to originality, would indeed have been startled to contemplate the prospect. Even his earliest and most respectful biographer was to notice this trait of fretful consensus: ‘‘By being too modest, or too timid, he rarely has the boldness to hazard a general remark. What many have said, and almost all believe, he states with confidence.’’ So Blair blended things smoothly, he borrowed Adam Smith’s earlier lectures on rhetoric, he conversed with and was encouraged by Kames, he was friendly with Hume, and indeed appointed himself ‘‘Episcopus in partibus Infidelium.’’ 10 Unsurprisingly, then, Blair shared many presumptions with Kames, such as preferences for the ‘‘liberal and humane,’’ ‘‘good sense and refined taste,’’ ‘‘just discernment,’’ the impulse to ‘‘apply the principles of good sense to composition and discourse.’’ Blair, too, went with the New Town of Edinburgh. Kames affected to be the metaphysician, a lofty office which Blair understood to be above his own mark: ‘‘Logical and ethical disquisitions move in a higher sphere; and are conversant with objects of a more severe kind; the progress of the understanding in its search for knowledge, and the direction of the will in the pursuit of good.’’ Belles lettres and criticism moved on a lower, but still valuable plain. This belief helps to explain a certain homeliness and accessibility in Blair. Kames speaks to adults, if with clumsiness: ‘‘Whoever heard . . . Kames’ Elements commended for style?’’ Legaré asked in 1828. But Blair is more emollient, an urbane pedagogue concerned to train young minds to good habits, who offers a more usable manual, which patiently explains how to write a letter, give a speech, form a sentence, speak 10. Ross, Lord Kames, 169; Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk, Containing Memorials of the Men and Events of His Time (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1861), 291–92; J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:348n; Robert Morrell Schmitz, Hugh Blair (Morningside Heights, N.Y.: King’s Crown Press, 1948), 39–42; John Hill, An Account of the Life and Writings of Hugh Blair, D.D., F.R.S.E., One of the Ministers of the High Church and Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh (1807; reprint, Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1808), 47.

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from a pulpit, write a poem, or compose a history, all things that young students might grow up to do. Blair does make more allowance for genius than Kames, though modestly. Rules and instruction, he admits, cannot inspire genius but could ‘‘direct and assist it,’’ could not ‘‘remedy barrenness’’ but only ‘‘correct redundancy.’’ Rules can show what is well done, what is erroneous, and ‘‘thereby tend to enlighten taste, and to lead genius, from unnatural deviations, into its proper channel.’’ So genius is not a wild exoticism, beyond ordinary accounting, but an intensification of gifts which must follow paths set out even for the literary foot soldier. Homer had known no poetic rulebooks, but still instinctively followed ‘‘the most material rules of criticism.’’ 11 But Blair had strong critical preferences. He hated any art that was ‘‘ostentatious and deceitful,’’ overly technical, or concerned with ‘‘the minute and trifling study of words alone.’’ ‘‘If the following Lectures have any merit,’’ he says in his introduction, ‘‘it will consist in an endeavor to substitute the applications of these principles [of reason and good sense] in place of artificial and scholastic rhetoric; in an endeavor to explode false ornament, to direct attention more towards substance than show, to recommend good sense as the foundation of all good composition, and simplicity as essential to all true ornament.’’ In short, Blair stood for the plain style and was an enemy to the baroque. Moreover, he had a greater sense of history than Kames, partly because he was more preoccupied with the achievements of the modern age, especially with the advance made by Joseph Addison and The Spectator over the rougher language of earlier English writers. But, like Kames, Blair thought belles lettres conduced to civilization, if only in giving to busy ‘‘men of serious professions’’ an agreeable way to spend their leisure and prevent their being ‘‘obliged to fly to low company, or court the riot of loose pleasures, in order to cure the tediousness of existence.’’ (This was a pertinent message for Southern college students, fresh from their own stewpots, as much as for Edinburgh advocates-to-be.) And, like Kames, Blair reprobates any notion that taste might be anarchic. ‘‘For is there any one who will seriously maintain that the taste of a Hottentot or a Laplander is as delicate and as correct as that of a Longinus or an Addison?’’ To think otherwise would be ‘‘an extravagance’’ and hence ‘‘there is a good and bad, a right and a wrong, in taste, as in other things.’’ But such taste is ‘‘ultimately founded on an internal sense of beauty, which is natural to men, and which, in its application to particular objects, is capable of being guided and enlightened by reason.’’ As such, it is possible to imagine the perfect critic, someone whose senses were so exqui11. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 14th American ed. (1783; reprint, New York: James and John Harper, 1826), 11–13, 25; HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 43.

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site and whose reason was so sure, that he ‘‘would, beyond doubt, be a perfect standard for the taste of others.’’ Absent such a paragon, there is the accumulated judgment of men in time: ‘‘that which men concur the most in admiring must be held to be beautiful.’’ 12 So taste is opinion, founded upon nature. Hence the progress of society from the ‘‘rude and uncivilized’’ to the ‘‘polished and flourishing nations’’ matters because it increasingly has allowed the free discourse that, refining taste, comes to disavow ephemeral aberrations of judgment. Hence, ‘‘Time overthrows the illusions of opinion, but establishes the decisions of nature.’’ 13 But this belief did mean that, as Blair understood it, languages have a social context and a history, as well as an internal logic, which enable them to express or disable them from envisioning the range of human nature. For example, ‘‘The Latin order is more animated; the English more clear and distinct. The Romans generally arranged their words according to the order in which the ideas rose in the speaker’s imagination.—We arrange them according to the order in which the understanding directs those ideas to be exhibited, in succession, to the view of another.’’ In general, languages begin as ‘‘barren in words,’’ but expressive, figurative, poetical, lively. Then, ‘‘as the world advances, the understanding has gained ground on the fancy and the imagination.’’ Languages mature, just as children become adults: ‘‘The imagination is most vigourous and predominant in youth; with advancing years, the imagination cools, and the understanding ripens.’’ In society, language passes from sterility and vivacity to copiousness and accuracy, ‘‘from fire and enthusiasm, to coolness and precision.’’ ‘‘Language has become, in modern times, more correct, indeed, and accurate; but, however, less striking and animated; in its ancient state, more favorable to poetry and oratory; in its present, to reason and philosophy.’’ 14 Hence Blair was very much a historian of language and his book has learned, if puzzled passages on Gaelic (‘‘said to be very expressive and copious’’) as a ‘‘primitive’’ language, and on the origins and evolution of English from Saxon (‘‘a dialect of the Gothic or Teutonic’’) and its mixture with Danish and Norman French to produce its modern, ‘‘somewhat irregular’’ form, of which Lowland Scots was a variant. (He had been the most energetic ex12. Blair, Lectures, 22. 13. Ibid., 10, 13–14, 20–24. On Addison’s influence on the Scottish Enlightenment, see Nicholas Phillipson, ‘‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist,’’ in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 179–202; Nicholas Phillipson, ‘‘The Scottish Enlightenment,’’ in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19–40. Also pertinent is John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987). 14. Blair, Lectures, 64, 65.

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ponent of the authenticity of Ossian.) Blair is especially sensitive to the respective strengths and weaknesses of different languages, in vocabulary, syntax, and grammar, and he regarded English as fecund but hard to discipline, which indeed explained the necessity for his own book. Still, he wished to move away from Gaelic and Lowland Scots to a purer, more metropolitan diction. As Samuel Gilman was shrewdly to remark in 1847: ‘‘While reading Hume, Robertson, Smith, Campbell, Blair, and even Stewart, one almost imagines them sitting in their studies—or rather walking, for they cultivated the habit of dictation,—moulding every sentence and every chapter so as to fall with the requisite grace and effect on the Southern [i.e., English] ears for which they chiefly wrote. Some of them, indeed, are said to have acknowledged, that they composed in English almost with as much difficulty as they would have done in a foreign language.’’ 15 Much of the difference between Kames and Blair was generational, the first having been born in 1696 just six years after the publication of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the second in 1718. Kames roamed eclectically from society to society, from time to time, and scarcely noticed disjunctions. But Blair was close to being a late Enlightenment figure and was a man who worried about context, who knew that history made language and therefore the possibilities of speech. What distinguished Blair from the early Romantics was that, finally, for him genres were rooted in the needs of human nature, which were invariant even under the shifts of social context, and he believed one could distinguish critically between good and bad, order and disorder, classical and ‘‘romantic and unnatural situations,’’ and could know which to prefer, not just for oneself but for civilized society.16 What marked off the next generation of critics to influence Southerners was not the impulse to use history as a way of understanding and explaining the evolution of genre, but the need to make that impulse central to the venture of criticism. There came to be a higher respect for the primitive and original. For these Romantics, order had ceased to be thought natural, but came to be regarded as an artificial shackling of the human spirit. Mostly, these critics were German. Above all were the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August. But there was also Madame de Staël, whose D’Allemagne was widely read. Also 15. Ibid., 85–87; Schmitz, Hugh Blair, 42–60; Samuel Gilman, Contributions to Literature; Descriptive, Critical, Humorous, Biographical, Philosophical, and Poetical (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856), 118, originally published as Samuel Gilman, ‘‘Mutual Influence of National Literatures,’’ SQR 12 (October 1847): 306–29, though the republication gives its original publication as 1836. 16. Blair, Lectures, 486. This standpoint explains why the most distinguished historian of modern literary criticism, who had a marked preference for the Romantic tradition, rated the Scottish critics so lowly, as but ‘‘minor’’: see René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, vol. 1, The Later Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), 104–32.

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significant were the Germans’ English followers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. These names begin to surface in Southern critical writing in the 1820s and, by the 1840s, had even begun to compete with Kames and Blair in the curriculum. However, the Scots lingered past the point when even the schoolmasters ceased to accept all their arguments, because the Scots were pedagogues, who taught firm rules. The Germans were harder to use as the basis for recitations and examinations. This was partly because the Romantic critics wrote, not from the standpoint of readers and the ordinary practitioners of correspondence or public speaking, but from stance of the author, and the rarely gifted author at that. Since these critics tended to prefer the inimitable and, forced to choose, mistrusted attempts to discipline nature’s way, they furnished doctrines of indifferent use to those in classrooms, who were struggling to give a polish to rusticity. Most accessible and influential were the lectures given by August von Schlegel in Vienna in the spring of 1808, translated into English in 1815 by John Black, a London journalist, as A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature.17 This book was much to inform Hugh Legaré’s discussions of literary Romanticism in the pages of the Southern Review, was quoted approvingly by Edgar Allan Poe in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, and appeared familiarly among the reading lists of later Southern undergraduates, even in an examination paper of the 1850s.18 In truth, Schlegel was in the nineteenth century more influential outside of Germany than inside it, where he tended to be regarded as an unoriginal version of his more profound brother, Friedrich. Even now his scholars are obliged to be defensive in suggesting that he was more than a deft ambassador of German ideas, better than just a tutor to Madame de Staël’s children.19 Heinrich Heine had some responsi17. On the circumstances and nature of the translation, see Thomas G. Sauer, A. W. Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism in England, 1811–1846 (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1981), 64–68. 18. G. R. Thompson, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 248–51. However, Poe also called Schlegel ‘‘somewhat over-profound’’ and in 1846 wrote, ‘‘I am not ashamed to say that I prefer even Voltaire to Goethe, and hold Macaulay to possess more of the true critical spirit than Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel combined’’: G. R. Thompson, Poe: Essays and Reviews, 364, 1414. See, for example, the examination for the junior class at South Carolina College, June 1858, given by William J. Rivers (William J. Rivers Papers, SCL), which asks, ‘‘Give Schlegel’s judgement on the Oedipus Tyr, in itself, and in comparison with the Coloneus.’’ See also John Coles Rutherfoord, ‘‘Index Rerum,’’ John Rutherfoord Papers, DU; entry for October 1846, in Robert Hardin Reid, ‘‘Diary and Lecture notes,’’ Reid Family Papers, PHS. 19. For example, Ralph W. Ewton Jr., The Literary Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 14–21; most energetic as a proponent is René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, vol. 2, The Romantic Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), 36–73.

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bility for this marginalization. Heine studied with Schlegel, when after 1817 the latter taught at the University of Bonn, and was then much influenced by the old man, indeed dazzled: ‘‘I still feel even today the thrill I then experienced when I stood in front of his desk and heard him lecture.’’ This was a man of emaciated spirituality who ‘‘wore kid gloves and was dressed in the height of Paris fashion,’’ who ‘‘exhaled the perfume of good society and of eau de mille fleurs,’’ who knew the Lord Chancellor of England as ‘‘ ‘my friend,’ ’’ and who had a liveried footman to trim ‘‘the wax candles burning in the silver candlesticks which, in a glass of sugared water, stood on the desk in front of this prodigious personage.’’ (He was not always so splendid; when Hugh Legaré first met him in 1835, he appeared ‘‘quite in deshabille, without cravat and in slippers.’’)20 But the later Heine, more pleased by French than German culture, came to excoriate both the Schlegel brothers as ‘‘the petty romanticists, who were as romantic as Tom Thumb and Puss in Boots,’’ and to see August as Madame de Staël’s eunuch Svengali: ‘‘Above the din of the most diverse voices, confusedly discoursing within [in her D’Allemagne], the most audible is the delicate treble of Herr A. W. Schlegel.’’ 21 Schlegel was born in Hanover in 1767, a city with marked connections to English culture. There he learned English as a boy, which prepared him later in life to become the preeminent German translator of Shakespeare’s plays. He studied classical philology at Göttingen, then in 1791 went to Amsterdam for four years to become a tutor for the children of a Dutch merchant. In 1796, at Schiller’s urging, he moved to Jena, where he stayed until 1801 and mingled intimately with Schiller, Goethe, Herder, as well as the set that included Novalis and Ludwig Tieck. Schlegel himself seems to have acted as an intermediary, a facilitator, at whose house the younger people would assemble ‘‘in blithe spirits . . . for the common midday meal,’’ where ‘‘intellectually lively social gatherings’’ too place. Tieck himself fondly remembered ‘‘that lovely time in Jena . . . one of the most radiant and delightful periods of my life.’’ Later matters grew less pleasant. First, Schlegel fell out with Schiller. Then the tangled sexual politics of Jena and Weimar led in 1803 to Schlegel’s divorce from his wife, Caroline, who was later to marry the philosopher Friedrich von Schelling. This process impelled Schlegel’s departure for Berlin in 1801. There in 1804 he was induced by Goethe’s letter of introduction to meet Madame de Staël, in exile from Napoleon’s displeasure, and 20. Max Brod, Heinrich Heine, trans. Joseph Witriol (1957; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1962), 93; HSL, ‘‘German Diaries,’’ in All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse in the Old South, ed. Michael O’Brien (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1982), 98. 21. ‘‘The Romantic School’’ (1833), in The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine, ed. Havelock Ellis (London: Walter Scott, 1887), 92, 69. Some translations render ‘‘delicate treble’’ as ‘‘clear falsetto’’: see Martin Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London: Verso, 1995), 241.

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was engaged to tutor her children.22 This association was to last, with one break, until her death in 1817, despite her propensity for treating him like a small boy, possessed of bad manners and erroneous opinions.23 He followed her wherever she went: to her home in Switzerland, to Italy, to Sweden, to Russia, and briefly to England. It was when as a literary lioness she swept into Vienna in 1808 that he gave the lectures which were to become so influential. In truth, he was not a very good lecturer, at least as to manner. Hegel was unusual in finding him ‘‘clear and eloquent,’’ but then Hegel’s standards of clarity were not as other men’s. Benjamin Constant’s opinion that Schlegel was a pedant was the more common view. In Vienna, Madame de Staël did her best for him. She talked the best society into attending, 250 of them, all paying the princely sum of twenty-five florins a head for hearing his fifteen hours of dissertation. Though they applauded politely, which seems at least to have fooled him into imagining success, they were not too pleased with his delivery, much puzzled by his content, and often distracted by a herd of cats that wandered among their legs.24 Nonetheless, though the Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature were ostensibly confined only to the drama from the Greeks onwards, Schlegel offered a general gloss on the new critical thinking about Romanticism, a concept (at least as an adjective, not yet a noun) he and his brother did more to establish than anyone else.25 In many ways, Schlegel was less far from the project of the Scottish Enlightenment than he was to seem in retrospect. He had not abandoned the allurements of universality, for he too wanted ‘‘to establish the fundamental laws of the beautiful’’ and to achieve ‘‘universality of mind.’’ But Schlegel mistrusted artificiality, ‘‘the conventions of education and habits of life,’’ and located universality, not in making order out of the heterogeneous, but achieving an empathy for the diverse, in acquiring ‘‘that flexibility which enables him [the critic], by renouncing all personal predilections and blind habits, to adapt himself to the peculiarities of other ages and nations— 22. Sauer, Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism, 2–3; Tieck, quoted in Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 219; Ewton, Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel, 12–13. 23. Sauer, Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism, 30. This small detail might seem to endorse the more formal opinion of Isbell that Schlegel’s influence on D’Allemagne has been much exaggerated: see John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s De l’Allemagne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 24. G. W. F. Hegel to Karl Daub, 29 May 1827, in Hegel: The Letters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), trans. Clark Butler and Christine Seiler, commentary by Clark Butler, 519; Elizabeth W. Schermerhorn, Benjamin Constant: His Private Life and His Contribution to the Cause of Liberal Government in France, 1767–1830 (1924; reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1970), 217; Sauer, Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism, 27. 25. On this, see Hans Eichner, ed., ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates / the European History of a Word (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 6–12 and elsewhere.

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to feel them, as it were, from their proper central point.’’ The external must be penetrated, because ‘‘internal excellence is alone decisive.’’ The ancients were admirable, but chiefly for having had the courage to be themselves. The moderns must learn to do likewise, though being different, they would make a different world. Hence the neoclassical instinct could become ‘‘but dull school exercises, which at best excite a frigid admiration.’’ ‘‘The groundwork of human nature is no doubt everywhere the same,’’ Schlegel said. But unlike Kames, Schlegel was dissatisfied to stop there: ‘‘But in all our investigations, we may observe that, throughout the whole range of nature, there is no elementary power so simple, but that it is capable of dividing and diverging into opposite directions. The whole play of vital motion hinges on harmony and contrast.’’ 26 Though he was diffident about the terminology, Schlegel resorted to ‘‘romantic’’ as a synonym for the modern, not to denote its identity with the ‘‘romance,’’ but to characterize ‘‘the mixture of the Latin and the old Teutonic dialects, in the same manner as modern civilisation is the fruit of the heterogeneous union of the peculiarities of the northern nations and the fragments of antiquity.’’ (This analysis had first been his brother’s.)27 So, for Schlegel, the classical was plastic, joyous, harmonious, human, while the modern was picturesque, religious, other-worldly, made conscious by Christianity of failure and the need for salvation. Since man had been expelled from Eden, he had sought vainly to return: ‘‘The old religion of the senses sought no higher possession than outward and perishable blessings; and immortality, so far as it was believed, stood shadow-like in the obscure distance, a faint dream of this sunny waking life.’’ Christianity was different, a reversal. In it, ‘‘every thing finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation of infinity; life has become shadow and darkness, and the first day of our real existence dawns in the world beyond the grave.’’ So the modern was habitually unfulfilled, and found earthly enjoyments fleeting and illusory: ‘‘Hence the poetry of the ancients was the poetry of enjoyment, and ours is that of desire: the former has its foundation in the scene which is present, while the latter hovers betwixt recollection and hope. . . . The feeling of the moderns is, upon the whole, more inward, their fancy more incorporeal, and their thoughts more contemplative.’’ 28 In particular, the moderns were more conscious of how mixed were things, and how art was obliged to underestimate though recognize this: ‘‘In nature . . . the boundaries of objects run more into one another, and things are not 26. Augustus William Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846), 17, 18, 19, 21. 27. Eichner, ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates, 6–7. 28. Schlegel, Dramatic Art, 21–22, 26–27.

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so distinctly separated as we must exhibit them in order to convey distinct notions of them.’’ So the Greeks worked for proportion, harmony, balance, and the moderns ‘‘on the contrary, have arrived at the consciousness of an internal discord which renders such an ideal impossible; and hence the endeavour of their poetry is to reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves divided, and to blend them indissolubly together.’’ Later, he explained further that the modern and romantic ‘‘is the expression of the secret attraction to a chaos which lies concealed in the very bosom of the ordered universe, and is perpetually striving after new and marvellous births; the lifegiving spirit of primal love broods anew on the face of the waters.’’ While the classical was simple and clear, the modern ‘‘notwithstanding its fragmentary appearance, approaches more to the secret of the universe,’’ for ‘‘nothing in truth can ever exist separately and by itself; Feeling perceives all in all at one and the same time.’’ The very clarity of the classical tradition signified its infidelity to the messiness of reality, or realities.’’ 29 So Schlegel’s book had as master units of analysis, the ancient and the modern, but it also argued that modern cultures differed. Thereby he accelerated the process by which genre and culture came to be understood as mutually dependent. For he explained the mutations of genre by the exigencies of time and nationality, first by looking at the Greek and Roman drama, then by examining in successive lectures the theatrical traditions of the Italians, French, English, Spanish, and Germans. He was conscious that such a typology underestimated ‘‘reciprocal but fluctuating influences’’ between cultures, but found each to have had such a differing pattern that a particularist analysis was the truer method. As one might expect, Schlegel was hostile to Aristotle, deprecated the French theater for its neoclassical imitativeness, saw signs of life in the Germans with Schiller (on Goethe he was cool), and recommended the Spanish and English theater as most original. If his book has a hero, it is Shakespeare, master of the romantic spirit that ‘‘delights in indissoluble mixtures; all contrarities; nature and art, poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death . . . blended together in the most intimate combination.’’ Indeed, Schlegel was to have a considerable influence on how even the English came to understand Shakespeare, especially when the German was used and plagiarized by Coleridge. Always Schlegel leaned to the national, original, and peculiar, to passion over regularity. Of this, Shakespeare seemed the quintessence. It was not that Schlegel was against order, merely that he thought all parts of creation had their own differing organic orders, which it was the business of art to discern and express. So, ‘‘In the 29. Ibid., 27, 343.

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John M. Stanley, Hugh Swinton Legaré (Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.)

fine arts, as well as in the domain of nature—the supreme artist, all genuine forms are organical, that is, determined by the quality of the work. In a word, the form is nothing but a significant exterior, the speaking physiognomy of each thing, which, as long as it is not disfigured by any destructive accident, gives a true evidence of its hidden essence.’’ Hence the imperishable spirit of poetry migrated and was a metamorph, not to be judged by fixed rules: ‘‘No one should be tried before a tribunal to which he is not amenable.’’ 30 Many of these passages, Hugh Legaré was to quote in 1831 when discussing the relative merits of the ancient and modern. Legaré did not much like Schlegel’s preference for the romantic but conceded that, on the whole and against Byron’s opinion, the historical case for the distinction had been persuasively put, if in too authoritarian a manner. Indeed, when acting the philosopher, Legaré preferred the neoclassical principles of order and distinction and lamented that the modern was the lesser for ‘‘our deformities, peculiarities.’’ Still, the modern was his, was ‘‘ours,’’ as was clear when Legaré went on to praise Byron’s Manfred.31 30. Ibid., 213, 342, 340; Sauer, Schlegel’s Shakespearean Criticism; Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 271–87. 31. HSL, ‘‘Byron’s Letters and Journals,’’ SR 7 (May 1831): 18–27 (quotation on p. 26).

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Legaré’s friend, Thomas Grimké, the proponent of the Reformation, of natural science and the modern, had few such contradictory inhibitions. His long essay on the origin of rhyme, published in the Southern Review serially in 1828 and 1829, was to show how the Romantic critical revolution was advancing in Southern culture. It is a characteristic Grimké piece, very learned and allusive, often shrewd, defiantly idiosyncratic, rhetorically inept. Grimké had put together his argument from the body of late Enlightenment and early Romantic literary history and criticism: from books in the former category like Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81), the 1799 Collected Works of Sir William Jones, and the Lycée, ou cours de la littérature ancienne et moderne (1799–1805) of Jean-François de La Harpe; and from books in the latter category like Friedrich von Schlegel’s studies of literary history and aesthetics, Friedrich Bouterwek’s history of Spanish literature, and Léonard Simonde de Sismondi’s Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe (1813). Grimké also drew upon those social theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially John Millar and Adam Ferguson, who had been most interested in how societies had changed through history. All this added up to a body of concepts and knowledge that made it possible for Grimké to make the central claim of historicism, that ancient and modern were different, discontinuous. He wrote, for example, ‘‘A dictionary of rhymes would be as unintelligible to a Greek or Roman poet, as an English orator would esteem it useless to have instructions, like those of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, explanatory of the compositions of prose sentences from poetical feet. The very fact then, that the character and objects of such a lexicon . . . would be incomprehensible to a classic poet, demonstrates the existence of a state of things in modern poetry, entirely unknown to the ancients. Whence has arisen this state of things: in other words, to whom, to what age, to what country, do we owe the invention of rhyme?’’ 32 Grimké’s argument that rhyme did not exist in the ancient world but that ‘‘the modern world’’ owed its invention mainly ‘‘both in the south and north of Europe, to the northern nations in connection, more especially in the south, with the Christian Latin poets of the fourth century, and to their successors’’ is less important here than his concluding question, which became the crucial question that arose when literature was understood socially and historically. ‘‘Whence has arisen this state of things . . . to whom, to what age, to what country, do we owe’’ a particular form of literature? Moreover, Grimké had been molded by a critical discourse in which ideas of nationality, especially concepts of North and South, had been crucially deployed. So he wrote freely of ‘‘Northern and Southern nations’’ in worrying the problem through. He contended that ‘‘Spanish literature arose, as it did in England and France, 32. Thomas Smith Grimké, ‘‘Origin of Rhyme,’’ SR 2 (August 1828): 33–34.

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with the natural developement of the language and state of society.’’ He used the concept of the ‘‘indigenous’’ to understand a literary sensibility. He spoke of the ‘‘stern and hardy Europeans of the North, and their refined neighbours of the South.’’ In fact, Grimké was not interested in transferring these ideas to the United States, to seeing American literature as divided in sensibility between Northern and Southern. Nor, indeed, was Legaré, though he comprehended the intellectual currents that would legitimate such an apprehension. In his 1830 essay on early Spanish literature, he gave a brisk summary of the new synthesis. ‘‘Since the beginning of that struggle which resulted in the deliverance of German literature from the bondage of French authority and a servile imitation of foreign models, a new order of researches, and almost a new theory of criticism have been proposed to scholars. It has been discovered that there is no genuine, living beauty of composition which springs not spontaneously, if we may so express it, out of the very soil of a country; which is not connected with the history, animated by the spirit, and in perfect harmony with the character and opinions of its people.’’ What was imitative of foreign cultures was ‘‘tame, vapid, and feeble.’’ So, ‘‘the German critics . . . and after their example, many others have, within the present century, busily employed themselves in tracing the history of modern literature up to its sources, with a view to show its connexion with national history and manners.’’ 33 This critical legacy was double-edged. It legitimated the notion of a literature formed by culture and society, offered the categories of North and South, but it also insisted that being ‘‘Southern’’ was a mixed blessing. The Southern was deemed to be sensuous, spontaneous, lazy, resistant to rationality; in Europe, innovation came from the North. As Henry Nott explained of French literature in 1831, ‘‘The Langue d’oc was admirably adapted to poetry; almost as soft as the Italian and sonorous as the Spanish, to both of which it was nearly allied. . . . [T]his difference has continually existed between Northern and Southern literature. Nature, strength, true-heartedness, too often attended with irregularity, has marked the North; taste, fancy, melody and regularity, the South.’’ One could solve this problem as Frederick Porcher did in 1852, by simply identifying all Americans, North and South, with northern Europe: ‘‘The people of the United States are originally and essentially members of a Northern Race. We call ourselves Americans, but we are not the less, on that account, Saxons or Kelts.’’ 34 But this was drastic. More intellectuals absorbed implicitly an identification with Southern Europe, which meant 33. Grimké, ‘‘Origin of Rhyme,’’ SR 3 (February 1829): 157; Grimké, ‘‘Origin of Rhyme,’’ SR 2 (August 1828): 37, 45, 46, 53; HSL, ‘‘Early Spanish Ballads: Charlemagne and His Peers,’’ SR 5 (February 1830): 62–63. 34. Henry Junius Nott, ‘‘French Novels,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 327; Frederick A. Porcher, ‘‘Modern Art—Powers’ Statue of Calhoun,’’ SQR n.s. 5 (January 1852): 87.

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that they were conscious, in aspiring to literary accomplishment, of working against the grain. In this lay an origin of the Southern habit of literary self-contempt. As early as 1818, writing from Edinburgh, William Campbell Preston indicated the fundamental issue, when urging a friend in Paris to come north, where climate left no option but intellectual pursuits: ‘‘An Italian in his lovely country is contented with the luxury of alternate sunshine and shade. . . . These poor Scotch on the contrary have neither splendour of climate or splendour of fashion to fill up the [vacancy] of their life—No sun to enervate them.’’ It was characteristic of appeals to create a Southern literature that they spoke of a need to transcend enervation. ‘‘It would be an indelible reproach to us, that whilst we waste so many thousands annually in luxury—whilst we squander our means in expensive tours of recreation and pleasure,—and even impoverish our resources in indulgences too gross to be mentioned’’: this is how the first pages of the Southern Literary Messenger urged the need for a Southern literature, which might overcome ‘‘that tendency to mental repose and luxurious indulgence supposed to be peculiar to southern latitudes.’’ ‘‘The Sunny South is not propitious to the products of literature,’’ Charles Campbell observed in 1847. And often, lurking sometimes unsaid, sometimes articulated, was the presumption that slavery bore a responsibility, the more especially as many believed that climate required the use of African slaves, accustomed to labor in sultry conditions. As a Charlottesville undergraduate confided to his notebook in 1842, slavery had always enervated those cultures in which it had existed, as in ancient Rome, with its ‘‘sensuality and indolence.’’ 35 But the pages of the first Southern Review were innocent of a developed concept of ‘‘Southern literature.’’ Robert Young Hayne, its chief mover, did have the different notion of ‘‘the literature of the South,’’ that is, he knew there was a South and, in it, there ought to be a literature. But it did not follow that anyone there had an obligation to take the South as a subject matter, but had merely to write on a variety of broad problems. And even the Southern Literary Messenger, which began its first issue in 1834 with a ‘‘Publisher’s Notice’’ from Thomas W. White and an exhortatory article on ‘‘Southern literature’’ by James Ewell Heath, did little to amend Hayne’s logic. There was talk of ‘‘the genius of the south’’ and of awakening ‘‘from its long slumber the literary exertion of this portion of our country.’’ There was an appeal for release from ‘‘a kind of vassalage to our northern neighbors,’’ and it was asked, ‘‘Shall it be said that the empire of literature has no geographical boundaries, and 35. WCP to Major O’Connor, 4 December 1818, WCP Papers, SCL; James Ewell Heath, ‘‘Southern Literature,’’ SLM 1 (August 1834): 2–3; CC to John M. Daniel, 27 September 1847, CC Papers, WM; John Coles Rutherfoord, ‘‘Commonplace Book’’ (1839–42), pp. 134–38, John Rutherfoord Papers, DU.

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that local jealousies ought not to disturb its harmony?’’ But, on the whole, Heath at least abjured animosity as a literary motive: ‘‘Without . . . intending any thing invidious, or without cherishing any unkind or unmanly sentiment towards our political confederates, we ought forthwith to buckle on our armour, and assert our mental independence.’’ 36 But Heath, like Hayne, offers no vision of Southern culture, says nothing about climate or society, is indifferent to subject matter. That is, the beginnings of the appeal for Southern literary accomplishment was closer to the logic of Edinburgh, where many had agreed that David Hume was an adornment to Scotland, but no one had thought he was thereby obliged to write about the Highlands or granite crags or taciturn crofters. By the same token, Hugh Legaré might be an ornament to Charleston and a Southern Review, but he was not thereby expected to write less about Demosthenes or more about the Cooper River. It was the generation below Legaré’s, those born after the turn of the century, who were reared with more thoroughgoing Romantic presumptions. But their opinions did not surface much before the early 1840s. De Bow, born in 1820, for example, when thinking in 1845 of moving the Southern Quarterly Review to New Orleans, wrote to J. F. H. Claiborne: ‘‘For the interest of Southern letters & Southern character & Southern Right this work must not be suffered to perish. It is the last attempt to establish and build up Southern Literature—if it fails no other man will have the temerity to undertake the task. And why should it fail?’’ Benjamin Blake Minor, born in 1818, second editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, stated his mission in 1844 to David Swain: ‘‘By making the Messenger, the representative of Southern Literature and, in part, the biography of our departed great ones, I hope to give it a dignity & value that will commend it to the influence & aid of all the friends of Learning & virtue.’’ Alexander Beaufort Meek, born in 1814, wrote to Simms in 1851: ‘‘I am glad you are about to collect your Poetic Writings. They will form a fit avant courier for Southern Literature and Southern Publication. I am convinced that we cannot have Home Independence of any kind,—in Commerce, Manufactures, Politics, or what not, until we have a Home Independence of Mind.’’ Basil Manly Jr., born in 1825, when a student in 1843 thought to write an essay on ‘‘the peculiarities of Southern literature & character.’’ The editor of the Southern Quarterly Review in 1847 accepted as a premise that the ‘‘people of the Southern States are so far a peculiar people, that their forms of social life differ from those of other States here and in Europe,’’ and this affected views of its literary obligations, though even he still thought of that Southern intellect as dedicated to a wide range of topics, ‘‘to physical science, to natu36. Robert Young Hayne to Edward Everett, 4 August 1829, Edward Everett Papers, MassHS; Thomas W. White, ‘‘Publisher’s Notice,’’ SLM 1 (August 1834): 1; Heath, ‘‘Southern Literature,’’ 1–3.

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ral history, biography, classical learning, to literature and science in all their forms, to historical, moral and religious truth.’’ 37 By 1851 the category was sufficiently established that Simms was suggesting to John R. Thompson the idea of ‘‘a good sized octavo volume, which, it seems to me might be made eminently attractive to the South . . . a History of Art & Literature of the Southern States.’’ Thompson passed along the idea and the letter to Kennedy, and solicited advice. Kennedy was cool, however, and thought that, since ‘‘the South is so decidedly political . . . that the great body of its literature will be found chiefly in that field,’’ it was doubtful that a book of such a constricted nature would command much of an audience. ‘‘There may be, however, a sufficient store of elegant letters—by which I mean any thing but political disputation and speeches—in the southern states to make an agreeable stock of criticism or literary history.’’ But no such anthology ever appeared, though Thompson worked on it; there is no evidence of what he might have included. If Simms’s The Charleston Book (1845) is any guide, it would have opted for the miscellaneous definition of Southern literature, that is, any literature written in the South, on whatever subject.38 Lower down the chain, in 1854 a young student in a Columbus, Mississippi, school was writing for his teacher, Samuel Meek, an essay on the ‘‘Progress of Southern Literature,’’ which naively explored the state of the argument. He began by noticing that the subject of Southern literature had been much pondered by liberal minds, but that progress had been slower than elsewhere in the Union, despite the fact that the South was ‘‘the natural home of Literature.’’ ‘‘No country can boast of more brilliant and flowery imaginations than ours; and nature has given them much at home to feast and nurture their fancys,’’ whereupon he offered a description of nature, its rivulets and dells. (In the Meek family, climate was seen as a Southern advantage.) However, too many had ‘‘made politics the theme of their study.’’ Nonetheless, if a prompt beginning was made, hope might be rewarded, ‘‘that the south may never from this day turn back but keep an onward and steady march until she shall have triumphed over every other nation, and even among her own good 37. J. D. B. De Bow to J. F. H. Claiborne, 12 September 1845, J. F. H. Claiborne Papers, MDAH; Benjamin B. Minor to David L. Swain, 1 February 1844, David L. Swain Papers, SHC; Alexander Beaufort Meek to WGS, 23 November 1851, Alexander Beaufort Meek Papers, ADAH; entry for 25 November 1843, in BM Jr., ‘‘Jottings Down,’’ BM Jr. Papers, FU; ‘‘Address to the Patrons of the Review, and to the People of the South,’’ SQR 11 (April 1847): iii–iv. 38. WGS to JRT, 10 May 1851, in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952–82), 3:119; entry for 13 June 1851, JPK Journal; JPK to JRT, 15 June 1851, 16 August 1853, JPK Papers, PLB; WGS, ed., The Charleston Book: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse (1845; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1983).

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qualities may Literature reign supreme.’’ He offered an estimate of American strengths in poetry (Longfellow, Bryant, Willis, Meek, Pike, Wilde, Waddel), in history (Irving, Prescott, Bancroft), and in romance (Cooper, Simms, Longstreet). Notably, he broached the fit subjects for a Southern literature, more or less conformable to Simms’s critical agenda: revolutionary battles, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the character of the Indians. With the Indians displaced, the ‘‘faces of intellectual men now tread the paths to which they were accustomed,’’ now fair women ‘‘with all the purity of heart and elegance of beauty’’ ornament a refined and progressive society, in which the minds of both men and women would ‘‘shake off that lethargy that has so long kept them in the background of science, and put every power that can accomplish any thing to work.’’ 39 By 1858, Archibald Roane in De Bow’s Review might familiarly make the connection which Legaré and Grimké had been uninterested to make in 1830, using the arguments of Schlegel to predict William Faulkner. Recently, there were ‘‘hopeful indications of greatly increased mental activity in the South, and of a corresponding literary expression of that activity.’’ Southern books had started to improve as ‘‘reflexes of Southern thought, Southern feeling, Southern manners, customs, and peculiarities,’’ because more rooted in the Southern soil, less imitative of the exogenous. For, as the Romantic had argued, ‘‘Imitation is always weak and feeble, and when too servile, emasculates the mind and deprives it of its manly strength.’’ This lesson England, Germany, and Spain had learned and, in them, literature had grown as ‘‘a vigorous and hardy plant fresh from its native soil.’’ Doing likewise, ‘‘in a few years we shall have a literature, the influence of which will be deeply and widely felt, and which will make its impress upon the opinions of the world.’’ 40 Throughout this progression, however, doubt was persistent. Most did not confuse prediction with accomplishment. Almost everyone was selflacerating. Politics was habitually blamed for intellectual distraction, or migration might be at fault, or inadequate schools, or a lackluster reading public, or the weather. And many were not sure about the wisdom of the Romantic venture, which slashed away the classical tradition and even the English literary tradition, and made Shakespeare an unavailable foreigner. 39. Henry Lowndes Muldrow, ‘‘Progress of Southern Literature’’ (1854), Samuel M. Meek and Family Papers, MDAH. Muldrow (1837–1905) was later a lawyer, a colonel in the Confederate cavalry, a U.S. congressman, and Assistant Secretary of the Interior in Grover Cleveland’s first administration. He was also prominent in the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890: on this, see Michael Perman, Strule for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 74, 84, 87. 40. Archibald Roane, ‘‘American Literature—Northern and Southern,’’ DBR 24 (February 1858): 176–77.

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Was it wise for the American or the Southerner to begin de novo? Was not literature a wider thing? Legaré had insisted that it was and, though he assumed that American literature would grow with its language, did not see that, beyond ‘‘politics and jurisprudence, [where] the American people were compelled by the very novelty of their situation to think for themselves,’’ the United States was very likely fundamentally to alter poetry, natural science, or philosophy. Americans were, after all, but ‘‘essentially European,’’ living in another place. There was nothing ‘‘in their situation here, to sever these strong ties—to give a new impulse to opinion in matters of philosophy and learning, or, in short, to influence in any material degree, their own intellectual character and pursuits.’’ No doubt, the English connection had been too powerful, and had produced ‘‘a state of things . . . fatal to intellectual dignity and enterprise.’’ 41 But the solution was not an introspective cultural nationalism, but a comparative scholarship and literature, which made available the classical and the modern, the European and the American. In 1831 Edward Johnston had been gloomier about the prospects for American literature and saw disadvantages that would hinder progress for the next century. These included too few cities, too many Puritans, ‘‘the forlorn and dismal nature of the enterprize of settlement,’’ too much unsettling westward migration, too much lame thinking (which presumed that civil liberty and literary accomplishment bore a significant relationship), too few myths, too much rapid celebrity, and too little lasting fame. As fundamentally, seeing how relatively little advanced was American literature, Johnston did not see the point of cutting off the British heritage. ‘‘They would have us, in a word,’’ he said with evident astonishment at the enthusiasts for American literature, ‘‘cease to look upon Alfred, Wallace, Bruce, Bacon, Hume, and Gibbon, as our countrymen’’ and cut away Sidney, Spenser, and Pope. This was not sensible, was indeed impoverishing, this forfeiting of a known British accomplishment for a vague American promise, ‘‘for the peerless wonders, past, present, and to come, of American chivalry, patriotism, and poesy.’’ Johnston was a young man, no old fogey from the late eighteenth century, but a protégé of Thomas Cooper and Henry Nott, the one English, the other married to a Belgian, and both disposed to a cosmopolitan culture. In 1849 Beverley Tucker saw things in much the same way, though his greater Southern feeling led him to be dismissive of Northerners like George Bancroft (who was ‘‘not particular about truth in a history’’) and James Fenimore Cooper, the writings of both of whom were as ‘‘no more than the twitterings of so many hedge sparrows.’’ But even Tucker thought it best to cultivate a wider world: 41. ‘‘An Inquiry into the Present State of Southern Literature,’’ SLM 23 (November 1856): 390; HSL, ‘‘Kent’s Commentaries,’’ SR 2 (August 1828): 73–74.

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‘‘Our reading men are familiar with the best writers of England, and with some of those of France and Germany, and try to keep up with the literature of the day. In doing this they have little time to spare for those who write only because they think that what they call America ought to have a literature of its own. We, here in the South, are not aware of any such necessity. We are for free trade, and go for getting what we want, of the best quality and at the cheapest market.’’ 42 Even much later, the awkward question would not go away. The same Archibald Roane who in De Bow’s Review in 1858 urged the cultivation of Southern literature also thought that American literature, north and South, remained persistently inferior to the European: ‘‘The truth is, all the contributions made by the United States to the world of letters might be obliterated without leaving any profound gulf. . . . There are some few authors in the country of genuine worth, (probably half a dozen,) but the great mob of book-makers have as little merit as they have large pretensions.’’ Even Henry Timrod, as interested in the South and as Romantic a writer as one might wish, felt not only the shortcomings of the Southern scene, but did not want to be confined in the prisonhouse of patriotism. In ‘‘Literature in the South,’’ which was first a speech given at Cheraw, then was published in Russell’s Magazine in 1859, he trotted out the familiar Simmsian lament that no one loved a Southern author, that neglect was his lot, that ‘‘the North is inattentive or abusive, and the South unthankful, or, at most, indifferent.’’ More distinctively, for this neglect he blamed anti-intellectualism and old fogeyism. He surmised that Hugh Blair was still used authoritatively in schools and ‘‘with the vast advance that has been made in critical science since the time of Blair few seem to be intimately acquainted.’’ Worse, there were those who praised Alexander Pope and read Lord Kames. ‘‘Here no one is surprised when some fossil theory of criticism, long buried under the ruins of an exploded school, is dug up, and discussed with infinite gravity by gentlemen who know Pope and Horace by heart, but who have never read a word of Wordsworth or Tennyson, or who have read them with suspicion, and rejected them with superciliousness.’’ 43 This, as will be seen later, was a backhander at William J. Grayson, with whom Timrod had had a critical exchange a year earlier. This was a semi-informed and self-interested jeremiad, but it was not one that accepted the category of Southern literature as a way to describe Timrod’s 42. Edward W. Johnston, ‘‘American Literature,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 436–44 (quotations on pp. 442, 437); Edward W. Johnston to Langdon Cheves Jr., 16 February 1836, Langdon Cheves Papers, SCHS; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘‘Macaulay’s History of England,’’ SQR 15 (July 1849): 407. 43. Roane, ‘‘American Literature,’’ 173; Edd Winfield Parks, ed., The Essays of Henry Timrod (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1942), 85–86.

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own work, for Timrod quarreled with those (including Simms implicitly) who had transferred over from the campaign for ‘‘Americanism in literature’’ to another ‘‘with an intensity of absurdity which is admirable indeed, [for] Southernism in literature.’’ By this last phrase, Timrod understood the proposition that ‘‘an author should confine himself in the choice of his subjects to the scenery, the history, and the traditions of his own country,’’ to write about prairies or backwoodsmen, Choctaws or pine forests. For Timrod, nationality mattered, but subconsciously; it expressed itself in ‘‘those thousand nameless touches, which are felt rather than expressed.’’ For the poetry of such a writer, Southern and/or American, ‘‘whether its scenes be laid in his native country or the land of faery,’’ local experience would express itself. Shakespeare was as English when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra as when he composed Henry V. If the Southern writer ‘‘be expected, under the penalty of being pronounced unSouthern in tone, and unpatriotic in spirit, never to pass the Potomac on the one side, or the Gulf on the other, we shall despair of ever seeing within our borders a literature of such depth and comprehensiveness as will ensure it the respect of other countries, or permanence in the remembrance of posterity.’’ Genius should be free to roam over time and space. It was not that Timrod thought it wrong to write about Southern things—its forests, flowers, society, slavery, history—just that the demand only to write of these was ‘‘a narrow creed.’’ 44 As will be seen, this expansive vision was easier for the poet to embrace than the novelist, for by critical convention and usage the one was thought to be free and universal, the latter to be specific and local. And not only in theory but in practice, Southern poetry did soar into strange empyreans, where many anxieties were to be expressed.

The Rationale of Verse 45 In the South nothing was more common than to write poetry, especially when young. The cognoscenti lamented that verse seemed deceptively easy. ‘‘Any educated man can write verses,’’ John Esten Cooke tartly commented in 1858. In 1846, William Porcher Miles looked over a poem by Augustin Louis Taveau and wearily observed that many young men wrote verse, which was ‘‘commendable, or at least excusable.’’ The periodicals were full of it, ‘‘poetry or other space-filling ‘copy’’’ being so useful for filling up the odd corner of a page. Miles rightly observed that good poetry required a technique and a vocabulary. Just as an architect needed to learn architraves, ‘‘so the poet— or in truth any writer—must exercise himself long, and laboriously, in ac44. Parks, Essays of Timrod, 87–91. 45. The title of Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Rationale of Verse,’’ SLM 14 (October 1848): 577– 85, and Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Rationale of Verse,’’ SLM 14 (November 1848): 673–82.

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quiring clearness, and purity of style, compactness, and nervousness of diction, before attempting to produce any continuous work. . . . [S]o the greatest poetical genius, must drudge through ‘Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, & Prosody’ . . . before he can give utterance to his thoughts.’’ 46 But Romanticism seemed to make the rules looser, to license self and locality (two things everyone had or could invent), with the result that poetry became a democratic medium, a career open to the ill-talented and gifted alike. Yet it was emphatically not a career. Poetry yielded even less income than prose, which was saying much. Moreover, it acquired an ethic hostile to the public world of commercial gain, so its unworldliness was thought a testament to its integrity. Poetry in the colonial South had been sociable. In its lighter forms, it had been verse written for clubs or friends ‘‘sat nodding o’er their Pipes, in pensive mood,’’ for lovers or wives, for ‘‘the gay, delightful, silken tribe, / That maddens all our city’’ upon the occasion of a bumper, a birthday, or Christmas Day.47 Mostly, its tone had been bantering, friendly, witty, metropolitan.48 But poetry could also be civic, the provisioning of odes for public days and deeds, for the celebration of Empire and commerce, for revolutions and wars, for moments when ‘‘Long had a mungrel French and Indian brood / Our peaceful frontiers drench’d with British blood.’’ For both moods, classical allusion was thought to be fitting, whether it was Sylvia beside the fireside or ‘‘Cannae, Pharsalia, wash’d with Roman gore’’ on the banks of the Mononghala.49 These traditions did not die, utterly. The Fourth of July and commencement days still called out their awkward odes, new buildings needed poetical dedication, great men required eulogy in verse, and gentlemen still thought that ladies liked acrostics.50 (And perhaps they did.) But, in gen46. John Esten Cooke to Thomas Dunn English, 12 October 1858, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU; William Porcher Miles, criticism of a poem on Mirano by ALT (penciled notation says 1845, though perhaps 1846), ALT Papers, DU; John Esten Cooke to Hamilton H. Sands, 31 August 1854, John Esten Cooke Papers, LC. 47. Tuesday Club of Annapolis, ‘‘Lugubris Cantus,’’ and St. George Tucker and James McClurg, ‘‘The Belles of Williamsburg,’’ in Southern Writing, 1585–1920, ed. Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin Jr. (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1970), 197, 236. 48. On these themes, see David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 49. William Dawson, ‘‘To Sylvia,’’ and Samuel Davies, ‘‘Extract from a poem on the barbarities of the French and their savage allies and proselytes, on the frontiers of Virginia,’’ in Davis, Holman, and Rubin, Southern Writing, 1585–1920, 231–32, 248–49. 50. See, for example, HBG, ‘‘Commonplace Book, 1824–1870,’’ HBG Papers, VHS, which has copies of HBG’s poetry over the years, such as ‘‘Lines written in an album’’ (1824), ‘‘Friendship,’’ ‘‘On leaving one’s home’’ etc. They are sentimental, about friendship, death, hopes of heaven, women, melancholy, and often written for young ladies, sometimes as acrostics of their names.

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eral, poetry became a solitary and apolitical business, a meditation on human nature, a conversation with selves often disguised in the form of magical spirits. These were developments viewed with misgiving and there were grave discussions about whether poetry could survive a modern age designed for prose. Poets became misanthropic and depressed. From being glad to pass a few dozen manuscripts from hand to hand, they grew gloomy to have a few hundred copies of printed verse stockpiled in their back rooms. For they had been beguiled by promises that, in choosing solitude, they might transform the world. They became disappointed to discover a world incuriously resistant. William Crafts, born in 1787, followed the old route of a lawyer who casually rendered up verse to friends and community. He was the son and namesake of a Boston merchant who removed to Charleston in 1783, ‘‘where,’’ as his son remembered, ‘‘he conducted an extensive mercantile concern,’’ served on the city council and in the state legislature, and was an agent for the Navy and War Departments during the administration of John Adams. The son was much divided between South Carolina and New England, where he studied at Harvard and where he found a Boston cousin to marry.51 As a poet, Crafts tried invariably to be light and familiar. ‘‘The Raciad’’ makes sport of the horse racing of Charleston, invokes ‘‘Grecian bards’’ and ‘‘laurelled Petrarch,’’ and speaks to a muse who knows ‘‘when to check the reins’’ and when to assist a jockey. In it, the scene is variously described: the betting, the grooms, the ladies, the carriages, all ‘‘the gaudy tribe.’’ This was Crafts in his Popean mood. But there were also poems on ‘‘Love’s Billet-Doux,’’ indeed love in its various moods, ‘‘among the birds,’’ asleep, offering a benediction, being a prisoner, at a Capuchin Chapel, risking rapid waters, all poems in the manner of Thomas Moore. More formally, Crafts tried a solemn ode on the Fourth of July (‘‘Then mid the fiery blaze of war, / Great Washington undaunted stood’’) and tried to render a local service by another ‘‘Ode for the Anniversary of the Orphan-House Institution, 1809.’’ And there were various poems of nautical shipwreck and storm.52 Once such verse would have been amiably greeted and praised. It was a sign of the times that, when Crafts died young and his friends published in 1828 a memorial selection of his prose and poetry, Hugh Legaré brutally demolished the gazebo of Crafts’s accomplishment. Lazy, incompetent, frivolous, vain were faults not only of Crafts’s life, but his poetry, Legaré said. Small gifts had been thrown away by ‘‘suicidal indolence and perverse vanity.’’ Crafts had made ‘‘a heap of ephemeral rubbish,’’ 51. ‘‘Obituary of William Crafts, Sen.,’’ in William Crafts, A Selection, in Prose and Poetry, from the Miscellaneous Writings of the Late William Crafts: To Which is Prefixed, a Memoir of His Life (Charleston, S.C.: C. C. Serring and J. S. Burges, 1828), 214–19 (quotation on p. 214). 52. For these, see Crafts, Writings of the Late William Crafts.

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which might be encountered ‘‘at any time’’ in ‘‘the ‘poetical corner’ of a fashionable newspaper, or monthly magazine.’’ Writing thus was to be Byron in his lesser moments, but without Byron’s technique, talent, or wit. Only here and there, in the odd phrase and line, did Legaré acknowledge merit. Such severity was pedagogical; Legaré did not want Charleston poets or lawyers to end as trivially as Crafts. But criticism was also rooted in a newer conception of poetry, which abjured the sociable. ‘‘What is poetry?’’ Legaré asked elsewhere and turned to Coleridge for an answer, which suggested not an amusement for friends, but something sterner, loftier, more passionate: ‘‘It is but an abridged name for the sublime and beautiful, and for high wrought pathos. It is, as Coleridge quaintly, yet, we think, felicitously expresses it, ‘the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge.’ ’’ Poetry was in nature, in cataracts and ‘‘Alpine precipices and solitudes,’’ but also in human nature, ‘‘in every vehement affection of gladness or grief, of pleasure or pain.’’ It lay in human sympathy, in what passed between people, but also ‘‘in the still more mysterious connexion between the heart of man and the forms and beauties of inanimate nature.’’ 53 Upon poets this was a severe demand, not to be met by scrawling ditties on the back of tavern bills. Washington Allston was a close friend of Coleridge and an acquaintance of Legaré, so one might have expected from him something better, because the painter was also a poet and had given much consideration to formal aesthetics and the complexities of consciousness. If philosophical clarity of purpose could help make a poet—and Coleridge had said it helped—then Allston was advantaged. He leaned to allegory, as philosophical poets did. He rode on horseback through the Milky Way, slept and dreamt ‘‘within a desert cave,’’ and was transported over fabulous landscapes. There he conversed with ‘‘the Sylphs of the Seasons,’’ who explained how time and variety of experience would change him, how he might tap ‘‘the soul’s creative might,’’ how he might ‘‘with rare combining skill, / With new-created worlds fill / Of space the mighty void.’’ This was Allston’s habitual preoccupation, how art made the world. In one of his best poems, ‘‘The Two Painters’’ cross the Styx on Charon’s ferry, and upon landing on the opposite side are cross-examined by the shades about how the world now considered philosophers, critics, poets, and painters, what values such genres were now thought to need. Matters are adjudicated by Leonardo da Vinci, appointed by Minos. One painter stands for the preeminence of passion, nature, and color, which ‘‘holds the highest place; / As being that distinctive part, / Which bounds it from another art.’’ The other represents mind and rules, composition and design, a man ‘‘in aca53. HSL, ‘‘Crafts’ Fugitive Writings,’’ SR 1 (May 1828): 503–29 (quotations on pp. 513, 514); HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ 21–22. Timrod cites the same definition in 1859, approvingly: see Parks, Essays of Timrod, 94.

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demic lore profound,’’ who cares little for coloring and wishes to transcend the ‘‘base, corrupting flesh’’ that chains his ‘‘soul to earth.’’ To help decide, Leonardo sends Mercury to fetch a sample of the artists’ work, but instead a ghostly gallery of all their works appears. Since many paintings concern people and events whose shades now examined their own representations, the distance between reality and art, memory and experience could be interrogated. Alexander the Great is portrayed, but Alexander the shade is displeased, finds the portrait too much of the Dutch school, in which he is given ‘‘Those bloated cheeks, and eyes so dull, / That drivelling mouth, and bottle nose, / Those shambling legs, and gouty toes,’’ which is scarcely the physiognomy he had needed to fight in the ‘‘charnel-house’’ of an ancient battle. Naturally, Leonardo rules that each painter is too partial, that Raphael and Michelangelo had respected both form and color. He sentences the accused to five centuries of being yoked together. If thus, by mutual labors joined, Your jarring souls should be combined, The faults of each the other mending, The powers of both harmoniously blending, Great Jove, perhaps, in gracious vein, May send your souls on Earth again; Yet there One only painter be; For thus the eternal fates decree; ‘‘One leg alone shall never run, Nor two half-Painters make but One.’’ 54 Still more effective than this is Allston’s ‘‘The Paint-King,’’ where the allegory is lightened with a dry satire. In it, an evil demon spirits away a young maiden called Ellen. He grinds her alive up into paint, in order to paint a portrait of Geraldine ‘‘the fairy so fair,’’ upon the understanding that an illlikeness will mean his volcanic extinction, while his success will make Geraldine ‘‘the bride of his bed.’’ He is all but there (‘‘now did the portrait a twinsister seem’’) when, needing to paint in the pupil of her eye, he sees that his palette lacks any black. He looks to the ground, sees Ellen’s real pupils being carried away by a mouse, and knows that he is lost. Geraldine duly engulfs him in flame, hurls him ‘‘in speechless despair / Down the depths of the chasm profound,’’ and from the canvas releases Ellen, evidently improved in appearance by the experience. This poem is very conscious of playing with Gothic conventions, of which Allston was an aficionado, having as a student 54. Washington Allston, Lectures on Art, and Poems, ed. Richard Henry Dana Jr. (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850), 199–239.

Image Not Available Washington Allston, Self-Portrait (Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, bequest of Miss Alice Hooper, reproduced with permission, © 2002 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, all rights reserved)

Image Not Available

Washington Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London)

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been so affected by the likes of The Castle of Otranto that he had had to check under beds and in closets for goblins; Coleridge remembered him as a good teller of ghost stories. ‘‘The Paint-King’’ was, more directly, a burlesque upon Walter Scott’s ‘‘The Fire-King.’’ ‘‘ ‘Oh mercy!’ cried Ellen, and swooned in his arms’’ is not meant to be serious. Allston’s images are alternately faery and plain. The fiend sits on the skull of a Titan and smokes a pipe, ‘‘Twice as big as the Eddystone Lighthouse, descried / As it looms through an easterly fog.’’ 55 The trick was whether wit and invention could make the poem’s bizarre allegory work, which it did. This self-consciousness about words and meaning, narration and theme, was Allston’s strength. He did not take himself too seriously as a poet, though he thought the forms of verse were worth care. Though he wrote conventional poems, he tried to put his experience and ideas into verse, to be light and intellectual, at once. So there were sonnets on looking at a painting by Michelangelo and another on Rembrandt, a poem on the cultural differences between Britain and America, a valedictory sonnet to Coleridge upon news of his death. On the whole, the poems show a man struggling to give vivacity to a melancholy temperament. Of the two painters, described in his allegorical poem, Allston was the passionless one, or so he feared. Coleridge was, for him, the one who had succeeded in ‘‘Binding in one, as with harmonious zones, / The heart and the intellect.’’ Allston dreaded ‘‘dead, prescriptive Rule, the scattered bits / of gathered knowledge.’’ This may explain why he preferred the invention of mythology to the reality of history, which was ‘‘the dead Past.’’ ‘‘Ruthless Time, with whom no creature strives, / At every step treads out a thousand lives’’ are lines which show a sensibility that, under the gift for deft lightness, was fundamentally bleak. Like most Romantics, Allston liked ambiguously to admire innocence, because he was conscious that the world was peopled by ‘‘cunning and bad passions.’’ In his poetry, people touch only rarely and ‘‘the living presence of Another’s mind,’’ the realization of sympathy which Legaré celebrated as the quintessentially poetic task, was a ‘‘deep mystery’’ seldom grasped, still more seldom by the less-than-great, which Allston knew himself to be.56 In his poetry, therefore, he meditated on his sense of failure as a painter, the sense that would eventually freeze him over the giant canvas of ‘‘Belshazzar’s Feast,’’ when he came to live in Massachusetts. But, ominously, most of his verse was written in England, when he was young and productive.57 This paralysis lay in a lack of self-confidence about his ability to ‘‘sense a shape.’’ ‘‘For who shall hope the mystery to scan / 55. Nathalia Wright, ed., The Correspondence of Washington Allston (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 68, 574; Allston, Lectures on Art, 255–62. 56. Allston, Lectures on Art, 362. 57. Washington Allston, The Sylphs of the Seasons, with Other Poems (London: W. Pople, 1813).

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Of that dark being symbolized in man?’’ 58 Such a failing might have furnished helpful doubt to a philosopher, perhaps even to a poet, but was a marked inconvenience in a painter, who needed to sense shapes. This fondness for fairies, demons, sprites, and talking Emotions was a characteristic of Southern poetry. In this, Edgar Allan Poe was typical, though he abominated the Lake School doctrine that poetry should be philosophical, that it should be ‘‘a study—not a passion.’’ He admired Coleridge, but contra Allston’s judicious tethering of reason and passion, Poe believed, ‘‘from the bottom of my heart, that learning has little to do with the imagination—intellect with the passions—or age with poetry.’’ Poetry was opposed to science ‘‘by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth,’’ by being indefinite and musical. It must be brief, capable of being ‘‘read at one sitting’’ (Paradise Lost was hence but a series of small poems or ‘‘essentially prose’’), it must aim at ‘‘an impression, or effect, to be conveyed,’’ which ought always to be beauty, ‘‘the sole legitimate province of the poem.’’ Truth and passion were better done in prose, but a tone (such as sadness) was better accomplished in verse. Originality was important, for poetry had become stultified over the centuries by deferential custom. But originality needed discipline, for the poet should be a master of technique, should know his spondees from his hexameters, his dactyls from his catalectic. Poe, in ‘‘The Rationale of Verse’’ (1848), was dazzlingly knowledgeable about such matters, too much so for John R. Thompson, who took the piece for the Southern Literary Messenger but ruefully found it ‘‘altogether too bizarre and too technical for the general reader.’’ 59 Poe’s argument that the rhythms of meter were attributes of the human body, and so poetry as ‘‘the universal language of the soul’’ would be similar among the Bantus, Chinese, and English possessed little to recommend it as a theory, even or especially to the experts. But the argument was typical of Poe, who was a devotee of logic and regularity, a man who preferred the universal to the local, myth to history. Allston’s faeries existed to tell something of man’s mixed nature; they were but humans who could do surprising things. But Poe’s ravens and condors transported his readers to unknown realms, in order to show patterns indifferent to the idiosyncrasy of human experience. No critic complained more about the ‘‘heresy of the didactic’’ than Poe, but he himself confounded the moral with the didactic and presumed that, because morality bored him, he had nothing to do with the didactic. In fact, he had to do with little else. He insisted that beauty was the poetic principle, but he strove in his own poetry to locate beauty in sound, while he roamed 58. Allston, Lectures on Art, 327, 347, 351, 456, 362, 370. See Allston, Sylphs. 59. G. R. Thompson, Poe: Essays and Reviews, 5–25; Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 395.

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free ‘‘out of space, out of time,’’ in a dream-land, ‘‘with forms no man can discover.’’ 60 Even when, in his verse, an unfortunate human shape wandered among the archangels, ghouls, or golden thrones, it was seldom to fare well, but usually to be dead in a sepulchre, an inert object around which winds blew, bells rang, waters lapped. Where Poe differed from his contemporaries was not in invoking the mythological, but in his ingenuity and by his striving to be original, the quality that his critical times had come so to prize. But mostly Poe differed in his chilling capacity to find beauty in what was beyond nature. There was little warmth of landscape in Poe, much that was silent, shadowy, ‘‘like starlight on a pall.’’ He liked moons, stars, graves, all the cold things. In his hostility to the philosophical, he permitted few subjects in his poems to think. Most only felt. So there is love, here and there; indeed, some of his poems are positively conventional. Yet Elizabeth and Annie and Miss Louise Oliver Hunter, otherwise nice young ladies, are always threatened with the fate of Annabel Lee ‘‘in her tomb by the side of the sea.’’ In his own miserable lifetime, opinion much differed over the merits of Poe’s verse, as it has since. Baudelaire was entranced by it, others found it jangling and bizarre. Simms argued in 1864 that ‘‘Poe & others, who aimed at nothing more than musical effects, & pretty surprises, have materially injured the present growth of Poets.’’ 61 But Poe was certainly the only antebellum Southern poet whose works passed into the popular imagination and made a world of its own, which even Poe could not bear to inhabit and at which others were fascinated to peer, at a safe distance. The Southern poet who came closest to Poe’s bleak faeryland was, surprisingly, Louisa McCord, that most vigorously commonsensical of women. Her opening lines in My Dreams (1848) announces: ‘‘There is a world of visions and of dreams, / Where the unshackled spirit seems to roam / Free from the dross of earth,’’ after which the reader is introduced to a goodly collection of demons and spirits and ‘‘phantom fiends,’’ to a smiling Fancy, a ‘‘spectrehaunted pillow,’’ and a Houri. But McCord’s poetic world, though like Poe’s driven by sharp discontent, is fundamentally humane; she wanted to understand her womanhood and break away from earthly things to gain some freedom of expression, fleetingly. Her poet’s home is ‘‘some far-distant world’’ where her spirit ‘‘feels that it dares be free.’’ This was not a necessity, only a hope. ‘‘Unfetter’d roams / The wandering spirit?’’ she asks, then answers. ‘‘No. ‘Tis bound, fast bound / In adamantine fetters: soaring oft / Above these clayey realms, how quickly dragged / Back to its prison-home!’’ The 60. G. R. Thompson, Poe: Essays and Reviews, 71–94; Patrick F. Quinn, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 79. 61. Quinn, Poe: Poetry and Tales, 56, 103; WGS to Theophilus Hunter Hill, 22 November 1864, in Oliphant, Simms Letters, 6:237.

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prison was her womanhood and her fear of ‘‘myself and nothingness.’’ ‘‘I dare not think,’’ she said, but did, restlessly.62 As a poet, McCord had an unusually powerful sense of time passing, of generations and declension. The opening dedication of My Dreams is to her father. Unlike most women poets she was interested in the experience of being a mother, and she cared much for sons (though daughters eluded her). In ‘‘Pretty Fanny,’’ a young woman dimly understands that her grandmother too ‘‘once . . . was a wedded wife’’ and when young had opinions on lovers and husbands. Grief, loneliness, and death were conventional Romantic themes, often expressed with blank intensity, but in McCord they were emotions painfully felt, not something got up for the sake of genre or to cut an interesting figure. In one of her best poems, the cosmological ‘‘The Voice of Years,’’ one transcendent voice speaks of the origins and development of existence, but also of an individual’s passage from birth to death, ‘‘Of hopes which were blighted, and joys which were flown, / Of the wreck of so much that was bright and was fair,’’ hopes consoled only by the mercy of a Christian god. Another voice, that of a star, is didactic, telling the reader that ‘‘When sorrows upon sorrows build, / Submissive bow, and be content.’’ Another poem, ‘‘His Life Was Like an April Day,’’ is a grim retelling of time’s cost: ‘‘The cares of youth, oh! what are they? / Forgotten, soon as born; / The cares of age bear hope away. / And peace is from us torn.’’ Life is a misery, ‘‘Which grasps and forms the heart / To Sorrow’s hard and roughened mold, / Making our life an art,’’ one which instructs us in pleasing the world, not in telling truth. Old age is but a calm resignation, with ‘‘but the wreck of fear and rage, / Of agony and strife.’’ Even in nature McCord saw death, more than life. Butterflies live briefly, flowers fade, another voice tells that ‘‘thou liv’st but for the tomb.’’ In the Hogarthian ‘‘Poor Nannie,’’ a man hears on a roadside the ghostly sound of a woman’s ‘‘soft, plaintive’’ moan; she is dying, someone whose ‘‘fatal beauty led / To shame, and houseless misery.’’ She has turned away from a loving father to a betraying lover. Later, hearing of her father’s dying away because of her loss, she tries to reach him but cannot, dying in the attempt. A wraith, she appears at his death-bed and he in turn dies, trying to console her frozen tears and pallid cheeks. The man on the roadside had been her lover; he had heard but rode on, went into society, and forgot; ‘‘now he haunts its dazzling glare, / And laughs, and there his smiles are many.’’ 63 McCord’s central poem is probably ‘‘The Fire-fly,’’ in which another inhuman thing tells lessons of evanescence. The pivotal stanza reads: 62. Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography, Letters, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 45–50, 87, 43. 63. Ibid., 133, 66, 93, 72–78.

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Again the lesson was, to be content with what was painfully human, but to be conscious of something more. Bent to earth, bowed down by fear Our highest hopes are only given, When humbled, shrinking, still we dare, Crouched in dust, to dream of heaven.64 McCord was to become political, an anomaly as a woman who spoke forthrightly on slavery, political economy, secession. Her poetry predated that phase. It was religious, when later she was little so, and it often invoked God when groping for something beyond pain and disappointment. It was vulnerable, when later she was concerned more to expose the vulnerabilities of others. Its diction was smooth and even, whereas later she was Carlylean, violent and angular, her prose a sleetstorm of exclamation marks and indignation. Her poetry was individual if never frankly personal, whereas later she was intensely social. In My Dreams, only here and there did she venture a verse that anticipated her later preoccupations. One of them, ‘‘Who Dares to Say They Died?’’ thinks about the problem of the great, to argue that their power survives the tomb, ‘‘For glory will not let them die.’’ But even this was personal, a mediation on what she hoped would be her father’s fate. Further, she foretold that these ‘‘visions of the past’’ would be kept alive not only by the public quality of glory, but by ‘‘that love which will not think they died.’’ Another, ‘‘The Village Churchyard,’’ is an imitation of Thomas Gray’s elegy and hence faintly a catalog of social types, buried and forgotten: statesman, village beauty, stranger, mother, son, father, widow. But, on the whole, society is lost in individuality and loneliness, with the poem offering McCord’s characteristic consolation that sorrow is instructive, it creates a brotherhood schooled in pain. Her plainest politics are in ‘‘Woman’s Progress,’’ but this poem was later, in 1853 after she had commenced her career in prose; it is an enactment in verse of her 1852 essay on ‘‘Enfranchisement of Woman.’’ 65 The transition can perhaps be seen in her play Caius Gracchus. It shows a 64. Ibid., 94–97. 65. Ibid., 60–61, 137–44, 150–54; Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 105–24.

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marked and sophisticated interest (natural to the daughter of Langdon Cheves and the wife of David James McCord) in the game of politics, in how its participants now zig, now zag, now are silent, then act, then fail and suffer, or succeed and suffer. Its main argument, no doubt, is that the state is man’s realm, that women can only act secondarily through sons and husbands to limit its brutality or to make it move. But the drama also refuses to think of women as merely personal. Late in the play, Cornelia’s daughter-in-law Licinia pleads with Gracchus to retire: Come home with me! I’d love you still, Though you of the world’s shame were made the butt; I’d love you in my heart’s world, and forget Men’s flouts and hisses, as the howling cry Of savage beasts that roam in unseen wilds. Men’s voices hurt us not; we’ll let them pass, And think they are spirits, gibbering ghosts, That wander in some stranger world to ours. Gracchus refuses, so Licinia turns to Cornelia for assistance, but does not get it. The mother replied: Alas! I cannot in your cause, my child. Our life is for the world. Man doth forget His every purpose, scorning it; And from the level of his high intent Doth thus degrade himself.66 The life of the world is not his alone, but ‘‘our,’’ a thing for men and women together, with women contributing the mettle to compel action, and men to do. It is a pitiless doctrine, that the personal is political, but it led McCord from the disembodied sprites of her earlier poetry to the bully pulpit of the Southern periodicals. In general, above the white noise of the magazines, the poetry of Southern women was bleaker than the men’s. Mary Elizabeth Lee, to be sure, had special reasons for being unhappy. She was born in Charleston in 1813, the daughter of William Lee (a lawyer), and she mostly educated herself. Formidably; when barely sixteen, she had read all four volumes of Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe in the original French and later she became a dedicated student of German, a translator and a reviewer for many journals, North and South. Caroline Gilman had encouraged her to write for The Southern Rose and she ventured into a verse much influenced by, as Samuel 66. Lounsbury, McCord: PDBL, 222.

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Gilman judged, William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, and Lydia Sigourney. But when thirty, she fell ill ‘‘from a most painful and mysterious disease, which baffled the skill of the ablest physicians’’; it came and went, gradually wore her down, made her spiritual, and forced her thoughts to turn much upon the cold probability of death, which occurred in 1849 when she was just thirty-six. Samuel Gilman thought that her poetry ‘‘transcribed and presented to the world her thoughts, feelings, and experiences, as they arose,’’ that she was therefore ‘‘the historian of her own mind.’’ 67 Unlike Louisa McCord, whose religiosity was something of a speculation, Lee was genuinely pious, someone who found in Christianity a warm consolation and truth, a woman who seems to have looked through her pain towards ‘‘heaven’s bright shore’’ with a simplicity of conviction.68 This softened her verse, which dealt much with moments of death, the brevity of life, ‘‘the short-lived smile of hope,’’ with ‘‘health a perished thought.’’ McCord was a great lady, conscious of her estate and influence, but Lee was modest, someone who wanted not to be remembered by ‘‘monumental marble,’’ but only in someone’s affectionate memory. Only occasionally did she yield to a wistful bitterness, as in ‘‘Human Joys,’’ which observes how ‘‘The fairest tint must yield to night, / The gayest smile to sadness,’’ and: Then say not, in life’s fragile bark, There’s quite enough of pleasure, For memory need but turn, to mark A heap of wasted treasure. But Lee was not only a student of her own pain and hope. Allston, Poe, McCord, all tended to abjure their place and time, or speak of it only by allegory in landscapes vaguely Transylvanian, Alpine, or English. The ‘‘South’’ did not exist for them, but it did for Lee, as it had for Crafts. Such an awareness showed that gentle self-laceration did not require an indifference to the 67. Mary Elizabeth Lee, The Poetical Remains of the Late Mary Elizabeth Lee, biographical memoir by Samuel Gilman (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & Richards, 1851), xi–xl. 68. The problem of religious verse has been little studied. The most ambitious Southern attempt, before the generation of Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks, to reason out the relationship was made by William Cooper Scott of Virginia, who published a series of articles in the Southern Literary Messenger between 1846 and 1853, subsequently published as William Cooper Scott, Genius and Faith: Or, Poetry and Religion, in Their Mutual Relations (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853) In general, Scott argued that poetical genius need not be lawless, that the imagination is best when moral, that the perils of being a genius mandated a special alertness to spiritual issues; at the same time, Scott saw little merit in most devotional poetry and was most concerned to recognize and encourage the spirituality of poetry beyond the confines of the Church, and to refute the impression that religiosity was constricting to the imagination. Without religion, which comprehended the world’s order, the poet fell into discord and confusion.

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external world, which might embrace more than the South. Lee has poems on Virginia, ‘‘A Ballad on the Old Dominion,’’ and George Washington, a sketch of the coronation of Queen Victoria, and reflections on American freedom and Bertrand du Guesclin. There is also civic verse, a ‘‘Centennial Ode for the South-Carolina Society’’ and an elegy for Charleston’s Saint Philip’s Church (‘‘the eldest Temple of my Southern land’’) as it burned.69 Little of this was very good—she reached always for the trite image—but it was adventurous, even candid. In one particular, she was singular. Lee was almost the only white Southern poet who fashioned an image of slaves and blacks. (Grayson was the other, but very differently.) In her poem ‘‘A Sketch,’’ a woman lies newly dead. To see her comes ‘‘an aged man,’’ whom a footnote identifies as ‘‘a slave’’ and adds, ‘‘The circumstances are real.’’ He is nervous, over eighty and nearly senile, struggling to remember how he had once cared for the woman. ‘‘He gazes on her with a vacant eye; / Until at last the startling truth comes home / To his bewildered bosom.’’ He kneels, struggles with doubt at God’s cruelty, recovers his faith, ‘‘kindling prayer / Lends a pure lustre to his ebon brow,’’ then he turns and leaves. That slaves were devoted and confused was scarcely an unusual conception for a Southern writer, though usually in proslavery prose, not in verse. But Lee saw a little beyond that. In ‘‘The Family-Parting—A Fragment,’’ friends are leaving to migrate ‘‘to the strange mazes of the boundless West.’’ The whites weep to be parted. But, in the poem, Lee notices that the migration occasions other griefs. There is also the slow And mournful tread of those, the lowly poor, The tempest-tost of earth! that seldom gain Aught, save a thorny garment of keen scorn, From the proud mansions of the pampered rich To wrap their heart’s core; yet who long had set Love’s signet on this dwelling, and rejoiced To turn uncrouching to its open gate, Where smiling charity, a porter, stood Constant yet never wearied. Of these, ‘‘an aged African’’ woman (not now certified by a footnote but identified in the text) approaches a baby, cries to be disconnected from it, and calls down God’s blessing. ‘‘There was a thrilling pause,’’ broken by ‘‘a shepherd of the household,’’ who bids them all bend down and pray. The message 69. Mary Elizabeth Lee, Poetical Remains, 3, 13, 22–23. She wrote a history textbook for the school children of Massachusetts: see Mary Elizabeth Lee, Social Evenings; or, Historical Tales for Youth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854) and, on this book, Lee, Poetical Remains, xxiii.

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is, no doubt, complacent. Lee seems to suggest that elsewhere slaves may be scorned, but not here, not in this mansion, not in her poetry. Knowing this, Lee’s slaves feel familial gratitude. Yet the old woman mourns the loss of the mistress’s child, not her own black granddaughter, who might be being concomitantly bundled off to Mississippi and be sitting in a nearby wagon, unnoticed by Lee. In the poem, it is unclear whether the benediction is given by a black or white preacher. Usually there might be no occasion for doubt and it is probably the latter, but Lee was unusual enough to notice black Christianity, to have her whites and slaves bend down together in prayer. She has a poem on ‘‘The Blind Negro Communicant,’’ who is also old, mingles with whites at the communion rail, is devout, and touches the poet’s heart. The congregation disperses and he goes ‘‘groping on / Along his midnight path,’’ accompanied by her pity. Lee consoles herself that, though his present is a ‘‘dark prison-house,’’ he would fare better later, this ‘‘old soldier of the cross.’’ Christ, thy Lord, Will lead thee through green pastures, where the still And living waters play.—And though thou art A creature lonely and unprized by men, Yet thou mayst stand a Prince ‘mongst Princes, when The King makes up his jewels! 70 This is not much recognition of black humanity, which is always merely simple and loyal, a thing espied from a pitying height. But for someone like Lee the concession to slaves of a princely heaven was not a slight thing, considering with what conviction she expected soon to be there. Elsewhere in Charleston, another single woman was writing poetry with more force than Lee, but equal eclecticism. Penina Moise (1797–1880) was a school teacher, who from 1845 ran the Hebrew Society for the Instruction of Jewish Youth. She was the daughter of Abraham Moise, a lawyer, who had migrated from Strasbourg in France in 1791; her mother Sarah came from Port-au-Prince in Haiti. Penina Moise was in the Charleston tradition of Reform Judaism and, indeed, was best known for her hymns. Eventually she contributed over 190 of them to the Hymns Written for the Service of Hebrew Congregation Beth Elohim of Charleston, S.C., first published in 1842 and later expanded. Some were later to find their way into the standard hymnal of American Reform Jews.71 In 1833, she published Fancy’s Sketchbook. The title is less promising than the contents, which betray a sensibility concerned to bridge 70. Lee, Poetical Remains, 30–32, 89–92. 71. James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 20, 23, 363, 367, 82, 231–33.

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traditions, the Jewish, the Christian, the local, and the cosmopolitan. Moise was preeminently a poet of ideas. The first few poems of Fancy’s Sketchbook indicate her range. The first is Jewish, to ‘‘The Hero of Gilead,’’ and is an apology for mercy against the ‘‘error of zeal.’’ The second is Shakespearian, ‘‘The Fairy’s Album,’’ in which Oberon borrows an album from Titania in the form of a white rose and tries to write a sonnet on it. Failing, he appeals to Cupid, by whose intervention the petal is turned red by blood, so creating the spring-rose. Hence, this is a poem about the necessary intermingling of pain and pleasure (‘‘peril in ambush to pleasure will cling, / As the thorn to the Rose from that hour’’), but also about the violation of virginity (‘‘Love wept on beholding the crimson dew gush / From the wound into purity’s cell’’). The latter may have been a theme of academic curiosity for a spinster schoolmistress, but perhaps not. The third, ‘‘Greece,’’ is Philhellene, with echoes of Byron and Lessing, speaking in praise of the ancient world, but also with a prediction for modern Greece that ‘‘A Living Laocoon thou writhest still, / Within the Turkish serpent’s mighty grasp, / But noble hearts shall yet their veins distil, / The reptile’s rigid coilings to unclasp.’’ The next is Popean, lines on a butterfly ‘‘crushed between the keys of a piano forte.’’ Then, Moise offers the local and mock-heroic, a poem upon the opening of a theater, with apostrophes to Shakespeare, Garrick, and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, the British actor who came to live and tour in the United States. And so on, through poems on the shipwreck of the Boston or ‘‘On Viewing Scheffer’s Engraving of the Lost Children,’’ on Cain or the execution of Isaac Hayne, on apples or Bonaparte.72 Moise was not afraid to be frankly political, though sometimes she was but vaguely patriotic in the David Ramsay line. One poem speaks of America’s warm reception for ‘‘persecuted foreigners.’’ But there is another half-serious, half-mocking poem, presumably written in the midst of the Nullification Crisis, which comes out frankly against the tariff, complains of the ‘‘menace and moan’’ the controversy is inspiring, and ends with a toast that ‘‘the twoheaded serpent be slain; / For when party is banished, / And fever has vanished / The Southron his strength will regain.’’ There is even a verse on ‘‘The Progress of Poetry’’ which speaks obliquely (the ostensible subject is ancient Greece) against ‘‘the serpent Slavery [which] couched its venomed sting / To poison Man’s most precious bosom-spring,’’ though there is evidence that Moise shared, at least, the use of family slaves.73 No doubt, her collected verse 72. Penina Moise, Fancy’s Sketch Book (Charleston, S.C.: J. S. Burges, 1833). 73. Ibid., 131–32, 60–61, 90–92; Hagy, This Happy Land, 99, notes that her mother, Sarah, in 1818 gave two slaves in trust for Penina, while reserving them for her own use during her lifetime. Sarah Moise died in 1842.

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contained the usual collection of flowers, trees, and sylphs, the customary groping for human allegory in the natural and unnatural world. But Moise is not especially bleak, her verse has an engaging bounce to it, and she is remarkably unafraid and venturesome, interesting for her syncretism. However, most Southern poets, at least the men, seemed to have felt that poetry offered a refuge from politics. Richard Henry Wilde literally gave up a political career to go to Italy and become his own Byron. Albert Pike, who became an energetic Arkansas politician, when not writing of love, confined most of his verse to accounts of his western travel, with purported imitations of Comanche and Navajo songs, much wistful recollection of his New England origins, and more strivings to evoke the strange landscapes of the prairies and canyons.74 In Pike’s verse, New England stood for civilization and the old, it had ‘‘venerable aisles’’ and ‘‘ancient piles,’’ while the West was the disturbingly trackless but exciting novelty of adventure, where it was ‘‘terrible to be alone, / In the wide world, a homeless thing.’’ By the same token, Alexander Beaufort Meek of Alabama, who was also a lawyer and politician, has the odd poem in eulogy to dead Whigs (Clay, Webster, Wilde) and one dead Democrat ( Jackson), but otherwise he was deliberately preoccupied with love and landscape, birds and climate.75 No doubt, this was implicitly political. The preface to Songs and Poems of the South (1857) explains that ‘‘the poetry of a country should be a faithful expression of its physical and moral characteristics,’’ that ‘‘its imagery . . . should be drawn from the indigenous objects of the region.’’ ‘‘It partakes of the raciness of the soil, the purity of the atmosphere, the brilliancy of its skies, its mountain pictures, and its broad sweeps of level and undulating territory.’’ Thus the very flowers reflexively embody ‘‘the Patriotic and the Beautiful.’’ So the relentless benignity of Meek’s poetry was a political gesture. There is nothing dark and Gothic in it, nothing that Poe or McCord might have found apposite to the human condition, but everywhere sunshine, verdancy, gentleness. Meek was very much the poetic antecedent to Henry Grady. That Alabama has a ‘‘delicate clime’’ was not evident to many of its residents, including Meek himself in prosaic moments, when he wrote of ‘‘the indolence induced by the 74. Pike came from Newburyport, Massachusetts, where his father, Benjamin, was a cobbler, farmhand, and odd-jobs man; relatives and his own work sponsored Albert’s attendance at Harvard. He went south and west to Arkansas in 1831. On this, see Walter Lee Brown, A Life of Albert Pike (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 1–12. 75. He was the son of Samuel Mills Meek, a physician and Methodist minister in Columbia, S.C., who moved to Tuscaloosa in 1814, when Alexander was five. The son attended the University of Alabama, then became a lawyer, editor, and judge in Mobile. On Meek, see Margaret Gillis Figh, ‘‘Alexander Beaufort Meek: Pioneer Man of Letters,’’ Alabama Historical Quarterly 2 (Summer 1940): 127–51, and Philip D. Beidler, First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).

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enervating fervors of the summer.’’ But, in his verse, it is always spring, in a place ‘‘where winter shall never intrusively come,’’ and even summer has but a ‘‘glow.’’ The breezes blow softly, mocking-birds sing in bowers visited by maidens, there are magnolias, oranges, lime, and honey-suckle, and Alabama is a rose, whose thorns damage only the tyrant.76 Certainly Meek was the most self-consciously Southern of poets. His verse, what it described and acknowledged, was enfolded by the South. When Wilde died, Meek mourned him as the ‘‘Bard of the South,’’ and commanded, ‘‘Droop down thy willows, Southern land!’’ So Meek wrote poems to Southern mothers in the Revolution, to Stone Mountain and the Mexican Gulf, to Virginia ladies and a ‘‘darkeyed Georgian.’’ One of his longest, most explicitly political poems, ‘‘The Day of Freedom,’’ which he ‘‘pronounced at Tuscaloosa’’ on the Fourth of July 1838, though it speaks warmly of the American Revolution and celebrates its veterans, though it cautions against party strife and animosity from Maine downward and pleads for ‘‘Fraternal States,’’ nonetheless reserves to the South stronger language. The South is an ‘‘imperial land.’’ Conquest is what freedom is for, landscape is the enumeration of possession, and so the Forest of Arden has a master.77 Meek was a cruder version of Simms as a poet. In the latter, there is the same sense that landscape is overlain by history, especially a succession of peoples, Indian and European. Simms too has verse on ‘‘the sunny, sunny South!’’ with ‘‘myriad flowers that bloom and fade.’’ But Simms had a much greater range, a better technique, more historical and literary knowledge, and posed less. Moreover, Simms wrote poetry incessantly. In practice, he wrote as a relaxation from the demands of prose, though he did believe with Shelley that ‘‘the Poet is a Seer,’’ and poetry was ‘‘winged thought.’’ Simms became best at the unguardedly personal lyric. Most Southern poets disguised self, but the ‘‘I’’ was continual with him. ‘‘Find out the secret in your soul & you will find out the secrets in other souls,’’ he advised an aspiring poet. Perhaps his parvenu roughness helped; he was willing to be vulnerable and few Southern gentlemen were. Indeed he wrote scathingly of ‘‘mere professors of the liberal arts,’’ the ‘‘men of elegant tastes and of moderate talent,’’ who swelled a pageant but were never the leaders of social change. Elsewhere he included Allston’s poetry in this category for being only ‘‘the elegant trifles of a well drilled, well ordered mind,’’ and having a dalliant, unpassionate ‘‘intercourse with the muse.’’ ‘‘Nothing, that we know,’’ he added, ‘‘has ever come from 76. See, especially, ‘‘The Homes of Alabama,’’ in Alexander Beaufort Meek, Songs and Poems of the South (New York: S. H. Goetzel, 1857), 57–59. 77. Albert Pike, Prose Sketches and Poems, Written in the Western Country (Boston: Knight & Horton, 1834), 89, 156; Alexander Beaufort Meek to ‘‘brother,’’ 31 October 1850, Samuel M. Meek and Family Papers, MDAH; Meek, Songs and Poems, v, 5, 2, 57–59, 107–9, 215–46.

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William Gilmore Simms (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

amateur authorship, but dilettantism, affectation, pert pretence and the most miserable conceit.’’ 78 Simms was an exponent of a theory of literary alienation, almost a proponent of the avant-garde. This was not merely a historical and social argument —the idea that men of genius saw more clearly and earlier, were scorned, might die in indigence and failure, then be recognized and have their truths posthumously enacted. Simms did believe all that, so much so that he relished and even invented evidence of his disparagement by society as evidence of his gifts. But he also saw alienation as a personal history, as the story of how the gifted child grew up. In one of his essays, he gives the history of such a boy, who ‘‘springs into sight’’ in a country village and ‘‘claims to be in possession of a secret.’’ He is set aside, does not play with the other boys, becomes solitary, and wanders alone in the woods. Composing original songs in the 78. James Everett Kibler Jr., ed., Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 197; WGS to Theophilus Hunter Hill, 22 November 1864, in Oliphant, Simms Letters, 6:236–37, 239; WGS, ‘‘Spirit of the Age,’’ SQR 7 (April 1845): 315–16; WGS, ‘‘The Writings of Washington Allston,’’ SQR 4 (October 1843): 381, 390.

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wilderness, he tries them out on ‘‘some favorite,’’ who does not understand, laughs, and then broadcasts the apparent folly of the versifier. So the boy’s alienation grows amid these accusations of presumption. ‘‘This isolation produces gloom, a fervid sense of injustice, a morbid sense of resentment.’’ (The boy may have entered the woods as Wordsworth, but he comes out as Byron.) Growing in ability and confidence, harder to refute, he compels society’s rage at his impiety. He survives only by ‘‘voluntary exile.’’ Only later does he find a few individuals who listen, who speak to others, who spread his doctrines, which change the world.79 This was, of course, a history of what Simms bitterly felt, and what he hoped. Many Southerners had such Romantic theories, but few managed to translate them into effective poetry, to make the Ashley River work as well as Lake Windermere.80 Simms did not manage it often, but sometimes he came surprisingly close, by his usual profligate process of hit-and-miss. In truth, his verse touched on most things, but was preoccupied with landscape, history, and self. In his poetry, Indians and the Spanish are frequent, rivers flow and mountains stand steadily, but woods are preeminent. On the whole, he abjured the ghostly, though few Southern poets could entirely omit ‘‘cold phantoms,’’ for they were the symbols of memory. Even Pike, beset by western reality, leaned towards the ethereal: his Coleridgean ‘‘Fantasma’’ speaks of the ‘‘void’’ of his heart, of gazing inward and seeing only shadows, dreams, memory, and imagination, and the poem is sharply conscious that ‘‘while I separate / Myself yet more from my external life, / And turn within, I see those floating thoughts / Quiver amid the chaos of the heart.’’ Rather, Simms could write with direct colloquialism, rather in the way of Thackeray later. ‘‘The Modern Lion,’’ for example, makes fun of the Beau Nashes of the world: I am a pretty gentleman I walk about at ease, My habits are all pleasant ones, And very apt to please. I dress with taste and tidyness, My coat’s a purple brown; And with a bamboo in my hand, I switch my way ‘bout town. There were many such verses, ephemeral but pleasing. However, when Simms ventured the epic strain, the effect is seldom compelling. Here and there, he hit the lighter side of Byron, as in ‘‘Tis True That Last Night I Adored Thee’’: 79. WGS, ‘‘Spirit of the Age,’’ 317–20. 80. For Simms on Wordsworth, see WGS, ‘‘Poetical Works of Wordsworth,’’ SQR n.s. 2 (September 1850): 1–23.

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His most characteristic poem, perhaps his best, was ‘‘Boy Lost in the Woods,’’ first written in 1828, then rewritten in the late 1830s, which is an effective enactment of Simms’s philosophy, a verse of sharp directness, which implicates the reader in an allegory of Germanic resonance. ‘‘You’ve been a boy,’’ it starts, peremptorily. You’ve been a boy. Forget your toils awhile, And be a boy again. Look back, and listen, While in the evening sunset, where we sit Aneath the lengthening shadows of the trees, Your fancy leads you to the by-gone hours, The ancient play-places, the time-worn haunts, Sacred to youth, and dear to thousand sports You shall not know again, save in some tale Of erring childhood, such as now you hear. So Simms describes a happy boyhood of ‘‘sweeter certainties,’’ with himself as ‘‘an erring youth—a lone one too, / Whom nothing seemed to love, yet loving all.’’ He wanders away from the city into the woods, ‘‘dense, green, and spacious’’ where his ‘‘freedom grew.’’ He is running away from ‘‘the streets, the city, man, my aunts, cousins, / And my own mother,’’ so his rambles are ‘‘sad.’’ But wandering thoughtlessly, he gets lost, becomes hungry, tries to get back, but fails: Fairly confounded with the crossing paths The crooked trees, the over-crowded thickets, That led, misled, now right, now left, now forward, Yet wrong, though going right, still left, though forward, And going backward, even when forward bent, And losing ground at every step I gained. The blow is most to his self-esteem, for he prided himself on his knowledge and command. Then the woods appear to grow dangerous, ‘‘vines caught my 81. Kibler, Poems of Simms, 102, 44, 207; Pike, Sketches and Poems, 186–91.

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feet,’’ and it begins to rain. In panic, the boy starts to run, until exhausted he lies down beneath an oak ‘‘and sobb’d until I sobb’d myself asleep.’’ He wakes up calmer, and ‘‘with resolute thought / I took my manhood on,’’ and tries again to find a way, but fails again. He begins to regret what he has lost, ‘‘the vacant chair I had so often fill’d,’’ the meats of his suppers. In my grief The ugliest crone of an aunt, the lankest cousin That ever vex’d before, had then been grateful To my sad eyes. He thinks he might be being punished for his lack of familial warmth, he warms to his mother’s accomplishments. But still he is lost, and despairingly sits down to await his fate, ‘‘almost resign’d, whatever it should be.’’ Inevitably, a woodsman shows up, takes the boy to his cottage, feeds him well, tells him ‘‘strange stories,’’ ‘‘queerly happy,’’ which now as a man the poet still remembers, and might one day write down and publish, if he can muster the courage to face ‘‘that most awful tribunal, / Where sits, upraised on sculls of slaughtered authors, / The mighty monster call’d an Editor.’’ So the boy sleeps well, and is shown the way home on the next day. His mother whips him for his errancy, as does his school master. This was intended to create a taste For the enjoyments of my loving home, But failed most strangely. So he becomes a habitual truant, whom eventually all abandon as a hopeless case. Their tyranny—like tyrannies in general, Upon the victims—have but strengthen’d me. It made me what I am—though it may bring me To block and halter yet—a fearless patriot, Ready to stand by any hapless urchin, Doom’d to three aunts, and thirty ugly cousins.82 This poem’s imagery was not original, but a variant on the brothers Grimm, a standard Bildungsroman arguing that pain and self-awareness make a worthwhile man. Still, it is humorous, when such narratives tended to be flatly earnest. Its language, though sometimes slack, often is refreshingly direct and tactile. Simms was conscious of sentiment, but also its absence. Not many Southerners were then willing to admit that families might be unhappy, 82. Kibler, Poems of Simms, 84–93.

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mothers cruel, and that a boy might benefit from that experience. No doubt, he stopped far short of disillusion. Simms liked to look on the bright side of despair and pain. But Simms, unlike Meek, knew there was a problem in the human condition and found a way in his poetry to state it, without resorting to faeryland, by also noticing that the world was ordinary, was also full of ‘‘plates and dishes, cups and clinking saucers.’’ 83 Oddly, Simms’s protégés, Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne, who carried the reputation of the South’s poetry in the mid-nineteenth century, in this regard marked a retrogression, though they were far more dedicated to the craft than Simms was, indeed were among the first Southerners to put themselves forward as poets pure and simple, willing to justify themselves solely by their verse. But the generation younger than Simms became Pre-Raphaelite and Tennysonian, began to grow interested in chivalry, maidens, and flaxen hair. From Virginia, Philip Pendleton Cooke’s Froissart Ballads (1847) had pointed the way. He died young, as Romantic poets ought, and his brother remembered that his tastes ran to ‘‘the old poets & prose writers,’’ such as Chaucer, and, among the moderns, preferred Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge over Southey and Byron, and then admired Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and Ulysses. The Froissart Ballads themselves were modeled on Lockhart’s translation of old Spanish ballads and were not memorable, being but weakened border ballads crossed with an Idylls of the King of uncertain narrative power. Only a very few of Cooke’s shorter lyrics have much impact, notably ‘‘Florence Vane,’’ which concerns being spurned by a young lady who then dies: The lilies of the valley By young graves weep, The pansies love to dally Where maidens sleep.84 This was more or less where Timrod and Hayne took matters up in the 1850s, they being very much interested in being sick and in love with Madeline, Katie, and her (usually unhelpful) like, but also struggling with the messianic role of the philosopher poet. Timrod was the better of the two, which Hayne himself acknowledged, though because Timrod died young soon after the war (which had led him into uncharacteristically political verse), it was Hayne who survived to make himself into one of the preeminent bridges be83. Ibid., 91. 84. John Esten Cooke to Rufus W. Griswold, 6 June 1851, John Esten Cooke Papers, LC; Louis D. Rubin Jr., et al., The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 124; John D. Allen, ed., Philip Pendleton Cooke: Poet, Critic, Novelist (Johnson City, Tenn.: East Tennessee State University Research Advisory Council, 1969), 11.

Henry Timrod (From Henry Timrod, Poems of Henry Timrod [1901])

Paul Hamilton Hayne (From P. H. Hayne, Poems [1882])

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tween the Old and the New South. But both bore much responsibility for spreading the legend of Southern literary debility, amplified from Simms, because for them life was pointless unless it possessed futility, spurned love, languid emotions in need of stimulation, conditions ‘‘yet so hopeless, yet so cureless.’’ The South would not have been valuable to them if other than debilitating. In the first poem Timrod gave to Russell’s Magazine, ‘‘The Arctic Explorer’’ sets off like Tennyson’s Ulysses or Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym to seek a newer world, but doubtfully: Whether, my hardy shipmates! we shall reach Our bourne, and come with tales of wonder back, Or whether we shall lose the precious time, Locked in thick ice, or whether some strange fate Shall end us all, I know not; but I know A lofty hope, if earnestly pursued, Is its own crown, and never in this life Is labor wholly fruitless. Which meant, of course, that, when it came to life, labor was mostly fruitless. Elsewhere, in ‘‘The Summer Bower,’’ Timrod finds a world that is ‘‘lax and lifeless,’’ to which he brings ‘‘vain repinings, sickly sentiments, / Or inconclusive sorrows,’’ for which nature offers no solace to ‘‘a weak, unquiet heart.’’ Likewise, Hayne writes on Lethe, ‘‘a dumb, dark region through whose desolate heart / Creeps a dull river with a stagnant flood,’’ and on ‘‘The Realm of Rest,’’ where ‘‘action faints, and Echo dies, / And the languid dirge of billows, / Lulls with opiate symphonies.’’ 85 In such worlds, there was repose, but little satisfaction. In Hayne’s ‘‘The Island in the South,’’ a man and a woman escape shipwreck on a paradise isle, live in love and with nature, but the woman dies and the man goes mad with grief. Then he returns to urban civilization (‘‘the stifling mart, / Where heaven’s free winds are throttled in the fumes / Of furnaces, and the insulted sun / Glooms through the crowding vapors at midday’’), only to plan escape again. In the cases of both Timrod and Hayne, though more for the latter, disappointment was implicit in their repudiation of both the bustling world of commerce and the enervating world of nature. Real life hangs between the streets of New York and August in the Low Country, with neither an adequate option. As Hayne puts it in his ode of 1856 upon the first anniversary of the Carolina Art Association, ‘‘There is no joy within us, no repose, / One creed our beacon, and one god our hold, / The creed, the god, of gold.’’ As 85. Edd Winfield Parks, Henry Timrod (New York: Twayne, 1964), 108; Henry Timrod, Poems of Henry Timrod, introduction by George S. Bryan (Richmond: B. F. Johnson, 1901), 17, 103–4, 106–8; PHH, Poems (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1882), 5, 7.

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with Poe, in Hayne science denies spirit, finds in man but transience, only ‘‘a thing of time and clay.’’ Art and poetry are supposed to do better, to ‘‘rise to a subtler view, a broader range / Of thought and aim.’’ Mine is a realm from immemorial time Begirt by deeds and purposes sublime, Whose consecration is faith’s quenchless flame Whose voices are the songs of poet-sages, Whose strong foundations resting on the ages, The throes and crashes of empires have not shaken, Nor any futile force of human rages.86 In Timrod’s ‘‘Vision of Poesy,’’ which lies somewhere between Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode and Shelley’s Alastor, the poet speaks of a small boy, who has grasped that nature is ‘‘inscribed with signs and characters unknown,’’ and that ‘‘but for sinful thoughts . . . we could spell the thrilling secret out.’’ Like Simms’s Lost Boy, he grows and wanders ‘‘to far hills and distant wilds,’’ and then finds a quiet spot in the forest, where he is visited by a maiden, ‘‘the Fairy of his dreams,’’ Poesy herself. I sow the germ which buds in human art, And, with my sister Science, I explore With light the dark recesses of the heart, And nerve the will, and teach the wish to soar; I touch with grace the body’s meanest clay, While noble souls are nobler for my sway. She describes her influence on mankind’s emotions and ambitions, but says she is but a catalyst, ‘‘I give the genius, point the proper ends, / But the true bard is his own only Fate.’’ The poet serves mankind sacrificially: ‘‘his songs attain the common breast, / Dyed in his own life’s blood,’’ if he was pure, devoted, dedicated to the proposition that ‘‘Truth alone is Beauty.’’ He must be androgynous, ‘‘as arméd warrior strong . . . gentle as a girl.’’ With this vision, the boy grows into a man, passes into ‘‘the busy world to seek his fate,’’ and comes back a grizzled and jaded Wanderer to his native land. There he speaks of his experiences, of his failure in poetry and love, which stems from his introspective selfishness (‘‘that dark world of shadows, where the soul / Wanders bewildered’’), from his inability to reach towards others; It was thy own peculiar difference That thou didst seek; nor didst thou care to find Aught that would bring thee nearer to thy kind. 86. PHH, Poems, 7–13.

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Rather, the Poet ‘‘would represent his race and speak for all’’: so the great Poet spheres Worlds in himself; no selfish limit bounds A sympathy and folds all characters, All ranks, all passions, and all life almost In its wide circle. But this lesser poet fails; ‘‘thy songs were riddles hard to mortal ear.’’ This is not utter failure, for something might be transmitted, not his name but ‘‘thy thoughts, / Clothed in sweeter rhymes.’’ Still, the higher mission of poetry is a very heavy burden, more than prose has to bear. In Hayne’s ‘‘The Soul-Conflict,’’ the soul is defeated but ‘‘never disheartened,’’ she ‘‘through the siege of temptations, / Yields not unto fraud, nor to might, / Unquelled by the rush of the passions, / Serene ‘mid the tumults of fight.’’ 87 But, from the first, Timrod and Hayne were discouraged, made it their badge, and kept score of disappointments as evidence of their soul’s purity. To William J. Grayson, this was a sickly and silly business. He was briskly neoclassical, he leaned to commonsense and Lord Kames. What made poetry was rules: ‘‘We may . . . define poetry to be the expression, by words, of thought or emotion, in conformity with metrical and rhythmical laws,’’ no more, no less. In the 1850s, Grayson had published The Hireling and the Slave and The Country, both poems self-consciously Augustan.88 The former was most noticed, and has been most deprecated subsequently, for its proslavery argument, that the African slave in the South lived better than the industrial worker employed and unemployed in Europe and the North. In this thesis, Grayson was little original. Indeed it was part of his stance that he did not need to be original, for all truths were old. Further, he believed that political economy was a fit subject for verse, because poetry and prose shared the whole domain of ideas and sensibility, and hence poets should not be confined to conversing with peddlers, or to observing daffodils and pots of basil. What mattered was technique, what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed. 87. Edd Winfield Parks, Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1962), 195; Timrod, Poems, 74–100; PHH, Poems, 16. 88. He was the son of William Grayson, a soldier and sheriff who died insolvent in 1797; his widow, Susannah, remarried a rich planter called William Joyner, who came from England. The younger Grayson was mostly educated at academies in New York and New Jersey, then at South Carolina College. He married well and invested well; he became a railroad director, the proprietor of houses in Charleston and Beaufort, as well as of several plantations and hundreds of slaves. But he was a frequent politician and inveterate officeholder, in state and nation; from 1841 to 1853 he was the U.S. Collector of Customs in Charleston. See Richard J. Calhoun, ed., Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 3–7.

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By these standards, The Hireling and the Slave has a reasonable claim to being the best poem written in the antebellum South, for its wit, command of language, allusiveness, and tautness of argument. Like most Augustan verse, in what it recommended, it could be slack, especially in pastoral: smiling in the West, Hope, still alluring, calms the anxious breast; And, dimly rising through the landward haze, New forms of beauty court his wistful gaze: The level line of strand that brightly shines Between the rippling waves and dusky pines, A shelving beach that sandy hillocks bound, With clumps of palm and fragrant myrtle crowned. As a description of Grayson’s home, the Sea Islands, this is more efficient than effective, though it is notable (the Augustan being habitually disillusioned) that Grayson did not fail to notice the cost of landscape. Unlike Meek, Grayson knew that the South had its price: so from ‘‘Mississippi’s broad alluvial lands . . . All bounties given, but health alone denied.’’ But Grayson was best at invective, at the sneer and the knowing glance. The poem contains a remarkable Dunciad of abolitionists, of which this is a sample: There, chief and teacher, Gerrit Smith appears, There Tappan mourns, like Niobe, all tears, Carnage and fire mad Garrison invokes, And Hale, with better temper, smirks and jokes; There Giddings, with the Negro mania bit, Mouths, and mistakes his ribaldry for wit, His fustian speeches into market brings, And prints and peddles all the paltry things. In particular, Grayson pursued Sumner as the hypocrite: There supple Sumner, with the Negro cause, Plays the sly game for office and applause; What boots it if the Negro sink or swim? He wins the Senate—’tis enough for him. What though he blast the fortunes of the state With fierce dissension and enduring hate? He makes the speech, his rhetoric displays, Trims the neat trope, and points the sparkling phrase With well-turned period, fosters civil strife, And barters for a phrase a nation’s life.

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No doubt, in such verse we are always outside Drury Lane or in Hyde Park, but in subject matter Grayson was briskly contemporary. Not only Sumner, but Millard Fillmore appears and various of Grayson’s contemporaries quietly show up. So, in talking of how America provided a home for religious refugees, he wrote: Luther’s followers, in their Western home, Like Bachman, scorn the bulls and fires of Rome. Likewise, William Elliott, the hunter, fisherman, and Grayson’s neighbor, puts in an appearance in a passage that celebrates Carolina Sports: Not Elliott, early trained, with easy skill, Old Walton’s various offices to fill, The sport to lead, the willing ear beguile, And charm with rare felicity of style, The straining line with nicer art employs, With keener zest the manly sport enjoys, Or takes the fish and fortunes of the day, Sunshine or shower, more buoyantly gay. There is a history of South Carolina, pre- and post-Columbian, in much of Grayson’s verse.89 The formal argument of The Hireling and the Slave is, in fact, complicated. It is not merely a proslavery apology, though it is strongly driven by indignation at New Englanders who profited from the slave trade or at the Duchess of Sutherland who, as Louisa McCord elsewhere said, preached Christian philanthropy while pocketing the revenues of Highland Clearances. Grayson does say that the lots of the slave and the hireling have, throughout history, been miserable, but he also deprecates this. He was not a straightforward apologist for any master class, especially the European, in peace or war: For him, no boon successful commerce yields, For him no harvest crowns the joyous fields, The streams of wealth that foster pomp and pride, No food nor shelter for his wants provide. . . . Torn from the cottage, conscript peasants go To distant wars, against an unknown foe, On fields of carnage, at ambition’s call, Perish—the warrior’s tool, the monarch’s thrall; Wasted by plagues, unhonored their remains, They fill a ditch on Danube’s marshy plains. 89. Parks, Essays of Timrod, 151; William J. Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave, Chicora, and Other Poems (Charleston, S.C.: McCarter, 1856), 28–29, 38–39, 61–62.

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This, too, was Augustan. In that tradition, the characteristic objects of satire were bishops, lords, politicians, profligate sons, and rapacious merchants. What distinguishes an upper class is hypocrisy, the plundering use of others’ lives, with religion and unctuous piety as their apology. But Grayson was an American Augustan, which complicated matters, for he had to consider whether the New World had changed anything, when John Gay’s Bear’s Opera moved westward. And this was, in truth, at the heart of the poem. The Hireling and the Slave is mostly a poem about migration, about the convergence of two different migrants, the European and the African, on the American strand. In general, Grayson argues that America had made a difference: his bleakest passages concern the Old World, William Hogarth’s England, but also Africa. He does not prettify the slave’s migration: Companions of his toil, the axe to wield, To guide the plow, and reap the teeming field, A sable multitude unceasing pour From Niger’s banks and Congo’s deadly shore; No willing travelers they, that widely roam, Allured by hope to seek a happier home, But victims to the trader’s thirst for gold, Kidnapped by brothers, and by fathers sold, The bondsman born, by native masters reared, The captive band in recent battle speared; For English merchants bought; across the main, In British ships, they go for Britain’s gain; Forced on her subjects in dependent lands, By cruel hearts and avaricious hands, New tasks they learn, new masters they obey, And bow submissive to the white man’s sway. It is the poem’s thesis that America had improved the human condition; it had not abrogated the cold fact of human inequality, but it had found a more humane way. This was partly a religious argument. As his autobiography was later to show, Grayson took pleasure in boisterous eighteenth-century ways but stiffly accepted that the growing piety of the nineteenth century had been a step forward, that it was better to sit in a pew than to lie vomiting under a table. So the great gift of America to the African was Christianity (‘‘religion undefiled / Dawns in the heart of Congo’s simple child’’), which taught truth, discipline, and gladness in being an efficient laborer. By the same token, the master had learned kindness and philanthropy.90 But, beyond that, Grayson was interested in landscape, which he lovingly 90. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 350–60; Grayson, Hireling and the Slave, 22, 25, 30, 31.

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invoked. There is something valuable in the American land, though it is unclear what, for it had not saved from near extinction the Indians, the people who linger in the poem as ghosts admonishing the slave not to risk unsupervised freedom in competition with the white man. Much is made of Providence, and a little of prophecy. Indeed, the poem ends with a vision of former slaves returning to Africa, there to create a modern, progressive society. It is a vision ironically similar to that then being articulated by black intellectuals like Alexander Crummell and Martin Delany:91 To Africa, their fatherland, they go, Law, industry, instruction, to bestow; To pour, from Western skies, religious light, Drive from each hill or vale its pagan rite, Teach brutal hordes a nobler life to plan, And change, at last, the savage to the man. . . . To tropic suns her fruits and flowers unfold, And Libya hails, at last, her age of gold.92 Here, in fact, lies the poem’s failure; it deals in hope, tries to be millennial and Augustan, all at once. This fudging is much connected with Grayson’s liking for his own place, which he celebrates elsewhere in Chicora and The Country. He was fascinated with how men interacted with nature in history’s progress, was a sort of ecological poet, often veered dangerously close to the abominated Wordsworth or even the Chateaubriand of Atala and René in writing of Nature and ‘‘deep, mysterious things, / Dim shadowy visions, half discerned.’’ Living as he did on the very edge of the continent, Grayson often pondered the moment of first contact, of what was lost and gained, in the time after the Indian first looked out and saw ‘‘great canoes, / Broadwinged, like winter cranes that fly,’’ disgorging ‘‘a hideous crew.’’ In Grayson’s sight, the European is masterly, a member of a conquering and imperial race, which makes a world but also destroys one. Nature’s ‘‘subtle spells and plastic powers’’ are needed for the white man’s salvation, too.93 Having written verse and being learned about its history, Grayson felt entitled in 1858 to discourse in Russell’s Magazine on ‘‘What is Poetry?’’ It is an sharp polemic against Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth. According 91. On this, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (1978; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 9–82; and Tunde Adeleke, Unafrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). 92. Grayson, Hireling and the Slave, 73, 74. 93. Ibid., 97, 123; William J. Grayson, The Country (Charleston, S.C.: Russell and Jones, 1858), 13.

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to Grayson, poetry is not inspiration, a divine afflatus, or soothsaying, but technique alone, done well or ill. It has no single or necessary form. It concerns human nature, which is various: ‘‘Because tastes are different, therefore poetry assumes a diversity of forms, applies itself to all subjects, addresses itself to all minds, and becomes, like them, multiform in shape and character.’’ This being so, Grayson was entitled to his own tastes. He did not much like border ballads, thought ‘‘The Ancient Mariner’’ repulsive in its putrescent imagery, was neutral about Shakespeare (a reticence which itself hinted at criticism), praised Milton ‘‘as supreme in sublimity and beauty,’’ but was vitriolic about Wordsworth. ‘‘He looked on nature as a kind of poetical milch cow, which he never tired of milking—a mass of raw material to be made up into metrical dresses’’: this is one of Grayson’s milder complaints, which hinges on a sense that Wordsworth had used nature to make a living as a poet, had been ‘‘mechanical,’’ even industrial in his commercial exploitation. ‘‘He wrote to write. It was his business, his occupation, his trade. He wrote from the eye and the head, and not, like Burns, from the heart.’’ 94 To all this, Henry Timrod took passionate exception, and in a subsequent number of Russell’s Magazine, he replied. One should, the young man insisted, distinguish between poetry and the poetical; the latter might inhabit more than verse forms. As Coleridge had suggested, ‘‘The distinctive qualities of poetry grow out of the poetic genius itself,’’ which was ‘‘a more than ordinary sensibility,’’ which made poetry a ‘‘medium of strong emotion . . . arising from an imagination more than usually vivid, [and] is the language natural to men in a state of excitement, is sensuous, picturesque, and impassioned.’’ So poetry and prose had a different vocabulary. Verse saw some subjects as unsuitable, some words (especially the abstract) as unfit, because poetry aimed at beauty. No doubt, such qualities might be present in prose, just as the prosaic was inevitable in verse, especially if a poem was long. ‘‘Verse, therefore, is required to preserve these parts in some sort of keeping with the poetry, the object being the production of a harmonious whole.’’ So Timrod defended Coleridge and ‘‘The Ancient Mariner,’’ though not fiercely. But, ‘‘Of the caricature of Wordsworth it is difficult to speak without indignation.’’ Plausibly, Timrod insisted that Wordsworth too spoke from the heart, and he scattered long quotations from ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ and other poems to prove it, as though no one reading them could doubt, as certainly Timrod never doubted. With this, Grayson was not impressed. In his autobiography, he was to elaborate his first argument but also remembered with amusement Timrod’s rejoinder. ‘‘I have the misfortune not to sympathize strongly with the admirers of Wordsworth. They are numerous and zealous. . . . I said so once [that Wordsworth was 94. Parks, Essays of Timrod, 141–46.

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mechanical] and was nearly annihilated by an indignant admirer who overwhelmed me with quotations to prove how much I was in error. The quotations did not change my opinion.’’ 95 It has been customary to see in this argument a struggle between Timrod the modern and Grayson the antiquated. Certainly this was how Timrod saw the controversy: ‘‘There are scholars of pretension among us, with whom Blair’s Rhetoric is still an unquestionable authority. . . . With the vast advance that has been made in critical science since the time of Blair few seem to be intimately acquainted. . . . Here Pope is still regarded by many as the most correct of English poets, and here, Kaimes, after having been everywhere else removed to the top shelves of libraries, is still thumbed by learned professors and declamatory sophomores.’’ So ‘‘gentlemen . . . know Pope or Horace by heart, but . . . have never read a word of Wordsworth or Tennyson, or . . . have read them with suspicion, and rejected them with superciliousness.’’ Indeed, Timrod’s interpretation, which was a sharpening of ideas found more diffusely in Simms his mentor, came to seem a master interpretation of the Old South’s intellectual inadequacies, the more so as Grayson’s Augustanism expressed itself in proslavery verse, so aesthetics and ideology neatly conjoined in the morally anachronistic.96 In fact, it was Grayson who was the modern, Timrod the conservative. For, of course, in this matter Timrod spoke the conventional wisdom of Southern poetry, which had been reading Wordsworth and Coleridge, and had been writing Romantic verse, for at least forty years when this squabble broke out. Two of the most prominent poets in Charleston and Georgia in the generation before Timrod, James Mathew Legaré and Thomas Holley Chivers, had been Romantic and transcendental. Timrod, indeed, began his rejoinder by implicitly appealing to public opinion, to ‘‘the general dissatisfaction occasioned by [Grayson’s] article.’’ Grayson, conversely, knew that he was heterodox. The preface to The Hireling and the Slave defends its metrical form as ‘‘offering some variety to the poetic forms that are almost universally prevalent. The poetry of the day is, for the most part, subtile and transcendental,’’ remote and fanciful, mystical and obscure. ‘‘It has occurred to me that a return to the more sober style of an earlier period may not be an unreasonable experiment on the public taste. The fashion in dress and furniture now and then goes back a century or two; why not the fashion in verse? The school of Dryden and Pope is not entirely forgotten. May we not imitate the poetry of Queen Anne’s time as well as the tables and chairs?’’ At a later time, this instinct would 95. Ibid., 73–77, 79–82; Calhoun, Witness to Sorrow, 164–65. 96. Parks, Essays of Timrod, 85–86. This argument is to be found in many places, but most starkly in Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), esp. 46.

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come to be called post-modern, because rooted in a powerful sense that taste and standards are intrinsically various, that no authority deserves to prevail as an orthodoxy, that intellectual preferences come and go historically. Grayson knew his own stance was out of joint with majority opinion, but he also knew that tastes might overlap in time and that anachronism could be modern, too. Nor did Grayson share a taste for everything old. For example, he disliked border ballads, as he later explained, because a love for them ‘‘is like the love of old china, relics, or autographs of great men real or supposed.’’ In these matters, Grayson was strong in his own tastes, gifted in explaining what he did not like. But, unlike Timrod, he did not deny the right of others to their own share in the melee of human diversity. He shrugged and said, contra-Kames, ‘‘there is no disputing about taste.’’ 97 In fact, Grayson’ easy eclecticism mirrored how poetry was dispersed in Southern culture. Many eras sat cheek by jowl, in shifting esteem. Apart from the ancient poets, Chaucer grew in importance, Shakespeare persisted, Milton was honored if not often read through, the Augustans were known, many eighteenth-century poets of sensibility (Goldsmith, Young, Thomson, Collins) were surprisingly popular, and the Romantics were deeply influential (Byron most in the early days, then Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley somewhat, Keats least). Perhaps only the metaphysical poets were a rarity.98 In the commonplace book of Adolphus W. Mangum, a student at Randolph-Macon College in the early 1850s, there is a miscellany of poetry: Southey, Spenser, Longfellow, Burns, Goethe, Coleridge, Swift, Shakespeare, and (more obscurely) the Scot Robert Pollok. His diary has some of these, plus more from modern poets like Thomas Moore, Lydia Sigourney, Eliza Cook, and P. J. Bailey, but also Robert Southwell from the sixteenth century. In general, most people leaned to the preceding hundred years, with little from earlier. 97. Parks, Essays of Timrod, 70; Grayson, Hireling and the Slave, xiv–xv; Calhoun, Witness to Sorrow, 163, 165. 98. In the lectures on belles lettres given by Frederick Porcher at the College of Charleston in late antebellum and postbellum years, he dealt with English poetry in the following manner: three lectures on ‘‘What is Poetry?,’’ versification, and ballads; two on ‘‘narrative and romantic poetry,’’ which embraced Chaucer and Spenser; a preliminary lecture on epic, followed by ten on Milton, all but one on Paradise Lost; five on ‘‘dramatic poetry,’’ which embraced the theory of the unities, Mysteries and Miracle plays, Marlowe and the stage, Shakespeare, and Ancient Drama with additional remarks on Samson Agonistes; ‘‘modern classical tragedy,’’ on Hume’s Douglas; ‘‘romantic tragedy,’’ which embraced two lectures on Macbeth; one on ‘‘romantic comedy,’’ using A Midsummer Night’s Dream; one on modern English comedy; one on ‘‘satirical poetry,’’ that is, Butler, Dryden, Swift, and Pope; one on ‘‘descriptive and didactic poetry,’’ including Pope, Young, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, Goldsmith, and Thomson; and two concluding lectures on ‘‘the latter poets,’’ first on Cowper, Burns, Crabbe, Scott, Moore, and Byron, then lastly on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. See Frederick A. Porcher Papers, CC.

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In her album, written in North Carolina in 1826, Louisa Jones copied down poetry from Ossian, Mrs. Hemans, Byron, Young, Cowper, and Goldsmith. More unusual was William Henry Holcombe, a keener reader, who went out in Natchez in 1855 and bought himself ‘‘some new and beautiful copies of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Byron, Shelley, Dante, Milton, Festus &c.’’ 99 Grayson laconically noted that he made no money from his verse and Timrod did the same, if with resentment. Both were gentlemen, with ample notions of fit living. It is a paradox little observed that the only person who truly made his living as a poet in the South was a slave, a man who used poetry to acquire a kind of freedom. George Moses Horton was born a slave in northeastern North Carolina in 1797 and was by 1820 in Chatham County, near Pittsboro.100 He began to walk to Chapel Hill, first to peddle fruit to the students on Sundays. Before buying, they extracted entertainment from him, first mock oratory, then (after he began to read) poetry, which at first he did not know how to write down, but dictated. The undergraduates began to commission poetry—acrostics, love poems and the like—for which he was paid, at first 25 cents, then up to 75 cents. With twelve orders a week, this began to be a goodly sum for a poor man. After his master died, the son allowed Horton to purchase his time for 50 cents a day. This was, in some ways, a familiar story for a slave—hazarding the market, hiring out—except that Horton’s merchandise was poetry. In time, Horton became a famous curiosity, with white patrons like Caroline Lee Hentz, William Mercer Green, and David Swain. Abolitionists grew interested and, unsuccessfully, collected money to buy his freedom. His poetry was published, first with Hentz’s help in Raleigh in 1829 as The Hope of Liberty, pirated in Philadelphia as Poems by a Slave. In 1845, in Hillsboro, there came The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, the Colored Bard of North Carolina. Two poems appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1843, at the initiative of Green. Horton acquired a modest library, one of the very few formally recorded for a slave. His books included Murray’s English grammar and Johnson’s dictionary to help with technique and correctness; from the ancients, Vergil, Homer, and Plutarch; from the moderns, Milton, James Thomson, Edward Young, selections from Shake99. Adolphus W. Mangum, commonplace Book entitled ‘‘Excerpta et Originalia’’ and Diary, Mangum Family Papers, SHC; Louisa M. Jones, Album (1826), Abraham Rencher Papers, SHC; entry for 17 January 1855, in William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC. 100. I rely upon Joan R. Sherman, ed., The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature, vol. 1, The Long Beginning, 1746–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 83–102. See also George Moses Horton, Naked Genius, compiled by Will H. S. Banks (1865; reprint, Chapel Hill, N.C.: Chapel Hill Historical Society, 1982).

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speare and Byron; plus the Columbian Orator, the same book that Frederick Douglass bought in Knight’s bookstore in Baltimore for fifty cents and was so deeply to impress him.101 In time, Horton became a fixture of the campus. The students asked him to give orations, first for the Fourth of July in 1849, then at the commencement of 1859 when James Buchanan came. During the war, he switched his trade to Union soldiers, who also needed acrostics for their ladies. Afterwards, finally free, he seems to have gone to Philadelphia, where he sold biblical tales and eventually died, perhaps soon after 1883. Most of the themes of Horton’s poetry are indistinguishable from his white, free contemporaries, which is less surprising if one recalls that much of his verse was written on commission.102 So he speaks to his muse, invokes landscape, hears singing birds, knows a bonny belle, and sees eagles soar. But he was also permitted to speak, if guardedly, of being a slave, though more of the general condition, less of his own sharp experience. Nonetheless he was very clear that freedom was preferable to slavery, that without liberty he lived on a ‘‘vile accursed earth’’ and endured ‘‘drudg’ry, pain, and toil,’’ and that he was thus condemned ‘‘because my skin is black.’’ Likewise, ‘‘The Poet’s Feeble Petition’’ begins: Bewailing mid the ruthless wave, I lift my feeble hand to thee. Let me no longer be a slave But drop these fetters and be free. Understandably, liberty is understood as a blessing, an asylum, a ‘‘golden prize,’’ a woman on whose breast ‘‘I languish to respire.’’ Still more plausibly, Horton’s verse was often religious and speaks of embracing death with gladness: Let me die glad, regardless of pain No pang to this world [to] betray, And the spirit cut loose from its chains, So loath in the flesh to delay Go chanting away.103 In the white community, poetry seldom reached towards the political and social imagination. Not the least of Grayson’s heterodoxies was the writing of political verse, especially about slavery, a topic about which usually Southern 101. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 34–36. 102. However, that the poetry of free blacks in New Orleans was similarly inattentive to racial matters may be pertinent: see Edward Maceo Coleman, ed., Creole Voices: Poems in French by Free Men of Color First Published in 1845 (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1945). 103. Sherman, Black Bard, 56–57, 62, 102.

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poetry was silent.104 Henry Rootes Jackson had argued in 1844, in a review of James G. Percival’s poetry, that Americans leaned to the brief, passionate lyric, partly because her poets were so by avocation not profession, and in a bustling, commercial world, the public wanted a concise ‘‘condensation of ideas.’’ Modern poetry was egotistical and so apt for Americans, whose institutions promoted individualism. Epic was the form for a feudal order with tradition and ritual, but American society was atomizing, presentist, egalitarian, selfish in little (though not great) things. Even in 1844, therefore, it seemed plausible for a critic to suggest that poetry served as a relaxation from modernity. Yet most poets believed it was their mission to intensify emotion, to transform, to improve, not to give a frisson of easeful sentiment to gentlemen and ladies in drawing rooms. Hence, it was little wonder that poets were systematically bad-tempered about their lot. It seemed an intolerable contradiction that ‘‘the true experience of my own heart’’ might, even by the poet himself, be thought ‘‘this trifle,’’ since hearts were so common a thing.105

Novels and the Like 106 Even the poets, vain though they were, sometimes felt that they had chosen unwisely. ‘‘What you say about prose is all too true,’’ Philip Pendleton Cooke wrote one of his brothers in 1844. ‘‘It after all is the weapon for a stoutminded man; it does effective work in the world, and I mean to accomplish myself in its use if I can. Poetry shall be only my occasional indulgence. I am a little ashamed to have written so much egotism.’’ It was widely believed that fiction had superseded poetry, that ‘‘in advanced stages of culture and refinement, prose-fiction will secure and maintain the ascendancy.’’ The world might be too much with us, but prose was ‘‘of the world and worldly.’’ 107 A. B. Williman confessed to Mitchell King in 1857 an old passion for verse, 104. ‘‘In fact, with few exceptions, the poets of the South are silent on the one theme that could have earned them a vast and loving audience: the merits of slavery’’: Aaron Kramer, The Prophetic Tradition in American Poetry, 1835–1900 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1968), 105. But Grayson seems to have sold no extra copies for his proslavery verses. 105. Henry Roote Jackson, ‘‘Percival’s Poems,’’ SQR 5 (January 1844): 191; A. B. Williman to MK, 16 March 1857, MK Papers, SHC. 106. ‘‘I find the evenings tedious, what a resource books are, I mean novels and the like, for books of science and so forth save me from them, I actually turn sick and faint at the sight of any title of any thing that has the word Philosophy in it, or at any word ending with lo or nomy or any of the y’s in use in this way’’: entry for 9 March 1837, Selma Plantation Journal, in An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–67, ed. Michael O’Brien, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 146. 107. Philip Pendleton Cooke to John R. Cooke, 6 July 1844, John Esten Cooke Mss, DU; ‘‘Onslow, or the Protege of an Enthusiast,’’ SQR 10 (July 1846): 78.

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which had ‘‘haunted me from boyhood.’’ Though Williman sent the odd piece on mockingbirds to Charleston journals, he had burned most of his verse. This was a judgment on his own competence, but the action involved the wider issue. ‘‘Is this an age in which Poetry even of a good order will find readers, not to say relishers [?] I confess to me there are grave doubts. The great thinkers, all or nearly all, speak to us in Prose; yet again prose steeped in the truest and most glorious hues of poetry.’’ This had been Carlyle’s accomplishment.108 Indeed, as Simms noted with reproach in 1849, Carlyle had ‘‘turn[ed] up his nose at poetry.’’ Augusta Jane Evans, in her novel Beulah, was to have a character observe, ‘‘I believe poetry to be the highest and purest phase of insanity . . . the spasmodic vent of a highly nervous system, overstrained, diseased.’’ 109 But this claim was the obverse of a troubling lack of legitimacy in fiction, which itself stood suspected of lightness, triviality, immorality, and deceit, all vices which might lead young men or women astray.110 Elizabeth Ruffin confided to her diary in 1827, banteringly: ‘‘Spent the whole day lolling and reading; finished the first volume of—shall not say what, but leave you to guess having given you a previous hint; no work done, all things neglected and give place to the strange infatuation of novel-reading so popular with us silly, weak women whose mental capacities neither desire nor aspire to a higher grade, satisfied with momentary amusement without substantial emolument.’’ It was common for female colleges to forbid novel-reading in their regulations. In this spirit, Martha Brookes responded uneasily to her clergyman father in 1851: ‘‘Your remarks about Novel reading are very good & would have applied to myself several years ago; for then I did indiscriminately read a great deal of trash: & at the time when I ought to have been storing my mind with useful knowledge, by attending to my school-tastes.’’ 111 But even an editor like John R. Thompson might advise an undergraduate sparingly about the merits of the form: ‘‘I am no Puritan, and I do not agree 108. A. B. Williman to MK, 16 March 1857, MK Papers, SHC. Conventionally, Simms looked on poetry as closer to the childhood of man, as a mystical or superstitious groping for the ideal, with phantoms and specters: see WGS, ‘‘Modern Prose Fiction,’’ SQR 15 (April 1849): 44. 109. WGS, ‘‘Modern Prose Fiction,’’ 58; Augusta Jane Evans, Beulah (1859; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 177. 110. In Caroline Gilman’s Recollections of a Southern Matron, a white servant is observed discussing a new Scott novel with a passenger on a vessel; this is thought to compromise her fitness. ‘‘How can I ask her to bring me a glass of water?’’ the narrator asks. See Caroline Gilman, Recollections of a Southern Matron (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), 274–75. 111. Entry for 10 February 1827, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 60; Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of a Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 132; Martha Brookes to Iveson L. Brookes, Iveson L. Brookes Papers, SHC.

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with many good people in condemning novels indiscriminately.’’ There were many novels, like those of Scott, which ‘‘in the intervals of study’’ offered ‘‘a wholesome ‘mental relaxation.’ ’’ Dickens would ‘‘do you no harm,’’ and reading Pickwick was ‘‘much better than spending the night at cards.’’ Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton (his ‘‘later works’’), Charlotte Bronte, Dinah Mulock (for John Halifax, Gentleman), and George Eliot would all offer ‘‘relief from hard work.’’ In this spirit and more, Francis Peyre Porcher resolved to his mother in 1843, ‘‘I never intend reading a Novel whilst in College.’’ The Demosthenian Debating Society of Barnwell County, South Carolina, solemnly deliberated in 1842, ‘‘Are the advantages of novel reading sufficient to warrant us, in recommending them to others?’’ and decided not.112 The most suffering victim of this stern proscription was probably Basil Manly Jr., for whom novel-reading was an anguished vice. In 1841, he wrote to himself, about his persistent faults, ‘‘Idleness, Biting my nails, Inattentiveness in Prayer &c—Novel Reading and evil speakings.’’ Later, he set down an elaborate case against the appalling temptation: Of Novel Reading I have resolved to give up totally and altogether Novel Reading. My reasons for this are 1. I find that it is a great hindrance to me. It keeps me from my college studies; it keeps me from my religious studies; and it keeps me from all my duties—And therefore should be relinquished 2. It is a great waste of time. Here have I spent during this day out of the 4 hours of study fully 3 in reading Miss Edgeworth’s Works. 3. Father & Mother, Grandfather & Grandmother, & Aunty disapprove of it. And therefore it should be relinquished. 4. The thing must be quit at some time or other. A minister of the gospel addicted to reading novels! Hence now 5. It certainly does not reflect glory on the Xtn profession & I think perhaps that (particularly) my reading them may shed disgrace upon it. Therefore it should be quit 6. I am ashamed to be seen reading them which certainly shows that there is in my mind an impression that it is wrong. It is therefore sin to me if to no one else. Therefore Inasmuch as I find that Novel Reading is a great hindrance to me in every branch of my duty 112. JRT to ‘‘Hugh,’’ 2 June 1860, JRT Papers, UVA; Francis Peyre Porcher to Isabella S. Porcher, March 1843, Porcher Family Papers, SCHS; entry for 1 July 1842, in Minutes of the Demosthenian Debating Society, SCL.

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Inasmuch as is it is [sic] a great waste of time & as it is disapproved of by my parents & those whose opinions I especially respect Inasmuch as it does not reflect glory but rather sheds dishonor on the Xtn profession and as it must be quit at some time or other Therefore I Basil Manly Junior do resolve & intend with the Lord’s will & in his strength to cease totally & forever the reading of those works of fiction called Novels.113 As with any worthwhile vice, the peril lay in pleasure and seductiveness. No doubt critics would have pointed the moral if they had known the case of James L. Dusenberry, a student at Chapel Hill, whose girl Mary came from home ‘‘so warm—so passionate & withal so yielding in her disposition that I see no way of escape, without committing the unpardonable sin against love & gallantry. It is not in my nature to thwart the inclinations of melting maids.’’ Nor did he, since he noted, ‘‘On Friday night Em was from home & Red & I passed a glorious night in her bed.’’ The other thing he did late at night was reading Dickens. As he admitted, ‘‘My passions are unused to restraint.’’ 114 The identity and literary habits of Red are unclear. So, the idea that fiction was pleasurably easy was troubling to a Christian people. When Caroline Gilman noted, ‘‘I am reading Charles V [by William Robertson] with the avidity with which I should engage in a novel,’’ she was not owning up to a uncontested virtue, either in her or the fiction. There was something sybaritic about fiction; it evoked the image of ‘‘lounging on a sofa & reading the last new novel.’’ After all, the novel had begun in the eighteenth century with Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, with seduction, rutting farmboys, Scottish lads abroad in town, the lascivious consumption of fruit; it had been advanced in France by Laclos in describing the warfares of sexuality, in which rakes wrote hypocritical letters on the naked backs of whores. Little wonder that George Frederick Holmes in 1843 might cluck that fiction required improvement, as though it were a red-light district which needed uplift. If this could be managed, Holmes wished the novel well, for then it might refute ‘‘the pharisaic and unreasoning condemnation . . . which all the would-be saints of the earth and many truly good men indulge in.’’ 115 That fiction indulged invention and so (perhaps) untruth was the connected accusation. Even the friends of fiction might be uneasy, because 113. Entry for 3 November 1841, BM Jr. Diary, BM Jr. Papers, FU. 114. Entries for 24 October, 31 October 1841, 20 March, 17 April 1842, in James L. Dusenberry, ‘‘Liber Carminum et Fragmentorum,’’ James L. Dusenberry Papers, SHC. 115. Caroline Gilman to her sister, undated, Caroline Gilman Mss, SCHS; GFH, ‘‘Bulwer’s Last of the Barons,’’ SQR 4 (July 1843): 216.

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such views were common and so might affect reputation and honor. Charles Gayarré saw no problem in mixing romance and history, but Albert J. Pickett, choosing between writing history and fiction, wondered aloud about whether venturing the latter might lead many ‘‘to doubt the authenticity of my late historical work.’’ Simms seemed a discouraging precedent, because he ‘‘never could gain reputation as a grave & accurate historian, after having produced so many works of fancy—and half truth if I may be allowed the expression.’’ 116 But Pickett was a timid, habitually worried man. Others were bolder. Becoming novelists, they acquired readers, popularity, even (sometimes) income, which was itself emboldening. Indeed, only the novelist among Southern writers had even a chance of a professional competence. But fiction was held to be, more than poetry, peculiarly well adapted to exploring society and history. Poetry soared away from earth, conveyed ‘‘supra-terrestrial ideas . . . images of truth and beauty, such as exalt the wrapt poet of futurity,’’ 117 but fiction clung to the ground. Walter Scott, above all, suggested that fiction might be truth, even that it had inherited the mantle of the epic, the poetry that Aristotle had claimed embodied a greater, more philosophic truth than history. But fiction divided into two genres, the novel and the romance, a division observed even by librarians when they divided up their books. The distinction, as Holmes explained it, was that a novel was ‘‘a portraiture of human life and manners, not an analysis of human nature, nor a metaphysical anatomy of the human mind.’’ In a romance, ‘‘the agency of preternatural, and sometimes even unnatural causes, was allowed; so that the romance was, in fact, the novel in extravanganza.’’ In his 1835 preface to the Yemassee, Simms was more precise, in arguing that the romance was ‘‘the substitute which the people of to-day offer for the ancient epic,’’ that the novel dealt with ordinary people under ordinary circumstances, but the romance ‘‘invests individuals with an absorbing interest—it hurries them through crowding events, in a narrow space of time . . . it seeks for its adventures among the wild and wonderful.’’ In short, the romance pushed credulity beyond limit so as to show the potentialities of human nature, whereas the novel plainly stuck to what was more-or-less normal, at least in the world of the middle class. But this was a distinction hard to sustain in practice. One critic might see Smollett and Fielding as the authors of romances.118 The Castle of Otranto or Frankenstein might plainly be ro116. AJP to CG, 25 November 1852, CG Papers, LSU. 117. ‘‘Democracy in America,’’ SQR 4 (July 1843): 66. 118. ‘‘Report on the condition of the Savannah Library’’ (draft AMS in a folder marked ‘‘Librarian’s reports, 1839–1845’’), ca. 1845, Savannah Library Society Papers, GHS; GFH, ‘‘Bulwer’s Zanoni,’’ SQR 2 (July 1842): 179; John Caldwell Guilds, ed., The Simms Reader: Selections from the Writings of William Gilmore Simms, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Char-

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mances, because men are seldom flattened by huge casques and cannot create life from odd bits of flesh, but Gil Blas was a less clear case, for in it nothing happened that might not happen to a man, however improbably events occurred in such swift succession. The world was sufficiently full of normal wonders to make even Simms lose his grip on the distinction. The American Revolution might offer, at once, the opportunity of a history, romance, or novel, and what really happened to the Kiawahs might seem romantic. A historian like Gayarré might cheerfully think romance one of the prerogatives of his craft, while the author of a romance might insist that historical knowledge was a prerequisite of his. All was fluid, some light here, some shade there, nothing fixed.119 Fiction written in the South began at about the same moment as elsewhere in the United States, though arguably it got off to a slower start. It is customary to date American fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), though there were scattered things from a few years earlier. In 1797, Samuel Relf of Virginia published a novel about Philadelphia called Infidelity, and soon after John Davis (born in England but living in Virginia) put out a number of novels, some on the John Smith–Pocahantas theme, including The Farmer of New Jersey (1800) and The First Settlers of Virginia (1805).120 But there was little enough thereafter until the 1820s, when Southern fiction began to be habitual, even to acquire a shape and direction. In general, its movement was from the Gothic and satirical, to the domestic, then to the earnestly romantic, which was also a movement from skepticism to commitment, from the apolitical to the political. Far too many novels and romances (as well as short stories) were published by Southerners to make a close survey plausible— these exist elsewhere 121—but one can plot these movements by a brief look at candidates from each moment, with side glances elsewhere: short stories by John Izard Middleton and Poe for the Gothic; Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes for southwestern humor and Kennedy’s Swallow Barn for the satirical; Caroline Gilman’s Recollections of a Southern Matron for the domestic; Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride for the female view of the political realm; lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 239; ‘‘History of the Romance,’’ SLM 7 (March 1841): 205. 119. On the fluid status of fiction and history in the early nineteenth century, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 120. Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1, 1590–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 620–60; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790–1830 (1964; reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), 299–302. 121. Rubin et al., Southern Literature, 92–117, 136–56.

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Caruthers’s The Knights of the Horse-Shoe for the male sense of the romance of politics. (Augusta Evans’s Beulah will be considered later.) These are not exclusive categories; there was much overlap. Hentz was domestic, as well as political. In particular, the southwestern humorist tradition was both satirical and, in many ways, an extension of the Gothic imagination. Students of William Faulkner may not be displeased to learn that one of Southern literature’s earliest stories concerns incest. ‘‘The Confessional: A Tale,’’ by John Izard Middleton, dates from 1810 and exists only in manuscript.122 It is set in a Roman church in the Trastevere. A novice nun called Nina sings sweetly in the choir and is hidden behind wirework and a curtain, out of which she can glimpse the congregation. She begins to see a man, who comes often, is wrapped in a Spanish cloak, leans with melancholy against a pillar, and who brightens when her voice in solo reaches him. She develops sensual ideas about him in her cell. Noticing that he goes into a confessional box when the service is done, she contrives to sit in the priest’s place. There she hears how he came from a noble Spanish family, how his mother died when he was very young, how his father adopted Angelina, the daughter of his deceased sister-in-law, and how they grew up together in affection and intimacy. When of an age, he and his first cousin began to feel illicit attractions, but drew back and avoided one another. On the eve of his departure for university in Salamanca, an earthquake struck. He rushed to her apartment to save her and, amid falling rock, they tumbled together on the floor, ‘‘lip prest to lip.’’ They survived and he fled on to university in guilt. There he received a letter from his father that announced the dishonor of the cousin, the father’s killing of her, and his own impending suicide. The father laid upon the son the duty to kill the offender. Anguished, the son could not kill himself, wandered the world, and came to Rome. The nun’s voice was the echo of his lost love and seemed to call to him from beyond the grave. By this point, the nun has fainted away. She awakes and takes a wrong turn from the box into the church, where she finds the man slumped by the steps of the confessional. She freezes in horror, just as moonlight catches her through a Gothic case122. The manuscript is to be found, undocumented, in the Edward Middleton Papers, SHC. It is signed, with what seems to read ‘‘J. J. Middleton.’’ This is, in fact, John Izard Middleton, whose ‘‘J’’ and ‘‘I’’ are remarkably similar; in fact the title page of his only book bears the name ‘‘J. J. Middleton,’’ which was presumably misread by the printer; see John Izard Middleton, Grecian Remains in Italy, a Description of Cyclopian Walls, and of Roman Antiquities. With Topographical and Picturesque Views of Ancient Latium (London: Edward Orme, 1812). Edward Middleton was a younger relation, born in the year of the short story, who served in the U.S. Navy, evidently in the Mediterranean in the 1830s and 1840s: he remained in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War.

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ment. The man awakes, seeming to see a supernatural vision. He advances towards her, calling out the name of Angelina. Nina falls into convulsions and, after a struggle of several hours in which she relates the man’s story to her sister nuns and confessor, she dies. The Spanish nobleman goes mad and flings himself into the Tiber from the Ponte Rotto. Middleton’s narrative is cool, atmospheric, gloomy, improbable. The sensuality is marked, barely repressed, almost pedophile. ‘‘Altho’ she had never read any Romance, yet there is a latent source of Romantic ideas in the heart of every girl of sixteen,’’ especially one who looks at herself in the mirror and sees a novice’s habit but also ‘‘a pair of soft blue eyes, a silken eyelash, a blushing cheek, and vermillion lip.’’ Innocence exists only to be betrayed, love is only a snare, youth only the prelude to death: ‘‘How quick are the transitions from joy to grief!—from blooming Youth to grizly Death!’’ Impulse has awful consequences, religion means little but guilt and immurement, the pastoral is a mockery of man’s condition, nature is indifferent. The last paragraph reads: ‘‘The bubbling whirlpool closed upon it—the majestic River flowed smooth and unruffled as before; and the mangled corpse of the Maniac cold and inanimate as the statues of Antiquity over which the Tiber rolls its yellow streams now sleeps among them.’’ One did not need to live a Gothic life to write Gothic tales, though it helped. Certainly John Izard Middleton’s life mirrored his art. His early days were golden; wealthy and well-traveled. He was a learned scholar, a talented painter, the lover of Madame Récamier, and the friend of Madame de Staël. ‘‘The Confessional’’ is dated in the year of his marriage to Eliza Augusta Falconnet of Naples, and is an uneasy augury of an unhappy marriage. For a while, they lived together in Philadelphia, where the ladies looked upon her with affection and anxiety. ‘‘Mrs. Izard Middleton is now as beautiful as she can possibly be,’’ Margaret Izard Manigault reported in 1812. ‘‘Her face is charming, & her person delicate. Nothing can surpass the animation of her countenance when illumined by the dazzling brightness of her complexion. When she enters a room—when she speaks—her cheeks vie with the full blown rose.’’ But this vivacity somehow displeased her husband. When she sang, ‘‘He cannot hear it, & walks off when she begins.’’ Neither he nor she settled into an American life. She was visited by her sister, who blurted out questions that suggested Mrs. Middleton’s unhappiness, such as ‘‘Does my sister love her husband?’’ and ‘‘She ought to love him very much to live in such a country!’’ By 1815, they had a daughter. In the spring of 1816, it was being said she had ‘‘had a most severe time in her confinement & her cold hearted surly unhappy looking mate yielded neither comfort nor consolation to her.’’ She recovered, but he seems to have secluded her. ‘‘He plays at bil-

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liards in the morning, & whist in the evening, & she is almost always alone. We wish to see her often; but do not succeed.’’ 123 By 1817, they were back in Naples, where she seems to have been happier, even gay.124 But in 1821, the grim rumor flew that she had gone mad, ‘‘had by a stroke of the sun, been deprived of her senses!’’ Others did not blame the elements for her misfortune, ‘‘for which alas! there is no remedy what a heavy reckoning some people will have one day for being instrumental in depriving that lovely being of her reason.’’ When she died is unclear, but he went on to cheat his relatives out of money, and to live in Paris until 1849, where some found him charming, others ‘‘old & dried up,’’ and a younger Middleton had to be circumspect in mourning ‘‘one who, whatever he may have been to others, was to me uniformly kind & affectionate.’’ 125 The hint descended through the generations of violence and cruelty, something unsayable.126 The Gothic vision remained a persistent element in Southern fiction and was given extra force by the popularity of Byron. Several of Joseph Ingraham’s popular novels flirt with the tradition. In Allston’s Monaldi, written in 1822 but published in 1841, the scene is also Italian. In it, too, there is betrayal, violence, fainting nuns, villains in cloaks, a purloined letter, bitter wandering, jealousy, revenge, and a ‘‘wild mixture of reason and madness.’’ 127 It is Othello, except that Othello and Desdemona survive to madness and regret, finally to reconciliation at Othello’s deathbed.128 (This inflection was not untypical of the Gothic story, whose literary antecedents were Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, with its witches over bubbling cauldrons and its Spanish re123. MIM to Charlotte Georgiana Izard Smith, 7 February, 21 September 1812, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Langdon Cheves, ‘‘Middleton of South Carolina,’’ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 1 ( July 1900): 244; MIM to Margaret Manigault Morris, 5 March 1816, Manigault, Morris, and Grimball Family Papers, SHC. 124. ADI to MIM, 28 September 1815, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Eliza Falconnet Middleton to Mary Hering Middleton, 1 February 1818; Eliza Falconnet Middleton to Mary Hering Middleton, 27 June 1818; Eliza Falconnet Middleton to Mary Hering Middleton, 12 September 1819, Hering-Middleton Papers, SCHS. 125. M. C. Derby to MIM, 15 November 1821, and J. [I.?] Mease to Charles Izard Manigault, 3 January 1825, Manigault Family Papers, SCL; Thomas S. Grimké and Henry Grimké to Thomas Middleton, 28 November 1831, Cheves-Middleton Papers, SCHS.; Alicia Hopton Middleton, Travel Journal (10 May–28 September 1835), p. 50, SCL; Henry Middleton to Williams Middleton, 1 November 1849, Williams Middleton Papers, SCL. 126. In her home on the Battery, I once asked the late Anna Wells Rutledge, who owned a number of Middleton’s paintings, about him and the marriage. She declined to be specific— he was, after all, a relative of hers—but hinted that there had been something badly wrong, perhaps involving violence. 127. Rubin et al., Southern Literature, 100; Washington Allston, Monaldi: A Tale (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), 245. 128. Margaret Fuller noticed the obvious parallel: see the summary of Monaldi ’s reception in Wright, Allston Correspondence, 596–600.

Pierre Guérin (after François Gérard), Madame Récamier, probably commissioned by John Izard Middleton (Courtesy Middleton Place Foundation, Charleston)

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Nicholas-François Dun, Eliza Augusta Falconnet (Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston)

venges.) Allston’s lesson was that ‘‘evil is but another name for moral discord; its law, revulsion; and its final issue the shutting up the soul in impenetrable solitude.’’ 129 In Poe, the Gothic tradition bleakly flourished, though he leaned a little more to the German tradition than to the Italian/Spanish, more to ‘‘some large, old decaying city near the Rhine’’ than the gloomy Trastevere church, more to Protestant than Catholic nightmares. ‘‘Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages’’ is how his story ‘‘Metzengerstein’’ begins. In ‘‘Morella,’’ incestuously, the narrator guiltily loves the daughter-simulacrum of a deceased mother, whose tomb proves empty when the child dies. Elsewhere in Poe’s world, pestilence stalks, pendulums slice, orangutans murder, and there are ‘‘assumptions and aspirations which morality had never before known.’’ 130 Everywhere is death, or death masquerading as a pale life. The quintessence was probably achieved in ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’’ first published in 1839. As always with Poe, much depended upon the adjectives and adverbs that created atmosphere. In the first sentence, there are things ‘‘dull, dark, and 129. Allston, Monaldi, 202. 130. Quinn, Poe: Poetry and Tales, 262, 134, 267.

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Edgar Allan Poe, Self-Portrait (Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington)

soundless,’’ ‘‘oppressively low,’’ ‘‘singularly dreary,’’ and ‘‘melancholy.’’ The pace does not slacken thereafter, as the narrator comes to visit the ‘‘mansion of gloom’’ of his old college friend. Nature is bleak, architecture shows ‘‘extensive decay’’ and ‘‘wild inconsistency,’’ and human nature in the form of Roderick Usher’s mind and body is nervous, ill, disordered. Throughout the house, its Gothic style bears down claustrophobically and furnishings are ‘‘profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered.’’ Usher’s manner too shows ‘‘incoherence—an inconsistency,’’ the struggle of body and mind against ‘‘the grim phantasm, fear.’’ Usher explains that his ‘‘tenderly beloved sister—his sole companion for long years’’ is inexplicably wasting away. She dies during the visitor’s first evening. Hence Usher’s art echoes with his pain: his ‘‘long improvised dirges,’’ his ‘‘amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber,’’ his paintings which betray ‘‘an intensity of intolerable awe.’’ One of these paintings shows a vault, far below the earth. His reading had been much in older, mystical works. Since the sister had asked that her body be held for two weeks in a vault, the two men alone carry her there, to a place ‘‘oppressive,’’ ‘‘small, damp,’’ unlit, sealed with a door of ‘‘massive iron,’’ which grates on its hinges. They screw down the lid of her coffin and leave. For days, the brother grows more agitated, restless, wandering, pale. He often stares into space, ‘‘as if listening to some imaginary sound.’’ The narrator too becomes restless and sleepless. He rises in the night, encounters Usher, who demands, ‘‘And you have not seen it?’’ They go to a window, which reveals the night in

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tempest and whirlwind, ‘‘wildly singular in its terror and its beauty,’’ pressing down on the house, bathing it in an ‘‘unnatural light.’’ The narrator urges Usher away and tries to distract him by reading from an old romance, which comes to hand. The reading begins to describe noises that are echoed in the house, a ripping, a grating, ‘‘a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation.’’ Usher, who is sitting towards the door, starts up. ‘‘We have put her living in the tomb! ’’ he cries. He had heard the noises days before, but denied and repressed them. ‘‘Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door! ’’ The door opens and there she stands, ‘‘blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.’’ She trembles, falls forward into the arms of her dying brother, ‘‘a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.’’ The narrator flees.131 As with his poetry, so with his prose, Poe’s gift was to take a literary form —in this case, the Gothic—which had been exaggeratedly human and make it inhuman. The obverse of this instinct was his detective stories, which take horror and make it elegantly cool and analytical—playing chess on the back of a butchered corpse. As is familiarly argued, the Gothic was not always the sensibility of the thoroughgoing Romantic. In the South, as elsewhere, it tended to appeal to the late Enlightenment sensibility, to those who grew up thinking that reason and civility were sufficient, were then troubled by passions and failure, and in response gaudily sketched visions of extremity.132 The Gothic bursts upon those happy in childhood, then bored, then troubled by confrontation with the adult world, especially the world of sexuality. They do not know how to cope, but the blame is shifted to villains, or nature, or madness, and, at the last, adulthood is refused by suicide or murder or the fearful intervention of phantasms. Allston frozen over Belshaar’s Feast, Middleton playing billiards while his wife suffered, Poe marrying a child, all these fitted the pattern. It was a genre troubled, above all, by a fear of the loss of mastery, so it is little wonder that it appealed to some Southern sensibilities.133 But the Gothic grew less common by mid-century.134 Poe was not typical for his time or, indeed, his class, since the Gothic impulse was usually an aristocratic, louche game. He, by contrast, was the son of an indigent English actress, Eliza Poe, who died when he was three, and a decamped actor and dancer, David Poe 131. Ibid., 317–36. 132. Horace Walpole wrote a Gothic novel and built a neo-Gothic home at Strawberry Hill, but as a literary critic he preferred the neoclassical: on this, see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 17–18. 133. ‘‘The subliminal frame of reference is felt to be a breakdown of control, both in the psyche and in the state’’: ibid., 157. 134. Mary Ann Wimsatt, ‘‘Antebellum Fiction,’’ in Rubin, Southern Literature, 96, 101, suggests there are Gothic touches in Caruthers and Southworth.

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of Maryland. At best, he was a bourgeois by adoption, since as an orphan, he was taken into the family of John Allan of Richmond, a Scots merchant engaged in international commerce.135 Coming late to the genre, Poe contrived to make it seem avant-garde. Later Romantics grew more confident about their emotions, had less fear, sometimes came to enjoy life’s bumpy ride, and worried less that falling might kill them. In the Gothic tale, the narrator is cool, the historian of madness and mayhem, troubled but able to get away. He speaks de haut en bas. It is the same with what is superficially a genre remote from the Gothic, that is, the tradition of so-called southwestern humor, which began with Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and eventuated in Mark Twain. The locale is different, western taverns instead of Roman churches. The response is at odds, humor instead of guilty astonishment. But the structure is similarly Federalist; the civilized narrator looks out on an unsafe and uncontrollable world disfigured by passionate license and ‘‘moral discord,’’ occasioned by the pell-mell pace of social mobility and change.136 The chaos never quite reaches him, but he knows about it, has stood on the scene, and so thinks it important to tell the monitory tale. But the genre had many other antecedents: English sporting tales of the eighteenth century and colonial writings on Lubberland, for example, and even Joseph Addison.137 And the class element is markedly different from that in the Gothic form: the narrator is not an aristocrat but usually of uncertainly middling rank, even a Christian minister, and so is uncomfortably closer to what he deprecates. The genteel is fragilely superior. Indeed, by the time of George Washington Harris and Mark Twain, the vernacular comes to be accorded respect, even legitimacy. Still, at the beginning and mostly, the leitmotif was amused condescension, democracy’s counterpoint. So, in this tradition, writers are often ‘‘startled by loud, profane, and boisterous voices,’’ encounter a ‘‘band of ruffians,’’ observe a Pandemonium, find themselves ‘‘completely horrorstruck.’’ Social differentiation is conveyed by the standard English of the narrator juxtaposing the broken, impertinent dialect of the vernacular heroes, who tend to have grotesque names, Ransy Sniffle, Sut Lovingood, Sharp Snaffles, Ovid Bolus. Their native wit is oddly respected, insofar as they tend to win in their various deceptions and rogueries, but the reader (whether laughing ironically or shaking a head primly) knows that they are immoral and do not know or care about the dif135. Silverman, Mournful and Never-Ending, 1–11. 136. Poe was a Southern Whig and skeptical of Jacksonian democracy: see Rubin, Southern Literature, 135. 137. Ibid., 136; on Longstreet and Addison, see John Donald Wade, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet: A Study of the Development of Culture in the South (1924; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969), 159.

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Johnson Jones Hooper (Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery)

ference between right and wrong. ‘‘Bolus’s genius for lying was encyclopedical. . . . [It] came from his greatness of soul and his comprehensiveness of mind. The truth was too small for him,’’ is how Joseph Glover Baldwin sketched one such. ‘‘it is good to be shifty in a new country’’ is the empirical motto given by Johnson Jones Hooper to Simon Suggs. Being on the frontier, these are transitional men, doomed to be overwhelmed by civility’s progress and, as such, serve much as Scott’s Highland eccentrics, amusing or pathetic exemplars of history’s dismissive stages. (From at least the days of John Locke—‘‘in the beginning all the World was America’’—the western rim had been understood as the childhood of mankind, where what was newest was also what was oldest.) ‘‘Thanks to the Christian religion,’’ Longstreet sermonizes at the end of one story, ‘‘to schools, colleges, and benevolent associations, such scenes of barbarism and cruelty as that which I have been just describing are now of rare occurrence, though they may still be occasionally met with in some of the new counties. Wherever they prevail, they are a disgrace to that community.’’ Since, in this reprobate world, the natural ethical order is suspended, it often followed that (as in the Gothic) the rules of physical nature are also intermittent. The frontier is a place of surreal legend and tall tale, where in Arkansas mosquitoes are ‘‘enormous,’’ where invulnerable bears

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‘‘A Paleness More Ghastly’’: Simon Suggs (From Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Sus [1845])

can calmly choose when to be killed, where on the Mississippi River a Mike Fink lives in ‘‘the mythic haze.’’ 138 In general, the authors of these tales were rambling men. Longstreet came from a migrant background. His father, William, married a woman of some means in New Jersey and moved to Augusta, where he became an inventor, a sponsor of cotton gins and steam mills, ‘‘a business man of an almost shocking degree of conformity to the later developments of the genus. Always he was trading, giving people power of attorney, buying a residence and selling 138. David Rachels, ed., Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes Completed: A Scholarly Text (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 4–5, 41; Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853; reprint, New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), 2; Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Sus, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, introduction by Manly Wade Wellmann (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 8; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, rev. ed., ed. Peter Laslett (1963; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301; David C. Estes, ed., A New Collection of Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s Sketches of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 114; Joseph M. Field, ‘‘The Death of Mike Fink’’ (1847), in Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, eds., Humor of the Old Southwest, 2d ed. (1964; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 101.

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it soon to some advantage, removing to another only to repeat the process, his money eye always wide open.’’ Hannah Longstreet, his widow, subsequently was a ‘‘Directress’’ of the Augusta Female Asylum. Their son, educated at the Willington Academy in South Carolina, then at Yale, was first a lawyer in Georgia, then a Methodist minister, but eventually a college president at various institutions in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.139 Like Longstreet, many of these writers were Southerners from the east who went west. Hooper was from North Carolina and went to Alabama, Alexander McNutt moved from Virginia to Vicksburg, Baldwin from Virginia to Alabama.140 But not infrequently, they were Northern-born, men rattling through different parts of the Mississippi Valley in pursuit of the main chance. Thomas Bangs Thorpe was from Massachusetts but grew up in New York, then went to Louisiana where he lived for twenty years before returning to New York. William Tappan Thompson came of age in Ohio and Philadelphia, studied law in Florida, and worked as a journalist in Georgia with Longstreet, where he settled. Joseph M. Field was born in Ireland, grew up in Baltimore and New York, acted and managed theaters and wrote for newspapers in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Montgomery, but mostly moved between St. Louis and Mobile.141 The great patron of the genre, William T. Porter, editor of the Spirit of the Times—‘‘A Sporting Paper; devoted to the Turf, the Ring, the Angler, the Hunter—News, Literature, Fashion, Taste, the Drama, and the Scenes of Real Life’’—presided from New York. So, unsurprisingly, this was a genre relatively indifferent to the North-South divide, but was mostly sensitive to what was East and West, what followed rivers and penetrated forests. It was very interested, therefore, in the scenes of travel, in steamboats, taverns, hotels, strangers talking. Everything moved, and the world was made 139. Wade, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, 12, 9, and elsewhere. 140. Baldwin’s father was a businessman near Winchester, Virginia, who seems to have thought it wrong to pamper a child. His son was sent, at the age of twelve, to be a clerk in a district court and, at seventeen, became an assistant newspaper editor. After going to Mississippi in 1836, three years later he moved on to Alabama (where he mostly practiced law and dabbled in politics) and in 1854 to California, where he became a judge. See Baldwin, Flush Times, v. Hooper was connected to families prominent in North Carolina history (a Hooper had signed the Declaration of Independence), but had a journalist father of little income and large family in Wilmington, such that the son had to work as a printer’s devil before turning to the law. (His mother, Charlotte, was a DeBerniere and so of Huguenot descent.) Hooper moved to Alabama when just twenty, though he traveled often and worked for a while (lower down the scale than De Bow) for the U.S. Census; mostly, he was a lawyer and journalist. See Johanna Nicol Shields, ‘‘A Sadder Simon Suggs: Freedom and Slavery in the Humor of Johnson Hooper,’’ Journal of Southern History 56 (November 1990): 641–64, and Hooper, Simon Sus, ix–xxviii. 141. I draw on the brief biographies prefacing the selections in Cohen and Dillingham, Humor of the Old Southwest.

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intelligible by story. Or, to be more precise, a man’s world was made intelligible. Women seem never to have written these stories and little appear in them, except as eccentrics, widows who ‘‘limped considerably, and howled like a full pack of wolves.’’ 142 Women belonged to the domestic realm, not the hunt for bears, and there were very few homes in this hinterland.143 Community does not exist and men talk peremptorily, wanting to be heard but not expecting to converse. Satire in the mode of Tucker’s Valley of the Shenandoah and Kennedy’s Swallow Barn took up a different, if connected stance. It is, superficially, more rooted, its rhythms more plangent. While southwestern humor laughs jaggedly in its fear of the future, the plantation novel smiles in its regret for the past. Tucker had nothing to do with the frontier, unless Charlottesville in the 1830s counted as such. Kennedy was not a rambler; he grew up in a narrow space, was corporate, Whig, metropolitan, quietly antislavery, smug. On the whole, he did not greatly fear change, because he thought people like himself could handle matters comfortably. But he was sadly conscious that change dispossessed the world of certain things. Change homogenized, flattened out the distinctions of different social worlds, and was creating a standardized American-European world, in which the city came to dominate the countryside. ‘‘What belonged to us as characteristically American, seems already to be dissolving into a mixture which affects us unpleasantly as a tame and cosmopolitan substitute for the old warmth and salient vivacity of our ancestors,’’ he explained in the revised edition of Swallow Barn in 1853. Modern inventions, foreign literature, European fashion, ‘‘all these, aided and diffused by our extraordinary facilities of travel and circulation, have made sad work, even in the present generation, with those old nationalisms that were so agreeable to the contemplation of an admirer of the picturesque in character and manners.’’ For Kennedy, the story of America was not of being colonially English, then growing towards an American difference; it was of being rurally American, growing towards an urban transatlantic culture. This was an analysis that made sense, if you grew up partially in northern Virginia, but lived all of your adult life near the docks of Baltimore, which disgorged European consumer goods and new copies of Dickens, and saw travelers set off for Liverpool and Le Havre. What seemed especially to have troubled Kennedy was the sense that the old order had conferred a recognition of individuality, but the new was impersonal in its bustle. He wryly noted in 1853 that the first edition of Swallow Barn had been widely noticed. ‘‘But ‘the progress’ has brought out 142. Edward E. Chielens, American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 284–89; Hooper, Simon Sus, 95. 143. There is a deer hunt in Caroline Gilman, Southern Matron, 241–48, but the women prevent the men from killing the deer.

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many competitors since that day, and has, perhaps, rendered the public taste more scrupulous. A book then was not so perilous an offering as it is now in the great swarm of authorships. We run more risk, just now, of being let alone,—unread,—untalked of.’’ 144 As with Walter Scott, Kennedy offered a sincere but not a serious elegy for lost worlds. He was much lighter than Oliver Goldsmith on the deserted village, partly because he chose to write of, not the heyday, but the last days of the old order, become absurd and anachronistic. He laughed at what he regretted. Kennedy had grown up in the school of Washington Irving, of both Salmagundi and Bracebridge Hall. Kennedy fancied himself a wit, wanted to offer a benign smile at human folly, was knowing about literary tradition and genre. He once described Swallow Barn as ‘‘variously and interchangeably partaking of the complexion of a book of travels, a diary, a collection of letters, and a history.’’ He smiled at the Gothic, for example. One of his characters, a spinster, has ‘‘in her boudoir . . . exquisite sketches from her pencil, of forms of love and beauty, gallant knights, and old castles, and pensive ladies, madonnas and cloistered nuns,—the teeming offspring of an imagination heated with romance and devotion.’’ Indeed, Kennedy had first aspired to an imitation of Thomas Love Peacock, the exquisite satirist of Romantic excesses. He once explained to his publisher, George P. Putnam, ‘‘The original idea of Swallow Barn was connected with a plan to write a kind of Headlong Hall story—rather of the comic and satirical kind. I meant to represent an old decayed place with odd and crotchetty people inhabiting it.’’ 145 So, in Kennedy, there is little that is ominous, history is not a nightmare, lightness is almost all. He narrates in the voice of a traveling outsider writing to an old friend in New York, so that he is free to be amused at everyone and might be uncommitted. He sees the Virginia plantation world (now vanished) as amiably uncosmopolitan, unlike himself. Its master, Frank Meriwether, ‘‘does not travel much, except to make an excursion to Richmond, which he considers emphatically as the center of civilization.’’ 146 He is very much a family man, a patriarch. So the early chapter on him as ‘‘A Country Gentleman’’ is succeeded immediately by two on ‘‘Family Portraits’’ and ‘‘Family Paragons,’’ which introduce the women of the family. In the Gothic tradition, women are sexual objects of guilty male predators; in the southwestern, they are rare stage props. But in Kennedy, they 144. JPK, Swallow Barn: Or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1853; reprint, New York: Hafner Publishing, 1962), 9–10. 145. Ibid., 11; JPK, Swallow Barn; or, a Sojourn in Virginia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832), 1:48; JPK to George P. Putnam, 3 May 1851, JPK Papers, PLB. 146. JPK, Swallow Barn (1832), 1:28–29.

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John Pendleton Kennedy (From H. T. Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy [1871])

are morally central, because the plantation is a household transmittable by marriage and so its prelude, courtship, matters. On the whole, Kennedy was anxious that his women be innocents, at least at first. In Swallow Barn, the cousins Lucy and Victorine are educated at home, two sisters ‘‘tranquilly gliding onwards towards womanhood in the seclusion of the parent bower . . . remote from the tawdry artifices of a compact and crowded society.’’ In the 1853 edition, the rhetoric of separate spheres was to be strengthened. Then their apprenticeship in ‘‘happy and guarded ignorance’’ prepares them for the rougher world of adulthood, for it gives a ‘‘strength sufficient to discern and repel whatever there may be dangerous in knowledge.’’ But, even in 1832, courtship was a literary necessity, almost more than a social obligation. ‘‘I need hardly say . . . that Ned was pretty fairly in love with Bel,’’ Kennedy tells the reader and the reader already knows this, because in such books men like Ned do fall in love with ladies like Bel. So the novel was a shared game between Kennedy, his characters, and the reader, in which all were asked to enjoy how the game was played. Individuality is nearly lost in the abstractions by which literature enacts unvarying experience. So, ‘‘It is to be remarked in regard to all love affairs, that whatever may be the embarrassment of the disclosure, there is by no means the same difficulty in conversing about them

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afterwards.’’ 147 This is almost Jane Austen’s stance, the voice of the social conservative who expected little to change in human nature and society, who asserted truths universally acknowledged, who mocked literary conventions even when using them, the Gothic in Northanger Abbey, the novel of sensibility in Sense and Sensibility.148 Indeed, Swallow Barn is something of a tour of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, where one bumps into a little Fielding here, some Irving there, a dash of Scott, an imitation of Peacock; it was, to use recent jargon, a very writerly book. Moreover, Kennedy presumed that reading helped to form character. So, ‘‘Bel Tracy is a little given to certain romantic fancies, such as country ladies who want excitement and read novels are apt to engender.’’ She likes hawking, not merely for its own sake but because of ‘‘the picturesque associations of falconry with the stories of an age that Walter Scott has rendered so bewitching to the fancy of meditative maidens.’’ Likewise, there is a joust, by way of an echo of Ivanhoe. But the chapter heading for this scene is ‘‘A Joust at Utterance,’’ a little joke on à outrance and representation, and the tone throughout is mocking about ‘‘Minstrel Blok, Hawk Fairbourne, and Childe Ned, Dragon-Killing Ned.’’ In later decades, this habit of literary parody was to receive powerful sanction from Thackeray, whom not all Southerners read with sympathy. He was often regarded as ‘‘the universal sneerer.’’ Jane Caroline North read Pendennis in 1851 and observed, ‘‘I dont like it, he doubles and turns and twists backwards and forwards until he confuses me, then the delight & sneering with which he displays all the little weaknesses and follies mankind ‘is heir to’ offends one—think he must be a cynical disagreeable person.’’ But, in truth, this tradition was more vulnerable to sentimentality than to cynicism. Parodists have a way of becoming what they parody. Certainly this was the case with Kennedy’s most direct heir, John Esten Cooke of Virginia, whose comedies of manners in the 1850s became a pastiche of the eighteenth-century novel, without the advantage of Thackeray’s bleak undertow. In the Virginia Comedians (1854), he summons up the spirits of colonial Virginia (‘‘very picturesque’’) for no good reason other than that Effinghams in powdered wigs contribute to a good romp, and the time is remote enough to be quaint.149 But Cooke, although he was very anxious to show how the past was differ147. Ibid., 42, 118, 132; JPK, Swallow Barn (1853), 45. 148. On this, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1987). 149. JPK, Swallow Barn (1832), 1:268, 269, 118, 140; Charles Woodward Hutson to Mother, undated (ca. 1860), Charles W. Hutson Papers, SCL; Jane Caroline North to Charles L. Pettigrew, 11 July 1851, Pettigrew Family Papers, SHC; John Esten Cooke, The Virginia Comedians: Or, Old Days in the Old Dominion (1854; reprint, Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968), 14.

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ent, was not much interested in making it as real as the present. This latter impulse, as Holmes once suggested, had long since been Scott’s great accomplishment: ‘‘He taught . . . the great truth that the past had once an existence as real, as vital, as obnoxious to all the small joys, the fleeting sorrows, the petty motives of life, as the age in which our lot has been cast.’’ But Scott chose a form, the romance, that seemed at the same time to undermine that realism and offer the gilded evasion. As one critic put it, ‘‘All know how [Scott] altered the style, manner and substance of novel-writing, and, more than all, of history. He has historized his novels and novelized his histories, and in this, conforming to the dictates of human nature, he first taught modern historians to give a more romantic turn to their productions, instructing them to impart a brighter flush of color to the chimeras of real life, and drawing from dead and naked facts, to philosophize upon them, and with it mingle interest and pleasure.’’ Southern historical fiction, when most resolutely imitating Scott (or James Fenimore Cooper), shared this mixed mission, which amounted to a deliberate indecision about the boundaries of truth and fiction, verisimilitude and romance. Gayarré, indeed, was praised for this polymorphism: ‘‘What Scott has done in romance you have achieved in the more sober walks of history. In both the characters of the unreal and real drama are alike not merely read of, but familiarly known.’’ To a Mobile newspaper, he was ‘‘the Historian of Louisiana, charles gayarre, whose two volumes, [are] so radiant with the hues of romance.’’ As Simms put it from the other side, ‘‘Fiction, indeed, is neither more nor less, than probable truth under intenser conditions than ordinary.’’ 150 Whatever else romantic fiction meant, it marked a greater trust of emotion. To be ‘‘intenser’’ was to be closer to truth, which was not how Kames had seen the matter, and certainly the Scot had not thought truth a matter of probability. In the wider world, women too had been historical novelists. Scott’s immediate predecessor as a chronicler of the Scottish past had been Jane Porter, whose Thaddeus of Warsaw in 1827 put Elizabeth Ruffin ‘‘in quite fine spirits.’’ 151 Later in the century, Mary Chesnut, Grace King, and Ellen Glasgow, among many other Southern women, were to hazard the genre. But, though many women read historical fiction, few Southern women before the Civil War wrote it, notwithstanding Augusta Evans’s first novel, Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (1855). History was largely understood as the public realm, which was man’s 150. GFH, ‘‘Bulwer’s Barons,’’ 218; ‘‘McKenzie’s Works,’’ SQR 13 (January 1848): 87; I. [ J?] N. McMahon to CG, 23 March 1847, CG Papers, LSU; newspaper clipping from Mobile Daily Register, 12 April (1854), JPK Papers, PLB; WGS, ‘‘Modern Prose Fiction,’’ 52. 151. Entry for 21 February 1827, Elizabeth Ruffin Journal, in O’Brien, Evening When Alone, 65.

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Caroline Howard Gilman (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

work. But, as it happened, much of public significance flowed through households and drawing rooms, and the private was scarcely contemptible. Caroline Gilman was a bridge. On the American scene, the domestic novel had originated in New England. Her first work of fiction was the Recollections of a Housekeeper (1834), latterly renamed the Recollections of a New England Bride and Housekeeper, which led naturally to the Recollections of a Southern Matron (1837). The former is a slight work, mostly a disconnected account of getting married in Boston and dealing with servants, but the latter is fuller and more complex. Gilman was anxious that the reader not be too much drawn by the allurements of fiction and purposefully reminded that this or that incident is ‘‘founded in truth.’’ And Recollections of a Southern Matron is not so much a novel, for it has little plot; rather, it is a study of manners, a series of scenes intending ‘‘to show the habits of Southern domestic life.’’ In it, a young Charleston woman lives in her family, witnesses a miscellany of things, is courted, marries, has children, and with that the book stops. Even after nearly twenty years of Southern residence, Gilman still wrote much as a semi-outsider, though

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her narrative voice is formally that of the young Charlestonian woman. Still, New Englanders appear with regularity in her story, her characters include ‘‘the stranger,’’ and she has the traveler’s habit of noting and musing about difference, whether it consists in accents, food, social customs, or educational habits. In Gilman, everything is always not something else. A home exists in a world of other places, though in Gilman, the shutters and doors of that home are open, so that people come in and out. So guests at dinner might be European, and argue the merits of different coffees, this one for Java and the other for Mocha, and someone might remember coffees drunk in Turkey or the richness of a cup ‘‘taken from the hands of a pretty limonadière at the Café des Mille Colonnes at Paris.’’ ‘‘Their hospitable doors are open to friends,’’ Gilman says with satisfaction of one family, ‘‘and the frequent traveller brings to their tranquil abodes the softened echo of the world.’’ 152 As such, Recollections of a Southern Matron’s emphasis on the South’s sense of community—‘‘I write in my paternal mansion’’ are its first words—is an observation from someone for whom the condition was painfully acquired and so a wonder. The young Caroline Howard had known no paternal mansion. Her childhood in Massachusetts had not been settled; her father, a shipwright, had died before she was three, her mother moved homes annually and died when Caroline was ten, she was boarded with an aunt, with winter visits to her brothers in Savannah.153 Her education was ‘‘exceedingly irregular, a perpetual passing from school to school.’’ An odd consequence of this background is the importance of slaves in Recollections of a Southern Matron, for they were the perpetual presences of the Southern domestic sphere and, unlike native Southerners, Gilman was estranged enough to notice them. Because Gilman became proslavery, it has been tempting to see her characterizations of slavery as arising from her domestication in the South, whereas it seems more probable that it came from her divided sensibility, which led her in 1838 to publish a travel account of the United States, in which half is written as a Northern tour, half as a Southern tour. For, in fact, Gilman was much more attentive to slaves than was usual in Southern fiction and, though all her slaves are conventionally loyal, they appear as individuals, with special needs, voices, mannerisms. So the mother of her heroine, Cornelia Wilton, has a maid called Chloe, ‘‘with a turban of superior height,’’ who carries keys, stands behind the mother’s chair, is an arbiter of taste who is ‘‘the most refined of our colored circle,’’ someone who varies in her demureness and has 152. Caroline Gilman, Southern Matron, 90, 233, 143, 154. 153. Janice Joan Thompson, ‘‘Caroline Howard Gilman: Her Mind and Art’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975), 2–6, 13.

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an expression that required interpretation. When a slave dies, Gilman says, ‘‘My father’s slave—that helpless being was more to me at that moment than worlds at my feet. She was human, and she lived.’’ 154 Gilman was very much interested in language, including that of slaves, and presumed the world had many voices. ‘‘I have never felt any more apprehension at having my children associate with negroes, lest their dialect should be permanently injured, than I should have at their listening to the broken English of a foreigner; and though, at the time of which I speak, I preferred to talk to the negroes in their dialect, I never used it to the whites.’’ So a Mr. Bates, a Connecticut tutor, says ‘‘ ‘Wha-r-t?’ . . . with a tremendous drawl,’’ and a footnote explains, contrapuntally, that ‘‘the common Southern expression is eh? or what say? pronounced almost like one word.’’ It is noted how, what in Boston is called a truck, is in Charleston a dray. Cornelia reads William Collins’s ode on the passions to her tutor and her pronunciation is scrutinized. ‘‘First fare his hand its skill to try—’’ ‘‘Fare! ’’ said Mr. Bates, ‘‘how do you spell it?’’ ‘‘F-e-a-r fare,’’ said I. ‘‘How do you pronounce these words?’’ said he, pointing to appear, car, tear, &c., in the spelling book. I answered, appare, [c]are, tare, &c.155 In this, Gilman was writing very much as a mother. She had had six children between 1820 and 1831, and a seventh in 1839. She was the editor of a children’s periodical. Education, of which language was the medium, was central to her. So, in talking even about the plantation, her immediate thought was how it worked as a school: ‘‘One would suppose that the retirement of a plantation was the most appropriate spot for a mother and her children to give and receive instruction.’’ It was not so, because there a mother had too many dependents, ‘‘a number which would constitute a village.’’ The duties of a mistress were legion: tending the sick, keeping the keys, sewing, hospitality. Likewise, Gilman has a chapter on the deficiencies of Southern education for boys, which stresses the stultifying effects of too much Latin grammar, blames teachers for being indifferent to the emotional difficulties of their charges, faults ‘‘superficial and imperfect’’ examinations, notes that textbooks were too expensively changed for the sake of mere newfangledness, and argues that unremitting schoolwork creates discouragement and listlessness. 154. Caroline Gilman, Southern Matron, 5, 24–25, 52, 39, 103; Caroline Gilman, ‘‘My Autobiography,’’ in The Female Prose Writers of America, ed. John S. Hart (Philadelphia: E. S. Butler, 1852), 53; Caroline Gilman, The Poetry of Travelling in the United States (New York: S. Colman, 1838). 155. Caroline Gilman, Southern Matron, 40–42.

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(On the other hand, she did not like a teacher to give too free a hand to students.) Rather, Gilman urges a new plan, in which school and home would share responsibilities; that, in the school, teaching would take place and the task of memory begun, but, in the home, the parent would undertake the necessary drudgery of recitation. Indeed, she comes very close to arguing that an education at home might be best, in the hands of a good private tutor, even on a plantation: ‘‘Here is no copying of others, no meretricious ambition from the struggle after pre-eminence. . . . In these far woods, breathing space is given for the young pulsation of the opening feelings.’’ 156 In all this, she emulated Maria Edgeworth, not only in her ideas on education, but her didactic usage of fiction. Her scenes of Southern life work somewhat like posters tacked to the wall of a classroom; her reader sits at a desk and is instructed by a kindly schoolmistress, who points at the illustrations of life and says; see how slaves talk, this is how you do needlepoint, there is merit in simple folk, this is how you can cope with death. Death is a marked feature of Gilman’s world, as it needed to be if she was to be faithful to the scything down that marked ordinary domesticity. Of her own six children, only three survived babyhood. People die in her book with gentle regularity: a grandmother, old Jacque a slave mentor, a mother, a tutor called Charles Duncan who loves Cornelia, cousin Anna, a neighbor’s daughter called Maria Alwyn, a baby of the slave Bella, these and others on and off stage. For Gilman, managing grief was a household task, the more so perhaps for a minister’s wife. So, ‘‘grief will be busy,’’ bodies have to be dressed, flowers arranged, coffins secured, ceremonies ordered, and monuments erected. Her language insistently speaks of wild emotion fiercely contained, of ‘‘the shrieking voice within’’ that does not emerge. Conventionally, she sought the consolations of religion, but knew the possibility of their absence, of what it might be like to face death without the comforts of Christianity: ‘‘Oh, dark, dark moment, when the fear of death is roused without its hopes, and we see the gloom of the grave untinged by the dawn of salvation.’’ Gilman seems to kill off Maria Alwyn, just to show how her survivor, her mother, with no belief in an afterlife would cope. Like most Christians, Gilman saw the atheist as unnatural. So Maria’s mother is portrayed as someone vulgar, mannish, cruel to servants. Even the disposition of the corpse is unnatural: ‘‘I was shocked to observe the body of the deceased laid out on a table in the parlor, in order to be near, as I learned afterward, to her mother, that she might see her while she prepared the house for the funeral.’’ So the dead serve the convenience of the living, because (for the irreligious) corpses have no higher purpose or destination. Mrs. Alwyn is shown talking 156. Ibid., 50–51, 224, 61.

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of futility, of how Maria had been a sweet girl, and of how her death would be easier to bear if Maria had been otherwise: ‘‘If she had been cross and ugly, she might have gone and welcome.’’ To this, Cornelia offers the usual hope, ‘‘ ‘You must at least be grateful that her mind was so pure, and pious, and prepared for death,’’ and, at this, the mother explodes, ‘‘ ‘Grateful! . . . What good will it do me? I shall be none the better for her hymns and her prayers. . . . Now, I’ve worked my fingers to the bone just for that dead body.’’ Cornelia takes pity on the ‘‘wretched mother’s unbelief ’’ and reiterates the truth of ‘‘the garden of heaven.’’ Nonetheless, Gilman ends the chapter with the thrill of the forbidden thought: ‘‘This picture (literally true) is a startling representation of an irreligious, uncultivated mind; but are there not many who secretly carry out these sacrilegious feelings when God lays their earthly blessings in the dust?’’ One passage, at least, suggests that Gilman herself had a strong sense of death’s disorder: ‘‘We bend over the stiffened form, and turn away, and come not again, for it is death: perchance we lift the bloodless hand, or smooth the straying hair—but only once, for it is death, and we are chilled.’’ She speaks of death’s ‘‘bitterness.’’ But she also says that ‘‘death is sad—not horrible.’’ Finally, she opts for the Christian sense. Death ‘‘should be dressed like night, with dark and flowing robes, and solemn, perhaps uncertain step; but, like night, with the new moon lighting up her sombre mantle, and distant stars, images of far-off life, looking down on her brow.’’ Death, it seems, is a woman.157 For the rest, the rhythms in Gilman’s book are inexorable, as was essential to domestic fiction: parents, childhood, schooling, courtship, marriage, birth, death, all happen in their cyclical turn. Life is not the less emotional or turbulent for this patterning, since emotions might be located in these rites of passage. So, ‘‘youth is full of hope and forgiveness.’’ But the unexpected is part of these rhythms. Slaves burn dramatically in a fire, as does old Nanny, Jacque’s sister. ‘‘It seemed to me like a nightmare, as she stood tossing her thin arms wildly in the flames, her dark form in contrast with the lurid light. . . . It passed away, and I felt a frantic desire for her safety.’’ It is not easy to experience the ordinary. Still, for Gilman, the home offers the best hope. She is inclined to mock the belle and the bon ton: ‘‘While the unmarried woman tastes the exhilarating cup of fashion,’’ she sermonized, ‘‘let the young wife and mother seek her dearest charm at home, kindle up the smiles for one, and tune her sweet voice, no longer lavished on the crowd, to infant lullabies.’’ 158 Her instincts are introspective and rooted in a certain mistrust of society. Indeed, if it is true that Southerners located self in the regard of others, Gilman 157. Ibid., 221, 28, 29, 217, 219, 179–80. 158. Ibid., 79, 102, 126.

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remained a New Englander.159 In reprobating dueling, she says, ‘‘Genuine honor lies in ourselves, and not in the opinion of the world. . . . [I]t is neither defended by sword nor buckler, but by a life of integrity and irreproachableness.’’ Indeed, it is this episode—a brother fighting a duel—which draws out Gilman’s most succinct statement of woman’s role. Man has dangerous passions and women must soften these, not inflame them like ‘‘the courtesan of classic times.’’ (So sex was euphemistically invoked as the dangerous option of being Aspasia, a role that woman must refuse.) ‘‘I may venture to show how female influence may ‘ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm’ of masculine feeling for good or for evil; how the genius of Christianity, or even worldly philosophy, quietly exhibited in woman’s gentle tones, may come with their enlightening power, not for the avoidance of mere physical pain, but with a serious regard to man’s true dignity and ultimate destiny.’’ Woman is the peace-maker, who smiles through pain, who is a hypocrite for the sake of morality, who ‘‘stoops not, but rather rises to a high moral elevation, and looks calmly down upon the angry passions that are floating beneath.’’ But man, too, has a ‘‘high responsibility,’’ he must meet the ‘‘arduous demand’’ of sustaining community, for he ‘‘controlled the happiness of a large family of his fellow creatures.’’ The woman is safer when entrusted not to a ‘‘mere idler,’’ but to a planter, say, who ‘‘has to answer to man and to God in the patriarchal relation he holds,’’ a man who knows the importance of being earnest.160 There was little in Gilman that was formally political, though her sympathetic vision of the South was, for a New England woman married to a Unitarian minister in Charleston, a deeply political gesture; her decision, even after Samuel Gilman’s death in 1858, to be loyal to the Confederacy is easy to predict from Recollections of a Southern Matron, even in 1837. Most of her children and grandchildren, after all, were born Southerners and remained so, though the family retained enough New England connection that a few married northward. At the moment of her writing the Recollections Gilman was, in many ways, a representative of the pre-abolitionist moment in North-South relations. Much changed in Southern fiction after William Lloyd Garrison spoke and Nat Turner rebelled, notably by the creation of the Southern political novel. Neither George Tucker’s Valley of the Shenandoah nor John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn had been other than implicitly political. But Beverley Tucker’s The Partisan Leader (1836) was very different and commenced a new vein. It is a futuristic tale of 1848–49, in which Martin Van Buren has secured a fourth term and corrupts the American political and legal system into a quasi159. This is the contention of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 160. Caroline Gilman, Southern Matron, 205, 207–8, 234.

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monarchical oppression, the Lower South has seceded, and Virginia tries to follow but is compelled into a guerrilla war against the Union. The novel explores divided loyalties in a Virginia family. So it is Waverley moved from the Highlands to the Appalachians, from the past to the future, and stripped of Scott’s studied ambivalence about Jacobite and Hanoverian, for Tucker used the novel bluntly to expound his political and economic views. The book is founded in a very old political vision, being the Commonwealth tradition reenacted. There is the old bogeyman of the standing army, and Tucker wrote under the pseudonym of Edward William Sydney, presumably a play upon Algernon Sidney. More immediately the book was a response to the politics of the Jackson era, to Nullification and the tariff, to the Whig revulsion from ‘‘King Andrew’’ and the maneuverings that secured the White House to Van Buren, that man of suspiciously pliant principles. There is but one slight and fleeting reference to ‘‘the poor negroes that the Yankees pretend to be so sorry for’’ but otherwise the book is indifferent to slavery.161 Tucker’s book, oddly, shows that it was easier to evade slavery in male political fiction: there need be no slaves present in scenes where politicians argue, judges are bought, or guerrillas kill. But, as Gilman shows, it was hard (though not impossible) to speak of Southern domesticity without representing household slaves, so it is not surprising that the Southern novelists who responded most sharply to Uncle Tom’s Cabin were the women. Caroline Lee Hentz was the most notable of these, especially in The Planter’s Northern Bride. Like Gilman, she was Massachusetts-born (in her case, in Lancaster). Her father had been an army officer. As has been suggested above, liminal women in the South seem to have been much more interested in studying and defending slavery than those who were Southern born and bred. Susan Petigru King of Charleston, for example, and (as will be seen) Augusta Evans of Mobile, did little enough with the subject, even after Mrs. Stowe had written. But Hentz lived much more on the margin than Gilman, who lived an adult Charleston life of solid respectability and continuity. Hentz, by contrast, married in 1824 a volatile French emigré called Nicholas Hentz, who sometimes taught in schools and colleges, sometimes not. They moved around, from Massachusetts where they had met, to Chapel Hill, then Covington in Kentucky, then across the Ohio River to Cincinnati (where her school was opposite Mrs. Trollope’s bazaar and she knew Harriet Beecher Stowe), then assorted Alabama towns (Florence, Tuscaloosa, Tuskegee), then Columbus in Georgia, and finally Marianna, Florida, where she died in 161. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader, a Tale of the Future, introduction by C. Hugh Holman (1836; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 14.

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1856.162 She too taught and later, with children and debts, she earned muchneeded money with her writings, which were various, short stories and novels but also plays and poetry. The controversy over Mrs. Stowe’s book was an opportunity, beckoning with sales. In much of Hentz’s writing, intersectional harmony had been a theme, natural not only to a Northern-born woman, but also to someone who lived much on the edge of the South. The plot of The Planter’s Northern Bride is simple enough. A Southern planter called Moreland visits the North, where he falls in love with Eulalia Hastings, the daughter of an abolitionist. The father first opposes, then reluctantly accedes to the marriage when both sicken at their frustrated love. Eulalia the bride moves South to her husband’s plantation, where she happily learns the benignity of slavery and the limitations of Africans, and produces a bouncy son and heir. There are crosscurrents—Moreland had been divorced and his ex-wife causes trouble, a deceitful Northerner masquerading as a preacher instigates an unsuccessful slave insurrection—but the straightforward burden of the novel is the successful marriage of a strong Southern man and a pliant Northern woman, an event that Hentz suggests should instruct all those not blinded by malignant animosity. Her slaves are cruder than Gilman’s, being not individual but merely stock characters: the loyal body servant, the old family nurse in her cabin, the gullible young female, the blacksmith runaway. Hentz is more didactic, speaking with direct political messages in the midst of her narrative, which iterate the nostrums of the proslavery argument. She is formally racist, starkly so, speaking much of the physical dimensions of race, of smells and revulsion, the ‘‘shudder of inexpressible loathing.’’ She has among the worst descriptions of Africa by any Southern writer, shuddering at cannibalism, ‘‘superstition so dark and loathsome,’’ and ‘‘the hetacombs of human victims slaughtered at the grave of a barbarian chief.’’ 163 Indeed, the book is almost more an argument for racial hierarchy than for slavery, which makes sense when one remembers that Hentz was concerned to find ground upon which Southerners and Northerners could stand together. The Planter’s Northern Bride is a bleak book, despite its often-glowing language, for it evidences much fear, which seems to have roots in Hentz’s experience as a woman. She writes of ‘‘the bondage of poverty, whose iron chains are heard clanking in every region of God’s earth, whose dark links 162. Charles A. Hentz, ‘‘My Autobiography,’’ Hentz Family Papers, SHC, reprinted in Steven M. Stowe, ed., A Southern Practice: The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D., Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 401–614. 163. Caroline Lee Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride, introduction by Rhoda Coleman Ellison (1854; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 41, 84.

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are wrought in the forge of human suffering, eating slowly into the quivering flesh, till they reach and dry up the life-blood of the heart.’’ This is partly the usual Southern vision of Mayhew’s Stygean London, but it was also the anxious glance of the struggling mother, not sure where sustenance was to come from. Both Hentz’s women and her slaves accept a planter’s mastership, because it offers safety, a thing of greater moment than freedom. Freedom itself she regards with skepticism. ‘‘Free! I wonder who is free?’’ a Northern servant is made to ask, and no encouraging answer is given except that God has refused to man ‘‘freedom from the bondage and the mystery and necessity of life.’’ But Hentz was unashamedly partial to wealth, and her enthusiasm for the South was much connected to its prosperity. Eulalia would be ‘‘cradled in the lap of wealth,’’ she would ‘‘have a kind, handsome husband, if ever there was one, and a rich one.’’ As to the Jacksonian matter of progress, ‘‘the avenues of wealth and distinction . . . open to all,’’ as ‘‘to golden portals of success and honor,’’ these for Hentz were uncertainties, true or not, she could not tell. In truth, Hentz was a snob, who dealt unsympathetically with poor whites. To slaves, she delivered the backhanded compliment that their religious faith was admirable because ‘‘[n]o proud, intellectual self-sufficiency,— no cold, questioning philosophy,—no God-defying strength of reason impeded, in their simple minds, the reception of evangelical truths.’’ But, for Hentz, wealth meant possibility. Eulalia, after her marriage, is reminded of her affluence, of her porcelain, silver, and slaves, and she looks ‘‘gratefully at her husband’’ and observes, ‘‘I am not insensible of the superior advantages of my present position. In the simplicity of my native home I was content, and I trust I should have remained so; but I have had many, many sources of enjoyment opened since, of which I never dreamed then.’’ 164 An unusual feature of The Planter’s Northern Bride is that Hentz portrays New England, not as the springboard for modern industrialism, all whirring spindles and great cities, but as a crabbed, isolated world of unworldly village provincials. Eulalia’s wedding journey from North to South is a movement into a world of greater complexity, movement, and sophistication. She ‘‘had never seen a car’’ or a steamboat and is frightened to see a steam engine: ‘‘Born in a little inland town, whose winding stream bore no heavier vessel than the school boy’s light canoe, and confined by circumstances to one peculiar spot, it is not strange that she knew so little of the world beyond.’’ 165 There is a hint that New England’s abolitionism exists because of a religious sanction, too narrow and unsophisticated to cope with the real world; Eulalia’s father is his village’s intellectual bully, whom Hentz shows 164. Ibid., 27, 338–39, 150, 161, 27–28, 346, 405. 165. Ibid., 178–79.

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bested by the urbane arguments of Moreland. The local minister who helps Moreland woo his bride does so, because he has unusually traveled, including to Virginia, and so knows more about morally and socially complicated worlds than the unknowing but self-confident villagers of his flock. Moreland is always reasonable, balanced, moderate. Slavery is good, on balance, though he admits to the existence of cruelty among a few masters, to injustices, which are but human realities. Hentz was much implicated in the discourse of moral landscapes, of the North as a constricting ‘‘cold dream,’’ and the South as warm and vivifying. Eulalia is being killed by the puritanical repression and ideological rigidity of her father, but she recovers and blossoms in ‘‘the beauty of . . . our Southern landscapes, the luxuriance of our gardens, the fragrance of our flowers.’’ Moreland’s brother Richard Laurens is a Northerner stricken with consumption, who is helped by the South’s benisons, but goes north to Cincinnati to die. Moreland falls ill during his New England sojourn, partly from being lovelorn, but also from a ‘‘change of climate, and a thousand causes unknown.’’ (All this was reminiscent of Madame de Staël’s Corinne.) Hentz is not convinced of the merits of ‘‘passions subdued, of weaknesses overcome, and sorrows endured and sanctified,’’ or of being ‘‘calm and passionless.’’ She is, to be sure, suspicious of license. Moreland’s ex-wife’s crime had been willfulness, a refusal to obey. (She is the daughter of an Italian, which is held to explain much.) But she taunts Eulalia with being ‘‘the daughter of a northern clime, without impulse or passion, cold as your wintry snows,’’ and the surge of passion with which Eulalia responds is held to be valuable for her, one of the many elements in her awakening.166 Hentz’s book is an obvious one, only here and there varying the standard beliefs of what—the book plainly confesses—was now her chosen culture. (Her earlier works had been more even-handed between North and South.) Its most striking contribution was to speak with the voice of the thousands of Northerners who, over the years, had been drawn to the South by its wealth, started to understand that slavery was essential to its opportunities, made more than a peace with its ideology, but came to share their neighbors’ complacency at their valuable power, while remaining anxious not to be despised by their distant relatives. Being New Englanders these migrants needed morality, but being Americans they sought prosperity; hence they made of the South’s gleaming fields a vision of both. So, in Hentz, the benediction from the North is important. In The Planter’s Northern Bride, Eulalia’s father comes around to his Northern daughter’s Southern life, her mistress-ship of a slave community and her birthing of a young master, and convinces himself that 166. Ibid., 404, 94, 127, 128, 366.

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slavery is a missionary venture, an engine for turning African pagans into Christians. In his last novel, William Alexander Caruthers shows the obverse of Hentz’s worldview. For her, the domestic scene offered a microcosm of the political realm. For him, domesticity was enfolded dialectically within a larger politics, which was masculine and violent. Indeed, few novels more neatly narrate the imperial vision of Southern culture than The Knights of the Horse-Shoe.167 The scene is set in the Virginia of 1714. The colony’s governor is Alexander Spotswood, who casts covetous eyes upon the West and leads a military expedition to the brow of the Appalachian mountains, whence he proposes to found an empire that might dispossess the natives and push aside the competition of France and Spain. Caruthers is very clear that the moral meaning of the novel and the South resides in this projection of power, that Spotswood is the pathfinder of the ‘‘glorious and magnificent scheme of conquering an Empire’’ that was to reach consummation in Caruthers’s own day. Spotswood was ‘‘the great pioneer, who first led the chivalrous youths of the Old Dominion upon those tramontane pilgrimages, which have already been so gloriously commemorated upon the plains of San Jacinto, by one of the same peripatetic race, and which we confidently predict will never rest this side of the gates of Mexico.’’ 168 Equally clear is that this is an American, not a British achievement, the harbinger of what a postcolonial South would accomplish by freeing itself of the trammeling by Westminster. For, in the novel, what is worthwhile is caught between two dark forces, the Indian savages to the west and the corrupt Europeans to the east. In the Old World, there is narrowness of vision, self-absorption, war between Whig and Tory, Jacobite and Hanoverian, Britain and France. It is a place that sends forth not only ‘‘human swarms from the European hives,’’ but also death. One of the novel’s opening scenes shows the governor being obliged secretly to bury the body of his half-brother, beheaded as a Jacobite, smuggled out of the country to find a resting place free of dishonor. To Europe goes the novel’s young hero, Francis Lee, and there he is thought to have died, drawn into bitter strife in a vain attempt to make sense of moral disorder. Europe, 167. The title of this novel varies. When first published serially in The Magnolia in 1841, it was The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe, but in all but one subsequent editions, ‘‘Golden’’ disappears. The modern edition of 1970 restores the adjective, even though using the 1845 edition, which does not have it. Since presumably Caruthers omitted ‘‘Golden’’ for his own reasons, whatever they were, I follow his usage. On this history, see ‘‘A Note on the Text,’’ in William Alexander Caruthers, The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe: A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion, introduction by Curtis Carroll Davis (1845; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), xxix–xxx. 168. Caruthers, Golden Horse-Shoe, 39, 213.

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too, threatens skepticism: here and there, the dark name of Lord Bolingbroke is invoked, when the topic of religion arises. (Caruthers was an evangelical Christian, who loudly praised the Reformation and mistrusted Roman Catholics.) Equally, the American natives offer only dishonor and death. Attempts at sharing the land are shown to be doomed. Indians are offered education at the College of William and Mary, but the ‘‘splendid scheme of philanthropy’’ fails. The governor’s son, John Spotswood, has a liaison with a young Indian woman, and for this he is murdered, ‘‘killed by a single blow of a dagger driven through his heart, and sent with such force that the long formidable weapon (worn in those days by Indian fighters,) had actually penetrated the floor and pinioned him to the puncheons beneath.’’ 169 Suspended between these two ominous worlds is Virginia, a place of sweet domesticity. The body of the executed Jacobite comes to interrupt a ‘‘snug little country fire-side party,’’ at which all have their place: the governor, his wife, their daughters, their sons, men of local importance, and (little regarded in the novel) a few slaves. Caruthers was very much interested in the ideology of separate spheres. As such tales required, there is much ado about courtship: lovers are lost and then found, virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Women are drawn to flowers and innocence, though they notice masculine crime. (A young man called Henry Lee furnishes a steady supply of mendacity, hypocrisy, pride, and betrayal.) Men ‘‘mix too much with the business and the anxieties of the world,’’ while pining for woman’s redemptive touch. ‘‘Man is impelled forward to action amidst the stirring adventures which are gathered around him like the meshes of a plot, until it becomes with his doubtful and doubting reason hard to separate the narrow boundaries which divide crime from errors of judgment.’’ To the contrary, ‘‘the heart of every girl clings to some image or other, real or imaginary, and they cling to it through life, whether married or single.’’ 170 Caruthers was self-consciously imitative of Walter Scott and he freely admitted to it. ‘‘We thank God,’’ he writes in one of his authorial asides, ‘‘that we have lived in the days when those tales of witchery and romance were set forth from Abbotsford, to cheer the desponding hearts of thousands, and tens of thousands.’’ A tactile sense of a glorious landscape, possessed by masculine energy which enables a world made safe for the purity of women, is essential to the novel’s dynamics. The two worlds of land and women, which men come to conquer, is dreamt of even by the women whom Caruthers describes. Ellen Evylin, who ends up married to the young cavalier who helps Spotswood conquer space, says this to a female friend: ‘‘You, Kate, know some169. Ibid., 20, 238, 131; Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers, 300. 170. Caruthers, Golden Horse-Shoe, 73, 95, 96.

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thing of a woman’s love, even in its inception; you know that it is not only a part of her being, but it is the whole, at least, the layer upon which all else is built. But I not only had true and unwavering faith in Frank himself, but I believed in his imaginary paradise, which his glowing and delighted imagination had painted for us.’’ This world of marriage merges with that of empire, for a woman admires the habit of command, without which empire is impossible. ‘‘ ‘Did you ever hear such a deep toned voice, Kate?’ said Ellen, ‘it sounds like the bass pipes of your organ; I could not help fancying him giving commands along a long line of soldiers in battle array.’ ’’ Like a woman, landscape has natural power. When the soldiers reach the Blue Ridge, they look down on a scene, sublime and overpowering: ‘‘Nearly every one wandered off and seated himself upon some towering crag, and then held communion with the silent spirit of the place. There lay the valley of Virginia, that garden spot of the earth, in its first freshness and purity, as it came from the hands of its Maker. Not a white man had ever trod upon that virgin soil, from the beginning of the world.’’ Like any virgin, the land needs despoiling. The natives have to be killed, ‘‘the war-whoop from fifteen hundred savage throats’’ has to be silenced. This accomplished, the possessed land can then create domesticity, whose possibility the soldiers nurture in letters back to those they love. In time, this conquered world becomes Caruthers’s own home, a place different from others. Spotswood sees this coming: ‘‘I do not hesitate to predict that a second Virginia will grow up here, which will rival the famed shores of the Chesapeake; but the products will be different, and the people must be different; for it is a colder region.’’ Caruthers sees it in nostalgic retrospect, living as he did in Savannah, but born as he had been in Lexington in western Virginia: ‘‘It has been our fate to exchange a home, combining the grandest and the loveliest extremes of nature—the green valley and the rugged mountain cliff—the serenest pictures of domestic comfort, in juxtaposition with the wildest ravines and most towering precipices—for one within the reach of old Neptune’s everlasting roar—and our heart still yearns towards our native mountains.’’ 171 Nonetheless, Caruthers did not intend his allegory to bestow an unmixed blessing on the project of empire. He was, after all, a Whig, and hence a man caught in the middle, with some sympathy for oligarchy, but some interest 171. Ibid., 205, 34, 40, 229, 228, 238. He was the son of William Caruthers, who owned a succession of farms and plantations, to the extent of 30,855 acres in western Virginia, and still more beyond the mountains in Ohio. The son studied at Washington College, then medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1823. For five years he lived back in Lexington, Virginia, but then for another six he was a doctor in New York City. Two more years in Lexington were followed by a permanent removal to Savannah. On this, see Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers, 7–8.

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in the people. He lived at a time when Virginians were troubled by decline and depopulation, when the Chesapeake, ‘‘that choice region,’’ was being ‘‘daily deserted by its natives for an unknown land of frogs, and vapors, and swamps.’’ He liked to imagine that, in time, ‘‘the descendants of these very restless emigrants, now miring in the swamps of Mississippi, may return, and hunt out the faded and perishing memorials of their forefathers, and cast their tents beside them, and say, here will we and our posterity dwell forever, in the land given to our fathers.’’ For this to happen, people would have to learn the merit of stability, see the value of the old ways in ‘‘that land in which was exhibited that rarest combination of social aristocracy and public equality— where virtue, and talents, and worth alone were consecrated to reverence, through hereditary lines of descent.’’ To make a future, Virginians would have to restore the past: ‘‘When those old grave stones are replaced, and flowers once more bloom over their green and dark forms, then will the regeneration of the Old Dominion commence, and not till then.’’ 172 This was a problem to which the political theorists were elsewhere giving much thought, not only for the sake of Virginia. Like Caruthers, their confidence was touched with misgiving.

172. Caruthers, Golden Horse-Shoe, 85–86. On Caruthers’s Whiggery, see Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers, 74–78.

book five

ride and ower

Chapter Sixteen

Our Present Peculiar, Complicated, and Remarkable System of Governments

The Virginia Construction 1 In many of the genres ventured by antebellum Southern intellectuals, they were much reliant on interpreting the innovations of European thought. Political thought was different. The pertinent interpretation had taken place in the late eighteenth century, when readings of John Locke, Algernon Sidney, David Hume, and Montesquieu had been collated with the indigenous experience of British colonials, American revolutionaries, and constitutionmakers to form what was then the modern world’s most original body of political thinking. Southerners were conscious of this preeminence, much of which had been fashioned by their forebears. As William Branch Giles observed in 1829, the events of 1776 ‘‘had opened a new aera in the science of politics.’’ To this had been added nearly a half-century of turbulent constitutional history, which had generated its own body of relevant texts: the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the decisions of John Marshall, and much else. Together, all these formed an ambivalent tradition. Some Southerners came to see themselves as shadows, as lesser men grappling with a powerful but imprecise legacy. A few others felt they had smoothly inherited a greatness, which they themselves might elaborate. Yet all knew that there was richness in this legacy. But this wealth needed careful husbanding, required the knowledge that ‘‘an incessant vigilance, a sleepless jealousy, and a promptness of resentment’’ were the marks of a serious republican, and demanded Title from JCC, The Works of John C. Calhoun, vol. 1, A Disquisition on Government and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, ed. Richard K. Crallé (Columbia, S.C.: A. S. Johnston, 1851), 188. 1. The phrase comes from Thomas Cooper, who spoke of ‘‘the Virginia construction of the U.S. Constitution’’: see TC, Consolidation: An Account of Parties in the United States from the Convention of 1787 to the Present Period, 2d ed. (Columbia, S.C.: Times and Gazette Office, 1830), 4.

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the insight that any complacent sense of completion would signal the end, even the moral bankruptcy of what 1776 had commenced. ‘‘Thinking,’’ John Taylor observed in 1814, ‘‘is as necessary to a body politick, to enable it to shun evil and obtain good, as to any other reasonable being.’’ So the thinker mattered, for thought was the instrument of vigilance. For the tradition also taught that all was mutable. ‘‘It is universally allowed that forms of government are liable to decay,’’ Taylor likewise observed. ‘‘Without repair, decay terminates in destruction. A constitution must therefore die in the common course of nature.’’ 2 Indeed, in 1824 Thomas Cooper thought the American constitution of 1787 admirable but for ‘‘one capital defect, viz: the want of a clause appointing a periodical revision of it every thirty years.’’ 3 It was to become usual, in the twentieth century, to speak of an older tradition of Southern political thought that was decentralist, conservative, and skeptical of democracy.4 This was, in truth, a better description of how that tradition stood in 1900, for then Southern politics, battered by the swift revolutions of Reconstruction, segregation, disfranchisement, and a failed Populism did, indeed, acquire such characteristics, though even then not universally.5 It may seem a paradox to observe, considering that one society had slavery and the other did not, that Southern politics in 1840 (for whites) were considerably more democratic than those of 1900. Indeed, it is arguable that many Southern conservatives after Reconstruction used racial politics as a way to reverse the contested achievement of Jacksonian democracy. Antebellum political thought covered a fairly wide ideological spectrum, though it stopped far short of the philosophies forged within those socialist traditions that mistrusted property. Merely to observe that the South had John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, John Taylor, John C. Calhoun, and Beverley Tucker, all very different men, is to see how fissiparous was the debate and how variously the problems of power, equality, democracy, and rights were there analyzed. In a 2. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, of 1829–30 (Richmond: Samuel Shepherd, 1830), 237; ‘‘Coit’s Eulogy’’ (the Rev. J. C. Coit), in The Carolina Tribute to Calhoun, ed. J. P. Thomas (Columbia, S.C.: Richard L. Bryan, 1857), 155; John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, ed. Loren Baritz (1814; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 522. 3. TC, Consolidation, 13. 4. The classic account was Jesse T. Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789–1861: A Study in Political Thought (1930; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963). 5. On these matters, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880– 1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974); Michael Perman, Strule for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

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phrase that George Fitzhugh much liked, Thomas Carlyle once spoke of the ‘‘constitutional battle of the Kilkenny cats,’’ and the Southern scene answered to the description.6 Little was settled, beyond the presumption of republicanism. Indeed, secession in 1860–61 was, in part, an attempt finally to resolve ambivalences that had grown intolerable, made so by generations of relentless scrutineers. The fierce certitudes that often seem to characterize Southern writings on the state arose from a knowledge of incertitudes. As Beverley Tucker observed of the Founding Fathers, ‘‘So anomalous is their plan, that, to this day, the ablest expounders of the constitution are not agreed upon its fundamental principles, and so little does it resemble any other government, whether past or present, that all attempts to illustrate and explain it by analogies to them, are sure to lead to dangerous mistakes.’’ Calhoun called the whole thing, ‘‘Our present peculiar, complicated, and remarkable system of governments.’’ 7 Of necessity 1840 came to express a revisionist view of what had happened in 1776 and 1787, even though it was important to antebellum Southerners to believe in their continuity with the Founding moment. This revisionism was assisted by the dark complexity of the American Revolution, which had had many reasons for obscuring its constitutional understandings when effecting the political settlement of Union. As Charles F. Mercer of Virginia put it in 1829, the Union ‘‘was founded in a compromise of principles, for the sake of uniting States, otherwise sovereign and independent, by a National Government of limited power,’’ which was to him a clear statement of an unclear situation. David James McCord in 1828 had likewise observed inclarity: ‘‘In a compact of such magnitude, comprehending such vast powers, and various and complicated objects and operations, formed too by the demands and concessions of various interests, it is impossible to suppose that any individual could see all the bearings which the Constitution would have when carried into effect, or correctly anticipate all the constructions that should or might be put upon it, when brought into contact with subordinate powers, or the diversity of subjects upon which it was to operate.’’ 8 Madison and Jefferson had left a confusing legacy, about which even they themselves were sometimes dubious, considering how long and political had been their careers. To be a Jeffersonian often required taking sides with Jefferson against himself, 6. Quoted in GF, ‘‘Popular Institutions,’’ DBR 28 (May 1860): 528. The original is in the essay on ‘‘Parliaments,’’ in the Latter-Day Pamphlets. 7. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, Intended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), 24; JCC, Disquisition and Discourse, 188. 8. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 185; David James McCord, ‘‘The Federal Constitution,’’ SR 2 (November 1828): 432.

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to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, if one could but reason out when he had been in his cups. One thing, at least, was fairly clear. There was felt to be a line of continuity back to the Commonwealth and Country party tradition. It was not for nothing that there was a college in western Virginia named for John Hampden and Algernon Sidney, that it was founded in 1776, and that it had James Madison and Patrick Henry on its first board of trustees. During the Virginia Convention of 1829–30, John R. Cooke of Frederick was merely conventional in announcing, ‘‘Sir, the fathers of the Revolution did but reiterate those great and sacred truths which had been illustrated by the genius of Locke, and Sydney, and Milton; truths for which Hampden, and a host of his compatriots, had poured out their blood in vain.’’ 9 Indeed, the young Hugh Blair Grigsby sat in judgment upon the skill with which this tradition was evoked in the debates: ‘‘Mr. Mercer replied, and quoted Locke’s work in opposition to Sir Robert Filmer, instead of Sydney’s work,—a devil of a mistake.’’ 10 Edward Johnston in 1831, when grumbling that American nationalists would dissever the intellectual and moral richness of the English past, chanted ‘‘the names of the Sydneys, of Raleigh, Hampden, Russell, and Chatham,’’ the rollcall of the Whig tradition. ‘‘The works of Milton, Sidney’s Treatise on government, Harrington’s Oceana, and Locke’s Tracts on toleration and government,’’ observed Henry Nott in the same year, ‘‘laid the solid basis for English freedom, upon which the superstructure has since been slowly, but solidly built.’’ As Lord John Russell had argued, the idea of freedom had passed from England to the French (in Montesquieu and Voltaire) and the Americans. But, Nott insisted, ‘‘we must look back for the impetus that set the ball in motion to the commonwealth from which more than one Milton survived, to hand down the torch through the gloomy period of the last Stuarts.’’ In Thomas Cooper, the South had a living survival of the old tradition; the English radical had brought in his bags to America and, eventually, to South Carolina, ‘‘an old painting upon copper’’ of Cromwell that passed into the possession of Edwin DeLeon of Savannah, a city whose Library Society was given in 1838 busts of Milton and Locke, whose visages were to supposed to edify and inspire the society’s readers.11 So this tradition was alive. Libraries readily fur9. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 54. 10. Entry for 17 October 1829, HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS. The version in HBG, The Virginia Convention of 1829–30: A Discourse Delivered before the Virginia Historical Society (Richmond: Macfarland & Fergusson, 1854), 87, reads: ‘‘When Mercer spoke of Locke’s reply, instead of Sidney’s, to Sir Robert Filmer, a glance of Leigh’s eye told that the speaker had missed his mark.’’ Mercer seems to have been habitually muddled; he gets his Algernon Sidney mixed up with his Sir Philip Sidney, in Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 175. 11. Edward W. Johnston, ‘‘American Literature,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 437; Henry Junius Nott, ‘‘The Life and Times of Daniel De Foe,’’ SR 7 (May 1831): 79; EDL, ‘‘Cromwell’s Letters

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nished its texts, which were read. Perhaps some works, even obvious ones like Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1724), let alone the more esoteric like Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus (ca. 1681) or Walter Moyle’s Essay on the Constitution of the Roman Government (ca. 1699), had faded from view.12 But the main lineaments of the tradition remained available. In John Taylor of Caroline, Southerners had an original, if idiosyncratic link with the Commonwealth tradition. He was, in fact, of the same generation as the younger Founders, he being born in 1753, Jefferson in 1748, and Madison in 1751. But Taylor was politically their junior and, for much of his life, their supporter and pamphleteer.13 Though he was a turbulent lieutenant who usually felt his leaders were too moderate, too compliant because too drawn to the power created in 1789, Taylor was nonetheless a man broadly loyal (considering the alternatives) and unwilling to follow John Randolph into bitter opposition.14 Moreover, the bulk of Taylor’s writing came late in life and so became a sort of commentary on the early years of the Constitution, though this effect was sometimes a trick of publication’s timing. His most important text of ‘‘political science’’ (the phrase was his own), entitled An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, was begun in the 1790s, several times abandoned and resumed, before finally being put between boards in 1814, and was simultaneously a quarrel with the Hamiltonian program and the Alien and Sedition Acts as well as a meditation on the future of the American world after 1812. But, more broadly, the Inquiry was an intervention into the debate of the 1790s over the implications of the French Revolution, as well as a longer and adverse retrospect upon the growth of state power in England during the eighteenth century.15 and Speeches,’’ Southern Quarterly Review 10 (October 1846): 290; entry for June 1838, in ‘‘Donation Book of the Savannah Library Society’’ (1813–1851), Savannah Library Society Papers, GHS. 12. Of which the most accessible modern editions are John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, 2 vols. (1733; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), and Caroline Robbins, ed., Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 13. On Taylor’s role in the early 1790s as a writer of pamphlets that ‘‘comprise the most extensive and systematic of all the Republican attacks on Federalism, [and] . . . reveal more obviously than many others the Republicans’ debts to English opposition thought,’’ see Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideolo (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 193–200. 14. On Taylor and Randolph, see Robert E. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, Pastoral Republican (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980), 124. It is something of a puzzle that Taylor, a man so mistrustful of parties, should often have pressed for the unity of the Republican Party. 15. On which, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783

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William J. Hubard, John Taylor of Caroline (Courtesy Library of Virginia, Richmond)

In many ways, Taylor was a conventional Commonwealthman. He mistrusted power, especially the interpenetrations of government, patronage, and wealth, by which each advanced and corrupted the others. He disliked the metropolitan and felt that virtue lay more in the countryside. He abominated standing armies and preferred the militia, because he valued the independence of the propertied. He abused Cromwell as an enslaving tyrant.16 He was, of course, a republican, who excoriated aristocracy, monarchy, and established religion. So, though he was not one for spelling out his intellectual influences, the lineaments of the Whig tradition were clear in him. Above all, he imbibed the sense that power was voracious and always ingenious, that dark forces inexorably gathered, offering temptation and leading men astray. Such restlessness needed to be checked by a concomitant vigilance by the wise. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). That is, the work of recent historians have demonstrated that the Whig idea was far from mere paranoia. 16. Cf. ‘‘Who could foresee that Cromwel would enslave those whom he was employed to defend? But there is no trusting of Liberty in the Hands of Men, who are obeyed by great Armies’’ (Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:194) with ‘‘Caesar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte may also be called masterly politicians, but the eulogy to them, is a censure upon the nations they enslaved’’ (John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, ed. F. Thornton Miller [1822; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992], 125).

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But there was much more to Taylor, whose originality of thought was often closer to the modern liberalism that some have discerned in Jeffersonianism.17 For one thing, Taylor put little faith in virtù. ‘‘Montesquieu’s position, ‘that virtue is necessary for the preservation of liberty,’ has long deluded the world into a state of indecision,’’ he thought. Rather, Taylor hazarded that a safer refuge lay in wisdom, by which he seems to have meant a rigorous intellectual understanding of man and society: ‘‘A political analysis alone, composed of moral principles, can reach and tame a beast.’’ 18 For another thing, Taylor was impatient with too much history, too many illustrations from ancient Rome and Florence.19 He was gravely indisposed towards ‘‘a search among the relicks of antiquity, for principles of which to form a modern government,’’ and so had little time for the conclusions or the analytical logic of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. His Inquiry began life as a refutation of John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–88) and, of the innumerable things in Adams that irritated and outraged Taylor, one was Adams’s complaisant sense that the past proved the fixities of human nature and social order. ‘‘Mr. Adams’s system promises nothing,’’ Taylor insisted. ‘‘It tells us that human nature is always the same: that the art of government can never change; that it is contracted into three simple principles; and that mankind must either suffer the evils of one of these simple principles; as at Athens, Venice, or Constantinople; or those of the same principles compounded, as at London, Rome, Lacedemon.’’ In quarreling with Adams’s citations of Machiavelli, Taylor was impatient. What did all this mean for us? he asked. ‘‘It is evident, that if the experiments of the Italian republicks, prove, as Mr. Adams asserts, that his theory would have been suitable to a state of ignorance and manners, similar to the Florentine; it is by no means a consequence, that it is suitable also for a state of knowledge and manners 17. Most notably Joyce Oldham Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), and Joyce Oldham Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 18. Taylor, Inquiry, 381, 560. 19. Perhaps because he seems to have relied on secondary sources, J. G. A. Pocock is indecisive about Taylor’s position; on the one hand, following Wood, he sees that Taylor in criticizing Adams was repudiating an older theory of politics and so was intimating a new school, increasingly remote from the civic humanist tradition and more skeptical of founding a republic upon virtue; on the other, he observes that Taylor ‘‘was a Republican and wrote anti-Hamiltonian polemic in which the ghosts of Swift and Bolingbroke stalk on every page.’’ See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 526, 531; and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 587–92.

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similar to the American.’’ More sweepingly, he asked: ‘‘Can any ingenuity induce us to believe, that a picture of human depravity and ignorance, during the middle age, is our picture?’’ 20 Taylor, rather, believed in the plasticity of human nature and hence in the possibility that the United States might have inaugurated a novus ordo seclorum. All the monsters discerned by the Machiavellian eye were what had happened, perhaps might happen even in America, but Taylor is not explicable without remembering that he felt the United States had learned something genuinely new in the history of political thought. In that sense, Taylor was a philosopher of the Enlightenment, which is easy to lose sight of because his prose was so jumbled and his fears so reiterated. Jefferson had the serene limpidity of the philosophe, whereas Taylor had the beliefs without the style. Nonetheless, the marks are there. He spoke of ‘‘our enlightened age,’’ he mocked the Old World, he had a fondness for stage theory. (Aristocracy, he argued, had three ages: the first, of ancient superstition; the second, of conquest and feudalism; the third, of paper and patronage.)21 Like Voltaire, he spat upon the ‘‘ignorance, fraud and superstition’’ of earlier ages, in particular ‘‘Gothic ignorance.’’ ‘‘The intellect of the last age pierced through the delusions, behind which the oppressions of hierarchy and nobility had taken shelter,’’ he told his reader. But Taylor also pulled back from the enormous condescension of posterity and made mock of complacencies. ‘‘Let us moderns cease to boast of our victory over superstition and the feudal system, and our advancement in knowledge,’’ he said, since he had not been convinced that modernity had, in most places, been doing much better, since often one form of gullibility had been replaced with another, more secular.22 So Taylor’s was a late Enlightenment sensibility, almost Herderian, in being conscious of the confused richness of the human record, which cast into doubt easy assertions of linear progress: The traces of intellectual originality and diversity; the shades and novelties of the human character, between the philosopher and the savage; between different countries, different governments, and different eras; exhibit a complexity, which the politician and philologist have never been able to unravel. Out of this intellectual variety, arises the impossibility of contriving one form of government, suitable for every nation; and also the fact, that human nature, instead of begetting one form constantly, demonstrates its moral capacity, in the vast variety of its political productions. 20. Taylor, Inquiry, 12, 118, 108. 21. Ibid., 26. The reader will discern the echoes of Vico and the presaging of Marx. 22. Ibid., 32, 63, 59, 35.

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True to this, in ways that would have made sense to Stephen Elliott the botanist, Taylor seems to have understood his theory as a venture in discerning and promoting a Linnaean order in the political realm. ‘‘The possibility of effecting a classification of the beings or individuals of the moral world, and of assigning each to his proper class, by an impartial and careful investigation of phenomena, with a degree of accuracy, exceeding even the classification of the vegetable world, is not incomprehensible,’’ he ventured. Here and there, his book flirted with assigning men, institutions, and principles into boxes marked ‘‘good moral’’ and ‘‘evil moral,’’ a categorizing done with Manichean enthusiasm. At the core of this impulse was his belief that ‘‘[t]he moral, like the physical world, is subject to system and regularity. It is not left by Omnipotence in a state so chaotick, as that the same moral cause, should now produce good, or then evil.’’ Or, as he put it elsewhere, ‘‘Unity, harmony, and proportion, are as necessary in politicks, as in the drama, musick or architecture. A tragi-comical government, a Corinthian capital over a Dorick column, jarring dissonances, mingled with soft tones, an aristocratick democracy or a monarchick aristocracy, destroys sympathies, proportions and melody. It is consistency which produces perfection in arts and sciences.’’ So, he saw disorder, but wished to correct it.23 Unlike many of his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, Taylor did not believe in what he shudderingly called ‘‘the idea of a natural depravity in man.’’ For, if man is depraved, ‘‘Man’s case is hopeless.’’ This conclusion Taylor found intolerable. He was anxious, for this reason, that the lesson of the French Revolution not be misread. ‘‘The human mind, buoyed up to the zenith of hope upon the billows of the French Revolution, sunk with its wreck into the gloom of despair,’’ he observed, by way of stressing that this pessimism had been too abundant.24 As Taylor saw it, man was both matter and mind, and while the former exercised constraints, the latter conferred freedom; ‘‘mind being an agent of sovereign power, there is no power able to limit its capacity.’’ (This was why Taylor was slightly more sympathetic to William Godwin than to Thomas Malthus, to both of whom the Inquiry devoted several pages before concluding that ‘‘Godwin’s system is an enchantress; Malthus’s, a gorgon.’’)25 Rather, men had a bundle of instincts and potentialities, for 23. Ibid., 14, 349, 344, 373, 375. 24. Ibid., 375, 6. See also Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, 215: ‘‘The enormities of the French Revolution planted a diffidence in republican theories, which has spread its branches to the United States, and is causing us gradually to cheat ourselves of our own principles.’’ 25. Taylor, Inquiry, 467. It is relevant to stress that the Inquiry was much engaged by the issues of the 1790s, a debate in which Godwin and Malthus were participants (in the latter case as a commentator on Condorcet) by way of offering alternate glosses on the implications of the French Revolution and the idea of progress.

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both good and evil. Free, they made the world and its institutions, but these having been made in turn structured how those potentialities were realized. Men might be drawn to evil, but also to good, according as they and other men had invented a world that had helped to make them. As Taylor put it, ‘‘forms of government mould manners,’’ by which he meant human behavior. Men were ‘‘both virtuous and vicious,’’ but they had the ‘‘power of regulating motives, or electing principles,’’ which had an effect upon virtue and vice. So, government is ‘‘a moral agent, which will be actuated by good or evil moral qualities; and that its qualities will certainly correspond with the principles by which it is created.’’ 26 This view was, in a strict sense, founded upon a reading of morality’s connection with human nature. In Humean fashion, Taylor gave to ‘‘the human agencies, arising from the mind’s power of abstraction’’ the adjective ‘‘moral,’’ while to ‘‘the direct and immediate effect of matter, independent of abstraction, the terms ‘natural or physical.’ ’’ 27 That is, he held that there could be more to man than self-interest, and this was not the less true because so much history seemed to suggest otherwise. Circumstances and human will together might make the difference in advancing or retarding the human condition. On both scores, the United States was peculiarly blessed. It was an intellectually enlightened nation, but it was also physically advantaged, with ‘‘oceans in front and rear, on one flank a barren, and on the other an enervating climate, with a vast expanse of territory within these natural circumvallations, [which] ought to enable them forever to reject the bitter potion’’ of European experience. So Taylor insistently fought off the ideological tyranny of the ‘‘natural,’’ which he took to be a resignation to a barren stoicism, an acquiescence in duplicating the sorry record of humanity. By the same token, he leaned towards fighting off the tyranny of history, as when he rejected John Adams’s insistence that the traditional forms of a polity (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) were ineluctable, because natural. This meant that Taylor was an American exceptionalist. American moral insight, being grounded in American circumstances, was not exportable. Indeed, he preened himself on this score, like any crude patriot: ‘‘The commencement of the American Revolution, knocked off . . . fetters, political science bounded forward, and a government was formed, which is at this moment the solitary political object of universal commendation. Few prefer even the government under which they live, to ours; none, any other.’’ 28 26. Ibid., 57, 148. 27. Ibid., 9. Cf. David Hume, ‘‘Of National Characters,’’ in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (1777; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 198. 28. Taylor, Inquiry, 535–36, 406.

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Perhaps no Southern thinker was more radically invested in the idea of individualism than John Taylor: ‘‘Society must be composed of, or created by individuals, without whom, it can neither exist nor act.’’ The will mattered: ‘‘If a number of people should inclose themselves within a triangle, they would hear with great astonishment, that they had lost the power of changing the form of the inclosure; and that the dead figure of the triangle governed living beings, instead of living beings who created that figure, governing it.’’ That is, Taylor thought society a reification, whose form could be altered by the decisions of individuals: ‘‘The sovereignty of the people arises, and representation flows, out of each man’s right to govern himself. With this individual right, political structures are built. Individuals, in forming a society, may arrange their rights in such forms as they please.’’ 29 So he raged at John Adams for thinking that men naturally combined into ‘‘orders.’’ ‘‘The constitutions [of the new American states] consider a nation as made of individuals; Mr. Adams’s system, as made of orders. Nature, by the constitutions, is considered as the creator of men; by the system, of orders. The first idea suggests the sovereignty of the people, and the second refutes it.’’ 30 In Taylor’s worldview, men—women did not exist for him—were alone, freely choosing and acting, and a wise polity offered them no inducement to combine with others, for it was by such combinations that greed and power were encouraged. (The idea that ‘‘the people’’ was itself a reification and a combination did not seem to occur to him.)31 Such ideas were intrinsic to his understanding of property: ‘‘I do not include under the idea of property, any artificial establishment, which subsists by taking away property; such as hierarchical, kingly, noble, official and corporate possessions, incomes and privileges; and that I consider those possessions as property, which are fairly gained by talents and industry, or are capable of subsisting, without taking property from others by law.’’ (So Taylor could scarcely have contemplated without despair the legal fiction that a corporation was an individual.) Division of men one from another was, indeed, the fundamental principle of the American polity. ‘‘Instead of balancing power, we divide it and make it responsible, to prevent the evils of its accumulation in the hands of one interest.’’ In this, Taylor was following William Godwin’s argument in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Man not being innately vicious, motives mattered: ‘‘If a man is merely the automaton of motives, a nation may operate upon the individuals who are publick agents, by a set of motives calculated 29. Ibid., 129, 354–55. 30. Ibid., 79. 31. On the sovereignty of the people as a useful fiction, see Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).

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to impel to virtue or vice. Division and responsibility will impel to virtue; aggregated or undivided power will impel to vice.’’ 32 This reasoning also meant that Taylor was in dissent from James Madison, who had thought that, men not being angels, a wise polity should balance self-interests and dispel animosities by a safe, dissipating, but permanent tension. To this pessimism, Taylor opposed a very guarded optimism; he believed that the principle of division dialectically improved human beings and served to prevent the emergence of factional passions: ‘‘It was not the policy or intention of the United States to excite the evil qualities of ambition or avarice, but to suppress them; nor to form a government compounded of parts, some of which would be calculated to excite these qualities, so as to produce a perpetual spirit of discord and uneasiness.’’ In practice, there was a similarity between Taylor and Madison, in that both ended up endorsing the heterodox idea that sovereignty was divisible, that a polity might dispense with a final resting place for power in its political institutions and yet survive, even flourish. Or, to be more precise, sovereignty rested only with ‘‘the people,’’ who originated the compacts of government and continued to monitor their operations. As Taylor put it, ‘‘The distinguishing superiorities of our policy, are, the sovereignty of the people; a republican government, or a government producing publick or national good; and a thorough system of responsible representation.’’ Yet, for Taylor, ‘‘the people’’ were only so many individuals, whose deliberations and free moral decisions happened to form a political volition. ‘‘It was reserved for the United States to discover,’’ he summarized, ‘‘that by balancing man with man, and by avoiding the artificial combinations of exclusive privileges, no individual of these equipoised millions, would be incited by a probability of success, to assail the rest; and that thus the concussions of powerful combinations, and the subversions of liberty and happiness, following a victory on the part of one, would be avoided.’’ 33 The practical implications of this analysis were, on the whole, straightforward. The presidency should not drift towards monarchical pretensions. Congress should abjure Hamiltonian funding schemes or chartering national banks. There should be no standing army. The Supreme Court had no right of judicial review, for granting the legitimacy of such a power displaced sovereignty from the people to the Court. Religion should be disestablished and tolerated. Freedom of speech must be axiomatic and education encouraged. Democracy, by which Taylor meant the people acting directly and collectively, must be resisted and the principle of representation acknowledged, because the latter contributed to the principle of division. Parties were a bad idea: 32. Taylor, Inquiry, 103–4, 82, 149. 33. Ibid., 130, 101, 363.

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‘‘Orders enslave nations, by making parties; and they are enabled to make them, by laws for transferring property.’’ 34 The roots of Taylor’s political theory in individualism had significant consequences. It gave him a special standpoint on the crucial issue of the United States as a social and political compact. It was to become very important to later Southern political thinkers to argue that the Constitution of 1787 was a revocable compact, by which the people of each of the thirteen states had, in their sovereignty expressed in conventions, licensed participation in the polity called the United States; and that, consequently, there had been thirteen American peoples, who kept the reserved right of withdrawal from the Union. Because of his individualistic ‘‘atomical philosophy,’’ 35 Taylor saw this question very differently, if not always with clarity. For one thing, he did not see a state such as Virginia as any more natural than the United States, or ‘‘Virginians’’ as more socially coherent than ‘‘Americans.’’ All societies and governments were fictions. Hence Taylor declined to see the movement from the individual to society, from society to the state, from the state to the Union, as the appropriate sequence for grounding any theory of the compact. The individual was real enough, to be sure, but all else was invention:36 ‘‘A social compact, which is only an union of individuals, for the end of creating a government, ceases on the accomplishment of this end. The political society created by a constitution, is the only existing society, and the government its agent; but under the natural individual right of self government, this political society may itself be dissolved.’’ But this was as true of the relationship between the individual and Virginia, as it was between the individual and the United States. This conception was essential to Taylor’s vision. He spoke of ‘‘the whole herd of fictitious compacts between the people and the government, or between the states, or the states and the Union’’ and firmly asserted that ‘‘none of these governments had any agency in their own creation.’’ No, ‘‘If these governments should frame compacts between themselves, even for self preservation, it would violate our policy, because it would impugn the sovereignty of the existing political society, and also detract from the national right of self government,’’ that is, of individuals. This was not an idiosyncratic idea. Thomas Cooper saw it similarly: ‘‘Every nation is composed of its individual citizens: the terms nation, state, community, are words merely— they do not denote any thing separate from the individual members whose aggregation and association has received these names.’’ 37 34. Ibid., 488. 35. Ibid., 375. 36. Here I differ from F. Thornton Miller, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, xii. 37. Taylor, Inquiry, 365; TC, A Tract on the Proposed Alteration of the Tariff, Submitted to the Con-

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Frank Blackwell Mayer, Independence, Squire Jack Porter (Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.)

Hence, for Taylor, the federal government was doubly made, by individuals directly, and by the states that were ‘‘moral beings’’ also made by individuals. This was a merit of the principle of division, that it multiplied the complexities of political connections. It followed that no state had the single prerogative of dissolving the Union, because that would only invoke one of the lines of connection between the atom that was the individual and the federal government: both ‘‘the popular and the federal, are the principles of the general government.’’ Likewise, ‘‘The general government is the creature of the people only, established to preserve their rights in their double capacity, as the state and federal sovereign. Responsibility is therefore equally due to them in both these capacities.’’ 38 In general, this was an argument for the preservation of the Union, as long as it behaved aright. In practice, it also seemed to mean that the individuals acting through states and the individuals acting as citizens of the Union had a double right to dissolution or reformation; by seceding as states, or by acting in a general American convention. In both sideration of the Members from South Carolina, in the Ensuing Congress of 1823–4 (Charleston, S.C. and Philadelphia: Joseph R. A. Skerrett, 1824), 6. 38. Taylor, Inquiry, 431, 435, 436.

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cases, Taylor shared the premise, so crucial to later Southern thought, that the constitutional convention was the means by which the sovereignty of the people must fundamentally be exercised, and that courts, legislatures, presidents, and constitutions were mere instrumentalities, revocable as intellect, will, and circumstances dictated. Where did this passionate individualism come from? John Taylor was a proud and self-confident man, rich, a patriarch ambitious for his children. He was also a slaveholder. Slavery as an American social institution is very little mentioned in the Inquiry, but the idea of slavery and freedom was intrinsic to Taylor’s vision of human individuality: ‘‘Freedom consists in having rights, beyond the reach and independent of the will of another; slavery, in having none. The form of the master, or his having three heads or none, does not create the slave. It is on account of the opinions; that nations might be made free by the form of the master, and that the powers of a government are incapable of limitation; that they have been so universally enslaved.’’ That is, slaves made themselves by trusting too much to masters, too little to themselves: ‘‘A man who surrenders his reason or his body to another, is soon forced to make both conformable to that other’s will. To prevent mental slavery, our policy reserves to the nation intellectual rights, or the use of its reason; and to prevent physical slavery, it reserves to the nation, the military power, in an armed and organized militia, knowing that it must retain both or neither. By retaining both, a nation is a physical and intellectual being.’’ 39 Perhaps most fundamentally, Taylor saw government as the mirror of the individual’s divided nature. ‘‘The union is a compact between two distinct minds, state and popular. The two branches of its legislature, consists of the separate representatives of these two minds. Its health, peace, and perhaps its existence, depends upon the consent of both of these minds to law.’’ Division made a healthy body politick, because it prevented the tyranny of the majority, which might find expression in ‘‘a perfect consolidated government guided by the popular mind, or a perfect federal government guided by the will of the states.’’ Likewise, man, ‘‘this humoursome, fickle, selfish, ambitious, and dishonest human being,’’ had his own vices and virtues, drives and restraints, in creative tension. Hence, in many ways, Taylor’s philosophy intimated the possibility of alienation, for in so mistrusting power he strove everywhere to enforce isolation and deny community. Yet he seemed to be cheerfully oblivious of this implication. He saw the dangers of men acting together, but not the strain of being alone. When he wrote of the isolation of the United States, he almost glowed with pleasure. No one was more remote from the instincts that would later move many towards Roman Catholicism’s promise of legiti39. Ibid., 384, 386.

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macy and community, no one less desired authority. ‘‘What is authority?’’ he sneeringly asked in Tyranny Unmasked. ‘‘Fashion only.’’ 40 The Inquiry is a turbulent and passionate book of Jacobean vividness. Taylor stated and restated, circled and fumed, excoriated and praised, chopped off the Hydra’s head of aristocracy in a plenitude of ways and paragraphs, and always wore his heart on his sleeve. Certainly he made phrases better than he made chapters or books. Yet he could be incisive. ‘‘We lose truth in names and phrases, as children lose themselves in a wood, for want of geographical knowledge’’ is a satisfying sentence. But the Inquiry is a very long book and many readers lost their way. ‘‘For heaven’s sake, get some worthy person to do the second edition into English,’’ John Randolph advised. Robert Turnbull with exasperation called Taylor’s prose ‘‘affected and otherwise defective.’’ 41 Others wondered about a mind that strangely mixed the disillusioned and the hopeful, as one might wonder at a Virginian Jeremy Bentham, who designed a Palladian panopticon. Nonetheless, clarified and adapted, many of Taylor’s ideas were to circulate widely. The Jacksonians took much from him, especially in their individualism, optimism, and suspicion of banks and paternalistic government.42 Especially when the election of John Quincy Adams revived the old issues, Taylor’s name was invoked. As Beverley Tucker was to remember, when John Quincy Adams advocated ‘‘centralism,’’ others moved towards ‘‘anti-centralism.’’ Then ‘‘we heard suddenly, of nothing but states’ rights; John Taylor’s resolutions, and Madison’s report, and other catechisms of the states’ right church were hunted up, and reprinted, and men with grey beards put on their spectacles, and diligently applied themselves to the study of the hornbook of a political school to which they had always professed to belong.’’ So a commentator on the annexation of Texas in 1844 might speak familiarly of ‘‘the moderate, self-denying principles of Jefferson, Macon, and Taylor of Caroline,’’ while an undergraduate at the University of Virginia in the late 1850s did not think it arcane to read the speech that Taylor gave when introducing Madison’s resolution to the Virginia legislature in 1798. Certainly the Nullifiers had studied their Taylor. Thomas Cooper spoke favorably of him in his Consolidation. Robert Turnbull’s important 1830 essay on the Supreme Court took Taylor’s New Views of the Constitution of the United States (1823) as a fundamen40. Ibid., 511, 471; Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, 159. 41. Taylor, Inquiry, 477; Randolph, quoted in John M. Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 24; Robert J. Turnbull, ‘‘The Tribunal of Dernier Resort,’’ SR 6 (November 1830): 464. 42. John Ashworth goes so far as to say, ‘‘In the Jacksonian era his views became Democratic orthodoxy,’’ which may be too strong: see John Ashworth, ‘‘Agrarians and Aristocrats’’: Party Political Ideolo in the United States, 1837–1846 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983), 16.

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tal text for providing a ‘‘body of facts and original reasoning.’’ Calhoun had gone out of his way to visit Taylor in Caroline County in the spring of 1823, and saw the latter not merely as politically useful when Calhoun was running for president (‘‘No man, except Mr. Jefferson, has more weight in Virginia’’) but also as an ideological mentor, one of ‘‘the political fathers of the Republican school,’’ which included Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe: ‘‘It is true, that I do not entertain on all points the opinion of my excellent friend Col. Taylor, for whom I have the highest esteem; but it is equally true, that not one of the candidates nor one of our Presidents, if we are to judge of their opinions by their actions, fully accord with him any more than myself.’’ This taste grew. ‘‘Each revolving year impresses me deeper and deeper with the truth and wisdom of the old Virginia school of politics,’’ Calhoun observed in rejoinder to Daniel Webster in 1838. ‘‘She was blessed, when this Government went into operation, with leaders of the clearest discernment and purest patriotism; the Jeffersons, the Taylors, the Roanes, and many others, who had formed the most just conception of our system of Government, and the policy to be pursued to preserve it.’’ 43 Taylor himself survived until 1824 and published several elaborative works that monitored the fate of the republic, celebrated agrarianism, commented on Marshall’s court, and observed the revived Hamiltonianism that came to be associated with Henry Clay.44 Throughout, his achievement had been to find a way to transmute the anti-Federalist tradition of the 1780s, which favored the Articles of Confederation and mistrusted the new order’s potentiality for authoritarianism, into a form of constitutional and social thinking that might work within the framework set up in 1789.45 Yet he also taught antebellum Southerners that one could not reason only within that constitution, which ought constantly to be answerable. Unionism was only enough if it addressed the fundamental problems of man’s individual and social existence. And, if the Union was not enough, there could be no more sovereign obligation than to kill it. 43. Tucker, Science of Government, 423–24; ‘‘Annexation of Texas,’’ SQR 6 (October 1844): 497; entry for 22 September 1858, in Robert Beale Davis, ‘‘Lecture Notes and Diary,’’ Beale and Davis Family Papers, SHC; TC, Consolidation, 8; Turnbull, ‘‘Dernier Resort,’’ 464; JCC to Ogden Edwards, 2 May 1823, and JCC to Joseph G. Swift, 24 August 1823, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Robert L. Meriwether et al., 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959–2003), 8:45, 243. 44. See John Taylor, Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political: In SixtyFour Numbers, introduction by M. E. Bradford (1818; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1977); John Taylor, Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated (Richmond: Shepherd & Pollard, 1820); Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked; John Taylor, New Views of the Constitution of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Way and Gideon, 1823). 45. Shalhope, John Taylor, 158.

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A more complex legacy lay in Taylor’s revision of the Commonwealth tradition. This had once been a cosmopolitan intellectual project, which had gathered its evidence eclectically across time and space as a way to comprehend the human condition, understood as (on the whole) a constant. Taylor was close enough to this tradition to play much of the game. He spoke of the Spartan constitution, he debated Machiavelli, he set Montesquieu against Bolingbroke. But he did this partly to prove the inutility of the old game and to show, instead, the peculiarity of the American experience, in which hope now lay. In time this novelty of standpoint would come to encourage a falling away of the old knowledge as an irrelevance. Southerners would come to measure the abstract problem of humanity against the concrete record of the United States, especially its founding moment, and speak less of the Petition of Right or the Helvetic Confederation or the Amphictyonic Council and more of what was said in that hall in Philadelphia. A sense of singularity bred the habit of self-absorption. That is, Taylor made political thought into a problem of an American historicism. As James Monroe, his friend, observed when opening the proceedings of the Virginia Convention in 1829, ‘‘Our Constitution was the first that was formed in the Union, and it has been in operation since: We had at that period the examples only of the ancient republics before us; we have now the experience of more than half a century of this, our own Constitution, and those of all our sister States.’’ It followed that, when at the same convention Chapman Johnson considered the relevance of remote times and places, he decided, ‘‘I know that our condition and that of the Roman people is so essentially unlike—our representative republic so radically different from their mixture of aristocracy and democracy, that it is not safe to reason from one to the other.’’ Further, ‘‘The modern European republics will supply as little aid to our deliberations. We should look in vain to Venice or St. Marino, to Holland or Switzerland, for the experience of a system like ours, operating upon a people like ours—or for information to guide us to the best means of protecting the peculiar interests which arise out of the peculiar population of Virginia.’’ It followed too that John Randolph could say that the constitution of Virginia, ‘‘with all its faults and failings, and with all the objections which practical men—not theorists and visionary speculators, have urged or can urge against it, [is] the very best Constitution; not for Japan; not for China; not for New England; or for Old England; but for this, our ancient Commonwealth of Virginia.’’ 46 But Taylor reinforced the custom of making political thought into a mode of indignation, a jeremiad, by setting standards of conduct so high as to en46. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 1, 273, 313.

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sure incessant occasions for observing defalcations.47 Indeed they were so high that he was conscious that men might become negligent, might fail to notice the signs of danger, if life went on regardless. In Tyranny Unmasked, he offered tests by which tyranny, coming masked like Scaramouche to a Venetian ball, might be discerned—‘‘To discover whether actual tyranny is coming or has arrived, let us endeavour to establish some unequivocal evidence, by which tyranny may be known’’ 48—which indicated how subtle might be the problem to all but the political scientist, the bravo watching the canals.49

The Horn-Book of Politics 50 Political thought drew much upon events, upon those moments of crisis and pressure when stray thoughts about David Hume’s essays were compelled into hard choices about the franchise, apportionment, tariffs, or revolution, because power was at stake. One such moment was the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30. It was not singular. A restlessness about constitutional forms distinguished the Southern experience in the nineteenth century.51 But Virginia did furnish perhaps the most sophisticated seminar on the Southern understanding of political science held between the Revolution and the Civil War. At bottom, the issues were straightforward. Virginia had formed a constitution in 1776 which had very little changed the political structure of the Old Dominion, save in ending colonialism and attaching a resonant Declaration of Rights. The new state had defined for itself a franchise confined to white, male freeholders, who had to own 100 acres of uncultivated land without a house, or 25 cultivated acres with a house, or a town lot with a house. 47. Or, to put it another way, he insisted that the standards of alertness that occasioned the American Revolution needed to be sustained. 48. Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, 224. 49. For the rhetoric of vigilance, see Tucker, Science of Government, 64–65. 50. ‘‘I had been weak enough to suppose, that we had already learned the rudiments of political science—that we had not come here to be taught the horn-book of politics—to be schooled and lectured on the elements of Government’’: Chapman Johnson of Augusta, in Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 259–60. 51. For example, Fletcher M. Green, Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States, 1776– 1860: A Study in the Evolution of Democracy (1930; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1966); Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Democracy, Liberty, and Property: The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820’s (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Don E. Fehrenbacher, Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Laura J. Scalia, America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State Constitutions, 1820–1850 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999); Marshall L. DeRosa, The Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991).

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Seats in the House of Delegates and Senate were apportioned by a system of county representation, which gave to each county an equal weight irrespective of the size of its population. But Virginia had much changed between 1776 and the 1820s. Its western population had grown quickly while the eastern had remained almost static, with the result that the Tidewater had counties with few white people and many slaves but a preponderance of political power, while the West had many white people (most of them nonfreeholders) and fewer slaves but less political power. In the eastern counties about 27 percent of white adult males were disfranchised, while in the West it was 44 percent and in the Valley of the Shenandoah about 49 percent. Westerners wished to change this situation, to make the system responsive to a changed demography and a more democratic ideology, as a matter of equity but also to gain the leverage that might change policies, especially in encouraging the internal improvements to which the Tidewater was mostly indifferent or hostile. But expediency was connected to principles, which had been ambiguously expressed in the Declarations of Rights of 1776. Should the suffrage be confined to ‘‘all men having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community,’’ which meant property? Or should one respect and interpret the dictum that ‘‘all men are by nature equally free and independent’’? 52 And what was nature, what was a community, what was freedom, anyway? The delegates came to Richmond and assembled on 5 October 1829 in the Capitol building which Jefferson had designed as an echo of the Maison Carrée in Nîmes. He was three years dead, but other ghosts of the Revolution were alive and in attendance: James Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall. The first two spoke little, upon the courteous presumption that these were now matters for the next generation, but their presence lent a sharp pertinence to the urgent intellectual task of reassessing the legacy of 1776. A speaker had to pause when mentioning the Federalist Papers, since one of its authors was sitting a few feet away and listening. In truth, there were layers of generations. Madison at seventy-eight was the oldest, and Hugh Blair Grigsby (silent and avid) at twenty-three was the youngest, but in between lay the scorching presence of John Randolph at fifty-six. Those who had been born when Virginia was comfortably a part of the British Empire debated with those born in the shadow of the Revolution, and those who would outlive the Union and the Civil War. The practical upshot of the convention was a few concessions to the West, with the East maintaining much of its power, a result surprising when one 52. Dickson D. Bruce Jr., The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829–30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1982), 1–4, 11, 19.

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William Goodacre, The Virginia Capitol in 1830 (Courtesy Valentine Museum, Richmond)

notes that Andrew Jackson was then in the White House, but less so when one recalls that the convention was elected under the old rules. Those who had the power had to consent to give it away, and they did so only sparingly, to the extent consistent with their sense of safety. As one delegate put it, ‘‘We are engaged, Mr. Chairman, in a contest for power.’’ Accepting this analysis, Littleton Waller Tazewell put the matter baldly by means of a story: ‘‘We are told, that in former times, a strong demand was made upon the Government of ancient Sparta, accompanied by a declaration, that if the demand was not granted, the demandant would come and take it. The laconic answer to this demand was, ‘Come and take it.’ ’’ 53 More pertinent are the intellectual presumptions displayed during the debates. Four themes ran contentiously through the four months of debate, before they adjourned on 15 January; the nature of the social compact, the relationship between abstraction and experience, the problem of progress and democracy, and the possibility of social disorder and schism. A very few matters were claimed to be consensual, and simply stated by Robert Taylor, almost the only Tidewater delegate sympathetic to reform. These premises numbered three: ‘‘1. That a free Government is the best cal53. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 257, 335.

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culated to promote human happiness, if not universally in all countries and in all times, at least in the American States: 2. That the sovereignty resides, of right, and in fact, in the people: 3. That the best mode of administering Government is by agents, instead of the people personally.’’ But Taylor was conscious that even this was venturing far. He asserted there were ‘‘axioms, or self-evident truths, [which] carry conviction to the human mind, the moment they are announced,’’ but he was also conscious of being ‘‘bewildered’’ by ‘‘so many conflicting and various principles,’’ so many ‘‘multiplied and endless combinations.’’ And so his gloss upon the three principles was halting: ‘‘I shall not stay to enquire whether these assumptions be false or true: I do not indeed, for myself, hesitate to declare my unqualified belief that they are consonant with all the dictates of reason and of truth; and I believe that I express the sentiments of every individual in this Convention, when I make the declaration.’’ 54 But between self, belief, and the denial of hesitation, much was fluid. Once there had been Mr. Jefferson’s glad confident morning of selfevident truths and eventually there would be the verities of democracy, but in between the Virginians of 1829 moved on a vaguer landscape.55 Fluidity was of the essence of their situation. The useful illusion of a constitutional convention was that it seemed briefly to stop history, reduce society and politics to their fundaments, give the people and their representatives the prerogative of reconsideration and reconstruction. At such a moment, self-evidence was unlikely. Hence the importance of the social compact, an elementary paragraph in ‘‘the horn-book of politics.’’ 56 But things had moved on since 1688. Now John Locke and the old masters were sometimes roughly treated. Charles Fenton Mercer found himself ‘‘alarmed, as well as shocked, at the levity with which the great apostle of English liberty [Locke] and his doctrines have been treated.’’ ‘‘Time was, when Montesquieu was considered as high authority,’’ another delegate rumbled. Yet another complained, ‘‘In the whole progress of this debate, the name of Thomas Jefferson, the great Apostle of liberty, has never once been invoked, nor has one appeal been made to the author of the Rights of Man [Paine].’’ Once ‘‘the name of Fox was venerated, and the principles of Burke abhorred.’’ For was not Burke ‘‘the enemy of human rights and the firmest defender of aristocracy and monarchy’’? How was it that ‘‘now Burke, Filmer, and Hobbes, judging from their arguments, have become the text books of our statesmen’’? 57 54. Ibid., 46–47. 55. One might observe, however, that in Virginia the verities of democracy were a long time a-coming, perhaps not until 1965. 56. As Alexander Campbell observed, ‘‘History affords some instances . . . of dispersed individuals forming a social compact’’ (Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 121). 57. Ibid., 193, 529, 411.

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The most lucid expositor of the young conservatives was Abel P. Upshur from the Tidewater.58 He asked the fundamental question. Upon what right did the proponents of reform ground their claim that majority rule was a selfevident truth? It could not be located in nature, for ‘‘there is no original a priori principle in the law of nature,’’ and no one was answerable to a state of nature ‘‘prior to society.’’ If nature was anything, it was a Hobbesian world of naked self-interest and violence; ‘‘the law of force gives the only rule of right.’’ In the beginning, perhaps all in the world (men, women, children, Africans) were equal, but the social compact had discriminated, decided who was to rule, who was ruled. The egalitarians could not have it both ways by insisting that they had natural rights, but others did not: ‘‘In point of rights, nature does not own any distinction of age or sex. . . . Nay, more Sir, nature as strongly disowns all invidious distinctions in complexion; in her eye, there is no difference between jet and vermilion. A distinction does indeed prevail here, Sir, and a wide one it is. But the same rule of taste would not answer in Africa; for the African paints the devil white.’’ In fact, the idea of majority rule, even of the state itself, was but a translation of the principle of numbers, coupled with force. Men had ‘‘the physical power,’’ women did not, though ‘‘nature has stamped no such inferiority upon that sex, as to disqualify it under all circumstances, for a safe and judicious exercise of the right of suffrage.’’ So, between an aboriginal equality no one respected and a universal suffrage which all agreed was ‘‘wild and visionary,’’ it followed that rights were a matter of social expedience and invention.59 Upshur was not shy about this un-Jeffersonian ‘‘novel and strange’’ insight. ‘‘There are no original principles in Government at all . . . existing in the nature of things and independent of agreement, to which Government must of necessity conform, in order to be either legitimate or philosophical. The principles of Government are those principles only, which the people who form the Government, choose to adopt and apply to themselves. Principles do not precede, but spring out of Government.’’ His reasoning was anthropological, Hobbes mating with Herder, with a dash of Pope’s line, ‘‘whatever is, is right.’’ The world was full of governments founded upon different principles, 58. Upshur grew up on a plantation called Vaucluse on Virginia’s Eastern Shore; he was educated by Connecticut tutors at home, then at Yale, from which he was expelled; he came home in 1807 to study the law with William Wirt in Richmond, migrated to Baltimore in 1810, and then returned to Richmond. He owned land on the Eastern Shore, but usually declined to work or live on it, reasoning that the country was ‘‘dull, flat and unprofitable’’; rather, he bought and sold land as an investment. He worked his way up the legal and political ladder in Richmond and Washington, to end as Secretary of State under John Tyler. (He was killed by an exploding cannon when on a warship.) See Claude H. Hall, Abel Parker Upshur, Conservative Virginian, 1790–1844 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964), 3–29 (quotation on p. 22). 59. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 66–69.

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Charles Fenderich, Abel P. Upshur (1844)

which made a nonsense of ideas of uniformity and universality. It would be silly to say that ‘‘there is one Government in the world which is really a Government, rightful and legitimate; and all other forms of social compact, however long, or however firmly established, are no Governments at all.’’ It followed that nothing was mandatory, that men were free and ‘‘at perfect liberty to choose our own principle, to consult all the circumstances which attend our condition, and to mould our Government as our interests and necessities may require.’’ 60 This made for plain sailing. Free to choose a principle, Upshur chose that which suited his condition: ‘‘The very idea of society, carries with it the idea of property, as its necessary and inseparable attendant.’’ This property needed protection. Land and slaves, and those who owned them, required the extra weight granted them implicitly in the old Virginia constitution, for they were the guarantors of social order. Since government mostly acted upon property, property had a stake in its decisions: ‘‘Let us boldly take the bull by the horns, and incorporate this influence of property as a leading principle in our Constitution.’’ In short, Virginians needed less of the vague pieties of 1776, what in 1826 Upshur had called the ‘‘childish fripperies of natural rights,’’ and more 60. Ibid., 69–70.

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history. For Virginians were not standing shuddering and naked at the beginning of time, whimpering on the fields of praise, but at the end of their shared, self-defining experience: ‘‘For fifty-four years we have been associated together, under the provisions of an actual Government. A great variety of rights and interests, and a great variety of feelings dear to the heart and connected with those rights and interests, have grown up among us.’’ 61 Not the least of these was slavery. So Upshur urged that Virginians go for experience and practicality, and disdain ‘‘speculative systems.’’ ‘‘The world has been full of them, from Plato, down through Harrington and Moore, and a host who succeeded them, even to the prolific bureaux of the French revolutionists. Of all their schemes, not one has ever been reduced to practice, in any part of the world.’’ 62 This was a new-fangled conservatism. Though Upshur did argue that property seemed to be intrinsic to an ordered society, he was otherwise radical in his thinking. Little but violence was natural: all else was human invention, concoctions of freedom and will, which everywhere necessarily enforced inequalities, mandated who was in and who was out, made of government and rights a tautology of social power. Upshur made no Burkean appeals to an ancient order of nature, but stood only on what Virginians had invented and, as he saw it, had made to work. As such, he was poised between those who mistrusted the abstract and those who understood only expediency, for Upshur was too dismissive of the idea of the natural for the latter, and too interested in discussing theory for the former. Fear of the abstract ran very deep in the convention. Denouncing theory was for many a mantra that validated practicality, for all liked to say, as even John Randolph improbably did, ‘‘I am a practical man.’’ So Benjamin Watkins Leigh called upon reformers to ‘‘give us something which we may at least call reasons for it [reform]: not arithmetical and mathematical reasons; no mere abstractions; but referring to the actual state of things as they are; to the circumstances and condition of this Commonwealth.’’ Philip Nicholas of Richmond asserted as a truth that ‘‘[a]ny man who had turned his attention 61. Ibid., 70, 73, 74; for Upshur on fripperies, see Richmond Enquirer, 28 January 1826, quoted in Hall, Upshur, 40. 62. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 78–79. When the Convention was deliberating, Hugh Legaré published a Burkean essay on Cicero’s De Republica, which (as here) was alluded to in the debates, and was a subject of discussion informally between Grigsby and Tazewell. See Chapman Johnson, ibid., 260, which speaks of ‘‘the days of Plato, down to the period of the last Southern Review.’’ Grigsby’s diary notes that he called on Tazewell after breakfast, ‘‘where he read nearly the whole of the review of Cicero de Republica, in the Southern Review of August in the present year, which, he said, contained opinions precisely similar to his own’’ (entry for 22 October 1829, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS). The original is HSL, ‘‘Cicero de Republica,’’ SR 4 (August 1829): 136–76.

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much to politics must know, that in those matters, there was no such thing as abstract truth.’’ 63 No doubt, the interpretation of the French Revolution explained much in this nostrum, for it was conventional to believe that the era had produced ‘‘the pernicious theories of Condorcet, Rousseau, and Godwin.’’ 64 Briscoe Baldwin disdained it all: ‘‘Let us leave, then, to school-men and sophists, all the theories concerning the origin and nature of Government in general, and save ourselves the trouble of enquiring whether it should be traced to patriarchal supremacy, physical force, or social compact.’’ In fact, the convention took careful pains to consider these matters, and did so at the beginning of its proceedings, as a first order of business. For there were those like Alexander Campbell, who expressed less fear of the abstract, who ‘‘knew of nothing that could rightly be called a principle, that was not an abstract idea.’’ For ‘‘Justice, goodness, truth, might be so called, and they were all abstract ideas,’’ and none the worse for that. But even Campbell was capable of a waspish anti-intellectualism: ‘‘The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy.’’ 65 Among the conservatives, Upshur’s was not an idiosyncratic voice. Philip Barbour made much the same case. ‘‘It is the very nature of the social compact,’’ he insisted, ‘‘that all who enter into it, surrender a portion of their natural rights, in exchange for which, they acquire other rights derived from that compact, and dependent upon it, both in character and extent.’’ That is, Barbour accepted Upshur’s vision of political society as tautology: ‘‘Is it not a solecism to say, that rights which have their very being only as a consequence of Government, are to be controlled by principles, applying exclusively to a state of things, when there was no Government? The question is, what are the political rights of the citizens? These political rights never existed, till Government was instituted. The same charter which created that institution, can alone create and define them.’’ Experience was definitive; it did not carry out or betray antecedent rights, it made them: ‘‘No laws, no rights, can possibly bear on relations, which have subsequently come into being: relations, which belong to an entirely new state of things, and which state, has principles of its own, derived from the instrument which created it.’’ Like Upshur, Barbour 63. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 319, 53, 52. 64. Chapman Johnson, ibid., 264. Cf. Adam Smith, who spent his life elaborating intellectual systems, but who, coming to know Robespierre and revising the text of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, came to condemn the ‘‘spirit of system’’ and the ‘‘man of system’’: Adam Smith, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 1, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (1976; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 231–34. For a discussion of this, see Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 391–94. 65. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 99, 64, 119.

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believed that parties to a civil compact, made a government, ‘‘the creature of their will,’’ and gave it the principles they had found to be ‘‘prudent and just.’’ ‘‘In politics, as in morals, the best test of propriety is practical utility.’’ 66 Important to this argument was a distinction between civil and political society, and hence between civil and political liberty. ‘‘Under a Government of an oligarchical, or even a monarchical form, civil liberty may, nevertheless, be enjoyed and to a considerable extent,’’ Barbour said. ‘‘But this is not political liberty. I may enjoy a large measure of personal freedom, under such a Government, but I enjoy it by permission, by sufferance merely.’’ This was the fate of women, children, paupers, and slaves, who all might have civil rights: ‘‘But, when the question has reference to political power, then we must have respect to age, to sex, to birth; and a variety of circumstances, which go, in practice, to exclude from the possession of it, a large majority of every community.’’ Stability required a disdain for what John Randolph, hissing out the phrase, called ‘‘King Numbers.’’ As Leigh explained, the compact was a sort of investment, a joint-stock company of interested investors. (Calhoun had used the same image in his Exposition of 1828.) As Barbour had it, ‘‘the social compact is only a contract,’’ a bargain made in the market place for mutual advancements.67 The role of women in the political compact was, here and there, relaxingly discussed as part of the debating game, as a topic ‘‘more calculated to amuse than instruct.’’ Conservatives used the topic of women as a way to bait reformers unwilling to extend the franchise beyond adult white males, and thereby force an acknowledgment that the proponents of change, too, preferred exclusivity and practiced discrimination. For this purpose, women were more pertinent than slaves, Indians, mulattos, day-laborers, foreigners, or children, since women were close to the men as wives, daughters, and sisters, and they possessed more than a little moral authority. Nonetheless, everyone dismissed female claims, with differing forms of politeness. A few, like John Scott of Fauquier, peddled the nostrums of the separate spheres, in arguing that God had ‘‘created women with all the tenderness, softness and delicacy of that sex, and when he placed them under the protection of man, he gave them an influence of another kind, more powerful than the right of suffrage. . . . If suffrage at the polls had been added, they would have been entirely too powerful.’’ Improbably, Samuel Moore thought that women did not need the vote, because ‘‘their interests are so identified with our own, that it is impossible that we can make any regulation injuriously affecting their rights, which will not equally injure ourselves.’’ But, with colder insight, he also noticed, ‘‘That the women 66. Ibid., 91, 94. 67. Ibid., 96, 98, 320, 106, 95; Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 10:492.

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have never claimed the right to participate in the formation of the Government, and that until they do, there can be no necessity for our discussing or deciding upon it.’’ 68 In general, the reformers were more trusting about the idea of the natural and self-evident, more skeptical of the casuistry in the ‘‘subtle distinction between civil and political rights.’’ Philip Doddridge saw no problem in the premise that there were ‘‘a priori rights, which are supposed to exist in a state of nature, and are retained to man in society, so as to be social rights, secured by the social compact,’’ and was content to quote the Virginia Declaration of Rights as his source and proof. John R. Cooke tidily squared the circle of abstraction and practicality by asserting that what ‘‘might have been called an abstract principle, in Europe, in the time of Locke and Sydney . . . became practical in Virginia, in 1776.’’ But, more, Cooke spluttered at Leigh’s skepticism. For what had the revolutionaries died? ‘‘For wild ‘abstractions, and metaphysical subtleties!’ No, Sir. For principles of eternal truth; as practical in character, as they are vital in importance; for principles deep-seated in the nature of man, by whose development, alone, he can attain the happiness which is the great object of his being.’’ Like Robert Taylor, Cooke had a trinity of succinct principles, though a different three: ‘‘ ‘That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the people.’ ‘That all men are, by nature, equally free.’ And ‘That a majority of the community possesses, by the law of nature and necessity, a right to control its concerns.’ ’’ Hence he was more trusting of human nature. The conservatives saw men as robbers, as wolves and tigers, but Cooke found this a libel. To the contrary, man was ‘‘an affectionate, a social, a patriotic, a conscientious and a religious creature.’’ He was, in short, closer to the person described in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments than anyone in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Cooke could unblushingly speak, as Upshur never could, of improvements in the ‘‘science of Government’’ and even of ‘‘the march of intellect’’ and ‘‘progress.’’ 69 More tellingly, Cooke made mock of the conservatives’ fears, what Doddridge called their disposition ‘‘to look altogether on the dark side of things.’’ They expected the worst, they dreamed that ‘‘property will be invaded, all the multiplied evils of anarchy will ensue, till the society, groaning under the yoke of unbridled democracy, will be driven to prefer to its stormy sway, the despotic Government of a single master . . . the natural death of the Government of numbers.’’ Speaking in rebuttal of Upshur, Doddridge made dry fun of the idea that ‘‘our children . . . will become freebooters’’ and ‘‘the 68. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 83, 130, 227. 69. Ibid., 55, 54, 59. That Americans enacted what Europe imagined is the argument of Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1978).

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rights of the minority may be invaded by a system of Legislative rapine, because ‘there are no principles in Government.’ ’’ As Alfred Powell shrewdly suggested, if these trepidations were realistic, then no constitution could be availing: ‘‘These fears presuppose that the people are vicious, corrupt, and dishonest: and if such be the fact, no possible security can be formed, recognizing the right of self-government in the people.’’ But conservatives felt one should face the brutal facts of human inadequacy. As Richard Morris of Hanover put it, ‘‘the principle upon which all free Governments rest, is not confidence, but jealousy and watchfulness.’’ To others, this analysis was overdrawn, even hysterical. Richard Henderson thought that even the nonfreeholder was competent to be a citizen, since the duties were not that complex. Shrewdness and bookishness were different things. ‘‘All who know men, and are versed in their concerns, in the various walks of life, are aware that individuals of limited education, observe character, with eyes at once steady and clear; unengrossed by books, wide awake to the world around them, they acquire and digest that every-day knowledge, that prevailing and discriminating common sense, which enable them to select their public functionaries with judgment.’’ 70 No doubt there was, near the heart of the conservative case, a contradiction. They urged that men were not to be trusted, yet they themselves asked to be trusted, indeed boasted of the wisdom and sufficiency of their stewardship of the state’s affairs since 1776. They asked why anyone would wish to alter so happy a condition, and were annoyed when it was even hinted that there had been moments of ‘‘misrule.’’ This contradiction expressed a profound disagreement over the shape of Virginia’s history, which crossed the conservative/reform divide. John R. Cooke cheerfully thought that reform would be but a consummation of the principles of 1776, but Doddridge differently thought he knew better, that 1776 had deliberately circumscribed the idea of equality. John Randolph gloried in the fact, but Doddridge was bitter. ‘‘The Constitution of Virginia is not a pact ‘made by all, for the benefit of all,’ ’’ Doddridge said; ‘‘So far from all the members of society having had an agency in making this Constitution, none were, even, consulted except freeholders, and those only of a certain class,’’ the body of ‘‘private gentlemen freeholders.’’ So the compact had not been widely beneficial, but had been a thing made ‘‘by a part of society, for the benefit of that part, in a very great degree.’’ For Doddridge, Virginia had come out of the eighteenth century as a flawed polity, in need of ideological and political transformation, which might fit her for a more modern world. For Randolph, decline was sweetly evident, politics a matter of holding on to old verities. For Powell, there was no de70. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 478, 59, 86–87, 113, 357.

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cline, the modern Virginians were not ‘‘degenerate sons’’ of 1776’s ‘‘virtuous and magnanimous people.’’ Barbour, scrutinizing the troublesome language of the Declaration of Rights that said ‘‘that all men are by nature, equally free,’’ not only declared ‘‘wholly inconsequent’’ the conclusion that ‘‘all men are entitled to an equal share of political power,’’ but asserted that every principle in that Declaration ‘‘is to be modified, by reference to the time when, and the circumstances under which they were declared, and by reference also, to the people on whom they were intended to operate.’’ Events since 1776 in San Domingo and France had required a reassessment, for they showed what ‘‘frightful and appalling scenes of horror and desolation’’ might occur if that language was misinterpreted and Virginia was threatened, as Randolph assured everyone it was, by ‘‘rank Jacobinism,’’ producing ‘‘a monstrous farrago’’ of schemes incited by ‘‘this maot of innovation.’’ Leigh even went so far, when disagreeing with a proposal from James Monroe, to hazard that ‘‘if George Washington were to rise from the dead, and to propose such a compromise . . . he should find the moral courage in his heart to reject and to oppose it, even coming from him.’’ 71 In short, most sensed the cold fact that ‘‘people are changed from what they have been.’’ Randolph was eloquent about the passing of ‘‘the good old Virginia planter.’’ William Naylor saw it too; he spoke of how Virginia had once been blessed by nature, but now ‘‘her population in the eastern section is stationary, her fields are deserted, and improvements abandoned,’’ and he ‘‘could weep over her desolations.’’ But Naylor drew a conclusion opposite from Randolph’s and instead saw hope in the West, urged that they ‘‘engraft the scion of genuine Republicanism upon the old stock of Virginian patriotism,’’ and make their improvements, even despite ‘‘the disparaging manner in which those gentlemen, (the gentleman from Hanover at least) have spoken of roads and canals.’’ So the reformers, too, liked the theme of decline, by way of urging the necessity of change. Richard Henderson spoke of ‘‘a commerce inferior to that of the little State of Rhode Island, an agriculture languishing, the mechanic arts in a state of depression and thriftlessness, and provision made for the education of about one-eighth of the children annually educated by the small State of Connecticut . . . and . . . not half so well educated.’’ 72 Much hinged on the problem of confidence. That Virginia had once been great and her political system had had a role in that, hardly anyone disputed; a glance towards James Madison would suffice to settle the insight. That she was changing, hardly anyone doubted. But would change forfeit greatness? Or had greatness gone already, only to be restored by judicious change? The 71. Ibid., 103, 79–80, 104–5, 91, 556, 716, 789, 151. 72. Ibid., 790, 133, 359.

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conservatives offered little reassurance that the continuance of their power would reverse history. At best, they promised only a slow descent into the maelstrom. They said, as John C. Coalter frankly admitted, ‘‘I confess I am afraid.’’ And the reformers reassured them that change would not occasion ‘‘tumult and riot.’’ As Doddridge put it: Could we forget where we are, and listen to the speeches of gentlemen in opposition, we should forget the business we are engaged in; we should imagine we were listening to Burke on the French Revolution. All the horrors of that volcano are set before us, as if in our madness, we were ready to plunge into it. We are likened to the impious priests of France in that last age; we are called fanatics, dreamers, and even drivellers, by a gentleman of this city: the history of the ancient Republics is invoked to alarm us: at one time it is said, that each of these perished when Suffrage was made general, and Governments established on the rights of numbers. With much more truth we are again told, that these Republics with all their temporary Governments, have fallen, without leaving in their histories any thing for our instruction: the truth is, that neither in antiquity, nor in the ages succeeding the fall of Rome, were there any Governments formed on our model; not one. Before ours, there never existed one Government in the world in which the whole power was vested in the people, and exercised by them through their Representatives; in which, powers were divided between separate and distinct bodies of magistracy; and in which no nobility or privileged order existed.73 The conservatives felt a connection to an older history and thought Virginia embedded in a longer narrative, but Doddridge (like John Taylor) offered an American historicism. Doddridge let much go. He was tired of being ‘‘incessantly lectured like school-boys about the Republics of Greece, Sparta, Lacedæmon, Rome, and Carthage,’’ and wanted to adhere to ‘‘our sense of the term,’’ to ‘‘the Virginia sense of it.’’ 74 He gestured towards the West and indicated that all would be well, perhaps even greater. And, somehow, the conservatives were not persuaded. They were not reassured by the thought of Ohio. In all this, little regarded were the two great subjects of slavery and democracy. The former was only obliquely germane to how the delegates saw their task, or so, at least, the delegates claimed. Madison saw such reticence as a 73. Ibid., 454, 425–26. 74. Ibid., 426. That Sparta and Lacedaemon are the same place might seem to indicate that he had been inattentive to the lectures.

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‘‘morbid’’ and ‘‘violent’’ disinclination to broach the subject: ‘‘I scarcely express myself too strongly in saying,’’ he told Lafayette, ‘‘that any allusion in the Convention to the subject you have so much at heart would have been a spark to a mass of gunpowder.’’ Yet allusions did prove necessary. As William F. Gordon put it of this matter of ‘‘negro property,’’ ‘‘it is very disagreeable to me to be obliged to touch the subject, but the fault is not mine; it lies in my way, and I cannot avoid it.’’ 75 When the matter was broached, however, there seem to have been no explosions. And much was said, if with different voices. Some thought slavery a moral evil, others that it was happily marginal in the West, others that it was happily growing in the West, others spoke glowingly of the master-slave relationship. Leigh anticipated James Henry Hammond’s 1858 ‘‘Mud-Sill’’ speech in arguing that slaves were a historical necessity: ‘‘In every civilized country under the sun, some there must be who labour for their daily bread, either by contract with, or subjection to others, or for themselves. Slaves, in the eastern part of this State, fill the place of the peasantry of Europe—of the peasantry and day-labourers in the non-slaveholding States of this Union.’’ 76 Randolph vented his spleen on the antislavery people, with his customary vividness. But, for the most part, slavery was enfolded into the broader issues of wealth, property, and ‘‘interests,’’ and the internal social dynamics of the institution did not much detain debate, though Westerners not infrequently invoked an unsubtle racism in speaking of ‘‘this principle of negro representation’’ and denouncing the weight given to slave property in calculating population and representation. And it was not uncommon to suggest that slavery might be responsible for the East’s decline, though one did not need to be a Westerner to say this. But most glumly agreed with Monroe, when he said that they were stuck with ‘‘the evil’’ of ‘‘the slavish population,’’ that there was no way out, for emancipation would bring only ‘‘disorganization . . . and perfect confusion.’’ 77 Still, as will be evident, the problem of social order implicit in the reality of slavery had profound consequences for the debate. As for ‘‘democracy,’’ no one spoke up for it, which says much for Virginia’s ways, for elsewhere in the South the topic was common enough. True, the reformers spoke for adult male suffrage, but they accepted the older defini75. Madison to Lafayette, 1 February 1830, quoted in Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 251; Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 144. 76. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 158. Cf. ‘‘Speech on the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858,’’ in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James Henry Hammond, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (1866; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: Southern Studies Program, University of South Carolina, 1978), 301–22. 77. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 698, 133, 149.

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tion of democracy as the direct rule of the people, and like the conservatives deprecated this ‘‘visionary and impracticable’’ idea and preferred the notion of a representative republic, of ‘‘the principle of intermediate elections’’ in ‘‘a great, extended, populous community.’’ Charles Morgan was a reformer, who pointed gladly to the experiences of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and endorsed a general suffrage, but even he refused to be drawn (when James Trezvant offered him the bait of the ancient republics) into endorsing ‘‘democratic or very imperfect Republics,’’ whose history were ‘‘not examples for us.’’ Reformers had all the premises of a democratic ideology, but not yet the willingness to annex the tainted word and make it good. Still, they did repel the contention that majority rule was unrepublican, and Johnson’s claim that ‘‘the people’’ did not mean the whole people, but only ‘‘the qualified voters.’’ And they were much tempted into the discourse of class animosity. Lucas Thompson rejected the conservative case for a ‘‘mixed basis’’ for representation as ‘‘anti-republican,’’ but insisted that it was wrong ‘‘to give out political power, in proportion to the wealth of the voter.’’ Alexander Campbell spoke of Virginians who ‘‘at home, or when they return from Congress, . . . have negroes to fan them asleep.’’ These slights were frequent enough that Barbour felt obliged to repulse the charge that ‘‘connecting the Right of Suffrage, with an interest in the soil, is aristocracy; rank aristocracy.’’ Such charges and countercharges were worryingly candid. The nervous John C. Coalter deprecated the whole business: ‘‘Surely—surely, we are not prepared to enter the great arena of the human passions, with the anathemas of Aristocrat—Monarchist—Oppressor of the Poor—Enemy of the People, and of human rights, on the one side, in order to carry through our work,—and with the denunciations of Demagogue—Agitator—Radical, &c. on the other!!’’ 78 To some extent, he prevailed, for the invocation of these matters was decorous, if unmistakable. Indeed, the fear of political schism ran deep, and it subtly interwove the problems of state and federal politics. Here the preoccupations of 1787 and 1861 met, and to this matter slavery was deeply pertinent. James Monroe stated the fear with precision, when he said that a weak compromise of the sectional feelings within the state would inflame resentments and lead to ‘‘an actual dismemberment of the Commonwealth.’’ This might lead to a schism in the wider Union: ‘‘If Virginia should be dismembered, on the ground of the present controversy, will not the Carolinas and Georgia, experience the same fate? The same principles are involved, and causes exist there, though not to the same extent. . . . There are causes of disunion among us, which do not apply to them, and if we can bind the States together, by opening communications between them, then our union will be perfected, nothing can ever break 78. Ibid., 240, 381, 263, 414, 119, 436, 454.

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it.’’ At the root of the division was slavery, as it was unequally distributed between eastern and western Virginia. In prospect was civil disorder. Monroe had witnessed France in the 1790s, and he reminded the convention of the scenes he had ‘‘witnessed,’’ the moments when the mob burst into legislative halls, when commandants repressed insurgency ‘‘with the bayonet.’’ So he thought it safer to hazard moderate reform, to bring nonfreeholders within the pale of citizenship, ‘‘with some reasonable protection for property.’’ One might step across the abyss. But it seemed very deep. William Branch Giles was blunt: ‘‘The forcible separation of Virginia, must and will lead to a separation of the United States, come when it will.’’ 79 What connected these things was complex. The representation of Virginia and the Southern states in the federal Congress was determined by the principle that slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining the size of a population. To abandon principles within the state that gave sanction to this, and to move to a simpler egalitarianism, might leave the state ideologically defenseless within the Union on this score. What gave eastern Virginia power within the state also gave Virginia power in Washington, or so the conservatives argued. Further, there was the fear of class division, of the landed being pitted against the unlanded, of slaveholder opposing nonslaveholder, in what might be called this ‘‘Trojan War between the two great parties of the State.’’ The nonslaveholders, if denied power, might reach out to others of their kind. ‘‘Will you not drive them to seek allies among your own people, associates in the measures, which are necessary to remove the obstacle that stands in their road to power?’’ asked Chapman Johnson. The world seemed poised. As Leigh saw it, one path led towards a United States ‘‘consolidated into one vast empire, without any reference to existing boundaries.’’ Another led to a moment ‘‘when this great political Confederacy shall be broken up, and separated into its original atoms, and new political beings shall rise out of its ruins,’’ which he guessed might be four smaller confederacies, ‘‘one Government North of the Hudson, another between the Hudson and the Potomac, another in the South, and another in the West.’’ 80 So the convention, not obsessively but often, would comment on the nature of the Union. Perhaps curiously, on this score there was little disagreement, though the Westerners had more to hope from an active United States which might offer internal improvements, and the Easterners feared the concomitant tariffs and protectionism. But the discourse of social compacts, which dominated their reasoning about Virginia itself, flowed naturally into a reading of 1787 as another moment of compact. William F. Gordon, who leaned 79. Ibid., 148, 150–51, 253. 80. Ibid., 677, 283, 590.

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George Catlin, The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30 (Courtesy Virginia Historical Society, Richmond)

towards the conservatives,81 asserted that the Constitution was ‘‘a treaty of one sovereignty with another,’’ that it combined ‘‘different and totally distinct societies under one general Government, for their common benefit . . . a Government of limited powers, the residue of power being retained by those sovereignties as such.’’ So the Senate of the United States gave equal representation to states, not because the Constitution disavowed the principle of King Numbers, but because ‘‘the Delegates on that floor do not represent numbers at all; they have nothing to do with numbers; they represent sovereignties; and the sovereignty of a State, does not depend upon its dimensions.’’ William H. Fitzhugh, a reformer, believed the same thing, that the United States Government was ‘‘a compact amongst independent sovereignties.’’ Robert Stanard, a conservative, likewise argued that, ‘‘The Federal Government is a Government formed by an association of sovereigns; the Governments of the several States by association of individuals.’’ Consistent with this, Thomas Bayly hazarded that the ‘‘Senate of the United States may be compared to an Assembly of Ambassadors, representing Sovereign States.’’ 82 Such an approach saw the Union as Virginia’s implication, as a thing in81. Bruce, Rhetoric of Conservatism, 36, lists him as among the ‘‘Moderates (voting conservatively on 50–79 percent of issues).’’ 82. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 142, 222, 303, 451.

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vented to serve Virginia’s purposes, and something whose instabilities grew from those inherent in Virginia’s own situation. If Virginia succeeded, so might the Union; if not, not. Less usual at the convention was the view that enfolded the fate of Virginia into that of the South. The incessant theme of East and West tended to limit the competing vision of North and South as an intellectual option, as did the greatness of the Virginian past, whose presence (literally so in that of Madison and Monroe) created a fiercely proud introspection. There were, to be sure, moments when the tariff or the antislavery movement was discussed, which were the moments when the idea of a coherent slaveholding South with shared interests was most relevant. So Leigh said, ‘‘Every commercial operation of the Federal Government, since I attained to manhood, has been detrimental to the Southern, Atlantic, slave-holding, planting States,’’ which went some way towards a vision of a Southern civilization, if not as far as Alabama and beyond. Randolph, strikingly, spoke of ‘‘our brethren of the South’’ and of Virginia as ‘‘the frontier State of the great Southern division of the Union,’’ though he inclined to see Virginia as a pioneer, after whom duller states scrambled to keep up. The rest of the South had been ‘‘dead to considerations to which they have, I fear, awaked too late,’’ while Virginia had been ‘‘left alone and unsupported, unless by the feeble aid of her distant offspring, Kentucky.’’ 83 In general, however, the convention’s intermittent habit of comparative constitutional analysis did not much favor the South over other states. Some might point to South Carolina’s constitution, but others to New York’s.84 Most looked inward. The lares and penates were compelling. As Leigh said in Burkean fashion, ‘‘An attachment to this, my native State, to every foot of her soil, to every interest of all her citizens, has been my ruling passion from my youth—so strong, that it is now (what all attachments to be useful to its objects, must be) a prejudice—I hardly recollect the reasons on which it was founded.’’ 85 Contemporaneously and with satisfaction, David James McCord in the Southern Review was quoting the words of Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut at the 1787 convention: ‘‘My happiness depends as much on the existence of my State Government, as a new-born infant depends upon its mother for nourishment.’’ 86 83. Ibid., 164, 315. 84. See, for example, Charles Morgan’s survey of the constitutions of ‘‘the twelve slaveholding States’’: ibid., 379–80. Cf. Mercer’s discussion, which ranges from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts: ibid., 179–81. 85. Ibid., 156. See also Chapman Johnson on ‘‘the land of my nativity’’: ibid., 257. 86. McCord, ‘‘Federal Constitution,’’ 454. In Madison’s notes, the text reads: ‘‘He turned his eyes therefore for the preservation of his rights to the State Gov ts. From these alone he could derive the greatest happiness he expects from this life. His happiness depends on their existence, as much as a new born infant on its mother for nourishment’’: Notes of Debates in

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South Carolina Doctrines Virginian introspection was often in marked contrast to South Carolinian political thought in the 1820s, which was dominated by the interstate dynamics of the federal Union. The causes of this difference were many, but two were preeminent. South Carolina had settled its internal constitutional argument in 1808, whereas Virginia in 1829–30 had not. For the latter, the question of who would rule at home usually took precedence over that of who would rule in the Union, except at moments of exigent crisis. And South Carolina had a stronger cosmopolitan impulse. It is hard to see many Virginians saying what came naturally in 1824 to Thomas Cooper, the anti-mercantilist who had once replied to Burke: ‘‘The argument in favour of insulation and independence, may be extended between two states, two counties, two townships, two men. It is a bad feeling; it induces us to wish our gains dependent on the depressions of our neighbours; whereas, it is now known that every nation is enriched by the prosperity of its customers.’’ 87 Further, the very dominance that Virginia had once exercised over federal affairs meant that, losing power, it tended to lose interest. But South Carolina had never been greatly influential, so its role became that of a terrier, significant for the loudness of its barking. The driving force of South Carolinian political thought in the 1820s was money, the complex urgencies of the American System, the tariff, internal improvements and, eventually, the Second Bank of the United States. Between the election of John Quincy Adams and the Compromise of 1833, South Carolina hammered out a fundamental critique of the Union. In its essentials, it was not original, for it built upon the ideological foundations laid by John Taylor, and the Jefferson and Madison of the late 1790s. As Cooper said in 1830, South Carolina’s ideas ‘‘amount, in fact, to the Virginia construction of the U.S. Constitution as her most accredited politicians . . . propounded it, at the memorable era from 1797 to 1801.’’ 88 These ideas were, to a surprising extent, consensual in the state, shared between Nullifiers and Unionists alike. At its heart was the truth that Legaré the Unionist announced in 1830: ‘‘Nobody pretends to deny, that except for a few designated purposes, the Federal Constitution is a bond of Union for distinct and independent the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison, introduction by Adrienne Koch (1966; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 230. 87. TC, Proposed Alteration, 12. Cf. TC, A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of Commons, on the 30th of April, 1792 (London: J. Johnson, 1792). 88. ‘‘Preface to the Second Edition,’’ in TC, Consolidation, 4. In the ‘‘Preface to the First Edition,’’ Cooper called himself ‘‘an Anti-Federalist.’’

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commonwealths.’’ Likewise, Robert Hayne was not inaccurate when he told Andrew Jackson in 1828, ‘‘There is no party here who desire a dissolution of the union.’’ 89 The difference between the camps, who nearly went to civil war with each other in the early 1830s, lay in varying relative judgments of the urgency of the crisis identified by Robert Turnbull in 1827, and whether that crisis justified the theory of Nullification. Most presumptions were shared; only the actions deducible from them differed. Though John C. Calhoun became the political champion of what Thomas Cooper called in 1830 the ‘‘South Carolina Doctrines,’’ 90 Cooper himself had defined them in a series of pamphlets from 1823 onwards, and offered its most accessible summation in 1836; his achievement was to turn an economic into a constitutional analysis.91 He began in 1823 with a critique of the tariff, which he saw as economically ill-advised. Cooper was not then localistic. Indeed, he observed, ‘‘Every man called to the national representation is a national, not a local representative. He is sent to debate, and after debate to decide upon the great interests of the nation.’’ Nor was he then much interested in the constitutional niceties; he gave the impression that, if tariffs had been economically sensible, he would have been pleased to see them enacted, as he had during the war of 1812.92 Even by 1824, however, Cooper had partially developed the political reasoning that made his economic arguments constitutionally operable. As was somewhat more characteristic of the South Carolinian school than the Virginian, Cooper made much of history, the specific sequence of events in the 1770s and 1780s. The subtitle of his 1824 pamphlet Consolidation was, ‘‘An Account of Parties in the United States from the Convention of 1787 to the Present Period.’’ 93 He was adamant that ‘‘the independence and separate sovereignty of each state of the Union . . . never was at any moment conceded, or in any manner or degree renounced.’’ Rather, the federal government was ‘‘a creature of the several independent states,’’ and, at the 1787 convention, the attempt to design a supreme national government had been repudiated, in both form and substance. The word itself, national, had been proscribed: ‘‘The great question came to issue on June 25th, when it was proposed and seconded, to erase the term national, and, to substi89. HSL, ‘‘The American System,’’ SR 6 (August 1830): 208; Robert Young Hayne to AJ, 3 September 1828, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926–35), 3:434. 90. TC, Consolidation, 31. 91. In TC, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina: Volume 1 (Columbia, S.C.: A. S. Johnston, 1836), 201–25. 92. TC, Proposed Alteration, 23; Stephen L. Newman, ‘‘Thomas Cooper, 1759–1839: The Political Odyssey of a Bourgeois Ideologue,’’ Southern Studies 24 (Fall 1986): 302. 93. Such variation as there is between the first and second editions occur after the first twenty-two pages.

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tute the word, united states, which passed in the affirmative.’’ 94 Cooper discerned three parties at the convention: the ‘‘consolidation, or national party’’; tertium quids who ‘‘did not advocate the abolition of state sovereignty . . . but wished to establish such a system as would give their own states some preponderance’’; and ‘‘the real friends of a federal, not a national consolidated government.’’ These last, he believed, had prevailed. So ‘‘Congress was created and appointed, not as a supreme, but subordinate authority.’’ This was not the less so, just because the nationalists usurped the name of Federalists, and branded their opponents as ‘‘anti-federalists, jacobins, republicans, democrats, and radicals.’’ As for the Federalist Papers, they were honorable, but only propaganda: ‘‘It is ridiculous to cite them as authority for the real views of the prevailing party; to which Col. Hamilton and Mr. Madison did not at that time cordially accede.’’ (Cooper acknowledged that later Madison ‘‘gradually changed his views.’’) So, for Cooper, the political history of the American republic since 1789 had been the attempt of consolidationists to extend federal authority, augment the military, extend patronage, interject the United States into European politics, and entertain the project of ‘‘making them,’’ i.e., the United States (as with most Americans then, for Cooper the phrase was plural, not singular), into ‘‘a great and energetic nation, one and indivisible.’’ Important to their strategy had been ‘‘the absolute and dangerous control exercised by the Supreme Court of the United States, over state laws, and state decisions.’’ Since Cooper was an old English radical, for him this consolidationist project was a conservative, antidemocratic movement, hostile to the principles of the French Revolution. Concomitantly, he lumped together ‘‘the Anti-Federalist, Republican, Democrat, Radical’’ as a party. By so understanding the character of power, Cooper pointed to a truth that many misunderstood; resistance to increased federal power could be conservative, liberal, or radical, indifferently, for much depended on why local power was desired and how it was exercised.95 In estimating the Founding generation, Cooper showed respect for Alexander Hamilton, though they disagreed. For the elder Adams, he had little but contempt, which was not unsurprising, since Cooper had once been jailed under the terms of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Cooper’s verdict was, if anything, more adverse than John Taylor’s: Cooper’s Adams was arrogant, irri94. TC, Consolidation, 6–7. Cooper makes more of this than the record seems to warrant. Madison’s notes have, for 25 June, ‘‘The mode of constituting the 2d branch being under consideration. / The word ‘national was struck out and ‘United States’ inserted’’ (Madison’s Notes, 188). That is, the term adopted for the Senate was ‘‘The Senate of the United States,’’ not ‘‘the national Senate.’’ This is short of being an alteration in the application of the word national to the whole polity. 95. TC, Consolidation, 7, 8, 9, 12, 10.

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table, stupid, bombastic, heedless, an enemy of the people. On Thomas Jefferson, Cooper’s old friend, patron, and correspondent, Consolidation is oddly silent; Jefferson appears only in a footnote, which remarks, ‘‘In 1817, Mr. J. C. Calhoun, was a strenuous advocate for re-imposing the long catalogue of internal taxes, abolished by Mr. Jefferson.’’ While Cooper outlined Hamilton’s schemes of the 1790s, he did not delineate the Jeffersonian response, but jumped to the issues of Madison’s and Monroe’s administrations, the rechartering of the bank, the expansion of internal improvements (Calhoun is singled out for reprobation), and the dark imminence of John Quincy Adams. So, at least in 1824, Cooper was sympathetic to John Taylor’s historical analysis, with the significant exception that Cooper seems to have believed that the Constitution of 1787 was wholly on his side and only needed clear application, whereas Taylor had had, from the beginning, doubts about many of its features. And this difference, too, was significant. The Virginians, who had long been skeptical of the Constitution, were less disillusioned by the history of its shortcomings, as that history unfolded after 1789. The South Carolinians had once been more convinced Unionists. As Legaré put it nostalgically in 1830, ‘‘We remember with a melancholy pleasure, what a romantic enthusiasm, what a generous and confiding spirit of hope and brotherly love, once warmed the bosom of this whole State in relation to our glorious republic.’’ 96 So South Carolinians came to a more abrupt disillusion. Far more than John Taylor, they wanted the history of the Union to prove their case, to demonstrate that they had rights within the logic of 1787. By contrast, Taylor had taken his stand upon extra-constitutional grounds. A strange mix of radicalism and conservatism was evidenced by a pamphlet Cooper published in 1826, which contains two essays, ‘‘On the Foundation of Civil Government’’ and ‘‘On the Constitution of the United States.’’ The first was a slight adaptation of a piece first written for the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester in 1787 and provides cogent evidence that the young English republican and the old South Carolinian Nullifier had much in common. It is a drastic piece. In its first few pages, Milton, Buchanan, Harrington, Sidney, and Locke are deemed inadequate, Richard Price ‘‘an improvement,’’ Joseph Priestley ‘‘much better,’’ and Tom Paine’s Rights of Man ‘‘never refuted.’’ So the tract is striking for the thoroughness with which most traditional groundings for political authority were tossed aside: the divine, the patriarchal (‘‘the exploded thesis of Sir R. Filmer’’), the parental (‘‘the parent cannot bind the son to perpetual submission even to parental authority, and much less to the authority of others’’), the native (‘‘the mere circumstance of being born in this or that part of the globe . . . 96. Ibid., 20; HSL, ‘‘American System,’’ 209.

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[cannot] equitably subject any one to perpetual government of any other of his fellow-creatures’’), prescriptive custom, force, conquest, or the aristocracy of the talents (‘‘there is just the same reason for a person’s interference in my private business, because he pretends to know more of it than I do, as there is for his interference in my public business on the same pretence’’)—all were found wanting. Rather, and this was a braver assertion in Manchester in 1787 than Columbia in 1826, ‘‘I conclude that the right of exercising political power, whether about to commence or actually existing, is derived solely from the people.’’ However, like John Taylor, Cooper saw the people as ‘‘a multitude of individuals,’’ as ‘‘an aggregate of individuals.’’ Unlike Taylor, however, Cooper lowered his guard, when these individuals came to form a majority within political society. For Cooper was a utilitarian, who believed with Bernard Mandeville that ‘‘the happiness of the community (i.e., of the individuals who compose it) is the great end and object of civil society’’ and that ‘‘the greatest good of the greatest number, is the polar star of all good government; and public utility the criterion by which every law is be tested.’’ The individual consents to be governed, but only to be well governed, and certain rights adhere to the private realm which government cannot touch: these include a man’s authority over wife and children, religious freedom, and self-defense. Since the idea of ‘‘the good’’ is historically fluid, all government is provisional; ‘‘the persons delegating must have a right of recalling or annulling partially or totally, as circumstances may require, that power which no longer answers the ends of its creation.’’ In general, the presumption of innocence in civil tensions should lie with the people and against the government, and no state has the right to deal with its citizens unequally, and hence no right to establish privileges. Nonetheless, ‘‘the interest (i.e. the happiness) of the majority is to be preferred to that of the minority.’’ From which there followed a conclusion anathema to most other Southern political thinkers, but which Cooper unblushingly asserted: ‘‘For every practical purpose the majority is synonimous with the society. . . . For if the opinions of the few were in all cases to be deemed of equal weight with the opinions of the many, the object of society would be perpetually frustrated, nor could society itself long exist.’’ Even worse, ‘‘it must of necessity be presumed that an active majority is the true majority: for where every one may be active who chuses, the presumption is equal on both sides of the question concerning those who are apparently neuter.’’ What mitigated this was Cooper’s insistence that government is an instrumentality, even a necessary ‘‘usurpation,’’ but not a morally independent power: ‘‘The Government is not a compact between the governors and the governed; for at the commencement of political communities among independent individuals, there could have been and can be, no governors. . . . The public servants and agents of the people for transacting public business,

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are indeed and always, and every where have been governors in fact, but by usurpation.’’ 97 But who were the people? Cooper’s answer to this question was surprisingly conservative. They did not include, the migrant Englishman believed, the stranger and the resident alien, though he believed in the right of free movement. They did not embrace the poor, either, though this exclusion seems to have occasioned Cooper ‘‘much consideration.’’ But, he finally thought, ‘‘no person can demand to interfere in framing laws, who contributes nothing to the expence of enacting or enforcing them.’’ So the people could not encompass the unpropertied, considering how much of legislation was concerned with property: ‘‘It is optional to the possessors [of a territory] to admit or reject as members of the community upon their own terms, those who have no proprietary or usufructuary right to any part of the such territory; provided also it be left optional to the latter, to accept or reject a membership on the terms proposed.’’ 98 On one point, Cooper was ambivalent. Cooper was a child of the English Enlightenment, but also someone who had gone as a delegate from the Manchester Constitutional Society to the Jacobin Club, a man who had known Robespierre, someone who was not adverse to the warm possibility of man’s brotherhood.99 From the latter instinct, he was disposed to believe in the possibility of the ‘‘maxim universal’’ and thought his analysis would ‘‘appear to hold universally true concerning society itself.’’ In the great struggle between Paine and Burke, Cooper had been on Paine’s side, and in South Carolina, Cooper bitterly opposed the dominant but ramshackle inconsistencies of the common law and wished for the clarity of codification. But particularism had had some impact on him, for it had much informed the English Enlightenment, which had been nourished on empiricism. So, ‘‘Government is not a thing of theory, and of abstract right,’’ but an expedience founded on experience. ‘‘The great object of all laws is the general welfare—public utility. There can be no rights inconsistent with this. If a right may be safely exercised under some circumstances and not under others, it ought not to be allowed in the latter cases.’’ But this was not, as in the hated Burke, a case for acquiescing in the sweet comfort of prejudice, but for ensuring that freedom would incessantly transform the nature of the state. For Cooper’s essay ends with a clarion call of hope that ‘‘the day is not far distant, when one stone of the fabric will not be left upon another.’’ 100 97. TC, Two Essays: 1. on the Foundations of Civil Government: 2. on the Constitution of the United States (Columbia, S.C.: D. & J. M. Faust, 1826), iii–iv, 5–9, 10, 12, 17. 98. Ibid., 14. 99. On Cooper’s French experience, see Dumas Malone, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783–1839 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1926), 34–72. 100. TC, Two Essays, 15, 18, 29.

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The second essay, ‘‘On the Constitution of the United States,’’ did not add much to the propositions advanced in Consolidation, except that it sharpened Cooper’s critique of the Supreme Court and leaned more towards a quasiCommonwealth position (‘‘the whole of History, so far as it relates to the internal affairs of a nation, consists of the struggles of Government to encroach on the rights of the people, and bring them under irresistible subjection’’). The notion that majority rule was beneficent had seemed more plausible in Lancashire, where oligarchy ruled, than in South Carolina, where the people voted, and Cooper was more conscious later that the enfranchised could be ‘‘quiet, confiding, easily dazzled and persuaded.’’ 101 What did differ was Cooper’s debut as a proslavery thinker. Here the gulf between Manchester and Columbia was immense. In 1787 Cooper had published the scathing and indignant Letters on the Slave Trade, which had condemned not merely the trade, but the institution of slavery itself.102 In 1826, in discussing the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, he offered a fierce contradiction to his younger self. In 1787, the Quakers had been his moral heroes; in 1826 he spoke adversely of ‘‘the religious feelings and philanthropic dispositions of very many persons in the Northern and Middle States . . . blind to the extent and bearings of this momentous question.’’ His arguments were to become staple fare: the antislavery people were ‘‘exercising their disinterested philanthropy at the expense of other people’’; slavery was an ancient and modern fact; the Bible sanctioned it and ‘‘the patriarchs were slave holders’’; the slaves themselves acknowledged slavery’s legitimacy since ‘‘it is in common practice among them throughout the whole of Africa’’; America improved the social condition of those out of Africa who had become better off than ‘‘the majority of labouring people of Great Britain’’; free blacks were ‘‘the most idle, debauched, thievish and insolent’’ set; African slaves flourished as labor in hot climates where whites died; ‘‘the commerce and prosperity of the Northern States depend mainly on the productive industry of the South’’; and emancipation would turn ex-slaves into vagabonds and lead to a race war. More particularly, Cooper made a case for the constitutionality of slavery and its compatibility with republicanism. In bringing these two things together, 101. Ibid., 29. How far oligarchy characterized South Carolina is much disputed by historians, with Lacy Ford most persuaded that the state was a functioning democracy, and Manisha Sinha most persuaded that it was not: see Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Manisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideolo in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). It is, of course, possible for a democracy to create an oligarchy. 102. TC, Letters on the Slave Trade: First Published in Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicles; and Since RePrinted with Additions and Alterations (Manchester, S.C.: C. Wheeler, 1787). See also TC, Supplement to Mr. Cooper’s Letters on the Slave Trade (Warrington: W. Eyres, 1788).

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the general problem of civil government and the fact of slavery, Cooper was a little heterodox. In general, when Southerners thought formally about government, tout court, they were inattentive to slavery, a problem they left to be settled by the specialized genre of the proslavery argument. But even Cooper maintained some distance. His most abstract essay, ‘‘On the Foundation of Civil Government,’’ barely alluded to slavery and even ‘‘On the Constitution of the United States’’ came around to it, only as the most blatant instance of misuse of the Constitution, not as a starting place for considering the problem of political society. Still, as elsewhere in Southern political thought, there was in Cooper’s theory a deep fear of the idea of slavery, that is, slavery for whites. He wrote, for example, that the concept of ‘‘perpetual allegiance to the government’’ subjected men to a despotism and ‘‘converts human beings into a species of property.’’ 103 This was so, because slavery could be defined essentially as ‘‘ ‘that state or condition in which a man is governed without his consent.’ ’’ 104 The story of South Carolina’s movement towards Nullification has been well told elsewhere.105 Here what matters is that what began as a constitutional quarrel ended up as a cultural assertion, that skepticism about the interpretation of the Constitution of 1787 became a quarrel with the emerging discourse of American nationality, and that eventually the state came to be understood as itself a nation. In the various resolutions passed by the South Carolina legislature and the Nullifying convention, in the fierce polemic of Robert Turnbull’s The Crisis, and in Calhoun’s delicately wrought and secret reasonings, the logic worked itself out with painful directness. The federal Union was, by South Carolinian lights, misbehaving itself, because it misunderstood its own purposes. Doubtless, there were disreputable economic reasons for all this; that Clay and the American System represented what Cooper called in 1827 (when he had suggested recalculating the value of that ‘‘most unequal alliance,’’ the Union) ‘‘the manufacturers . . . a combining, club-meeting, planning, scheming, petitioning, memorializing, complaining, statement-making, worry, teasing, boring persevering class of men.’’ What came to matter was that, since the Constitution might be construed to facilitate these misdeeds, it fol103. TC, Two Essays, 44–46, 7. 104. Cooper adds a footnote here, to elucidate an asterisk placed against the word ‘‘without’’ in the text: ‘‘Not, ‘against,’ for this may consist with freedom: it is the case in all minorities’’: ibid., 13. 105. See, for example William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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lowed that in defending the countervailing power of the state, the institutions of the Union had to be illegitimated. The Supreme Court lay at the heart of the matter, for several reasons. Under John Marshall, it had asserted the right of judicial review and made decisions that tended to aggrandize the competence of the federal government over economic and legislative concerns. If the authority of the states was to be asserted, the court needed to be stripped of this suzerainty. The theory that might justify this process was not complicated. It was not difficult to demonstrate that judicial review had nowhere been explicitly ceded to the court, either during the 1787 Philadelphia debates, in the text of the Constitution, or even in the political debates of the ratifying process, not even in the Federalist Papers. The court was not, as Turnbull called it, ‘‘the tribunal of dernier resort.’’ ‘‘We do not find,’’ James Hamilton wrote, ‘‘. . . that the Supreme Court has the power to decide in a controversy, between the Government of the United States and a State, on any question growing out of its reserved rights.’’ 106 It was more contentious to argue that, absent the Court, it was the states who, having made the United States, remained the final judge and jury of constitutionality. Certainly this proposition lay at the heart of Calhoun’s argument for Nullification, which offered the blueprint of a mechanism that might give substance to the vague assertions of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which tried to turn a slogan into a process, and so create a concrete alternative to the already-established procedure elaborated by John Marshall. In this, Calhoun was authoritarian. The South Carolinians suggested strengthening one power (the states) to countervail another (the Court). In this, they offered a dissent from the Madisonian notion that, in the Constitution, stability lay in the divisibility of sovereignty. Likewise, whereas John Taylor had understood that safety lay in the denial of unitary sovereignty, in what he called the principle of division, and hence Taylor had been bold enough to risk the idea of powerlessness, the South Carolinians were very much interested in power. Justice Joseph Story and Daniel Webster had explicitly argued that the Constitution was the creature of the American people in aggregate and the Court served as their constitutional arbiter. As Robert Turnbull quoted him, in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, Story had firmly declared, ‘‘The Constitution of the United States was ordained and established, not by the States in their sovereign capacity, but emphatically, as the Constitution declares, by the people of the United States.’’ And, as James Hamilton quoted Webster replying to Hayne, the South Carolinian doctrine made the national government ‘‘the servant of 106. Speech of TC, 2 July 1827, Niles Weekly Register 33 (8 September 1827): 28–32, reprinted in William W. Freehling, ed., The Nullification Era: A Documentary Record (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 21; James Hamilton, ‘‘Debate on Mr. Foot’s Resolution,’’ SR 6 (August 1830): 181–82.

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four and twenty masters, of different wills and different purposes. . . . [Instead] We are all agents of the same supreme power, the People. The General Government and the State Governments derive their authority from the same source. Neither can, in relation to the other, be called primary.’’ This latter assertion of Webster’s was, in fact, the same proposition for which John Taylor had argued, but with an exception that the South Carolinians did not fail to note. Taylor had never granted to the Supreme Court the power of judicial review over fundamental constitutional issues. That Webster did meant that, finally, the locus of sovereignty would rest with a branch of the federal government, and would not be diffused throughout the federal system as Taylor had wished. To this, Turnbull opposed the assertion that the ‘‘judiciary department of the United States’’ should not be regarded ‘‘as the high, controlling authority over the sovereignty of the States,’’ but only as ‘‘a co-ordinate, independent department in our anomalous system, no more sovereign over the State judiciary authorities, than those authorities are sovereign over it.’’ Most fundamentally, as Hamilton was right to see, one had to decide what ‘‘we, the people’’ meant. ‘‘The people of what?’’ he asked. The options were ‘‘the United States as one aggregate whole, or the people of each State, as forming a separate sovereignty, or the people of the States, as composing separate sovereignties.’’ 107 For Hamilton, at least, the choice was clearly not the first of these, but the two last. Hence many South Carolinians ended up refusing the idea of American nationality. They were insistent that the United States were (not was) a federation or a confederation, at best a league or an alliance, but not a nation. ‘‘In all its relations to the States, the General Government is strictly federal,’’ Hamilton argued; ‘‘it is national only in regard to its operation on the citizens, individually of the States, by virtue of clearly delegated grants of power, and in its diplomatic relations with foreign nations.’’ Nationality was the road not taken in 1787, a refusal that powerful sophisters (Webster, Clay, Marshall, Story) wished to subvert by stealth. Fundamental constitutional disputes should be regarded, as Cooper put it, as each ‘‘an international dispute, which each party at his own risk, must settle according to the own rules and notions of right and wrong.’’ But there was a significant trick in this argument. In denying the United States the status of a nation, South Carolinians gave to the states that same status, and so acquired for them a standing little available in 1776 or 1787. This was not a refusal of the idea of nationality, but its annexation and relocation. Cooper said in 1836, in his preface to the Statutes at Large of South Carolina, that ‘‘The Colonies of Great Britain in North America formed themselves, on the 4th of July, 1776, into thirteen distinct communities or 107. Turnbull, ‘‘Dernier Resort,’’ 439, 433; Hamilton, ‘‘Foot’s Resolution,’’ 168, 171.

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nations, each of them, like every other nation, independent of the others, with distinct forms of government, and separated into distinct and circumscribed territories and localities.’’ This was the primary allegiance, though Cooper acknowledged that an American had a double allegiance, to his state and to the United States. But the latter was a ‘‘derivative, limited and subordinate government,’’ and allegiance to it was likewise. Strictly, ‘‘allegiance is a term applicable only to that submission which we owe to our own Sovereign State; which was such before the federal government was created; which is so still; and which will be such when the federal government is altered or dissolved.’’ For those in doubt on the matter of political and social identity, he offered firm guidance: ‘‘If a citizen of this State be asked, ‘are you an American?’ His reply ought to be, ‘Sir, I am a South Carolinian.’ ’’ Indeed, it may have been Cooper—or it may have been another professor at South Carolina College— of whom the English traveler George Featherstonhaugh told this story of a dinner party in Columbia: ‘‘I could not help asking, in a good-natured way, if they called themselves Americans yet; the gentleman who had interrupted me before said, ‘If you ask me if I am an American, my answer is, No, sir, I am a South Carolinian.’ ’’ 108 Calhoun came to design Nullification as a way of steering between the Charybdis of Thomas Cooper’s radical idea of state nationality and the Scylla of Henry Clay’s Unionism. Calhoun wanted state sovereignty and the Union, even at moments of the sharpest disagreement, whereas Cooper et id omne genus wanted South Carolinians to know that there was a fundamental preference for the state over the Union, which brooked no ambivalence and would probably, in time, demand a choice. For Calhoun, state interposition was the middle way, even if it did not look it to Andrew Jackson poring over his military maps of Charleston Harbor and contemplating invasion. As Calhoun reminded his readers in 1831, ‘‘I yield to none . . . in a deep and sincere attachment to our political institutions, and the union of these States. I never breathed an opposite sentiment.’’ 109 One can see this in the two crucial documents, the Exposition of 1828 and the so-called ‘‘Fort Hill Address’’ of 1831. In Calhoun’s draft version of the Exposition,110 most of his arguments concern the specific economic problem of the tariff, which would lead to ‘‘our ruin,’’ and it is only towards the end that fundamental constitutional issues are 108. Hamilton, ‘‘Foot’s Resolution,’’ 174; TC, Consolidation, 35; TC, Statutes at Large, 201– 2, 221, 222; George W. Featherstonhaugh, Excursion through the Slave States, from Washington on the Potomac to the Frontier of Mexico; with Sketches of Popular Manners and Geological Notices, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1844), 2:341. 109. Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 11:415. 110. The committee amended Calhoun’s version. The two versions are placed on adjoining pages in ibid., 10:444–534.

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explored. But the sequence of the argument—from the economy to the law— meant that Calhoun here was inclined to stress the socioeconomic grounding of constitutional issues, by arguing that South Carolina had peculiar interests, as did all the states, and that there was a ‘‘diversity of interest in the several classes and sections of the country.’’ 111 This analysis worked against the grain of his other instincts. For Calhoun was not, in fact, similar in instinct to Upshur, the new-fangled conservative who saw little that was general in human history. Calhoun was easier about the idea of the universal. His Exposition observes, for example, in what would become a sentiment of Lord Acton,112 that ‘‘[i]f there be a political proposition universally true, one which springs directly from the nature of man, and is independent of circumstances, it is that irresponsible power is inconsistent with liberty and must corrupt those who exercise it.’’ Further, ‘‘On this great principle our political system rest(s).’’ So Calhoun was prepared to manufacture maxims, like, ‘‘The essence of liberty comprehends the idea of responsible power: that those, who make and execute the laws, should be controlled by those on whom they operate; that the governed should govern.’’ Or, ‘‘Universal experience in all ages and countries teaches . . . that power can only be restrained by power, and not by reason or justice.’’ So he spoke of principles and laws, and their ‘‘natural operation,’’ and, in truth, he was never much interested in any history that preceded that of his own times, despite his vague citations of Barthold Niebuhr. Some of this was temperamental. In theory, like a good republican, Calhoun respected liberty and its concomitant, ‘‘the great diversity of the human intellect.’’ But, in fact, he was always puzzled by those who disagreed with him and tended to regard contrary opinion as a buzzing fly, to be brushed away as a nuisance. So he could write, ‘‘These truths do seem to me to be incontrovertible; and I am at a loss to understand how any one . . . can call them into question.’’ For how could anyone doubt him, if he was in possession of ‘‘an universal and fundamental political principle’’? 113 For Calhoun, the crucial distinction lay in the great matter of sovereignty: ‘‘There is in our system a striking distinction between government and sovereignty. The separate governments of the several States are vested in their respective legislative, executive, and Judicial Departments, while the sovereignty resides in the people in the States respectively; on the other hand the powers of the Gen[eral] Government are vested in its Legislative, executive, 111. Ibid., 474, 486. 112. Indeed, Acton read Calhoun closely. See, especially, ‘‘Political Causes of the American Revolution’’ (1861), in John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, vol. 1, Essays in the History of Liberty, ed. J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 216–62. 113. Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 10:486, 490, 504, 492, 494, 11:416, 420, 422.

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and judicial Departments, while the sovereignty resides in the people of the several States, who created it.’’ This far was orthodox, by most Southern logics. ‘‘But,’’ Calhoun went on, ‘‘by an express provision, the Constitution may be amended, or changed by three-fourth[s] of the States; and thus each State by assenting to the Constitution with this provision, has modified its original right as a sovereign, of giving its individual consent to any change in its political condition, and by becoming a member of the Union has placed this important power in the hands of three-fourth(s) of the States, in whom the highest power created by the Constitution actually resides.’’ This was ingeniously unorthodox. Deliberately muffled, however, was the stark fact that Calhoun had here admitted that state sovereignty had, indeed, been given up in 1789, if not to the federal Government or the Supreme Court. He was conscious of the problem. For he had first written, ‘‘by assenting to the Constitution with this provision, has surrendered [my emphasis] its original right as a sovereign,’’ before substituting the weaker word ‘‘modified.’’ He did not get away with this. The committee that revised his draft restored the word ‘‘surrendered.’’ 114 So, while radicals like Cooper said that the final arbiter of sovereignty was the individual state, and Joseph Story said it was the Supreme Court, Calhoun said it was a tribunal of the states, sitting in perpetuity and charged with monitoring the evolution of the American polity. From this proposition flowed all the logic of Nullification: that, if a federal law was thought repugnant, a state could summon its instrument of sovereignty—the state convention elected by the people—and nullify, but that such a nullification might be repealed by similar conventions in the other states of the Union, if threefourths of them agreed. Under such circumstances, state sovereignty did not exist as a matter of principle, though the procedure was so improbably extended that, in practice, it would, for this tribunal would almost never sit. So Calhoun conceded that the other states of the Union, at least when it came to federal law, had the right to reach inside the polity of South Carolina and tell it what to do.115 South Carolina might nullify the tariff, but if Massachusetts and seventeen other states told it otherwise, according to Calhoun, South Carolina must submit. Thus sovereignty had been bargained away in 1789. But for Calhoun, it had passed not to ‘‘a great consolidated Government with unlimited powers,’’ but to the states collectively, standing aside from the federal government as they had stood in 1776 and 1788, in perpetual alliance, guardians of the great trust of governing, ‘‘a higher power, standing by the consent of all above all in our system of govt[,] the creating and preserving power.’’ 114. Ibid., 10:496, 498, 499. 115. However, there is an astute reading in Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 167–68.

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In short, the states were God, ‘‘this supreme controlling power,’’ whose existence usefully enjoined virtue.116 Not all South Carolinians liked this God. Judge John Richardson, for one, thought it ‘‘an absurdity,’’ this asserting of state power and giving it away simultaneously.117 Nathaniel Macon, the aged Jeffersonian and former anti-Federalist, saw no difficulty about nullifying a federal law or even secession, but presumed the former put the state out of the Union and made it a foreign power. ‘‘To nullify and be in the Union . . . seem[s] to be impossible,’’ Macon told Andrew Jackson. But for Calhoun, the states collectively had a mystic force. As the ‘‘Fort Hill Address’’ put it, ‘‘The States . . . form a power, whose decrees are the Constitution itself, and whose voice can silence all discontent.’’ 118 Even a South Carolinian should assent to such a burning bush. Beyond this vital nuance of structure, the Exposition did offer a broad reading of the problem of man and government. In praising the ‘‘wise and practical statesmen’’ of the Revolution, Calhoun characterized their vision: They saw and felt, that there existed in our nature, the necessity of government, and govt of adequate powers; they saw that the selfish predominate over the social feelings, and that without a government of such powers universal conflict and anarchy must prevail among the component parts of society; but they also clearly saw, that our nature remaining unchanged by change of condition, unchecked power, from this very predominance of the selfish over the social feelings, which rendered government necessary, would of necessity lead to corruption and oppression on the part of those vested with its exercise. Thus the necessity of government and of checks originate in the same great principle of our nature; and thus the very selfishness of our nature, which impels those who have power to desire more, will also with equal force impel those on whom power operates, to resist aggression; they [two or three illegible words] saw that in the ballance [sic] of these opposing tendencies, originating in the same source, the one impelling to excess and the other to effect restraint in the exercise[,] liberty and happiness must for ever depend. This great principle guided in the formation of every part of our political system. There is not an opposing interest, through out the whole, that is not counter-poised.119 116. Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 10:506, 520, 522. 117. City Gazette, 14 September 1830, quoted in Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 168. 118. Nathaniel Macon to AJ, 25 September 1833, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 5:209; Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 11:421. 119. Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 10:526.

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So, large states counterpoised small, rulers faced the ruled, legislators struggled with courts, states of ‘‘separate & peculiar interests’’ balanced those with different interests, and so forth. Calhoun’s was a Hobbesian world with Queensberry rules. But, on the whole, his wisdom and experience told him to rely upon man’s selfishness, before trusting to his collegiality. The people might be sovereign, but that was no reason to trust them. As the ‘‘Fort Hill Address’’ made clear, the problem was that selfishness was not uniform. There was a ‘‘dissimilarity of interests,’’ which occasioned ‘‘the great difficulty of forming, and preserving free institutions.’’ (Abel P. Upshur was to put it epigrammatically, by saying that ‘‘our character is not homogeneous, and our pursuits are wholly different.’’) If the American had been homogeneous, no doubt suffrage alone could handle matters, but ‘‘it is the conflict of opposing interests which renders it the most difficult work of man.’’ Hence Calhoun’s ‘‘Address’’ was more preoccupied than had been his Exposition with the issue of locality, less drawn to stressing the universal. Upon his account, governments had once been founded on the representation of classes. But, happily, in America there were ‘‘no artificial and separate classes of society,’’ for ‘‘we have wisely exploded all such distinctions.’’ Instead there had arisen interests rooted in geography, climate, soil, and the like, so ‘‘the powers of the government were divided, not heretofore, in reference to classes, but geographically.’’ Hence the states stood for the ‘‘local and peculiar.’’ 120 Nonetheless, though Calhoun spoke of these matters being ‘‘truly and emphatically American, without example, or parallel ’’ and meant it, the ‘‘Address’’ moved subtly to assimilate the American experience to the universal problem of government, to see it as ‘‘an old question under a new form, long since perfectly solved.’’ ‘‘All Governments ancient and modern, blessed with Constitutions deserving to be called free,’’ including that of England, understood the basic principle that opposed interests must be given a mutual veto. Without this provision, there was only irresistible power, only despotism: ‘‘Nor does it in the least vary the principle, whether the distribution of power be between co-estates, as in England, or between distinctly organized, but connected governments, as with us. The reason is the same in both cases, while the necessity is greater in our case, as the danger of conflict is greater, where the interests of society are divided geographically.’’ Indeed, the ‘‘Address’’ has a passage that is dismissive of any thoughtless optimism which imagined that 120. Abel P. Upshur, A Brief Enquiry into the True Nature and Character of the Federal Government; Being a Review of Judge Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1840; reprint, Philadelphia: John Campbell, 1863), 128; Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 11:417, 418.

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‘‘a state of intelligence so universal and high’’ would develop that ‘‘all the guards of liberty might be dispensed with.’’ ‘‘I fear experience,’’ Calhoun sardonically observed, ‘‘has already proved that we are far removed from such a state, and that we must consequently rely on the old and clumsy, but approved mode of checking power.’’ 121 In the ‘‘Address,’’ Calhoun also moved to close a loophole in his earlier reasoning. If vetoes were mutual, it should follow that, while a state might nullify a federal action, the federal government might also veto a state action, which was precisely what the Virginia Plan of 1787 had called for. ‘‘The error,’’ Calhoun now said, ‘‘is in the assumption, that the General Government is a party to the Constitutional Compact.’’ Rather, the states made the compact, and the federal government was (as Cooper had argued) ‘‘but its creature,’’ which dealt with delegated matters, but had no right to adjudicate fundamental issues.122 Like many others but unlike Cooper, Calhoun was very anxious to keep at bay the idea of majority rule. ‘‘Let it never be forgotten,’’ he insisted with underlinings, ‘‘that where the majority rules the minority is the subject,’’ and under such circumstances, ‘‘there would be in fact between the sovereign and subject, under such a government, no Constitution; or at least nothing deserving the name, or serving the legitimate object of so sacred an instrument.’’ In this, the resonance with slavery was irresistible. The slaveholder knew enough about the exercise of arbitrary power to fear its application to himself. Jefferson had long since intimated the fatal connection, that slavery made instincts fundamentally at odds with republicanism. Nothing, in truth, was more common than for Southerners, without irony, to decry political ‘‘slavery.’’ John Taylor had seen the issue clearly: ‘‘Freedom consists in having rights, beyond the reach and independent of the will of another; slavery, in having none.’’ For Calhoun, the granting of this willpower to all created the conditions for civility; it created ‘‘that moderation and justice so essential to harmony and peace, in a country of such vast extent, and diversity of interests as ours.’’ 123 Knowing the free and vigilant power of others, the wise man acted prudently in the exercise of his own power. The system protected the weak in their weakness, but (pertinently for such a potentate as Calhoun) the strong from their own strength. The Unionist often suggested that the Union, with time, would diminish geographical diversities and had a moral obligation to prevent their growth. Calhoun was aware of this argument, not least because it was often the antislavery Unionist who made this case, for certainly the death of slavery would 121. Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 11:419, 420, 432–33. 122. Ibid., 424. 123. Ibid., 425, 426; Taylor, Inquiry, 384.

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advance social homogeneity. But any anti-imperialism deducible from such a stance was troubling for an ex-Secretary of War, a future Secretary of State, a man who believed devoutly in Manifest Destiny and the creation of what James Henley Thornwell was to call in 1850 ‘‘this vast imperial Republic.’’ As Calhoun saw it, not the least merit of his own political theory was that it made possible a continuing American expansionism. For Calhoun the Nullifier was not innocent of admiring the glamour of power: ‘‘I see in the union, as ordained by the Constitution, the means . . . of securing to us justice, peace and security, at home and abroad, and with them, that national power and renown the love of which Providence has implanted for wise purposes so deeply in the human heart.’’ 124 Here lay a profound difference from John Taylor. The latter had designed his political theory to find a still point in a dangerous world; Taylor looked inward, to his local place, and wished to be left alone. Calhoun was more worldly; he designed his theory for a dangerous world, certainly, but one whose movements he respected, from whose volatility he wished to profit. Part of him liked the idea of process, change, and growth; he wanted only to prevent these degenerating into chaos and disorder. So Calhoun tried to salvage American nationality. Hammond later spoke of Calhoun’s ‘‘deep, long cherished, and I might almost say superstitious attachment to the Union.’’ In this, Calhoun was in a marked minority among Southern political theorists, who conducted a long quarrel with the likes of Daniel Webster. Joseph Story, in particular, had insisted that the United States had been made by ‘‘one people’’ with such fierce insistence that refutation of him by Southerners came to be habitual and mandatory.125 Abel P. Upshur, who supported Nullification in 1832 after he saw what Andrew Jackson proposed to do to South Carolina by using precisely Story’s historical theory, took on the task most directly in his Brief Enquiry into the True Nature and Character of the Federal Government; Being a Review of Judge Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1840).126 Story had argued that, by having shared a common allegiance to the British crown, Americans had entered the revolutionary battle as a single people. To Upshur, this misunderstood the idea of 124. ‘‘The Christian Doctrine of Slavery’’ (1850), in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, ed. John B. Adger et al., 4 vols. (1871–75; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 4:401; Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 11:431. 125. ‘‘Hammond’s Oration,’’ in Thomas, Carolina Tribute, 302; Story, quoted in Upshur, Brief Enquiry, 10. 126. Expounded in ‘‘Proclamation,’’ 10 December 1832, in James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, 10 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896–99), 2:648–51. On Upshur as a Nullifier, see Hall, Upshur, 87– 93.

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a people, which he defined politically, not culturally. After all, he observed, ‘‘the inhabitants of different islands may be one people, and those of contiguous countries may be . . . different nations.’’ Rather, a people was ‘‘a political corporation, the members of which owe a common allegiance to a common sovereignty, and do not owe any allegiance which is not common; who are bound by no laws except such as that sovereignty may prescribe; who owe to one another reciprocal obligations; who possess common political interests; who are liable to common political duties; and who can exert no sovereign power except in the name of the whole.’’ Under such a rubric, there were thirteen peoples in 1776, ‘‘separate and distinct,’’ with markedly different histories and forms of government. In that sense, Canada had had a perfect right not to join in the American Revolution, for it had no obligation of comity. Nor had the mere establishment of a working military and financial alliance in the 1770s made a single people. ‘‘It is true,’’ Upshur said, ‘‘that they acted together; but is it not equally true that each acted for itself alone, without pretending to any right or authority to bind any other’’? The Declaration of Independence spoke with thirteen voices speaking together, was ‘‘simply their joint expression of their separate wills.’’ If there had been thirteen declarations of independence by individual states, which had subsequently cooperated in the war, the situation would have been no different. The revolutions had been local, before the Revolution became continental; old allegiances had been disavowed, new constitutions drafted, bills of rights promulgated, sovereignties asserted and established. Virginia had issued her own declaration of independence on 15 May 1776. The Articles of Confederation had explicitly declared that ‘‘each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence.’’ As for the Constitution of 1787, though its preamble began with the phrase ‘‘We, the people of the United States’’—Story made much of this—the original draft had read, ‘‘We, the people of the States of New Hampshire’’ and so forth, and a revising committee had abridged the list, not to change its meaning but to effect a greater stylistic elegance.127 Significant was Upshur’s observation that it would have been better in 1787 to have written, ‘‘We, the peoples,’’ but that ‘‘no such plural termination is known in our language.’’ This reads oddly for a modern reader. But Upshur was right for the usage of his day, as well as 1787, for the plural form had been shunned ever since the sixteenth century and remained controversial in the nineteenth.128 Hence, one might write indifferently ‘‘the people are’’ or ‘‘the people is,’’ and the same word might convey what the twentieth century 127. Upshur, Brief Enquiry, 14, 15, 41, 43, 47, 51. 128. Ibid., 53; The Compact Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1305.

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would insist on differentiating as a single ‘‘people’’ or multiple ‘‘peoples.’’ But in 1840 one could not write ‘‘the peoples are’’ and be thought literate. This greatly influenced how it was possible then to think. So, according to Upshur, the United States had formed ‘‘a league between independent sovereignties, and not one nation composed of all of them together.’’ Citizenship was conveyed by membership in a state, not in the Union; one was only a citizen of the United States by virtue of first being one of Massachusetts. (This was to be altered by constitutional amendment during Reconstruction.) Hence ‘‘the idea that the people of these States were, while colonists, and consequently, are now, ‘one people’ ’’ was indemonstrable. Rather, Upshur reiterated what Story denied, that the Constitution was a compact, ‘‘because it was made by sovereign States, and because that is the only mode in which sovereign States treat with one another,’’ and this was true whether the compact had created a consolidated or federative government. (Here Upshur went further than most.) But merely to survey its institutions (the Senate, the House, the electoral college, even the judiciary) was to observe how deeply seated was the principle of representation of states, and how utterly absent was any institution that treated with the American people in aggregate, as was any place where these might speak together. Hence, conventionally, Upshur concluded: ‘‘The Federal Government is the creature of the States.’’ Like Calhoun, he asserted that it was ‘‘not a party to the Constitution, but the result of it,’’ and so was not authorized to be a judge of its fundamental principles.129 For Upshur, then, states’ rights were not merely historical facts, but also logical necessities. The federal government was no doubt useful for matters of war, commerce, and diplomacy, but states might do all that, if less efficiently. But, ‘‘we rely exclusively on the State governments for the security of the great rights of life, liberty, and property. All the valuable and interesting relations of the social state spring from them.’’ 130 Marriage, family, slavery,131 justice, contracts, property, everything that was fundamental was its sphere. Take away the federal government and social life would go on. Take away the state, and social order itself disappeared. Like Calhoun, Upshur abominated the idea of majority rule, because he too mistrusted human selfishness and cupidity. But Calhoun was notable for omitting condemnations of democracy, whereas Upshur displayed a barely disguised Federalist contempt for the mob; indeed, he argued that one rea129. Upshur, Brief Enquiry, 55, 56, 60, 71, 72–84, 85. 130. Ibid., 96–97. 131. Upshur was initially antislavery and was a supporter of the colonization movement; he hoped that time and changing circumstances would lead to its slow death in Virginia. By the late 1830s, he was proslavery. See Hall, Upshur, 69–86.

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son for stressing states’ rights was that state governments were less prone to corruption than the people who inhabited the states thus governed. For Calhoun, minority rights were an expression of democracy, but not for Upshur. According to the latter, ‘‘In all free governments, the democratic principle is continually extending itself. The people being possessed of all power, and feeling that they are subject to no authority except their own, learn, in the end, to consider the very restraints which they have voluntarily imposed upon themselves, in their constitution of governments, as the mere creatures of their own will, which their own will may at any time destroy.’’ So democracy was the enemy of liberty. The people might be the fount of sovereignty, but they ought not to be trusted. Cant about their ‘‘ ‘intelligence and virtue’ ’’ should be dismissed. Government was founded ‘‘not in the virtues, but in the vices of mankind; not in their knowledge and wisdom, but in their ignorance and folly.’’ Its purposes were confined to protecting the weak, dealing with crime by prevention and punishment, and eliciting a sense of social duty. Government was ‘‘not a self-acting machine, which will go on and perform its work without human agency. . . . Until all men shall become so perfect as not to require to be ruled, all governments professing to be free will require to be watched, guarded, checked and controlled.’’ 132 Not everyone saw democracy in this way. In fact, most saw it very differently. If you stood on the porch of the Hermitage outside of Nashville and looked out over and past the heads of the slaves, you might think the people were a friend to liberty.

The Great Principles of Democracy Southern politics were being democratized as rapidly as any in the United States and had in Andrew Jackson the icon and catalyst of that transformation. Southern skepticisms about democracy existed, not because Southerners lived in a world untouched by change, but because some Southerners were unabashedly making the new order and others were uneasy about it. Yet Southern conservatism, on the whole, did produce more systematic thinkers and more sophisticated texts than did the Southern democratic tradition, though it is a matter of some nicety to decide whether Calhoun should be set down on the conservative or liberal side of the ledger. The idea of democracy was a willingness of the heart; if one did not believe in it simply, one was unlikely to believe in it at all. As the nonfreeholders of Richmond put it in their memorial to the Virginia Constitutional Convention, when they respectfully asked for the vote, their request ‘‘rests upon no subtle or abstruse reasoning; but 132. Upshur, Brief Enquiry, 128, 127.

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upon grounds simple in their character, intelligible to the plainest capacity; and such as appeal to the heart, as well as the understanding, of all who comprehend and duly appreciate the principles of free Government.’’ So Andrew Jackson could say, ‘‘I have great confidence in the virtue of a great majority of the people.’’ 133 Most intellectuals did not. One can see in Jackson what were the lineaments of a Southern democratic Unionism, no less clear and certainly no less influential because Jackson’s spelling was bad, his anti-intellectualism notorious, and he was possessed of very little formal knowledge.134 For all that, Jackson was an influential political thinker, perhaps the more so for being sometimes muddled. In many senses, he was a very old-fashioned Commonwealthman. He lived with a vivid sense of ‘‘the hydra of corruption,’’ especially of the ‘‘Money Power.’’ His bitter onslaught on the Second Bank of the United States was everything that Trenchard and Gordon, and John Taylor, might have wished of the wise statesman. ‘‘It seems to me,’’ Jackson told Chief Justice Taney in 1836, ‘‘that one of the greatest threatners of our admirable form of Government, is the gradual consuming corruption, which is spreading and carrying stockjobbing, Land Jobbing and every species of speculation into our Legislature, state and national. the greatest generator of the new vices which are I fear, undermining the purity and complicating the simplicity of our virtuous Government as left us by our fathers, is the paper system, which has introduced a thousand ways of robbing honest labour of its earnings to make knaves rich, powerful and dangerous—whatever demoralizes the people, must tend to destroy Institutions founded solely upon their virtue.’’ Consistent with this, when president he destroyed the Bank, eliminated the national debt, vetoed schemes of internal improvement, and sought to mitigate the development of entrenched bureaucratic interests by encouraging rotation in office. He spoke often of the too-pressing temptations of politics, those ‘‘scenes of Corruption’’ and ‘‘open bribery,’’ which he noticed even before he felt himself cheated of the Chief Magistracy (his preferred term) in 1824. He had affirmed, in the same year in which Cooper’s Consolidation was published, ‘‘the Soverignty [sic] of the States’’ and felt ‘‘satisfied that the general government can not, but with the assent of a state, exercise authority & jurisdiction within the limits of the State; to concede a different & enlarged power would be to produce in the end a consolidation of the States, to the utter destruction of those checks & balances of power at present existing under our confedera133. Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 26; AJ to James Hamilton Jr., 29 June 1828, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 3:412. 134. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 7.

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Hiram Powers, Andrew Jackson (Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.)

tion.’’ In 1830, when making notes for his Maysville veto message, he wrote of preventing ‘‘consolidation and the destruction of states rights.’’ 135 Certainly John Randolph felt Jackson to be an ideological ally against ‘‘Leviathan,’’ 136 and Jackson himself seems never to have thought himself an innovator. Indeed, he once told Winfield Scott, ‘‘My notions Sir are not those now taught in modern Schools & in fashionable high life; they were imbibed in ancient days.’’ 137 The immediate reference was to concepts of honor, where Jackson was spectacularly and violently traditional, but it was a sentiment of general applicability to Jackson’s views, however vague he may have been about the precise doctrines of both ancient and modern schools. In this, he misunder135. AJ to the Rev. Hardy M. Cryer, 7 April 1833, and AJ to Roger B. Taney, 13 October 1836, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 5:53, 430; AJ to John Donelson, 9 February 1824, and AJ to James W. Lanier, ca. 15 May 1824, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser et al., 6 vols. to date (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980–2002), 5:354–55, 409– 40; ‘‘Notes for the Maysville Road Veto’’ [19–26? May 1830], in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 4:138. 136. John Randolph to AJ, 29 October 1831, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 4:366. He was so outraged, however, by Jackson’s Proclamation on Nullification that ‘‘he got off his death bed to campaign against it’’: Ellis, Union at Risk, 132. 137. AJ to Winfield Scott, 3 December 1817, in Moser, Jackson Papers, 4:157.

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stood himself, for in some ways he came to stand for a political ideology of striking modernity. For Jackson stood for the idea of the people’s sovereignty and the indispensability of a perpetual Union; for him, these were connected ideas, as much so as they would later be for Abraham Lincoln. Close to the root of both ideas was the experience of Andrew Jackson the soldier. He had been born in 1767 in South Carolina, close to its border with North Carolina; there is famously a dispute about which state can claim him, but Jackson himself (he asserted it in his will) always thought himself a South Carolinian. Both his father, also Andrew, and his mother, Elizabeth Hutchinson, had been born in Ulster and had migrated to the American colonies in 1765. The father, who was a bare subsistence farmer, died just before the son was born, and the mother brought her children up in the household of James Crawford, whose wife was Elizabeth’s sister. Andrew Jackson had a very rudimentary education in a local school, before his mother died of cholera in 1781. So he was barely old enough to take up arms against the British in the militia, fought in the Battle of Hanging Rock, became briefly a prisoner of war, and, when in British hands, received a gash on his head and fingers for refusing to clean a British officer’s boots.138 When he spoke of ‘‘our independant rights secured to us by the bravery and blood of our forefathers,’’ he spoke of his own bravery and blood. Anglophobia was in the making of his identity, as at New Orleans it was in the creation of his fame. He never saw a reason to doubt the exceptionalism of the United States—or, as he variously and significantly called it or them, the ‘‘united States,’’ the ‘‘U. States,’’ the ‘‘u states,’’ or the ‘‘U.S.’’—or the fact that Britain was ‘‘the common enemy of mankind, the highway robber of the world,’’ sprung from a ‘‘Barbarous Europe,’’ every one of whose governments was marked by ‘‘despotism and corruption’’ and presided over ‘‘chained and shackled Peasants.’’ His was an expansionist exceptionalism, for (as he explained to Calhoun), ‘‘america has given birth to civil liberty, and from it, the whole Globe will ere long be electrified, unless the combined efforts of the Despots in Urope can extinguish it in america, as well as else where.’’ This was, of course, a belief of grim practicality, for Jackson was the American imperialist par excellence. As a soldier, he fought in the Creek War, saved the Louisiana Purchase from the British, seized Florida from the Spanish, and, as a president and politician, brutally expelled Native Americans westward and encouraged the annexation of Texas. He would, if he had had his way, even have extended the American imperium to the Caribbean. He hated the Spanish and Mexicans, despised the Indians (he thought any treaty with them to be ‘‘an absurdity,’’ for they were ‘‘subjects of the United States, inhabiting its 138. Remini, Jackson and Empire, 2–25.

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territory and acknowledging its sovereignty’’ and so to be dealt with ‘‘at pleasure’’),139 and treated the alien as he did those who challenged his honor, as people to be killed. Self-doubt about the providential mission of his country was as unknown to him as skepticism about slavery, for both were emanations of his presumption of mastery, which was exercised by kindliness if his subjects were pliant, by violence if not. This military experience lay at the heart of his Unionism, as it did for many Westerners, whose mobility across state lines had furnished a practical experience of what he called in 1809 ‘‘our common country.’’ Calhoun, Upshur, Randolph, Taylor, these were all men fixed in their native orbit. But Jackson had moved. In 1830, when puzzling over why Indians should be opposed to their removal, he wrote: ‘‘Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions. Does Humanity weep at these painful separations. . . ? Far from it. It is rather a source of joy that our country affords scope where our young population may range unconstrained in body or in mind, developing the power and faculties of man in their highest perfection.’’ But these joyfully unconstrained youths needed the protection of the Union against their competitors for land and power. ‘‘United we stand—divided we perish’’ was Jackson’s motto, and it was a logical one. As a general of militia in Tennessee, he did not look to South Carolina for help when Indians needed slaughter or the Spanish required expulsion, but to Washington. Andrew Jackson, after all, spent most of his adult life as an employee of the federal government, and of the executive branch at that. As a young man, moving from South Carolina to Tennessee, he had been a lawyer, a land speculator, and (a very little) a slave trader. Fleetingly, in the 1790s, he was a U.S. congressman and then senator, but he never liked being a legislator. He was a U.S. senator again from 1823 to 1825, but liked it still less. ‘‘I declare to you,’’ he told Henry Baldwin in 1824, ‘‘I am worn out with the fatigue of legislation—Nature never intended me for any such pursuit I am sure.’’ 140 The only state office he ever held was as a justice on Tennessee’s 139. AJ to George Washington Campbell, 15 October 1812; AJ to Henry Dearborn, 13 January 1804; ‘‘Toasts for Independence Day Celebration’’ (ca. 1 July 1805); AJ to Felix Grundy, 15 March 1813; AJ to William Harris Crawford, 16 June 1816; AJ to James Monroe, 4 March 1817; ‘‘To New Orleans Citizens and Soldiers,’’ 15 December 1814; AJ to Edward George Washington Butler, 8 January 1822; AJ to JCC, ca. 12 August 1823, in Moser, Jackson Papers, 2:334, 5, 63, 386, 4:45, 95, 3:204, 5:133, 288. 140. ‘‘Second Annual Message,’’ 6 December 1830, in Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:521;

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superior court from 1798 to 1804; he was never governor, and never served in the state legislature. Later, of course, he was president, but earlier he had worked for long years for the War Department as a soldier and territorial governor. Though he would have despised the appellation, he was a persistent office seeker, asking to fill several of the many jobs required for governing the American empire. He was not a natural employee. Though he was to write that officers and soldiers ought to be ‘‘imbued with a proper sense of duty, and conform to the restraints of exact discipline with that cheerfulness which becomes the profession of arms,’’ he himself liked to give orders but did not much like taking them. Often he was close to insubordination, when he felt the federal government—the president or the Secretary of War—was timid or overly scrupulous, which was (in his eyes) more often than not. Jackson knew that empire building was a rough-and-ready business, better handled by people like himself than mincing Yale and Harvard graduates, who cared for futilities like treaties and international law. All this bellicose experience conflicted with Jackson the Commonwealthman, for it made him a ‘‘military chieftain,’’ the sort of person whom that tradition abominated. In 1825, he went to pains to neutralize that issue and ‘‘cant phrase,’’ raised by ‘‘Mr. Clay and certain of his retainers,’’ by casting doubt on Clay’s manliness (he ‘‘never yet has risked himself for his country’’), by recalling the virtue of Washington, and insisting that ‘‘[d]emagogues . . . have in times past, done more injury to the cause of freedom and the rights of man, than ever did a ‘Military Chieftain.’ ’’ Believing in and administering the ‘‘national point of view,’’ ‘‘the Arm of Government,’’ ‘‘the interest and security of the United States,’’ and the ‘‘general welfare,’’ Jackson thought that the government in Washington should spend the money necessary to sustain all this: the fortifications, the ships, the arms, the naval bases, the armories, the hospitals. When it came to such matters, his preference for governmental frugality deserted him. So, though his first inaugural address said conventionally that ‘‘standing armies [are] dangerous to free governments in time of peace,’’ elsewhere in the same speech, he spoke warmly of the need for ‘‘the preservation of our forts, arsenals, and dockyards.’’ This helps to explain why, when he was a senator in 1824, he was benignant towards high tariffs, for in his mind it was a ‘‘subject of our national Independence, defence, & Domestic oeconomy.’’ Tariffs promoted home industry: ‘‘The experience of the late war convinced me that our Liberty was too precious, to be left for the means of our defence upon the precarious supply ‘‘Address to Citizens of Nashville,’’ 16 January 1809, AJ to Henry Baldwin, 20 May 1824, in Moser, Jackson Papers, 2:210, 5:411.

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to be derived from commerce in a state of war, when that war was to be waged with maratime powers who held the power of the Deep, & who by withholding from us the means of defence, could make us an easy conquest.’’ 141 However little he thought of those not American, Jackson was a believer in the integrity of the ordinary American. He had ‘‘great reliance on the good sense & virtue of the people.’’ This was odd in a man who inhabited so lawless a world, who might have been expected (especially for a Scotch-Irishman who became Presbyterian in later years) to have more of an instinct for original sin. Many thought Jackson himself, as John Sevier said, ‘‘one of the most abandoned rascals in principles my eyes ever beheld,’’ the sort of man who had, after all, knowingly married a bigamist, defied military orders, shot men on a whim, and dissimulated in the same breath with which he reprobated the honesty of others. Yet he seems to have thought himself above reproach, however often others had reason to doubt him. To him, such doubters were but ‘‘intermeddling Pimps & Spies,’’ or ‘‘puppits, male and female . . . secretly at work to destroy me.’’ Many conservatives, knowing themselves to be flawed, thought a flawed humanity was all there was for building a polity. But Jackson, with magnificent self-belief, did not notice flaws in the people, unless (and this was a large and frequent exception) they were the flaws of others thwarting his will, who were swiftly demonized as ‘‘secrete, & hired assassins.’’ This faith in the people grew over the years. When a member of Tennessee’s first constitutional convention in 1796, he had endorsed property qualifications for members of the State Assembly, but this skepticism seems to have quickly fallen away and he came to stand for a simple adult white male suffrage, certified by residence. In one sense, this was puzzling. Soldiers, federal administrators, and large slaveholders were not nature’s democrats. But Jackson believed in the people’s voice, indeed wanted to extend its power far and wide. When president, he proposed democratizing the bench by making it elective, abolishing the electoral college, limiting the president to one term of four or six years, and removing disputed presidential elections from the House of Representatives. Whence, then, this belief in ‘‘the good sense of the people’’? 142 141. ‘‘First Annual Message,’’ 8 December 1829, and ‘‘First Inaugural Address,’’ 4 March 1829, in Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:455, 437–38; AJ to Samuel Swartout, 22 February 1825, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 3:278–80; AJ to James Monroe, 4 March 1817, AJ to [William Savin] Fulton, 4 July 1824, in Moser, Jackson Papers, 4:93, 98, 5:426. 142. AJ to JCC, ca. 12 August 1823, AJ to Jacob Call, 9 October 1824, AJ to Winfield Scott, 3 December 1817, in Moser, Jackson Papers, 5:288, 446, 4:158; AJ to John C. McLemore, 17 June 1831, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 4:304. On AJ’s marriage and his adult views on suffrage, see Remini, Jackson and Empire, 57–69, 77, and Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 33. For his electoral

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Some of it was an instinctive egalitarianism. He had had early years as an ordinary enough man, riding the backwoods, mucking in at taverns, and he was ill-educated, with no reason to echo Beverley Tucker’s condescending belief that ‘‘the wise man can take no delight in the company of the fool.’’ Jackson seems to have had a genuine sympathy for ‘‘the great working class,’’ and a resentment of ‘‘aristocratical tendencies’’ and ‘‘combinations of the wealthy and professional classes.’’ This was despite his being a landed gentleman with 150 slaves, for he seems to have regarded the planter as someone who belonged to the class that worked and as one of the ‘‘independent farmers [who] are everywhere the basis of society and true friends of liberty,’’ and he spoke of ‘‘the planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer [who] all know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy.’’ When president, he put on few airs and later, when it was proposed that he be buried in a sarcophagus brought from Palestine and once (it was then thought) intended for the Emperor Alexander Severus, Jackson declined with words against kings and emperors and with sentiments in favor of republican simplicity, economy, and plainness.143 Much, too, was a shrewder instinct. He was popular with the people, he was their icon. They lined the streets to fete him, they composed ballads that celebrated him, they gave him grand banquets, such as the one in Lynchburg in 1815, for which even Thomas Jefferson (who in the late 1790s had called Jackson ‘‘a dangerous man’’) rode a long day to attend. But it is hard to imagine Andrew Jackson as a democrat if ‘‘the good sense of the people’’ had not so consistently favored him, for he was always volcanic towards those who got in his way. ‘‘By the Eternal! I’ll smash them!’’ was his idea of responding to reverses.144 But the people gave him power, so he believed in them.145 It was an amiable reciprocity. He became a proponent of the popular will, because his own will was so strong and became the stronger because of theirs. reforms, see ‘‘First Annual Message,’’ 8 December 1829, in Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:447–49. 143. Tucker, Science of Government, 81; AJ to Martin Van Buren, 24 November 1840, and ‘‘Paper Read to the Cabinet,’’ 18 September 1833, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 6:83–84, 5:93; ‘‘Fourth Annual Message,’’ 4 December 1832, and ‘‘Farewell Address,’’ 4 March 1837, in Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:600, 3:305. On the tomb, see Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 517–18. His refusal is in AJ to Jesse Duncan Elliott, 27 March 1845, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 6:391– 92, which notes that the tomb is now known to have been designed for ‘‘a humbler personage’’ and was in 1933 in the ‘‘National Museum,’’ presumably the Smithsonian Institution. 144. Remini, Jackson and Empire, 109, 320; Remini, Jackson and Freedom, 349. 145. This is argued, perhaps more benignly, in Robert V. Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 40.

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For Jackson, therefore, the sovereignty of the people was an executive force, not a resistance to power; through him, it made things happen. He was the first president, for example, to exercise the veto, not as a judgment of constitutionality, but as a mere judgment of policy. This, of course, is what the old Whig imagination had predicted would happen in a democracy, this executive aggrandizement. But for Jackson, the demagogues were always the other politicians, those ‘‘Whiggs, nullies & blue light federalists.’’ Andrew Jackson himself was but the people’s servant, the instrument of what they would master. And there was so much to master, a continent to subdue and a Money Power to kill, before it killed him. So, in Jackson, ‘‘the great principles of democracy’’ became legitimate in Southern and American usage. At its heart was the idea of majority rule conferring sovereign power: ‘‘the majority is to govern,’’ he insisted. All the old doubts, insisted upon by Madison and reiterated by Calhoun, were swept aside. This, of course, made Jackson’s traditional noises about ‘‘our political fabric being regulated by checks and balances’’ moot, for no check was legitimate if it checked the popular will, which had been the whole point of the Old Republican vision. John Taylor had understood republicanism to be freedom made by the diminishment of power, but for Jackson democracy was preeminently a matter of power and will. So, while Calhoun wrote to Jackson in 1826 that ‘‘it must be determined in the next three years, whether the real governing principle be the power and patronage of the Executive, or the voice of the people,’’ Jackson conflated the executive and vox populi.146 Much was clarified in Jackson’s response to the Nullification Crisis, when he defended ‘‘a Government of laws and a Federal Union founded upon the great principle of popular representation.’’ Jackson the Commonwealthman had been expected by many, because of all his talk about states’ rights, to be sympathetic to South Carolina, especially as his earlier endorsement of the American System had mollified in the 1820s. Soon after the Maysville veto in 1830, he fell into language that even Calhoun would have approved. His Annual Message in that year spoke of ‘‘sustaining the State sovereignties,’’ though only ‘‘as far as is consistent with the rightful action of the Federal Government.’’ Yet he did admit the ‘‘diversities in the interests of the different States . . . arising from situation, climate, population, and pursuits.’’ 147 Even so, his response to Nullification was apoplectically nationalist. Indeed, so marked was the difference between what Jackson had said about states’ 146. AJ to Andrew Jackson Donelson, 12 May 1835, Donelson Papers, LC, and AJ to Martin Van Buren, 30 March 1837, Van Buren Papers, LC, quoted in Remini, Jackson and Democracy, 339, 136; AJ to Hugh Lawson White, 29 April 1831, ‘‘To the Tennessee Legislature,’’ 12 October 1825, and JCC to AJ, 4 June 1826, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 4:272, 3:294, 304. 147. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:631, 512–13.

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rights and what his ‘‘Proclamation’’ asserted, that many were astounded and wondered if, since he often used aides to draft state papers, the doddering old man had put his name to a document that he had not read or understood, but which Joseph Story found unexpectedly ‘‘excellent,’’ full of ‘‘the true principles of the Constitution.’’ 148 Yet Jackson knew what he was about, as always. Partly, the issue was personal, for Jackson always vividly personalized his politics. He had had a bitter feud with Calhoun, after he had discovered that the latter (when Secretary of War) had been critical of his behavior during the Seminole War, and especially after the farcical Peggy Eaton affair. So Jackson looked on Nullification as driven by ‘‘the delusive theories and misrepresentations of ambitious, deluded and designing men,’’ with Calhoun cast as the heir of Aaron Burr, the conspirator against the Union. Jackson the commander-inchief saw mutiny—‘‘A recent proclamation of the present governor of South Carolina has openly defied the authority of the Executive of the Union’’— the more so as the rebels had the temerity to mobilize the militia. Jackson the nationalist understood that ‘‘[i]f these measures can not be defeated and overcome by the power conferred by the Constitution on the Federal Government, the Constitution must be considered as incompetent to its own defense, the supremacy of the laws is at an end, and the rights and liberties of the citizens can no longer receive protection from the Government of the Union.’’ Power, competence, supremacy, protection, this finally was how he understood the nation, which was for him a perpetual union. The laws allowed for orderly procedures of redress, but not for subversion by states, for though revolution was ‘‘a natural right’’ adhering to individuals, other individuals in the body politic might decide to oppose them. Short of revolution, members of the Union had obligations of conformity to laws properly enacted. This was a simple matter. In reasoning about the constitution, Jackson was very reluctant to enter into complexities, to discuss ‘‘particular theories’’ about whether the ‘‘federal compact’’ was ‘‘federal or social or national.’’ It was enough for him that it was ‘‘ ‘a compact by which power is created on the one hand and obedience exacted on the other.’ ’’ To this, ‘‘in whatever mode it may have been done, the people of South Carolina have freely and voluntarily given their assent, and to the whole and every part of it, they are, upon every principle of good faith, inviolably bound.’’ 149 Most, of course, of what Jackson declined to define was what Southern political thought had spent years (and would spend more) upon clarifying, 148. On this, see Ellis, Union at Risk, 84–88, which suggests that Edward Livingston had formally drafted it, but with the assistance of his aide in the State Department, Nicholas P. Trist, who had held conversations with James Madison on these matters. 149. AJ to Edward Livingston, n.d. (December 1832), in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 4:494; Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:611–12, 617, 622.

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Clark Mills, Andrew Jackson (1848–53), the ‘‘military chieftain’’ in Lafayette Square, opposite the White House

and what he presumed (that the Union was a power that exacted obedience) was what many Southerners denied. In truth, Jackson’s reasoning was military. You enlisted, you accepted orders, and if you did not, you were executed for mutiny. ‘‘Hamans gallows ought to be the fate of all such ambitious men who would involve their country in civil wars, and all the evils in its train, that they might reign and ride on its whirlwinds and direct the storm,’’ he said in 1833.150 No soldier is likely to be a Madisonian. An army is not a debating chamber; there is a chain of command and the sanction of force. So, Jackson’s answer to South Carolina was a ‘‘Force Bill,’’ and Jackson’s language and demeanor during the crisis was joyfully martial, the more so as it was the only significant military crisis that came his way during his time as Commander-in150. AJ to the Rev. Andrew J. Crawford, 1 May 1833, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 5:72. On the hanging of Haman, see Esther 7:9–10.

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Chief. Still, he was also a politician, and amid his spitting outrage he managed to facilitate the quiet compromise that ended the affair. Yet Jackson was not entirely easy in his mind about it all. When young, he had been much influenced by Nathaniel Macon, the North Carolina congressman, a man of strict constructionist views who had later joined John Randolph in dissent from Jefferson. It had been then that Jackson had been strongest in asserting, as he had in 1797, ‘‘the sovereignety of the State, both by Constitutional principles and by the law of nations,’’ a notion that drifted away in later years. In the late summer of 1833, after the dust of the crisis had settled, Jackson exchanged letters with the old man. For Macon had disagreed with Jackson. South Carolina could not commit treason, for she was a sovereign power: ‘‘The Governments of the United States and the States are governments of opinion and not of force.’’ South Carolina had entered the Union freely and could as freely leave it, so secession was a right and no Union had legitimacy that was founded upon coercion. On the other hand, Macon did not see how South Carolina could both refuse federal law and remain in the Union: ‘‘If South Carolina would not permit the laws of the United States to be enforced within her limits, she was out of the Union and ought to have been treated as a foreign power; The union is a matter of choice and interest.’’ Jackson could not allow this latitude: ‘‘I consider all free Governments, Governments of opinion, but should hold ours no government at all, if there were no laws to give effect to the public opinion. We live under a government of laws—laws emanating from the public will; but if there were no means of enforcing public opinion, when embodied in a public law, it would be neither a government of opinion nor force.’’ Nor could Jackson allow that state sovereignty had survived the formation of the Union. Defiance of the constitution was treason, because ‘‘the State authorities of no one state, have a right to repeal [a] clause of the constitution, which all the people in each state severally, concurred in establishing.’’ There was the supreme law of the land, and citizens and states must obey it. ‘‘In my opinion, the admission of the right of secession, is a virtual dissolution of the union,’’ and certainly the ability to take or leave laws at pleasure made a mockery of a functioning polity, and made it ‘‘depend upon the breath of every faction, which may obtain a momentary ascendency in any one state of the confederacy.’’ States ‘‘expressly gave up the right to secede, when they entered into the compact binding them in articles of ‘perpetual union.’’’ Only revolution was a natural right; secession could never be a constitutional procedure.151 151. AJ to John Sevier, 18 January 1797, Jackson Papers, LC, quoted in Remini, Jackson and Empire, 99; Nathaniel Macon to AJ, 26 August 1833, and AJ to Nathaniel Macon, 2 September 1833, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 5:171, 177–78. On AJ’s early relationship to Macon, see Remini, Jackson and Empire, 94, 129.

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By all this, Macon was not convinced. Jackson was urging the right of conquest, which made a nonsense of the idea of rights, for ‘‘a conquered country is at the mercy of the conqueror, [with] no rights but what he pleases to give.’’ Worse, Jackson sounded to Macon like a British monarchist: ‘‘The opinion, that a state cannot secede, seems to me, like the old British doctrine, once a subject always a subject, and that a conquered state would not be unlike Ireland.’’ Did not American government rest on consent, not force? Jackson could not see it. He thought himself a kindly father, not a tyrant. In addressing South Carolina, he spoke of ‘‘the influence that a father would [use] over his children whom he saw rushing to certain ruin’’ and of ‘‘paternal language’’ and ‘‘paternal feeling.’’ (His own son had done more than a little rushing to ruin in his time.) ‘‘All local and sectional feelings should be discarded and the whole United States regarded as one people, interested alike in the prosperity of their common country,’’ he had said in 1832. His 1832 proclamation denouncing South Carolina, lest there be any doubt, resorted to emphasis: ‘‘We are one people.’’ If there was one people (not thirteen once or twenty-four now), there was one ‘‘popular will,’’ 152 which had made a perpetual union that advanced liberty in an otherwise unfree world. To deny this was treason, the disobedience of a private soldier who could not grasp his own best interest. In the long run, of course, Jackson’s views became the American standpoint, the validation for Lincoln’s prosecuting the ‘‘War of the Rebellion,’’ just as Macon’s became the Southern understanding of what those actions meant as facts of conquest and subjection. It is clear that, for most sophisticated Southern political thought in the 1830s, Jackson’s was a minority standpoint, as was Calhoun’s idiosyncratic doctrines of interposition.153 As Rhett dryly observed, even when eulogizing Calhoun’s actions in 1832, ‘‘Whether nullification is a part of the system of Government organized by the Constitution of the United States, may be doubtful.’’ Macon’s view was nearer to the consensus, that the Union was a provisional confederation of sovereignties, which must be so for reasons of natural right, but also of history. To the contrary, Jackson asserted in his farewell address that ‘‘[o]ur Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment,’’ and that ‘‘it is no longer a question whether this great country can remain happily united and flourish under our present form of government.’’ With that, Jackson claimed that history had ceased, that perpetuity had arrived, because ‘‘the democracy of the U[n]ited States’’ had been accomplished. How could a single people abolish itself ? ‘‘To say that any State 152. Nathaniel Macon to AJ, 25 September 1833, and AJ to Tilghman A. Howard, 20 August 1833, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 5:209, 165; Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:652, 600, 648. 153. It is also clear, from the standpoint of politicians, in the account of the response to Nullification and the Force Bill in Ellis, Union at Risk.

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may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States are not a nation, because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation may dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any offense.’’ Still, even in saying this, something lingered of the older tradition. For he had written, ‘‘the United States are not a nation,’’ not ‘‘the United States is not a nation.’’ Nonetheless, the schism was profound. Jackson progressively turned the United States into a nation, whereas most Southern political thought was making the individual states into nations, or even the South into one (which was not much of a consideration in 1832). There could be no plausible compromise between these standpoints, except what Jackson called ‘‘the strange position’’ of Calhoun’s theory, which convinced few.154 Indeed, the reaction which Jackson provoked made compromise the more difficult, and even forced Calhoun to a reconsideration.

Power and Liberty 155 In the long aftermath of the Nullification Crisis, many Southerners tried to make sense of how those events might perhaps modify political thought. Younger men had their own ideas, as we shall see, but it is of interest to see what an old hand like Calhoun made of it all, for he carried older concepts into the new moment and was alert enough to observe a difference. At the end of his life, he looked back and struggled to compose his thoughts on the American polity in his time. He did this in two works, the Disquisition on Government and the Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, both probably written in 1848, though with varying degrees of finality. His posthumous editor and political secretary, Richard Crallé, surmised that the Disquisition was essentially finished and fair-copied, if not given a final look by Calhoun, but the Discourse was handwritten on loose sheets and bore ‘‘evident marks of interrupted and hurried composition.’’ 156 On the whole, posterity has paid more attention to the Disquisition, which is briefer and general, but the Discourse also repays close attention, for it was, in its own way, a history of American political thought and a proposed synthesis of the American political tradition. The Disquisition is prolegomenon to the Discourse; the former elaborates a 154. ‘‘Rhett’s Oration,’’ in Thomas, Carolina Tribute, 345; Richardson, Messages and Papers, 3:293, 294, 2:648–49, 641; AJ to Martin Van Buren, 24 November 1840, in Bassett, Jackson Correspondence, 6:83. 155. ‘‘Herein is to be found the principle which assigns to power and liberty their proper spheres, and reconciles each to the other under all circumstances’’: JCC, Disquisition and Discourse, 53. 156. JCC, Disquisition and Discourse, vi.

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John C. Calhoun, ca. 1843 (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

theory to explain the empirical events described in the latter. The Disquisition makes its case with Calhoun’s usual logical force. His presumption is that man is social, even mildly sociable, but selfish as an individual, which leads to ‘‘a universal state of conflict.’’ Hence there is the need for government, a ‘‘controlling power,’’ which was coeval with man’s historical experience; ‘‘In no age or country has any society or community ever been found, whether enlightened or savage, without government of some description.’’ So the state of nature is ‘‘purely hypothetical,’’ a thing which ‘‘never did, nor can exist.’’ Rather, man’s natural state is ‘‘the social and political—the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race.’’ Government is no labored invention, much debated or hesitated over in controversy, but is instinctive, is ‘‘like breathing.’’ (Certainly politics was ‘‘like breathing’’ to Calhoun himself.) But government has the temptation of power, so itself needs controlling, which makes the necessity of a constitution, which is the technique of watchfulness. But power is intrinsic to government, especially in its obligation to provide the means of military defense, for ‘‘the human race is not comprehended in a single society or community,’’ but is divided by ‘‘the limited reason and faculties of man, the great diversity of language, customs, pursuits, situation and complexion, and the difficulty of intercourse.’’ (It will be remembered that Calhoun had been a Secretary of

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War, and then a Secretary of State.) These communities fight even more than individuals, because their relations are less softened by instincts of social sympathy and ‘‘self-preservation is the supreme law.’’ Man’s ‘‘strongest passions’’ are ‘‘avarice, ambition, and rivalry.’’ 157 But how could one limit the abuse of power, knowing that power is necessary? ‘‘There is but one way in which this can possibly be done; and that is, by such an organism as will furnish the ruled with the means of resisting successfully this tendency on the part of the rulers to oppression and abuse. Power can only be resisted by power,—and tendency by tendency.’’ So Calhoun resisted Taylor’s idea that safety lay in powerlessness. Rather, the power of the ruled lies in the suffrage, though suffrage itself is insufficient to resolve the problem of power, for its existence makes the rulers responsible to the voters. Thereby the problem of power’s abuse is just transferred to the people and not consequently solved. As he had argued twenty years earlier, Calhoun thought a homogeneous community could more easily monitor a government, for the latter’s actions will affect people uniformly and, if adverse, will evoke a powerful and sufficient response. But communities are usually divided into multiple interests, in which case government becomes a battleground. Implicitly repudiating Madison—and this was Calhoun’s verdict on the experience of the early republic—these interests do not cancel each other out, but gradually coalesce. ‘‘If no one interest be strong enough, of itself, to obtain it, a combination will be formed between those whose interests are most alike;—each conceding something to the others, until a sufficient number is obtained to make a majority.’’ So political society resolves itself into a majority and minority, between which there are ‘‘incessant struggles.’’ 158 A government requires resources to fulfill its duties and so needs taxes, but these are by necessity collected and disbursed unequally, so ‘‘taxes must be, in effect, bounties to that portion of the community which receives more in disbursements than it pays in taxes; while, to the other which pays in taxes more than it receives in disbursements, they are taxes in reality,—burthens, instead of bounties.’’ Given that the majority controls government, the inevitable consequence is that government becomes the means by which the minority grows more impoverished and the majority more enriched, the more so as a majority sanctioned by suffrage is effectively sovereign and, hence, irresponsible, and ‘‘the minority, for the time, will be as much the governed or subject portion, as are the people in an aristocracy, or the subjects in a monarchy.’’ Majority and minority might, of course, exchange positions, but this mutability, if anything, increases oppression, since the knowledge of a 157. Ibid., 4, 2, 58, 8, 9, 10, 47. 158. Ibid., 12, 16.

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brief possession of power increases the tendency to make hay while the sun shines. Further, the development of ‘‘party organization, and party caucuses and discipline’’ leads to ‘‘the conversion of the honors and emoluments of the government into means of rewarding partisan services, in order to secure the fidelity and increase the zeal of the members of the party.’’ 159 How to stop this? By giving minorities the right of veto, ‘‘a concurrent voice in making and executing the laws.’’ Protection is what matters. ‘‘The sense of the entire community’’ needs to be ascertained, all its interests need to be understood, and the means of self-defense need to be devised. Hence a wise polity must pay attention to the lineaments of the social and economic landscape, and find a way to furnish constitutional power, at least negatively. Wisdom ‘‘regards interests as well as numbers.’’ So Madison was wrong in overestimating the fissiparous nature of interests, and certainly Jackson was wrong to trust to the people and their majority will. Everyone was wrong who trusted to the vigilance of the press, for newspapers had become the instrument of party. Furthermore (here Calhoun was most disillusioned), there is little safety in a written constitution, for these various forces bend its construction to suit themselves. There is little to be expected even of checks-andbalances, for a majority party can control concurrently all the departments of government (executive, legislative, judicial) and enforce its will: ‘‘Where the numerical majority has the sole control of the government, there can be no constitution; as constitution implies limitation or restriction.’’ The only safety lies in ‘‘this negative power—the power of preventing or arresting the action of the government,—be it called by what term it may—veto, interposition, nullification, check, or balance of power.’’ Granted such a power, compromise becomes mandatory in a polity. Absent such a power (here Calhoun was most gloomy and prescient), the bitter dialectical ‘‘vibrations’’ of minority and majority ‘‘would continue until confusion, corruption, disorder, and anarchy would lead to an appeal to force;—to be followed by a revolution in the form of government.’’ 160 The more complex a society, the more quickly this will unfold; the simpler, the more slowly. Since Calhoun was a democrat, his case showed that a democrat did not need to believe in a benignant human nature. Calhoun did not complain about King Numbers for John Randolph’s reasons. Indeed Calhoun stressed the principle of concurrence in order to make the world safer for democracy: ‘‘Among the other advantages which governments of the concurrent have over those of the numerical majority,—and which strongly illustrates their more popular character, is—that they admit, with safety, a much greater extension 159. Ibid., 19–20, 23, 41. 160. Ibid., 25, 27, 28, 75–76, 36, 35, 42.

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of the right of suffrage. It may be safely extended in such governments to universal suffrage: that is,—to every male citizen of mature age, with few ordinary exceptions.’’ Concurrence minimized class conflict, by compelling cooperation between rich and poor, by its tendency ‘‘to unite the community.’’ (Here Calhoun was most illusioned.) ‘‘Hence, instead of faction, strife, and struggle for party ascendency, there would be patriotism, nationality, harmony, and a struggle only for supremacy in promoting the common good of the whole.’’ Like Taylor, Calhoun thought the human condition could be improved by a wise polity, but unlike Taylor he did not see safety in individualism, but in understanding the communitarian instinct. Calhoun believed in ‘‘progress, improvement and civilization,’’ in the development of ‘‘the faculties, intellectual and moral, with which man is endowed.’’ With Adam Smith, he trusted to the moral efficiency of freedom. With Hobbes, however, he mistrusted how license bred violence. Men needed a sense of security, in order to develop themselves most wisely. Power and liberty had their ‘‘proper spheres.’’ Power guaranteed the survival of what liberty had created (‘‘increased population, wealth, and other advantages, which progress and improvement bestow on the community’’). If each are given their ‘‘appropriate sphere, all conflicts between them cease; and each is made to co-operate with and assist the other, in fulfilling the great ends for which government is ordained.161 Yet Calhoun (and this was consistent with his idea of a segmented society) did not think that the principle of concurrence could be universally applied to all societies. Founding itself upon a sensitivity to the social landscape, wisdom needed to notice how societies differed. This applied even to the balance of power and liberty. Some societies needed more power and less liberty, some the reverse: ‘‘The causes calculated to enlarge the one and contract the other, are numerous and various. Some are physical;—such as open and exposed frontiers, surrounded by powerful and hostile neighbors. Others are moral;—such as the different degrees of intelligence, patriotism, and virtue among the mass of the community, and their experience and proficiency in the art of self-government. Of these, the moral are, by far, the most influential.’’ Here was the discreet suggestion of an American exceptionalism, though Calhoun did not press the point. Rather, he offered the usual Scottish theory of stages and suggested that the United States lay in the final stage of a commercial society, as did modern Britain. However, Calhoun did stress that liberty and equality were not good companions, for liberty created inequality as it made progress. The loose phrasing of the Declaration of Independence had bred ‘‘great and dangerous errors [which] have their origin in the prevalent 161. Ibid., 45–47, 49, 52, 53.

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opinion that all men are born free and equal;—than which nothing can be more unfounded and false.’’ 162 Calhoun seems to have been conscious that his readers would need evidence, beyond his contention that a polity founded upon the principle of concurrence would work. Many of the final pages of the Disquisition are dedicated to examples. First is the jury, in which twelve men are obliged to arrive at consensus and each had a veto. Second, improbably, is Poland, where every member of the Diet had had a veto, ‘‘thus making an unanimous vote necessary to enact a law, or to adopt any measure whatever.’’ The Polish constitution was usually regarded as the ne plus ultra of ineffectuality and paralysis, but Calhoun thought otherwise; ‘‘this government lasted, in this form, more than two centuries; embracing the period of Poland’s greatest power and renown,’’ and twice prevented the Turks from invading deeper into Europe. Third, almost more improbably for a South Carolinian, he offered the case of the Confederacy of the Six Nations, where each Indian tribe had exercised a veto, yet it became ‘‘the most powerful of all the Indian tribes within the limits of our country.’’ 163 Lastly, there were the constitutions of the Roman Republic, after the establishment of the tribunate, and of Great Britain since the Revolution of 1688. (Calhoun was not markedly Anglophobe.) Last, of course, was the case of the United States itself, to which Calhoun turned in the Discourse. The Discourse is a didactic work, written with self-confidence, and as such it tried to extract clarity from the complex and doubt-ridden debates about the nature of the American polity. Usually Calhoun preferred the dispassionate and the abstract. No one less liked personalizing politics, which alone would explain why his relationship with Jackson never flourished, for Jackson did little else. But, unusually, by lapsing into illustrative and explanatory history, Calhoun here named names. One might read the Disquisition and think Calhoun a sort of Enlightenment philosophe, who liked patterns, but the Discourse is the work of a man who had lived through half of the nineteenth century and noticed the messiness of experience. He did not like messiness, but he observed it as a fact. So, what was the United States? It was ‘‘a system of governments, compounded of the separate governments of the several States composing the Union, and of one common government of all its members, called the Government of the United States. The former preceded the latter, which was created by their agency.’’ These governments shared structural similarities, the separation of powers legislative, judicial, and legislative. The federal government had delegated powers, the rest being reserved to the states, and collec162. Ibid., 53–54, 62–63, 57. 163. Ibid., 71–73.

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tively ‘‘ours is a democratic, federal republic,’’ indeed ‘‘democratic throughout,’’ a polity in which ‘‘the people are the source of all power.’’ Further, ‘‘the powers conferred on them,’’ the governments, ‘‘are not surrendered, but delegated; and, as such, are held in trust, and not absolutely; and can be rightfully exercised only in furtherance of the objects for which they were delegated.’’ Above all, this was a federal polity, not national, not confederate. By ‘‘federal,’’ Calhoun meant ‘‘a political union, in contradistinction to a government of individuals socially united; that is, by what is usually called, a social compact . . . federal and not national, because it is the government of a community of States, and not the government of a single State or nation.’’ To demonstrate this, in a way reminiscent of Thomas Cooper’s account, he rehearsed the history of the 1787 convention and its marked repudiation of the nationalist impulse. So the Constitution retained the essential form of government that had been designed during the Revolution and under the Articles of Confederation, that is, it was a union among ‘‘free, independent and sovereign States,’’ who had merely changed the superstructure. Seventeen eighty-seven had tinkered with details. And certainly the polity had not created, nor had it been created by, ‘‘the American people,’’ as ‘‘one great community or nation,’’ which might make the states ‘‘inferior or subordinate.’’ The phrase ‘‘We, the people’’ meant ‘‘We, the people of the several States of the Union.’’ But neither had the establishment of the Union created a government ‘‘over’’ the people and the states; rather, the people remained ‘‘over’’ the Union, as its guardian and judge. In all this, Calhoun largely followed Upshur’s line, just as Upshur had followed that of Calhoun in the late 1820s. (Like Upshur, he noted that ‘‘the term ‘people,’ has in the English language, no plural, and is necessarily used in the singular, even when applied to many communities, or states confederate in a common union,—as is the case with the United States.’’) So, ‘‘There is, indeed, no such community, politically speaking, as the people of the United States.’’ And, like Upshur, Calhoun did not stop to consider the notion that an American people might have been constituted by a shared culture, though he did concede that the idea of federalism had arisen from the colonial experience. There had been ‘‘the ties of a common origin, identity of language, similarity of religion, laws, customs, manners, commercial and social intercourse,’’ while, even so, history had made discrete polities.164 So the Disquisition did not dismiss the idea of culture; it was just that Calhoun believed that culture worked at a more localistic level. Calhoun was at pains, not only implicitly to repudiate Jackson and Story’s nationalism (‘‘a fiction. . . . of recent origin’’), but also Madison’s idea of a polity that was partly federal, partly national. For Calhoun, the polity was 164. Ibid., 111, 112, 113, 116, 122, 128, 133, 162, 189.

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‘‘throughout, federal.’’ In all its operations, institutions, and mechanisms, it ‘‘every where recognizes the existence of the States.’’ 165 (Calhoun did not, for a long time in his analysis, name Madison in this error except by referring to ‘‘the authority of the ‘Federalist.’ ’’)166 Further, Madison’s idea that the states persisted, even while the federal government was national, was impossible. For if the latter was true, the reserved powers of the states would necessarily have been destroyed and the people would have been transmuted from ‘‘an unorganized mass of individuals’’ into ‘‘one community or nation, having but one constitution and government as the organ, through which to will and to act.’’ Indeed, it was ‘‘difficult to imagine how a doctrine so perfectly absurd, as that the States are federal as to the reserved, and national as to the delegated powers, could have originated.’’ In addition, compounding his onslaught, Calhoun refused the most fundamental of Madisonian ideas, the divisibility of sovereignty: ‘‘Sovereignty is an entire thing; to divide, is,—to destroy it.’’ Hence sovereignty remained, not in any of the governments (state or federal), but ‘‘in the people of the several States,’’ who had inherited it from the British government during the Revolution.167 In the Discourse as in the Disquisition, Calhoun always presumed the inevitability of power. Politely but firmly, speaking of ‘‘the distinguished and patriotic authors of this celebrated work,’’ Calhoun analyzed away the compromise formulations of the Federalist Papers. ‘‘It is remarkable how often this celebrated work changes its ground, as to what constitutes a national, and what a federal government,’’ he dryly observed. This arose, he did not fail to notice, because Madison, Hamilton, and Jay had wanted a national government, but had failed to gain one, so their shifting definitions had been not merely muddle, but artifice: ‘‘They all acquiesced in the decision, which overruled their favorite plan, and determined, patriotically, to give that adopted at the convention, a fair trial; without, however, surrendering their preference for their own scheme of a national government.’’ 168 But Calhoun was also at pains to refuse the conception of the United States as a confederacy, which he understood as a government which was little more than ‘‘an assembly of diplomatists, convened to deliberate and determine how a league or treaty between their several sovereignties, for certain defined purposes, shall be carried into execution.’’ In this, Calhoun turned away from a common conception, elaborated by, for example, Thomas Bayly at the Virginia Convention of 1829–30, when he had spoken of the U.S. Senate as 165. Ibid., 140, 137. 166. Ibid., 150–51. He quotes from and specifies in a note, ‘‘Federalist, Nos. 39 and 40,’’ which were by Madison. 167. Ibid., 141–42, 146, 147, 190. 168. Ibid., 161, 157.

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‘‘an Assembly of Ambassadors, representing Sovereign States.’’ Here Calhoun seems to have been inconsistent, for he elsewhere spoke of the Constitution of 1787 as not fundamentally changing the nature of the old Confederation, but here he also insisted that 1787 marked a ‘‘different organization,’’ in altering what ‘‘had previously been, in reality, a league between the governments of the several States.’’ The distinction lay in the process of ratification, by which the sovereignty of the people had been consulted. That is, the Union had not been made by states, sanctioned by the people, but by the people themselves directly after their states had negotiated a Union. This was, in essence, John Taylor’s idea that the people’s wishes had been doubly consulted and doubly the people had created their governments. In Calhoun’s version, this read: ‘‘Both governments,—that of the United States and those of the separate States, derive their powers from the same source, and were ordained and established by the same authority;—the only difference being, that in ordaining and establishing the one [the United States], the people of the several States acted with concert or mutual understanding;—while, in ordaining or establishing the others, the people of each State acted separately, and without concert or mutual understanding.’’ But, crucially for Calhoun, this process of ratification had not created an irresistible national government, but to the contrary, one that subsisted on the sufferance of the people’s mandate. Most important, it had made the state governments and the federal government ‘‘equals and co-ordinates.’’ 169 Though Calhoun was a democrat and thought the United States ‘‘a democratic, federal republic,’’ he resisted the presumption that it was ‘‘an absolute democracy’’ based on mere numbers. It had, built into its constitution, his principles of interests and concurrence. In this, of course, the weight of the states was preeminent. In the Senate, small and large states were equally represented, just as in the electoral college the election of the president was not based on a numerical majority, any more than it was in the House of Representatives, if the election ended there. (Calhoun regretted, in passing, that altering the procedures for electing the president and vice president had made it less likely that this would happen, as it had in 1800 and 1824.) Throughout the processes of government, in the Congress, the executive, and the Supreme Court, numbers were but a consideration. This aspect of Calhoun’s exposition should be stressed, for it is often, in effect, suggested that he wished (by establishing a dual presidency) to create for the first time the principle of concurrence in the American constitution. But, in fact, Calhoun thought concurrence was intrinsic to the existing structure (‘‘the constitution and the government . . . rest, throughout, on the principle of the concurrent majority’’), but 169. Ibid., 163–65, 167, 168; Virginia Convention, 1829–30, 451.

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the principle had been weakened by the developments of the early republic, and needed restrengthening. The chief aim of the Discourse was to narrate the history of this weakening, in order to prove the case for a strengthening.170 Equally, Calhoun was a mediator, for he always fought off the sense, evident in Taylor and Upshur and many others, that the federal government was an ugly necessity, that the state governments were somehow the more natural and desirable units. Calhoun saw the advantages of Union. As he narrated the mood of the 1770s and 1780, he observed, ‘‘To dissolve the Union was too abhorrent to be named.’’ For not the least of its virtues was that it offered ‘‘rich rewards.’’ But, equally, ‘‘consolidation was not less repugnant to their feelings and opinions,’’ so what had evolved was a necessary, even a desirable via mediatrix, born of ‘‘moderation, forbearance, mutual respect, concession, and compromise.’’ 171 The middle passages of the Discourse consist of a more minute and strictconstructionist analysis of the various powers lodged in differing parts of the polity: how foreign policy is formulated, how treaties are ratified, who coins money, the nature of the Bill of Rights, and so forth. (The Discourse occasionally has the air of a textbook.) Calhoun’s general conclusion is that, again contra-Madison, the separated powers have a natural tendency to be overcome by the coalescences of power: ‘‘To form combinations in order to get the control of the government, in a country of such vast extent,—and consisting of so many States, having so great a variety of interests, must necessarily be a slow process, and require much time, before they can be firmly united, and settle down into two organized and compact parties. But the motives to obtain this control are sufficiently powerful to overcome all these impediments.’’ This argument was for Calhoun a step further away from the Exposition and Protest, and shows him poking a toe into the murky waters of Romantic social theory, for these political combinations were made out of cultural material, what he described as ‘‘similarity of origin, language, institutions, political principles, customs, pursuits, interests, color, and contiguity of situations.’’ Of these, contiguity was the greatest. What is remote is unfelt, what is close is sympathized with: ‘‘We feel intensely the sufferings endured under our immediate observation;—when we would be almost indifferent, were they removed to a great distance from us.’’ So these coalescences become ‘‘sectional,’’ or finally will ‘‘if not prevented.’’ (Again, skeptically he rehearsed all the mechanisms that most people felt would prevent coalescence, but did not: the written constitution, the party system, public opinion, the press, the veto power of the presidency.) Above all, the federal government could not 170. JCC, Disquisition and Discourse, 112, 169, 179, 185. 171. Ibid., 193, 196.

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be expected to protect the powers reserved to the states, for it naturally aggrandizes its own powers. So, the Madisonian moment has passed; ‘‘Time and Experience have shown fully, where the danger lies,’’ and that ‘‘the antagonism relied on’’ is unreliable. History demonstrated that consolidation is the short-term inevitability, which (when accomplished) would lead to ‘‘a resistance proportionally powerful’’ and to destruction, or to a government of ‘‘despotic force and oppression.’’ Likewise, Calhoun felt the growth of the geographical size of the Union required less centralization, not more, for the federal government would become less and less capable of sensitivity to so complex, huge, and various an empire.172 These outcomes being undesirable, but the present system tending inevitably to create them, what options were available to stop the tendencies? Calhoun here reverted to his older idea, state interposition (‘‘the vis medicatrix of the system;—its great repairing, healing, and conservative power’’). However, now he was at pains to specify that, if a state should nullify and then declined to accept the verdict of three-fourths of its peers, it would be obliged to secede; this answered Macon’s argument to Jackson. As to secession itself, however much he wished to save and purify the Union, Calhoun was clear that it was a constitutional right, not merely an extra-constitutional right of revolution. In all this, however, he now paid more elaborate attention to the legal arguments often adduced to assert the supremacy of federal law, by way of arguing that the federal government was supreme only in its own sphere and certainly could not act as the judge of any conflicts between the states and itself. This meant, of course, challenging John Marshall’s contention that ‘‘the Supreme Court of the United States has the right to decide on the constitutionality of all laws,’’ state and federal. Unlike many commentators, Calhoun made most of, not Marbury v. Madison or the many Federalist decisions of Marshall, but what he regarded as the fons et origo of the problem, the twenty-fifth section of Judiciary Act of 1789, which gave to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, the right to hear appeals on matters arising, not only on exclusively federal matters or on interstate conflicts, but on issues confined to the province of a state. This was ‘‘unauthorized by the constitution,’’ for a state court was not inferior to a federal court, but co-ordinate and equal. So this section ought to be repealed, as it had led necessarily to the broader doctrine that the states themselves were ‘‘inferior and subordinate.’’ For, in Calhoun’s view, the Supreme Court as a part of the federal government could not be expected to protect the states, but only to expand its own sphere. And in the clause of the Constitution that gave to the federal government the duty to guarantee republican government in the states was a commodious technique 172. Ibid., 231–34, 238–39, 314.

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of superintendence over a state’s policy, for much could be defined as being embraced by the term ‘‘republican.’’ Universal suffrage, for example, might.173 Towards its close, the Discourse becomes more personal. It discusses the early days of the republic, condemns the growth of the spoils system (though Jackson is loftily ignored), reprobates Hamilton’s establishment of a national bank and his Report on Manufactures, and discusses the reaction to the centralizing tendencies of the Federalists led by Jefferson and a reformed Madison, particularly the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which are said to form ‘‘the political creed of the States rights republican party.’’ Calhoun’s assessment of Jefferson’s administrations is cool; Jefferson had reformed a little, but not enough, indeed he ‘‘failed to undo, effectually, the consolidating, national policy of Gen. Hamilton, and to restore the government to its federal character.’’ Madison, by taking the country into a war that necessarily required the strengthening of a ‘‘national line of policy,’’ did no better. Perhaps because he was himself a prominent member of his cabinet, Calhoun says little of Monroe. Not unexpectedly he condemns John Quincy Adams as a warmed-over Hamiltonian and offers a bleak history of tariff policy. But thereafter, though their policies are narrated, Clay and Jackson go unmentioned. Naturally, Calhoun sees a dangerous strengthening of the federal government and the executive branch, with a concomitant growth in a party system and patronage. He does grudgingly acknowledge that ‘‘the Democratic party’’ (not Jackson, still anonymous) ‘‘are entitled to the credit of putting down the Bank of the United States; of checking extravagant expenditures on internal improvements; of separating the government from the banks; and, more recently, of opposing protective tariffs; and of adopting the ad valorem principle in imposing duties on imports. . . . [A]ll [are] important measures.’’ Still, since there had been no fundamental constitutional purification, all these gains had been temporary and so reversible when the other party came to power.174 The destination of Calhoun’s history is the sentence that reads, ‘‘[T]he sectional tendency of parties has been increasing with the central tendency of the government.’’ As power at the center had increased, so the incentive to coalesce in order to acquire or resist that power had increased pari passu. It is only here—over 370 pages into his disquisiting and discoursing—that Calhoun averts to slavery. He sees the first thirty years of the republic’s history, in which the national status of the peculiar institution had been ‘‘adjusted to the satisfaction of both parties’’ as a ‘‘happy state of things,’’ but sadly deranged by the Missouri crisis. That compromise had been well judged, but ‘‘the dis173. Ibid., 295, 300–301, 263, 318, 338, 325, 323–33. 174. Ibid., 358, 360, 361, 371.

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ease lay deep,’’ for events had ‘‘touched a fanatical as well as a political cord.’’ With the newly established idea of a federal government of suzerain powers, those ‘‘who believed that slavery was a sin, as well as a great political evil,’’ had stirred from their dormancy; there had been the controversy over abolitionist pamphlets, and of petitions to Congress. Each party, striving to gain the increased power of the center, had begun to cultivate the remoter fringes of the political spectrum and so worsened the problem. All this, Calhoun reasoned, was a consequence of a government now attentive only to the numerical majority. The result, he felt, would be the ‘‘sad alternatives’’ of disunion or (here he was most old-fashioned) monarchy. The former being ‘‘highly probable,’’ what to do? 175 A restoration of federalism, ‘‘to compel the parts to respect the rights of each other,’’ was his solution. How? Repeal the twenty-fifth section of the 1789 Judiciary Act; repeal ‘‘all acts by which the money power is carried beyond its constitutional limits’’; divest the president of ‘‘all discretionary powers’’; reinstate the old mechanism for electing the president and vice president. But this was not enough, for too much history had happened, especially the divergence occasioned by the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory: ‘‘Alienation is succeeding to attachment, and hostile feelings to alienation; and these, in turn, will be followed by revolution, or a disruption of the Union, unless timely prevented.’’ The North was growing preponderant and even Calhoun’s many measures, even ‘‘the restoration of the federal character of the government can furnish no remedy.’’ So a radical extension of the principle of concurrence was needed; ‘‘the weaker section’’ must be given ‘‘a negative on the action of the government.’’ There must be two presidents, each elected from the two sections, whose double approval would be needed for the passage of all legislation; one ‘‘might’’ specialize in foreign relations, the other in domestic policy, with the choice made by lot. There were ample precedents for this arrangement, in Rome, at Sparta, even in Britain where power was shared between the monarch and the prime minister. This would be ‘‘the means of restoring harmony and concord to the country and the government’’; there would be ‘‘mutual affection and brotherhood.’’ 176 The Discourse ends with a very few pages on state governments, which suggest that the problem of discord there tended to focus on urban-rural conflicts and that the solution of a concurrent majority might be best effected by the system of county representation which had, ever since 1808, marked the constitution of South Carolina and been (in Calhoun’s opinion) so effectual in alleviating the old tension between lowcountry and upcountry and in making 175. Ibid., 371–73, 381. 176. Ibid., 383–85, 390–95.

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the state a place without a divisive party system, without the corruption of spoils, but possessed only of ‘‘kind feelings, and mutual attachment.’’ Calhoun was no doubt conscious that a skeptical reader’s mind might run to the bitterness of the Nullification Crisis by way of doubting this ‘‘most happy’’ history. So he observed that this crisis had been but ‘‘the exception of occasional, but short local dissensions, in reference to the action of the federal government, and even the most violent of these ceased, almost instantly, with the occasion which produced it.’’ 177 The last words of the Discourse are ‘‘concord and harmony.’’ The words occur with great regularity in Calhoun’s political theory and give it an almost chiliastic quality. Though he used the language of political contestation and, indeed, grounded his theory upon the idea that only power could resist power, nonetheless there is a curiously genteel quality in Calhoun. His disinclination to name Jackson and Clay in the history of his times, his polite skirmishings with Madison’s theory, his minimizing of the bitterness of Nullification (which scarred a generation)—all point to a sensibility that hated raw conflict. He was no John Randolph or Andrew Jackson, both of whom loved a good fight, who swished their riding crops and cried, ‘‘By the Eternal!’’ Calhoun was not the duelling sort. He preferred a world in which his will would go unchallenged, in which if he did not get his way, at least he might have a veto to prevent his opponents from prevailing. His vision was not of a world in which the will of a Southern president would persistently clash with that of a Northern president, but one in which each section would rapidly learn the futility of self-assertion and then relax into a spirit of generosity. Madison had presumed that tension was the perennial human condition. But Calhoun was the sort of person who looked away from tearing flesh; he wanted a politics that would be apolitical. He wanted safety, security, a world where nothing dangerous and unexpected would be allowed to happen, because human intelligence had divined the little secret mechanisms by which difficult things might be prevented. Though his theory started with a sort of Hobbesianism, it ended with a more sentimental liberalism. This was perhaps his final impracticality, for he wanted power and safety, all at once, and wished to have a will and be admired for it, too.

Clustering Groups 178 There was little that changed in the last years of the antebellum period that had not been implicit in the debates of the preceding decades, except mood. 177. Ibid., 405–6. 178. ‘‘Looking, then, to the nature of man, and the circumstances in which he was placed in the world, we shall see mankind scattered over the face of the earth, not as insulated indi-

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Most Southern thinkers had calculated the value of the Union, but mostly the balance, if barely, had come out in favor of staying in. But it was a small step from reasoning within an unsatisfactory Union to imagining life outside it. It was the intellectual accomplishment of Southern political thought to make such an act of imagination and will possible. Cynicism about the Union grew or, what often came to the same thing, idealism about the South. There had been a thin strain of skepticism even in Calhoun, when he spoke of the futility of written constitutions or of checks and balances, and argued instead for the exercise of a power beyond appeal. When Calhoun died, his younger eulogists often amplified this mood. James Henry Hammond, for example, bluntly observed in 1850: ‘‘In fact, neither this Union nor any Union or Government can exist long by virtue of mere paper stipulations. ‘Written constitutions,’ said Anacharsis to Solon, ‘are but spiders webs, which hold only the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful easily break through.’ ’’ 179 More, Hammond coldly asserted, for twenty years, the Constitution had been ‘‘a dead letter’’ and played no role in sustaining the Union, which had been, rather, ‘‘held together by habit—by the recollections of the past and a common reverence for the patriots and heroes of the Revolution—by the ties of political parties, of religious sects, and business intercourse.’’ Some of these ties began to break; the Baptists and Methodists separated in the early 1840s; the parties began to grow more distinctly sectional. Economic exchange remained, but, as Adam Smith had taught, one did not need a Union to sell things, though most thought it helped. More fundamentally, the direction of political thought had teased out, at least, two insights; that power was the only reality of politics, and that governments needed to rest upon a shared social basis, what was sometimes called ‘‘community.’’ On the whole, the older traditions of political thought had been, though very much interested in power, less impressed with belonging. There were individuals or ‘‘interests’’ who made their compacts, but the idea of social identity as the necessary underpinning of a polity was a more modern idea, which first came to the South as a vision of culture, at first far removed from the realm of politics or political science. In the writings of men like Upshur, the conception of culture and the definition of the ‘‘people’’ made viduals, but in clustering groups, united by the necessities of nature, by the ties of kindred, and the reciprocal experience of benefits’’: Tucker, Science of Government, 36. 179. ‘‘Hammond’s Oration,’’ in Thomas, Carolina Tribute, 317. Cf. GF, Sociolo for the South: Or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), 188–89: ‘‘The abstract doctrines of nullification and secession, the general principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and Constitution of the United States, afford no protection of rights, no valid limitations of power, no security to State Rights. The power to construe them, is the power to nullify them. Mere paper guarantees, like the constitutions of Abbe Sieyes, are as worthless as the paper on which they are written.’’

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Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (Courtesy Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary)

little connection; the ‘‘people’’ were just those who sanctioned the polity. They or it, ‘‘the people,’’ did not have to be homogeneous; indeed, the tradition said that diversity was the occasion for the compact, was why government was necessary at all. So, on the whole, older political thought had reasoned backwards from the polity. But the newer tradition required one to reason forwards from the people to the state, indeed insisted that, unless one could define the people by a careful cataloguing of social habits, economic institutions, racial characteristics, and religious customs, there was no legitimate sanction for a state. This process of reasoning had many sources, of which Romantic social theory was the most important, but the tensions of the older way also made this newer idea attractive. As Calhoun had often wistfully observed, things went more easily in a homogeneous world. So, considering the incessant tensions of the Union, why not opt for a political world posited on the shared culture of the South? Certainly, if power was the only reality, why not opt for real power, rather than eking out a fragile existence as a minority and being obliged to dream up constitutional amendments, which were but ‘‘paper stipulations’’? Much in the later communitarian tradition of Southern political thought is summed up by two thinkers, Beverley Tucker the Virginian lawyer and

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James Warley Miles the South Carolinian theologian. Of these, Tucker was the less thoroughgoing, but probably the more typical. Apart from Frederick Grimke’s The Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions (1848), which was written by a South Carolinian but published in and influenced by Ohio, Tucker’s A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, Intended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (1845) is the closest thing to a systematic ‘‘study of political science’’ 180 undertaken by an antebellum Southerner; Calhoun’s later writings were suggestive rather than thorough. By Calhoun, passion was restrained, but Tucker was complex and vivid, which is what one might expect of John Randolph’s spiritual heir. What in Randolph had been a Swiftian saeva indignatio became in Tucker a sentimental waspishness. Some things in Tucker are conventional, except in his being unguardedly blunt. Tucker was, after all, a lawyer and a college professor, not a politician.181 ‘‘It is not my business to study popularity, but truth,’’ he told his students, with no little vanity. So he could afford to express disdain for the arbitrary majoritarian rule of democracy’s ‘‘rabble, drunk with flattery and alcohol, [who] unite to plunder and oppress the middle classes, and shout the praises of parties and demagogues.’’ This was of a piece with his intellectual snobbery: ‘‘the wise man can take no delight in the company of the fool.’’ He concurred in the compact theory of the American constitution, in which the federal government was but the creature of the states; he dismissed the phrase ‘‘the people of the United States’’ as ‘‘a mere noun of multitude.’’ He saw little evidence that ‘‘in the important science of government, we have made any advances beyond that sound practical wisdom which made [the Founders’] first acts of legislation the admiration of the world.’’ Logically, he had a nostalgia for the Virginia Constitution of 1776, and like Randolph felt the convention of 1829–30 had been marred by too much ‘‘of reading lectures on fair and fanciful theories.’’ 182 Like many Virginians, he was much absorbed by the history of England. Yet Tucker also, arguably, was the first Southerner to offer a Romantic theory of government.183 His reactionary views were mediated by a very mod180. Tucker, Science of Government, 5. 181. He was the son of St. George Tucker and lived for his first four years on a plantation near Petersburg called Matoax. After the death of his mother the family moved to Williamsburg, where the father taught law at William and Mary and the son graduated in 1801. For a while, Beverley studied the law in Staunton, then practiced badly in Charlotte County, then moved in 1815 to Missouri where he owned a plantation and became a judge. He returned to Virginia in 1833, to teach law at William and Mary. A useful brief biography is Robert J. Brugger, ‘‘Nathaniel Beverley Tucker,’’ in Legal Education in Virginia, 1779–1979: A Biographical Approach, ed. W. Hamilton Bryson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982), 643–56. 182. Tucker, Science of Government, 451, 44, 81, 385, 236, 285. 183. A weaker case could be made, however, for Hugh Legaré.

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ern sensibility, which quoted Carlyle and debated with Tocqueville. He had a much richer sense of the scope of human emotions than was anywhere evident in the cooler world of Calhoun, or even John Taylor, who was emotional without being much interested in the problem of passion. Tucker’s earliest pages, when he is introducing his students at the College of William and Mary to the problems of political science, are murmurous. He speaks of mystery and enthusiasm, quotes poetry that intimates mortality, refers to ‘‘moods’’ and ‘‘feverish excitement,’’ wonders whether the progress of natural science will increase human happiness and whether knowing ‘‘the secrets of the abyss’’ will not tragically remove wonder from the world. He is very conscious of growing old, and speaks of his coming death to the young men, they being ‘‘in the flush of vigorous and aspiring manhood’’ and he with ‘‘the frost of age . . . now settled’’ on his head. He talks of the death of friends and ‘‘the forgotten dead.’’ He observes, as a crucial insight, that God has given to Man dominion over the earth and the intellectual means progressively to perfect that control, so that even ‘‘the fierceness of the tiger crouches to his mastery.’’ But, ‘‘In all the earth one thing, and one alone, rebels against him, and defies him. it is his own heart. The stain of far-descended ancestral sin is upon it, and it is not, and it cannot be subject to that will which should be his.’’ So self-knowledge is foundational. ‘‘To all men, in all conditions, selfknowledge and self-control are indispensable to happiness.’’ The religiosity of this is quite explicit. Tucker had by the end of the 1820s become an evangelical Presbyterian, if a peculiar one.184 The older tradition of Southern political thought had lain, on the whole, within a narrow religious range that had run from deist (Madison, Jefferson, Cooper) to Unitarian (Calhoun) to Episcopalian (Taylor, Upshur).185 But Tucker was influenced by Calvin and (not to him incongruously) Byron, both passionate thinkers. So, when Tucker asserts, ‘‘It is the will of Heaven, that passion shall be submitted to the dominion of reason,’’ he shows a richly and lively sense of what passion might mean, which goes beyond the dutiful Presbyterians’ list of sins. Hence the individual problem of self-control is identical with that of social control, but in both cases difficult. For man’s nature (his ‘‘wayward sway of appetite and passion’’) lies beyond the range of the Stoic or Epicurean philosophe, whose rationality can scarcely penetrate this ‘‘web of paradox so intricate, that philosophy herself is at a loss to fix the point where her speculations on consequences and results should commence.’’ 186 184. Tucker, Science of Government, 6–9, 10–11; Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 67–70. 185. Or so I infer, though the modern biographers of Taylor and Upshur are singularly uninterested in their subjects’ religious beliefs, which probably means they were Episcopalians. 186. Tucker, Science of Government, 14, 19.

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Moreover, a man is not alone with these passions. Whereas Taylor and Cooper had been sharply individualistic, for Tucker the world was peopled by communities. Once he is done with prolegomena and begins to speak ‘‘on government,’’ his first words are: ‘‘Man is emphatically a social animal. Other creatures are solitary or gregarious, according to the impulse of instincts, which make them find pleasure in the presence of others of their kind, or cultivate a surly satisfaction in secluded loneliness. But man is social from necessity. . . . [W]ater is no more necessary to the fishes of the deep, than society is to man.’’ This necessity is the need for security, first against other animals, then against other men. So man has been tribal from the first; there was no historic moment of social compact, because no moment before the time when one human hand had reached for another to help in deflecting a talon or a spear: ‘‘Looking, then, to the nature of man, and the circumstances in which he was placed in the world, we shall see mankind scattered over the face of the earth, not as insulated individuals, but in clustering groups, united by the necessities of nature, by the ties of kindred, and the reciprocal experience of benefits.’’ Here Tucker became modern in his thinking, for he became sociological and saw these societies as having ‘‘a sort of collective personality,’’ which looked ‘‘with jealousy or envy on others.’’ 187 He speaks of a body politic as ‘‘a sort of artificial moral person.’’ 188 More importantly, he has little room for the idea of individual rights. All rights are social, ‘‘reciprocal and correlative,’’ a matter of ‘‘allegiance and protection,’’ ‘‘cause and consequence.’’ In that sense, Tucker was much closer to the Hegelian vision, in which man and the state are dialectically bonded. The individual is responsible to the community, the community to the individual, and this reciprocity is exclusive; the community owed nothing to those individuals beyond its membership and ‘‘the individual member is responsible to none but his own community.’’ Humanity is little, the tribe is all. But Tucker doubted the idea that the tribe is made by a primitive compact, partly because he had cursorily studied Native American tribes, but also because he was alert to the history of compulsion and discipline. Society had arisen from necessity and was not ‘‘an affair of convention freely entered into.’’ So, ‘‘I am slow to believe that governments were first formed by a recognition of the right either natural or conventional, in a majority, however small, of any society, then for the first time submitting itself to government, to bind the rest.’’ Only eventually, and against the human grain, has the idea of majority rule arisen. ‘‘Trust me, gentlemen, the constructive presence of the will of the whole, in a bare majority, is one of the most violent 187. Ibid., 36. 188. ‘‘Persons’’ in the text, but I presume this is a misprint: ibid., 67. Cf. ‘‘The moral person once known as the kingdom of England can now be nowhere found’’: ibid., 76.

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fictions of law, and one of the last that men can be brought to acknowledge as practically true.’’ In the beginning, ‘‘the first idea of government is derived from a habit of deference to one man, and that when the authority of government comes first to be distinctly recognised, it is always personated by a single individual speaking and acting on behalf of all.’’ 189 Tucker seemed to regret the passing of this; he pined for the martinet, who was admired. One remembers John Randolph, with his whip and his dogs, swishing his way into the Senate chamber. In one sense, Tucker was more old-fashioned than Taylor. The former believed in the old cycles of the Machiavellian imagination; societies licensed freedom, they grew prosperous but bred cupidity and flattering demagogues, they acquired mobs and disorder and sloth, they brought forth mercenaries and military despotism, an aristocracy developed to share power, and from the quarrel of monarchy and aristocracy the idea of liberty was reborn. Tucker offered his Virginian students a very tepid hope that the United States would transcend all this, considering ‘‘that that which is good is ever pregnant with a principle of self-destruction.’’ Indeed, as a disciple of Burke, the only allowance of usefulness Tucker accorded to political theory was the slim hope that knowledge of this cycle might slow or mitigate it. Or, to be more precise, since Tucker disbelieved in perfectibility, he ventured that an informed shrewdness might teach where we might ‘‘surrender something of what, in itself, is good for the sake of preserving and securing the rest.’’ So history is not the linear process of improving the good and removing the evil, but rather the unstable process of sacrificing the good for a greater good, also flawed with evil. As Tucker was to write elsewhere, ‘‘Even when . . . change is from worse to better there is always some loss, and it will not do to rely on any calculations which, looking only to the gain, do not take that loss into the account.’’ Every society must kill the thing it loves. One might only entertain the faint hope ‘‘of checking the car of destiny in its fatal career, and postponing the evil day when the history of the liberty and happiness of Virginia shall but furnish school-boy’s themes in distant lands.’’ And the Lectures are elegiacally full of the sense that Tucker felt himself to be living in a time of ‘‘degeneracy,’’ that he could not conceal ‘‘the fact that [Virginia’s] estimation aboard is not what it has been.’’ 190 So, one day, a New Zealander might stand upon a James River bridge and survey the ruins of Jefferson’s Capitol. Like Hugh Legaré, who observed in 1829, ‘‘So pliable are all political forms 189. Ibid., 37, 39, 52, 55, 58, 61–62. His discussion of Native American tribes is in ibid., 59–60. 190. Ibid., 48, 50, 286; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘‘Macaulay’s History of England,’’ SQR 15 (July 1849): 399.

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—so absolutely do they depend upon the spirit which animates them,’’ Tucker saw a deep reality in feeling, and in will.191 ‘‘No people can be free, who do not, in the same strong sense of the word, will to be so.’’ When the will slackened, when ‘‘ambition, and avarice, and the love of pleasure, and the love of display, have gained mastery of the heart, freedom no longer exists, except by sufferance. While her forms can be made instrumental to the purposes of tyranny, the forms will be retained, but the substance of freedom is already gone.’’ Hence ‘‘whatever the forms of a constitution may be, they who administer it can mould it to their purpose, and make it an instrument in the hands of whatsoever interest may predominate in the state.’’ If ‘‘ ‘the seat of freedom is in the mind,’ ’’ Tucker knew there was good reason to be interested in influencing ‘‘the mind of the community.’’ This he understood as an elitist task, not assigning ‘‘the tasks of thought to the unthinking, and the authority of law to those who should be the subjects of its corrective discipline,’’ but to the best men. An unblinking believer in the realities of class, with quotations from Tocqueville he dismissed the idea that America had a genuine aristocracy as a ‘‘distempered fancy’’ and ‘‘the demagogue’s bugbear,’’ but he was pleased to note that it had a governing class; he was only disgruntled at evidence that its efficacy was shrinking. ‘‘Nature and circumstances make a difference among men, whether in society or out of it. There are diversities of natural and acquired endowments, of strength and courage, and intelligence, and prudence, of industry, steadiness and sobriety, and these make differences in acquisitions, and in the estimation of mankind. . . . Society thus, without the agency of government, divides itself into classes.’’ 192 For Tucker understood the ideas of freedom and equality to be opposed.193 What is freedom? he asks, and offers up the parable of ‘‘a single insulated individual, alone and disconnected from all his species . . . [who may] do whatsoever may seem good in his own eyes.’’ But come a companion and all is changed, for society requires restraint. ‘‘Each may presently set his heart on doing something which may conflict with the equal right of the other to do as he pleases. . . . Here, then, is at once a limitation on freedom imposed by equality.’’ Indeed, the more government promotes freedom, the more social inequality grows, for men seize opportunities unequally when their enterprise is stimulated: ‘‘In proportion as government faithfully accomplishes its proper end 191. HSL, ‘‘Law of Tenures,’’ SR 3 (February 1829): 19. Cf. Tucker, Science of Government, 131. 192. Tucker, Science of Government, 107, 108, 141–42, 288, 95, 286, 81. 193. In this, Tucker is quarreling with Tocqueville, who believed that democracy would enforce equality of condition. Or so Raymond Aron argues, paraphrasing Tocqueville’s preface to Democracy in America; see Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1, Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville and the Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 190.

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in the protection of all the rights of all men, in all conditions, just in that proportion is the advance toward that state of inequality more sure, more uninterrupted, and more rapid.’’ Where Tucker seemed to be in dissent from the modern European conservative was in believing inequality to be a fact, even a social blessing, but not a principle. He quotes Tocqueville as saying, ‘‘Aristocratic institutions cannot exist, without laying down the inequality of man, as a fundamental principle,’’ and Tucker believed (like Crèvecouer) that, if men come to accept themselves as inferior, energy and enterprise will cease.194 So the idea of equality is a sort of necessary ideological trick, valuable even when it led to self-defeat. Tucker was not so dismissive of nature as Upshur, for the former felt that human inventiveness (the creating of fictions) had uphill work to do against the compulsions of history and society. However powerful the mind of a community, however competent the best men, ‘‘the best institutions owe all their value to their adaptation to the character, habits and wants of the people, and all their permanency to the preservation of those qualities in the people which first made them fit to live under such institutions.’’ That is, Upshur had the more self-confident intelligence, a stronger sense of mastery. He said, in effect, in reversal of the ancient Arab saying, nothing is written. But, for all his bluster, Tucker wrote like a man closer to the end of time, a prisoner of what went before, a husbander of a heritage draining away. This was the John Randolph theme, the message Tucker most wanted to convey to his young students: they in turn should learn how to nurture the past and postpone the awful moment when the frail experiment of Virginia and the United States (though the latter mattered much less) would falter. Tucker wrote like a son, who spoke of reverence for fathers, and of filial duties. Arresting decline was the holiest of duties: ‘‘May we hand down to our posterity the rich inheritance of freedom purchased and transmitted to us by our fathers.’’ In his politics, Tucker was notoriously ultra, a secessionist decades before others, a man who wrote a novel of revolutionary violence, but all his radicalism intended a revolution that might conserve; he could not imagine virtue in the new. Not the least reason for this was that, though he spoke of the influence of the wealthy and talented and he descanted on the value of the human will, he was (as a historicist) not very sure that the human will was efficacious. Indeed, the history of Virginia embedded in his lectures stresses continually, to use the image of another younger son, that ‘‘history is simply social development along the 194. Tucker, Science of Government, 145–46, 148, 94. Crèvecouer, of course, had long since defined this as the great difference between Nantucket and his native Normandy: see J. Hector St. John de Crèvecouer, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; reprint, New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904), 119–55.

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lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.’’ 195 Such skepticism was the by-product of Tucker’s Burkeanism. Our government, he said in quoting Hamlet, ‘‘was the creature of circumstances, which stamped their very form and pressure upon it.’’ 196 Not ‘‘the creature of theory,’’ government shaped itself around the society that made it and so contained all of society’s oddities. So, ‘‘There are features in the constitution of Virginia, especially, utterly at variance with all theory, but in exact conformity to the wants, habits, and prejudices of the community.’’ Tucker took pleasure in this thought; ‘‘The constitution adopted by Virginia at the revolution, was a stumbling block and an offence to political theorists as long as it endured,’’ precisely because it was illogical, but ‘‘worked well.’’ Virginians had striven no more for freedom than anyone else, and perhaps had understood popular government less than the New Englanders.197 But they had blundered upon a happy circumstance. This insight perhaps explains why Tucker’s lectures, though eloquent in their praise of Virginia, were singularly silent about particular Virginians (Randolph aside) and were remarkable for not lavishing ritual praise on Washington, Henry, Jefferson, and the rest. History was something that had happened to the Fathers, less something they had made; the Virginian and American world had formed them into giants. Here Tucker’s history is strictly Tocquevillean, because social; in the latter’s history of the French Revolution, Turgot and Louis XVI are little, compared to the invisible workings of administrative centralization, and in Tocqueville’s study of American democracy, Andrew Jackson barely rated a mention. Hence, for Tucker, slavery mattered as part of the habits of Virginian society; its maintenance, just as it had helped to make Virginian freedom, would serve to sustain that same freedom. Reversing Samuel Johnson’s ancient jibe and Jefferson’s fretting that mastery made despots, Tucker calmly asserts, ‘‘It is an old observation that the spirit of freedom is nowhere so high and indomitable as among freemen who are the masters of slaves. The existence 195. Tucker, Science of Government, 213, 235, 237; Henry Adams to Samuel J. Tilden, 24 January 1883, in The Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, 1868–1885, ed. J. C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, and Viola Hopkins Winner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1982), 491. 196. Tucker, Science of Government, 255. Legaré uses the same allusion in HSL, ‘‘Early Spanish Ballads: Charlemagne and His Peers,’’ SR 5 (February 1830): 63. It comes from Hamlet’s charge to the players, in Act 3, Scene 2: ‘‘For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’’ 197. Tucker, Science of Government, 255, 284, 256.

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of slavery in a community will always keep alive a jealous passion for liberty in the lowest class of those who are not slaves.’’ This assertion is an extension, perhaps even the origins, of Tucker’s interest in social discipline. On the whole, Tucker’s proslavery stance was of the Herrenvolk variety; slavery created a safe worker-ant population, made color a bond of sympathy between rich and poor, constrained the tendency of poorer whites to insurrectionary envies, and schooled the wealthy in noblesse oblige and responsibility. This last idea seems to have been a specific instance of his insistent theme that ‘‘there is no freedom for him, in whom there is not an abiding disposition to bring appetite and passion under the dominion of fixed laws, whose authority freedom must not dare question.’’ More concretely, ‘‘The puzzle is to contrive such restraints on the sovereign will of a free people as may be necessary to the preservation of their free institutions, without annihilating the freedom they are meant to secure.’’ Universal suffrage, he thought, only exacerbates the problem, not by giving power to the poor, but by making it easy for the wealthy to manipulate the electorate. A better answer is to have ‘‘an element in every society, which can only be restrained in its proper place, and withheld from mischief by coercion.’’ 198 Slaves conveniently fit the bill. In this analysis, Tucker was coldly racist, contemptuously paternalist. But, like most Southern political theorists, he correlated the social institution of African slavery with the moral problem of human freedom.199 ‘‘The substance of slavery is all— the form nothing. The man who works and must work, from morn till night for food and raiment, without hope of change, is a slave. It matters not how he became so; by what authority his servitude is imposed; by what necessity it is maintained.’’ By the same token, ‘‘the spirit of servitude can never enter deeply into the heart made haughty by the habitual exercise of unquestioned and inherent authority.’’ But this, too, is provisional. Slavery might retard ‘‘our advance in the fatal career of improvement which ends in splendid vice,’’ might ‘‘save us, at least for a time,’’ but no more.200 Beverley Tucker was, at best, an implicit Hegelian and his Christianity was buried as the secret of his understandings. James Warley Miles was a close student of German thought and, above all, a meditating Christian, who grounded his political theory in a theodicy. In doing so, he was not untypical of mid-nineteenth century Southern thinkers, who spent much time reprobating the Godlessness of the older tradition. Miles’s Discourse on the Occa198. Ibid., 331, 455–56, 340. 199. Cf. the argument in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 200. Tucker, Science of Government, 336, 110, 160–61.

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sion of the Funeral of the Hon. John C. Calhoun, which was given on 26 April 1850, shows how a younger generation could look on the American polity very differently. Miles was, of course, an ordained Episcopalian minister, speaking in Saint Philip’s Church in Charleston to a congregation, so that alone explains his opening remarks on ‘‘The Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe’’ and ‘‘the solemn lessons of Providence’’ and ‘‘the power, the majesty, and the wisdom, of Deity,’’ which had not been formulations of much consequence to the likes of Taylor and Madison. But it ran deeper than that, for Miles believed that polities were sanctioned by God, which made it much harder to be coldly skeptical about their practicality. That self, God, and nation are awesomely confounded was the new idea. Not that there is an utter lack of continuity in Miles’s political ideas. Like many before him, he believed that free institutions rested on a people’s virtue and that polities mutated according as the people deserved and understood ‘‘the fundamental Idea’’ of liberty, which was hedged with the concomitant ideas of truth, justice, duty, and principle; this was familiar territory. On the other hand, Miles dismisses abruptly ‘‘specious theories of a social contract, or of natural equality, or of government, as a mere experimental machine.’’ 201 Rather, political science must begin with ‘‘the necessary development of human nature, as constituted by Deity himself.’’ The State is in the mind of God, and had been so from the beginning: ‘‘As . . . the nature of man involved his whole developments as a moral, social and political being, for the full perfection of all his faculties, the State must have been included in the original idea of Man.’’ It follows that man cannot be perfected until the state is, likewise. Man needs the small world of the family, but also the ‘‘still wider sphere’’ of the State. Like Calhoun, Miles believed that government was intrinsic to the human condition, as much a law of nature as gravitation: ‘‘Man could never choose whether he would be governed or not; it is inseparable from any condition of his existence.’’ But since Miles believed that human nature was changing—he had the language of development, if not yet of evolution—it followed that government assumes the form that the historical condition of human nature has reached, and is molded by ‘‘man’s progress.’’ The most advanced stage is that in which the governed and the governing become identical, because they share ‘‘the general intellect,’’ the premises of the culture. ‘‘The true citizen is he, who partaking of the political equality of the State, is both governing and governed, and thus is entitled to all the privileges of the freeman.’’ An individual earns the right of citizenship by becoming 201. JWM, The Discourse on the Occasion of the Funeral of the Hon. John C. Calhoun, Delivered under the Appointment of the Joint Committee of the City Council and Citizens of Charleston, in St. Philip’s Church, April 26th, 1850 (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1850), 6, 10–11.

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‘‘conscious of the true principles of self-control,’’ and likewise ‘‘when a Nation becomes conscious of the true principles of government, and of social and national duty, it also possesses the natural right of self-government.’’ This is a dialectical process: a people must be free to earn a free government, but that government in turn must foster the ‘‘moral and religious elements’’ that make up the knowledge of freedom. Miles was a German idealist, so for him it was self-consciousness that mattered, the ability ‘‘to comprehend the true nature of freedom.’’ Those who lack such self-knowledge must necessarily be excluded from the polity.202 And what does government do? It offers ‘‘order, just law, and consequent security and protection of every individual right.’’ However, Miles is clear that ‘‘the Government is not the State,’’ nor ‘‘the mere aggregate of the individuals’’ in it. Rather, ‘‘the State is the organic or constitutional embodiment of the nation under the idea of a particular polity.’’ Or, to be more precise, ‘‘the State is the nation existing as a political being, developing and exercising determinate functions, according to the law of its nature or constitution.’’ To that nature, government owed its form and was the state’s ‘‘organ of reason and will.’’ This being so, the state must exercise moral functions and, by so doing, ‘‘becomes clothed with a venerable sanctity, as including all the ends of family existence, and proposing still higher ones of its own,’’ no less than aiming at ‘‘the most perfect earthly condition of man.’’ Under this reasoning, the idea of liberty and individualism much changed. ‘‘Liberty . . . cannot be the greatest individual freedom from restraint compatible with the safety and peace of the State,’’ which was certainly how the older tradition had viewed the matter. Rather, ‘‘it is that condition, in which man can most perfectly fulfil the ends of his creation,’’ and, ‘‘Absolute individual unrestraint is an impossibility.’’ Liberty itself ‘‘has a nature . . . [with] inherent laws of its own.’’ 203 All this was mystical, and tended to make of a State a religious authority. So the statesman ‘‘bears pre-eminently the sacred palladium of law and justice in his own bosom,’’ acquires ‘‘legal authority,’’ and becomes ‘‘the universal voice of the commonwealth,’’ to which ‘‘homage’’ is due. Calhoun, the occasion for Miles’s discourse, had a character which was ‘‘the offspring of the profoundest moral principle . . . based on immutable Truth.’’ Calhoun the practical statesman had served a moral purpose, for against South Carolina had been arrayed ‘‘the tremendous moral artillery of spurious philanthropy, and pretended zeal for the cause of justice and humanity . . . corrupt Ambition, phrenzied Fanaticism, insatiable Rapacity, and unprincipled Demagogueism,’’ which had impiously evoked the name of religion. Since ‘‘the only 202. Ibid., 12–17. 203. Ibid., 18–20.

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safety of States, and the only permanent support of individuals, are to be found in an adherence to the principles of Religion, and an obedience to the precepts of Revelation,’’ a judgment was pending on the American state.204 That this judgment was likely to be adverse is not explicitly stated in Miles’s Discourse, but is everywhere implicit. Such a neo-Hegelian rhapsody, no doubt, passed over the heads of many in their pews in Saint Philip’s. But the simpler message of Miles, that government should be intimately constituted on the social nature of the people, was more intelligible, not least because it familiarly signaled a death knell for the Union. ‘‘E pluribus unum’’ had been the old motto, but this was now deemed to be impractical, impious, and unphilosophical. Yet Miles’s organicism, though it spoke of freedom, breathed the language of coercion. For what was more binding than a State which was also the precondition for a self ? Where was the manoeuvering room? It lay at those moments when nations ceased to express their best instincts and so lost their raison d’être. This was happening to the United States, so to replace a failed American with a Southern polity might bring the State closer to a self, which had apprehended the idea of Liberty and self-consciousness. This implication Miles was to explain candidly and in retrospect in 1863 in a discourse entitled God in History. The United States had ‘‘started from the basis of advanced civilization,’’ but had ‘‘ignominously failed’’ because of ‘‘unscrupulous selfishness.’’ The Confederacy had entered ‘‘into the great drama of history, possessing as its larger inheritance all with which the old Union commenced its career, and with the terrible lesson of its failure beside.’’ It would be blasphemy to argue that ‘‘the hope of human liberty’’ rested on the fate of the Confederacy. (A reproach to an older impiety about the divine mission of the United States was implicit.) Still, ‘‘we may well and reverently ponder whether we are not entrusted with the furtherance of it [freedom].’’ If it prove selfish, the Confederacy would go the way of the United States. If man and state achieved something better, the Confederacy had the chance to achieve ‘‘the foundation of a political organization, in which the freedom of every member is the result of law, is preserved by justice, is harmonized by true relations of labor and capital, and is sanctified by the divine spirit of Christianity.’’ But human nature and the state must develop together, for ‘‘it is a truism . . . that man can only develop all of his capacities in the organism of the state.’’ Conversely, no state can be successful that has not ‘‘grown organically as the embodiment of the political spirit and wants of the nation.’’ 205 204. Ibid., 22–23, 36, 39. 205. JWM, God in History: A Discourse Delivered before the Graduating Class of the College of Charleston on Sunday Evening, March 29, 1863 (Charleston, S.C.: Evans & Cogswell, 1863), 23–24.

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So self, history, morality, and the state had become confounded. The rationale of secession lay in the obligation to abandon an immoral polity in order to establish another, truer to the idea of Liberty, truer to self, indeed making a true self possible. In so contending, Miles had moved the argument far beyond the older tradition of political thinkers like John Taylor, who had presumed self to be prior to the social compact and necessarily autonomous, who had insisted that it was by the individualism of willful citizens that the state was held accountable, as a thing to be ordained, adjusted, or abolished. Upshur had abolished the idea of nature, but kept that of the individual will. Calhoun then saw how individuals had begun to crowd together, as a way to use power and to resist others, also aggregating and powerful. From this, Tucker began to speak of community as the sanction of the State, partly because he saw individuals as unpredictable and passionate, and hence in need of community. Finally, Miles argued that self, family, and the State were God’s work mediated through the mind of Man, and thereby greatly raised the psychic stakes for judging and creating a polity. For Taylor, the state might disappear and he, John Taylor, would still exist, might decide or not to make another state, in concert with other reasoning men. ‘‘Individuals, in forming a society, may arrange their rights in such forms as they please,’’ he had chirpily said.206 But, for the grimmer Miles in a later Southern world, the disappearance of the state would be a self-abolition. For the world was not all freedom, but was a thing of necessary and meaningful constraint. Faced with the choice between a prison made by others and a home fashioned by one’s own community, who would refuse to move to the latter? Who would refuse, even knowing that home was as much a prison?

206. Taylor, Inquiry, 354–55.

Chapter Seventeen

As If Money Was the Most Important Matter in This World

Political Economy Will and Must Be Our Judge Political economy was the modern discipline par excellence, which promised the world much, that it is to say, wealth. The world noticed these promises, or so the political economists had reason to think. To understand the discipline’s function in the antebellum South, therefore, requires a look not only at intellectuals, but also at those politicians who themselves struggled with and imposed imagined truths on the American scene. For no genre was more at the heart of politics, and its insights had a share in moving men to struggle and civil conflict. As Thomas Cooper put it: ‘‘I know of no branch of knowledge more directly bearing on the great concerns of human life, or the efficient means of human happiness; nor any that is likely to stand higher in public estimation, or to be considered as more necessary in the education of a gentleman, and a man of the world. The thinking part of the public are becoming intensely alive to it.’’ Or, as M. R. H. Garnett put it after the experience of another twenty years, ‘‘In free countries, the chief questions, which divide parties, depend for their resolution, on the principles of Political Economy. Nearly all the arguments which have resounded in our legislative halls, and on our hustings, for the last twenty years, for and against the Bank and the Independent Treasury, the Protective System and Free Trade are professedly drawn from this science.’’ 1 The South had been unusually well schooled in the technical discipline of political economy. Its academic study began earlier there than almost anyTitle from CC to Lavinia McPheeters, 7 April 1834, CC Papers, WM: ‘‘Newspapers . . . are stuffed with Bank, Bank, as if money was the most important matter in this world.’’ 1. TC, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, 2d ed. (1830; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971), 32; M. R. H. Garnett, ‘‘The Distribution of Wealth,’’ SQR 11 (January 1847): 1.

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where else outside of Scotland. Though the records are imprecise, it seems that Bishop James Madison was using The Wealth of Nations at the College of William and Mary in the mid-1790s, as a text useful to discharging his duties as Professor of Moral Philosophy, the Law of Nature and Nations, and Fine Arts. The book itself had only reached an American edition in 1789, and Madison was almost certainly the first American to teach it. Carrying on this tradition from Madison (who died in 1812) through John Augustine Smith, Thomas Dew lectured on the subject after his election as Professor of Political Law in 1826 and in 1829 published part of his lectures as Lectures on the Restrictive System. Elsewhere in the state, Jefferson was to make political economy fundamental to the innovative curriculum of the University of Virginia from the mid-1820s, partly as a result of correspondence with Thomas Cooper in the preceding decade; the subject came to be taught by George Tucker, who published widely on its issues and may have been the most sophisticated student of economics in his American generation.2 Cooper himself began teaching it at South Carolina College in 1825 and published his lectures in 1826 as Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy. This pattern of growing academic respectability closely emulated the timing with which England assimilated Scottish thought. Though Thomas Malthus had been a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1793, his duties had not then included economic matters, but in 1805 he became professor of history and political economy at the East India College in Haileybury. (Francis Lieber’s chair at South Carolina College in the 1830s was to echo this title.) George Pryme gave lectures on political economy at Cambridge from 1816, and the Drummond Chair of Political Economy was created at Oxford in 1825, with explicit purposes in the teaching of a Christian version of the discipline; its first incumbent was Nassau Senior. As for France, Napoleon had thought the subject suspect, so matters were delayed there. In 1815, lectures were first given at the Athenée in Paris, by way of adult education. There was a chair of ‘‘industrial economy’’ at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (a sort of school of technology) in 1820, but the Collège de France did not get a professor of political economy until 1832; Jean-Baptiste Say lectured at all of these places. The American North was more tardy. The earliest to be engaged was Brown University, when Francis Wayland began teaching it in the winter of 1828–29, before publishing his lectures as The Elements of Political Economy in 1837. Harvard College briefly included some lectures by Francis Bowen under the rubric of moral philosophy in the mid-1830s, but he left and only returned 2. Such is the opinion of Paul Conkin, who observes, ‘‘I believe Carey was the most original and broadly influential American economist before the Civil War. In analytic ability, I rank Tucker highest; on sheer originality, Raymond.’’ See Paul K. Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), xi.

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in 1852; in the meantime, the subject was ignored.3 Yale College seems to have done little or nothing before the Civil War.4 Not everywhere in the South, however, was political economy taught, well or at all. The University of Georgia made an effort to introduce it in 1838, but failed.5 When the University of North Carolina reformed its curriculum in 1819, it noticeably failed to include the subject. In 1833, there was an abortive reform that would have instigated it, but the scheme miscarried. By the 1840s, some three hours a week for eleven weeks in a student’s whole career concerned itself with Adam Smith and his kind, classes evidently done by Charles Phillips, whose chief duties were in mathematics. By the 1850s, the president of the university was responsible for political economy, as part of the omnibus duties that encompassed moral philosophy, metaphysics, constitutional law, and international law; he taught it in the first term of the senior year and used, for a textbook, Francis Wayland, but there is no reason to think that David Swain much cared for the subject. At Davidson College, which was for Presbyterians, the curriculum of 1838 likewise put political economy among the minor obligations of the senior class. The same was true of the University of Mississippi from its foundation in the late 1840s.6 Nonetheless in the South, at least, academic study when forcefully pursued was influential upon politicians, and mingled in a broad-ranging public discussion about economic policy which was much divided between those who adhered to strict laissez-faire and those who saw a legitimate role for government. This ambivalence was not new. The South had inherited from its founding statesmen a deep engagement with the management of money. The tariff, the national bank, the funding of state debts, all these had been at the heart of the revolutionary and federal enterprise: Jefferson, Madison, and many others had offered their understanding of how economies might be managed or ignored by the state. Jefferson had been a close reader of Adam Smith and Malthus, a skeptic of David Ricardo’s ‘‘muddy reasoning,’’ and in 1803 a re3. Byrd L. Jones, ‘‘A Quest for National Leadership: Institutionalization of Economics at Harvard,’’ in Breaking the Academic Mold: Economists and American Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William J. Barber (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 96–97. 4. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750– 1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 372; Henry William Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought, 3d ed. (1971; reprint, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 257; Barber, Breaking the Academic Mold, 73–74, 96–97, 132–68. 5. E. Merton Coulter, College Life in the Old South: As Seen at the University of Georgia (1928; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973), 39. 6. Ibid.; Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 1, From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789–1868 (1907; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1974), 255–57, 359–67, 464, 550, 661; Mary D. Beaty, A History of Davidson College (Davidson, N.C.: Briarpatch Press, 1988), 20; Allen Cabaniss, The University of Mississippi: Its First Hundred Years, 2d ed. (1949; reprint, Hattiesburg: University & College Press of Mississippi, 1971), 10.

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cipient of Say’s Traité d’économie politique sent by the author; in 1817, Jefferson translated and wrote a preface to the American edition of Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy.7 James Madison likewise read Adam Smith, David Hume, Robert Owen, Thomas Malthus, and William Godwin, in order, as Madison wrote to Say in 1816, to discover ‘‘the true principles of political economy [which] are everywhere needed . . . more so in our young country than in some old ones.’’ 8 But much, in all this, was formed by writings antecedent to Smith and his successors, much more was dictated by pressing political circumstances, and little was systematic, however deeply influential on the new republic. Though they were interested in the millennial promise of these writings, the Virginian Founders tended to see them as a division of a broader science of man; in this, they were closer to Smith’s ambition than to how the discipline came to be seen later, when its authority rested much upon being the specialized theory that had survived the intellectual shipwreck of the Enlightenment, a venture that even the critics of Reason might think reasonable. And in their practice as statesmen, the Virginians had transmitted a markedly confusing message to their heirs. The early years of the republic had been unstable, inheriting the old problems of revolution, and facing the new problems of a world at war. Finance had been alternately chaotic, ordered, and then deranged. Formally, Jefferson and Madison had spoken warmly of farmers and independence, expressed suspicion of manufactures and cities, preached laissez-faire and republican frugality. But Jefferson had imposed an embargo, which was the least laissez-faire action of any American president in the first century of the republic, was indeed an action of Napoleonic abruptness, while Madison had raised tariffs and chartered a national bank. Not for nothing did David James McCord in 1846 include the embargo in his catalog of protectionist errors, and speak of ‘‘the embargo and restrictive system of Mr. Jefferson.’’ 9 No doubt, the Virginians had pleaded exigency and deprecated themselves, but much in national life was an accumulation of exigencies. Political economy (all agreed) was the observation of facts, of what men did, not what they preached should be done. So, though the generation of 1820 knew the older orthodoxy, they also knew that experience and policy might be very different. And they were to experience their own instability, their Panics and trade cycles, their depressions and booms. Indeed, as 7. See Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790–1830 (1964; reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), 424; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (1980; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 253, 190–95. 8. James Madison to Jean-Baptiste Say, 4 May 1816, quoted in Richard K. Matthews, If Men Were Angels: James Madison and the Heartless Empire of Reason (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 86. For Madison on Malthus, see ibid., 91. 9. David James McCord, ‘‘Political Economy—Manufactures,’’ SQR 9 (April 1846): 395.

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Dew suggested, it was supposed to be the value of political economy that, amid this incessant flux, it offered the ability to stand back and see a pattern. One may broadly see two tendencies in Southern economic thought. There were those who adhered to a fairly strict version of classical economics and preferred the free market: among these, one can count John Taylor, Thomas Dew, and Thomas Cooper. And there were those who saw merit in government intervention and were interested in the possibility of urban and industrial development: among these were George Tucker, Henry Clay, and Jacob Cardozo. And then there was John C. Calhoun, who in this (as in much else) effected a synthesis. First, the proponents of laissez-faire. In many ways, the writings of John Taylor were atypical, even in this tradition, though they did articulate a standpoint not uncommon among those who preferred agriculture. His closest attempt to articulate his economic views were in Arator, which was first published serially in 1803, emerged as a book in 1813, then reached its final edition in the author’s lifetime in 1818. As has been observed earlier, Taylor could often be an old fashioned Commonwealthman with, as he himself admitted, ‘‘a spice of fanaticism’’ and a prose style ‘‘wild, careless, and desultory.’’ 10 Over him loomed the ghost of Sir Robert Walpole, of standing armies, oppressive taxation, corrupt filiations, war, and decline; the fear that weeds might grow on honest plantations, while in the city merchants, stockjobbers, and bankers idled in the brothels. But Taylor had read his Adam Smith, who gave him a stinging critique of mercantilism and government interference, but also an analysis that favored agriculture over industry, and tended to relegate the commercial world to the realm of the less useful, even parasitic. Certainly Taylor understood the basic principle of ‘‘political economy,’’ that economics and politics were interrelated ventures, though not easy in their relationship. For men and women might be wealthy but oppressed, or poor and free, and the trick was to contrive to be prosperous and at liberty. In this sense, Taylor was a critic of the country party, for being too little political, of disdaining the court and staying at home, drinking with Squire Western. ‘‘We farmers and mechanics have been political slaves in all countries, because we have been political fools. . . . [W]e have been taught by those whose object is to monopolize the sweets of life, which we sweat for, that politics are without our province, and in us a ridiculous affectation.’’ Farmers should stir themselves, 10. John Taylor to Thomas Jefferson, 5 March 1795, quoted in Robert E. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, Pastoral Republican (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980), 108; John Taylor to Aaron Burr, 25 March 1803, quoted in Loren Baritz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, by John Taylor (1814; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), xxiv.

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permanently not episodically bring to bear their majority power by electing ‘‘a genuine agricultural interest, uncorrupted by a mixture with stock-jobbing, by a view of office, or by odious personal vices, and combined with good talents.’’ 11 Taylor’s starting point was the fear of decline, which was becoming an instinct for the Virginian planter, as he saw soils wearing out, crops diminishing, people moving westward, and abandonment.12 This was not what the American Revolution had promised, but it seemed a stubborn fact of independence on the Rappahannock, ‘‘deserted because the lands are exhausted.’’ Margins had grown too thin to bear great taxation and the paraphernalia of a Hamiltonian state, with its ‘‘armies, loaning, banking, and an intricate treasury system, endowing a government with the absolute power of applying public money.’’ Protectionist duties made an ‘‘aristocracy of capitalists,’’ aristocracy being defined as something ‘‘founded in the principle of distributing wealth by law,’’ which was the reverse of true republicanism. England was the hideous precedent, with its ‘‘idle classes of the nobility, clergy, army, navy, bankers and national debt holders, with their servants and dependents.’’ The agriculturalists, who formed nine-tenths of the population, were made subservient to a swindling tenth. Within this majority, Taylor was reluctant to differentiate, but merged planters, farmers, yeomen, and tenants into a single, sympathetic ‘‘agricultural class,’’ who were ‘‘hardy, honest, and free husbandmen,’’ those who were ‘‘our sound yeomanry.’’ He was at unconvincing pains not to oppose manufactures themselves, which might be valuable to a society, but merely the distorting effort to confer patronage upon them. Rather, manufacturing should be allowed to grow freely out of the surpluses of a free agriculture. The other way but killed agriculture, without which manufactures themselves could not flourish.13 A paradox for Taylor was that English agriculture had been more productive than American, indeed had been notable for its restless search for innovation and invention, celebrated for the draining of Fens, the use of mechanical devices, the experimenting with crops and manures. This Taylor explained by the English system of oppression, that ‘‘the tenants or agriculturists are a 11. Shalhope, John Taylor, 104; John Taylor, Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political: In Sixty-Four Numbers (1818; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1977), 50–51, 96, 110. 12. Taylor had, of course, lived through these transitions and resisted them. He had inherited land from his father James, married into more land from his bride, Lucy Penn, and then acquired three more plantations from his own resources. He did very well by all this. In later years, his annual income exceeded $5,000 and, in his will, he was able to bequeath not only land to each of his sons, but $10,000 to a granddaughter. See Shalhope, John Taylor, 13–34, 183–84. 13. Taylor, Arator, 70, 74, 103, 93, 77–80.

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species of slaves, goaded into ingenuity, labour and economy . . . lashed into a good system of agriculture in the same way that good discipline is produced in an army.’’ In America, there was too much land, too many opportunities for escape, too much freedom for this pattern to recur. The compulsions that had rendered the English system more productive did not exist in America. No doubt, the United States had its own system of compulsion in chattel slavery, but Taylor thought this ‘‘a misfortune to agriculture, incapable of removal, and only within the reach of palliation.’’ In this, Taylor’s views were those customary to his generation, though he had eccentric emphases. He was much preoccupied with vice-ridden ‘‘free negroes and mulattoes,’’ whom he saw as parasites upon slavery’s operation, as ‘‘agents or brokers for disposing of stolen products,’’ as like so many stockjobbers who made slaves unhappy by giving them the idea of freedom, and so forced masters in repression to be more severe, which in turn diminished productivity. Taylor’s demand was that free blacks be expelled, perhaps westward to free lands or to Africa.14 On the broader subject of slavery, Taylor is less than clear in Arator. ‘‘Societies are instituted to control and diminish the imperfections of human nature,’’ he began, ‘‘because without them it generates ignorance, savageness, and depravity of manners.’’ But even the best societies retain ‘‘a disposition to command, and to live by the labour of others,’’ which these societies beget ‘‘sub-societies for acquiring power and wealth.’’ Taylor is obscure about what was described by the phrase, ‘‘sub-societies,’’ though very clear they were ‘‘perfidious, ambitious, avaricious and unconstitutional’’ and somehow work to disrupt the orderly world of the master and the slave. For the rest, Taylor saw advantages to slavery. He quoted Jefferson’s famous passage in the Notes on the State of Virginia, which argued that slavery excited a spirit of despotism in masters, only to dismiss it. ‘‘The slave states do [not] seem less productive of characters in whom the nation is willing to confide than the others,’’ he observed, and Jefferson himself was evidence that slavery did not produce moral monsters. Rather, Taylor said, slaves were too low in status to excite ‘‘furious passions’’ in masters. The character of the latter is formed by relationships with their equals and near-equals, not with inferiors. If anything, Taylor thought that ‘‘the sight of slavery and its vices may inspire the mind with an affection for liberty and virtue, just as the climates and deserts of Arabia, would make it think Italy a paradise.’’ 15 Yet Taylor was anxious not to be thought to ‘‘approve of slavery,’’ while seeing no route to its ending, since he assumed that the practical consequence of emancipation would be a race war in the Haitian manner. He expressed 14. Ibid., 111–12, 115–16. 15. Ibid., 119–24.

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a cautious hope that, if free blacks were removed, ‘‘slavery might then be gradually re-exported, and philanthropy gratified by a slow reanimation of the virtue, religion, and liberty of the negroes, instead of being again afflicted with the effects of her own rash attempts suddenly to change human nature.’’ This, too, was unclear, but the reader is referred to an appendix, which begins: ‘‘The slave-holding states have been deterred from making agricultural improvements, and establishing any tolerable system of police for the management of slaves, by the lazy and hopeless conclusion, that the destruction of their lands, and the irregularities of their negroes, were incurable consequences of slavery.’’ By ‘‘police,’’ Taylor seems to have meant an enforceable slave code which might control not only the slaves but also ‘‘the errors of their owners,’’ even to the point of limiting ‘‘the prerogatives of ownership.’’ So owners should be compelled into paternalism, which would foster slave happiness and diminish runaways, whom Taylor was disposed to punish severely, not only as a lesson to other slaves but as a way to make masters benign. So the slave was improved by being whipped and the master by whipping.16 In another chapter on ‘‘Labour,’’ Taylor again invoked the Haitian prospect. He complained of the folly of ‘‘an amiable and peaceful religious sect,’’ that is, the Quakers, who did not know what they were about, who would occasion civil war and exterminations. If, he asked, the French Revolution could not deliver upon its promises, what hope was there of ‘‘making republicans of negro slaves, and conquerors of ignorant infuriated barbarians?’’ And who in the North really wished to grant full civil equality to the emancipated? ‘‘Negro slavery’’ was an evil which must be confronted: ‘‘To whine over it, is cowardly; to aggravate it, criminal; and to forebear to alleviate it, because it cannot be cured, foolish.’’ So slavery must survive and be made to work as well as statesmanship and prudence could contrive, but Taylor was persistently unclear on how well that might be. That slavery was an evil he said clearly, but for whom? Evidently not for the slaves, who were ‘‘docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed’’ and had no capacity for liberty. Indeed, Taylor went so far as to argue that ‘‘slavery to an individual is preferable to slavery to an interest of faction,’’ that blacks were better off under their present circumstances, than technically free in a Robinocracy.17 For the rest, most of Arator consists of practical advice. Keep your overseers for a long time and pay them well in wages, not in a share of crops; do not be absentee; put up fences; manure; build slave quarters with brick walls; provide slaves with so many coats, shirts, and rations; prefer a four to a three crop rotation; drink cider, and so forth. Therefore Arator is very much 16. Ibid., 124–25, 356–58. 17. Ibid., 176–83.

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a book in the tradition of the De Agri Cultura of Cato the Censor, not least for its interest in the efficiencies of modern farming, but also in the tradition of the innumerable agricultural manuals that crowded the shelves of eighteenthcentury libraries.18 It is mostly a microcosmic book about how to deal with a Virginian plantation, more than a systematic vision of political economy. Leave us alone, Taylor said, let us manage our farms with wisdom and all will be well, or at least less ill. This stance explains why, contrary to usual opinion, Arator is not a pastoral book.19 It is singularly devoid of apostrophes to nature. Taylor’s chapter on ‘‘The Pleasures of Agriculture’’ says nothing Coleridgean about moonlight on the Rappahannock or the deep mysteries of sympathy with Nature, nothing as lyrical as the urban Legaré descanting on waterfalls. Rather Taylor took pleasure in technicality: ‘‘The novelty, frequency, and exactness of accommodations between our ideas and operations, constitutes the most exquisite source of mental pleasure. Agriculture feeds it with endless supplies in the nature of soils, plants, climates, manures, instruments of culture and domestic animals.’’ He did quaintly say that ‘‘[p]oetry, in allowing more virtue to agriculture, than to any other profession, has abandoned her privilege of fiction,’’ and that at the Day of Judgment, farmers would see especial favor. But this dispensation would arise not from any benison of nature, but from the fact that good farming required liberality, and God would reward those who ‘‘feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give drink to the thirsty.’’ So it was not the slave, nor the overseer, nor any dependent (though they all touched nature), who were embraced by the term ‘‘agriculture,’’ but only men like Taylor himself, patriarchs, whose productivity was patriotic, who made luxury possible; ‘‘by combining a thorough knowledge of the real affairs of life, with a necessity for investigating the arcana of nature, and the strongest invitations to the practice of morality, [agriculture] becomes the best architect of a complete man.’’ 20 Little flowed from nature itself, and so Taylor’s book was well named. It is the arator who matters, not nature. He who exploits, not that which is exploited, is central. This helps to explain Taylor’s otherwise contradictory emphasis on using the power of the state, the ‘‘police,’’ to strengthen the hand of the farmer. Alone, the farmer’s power and intelligence were not enough; he needed help. So, at the last, Arator is an authoritarian book, and libertarian only towards the patriarch: everyone and everything else—slave, overseer, cows, corn—is supposed to be controlled. Taylor spoke freely and invidiously of ‘‘capitalists.’’ His usage was adapted 18. On Cato, see N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 214–15. 19. Melvin E. Bradford prefers to call it ‘‘hard pastoral,’’ more Cato than Vergil, but I find this an evasion: see his introduction to Taylor, Arator, 36–38. 20. Ibid., 313–16.

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from that common in eighteenth-century France, which he picked up from Arthur Young’s Travels During the Years, 1787, 1788, and 1789 in France, a work broadly influential on Taylor. The term denoted an investor of capital who sought advantage selfishly, or, as a Parisian dictionary put it in 1790, ‘‘a money monster, [a] man with a heart of stone, who is fond of nothing but cash.’’ In British usage, in Malthus and Ricardo, the word was more neutral and just meant the investor.21 But for Taylor, a capitalist was irresponsible, someone who took everything but made nothing, a man who lacked the liberality that Taylor understood to be the central morality and wisdom of life. Indeed, a final note in the 1818 edition of Arator, written after most of the book, broadened this moral distinction into a social analysis, which much muddied his argument. ‘‘Society,’’ he argued, ‘‘is unavoidably made up of two interests only, in one of which all special and particular modifications of interest are included; namely, one subsisting by industry; the other, by law.’’ The former interest was great and natural, governed by ‘‘good moral principles’’ and embraced chiefly agriculture, but also ‘‘manufacturing, tuition, physic, and all trades and scientific professions.’’ The latter was small and artificial, it was ‘‘constituted of intrigues and stratagems’’ and was made up of the government, the law, and the capitalists, those who could only prosper by exploiting the former and rigging the game.22 Health in a commonwealth resided in the former controlling the latter; but history showed how easily the reverse happened. Despite formal arguments that spoke much of the wide world, John Taylor was an unworldy man. Small things were his passion; how to make a trench, how to use Indian corn. He hated and was eloquent against those who got in his way, those who intruded upon his absorbing game of cultivation, except when he thought they might perfect and not diminish his power. His vision was powerfully moral, whatever one may think of his morality, but it was not macrocosmic. He did not give to stock exchanges, tariffs, rent, currency, and population all the detailed consideration that he gave to enclosing pastures. Indeed, it is hard to extract from Arator anything approaching an economic analysis, which addressed the practical problem of American life. Taylor’s eyes were fixed on a few acres in Virginia, so he said little about New England, or the West, or Mississippi, let alone New York, New Orleans, or Philadelphia. Not even agriculture was broadly considered. The implication is merely vague, that if he was given police help, Taylor and his ilk could make the Virginia plantation productive. But what that meant for America, in general, is curiously unexplored in Arator. This was more explored in his 21. I rely upon the discussion in Shalhope, John Taylor, 187–88. 22. Taylor, Arator, 375–85.

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Tyranny Unmasked of 1821, a book of broader economic scope but a work incomparably less influential. The disjunction is telling. It was hard to contain the microcosm of the farm and the macrocosm of the economy within the same analysis. In his Arator, Taylor tended to be pessimistic about the American future, though his Inquiry (as has been seen) had been less so and had wandered into pessimism because then Taylor had glimpsed the possibility of America doing better and been unsure that such promise would be fulfilled. But Cato is seldom upbeat. In this, a deep-seated Anglophobia was significant. A degenerate England was a lesson of what the world, including America, tended to become. The other people, the schemers, always had the advantage, for they came to control the rules by which the virtuous were forced to play, unless the latter exerted themselves in the public realm. This view was common among old school Jeffersonians, and Jefferson himself (not always a Jeffersonian) was never very decisive about whether the economic future was more to be trusted or feared. The wider intellectual tradition of political economy shed only inconsistent light. Adam Smith himself had been urbane and reassuring, savage towards the mercantilists, but sanguine about a probable world ordered on his principles. Thomas Malthus had introduced a disquieting analysis, explicitly intended to rein in the optimism of Condorcet and Godwin, if more friendly towards them than was usually thought; his caution was set down more in regret than anger.23 ‘‘I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure,’’ he wrote in the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and was not being ironic. ‘‘I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them.’’ As he later explained, to be too optimistic was hard on the nerves, because of incessant disappointment; such a person might be inclined to give up the struggle. Better placed was the moderate realist, prepared for ‘‘the constant struggle . . . calculated to rouse the natural inactivity of man, to call forth his faculties, and invigorate and improve his mind.’’ (Malthus was a moderate Anglican of sweet domesticity.) On the whole, Southerners caught this tone, though they did not always read Malthus in this way and they were also interested by the braver promises of Jean-Baptiste Say, who made much of political economy as a science, which might offer liberation from merely human constraints. Say was a Baconian and almost all Southerners in principle saw a wisdom in ‘‘only admitting facts carefully observed, and the consequences rigorously deduced from them; thereby effectually excluding those prejudices 23. Or so, persuasively, it is argued in Winch, Riches and Poverty, 223–405.

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and authorities which, in every department of literature and science, have so often been interposed between man and truth.’’ The French tradition offered firmer sureties than the British. Claude-Frédéric Bastiat’s confident rebuttal of the protectionists was translated in 1848 by Louisa McCord as Sophisms of the Protective Policy. David Ricardo, it is true, had offered ‘‘principles of political economy and taxation,’’ but Ricardo was a diffident, unsure man, whose tone was tentative even when his words indicated certainty. Further, the English tradition, not excluding Malthus, was much more interested in the moral and Christian dimensions of a subject explicitly concerned with matters of luxury, poverty, and the distribution of wealth. Where there was Christianity and ethics, there was controversy, especially in the South. For a slaveholder might have often mixed feelings about ethics. The claim that political economy was a science seemed to offer a comfortingly dispassionate alternative. ‘‘Men and prejudices have gone against us,’’ Louisa McCord observed in De Bow’s Review in 1856. But ‘‘science cannot be swayed by prejudice and outcry. . . . All that is now needed for the defence of United States negro slavery and its entire exoneration, is a thorough investigation of fact. . . . [F]act! fact! fact! . . . and Political Economy . . . will and must be our judge.’’ 24 Thomas Dew was probably the political economist who benefited most from this interest in science, the man whom most Southerners thought soundest, precisely because his tone was so decisive, so comfortingly didactic. The South sat in his classroom and was told what to think. His Lectures on the Restrictive System (1829) were first given to the young ‘‘gentlemen’’ of the College of William and Mary and have, as a consequence, an insistently paternal air. So, ‘‘In a former lecture . . . I showed you that consumption was the end and object of production.’’ And, ‘‘This proposition appears to me, and I have no doubt to you likewise, with minds yet pure and unsophisticated.’’ In Thomas Cooper’s contemporary lectures, by comparison, all was disorder. Cooper advised his students ‘‘to read me . . . with distrust; and concede nothing to authority.’’ In Dew, all is cool progression and priggish dispassion, flowing outward from a man who claimed to be as ‘‘calm and unprejudiced as the stoic philosopher of old.’’ ‘‘It will be my constant aim, as far as possible, to avoid mingling in the politics of the day. Far be it from me, within these venerable walls, consecrated to literature and science, to heap opprobrium and 24. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: Text, Sources and Background, Criticism, ed. Philip Appleman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 18; the quotation on the moderate realist comes from an appendix to the 1806 second edition of the Essay, 230, quoted in Winch, Riches and Poverty, 295–96; Jean-Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy; or the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliot, 1836), xvii; ‘‘Slavery and Political Economy,’’ DBR 21 (November 1856): 444–45, in Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 445–46.

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William Garl Brown[e], Thomas Roderick Dew (1860) (Courtesy Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary, purchased from the artist)

censure upon any of the individuals who have been prominent in the councils of the nation: we are here in search of truth, and consequently can consent to modify our opinions by no party considerations.’’ This was de haut en bas. ‘‘It would be descending, indeed, from the dignity which pertains to the office I have the honour to fill, were I to enter into the political arena, and mingle in the angry strife and turmoil of party dissension.’’ In theory, then, Dew’s political economy was supposed be all economical, little political. In practice, it was everywhere political. His object was to turn Virginian students into devoted enemies of Henry Clay: ‘‘It is the great duty of the Professor to inculcate upon the mind of the Student those general principles alone, which may form the basis of his future opinions and actions.’’ 25 This intention did not go unnoticed. In 1843, there was a controversy in Virginian newspapers over whether Dew had produced a generation of intolerant disciples of free trade.26 Certainly that had been his plan, the purpose of his seamless and authoritarian narrative. 25. Thomas R. Dew, Lectures on the Restrictive System Delivered to the Senior Political Class of William and Mary College (1829; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 3, 9, 75, 47, iv; TC, Two Essays: 1. on the Foundations of Civil Government: 2. on the Constitution of the United States (Columbia, S.C.: D. & J. M. Faust, 1826), iii. 26. Stephen Mansfield, ‘‘Thomas Roderick Dew at William and Mary: ‘A Main Prop of That Venerable Institution,’’’ Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 75 (October 1967): 440–41.

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Dew was lecturing concurrently on metaphysics and government, and both intermingled strongly in his version of political economy. His vision of the human experience is fairly bleak, far more so than Adam Smith’s. For Dew, man desires happiness but is beset by difficulties, evils, and anxiety. He ‘‘resembles the waterman, who rows his boat against the running stream; his constant exertions are necessary to his continued progress; and if there be any intermission of exertion on his part, the boat proceeds more slowly on its course, and only by the impetus which had been before communicated, and soon unless he renews his labour begins to float down the current.’’ Man is constantly making, selling, buying, working. The great engine of progress is self-interest, which has felled forests, built cities, and transformed the ‘‘dreary wilderness.’’ This instinct does not need governments to direct it, for individuals prosper most by an ‘‘enlightened self-interest.’’ By self-knowledge, men come to know their own interests and capacities, better than any government can discern or judge. On the whole, man is a species of strivers. The indolent are an exception, mere ‘‘deformed and unnatural specimens’’ of humanity. Men might sometimes be ‘‘imperfect and blundering,’’ but history shows that governments have been more so, marked by little but ‘‘incompetency and imperfections.’’ 27 Like Taylor, Dew was tied to the Virginian experience, but he had a wider vision, too. He took the idea of the United States seriously, partly because he took the idea of nationality seriously. So, ‘‘general principles are frequently much more true when applied to nations than to individuals.’’ He often used language that indicated a belief that nations had natural potentialities. So, some countries ‘‘have latent capacities of indefinite extent, for the production of cotton.’’ But Dew was at pains to repudiate the assumption that a nation was more than the sum of its parts, that it had ‘‘a corporative capacity, as wholly distinct from the individuals who compose it.’’ Rather, ‘‘the interest of the nation is identified with that of individuals,’’ but all of them, ‘‘all the various classes of society,’’ even slaves, who were men not ‘‘property alone, like horses and cattle.’’ Concomitantly, government has no prerogatives ‘‘in its corporative capacity’’ to possess ‘‘rights, privileges and interests at war with those of the individuals of the community.’’ Government is but the broker who prevents the strong from exploiting the weak, and protects the community against external enemies. The more perfectly a government contains the diverse elements of a society, the better it works. The more sectarian are the ruling interests (as in monarchies, aristocracies), the less well is society managed. So wise government and political economy have a sympathy, a shared stake in diversity participating in their operations.28 27. Dew, Restrictive System, 4, 7, 5, 8. 28. Ibid., 7, 87, 9–10, 12.

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But Dew did not think that an individual had a responsibility to foster economic nationalism, to buy more expensively at home when he might buy more cheaply abroad. For one thing, he believed (contra Henry Clay) that protectionism offered only fleeting advantages to American manufacturing and could not effect a permanent transition to an industrial culture. As important, he drew little analytical distinction between the division of labor within a society, and that between societies. As climates and soils varied, so would the produce of different nations: ‘‘An active and a free commerce will enable each section and each latitude to produce the commodity which naturally befits it.’’ He came very close to articulating a global vision. Goods were produced hither and yon, and ‘‘consumers, whether rich or poor, experience the beneficial effects, no matter whether they inhabit on the banks of the Ganges, the Tagus, or the Po, or upon the banks of the Mississippi, the Amazon, or the La Plata: no matter whether they live upon the sea-shore, or far in the interior of our western regions, where the goods can only arrive after a long and tedious journey by water and by land, by canal and turnpike.’’ So the individual, rowing upstream, should find his provisions for the journey as cheaply as wherever he might. In all this, Dew was closer to the Enlightenment, to the sense that nations were a thin buffer between the individual and the world, a bargain and not a kinship. He says, at one point, that an individual is ill advised to look to governments for guidance in understanding his own interests; ‘‘Let him be directed by his friends and his relations, whom nature points out as his guardians.’’ Family is natural, but the state is an artificiality. Likewise, an economy is best when natural, unforced. Dew quotes Fénelon to the effect ‘‘that trade is like the native spring of the rock, best and most abundant when suffered to flow through the channel into which nature directs it, but often diminished, and sometimes wholly destroyed, by an attempt at improvement.’’ Indeed, for so cool an intelligence, Dew sometimes tempted himself with mysticisms: ‘‘I do believe, that trade has within itself a self-sustaining energy, which remedies, often to a considerable extent, the blunders of legislation. As there is in the human body what the physiologist terms the vis medicatrix naturae, or the healing power of nature; so in the body politic, there is the vis medicatrix reipublicae, or the healing power of the Republic.’’ 29 Dew was much taken with the idea of fluidity. Change is inevitable and desirable, though it often comes with short-term pain. This attitude manifested itself in many ways, but strikingly in his views on migration. It was the Virginian experience to see people leave, to observe them abandoning the James River for the Ohio and the Mississippi. Dew knew the anguish of this: ‘‘There is no person who will be more ready to admit the great inconveniences attendant on emigration, than myself. I know too well the pangs which even 29. Ibid., 15, 22, 112, 6, 90.

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a temporary absence from our homes, friends and relatives, may occasion, not to be impressed fully with the extent of the sorrow and affliction of those who part forever from the scenes of their youth.’’ (Dew himself traveled, but remained very rooted in eastern Virginia; his birthplace in King and Queen County was very close to Williamsburg, whose college he always refused to leave despite frequent lucrative blandishments.) Many were bent upon preventing this bleeding away, and argued for density of population as the prerequisite of prosperity. But Dew believed, from his reading of American history, that prosperity lay in dispersal: ‘‘I believe where the government is a good one, a thin population, spread over a great extent of soil, will accumulate capital much more rapidly than a dense population, enclosed in narrow limits.’’ As will become evident, in this sense Dew was more thoroughly an American political economist than Thomas Cooper, or even George Tucker. They tended to reason from European experience and fit America in, with varying degrees of care. But Dew reasoned from the American scene. A Jeffersonian, he turned his back on a Europe ‘‘torn, disjointed, and oppressed.’’ Less passionately, he was at pains to explain the idiosyncratic circumstances that had made modern British wealth, which did not apply to the United States.30 The reader gets from Dew a coherent portrait of the American economy: how it had fared during the Napoleonic Wars, the nature and scale of its exports, its manufacturing base, its fluctuating tariffs, its trade with Cuba or South America, its money supply, wage rates, and the like. More fundamentally, Dew examined the economic data of the American colonial period and the new republic, to observe that there had been prosperity, and to conclude that more of the same might be wisdom. It was in this sense, ironically, that, as an American, Dew opposed the American System, which was (as Dew understood it) an artificial remaking of the United States in the image of Britain as it had been. Dew wanted America to be itself. Migration was the American way, as it expressed ‘‘a man’s natural liberty.’’ But, equally, for Dew this liberal system was much attended by pain, was not easy, was still a case of rowing upstream. A market was a messy, imprecise business, which only worked in the long term. That is, Dew had partly caught the chastened mood of Malthus, however little he thought the precise doctrine of Malthus was applicable to the American experience. But only partly, for Dew was an Episcopalian, not an Anglican, so he was marked by moments of American optimism. ‘‘Where, I would ask, is the nation that enjoys the freedom of America? When we walk abroad, we are as free as the air that encircles us. . . . Energy can never be wanting, where this is the case.’’ 31 To be free to act was to act. 30. Ibid., 44, 45, 185, 137–41. 31. Ibid., 46, 121.

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On the great matter of the moral claims of agriculture and industry, Dew was clear, if crude. Though Dew saw the professions as intellectually stimulating, he was otherwise silent about the merits of urban life and eloquent about the anomie of the factory worker who ‘‘can sum up the labour of his life in the clipping of the wire with which a pin is made, or who has been engaged in watching or working at some part of a vast machine, to which he may be said to form but a contemptible appendage.’’ Like Taylor, Dew thought that agriculture presented many tasks, both physically and intellectually demanding. Unlike Taylor, he believed that ‘‘the external scenery . . . of nature, is well calculated to enlarge and liberalise the mind,’’ and gushed (with quotation from Archibald Alison) about waving trees, flowing rivers, darkening clouds, and sunshine. In factories, by contrast, children were sundered from parents, there was sickness, disease, unemployment, and instability. He accepted Sismondi as having accurately described all this misery. He quoted Jefferson’s famous apostrophe on the morality of those who labored in the earth and were chosen by God. He rejected John Ramsay McCulloch’s argument that manufacturing begat invention, fertility of ideas, and so human improvement. And Dew rejected it for class reasons, for he reasoned that factories gathered together the lowly, who only shared and amplified their vices: ‘‘A society of operatives, of the lowest and most ignorant classes of the community, might enjoy each other’s conversation through life, without improvement, either to the head or the heart.’’ 32 (There were few lowly people in Dew’s Williamsburg lecture room.) Insofar as manufacturing brought the genteel into contact with the vulgar, by so much was morality diminished. Above all, manufactures created great cities, which were begetters of mobs and political instability, which in turn begat police, espionage, and standing armies. Dew, it must be remembered, had traveled in Restoration France, and lived in the time of Peterloo. But, like Taylor and Jefferson, he thought that great capitalists made parasitic dependents of their operatives, which undermined a virtuous suffrage. Of the many things that separated Dew out from the older Virginian tradition, however, perhaps most apparent is his relative indifference to the idea of independence, to its possibility in a modern world. Henry Clay revolted at the idea of being economically dependent on Britain. Dew saw safety in it, if the dependence was reciprocal. He quoted William Branch Giles as saying that this was ‘‘a world of relations and dependencies,’’ that ‘‘this mutuality of dependence neutralizes its effects, and produces a relative independence, which is all the independence which is practicable or desirable amongst mankind in private life.’’ In Dew’s own words, ‘‘positive independence [can] not 32. Ibid., 144, 146. Dew cites ‘‘Nouveaux Principes d’Economie Politique, par M. de Sismondi, second paris Edition, Tom. 2d, p,313–14,’’ ibid., 149.

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be enjoyed in this world of relations.’’ This was in marked contrast to many, including Taylor and Calhoun, who spoke warmly of plantations as isolated, patriarchal communities. With Dew, all is mixed. He pointed to his coat in the classroom of William and Mary, said he had bought it in France, but explained how very many people had been necessary to make it, before ‘‘it finally reached my back, where it is to be consumed, unless it shall pass into the hands of my servant.’’ 33 From any individual spreads out myriads of interconnections, which explains why governments cannot benefit economies: the thing is too complicated and shifting, even to be grasped, let alone to be rationally influenced. Though Dew valued his community, he defended the exogenous. For him, localism was too fixed, imperfect, and prejudiced: ‘‘Let but the foreigner, however, come among us, and how soon will he point them [our peculiarities] out, and make us sensible of them: or, let any one, with all his prejudices, start from the narrow circle in which he has hitherto been moving, and form a more extensive acquaintance with the world, and his prejudices and peculiarities will begin to wear away.’’ This was desirable. ‘‘Improvement . . . arises, when we associate or come into collision with those who can correct our faults.’’ Theory was what comprehended these collisions. Political economy, no doubt, rested on Baconian observation, ‘‘fact and experience.’’ But the world was constantly moving. ‘‘Throughout all animated nature, we see still greater bustle, change, and movement; we see event following event in quick succession; mind operating upon matter, and matter upon mind.’’ If all was random, man had no hope of rational response, for ‘‘the stone which fell to earth to-day, might mount upwards tomorrow.’’ 34 Fortunately, God had laid down laws and given man reason, but he needed more than common sense.35 He could only act wisely ‘‘by an accurate observance of the past: there is no event which he could possibly have anticipated by mere reason alone, without the aid of experience.’’ Things changed too much for Burkeanism to be safe: ‘‘The great difference between the common sense, or matter of fact reasoners, and those charged with theory, is, that the former seem to’’—here Dew was quoting Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind 36—‘‘‘consider the actual institutions of mankind as the only safe 33. Ibid., 134, 4–5. Dew cites ‘‘Mr. Giles’ Pamphlet on the Tariff, Appendix, pp.178–9’’ ibid., 131. 34. Ibid., 146, 187. 35. Though Jesse Burton Harrison took from the Germans a disregard for Scottish philosophers, he has a passage influenced by Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (itself similar to Dugald Stewart) which echoes Dew’s indictment of the adequacy of common sense. See JBH, ‘‘English Civilization,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 478–88. 36. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 2 vols. (1813; reprint, Boston: James Munroe, 1836–37), 1:172.

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foundation for our conclusions, and think every plan of legislation is chimerical, which is not copied from one which has already been realized; while the others apprehend in many cases, we may reason safely, a priori, from the known principles of human nature, combined with the particular circumstances of the times.’ ’’ There was no escape from theory—‘‘men who call so loudly for facts and reject all theory, are in fact the greatest theorists’’—only wise management of it by self-knowledge. This was a characteristic argument of political economists, who were aware that what they taught was difficult. ‘‘To despise Political Economy . . . and to rely upon experience and common sense, is plain folly,’’ was how Gwinn put it in 1849. But this contention was also designed to demonstrate that people like Dew should be heeded by politicians. As Dew put it, ‘‘When men rise in deliberative bodies, and thank their God they are no political economists, no theorists, they in a short time shew by their unwarrantable generalizations, how much they stand in need of that sound theory against which their philippics are directed.’’ And who were the people like Dew? ‘‘The philosophers who sit as passengers in the ship of State, and observe with calm but scrutinizing eye, all the movements on the deck.’’ 37 In this sense, Thomas Cooper was not the man to perfect a Southern political economy, for no one was less calm than Cooper.38 Nonetheless, the Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy provided a good, if volcanically idiosyncratic tour of the new discipline, a book that was widely read and used, not only in the South. This influence arose partly because Cooper, unlike Dew, conveyed a polemical enthusiasm for the beneficial consequences of these dry matters. Even when speaking of the Stygean gloom of Lord Liverpool’s England, Cooper could discern that the dispersal of the truths of political economy occasioned ‘‘a glimpse of the dawn of a new day; and of peace on earth, and good will toward men.’’ Further, Cooper went quickly to the heart of the matter in his first few pages, so that the student might carry away a few simple and warming nostrums, to replace ‘‘the wicked and destructive tendency of the old maxims’’ and to see, instead, that ‘‘men and nations gain in prosperity, in proportion as their neighbors gain,’’ that impoverishing consumers is bad business, that ‘‘a spendthrift government and a spendthrift individual, are public nuisances,’’ and that ‘‘the time . . . is fast approaching in Europe, when 37. Dew, Restrictive System, 188, 192, 194, 195; Charles John Morris Gwinn, ‘‘Whateley’s Political Economy,’’ SQR 15 (April 1849): 27. 38. Of the various accounts of Cooper’s political economy, the best is Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity, 141–52. But see also William C. Whitten, ‘‘The Economic Ideas of Thomas Cooper,’’ Essays in Economics, no. 20 (June 1969): 44–82, and Michael D. Bordo and William H. Phillips, ‘‘Faithful Index to the Ambitions and Fortunes of the State: The Development of Political Economy at South Carolina College,’’ in Barber, Breaking the Academic Mold, 42–71.

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it will be thought there, as it is known here, the government which is effective at the least expense to the people, is the best government.’’ 39 Thomas Cooper was, if nothing else, a proponent of modernity and so he sketched an intellectual history, in which the ancients knew little of this ‘‘science of modern date,’’ the Middle Ages were hobbled by feudalism and ‘‘monkish Christianity,’’ and the early modern era was besotted by ‘‘the mercantile system . . . founded on the silly fallacy of the Balance of Trade.’’ The heir of mercantilism was ‘‘the manufacturing system,’’ ‘‘a system equally absurd and selfish, with its ‘‘monopoly, exclusive privilege, restriction, and prohibition.’’ Then came the new science of political economy: first Sir Dudley North in 1691, then Sir James Steuart in 1768, then Adam Smith in 1776, while in France Quesnay and the Physiocrats shed a different light, followed by Mirabeau, Mercier de la Rivière, Pont de Nemours, Turgot, and Condorcet. Subsequently, there were Malthus, Ricardo, Say, Sismondi, McCulloch, and the elder Mill. This was the genealogy of the subject’s founders. Likewise, Cooper spent much time on elementary definitions, things for undergraduates to memorize and write in notebooks, and spent several pages listing the erroneous maxims of the exploded orthodoxy. More broadly, he premised that political economy was not to do with politics, but was ‘‘that science which develops the sources, the distribution, the accumulation, and the consumption of national wealth.’’ 40 His greatest originality lay in being more preoccupied with the problem of distributing wealth than was common, but he was otherwise conventional in stressing the centrality of private property and the destructiveness of taxation. Cooper had once been an English political radical, and remained one in his own funny way. He had come to economics from the domain of politics and the law. To him, the attraction of this new discipline was its message of freedom, a thing he felt more deeply even than Dew, who spoke much of liberty but had never spent time in jail for defying a government, as Cooper had. The ethic of liberty that had drawn Cooper from Manchester to Jacobin Paris and then into exile in America found a satisfactory echo in the nostrums of political economy, where political morality and financial expediency coincided. To Cooper, it was clear that ‘‘the permanent and regular increase of human population and human comfort, is founded on the absence of all favored and privileged orders, classes, professions and pursuits . . . [and] on the fair and honest operation of equal rights, equal laws, equal protection to every citizen in every honest pursuit, and in the unrestricted expenditure of all his hon39. TC, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, edition no. 2, with additions (London: R. Hunter; Columbia, S.C.: M’Morris & Wilson, 1831), iv–v. 40. Ibid., 8, 7.

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est earnings.’’ Cooper reasoned like a parvenu with a memory. ‘‘Monopolists are rich and influential—who speaks for the Poor?’’ is a Cooper question, not one that comes from Dew, but a question rooted more in Cooper’s memory of Manchester than his experience of Columbia.41 Perhaps not inaptly, since he had migrated across cultures, Cooper mistrusted the idea of nationality, especially but not exclusively in political economy: ‘‘The moral entity—the grammatical being called a nation, has been clothed in attributes that have no real existence except in the imagination of those who metamorphose a word into a thing; and convert a mere grammatical contrivance, into an existing and intelligent being.’’ For Cooper, nations were no more than ‘‘the individuals who compose it, in the capacity of members of a political community.’’ These individuals had moral obligations which were not absolute but social: ‘‘There are no rules of morality— there is no such thing as virtue or vice, but what originates from our connections with other creatures.’’ So Cooper had no belief in natural rights. ‘‘Horne Tooke’s etymology is well founded,’’ he observed. ‘‘Right is, rectum, directum, from regere, dirigere: that which is commanded, ordered, directed. . . . All laws . . . are the directions and regulations of a body of men, combined for mutual convenience, into a society or community, prescribing what is for the common good, and inforcing obedience by their combined powers.’’ People like Hugo Grotius and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui might ‘‘boast of a law of nature and of nations,’’ but Cooper was scathingly dismissive of such bombast. ‘‘There is no such thing,’’ he insisted. ‘‘What is called the law of nature, consists of systems fabricated by theoretical writers, on a contemplation of what might be usefully acknowledged among men as binding on each other.’’ And Cooper was a sort of utilitarian. His father-in-law, Joseph Priestley, had after all coined the phrase ‘‘the greatest good of the greatest number,’’ which Cooper quoted approvingly in his lectures. Utilitarianism in some hands, of course, might be authoritarian and prescriptive, in ways beyond even Cooper’s understanding of social compulsion. In Adam Smith’s fashion, rather, Cooper understood the greatest good to be served by independence and a judicious selfishness; ‘‘the motive of self interest . . . is more efficacious than all the laws that can be enacted.’’ 42 So Cooper saw political economy, not as ‘‘detached and desultory’’ as Jacob Cardozo was later to suggest, but scientific. However, unlike Say to whom science was all certainty, Cooper as a chemist knew that in every science, ‘‘doubts and mistakes have arisen and may arise, when the antecedent circumstances are partially, and imperfectly observed, and when conclusions are deduced 41. Ibid., 27, 28. 42. Ibid., 63, 64, 29, 30.

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from incomplete premises.’’ Still, since The Wealth of Nations, experience had removed many doubts, to the point that Cooper believed there were ‘‘elementary truths, settled and uncontrovertible.’’ These had their definitions, which he proceeded to give. Wealth, labor, wages, produce, rent, of all these and many more he gave brief, efficient, and wildly inconsistent descriptions. All of Cooper’s chapters are extended definitions, laced with brisk commentary. Indeed, so freely did Cooper narrate and digress that one can find many of his characteristic themes in the book: his desire for legal codification, demand for education, passionate anticlericalism, impatient belief in individualism, even his interest in women being better educated rather than ‘‘silly play things . . . dependent on their husbands.’’ The chief pleasure of Cooper—and the main source of irritation to his many critics—was his decisiveness and confidence, which was no respecter of reputations. So, ‘‘According to Adam Smith, wealth is the result of land and labour. Be it so. But this does not tell us what wealth is. The cause is one thing; the effect is another. According to Lord Lauderdale, wealth is every thing useful and delightful to man. This is too vague.’’ Unlike Taylor, Cooper thought little of Smith’s relegating many to a quasi-parasitic role. Rather, Cooper defended the utility and necessity of ‘‘legislative, executive and judicial officers,’’ lawyers and physicians, ‘‘carriers, factors, agents, bankers and their necessary sub-assistants,’’ as well as ‘‘men of science, teachers and instructors,’’ and ‘‘paper makers, printers, booksellers, and all that class of society.’’ Cooper even allowed that clergymen were ‘‘in the present state of society’’ not dispensable, though he placed an asterisk against them in the text and added in a footnote, ‘‘A future, better informed state of society, will assuredly dispense altogether with a hired and paid clergy.’’ 43 Certainly, he was an early advocate of the notion that science by its inventiveness made wealth. In general, Cooper leaned to the moral and empirical superiority of agriculture over manufacturing. He seems, oddly, to have believed (what would have been unintelligible to John Taylor) that agricultural improvements were a permanent accretion of capital investment, whereas industrial machinery wore down and became ‘‘useless and out of date.’’ So, ‘‘A field of twenty acres fenced with a stone fence, or a live hedge, or with post and rail charred, accompanied with a good brick or stone barn, will be of the same use three centuries, as on the day these improvements were finished,’’ Cooper sanguinely observed, with the ignorant omniscience of a nonfarmer talking about the countryside. Slightly more persuasive were his beliefs that ‘‘[t]he employments of agriculture are healthy, and invigorating. They bring up a robust and hardy peasantry. Not so in manufactures: a system in England very hurtful 43. Jacob N. Cardozo, ‘‘Political Economy—Rent,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 195; TC, Political Economy, 35–36, 111, 73, 116.

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to the body and the mind. Both are depraved.’’ At odds with the conventional wisdom that commerce by creating interdependence made international peace—Legaré believed this—was Cooper’s bleaker sense that ‘‘[m]anufactures and commerce are the great perpetual sources in modern days of national quarrels. They are war-breeders.’’ Still, Cooper was an urban man and believed that large cities were indispensable to human improvement. He was also a scientist, conscious that agriculture, though moral and productive, was not intellectually demanding: ‘‘There cannot be in a merely agricultural country, the same quantity of knowledge and of intellect as in a country that combines manufactures and commerce with agriculture. . . . Agriculture stands less in need of [science and art]. The power of intellect and knowledge is abundantly called in play in a manufacturing and commercial country only.’’ 44 So, he was oblivious of John Taylor’s intellectual excitement about the niceties of cultivation. Indeed, Cooper argued that agriculture was the healthier for a commercial sector that produced consumers for agricultural products, and furnished technical inventiveness. Cooper was especially vain about science as the master of nature. Men had commanded wind, water, magnetism, and electricity: ‘‘We have made the planetary system subservient to our hourly enjoyments; and we are proceeding daily in the glorious career of overcoming the obstacles which nature has placed in the path of our wishes, and of subjecting all her elements to our controul.’’ These scientific gifts made insignificant those of poets, orators, and rhetoricians, who were but ‘‘the inventors of play things for the childhood of society; whose labours have in instances innumerable made mankind the worse; in some, very few instances perhaps the better; and even these few, it would be difficult to enumerate and substantiate.’’ It is well to remember that Cooper’s book existed because, at South Carolina College, he had begun to lecture on political economy, having passed on other teaching to Henry Junius Nott. He seems to have regarded that former task of lecturing as a sort of prison, for he wrote of ‘‘being freed from the Professorship of Rhetoric, Criticism, and Belles Lettres.’’ ‘‘Knowledge is power’’ was one of Cooper’s favorite nostrums, but some kinds of knowledge were more powerful than others.45 Nonetheless, Cooper knew well enough that industry could breed unemployment, misery, and starvation: these were ‘‘dreadful draw backs from the splendid prosperity of the manufacturing system’’ and refuted the optimisms of Say and Ricardo, ‘‘who think that production will tempt and produce production without end; and that a glut in production cannot take place.’’ In this, Cooper agreed with Malthus and Sismondi. Economists, Cooper thought, 44. TC, Political Economy, 131, 132, 299, 133. 45. Ibid., 212, iii, 325.

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‘‘do not allow sufficient importance to time,’’ that is, to the awkward transitions in an economy; ‘‘It is not easy for capital to quit suddenly in an accustomed path and destination.’’ Most important, he disagreed with Jacob Cardozo’s easy faith in the justice of employers, and indeed was not opposed to trade unions. Industry encouraged overpopulation, which led to cheap labor and low wages; moreover, it overspecialized skills in workers. Worse was that industrial workers were robbed of ‘‘all independence of mind . . . when the body is thus enslaved.’’ Becoming ‘‘servile tools of the capitalist,’’ they became political, as well as economic dependents: ‘‘They must act politically as he wishes; they must vote as he votes.’’ As bad was Cooper’s belief that manufacturing tended ‘‘to drive out of trade all men of moderate wealth, and personal industry, and to concentrate the enormous power of great capital in the hands of a limited monied aristocracy.’’ Strangely, he felt that ‘‘[f ]rom all these serious objections agriculture is free.’’ 46 But Cooper was indecisive about industry. His chapter ‘‘On Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce Generally, and on Colonies’’ can be read as, on balance, anti-industrialist. Manufacturing made great wealth, employment, and stimulated a more imaginative agriculture, but it also destroyed independence and health, made wars, misery, and unemployment, and made men the instruments of an industrial oligopoly. Elsewhere, Cooper suggested that manufacturers were ‘‘by inclination and by interest, here and every where, monopolists, whose representations are always to be suspected.’’ That is, they would always want what Henry Clay was willing to give them. But, in another chapter, ‘‘Of Manufactures and Machinery,’’ Cooper was more positive. True, machinery had a way of replacing human beings, and of making misery. But he thought these were mostly short-term effects, notable but bearable, remembering that ‘‘[g]ood, pure and unmixed, is not to be expected in the course of human affairs.’’ In the long term, new machinery meant profit, demand, a better product, national wealth, greater capital, employment, and a healthier population: ‘‘We ought to be contented with such a result, although it be attended for a short time with an amount of evil which we are unable completely to provide against.’’ But little of this was healthily possible without the end of protectionism and the inauguration of laissez-faire. To prefer the American System was mere ‘‘ignorance.’’ This latter standpoint was, in fact, not uncharacteristic of South Carolinians. Even David James McCord observed in 1846 that ‘‘South-Carolina has never been opposed to manufactures. She has always seen their benefit when not forced at the expense of the community, but undertaken and conducted by individual enterprise.’’ 47 46. Ibid., 134–36. 47. Ibid., 209, 214, 229–30; David James McCord, ‘‘Mr. Clay and the American System,’’ SQR 10 (July 1846): 193.

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Cooper’s belief in free trade was much rooted in his legal philosophy. He was, after all, the American editor of The Institutes of Justinian and wrote frequently on legal matters. Laissez-faire was, for him and above all, a matter of equality before the law. This mattered more deeply to Cooper than even the practical matter of wealth or its absence. The heart of his views are contained in the following passage: The principles of Political Economy . . . are, protect nothing but by laws affording a common protection to every citizen in the same respect; encourage the honest pursuits of every citizen alike, favouring none, restraining none. Leave the employment of individual industry and capital to the individuals who own it; interfere in no private concerns. Keep us from attacks from without, from dissension, fraud, and vice within; let the burthens of the government fall as equally as possible on the citizens who are benefited by the blessings of government, and in proportion to their ability to bear the burthen of taxation; do not wantonly, or on speculations untried, and on promises for which no guarantee can be given, tax one citizen for the benefit of another, or rob one man of his honest gains to swell the profits of his neighbour. Let liberty be truly the parent of equality, and be cautious of governing over much.48 In this can be discerned the voice of the emigré, who had spent much of his life fending off the persecutions of governments and factions. Pitt had driven Cooper from England, the Federalists had put him in jail in Pennsylvania for seditious journalism, the Presbyterians had prevented his appointment to the University of Virginia and eventually would drive him from his presidency of South Carolina College. Having experienced all this pressure, he wanted to be left alone, for more than his economic activities. ‘‘Laissez nous faire,’’ the old maxim that French merchants had uttered to Jean-Baptiste Colbert when he had asked them what they needed from government, was for Cooper an urgent, moral, personal matter. He wanted to be left alone to work in his chemical laboratory, write his books and journalism, say indiscreet things about the Pentateuch, and not pay a price for it. In turn, he did not think people should be rewarded for interfering in the lives of others. He did not want to see others corruptly rewarded for flattering the Congress or God and getting their bounties for making empty promises about the economy or eternity. By the same token, he did not ask to be helped. He has a blistering and misogynist passage about the foolishness of charity, a vituperation of poor William Paley for lauding the instinct of pity. ‘‘These,’’ Cooper said, ‘‘are the ethics of sentimental novelists—of that morbid sensi48. TC, Political Economy, 253.

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bility that induces a weak female to indulge all her charitable dispositions, not for the sake of doing good upon reflection, but to get rid of the uneasiness, she has accustomed herself to indulge at the sight of pain.’’ This was useless self-indulgence. One should want to increase human happiness and diminish misery; this was the utilitarian doctrine. But this arose from no ‘‘idiot sensibility, consisting in obeying our feelings at the expense of every other rational consideration,’’ from no ‘‘morbid tenderness of mind.’’ 49 Such a philosophy might be harsh. Cooper’s palliative was education, for the support of which he demanded extraordinary, radical intervention by government. It was the duty of every state, he said flatly, to provide immediately ‘‘a complete and comprehensive system of impartial and universal education,’’ open to all ‘‘without money and without price,’’ who might attend lectures or neglect them, ‘‘so long as he sees his own advantage in so doing.’’ He did not even exclude its extension to women, though he unconvincingly pleaded his own incompetence to judge the matter. Cooper was under no illusion that such a system would create equality of condition, just the chance to compete: ‘‘Nature, and the unavoidable circumstances of society, have created inequalities that are also unavoidable.’’ Absent this educational leviathan, Cooper inclined to oppose universal suffrage, which prematurely enacted might only serve to consolidate oligarchy.50 This unpitying individualism in Cooper underlay his hostility to the cooperativeness of socialism. He did not, like Smith and Bentham, think that self-interest was rational. ‘‘When I was young,’’ he said, ‘‘I was desirous, like Mr. Bentham and his followers, of deducing the maxims of civil government, from what seemed to be the prevailing tendencies of human nature; and I took for granted, that every man, and every body of men, would act uniformly on the obvious motive of self-interest.’’ In this, he was ‘‘mistaken,’’ for men also act ‘‘from caprice, from prejudice, from flattery, from temporary excitements, from unfounded likings and dislikings, from imperfect apprehension . . . from unavoidable want of information, from sudden impulse, from want of reflection and consideration.’’ 51 Nature was no guide to action. Only experience demonstrated what was useful for the public good, not abstraction. Cooper, however, nowhere explained how the judge of experience himself escaped the caprices of human nature. Cooper was Enlightened enough to believe that freedom and the diffusion of knowledge would add to society’s abundance, but Romantic enough to know that humans might be no better morally for this. So, the Southern undergraduates who learned from Dr. Cooper had a 49. Ibid., 310–11. 50. Ibid., 327, 334, 362–66. 51. Ibid., 332–33.

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curious guide. The Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy were tumultuously European in emphasis, digressive in subject matter, full of heterodoxies struggling against the conventionality of its laissez-faire doctrines. There is little that is comfortable in Cooper. His narrative voice is confident, but his tone vies with his vision of an uncertain, tense, shifting world. His myriad of tiny facts makes a pattern, but only just, as an act of repression. But Cooper was, if nothing else, engagé. At one point, he chirpily reprints the proceedings of a ‘‘meeting of the Planters, Merchants, and others, inhabitants of the town of Columbia, and its vicinity,’’ in 1827 to protest ‘‘the right assumed by our National Government, of imposing high duties on Foreign Manufactures,’’ duly signed by a gaggle of proto-Nullifiers, including William Campbell Preston, Henry Junius Nott, David James McCord, and Cooper himself.52 For Cooper, the classroom had few pretensions; it was no dispassionate antechamber to the real world, just a place where free discussion might take place. Reading his book is like nothing so much as hearing an opinionated old man raising his voice in a tavern above the din of others’ talk. Amid such a cacophony, though, the Southern student usually chose to hear the conventional more than the unconventional dimensions of Cooper’s thought, for it was unusual for a Southern academic to do other than endorse a strict laissez-faire. George Frederick Holmes asked Lieber in 1847, ‘‘Is there any instance of any scientific writer upon Political Economy laying down other doctrine than those of free trade?—or any Professor of this Branch of study in any of our colleges lecturing against it?’’ The books used as textbooks show this. Lieber in 1836 was using the smaller version of Thomas Cooper’s lectures. By 1843 he was using Say, supplemented by his own essays on property and labor, but by 1848 had added ‘‘Paley’s Political Philosophy.’’ After Lieber’s departure, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet inherited the teaching of political economy and, to the scandal of Oscar Lieber, started using Francis Wayland. This seems to have been controversial enough to require Longstreet to explain himself to the Board of Trustees in 1859: ‘‘The latter [Wayland] is infinitely preferable as a text-book to the former [Say]. It emanates to be sure, from an Abolitionist; but there is not a word in it upon the subject of slavery—nothing sectional—unless we regard its views upon the restrictive system, as sectional—and here, it is decidedly and forcibly with the South.’’ Dew himself had used Say, his own book, and referred extensively to Smith and Malthus. At the College of Charleston in 1860, Nathaniel Russell Middleton was using Say and Ricardo.53 52. Ibid., 241–46. 53. GFH to FL, 14 April 1847, FL Papers, HEH; FL to Robert Barnwell, 17 June 1836, FL to Robert Henry, 1 May 1843, FL to President of South Carolina College, 29 April 1848, Oscar Lieber to parents, 16 February 1859, all in FL Papers, SCL; Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to

William H. Brown, Thomas Cooper in Silhouette (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

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Further, there were any number of Southern intellectuals who happily toed Cooper and Dew’s line. Louisa McCord and her husband, David James McCord, were most adamant, as was their wont on all matters, the more so as laissez-faire increasingly became the intellectual competitor, not of mercantilism, but of various forms of socialism.54 ‘‘We,’’ Louisa McCord said of political economists in 1849, ‘‘have for opponents Communists, Fourierists and Owenists—Cabet, Blanc, Proudhon, Leroux etc.’’ Gwinn, too, wagged his finger at ‘‘foolish opinions’’ in France, marked by ‘‘an ignorance of the very fundamental principles of the science.’’ But not all the French were unsound. Louisa McCord was sufficiently enamored of the French proponent of laissez- faire, Bastiat, to translate him into English. In this, Southern intellectuals competed to demonstrate which theory best promised human improvement. As Louisa McCord put it, ‘‘The great, irreconcilable difference which exists . . . between socialists and economists is this: socialists believe in a natural and essential antagonism of interests; economists, in a natural harmony of interests, or rather, in the possession, by them, of a necessary and progressive harmonizing tendency.’’ 55 Yet there were no Southern socialists, and the domestic debate was more narrowly framed. Nonetheless there was a debate. One could wish for an active government without declaring that property was theft. Henry Clay and George Tucker were to argue strongly for government activism and supervision, and from a New Englander in Baltimore there had long since come the most urgent argument for government involvement in the form of Daniel Raymond’s Elements of Political Economy (1823). There was a noticeably unstable relationship between laissez-faire and conservative agrarianism, which Taylor had thought sympathetic. Dew might have been most adamantly libertarian, but he was markedly if not enthusiastically open to the argument that the South would become industrial, even at the expense of slavery. All this engendered confusion. Tucker acknowledged in 1840 that there was ‘‘controversy and discord’’ and unsettlement. M. R. H. Garnett in 1847 observed that the results of political economy ‘‘cannot, as in Mathematics, be Board of Trustees, South Carolina College, 4 May 1859, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Papers, SCL; J. B. Christian to Henry Augustine Washington, 18 April [1850s?], Henry A. Washington Papers, WM; Nathaniel Russell Middleton to Anna Elizabeth DeWolf Middleton, 19 April 1860, Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, ColC. 54. For David James McCord’s writings, see, for example, McCord, ‘‘Political Economy’’; McCord, ‘‘Mr. Clay’’; David James McCord, ‘‘The Anatomy of the Navigation Laws,’’ SQR 16 (January 1850): 416–44; David James McCord, ‘‘The Navigation Laws,’’ SQR n.s. 1 (April 1850): 48–75. 55. Lounsbury, McCord: PSE, 60, 70; Gwinn, ‘‘Whateley’s Political Economy,’’ 6; Frédéric Bastiat, Sophisms of the Protective Policy, trans. Louisa S. McCord (New York and Charleston, S.C.: G. P. Putnam, 1848).

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founded on definitions; the premises are too complex,’’ which rather made a nonsense of Lieber’s attempt a few years later to set down in about four pages the ‘‘Leading Truths of Political Economy.’’ Earlier, an unflattering reviewer of Daniel Raymond in the Southern Review in 1830 had seen this coming, by being troubled that Jacob Cardozo’s opinion of political economy’s fragmentary quality was reinforced by Raymond’s influence: ‘‘Many will take up the opinion that there is no certainty in Political Economy; that it consists of a mass of conflicting theories, and dogmatical assertions, or illogical deductions from principles not fully established, or entirely without foundation.’’ 56 On both sides of the argument, it mattered a great deal that people believed in the irrefutable clarity of political economy. Yet, somehow, this was hard to achieve. Opening paragraphs of books and articles continually declared transparency, which later prose unaccountably obscured. Dew had been more candid. To understand these subjects was like traveling in the Alps: one had to ‘‘climb with toil and pain over the barren rocks and bleak precipices’’ before reaching ‘‘an exalted station’’ with perspective on the view. But, mostly, people lost their way. Gwinn discouragingly thought in 1848 that ‘‘[t]he science of Political Economy is regarded as of little value by the greater number of intelligent individuals in this country,’’ precisely because it was thought ‘‘impossible to construct any scheme, which shall provide, or account for, the varieties of human acts or legislation.’’ Young men were set to learn these things in college, but forgot them after graduation and become ‘‘as silent upon the subject of the principles of trade, as they are desired to be upon the rationale of the will, the powers of the understanding, or the doctrine of curvilinear figures.’’ But even Gwinn chanted the mantra of simplicity. ‘‘The facts upon which Political Economy rests are so simple, that they are at the disposal of every man, however limited his acquaintance may be with business, or the active occupations of life.’’ In this, political economy—arising as it had out of moral philosophy and often taught cognately—inherited for its adherents a mystical, even religious status. Its truths were a catechism. ‘‘If the brief question be asked: Is Lieber a free-trader or protectionist,’’ Lieber explained in 1856, ‘‘the equally brief answer must be given, he is a free trader of the distributist kind . . . and believes it an ordinance of that God who gave uniform desires to men and a most diversified capacity of satisfying them to the earth, on the one hand, and on the other an application of the holy and angelic greeting: Peace and good will toward all men, in the sphere of exchange and production.’’ 57 56. ‘‘Raymond’s Political Economy,’’ SR 5 (February 1830): 27. 57. George Tucker, ‘‘The Theory of Profits,’’ Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 2 (1840): 89–100, quoted in Tipton R. Snavely, George Tucker as Political Economist (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 39; Garnett, ‘‘Distribution of Wealth,’’ 3; FL,

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We Can Take Care of Ourselves 58 But, for some, the injunction to leave things alone was not enough. The most thoughtful of these was George Tucker, first in essays mostly written in 1813, which appeared in the Port Folio of Philadelphia over the next two years, and were republished or first published in his Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy (1822). These offered a powerful defense of cities, expansion, government responsibility, and were even relaxed about national debts. Though he was polite towards the countryside, Tucker had little of John Taylor’s sense that agriculture was intellectually invigorating. ‘‘Many a one passes a gay and cheerful existence in the city, who would merely vegetate in the country, and would be unwilling to exchange the activity and bustle and increased sensation which are compressed within a few years spent in town for a far more protracted, though duller, existence in the country,’’ he said in words that would have displeased Thomas Jefferson, though the latter had enjoyed Paris enough to know what Tucker meant. Tucker was, at that time, much preoccupied with pondering the implications of Malthus, especially in pushing away ‘‘the gloomy and disheartening picture of the condition of man’’ that Malthus seemed to encourage. He read Malthus as saying that much human vice was occasioned by the pressure of population, but Tucker believed that other causes were more important and hence one need not necessarily fear population growth. Norway, Sweden, and Scotland had a bare means of subsistence, but these countries were not marked by vice. Rather, Tucker thought, the nuances of social ideology and structure, ‘‘the laws and manner of civilized society,’’ were what mattered.59 It was not that Tucker was wildly optimistic, rather that he thought Malthus had ascribed too much consequence to ‘‘the relative force of the procreating power,’’ when so much else in human experience occasioned ‘‘evils and calamities,’’ when ‘‘death and disease await man at every step of his pilgrimage through life,’’ when he was ‘‘often the victim of his own ungoverned passions, or those of his fellow men,’’ and considering that ‘‘war is as much his natural state as peace.’’ Remembering all this, it was the more notable that sexuality was necessary to ensure human survival. But Tucker’s critique ran further. He ‘‘Leading Truths in Political Economy,’’ DBR 15 (August 1853): 186–90; ‘‘Raymond’s Political Economy,’’ 27; Dew, Restrictive System, 2; Charles John Morris Gwinn, ‘‘Progress of Political Economy,’’ SQR 14 ( July 1848): 1–2, 22; FL to Samuel A. Allibone, 20 June 1856, FL Papers, HEH. 58. ‘‘Speech on Abolition Petitions,’’ 9 March 1836, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Robert L. Meriwether et al., 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959– 2003), 13:109. 59. George Tucker, Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan, 1822), 317, 307, 322.

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doubted that population would ever outrun subsistence, for exigency would compel frugality, even from the wasteful rich. He saw little evidence that war was ever occasioned by subsistence crises, but rather arose from ‘‘the ambition of princes—by rivalship in commerce—by court intrigues—by envy or dread of a neighbouring power—and now and then by sympathy with one of the parties in some national dispute.’’ Disease cut down humanity, with no regard for Malthusian considerations, but ‘‘from occult physical causes, often beyond the knowledge of men, and always beyond his control.’’ Most fundamentally, Tucker believed that population growth, instead of being wildly destructive, bred its own social mores which tended to mitigate the birth rate: ‘‘[A]s a country increases in density of numbers, and improves in civilization, checks to redundancy also increase, independent of the greater difficulty of subsistence, until they are sufficient to keep its population stationary.’’ 60 Tucker was anxious to take up a middle position between Godwin and Malthus. The former he saw as visionary, because overestimating the capacities of human reason. Tucker followed the Humean line that a man acted from only ‘‘his feelings and passions,’’ and that reason was ‘‘merely an instrument’’ for using emotions ‘‘principally selfish, but in some degree sympathetic.’’ In general, though, selfishness was essential: ‘‘Our pursuit of happiness, the great business of life . . . is managed with greater diligence, better judgment, and more success, when every man acts for himself, than if he merely acted as a member of an extensive partnership.’’ But Malthus understood too little of the cunning of selfishness, made men too doomed, and encouraged governments to an easy reconciliation ‘‘to their own improvidence, their ambitious projects, and their frigid indifference to human suffering.’’ 61 This cautious optimism, which thought so little of human reason and so much of urbane civilization, Tucker explicated in a remarkable prognostication, ‘‘The Future Destiny of the United States’’—a country whose demography might be used as a commentary on Malthusianism. For in the United States the population was doubling every twenty-five years, a figure that Benjamin Franklin had hazarded in 1760 and that both Smith and Malthus had accepted as an estimate. As Tucker saw it, the country had ample room to expand, and might be expected to reach 120 million by 1922. But this had dangers. Westward migration, steamboats, the growing power of commerce upon the Mississippi, all might prefigure dissension, dismemberment of the Union, first by the secession of the West, then by the splintering of the East60. Ibid., 314, 326–27, 330. 61. Ibid., 331–32. Cf. David Hume’s famous remark: ‘‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’’; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (1739–40; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 266.

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ern states, perhaps then of the Western states. At the root of these hostilities would be not be a subsistence crisis but its opposite, the pressure of economic diversity. This state would be free and another slave; this might grow cotton or sugar and this other cereals and cattle; this would have a stake in foreign commerce and another have none. Curiously, less presciently, Tucker then saw nothing ominous in the political arrangements of so decentralized a Union, ‘‘the power of whose government is limited to its concerns with foreign nations, leaving the several distinct republics which compose it, to make and administer their own municipal laws and to discharge all those functions which come into immediate contact with the citizen.’’ Like John Quincy Adams later, Tucker thought it probable that the federal government might undertake ‘‘acts of splendid beneficence, such as canals, roads, and public institutions, whose utility is not confined to particular states.’’ Tucker does not then seem to have grasped that such beneficence might be seen otherwise, as a consolidation that exacerbated the centrifugal tendencies of expansion. Nor did he look with marked misgivings upon what he predicted would be the growth of manufactures, which he saw as a concomitant of the increasing density of population. Indeed, he thought that manufacturing would grow most in the West, which would become ‘‘the Flanders of the United States . . . covered with populous cities, and be the seat of wealth, of luxury, and of arts more or less liberal,’’ from which the East would import its finished goods. This, in turn, would transform America’s relationship with Europe. At the moment, in 1813, the United States was the countryside to Europe’s city, but soon American industry would be sufficiently independent as to make this old trade (agricultural goods exchanged for commercial products) unnecessary. Stripped of an important trade, Europe might feel the pressure of its surplus industrial population and begin a decline. So, westward the course of Empire, but not without misgivings and worries.62 In general, Tucker looked with favor upon a density of population. More people meant more military efficiency, more manufactures cheaply made and dispersed, the greater means to facilitate ‘‘letters and the liberal arts,’’ a better market for publishing. The fine arts were ‘‘the offspring of luxurious opulence’’ and good taste was ‘‘matured and perfected only by the genial influence of the riches or applause which populous communities alone can give.’’ Great and densely populated cities, like London, no doubt bred great vices and crimes, but it was unclear that, proportionate to population, things were worse than in the countryside. For Tucker, this argument was not merely that of a man becoming urban, who started life in Bermuda and ended it in Phila62. Tucker, Various Subjects, 1–24; James Edward Winkler, ‘‘The Political Economy of Henry Clay’’ (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1969, 75).

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delphia. It was also rooted in an agnostic view of human progress and its relationship to happiness. Tucker took human psychology seriously, and skeptically. ‘‘Where,’’ he asked, ‘‘is the mode of weighing and ascertaining the pains and pleasures which agitate the human heart, not for an hour or a day, but during a whole life; and not of a single individual but of a whole community?’’ The best-placed suffer, the worst-placed find enjoyment, so it might be ‘‘that a cool and unprejudiced observer (if such a one could possibly be found) would, perhaps, say, that the sum of human happiness, in every country and in every age, does not materially vary.’’ Rude or civilized, poor or rich, free or oppressed, ‘‘men will ever strive after that which is best in their eyes: and, though the object of their endeavours were an illusion, this active pursuit itself would be beneficial; for if they do not overtake the game, they have the pleasure of the chace.’’ 63 This skepticism took some urgency out of Tucker’s speculations, for if change did not increase human happiness, why did it matter? Well, he surmised, the texture of pleasure and pain was of interest. A dense population might increase pain, but also pleasure, if mostly for an elite. Tucker acknowledged that, if Europe was any guide, ‘‘the fruits of the improvements which progressive art, science and civilization have made, seem to be gathered by a small portion of society; whilst the mass of the people are doomed to misery and want.’’ But Europe also suggested that this arose, less from density of population, more from ‘‘the blind and unjust institutions of society,’’ from overtaxation, feudalism, primogeniture and the like, by which ‘‘property is forced into particular channels, and is not suffered to distribute itself according to the industry, prudence and good fortune of each individual.’’ Still, he was not sure. He allowed that there might be some misery intrinsic to density, and perhaps a happy mean might be a society less concentrated than Europe, but more populous than the United States. ‘‘We are now in that middle state which is equally remote from the miseries of rude and of civilized society,’’ as he put it elsewhere, with little enthusiasm. However that may be, he was confident that it would be long before Americans reached any need to mistrust population growth, that ‘‘as, under the genial influences of freedom and abundance, we continue to increase in numbers, we shall, in a still greater proportion, advance in political wealth and strength, and in individual improvement and happiness.’’ 64 So, there was no need for an American Malthus yet. In his later writings, Tucker was to take careful note of a world that had moved on, especially to bitter disputes over politics and money. He himself was an apolitical man. ‘‘The writer of the following sheets flatters himself 63. Tucker, Various Subjects, 73–74, 77–78. 64. Ibid., 323, 75–85.

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that he enters on the discussion of these questions free from an undue bias, personal or political; and he is conscious of no motive except the wish to discover and disseminate the truths of a favorite science,’’ he wrote in the opening pages of his Theory of Money and Banks (1839), and this displayed more sincerity than even a gentlemanly pose required.65 Tucker was a dilettante in the old, best sense of the word, that is, he took pleasure in reasoning out the problems, sifting through the statistics, weighing the logic, and did so with a thoroughness that a later age might feel compelled to call professional. This may help to explain why, of all the Southern political economists, he managed to step past a concern with the singleness of truth. For he was troubled to get complex issues right, mostly for his own satisfaction, and was less bothered with stating the obvious, so that undergraduates might remember it. (He was a professor for part of his life, but diffidently.) But this instinct also meant that there was a certain passivity in Tucker: he observed, analyzed, described trends, and folded his hands. Nonetheless, he had his preferences. In general, he was a cautious modernizer.66 From the 1830s, he favored the development of manufacturing in Virginia, defended the utility of national debts, supported a managed banking system, opposed the Jacksonian onslaught on the Second Bank of the United States, and was inclined to think that slavery in the long run would falter because less efficient than free labor. Like Hugh Legaré, Tucker understood that credit was an essential element in the successful functioning of a modern economy, though he also believed that paper money needed to be convertible into specie and thought a silver standard most workable for the United States, not the traditional policy of bimetallism.67 As to tariffs, he had when in the House of Representatives voted against them in 1824, with the standard objection that they were discriminatory, but he saw the occasional (usually temporary) case for them and thought people exaggerated both their advantages and disadvantages. Mingling optimism and pessimism, he held implicitly to a theory of increasing returns and a rising living standard, though he also came around to a qualified acceptance of Malthusianism, at least to the extent that he thought wages, when density of population came to pass in America, might tend to settle towards subsistence. (This might seem a contradiction, though resolvable when one remembers that Tucker was no social and economic egalitarian, but a careful statistician; society might in aggregate be better off, even when some wage 65. George Tucker, The Theory of Money and Banks Investigated (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1839), 1. 66. The following is largely drawn from Snavely, George Tucker. 67. Cf. ‘‘Spirit of the Sub-Treasury’’ (1837), in Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Swinton Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Burges & James, 1845–46), 1:280–321.

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earners were worse off.)68 He was nothing if not independent in his reasonings. For example, he quarreled with Ricardo on rent, wages, and profit.69 The most striking and original feature of Tucker’s political economy was his attention to the role of psychology in economic behavior. It seems probable that this arose because, as will be seen later, he was also a student of metaphysics and taught in his Charlottesville classes the Scottish philosophers, especially the Thomas Brown who moved that tradition closer to modern psychology. Moreover, Tucker had there praised those, like John Locke, who had mingled the practical disciplines of politics and trade with the issues of epistemology, or like Adam Smith who had written not only The Wealth of Nations but The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This tendency in Tucker centered on his definition of value. Ricardo had offered this functional definition: ‘‘The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or lesser compensation which is paid for that labour.’’ This worked outward from the material object. Thomas Cooper had seen value differently, as ‘‘the utility artificially conferred on any material object, by which it is rendered capable of contributing to human necessity, comfort, or enjoyment. . . . The ingredients that give origin to value, are capital, labour, skill, and perhaps in some few cases, rent.’’ 70 Tucker took this slim hint about ‘‘human necessity, comfort, or enjoyment’’ and made it more central.71 For him, value meant ‘‘the feeling with which we regard whatever can render us benefit or afford us gratification.’’ Hence it was ‘‘an emotion of our minds comprehending all that can impart pleasure to our senses, our tastes, or desires; as health, talents, friendship, reputation, land, money and goods.’’ As such, it was as various as ‘‘the endless diversities of objects, and of human tastes or opinions, and it is susceptible of all degrees of intensity, from a simple wish to a most passionate desire.’’ 72 Upon this reasoning, man as an economic animal was more complex than the motive of self-interest. Like68. On this, see Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity, 157–59. In general, Conkin emphasizes the pessimistic side of Tucker, Snavely the optimistic. 69. He summarizes the dissent in ‘‘Autobiography of George Tucker,’’ Bermuda Historical Quarterly 18 (Winter 1961): 140. 70. Merit M. Robinson, ‘‘Notes on the Lectures on Moral Philosophy by George Tucker Esquire’’ (1831–32), Cabell Deposit, UVA; David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ed. Piero Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 11; TC, Political Economy, 74. 71. Tucker reviewed Cooper’s book and there reconsidered the problem of value: see Tucker, ‘‘Political Economy,’’ American Quarterly Review 1 (1827): 309–31, quoted in Snavely, George Tucker, 46. 72. George Tucker, The Laws of Wages, Profits, and Rent, Investigated (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1837), 1–2.

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Frederick Langenheim, Henry Clay (Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

wise, utility was not a satisfactory guide to value, for men might value sensibly or stupidly, gallop after mindless fashions, or disdain the wise purchase. Tucker’s urbane and cautious sense that emulating Europe might not be a disaster, was to be curiously intensified by the Anglophobe who was to set much of the agenda of the South’s views on political economy, for good or ill. It is customary, in accounts of these matters, to neglect Henry Clay. Yet talking about Clay and the American System was much of what Southern political economy came to do, despite Clay’s being half-in and half-out of Southern culture. For he identified most with ‘‘the West’’ and often spoke of ‘‘the South’’ as something not himself. But Clay also traded upon his equidistance between the sections and tended to use the West as a base for mediating between North and South.73 And, after all, he was a Virginian, a Kentucky senator, a slaveholder, and there is little reason to ignore Clay, just because many other Southerners eventually became persuaded that his analysis was wrong. 73. For, example, in speaking of the Tariff of 1824, he said, ‘‘The South as usual is against it, but we trust that the confidence of opinion which happily exists between the West and the middle states will ensure the passage of that salutary measure’’: Henry Clay to Porter, 31 January 1824, quoted in Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 232.

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In any formal sense, Clay was not intellectual. He had been little educated at a field school in Virginia, knew no Latin or Greek, could not speak French, never went to college, and improvised a lot.74 He never could remember a line of poetry, and his audiences were required to correct his manglings of Scott and Shakespeare. ‘‘A rose will smell the same, call it what you will’’ was his version of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. For such blundering, John Randolph liked to make fun of him. Stung by this, Clay admitted, ‘‘I know my deficiencies. I was born to no proud patrimonial estate; from my father I inherited only infancy, ignorance, and indigence.’’ And Randolph, never one to pass up exploiting a weakness, added, ‘‘The gentleman might continue the alliteration, and add insolence.’’ But Randolph also knew that Clay was among the cleverest men of his generation, and other opponents like David James McCord grudgingly acknowledged that Clay was ‘‘a gifted man.’’ Even Calhoun, though he judged Clay to be restless and weak in judgment, knew him to be ‘‘a man of genius, activity and resources.’’ 75 Clay’s interest in protectionism was rooted in nationalism and was never much bothered with the intricacies of economic theory. Contemporaries noticed this. As David James McCord observed, ‘‘Mr. Clay was, or affected to be, as ignorant of the principles of free trade, as he was inconsistent with the principles he himself has acknowledged.’’ Clay gained most of his economics from reading Niles’ Register, though it is just possible that he had read Adam Smith.76 More certain is that he derided ‘‘the visionary speculations of theoretical writers,’’ which was the kind of anti-intellectual rhetoric that much irritated Thomas Dew.77 As everyone agreed, Clay made his theory out of his circumstances. He represented a Kentucky that was bustling, growing, but 74. But he did not come from an impoverished background. He was the son of the Reverend John Clay and Elizabeth Hudson Clay, who had a tobacco plantation close to Hanover Court House, Virginia; the father was a Baptist preacher, who owned twenty-one slaves, and the mother was of a prosperous family. The father died when Henry was four; indeed, the latter inherited two slaves. The mother remarried and in 1791, she and her new husband migrated to Kentucky, though Henry remained in Richmond to work in a law office and study (he never went to college and was then only fourteen); eventually he became clerk to George Wythe, perhaps Virginia’s most distinguished lawyer. In 1797, he migrated to Lexington, Kentucky, where he began his own prosperity as a lawyer and politician. In 1799, he married Lucretia Hart, also from Virginia, by whom he had eleven children; in his frequent absences, she mostly managed his property, which by the end of his life amounted to the ownership of thirty-three slaves, extensive holdings in land and stock (railroad, saltworks, bridges, turnpikes), perhaps to the value of $100,000. See Remini, Henry Clay, 1–31, 763. 75. Remini, Henry Clay, 6, 25, 227; McCord, ‘‘Mr. Clay,’’ 175; JCC to John A. Dix, 5 October 1828, in Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 10:429. 76. McCord, ‘‘Mr. Clay,’’ 175; Winkler, ‘‘Political Economy of Henry Clay,’’ 28–35. 77. ‘‘On the Protection of Home Industry,’’ speech in the House of Representatives, April 26, 1820, in The Works of Henry Clay, ed. Calvin Colton, 6 vols. (New York: A. S. Barnes & Burr, 1857), 5:227. Cf. Dew, Restrictive System, 194.

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needing connection to the rest of the nation and its markets. These were facts of his personal life, not only of his political one. In Lexington and its environs, Clay was an entrepreneur, who owned land and slaves, but also a hemp and cotton spinning mill; he was the director of two banks; he owned and rented out town lots; he had a tavern. And he benefited from his own policies. In later years, he could travel from Lexington to Washington in the lightning speed of a week and a half, partly by taking the National Road from Wheeling to Maryland.78 Clay despised England and feared its power, a man born at the end of the Revolution, growing up in the midst of the French Revolutionary wars, and making his name as an instigator of the War of 1812 before becoming one of its peacemakers at Ghent in 1814. It is not too much to say that Clay, like Calhoun, first came to political economy as the continuation of war by other means. Clay wanted an America that did not need Britain or Europe, that was not victim to its commercial power. In one of his first speeches, to the Senate in 1810, on ‘‘Domestic Manufactures,’’ he set down a postcolonial principle that always informed him: ‘‘The domestic manufactories of the United States, fostered by government, and aided by household exertions, are fully competent to supply us with at least every necessary article of clothing. I am, therefore, sir . . . in favor of encouraging them, not to the extent to which they are carried on in England, but to such an extent as will redeem us entirely from all dependence on foreign countries.’’ 79 For Clay, protection meant independence, though his critics (including Thomas Cooper and David James McCord) argued that he would merely translate mercantilism from Britain to the United States.80 Others, including the later Calhoun, thought Clay was wrong to believe that Britain herself had prospered by protectionism, which had only hindered a still greater wealth.81 But Clay believed protection meant prosperity. He was never much bothered by the constitutional niceties that wracked his opponents; the government needed to do what was necessary for the general welfare. Though he uttered pieties about the principles of 1798, on the whole, he believed in the benignity of a ‘‘parental’’ state, especially when he was the father.82 This was a hemispheric vision, even though Clay mistrusted the cosmopolitan idea. Clay’s first usage of the term, ‘‘American system,’’ arose from 78. Remini, Henry Clay, 412–13; Colton, Works of Henry Clay, 5:10. 79. Colton, Works of Henry Clay, 5:10. 80. See Condy Raguet, The Principles of Free Trade (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1835), 4, quoted in Winkler, ‘‘Political Economy of Henry Clay,’’ 40. For McCord’s views, see McCord, ‘‘Political Economy,’’ 392–93, 410. 81. For example ‘‘The Tariff,’’ SQR 1 (April 1842): 513. 82. Colton, Works of Henry Clay, 6:74. On 1798, see Remini, Henry Clay, 158.

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his sympathy with the revolutionary regimes of Latin America. ‘‘Our Institutions . . . now make us free; but, how long shall we continue so, if we mould our opinions on those of Europe? Let us break these commercial and political fetters; let us no longer watch the nod of any European politician; let us become real and true Americans, and place ourselves at the head of the American system.’’ 83 Instinctively, Clay understood what economic historians in the twentieth century came to believe, that free trade was a kind of English imperialism, because free trade was not ‘‘of perfect reciprocity.’’ ‘‘The truth is,’’ he observed in 1820, ‘‘. . . that we are a sort of independent colonies of England—politically free, commercially slaves.’’ 84 So the sinews of nationality needed strengthening with rational controls: hence, internal improvements, a national bank, a protective tariff applied to selective products (iron, wool, cotton). That this involved discrimination between interests little bothered Clay. He was often negligent about the details, not fussy about the levels of tariffs, which was why he found it easy to compromise with the Nullifiers in 1833. He thought that, though in the short run somebody might briefly suffer, in the long run sustained prosperity would help all classes and regions. Moreover, he had little fear of industry, though he assumed that agriculture needed to be dominant in any healthy economy, that ‘‘all others should bend to it.’’ Whatever grinding poverty might be like in Manchester, he thought American manufactures were different. He had been to the Lowell factory in Waltham and seen ‘‘hundreds of young girls and boys,’’ and all was ‘‘order, neatness, and apparent comfort,’’ all was respectable.85 Industry did not occasion vice, but solved it by employing the idle. And Clay liked technology, was thrilled by steamboats and spinning jennies and cotton gins, was impressed by the rapidity with which technology’s knowledge was dispersed and emulated. All this was not sophisticated, but it was effective. Clay barged into people’s lives and changed them. On South Carolina, he had the most effect, for he raised issues about which the state was most passionate, but also much conflicted. The Panic of 1819, a depression in cotton prices, and unease about and the fate of slavery prompted a reappraisal that turned into a critique of the American System by the late 1820s. George McDuffie, preeminently, made a name for himself by claiming that protectionism cost the exporting South 83. Annals of Congress, 16th Congress, 1st session, pp. 1719–1731, quoted in Remini, Henry Clay, 174. 84. Colton, Works of Henry Clay, 5:221. Cf. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, ‘‘The Imperialism of Free Trade,’’ Economic History Review 6 (March 1953): 1–15. 85. Speeches, ‘‘On American Industry,’’ 30 and 31 March 1824, and ‘‘On the Protection of Home Industry,’’ 26 April 1820, U.S. House of Representatives, in Colton, Works of Henry Clay, 5:263, 223.

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dearly. Calhoun, to save his political base in a South Carolina moving towards Nullification and to stake out a distinctive position in national politics against Clay and Adams, as well as (later) Jackson, turned himself into the free trade statesmen par excellence, whom Richard Cobden himself was to praise.86 No small role in these transformations was played by intellectuals who were technically interpreting the discipline of political economy, and whispered or bellowed into the ears of politicians. A benchmark was laid down by Jacob Cardozo in 1826, when he published his Notes on Political Economy in Charleston. Cardozo was a Sephardic Jew, born in Savannah in 1786, whose father, David, had moved from New York during the American Revolution and subsequently migrated to Charleston. The son had worked his way up from being an apprentice and a lumber clerk to becoming editor of the Southern Patriot in 1817 to being its owner and publisher in 1823. As a journalist, in various capacities, he stayed in Charleston until the Civil War, when he drifted westward to Atlanta and Mobile, where he was to die in 1873. In general, his newspapers were proponents of free trade, but he worked also to encourage commerce, banking, economic diversification and scientific agronomy, as a way to alleviate overreliance on cotton and rice. In theoretical matters, Cardozo made himself a quasi-sympathetic critic of Ricardo, especially of the latter’s theory of rent, and tried to reason out what might be universally true of political economy and what was culturally specific to Ricardo’s Britain. Like Tucker, Cardozo was conscious that both economies and political economists had a social context. Still, his starting point was Ricardo’s emphasis upon value, distribution, exchange, and taxation.87 On value, Cardozo shared the criticisms made of classical economics by James Maitland, the Earl of Lauderdale, and by Malthus.88 The value of labor was relative, not absolute, it varied from time to place, and it was much affected by demand. (As Lauderdale had suggested, political economists tried to prove absolute value as alchemists used to look for the philosopher’s stone.) Moreover, Cardozo thought that Smith and Ricardo had overestimated the role of labor in economic activity, and instead believed that nature herself in the form of land made fluctuating contributions to value, as did capital. 86. See Richard Cobden to William Porcher Miles, 5 March 1859, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC: ‘‘I have always entertained a grateful sense of the great service which Mr. Calhoun rendered to the cause of Free trade at a time when it was less understood & appreciated than at present. His advocacy of that great principle was characterized by a force of logical reasoning which has never been surpassed.’’ 87. Melvin M. Leiman, Jacob N. Cardozo: Economic Thought in the Antebellum South (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 4–5, 16. 88. The following summary derives from Leiman, Jacob N. Cardozo.

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Hence, value was the compound of land, capital, and labor, as they fluctuated within the constraints of supply and demand. As to rent, Ricardo had held that ‘‘as poorer and poorer soils are used, the increased cost of cultivation leads to rising rent on the more fertile lands.’’ So rent was a surplus to the owners of fertile lands. Malthus, rather, had thought it came from agricultural improvements. Cardozo was plainer: ‘‘We consider rent, therefore, to commence from the moment land is taken into cultivation, and that its amount will be regulated by the surplus which it will yield after the replacement of the capital of the cultivator with the average rate of profits and wages.’’ Rent was the interest on capital invested in land, not significantly different from any other capital investment, and equally subject to supply and demand. Land unprofitable and unused under one set of market conditions might become valuable in another. Poor land in Europe might yield more rent than fertile land in America. In this sense, Cardozo was one of those economists who moved to see land and agriculture as not primary or special, as they had tended to be regarded in classical economics of the Smithian and Ricardian sort, but just one economic activity among many.89 So Cardozo’s economics were expansive, flexible, optimistic, reluctant to see fixed limits. He even argued that capitalist and worker might both gain without exploiting each other: ‘‘The proportion received by the capitalist,’’ he argued in 1838, ‘‘whether his capital is in land, money, or commodities, diminishes with the progress of society, but as the quantity of commodities constantly increases, all classes receive a greater share of those commodities.’’ It was logical, therefore, that Cardozo favored a strong banking system, which might encourage commerce, though his views evolved. At first he favored the second Bank of the United States as a control on the destructive implications of many independent banks, whose ability to create credit might cause irresponsible damage, but after 1837 he wanted government and banking to be more rigorously separated, without banks being free to issue notes ad libitum, and favored the sub-treasury plan of Martin Van Buren. Then, after 1847, he came to a sterner laissez-faire position of free competition among banks, which he reappraised in the later 1850s to urge that government should regulate what in banking might be free, what prescribed.90 In the 1820s and 1830s, he seems not to have doubted the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, and he supported hard money, in the sense of not insisting on a metallic standard, but in opposing inflationary banking practices and favoring the convertibility of notes into specie at a conservative level without sacrificing 89. Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought, 300; Leiman, Jacob N. Cardozo, 37; Jacob N. Cardozo, Notes on Political Economy (1826; reprint, Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972), 33– 34, 38. 90. Leiman, Jacob N. Cardozo, 61 (quoting Southern Patriot, 11 January 1838), 94–96.

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elasticity. Indeed, Cardozo broke with Nicholas Biddle after 1837, because he felt the latter had fostered inflation in the mid-1830s. In general, Cardozo wanted banks to serve the national economic interest, and mistrusted them when he felt they had acted in their own cynical interest, though he was very far from having Jacksonian nightmares about Monsters. As to the tariff, Cardozo was a moderate. He saw a case for some duties when wartime expenses required subvention or for retaliation, but he was prominently active against Clay’s American System and the Tariff of 1828. He never thought that hostility to protectionism justified the South’s secession, but he did insist that the South had an interest in free trade, while suffering far less from protectionism than people like McDuffie were insisting. In general, Cardozo thought high duties unduly forced the pace of industrialization, in a culture not yet socially prepared for it. Free trade, by contrast, would effect the transition at its own pace, regulated by producers and consumers alike. This would be the case as much for the South, which he expected would develop a manufacturing base, as the North. Just as the Corn Laws worked as a tax on the English commercial economy for the artificial sustenance of an otherwise fading landed aristocracy, so the American System worked in reverse to tax agriculture and force feed American industry, so occasioning a debilitating misdirection of resources. By creating expensive imports, high tariffs depressed home demand. But, in general, Cardozo’s critique suggested that tariffs hurt both North and South, if not equally then proportionately, but not enough to the South’s marked disadvantage to require extraordinary indignation or action, only vigilance and pressure. The leitmotif of Cardozo’s economics was a skeptical sophistication, a flexibility that noticed the shifts of events. He was, after all, a journalist who digested the weekly and daily news. And this, too, was also his weakness, for he tended to write episodically, to contribute only ‘‘notes’’ on his subjects. Nonetheless, he was a formidable technician. His 1830 pamphlet, The Tariff: Its True Character and Effects Practically Illustrated, struck a note of common sense and sophistication about a subject that had habitually produced vague waffle and ill-informed passion.91 Cardozo understood that one had to get the numbers right, and spent much time reprobating even his allies for statistical sloppiness. In this, he helped to create a tradition of statistical thoroughness that much marked the Southerners. Dew was eloquent on their necessity and Calhoun liked to use them. Eventually there would be J. D. B. De Bow, who became the first of American statisticians. On balance, Cardozo was an optimist, at least for the United States. But he was a bourgeois gradualist devoted to private property and the prerogatives of the entrepreneur, a man who dis91. It is reprinted in Cardozo, Political Economy, 159–214.

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J. D. B. De Bow (From Otis Clark Skipper, J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South [1958])

liked unions, strikes, the ‘‘levelling’’ of socialist ideologies. He was happy to leave workers to the tender mercies of an employer’s sense of justice, and content to live in a South that he described in 1845 as ‘‘in form of government . . . democratical—in internal organization . . . oligarchical.’’ He had a rich faith that science might overcome the tendency of economies to deplete their resources. Both in agriculture and industry, ‘‘the resources of chemistry and mechanical philosophy enable man hourly to multiply his enjoyments by enlarging his dominion over nature.’’ 92 Above all, Cardozo realized that classical economics had been propounded by Europeans relatively unaware of American conditions, and so the usefulness of political economy for Southerners depended upon an alert reconsideration of its doctrines. One must filter out what, masquerading as universal theory, was actually English or Scottish or German, and one must be alert to what was pertinent west of the Atlantic. As John Taylor had put it in 1821, 92. J. D. B. De Bow, Statistical View of the United States (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854); Charleston Evening News, 1 October 1845, quoted in Leiman, Jacob N. Cardozo, 215; Cardozo, Political Economy, 5.

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the principles of political economy could vary: ‘‘It is sufficient to show a difference in the circumstances of different countries, in order to evince the species of political economy practicable in each. All the European writers upon political economy have extracted their systems from, and laboured to accommodate them to, local existing circumstances.’’ So Cardozo, for one thing, understood that ‘‘[e]xperience assures us, that on this division of the globe on which our lot is cast, a high degree of wealth results from involuntary services.’’ But, in general, ‘‘We ought not to be implicitly guided by the results of investigations pursued by European writers into the sources of wealth without an examination of the circumstances on which their systems have been framed.’’ Further, he was conscious that this was not yet a coherent discipline. ‘‘In political economy,’’ he observed in 1828, ‘‘. . . the different branches having been investigated in a detached and desultory order, there has not been that concatenation and dependence of parts which so greatly promotes investigation, and its discoveries have consequently been effected, not only more slowly, but more laboriously.’’ He even hazarded that the United States might be a sounder place from which to deduce economic principles: ‘‘It is reasonable to suppose . . . that a country whose institutions and laws have done less to derange the natural order of things than where a vicious social organization has resulted either from military violence or a selfish policy, will present the fairest field for analysis and speculation into the causes of wealth.’’ 93 Between Louisa McCord, Thomas Cooper, and Jacob Cardozo, therefore, there was much range of opinion in South Carolina, much leeway in ‘‘analysis and speculation.’’ Even John C. Calhoun, the doyen of free traders, was a less orthodox figure than he seemed. Certainly he was the most sophisticated of Southern politicians when it came to political economy, and intellectually he could run rings around Clay’s simpler nostrums.94 But how Calhoun arrived at this sophistication is a matter of some obscurity. He never acquired the habit of acknowledging his intellectual debts, apart from the occasional deference to Jefferson, Madison, and the old school of Virginian thinkers. Everywhere in his speeches and writings, a reader can see the vague shapes of formal traditions, here some Montesquieu, there some Algernon Sidney, elsewhere some Adam Smith. It is, indeed, possible that Calhoun never read any of these writers, beyond what an ordinary school, college, and legal edu93. Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, 97; Cardozo, ‘‘Rent,’’ 193, 195; Cardozo, Political Economy, iii–iv. 94. The best study of Calhoun’s economic views, from which I have learned much, is Lacy K. Ford, ‘‘Republican Ideology in a Slave Society: The Political Economy of John C. Calhoun,’’ Journal of Southern History 54 (August 1988): 405–24.

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cation required. Occasionally, young men would apply to him for suggestions for reading and he would return brief letters of remarkable vagueness, which stand in marked contrast to the detailed bibliographical advice of Jefferson to an earlier generation, or that of William Campbell Preston and Mitchell King to a later one.95 In 1836, Calhoun was asked what an aspirant lawyer might read and confessed, ‘‘I remained only two years at the bar, and have not read a law book in 25 years,’’ which might be accounted a lacuna for a maker of laws. Read the statutes, he contrived to suggest, and case law, and history (the ‘‘ancient classiks,’’ English and American history), but the only author he mentioned was Gibbon. In 1840, to a more general enquiry about the study of politics and government, he observed that ‘‘there is no satisfactory work extant on our system of government’’: The Federalist was the best, but still full of ‘‘false views and [it] by no means goes to the bottom of the system.’’ Otherwise, he advised reading the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, plus some of the literature generated by the Nullification controversy, and he suggested not reading Joseph Story. He again advised the history of the ancient world (‘‘the five states of antiquity’’), English and American history, but also Aristotle whom he accounted ‘‘among the best’’ of the ‘‘elementary treatises on Government.’’ This time, however, Calhoun counseled the wisdom of acquiring ‘‘a thorough knowledge of political economy,’’ of one’s ‘‘country in all its relations, external & internal, including its resources, and the character of the people.’’ 96 But how one did this, by what books or authors, the young Mr. Wallace was not informed. Calhoun was, by his own confession, no admirer of the reading habits of the day. ‘‘There never was a period less given to serious reading & reflection,’’ he told Lieber in 1837. So there is little surprise in there being little or no evidence that he ever read a novel or a poem. But he also felt that most periodicals were shallow, though he subscribed to the Southern Review and occasionally praised its contents. Here and there, flitting casually by, a book is mentioned in his surviving papers. Basil Manly left at his Charleston lodgings in 1837 a copy of Francis Wayland’s textbook on political economy, and Calhoun read and praised it; ‘‘there are very few of the conclusions, in which I do not concur,’’ he said, but left inexplicit which conclusions. For a while, he was deeply 95. Cf. Jefferson to Peter Carr, 19 August 1785, in Merrill Peterson, ed. Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 814–18; WCP to [William J. Rivers?], 15 March 1850, William James Rivers Papers, SCL; and MK to David Johnson, 1 August 1836, reprinted in John Belton O’Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina, 2 vols. (1859; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Company, 1975), 1:367–77. 96. JCC to Thomas J. Johnson, 20 March 1836, and JCC to A. D. Wallace, 17 December 1840, in Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 13:116–17, 15:389.

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interested in the construction of a Charleston-Cincinnati railroad, which may explain why in 1837 he bought a copy of Henry Fairbairn’s Treatise on the Political Economy of Railroads.97 But the rest is silence. He never sought out the intellectuals of his Southern day. Legaré, Dew, Tucker, all the figures with whom one might expect Calhoun to have had a fruitful exchange of ideas, he ignored except when (as with Legaré or Upshur) politics forced a connection. Bizarrely, it was only with Lieber that he had any literary correspondence and that only because Lieber pursued him. In truth, Calhoun was what Matthew Arnold would later call a Philistine; not only was he indifferent to belles lettres, but to art, music, metaphysics. He used indignantly to repudiate the suggestion that he had a gift for abstraction as a sort of insult, and certainly a reputation for intellectuality was no advantage for a politician in a Jacksonian world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Calhoun was a provincial man, who liked his family and home, and who mistrusted the exotic. He never traveled to Europe even to Clay’s limited extent, and indeed he traveled very little even within the United States, beyond his beaten path between Washington and his home in the upcountry. Indeed, Calhoun seems to have assumed that his own localism was a law of God’s nature: ‘‘The Author of our being never intended that creatures of our limited faculties should embrace with equal intenseness of affection the remote and the near. Such an organization would lead us constantly to intermeddle with what we would but imperfectly understand, and often to do mischief where we intended good.’’ For Calhoun, ‘‘peculiar’’—as in ‘‘peculiar soil, climate, situation, institutions, and productions’’—was a term of approbation, and he thought little of ‘‘the warm embraces of . . . universal patriotism.’’ 98 Rather, Calhoun lived in a relentlessly political world, knew mostly politicians, engaged the issues that a thoughtful politician needed to know. But he was, in his humorless way, a gregarious man, though not a good listener. Louise Preston, for one, found him inattentive and self-absorbed.99 (He was a little better if his interlocutor was a man, speaking of the male domain.) The impression given by his surviving papers is of a man who picked up the nostrums conventional to his day and connected them to his own original reflec97. JCC to FL, 25 April 1837, FL Papers, HEH; JCC to Bartlett Yancey, 16 July 1828, JCC to BM, 21 August 1837, receipt from F. Taylor, 28 December 1837, in Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 10:401, 13:530, 14:41. 98. ‘‘Speech in Reply to Daniel Webster on the Subtreasury Bill,’’ 22 March 1838, ibid., 14:206. 99. Undated entry preceding an entry for 6 January 1838, in Louise Penelope Davis Preston Diary, SCL.

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tions on immediate circumstances, as they came to someone incessantly at or near the center of American political life. This meant that his political economy was, simultaneously, conventional and idiosyncratic. That is, Calhoun may not have been any better read than his great opponent, Clay, but he was cleverer in synthesizing his own reasoned observations with the conventional wisdom. In later years, Calhoun was much nettled by the accusation that he had changed his views, that he had gone from being a friend to the national bank, to internal improvements, and to the tariff to being all the other way. Indeed, for later historians, this supposed apostasy came to seem emblematic of the South’s change of status and mind. Clay liked to needle him on the point and seldom failed to elicit an outraged and earnestly precise refutation. The evidence suggests that Calhoun and his enemies were each half-right on these matters. Calhoun insisted that context needed to be remembered, that his votes for these things in the mid-1810s were explicable by the facts of European war, the Embargo, debt, and in this insistence he was right.100 It is often forgotten that most of Calhoun’s early career dealt with military matters and their implications, not least during his long tenure as Secretary of War from 1817 to 1824. He then believed, as he always did, in the moral necessity of the Union for the survival of American freedom, but was understandably then more impressed by the fragility of the venture, as anyone born in 1782, who grew up with the desperate instability of the new republic in the midst of a hostile world at war, well might. For Calhoun in 1812 and 1816, the Union needed arms, discipline, solvency, communications, to make it through. His early speeches dwelt on these considerations insistently. He felt that Europe would come again, with the fire and sword that had burned the Capitol. ‘‘He believed this great people, daily acquiring character and strength,’’ he was reported as saying in 1816, ‘‘would excite the jealousy of foreign powers.’’ Revenue from the tariff would amortize the debt, but also ‘‘see the nation free from external danger and internal difficulty,’’ by enlarging the armed forces and building roads, harbors, and canals, all eased by a bank that might give coherence to the fiscal system. He was particularly worried that the Americans were not a military people, that (left to their own devices) they would fumble independence away. ‘‘The situation of the country naturally inclines us to too much feebleness rather than too much violence,’’ he said, so much so that there were congressmen ‘‘opposed to armies, to navies, to every means of defence.’’ 101 Between a restlessly imperial Europe and a militarily supine 100. Of his various defenses, see especially ‘‘Speech on the Force Bill,’’ 15 and 16 February 1833, in Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 12:45–94. 101. ‘‘Speech on the Additional Revenue Report,’’ 20 January 1816, and ‘‘Speech on the Revenue Bill,’’ 31 January 1816, ibid., 1:315, 319.

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John C. Calhoun, ca. 1811 (Courtesy South Carolina State Museum, Columbia)

America, there needed to be a federal government that fended off the one and prodded the other into life. On the other hand, Calhoun liked to remember that he had done these things reluctantly, grudgingly, that the tariff of 1816 had been a bill for revenue and only incidentally embodied a protectionist purpose, that he had always been a Jeffersonian of the 1798 variety. The evidence for this is mixed. His early words sometimes support the contention, if you look selectively, as he did in later years when he triumphantly quoted himself to prove consistency. But not all the words did, and the tone seldom. The later Calhoun would never have said, as he did in 1816, that ‘‘gentlemen ought not to give into the contracted idea, that taxes are so much money taken from the people: properly applied, the money proceeding from taxes, was money put out to the best possible interest for the people.’’ Later, he said things like, ‘‘Every dollar we can prevent from coming into the treasury, or every dollar thrown back into the hands of the people, will tend to strengthen the cause of liberty, and unnerve the arm of power.’’ Nor would he have said later, without choking, that one should not be too bothered by ‘‘the most refined and subtle arguments’’ about the precedents of the Constitution, or that it was wise to raise money before deciding what to do with it. ‘‘A system [of internal improve-

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ments] it is contended ought to be presented before the money is appropriated. He thought differently,’’ he put it in 1817.102 Moreover, the development of manufacturing was not then incidental to him. He always insisted that he was consistently a friend to industry, and the record bears him out. William Cobbett and Henry Mayhew made little impression on him, even later. Rather, industry was moral, progressive, scientific, civilized. But in 1816, Calhoun was convinced that the military and fiscal weakness of the United States in war stemmed from its overreliance on agriculture. ‘‘Commerce and agriculture,’’ he argued, ‘‘till lately, almost the only, still constitute the principal sources of our wealth. So long as these remain uninterrupted, the country prospers; but war, as we are now circumstanced, is equally destructive to both.’’ But war with a maritime power like England had been impoverishing, had cut off trade and wealth, and the country had lacked the industrial independence to prosecute war successfully. Instead the country needed all three elements—agriculture, manufactures, commerce—for the sake of the strength that economic diversity gave during wartime: ‘‘Without commerce, industry would have no stimulus; without manufactures, it would be without the means of production; and without agriculture, neither of the others can subsist. When separated entirely and permanently, they perish. War in this country produces, to a great extent, that effect.’’ 103 Moreover, industry had an integrating effect, it created interdependence within the Union, and so it counteracted centrifugal tendencies. Indeed, it was when Calhoun came to believe the reverse, that protectionism and manufactures made for more tension than integration in the Union, that he moved decisively towards free trade. And there are many passages in his early speeches that show a young man’s self-conviction that the old order was bad and needed the expansive, controlling reforms of himself and his friends, who brought ‘‘a liberal and enlightened policy,’’ who had noticed ‘‘the mass of knowledge acquired within the last few years,’’ and who disdained ‘‘the old imbecile mode.’’ Calhoun did not then trust laissez-faire: ‘‘Let it not be said that internal improvements may be wholly left to the enterprize of the states and of individuals. . . . [M]any of the improvements contemplated . . . are on too great a scale for the resources of the states or individuals; and many of such a nature, that the rival jealousy of the states, if left alone, might prevent. They required the resources and the general superintendence of this government to effect and complete them.’’ An imperial republic on a huge scale could not survive without ‘‘a perfect system of roads and canals,’’ which might carry commerce, trade, ‘‘the mail and 102. ‘‘Speech on the Additional Revenue Report,’’ 20 January 1816, and ‘‘Speech on Internal Improvements,’’ 4 February 1817, ibid., 314–15, 405. 103. ‘‘Speech on the Tariff Bill,’’ 4 April 1816, ibid., 349–50.

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the press’’ as ‘‘the nerves of the body politic’’ by which distant people might be brought into swift contact and sympathy. The immense confidence of his famous injunction, ‘‘Let us conquer space,’’ was something he lost later, not because he was to lose confidence, but because he decided that confidence needed to be reposed somewhere other than in the federal government.104 The overall impression of his early career is of someone improvising, who had not given much thought to the matter of political economy, who reasoned like a quasi-wartime leader with little time for niceties, and who went along with his friends and mentors (Langdon Cheves, William Lowndes, even Henry Clay). Calhoun did not, on the whole, like to admit to having changed, though he did acknowledge in 1837 that, ‘‘when a young man, and at his entrance upon political life, he had inclined to that interpretation of the constitution which favored a latitude of powers,’’ but added, with mature pomposity, that ‘‘experienced observation and reflection had wrought a great change in his views.’’ And he did admit that in 1815, ‘‘I had reflected but little on the subject of banking.’’ 105 What changed? For a long time, not much. As Secretary of War, he remained a guarded friend to centralized power, for he needed it to accomplish his task of bringing order and efficiency to a disorganized department. How little Calhoun was then a Commonwealthman is shown by the fact that his great accomplishment lay in moving away from the militia who had performed with such episodic efficacy in the War of 1812, towards a professional standing army, commanded by an officer corps well trained at a revamped West Point.106 Moreover, the War Department was more an administrative appointment, which led to a myriad of memoranda about Revolutionary pensions and Indian removals but gave little occasion for pronouncements on broad economic, constitutional, and political matters.107 Things only began to change when Calhoun reemerged into the spotlight of politics in the election of 1824 and thereafter. But, even then, in 1824, 1825, even into 1826, he was all but silent on the economic issues of the American System. His quarrels were at first political, with Clay and Adams as the shady victors of 1824, the year whose events had left him with the dignity and impotence of the 104. ‘‘Speech on the Additional Revenue Report,’’ 20 January 1816; ‘‘Speech on Internal Improvements,’’ 4 February 1817, ibid., 314–15, 399, 401. 105. ‘‘Remarks on the Proposal to Purchase James Madison’s Notes on the Constitutional Convention,’’ 20 February 1837; ‘‘Speech on His Amendment to Separate the Government and the Banks,’’ 3 October 1837, ibid., 13:449, 610. 106. Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 90–93. 107. It should be noted that Robert Remini sees Calhoun’s tenure in the War Department as not personally venal, but casual about the fiscal corruption of others; see Remini, Jackson and Freedom, 17–21.

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vice presidency. His dissent began with constitutional issues, worked out in the ‘‘Onslow’’ correspondence. Indeed, when in 1837 Calhoun gave a history of the tariff controversies of the 1820s—something he did compulsively— he flatly declared that ‘‘the tariff of 1828 was as much a political movement as a measure of protection,’’ and certainly his growing opposition had been political, as when in the session of 1826–27 he had used his casting vote as vice president to defeat a raising of wool duties.108 It was more the power of the Clay-Adams faction he resented than their policies, though inevitably it became hard to distinguish these elements. Pressure came on Calhoun from elsewhere. Clay began to escalate the scale of protectionism and, under this stimulus, informed economic opinion in South Carolina started to move faster than Calhoun had. Of the likes of McDuffie, Cooper, and Cardozo, Calhoun seems to have been skeptical, at least at first. Only by the summer of 1827 was he writing privately to Littleton Waller Tazewell that the protectionist system was costing the South money: ‘‘I hold it certain, that at present, we are the only real contributors to the national Treasury. We alone pay without indemnity, while other sections are more than indemnified for all their contributions, in their character of monopolists and receivers.’’ He was most impressed, however, not with the economics, but with the growing body of Southern public opinion. Even this response evolved gradually. Early in the campaign of 1828, though he observed that ‘‘the Southern States are almost unanimous in viewing the high duties, as exceedingly oppres[s]ive to them, and as the real source of the their [sic] present embarrassments, and I may, add impoverishment,’’ he also thought that the South was calm, sore about the tariffs more than excited. And he saw no reason to doubt the South’s ‘‘long cherished attachment to the Union.’’ But in 1828 Calhoun was the ally of Jackson, who was expected to win and supposed to be the friend of states’ rights. Calhoun was not sure, at first, that he himself believed that the American System was economically deleterious. It was the opinions of others that he cited. So, to Monroe in 1828, he observed, ‘‘There is almost universal embarrassment among the people of the staple States, which they almost unanimously attribute to the high duties.’’ But this Southern soreness turned to a mounting excitement. Calhoun felt himself in new waters, unsure of himself, not in control. In late July 1828, he told Samuel Ingham of Pennsylvania that the tariff was causing ‘‘nearly universal excitement of the deepest character,’’ of which ‘‘I have never seen more in the South.’’ Planters were in difficulty, as he himself was. Still, there was still a holding back: ‘‘It is not wonderful, that the entire population of a country thus reduced to poverty 108. ‘‘Speech on the Bill to Reduce the Duties on Certain Imports,’’ 23 February 1837, in Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 13:457.

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by the acts of the Government, as they believe, should be deeply excited, and that in that state some acts of extravagance should break out.’’ It was what ‘‘they believed,’’ not what he believed. He still held that the tariff was constitutional and, at moderate levels, could do good, but he began to distance himself from the idea of protecting industry for its own sake, and to argue that tariffs were necessary only for a frugal government’s revenue.109 Calhoun’s political bases—first, South Carolina, then the South—changed, and so he had to change too, unless he was willing to accept irrelevance. It was typical of Calhoun that, having apprised the situation, he leapt with great abruptness into the new cause, while claiming that nothing was sudden. ‘‘You know I have for years dreaded, what is most falsely called the American system,’’ he told John McLean in August 1828, but it is doubtful that McLean did know this with any assurance.110 There was, however, an underlying consistency, if not the one Calhoun claimed. He had been a nationalist because he had been convinced that the Union would be best served by an activist policy, in war and peace. The late 1820s convinced him that this had been wrong, that activism drove wedges into the Union, created inequities and resentments, special interests and victims, and so the game was not worth the candle. A different game had to be played. A new economic philosophy eventually flowed from this, but not all at once. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that, almost for the first time. Calhoun had to think hard about political economy, initially to find an economics that suited his political situation. Laissez-faire, apart from being intellectually respectable, suited him well, for his new politics were fearful, suspicious, wary. Better not to act, better to pull in the horns of government, better to quiet the dogs and let them sleep, and in their quietude the Union might survive. Ironically, however, first there had to be uproar, all the din of Nullification, to force the concession of quietude from Clay. For Calhoun was convinced that it was interposition (the word he preferred to Nullification) that had been the political and economic saving of the Union. Not unimportant in all this (and easy to miss because it was a silence) was the lessening of his old concerns. It was less plausible in 1830 that imperial Europe would come again. Calhoun’s old military concerns faded from his mind, apart from the bayonets threatened by Andrew Jackson against South Carolina. For a while, Calhoun’s economics were crude by the standards of his contemporaries. He tended to follow McDuffie’s line that the South was paying a huge indemnity for the American System, that most of its ills were expli109. JCC to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 1 July 1827; JCC to Micah Sterling, 29 June 1828; JCC to James Monroe, 10 July 1828; JCC to Samuel D. Ingham, 23 July 1828; JCC to Samuel Smith, 28 July 1828, ibid., 10:293, 391, 399, 402, 403–4. 110. JCC to John McLean, 4 August 1828, ibid., 405.

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cable by the tariff. Cardozo knew better, but Cardozo’s cool estimates were bad politics, and Calhoun had not yet became an adept at statistics. Moreover, Cardozo was not very sensitive to the politics of slavery, as Calhoun was. Looking ahead in 1828, Calhoun saw two scenarios for an increasingly industrial America. At the moment, the South was agricultural, export-driven, dependent on slavery, and this had been so ‘‘from the settlement of this section of the country to this day.’’ In the first scenario, she might try to become industrial, but fail. ‘‘It is a fearful experiment,’’ he told McLean in 1828, ‘‘to compel us, rich in land and Negroes, but destitute of money capital, skilled in the culture of corn, cotton, rice and tobacco, but utterly without experience or skill in mechanick labour to turn manufacturers.’’ (Calhoun seems always to have had doubts about Southern enterprise; in 1836 at a speech in Pendleton, he confessed that he was rejoiced ‘‘to see the spirit of industry, activity and enterprize, now awake in the land,’’ but also that ‘‘[w]e of the South have had heretofore too little of this spirit.’’) By failing, the South would become a colonial dependency of the North, stand towards it (as the Exposition had explained) as the American colonies had to Britain in the eighteenth century. But the other, the optimistic scenario was as troubling. Calhoun presumed that any new Southern industry would be powered by slave labor. What then? ‘‘Suppose we should succeed in the rivalry, and instead of cotton, should send yarn and goods to the North, do you think, that the free laborers, the voters of the North, would permit bread to be taken out of the mouths of their wives and children, by the slaves of the South?’’ 111 Between 1828 and the compromise tariff of 1833, Calhoun worked out most (not all) of his views of American political economy. It is important to reiterate that he had nothing, per se, against American industry. ‘‘I have ever been a sincere friend of our manufactures,’’ he told Monroe in 1828. He said this insistently, and there is no reason to doubt him. Indeed his views on industry were remarkably similar to Clay’s, almost guilelessly so. As late as 1842, Calhoun was reiterating that he was ‘‘no enemy to the manufacturing interest,’’ and that ‘‘according to my conception, the great advance made in the arts by mechanical and chemical inventions and discoveries, in the last three or four generations, has done more for civilization, and the elevation of the human race, than all other causes combined in the same period.’’ 112 His private life showed that this was no empty piety, but an investment strategy. He owned a gold mine in Georgia—indeed a strike there occasioned his only delinquent trip from Washington during a congressional session—and he was 111. Ibid.; ‘‘Speech at Pendleton,’’ 12 August 1836, ibid., 406, 407, 13:275. 112. JCC to James Monroe, 5 September 1828; ‘‘Speech before the Passage of the Tariff Bill,’’ 5 August 1842, ibid., 10:416, 16:362. For a further example of JCC on manufactures, see JCC to Samuel D. Ingham, 26 September 1829, ibid., 11:79.

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very much interested in railroads, especially that proposed for construction between Charleston and Cincinnati.113 In time, he came to believe that the tariff was not only bad for the South but even for the manufacturers, for it took purchasing power from their American consumers. The economy in all its sectors did best when most free. He came to argue that a tax on imports was, in effect, a tax on exports, which was peculiarly damaging to the South; that the tariff raised a planter’s costs, while depressing the price of his crop; that it was in the South’s natural interest ‘‘to keep open the market of the world unchecked and unrestricted, to buy cheap, and to sell high.’’ He could grow almost lyrical (though lyricism was not his gift) about free trade, removing burdens, breaking shackles, and taking down toll gates. But he was a moderate. He knew that economies did not like shocks, but had to be adjusted quietly; so he agreed to a gradual lowering of the tariff in 1833 and was opposed later to ‘‘a sudden and total repeal’’; likewise, he was inclined to keep the Bank of the United States going while reconsideration was carefully undertaken. ‘‘I am opposed to all harsh or precipitate measures’’ was his mantra.114 Not that he was a booster. Calhoun was an austere man, who believed in hard work, for himself and others, and so he advocated a prosperity grounded in productivity and the making of things. He was inclined to brief jeremiads on ‘‘the love of gain,’’ which might ‘‘overspread the land, to the absorption of every other passion and feeling.’’ 115 This much explained what became, by the late 1830s, his chief preoccupation, the currency, banking, and the problem of credit. In one sense, the problem was forced on him. The Jacksonians took after the Bank of the United States, dumped government money into unregulated ‘‘pet banks,’’ and made a mess of the American banking system. Someone had to sort out the problem and, increasingly, Calhoun saw this as his mission. He liked nothing better than Augean stables, ready for his cleansing. He set about studying the problem, perhaps even the scholarly literature; his speeches grew longer, more discursive, more full of statistics and patient explanations to his dull-witted colleagues. (Clay was counted among these.) He came to know how the Bank of Amsterdam had worked in the seventeenth century, and how the Bank of England worked in his own day. Part of this was an old-fashioned instinct. Calhoun did not like bankers and used the word ‘‘capitalist’’ rather as Taylor had, not appreciatively. He worried that capital had a tendency ‘‘to destroy & absorb the property of 113. See JCC to John S. Williams, September 1835; JCC to William Hendricks, 4 January 1838, ibid., 12:557, 14:53. 114. ‘‘Speech on the Force Bill,’’ 15 and 16 February 1833; ‘‘Speech at Pendleton’’; ‘‘Speech on the Bill to Reduce the Duties on Certain Imports,’’ 23 February 1837; ‘‘Speech on the Bill Authorizing an issue of Treasury Notes,’’ 18 September 1837, ibid., 12:57, 13:273, 456, 563. 115. ‘‘Speech at Pendleton,’’ 12 August 1836,’’ ibid., 13:275.

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society and produce a collision between itself and operatives.’’ This insight was a mark of those Southerners who took slave society seriously as a counterpoint to industrialism: others, like the McCords and Garnett, thought that American industrial society was naturally harmonious. Calhoun was troubled at the ‘‘pernicious influence’’ that banks exercised over the distribution of wealth. He once explained that banking ought to be regarded as a lowly occupation, which required only ‘‘inferior qualities,’’ but the wealth of the profession was leading astray the young and ambitious: ‘‘With the great increase of its profits and influence, it is gradually concentrating in itself most of the prizes of life—wealth, honor, and influence—to the great disparagement and degradation of all the liberal and useful and generous pursuits of society. The rising generation cannot but feel its deadening influence.’’ Soon, he said— and his shudder was palpable as he pointed to the Gothic horror—the apogee of honor ‘‘would be the place of attorney to a bank.’’ With this went Taylorlike prejudices against speculators. He muttered rhythmically about ‘‘speculation, peculation, and corruption.’’ Stockjobbers, in particular, he mistrusted as ‘‘a growing and formidable class, who live by raising and depressing stocks, and who behold in the present state of things [1836] the most favorable opportunity of carrying on their dangerous and corrupting pursuits.’’ He hated those who fostered speculative fevers and encouraged inflation, the more so because it beguiled so many. ‘‘Nothing is more stimulating than an expanding and depreciating currency,’’ he said in 1838. ‘‘It creates a delusive appearance of prosperity, which puts everything in motion. Every one feels as if he was growing richer as prices rise, and that he has it in his power, by foresight and exertion, to make his fortune.’’ His imagery for this was almost sexual, though explicitly only alcoholic. ‘‘It is the nature of stimulus, moral as well as physical, to excite at first, and to depress afterwards. The draught which at first causes unnatural excitement and energy, is sure to terminate in corresponding depression and weakness; nor is it less certain that the stimulus of a currency, expanding beyond its natural limits, follows the same law.’’ 116 Nonetheless, for all his talk about going back to primitive principles, Calhoun was a modern man, who saw (by his own lights) deeply into the changing nature of economic modernity. Taylor had thought that the coming world might be waved away, but Calhoun knew better. He knew that banks, paper, and credit were of the essence of a modern economy, that there was no going back to a simple system of hard money, of hoards of silver and gold in every116. ‘‘Memorandum [by Richard K. Crallé],’’ 4 December 1831; ‘‘Speech on the Removal of the Deposits,’’ 13 January 1834; ‘‘Speech on His Amendment to Separate the Government and the Banks,’’ 3 October 1837; ‘‘Speech on the Bill to Regulate the Deposits of Public Money,’’ 28 May 1836; ‘‘Speech for the Subtreasury Bill and against William C. Rives’s Substitute,’’ 15 February 1838, ibid., 11:523, 12:218, 13:603, 217, 14:154; Garnett, ‘‘Distribution of Wealth,’’ 10.

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one’s private strong box, and that specie was a small proportion of the money that drove an economy, and this must be so. The difficulty was, what should be the proper relationship between government and the currency, remembering that the Constitution mandated responsibilities upon the former for the superintendence of the latter, and remembering that Calhoun defined ‘‘currency’’ very broadly? As he said in 1834, ‘‘The currency of the country is the credit of the country—credit in every shape, public and private; credit, not only in the shape of paper, but that of faith and confidence between man and man; through the agency of which, in all its forms, the great and mighty exchanges of this commercial country, at home and abroad, are affected.’’ He had agreed in his younger days to the chartering of the second Bank of the United States and, with only a little stretch, believed in its constitutionality. Indeed, he boasted in 1834 that, though he was ‘‘no partizan of the Bank,’’ and had no relationship to it, ‘‘The Bank owes as much to me as any other individual in the country,’’ and that ‘‘had it not been for my efforts, it would not have been chartered.’’ In general, he felt that the Bank had discharged its trust with fidelity and competence. He was appalled when Jackson removed the deposits in 1834, and thought it an irresponsible idiocy to spread huge sums of government money among a miscellany of minor banks, both because it gave the banks an undeserved reward (six percent, he reckoned) most were illprepared to discharge sensibly, and because it gave the government an ominous patronage. For the banks, it added to what he already regarded with misgivings, their ability to print money, willy-nilly, and so occasion inflation, instability, and financial panics. That of 1837 was a vindication for him, or so he thought. Nonetheless, this crisis forced him to ponder the deeper question of whether the government should be depositing money in private banks, even in Nicholas Biddle’s bank. Further, Calhoun began to wonder what was the influence upon the economy occasioned by the fact that the government accepted as currency those pieces of paper printed by private banks. Did this not make the government a conspirator in the generation of inflation? He concluded that it did, so he came to the view that government and banking needed to be radically dissevered; hence his support for the sub-treasury. He argued in 1837, ‘‘I am of the impression that the connexion [between government and banks] has the most pernicious influence over bank currency; that it tends to disturb that stability and uniformity of value which is essential to a sound currency; and is among the leading causes of that tendency to expansion and contraction, which experience has shown is incident to bank-notes as a currency.’’ 117 117. ‘‘Speech on the Removal of the Deposits,’’ 216, 211; ‘‘Speech on the Bill to Regulate the Deposits of Public Money,’’ 204; ‘‘Speech on the Bill Authorizing an Issue of Treasury Notes,’’ 553.

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The tariff was a crucial issue, not merely for its inequity. Because ‘‘the issues of the banks expand and contract with the expansion and contraction of the fiscal action of the Government; with the increase of its duties, taxes, income, and expenditure,’’ it followed that the great surpluses generated by the tariff had fed the expansion of the currency, and multiplied the number of banks. This was a very technical matter, which Calhoun explained in great, exacting detail in his speech to the Senate on 15 September 1837. This speech showed him to be not only a free trader but (to use a later jargon) a monetarist. His advice was: reduce the fiscal scale of government, remove it from a marked influence on the market, trust to supply and demand, and all would go well. His faith here was instinctive, perhaps merely reactive. He had seen how the other way had worked, and not liked it. Above all, he dreaded the surpluses generated by the tariff, which were (after all) incidental to its purposes. Not much of a tariff was needed to pay the government’s expenses, but a large revenue was essential to marginalize cheap imports. But what to do with all this money, which first had paid off the national debt, but then piled up in the treasury? Give it to the pet banks? This led to economic derangement. Spend it on an enlarged government, more bureaucrats? This created a centralized power, armed to the teeth with the power that revenue created. (That ‘‘the revenue is the state’’ was a maxim from Burke that Calhoun liked to cite.)118 Distribute the surplus to the states? This created clients in state legislatures, who governed with the monies handed down from Washington. Given that Calhoun believed that, unresisted, tariffs had a natural tendency to be raised, this was a vicious, upward spiral. He was determined to break it, and thought that Nullification had commenced movement in the other direction. He thought of this purification as consummating a Jeffersonian revolution that had stalled. He explained it succinctly during the election campaign of 1840, in a passage which, if not very good as candid history, was instructive about his sense of history: The political revolution of 1801, which brought Mr. Jefferson into power, as important as it is acknowledged to be, was but partial. It was impossible, under the circumstances of the times, to carry out fully the great principles of the party. The Federal principles and policy, against which the patriots of that day contended, had been laid on foundations too deep and strong to be subverted by the most successful assault. The funded debt, the National Bank, and the connection of the Government with the banking system, constituting the basis of that policy, could not be reached by that revolution. All that could be accomplished then was to get clear of the odious alien and sedition laws; to introduce 118. For example, Meriwether, Calhoun Papers, 13:601, 14:147.

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rigid economy and accountability in the public expenditures; to apply the surplus revenue, beyond the necessary wants of the government, to the discharge of the funded debt; and to prevent any further departure from the principles of the Constitution—all of which were faithfully and successfully attended to by Mr. Jefferson and his administration. Fortunately, the debt has since been discharged, the Bank has ceased to exist, and the Government separated, I trust forever, from the banking system. Doubly fortunate, their legitimate offsprings, the protective tariff and the mis-called American system, are at their last gasp.119 This was the creed to which he adhered for the rest of his career. Matters looked good in 1839 and 1840, after the Compromise of 1833, after the death of the Bank of the United States, after his unholy alliance with Van Buren had achieved the Subtreasury. They looked less good when the Whigs returned to power in 1841, and Clay rose again to prosecute his old programs. Though Calhoun’s technical command of these economic problems was formidable, his venture had been to elaborate an economics that vindicated the politics he had embraced from 1828 onwards. His statistics, his insistent historicizing of the American economy, were suspiciously coherent, tidily Manichean. Free trade was not only moral, favorable to constitutional liberty, but made for economic prosperity, North and South. Protection was not only immoral, destructive of constitutional liberty, but made for economic derangement, North and South. These were the economics of a partisan, but a clever one. Late in his career, Calhoun reached for something beyond these considerations, into intellectual territory that Thomas Dew had begun to occupy in the 1820s, and Karl Marx and J. A. Hobson would refine later. Earlier in their careers, both Clay and Calhoun had shared the desire to foster economic independence, above all from Britain, however much they had sometimes differed on the means to achieve this. Calhoun never had much time for ‘‘foreigners,’’ all the aliens who put their money into American ventures. But, as Dew had insisted, free trade had little respect for the nation-state. Calhoun was among the first Americans to understand this, and to suggest a political economy for the coming moment. For one thing, he came to believe that the precedent of Britain, which had so entranced Clay, was inapt. Britain was a small island, with few natural resources, which needed industry to create an export trade. For the United States, on the other hand, extracting her abundant resources and shipping them, exchanging them for ‘‘the products of the 119. ‘‘Speech on Felix Grundy’s Report on the Assumption by the General Government of the Debts of the States,’’ 5 February 1840; JCC to Nathaniel Bailey and others, 14 September 1840, ibid., 15:76, 353.

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rest of the world, forms the basis of our industry.’’ But Calhoun discerned something deeper and further than that. ‘‘We have, Senators,’’ he predicted in 1842, ‘‘reached a remarkable point in the progress of civilization, and the mechanical and chemical arts, and which will require a great change in the policy of civilized nations.’’ Industry had grown so productive that only a little of a country’s capital and labor was needed ‘‘to clothe its people, and supply itself with most of the products of the useful arts.’’ With the domestic market oversupplied, it followed that ‘‘no people, restricted to the home market, can, in the present advanced state of the useful arts, rise to greatness and wealth by manufactures.’’ Rather, ‘‘they must compete successfully for the foreign market, in the younger, less advanced, and less civilized countries.’’ With this trade, though, went the spread of ‘‘population, light, civilization, and prosperity, far and wide over [the globe’s] entire surface.’’ 120 In one sense, this was the old message of free trade. But there was an imperial undertone in Calhoun’s version. ‘‘What is to be done?’’ he asked, Lenin-like. ‘‘What course does true policy require, to give the highest possible impulse to the industry and prosperity of the country, including manufactures and all?’’ The answer was, ‘‘Instead of looking to the home market and shaping all our policy to secure that, we must look to the foreign, and shape it to secure that.’’ For one thing, Calhoun believed the problem of home industry was all but solved, that the industrial sector was mature, that the notion of America as an economic child needing protection was passé. ‘‘We have arrived at the manhood of our vigor,’’ he said in 1840. ‘‘Open the way— remove all restraints—take off the swaddling cloth that bound the limbs of infancy.’’ The developed world was growing full of mature economies, whose surplus needed export, who needed the less developed world to sustain their own greatness, and keep their workers happily employed. In this scramble for Africa and Asia, the United States had the advantages of its great resources, but needed the freedom to trade, which only a laissez-faire policy could provide. ‘‘Why should we doubt our capacity to compete successfully, with a sound currency and low duties, in the general market of the world?’’ The United States had cotton, water, coal, timber, fertile soil, an intelligent and advanced workforce, with only ‘‘two drawbacks—high wages and high interest.’’ 121 So, he suggested, conquer Lima, Dakar, Canton with American exports or face domestic difficulty. As prognostication, this was strikingly, disquietingly prescient. But this injunction also spoke to an optimistic vein in Calhoun, at odds with the dark demons of the Commonwealth tradition otherwise haunting 120. ‘‘Speech before the Passage of the Tariff Bill,’’ 5 August 1842, ibid., 16:368–69. 121. ‘‘Speech on Felix Grundy’s Report,’’ 92; ‘‘Speech before the Passage of the Tariff Bill,’’ 369–71.

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him. In this brighter vision, the mature man must compete or die, must subjugate or fail. Calhoun as an American, a Southerner, and a slaveholder did not doubt that in the plenitude of his means and competence, he would succeed. Why should Southerners doubt their capacity to compete successfully? he asked, and knew the glad answer. All his life, he believed in the Union and tried to save it, but not because he was afraid for the South if it was obliged to go alone. ‘‘As for ourselves,’’ he observed in 1836 when debating the abolitionist petitions, ‘‘I feel no apprehension. . . . [A]s great as is the danger, we have nothing to fear if we are true to ourselves. We have many and great resources; a numerous, intelligent, and brave population; great and valuable staples; ample fiscal means; unity of feeling and interest, and an entire exemption from those dangers originating in a conflict between labor and capital. . . . With these impressions, I ask neither sympathy nor compassion for the slaveholding States. We can take care of ourselves.’’ There is no reason to doubt that this optimistic political economy took root in his self-confidence as a slaveholding patriarch, in his sense of self-sufficiency, which was not individualistic, and blurred the line between self and society. He famously articulated a vision of the South as ‘‘an aggregate . . . of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative.’’ 122 This mirage was not a refusal of the world, a building of barriers, as it had been in John Taylor, anxious to stave off decline. In Calhoun, this aggregation of communities was the social bedrock for an engagement with the world, for the imperialism of an economy which might take Americans and Southerners far beyond the American shore, beyond the old fascination of Britain and Europe, into an American century.

122. ‘‘Speech on Abolition Petitions,’’ 9 March 1836; ‘‘Further Remarks in Debate on His Fifth Resolution,’’ 10 January 1838, ibid., 13:108–9, 14:84.

Chapter Eighteen

Our Slavery Question

Not So Much through Principle as from Necessity 1 To think about slavery was to engage the most profound dimensions of a Southern life. It was to confront what it meant to be human, to consider how society should be structured and history shaped, to wonder how a self was possible. As George Fitzhugh put it, ‘‘We did not intend to write the history of slavery, or to treat of it in all its aspects. It has been so interwoven with all the relations and history of human kind, that to do so would require a Moral Cosmos and a history of the world.’’ 2 This scope, however, meant that the genre of the proslavery argument had a very weak center; with the possibility of touching everything, it had the discretion to omit almost anything, even slavery itself. Nonetheless, a pattern is evident. Broadly, the movement of thought from the 1820s onwards was from the concrete to the abstract, the skeptical to the millennial, the disillusioned to the optimistic, the focused to the diffuse, from the idea that slavery exemplified how all fallible humans were entrapped to the conviction that some humans might be free, even happy. There is no tidy beginning to the proslavery argument. It stretched back to antiquity, was modified by the Church Fathers, debated by the scholastics, revised by the early moderns, and warily discussed by the Founding Fathers. The eighteenth century, which abolished serfdom in much of Europe, began to end the slave trade, and started to emancipate slaves in the American North, had no shortage of occasions for meditating upon the nature of slavTitle from Richard Rush to William Henry Trescot, 1 December 1851, William Henry Trescot Papers, LC. 1. ‘‘For myself, I have been quite moral, with some exceptions, not so much through principle as from necessity’’: William Cabell Rives Jr. to John Coles Rutherfoord, 24 December 1844, John Rutherfoord Papers, DU. 2. GF, Sociolo for the South: Or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), 221.

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ery. The generation of 1776 in Virginia and elsewhere had toyed with the idea of emancipation, not without hope, for theirs was a generation that had seen the world change, seen ancient things die, and they had reasons to believe that human decisions could be efficacious. Most famously, St. George Tucker (then of Virginia, but first of Bermuda) had in 1796 published A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, in the State of Virginia, on whose title was placed an epigraph from Montesquieu, to the effect that ‘‘[S]lavery not only violates the Laws of Nature, and of civil Society, it also wounds the best Forms of Government; in a Democracy, where all Men are equal, Slavery is contrary to the Spirit of the Constitution.’’ It is a book founded on the dark knowledge that slaves had suffered and that America had been ‘‘the vale of death to millions of the wretched sons of Africa.’’ But it is not, otherwise, a bleak book. Tucker is blithe on what Virginians might do, considering the ‘‘genial light of liberty,’’ 3 the pattern of slavery’s shrinkage in the modern world, and the tendency to grant legal rights even to Southern slaves. Did not man have a capacity for reason, and were there not ‘‘the absolute and unalienable rights of human nature’’? And did not the Virginian, as Tucker said in 1803, live in an ‘‘enlightened age, when philanthropy is supposed to have been more generally diffused through the civilized nations of the earth’’? ‘‘But if the voice of reason, justice and humanity be not stifled by sordid avarice, or unfeeling tyranny,’’ he observed, ‘‘it would be easy to convince even those who have entertained such eroneous notions, that the right of one man over another is neither founded in nature, nor in sound policy.’’ Tucker has neat tables to prove that a gradual scheme of emancipation might comfortably work and to show how easy this would be. True, he noticed ‘‘how frequently the laws of nature have been set aside in favour of institutions, the pure result of prejudice, usurpation, and tyranny.’’ But was not government a science, and did not science serve freedom? ‘‘Science counteracts [the] mechanical monopoly of knowledge, and unfolds to its votaries those principles which ought to direct the operations of the machine. . . . Hence, since the introduction of letters, those nations which have been most eminent in science have been most distinguished by freedom.’’ 4 So, a little talk among gentlemen might reason it out: ‘‘From the communication of sentiment between those who lament the evil, it is possible that an effectual remedy may at length be discovered. Whenever that happens the golden age of our country will begin.’’ 5 3. St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, in the State of Virginia (1796; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 7. 4. St. George Tucker, View of the Constitution of the United States: With Selected Writings, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 14. 5. Tucker, Dissertation on Slavery, 7, 95, 64, 104; ‘‘Editor’s Preface’’ to St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference, to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Govern-

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Charles B. J. F. de St. Mémin, St. George Tucker (Courtesy Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary)

Thirty years of communicating sentiment yielded, not a remedy, but a conviction of intractability. Six months before the death of Thomas Jefferson, Edward Brown of Charleston placed upon the title page of his pamphlet Notes on the Origin and Necessity of Slavery not Montesquieu, but those lines from Shakespeare’s most cynical play, Troilus and Cressida, wherein Ulysses argues that only hierarchy stands between man and the abyss: ‘‘Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark! what discord follows; each thing meets / In mere oppugnancy.’’ For Brown, modern progress had been made not by freedom, but by slavery. Tucker had seen American history as made by the freedom of Europeans and the enslavement of Africans, and had thought that the American future would be the process of extending the liberality of the former to the lives of the latter. But Brown saw slavery as having made the settlement of the New World possible, indeed in having made man capable of civilization. In this, Brown was deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment’s theory of four stages in human history, which had attempted to explain how humans had advanced from hunting societies, to pastoral, then agricultural, lastly to the commercial.6 For Brown, slavery had been history’s Malthusian schoolroom, wherein primitive man’s instinct for unbridled liberty ment of the United States; and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: William Young Birch and Abraham Small, 1803), reprinted in Tucker, View of the Constitution, 10, 14. 6. The classic modern account of this is Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). There are extensive references to Adam Smith, the most energetic proponent of the analysis, in Brown’s work.

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had been changed into discipline: ‘‘Slavery has ever been the step-ladder, by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization. . . . [It is] the only state, capable of bringing the love of independence and of ease, inherent in man, to the discipline necessary to the supply of food, raiment and shelter necessary to physical wants.’’ Slavery arose, not from greed but from necessity, ‘‘which compelled him to sacrifice his liberty to obtain the means of preserving life,’’ which was no easy thing. The institution had been governed by the laws of supply and demand. In countries where the supply of labor outstripped its demand, slavery had been redundant; this was so of modern Britain and France. Elsewhere, notably in newly settled lands where labor had been expensive and subsistence abundantly cheap, slavery was essential; it was the price to be paid for an adequate exploitation of the land, that is, for the establishment of civilization.7 This was an economic calculus, though the analysis rested upon a vision of human nature. As Brown saw it, men are unlovely creatures, lazy and corrupt: ‘‘The love of virtue is not inherent in Man, and would not of itself be sufficient to control his appetites and passions. The true and only motive which operates on the mass of mankind, is the reward which is expected to follow a moral course of life; which reward, consists in the facility of obtaining subsistence, the comforts, credit and respectability, which, in civilized society, are consequent on correct conduct.’’ So a class system is essential to an advanced culture, for gradations make ambition and distribute esteem. Conversely, ‘‘There is not any thing, which can so effectually pave the way for insubordination and habits directly the reverse of sobriety and good order, as perfect equality in civilized society.’’ In Brown’s Tory vision, the value of slavery lay in helping to depress the working classes, which might otherwise rise in affluence and power to challenge and overthrow their betters, who are necessary to sustain standards of culture. Slavery was ‘‘the only barrier to [a] disorganization of civilized society,’’ because forced labor, by competition, depressed the wages of free labor and simultaneously ‘‘by depriving the slave of volition and preventing him from rising to liberty and competency, prevents that perfect and universal equality, which is but another phrase for barbarism.’’ 8 For the rest, Brown rapidly struck notes that subsequent Southerners were to elaborate: the tone of grievance that the world misunderstood the South and was conspiring to destroy it, the claim that slaves were humanely treated by Godly masters, the repudiation of Thomas Jefferson’s egalitarianism and 7. Edward Brown, Notes on the Origin and Necessity of Slavery (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1826), 6, 13, 32. 8. Ibid., 24–25, 30–31.

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view of slavery as fostering an unrepublican and despotic psychology, the assertion that slaves lived better than British industrial workers and that free blacks degenerated, the suggestion that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible. Still, these come at the end of his pamphlet as extras to his main argument, that slavery was a problem in political economy, and that thinking about slavery was a means to locate Southern culture in the historical trajectory of human civilization. For Brown, the driving question was, who are we? For St. George Tucker, the answer had been: we are an enlightened people who control our own destinies. For Brown, it was: we are a flawed people who are in the grip of historical necessity, but nonetheless advancing the purposes of civilization. Brown’s was to remain the basic answer throughout the antebellum period. It helps to explain why political economy and its bastard stepchild, sociology, were the queen disciplines of the proslavery argument, for each embodied the ethic of necessity, were thought (as Dew put it) ‘‘to be sustained by facts and reasoning as irresistible as the demonstration of the mathematician.’’ 9 Nonetheless, the 1820s retained a residual sense that slavery was not immutable, that necessity might also move to subvert slavery. The colonizationists outside and inside the South had their schemes and hopes and money. As late as 1832, Jesse Burton Harrison could observe, ‘‘There is a serious disposition to look the evil of slavery (nothing less!) in the face, and to cast about for some method of diminishing or extirpating it.’’ The humanitarianism of this was constrained. Like most Southern antislavery people, such as Cassius Marcellus Clay later and Jefferson earlier, Harrison was little moved by the plight of slaves: ‘‘We believe there is not the slightest moral turpitude in holding slaves under existing circumstances in the south. . . . Our solicitations to the slaveholders, it will be perceived, are founded but little on the miseries of the blacks. We direct ourselves almost exclusively to the injuries slavery inflicts on the whites.’’ That is, slavery incapacitated the work ethic, prevented the growth of manufactures, was hostile to dense population growth, and discouraged white immigration. In this judgment, Harrison was not very remote from Thomas Dew, who was rendering a very different verdict on the 1831–32 emancipation debates in the Virginia state legislature. Dew, too, doubted the long-term prospects of slavery, at least in Virginia, but he was scathingly precise that ‘‘every plan of emancipation and deportation which we can possibly conceive, is totally impracticable.’’ 10 9. Thomas R. Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond: T. W. White, 1832), 8. 10. ‘‘The Slavery Question in Virginia’’ (1832), in Aris Sonis Focisque, Being a Memoir of an American Family, the Harrisons of Skimino, ed. Fairfax Harrison (n.p.: privately printed, 1910), 337, 342; Dew, Review of the Debate, 8.

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Dew was radical in his moral reasoning and half-stepped beyond the historical reasonings of Edinburgh into the sharper relativism of historicism. Like Brown, he knew that man was ‘‘frail’’ and ‘‘imperfect,’’ but also that he was trapped in a history marked by stages and was ‘‘almost entirely the creature of circumstances.’’ 11 Knowledge was local, as was morality. A man born in a free society mistrusted slavery, just as one born in a slave society was puzzled by freedom. ‘‘We make self the standard, and endeavor to draw down every one to its dimensions.’’ By the same token, the nature of slavery was specific to times and places. Like Brown, Dew believed that slavery encouraged the development of civilization, because it was linked to the invention of property and agriculture, it encouraged a self-interest in preserving life, and so it diminished war by being sympathetic to commerce. Further, slavery mitigated the warlike instinct for vengeance and elevated the condition of woman by removing her from the degrading necessity of chattel labor. In short, slavery was part of the origins of modern society, of what others would come to call capitalism. To be sure, Dew sincerely gestured towards the moral case for slavery. He duly cited his Bible and trotted out his lawyers (Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel), but his argument was broadly located in the twilight zone where political economy met social ethics, where necessity was thought to create morality. In this place, Dew occupied a guardedly optimistic position, typical of the Episcopalian. For Dew, ‘‘when we look abroad to the works of omnipotence—when we contemplate the external, the physical world—and again, when we turn to the world of mind, we never find evil the sole object and end of creation. Happiness is always the main design, evil is merely incidental.’’ (George Fitzhugh, another Episcopalian, believed this, too: ‘‘God has made nothing evil, nothing useless.’’) Since God was benevolent, slavery as one of his institutions ‘‘has been perhaps the principal means for impelling forward the civilization of mankind.’’ 12 For a Calvinist like Thornwell, this was mushy heresy, but Calvinists were a minority in the South and, in this belief, Dew was more in the mainstream. So history mattered, for it explained what had been and what might be. Thomas Dew was a Burkean, suspicious of Enlightenment abstractions, skeptical of the notion that morality could stand outside of history and, by force of virtue, successfully change the world. For Dew, no legislature could enact bills ‘‘upon purely abstract principles, entirely independent of circumstances, without the ruin of the body politic.’’ Circumstances were what made ‘‘every political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.’’ Nothing should 11. Dew, Review of the Debate, 8, 9. While Brown had relied for his stage theory on Adam Smith, Dew preferred to draw on William Robertson. 12. Ibid., 111, 28; GF, ‘‘Love of Danger and of War,’’ DBR 28 (March 1860): 302.

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be ‘‘stript of every relation in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.’’ 13 Context was all. Hence much of Dew’s Review is an accountant’s description of the South’s actuarial limitations. The estimated worth of Virginia’s slaves was $100,000,000, which was a third of the state’s wealth, so compensated emancipation was an impossibility, for there were no means to pay the bill. If one merely wished, as some did, to purchase and transport the annual increase in the Virginian slave population (about 6,000), it would require between $1.38 million and $2.4 million each year, perhaps for fifty years or more. For the United States as a whole, remembering that such a policy would inflate slave prices, Dew calculated that it would require an annual expenditure of $27 million to purchase and transport 60,000 slaves. This would have little effect on the basic problem, which was that African Americans were growing as fast demographically as whites. And Dew believed that colonization would occasion little benefit even for those returned to Africa, for he thought that most would perish from the disease and climate of west Africa.14 With affected dispassion, Dew anatomized what would be the economic effect of such emancipations, on slave prices, on land values, on immigration and emigration, on the domestic slave trade, and found little good and much harm. ‘‘There is,’’ he summarized, ‘‘$100,000,000 of slave property in the state of Virginia, and it matters but little how you destroy it, whether by the slow process of the cautious practitioner, or with the frightful despatch of the self confident quack; when it is gone, no matter how, the deed will be done, and Virginia will be a desert.’’ Still worse was the economic prognosis for freeing slaves but allowing them to remain in Virginia; like many others, Dew thought free blacks were indolent and degenerate. Slavery, after all, was property and, as Dew saw it, the state rested upon and was instituted to protect property. No Virginian government that sought to end slavery could survive, nor could society itself, for even the nonslaveholder depended upon the institution: ‘‘All the sources of wealth and departments of industry, all the great interests of society, are really interwoven with one another—they form an indissoluble chain; a blow at any part quickly vibrates through the whole length—the destruction of one interest involves another. Destroy agriculture, destroy tillage, and the ruin of the farmer will draw down ruin upon the me13. Dew, Review of the Debate, 46. 14. Ibid., 47–50, 82–83. Cf. A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of Society (1828), in Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley, ed. Daniel W. Stowell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 73: ‘‘It has been a favorite project of some of our least mathematical economists, to transport all the colored people of the U. States to Africa, without considering that the cost of the annual increase alone, if purchased, when added to the lowest possible freight, would exceed the annual revenue of the U. States.’’

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‘‘Horrid Massacre in Virginia’’: Nat Turner (From Samuel Warner, Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene Which Was Witnessed in Southampton County [ Virginia] [1831])

chanic, the merchant, the sailor, and the manufacturer—they must all flee together from the land of desolation.’’ 15 There is a touch of Volney in Dew, a hint of Ozymandias. The rest of his argument is the making of a case for necessity. To the argument that slavery was, ‘‘in the abstract at least,’’ un-Christian, he responded that, ‘‘any question must be determined by its circumstances, and if, as really is the case, we cannot get rid of slavery without producing a greater injury to both the masters and slaves, there is no rule of conscience or revealed law of God, which can condemn us.’’ His metaphor for the Southern position is chilling. ‘‘The physician will not order the spreading cancer to be extirpated although it will eventually cause the death of his patient, because he would thereby hasten the final issue.’’ (Hugh Legaré, whose arguments anticipated and paralleled Dew’s, compared slavery to an inherited case of syphilis.)16 The image is stronger than Dew’s subsequent palliations, that slavery is sanctioned by the Bible, that Jefferson misunderstood its psychology, that selfinterest requires kindliness in masters, that slaves come to sympathize with their owners, that slavery is republican, that fear of insurrection (even after Nat Turner) is exaggerated and white police power is supreme, that slave labor is productive and historically had produced most of American prosperity. Dew offered the best case, but it was predicated on allowing for the 15. Dew, Review of the Debate, 64, 68–69. 16. Ibid., 106; HSL, ‘‘Hall’s Travels in North-America,’’ SR 4 (November 1829): 353.

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worst. More, he was moving towards a theory of historical irony, the idea that the bad created the good. This was a theme developed by William Harper and it constituted a central component of the proslavery argument in the 1830s, one that Fitzhugh in the 1850s would turn into a playful, grinning paradox. Thomas Dew was a sort of bourgeois accountant, a man in a black frockcoat who lived a life of exemplary domesticity, while keeping the books for an irregular world. Though he came from a planting family, it is not clear that Dew himself ever owned a plantation, though he certainly had extensive business investments.17 By contrast, William Harper, though his proslavery treatise came five years later than Dew’s Review, reasoned more like an eighteenthcentury gentleman.18 Immorality worried the priggish Dew, but Harper was relaxed about it. As he observed in an 1828 article on the deficiencies of the colonization movement, the abstract question of whether slavery was natural, humane, or just was ‘‘not [to] our purpose to go at large into . . . on the present occasion.’’ Christianity had ‘‘nothing to do with the matter, except, indeed, that the total silence of its Divine Author upon this subject, and the positive injunction of obedience upon bondsmen, in the midst of the sternest, the harshest, and most indiscriminate system of servitude that ever existed, seem to make the inference inevitable, that He considered the institution as altogether a matter of political expediency.’’ 19 William Harper’s career was fairly conventional, save in being the son of a preacher (called John) who had been sent in 1789 by John Wesley to Antigua, where William was born in 1791. His mother Henrietta Hawes died when he was very young, after the family had moved to Boston. There his father sent him to be educated in Baltimore, then in Charleston, to which the father had removed in 1799. The son went to the South Carolina College, taught a little school to pay his fees and graduated in 1808, thought of being a doctor but became a lawyer, spent a few years in Missouri (there following his father-inlaw), before returning to Columbia in 1823, briefly serving as an appointed 17. See, for example, Thomas R. Dew to B. Franklin Dew, 27 March, 17 April 1843, Dew Family Mss, WM; Thomas R. Dew, document grating a power of attorney, endorsed by Thomas G. Peachy, 17 December 1841, John Rutherfoord Papers, DU. 18. The original publication is William Harper, Memoir on Slavery: Read before the Society for the Advancement of Learning, of South Carolina, at Its Annual Meeting at Columbia, 1837 (Charleston, S.C.: J. S. Burges, 1838): but I cite hereafter its republication as William Harper, ‘‘Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics,’’ ed. E. N. Elliott, in Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments: Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on This Important Subject (Augusta, Ga.: Pritchard, Abbott & Loomis, 1860), 549–626. 19. William Harper, ‘‘Colonization Society,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 233. Many of the arguments in this essay anticipate Dew, whom Harper seems to have known and worked with. John Belton O’Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: S. G. Courtenay, 1859), 1:273, has: ‘‘In the discharge of a public duty at Washington, in connection with Professor Dew, Judge Harper was absent the most of March and April [1835].’’

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William Harper (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

U.S. senator, but mostly having judicial appointments, which did not prevent him from being zealous in the cause of Nullification. He married well to Catherine Coalter and lived well, and became an Episcopalian. He was said to have written poetry, been kindly, been often silent but capable of being a good talker. Above all, he was famous for having a prodigious memory. William Grayson, who was not habitually generous, benignly thought him ‘‘a man of wisdom and virtue, the business of whose life is the conscientious and earnest seeking after truth.’’ 20 Harper built upon Dew, which was a pattern in the proslavery argument. It was, preeminently, a cumulative discourse in which thinker referred to thinker, in which the South was very conscious of itself as an intellectual community, whose members learned from one another. The obverse of this was a growing sense, absent from Jefferson and St. George Tucker’s generation, 20. On Harper, see O’Neall, Bench and Bar of South Carolina, 1:270–74; an unattributed manuscript, marked ‘‘Memoir of William Harper prepared at the request of Wm. Gilmore Simms for Appleton’s Cyclopedia of Literary Men,’’ William Harper Papers, SCL; and William J. Grayson, ‘‘Slavery in the Southern States,’’ SQR 8 (October 1845): 320.

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that slavery prevented community with others beyond the South. Harper was much vexed that the modern world wished to disown slavery and the South, when one considered how much of that world had had and still had the institution. But, then, Harper was less persuaded than Dew that morality was only local and was more drawn to the older vision that there was a ‘‘tribunal of the civilized world,’’ even to the now-suspect proposition that ‘‘human nature [is] the same in all countries.’’ So Harper was troubled that the South pleaded before the tribunal, but its judges did not listen. Dew, he observed with disappointment, ‘‘seems not to have attracted the slightest attention out of the limits of slaveholding States themselves . . . [and] seems to have produced no effect whatever.’’ 21 Very few proslavery thinkers had much expectation of transcending their locality. Dew mainly addressed himself to the makers of public policy in Virginia and Harper spoke to other South Carolinians. The Memoir on Slavery was first a speech before the Society for the Advancement of Learning of South Carolina, in Columbia. William Smith’s Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery (1856) were lectures addressed to Southern college students, just as John Fletcher’s Studies on Slavery, in Easy Lessons: Compiled Into Eight Studies, and Subdivided Into Short Lessons for the Convenience of Readers (1851) was a sort of school anthology. James Henry Hammond did write letters to Thomas Clarkson, the aging English abolitionist, but it is doubtful that Hammond expected an answer and certainly his tone made one difficult. The theologians, to be sure, entered into intersectional dialogues, notably that conducted between Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland, for Christians had a stubborn expectation that a shared truth ought to be discoverable among believers everywhere.22 But Henry Hughes was dreamily and egocentrically oblivious of audience. Perhaps only George Fitzhugh believed, almost innocently, in the wider conversation: he corresponded with antislavery periodicals, traveled to New Haven to debate Wendell Phillips, and was convinced that Dew was wrong to think that cultures did not speak to one another. In Harper, there is a recognition that cogency alone did not command broad influence, though also a feeling that (despite this) cogency was what Southerners owed to themselves by way of self-knowledge. Harper was among the first to understand that the defense of slavery mandated the repudiation of egalitarianism. In this stark Federalist impulse, he followed Brown, anticipated Fitzhugh, and quietly modified Dew, who had tiptoed around the Declaration of Independence. For Harper, there was no 21. Harper, ‘‘Slavery,’’ 550, 575, 551. 22. Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution: In a Correspondence between the Rev. Richard Fuller of Beaufort, S.C., and the Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R. I. (New York: L. Colby Gould; Boston: Kendall and Lincoln, 1845).

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logical relationship between freedom and equality, but rather society was a texture of power and dependency. ‘‘Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free, and that no two men were ever born equal?’’ he asked. ‘‘Man is born in a state of the most helpless dependence on others. He continues subject to the absolute control of others,’’ at least until maturity, but even then ‘‘inequality is further developed, and becomes infinite in every society, and under whatever form of government.’’ So slavery is no anomaly in the human condition. Slaughtered animals, children, women, criminals, unenfranchised whites, slaves, all form part of the pattern of exclusions and inclusions that make the world. This came close to understanding morality as power alone, but Harper stopped short of this. For, ‘‘we admit the existence of a moral law, binding on societies as on individuals. Society must act in good faith.’’ Each in their place must act justly and not deliberately impede the natural imperative to seek for happiness, for everyone is above and below someone else. ‘‘Man is born to subjection’’ was a truth with its own ethics. ‘‘The condition of our whole existence is but to struggle with evils—to compare them—to choose between them and, so far as we can, to mitigate them. To say that there is evil in any institution, is only to say that it is human.’’ So man has no inalienable rights and governments habitually deprive men of liberty: that is what laws are for. Hence the ideological legacy of the American Enlightenment was but the ‘‘well-sounding, but unmeaning verbiage of natural equality and inalienable rights.’’ 23 Believing this, Harper could be at ease in acknowledging fault. Native Americans had been cruelly defrauded of their lands and exterminated, the African slave trade had been marked by an ‘‘enormous amount of evil,’’ and slavery itself was full of abuses. With Dew, Harper agreed that slavery occasioned social progress, but the latter also acknowledged that each stage of history had its peculiar evils and he was unsure that there was such a thing as a transhistorical standard. ‘‘The will of God, as determined by utility, would be an infallible guide, if we had an unerring measure of utility,’’ which they did not. Even to imagine a greater stage of history, ‘‘a state of society in which all shall have property, and there shall be no great inequality of property,’’ where there might be abundant and effective schools and religion, would not be to imagine a world guaranteed happiness. Human misery came less from ‘‘external circumstances,’’ but more from ‘‘men themselves,’’ from their ‘‘depraved circumstances, their wayward passions and perverse wills.’’ Even in the best of society, there was ‘‘all the petty competition, the envy, the hatred, malice and dissimulation that torture the heart,’’ not to mention ‘‘licentiousness.’’ 24 23. Harper, ‘‘Slavery,’’ 553–58. 24. Ibid., 562, 565–66.

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This is close to Harper’s central message. He was very much the aging cynic, who knew human frailty because he had experienced it. He was a judge, after all, before whom human depravity was incessantly paraded. So he thought it silly to imagine that happiness was anything other than a fleeting accomplishment. Hence he mistrusted the do-gooder and gleefully quoted Coleridge, who had said, ‘‘I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in heart somehow or other.’’ Harper’s best case for slavery was, not that it was a positive good, but that it might create a society slightly less evil or at least not significantly worse: ‘‘That there are great evils in a society where slavery exists, and that the institution is liable to great abuse, I have already said.’’ Slaveholders, after all, were human. ‘‘But the whole of human life is a system of evils and compensations. We have no reason to believe that the compensations with us are fewer, or smaller in proportion to the evils, than those of any other condition of society.’’ This made him insouciant about much, allowed him to ‘‘examine without blenching, the actual and alleged evils of slavery.’’ 25 He admitted to a great deal: brutality, flogging, sexual abuse, cruelty, the splitting up of families, the limitation placed upon the moral, intellectual, and economic development of the slaves, the encouragement in them of petty theft, lying, and licentiousness. Indeed, he thought that slavery seemed to place the slave beyond morality, because ‘‘he has no character to establish or to lose’’ and ‘‘theft in a freeman is a crime; in a slave, it is a vice.’’ Further, he acknowledged that slave women were readily used to gratify ‘‘the hot passions of men.’’ In fact, he was deeply interested in the sexual dimension of slavery, to which he devoted several warm pages that wandered into reflections upon white and black prostitutes.26 Yet there were limits to Harper’s cynicism. His standard response to the evidence of Southern abuses was evidence of abuse elsewhere. Slaves were flogged, but so were English sailors. Slave women were seduced, but London was full of stews. Yet, usually, he pulled back from the abandonment of American exceptionalism, which was the logical consequence of his drift towards flattening out the human experience into a comity of vice. America and the South must be better. Southern brothels were few, South Carolina had no divorce, slaves were secure and Christian, crime was uncommon, so the South had the human vices but in a ‘‘mitigated form.’’ This was the best that life could afford, this mitigation. Civil liberty, which was man’s fragile and artificial invention, pressed against ‘‘the proclivity of the natural man . . . to domineer or to be subservient,’’ but weakly, for ‘‘the Creator, for his own purposes, has set a limit beyond which we cannot go.’’ 27 25. Ibid., 571. 26. Ibid., 622, 571, 579, 580. 27. Ibid., 588, 556.

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Harper was deep enough into the nineteenth century to accept the comforting explanations of race, even to flirt with polygenesis. But this was a bonus, which somewhat undercut the logic of his argument, which mostly rested not upon the distinctiveness of Southern slavery, but on its normality. Harper integrated the slavery around him into the trajectory of world history—like Dew, he wanted to belong—by defining slavery so generally that it was hard not to belong. ‘‘What is the essential character of slavery, and in what does it differ from the servitude of other countries?’’ Harper asked. His definition was: ‘‘Where a man is compelled to labor at the will of another, and to give him much the greater portion of the product of his labor, there slavery exists; and it is immaterial by what sort of compulsion the will of the laborer is subdued.’’ So, blows, starvation, fear, all the compulsions of any society, made slaves. By this reasoning, even the legally free person was socially enthralled and was but a ‘‘masterless slave.’’ 28 Fitzhugh was to inherit this notion of slaves without masters. Like Dew, by stressing the inevitability of inequality, Harper had a marked tendency to derogate the value of social mobility, even for whites: ‘‘It is better that each one should remain in society in the condition in which he has been born and trained, and not to mount too fast without preparation,’’ Dew had said. Harper asked, ‘‘Is it not better that the character and intellect of the individual should be suited to the station which he is to occupy?’’ This amounted to a suspicion of the modern theory of competition, which so marked English society: this insight Fitzhugh was to develop. This suspicion was a matter for anxiety. Dew, in particular, had been much conflicted about it as a skepticism about Adam Smith’s marketplace, which clashed with Dew’s belief in modernity and progress. Harper was less troubled, for he believed less in progress. He knew that ‘‘mutation and progress is the condition of human affairs. . . . [T]he wheel must roll on.’’ But, in the dispute between the ancients and the moderns, he inclined to the former and his sense of modernity was Malthusian, so he understood progress as mostly change, in which the mix of affluence and poverty might alter, but the world on balance would remain much the same. So he said of modern England that ‘‘this inequality, this vice, this misery, this slavery, is the price of [its] civilization.’’ Nothing came without a price.29 Hence Harper had an almost Sadean sensibility. In his memoir, the omnipresence of vice and pain are sensually invoked, lovingly documented. More than most, Harper exemplified the tendency of the proslavery argument, like its antislavery opponent, towards a cultural pornography. Images abound of young men pawing willing slaves, of English prostitutes walking the streets, 28. Ibid., 590. 29. Dew, Review of the Debate, 96; Harper, ‘‘Slavery,’’ 589, 566, 567.

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of whips on backs. But the Marquis de Sade was the spiritual ancestor of Friedrich Nietzsche and this anticipation, too, was in Harper. He thrilled to the idea of the master, of the leader, of beating the odds. ‘‘We, the slaveholding States, are in a hopeless minority in our own confederate Republic—to say nothing of the great confederacy of civilized States,’’ he noted, yet they had produced a wealth of political leadership, which even the South’s enemies (even John Quincy Adams) had been obliged to acknowledge. This preeminence had emerged precisely from the inegalitarian ethic of slavery: ‘‘In the course of human affairs, there arise difficulties which can only be comprehended or surmounted by the strongest power of intellect, strengthened by the most assiduous exercise and enriched with the most extended knowledge. . . . The first want of society is—leaders.’’ For greatness filtered down: ‘‘The whole of society receives the benefit of the exertions of a mind of extraordinary endowments.’’ 30 Nonetheless, Harper pulled back from Superman, which Henry Hughes later would not. Harper also knew that even great men might be ‘‘found inadequate to the exigency.’’ Indeed, the final pages of his oration are a confession that history is an irony, beyond prognostication and control. This was the unavoidable lesson of slavery for his generation. To write of ‘‘us, on whom this institution is fastened, and who could not shake it off, even if we desired to do so,’’ was to admit the limitations of will and the fallibility of intentions. Harper’s general standpoint was that, ‘‘[i]n moral investigations, ambiguity is often occasioned by confounding the intrinsic nature of an action, as determined by its consequences, with the motives of the actor, involving moral guilt or innocence.’’ Wilberforce and Clarkson, for example, had striven to improve the world. But had they? Even they might not know. ‘‘A mole may inundate a province—a spark from a forge may conflagrate a city—a whisper may separate friends—a rumor may convulse an empire—but when we would do benefit to our race or country, the purest and most chastened motives, the most patient thought and labor, with the humblest self-distrust, are hardly sufficient to assure us that the results may not disappoint our expectations, and that they may not do evil instead of good.’’ Slavery might advance a Manifest Destiny of conquest, but it did not follow that this empire would increase the sum of human happiness. For history required and taught only ‘‘labor and self-distrust.’’ 31 In calculating where slavery positioned the South in the modern world, deciding what to make of British society was of special importance. Some 30. Harper, ‘‘Slavery,’’ 598, 576–77. 31. Ibid., 577, 561, 606, 625–26.

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of this instinct was practical. Liverpool was the South’s trading partner and the cotton mills of Lancashire were the consequence of unfreedom. Political economy, which was often the intellectual underpinning of reasoning about slavery, was largely a British invention, with most of its evidence and logic drawn from British social experience: just like Karl Marx in Germany or Henri Saint-Simon in France, the Southern slaveholder in thinking about modern society had to engage English life and Scottish thought. Further, the proslavery argument was a debate about American exceptionalism, a mediation on the trajectory of the American Revolution and a defense of the new republic. It had, therefore, its roots partly in books like Robert Walsh’s An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (1819), which Dew praised in his Review as ‘‘a complete and triumphant vindication of the United States, against the taunts and illiberal insinuations of British writers.’’ Harper was much affected by Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (1833). And it was fairly typical that Hugh Legaré, who disliked to discuss slavery, did so when reviewing Basil Hall, a specimen of the British school of Tory condescension.32 So, though it was to become a defense of the South against the North, the proslavery argument began life as a defense of America against the old enemy. The urgency of this deepened as Britain, the vanquished foe of 1783, grew not weaker but into the industrial Leviathan of an imperial age. Rational men could fairly question where the world’s future lay, in the direction of American or British society, and rational slaveholders had to ask what role slavery might play in all this. Their dilemma was great. Prove that slavery was historically normal and you might suggest that America belonged to an unchanging human experience and to a world with a bleak, inegalitarian future. Increasingly, this was felt to be diminishing, so many Southern thinkers tried to remake American slavery into evidence of America’s transcendence of the human condition. Asked to choose between being American and being slaveholding, exceptionalist or not, Southerners tried to have it both ways. It is no accident, therefore, that James Henry Hammond, in his two letters to Thomas Clarkson in 1845, betrayed a nativist temperament, which grumbled about the foreigner who ‘‘naturally hates everything American’’ and was hated back for ‘‘infamous libels.’’ What had been a mild tension in Harper, between acknowledging vice and claiming virtue, became in Hammond what amounted to a hypocrisy. For few in the South exceeded Ham32. Dew, Review of the Debate, 45; Harper, ‘‘Slavery,’’ 563–64; HSL, ‘‘Hall’s Travels,’’ 352– 69. However, though he found much else to criticize in Hall’s opinion of American society, Legaré found Hall to be surprisingly sensible on slavery.

Matthew Brady, James Henry Hammond (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

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mond in arriviste amorality. His father Elisha had been a builder of stone walls in Massachusetts, but had worked his way through Dartmouth College, become a schoolmaster and principal of an academy in Georgia, while dabbling in farming and a general store; he moved on to Columbia, where he put money into a sawmill, sold meat and vegetables on the sidewalk, and became the steward at South Carolina College. This was far from poverty, though his son had felt it to be so and striven with urgent calculation to remedy the inclarity of his origins. So he had married a plain heiress coldly for money, then abused her (she left him), built a plantation empire, fitfully neglected his children (white and mulatto), scoffed privately at Christianity while issuing gubernatorial proclamations in praise of the Redeemer, and became a political pariah for sexually molesting his nieces.33 Yet Hammond had a shrewd mind and was a pitiless judge of character, including his own. This was the man who stepped forward to vindicate the probity of his culture. He did so for political reasons, at a time when his career needed help, and the action served his purpose, which was not to persuade Thomas Clarkson but to earn Hammond credit with Southern opinion. In this, he was successful. ‘‘My Clarkson Letters have added considerably to my reputation,’’ he noted in his diary in July 1845. ‘‘They are published in all the papers and many thousands in pamphlets. Walker writes me from Charleston that they are equal to any thing Calhoun ever wrote in matter and superior in manner.’’ 34 Hammond’s letters were written with a self-conscious sense that the main lines of the debate had long been set and therefore originality was improbable. Certainly he mostly offered variants on the old arguments and grabbed whatever was at hand, whether he believed in it or not. Being himself a hypocrite, he tended to assume that the abolitionists were also but a ‘‘self-righteous and self-exalted class.’’ 35 In fact, it was precisely his amorality that created Hammond’s greatest originality. Most of his formal message was that slavery was moral either by God’s or man’s law. But his most heartfelt insight was that morality was irrelevant. This denuding of Dew’s priggishness to leave only his sense of necessity was so trenchantly expressed by Hammond and encapsulated so important a feature of antebellum Southern thought that the passage in which he made his case is worth extended quotation. 33. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 7–10 and elsewhere. 34. James Henry Hammond, ‘‘Two Letters on the Subject of Slavery in the United States, Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, Esq,’’ in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James Henry Hammond, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (1866; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: Southern Studies Program, University of South Carolina, 1978), 188, 190; entries for 21 November 1844 and 2 July 1845, in Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, ed. Carol Bleser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 126, 149. 35. See, especially Hammond, ‘‘Two Letters,’’ 160, 125 (quotation on p. 125).

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If you were to ask me whether I am an advocate of slavery in the abstract, I should probably answer, that I am not, according to my understanding of the question. I do not like to deal in abstractions. It seldom leads to any useful ends. There are few universal truths. I do not now remember any single moral truth universally acknowledged. We have no assurance that it is given to our finite understanding to comprehend abstract moral truth. Apart from Revelation and the Inspired Writings, what ideas should we have even of God, Salvation and Immortality? Let the Heathen answer. Justice itself is impalpable as an abstraction, and abstract liberty the merest phantasy that ever amused the imagination. This world was made for man, and man for the world as it is. We ourselves, our relations with one another and with all matter are real, not ideal. I might say that I am no more in favor of slavery in the abstract, than I am of poverty, disease, deformity, idiocy or any other inequality in the condition of the human family; that I love perfection, and think I should enjoy a Millennium such as God has promised. But what would it amount to? A pledge that I would join you to set about eradicating those apparently inevitable evils of our nature, in equalizing the condition of all mankind, consummating the perfection of our race, and introducing the Millennium? By no means. To effect these things, belongs exclusively to a Higher Power. And it would be well for us to leave the Almighty to perfect His own works and fulfil His own covenants; especially, as the history of the past shows how entirely futile all human efforts have proved, when made for the purpose of aiding Him in carrying out even his revealed designs, and how invariably he has accomplished them by unconscious instruments, and in the face of human expectation. Nay more, that every attempt which has been made by fallible man to extort from the world obedience to his ‘‘abstract’’ notions of right and wrong, has been invariably attended with calamities, dire and extended, just in proportion to the breadth and vigor of the movement. On slavery in the abstract, then, it would not be amiss to have as little as possible to say. Let us contemplate it as it is.36 So, morality was God’s business. Men dealt only with the world ‘‘as it is’’ and ideality was irrelevant. The only pertinent question was, how fared the Southern world? Rich, powerful, and successful was Hammond’s answer, for cotton was king. What else did one need to know? This conclusion affected manner. Brown, Dew, even Harper, had been fairly earnest men, who liked to believe in morality and wished urgently to establish that slavery, being necessary, was also moral. Hammond rehearsed 36. Ibid., 119–21.

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their arguments as part of the game, not because he believed in morality, but because others, less astute and disillusioned than himself, did. But amorality made Hammond’s rhetoric, which was satirical. With Hammond, slavery is the occasion for jokes, by which the parvenu patrician mocked those who believed in or attacked the world in which the servant’s son was making his way. Sex, for example, which Harper had discussed with careful urbanity, became with Hammond an occasion for laughter: ‘‘It is a common observation, that there is no subject on which ladies of eminent virtue so much delight to dwell, and on which, in especial, learned old maids like Miss Martineau linger with such insatiable relish. . . . I may not, however, pass it over; nor ought I to feel any delicacy in examining a question to which the Slave-holder is invited and challenged by Clergymen and Virgins.’’ Likewise, Clarkson is made fun of, for overdoing things: ‘‘You assert that our slavery has also ‘demoralized the Northern States,’ and charge upon it not only every common violation of good order there, but the ‘Mormon murders,’ the ‘Philadelphia riots,’ and all ‘the exterminating wars against the Indians.’ I wonder you did not increase the list by adding that it had caused the recent inundation of the Mississippi and the hurricane in the West Indies—perhaps the insurrection of Rebecca, and the war in Scinde.’’ For Hammond understood that style was the man and, by extension, the culture. He told Clarkson, ‘‘I could not but be struck with the extremely simple manner of your letter. You seem to have thought you were writing a Tract for benighted Heathen, and telling wonders never before suggested to their imagination, and so far above their untutored comprehension as to require to be related in the primitive language of ‘the child’s own book.’ This is sufficiently amusing.’’ This quality did not go unnoticed. William J. Grayson, who admired the Augustans, wrote in 1845 that Hammond’s letters ‘‘are written . . . with intermingled logic, wit, and sarcasm, which commands the public favor, and gives them the best possible quality for a book, that of being, like Randolph’s speeches, readable by every body.’’ 37 So self-confidence or its illusion—there was little difference for Hammond —was all. His Americanism was a crucial part of this. His predecessors had been much closer in spirit to the eighteenth century and, with it, to the anxiety of British influence. Hammond did not care for Europe, except as a place cheaply to pick up art. A trip there in 1836–37 had cured him of whatever lingering deference he might once have had. He came to think of England as a land of ‘‘humbuggery and pillage,’’ which he detested. In this, Hammond outlined a theme that Fitzhugh was to develop: that the South might solve the problem of modernity, a task that certainly required self-confidence. That 37. Ibid., 134, 136, 189, 191; Grayson, ‘‘Slavery in the Southern States,’’ 320. This identification is conjectural. The article is, in fact, signed ‘‘E. G.,’’ but the copy in the Charleston Library Society identifies the author as Grayson and the style is consistent with his.

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problem was the pell-mell indiscipline of progress, which had burst out in the bloodiness of the French Revolution, an event whose spirit of transcendentalism was steadily regaining confidence and renewing rash experimentalism: ‘‘For our own sake, and for the sake of those infatuated men who are madly driving on the conflagration; for the sake of human nature, we are called on to strain every nerve to arrest it. And be assured our efforts will be bounded only with our being.’’ 38 So the South, as a conservative power, was the safeguard of the world’s orderly progress. With this went the idea that the South’s racial and class structure provided it with an insulation against the ideological instability of modernity. It was Hammond who first stressed that ‘‘isms’’ had no purchase on the Southern mind, because Southerners were not excitable: ‘‘We have been so irreverent as to laugh at Mormonism and Millerism, which have created such commotions farther North; and modern prophets have no honor in our country. Shakers, Rappists, Dunkers, Socialists, Fourrierists and the like keep themselves afar off. Even Puseyism has not yet moved us.’’ Slavery helped to explain this, for in the South, there was ‘‘no material . . . for such characters to operate on.’’ This was to prove a powerful idea, one of the central myths of Southern culture, which has lasted to the present day. In Hammond’s case, it was a self-consciously artificial argument, one that was probably intentionally dishonest. For he made this claim in the midst of arguing that Southern religion was peculiarly amiable, uninterested in matters of class or color, devoid of a controversial literature: ‘‘Our sects are few, harmonious, pretty much united among themselves, and pursue their avocations in humble peace.’’ This was the same Hammond who in 1842, two years before his letters to Clarkson, had written in his diary, ‘‘The most impudent class on earth are the clergy. Because they [are] tolerated in denouncing us from the pulpit and damning our souls, they feel privileged to take any liberty whatever.’’ This was the same Hammond who in 1854 was to write, ‘‘Wherever I look around me I see a wall of Fire. Wherever I place my foot the earth crumbles. God hates me. No wonder the Bible pourtrays him as a God full of Wrath, exacting the pound of flesh and the blood, since he has the power. No wonder Christian Preachers proclaim him as an infuriated Demon seeking whom he may destroy. Such and such only is my experience of him.’’ This was characteristic of the private Hammond on religion: he believed in God, but chiefly as a greater slaveholding patriarch, against whose malevolent power he was doomed to struggle. But the battle was lonely, since Hammond had no sense of religious community. Pride left him alone to face this God, in a world that (like a gnostic) he 38. Hammond European Diary, 24 August 1836, James Henry Hammond Papers, SCL, quoted in Faust, Hammond and the Old South, 191; Hammond, ‘‘Two Letters,’’ 171–72.

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saw as a hell.39 But these private feelings were excluded from the smiling benignity of Hammond’s public portrait of Southern slaveholding culture. And not everyone could pull this off, this cynical hypocrisy. Some even thought Hammond was speaking the truth, that the mask was the face. And so they set about establishing the morality of slavery.

A Moral Pathology 40 The 1840s mostly saw an elaboration of proslavery arguments, very seldom innovations, though the tone grew more urgent as the political scene grew more turbulent and worryingly unpredictable. (The 1850s were another matter, with Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh claiming new ground.) The denominational split of Baptists and Methodists generated much controversial apologetic.41 Thornton Stringfellow, the Virginia Baptist, notably produced a methodical survey of the biblical case for slavery in 1841, first in a Richmond newspaper, then as a pamphlet in 1850; in this, he was building upon the debate between Fuller and Wayland.42 Ministers were consistently the most energetic proponents of slavery; the matter was dialectically useful, for not only did the Bible help to sanction slavery, but proslavery helped to legitimate an expansive evangelicalism once suspect for its radical tendencies. But each paid a price for the alliance. Proslavery was obliged to put on a reforming and humane face, to step away from Harper’s calm acceptance of vice and argue that slavery, being Christian, was helping to ameliorate the human condition, slave and free. But religion had to become increasingly literalist about biblical exegesis, for it was in inerrancy that the Bible seemed most serviceable to the proslavery case. One serious consequence of this conjugation was the growing stress upon slavery as a patriarchal institution, as the descendant of the social system of 39. Hammond, ‘‘Two Letters,’’ 134, 133; entries for 18 July 1842, 3 October 1854, and 13 December 1853, in Bleser, Secret and Sacred, 98, 264, 263. 40. ‘‘A Moral Pathology, which feels its way in life, and adapts itself to circumstances, as they present themselves, is the nearest approach to philosophy, which it is either safe or wise to attempt’’: GF, Cannibals All!: Or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond: A. Morris, 1857), 82. 41. On this, see C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985); Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay, eds., Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). 42. Thornton Stringfellow, A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery: In an Essay, First Published in the Religious Herald, and Republished by Request: With Remarks on a Letter of Elder Galusha, of New York, to Dr. R. Fuller, of South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850); it was reprinted as ‘‘The Bible Argument: or, Slavery in the Light of Divine Revelation,’’ in Elliott, Cotton Is King, 459–521.

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Abraham. ‘‘I propose to show from the Scriptures,’’ Stringfellow had written, ‘‘that this state, condition, or relation [of slavery], did exist in the patriarchal age, and that the persons most extensively involved in the sin, if it be a sin, are the very persons who have been singled out by the Almighty, as the objects of his special regard.’’ Even Hammond could write of the plantation’s way of dealing with crime as a ‘‘patriarchal mode of administering justice.’’ The idea was not original and could be found as far back as Zephaniah Kingsley’s eccentric A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-Operative System of Society as It Exists in Some Governments, and Colonies in America, and in the United States, Under the Name of Slavery, with Its Necessity and Advantages (1828), which had argued for slavery but refused racism. ‘‘A patriarchal feeling of affection is due to every slave from his owner,’’ Kingsley had said, ‘‘who should consider the slave as a member of his own family, whose happiness and condition is identified with that of his own family, of which his slave constitutes a part, according to his scale and condition.’’ 43 Nonetheless, this religious emphasis on the patriarchal strengthened a tendency to see slavery as antimodern (thus moving away from the themes of Dew), but also the tendency, traceable in Calhoun, of seeing the world of slavery as a series of island communities, as small worlds presided over by a patriarchal master, around whose feet clustered wife and children, overseer and slaves.44 Mary Chesnut was to pick up the theme, scathingly, when she wrote in her diary in 1861: ‘‘God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad. This only I see: like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines.’’ 45 Treated with more benignity, the patriarchal theme came to figure significantly in the 1850s writings of Fitzhugh and Hughes. For if the essence of modernity was interconnection, making slavery patriarchal and so socially isolated made it plausibly antimodern. The prominence of the religious argument for slavery had a further consequence; it much weakened the discreteness of the idea of slavery, by enfolding the issue of man’s relationship with other men into theodicy, the justifying of God’s ways. The first paragraph of Stringfellow’s Brief View speaks of man’s ‘‘unlimited subjection to God’s revealed will.’’ 46 And William A. Smith, in analyzing the place of slavery in moral philosophy, was insistent that slavery 43. Stringfellow, ‘‘Bible Argument,’’ 463; Hammond, ‘‘Two Letters,’’ 149; A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of Society (1828), in Stowell, Balancing Evils, 74. 44. Cf. William A. Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery (1856; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 304. 45. Entry for 18 March 1861, in The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries, ed. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 42. 46. Stringfellow, ‘‘Bible Argument,’’ 461.

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was intrinsic to man’s relationship to God and so necessary to the sustenance of a Godly order in man’s affairs. This was raising the stakes. Defining slavery had always been a problem. The canon provided many options. St. George Tucker had briskly summarized some of them: ‘‘Justinian calls it a constitution of the law of nations, by which one man is made subject to another, contrary to nature. Grotius describes it to be an obligation to serve another for life, in consideration of diet, and other common necessaries. Dr. Rutherford, rejecting this definition, informs us, that perfect slavery is an obligation to be directed by another in all one’s actions. Baron Montesquieu defines it to be the establishment of a right, which gives one man such a power over another, as renders him absolute master over his life and fortune.’’ Dew quoted William Blackstone, to the effect that slavery was a form, ‘‘whereby an unlimited power is given to the master over the life and fortune of the slave.’’ Fitzhugh cited William Paley’s definition, perhaps the most debated among Southerners, because Paley formed so prominent a part in any Southerner’s education in moral philosophy. According to Paley, slavery was ‘‘an obligation to labor for the benefit of the master, without the contract or consent of the servant.’’ To this, William Smith added the definitions of William Whewell and William Ellery Channing: the former saying that ‘‘slavery converts a person into a thing—a subject merely passive, without any of the recognized attributes of human nature’’; the latter that ‘‘[t]he very idea of a slave is that he belongs to another; that he is bound to live and labor for another; to be another’s instrument, that is, in all things, just as the threshing-machine, or another beast of burden; and to make another’s will his habitual law, however adverse to his own.’’ 47 Southerners habitually, from their own experience, rejected or modified these definitions. They tended, rather, to claim that slavery was not contrary to nature, the master’s will was never absolute, the concept of rights was elusive, the slave sometimes did consent by word and always did by deed, and the slave was not a thing but a human being. But this assertion of the slave’s humanity embroiled him or her in the general problem of the human condition. If the slave had a will, he or she had some measure of freedom and so her or his condition became important to understanding freedom; this made it unclear whether even the nonslave could be free. If slavery dissolved at the touch of definition, so did liberty. In the case of William Smith, this last proposition did not come from an epistemological skeptic, but from someone who believed that there was ‘‘a vast mine of principles—pure essential truths—which are firmly rooted in the belief of all civilized and honest men.’’ Smith was a Virginia Methodist whose father, 47. Tucker, Dissertation on Slavery, 14–15; Dew, Review of the Debate, 19; Fitzhugh, Cannibals, 120; Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 146.

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William, had come from England in the late eighteenth century, where he had become a prosperous merchant in the West India trade, mostly in Fredericksburg; he was a Mason, but not a churchgoer. His wife, Mary Porter of Orange County, was the Methodist, though she died in 1804, when the son was only two. The father went on until 1813, when he was murdered in a Fredericksburg inn by two men to whom he had entrusted the management of his fortune, whereupon ‘‘his children were left penniless by the treacherous absconders.’’ The son survived by becoming an apprentice, then by being adopted and working in his guardian’s Petersburg store, but he never went to college and instead became a poor Methodist preacher, itinerant, then resident in various Virginia towns (Petersburg, Lynchburg, Norfolk, Richmond, Manchester). By the early 1840s he had become involved in the foundation of Randolph-Macon College, where he came to hold the chair of ‘‘moral and intellectual philosophy’’: in 1846 he became the college’s president, a post he held until 1866.48 Smith’s Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery were published in 1856, though he had been lecturing on the subject since the 1840s. Fitzhugh was to hear him speak in Bowling Green in 1856, and also reviewed Smith’s book for the Richmond Enquirer. Smith was not a subtle thinker, but rather someone who has been described as ‘‘stout [and] excitable,’’ yet he reasoned with a symptomatic clarity, saying plainly what others half-lost in greater complexity. Smith had his own definition of slavery: ‘‘the abstract principle of slavery is the general principle of submission or subjection to control by the will of another.’’ 49 The willingness to use the word ‘‘abstract’’ without criticism was, in itself, symptomatic of Smith’s times. The later antebellum generation was much interested in the question of abstraction, by way of a reproach to an earlier generation which in its Burkeanism had been very anxious to disavow Jacobin speculation. Opting for a merely local knowledge, the men of 1830 were later thought to have forfeited the South’s moral place in a wider world. This place Southerners in the 1850s were much concerned to reclaim. Smith’s definition had an implication: ‘‘It will readily occur to all intelligent minds, that this principle enters more or less as an essential element into every form of human government.’’ Control is intrinsic to government and necessarily an abridgment of absolute freedom. For freedom is self-control, whereas slavery is control by another. Since allowing men an absolute self48. J. R. Spann, ‘‘William Andrew Smith, D.D.,’’ The John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph-Macon College 4 (June 1916): 347–63 (quotation on p. 347). 49. Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 28, 40; Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 251; Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South (1943; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962), 49–50.

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control creates only anarchy, it followed that slavery entered into the necessary constitution of all societies: ‘‘Government must place its subjects under the operation of the principle of slavery in some things, the more effectually to secure their practical freedom in other things.’’ Governments varied this balance of freedom and slavery, from despotism to democratic republics, but the last only worked if the idea of the State persisted to control anarchy: ‘‘We call it, by way of eminence, a free government; and so it is, relatively to other forms, a very free government! But then it is only relatively, not absolutely so.’’ For Smith, as for many others, this argument arose from a rejection of Locke, from an Aristotelian presumption that there had been no isolated and aboriginal state of nature after which society was contracted, but rather that man’s nature was intrinsically social: ‘‘Several ideas enter into this [social] state— not only individuality . . . but also contiguity of time and place, variety, and often contrariety of relations, together with all the ideas which, as sequences, grow out of these. Now, a leading idea involved in the state, and inseparable from it, is the idea of government, that is the political is inseparable from the social state.’’ Upon this reasoning, rights were not freedom but its limitation, being derived from regere, to rule.50 Since Smith was a Methodist, he believed in original sin. The Fall had made a flawed human nature: ‘‘Under the clouded condition of intellect consequent upon this deprivation, [man’s] lower nature, with its appetites, propensities, and passions, is brought into constant and fierce conflict with his spiritual nature. . . . The history of each individual man becomes the history of a warfare—a warfare with himself, and a warfare with his fellows.’’ Hence the necessity of civil government, which was ‘‘control by the authority of God and the people.’’ In practice, a disciplined democratic republic best secured freedom, but this was not logically so: ‘‘It is not this or that kind of government that makes the subject essentially free.’’ Power, ‘‘whether wielded by one or by many, secures each man in the enjoyment of his natural rights— affords him that system of appliances which develops and matures the selfacting power of his will. . . . It is this that makes him free.’’ What did follow was that each human being stood in a different relationship to these rights and this government. This was a continuum, in which no one was absolutely free, no one absolutely enslaved, but many had differing quotients according to their capacity for self-control and self-knowledge. Hence ‘‘females, together with minors of both sexes, and the inmates of State Prisons’’ were ‘‘not among the sovereigns of society.’’ The savage races of Africa stood still lower: just as ‘‘it becomes the duty of a civilized state to place all its minors under the despotism of parental control . . . it is the duty of the state to place an uncivilized 50. Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 47, 48, 50, 55–56, 68–69, 85–92.

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race which may chance to dwell within its borders, under a similar form of government.’’ Nonetheless, they stood lower, not nowhere. Smith repudiated Channing with indignation: ‘‘[T]he constitution of the human mind is in flat contradiction to the idea of the absorption of the will, the conscience, and the understanding of one man into the personality of another!’’ Rather, slavery was throughout a system of rights and responsibilities, in which slaves and masters had agency. Being so, slave shaded into free labor: ‘‘The only difference between free and slave labor is, that the one is rendered in consequence of a contract, the other in consequence of a command.’’ Nonetheless, slavery had a distinguishable form as a variety of the human condition, one subject among many, one freedom among many. Hence, ‘‘Domestic slavery is one of the subordinate forms of civil government . . . an imperium in imperio—a government within a government.’’ 51 It was characteristic of those proslavery thinkers who most granted the humanity of slaves and most enfolded slavery into the metaphysical problem of human nature that they tended to be the most racist. A slave that is a thing and not a human does not, after all, need a race. Without the explanatory power of racial ideology, there was little riposte to the idea that slaves might earn the right to greater civil freedom by their moral actions. The tendency was exemplified by Thomas R. R. Cobb, whose 1858 Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America, with a prefatory Historical Sketch of Slavery, was the most sophisticated and learned survey produced by any Southerner of the multifarious forms that slavery had assumed in human history.52 ‘‘We recognize in the negro a man, endowed with reason, will, and accountability,’’ he wrote, ‘‘and in order to justify his subjection we must inquire of his intellectual and moral nature.’’ 53 This justification for ‘‘negro slavery’’ (not slavery ‘‘in the abstract’’) rested in the physiognomy of sub-Saharan Africans, duly evi51. Ibid., 105–6, 109, 116, 120, 127, 147–48, 150, 154. 52. He was the son of John Addison Cobb, who owned Cherry Hill Plantation in Jefferson County, Georgia, which had about 6,000 acres and 150 slaves, plus a farm called Rootesville. But the land was left to the care of an overseer, while the family lived in Athens, Georgia, and the father had various jobs as town commissioner, chairman of a local grammar school, and director of both the Georgia Railroad Company and the local branch of the Bank of the State of Georgia. The son studied at the University of Georgia and became a mostly unsuccessful lawyer in 1842. During the 1850s, he served as reporter of the Georgia Supreme Court. He was the founder both of a female academy (the Lucy Cobb Institute) and a law school (the Lumpkin Law School). He was a secessionist who helped to draft the constitution of the Confederacy and served in the army. He was killed near Fredericksburg in late 1862. See William B. McCash, Thomas R. R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1983). 53. Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America. To Which Is Prefixed, an Historical Sketch of Slavery. Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnston, 1858), 21.

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denced by travel accounts, ethnologies, and learned papers before the Royal Institution of Manchester. Hence William Smith, too, spent much of the second half of his lectures upon the racial inferiority of Africans. But Smith had another reason for thinking that slavery was permanent and beneficial to American society, which he shared with many whose reasoning about slavery had taproots in Federalist political philosophy, which was the case with most. He thought slavery helped to stabilize a pellmell, democratic, expansionist, and mobile society, which otherwise encouraged a weakening of self-control and so threatened a social crisis: ‘‘To compare the civilized world to one vast city, our republic seems destined to become the great market or business-street of it.’’ But all this ‘‘bustle and activity’’ tended to weaken ‘‘those moral and intellectual pursuits that so eminently fit men for the soberest duties of life and the felicities of heaven.’’ Pursuing wealth and political power was ‘‘daily becoming the supreme attraction, to which the popular impulse yields as readily as the unfortunate ship obeys the resistless circles of the maelstrom.’’ To this, the principle of slavery offered an indispensable corrective, especially considering that Smith did not wish to discourage expansion and immigration, or to lose the energy attendant upon newcomers’ entry into the North or even the West. Nonetheless, he mistrusted the influx of so many Catholics, so many heathen Chinese. Since slavery precluded from the South this immigration, the South could serve to stabilize the republic: ‘‘Upon these States will devolve the duty of holding the balance of power between these great contending forces, and of preserving the ark of American liberty in the politico-religious storms that are about to sweep over the land, and shake the foundations of our confederacy.’’ 54 So slavery gave the South a moral mission to modernity. This idea of mission was indispensable to Fitzhugh. But it could scarcely have been absent, for the idea had long been intrinsic to the proslavery genre. Its origins in stage theory, political economy, and moral philosophy necessarily required an elaboration of the South’s social relationship to modernity, and it was improbable that an American conjecture would do other than assert that an American society could be less than superior. The lines of the proslavery argument had been firmly set by the early 1850s. It began to pass into the stage of anthologies, no longer an innovation but a thing for schoolchildren to study by rote and for Alexandrian scholars like Thomas R. R. Cobb to epitomize. A canon had developed. In 1852, the Charleston publishers Walker and Richard published the 400-odd page The Pro-Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the South54. Smith, Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 259, 273.

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ern States, which contained the writings of Dew, Harper, and Hammond, as well as a summary piece by Simms. When Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments was published in Augusta in 1860, under the editorship of E. N. Elliott of Mississippi, it had expanded to 900 pages and now (while omitting Dew and Simms) added pieces by Thornton Stringfellow, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, and Samuel Cartwright; further, it acknowledged the contributions of Northerners to the argument by using essays by David Christy of Cincinnati and Charles Hodge of Princeton. So expansive was the subject that it was thought necessary to characterize the essays by genre and methodology. Hence Christy’s essay was subtitled ‘‘slavery in the light of political economy,’’ while others were designated as speaking from within the analytical traditions of moral and political philosophy (Bledsoe), divinity (Stringfellow and Hodge), statistics (Stringfellow again), social ethics (Harper), political science (Hammond), ethnology (Cartwright), and international law (Elliott). Yet Elliott omitted what were certainly the most original works of the 1850s, those by Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh. This was no surprise. Both writers had been greeted with puzzlement, as eccentric and deviant, with no place in so safe a work as Elliott’s Cotton Is King. And both were pleased to be thought idiosyncratic. Their existence pointed to the truth that the proslavery argument had become old enough, safe enough, to generate those who sported with its themes, subverted its logic, thumbed their noses at old fogies, and experimented with rhetoric. Henry Hughes was, of the two, the more eccentric. Indeed, he was one of the most original figures in Southern thought. He came from Port Gibson, Mississippi, the son of a land speculator who died with an insolvent estate. Hughes became a young lawyer in New Orleans, where he lived with his mother, kept (as we have seen) a diary, chased girls and admired men, read widely, kept a scrapbook of his faltering fame, traveled briefly to Europe, and became a Democratic politician mostly interested in reviving the slave trade.55 In 1854, when only twenty-five, he published his Treatise on Sociolo . Its most striking characteristic is its style, which almost no one liked. ‘‘We deny any plain man to understand his book; and not because his thoughts and ideas are higher than those of other men, but because his style is obscure,’’ one reviewer put it.56 Indeed, the rhetoric was so bemusing that many failed to notice Hughes’s heterodoxy. Readers clung to shapes that, in the fog, seemed familiar. Yet the style was a presage of things to come, to those later moments when the bloated discursiveness of mid-Victorian prose was to 55. The best account is Douglas Ambrose, Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 56. Unidentied clipping, Scrapbook, Henry Hughes Papers, MDAH (hereafter Hughes Papers).

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be stripped down. Hughes’s writing is brief, epigrammatic, repetitive, neological. Few sentences have more than ten words. His tone is abruptly authoritarian; assertion is all, doubt non-existent. The narrative is anonymous and abstract, stripped of the author’s identity, but also of history and social context. With a very few and late exceptions, only one society is formally acknowledged, that of ‘‘the United States South.’’ 57 (Hughes was perhaps the first person to use this phrase.) The North, American society, Europe, the ancient world, Aristotle, Jefferson, all the familiar historical, social, and personal referents of the proslavery argument were starkly eschewed. There is no historical time in Hughes, no landscape, no people, only categories like ‘‘society,’’ ‘‘system,’’ ‘‘regulation.’’ All this was deliberate. Hughes’s diary had been painfully personal, and his other writings and speeches have the usual quotient of humanity. But the Treatise was designed to be otherwise. His motive is laid out in the book’s prefatory epigraph, which praises perspicuity, logic, and plainness for conveying the truth, while relegating the ornamental to the business of entertainment. ‘‘The thinkers rule, and must first be convinced,’’ for they give opinion to the public. Many of the book’s assertions are simple, and many not original. There is no social contract, man is a social animal, society is intended for progress, which entails the perfection of ‘‘health, education, enjoyment, morality, and religion.’’ What matters is reality, not the idea of it. Society is constituted by power, provided by physical and mental labor, of which the latter is the greater. Society is, further, intended to prevent anarchic license and furnish an ordered liberty, by means of hierarchy. Men are driven by ‘‘desire and fear,’’ and face the option either to compete or cooperate; the former option creates a wasteful, free labor society, while the second makes what Hughes chose to call a ‘‘warrantee’’ society. Like many in the 1850s, he fought shy of the word ‘‘slavery,’’ because he found the usual definitions did not describe the society around him. (He quoted Paley on slavery without attribution, before refuting him.) Rather, he saw a system of reciprocal rights, which was what constituted ‘‘the system in the United States South.’’ ‘‘Property in man, is absurd. Men cannot be owned. In warranteeism, what is owned is the labor-obligations, not the obligee.’’ 58 What was fairly new in Hughes was his repudiation of individualism and his annexation of the private to the public realm. The state should be responsible for all; individuals only have such rights as are ceded by the state. In 57. There is one reference to ‘‘the warrantee commonwealths of the United States,’’ a few to the English common law, and the only historical event discussed is a brief (but important) reference to Alfred the Great: Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociolo , Theoretical and Practical (1854; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 211, 238, 255, 266–69, 271. 58. Ibid., 47, 55, 166, 167.

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Hughes’s world, it is not the state that represents individuals, but individuals who represent the state. This was a philosophic, but mostly an administrative matter. Henry Hughes was an organization man. He had schemes, diagrams, flow charts, and the number of his beast was seven. He thought society should be divided into and governed by a heptarchy, a notion he acquired from an odd reading of ‘‘the system for civil administration of laws, completed by King Alfred,’’ the only human being that gets a mention in the Treatise. ‘‘A societary organization is therefore a union of seven organs for seven ends.’’ These organs were economics, which provided subsistence; politics, for security; hygiene, for health; philosophy, for education; aesthetics, for enjoyment; ethics, for morality; and religion, for spirituality. Each should have its own administrative structure, each its own (what Hughes’s spiritual successors were to call) mission statement, each its own regulatory authority. The scope of this welfare state, by the standards of 1854, was breathtaking, almost beyond what 1950 came to legislate in Sweden and Britain. A few things were continuations of what the American state at its various levels already did; running post offices, coining money, registering patents, maintaining armed forces, and the like. But Hughes saw its power as all-pervasive. It would create and administer internal improvements (‘‘levees, harbors, breakwaters, lighthouses and landings . . . railroads, canals, watercraft, and all common carriers’’). It would regulate insurance and agriculture, inspect all products, administer poor laws and build workhouses, set the legal terms for labor/capital relations, ‘‘adjudicate wages, interest, rent, prices,’’ and ‘‘order migration.’’ It would maintain and require a hygienic environment, set food and drug safety standards, inspect and regulate ‘‘the structure of all habitations and houses,’’ require vaccinations, dispose of noxious chemicals, and sustain a system of racial laws that might prevent miscegenation. There would be public schools, whose teachers would be tested and authorized by the state, which would also ‘‘order fellowships, scientific surveys, and scientific commissions.’’ Art galleries, circuses, opera, all forms of public entertainment would be regulated, as well as created, along with public pageants, parks, promenades, all the civic amenities. To pay for this, each segment of the heptarchy would ‘‘have the power of limited or unlimited taxation.’’ Hughes seems to have imagined that each division would be a mini-government, though he was murky about the structure. In one place, he speaks of ‘‘each system’s sovereign power [being] divided into a separate legislative, judiciary, and executive department.’’ Elsewhere, there is talk of a single senate, with multiple lower houses. He is unclear whether this was a government for the United States, as a whole, or for each state, so whether federalism would survive was problematic. Indeed, he was even unsure whether two of the branches, ethics and religion, ought to have governments at all: ‘‘They may or may not, be free or warranted; public

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or private; consolidated or divided; independent or united; coördinate, subordinate, or superordinate.’’ That is, he was unsure about the separation of church and state, but on the whole leaned towards it, for he said, illogically, that ‘‘a heptarchy of five municipalities is . . . the best form of society.’’ 59 One could, at a stretch, see this as Whiggism run amok, but Hughes went much farther than anything a paternalist Henry Clay or Daniel Webster ever imagined for American society. The origin of Hughes’s vision, rather, lay partly in Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte, especially the former, both of whom Hughes had read in the early 1850s. Hughes’s response to Fourier was deep, but also ambivalent. ‘‘Finished the first volume of Fourier’s ‘Passions of the Human Soul,’ ’’ he noted in his diary in early 1852. ‘‘That book’s influence on me! May God guide and govern it.’’ ‘‘Continued Fourier on the Passions,’’ he wrote a little later. ‘‘I do not think that this book will mislead, nor make me visionary. It will generate conceptions; it will supply elements. These I can combine; can accept or reject.’’ In fact, not the least of Fourier’s gifts may have been a mathematical penchant for enumerated lists. Whereas Hughes was to have his heptarchy, Fourier suggested no fewer than three theories of destiny, four stages of history with thirty-six periods, twelve passions, sixteen possible societies, seventy-two types of cuckolds, and 810 personality types.60 From Fourier and Comte together, Hughes derived the boldness to use sociology as the basis for a newly imagined political and social structure. The Treatise has two sections, ‘‘theoretical’’ and ‘‘practical,’’ a division intended to convey Hughes’s sense that intellect must first discern the structure of reality, then create the institutions to perfect the human condition. Unusually for a proslavery thinker, Hughes was convinced that perfection was possible. In this, his religion mattered, for he had a messianic and millennial streak. In his diary, he once wrote, ‘‘The chief aim of my life shall be to unite the great powers of the earth in one Republic, to abolish slavery, and to reform the system of human laws and human philosophy,’’ and then entered a prayer to God. He proclaimed himself God’s instrument, God’s young raven, a Christ to Louis Kossuth’s John the Baptist. Certainly the final two pages of the Treatise offer a lush religious vision of a fulfilled Fourierite world, wherein the sun shines upon ‘‘leagued plantations,’’ in which ‘‘happy warrantees’’ banquet in refectories, worship in chapels, study in schools, tell stories and sing and dance in ‘‘plantation-saloons’’ in the cool of the evening, then sleep in dormitories, ‘‘over whose gates Health and Rest sit smiling at the feet of Wealth and Labor, rise at the music-crowing of the morning-conches, to begin again 59. Ibid., 48–49, 61–69. 60. Entries for 2 and 23 May 1852, Hughes Diary, Hughes Papers; The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, trans. and ed. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 84, 81, 171, 189, 90, 220.

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welcome days of jocund toil, in reeling fields, where, weak with laughter and her load, Plenty yearly falls, gives up, and splits her o’erstuffed horn, and where behind twin Interest’s double throne, Justice stands at reckoning dusk, and rules supreme.’’ It is a tone and a rhetoric not to be matched in Southern thought until the rhapsodies of Henry Grady, which also arose from the language of the King James Version.61 But such a romantic eruption was, for Hughes, the only such rhetorical moment in a work otherwise of studied, inhuman restraint. Restraint, indeed, was close to the core of Hughes’s vision. He was a very troubled young man, divided between megalomania (‘‘I am the Child of Destiny & Favorite of God’’) and self-contempt (‘‘I grow childish with passion’’). He worried a great deal about his health and sanity; his eyes were bad, he had ‘‘a depression of the chest, which may terminate in a disease of the heart,’’ a physician ‘‘limited [his] life to two years, without a partial abandonment of study,’’ and his thoughts ‘‘turned towards insanity.’’ In one of his more lucid moments, he observed, ‘‘I am a strange man: wicked, religious, egotistical, virtuous, vain, haughty, modest, manly, boyish.’’ 62 Ambition reached out everywhere, to philosophy (‘‘I have, I think, this week arrived at the long sought identity of time and motion’’), politics (‘‘I will be the President of America and Europe’’), and the military (Why does a soldier’s life seem my coming destiny[?]’’). He worried much about his sexuality (‘‘I feel myself a man. Before I did not’’), read Tennyson (‘‘Oh woman Tennyson, Sweet Tennyson, darling, dearest’’), and pondered the merits of polygamy. He was often poor (‘‘I am so poor that I have not without borrowing money to buy a pair of shoes’’) and needed money from his mother. He was awkward in company (‘‘Nobody ever talks to me. In conversation, I lead or nothing or little is addressed to me’’).63 So he became very much interested in ways to discipline these swings between euphoria and melancholy, these impulses towards drink, sex, and gluttony, which were the usual temptations of the young lawyer in New Orleans. But Hughes also had unusual temptations (‘‘God let me be a despot’’).64 To help out, there was prayer, of course, and even temper61. Entry for 10 November 1848, Hughes Diary, Hughes Papers; Hughes, Treatise, 291–92. Cf. the closing passages of ‘‘The South and Her Problems’’ (1887), in Life of Henry W. Grady, Including His Writings and Speeches, ed. Joel Chandler Harris (New York: Cassell, 1890), 119–20. 62. Entry for 9 November 1851, Hughes Diary, Hughes Papers. 63. Entries for 13 October 1851, 25 February 1849, 6 May 1849, 1 June 1850, 9 November 1851, 30 April 1848, 20 January 1851, 12 December 1852, 25 August 1851, 1 August, 11 January 1852, 2 February, 28 December 1851, Hughes Diary, Hughes Papers. 64. Entry for 3 February 1850, Hughes Diary, Hughes Papers. One should note, however, that Hughes was a great admirer of John A. Quitman, the would-be conqueror of Cuba, who early in 1850 was in New Orleans to plan his filibustering. See Henry Hughes, ‘‘Eulogy on

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ance. Hughes took up exercise for his health and for ‘‘bodily strength,’’ which was ‘‘an element of the supreme hero.’’ He wistfully wished ‘‘that I had wealth & leisure to educate my body.’’ There were diets (‘‘Tomorrow and for six days a dietetic mortification’’). But success was unsure: ‘‘I have of animal gratifications, this dread and disgust, yet with these, almost ungovernable appetites. Prayer is my chief means of controlling them; for in resolve I place there no trust.’’ ‘‘Above all let my will be inexorable and crushing’’ was more a hope than a fact, and could scarcely be otherwise, both for himself and his society.65 So he imagined a world where resolve and will would not matter, for the state would regulate and ensure all. He abolished individuality, because he could not trust his own. This new world a-coming would be orderly, kindly, cultured, prosperous, free of all conflict. Hughes’s contemporary, William Henry Trescot, asserted that history was made by antagonism. but Hughes opted for ‘‘syntagonism.’’ Above all, this world would be ‘‘hygienic.’’ ‘‘Warranteeism,’’ he said in the Treatise, ‘‘is a contrivance to procure a competence for everybody. . . . It distributes to warrantees a comfortable sufficiency not for strength only, but for health. Warranteeism is not political and economic only. It is hygienic. This also is its essence.’’ 66 This clinical language of purity is most evident in his discussion of race, a topic that surfaces late in theTreatise. Like others, including Fitzhugh, Hughes acknowledged that race was logically inessential to slavery, but he did admit that in the South ‘‘warranteeism with the ethnical qualification is ordained and established.’’ For Hughes, race had to do with bodies, some superior, some inferior. Men ‘‘have hygienic duties’’ and ‘‘hygiene is both ethnical and ethical.’’ To this theme, he warmed: Hygienic progress is a right. It is a right, because a duty. But hygienic progress forbids ethnical regress. Morality therefore, which commands general progress, prohibits this special regress. The preservation and progress of the race, is a moral duty of the races. Degeneration is an evil. It is a sin. That sin is extreme. Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters. The law of nature is the law of God. The same law which forbids consanguineous amalgaQuitman,’’ Port Gibson Herald, 30 August 1858, reprinted in Selected Writings of Henry Hughes: Antebellum Southerner, Slavocrat, Sociologist, ed. Stanford M. Lyman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 158–66. 65. Entries for 7 June, 8 February 1852, 5 May, 27 October 1850, 23 May 1852, Hughes Diary, Hughes Papers. 66. Hughes, Treatise, 284.

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mation; forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest.67 But who had mentioned incest? In this was presaged the logic of racial segregation. The races ‘‘must not be aggregated; they must be segregated.’’ Bodies must not touch. Little wonder, then, that Hughes was troubled, for all this was being written in New Orleans, that unhygienic feverish place built upon a swamp, where hurricanes humiliated human pretensions, mosquitoes swarmed, humidity quickened odors, sewage filled the streets, and corpses had to be buried above ground because the earth would not retain them; a place, too, where ethnic intermarriage was commonplace, gentlemen openly had mulattos for mistresses, and their children published poetry. No place for a hypochondriac, but somewhere to inspire an aspiration for a science that would cleanse the world of everything untidy, threatening, seeping. Hughes seems to have realized the contrast. In 1855, he lectured to the ‘‘Young Ladies of the Port Gibson Academy’’ on ‘‘Hebe or Hygienic Worship’’ and said: ‘‘Ill-health has been the country’s doom. We of the United States are called a nation of invalids. Diseases either hereditary or original are the common lot. Perfect health is the exception and ill health the rule.’’ 68 Henry Hughes was an oddity beyond the pale of conventional Southern thought, though mostly by being so stringent. Repudiating individualism and stressing collectivity had been the tendency of Southern thought for thirty years or more. Hughes just took the next step in acknowledging the power of the collectivity, and suggesting how that power might be used. George Fitzhugh, too, exemplified trends, but with idiosyncrasy. He was a man half-in, half-out of what his world thought, with a relationship to Southern intellectuality that was complicated, since he had a strange mix of conventional ideas, startling insights, and avant-garde philosophy. Much, in this, is explicable by his being an isolated figure. He was born in 1806 near Brentsville, Prince William County, of a respectable Virginia family. His father was an army surgeon and a modest plantation owner, who died in 1825 and whose estate—since 1812 this had been Bellmount in King George County—was sold in 1829. George Fitzhugh had little formal education, just a field school, but then nothing of the usual attendance at William and Mary or Princeton or Yale, only the reading of law. As a lawyer, his practice was local and desultory, he never held political office, and he scarcely traveled until the 67. Ibid., 238–40. 68. Ibid., 239–40; ‘‘Hebe or Hygienic Worship,’’ Hughes Papers. Hughes gave three lectures on the ‘‘theory of capilliarity,’’ the manuscripts of which are in the Hughes Papers.

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George Fitzhugh, photograph taken in 1855, in New Haven, Conn.

1850s, so neither by family, profession, nor ambition did he acquire much of a place in wider circles, though he was something of a protégé of Robert M. T. Hunter.69 In 1829 he had married Mary Metcalfe Brockenborough and seems to have moved into his in-laws’ house in Port Royal.70 He acquired a few slaves through his marriage, but it is unclear that he was ever a planter.71 Certainly, anyone for whom the solitary George Frederick Holmes represented a link to the Great World is someone who was in deep trouble, socially. In Fitzhugh such unworldliness became an intellectual strength, for the most original part of Fitzhugh was that he hated what most Southerners admired, chief among them the doctrines of laissez-faire. 69. See Fitzhugh’s two letters to Hunter in December 1839, in Correspondence of Robert M. T. Hunter, 1826–1876, ed. Charles Henry Ambler (1918; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 30–31. 70. Wish, George Fitzhugh, 12, says he moved to the ‘‘classical, if somewhat decayed, mansion of the Brockenboroughs.’’ 71. Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (1969; reprint, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 128, calls him ‘‘a small slaveholder, an indifferent planter, and a man who wrote too much and read too little.’’

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First, the unoriginal parts of his thought, the things that many other Southerners had argued before him. Fitzhugh attacked the abuses of modern industrialism and the cruelty of a free market system. He refused the idea of individualism and the social contract, while rejecting natural rights theory and the Jeffersonian doctrine that the world needed as little government as possible. He mistrusted the philosophical premises of the Enlightenment and had a Burkean preference for tradition. He saw domestic slavery as just another variety of subordination, in a world where power and subjection was intrinsic to social relations. He stressed the ancient normality of slavery and believed that the South, because of slavery, was peculiarly free from the modern world’s tendency to social crisis. He looked upon Africans as children, especially fitted for the condition of servitude. He was a Christian who regarded the Bible as a proslavery document, a dogged localist who mistrusted centralization, and a xenophobe who worried about heathen foreigners.72 He favored economic diversification and was much interested in technological innovation. He favored patriarchalism and had a great respect for the ancients, especially Aristotle. In short, much of his reasoning could be found abundantly in previous Southern thought. His originality lay partly in the peculiar force with which he combined all these thoughts. The isolation of Fitzhugh seems to have made him feel the need to assert originality and to eschew indebtedness. His writing is remarkable for its studied silence about other proslavery writing, though the congruence of his thought with their arguments is unlikely to have been a coincidence. Fitzhugh was an autodidact, but he was not an illiterate. However, it is also true that combining thoughts created something very close to a new synthesis. Fitzhugh claimed to see a pattern, a metanarrative, where others had merely aggregated insights. At the heart of this analysis was a refusal of imperialism. Fitzhugh’s formal argument was that free trade was the ideology of a rapaciously acquisitive, competitive modernity, which trapped people into an atomized individuality, where they were powerless and exploited. He dated the emergence of this system to the disintegration of feudalism, to the emergence of an early modern world that found in Hobbes a shrewd, dismayed prophet, and in Adam Smith an apologist for selfishness, peddled as a system of ethics. Hence the philosophy of liberty that marked the American Revolution was a delusion, for liberty merely trapped people, a fact not unnoticed by the revolutionaries. For Fitzhugh, governments palpably did not derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. ‘‘The women, the chil72. He sympathized publicly with the nativism of the American party: see GF, ‘‘Make Home Attractive,’’ DBR 28 (June 1860): 632.

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dren, the negroes, and but few of the non-property holders were consulted, or consented to the Revolution, or the governments that ensued from its success. As to these, the new governments were self-elected despotisms, and the governing class self-elected despots. Those governments originated in force, and have been continued by force.’’ 73 By this, Fitzhugh cut the Gordian knot of Southern thought, which had deprecated the consequences of industrial modernity, but simultaneously had lauded Adam Smith and American liberty. Fitzhugh told Southerners that they could not have it both ways, that wisely to choose slavery was to refuse a debilitating liberty. In so doing, of course, he was also preaching to non-Southerners that to embrace liberty was to be foolish. Fitzhugh had derived this critique from many sources other than the Southern intellectual tradition, but certainly partly from many whom he liked to call socialists. ‘‘To them we are indebted for our argument against free trade,’’ he acknowledged in Sociolo for the South, and the observation seems to have been an honest account of his own intellectual evolution. He did believe that the modern socialists had made the greatest advance in analyzing slavery since Aristotle himself. Their originality lay in inquiring ‘‘from history and statistics, whether the physical and moral condition of emancipated serfs or slaves had been improved or rendered worse by emancipation. . . . It entered no one’s head to conceive a doubt as to the actual freedom of the emancipated. The relations of capital and labor, of the property-holders to the non-property-holders, were things about which no one had thought or written.’’ But Fitzhugh’s definition of socialist was commodious. It did not include Karl Marx, of whom he seems not to have heard, but did cover many upon whom Marx himself was contemporaneously drawing. Some of these, like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Henri Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, and Charles Fourier, might have answered to the name of socialist. But Fitzhugh lumped them together with many others who were broadly critics of modern society, such as Robert Owen, Thomas Carlyle, and Fanny Wright. In this, Fitzhugh was not especially idiosyncratic. In the mid-nineteenth century, socialism was a word that had not narrowed its meaning, but covered roughly any collectivist solution to the problem of modern society. Hence Fitzhugh also understood socialism to be of a piece with alternative visions of social morality, which was why he was prone to including in his lists of socialists, ‘‘New York Free Love, and Oneida Incest, and Mormon Polygamy,’’ and might elide ‘‘socialists and communists,’’ those who were interested in the communal vision.74 Proudhon, for example, he called a communist. Likewise 73. GF, Cannibals, 353. 74. Ibid., 35.

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he could call Louis Napoleon a socialist, because ‘‘he understands the disease of society, and has nerve enough for any surgical operation that may be required to cure it.’’ 75 However, though Fitzhugh learned from the socialists, he saw them as a symptom of an intrinsically flawed free society, and so incapable of being its solution. They were but continuing ‘‘the little experiment of universal liberty that has been tried for a little while in a little corner of Europe.’’ In fact, Fitzhugh had an interesting conception of the relationship between ideas and society, which alone made him unfit to be a proto-Marxist. He believed that societies tended to have social philosophies at odds with what they practiced, but in sympathy with what they desired. So, oddly, Northerners were proslavery and Southerners pro-freedom. Those in a free society know the evils of ‘‘universal liberty and free competition,’’ and as a solution ‘‘propose a remedy, which is in fact slavery; but they are wholly unconscious of what they are doing, because never having lived in the midst of slavery, they know not what slavery is.’’ Southerners, on the other hand, ‘‘have seen none of the evils of liberty and competition, but just enough of those agencies to operate as healthful stimulants to energy, enterprise and industry, [and so] believe free competition to be an unmixed good.’’ 76 Only slavery could afford a solution to the crisis of freedom. By ‘‘slavery,’’ Fitzhugh meant many things, of which Southern slavery was almost the least significant. As he observed, ‘‘We deem this peculiar question of negro slavery of very little importance. The issue is made throughout the world on the general subject of slavery in the abstract. The argument has commenced. One set of ideas will govern and control after awhile the civilized world. Slavery will everywhere be abolished, or every where be re-instituted.’’ By slavery, Fitzhugh meant any social system that formally recognized inequality, the necessity of authoritarian order and human interdependence, and embodied ‘‘a safe, efficient and humane community of property.’’ Hence, ‘‘A Southern farm is a sort of joint stock concern, or social phalastery, in which the master furnishes the capital and skill, and the slaves the labor, and divide the profits, not according to each one’s in-put, but according to each one’s wants and necessities.’’ 77 (From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, as a later slogan for socialism would have it.) For Fitzhugh, slavery was about being safe and protected, about people being unequal but nice to each other. Here Fitzhugh’s own history seems to have been peculiarly important. He was a very domestic and sentimental man. ‘‘Love and veneration for the 75. GF, Sociolo , 169, 62, 42; GF, Cannibals, 33, xix, 35. 76. GF, Sociolo , 70–71, 80–81. 77. Ibid., 94, 48.

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family is with us not only a principle, but probably a prejudice and a weakness,’’ he confessed. ‘‘We were never two weeks at a time from under the family roof, until we had passed middle life, and now that our years almost number half a century, we have never been from home for an interval of two months.’’ Indeed, his understanding of history was rooted in his reading of the fate of the family. So the Romans were exemplary, because in Rome ‘‘the family was hedged all round with divinities, with departed ancestry purified and apotheosised, who with kindly interest guarded and guided the household.’’ Catholic medievalism sanctified marriage, but with modernity ‘‘as liberty, equality and fraternity advanced, it was reduced, at the free North, to a mere civil contract, entered into with no more thought, ceremony or solemnity than the bargain for a horse.’’ 78 For Fitzhugh the family was a ‘‘holy and charmed circle’’ and the solution for social ills was to make the family’s values general. If man was gregarious and so ‘‘the least selfish of animals,’’ inside the family ‘‘there is little room, opportunity or temptation to selfishness.’’ The slave stood in one of the circles of the familial. ‘‘Man loves that nearest to him best. First his wife, children and parents, then his slaves, next his neighbors and fellow-countrymen.’’ The master was a harassed but kindly man, in control yet obliging, gratefully enmeshed in a system of reciprocal obligations. He was not someone to ‘‘tread on the worm nor break the bruised reed.’’ True, as Jefferson had predicted, ‘‘the habit of command may make him imperious,’’ but this was only when he was thwarted. Mostly, ‘‘His whole life is spent in providing for the minutest wants of others, in taking care of them in sickness and in health. Hence he is the least selfish of men.’’ A secluded bachelor, by contrast, was ‘‘always selfish.’’ A patriarch was ‘‘almost always kind and benevolent,’’ and the slaveholder was ‘‘the head of the largest family.’’ Hence, ‘‘nature compels master and slave to be friends.’’ The master was ‘‘lofty and independent in his sentiments, generous, affectionate, brave and eloquent.’’ He was the strongest person in a world where most were naturally weak and all, even the master, required protection; being interdependent, humans needed what Fitzhugh liked to call ‘‘association.’’ 79 This was as much a theory of gender as anything else. Fitzhugh was deeply committed to Victorian notions of domesticity and separate spheres. This, alone, placed him very far from William Harper, for whom the family posed no respite from the world’s cares. But, according to Fitzhugh, women and children had ‘‘but one right, and that is the right to protection,’’ which carried with it ‘‘the obligation to obey.’’ Nature meant every women to have ‘‘a hus78. GF, Cannibals, 284; GF, Sociolo , 194, 195. 79. GF, Sociolo , 106, 247–48, 244; GF, Cannibals, 55.

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band, a lord and master, whom she should love, honor and obey.’’ If she is so wisely obedient, ‘‘she is in little danger of mal-treatment; if she stands upon her rights, is coarse and masculine, man loathes and despises her, and ends by abusing her.’’ Fitzhugh celebrated dependence, ‘‘for man isolated and individualized is the most helpless of animals.’’ But he is clear that the master, too, is dependent, just differently so: ‘‘It is delightful to retire from the outer world, with its competitions, rivalries, envyings, jealousies, and selfish war of the wits, to the bosom of the family, where the only tyrant is the infant—the greatest slave the master of the household.’’ He wrote in 1859 of ‘‘the strength of weakness.’’ Yet he argued that the world needed masters, was lost without them, and so the worst Fitzhugh could think to say of free society was that it made slaves without masters. Rather, ‘‘Subordination, difference of caste and classes, difference of sex, age and slavery beget peace and good will.’’ 80 It is a strikingly naive vision, which gravely undercut what had long been the proslavery argument’s strongest suit, its cold cynicism about the intrinsic brutality of the human condition. With Fitzhugh, Southern thought passed abruptly into the world of Godey’s Lady’s Book and it made sense that he admired Charles Kingsley, whose novel Alton Locke about English industrial squalor came from the same pen that was to write The Water Babies. Fitzhugh’s sentiment was very expansive, even Wordsworthian, for it extended beyond wife, children, and slaves, to ‘‘dogs, horses, birds and flowers.’’ Like Calhoun, Fitzhugh wanted power, but he also wanted to be loved, to belong to a Christian ‘‘band of brothers.’’ So he invented women, children, and slaves who doted upon his masterly kindness. This had the unexpected consequence that, for a long time, he refused to countenance the racist theory of Josiah Nott, which he saw as ‘‘at war with scripture, which teaches us that the whole human race is descended from a common parentage; and . . . it encourages and incites brutal masters to treat negroes, not as weak, ignorant and dependent brethren, but as wicked beasts, without the pale of humanity. The Southerner is the negro’s friend, his only friend.’’ This was the trust of a timid man, who averted his eyes from what was unpleasant, if that ugliness formed part of his own world. He once observed of the ancients, whom he otherwise admired, that, ‘‘Our hearts . . . are not as hard and callous as theirs, for they delighted in gladiatorial combats which would fill us with horror.’’ Ugliness elsewhere (‘‘the bleak winds, the cold rains, and hot sun of heaven’’) might be fine, for it pointed a contrast and fed the comforting illusion of a ‘‘South, quiet, contented, satisfied,’’ and a slavery ‘‘healthy, beautiful and natural.’’ So Fitzhugh had noticed the tendency of the age to grow less hardened, to favor 80. GF, Sociolo , 214–15, 25, 183; GF, Cannibals, 300; GF, ‘‘Ancient Families of Virginia, Maryland, Etc,’’ DBR 26 (May 1859): 497.

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compassion: ‘‘Those who feel so much for the negroes of the West Indies and of America, begin to feel quite as much for wives, children, apprentices, ward, sailors, soldiers, and hirelings.’’ 81 He noticed, because he shared the impulse; he was much concerned to be kindly, to diminish pain. This impulse helps to comprehend Fitzhugh’s political vision, otherwise puzzling and inconsistent. For, despite his quoting John Randolph’s assertion ‘‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,’’ Fitzhugh was no unreconstructed reactionary, but a moderate progressive who praised reformation and deprecated revolution. He kept up with the most advanced social thought, did not hesitate to use a new-fangled neologism like ‘‘sociology’’ or to recommend that the new University of the South have a professorship in the discipline, and he avidly kept up with the latest periodicals. He was a conservative Democrat who had been radical when young, who favored democracy because it granted the right of self-government but also created the state that governed.82 He had little time for John Taylor’s agrarian utopia, observed that ‘‘the wit of man can devise no means so effectual to impoverish a country as exclusive agriculture,’’ and wrote that ‘‘farming is the recreation of great men, the proper pursuit of dull men.’’ He favored universal, public education, as well as a modernized, though not centralized banking system, while being opposed to specie as the basis for a currency. In later parlance, Fitzhugh was opposed to monetarism, for he did not think an increase in the money supply occasioned inflation. He encouraged a modest urbanization, and observed that the old Tidewater culture had not been good: ‘‘The people on the rich lands, on navigable rivers, were a few absentees, without villages, towns, mechanic arts, churches or schools. They made money at home, and the rivers tempted them to spend it abroad.’’ Large cities were a curse, but ‘‘numerous small towns are great blessings, because they prevent the evil effects of centralization of trade, retain wealth and population at home, and diffuse happiness and intelligence, by begetting variety of pursuits, supporting schools, colleges and religious institutions, and affording the means of pleasant and frequent association.’’ He has a glowing description of his own town of Port Royal, that ‘‘village of flowers,’’ with its pleasant cottages ‘‘surrounded with trees, flowers, ivy, and other evergreens.’’ Indeed, after he came to live there, Fitzhugh was even to 81. GF, Cannibals, 301; GF, Sociolo , 26, 95, 115, 106, 81; GF, ‘‘The Conservative Principle; or, Social Evils and Their Remedies,’’ DBR 22 (April 1857): 420–21. 82. GF, ‘‘The Valleys of Virginia—the Rappahanock,’’ DBR 26 (June 1859): 618; GF, Sociolo , 30. ‘‘We were radical when young, and so was the party. The advance of age, and maturer judgement, have made us conservative, and we find that the Democratic party is becoming quite as conservative as we’’: GF, ‘‘The Old Dominion—Valley of the Rappahanock,’’ DBR 26 (April 1859): 382.

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write in praise of Washington, D.C.—not many did—and urged the value of public works, statues, museums, and public parks, just like Frederick Law Olmsted. So he favored internal improvements, especially roads that connected immediate localities, though he mistrusted railroads for their greater reach. On the other hand, he liked the idea of ‘‘city railroads’’ or trams, which might allow towns to spread over a greater area and hence he favored the suburban. He endorsed the establishment of a ‘‘great Southern University,’’ for the same reasons that John Quincy Adams had once wanted an American national university. For a man so repulsed by the social system of modernity, Fitzhugh had a marked fondness for its products, for such as ‘‘books on the various arts and sciences, and on other subjects, the manufacture of fine silks, woolens, calicoes, shawls, the making of exquisite porcelain, the building of ships, and steamboats, the construction of machinery, and a thousand other pursuits.’’ 83 What held his political philosophy together was the question of scale, an understanding of boundaries. Class mattered here. Contrary to the usual image of him, Fitzhugh was a bourgeois thinker, remote from the great acres and hundreds of slaves of an Alston or a Manigault. Fitzhugh’s social descriptions of Virginia concentrate on towns and country seats, but are singularly inattentive to the plantations that surrounded them.84 The slavery he describes was the intimate slavery of an urban household, presided over by a town lawyer, which was the world Fitzhugh knew. He is very clear that he disliked, not only the vulgar munificence of the parvenu millionaires that industrialism had thrown up, with their ‘‘varnished and gilded pomp,’’ but the old aristocracy, too, in Europe and Virginia. ‘‘Tide-water old fogyism retains its dogged, do-nothing spirit,’’ he once snorted. ‘‘It hates and opposes railroads, canals, daily mails, and other modern innovations, quite as cordially as its ancestry hated and opposed the looms.’’ Cannibals All! was dedicated to Henry Wise, the progressive governor of Virginia and, in De Bow’s Review, Fitzhugh deprecated opposition to Wise: ‘‘No wonder the old fogies on the tide-water should think him eccentric; for he belongs to the go-ahead, modern world, while they are dreaming of times long past in sleepy hollows, on our eastern shores, or conning over the Resolutions of ’98, ’99, and the doctrines of nullification and secession, as panaceas for the ills that human flesh is heir to.’’ 85 This was very remote from the quasi-aristocratic reasonings of 83. GF, Sociolo , 15, 156, 137–39, 172; GF, ‘‘The Valleys of Virginia—the Rappahanock,’’ DBR 26 (March 1859): 276; GF, ‘‘Washington City,’’ DBR 24 (June 1858): 502–8; GF, ‘‘Modern Civilization,’’ DBR 29 (July 1860): 69; GF, ‘‘Rappahanock,’’ 615. 84. For example, in GF, ‘‘Old Dominion.’’ 85. GF, ‘‘Private and Public Luxury,’’ DBR 24 (January 1858): 51; GF, ‘‘Valleys of Virginia,’’ 275.

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Abel P. Upshur and Beverley Tucker. The progressive impulse seems to have strengthened in Fitzhugh, the deeper into the 1850s he got. Writing for De Bow’s Review, the great Southern periodical of modern improvement, doubtless helped. But he was reading the drift of the times, when many Southern states were increasing budgets and sponsoring internal improvements. ‘‘The ‘do-nothing’ doctrines of political economy have gone out of fashion,’’ he was pleased to observe. ‘‘Charleston, once the focus of that old school, has become the active head and center of the new school, which advocates State protection to State works of improvement.’’ 86 Hence, in his various genealogical writings, Fitzhugh was not very much interested in claiming a baronial descent and dismissed those who liked to dwell exclusively on the Cavalier origins of Virginia, though he did admit that they had helped by their military discipline to carry the young colony through its brutal inception. Instead, he was happy to observe that many Virginians had begun life as transported convicts and that, despite this, their descendants had fitted well into society: ‘‘The morality and intelligence of the rich and poor do not differ widely. Good moral deportment, education, and refinement of manners, generally secure admission into the best society.’’ Rather, Fitzhugh favored a society of modest competences, widely dispersed, in which the state gave back much in public works. ‘‘We should discourage private luxury and encourage public luxury’’ was his motto. So he spoke warmly of sumptuary laws, as when, during the early Roman republic, ‘‘costly living was treated as a crime, [and] men required to take their meals in view of the public, so that the ‘censores morum’ might discover and punish any departures from simplicity and economy of living.’’ This was interventionist. Consistent with this, by 1859 when he was writing for De Bow, he revised the euphoric vision of the master found in Cannibals All! and worried that a head of household had too much unrestricted power: ‘‘He is often deficient in temper, in wisdom, in morals, and in religion, for the despotism he wields.’’ So the state should regulate the family: ‘‘The want of some family supervision and control from without, is a crying defect in modern social organization.’’ 87 In Fitzhugh, the specter of the social worker unexpectedly looms. This instinct for the aurea mediocritas extended to culture and the state. 86. GF, ‘‘Rappahanock,’’ 612. The best account of this transformation in the 1850s remains J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 267–342; and J. Mills Thornton III, ‘‘Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction,’’ in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 349–94. 87. GF, ‘‘Old Dominion,’’ 372; GF, ‘‘Valleys of Virginia,’’ 273; GF, ‘‘Oliver Goldsmith and Doctor Johnson,’’ DBR 28 (May 1860): 511; GF, ‘‘Luxury,’’ 53; GF, ‘‘Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia,’’ DBR 26 (February 1859): 124–25.

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‘‘Almost the only secret of high civilization and national greatness consists in narrow and confined territorial limits,’’ he said. A thing too small, such as a plantation alone, was overly constricted, but a thing too great (Rome, London, an empire) became a despotism: ‘‘History, ancient and modern, teaches but one lesson on this subject. Little Phoenicia and little Carthage, the hundred little states of Greece, and Rome, whilst her dominion was confined to Italy, were truly great.’’ Society should keep in touch with the proportions of the family, for ‘‘Counties, States, and nations, are but collections of families,’’ which was why Fitzhugh much favored genealogical researches. The scale of the individual American state seemed about right. It ought to be perfected as an independent nationality and thereby ‘‘counteract the centralizing tendency of modern improvements in locomotion and intercommunication, which naturally rob the extremities to enrich the centres of Power and of Trade.’’ 88 In his restlessness to protect this sense of proportion, Fitzhugh came to understand that free trade was an imperialism, which turned even the politically independent into ‘‘mere colonies and plantations for the centres of trade.’’ This was especially so, if they depended exclusively on agriculture. ‘‘Political independence is not worth a fig without commercial independence,’’ he said. ‘‘The tribute which the centres of trade, of capital, and of mechanical and artistic skill, such as England and the North exact from the nations they trade with, is more onerous and more destructive of civilization than that exacted from conquered provinces.’’ 89 So Fitzhugh was a proponent of states’ rights, though not for the usual reasons; he was, for example, opposed to the doctrines of Nullification.90 He even ‘‘entertained a peculiar contempt for the resolutions of ’98–99’’ for being too Lockean, and he doubted that ‘‘even the Calhoun school has ever fully comprehended the origin, character, and anatomical naturalness and necessity of State nationality,’’ because they rested their case upon sovereignty, an abstract thing, whereas ‘‘a nation is a physical being, whose existence can no more be disputed or denied than that of a man or a horse.’’ As a natural cultural and social unit, each Southern state should ‘‘condense within its boundaries all the elements of separate independent nationality.’’ Until then, civilization would be ‘‘imperfect and incomplete.’’ ‘‘Each must not only have within itself good lawyers, doctors and farmers, but able statesmen, learned philosophers, distinguished artists, skilful mechanics, great authors, and every institution and pursuit that per88. GF, Sociolo , 202, 203; GF, ‘‘Old Churches,’’ 124. 89. GF, Sociolo , 203, 18. 90. ‘‘We would not be misunderstood. We have no doubt whatever as to the right of nullification. But what is the mere abstract right worth, without the physical strength and ability to enforce it?’’: GF, ‘‘Valleys of Virginia,’’ 275.

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tain to high civilization.’’ 91 It followed that power exercised by too great a society was a tyranny, but power within discrete boundaries was an aid to civilization. The Commonwealth tradition survived thereby in Fitzhugh, but flexibly. This anti-imperialism was mostly an economic doctrine, but also a cultural protest against hegemonic metropolitanism. Free trade, by creating ‘‘centres of opinion, thought and fashions,’’ took away men’s nationality and impaired ‘‘their patriotism by teaching them to ape foreign manners, affect foreign dress and opinions, and despise what is domestic.’’ Paris was as much an enemy for being a ‘‘centre of thought and fashion’’ as London for controlling trade. ‘‘A Virginian thinks it a disgrace to be dressed in home-spun, because home-spun is unfashionable. The Frenchman prides himself on being a Frenchman; all other people affect the cosmopolitan.’’ So, though he thought well of James Boswell as a biographer, he disdained the Scot for being ‘‘a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world’’ and so ‘‘a fashionable monkey . . . the most contemptible of all the animals formed by Deity.’’ This opinion was Jeffersonian, no doubt, but influenced by a Romantic sense that culture was healthiest that arose on native grounds: ‘‘We want American customs, habits, manners, dress, manufactures, modes of thought, modes of expression, and language. We should encourage national and even State peculiarities; for there are peculiarities and differences in the wants and situations of all people, that require provincial and national, not cosmopolitan, institutions and productions.’’ This theme was more prominent in Cannibals All!, which was much preoccupied with the problem of language, which Fitzhugh understood to be ‘‘a thing of natural growth and development, [which] adapts itself naturally to the changes of time and circumstance.’’ 92 Fitzhugh was a linguistic libertarian. Language was ‘‘the child of nature,’’ which could only be spoiled by grammarians, lexicographers, and rhetoricians. New places, new times, required new words, which the cosmopolitan centers of culture strove to kill with standardization. No one could ‘‘foresee and provide for the thousands of new circumstances which make change of language, or varieties of movement necessary.’’ Nature knew best, was ‘‘always graceful and appropriate, and always ready to adapt herself to changes of time, situation and circumstances.’’ Hence Fitzhugh was an enemy of the neoclassical, hated the age of Louis XIV when Frenchmen were but ‘‘servile copyists of Roman art,’’ mistrusted imitation, and (like the German Romantics) admired Shakespeare for his rough inimitability. So, ‘‘We admire not 91. GF, ‘‘Small Nations,’’ DBR 29 (November 1860): 568; GF, Sociolo , 139. 92. GF, Cannibals, 87, 89–90; GF, ‘‘Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, Etc,’’ DBR 28 (April 1860): 416.

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the pellucid rivulet, that murmurs and meanders, in cramped and artificial current, through the park and gardens of the nobleman; but we do admire the flooded and swollen Mississippi, whose turbid waters, in their majestic course, sweep along upon their bosom, with equal composure, the occupants of the hen-roost and the poultry yard, the flocks, the herds, the crops, the uprooted forest, and the residences of man.’’ 93 Fitzhugh had written Sociolo for the South without much thought to language or authorship. But his first book had gained him some fame, brought him correspondents, propelled him more into the world. Eventually, after the publication of Cannibals All!, he was to get a minor political job in Washington and soon became a sort of regular columnist for De Bow’s Review, whose editor regarded him with mingled admiration and puzzlement. During this process, Fitzhugh had begun to become very self-conscious about writing, about what language meant and what having an audience might entail. In 1859, he was to say, ‘‘We don’t write for either the masses or the old fogies, for the masses cannot understand us, and the old fogies are so wedded to their idols that they will not understand us. We write for the intelligent young and middle-aged, and for an appreciative posterity.’’ He developed a rough theory of the avant-garde, the idea that the thinker owed it to himself to express the unpopular truth, though to do so ‘‘is sure, for the time, to injure the teller.’’ Hence, ‘‘To be ahead of the age, is to make war on the age.’’ 94 This talking to the unborn compounded his sense of isolation. In the vein of Carlyle, whose rough bluntness the Virginian much admired and not a little imitated,95 Fitzhugh became a playful, confessional, whimsical writer, in a way that was very unusual in the Southern tradition. He was freely vain: ‘‘That little work [Sociolo for the South] has met, every where, we believe, at the South, with a favorable reception.’’ He admitted to ignorance: ‘‘Returning from the North, we procured in New York a copy of Aristotle’s ‘Politics and Economics.’ To our surprise, we found that our theory of the origin of society was identical with his, and that we had employed not only the same illustrations, but the very same words.’’ He threw out extravagant generalizations: ‘‘We should not be far out in saying, that no book on physics, written more than four hundred years ago, is worth reading, and 93. GF, Cannibals, 90–91, 94, 347–48; GF, Sociolo , 92. 94. J. D. B. De Bow, ‘‘George Fitzhugh,’’ DBR 26 (April 1859): 481; GF, ‘‘Uniform Postage, Railroads, Telegraphs, Fashions, Etc,’’ DBR 26 (June 1859): 659; GF, ‘‘Goldsmith and Johnson,’’ 505. 95. ‘‘We dislike very much to differ with Mr. Carlyle, with whose opinions about government we, in the general, agree’’: GF, ‘‘Frederick the Great, by Thomas Carlyle,’’ DBR 29 (August 1860): 155. Wish, George Fitzhugh, 64, 71–81, 172, 224, 241, 265, 267, makes much of Carlyle’s influence on Fitzhugh.

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none on morals written within that time.’’ He quoted a lot, from Solomon, Juvenal, Horace, Voltaire, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Johnson, and Carlyle, then paused to comment discursively on this habit, on what sort of author he was. For both its substance and style, so that the recent reader can know how Fitzhugh spoke to readers, the passage is worth quoting at length: The reader will excuse us for so often introducing the thoughts and words of others. We do so not only for the sake of their authority, but because they express our own thoughts better than we can express them ourselves. In truth, we deal out our thoughts, facts and arguments in that irregular and desultory way in which we acquired them. We are no regular built scholar—have pursued no ‘‘royal road to mathematics,’’ nor to anything else. We have, by observation and desultory reading, picked up our information by the wayside, and endeavored to arrange, generalize and digest it for ourselves. To learn ‘‘to forget’’ is almost the only thing we have labored to learn. We have been so bored through life by friends with dyspeptic memories, who never digest what they read, because they never forget it, who retain on their intellectual stomachs in gross, crude, undigested, and unassimilated form, every thing that they read, and retail and repeat it in that undigested form to every goodnatured listener: we repeat, that we have been so bored by friends with good memories, that we have resolved to endeavor to express what was useful out of facts, and then to throw the facts away. A great memory is a disease of the mind, which we are surprised no medical writer has noticed. The lunatic asylum should make provision for those affected with this disease; for, though less dangerous, they are far more troublesome and annoying than any other class of lunatics. Learning, observation, reading, are only useful in the general, as they add to the growth of the mind. Undigested and unforgotten, they can no more have this effect, than undigested food on the stomach of a dyspeptic can add to his physical stature. We thought once this thing was original with us, but find that Say pursued this plan in writing his Political Economy. He first read all the books he could get hold of on this subject, and then took time to forget them, before he began to write.96 So Fitzhugh had the reader very much on his mind, and often addressed him (not her). He revealed his narrative strategies: ‘‘We intend this chapter as our trump card, and have kept it in reserve, because it is rash to ‘lead trumps.’ ’’ He apologized when method failed him: ‘‘As this is a short chap96. GF, Cannibals, xiii, xxi, 80, 99–101.

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ter, we take the opportunity to apologize and account for our discursive, immethodical and unartistic manner.’’ He reminisced about his career, by way of explaining his style: ‘‘We practiced as a jury lawyer for twenty-five years, and thereby acquired an inveterate habit of cumulation and iteration, and of various argument and illustration.’’ He mused on national traditions of exposition: ‘‘Artistic execution is un-English. It neither suits their minds nor their tastes. Discursiveness and prurient exuberancy of thought and suggestion, they often possess, but always fail when they attempt a literary or other work of Art.’’ He expressed his opinions on how readers read: ‘‘A continuous argument, without pause or break, on a subject profoundly metaphysical, equally fatigues the writer and the reader. Nobody likes it, and very few read it.’’ He admitted that he was impetuous and ironically explained this by his humble position in the literary world: ‘‘We indulge in abandon, because, as a writer, we have no reputation to jeopardise or to lose. But, should this book take, we will mount the antithetical stilts of auctorial dignity. . . . We do not as yet bore the world with ‘respectable stupidity,’ because our position does not authorize it.’’ He commented on his habit of using poetry for epigraphs: ‘‘The reader must have remarked our propensity of putting scraps of poetry at the head of our chapters, or of interweaving them with the text. It answers as a sort of chorus or refrain, and, when skillfully handled, has as fine an effect as the fiddle at a feast, or the brass band on the eve of an engagement. It nerves the author for greater effort, and inspires the reader with resolution to follow him in his most profound ratiocinations and airiest speculations.’’ He guessed that the reader might grow irritated at all this disorder: ‘‘Now it may be, that sometimes, when we ‘have gone it rather strong’ (as we are very apt to do) and offended the reader, our scraps of poetry may answer the purpose of the Abolition songs, and soothe and propitiate him. . . . I am sure, when we have, as we often do, mounted with our reader into the highest regions of metaphysics, that his head becomes a little giddy, (at least ours does,) and that he is thankful for a little poetry or a turn at play with our Abolition Goats.’’ He chatted about his publisher and noted that, ‘‘To be candid with the reader, we have learned lately that the physique of a book is quite as important as its metaphysique—the outside as the inside. Figure, size, proportion, are all to be consulted: for books are now used quite as much for centre table ornaments as for reading.’’ 97 All this chatty exuberance might be read as postmodern, but Fitzhugh was closer to the mode of Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy (which might come to the same thing), wherein author and reader wandered together through an unstable world of short, episodic chapters, and the unfolding plot was by 97. Ibid., 127, 347, 348–67.

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no means the most important preoccupation of either. As Sterne observed, ‘‘Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;—so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.’’ 98 In this manner, Cannibals All! was rhetorically a more ingenious work than Sociolo for the South, but also a work that tended to admit defeat in the struggle for ideological power, for it was half-content to be playful. Fitzhugh’s comedy was born of resignation.99 But he also had a sense of humor. ‘‘There is nothing in this world that we like so much as a good, hearty laugh,’’ he once wrote, by way of explaining why he liked Byron.100 Fitzhugh had a deep skepticism and ambivalence about the efficacy of ideas. As a Burkean intellectual, he faced the familiar dilemma that, if society evolved organically, the thinker’s originality might be merely destructive. ‘‘All human experience proves that society must be ruled not by mere abstractions, but by men of flesh and blood,’’ he insisted. As a Romantic, he told himself that truth lay only in conforming to nature, in letting things take their course. ‘‘There is not a true moral philosophy, and from the nature of things there never can be,’’ he observed in his first book. ‘‘Such a philosophy has to discover first causes and ultimate effects, to grasp infinitude, to deal with eternity at both ends. Human presumption will often attempt this, but human intellect can never achieve it. We shall build up no system, attempt to account for nothing, but simply point out what is natural and universal, and humbly try to justify the ways of God to man.’’ He had, in fact, Romantic philosophy in an unusually pure form, especially in its self-conscious critique of the Enlightenment, which he understood to have commenced with John Locke. So, in France in the eighteenth century, ‘‘there was faith in nothing, speculation about everything.’’ The intellect became presumptuous and ‘‘undertook to form governments on exact philosophical principles, just as men make clocks, watches or mills.’’ As materialists, the philosophes ‘‘confounded the moral 98. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 9 vols. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760), 2:68. 99. One might note, however, that Fitzhugh mistrusted the trivial. His version of English literary history disliked the Addisonian tradition and spoke of ‘‘something light, trivial, formal, and affected in the boasted literature of Queen Anne’s day,’’ which he explained by its being composed in ‘‘a time of safety, security, and domestic peace.’’ He saw this tradition as descending to the Lake School and ‘‘the little by-play or twaddle of Blackwood.’’ On the whole, however, he thought that English literature since the 1770s had grown more serious, earnest, and profound. See GF, ‘‘The Northern Neck of Virginia,’’ DBR 27 (September 1859): 295. 100. GF, ‘‘Milton, Byron, and Southey,’’ DBR 29 (October 1860): 438.

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with the physical world,’’ and thought society was a ‘‘thing whose movement and action could be controlled with as much certainty as the motion of a spinning wheel, provided it was organized on proper principles.’’ It would have been as easy ‘‘to have made a tree, for a tree is not half so complex as a society of human beings, each of whom is fearfully and wonderfully compounded of soul and body, and whose aggregate, society, is still more complex and difficult of comprehension than its individual members.’’ Men might, at best, cultivate trees. By a similar logic, ‘‘laws, institutions, societies, and governments grow, and men may aid their growth, improve their strength and beauty, and lop off their deformities and excrescences, by punishing crime and rewarding virtue.’’ Only when society had been around for a long time and worked ‘‘under the hand of God and nature’’ could man by observation ‘‘discover its laws and constitution.’’ 101 Believing in its inefficacy, Fitzhugh was not much drawn to metaphysics. ‘‘We know little of German metaphysics, German theology, German politics, and less of German geography—it is all a mystery to us,’’ he once chirpily admitted.102 Still, he knew enough to summarize the drift of much modern philosophy: ‘‘We cannot prove that we exist; we cannot prove that we are free agents. We must take our consciousness and involuntary belief, as proof that we do exist and are free agents. This is the conclusion at which metaphysicians have arrived.’’ But this conclusion meant that one could think logic irrelevant, even misleading, for philosophy was ‘‘always wrong’’ and common sense ‘‘always right.’’ The former did not notice the world, but reasoned ‘‘from narrow and insufficient premises.’’ The latter was observant, judged shrewdly and justly, though ‘‘being busied about practical every day matters, has never learned the process of abstraction’’ or scrutinized self-awareness; it ‘‘always judges rightly, but reasons wrong.’’ (By this reasoning, he believed that women saw life with greater clarity, because they were stronger in sense and weaker in argument.) So Fitzhugh mistrusted those who thought science might improve agriculture, for he had no confidence that chemistry was subtle enough to grasp the complexity of nature. This might serve for a criticism of Edmund Ruffin, yet oddly Fitzhugh later paid him handsome tribute, partly for ‘‘his many valuable treatises on the subject of Slavery,’’ but also as a ‘‘successful practical farmer’’ whose work on marl ‘‘has been worth millions to Virginia.’’ Nonetheless, Fitzhugh discerned a general fact about the scope of 101. GF, Sociolo , 70, 11, 175–76. 102. GF, ‘‘Johnson,’’ 419. He later wrote an essay on German literature, which repeats the merest stereotypes, but begins by confessing his ignorance: ‘‘The reader is, no doubt, curious to know what are our qualifications for writing the subject we have selected for this essay. Why, the best in the world, because we know nothing about it; or, at least, knew little about it when we undertook to write on it.’’ See GF, ‘‘German Literature,’’ DBR 29 (September 1860): 284.

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human intelligence: there were ‘‘no truths which the human mind can comprehend and follow out, in all their ramifications, and to their whole extent.’’ So it made sense to him to derogate philosophes in order to praise mechanics, the makers of ‘‘the cannon and the gun, the compass, the steam engine, and the electric wire.’’ The enemy was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, ‘‘the anatomist, who should attempt to create a man.’’ For, ‘‘Social bodies, like human bodies, are the works of God, which man may dissect, and sometimes heal, but which he cannot create.’’ 103 But Fitzhugh also said that ‘‘invention alone begets civilization,’’ and by invention he meant more than the making of spinning jennies. He believed that ‘‘[w]ords, written, printed, and disseminated in books, are actions—actions that often affect the weal or woe of mankind, far more and far longer than the devastations of armies.’’ There was, therefore, a leeway. Society was also invention. So property was ‘‘not a natural and divine, but conventional right; it is the mere creature of society and law.’’ As such, it ‘‘derives its only title now from the will of society through the sanction of law,’’ and might be unmade by another will. The best of intellect lay in intelligent observation, then moderate action. Moses, Confucius, Solon, Lycurgus and Alfred the Great were not only reformers, but also ‘‘philosophers . . . too profound to mistake the province of philosophy and attempt to usurp that of nature.’’ They did not make governments on ‘‘‘a priori ’ reasoning,’’ but ‘‘simply lopped off what was bad, and retained, modified and simplified what was good in existing institutions.’’ Along these lines, Fitzhugh struggled to explain what role he himself was trying to play. He hazarded: ‘‘A Moral Pathology, which feels its way in life, and adapts itself to circumstances, as they present themselves, is the nearest approach to philosophy, which it is either safe or wise to attempt. All the rest must be left to Religion, to Faith, and to Providence.’’ 104 But even of this, he was unsure. So Fitzhugh had the modern sense that the world was growing too complex for understanding and, with this, he flirted with the existential conclusion that means and not ends were all that one might have. Man was a Sisyphus, whose ‘‘existence and . . . happiness require that he should continue to roll upward the ever-rebounding rock.’’ The stone would never rest in ‘‘a fixed and firm position.’’ Rather, ‘‘happiness consists in the pursuit, and none but the hypochondriac moralizes too closely as to the ‘cui bono.’ ’’ Life required defying reason, for the latter ‘‘cannot reconcile the belief in Providence, or a First Cause, with human free agency’’ and ‘‘disproves the existence of an 103. GF, Sociolo , 116, 118, 155–56, 159; GF, ‘‘Northern Neck,’’ 282; GF, ‘‘Old Dominion,’’ 385; GF, Cannibals, 35. 104. GF, Sociolo , 20, 183; GF, ‘‘Milton and Macaulay,’’ DBR 28 (June 1860): 678; GF, Cannibals, 82.

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external material world.’’ However, ‘‘reason neither controls or affects involuntary belief.’’ Even Hume and Berkeley knew this, he thought, and ‘‘would have dodged as soon from the blow of a stick, as the veriest clodhopper in England.’’ 105 Even instinct floundered: ‘‘In the physical and moral world, every truth has its opposite truth. Conflicting forces sustain physical existence, vegetable, animal, and human life; and conflicting forces sustain the moral world, sustain society and human government.’’ Philosophy liked to choose sides, but this was no good. Paley, for example, ‘‘is wholly discredited and out of vogue. No system has taken its place.’’ For the problem was that ‘‘in language, law, medicine, and fashion, there are opposing forces, opposite, contradictory, and conflicting principles, which are equally true and equally necessary. . . . The world has no accepted philosophy now.’’ Each man had his own theory and, at best, one treated the symptoms of a diseased world; causes were beyond knowledge or control.106 This was not merely a social truth, but a psychological one. Personality, too, was conflicted. Fitzhugh disliked Macaulay’s writing, for example, because, ‘‘Moral qualities, with him, do not, as in real life, gradually meet, run into, and qualify one another.’’ 107 One of the treatments for a diseased world was religion, that usefully irrational thing. Fitzhugh seems to have been an Episcopalian of High Church 105. GF, ‘‘Law Reports—Multiplicity of Law Books,’’ DBR 27 (July 1859): 78, 77. Elsewhere, he cites Doctor Johnson for entertaining a similar opinion, that ‘‘all theory is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it’’: GF, ‘‘Johnson,’’ 421. 106. GF, ‘‘Law Reports,’’ 83. These thoughts embody, with some precision, what Isaiah Berlin was later to argue was the distinctive contribution of Romantic philosophy. It is of interest that this essay of Fitzhugh’s ends with a quotation from the fourteenth canto of Byron’s Don Juan, which reads in full: If from great nature’s or our own abyss Of thought we could but snatch a certainty, Perhaps mankind might find the path they miss— But then ‘t would spoil much good philosophy. One system eats another up, and this Much as old Saturn ate his progeny; For when his pious consort gave him stones In lieu of sons, of these he made no bones. But System doth reverse the Titan’s breakfast, And eats her parents, albeit the digestion Is difficult. Pray tell me, can you make fast, After due search, your faith to any question? Look back o’er ages, ere unto the stake fast You bind yourself, and call some mode the best one. Nothing more true than not to trust your senses; And yet what are your other evidences? 107. GF, ‘‘Milton and Macaulay,’’ 676.

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tendencies, who smiled upon Puseyism. Ritual delayed the crisis of agnosticism, for ‘‘Christianity, stripped of the formal and extraneous, degenerates into universalism and deism, and leads very soon to downright infidelity.’’ Mystery, formality, and liturgy helped, as religion was necessarily a superstition which needed ceremonial, and ‘‘a reasonable religion, squared down to philosophic rule, and reduced to human comprehension, is no religion at all.’’ For, after all, ‘‘We must all believe what we cannot understand.’’ Indeed, there is evidence that, by 1860, Fitzhugh was flirting with Roman Catholicism. Whereas earlier he had spoken appreciatively of the Reformation, later he spoke of ‘‘the rolling back of the reformation’’ and ‘‘the admiration generally expressed for the Catholic Church as a political institution, and the daily adoption of more of form, of rule and ceremony, by the orthodox Protestant Trinitarian churches.’’ 108 This would have come as news to Thornwell and Miles, who had very different responses to the same apprehension of the nineteenth century’s spiritual crisis. All this was a long way from St. George Tucker’s smooth confidence in human reason and will. With Fitzhugh, the proslavery argument imploded into paradox. Other social thinkers, less intelligent or less imaginative, did not see that the collision of freedom and order might disintegrate individualism and leave only the provisional, the momentary. Hughes solved the problem by commanding a greater dose of order and erasing the free individual, but this went too far for most thoughtful Southerners, who wanted to be more than only the guardians of a happy prison camp. Most tried to muddle through, tried to have it both ways, to define a history and sociology acquainted with morality, a morality traceable in history. This kept the anarchy of both history and morality at bay, for they understood that the past was full of vice and morality full of contradiction. Nonetheless, strikingly, Southerners contrived to be hopeful in the 1850s, which was an expansive decade. In forty years, the proslavery argument had drifted from a bleak sense of human limitation to a quasi-millennial vision. But, along the way, the slaves themselves had dropped out of the proslavery argument. Indeed, by the end, it became habitual to deny that Southern social relations constituted slavery at all. In truth, real slaves had never been central. The genre had been a way for white Southerners to articulate a theory of society and they had always been more preoccupied with how whites related to one another in politics, economics, and society than how whites related to African Americans. The slave was the most inexplicit figure in the discourse, a shadowy presence, signifi108. GF, ‘‘Bayard Taylor’s Travels in Greece and Russia,’’ DBR 27 (December 1859): 653; GF, ‘‘Disunion within the Union,’’ DBR 28 (January 1860): 5–6.

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cant only as a type. He or she was never given a name, was never an individual with a history or an opinion, despite the fact that all these proslavery works were written within a few yards of particular slaves, many of whose experiences and voices and bodies were used and known, however imperfectly. This silence Mary Chesnut, at least, was to remember and evoke. ‘‘People talk before them as if they were chairs and tables,’’ she inserted in her diary in 1861 on Jefferson’s birthday. ‘‘And they make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?’’ 109

109. Entry for 13 April 1861, in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 48.

book six

hilosophy and Faith

Chapter Nineteen

The Dim Land of Vagaries

The Numberless Brood of the Scotch Metaphysicians 1 For many Americans, philosophy was mostly a thing written by ancient Greeks and modern Europeans, about which they were obliged to read in college. As Samuel Tyler of Maryland put it in 1856, when surveying the history of philosophy, ‘‘We have said nothing of philosophy in America; because, as yet, the various European systems are struggling for a foothold here. We are somewhat in the condition of ancient Alexandria, where all the doctrines of the world commingled.’’ 2 James Henley Thornwell had been more sweeping in 1839 about his times, indeed swept away more than America: ‘‘The grand defect of England and America is that they have nothing which can be called philosophy at all.’’ 3 But the South did have some people who were attentive to philosophy and made their discriminations about which philosophical schools were pertinent, mistaken, or worthy of discipleship. This metaphysical venture had intellectual prestige, but it also occasioned anxiety, for its terms were Title from Augusta Jane Evans, Beulah (1859; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 288: ‘‘She found the historians of philosophy as much at variance as the philosophers themselves, and looked with dismay into the dim land of vagaries, into which metaphysics had drawn the brightest minds of the past.’’ 1. F. J. V. Broussais, On Irritation and Insanity. A Work, Wherein the Relations of the Physical with the Moral Condition of Man, Are Established on the Basis of Physiological Medicine, trans. TC (Columbia, S.C.: S. J. M’Morris, 1831), 343. 2. Samuel Tyler, ‘‘History of Philosophy,’’ SQR 2 n.s. 2 (November 1856): 260. Tyler was a correspondent of Holmes, the leading American proponent of Baconianism, a legal scholar, and an evangelical: see Neal C. Gillespie, The Collapse of Orthodoxy: The Intellectual Ordeal of George Frederick Holmes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 57, 101, 181; Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), passim. 3. JHT, ‘‘An Address Delivered to the Euphradian & Clariosophic Societies of the South Carolina College, December 3d 1839,’’ JHT Papers, SCL (unpaginated ms).

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elusive, hard to remember, and difficult to reconcile. The most urbane intelligence could find itself awkwardly reduced to a sense of dribbling idiocy, the more so as philosophy might calmly and unintelligibly inform you that there was no such thing as intelligence, anyway. Nonetheless, Southerners surveyed the options. There were, first, the Scottish realists, who were most influential within the collegiate curriculum and remained broadly dominant until the Civil War, at least among those who taught moral philosophy as a duty, more than an avocation. Among these, the names of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart were familiarly invoked and usually praised, though (as will become clear) they were also often used as sounding boards, even as straw men, conveniently available for refutation or skepticism. For Southerners also had available the English philosophical tradition. Francis Bacon was much admired and even understood, though John Locke was more praised than grasped. At a pinch, both were usually thought to be compatible with the Scots. But George Berkeley and David Hartley were a different matter. Like David Hume, they offered drastic options. The loss of external reality and the abolition of spirituality, even the death of God, were alternatives to which a few Southerners were drawn, though nervously, temporarily. So it became more common to look away from Britain towards the Continent, towards German transcendentalism and French positivism, both traditions that had themselves partly arisen out of a sense that neither Reid nor Hume could be right, if intelligibility, efficacy, and morality were to be sustained. But these options, too, were found wanting. In truth, by 1861, Southerners had run through the lexicon and found nowhere a body of philosophy that answered to their complicated position. As usual, they needed a body of thought that was mobile but not too much so, reassuring but not constricting. It will be useful to begin with the text, with which most Southern college students began their philosophical education in the Scottish tradition, the Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) of Thomas Reid, the Aberdonian who came to succeed Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. There young Southerners found a book that quietly, accessibly mimicked and resolved their own youthful uncertainties. As a young man, Reid had been attracted to George Berkeley’s idealism, but then had found himself appalled by what was partly built upon Berkeley, that is, David Hume’s radical skepticism. Thinking that the two philosophers were connected, Reid turned on both. Berkeley was deemed to lead to ‘‘a serious conviction, that there is no such thing as a material world; nothing in nature but spirits and ideas; and that the belief of material substances, and of abstract ideas, are the chief causes of all errors in philosophy, and of all infidelity and heresy in religion.’’ In pursuing this doctrine, Hume had gone further, had

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undone ‘‘the world of spirits, and [left] nothing in nature but ideas and impressions, without any subject upon which they may be impressed.’’ 4 In so doing, Hume had consummated a long tradition, that began anciently with Pyrrho and was continued in modern times by René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, and John Locke. Each had seen the dangers in their inquiries and pulled back, but Hume had ‘‘drowned all in one universal deluge.’’ In commanding the inward glance, Hume had offered ‘‘the forbidden tree of knowledge; I no sooner taste of it, than I perceive myself naked, and stripped of all things, yea, even of my very self. I see myself, and the whole frame of nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like Epicurus’s atoms, dance about in emptiness.’’ 5 Reid was aware that, granted the premise of consciousness, Hume’s case was irrefutable, for there was nowhere to anchor awareness, no evidence independent of mind that proved humans saw rightly. So, boldly, Reid removed the intervening trouble, ideas themselves. Smell a rose, he advised. ‘‘Philosophers . . . tell me, that the immediate object of my memory and imagination in this case, is not the past sensation, but an idea of it, an image, phantasm, or species of the odour I smelled.’’ But what evidence was there for the existence of ideas themselves? For the rose, there was the evidence of the smell, both immediate and in memory: ‘‘Sensation and memory therefore are simple, original, and perfectly distinct operations of the mind, and both of them are original principles of belief.’’ Imagination was another, distinct matter. ‘‘Sensation implies the present existence of its object; memory its past existence; but imagination views its object naked, and without any belief of its existence or non-existence, and is therefore what the schools call simple apprehension.’’ Hence humans knew the world directly; this was a part of their constitution. Pitiable were those who, deluded by logic, thought absurdly otherwise: ‘‘The evidence of sense, the evidence of memory, and the evidence of the necessary relations of things, are all distinct and original kinds of evidence, equally grounded on our constitution; none of them depends upon, or can be resolved into another.’’ 6 In all this, there was a mixing of respect for intellectual endeavor with a pert anti-intellectualism against ‘‘the adepts.’’ ‘‘I resolve for my own part, always to pay a great regard to the dictates of common sense, and not to 4. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, ed. with an introduction by Timothy Duggan (1764; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 14; one should note that Duggan’s edition uses the Charlestown edition of 1813, of which David Fate Norton complains in Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations, ed. Stephen F. Barker and Tom L. Beauchamp (Philadelphia: Philosophical Monographs, 1976), 125, 131. 5. Reid, Inquiry, 14, 18. 6. Ibid., 25, 27, 30.

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depart from them without absolute necessity; and therefore am I apt to think, that there is really something in the rose and lily, which is by the vulgar called smell, and which continues to exist when it is not smelled.’’ And so Reid’s Inquiry was arranged by sections that examined human senses, those of smell, touch, and sight, the faculties that connected the inward and the outward worlds and so made immediacy possible. Indeed, Reid may be said to have tried to abolish metaphysics, to offer in its place physiology, or faculty psychology. He turned back to the body and bade the mind obey and trust it. So the Inquiry is a tactile book, accessible for its homely evocativeness: ‘‘That such a noise is in the street, such another in the room above me; that this is a knock at my door, that, a person walking up stairs, is probably learned by experience. I remember, that once lying abed, and having been put into a fright, I heard my own heart beat; but I took it to be one knocking at the door, and arose and opened the door oftener than once, before I discovered that the sound was in my own breast.’’ This was part of Reid’s attractiveness for generations of readers. By all accounts, Reid himself was an unworldly man, who kept his distance from the wrangling literati of Scotland and who understood the impatience of the ordinary man towards metaphysics. With firm elaboration and no little dissimulation, he affected to represent this skeptical bewilderment: ‘‘Sensible men, who never will be skeptics in matters of common life, are apt to treat with sovereign contempt every thing that hath been said, or is to be said, upon this subject. It is metaphysic, say they: who minds it? Let scholastic sophisters entangle themselves in their own cobwebs: I am resolved to take my own existence, and the existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold, and honey sweet, whatever they may say to the contrary.’’ 7 Reid was intervening in a complicated debate, begun locally by Frances Hutcheson but elsewhere involving the names of Locke and Descartes, in which Aberdonian unworldliness was not always or immediately an advantage. Scotland had traditionally been European as well as provincial, with its local adaptation of the civil law, with its old alliance with France, and its connection with Dutch medicine. David Hume was a European man of letters, self-consciously cosmopolitan, who gave Edinburgh a standing in the world of the Enlightenment by his diffident glamour and sharp intellectuality. He might smile and license Reid’s dissent, and (not implausibly) claim to have anticipated it. But Reid needed help before he could be regarded as a serious philosophical rival to Hume. He helped himself by further writings: the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1786) and Essays on the Active Powers 7. Ibid., 40, 53, 19–20. On Reid, see Nicholas Phillipson, ‘‘The Pursuit of Virtue and University Education: Dugald Stewart, and Scottish Moral Philosophy in the Age of the Enlightenment,’’ in The University in Society, Past, Present, and Future (Edinburgh: n.p., 1983), 4.

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of Man (1788). But assistance came from several other quarters: responsibly from Adam Ferguson, who assimilated some of Reid to his lectures on moral philosophy, irresponsibly from James Beattie (one of Reid’s students), who popularized Reid in ‘‘voluminous and fatuous writings’’ and attacked Hume with sufficient bitterness that even Hume noticed and resented ‘‘that bigotted silly Fellow.’’ 8 But, above all, help came from Dugald Stewart, who rescued Reid from his rottweiler assistants, by restoring urbanity and perspective, by indeed inventing the idea of a Scottish philosophy, with Reid at its center.9 This was done from Stewart’s lecture room at the University of Edinburgh and in works of sweeping cogency and duration, which bridged the worlds of Adam Smith and Victor Cousin: the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (published in two installments in 1792 and 1813), the Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793), the Philosophical Essays (1810), the Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828), as well as in biographies of Adam Smith, William Robertson, and Thomas Reid.10 (Stewart was helping more Scots than just Reid.) Most accessibly, Stewart contributed supplements to the Encyclopedia Britannica in the editions of 1815 and 1821, which together formed his Dissertation Exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe. So, from the 1790s onwards, when the French Revolution suggested the consequences of skepticism and the urgency of self-evident truths, Stewart carried Reid forth in the struggle against the ‘‘universal deluge,’’ whose stakes were now more than philosophical, more even than the old struggle between the Kirk and dissent.11 The unworldly was now preeminently worldly. In Berlin, to be sure, Hegel was not impressed; he thought Stewart ‘‘the last and the least significant’’ of the succession of Scottish philosophers.12 But Stewart did not aim at technical philosophers, but 8. On Ferguson, see David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965); on Beattie, Phillipson, ‘‘Dugald Stewart,’’ 6. The characterization of Beattie is from Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (1945; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 134, and the Hume quotation is Hume to William Strahan, 26 October 1775, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:301. 9. On this, see Paul Wood, ‘‘Introduction: Dugald Stewart and the Invention of ‘the Scottish Enlightenment,’’’ in The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation, ed. Paul Wood (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 1–35. 10. Stewart commends Cousin in the preface to Dugald Stewart, The Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. 5, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828; reprint, Boston: Hilliard and Brown, 1829), viii. 11. Though Reid broke with the Revolution much later than most: see Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 222–25. 12. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 378.

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at winning over the clerisy. To Reid’s engaging vulnerability, Stewart added urbanity and assurance, which helped both the common man and the adept to gain a sense of place. Not least, Reid and Stewart, especially the latter, invented a shape for the history of philosophy, which used Hume respectfully as a straw man in the game of elevating Baconian realism and derogating idealism, and used Christian morality and religion as the standard by which to discriminate among metaphysics.13 On the other hand, theirs was a moderate philosophy, as hostile to Calvinists as to atheists, and this much assisted their widespread circulation and acceptance: they had made themselves the middle ground.14 Common sense philosophy had lodged itself in the American mind, almost as quickly as in the Scottish. When John Witherspoon came from a parish in Paisley to become president of the College of New Jersey in 1768, he was not beginning a dialogue between the American colonies and Scotland, only continuing it.15 Jonathan Edwards himself had quarreled with Lord Kames over doctrines of free will in 1758 and published a book in Edinburgh, and Stewart was later to praise Edwards’s work on necessity.16 Editions of almost all the Scottish writings appeared in the colonies, then in the United States, both North and South, with great rapidity and with an influence almost beyond their immediate impact in Britain. With Scottish books came migrant Scottish teachers, then (reversing the flow) many American students found their way to Scottish universities. So, for example, George Tucker, who used Reid, Stewart, and Thomas Brown (Stewart’s successor) while lecturing on moral philosophy at the University of Virginia in the 1820s and 1830s, had had Scottish teachers even in Bermuda, before his attendance at William and Mary, 13. On the Baconianism of Scottish thought, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 3–31. 14. Emphasized in Knud Haakonssen, ‘‘Scottish Common Sense Realism,’’ in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 618–20. 15. See Ned C. Landsman, ‘‘Witherspoon and the Problem of Provincial Identity in Scottish Evangelical Culture,’’ in Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 29–45. 16. See Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 73; Dugald Stewart, The Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. 6, Dissertation, Exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe (1815–21; reprint, Boston: Hilliard and Brown, 1829), 281: ‘‘Dr. Jonathan Edwards, the most celebrated, and indisputably the ablest champion of the scheme of Necessity.’’ See also Stewart, Dissertation, 384, which says that the circumstances of the New World were unfavorable to philosophy, but made Edwards the single exception and explained the anomaly by Edwards being driven ‘‘less by the impulse of speculative curiosity, than by his anxiety to defend the theological system in which he had been educated.’’

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where even in Jefferson’s day Scottish influence had been marked.17 Robert Henry, who was using Reid at South Carolina College in the same period, had been born in Charleston in 1792 but educated between 1811 and 1814 in Edinburgh, where he attended the lectures of Brown and was a fellow student of William Hamilton. But, with time and the ubiquity of Scottish books on curricula, the personal link ceased to be crucial. Moses Waddel, who was employing Reid and Beattie at the University of Georgia in 1824, had far fewer direct links with Scotland.18 Often Scottish realism was dismissed as an evasion of philosophy, a schoolboy’s tedium. Hegel loftily argued that with ‘‘Thomas Reid, Beattie, Oswald, and others . . . speculative philosophy quite disappears.’’ Further, the Scots tended to be lumped together as an indistinguishable mass, even though nearly a century lay between Frances Hutcheson’s Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of 1725 and Thomas Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind of 1820. In fact, Southerners used these Scottish works less as touchstones and more as points of reference, which led in many directions. Thornwell’s memoir of Robert Henry alerts one to the fact that the reading of a Scottish text might even occasion an idealist response. As Thornwell remembered, though Henry had ‘‘an exalted estimate’’ of Brown’s philosophy, he rejected Reid’s notion of the immediacy of perception ‘‘not by virtue of the principle that the relation of knowledge implies an analogy of existence, but because he was persuaded that the only facts given in our consciousness were the successive changes in the states of our own being.’’ Indeed, ‘‘next to Dr. Brown, the philosopher whom Dr. Henry most prized was the Bishop of Cloyne. We have often heard him say, that if he were compelled to adopt one side of the alternative, he would find it far easier to maintain the non-existence of matter than the non-existence of mind.’’ 19 17. Merit M. Robinson, ‘‘Notes on the Lectures on Moral Philosophy by George Tucker Esquire’’ (1831–32), Cabell Deposit, UVA (hereafter Robinson, ‘‘Tucker Lectures’’); Robert Colin McLean, George Tucker, Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 4. 18. JHT, ‘‘Memoir of Dr. Henry,’’ SQR 2, n.s. 1 (April 1856): 190–93; entry for 6 January 1824, in Moses Waddel Diary, Waddel Family Papers, PHS. One might also note that Robert Henry’s father, Peter, was Scottish, a merchant in the West Indies, though his mother, Anne Adelaide Schweirs, was the daughter of a merchant in Bremen, who met Peter Henry in Jamaica. They settled in Charleston in 1792, in time for her to be delivered of her son, Robert, but her husband died in 1794 from the effects of being captured and mangled by French privateers in the Caribbean; thereafter she ran a dry goods store in Charleston. After studying at the University of Edinburgh, Robert worked for a London merchant who traded with the Dutch West and East Indies, by which experience he learned Dutch; from his Bremen relatives, he acquired German. By 1816 he was back in South Carolina, by 1818 married to a South Carolinian lady, and in the same year elected to a professorship at South Carolina College. 19. Hegel, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, 376; JHT, ‘‘Dr. Henry,’’ 204–5.

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It is often difficult to know what happens in a classroom, even when one is in it. To help in penetrating the mystery, there survives a student’s manuscript transcription of Robert Henry’s lectures on metaphysics, thirty-nine of them given in 1825.20 From these can be gained an insight into what a young student was then expected to understand. The lectures take the form of dialogues, in which a questioner inquires after and receives a clarifying answer from his interlocutor. These exchanges are little concerned with the history of philosophy, which is only explored when a rehearsal of different philosophers’ views is deemed useful for explicating a problem. Rather the lectures try to sketch the constitution of human knowledge. They start with four lectures on perception, which argue that perception resides ‘‘not in the organ of sense but in the mind.’’ It is asserted that sight, touch, and smell are conveyed by the nerves to the brain, there to be perceived by the mind. But a mind is not merely material, because the nerves are only the instruments of sensations. Nor is the mind passive, ‘‘for without attention, we can not perceive.’’ Hence Henry asserts the dualism of mind and body: ‘‘Matter thinks not, mind does.’’ To demonstrate this, he briefly rehearses the standpoints of philosophers from Plato to Descartes, and on to Hume and Reid, after having observed ‘‘that the mind perceives external objects only through the medium of the organs, and these only when it is active.’’ Asked by the questioner, ‘‘Is the opinion generally entertained by philosophers adopted, or controverted, by Dr. Reid?’’ Henry replies, ‘‘He generally controverts them,’’ and then shows why Reid had been wrong to do so. A belief in the existence of external objects is to be considered, not as something instinctive (as Reid had it), but as dependent upon ‘‘a chain of reasoning.’’ So Reid was inconsistent to deny that the mind is active in perception. Rather, as Henry summarized the matter, ‘‘Perception relates not to external objects but to the different states and changes of the mind occasioned by these external objects. Those who are opposed to Dr. Reid say that the mind is active not in perceiving objects, but in perceiving its own changes.’’ That is, the rose is not smelled immediately, but intermediately. Henry felt that individuals were most interested in the problem of what to believe and how to act. But what was belief ? A person must believe ‘‘what the constitution of my nature determines me to believe.’’ But where did human knowledge come from? Sir Isaac Newton had advised that ‘‘for the regulation of the mind in philosophical inquiries,’’ one should seek no more natural causes than were sufficient for explanation. But Henry cautioned that appeals 20. ‘‘Lectures on Metaphysics by Robert Henry, D.D.,’’ bound manuscript volume in Robert Henry Papers, SCL, from which the following discussion of Henry’s philosophy is drawn.

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to nature, in matters of the mind, are not useful, because ‘‘many arguments are drawn from analogy and not from the nature of the thing itself.’’ So Henry cataloged that nature by looking at smell, taste, hearing, sight, touch, with glancing descriptions of human physiology. These had been Reid’s concerns, too, but Henry denied Reid’s presumption that smell lies directly in the mind, not in the organ of smell, ‘‘for when we are diseased in that organ, as when we have a cold, we can not distinguish smell.’’ Concomitantly, taste exists ‘‘in the mind . . . because the taste of the same bodies is different, in different states of health.’’ And likewise hearing takes place partly in the mind, because ‘‘in distinguishing sounds as caused by external objects,’’ reasoning by association takes place, which makes language possible, which was not a ‘‘human invention,’’ but ‘‘the bounty of the Deity.’’ 21 So body and mind interact. On the matter of sight, Henry wrangled briefly with Berkeley, who had argued that sight knew only color. Henry thought that light and color were ‘‘original,’’ while dimension and distance were derived ‘‘from experience and association.’’ (This, again, was a dissent from Reid, who had thought sight an immediate perception.) But sight, unlike language, is not culturally specific: ‘‘the sense of sight [may] be considered as an universal and natural language.’’ As to touch, Henry asserted that this sense offers the greatest proof of the reality of the external world, even if touch only begins the mental processes that lead to the understanding of such things as dimension, solidity, hardness, and softness. So, in general, ‘‘The evidence of consciousness has never been denied—We are conscious of sensations and perceptions; we are moreover conscious that in the reception of them, we are in a great degree passive; and therefore that something must act upon us—This something is referred by experience to something external, and this we call Matter.’’ So mind and matter interact to create consciousness. This can be known from evidence, which falls into two categories, demonstrative and moral. The first is mathematical, but the latter ‘‘considers truth as we become acquainted with it from the constitution and from the revolution of events.’’ Of the two, moral evidence is the more important and the only one to which ‘‘the evidence of consciousness’’ can be referred. But what is consciousness? It is ‘‘that faculty of the mind by which we become acquainted with our own thoughts.’’ Here was the crux of the matter. Without consciousness, ‘‘truth and knowledge would be useless—Pleasure and Pain would be indifferent to us—Good 21. Here Henry veers slightly into matters of propriety. It is asked whether physical gestures can convey ideas and Henry says they only manage ‘‘expressions of our feelings.’’ ‘‘When then may vehemence of action in a discourse be considered proper—when improper?’’ To which, it is replied, ‘‘When the mind is strongly agitated, it is proper; otherwise it is improper,’’ but that ‘‘the liberty allowed in the use of action’’ varied between countries.

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and Evil—for we would be no better off, were we enjoying all these and unconscious of it.’’ Nor had anyone, even skeptics, denied the reality of consciousness, for ‘‘how do we know that we doubt, but by consciousness’’? Yet consciousness is not all-powerful. It cannot give ‘‘direct information concerning our complex ideas,’’ but only simple ones. It cannot ‘‘account for our notions of power’’ or ‘‘our belief of Personal Identity.’’ Indeed, it is not ‘‘a distinct faculty of the mind,’’ but ‘‘that essential activity of the mind which attends it in all its various states.’’ So feeling and consciousness of feeling are simultaneous. Nonetheless, consciousness is ‘‘the foundation of metaphysical enquiry.’’ For Henry, the mind had powers and faculties, which could be enumerated. These were attention (divisible into judgment and volition), conception (‘‘that faculty which unites into one whole, the several simple sensations which form our complex ideas’’), the association of ideas (‘‘contiguity of time and place’’), and memory (‘‘present knowledge of past perceptions,’’ which was greatly assisted by logic). To explain the power of abstraction, Henry went back to the history of philosophy, to Plato, Aristotle, and the Scholastics, whose schools he conventionally described as Realist, Nominalist, and Conceptualist. With an eclecticism unusual for him, Henry allowed that all these had had a piece of the truth, that the nature of abstraction was unresolved. His own definition of abstraction ran: ‘‘that faculty of the mind by which it considers the general similitude of existing things without adverting to their discrepancies.’’ Still, he acknowledged that eclecticism was unsatisfactory, for a conviction about the reality or otherwise of universals helped to determine ‘‘the choice of two different roads to knowledge—The one, which contemplates the general nature and designs of things a priori—The other, which examines objects singly and rises gradually to the knowledge of genera and species.’’ On the faculty of judgment, which he asserted varies less between men than is commonly supposed, Henry ventured several observations: that it is the habit of the mind to proceed from the more to the less general, that in invention the mind has no direct influence over its ideas, that reasoning is ‘‘the discovery of relations’’ and that ‘‘as we discover these relations successively, & advance only step by step; so evidence which consists in the perception of these relations can be different only in degree, and not in kind.’’ When considering the faculty of reasoning, he put in a few unkind remarks about the Sophists, some defensive praise for Aristotle and the syllogism, and the observation that logic is valuable, though as an art, not a science. Henry gave no clear answer to the old question, ‘‘What is truth?’’ But he did hazard that truth is abstract and ‘‘consists in a certain relation between objects.’’ The question, ‘‘What is the best notion we are able to form of Eternal and Im-

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mutable truths?’’ receives the shuffling reply, ‘‘It is that perhaps of relations which cannot be changed.’’ And so on to matter and form, the essence of bodies, and the existence of matter. Under the last of these, Henry balanced Reid against Berkeley and mildly observed that, for the ordinary business of living, both of their opinions about the source of ideas were ‘‘harmless.’’ ‘‘If we admit that a man’s ideas depend on causes independent of himself; and that when introduced into the mind, they immediately acquire fluid and definite relations, he will continue to speak and act in the same way as if he believes in the existence of a material world. If this be the case it matters not in practice, whether we receive our ideas mediately (i.e. through the means of external objects) or immediately from God.’’ Then Henry considered space, motion, number, and time, before he came back to mind. After briskly asserting that one knew of the existence of the mind ‘‘from its effects’’ and that mind and matter cannot be ‘‘referred to the same first principles,’’ he rehearsed Leibniz’s contention that body and mind consist of monads, though unfavorably. Henry also stated the materialist argument for the identity of mind and matter, but resisted that, too. The division of the mind into faculties, his own Scottish way, was (he admitted) denied by materialists. For the latter, these were but names for different states connected into a system, ‘‘that though intelligence is not found in separate particles of matter, it may yet reside in a system, for we have the evidence of experience to show that new modifications of elements produce results entirely different from the properties of the part which compose them, as gases becoming liquid, and liquids assuming a solid form.’’ But, if this were so, ‘‘mind or thought is dependent entirely on motion and change, and therefore entirely accidental,’’ which was not a tolerable conclusion, at least for Robert Henry. Is the soul immaterial? Some thought so and Henry stated their case, but also their difficulty, which was that the soul is invisible and hence, at best, a conjecture. But, then, mind has qualities of immateriality, too, for thoughts have no shape or form, no length or squareness. The question, ‘‘Can that totality or intimate connection which exists among our thoughts, be accounted for, without allowing the mind to be immaterial?’’ receives the reply, ‘‘No; for if thoughts reside in a single particle of matter; then it is obvious that if the addition of intelligence renders one particle of matter different from all other particles of matter, then thought and matter must be things entirely distinct.’’ That is, matter is passive, but mind is active, and more happens in the mind than could be explained by materiality. Difficult though it might be to grant immateriality or the existence of the soul, one could discern its existence by its effects. Nonetheless, this was an act of faith, one repudiated by the Abbé

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de Condillac. One leapt into the air: ‘‘The phenomena of thinking and willing are ultimate facts, which we believe without being able to explain, as is the case with many other phenomena in Philosophy.’’ But what is personal identity? It is ‘‘the consciousness of our own continued existence, amidst the fluctuating existence of our ideas.’’ This is not the same thing as consciousness, which knows only the present. Identity involves the future. Nor is identity memory, for remembering an action does not prove that the same person has committed that action. This was dangerous ground, for a failure to hold together past, present, and future threatened disintegration. Henry’s dialogue on this subject runs like this. ‘‘Is it any just objection to personal Identity to say that because the thoughts change, the mind itself changes?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘Is it sufficient to establish accountability to say that the being of to day though not the same with the being of to morrow yet feels a strong interest in his welfare?’’ To which the answer, starkly, is ‘‘No.’’ So, an identity and a mind add up to more than its constituent thoughts, but this fact does not preclude the existence of irresponsibility. Henry’s concluding lectures turn towards theology, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of God and Revelation. These are, on the whole, conventionally Arminian. They make clear that Henry’s careful separation of mind and matter, and the contention of the immateriality of mind, had been designed to serve the contention that the death of matter did not necessarily entail the death of the mind or the soul. It was common enough among humanity to believe in an afterlife, Henry asserted, though he knew and refused the objections of cultural relativists who spoke of those nations who seemed not to believe in this possibility. ‘‘The fact is,’’ he rejoined, ‘‘either their language and manners are not well understood, or they were in a state of moral degradation.’’ But the expectation of surviving death raised the moral question of reward and punishment, and so the ancient issue of free will and necessity. Here Henry opted for a moderate assertion of free will and human accountability. God is omnipotent but has ceded much discretion to his ‘‘intelligent and moral offspring.’’ Though logic made only a fleeting appearance in Henry’s metaphysical lectures, other evidence suggests that elsewhere he gave it much weight in his teaching and used, for a text, the Aberdonian William Duncan’s Elements of Logic, whose influence can be discerned even in the metaphysical lectures.22 22. TC to Board of Trustees, South Carolina College, 22 April 1821, TC Papers, SCL: ‘‘Professor Henry, in lieu of Paley’s moral philosophy or Paley’s evidences of the Xtian religion & of Watts’s logic, wishes to be permitted to substitute, Grotius de veritate religionis Christiani, Ferguson’s Moral Philosophy, & Duncan’s logic: in which, I concur with him.’’ Duncan (1717– 60) was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen: see William Duncan, The Elements of Logic. In Four Books. Designed Particularly for Young Gentlemen at the University, and

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Thornwell thought that an emphasis upon logic was Henry’s peculiar strength and influence, that he heeded the syllogism of Aristotle as fully as the empiricism of Francis Bacon: ‘‘He was the first man to give logic its proper place in the South Carolina College. He was the first of those who undertook to teach it there, that really understood it.’’ Indeed Thornwell hazarded that this emphasis, coupled with Henry’s importance to an institution itself influential in the state’s life, had helped to make a characteristic of South Carolinian thought: ‘‘Logic . . . became a prominent study in the State; and this circumstance will explain the general tendencies of mind which the statesmen and scholars of the commonwealth have confessedly exhibited.’’ Certainly Henry himself felt that metaphysics was useful to the commonwealth. In his 1850 eulogy of Calhoun, Henry himself stressed that the young statesman, after encountering Locke on the Human Understanding, had had his intellect ‘‘moulded into that type, which has sometimes been disparaged as metaphysical, but which, by whatever name designated or desecrated, must forever remain the true test, by which the highest order of capacity is distinguished from what is superficial and common.’’ 23 The general tendency of Henry’s lectures, then, was to accept the broad manner in which the Scots had analyzed metaphysical issues. Like them, he abjured history, stressed the activity of the mind, discerned and categorized faculties, presumed a connection between mind and matter, and worried about moral and religious implications. But his account is, on the whole, less commonsensical, more drawn to immateriality, and greatly troubled by Reid’s insistence that the relationship between mind and matter is unmediated and instant. Elsewhere in the South, disquisitions within the framework of Scottish realism were similarly idiosyncratic and varying. Henry Nott in Columbia was, in 1835, using John Abercrombie’s Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers, and the Investigation of Truth, ‘‘to which I added copious explanations and corrections where I differed from him.’’ 24 Nott was a laughing skeptic and his ‘‘copious’’ corrections were doubtless aimed at an author usefully available as a straw man. At the other extreme, though none of his lectures survive, Moses Waddel’s use of James Beattie as a text suggests that he was more dogged in his hostility to David Hume, more aggressively Presbyteto Prepare the Way to the Study of Philosophy and the Mathematics (1748; reprint, New York: Evert Duyckinck, 1848). 23. JHT, ‘‘Dr. Henry,’’ 196; Robert Henry, Eulo on the Late Honorable John Caldwell Calhoun, Delivered at Columbia, South Carolina, on Thursday, May 16, 1850 (Columbia, S.C.: I. C. Morgan, 1850), 7–8. 24. Henry Junius Nott to George McDuffie, undated, Henry Junius Nott Papers, SCL. Abercrombie (1780–1844) was an Edinburgh physician, first trained at Marischal College in Aberdeen.

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rian, than were Henry’s polite and patient metaphysics. ‘‘It has been my aim to avoid every thing, which might have the slightest agency in disturbing the harmony existing among our religious denominations,’’ Henry observed in 1834, ‘‘and to promote that holy calm of the passions, which is alike favorable to our happiness as citizens and to success in our pursuits as philosophers,’’ which was scarcely Waddel’s view of his purposes.25 George Tucker in Charlottesville, though he cultivated the Edinburgh succession of Reid, Stewart, and Brown, did so loosely: ‘‘I shall use Dr. Brown’s lectures by way of Text-Book, the profoundest writer on the subject since the days of Locke,’’ he announced, ‘‘. . . but presenting my own views sometimes in conformity, sometimes contradicting the text book.’’ 26 Like Henry, Tucker ran over faculty psychology, the various properties of smell, taste, touch, and so forth. But he was much more concerned than Henry to alert his auditors to the differences between the various Scots, and he was inclined to impatience when distinctions between mental faculties grew too minute, as indeed was Brown himself, who was in significant dissent from his predecessors. And Tucker coupled the Scottish realists with a close consideration of Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, Hume, and Destutt de Tracy, and so was much more concerned with the history of philosophy than Henry, was more expansive in his scope, and more prone to asides. (At one point, for example, he paused to lambaste the new science of phrenology.)27 In particular, the variations between French and British philosophy were a significant issue for Tucker, while a matter of indifference to Henry. In this, Tucker was more faithful to Thomas Brown, who had been much influenced by the physicality of the French school, who indeed saw the philosophy of mind as a ‘‘physical enquiry,’’ spoke of ‘‘mental physiology,’’ and is often regarded as one of the founders of the British school of psychology.28 Indeed, that Brown shows up so frequently in Southern collegiate instruction is itself evidence of how far from Reid had understanding drifted, for Brown seldom mentioned Reid without correcting him.29 Tucker saw British and French philosophy as diverging. The British, from 25. Robert Henry, The Mysteries of Religion Worth the Assent of the Human Understanding: A Sermon, Preached in Charleston, in December, 1833 (Columbia, S.C.: Office of the Christian Herald, 1834), 3. 26. Robinson, ‘‘Tucker Lectures.’’ In this analysis, I dissent from McLean, George Tucker, 158–59, who argues that Tucker was an orthodox exponent of Scottish realism. 27. Robinson, ‘‘Tucker Lectures,’’ 24. 28. Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Mind, 4 vols. (1830; reprint, Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1851), 1:91, 156–293; on Brown, see James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton (New York: Robert Carter, 1875), 317–37, esp. 325. There is a signal lack of modern scholarship on Brown. 29. See, for example, Brown, Philosophy of the Mind, 1:194–96, 294–95, 2:22–63, 85–90.

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Hobbes to Hume, had moved towards simplification, a tendency that Reid and his followers had reversed. The French, in the preceding half century, had moved from ‘‘extreme simplification’’ to ‘‘too great multiplicity.’’ 30 While Henry saw metaphysics as a theodicy, Tucker saw it as a discipline whose purpose was to train young men for a wider society, and a wider intellectual life: ‘‘Mental Philosophy is to be regarded rather as auxiliary to other studies than a primary object of pursuit.’’ This was, nonetheless, a defense. Earlier, Tucker had observed, ‘‘Experience proves metaphysical speculation invigorates the faculties.’’ Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Smith had all been both metaphysicians, and practical men, as statesmen, political philosophers, historians, and economists;31 so, likewise, with Burke, Leibniz, Descartes, Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Haller, Humboldt, and Goethe. Such casual cosmopolitanism, which was Tucker’s mark, had deliberately not been Henry’s purpose. God and virtue, as Reid and his successors saw it, were too important to be marred by casual affidavits for the urbane breadth of Voltaire. This alone tended to put Tucker at odds with a fundamental tendency in Scottish thought between Reid and Brown, to which Stewart had formed a partial exception; they had tried to make philosophy more technical, less social and political, and more interested in physicality (muscles were greatly important to Brown) as a way of gaining access to a science of mind.32 Likewise, Tucker was impatient with logic. When he reached that point in Brown’s lectures where Henry had defended the syllogism, Tucker was dismissive of scholasticism as trivial, technical, ‘‘merely verbal,’’ and hazarded that the world might have got along well enough if Aristotle had never been. This was the Virginia gentleman’s usual opinion of the syllogism, if James Barbour in 1829 is a guide. ‘‘He said he was much amused some time since in looking over the syllogisms of Aristotle, particularly when he undertakes to prove that motion does not exist,’’ Grigsby was to record. ‘‘First he takes as his major proposition that a thing does not move where it is; then as his minor one, that it cannot move where it is not; then follows the consequence, It does not move at all. Grant him his 30. Robinson, ‘‘Tucker Lectures,’’ 77. 31. Cf. Stewart’s remark, quoted by Winch, about his students is apposite: ‘‘It is enough for my purpose if it be granted, that it was by habits of metaphysical thinking that the minds of those authors were formed, by which political economy was first exalted to the dignity of a science.’’ See Donald Winch, ‘‘The System of the North: Dugald Stewart and His Pupils,’’ in That Noble Science of Politics: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History, ed. Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 58: the original is Stewart, Dissertation, 431. 32. Dugald Stewart did lecture on politics and political economy, but his lectures were not published until the 1850s. See Winch, ‘‘System of the North,’’ 44. Winch makes more of Stewart’s political awareness and of his agreement with his pupils (who included Francis Jeffrey) than I would think safe.

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premises, and he could prove that a dog is a man; thus an animal is a man, but a dog is an animal, therefore a dog is a man.’’ 33 In preference to logic, Tucker was happier to consider aesthetics, to look at beauty, the sublime, and the attractions of Palladianism. Though he had recommended beauty, Robert Henry was more anxious to stress ‘‘nobler and more entrancing pleasures, than a mere gross and carnal existence can furnish’’ and wished to combat the ‘‘sensual tendencies of modern life.’’ But, in several essays on philosophy, Tucker put his faith in a different kind of physicality, by arguing that ‘‘physical beauty does exist’’ and by sensually dwelling on ‘‘the clearness and smoothness’’ of marble in an elegant Grecian building, the richness of a painting’s colors, and ‘‘the brilliancy of the eyes, the coral of the lips, the transparent polish of the skin’’ of ‘‘female loveliness.’’ 34 Reid had, in fact, argued that beauty adhered in the physical object itself, not in the mind of the observer, which was a repudiation of Francis Hutcheson’s contention that ‘‘by Absolute or Original Beauty is not understood any Quality suppos’d to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it.’’ 35 But Reid had no gift for sensuality, that un-Aberdonian thing. In some ways, Tucker was more commonsensical than the Scottish philosophers and intended to be so. In one of his longer philosophical essays, ‘‘On Cause and Effect’’ (1842), he was to show his distress at finding that Hume, Stewart, and Brown had agreed that cause and effect were indemonstrable. So Tucker went to some trouble (if not to prove, at least to assert) that ‘‘in all cases in which our senses can measure and appreciate the changes that take place in causation, both in the antecedent and the consequent, we can see the connection between them, and the necessity of that connection; or, in other words, that the effect is the necessary consequence of the cause.’’ This was plain and vulgar but, as Tucker saw it, right. In 1853, he sent this essay to Ralph Waldo Emerson, after having heard Emerson lecture in Philadelphia and suspecting a sympathy in their views on this matter. Explaining himself, Tucker reminisced about Charlottesville, to explain the origins of his essay: ‘‘When 33. Robinson, ‘‘Tucker Lectures,’’ 150; entry for 8 October 1829, in HBG Diary, HBG Papers, VHS. 34. Robert Henry, The Cultivation of the Fine Arts, Favorable to the Perfection of Private Character and the Development of Public Prosperity: An Address, Delivered by Request before the Clariosophic and Euphradian Societies of the South Carolina College (Columbia, S.C.: n.p., 1840), 12, 14; George Tucker, Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan, 1822), 205, 207. 35. On this, see James W. Manns, Reid and His French Disciples: Aesthetics and Metaphysics (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 42–48; Frances Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; in Two Treatises. I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. II. Concerning Moral Good and Evil, 3d ed. (London: J. and J. Knapton et al., 1729), 14.

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I was appointed to teach moral philosophy in the University of Virginia by Mr. Jefferson (whom you unjustly characterized, or rather, to whom you did but half justice) I endeavoured to bring down Philosophy from the cloud and to make her, without loss of gravity or dignity, speak a language intelligible to all. Among the doctrines there evolved by a course of patient thought— the drill of which you speak—was this of causation.’’ Certainly Tucker had been commissioned to teach philosophy; it was more a duty than a passion. When he first lectured on metaphysics, he ‘‘read and wrote until a late hour in the night, so as sometimes to apprehend from the grotesque images that floated before my fancy when I retired to rest, that my brain might be seriously affected.’’ This did not go unnoticed. When John N. Tazewell was contemplating what courses to take in Charlottesville, his father Littleton Waller Tazewell expressed indifference to the prospect of Tucker’s lectures on metaphysics: ‘‘My acquaintance with him, does not impress me with a very high sense of his qualifications for the metaphysical chair, and I feel very well satisfied he will feel awkward in it, at least during his first session.’’ 36 Nonetheless, Tucker did not disdain the empirical impulse of Scottish realism. In 1804 Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review had criticized Reid and Stewart, even Hume in his own way, for encouraging a sense that a ‘‘vast advantage may be expected from applying to the Science of Mind those sound rules of experimental philosophy that have undoubtedly guided us to all the splendid improvement in physics,’’ and doubted that tinkering with method would lead to ‘‘any great advancement in the knowledge of the operations of the mind . . . or that the condition of mankind is likely to derive any great benefit from the cultivation of this interesting but abstracted study.’’ Indeed, more drastically in 1810, Jeffrey observed that, contrary to Stewart’s cheerful estimate of progress in philosophy, nothing of significant value had been done since the ancients: ‘‘The knowledge and the power of man over inanimate nature has been increased tenfold in the course of the last two centuries. The knowledge and the power of man over the mind of man remains almost exactly where it was at the first development of his faculties.’’ In 1828 Hugh Legaré agreed with Jeffrey, despite a certain admiration for Stewart and being schooled in Edinburgh: ‘‘We are at a loss to understand how any discoveries . . . can be made in ‘the subjects of our consciousness,’ (to use Dugald Stewart’s phrase for what is vulgarly called, the mind) or what there can be in ontology, pneumatology, psychology, or any other metaphysic-ology, ex36. George Tucker, ‘‘On Cause and Effect,’’ in Essays, Moral and Metaphysical (Philadelphia: G. Sherman & Sons, 1860), 36–37: this was first published as a pamphlet in 1842; George Tucker to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 15 May 1853, Ralph Waldo Emerson Papers, HU; ‘‘Autobiography of George Tucker, 1775–1861,’’ Bermuda Historical Quarterly 18, nos. 3 & 4 (Autumn/Winter 1961): 136; Littleton Waller Tazewell to John N. Tazewell, 24 April 1825, Tazewell Family Papers, LV.

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cept, indeed, a great deal of neology, and mere verbal refinements and distinctions.’’ But, in this dispute, Tucker took Stewart’s side.37 At least, Tucker thought that empiricism in matters of mind had brought progress. Indeed, as evidence of this faith, he undertook a little empirical research himself. He went to New York in 1836 to interview and give a questionnaire to the Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, since he calculated that here was an unusual opportunity to observe two minds, but a single body and identical experiences. ‘‘Let the experiment result as it will, I can not but think that it will shed light on mental science.’’ 38 The cases of Henry and Tucker are adduced, not to diminish the centrality of Scottish realism to philosophical awareness in the South, but to suggest that, in some hands, there was much leeway in using and interpreting what was a fractured tradition. No doubt, in many colleges, something balder, clinging more resolutely to the textbooks, went on. Iveson Brookes spoke for many when he observed complacently in a speech to his 1819 commencement: ‘‘It was not until the present age that the philosophy of the mind found a Reid and Stewart to raise it from the obscurity and imperfect state in which the ancients left it, and to render it successful in exhibiting to our view the mental powers and to make it efficacious in explaining to us the operations of the human intellect.’’ But, in the periodicals, there was a lot of caviling and distinguishing among the Scottish philosophers, more than enough to annoy the many readers who took fright at ‘‘the incomprehensible jargon of the metaphysicians’’ and were reluctant to get lost in ‘‘the mazes of their deceitful labyrinths.’’ What was common sense to Reid was impenetrable to many others and, with some regularity, Southerners questioned ‘‘the vagaries of learned men’’ and asked whether there was any point to philosophy. ‘‘The quibbling controversy which for a time was carried on by the school of Scotch philosophers against the metaphysical system advanced by Locke, must be regarded as another instance of the folly of philosophers,’’ someone called ‘‘M.’’ from Springville, South Carolina, announced in 1841, in a witty survey of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to Victor Cousin, which showed no little command of its issues, but a systematic contempt for its niceties. In what would become the habitual Southern way in the twentieth century but was less common earlier, an agricultural anecdote was deployed to refute an intellectual fancy: ‘‘Hume and Berkeley . . . asserted that there was no material universe; 37. Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (1843; reprint, New York: Appleton, 1870), 487, 511; HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 29; George Tucker, ‘‘Metaphysics,’’ Virginia Literary Museum 46 (28 April 1830): 721–27. 38. George Tucker to Joseph C. Cabell, 18 March 1832, Cabell Deposit, UVA. His account of the experiment is in George Tucker, Essays, Moral and Metaphysical (Philadelphia: G. Sherman & Sons, 1860), 246–56.

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that all was mind; that every thing was made up of ideas; that separate from the existence of ideas in the mind, there was no universe! . . . The absurdity of this doctrine is well illustrated by a fact in the life of a retired philosopher, who had embraced it. On a certain occasion some pigs had broken into his corn-fields; ‘Doctor,’ said a plain honest farmer, . . . ‘some ideas of pigs have broken into your ideas of corn, and if you do not hasten to put them out, I fear you will have a confusion of ideas.’’’ 39 Others, however, were less anti-philosophical. Samuel Gilman in 1825 offered an unskeptically Whiggish defense of philosophy, contra-Jeffrey, and a patient and benign exposition of the version offered by Thomas Brown. But Gilman did so, being conscious that ‘‘the Scotch school’’ was accused of shortcomings: ‘‘They fastidiously and conscientiously folded up their excursive powers, or only opened them to brood over the chaos in which the science of the mind lay. . . . This peculiarity, we apprehend, is the cause of a considerable depression of their original reputation, and has emboldened the critics to intrude upon Mr. Stewart’s weary and honorable retreat, with asking what he has done.’’ Removing rubbish from the path of science, however elegantly, while failing to make ‘‘a last grand experiment’’ had occasioned ‘‘disappointment,’’ which explained why many had turned away and so had not noticed Brown’s later accomplishment, with which Gilman was deeply impressed.40 Though Gilman did have criticisms of Brown, they were mostly aesthetic, which was odd since few thought Brown a good enough writer to bear serious literary criticism. But Gilman discerned a sentimental, overly poetical force in Brown’s lectures. Four years later, to the contrary, in the Southern Review someone (perhaps the Rev. Annan of Baltimore) was deeply skeptical of Brown; doubted his theory of the muscles’ effect upon perception, thought he conceded too much to dualism, was closer to Hume’s theory of causation than he imagined, was a sort of closet idealist,41 misunderstood cause and effect, and was prone to vanities and unjust disparagements of his predecessors, especially Reid. Elsewhere, James Hervey Smith (not yet a Kantian) urged the superiority of the French materialist school over the Scots, and James Wright Simmons explored differences among some Edinburgh critics (Adam Smith, Archibald Alison, and George Mackenzie) about the ‘‘associa39. Iveson L. Brookes, ‘‘Commencement speech,’’ 21 May 1819, Iveson L. Brookes Papers, SHC; Charles Woodward Hutson to Mother, undated, Charles W. Hutson Papers, SCL; ‘‘Deliramenta Philosophorum: Or, the Vagaries of Learned Men,’’ SLM 7 (April 1841): 296, 294; see also W. Carey Crane, ‘‘Speculative Philosophy: Cui Bono?’’ SLM 10 (June 1844): 357–59. 40. Samuel Gilman, ‘‘Brown’s Philosophy of Mind,’’ in Contributions to Literature; Descriptive, Critical, Humorous, Biographical, Philosophical, and Poetical (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856), 361–62. 41. McCosh acknowledges this criticism, but thinks Brown just ‘‘saved his system from a sceptical tendency’’: McCosh, Scottish Philosophy, 321.

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tion of ideas,’’ especially as it affected matters of taste.42 But all this was mild criticism compared to what Thomas Cooper was saying.

We Regard Man as Inherently a Being of Motion 43 Robert Henry taught in the same college as Thomas Cooper, a fact that personified two separable philosophical legacies for Southerners. For Cooper stood for a truculent materialism that ‘‘the Scotch doctors,’’ as Cooper used to call them dismissively, had been at pains to repudiate almost as much as they had wished to fend off the skepticism of Hume. Materialism was, of course, a doctrine as ancient as Democritus, but in the eighteenth century it had received great impulse in the English tradition from David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749) and from Cooper’s father-in-law Joseph Priestley. Cooper himself had defended materialism as early as 1787 as a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, in his ‘‘Sketch of the Controversy on the Subject of Materialism,’’ which was published in his Tracts, Ethical, Theological and Political of 1789. His main argument then was that there was no evidence for immateriality, of mind or anything else: ‘‘Perception is a property of the brain, and therefore results necessarily from the nature or essence thereof. Such is the proper and direct proof of the doctrine of materialism; and which as far as I am acquainted with the controversy remains unanswered.’’ Later, he calmly asserted that ‘‘the soul does not exist,’’ 44 and was but an implausible phantasm willed upon the Western imagination as ‘‘a spawn of the Oriental or Gnostic and Platonic christians.’’ For Cooper, an idea was ‘‘a motion in the brain, perceived,’’ pure and simple, with no intermediate processes, and so was but a corporeal thing: ‘‘The phenomena of thinking are the result of our organical structure, and the impressions of external objects thereon.’’ None of this, in Cooper’s opinion, need vitiate Christianity or the morality of an afterlife: one did not need a soul in order to be resurrected. God could transform dead bodies, as well as live souls. Indeed, Cooper thought the Scriptures promised only this. Otherwise, he was thoroughly Hartleian, truculently so: ‘‘All the phenomena of thought may be comprized under perception, recollection, judgment and volition. Of these, the three latter are demonstrably modes of motion. Hartley has proved it: and . . . it is inexcusable in the present day to attempt the discussion of the phenomena termed mental, without adopting or confuting his system.’’ Perception and consciousness were identical things: 42. ‘‘Brown’s Philosophy of the Human Mind,’’ SR 3 (February 1829): 125–56; James Hervey Smith, ‘‘Physiologie des Passions,’’ SR 6 (August 1830): 116–40; James Wright Simmons, ‘‘Theory of Association in Matters of Taste,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 368–91. 43. JHT, ‘‘The Test of Truth,’’ SQR n.s. 12 (October 1855): 486. 44. TC, Tracts, Ethical, Theological and Political (Warrington: W. Eyres, 1789), 192.

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‘‘As all the objects of our knowledge agree in the common circumstance of being perceived, and as I know of no difference between consciousness and perception, but what relates solely to the object, and not either to the thing itself, or the subject, I admit none.’’ 45 Cooper reiterated many of these doctrines when in 1805, then in Pennsylvania, he edited and commented upon the Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley. In so doing, Cooper’s characteristically bold and self-satisfied tone annoyed many, not least Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, whose skepticism of Dugald Stewart did not lead to an embrace of Cooper. ‘‘The observations annexed by Mr. Cooper are the work, we think, of a powerful, presumptuous, and most untractable understanding . . . written in a defying, dogmatical, unaccommodating style.’’ Cooper was still endorsing David Hartley, and Jeffrey (anticipating Robert Henry) thought it worthwhile to state the other case: ‘‘To us, indeed, it has always appeared that it was much easier to prove the existence of mind, than the existence of matter.’’ And it was sensible to reiterate dualism, which Cooper had erased: ‘‘All the knowledge which we gain only by Perception and the use of our external Sense, is knowledge of Matter . . . and all which we gain only by Consciousness and Reflection on our own inward feelings, is necessarily knowledge of Mind. . . . This in fact is the whole basis, and rationale of the distinction between mind and matter: and, consequently, unless it can be shown that love, anger, and sorrow, as well as memory and volition, are direct objects of sense or external perception, like heat and colour, or figure and solidity, there must be an end, we think, of all question as to their being material qualities.’’ Cooper, as one might expect, was not impressed with this and more than twenty years later was still grumbling about ‘‘a hundred such flippant reviews such as those of Mr. Jeffrey.’’ 46 Thomas Cooper had studied medicine as a young man. His ‘‘Sketch of the Controversy on the Subject of Materialism’’ not infrequently cites the physiological work of Albrecht von Haller, the Swiss anatomist who had taught at Göttingen. Likewise, Joseph Priestley had been a chemist, as Cooper was to be. These materialist disciplines formed Cooper’s standpoint on these problems: mind was matter, and so physiology and chemistry would explain thought. For this reason, he was much drawn to the French school, which mingled psychology and physiology, and reduced philosophy to their consequences. Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and François Joseph Victor Broussais were among Cooper’s guides, and in 1831 he published a translation of Broussais’s On Irritation and Insanity, subtitled A Work, Wherein the Relations of the Physical with the Moral Conditions of Man, are Established on the 45. Ibid., 302, 188, 192, 222, 210, 239, 273, 296–97. 46. Jeffrey, Contributions, 492, 495; TC, ‘‘Gall on the Functions of the Brain,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 140.

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Basis of Physiological Medicine. But this newer work mainly served to update the materialist contention in which Cooper was consistent from the beginning to the end of his life. ‘‘No man is qualified to write on metaphysics and the phenomena of intellect, who is not well versed in physiology’’ was his reiterated opinion.47 In 1823, for example, he published The Scripture Doctrine of Materialism, anonymously in Philadelphia. It came four years after his removal to Columbia, and was partly occasioned by the complaints of South Carolina Presbyterians against him.48 This was paired with an amended republication of his 1787 essay.49 Much of the long pamphlet was intended to demonstrate that Christianity did not require a man to believe in the soul, freedom of the will, the Trinity, or much else in the orthodoxy, especially of Calvinism, or that sound morality rested upon such indemonstrable pieties. So, Cooper observed, ‘‘Civil society . . . has nothing to do with religion, but as it tends to mutual happiness while we live together here on earth . . . I wish some one would undertake to shew how public morals are promoted by the doctrines of death-bed repentance, election, and reprobation, and the final salvation of backsliding saints.’’ 50 Indeed, Cooper argued that Jesus himself was a proponent of materialism, a bold notion that appealed to Thomas Jefferson, whose consenting letter Cooper was later pleased to reprint.51 Further, Cooper argued that all belief must be tested against scientific evidence. This pamphlet was also a fierce denunciation of priestcraft, that conspiracy designed to extract money from the populace for the comfort of a parasitical class of obfuscators: ‘‘The priesthood in every age, in every country, forbid discussion, frown down all investigation; they require, like other tyrants, passive obedience and non-resistance. . . . Their intent here, as elsewhere, is to fetter your minds first, and your bodies afterwards; and finally, to command your pockets.’’ Cooper was, by then, bitter at the ideological intolerance of American culture, which everywhere preached toleration and everywhere demanded conformity: ‘‘In no other country is the wise toleration established by law, so complete as in this. But in no country whatever, is a spirit of persecution for mere opinions, more prevalent than in the United States of America.’’ 52 In 1823 Cooper remained hostile to the Scots, indeed in his resentments of 47. TC, Tracts, 180–82; Broussais, Irritation and Insanity, 342–43. 48. On this, see Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina, vol. 1, South Carolina College (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 98–101. This pamphlet was reprinted as an appendix to Broussais, Irritation and Insanity, 299–329; Cooper owns up to its authorship in Broussais, Irritation and Insanity, 296. 49. TC, A View of the Metaphysical and Physiological Arguments in Favor of Materialism (Philadelphia: A. Small, 1823), reprinted in Broussais, Irritation and Insanity, 331–76. 50. Broussais, Irritation and Insanity, 323. 51. Thomas Jefferson to TC, 11 December 1823, reprinted in ibid., 328–29. 52. Ibid., 327–28, 323.

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a school so approved by the orthodox, increasingly fierce against them. ‘‘I am aware,’’ he sniffed, ‘‘of the ‘faculties of the mind,’ the numberless brood of the Scotch metaphysicians. I cannot and will not condescend to reply to the dreadful nonsense on this subject assumed as true by Dr. Reid and Dr. Beattie, or to the shallow sophisms of Dr. Gregory, or the prolix pages of inanity of Dr. Dugald Stewart, or the ignorant hardihood of assertion of Dr. Barclay in this late enquiry.’’ Alone among these, Cooper gave some exemption to Brown among ‘‘his superficial and dogmatic predecessors,’’ for having better views on cause and effect. But Brown, though ‘‘a clear sighted and able metaphysician,’’ was nonetheless ‘‘of the Scotch school; whose characteristic is, a dreadful ignorance of all physiological facts.’’ The Scots, he added in 1831 in a piece on the association of ideas, ‘‘have had their day.’’ ‘‘They are favorites with the clergy, for they are of the orthodox school of ideology; they are ontologists and psychologists; they offend no popular prejudices; they run counter to no clerical doctrines; they express due horror at the tendencies of heterodox metaphysics; their style of writing is good, frequently marked by elegance and taste; while the dogmatism that pervades their pages of inanity is well calculated to impose upon the numerous class of readers who are content to read without thinking. But the progress of accurate physiology, has destroyed them.’’ 53 Certainly, it had been the contention of the Scots and many others that materialism destroyed morality. Cooper, apart from annexing Jesus to his cause, replied that morality was social, not innate. It was ‘‘that course of conduct in individuals, which upon the whole is best calculated to promote the happiness of society. It relates in all its parts to society; for there is no rule of moral conduct applicable to an individual perfectly insulated—entirely unconnected with all other living things.’’ No one was born with a moral sense. Children did not know right from wrong. These were things learned as a person progressed through society—in the home, school, college, and adult life. Hence the doctrine of the association of ideas, first articulated by Locke, was a vital component in the formation of morality, not ‘‘the supposed moral sense . . . one of the numerous ontological reveries of the Scotch school of metaphysics.’’ So, morality grew by stages, with ‘‘the gradual formation of ideas, and the gradual development of knowledge by instruction, and which varies according to the existing state of knowledge in every age and every country, and every individual.’’ But this had its limits, for society could do no more than its best to modify an individual’s physical nature.54 It was, therefore, with no little curiosity that Cooper monitored the work 53. Broussais, Irritation and Insanity, 343, 380. There is more abuse of the Scots in TC, ‘‘Functions of the Brain,’’ 143. 54. Broussais, Irritation and Insanity, 400, 401; TC, ‘‘Functions of the Brain,’’ 146.

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of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Caspar Spurzheim, the pioneers of phrenology, for they seemed to strike at the heart of the matter, the physiology of the brain itself. On the whole, Cooper was deeply impressed by Gall’s work and recognized it for what it was, the pioneering and foundational work on the brain’s physiology. His long review of Gall’s Sur les fonctions du cerveau (1825), which formed part of the first number of the Southern Review, is a careful and respectful explication. Cooper was, of course, pleased that Gall endorsed many of Cooper’s customary viewpoints, notably his indifference to the existence of the soul. But much in Gall was new and detailed, especially the evidence that the brain was ‘‘not one organ, but a nervous apparatus—an assemblage of organs distinct from each other, and each destined to its peculiar function,’’ and that there was ‘‘no common sensorium’’ but that each part of the brain perceived distinctly and separately. Cooper was struck with Gall’s clinical techniques, his novel way of dissection. Oddly, he seemed glad with what resolution Gall had excluded the problem of ‘‘the intellectual and moral functions of the brain’’ from the problem of its anatomy. But not so odd, because Gall had shown ‘‘that the divisions of the faculties of the mind usually adopted by metaphysicians, such as the imagination, the judgment, memory, attention, volition, are merely abstract terms, from which no useful practical conclusion can be deduced.’’ No man had a natural propensity to music, poetry, mathematics, or whatever. Similar environments produced different people, but the character of the individual must be grounded in his or her physiology, in ‘‘an original difference of organization which constitutes the nature of the animal.’’ Further, the five senses did not explain as much as the Scots claimed: ‘‘No man is a painter by nature, because his eye-sight is good.’’ ‘‘Neither are the senses the sole sources of sensations and ideas.’’ In all this, it might seem that Gall went even beyond Cooper, who had some sympathy with the formative power of environment, if not as much as Dugald Stewart, whom Cooper mocked for arguing that gender was learned. Still, Cooper seemed to agree with Gall’s argument that education cannot ‘‘give rise to our propensities, talents, or faculties: it may improve or modify them; but none of them originate from this source.’’ And the dilemma is resolved when one sees that Gall argued, and Cooper seemed to agree, that experience changed physiognomy, ‘‘that moral qualities and intellectual faculties, manifest themselves, augment and diminish in proportion as the organs, appropriated to them, become developed, are strengthened or weakened.’’ 55 Gall was sympathetic to the idea that, as proof of the brain being ‘‘the exclusive organ of our moral qualities and our intellectual faculties,’’ brains grew more complex and larger as one proceeded upward from brute creation. 55. TC, ‘‘Functions of the Brain,’’ 137, 142–46.

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This applied, not only as between species, but as between men and women, various nations, and individuals of varying intellectual capacity. (It will be evident that Cooper’s interest in physiology left him peculiarly vulnerable to this line of reasoning, which helps to explain his own racist writing, as well as his influence on writers like Josiah Nott.) But this inequality was not a moral fact: ‘‘The mental faculties of all men are, generally, the same in all essential particulars, and the differences are but accidental and accessory.’’ Nonetheless, there was value in craniology, the study of the external shape of skulls, as well as of the internal organization of brains. But Cooper was skeptical that research was sufficiently advanced to ascribe particular functions to defined areas of the brain and hence to hazard a map of the skull. Upon this latter confidence, of course, the popular manifestations of phrenology, in the hands of advocates like George Combe, came to rest. Eight years later, as the phrenologists grew bolder, Cooper was obliged to deepen his skepticism, to stress that much remained unproven, and to question ‘‘the craniological maps of Gall and Spurzheim.’’ Still, for all his doubts about details, he was aware that these pioneers were not ‘‘visionaries or charlatans.’’ 56 In the precise lineaments of his beliefs, Cooper was a minority of one, but many others in the South shared or became influenced by various of his beliefs. He and Jefferson, the latter with inferior technical skill but immensely greater prestige, represented a formidable materialist challenge, were a reminder of other perspectives, and shared membership in a small order of skeptics who exchanged a careful correspondence: Jefferson, Cooper, Priestley, Rush. Yet Jefferson was much more sympathetic to the Scottish school than Cooper and, even as he had sought to appoint Cooper to his new Central University, he was also writing to Dugald Stewart, to aid Francis Walker Gilmer in the recruitment of other faculty. Indeed, Jefferson had met Stewart in Paris, claimed him as a friend, was sent a copy of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind in 1792, and in 1820 told John Adams that Stewart was ‘‘a great man,’’ to be ranked with Tracy as ‘‘the ablest metaphysicians living; by which I mean investigators of the thinking faculty of man.’’ But Jefferson was never a consistent thinker, rather a man who muddled together standpoints that more rigorous minds knew to be incompatible. For, at the same time, like Cooper, he had had the friendship of European materialists, including Cabanis, whom he had met at the salon of Madame Helvétius in Antevil and who sent him in 1803 a copy of his work on ‘‘the physical and moral faculties of man.’’ 57 56. Ibid., 153; TC, ‘‘On Phrenology, Craniology, Organology,’’ Southern Literary Journal 1 (February 1836): 400–401. 57. Thomas Jefferson to Dugald Stewart, 26 April 1824, and Thomas Jefferson to Pierre J. G. Cabanis, 12 July 1803, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York:

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Oddly, the person who was significantly formed by the twin influences of Henry’s Scottish realism and Cooper’s materialism was James Henley Thornwell, the Calvinist. As an adolescent, he had come across a copy of Stewart’s Elements in the library of his patron, General James Gillespie, a man who, like Cooper, was a Unitarian.58 (Thornwell needed a patron, because his father had been a plantation overseer who died when James was eight, at which time his mother and her children were driven to work.)59 The Elements seems to have made a profound impression upon Thornwell and given him a permanent taste for metaphysics; indeed, when striving to acquire the habit of mental discipline, Thornwell was to commit to memory not only conventional things like Horace, Vergil, and Milton, but was said to have been able to recite whole pages of Stewart. Enrolled as an undergraduate in South Carolina College in 1828, Thornwell then fell much under the influence of Cooper. Another of his patrons, William Robbins, at one point referred to Cooper as Thornwell’s ‘‘idol.’’ To this, Henry was a counterbalance. Indeed, though the evidence from his student days is scanty, one can see Thornwell veering between the two, at a time when his religious vocation was as yet unclear and his avid reading of the new issues of the Southern Review betrayed a desire to be a broad man of letters, turning through his mind the cosmopolitan scope of knowledge, with a free vigor and sarcastic bluntness that was very much Cooper’s style. (Even in the 1850s, when in his Discourses on Truth he was exhorting his students about the meaning of a liberal education, he was quoting Legaré’s 1828 essay on classical learning, with its mystical invocation of the ‘‘great communion of scholars.’’)60 There is a Thornwell letter to Gillespie from 1830 that speaks of his having recently read Swift, Hume, and Berkeley. Its conclusion pointed the way to Henry, but was written with a free, relaxed curiosity reminiscent of Cooper. ‘‘Humes Essays, which are a compendium of his treatise of Human nature, I read immediately after Berkely because I wish to follow out the train of reasoning by which matter and spirit are proved to be nonentities. . . . Matter and spirit are shown to be idle delusions. Nothing, says Hume, exists but ideas and impressions. There is no mind on which they may be impressed.’’ For Thornwell, it was striking that such clever men, such Library of America, 1984), 1487–89, 1135–36. On these matters, see Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (1943; reprint, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 48–53, 83–88. 58. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, D.D., LL.D. (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1875), 44. Palmer dances around the slander, but seems to admit it and blame it upon Gillespie’s New England origins. 59. James Oscar Farmer Jr., The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986), 41–42. 60. Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 63, 61; John B. Adger et al., eds., The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, 4 vols. (1871–75; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 2:612.

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‘‘men of such sagacity and penetration,’’ could accept a premise ‘‘from which such ridiculous principles flowed.’’ Berkeley saw no such incongruity, indeed undertook to show that his views on the nonexistence of matter was the common opinion, and that it was odder to have a belief in the existence of matter. Hume, at least, had ‘‘the frankness to confess that his opinions contradict the common sense of men.’’ For Thornwell, this was a serious study, but not entirely so, for ‘‘it is amusing to observe into what a labyrinth of perplexities men may involve themselves.’’ 61 In fact, with longer deliberation, Thornwell was later to come much closer to Hume than to Reid. In shorter order, however, by his senior year, Thornwell had distanced himself from Cooper. Indeed, one could make a case that he betrayed the old man. In 1831, when Thornwell was a senior, Cooper was accused as usual of ‘‘teaching infidelity in his lectures.’’ Students friendly to the president introduced resolutions before the student body, which they hoped would counteract that public opinion which was hostile to Cooper. Thornwell led the opposition to the resolutions and forced their withdrawal. Much in Thornwell’s later years is explicable by that action, that repression and denial of the materialist option, which always retained a fierce fascination for him. One can read a striking passage of his, written in 1839, as a meditation on the dilemma posed by the simultaneity in his intellectual training of Henry’s religious and Cooper’s materialist visions. ‘‘None can survey the constitution of the human mind as it now exists . . . without being satisfied that it is a noble structure, but a structure in ruins,’’ like an ancient temple, once graceful, now reduced to ‘‘rubbish.’’ ‘‘The mind exhibits clear indications of having suffered from a great moral convulsion. We instinctively feel its powers to be great and gigantic, but we feel, at the same time, that they are fearfully disordered. . . . [W]e are left with a mind capable of grasping almost infinity itself, yet mysteriously chained to earth—with desires strong and restless after an unknown and indefinite good and yet unaccountably doomed to the husks and ashes of the fleeting and transitory objects around us.’’ 62 Two unpublished sets of manuscripts best show Thornwell’s philosophical demeanor. (His theological works show it, too, but that will be addressed in the next chapter.) The first is his address to a joint meeting of the Euphradian and Clariosophic Societies of the South Carolina College in December 1839, 61. JHT to Gillespie, 24 January 1830, JHT Papers, SCL; Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 66, reprints this, but tidies up the spelling and punctuation. Part of the original manuscipt is now missing and I have used the original where possible, with a few missing words taken from Palmer’s transcription. 62. Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 82; JHT, ‘‘Address delivered to the Euphradian and Clariosophic Societies of the South Carolina College, December 3d 1839,’’ JHT Papers, SCL (hereafter JHT, ‘‘1839 Address’’).

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when he was leaving his chair of Belles Lettres and Logic to become a minister in Columbia. The second are some lectures on philosophy, which are undated but are probably from the later 1840s; they are incomplete, some being missing, but what there is gives a reasonable view of what he was telling the young gentlemen, though (in view of their sophistication) not perhaps what they understood from the precise and passionate man before them.63 In the 1850s in periodical articles, Thornwell was to sharpen his views, especially his reactions to German philosophy. These will need to be examined later when this book turns to consider Southern theology, but the earlier manuscripts are relevant here for their wrestling with the legacy of Scottish thought. To understand Thornwell’s philosophy, one must remember that he was a Calvinist, not from any rigid coldness of belief and conviction, but because he was a man of very great emotion, anxious to find a system that would offer him order and repression. As he was to tell the societies in 1839, ‘‘A truly good man does not eradicate the emotions of the heart—he is not a cold and icebound stoic—he feels, he wavers not, he weeps, but stands his ground, he denies himself.’’ This helps to explain the insistent lyricism of Thornwell, his frequent resort to poetry, his fumbling for passionate metaphors, amid a discourse that formally celebrated and embodied a stern rigor, a contempt for the ‘‘flimsy, superficial, trashy,’’ but which also deprecated anything (like medieval scholasticism) that was ‘‘cold, barren, and lifeless.’’ With middle age, which came upon him very promptly, Thornwell was to lose the easiness of his undergraduate readings. An awful tenseness of responsibility descended on him. He became greatly persuaded that philosophy mattered and was foundational, not only for a liberal education and young men at desks, but because men of mind changed history. Francis Bacon had been ‘‘a man whose single mind has moved the world.’’ So, in modern times, ‘‘a few men govern the age. . . . In order, therefore, to counteract the superficial tendency of the present age—arising from an injudicious attention to general education on the part of the master minds and from the pernicious system of philosophy which has the largest share of popular approbation, all that is required is a class of speculative men—a class, in other words, of moral philosophers.’’ So one had to return to the hard texts of the originating phi63. In ‘‘Lecture Third,’’ he quotes from the second volume of Victor Cousin’s Course of the History of Modern Philosophy a passage about Locke. This quotation differs in its wording from that in the first English translation by O. W. Wright, published in 1852 both in Edinburgh and New York, which suggests that it is Thornwell’s own translation from the original French edition, which was published between 1841 and 1846. Furthermore, the lectures make no mention of Sir William Hamilton, who would almost certainly have been featured in any lectures from a later period. Thornwell taught at South Carolina College, 1837–39, as professor of Belles Lettres and Logic; 1840–51, as professor of Sacred Literature and the Evidences of Christianity and chaplain; 1852–55, as president.

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losophers and think the problems through. This was, among other things, a pedagogical decision, which cannot have simplified the life of his students. As he told them, ‘‘The recent publications professing to treat on philosophical subjects from their avowed purpose and design must necessarily be shallow and unsatisfactory. They can be nothing but mere compilations from other works: they are written for schools and colleges and are mere printed common place books. . . . Such books we have in abundance, but they are [as] worthless as they are numerous.’’ But the decision went deeper, into a belief that the metaphysics of Baconian induction underpinned modernity: ‘‘A sounder view of the end and aim of philosophy has effected wonders. To a purer metaphysics men are ultimately indebted for all the discoveries which adorn the history of modern science.’’ As he put it in 1855, ‘‘Macaulay thinks the ‘key of the Baconian philosophy was utility and progress.’ We cannot think so. Utility and progress rather were consequences that followed upon the employment of the key to which he resorted.’’ 64 But Thornwell was a strange Baconian and a stranger Calvinist. In the warfare of science and religion, it had become customary to believe that matter was evident but spirit and God required faith. This dichotomy between reason and belief finessed the awkward tendency of science to explain away the supernatural, by consigning each to differing realms of heart and head. Thornwell never found this satisfactory. To resolve the dichotomy, Thornwell carried skepticism even into the problem of matter, which was a final betrayal of Cooper but also a testimony to the old man’s intellectual force. For Thornwell, even matter required faith. Thornwell’s arguments have some intricacy, so they need careful reconstruction. First, he gave much importance to logic, but not the logic of the eighteenth century, which had had (as he saw it) a bad tendency to turn logic from an instrument into a principle. Hence he mistrusted William Duncan’s Logic, which Henry had used, but which Thornwell felt confused logic with metaphysics.65 Rather, ‘‘Logic gives us the rules by which we may reason safely and conclusively on any subject, whether Law, morals, politics, religion or the practical affairs of life, but it neither supplies nor professes to supply us with the premises or data on which our reasonings proceed. . . . [Logic] simply supplies the instrument by which we reason, and not the principles on which we reason.’’ 66 Further, logic was an instrument based in nature; it gave a name and a rigor to what men had done, even before the formal invention of the method: ‘‘Men reasoned long before an art of Logic was or could have been 64. JHT, ‘‘1839 Address’’; JHT, ‘‘Test of Truth,’’ 479. 65. See JHT, ‘‘Lecture First,’’ 6, JHT Papers, SCL (hereafter JHT, ‘‘Lecture First’’ and similarly for the other lectures in this series). 66. JHT, ‘‘Lecture First.’’

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dreamed of and Logic only professes to show the rules or precepts in conformity with which sound rationalization always has been conducted. It is manifestly not an art of reasoning, but the art of reasoning—it does not point out to us how men may reason but how they must reason.’’ Logic, especially the syllogism, was often accused of being tautological. Thornwell admitted the fact, but observed that this was true of most knowledge, indeed of scientific induction itself. Reid and Stewart ‘‘seem to think too that syllogism and induction are enemies.’’ In fact, ‘‘Induction is the stepping stone to syllogism. We cannot form a general principle without induction—nor can we form a syllogism without a general principle. Thus instead of being hostile they are inseparable. Aristotle and the schoolmen were aware of this. The fault of the schoolmen was that they carried on induction imperfectly and not that they neglected it.’’ In this sense, Baconianism was not, as was usual to believe, a repudiation of scholasticism but its broadening. So Thornwell was touchily defensive of Aristotle. Indeed this marked a broader allegiance by Thornwell in the ancient dispute between Aristotle and Plato. As Thornwell wrote in 1856, ‘‘We do not profess to be disciples of Plato; our partialities and affinities are all, on the other hand, with his illustrious scholar, whom he himself pronounced to be the ‘intellect of his school.’ ’’ What he did allow to Plato, which spoke to Thornwell’s passionate nature, was that he ‘‘turned philosophy into poetry, and converted speculation from a barren waste of briars and thorns into a garden of delightful and refreshing flowers.’’ Still, for Thornwell, flowers were nice, but they were not enough. As Holmes was to say of Aristotle himself, in what might be almost a description of Thornwell, ‘‘He seeks no ornaments, if a flower springs up in his path—he throws it ruthlessly from him.’’ 67 On induction, Thornwell was unorthodox by the standards of his day.68 It is familiarly said that it was Sir David Brewster in 1855 who first argued that hypothesis was the driving force of induction, and that no one in America before Chauncey Wright in the 1860s understood this. In fact, this had been Thornwell’s position, which he may have gained from Thomas Brown.69 67. ‘‘Logic’’ and ‘‘Lecture—Syllogism,’’ JHT Papers, SCL; JHT, ‘‘Plato’s Phaedon,’’ SQR 2 n.s. 1 (August 1856): 416; GFH, ‘‘History of Literature,’’ SQR 2 (October 1842): 501. Like Thornwell, Holmes leaned to Aristotle, though with less decisiveness, more fondness for the poetical. 68. I agree here with Farmer, Metaphysical Confederacy, 142–43, though, in general, I think Farmer underestimates Thornwell’s heterodoxy. 69. Farmer, Metaphysical Confederacy, 142–43, citing Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 166–67. Cf. Brown, Philosophy of the Mind, 1:231: ‘‘An hypothesis . . . is nothing more than a reason for making one experiment rather than another; and it is evident, that, without some reason of this kind, as experiments and observations are almost infinite, inquiry would be altogether profitless.’’

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George Campbell in the eighteenth century had restated the orthodox Aristotelian view that (as Holmes was to put it) ‘‘from particulars we rise to the apprehension of general truths.’’ Thornwell dissented: ‘‘Hypothesis and conjecture have no doubt contributed very largely to the discovery of those general and all-pervading laws which have immortalized the names of Newton and his followers. By a sort of happy sagacity, if not intuitive sagacity, a theory in the first instance, is formed, and afterwards corrected, as occasion may require, by observation and experiment. . . . It is indeed very questionable whether induction, without the aid of hypothesis and analogy, ever could lead to the discovery of a new truth.’’ Thus, one did not proceed from particulars to the general, but usually from the general to particulars, which was after all the method of the syllogism. So hypothesis made new patterns out of old facts: ‘‘It is true that these particulars thus analytically developed are not in the strictest sense of the term, new truths. They were involved in others— but for all practical purposes, they were as completely unknown to us and as utterly unavailable as though we had never acknowledged or heard of the generals in which they were contained.’’ 70 Thornwell reiterated the significance of Bacon, but partly for having made Descartes possible, the person who ‘‘may be regarded as the father of the true science of the mind.’’ Descartes had kept constantly before him the distinction between mind and matter and insisted upon ‘‘the informations of consciousness as affording our only certain knowledge of our spiritual nature, whilst he carefully guarded against all those visionary and dangerous hypotheses which only mislead in attempting to explain the operation of mind by the analogies of matter.’’ These precepts deserved ‘‘all praise,’’ but had been unhappily disregarded by the eighteenth-century materialists: ‘‘Such men as Hartley, Priestley and Darwin in their vain efforts to simplify a subject much plainer in itself than their own elaborate explications, have only darkened counsel with words without wisdom, and their writings have consequently sunk into that merited contempt which from their frivolous nature, it was to be hoped that an enlightened age would award them.’’ Even John Locke had been drawn into ‘‘explaining intellectual phenomena by material similitudes.’’ 71 70. GFH, ‘‘Morell’s Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century,’’ SLM 16 (July 1850): 394; ‘‘Lecture—Syllogism,’’ JHT Papers, SCL. Cf. GFH, ‘‘Whewell on the Inductive Sciences,’’ SQR 2 (July 1842): 209, which observes: ‘‘Syllogistic reasoning is properly the vehicle of demonstration . . . but it is useless for demonstration.’’ But then Holmes conventionally saw induction, ‘‘the method of invention,’’ as proceeding from the particular to the general. Later, in GFH, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 3 (April 1851): 199, he indicates that Mill’s Logic (b.ii, c.iii) argues that the syllogism is a form of induction, of which Holmes was dubious. 71. JHT, ‘‘Lecture First.’’

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Nonetheless, like Brown, Thornwell believed that investigating the mind involved the same methodology as was deployed in ‘‘all the departments of physical science,’’ for the mind was ‘‘certainly a physical entity or natural substance.’’ But the mind was used to study the mind, so investigators were trapped within its constitution and hence ‘‘we can fathom the depths of truth no deeper than our line will go.’’ Modern science, Thornwell believed, was in the process of decomposing matter into disparate atoms, disconnected compounds, riddled with ‘‘minute and imperceptible chasms between all.’’ Nature was in pieces, ‘‘a multitude of states of a multitude of vibrating particles,’’ too disaggregated to sponsor the mind’s sense of unity. So that sense was an illusion: ‘‘True the mind is felt to be a simple and indivisible substance, but still its affections may either coexist or succeed each other with such amazing rapidity as to present the appearance of actual coexistence; and such real or apparent coexistence is as really a complex phenomenon of mind as the coexistence of various material elements is a complex phenomenon of body.’’ Hence simplicity was imposed upon complexity by the mind: ‘‘Our thoughts are countless—the connections among them and the complex or apparently compound results to which these connections give rise must be equally numberless—and hence the chemistry of mind, if I may be allowed the expression, is capable of the same indefinite progression as the chemistry of body. We have but to observe the phenomena and separate the simple from the complex.’’ 72 To argue that knowledge was about perceiving connection, was to venture into Humean territory: ‘‘From the past we ascertain what has been the order of succession in the various appearances which we have noticed . . . and we unhesitatingly apply the experience or observation of the past as an unerring measure of the future.’’ Yet children assumed order before they had much experience of it, and men could believe in that which they had not experienced. So, ‘‘Experience . . . so far from being the foundation of this universal belief—only guards and directs its application. Its origin must be referred to the constitution of our nature.’’ God had given man power over nature and such suzerainty was impossible without the power to interpret facts, ‘‘constantly transpiring before our eyes.’’ However, this power was limited; it consisted only ‘‘in understanding the established order of sequences in nature so as to know with a good degree of certainty what consequents will follow what antecedent.’’ Man conquered by yielding to nature: ‘‘He sees and learns her whole succession—he knows the links in the chain—and can consequently adapt himself to her established constitution.’’ This task was not simple, because nature was unclear, with ‘‘many hidden and unobserved operations,’’ many 72. JHT, ‘‘Part of Lecture iv—On Materialism’’ and ‘‘Lecture First.’’

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‘‘abstruse and complicated hieroglyphics.’’ Man dealt only in probabilities. The concept that nature had laws, the idea that there was cause and effect, was only a linguistic convenience. Such laws ‘‘cannot be said to be the causes of the phenomena of nature—they are only the phenomena themselves. They explain nothing—they account for nothing—they are only classifications of the results of our experience.’’ And the philosopher who taught this most persuasively was David Hume: ‘‘Mr. Hume has unanswerably proved, as it appears to me, that among all the appearances of nature we can trace no evidence of a necessary connection. What we call the power of one event to produce another amounts to nothing more than the statement of our firm conviction that the one will infallibly succeed the other in the order of time; and if our experience had not furnished us with a knowledge of uniform sequences we should never have dreamed that, in any correct sense, one phenomenon of sense or of consciousness was the cause or efficient producer of another.’’ A belief in cause was ‘‘an instinctive principle of our nature,’’ not the product of evidence.73 So Hume had been logical to doubt ‘‘a great first cause,’’ for ‘‘in those natural appearances which are generally denominated causes of others, he could trace no other relations but that of priority in time.’’ His error, shared by Thomas Brown, had been to confound antecedence with power. That is, whatever the usual difficulties of cause and effect, God had power and could force and create connections. But that was God’s knowledge and power, not man’s. A knowledge of physical reality, whose existence Thornwell did not doubt, was beyond human scope. Reality was a consequence of God’s power. Thornwell’s view of this was unusually thoroughgoing, because his sense of the disconnection of nature was so heightened. There was an ‘‘infinite chasm between something and nothing—between entity and non-entity.’’ Only omnipotence could traverse it. Many supposed that ‘‘the laws of nature are efficient causes established and ordained by God which bring about, by their imparted efficacy, all the changes which unceasingly take place.’’ This was wrong. Rather, changes arose from ‘‘the immediate concurrence and interposition of Deity—in him we live and have our being—and not a sparrow falls to the ground without his heavenly notice.’’ So, ‘‘Without his special and constant interposition, the wheels of nature would stand still and all succession be everlastingly arrested.’’ God not only tended to the planets, but to ‘‘every particle and atom,’’ by way of ‘‘sustaining, supporting, and directing the manifold movements of universal being.’’ 74 73. JHT, ‘‘Lecture Second.’’ 74. Ibid. For perspective on this, see Ian Simpson Ross, ‘‘The Natural Theology of Lord Kames,’’ in Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation, 336: ‘‘There are two main kinds of natural theology: theistic and deistic. The former holds that the supreme creator-governor is

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This, then, was the sequence of Thornwell’s theodicy. God must exist and was obliged to be unceasingly active, because nature itself and man’s thought lacked coherence and could not by themselves hold together. God gave man an instinct for seeing order, but he did not make the world itself orderly. Indeed, so disconnected was nature that God’s will was needed at every point to hold it together. Man, in short, was given a mind that provided a useful illusion of pattern, while all around him God was forced to labor unceasingly to turn chaos into cause and effect. This was a very dark vision of the human predicament, deployed to celebrate a very energetic vision of the Godly predicament. Thornwell took care to confront Berkeley and Hume directly. He did not underestimate the gravity of their challenge, for these were ‘‘distinguished men,’’ whom other great minds had labored to answer. By Hume and Berkeley, ‘‘human nature was compelled to put the question, which it had never dreamed of asking before, why it believed in its own existence and the existence of the things around it. Skepticism had assumed a form which put faith upon the defensive. She must answer or be silenced forever.’’ On the whole, however much he deprecated skepticism’s impiety, Thornwell thought the challenge to have been bracing, had led to the jettisoning of many ‘‘antiquated opinions,’’ and created many newer insights, some of them mistaken, some not. He construed Hume’s questioning as a restatement of the old inquiry, what is truth? And Thornwell believed that something like an answer had been approached, but no more. Still, ‘‘although a categorical answer has not been given and perhaps never will be given to the question what is truth, she has been sufficiently described to be designated by every candid enquirer— the marks which characterize her have been pointed out and the path of investigation in which alone she can be found sufficiently made known.’’ 75 Of the various respondents to Hume, Thornwell found ‘‘the Scotch philosophers of the school of Dr. Reid’’ inadequate, for asserting what was indemonstrable. They had referred truths ‘‘to a peculiar and separate faculty of the mind of which they have given us very contradictory descriptions but which the majority of them agree in calling Common Sense.’’ This ‘‘is not only incapable of being proved—but if admitted, would be productive, as it appears to me, of the most disastrous consequences.’’ The Scots doubtless had had laudable aims, but their methods and phrasing were to be deprecated, indeed had created a tendency to ‘‘the establishment of the vilest system of atheism which ever cursed the world.’’ To demonstrate this unusual opinion, Thorncontinually active in the world. The latter typically argues that the supreme being after creating the world left it to operate according to natural law.’’ 75. JHT, ‘‘Lecture Third.’’

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well carefully quoted from Beattie and Reid, especially where they had argued that reason was instinctive, that the faculty of common sense ‘‘takes cognizance of truth and falsehood.’’ Reid had refuted Locke’s premise of the tabula rasa of the mind ‘‘by investing us with a new percipient faculty from whose decisions there could be no appeal.’’ This, Thornwell thought, was ‘‘precisely the system of Immanuel Kant.76 All our ideas, according to him may be traced to sense, understanding and reason; and if I understand the meaning which he attaches to these terms—his sense is the sensation of Locke, his understanding Mr. Locke’s reflection and his reason the common sense of Reid, Beattie and Oswald.’’ In France, these ideas had been further propagated by Simon-Théodore Jouffroy, whom Thornwell also quoted. There were no quotations from Kant, whom Thornwell then knew only at second hand.77 The difficulty was a tendency to gnosticism, which overestimated human powers. By the tenets of Scottish philosophy, ‘‘Every question of philosophy is already solved in the secret recesses of the soul and all that remains to be done is to draw this mysterious solution into light.’’ This arrogance encouraged skepticism and lost sight of man’s ‘‘absurd prejudices and unaccountable caprices,’’ his ‘‘whims and wayward fancies,’’ which might be passed off as profundity: ‘‘Every man could maintain his opinions by an appeal to his own common sense or pure reason. By thus opening the door for the belief of every thing we are only preparing the mind, by a powerful reaction, to the rejection of every thing.’’ Such tolerant principles ‘‘destroy the distinctions between truth and falsehood and make philosophy only a farce.’’ If God gave common sense to man, then what man discerned would be Godly. These were, indeed, the conclusions of Cousin and Jouffroy, and Thornwell had quotations to that effect.78 But these were not the only objections to common sense philosophy. First, Reid had wrongly confounded sense and intelligence by ‘‘maintaining that every perception of sense involves a judgment, that the act of seeing in itself implies a judgment concerning the existence of the object that is seen.’’ Second, the Scots had revived ‘‘the exploded dogma of Des Cartes in regard to the existence of innate ideas.’’ Here Reid and Kant (and Jouffroy) seemed congruent: ‘‘Reid speaks of certain original judgements as parts of the natural furniture of the mind. The categories of Kant are the necessary forms in which intelligence must develope itself and these forms are communicated to us neither through the medium of the sense nor the consciousness, but belong 76. The MS has ‘‘Emanuel,’’ but above the first letter someone (almost certainly Thornwell himself ) has written ‘‘Im’’ by way of correction. 77. JHT, ‘‘Lecture Third.’’ 78. Ibid.

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necessarily and inseparably to the pure reason, so that wherever mind exists, they must exist also.’’ 79 Charitably, Thornwell conceded that the impious implications of common sense philosophy, especially in French hands, were unintended by the Scots and that Stewart had adroitly avoided the danger.80 But if reason was not innate, what was truth? It was faith: ‘‘We believe, because we feel determined to believe by the law of our nature—the constitution of our minds.’’ Evidence occasioned belief, without determining it, and ‘‘every step in demonstration is nothing but a succession of intuitive perceptions.’’ The mind’s constitution required the will to believe, which meant that a man could believe in what was wrong, for the mind determined only the will and could not provide infallible judgments. So truth was what ‘‘we ascertain by means of our faculties under the guidance of those intuitive judgments which are formed as soon as the mind has the proper objects before it.’’ These judgments ‘‘do not give us knowledge—they only teach us how to acquire it.’’ So, ‘‘existence is a mere abstraction; and in reality cannot be separated from the thing that exists. The thing and its existence can only be distinguished in thought. To perceive a thing therefore is to know that it exists and to know that it exists is to perceive it.’’ Hence, however humbling to human reason it might be, ‘‘all our intellectual acquirements are ultimately resolvable into faith. . . . To oppose reason to faith is simply to oppose reason to itself, since all its elements are only so many successive forms of spontaneous and irresistible faith.’’ In this, Newton and a child were equal, both trusting. And both were ‘‘possibly . . . totally ignorant of the real constitution of substances’’ in the material world. Like Robert Henry, for Thornwell ‘‘the evidence of the existence of mind was much more conclusive than the evidence of the existence of matter, and of the two, the ideal hypothesis of Berkeley does much less violence to our nature than the scheme of materialism.’’ 81 It is striking that, in his criticism of Scottish realism, Thornwell often abandoned its emphasis upon faculties and in this he agreed with Cooper, though also with Thomas Brown.82 For Thornwell, consciousness was single, 79. Here one must note Flower and Murphey’s argument that the influence of Scottish realism led to a special reading of Kant as a companion to Reid (not as a precursor to Hegel as he was more commonly seen in Britain), and that this set the stage for pragmatism. See Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Capricorn, 1977), 1:210. 80. JHT, ‘‘Lecture Third.’’ 81. Ibid., and JHT, ‘‘Lecture Fifth.’’ Cf. John Taylor’s insistence that human institutions were made by mind and were not ‘‘natural’’: John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, ed. Loren Baritz (1814; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 9–10. 82. Cf. Brown, Philosophy of the Mind, 1:274. ‘‘It may still, indeed, be said with truth, that

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the mind ‘‘one and indivisible’’: ‘‘A faculty of the mind is nothing but the specific mode in which the mind as one and indivisible acts, and the only difference in the modes of its actions arise from the objects which give rise to that action.’’ Consciousness was also rapid, ‘‘of that moment.’’ Later, he said, ‘‘At first view there appears to be no principle of order at all in the various operations of the intellect—the whole subject strikes the mind with a sort of vague and astounding confusion and we know not at what point to begin the comparison of the phenomena.’’ Still, there are patterns. There were no faculties but there were, as Brown had put it, ‘‘states of the mind.’’ 83 It had been customary to make a division between will and understanding, or between intellectual and active powers (this had been Reid’s distinction), but Thornwell found this unsatisfactory, for being insufficiently mobile: ‘‘The parts of the division run into each other and they do not embrace all the phenomena. The will has as much influence upon the understanding as upon the passions, and there are many emotions—such as joy—grief—beauty &c—which have no peculiar relation either to the understanding or the will—to the active or the intellectual powers.’’ On the whole, he leaned to Brown’s category of division, into ‘‘external affections,’’ that is, things to do with the physical senses and material experience, and ‘‘internal affections.’’ But Thornwell grew restless when Brown went on to greater subdivisions or ascended to sweeping principles, because he was making a Procrustean system out of what was necessarily fluid. ‘‘The egregious blunders of Hartly should have taught Dr. Brown that the minute analysis which would destroy the diversities of our intellectual faculties and refer them all to the operation of a single principle is likely to be only a childish play in ringing the changes on mere words.’’ 84 Thornwell’s skepticism is succinctly expressed at the end of his eighth lecture, when he was trying to summarize a discussion about ‘‘conception.’’ ‘‘It is hardly necessary for me to add . . . that our conceptions cannot with propriety be said to be either true or false. . . . Our conceptions may be real or imaginary—the objects conceived may or may not have an existence—they the different feelings,—the states or affections of mind which we term complex,—are absolutely simple and indivisible, as much as the feelings or affections of the mind which we term simple.’’ 83. Much of this argument seems to have been derived from Thomas Brown, who opposed ‘‘the tendency of the Scots to consider consciousness as a separate faculty’’ (Dallas Victor Lie Ouren, ‘‘HaMILLton: Mill on Hamilton—a Re-Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton’s Philosophy’’ [Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1974], 80–81). It may be signicant that Brown was much influenced by Destutt de Tracy, indeed was accused by Sir William Hamilton of plagiarizing Tracy; Tracy, as a materialist, was influential on Jefferson and Cooper. 84. JHT, ‘‘Lecture Fifth’’ and ‘‘Lecture Eighth,’’ the latter of which has many criticisms of Brown.

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may be the creatures of our fancy or the objects of perception, but the apprehension of them does not involve any judgment except the momentary belief which accompanies.’’ Indeed, at one point, Thornwell was uncomfortable even with Hume, for leaning too close towards the association of ideas, of speaking too loosely of a ‘‘kind of attraction’’ between them. Thornwell retreated to Brown’s weaker hypothesis of ‘‘suggestion,’’ that ideas might tend to suggest other ones. ‘‘If the association of ideas be understood to mean nothing more than this succession of ideas arising without an external cause and involving no prior union of the ideas suggested and suggesting . . . it might be used with safety.’’ Nor was Thornwell comfortable with Hume’s contention that the association of ideas was connected to ‘‘resemblance, contiguity in time or place and cause and effect,’’ for he found Hume’s reasoning on this score contradictory.85 That Thornwell could, in some ways, be more skeptical than Hume seems odd. But it was not so. Even Hume had had to worry about the implications of his skepticism and in later years politely withdrew to safer ground; he did not abandon his skepticism about human nature but kept a discreet silence and talked urbanely as though things were real, reliable.86 Thornwell had less reason to worry. He could push skepticism to its limit, because he rested content in the knowledge that he had a coup de théâtre. Jahweh stood in the wings of Thornwell’s philosophy, ready to hold together nature, mind, man, and morality, when all in the play seemed lost. That is, Calvinism made it possible for Thornwell to be Humean. Nonetheless, one should not underestimate the force or significance of Thornwell’s metaphysics. Most Calvinists arrived at their beliefs by a different route, doubting neither God nor reality. Thornwell came to God because he doubted reality, matter and mind, and secular philosophy could provide no order for existence that logic could validate. Nothing was left but God, if there was to be order, at all, outside the mind. But faith, for Thornwell, did not flow from a real man to an indemonstrable God made real by faith. Rather, faith flowed from a real God to man and matter otherwise unreal, disordered, swift, and shadowy. When Thornwell was writing as a theologian, this outflowing from God was to be called grace. Hence it was easy enough for Thornwell, being so radical, to dismiss as 85. JHT, ‘‘Lecture Eighth’’ and ‘‘Lecture Twelfth.’’ 86. In fact, it has been suggested that Hume should be regarded as ‘‘the first post-skeptical philosopher of the early modern period,’’ that is, he inherited skepticism from his philosophical predecessors and was concerned to reason out what men did, if one took skepticism for granted: on this, see David Fate Norton, ‘‘An Introduction to Hume’s Thought,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1.

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unmeaning an issue that had bedeviled American philosophy since at least Jonathan Edwards and much preoccupied more lumbering Southern intellectuals: the problem of the will. The contention that man had a will, that is, a faculty capable of choosing between right and wrong, or of refusing to choose, or of choosing wrongly, and that therefore man had a capacity to meet or deny his moral responsibility in God’s order, was an issue that ran deep into the old dispute between Calvinism and Arminianism. With too much necessity and too little free will, a moral man became but a automaton, unworthy of praise because merely obliged by nature into virtue. With too much free will and too little necessity, God’s predestinations were deranged by human whim. But what was will? A faculty of the mind? But, if so, where did it stand in relationship to the rest of the mind, to understanding, to judgment, to all the other faculties so painstaking described by the Scotch doctors? Thornwell swept the problem away. ‘‘If . . . we say the primary principle in man is will, then we are compelled to regard intelligence as a characteristic of that quality, and, therefore, subordinate to it. So, also, if we regard the primary principle in man as mind, then, since it is necessary to make him a unit, it is necessary to regard will as a principle of activity, as a quality of that primary mental principle. This is a very important consideration.’’ For Thornwell, the old categories of will, understanding, and the faculties were too static. It was not plausible that evidence reached the mind and its faculties leisurely took their turn in making their discriminations. No, Thornwell said, everything was mobile, instantaneous, compounded. ‘‘We regard man as inherently a being of motion, and, therefore, we variously denominate that principle or being as soul, spirit, or will. We, therefore, do not consider man as indebted to his mind, or to his reasons, for his motion, (and under motion we include conduct and practices,) but as being moved to action by the resistless hand of nature. He moves because it is the good pleasure of God, his creator, that he shall have power to move. This is the primary principle of his nature. God has made man a being or principle of action. It is, therefore, after motion that he is brought into acquaintance with reasons.’’ However you looked at it, man had no free agency. For he faced two choices, neither pleasant. First, ‘‘If God be man’s creator, and man be mind, and mind be moved to action by reason, and God be the author of the reason that moves him, then God is the ultimate cause of man’s action. This destroys man’s moral freedom.’’ Or, second, ‘‘If . . . God be the creator of man’s mind, and man’s mind be moved by reasons, and God be the author of the reasons, then God is the author of man’s rationality. This destroys man’s intellectual freedom.’’ Which was not to say that Thornwell denied morality or rationality, but that he thought ‘‘moral truth and reason lie outside of man,’’ that he moved spon-

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taneously and, so moving, might move in ways that conformed to the moral order defined by God, or he might not.87 Freedom was an irrelevance. Others in the South were more cautious, more traditional in their deliberations on this matter of the will. Someone writing in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1847, it is true, made fun of the will, mocked Edwards for confusions of terminology, after having traced the various definitions of it given by philosophers from Locke to Hume, from Reid to Cousin.88 Like Thornwell, he (or less likely she) inclined to think that there was no such thing as the will, though for different reasons. The idea of the will was impermissibly anarchic: ‘‘If the mind could create opinions for itself, no principle in religion or philosophy could endure for a day. . . . Truth, justice, law; all distinctions of right and wrong, friend and foe, debtor and creditor, husband and wife, parent and child, and even the certainty of numbers themselves, would be borne away by the overwhelming power of the will.’’ Things were simpler. To reason was to grasp the relations of ideas presented to the mind; these ‘‘rapid and evanescent combinations’’ eventually produced a single perception, which the understanding accepted as a truth. But, ‘‘There can not be one faculty by which the mind judges, and another by which it enforces or resists its own judgments. The mind is not double, nor is it divided against itself. It is integral. . . . It does not deliver over its judgments from the right side, to be disposed of by the will on the left side.’’ The author ventured a burlesque of the philosophical proponents of the will: According to these writers, a good judgment of the intellect cannot, of itself, stir a single muscle in the man: He cannot help himself to an egg at table, without motive, last determination, volition . . . [or be] asked whether he chooses tea or coffee—motive, last determination, volition, tea, if you please, madam. Do you take cream? motive, last determination, volition, yes, madam. Do you like it strong? motive, last determination, volition, very strong—motive, last determination, volition, extends his 87. JHT, ‘‘Test of Truth,’’ 485–86, 489. Thornwell seems to have drawn back from the anarchism of this, since he also suggests that one might learn rationality from society, that a child is not rational but a man might become so. 88. There are no suggestions as to the authorship of this piece, though the writer gives a few clues: on p. 57, he says ‘‘the court of which this writer was a member,’’ and a note on p. 61 observes, ‘‘The writer is the author of a work on the Mind, which will shortly issue from the press.’’ Albert Taylor Bledsoe did practice law in Springfield, Illinois, from 1838 to 1848, and published several works on the mind, but his Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry came out in 1845, and his Theodicy in 1853. The piece reads, here and there, like Bledsoe but does not end up with the same arguments, since Bledsoe contends for freedom of the will, and this writer pleads necessity.

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hand to receive the cup—motive, last determination, volition, helps himself to bread—motive, last determination, volition, butter—motive, last determination, volition, raises the cup to his mouth, which opens by the same process—by the same process he masticates; and lastly, by motive, last determination, volition, swallows, when the mental operation ceases and all parties agree, the influence of the will is at an end. These processes were unnecessarily complex, though not ‘‘mysterious enough for metaphysicians, who have sought out as many faculties in the mind, as there are wheels in a machine, and one of the most distinguished among them has divided it into as many compartments as there are circles in his native Germany.’’ Unlike Thornwell, however, this essayist was content to believe that the mind naturally chose good over evil: ‘‘Perception of the greatest apparent good is a law unto [man], as gravitation is to matter, that never relaxes its hold; it binds him in fetters he cannot break if he would, and he would not if he could.’’ Necessity was a fortunate thing.89 All this was too much for Daniel Whitaker, who did not often reprove his own contributors, but who instantly tacked on a fierce denunciation of this piece and stood in amazement that anyone could doubt the fact that ‘‘[t]here is much in the human will. It is a fundamental part of the mental constitution.’’ And, good American that he was, Whitaker saw in necessity an undemocratic thing, for it contradicted freedom: ‘‘We think it is time that this notion should be abandoned as obsolete and worthless.’’ Philosophy should shape up. ‘‘We are the advocates of moral as well as civil liberty, and the age, including all the metaphysicians, should come up to the defence of this great doctrine, and maintain it as a sensible creed, and an essential element in any sound system of metaphysics, as well as morals and religion.’’ 90 Not all were behaving themselves. Thornwell, by these lights, was not. But Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Methodist and Arminian, was doing his best. His blustering Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will (1845) was an anxious defense of human freedom and religious morality. Its themes perhaps lie deep in a life of marked instability. He was the son of Moses Ousley Bledsoe and Sophia Childress Taylor and was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, where his father edited a newspaper and was a small slaveholder. Albert was educated at West Point, from which he graduated in 1830. He served on the southwestern frontier for two years, before resigning his commission in 1832 and beginning to study the law in Richmond. In 1833 he went to Kenyon College in Ohio to become a tutor and stayed to study the89. ‘‘The Will,’’ SQR 11 (January 1847): 54–55, 57–58, 51, 62. 90. Daniel K. Whitaker, ‘‘The Will—Note by the Editor,’’ SQR 11 (January 1847): 66, 67– 68.

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ology. Briefly he was an Episcopalian minister, but gave up his vocation because of theological scruples about the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. He taught mathematics for a year (1835–36) at Miami University in southwestern Ohio, and in 1836 married Harriet Coxe of Burlington, New Jersey. For two years, he had various ministries: in Sandusky, in Cincinnati, in Hamilton, perhaps in northern Kentucky. In 1838 he went to be a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. (He knew Abraham Lincoln there.) His family, in fact, had already moved to Illinois in the late 1820s. In 1844 he went to Cincinnati to practice, but returned to Springfield in 1846. In 1848 he was elected professor of mathematics at the new University of Mississippi, from which he moved to a similar job at the University of Virginia in 1854. He seems never to have owned slaves when living in the South, his wife being opposed to the practice, but relied instead upon hired slaves. For much of his life, he was little prosperous, except when he went to Charlottesville, where a professorship was worth about $3,000 annually, with a free house.91 This was a life, which seems to have taught him that a man may make free choices, may be here rather than there, as his will dictated. The details of Bledsoe’s refutation of Edwards are less pertinent here, except to note that his fundamental objection was that Edwards was muddled and tautological, asserting freedom for the will but making it too dependent upon the authority of the ‘‘strongest motive’’ to allow significant freedom. Bledsoe’s own position was that ‘‘[w]hatever God foreknows will most certainly and infallibly come to pass. . . . We have just as much right to suppose, that God foreknows that the volitions of moral agents are not necessitated, as the necessitarian has to suppose that He foreknows the contrary.’’ God’s omniscience was concerned with the results of actions, not their means, with outcomes, not causes. Man was free to choose; it was just that God already knew what he would freely choose. Further, Bledsoe believed that more must be allowed to the will than a responding to motive: ‘‘A will that is determined, instead of determining, is no will at all. And the liberty of the will for which we contend, is implied by the power of the mind to act.’’ For this activity, Bledsoe contended. ‘‘We should not say, then, that the mind is self-determined, but simply that it is self-active.’’ Something extra happened in the mind that was not explicable by the pressure of the external world. Hence, ‘‘a free-agent . . . is one who acts without being caused to act.’’ The mind had ‘‘appetites, pas91. Willard Murrell Hays, ‘‘Polemics and Philosophy: A Biography of Albert Taylor Bledsoe’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, 1971), 19, 119–24, 22–23, 253, 325; Sophie Bledsoe Herrick, ‘‘Albert Taylor Bledsoe [1809–1877],’’ in Library of Southern Literature, vol. 1, AdamsBoyle, ed. Edwin Anderson Alderman and Joel Chandler Harris (New Orleans: Martin & Hoyt, 1907), 395–99. On Bledsoe’s theology, see Benjamin S. Hedrick to Mary Ellen Hedrick, 28 December 1856, Benjamin S. Hedrick Papers, SHC.

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sions, and desires . . . noble affections, and, above all . . . a feeling of moral approbation and disapprobation.’’ Among these, the will freely discriminated. Man chose and intended to gratify a passion; we act. ‘‘In all this, we form our designs or intentions free from all influence whatever: nothing acts upon the will: we fix upon the end, and we choose the means to accomplish it. We adapt the means to our end; because there is a fitness in them to accomplish that end or design; and because, as rational creatures, we perceive that fitness. . . . Reason is not the force, it is the law. All the power resides in the free, untrammelled will.’’ 92 For Bledsoe, to plead that the will was formed by circumstances was to deny human freedom: ‘‘If volition is produced by circumstances, then it is a passive impression made upon the will, and not an act at all.’’ As to how the mind or the will acted, Bledsoe, at his exordium, cheerfully admitted ignorance. ‘‘How does it act, then? I do not know. This is a mystery. Indeed, every ultimate fact in man’s nature, and every simple exercise of his intellectual powers, is a mystery.’’ But it was a mystery that was ‘‘the only safe retreat from self-contradiction, absurdity, and atheism.’’ This was what God had made, ‘‘a being that acts freely, without labouring under any necessity, either natural or moral, in its accountable and moral agency.’’ It was in a ‘‘tri-unity of the sensibility, the intelligence, and the will, that the glory of man’s nature, as a free and accountable being, consists.’’ 93 Bledsoe did not much trouble himself with philosophical skepticism. He wrote as though matter and mind were real, if a mystery. But, at his conclusion, he ended up with a few isolated propositions similar to Thornwell’s. First, he stressed spontaneity in human action and thought. Bledsoe agreed that consciousness discerned the action of its own body, but had no power to grasp whence action came; consciousness concluded that there were volitions because it saw effects. ‘‘We find our minds in a state of acting. This is all we discover by the light of consciousness.’’ Indeed, the mind did not really know whether it was free or not; it only inferred freedom. ‘‘This idea of liberty . . . follows from the fact of consciousness that we do act, by an inference as clear as noonday; by an inference so natural, so direct, and so inconceivably rapid, that it has often been supposed to be included in the testimony of consciousness itself.’’ Second, like Thornwell and against Reid, Bledsoe admitted that men were not conscious of their existence, but only of their consciousness asserting existence. Still, very unlike Thornwell but conforming to Whitaker’s demand for optimism and speaking fervidly against those who 92. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, An Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will (Philadelphia: H. Hooker, 1845), 141, 187, 212, 215, 217. 93. Ibid., 217–20.

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counseled ‘‘darkness and despair,’’ Bledsoe ended with a euphoric claim for the possibility of progress under the auspices of a Baconian modernity that had transcended ‘‘the philosophy of antiquity.’’ No one, he said, should imagine ‘‘that the great problem of the intellectual system of the universe is not within the reach of the human faculties.’’ 94 It will have become evident that, for slaveholders in a modern world, the question of consciousness, freedom, and will was unusually pertinent. As individual masters, they were often taught to believe that their will was paramount, binding, that to command was to be obeyed. As citizens of the slaveholding South, they were as often told that they were the creatures of necessity, trapped by historical circumstances, their will irrelevant. It is little surprise, therefore, that when they considered the abstract questions of consciousness, reality, and freedom, they did not speak with one voice but veered between Bledsoe’s optimism in human freedom, Henry’s moderate sense that circumstances constricted a freedom that was real but limited, and Thornwell’s bleak sense that man was trapped in a universe disordered but for God’s grace. Hegel in the Phenomenolo had argued that a master, who was only a master, could not be finally free, because his sense of self-consciousness was mediated through another, his slave, whose reality he believed to be ‘‘unessential.’’ Only the slave could achieve true knowledge of self, for only through risk and fear, denied to the master by his complacency but inherent for the slave, could that knowledge come. ‘‘In the master, the bondsman feels selfexistence to be something external, an objective fact; in fear self-existence comes to be felt explicitly as his own proper being, and he attains the consciousness that he himself exists in his own right and on his own account.’’ 95 If it is asked, did the philosophical Southerner believe that there was an objectivity beyond self, let alone within it? The answer is far from clear. The Scots commanded the Southerner to believe that bodies and minds could be trusted and, if the accounts of American philosophy outside the South are reliable, most Americans obeyed this dictum gladly and were untroubled by the ghosts of Berkeley and Hume. But it is clear that philosophical Southerners were much troubled, that their belief in the reality of the world was an effort, that for them the Scottish realists had not settled the matter. Nothing occurred more often, almost as a consensus, than their assertion that it 94. Ibid., 227, 229, 233–34. 95. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenolo of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 239. Frantz Fanon was later to dismiss this analysis: ‘‘The master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.’’ See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1967), 220.

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was ‘‘easier to maintain the non-existence of matter than the non-existence of mind.’’ Yet, even for Bledsoe, mind was a mystery.96 For Thornwell, it was a mystery and a necessity, moving blindly and urgently, only blundering into morality by chance. This last was not a bad description, not of slavery as it was defended, but of slavery as it was experienced.

Cloudy Transcendentalism 97 Southern dissatisfaction with Scottish realism led to a search for other options. One might expect that utilitarianism would have had its adherents, if only amongst those with sympathy for the eighteenth-century materialist tradition. Yet it is striking that Jeremy Bentham, the aspirant Newton of this new moral world, found very few sympathizers in the South, unless it was the itinerant and insignificant James Alexander Ventress of Mississippi, whom Say recommended to Bentham in 1831 as ‘‘americain des États-Unis, zélé defenseur de nos Doctrines’’ when Ventress was passing from Paris to London. To be sure, utilitarianism mostly declined to enter into a dialogue with metaphysics. Only Bentham’s theory of ‘‘paraphrasis’’ (which he once expounded in a footnote) had much philosophical originality. By this, Bentham had argued that there were real entities discoverable directly by the senses in mind or body, but there were also linguistic constructs; pleasure and pain were real, while concepts like ‘‘duty, right, power, title’’ were discursive images that existed at a remove from the instinctive. The task of the scientific legislator was to analyze these fictions and establish their relationship to the ‘‘fundamental axiom’’ that ‘‘it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’’ 98 His gravest responsibility was to give clarity to words, not to use them as an obfuscation that disguised the misuse of power. This argument was more promising than adequate. Later John Stuart Mill, whose father was educated in Edinburgh, was to be embarrassed by this lacuna and sought to provide a subtler metaphysics for a utilitarianism that Mill wished to sustain. Hugh Legaré was happy enough to evade metaphysics, but his 1831 essay 96. It may, of course, be relevant that when he was writing his Inquiry, Bledsoe was in Illinois and not a slaveholder. 97. HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ 29. 98. J. B. Say to Jeremy Bentham, 12 October 1831, James Alexander Ventress and Family Papers, MDAH. On Bentham’s notion of paraphrasis, see G. L. Williams, ‘‘The Early Utilitarians: Bentham and James Mill,’’ in The Nineteenth Century, ed. C. L. Ten, Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 7 (London: Routledge, 1994), 6–8; James Steintrager, Bentham (1977; reprint, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 20–43. The quotations are in Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government and an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. Wilfrid Harrison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), 3, 106.

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on ‘‘Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians’’ was dismissive. In Legaré’s view, Bentham had been right when unoriginal, wrong when most himself, a rambling, incoherent self that invited mockery. Nothing in the doctrine of utility was new, being little more than chilled Epicureanism. Mathematical calculations about social behavior based upon logarithms of self-love misunderstood not only human nature, but even the techniques of expediency, which could not be based upon rationality. Legaré thought even Hume had understood this: ‘‘It seems to be taken for granted in that discipline [utilitarianism], that sentiment has no share in moral approbation, and ought to have no influence upon moral conduct. Its inevitable tendency, if not its avowed object, is to chill enthusiasm, to extinguish sensibility, to substitute wary, and even crafty calculation, for the native goodness of an uncorrupted heart.’’ Bentham had morality backwards: ‘‘True philosophy . . . is studious to inculcate not that whatever is expedient is right—but that whatever is right is expedient.’’ For Legaré, not only pleasure and pain were intrinsic to human nature, but also a sense of poetry, ‘‘the imagination and the heart.’’ 99 In this, Legaré was more rapt than most, but it was habitual to make fun of Bentham’s prose. Cooper, though he sympathized with Bentham’s assault upon the common law, his atheism, and his wish for legislative clarity, and was the nearest thing to a utilitarian that Southern culture had, nonetheless despaired at ‘‘the obscure, involuted, Benthamee dialect’’ and often ‘‘found only common-place notions arranged with pompous, needless accuracy.’’ 100 George Frederick Holmes, at a time when he was indulgent of skeptics, nonetheless agreed with Legaré that ‘‘the mere hope of personal benefit’’ was mistily grasped by human beings, which was just as well. To these objections was added the common belief that utilitarianism was the philosophy for a commercial, book-keeping age, which was inexcusably turning away from liberal education towards ‘‘exclusive professional attainments.’’ And, of course, no one who thought that morality was a matter for a Christian God had much patience with Bentham, especially as he seemed (like Mandeville) to contend that selfishness was creative. Even poor Archdeacon Paley, who had propounded a much milder version of the merits of expediency, was savaged by many Southerners for peddling, as Thornwell put it, such ‘‘abominable principles.’’ These objections taken together explain the resistance to utilitarianism in the South, where it was hard to find atheist, commercially minded, unpoetical proponents of rationalist expediency who were indifferent to mangled prose. William Campbell Preston’s verdict was that of his gen99. HSL, ‘‘Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians,’’ SR 7 (August 1831): 292, 294, 296. 100. TC, ‘‘Bentham’s Judicial Evidence,’’ SR 5 (May 1830): 381–82. See also EDL, ‘‘Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,’’ SQR 10 (October 1846): 259, on the deleterious influence of Bentham’s style.

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eration. He visited Etienne Dumont in Paris in 1818, the man whom Preston later characterized as ‘‘the redacteur of Jeremy Bentham’s works, which being written in the absurd dialect called by the wits of the day the Benthamese, were translated (as Dumont modestly professed) but in fact reproduced in elegant French.’’ Cooper, who ‘‘was a great admirer of Bentham,’’ later ‘‘induced me to read his works in after life, which I did with some profit and little pleasure.’’ But, in this, Preston knew himself to be singular. Bentham’s works ‘‘have fallen greatly into disuse,’’ he observed in the 1850s.101 But there were alternatives. The French and the Germans were offering perspectives at some distance from Stewart’s Edinburgh classroom or Bentham’s London lodgings. In general, the French offered intellectually the more relaxing option, which turned philosophy away from the problem of mind towards principles of social action. The Germans pushed deeper into the mind, but in troubling ways. Yet these were intertwined matters. Philosophy, like natural science, was an international discourse with national emphases, in which Germans were aware of Scots, the French were influenced by Germans, and Americans were conscious of these interpenetrations.102 Victor Cousin, indeed, strove to reconcile the valid insights of all these traditions into a happy eclecticism, especially in trying to make common sense lie down with transcendentalism; he was both a proponent of Reid and a personal friend of Hegel. When Cousin was in Germany in 1824 Hegel helped to get the Frenchman out of a Prussian jail, and when Hegel was in Paris in 1827 Cousin helped him sample French cooking.103 In these matters, chronologically the Germans preceded the French and significantly predicated their philosophy, so one must begin with the Southern reaction to Kantian and post-Kantian German philosophy, or else one cannot understand why some Southerners turned to Paris. In the 1820s, Kant seems to have been little more than a name in the South, or indeed anywhere in the United States. Dugald Stewart, upon whom so many relied, had set a dismissive standard. He could not read German, he knew of these issues partly through Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (which made him a little uncomfortable, for he apologized for ‘‘quoting a French lady as an authority on German metaphysics’’),104 he thought that there was little 101. GFH, ‘‘Bulwer’s Zanoni,’’ SQR 2 (July 1842): 185; ‘‘American Literature,’’ SQR 11 (January 1847): 124; JHT to WCP, 1 May 1847, JHT Papers, SCL; Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 59. 102. For example, GFH, ‘‘Whewell,’’ 203, notes that Whewell had borrowed from Cousin. 103. Manns, Reid and His French Disciples, 60–61. Manns argues, however, that though Reid was crucial to Cousin, he was little influenced by Schelling or Hegel but rather by Leibniz (63). On Cousin and Hegel, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 631–80. 104. Stewart, Dissertation, 359.

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new in Kant that had not been anticipated by Ralph Cudworth in England, by Reid and Hume in Scotland, and by Malebranche in France, but he seems to have grasped the essential point that Kant had sought to evade the problems of skepticism proposed by Hume. As to Fichte and Schelling, Stewart had never read them. Relying partly upon the moral philosopher Joseph-Marie Degérando, a friend of Benjamin Constant and a member of the ‘‘Idéologue circle’’ who had taught at the Lycée Républicain, Stewart peddled the line that German obscurity masked not profundity but confusion, that the emperor of Königsberg and his successors had no clothes.105 So Hugh Legaré was fairly typical in speaking in 1828 of the ‘‘cloudy transcendentalism of the German school’’ and of knowing his little through the medium of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, if unusual in hinting cannily and cynically that Kant was the wave of the philosophical future. And Robert Henry, though he read German, was not untypical of those trained by the Scottish school. According to Thornwell, Henry seems to have tried Kant and thought of him as Stewart did, but ‘‘as to Kant’s successors, we do not believe that Dr. Henry could ever be induced to read a line of their writings.’’ Thornwell, though he was to become more subtle about the Germans, was at first inclined like Stewart to see Kant as a failed version of Reid as a respondent to Hume. Considering that Thornwell thought Reid too had failed, this was no inducement to dally with Kant. The Southern Review’s reviewer of Thomas Brown in 1829 spoke, though only in a footnote, of ‘‘the technical obscurity of Transcendentalism’’ and suggested that Kantianism was little more than warmed-over Aristotelianism, a view that Holmes was later to echo with more subtlety. Stephen Elliott in the same year, when reviewing Henry Dwight’s Travels in the North of Germany, knew enough to know that Dwight’s views of Germany’s ‘‘schools of philosophy’’ were ‘‘defective,’’ though providing some useful information, but Elliott fought shy of venturing more: ‘‘[W]e are willing at present to leave the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Kant, to a future day, and to more profound and more thoroughly initiate adepts.’’ 106 This skittishness was common. In New England, James Marsh was one of the main channels through which Kant and his successors reached American culture and informed New England transcendentalism. Marsh had read Madame de Staël and Coleridge as guides to German philosophy while a tutor at Dartmouth in 1819, two years after the Biographia Literaria had been published. With some difficulty, he had 105. See ibid., 355–81, on the Germans, passim. On Degérando, see Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 162, 164. 106. HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ 29–30; JHT, ‘‘Dr. Henry,’’ 205; ‘‘Brown’s Philosophy,’’ 129; Stephen Elliott, ‘‘Education in Germany,’’ SR 4 (August 1829): 122.

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tried to read the German originals during the 1820s, but his main interest lay in publicizing Coleridge, whose Aids to Reflection he edited and reissued in Vermont in 1829. In 1829, he wrote or tried to write to Coleridge (the letter was not delivered), to whom he observed: ‘‘The German philosophers, Kant and his followers, are very little known in this country, and our young men who have visited Germany have paid little attention to that department of study while there. I cannot boast of being wiser than others in this respect, for though I have read a part of the works of Kant, it was under many disadvantages, so that I am indebted to your own writings for the ability to understand what I have read of his works. . . . The same views are generally entertained in this country as in Great Britain respecting German literature, and Stewart’s History of Philosophy especially has had an extensive influence to deter students from the study of their philosophy.’’ 107 By ‘‘our young men,’’ he mostly meant George Ticknor, George Bancroft, and Edward Everett, whose German experience had certainly led to no understanding of German philosophy. Between 1823 and 1826 Marsh taught at Hampden-Sydney, where Jesse Burton Harrison was briefly an undergraduate before going on to Harvard; the two seem to have formed an intellectual friendship, given an extra Germanic impulse from Harrison’s coming to know Ticknor at Harvard.108 There seems little reason to doubt, upon the evidence of Harrison’s writings, that Marsh encouraged a sense of the importance of Coleridge and, beyond him, of the Germans. It is also true that Coleridge and his peculiar version of the Germans found their way into Southern culture independently, significantly through Coleridge’s close friendship with Washington Allston. Certainly Legaré in 1828 was entirely familiar with Coleridge and showed himself freely influenced by the Biographia Literaria, and Legaré was a friend of Allston’s, just as he was a correspondent of Harrison. What is clear is that, while in Berlin in 1830, Harrison came to know something of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, either through attending them or hearing them discussed.109 The lectures themselves were not 107. James Marsh to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 23 March 1829, in Coleridge’s American Disciples: The Selected Correspondence of James Marsh, ed. John J. Duffy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 80. 108. See James Marsh to JBH, 31 January 1824, Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC; James Marsh to JBH, 2 April 1824, Burton Harrison and Family Papers, LC. 109. Harrison could not have learned even this scanty knowledge from Coleridge, who seems only to have known Hegel’s Logic, an annotated copy of which he owned, and whose only observations on this were in his then-private Notebooks: see Gian N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge’s Manuscripts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 238–45. There seems to have been little knowledge of Hegel in Britain before George Henry Lewes and the late 1830s: on this, see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (1980; reprint, London: Libris, 1994).

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yet published. In Harrison’s 1832 essay for Legaré and the Southern Review on ‘‘English Civilization’’ is a sentence that reads, ‘‘The philosophical mind of Hegel has divided the past history of civilization into four Missions, the Oriental, the Greek, the Roman, and the Teutonic.’’ The idea was not developed, other than by Harrison remarking that ‘‘Teutonic’’ was ‘‘too vague to embrace all modern civilization.’’ But Harrison seems to have been the first American to mention Hegel’s name in print, and this was appropriate in an essay that was the clearest and earliest repudiation of British philosophy, especially of Scottish realism, in Southern intellectual culture. For Harrison was insistent that the British empiricist tradition was inadequate, that Baconianism was not enough, and did so partly with arguments and quotations drawn from Coleridge, ‘‘plus Allemand que les Allemands.’’ Part of his objection was aesthetic, that the English—he wobbled somewhat between using ‘‘English’’ and ‘‘British’’—too little valued ‘‘the ideal’’ and were too dominated by naturalism and contented themselves too much with ‘‘mere likenesses.’’ Part of this was a distaste for Burkeanism, the turning of prejudice into ethic, in preference to a search for abstract truth and reason. But much was metaphysical, Harrison’s objection to ‘‘the limited range of empiricism.’’ ‘‘The philosophy of true British growth . . . is that which ‘inaugurates Common Sense on the throne of Philosophy’ [this was Coleridge’s phrase], restricts her own domain to the observation of the actions of the mind, regards all ontology . . . as an irremediable chaos . . . authorizes faith in no dogma which cannot be subjected either to experiment or observation for the purposes of induction, and encourages the pursuit only of such inquiries as lead to practical, sensible results.’’ Instead of being influenced by Stewart’s disregard for the Germans, Harrison was rather influenced by Friedrich von Schlegel’s contempt for Scottish philosophy, which was (as Harrison paraphrased Schlegel) ‘‘a paltry, mechanical art, rather than a science.’’ However, Harrison was much clearer on what was wrong with the British school than he was on what was right with the Germans, except in indicating that they retained a broader ambition for metaphysics, that they were not turning away from the pursuit of, in Coleridge’s words, ‘‘the science of ultimate truths,’’ and that there was a domain of reason beyond empiricism.110 During the 1830s, a greater awareness of the German philosophers grew, piecemeal, in the South. Lieber, for one thing, brought some command of the subject to Columbia. When in Boston and trying to make a living, he had edited the Encyclopedia Americana, which had been in part a translation of the seventh edition of the Conversations-Lexicon, the encyclopedia published by Brockhaus in Germany; in it were several articles on German philoso110. JBH, ‘‘English Civilization,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 463, 484, 472, 475, 480, 478, 479.

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phy. In the 1850s, Lieber was to place a bust of Kant in his Columbia lecture room, along with others of Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe, and Luther. His Manual of Political Ethics (1838) contains several flattering references to Kant ‘‘the great philosopher,’’ some quotations, and a brief characterization of Kant’s standpoint: ‘‘The fundamental moral law Kant calls, in his philosophical system, the categoric imperative, because it demands without proof, and every intelligent being must acknowledge its necessity, the justness of the demand.’’ There are also some dissents from Kant’s ethical views, and a marked dissatisfaction with Kant’s writing on perpetual peace which, Lieber said, ‘‘belongs certainly to the weaker productions of that philosopher.’’ 111 In each case, Lieber seems to have relied upon an 1838 Leipzig edition of Kant’s writings. Elsewhere in the book, though Lieber used German authors extensively, they were more often historians like Arnold Heeren, Leopold von Ranke, and Friedrich von Raumer, and very seldom were they philosophers. Yet Lieber’s subject matter, the ethical relationship between the individual and the state, lay squarely within the preoccupations of the German philosophical tradition and at least suggested some nods towards Hegelianism and its forebears. But Lieber relied more upon the British philosophical tradition, more commonly referred to Hobbes, Harrington, Locke, and Hume (as a political thinker) than to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all of whom are silent in his book. This is less surprising, when one remembers that Lieber was doggedly Anglophile, or sympathetic to the ‘‘Anglican’’ as he oddly liked to call the English tradition. And Kant, like Hume, wrote on matters of political philosophy in ways and on occasions that were at some distance from the complexities of his metaphysics, and this Kant was often better known than the philosopher of pure reason.112 Thomas Dew, for example, in his Digest, cites Kant only for his opinions about the revival of classical literature in Italy.113 Yet Lieber did seem elsewhere to have grappled a little with Hegel. In an 1834 letter to Karl Mittermaier, he observed, ‘‘The idea of a Constitutional Government, and of liberty founded on firm laws, has never been understood by Prussia. Hegel has done infinite harm to the cause of science. Instead of earnest, thoughtful investigation, and a discreet acknowledgement of previ111. Frank Friedel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal (1947; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968), 63–81; FL to Anna Ticknor, 14 December 1855, FL Papers, HEH; FL, Manual of Political Ethics, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1838–39), 1:49, 2:82, 88, 653. 112. There is some discussion of metaphysical issues in FL, Political Ethics, 1:1–101, but not subtly. 113. Thomas R. Dew, A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations (New York: D. Appleton, 1853), 426.

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ous experience he is full of arrogance and presumption.’’ And there are fragmentary notes among his Columbia papers, that date from the late 1830s and early 1840s, which deal with German philosophy. Again, they express more dissatisfaction than pleasure at the German contribution. One from 1838 tries to argue that there needed to be a middle ground between English utilitarianism and German idealism, if there was to be an ‘‘instauration of philosophy.’’ ‘‘Germans & English in the extreme,’’ they begin, ‘‘the former have not yet learned that absolute knowledge is impossible, and that absolute distinction, absolute definition &c &c is impossible; the latter are not yet beyond the poor happiness principle—utility.’’ Elsewhere in these jottings, he complains about utilitarianism as demeaning to human nobility and constricting, and holds Bacon responsible for much of this narrowness. In a second fragment from 1841, entitled ‘‘German Philosophy,’’ he observes that ‘‘the German philosophers commit the same error as the Hindoos, or ancients, or realists, namely that they embody general ideas into entities. . . . [W]e must not forget that personifications are figures not realities, and generalizations in each mind receive a common name, but this is no entity. . . . [S]o with institutions, with History. Gott lebt in der Geschichte. This is true if properly understood, but it seems that if we first abstract History, then imagine the geist der Geschichte as an independent entity and finally say Gott ist die Geschichte, as Hegel, I think says, and further consider each historic action or every action, great or small, as only a concrete manifestation of this Geist, I cannot see there is an difference between this and the mentioned case of the Hindoos.’’ That is, both had the habit of turning particularities into generalities and personifying them as gods.114 In general, Lieber leaned here towards materialism. He thought that philosophy would only be effective when it had developed a ‘‘strict and cogent Critique of the Human Mind,’’ based on ‘‘all the discoveries in the province of physiology.’’ What was needed was ‘‘a Humboldt and Descartes with a good dose of Anglicism, all in one person.’’ There should be less of German ‘‘floating in the air,’’ but less also of ‘‘English narrowness and so called common sense talking.’’ A third undated fragment sharpens his complaint against Hegel: ‘‘German philosophers, especially Hegel, very frequently found their reasonings upon distinctions arising out of words, and not, necessarily, out of different ideas’’ and that this habit partly arose from the structure and potentialities of the German language.115 So Lieber brought an awareness of German philosophy more than he 114. FL to Karl Mittermaier, 13 September 1834; ‘‘Restauratio tertia: Organum novum,’’ dated ‘‘Columbia, S.C., March 1, 1838,’’ and ‘‘German Philosophy,’’ dated ‘‘Columbia, S.C., January 1841, all in FL Papers, HEH. 115. ‘‘German Philosophy’’ and ‘‘Philosophy,’’ Mss in FL Papers, HEH.

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brought an advocacy of it, but he certainly gave an impulse to a Southern willingness to roam through European philosophical traditions. It was through Lieber that Preston came to discuss Kant’s relevance to the copyright matter. Nor was it an accident that Thornwell, who uncomfortably shared a campus with Lieber, and that James Warley Miles, who studied with Lieber, sharpened their inquiries into German philosophy during the 1840s and 1850s, just at the moment that Holmes did likewise. Of these three, the spectrum from the least to the most Germanic ran from Holmes through Thornwell to Miles, and one is inclined to put Lieber somewhere after Holmes, but before even the later Thornwell. Lieber himself observed of Miles that ‘‘I have never seen so Germanic an American; he is ten times more a German than I am, or I am ten times more an American than he is.’’ 116 By the mid-1840s, references to German philosophy had become common in Southern discourse.117 So, in 1844, M. R. H. Garnett in reviewing Heeren’s histories of the ancient world could observe, casually: ‘‘In the healthy mind, the will is in accordance with its dictates; or, to embrace a useful distinction of the German metaphysicians, and one which is becoming more and more familiar to English literature, we might say, that the will coincides with and submits to the reason, and manifests itself through the understanding.’’ This much vocabulary, no doubt, one could glean from Coleridge, who understood the German tradition as mostly intellectual and abstract, but Mary Elizabeth Lee, both a reader and translator of German literature, in 1845 saw beyond Coleridge to grasp that the Germans had passion, too. German literature, she said, had become ‘‘nearly indispensable to the reputation of those who move in our literary circles.’’ More important, the Germans had deep emotion: ‘‘Their philosophy is of an eminently spiritual order, and there is a world of sensibility in their writings.’’ Coleridge had begun to seem old hat, when a second edition of the Biographia Literaria appeared in 1847, and it could be observed that what made the book inaccessible in 1817—its preoccupation with ‘‘certain preludes and hints of a system of metaphysics, rather startling, very German and altogether incomprehensible’’—no longer did so. ‘‘German metaphysics were more of a bugbear then than they are now, and if the English public have not yet learned to believe that Kant was the perfection of all philosophy, they have at least ceased to regard him as the embodiment of all evil.’’ 118 In 1847, too, even a discussion of American literature, even reviewing men as homespun as Rufus Griswold and Alexander Beaufort 116. FL to George Ticknor, 14 March 1853, FL Papers, HEH. 117. For example ‘‘Critical Notices—Fichte,’’ SQR 10 (July 1846): 253–54. 118. M. R. H. Garnett, ‘‘Relations of the Ancient World,’’ SQR 5 (January 1844): 185; Mary Elizabeth Lee, ‘‘Works of Wilhelm Hauff,’’ SQR 7 (January 1845): 197; ‘‘Critical Notices— Coleridge’s Literary Life,’’ SQR 13 (April 1848): 527.

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Meek, was thought to require a long and informed disquisition on Kant and Hegel, Jacobi and Fichte, if only by way of protecting the minds of ‘‘the young student . . . against the dangerous reasonings and conclusions, with which this philosophy abounds.’’ 119 Sarah Grimké’s fragment on women’s education, probably written around 1850, begins with a quotation from Fichte. In 1859, even a gentleman delivering an address to a Female Institute in Virginia could feel at ease in alluding to ‘‘the sublime speculations of Kant.’’ 120 Nonetheless, much of this familiarity, for most people, remained at second or third hand. But they were fed by those few who grappled with the originals. Some of these were Southerners, but many not. By the late 1840s, modern German philosophy was old enough that there were scholarly histories to which to turn. Victor Cousin himself, of course, habitually surveyed the history of philosophy and, as was said in 1857, ‘‘Everybody in America, now speaks rather knowingly of M. Cousin.’’ 121 There was John Morell’s Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1846), which, however much Holmes and others found it wanting, was a guidebook for the layman. Later, there was Albert Schwegler’s History of Philosophy in Epitome, translated from the German into English in 1850, though even more reprobated than Morell, if not for superficiality, at least for cheap partisanship. But a great role was played by the translations of modern German writers, including philosophers, published by Henry Bohn in London and much pirated in the United States from the late 1830s onwards. From the Bohn list alone, one could readily read not only Goethe and Schiller, but the Schlegel brothers, Ranke, Johann Neander, and Alexander von Humboldt. Yet it is significant that, though there were earlier English translations of Kant, his Critique of Pure Reason (in J. M. D. Meiklejohn’s translation) did not reach the Bohn list until 1855 and John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Philosophy of History until 1857. Holmes in 1852 seems to have been reading his Kant in a French translation. Though Thornwell in 1853 was carefully studying Kant 119. ‘‘American Literature,’’ 166–67. The author of this seems to have read German (plus Greek, French, and Latin), for he quotes Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Kant from German editions (138, 155); his last acknowledges reliance upon Heinrich Moritz Chalybacus’s Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy from Kant to Hegel (Dresden and Leipzig, 1839), Schelling’s Lectures on Philosophy (Berlin, 1842), Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg’s Lectures on Philosophy (Berlin, 1842), and an unspecified book by a Professor Roth (perhaps Karl Johann Friedrich Roth), from Heidelberg, 1842. 120. Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays, ed. Elizabeth Ann Bartlett (1838; reprint, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 108; Alexander H. Sands, ‘‘Intellectual Culture of Woman,’’ SLM 28 (May 1859): 323. 121. ‘‘Dictionary of Philosophical Sciences,’’ SQR 2 n.s. 2 (February 1857): 340. The standard work was Victor Cousin, Course of the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. O. W. Wright (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1852), which was published by Appleton’s in New York in the same year.

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‘‘in the original,’’ his lectures on theology later in the decade have footnotes, not to a German edition, but to the Bohn version in English.122 So common had the Germans become by the 1850s, especially if you were educated in Columbia, that an undergraduate might chaff at the tedium of it all: Mrs. Boyce tells me, there is an article of Dr. Thornwell’s in [the last Southern Presbyterian Review], Germanish and Metaphysical, and begged me to read it, and let her know if I could peer through its Egyptian darkness. I told her, I had adopted a sure expedient for not getting my brains utterly bewildered when reading the incomprehensible jargon of the metaphysicians—and that was to get quietly down on my hands and knees and crawl along through all the mazes of their deceitful labyrinths, touching sure Mother Earth all the while. As long as one gropes thus, there is something to hold on by, but let him try to walk on his two feet only, and some will-o’the-wisps, the Hegels and Schellings and Kants, the Berkeleys and Bolingbrokes and Humes, will infallibly lead him into mires and gins and pitfalls. I have a great contempt for the present Germanic tendency of our best thinking minds, and am afraid all who have dabbled in the waters of German lore have more or less tainted the healthy, English flow of their native-born fountains of thought. It is the fashion of this day, started by Coleridge and DeQuincey, and like all fashions, I suppose, will die the death in good time. Elsewhere, the same young man deprecated Germanic tendencies in his fellow students: ‘‘Buist came in after awhile and introduced the subject of Metaphysics largely. Reading some of the German metaphysicians lately has completely muddled his wak [sic] head, and he discourses profusely on such topics even in ladies’ society.’’ Benjamin Morgan Palmer was to tell a story of Thornwell having mentioned the Critique of Pure Reason in a lecture and a student being moved to buy a translation: ‘‘After puzzling over it for a night, and finding that it spake nothing to him, he sold it at a discount to another student; and thus it passed in quick succession to several owners, finally at less than half the cost. Dr. Thornwell enjoyed the story hugely.’’ 123 Part of this new awareness of German philosophy arose because the theo122. GFH, ‘‘Morell’s Philosophy’’; Tyler, ‘‘History of Philosophy,’’ is a review of Schwegler; GFH, ‘‘Faith and Science—Comte’s Positive Philosophy [Second Paper],’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 4 (April 1852): 183; JHT to Thomas E. Peck, 15 April 1853, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 373; Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:61. 123. Charles Woodward Hutson to Mother, ‘‘Wednesday in Apr. 1860’’ and a second undated, Charles W. Hutson Papers, SCL; Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 569.

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logians were fretted by a growing sense that the Higher Criticism of the Bible posed (what was understood to be) a pantheist and agnostic challenge to Revelation, and that this threat was significantly related to German metaphysics. Turning back the challenge obliged an engagement with the Germans; refutation brought them to life. Another part was that Coleridge as a sponsor of the Germans had been succeeded by Thomas Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus was an eccentric tour through the issues of transcendentalism. A further part, connected to both the foregoing, was that New England had developed an indigenous American sponsorship of transcendentalism and many Southerners kept a wary eye on intellectual developments to the north. For example, in the Southern Quarterly Review of 1842, someone reviewed the Dial, not unsympathetically, and drew these themes together in a few sentences. It was observed that the Transcendentalists were unsympathetic to Locke and preferred instead a philosophy of innate ideas: ‘‘They insist that this material philosophy, as they term it [Locke’s], is sceptical and atheistical in its tendencies, and that nothing but the deepest and overmastering piety of its founder prevented him from being the victim of his own errors. The tendencies of the more spiritual philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Coleridge and Cousin, of the Transcendental School, may not appear in the sequel, as we believe, to be any more favorable to the claims, either of natural or revealed religion.’’ Someone else in 1847 noticed the same Germanic importations into Boston and Concord and thought the New Englanders had missed the point, not only because their study of German philosophy was ‘‘so slight and imperfect, as scarcely to deserve notice, except in terms of condemnation,’’ but because they were trying to import wholesale, too exuberantly, a philosophy that needed to ‘‘be adopted with discrimination, with judgment.’’ 124 Thornwell and Miles represent the two poles of those who seriously engaged German philosophy, the former polemically negative, the latter elegantly appreciative. On the whole, more in the South stood with Thornwell than with Miles, though not often with Thornwell’s subtle rigor. In the Southern Presbyterian Review for 1850, for example, somebody took care to enumerate ‘‘objections to the German Transcendental Philosophy.’’ These were the familiar objections, made distinctive only by the author’s cunningly drawing upon German sources, for the Germans notoriously objected to themselves. These failings were enumerated under six headings. First was ‘‘acknowledged obscurity.’’ For this, predictably Dugald Stewart was quoted, but also Kant himself (‘‘I . . . [must] write a commentary on my own works’’) and Herder (the Critique of Pure Reason is ‘‘a fog of fine spun verbiage, calculated, by means of dialectical sorcery, to confound the very implement of reason, namely, lan124. ‘‘Transcendentalism,’’ SQR 2 (October 1842): 446; ‘‘American Literature,’’ 146.

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guage’’). Second, ‘‘it rests on no fixed and sure foundations,’’ being ‘‘fluctuating, self-contradictory, and [conveying] no certainty or satisfaction to reasonable minds.’’ Third, it proceeded on a ‘‘false mental analysis’’ and misunderstood mental faculties, for there was no useful distinction between the understanding and reason. Fourth, it was ‘‘a system of philosophical scepticism,’’ which by abjuring ‘‘the objective, the sensuous, the material’’ and turning inward to the ideal denied the reality of God’s creation, its objective concreteness. Fifth, philosophical skepticism had given rise to religious skepticism. God was to Fichte ‘‘the moral order of the universe,’’ to Schelling ‘‘the universe itself,’’ to Hegel ‘‘the whole process of human thought,’’ to Feuerbach ‘‘the mere invention of our reason.’’ Hence German philosophy led, at worst, to atheism and only at best to pantheism. Heine was quoted, triumphantly, as having said in 1835: ‘‘Germany is at present the fertile soil of Pantheism. That is the religion of all our greatest thinkers, of all our best artists. You do not hear it spoken of, but every one knows it. Pantheism is the public secret of Germany. We have, in fact, outgrown Deism.’’ The Higher Criticism was turning the Bible into a book like other books, a mere fable, a philological playpen. Sixth, transcendentalism was impractical, for being fatalistic, opposed to the freedom of the will, even as it puffed up intellectual and spiritual pride. By way of summary and rejection, the reviewer quoted from Fichte himself, as though this proved his case: ‘‘There is absolutely nothing permanent, either without me, or within me, but only an unceasing change. I know absolutely nothing of any existence, not even my own. . . . Images there are. . . . I am myself one of these images; nay, I am not even so much, but only a confused image of images.’’ 125 The philosophy of the Scotch doctors had been, on the whole, static. Common sense and mental faculties were ahistorical, fixed everywhere in human nature. This was a point of sympathy with Baconianism. But flux, historically understood, was the vision of most German philosophy, though the Germans also struggled to find a still point in the chaos. Most Southerners looked elsewhere for their still points, though some came to realize that a Calvinist God could prove as hard to fix as a Hegelian Absolute. Even James Smith Rhett of Charleston, who dabbled in Kant and much garbled him, managed to persuade himself that Kant had demonstrated that, in the mind, the flux of time comes to a halt. Yet not everyone found ‘‘unceasing change’’ so repellent. Many were growing acutely conscious of it; a few even liked it. James Warley Miles, in the midst of the Civil War, told the 1863 graduating class of the College of Charleston that ‘‘[m]ovement is the great law of the universe.’’ 126 125. ‘‘Objections to the German Transcendental Philosophy,’’ Southern Presbyterian Review 4 (January 1851): 328–31, 334–35, 337, 342. 126. James Smith Rhett, ‘‘Miles’s Philosophic Theology,’’ SQR n.s. 1 (April 1850): 123–45,

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Somebody, perhaps Miles himself, wrote in 1857 for the Southern Quarterly Review a sophisticated and sympathetic analysis of Friedrich Schelling, based on original and secondary German sources, and in it provided an acute understanding of the issues posed and debated by German philosophy. The article contrived to understand—this came more naturally in approaching the Scots —that even the Germans had a fractured tradition, that the philosophers of mutability had themselves mutated. Schelling’s early philosophy was summarized, with an awareness of the fundamental issue of change: ‘‘The whole of nature is one organism, a perpetual process of production; the individual is but a part of one living whole, and the whole proceeds through successive individuals in a course of developement according to the laws of its own life; the ‘soul of the world’ is manifested in the powers, forms, and series of the inorganic and organic matter.’’ And, of Hegel, the reviewer said: ‘‘By a violent fiction, he introduced into the abstract idea of absolute Being, a principle of movement—identifying the logical process with the real development, not distinguishing between the logical possibility and real activities, and making creation itself to be the idea ‘falling away from itself.’’’ 127 Process, successive, development, dynamically, movement, these were the words that denoted a sympathy with the principles of German philosophy, and connoted that some Southerners had grasped that more was at stake in German thought than a parallel to Reid’s refutation of Hume’s Pyrrhonism. Hence a basic reason why Thornwell, even if he was aware that life had ‘‘countless contingencies and diversified occasions,’’ refused the German option was his inability to concede that all changed, especially to grant that moral truth was historically conditioned. At one point, Thornwell quoted ‘‘Carlyle’s theory, borrowed from Hegel’’: ‘‘ ‘Every man is to a great extent the creature of his age. . . . Whether he will or not, he must be a man of the nineteenth century. He shares in all the motion of the moral as well as in that of physical world.’ ’’ For Thornwell, this was intolerable, for it implied that ‘‘natural theology is a progressive science.’’ ‘‘Truth,’’ he wished to believe, ‘‘could hardly be a unit if it were being disturbed by the addition of new truth not harmonizing with that already existing.’’ Man, to the contrary, progressed only by coming ‘‘to know and to obey moral laws that are older than the laws of nature.’’ Thornwell certainly saw man as ‘‘a being of motion,’’ but that motion led him to ‘‘truths that lie outside of him.’’ 128 No one believing this could sympathize with German philosophy. esp. 143; JWM, God in History: A Discourse Delivered before the Graduating Class of the College of Charleston on Sunday Evening, March 29, 1863 (Charleston, S.C.: Evans & Cogswell, 1863), 20. 127. ‘‘Philosophy of Schelling,’’ SQR 2 n.s. 2 (February 1857): 380, 385. It should be added that this piece sympathizes with the later Schelling, who turned towards Roman Catholicism and away from ‘‘pantheism.’’ 128. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 2:483; JHT, ‘‘Test of Truth,’’ 476, 481.

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In examining the relationship between the South and German philosophy, the St. Louis Hegelians are worth mentioning, though their pertinence is elusive. With the exception of a slightly earlier set in Cincinnati led by John B. Stallo, the Missourians were the first Americans to arrive at a systematic appreciation of Hegel. Southerners seem to have been mostly oblivious of the Cincinnati group. Only George Frederick Holmes read J. B. Stallo’s General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature with an Outline of Some of Its Recent Developments Among the Germans, Embracing the Philosophical Systems of Schelling and Hegel, and Oken’s System of Nature (1848). And Holmes was dismissive: ‘‘Mr. Stallo . . . some years since offered himself to the American people as the expositor of the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling, and invited them to disport themselves in the nebulous labyrinths in which he had lost himself.’’ 129 Frederick Grimke, however, once of Charleston but then chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, did express to Stallo his admiration for the book and seems to have traveled to Cincinnati to meet him. Indeed, earlier, Grimke had showed some curiosity about German thought in an 1838 letter to Hugh Legaré, in which he confessed to not yet having read Kant.130 In that Ohio group, however, was the Virginian Moncure Daniel Conway, though his sympathies with German thought were mostly born of time spent in New England, where he became something of a disciple of Emerson. Still, Conway partly came to transcendental sympathies by reading Coleridge and Carlyle while still in Virginia, and these were familiar enough texts in Southern discourse.131 St. Louis was in a slave state, was often held to be Southern, and one might consider the city’s Hegelians as consistent with a growing Southern understanding of German thought. Denton J. Snider, a founding member of the movement and its first historian, who was himself born in Ohio of Southern parents, considered that the group had been formed by the ‘‘four elements of St. Louis,’’ and these had been the Roman Catholics, the New Englanders, the Germans, and the Southerners. And the bruising issue of slavery and freedom, so crystallized in Missouri, deeply informed their debates over Hegel. ‘‘The time was calling out for First Principles,’’ Snider remembered. ‘‘The Civil War had just concluded, in which we all had in some way participated, and we were still overwhelmed, even dazed partially by the grand historic appearance. What does it all mean? was quite the universal question.’’ Wrangling 129. Loyd D. Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 44; GFH, ‘‘The Positive Religion: Or, Religion of Humanity,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 6 (July 1854): 344; Frederick Grimke to HSL, 18 May 1838, HSL Papers in the Harry L. and Mary K. Dalton Collection, DU; GFH, ‘‘Positive Religion,’’ 344. 130. On this, see Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers, 44; Frederick Grimke to HSL, 18 May 1838, HSL Papers in the Harry L. and Mary K. Dalton Collection, DU. 131. John d’Entremont, Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway, the American Years, 1832–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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over the metaphysics of constitutionality and federalism had been especially formative.132 Yet most of the relevant history lies beyond the boundary of this book: though debates began in 1858, the St. Louis Philosophical Society was not founded until 1866 and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1867. And there is more to be said for the view that the movement arose, mostly, from the confluence of expatriate New Englanders and Germans.133 Harris was by origin a New Englander, a Yale man, much influenced by the local version of transcendentalism. Brokmeyer was a German immigrant who, though he taught in Kentucky for a while in the 1840s, studied at Brown University before going to Missouri in 1854. Those in St. Louis were less informed about Southern intellectual discourse than New England’s, and so St. Louis was more in the New England and German intellectual diaspora than the South Carolinian and Virginian. Nonetheless, St. Louis was a fairly typical Southern city of the 1850s and 1860s, not very dissimilar from New Orleans, and had the usual features, a large immigrant population, an admixture of migrants from elsewhere in the United States, a cultural life that favored clubs and societies. In particular, the city had what Snider identified as ‘‘the Great St. Louis Illusion,’’ ‘‘the doctrine of the future supremacy of St. Louis,’’ against which his Hegelians dialectically struggled.134 This hubris had been J. D. B. De Bow’s, too. Nothing that happened in St. Louis was unexpected for a Southern city: its liminality was indigenous. George Frederick Holmes’s response to Stallo was typical of the former’s later thought, which was itself emblematic of those Southerners who had examined the German option and found it wanting, and then turned towards the French. Even as a young man, Holmes had been impatient with metaphysics, even that of non-Germans.135 In the 1840s, he was little interested in Hume, Reid, and the matters they raised. He was, he observed in 1842, 132. Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Literature, Education, Psycholo , with Chapters of Autobiography (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1920), 17–24, 27, 191. 133. See, for example, Henry A. Pochmann, New England Transcendentalists and St. Louis Hegelianism (Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1948), which leans to the New England model; William H. Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), leans to the Western. 134. Goetzmann, American Hegelians, 7; Snider, St. Louis Movement, 76–77. 135. In 1853, when he was making more of metaphysics and logic, Holmes stressed how badly they were taught in college. ‘‘A brief abridgment of Scotch psychology, which bears about the same relation to metaphysical science that a tadpole does to a crocodile, is nearly all that is ordinarily pretended to be taught of the latter.’’ GFH, ‘‘Sir William Hamilton’s Discussions,’’ SQR n.s. 8 (October 1853): 330; see also GFH, ‘‘Morell’s Philosophy,’’ 396, which hints at a greater appreciation of the dialectical.

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George Frederick Holmes (Courtesy University of Mississippi)

‘‘nearly as sceptical as Jefferson, Broussais or Dr. Cooper, of the utility of metaphysics,’’ for he believed ‘‘that there is nothing which has debauched so many minds, and poisoned so many well-springs of knowledge, as Psychology or Transcendental Metaphysics, and that there is nothing, which in itself is so utterly useless, as what is ordinarily spoken of, we will not say understood, by the name of metaphysics.’’ Rather, without much more than identifying the problem, Holmes asserted ‘‘that we are in no way authorised to assume the existence of any power, property or faculty in our own natures, diverse from those whose existence is palpable and self-evident, but are bound to confine ourselves in all our speculations to material influences.’’ 136 This was not because there might not be spirituality or immateriality in matters of mind, but these qualities were indeterminate, so it was best to stick to materiality. By the same token, though ‘‘cause and effect, are, as Hume, Brown, and Stewart have already conclusively demonstrated, nothing more than the uniform antecedence and sequence of the same phenomena,’’ nonetheless a 136. GFH, ‘‘Whewell,’’ 210, 213, 215.

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man must rely upon the inferences of experience. Thus Holmes then did not deny the force of Humean skepticism, he merely found it unprofitable.137 Like most of those formed in the Scottish tradition, Thornwell was convinced that such problems had to be insistently confronted if any progress, metaphysical or otherwise, was to be made. But Holmes, like many who were younger than Thornwell—George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes come to mind—was first inclined to find these problems a blind alley and then to feel the need for a fresh start. For them, hankering after final causes was unfruitful and led only to ‘‘dogmatism and hypothesis.’’ 138 There was little in Holmes’s background and life that suggested finality. His father had been Judge Advocate of British military forces in Demarara and Essequebo. Unfortunately, Henry Holmes had spent more than he earned and, upon his early death in 1830, the assets of his estate totaled almost £11,000, while his debts in British Guiana amounted to £64,000, plus other sums in England. Hence his widow, Maryanne, and his son, then ten, were obliged to live upon the charity of an aunt in northeastern England. The younger Holmes graduated from the University of Durham, but came to Canada in 1837, moved on briefly to Virginia, lived in South Carolina for a few years in the 1840s, and thereafter (apart from a brief and disastrous tenure as president of the University of Mississippi) stayed mostly in Virginia, in Williamsburg, where he taught at the College of William and Mary, at Burk’s Garden, where he rusticated in the far mountains, in Richmond for a stint at Richmond College, and eventually in Charlottesville, where he was a professor from 1857.139 He began to write when very young. He was just twenty-two when he started publishing and might be said to have conducted his education in the Southern periodicals. So it is not surprising that in 1842, he was much impressed that old ideas had worn out. Unlike Thornwell, Holmes was drawn to the historicist solution to metaphysical problems. He repudiated the ‘‘placid indifference’’ of Montaigne, that consummate anti-historicist,140 and urged instead ‘‘a new revolution.’’ ‘‘All philosophy, speculative and practical, has been thrown into the furnace, and the ferment is now in progress, which will effect its transmutation.’’ 141 Societies were crumbling, church and state were 137. Later, when he had turned to Catholicism, Holmes became harsh towards Hume: see GFH, ‘‘Hume’s Philosophy,’’ SR 9 (July 1872): 92–120; GFH, ‘‘Hume’s Philosophy,’’ SR 9 (October 1872): 309–36 (this was substantially written in 1856, according to Gillespie, Collapse of Orthodoxy, 104). 138. GFH, ‘‘Whewell,’’ 230. 139. Gillespie, Collapse of Orthodoxy, 3–6, and passim. 140. On this, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 141. GFH, ‘‘Whewell,’’ 194.

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assaulted, science challenged, and literature renewed. One must think anew, one must act. So, at first, Holmes leaned towards those who were briskly active on the side of the future, to Jules Michelet and Auguste Comte, until he himself began to age and the problem of eternity began to press upon him. The Germans, however innovative their philosophy, were too conservative socially for Holmes. Moreover, Holmes was deeply committed to synthesis, to bringing together ‘‘ ‘disjecta membra’ ’’ into an organic and living whole. By itself, this would not have foreclosed the German philosophical tradition for him, for who was more committed to the love and pursuit of the Absolute than the Germans? Indeed, for this reason, Holmes gave them a try. In turn, during the early and mid-1840s, Holmes looked at Johann von Herder, Friedrich von Schlegel, and German classical scholarship, only to find them much wanting. They seemed too much disordered—Herder drove Holmes to distraction on this score—too aware of the elements of synthesis, too anxious to remind one of its constituent and dialectical parts for Holmes’s taste. Rather, he wanted a scheme that was cleaner, freer of doubt. ‘‘The progress of the world has not been brought about by loose, blind, and disconnected efforts,’’ he liked to think; ‘‘its advance has been in one connected chain, each link of which has been formed in obedience to certain fixed laws.’’ This was not exactly optimism. Man alone, isolated, with his ‘‘undying hope and restless energy, seems purposeless and blind,’’ trapped in gloom, possessed only of ‘‘hollow semblances, empty accidentals, which the grave will strip from him.’’ In ‘‘man’s social existence’’ was some hope, though its ‘‘vast web, whose meshes are woven around us, [is] in apparently inextricable confusion,’’ and in such a maze it was easy to be lost. But the effort must be made, the thing fashioned, and the fashioners of order ought to be honored. Man needed light, but the Germans brought darkness by their language, their obscurity. This had been Edwin DeLeon’s impression, too: ‘‘The researches of the German philosophers . . . are rendered useless to the great majority of persons, by being locked up in a peculiar jargon, unintelligible to the uninitiated, and varying with each particular system.’’ In truth, with his antipathy to metaphysics, Holmes could not quite grasp what the Germans, especially Kant, were about. ‘‘We do not know what may be the opinions of our readers upon the philosophical writings of Kant . . . but we must candidly declare, that to us they are the most incomprehensible farrago of hyper-metaphysical reveries that we have met with even in Israel.’’ Fichte? ‘‘Incomprehensible.’’ ‘‘We . . . renounce the inquiry in absolute despair.’’ Between ‘‘the timid range of Scotch empiricism’’ and ‘‘the arrogant and blighting pretensions of German transcendentalists,’’ where was one to look? 142 142. GFH, ‘‘Schlegel’s Philosophy of History,’’ SQR 3 (April 1843): 316–17; GFH, ‘‘Herder’s Philosophy of History,’’ SQR 5 (April 1844): 272, 273; EDL, ‘‘England under Seven Adminis-

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On the whole, to France. Not to Victor Cousin and eclecticism, which Holmes once dismissed as an ‘‘olla podrida (which is not Philosophy),’’ and ‘‘a pure stagnation of the creative intellect . . . a diligent brooding upon addled eggs on the hope of a living progeny,’’ whose only merit was to encourage a historical sense about philosophy and philosophers, to encourage a reading of the original texts. Nonetheless, ‘‘the History of Philosophy is not Philosophy itself.’’ Yet it is notable that, in turning towards and trying to master the issues raised by Auguste Comte, Holmes learned some patience with metaphysics, indeed no little sophistication in his own scholarly, lumbering, digressive way. Partly, he was driven to this by an awareness that modern philosophy threatened religion. Unlike many others, his response was not to dismiss that philosophy, but with painstaking care to reexamine the issues. Holmes always wrote with a sense that, if he could not honestly demonstrate the cogency of Christianity, he would forego it, but that there was a solemn duty to ‘‘strain every nerve to establish that reconciliation between religion and philosophy which has been asserted to be impossible.’’ 143 In general, Holmes’s sympathies were Aristotelian, his Aristotle being recast in modern terms, for Holmes saw ancient Greek philosophy as having rehearsed the problems vexing his own time. The Eleatics (especially Parmenides) were ‘‘the Hegelians and Schellingists of our own day,’’ for arguing that ‘‘the certainty of human knowledge’’ lay ‘‘in the identity of the world and mind, and in the constant hypostasis and revelation of the Deity harmoniously in the spheres of matter and of intellect.’’ Protagoras’s empiricism was that of the French Encyclopedistes, for making man the measure of all things. Hippias was the ancient Victor Cousin, for being skeptical. Plato was ‘‘analogous to the theories of those moderns who attempt to deduce the certainty of our knowledge from the supposed existence of universal and necessary truths.’’ And Aristotle was the critic of them all, who showed that Platonic forms were but indemonstrable assumptions, that the Eleatic identity of mind and matter ‘‘transcended the legitimate limits of human speculation,’’ and that the Sophists had vitiated the possibility of truth and knowledge. Aristotle, instead, had sought ‘‘to establish philosophy principally on the basis of the senses; but he recognized, at the same time, the impossibility of drawing certitude from this source, and referred the certainty of human knowledge to the forms in which it was perceived by the mind, and to those indemonstrable principles, which are evidenced by the common belief and the common sense of mankind, and which constitute the necessary basis of all reasoning.’’ Hence trations,’’ SQR 8 (October 1845): 484; GFH, ‘‘Thimm’s Book,’’ SQR 11 (January 1847): 102–3; GFH, ‘‘Hamilton’s Discussions,’’ 296. 143. GFH, ‘‘Morell’s Philosophy,’’ 385, 388, 389; GFH, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ 187.

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Aristotle was the ancient forebear of Francis Bacon, even ‘‘the undeveloped type of that of Kant’’ the practical reasoner.144 Holmes seems to have regarded these issues as perennial, as being recast at different times (the Middle Ages, the early modern period) in different philosophical languages. For the modern era, he inclined to see the Scots, ‘‘however paradoxical it may appear,’’ as Platonic, the Eclectics as Alexandrian. By 1851, he had arrived at a sharper appreciation of Kant, who had ‘‘referred all knowledge to the inexplicable co-operation of sensible influences and intellectual processes, assigned to the mind the formal part in all perception and reasoning, and thus rendered certitude purely relative to the individual intellect.’’ But Holmes also respected the contribution of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the pietist critic of the Aufklarung, who had contended that irrationalism was also a practical necessity.145 Or, as Holmes put it, Jacobi had ‘‘denied any intelligible foundation for the certainty of our knowledge, or for the construction of a metaphysical system, referring our practical convictions of truth to the irresolvable function of belief, which he regarded as a primitive property of our being.’’ Holmes did not dismiss the prospect of progress in the philosophy of mind, but he inclined to think that much had been done in overanxious haste, with much confusion and vague distinguishing. Instead, he offered his own version of how things worked. By our senses, we see ‘‘simple facts’’ directly, but the mind fashions these into patterns ‘‘according to the laws of the mind itself.’’ So all knowledge is ‘‘relative to the human apprehension,’’ and it is impossible to have ‘‘a nice estimation of the objective and subjective factors which have co-operated.’’ In the confusions of dualism, cause is inexplicable. We know there is something beyond self and distinctions within self, but we cannot explain what. This ignorance is ‘‘the great postulate on which all philosophy and knowledge must rest,’’ and most philosophical schools had found terms to confess it, as in ‘‘the indemonstrable principles of Aristotle, the intuitions a priori of Kant, the fundamental principles of belief of the Scotch school, the belief of Jacobi, and the consciousness of Reinhold.’’ The reality of the world cannot be demonstrated by the mind; ‘‘the mind cannot go out of itself—cannot transcend its own laws and conditions, which it needs must do if it could examine, with any prospect of a definite result, into the certainty, as established by logical proof, of the existence of either matter or mind.’’ Indeed, it would not help to demonstrate that mind 144. GFH, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ 188–90. 145. The modern proponent of Jacobi’s importance is Isaiah Berlin: see Isaiah Berlin, ‘‘Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,’’ in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (1979; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 162–87; and Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1993).

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or matter is real, for only proof of the reality of both would cut the Gordian knot, make the dualistic conversation more than a postulate. The essences of mind and matter are beyond philosophy, and this was as true for materialists like Cabanis and Broussais as for idealists like Berkeley.146 Nonetheless men have beliefs, even certainties. These lie ‘‘beyond the absolute empire of the reason.’’ This, however, poses a problem, the necessity of steering between Scylla and Charybdis. Disbelieving in empiricism can sanction mysticisms indifferent to evidence, while dismissing the human capacity for error can lead to an overconfident positivism. In the modern era, the German Idealists ‘‘have overleapt the barriers of nature by assigning a positive character to the vague and incomprehensible, the Sensationalists have left the track as far on the other side by giving an exclusive character to the positive and comprehensible.’’ But the human mind contains ‘‘inseparably blended together, two elements, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, the definite and the vague,’’ both indispensable. This mongrel, however, though it cannot prove reality, assumes reality, for otherwise ‘‘we could neither reason nor act at all.’’ This being so, the problem of the modern era was that of ‘‘a satisfactory theory of practical and scientific limitations.’’ That is, one needed to judge which assumptions of reality were fruitful, which not.147 Thus, as Holmes admitted, he combined ‘‘together the doctrines of Kant and Jacobi,’’ practical reason with practical irrationalism.148 But Holmes wanted to go a step further, to find a place for Christianity ‘‘or religion in general’’ in this philosophy. Here he turned towards Thornwell’s solution, that the problem of religion and that of science were identical, that both rested on faith. More than Thornwell, however, Holmes recognized that without establishing the persuasiveness of this identity, religion was doomed: ‘‘If this discrepance be not disproved, and a valid ground of conciliation be not discovered, it is easy to see that religion must yield to science.’’ One could, of course, merely deny the force of scientific evidence. Catholic commentators had taken this line with Isaac Newton, just as ‘‘many of our orthodox evan146. GFH, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ 192–95. Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1758–1823) was the first significant popularizer of Kant; on this, see Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xiii, 326, 351–53, 378. 147. GFH, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ 199, 204, 205. 148. GFH, ‘‘Instauratio Nova—Auguste Comte,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 4 (July 1852): 338, observes, ‘‘We do not accept the philosophy of Kant without important modifications, nor admit the entire validity of his principles or the logical strictness of all his conclusion. But the Critique of Pure Reason is imperatively the primer to all adequate philosophical speculation in this age; and the latter half of it, devoted to the Transcendental Dialectics and Methodology, is of indispensable importance in determining the necessary imperfections and limitations of the human reason, and their causes.’’ It is notable that Holmes assimilated Kant to Aristotle, but dissevered him from his successors, ‘‘the poisonous slime of a spurious and seductive idealism’’ (ibid., 342).

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gelical divines’’ were doing the same with nineteenth-century science. Alternatively, one could negate ‘‘the religious principle of a supersensuous faith,’’ which was the solution of David Strauss. Or, like Comte, you could give up on religion altogether. None of these options seemed satisfactory to Holmes. He opted for something lower, not ‘‘first principles and truths which lie beyond the legitimate range of demonstration,’’ but using ‘‘as the basis of science those leading truths which our practice constantly and instinctively adopts.’’ So Holmes no longer dismissed metaphysics as an irrelevance, but saw it as necessary, though less for what it proved, more for what it reminded us was unprovable: ‘‘We cannot divest ourselves of its [metaphysics’] influence if we would.’’ But this also meant that metaphysics needed to be disciplined along Holmes’s line. This was a grudging but real concession to the relevance of metaphysics; ‘‘we have girded ourselves for the task, though unused, and ordinarily disinclined to such speculations.’’ 149 Holmes’s interest in Comte grew from this desire to reconcile science and religion, just as this desire had been partly formed by the interest. In this, Holmes was conscious of picking out a thinker whom the age had as yet little regarded, and in this Holmes was shrewd. It was true that William Whewell, John Herschel, and John Stuart Mill had praised Comte—and, as Holmes thought, Whewell might have plagiarized him—but these laudationes had been brief.150 Holmes’s own writings on Comte are early among those in the English-speaking world, and were certainly among the most thorough.151 His response to Comte, however, fell into two periods, before and after his reading of the Systéme de politique positive (1851–54), before and after Comte declared himself a prophet of a new religion of humanity. (In this Holmes was typical; Mill too came much to regret his earlier enthusiasm.)152 The earlier Comte, the author of the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), had been a scientific systematizer, a maker of patterns in history, a classifier of the hierarchies of human knowledge, all roles with which Holmes was deeply sympathetic. Hence Holmes was willing to regard Comte as the preeminent philosopher of the age, a thinker of immense range and capacity for synthesis, one ‘‘who 149. GFH, ‘‘Philosophy and Faith,’’ 207–10, 214, 216, 217. 150. GFH, ‘‘Faith and Science—Comte’s Positive Philosophy,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 4 (January 1852): 11–12. 151. Gillespie, Collapse of Orthodoxy, 123–24, notes the context of others’ responses. There had been some interest in Comte in New England from 1844 onwards, by Channing, Parker, Ripley, and Brownson. 152. On the reception of Comte, at least in Europe, see Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, trans. Sheila Gogol (1990; reprint, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 250–66. It is notable that Comte’s greatest influence was in Latin America; see Ralph Lee Woodward, Positivism in Latin America, 1850–1900: Are Order and Progress Reconcilable? (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1971) and Leopoldo Zea, Positivism in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974).

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stands next to Bacon among modern philosophers,’’ the most likely candidate to advance ‘‘the urgent necessity for a general intellectual regeneration,’’ the person who might remedy the faults of the age, ‘‘its total want of consistent principles, and the entire absence of anything like logical or philosophical sequence in its schemes, its practices, and its reasonings.’’ Above all, Comte might help to resist ‘‘the universal spirit of resistance to all authority, resulting in anarchy, political, social, and religious.’’ He might serve to resist turning science into commerce, the ‘‘mammonization’’ of intellect. The modern political convulsions of Europe, which might come to America, needed a new philosophy to ward off repetition. Comte knew the problem, the heart of the matter. Holmes honored his venture, felt indeed ‘‘a deep gratitude’’ for the Cours de philosophie positive, ‘‘the great and most valuable legacy which the first half of the nineteenth century has bequeathed to posterity.’’ System was necessary, because of ‘‘the universal distemperature of the times, which threatens to convert the human family into a pandemonium upon earth,’’ made intellect itself a disintegration.153 Yet, though Holmes honored Comte, the former so criticized positivism and at such a fundamental level that it is sometimes hard to see why Holmes honored Comte. In their correspondence, Comte himself was in little doubt that Holmes was ‘‘an adversary,’’ whose writings were ‘‘an attack.’’ 154 That Holmes was taken aback by this reproof and saw his criticisms as mere suggestiveness is evidence of a certain unworldliness in Holmes, an inability to see that many medium-sized criticisms have a way of adding up to a repudiation.155 Holmes disliked, for example, the ‘‘entire negation of logic and metaphysics . . . the absolute repudiation of all religious belief and the substitution of the adoration of a typical humanity for all forms of religious worship.’’ Though he was impressed with Comte’s attempt to see how patterns of human knowledge fitted together, how the theological, metaphysical, and positivist systems had evolved historically to form the new science of sociology, he was not sure that all was successive, that one system died utterly when another was born, but suspected that much survived and mingled. ‘‘The tendency of the human intellect is undoubtedly to render scientific all the conquests of reason which can be co-ordinated under general laws; that is to say, to bring all its information under the categories of positive philosophy. In its advances towards this goal, it passes through the two other previous stages; and so far the positions of Comte are correct.’’ For ‘‘much of our knowledge still remains 153. GFH, ‘‘Faith and Science: 1,’’ 15, 20, 21, 23. 154. Auguste Comte to GFH, 18 September 1852, MS. vol 1808, quoted in Gillespie, Collapse of Orthodoxy, 142. 155. See GFH to Auguste Comte, 5 February 1853, in Richmond Laurin Hawkins, Positivism in the United States (1853–1861) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 125–27.

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in the transition state, and may never pass beyond it, though the domain of this intermediate system must shrink up with progress of science.’’ Men had reasoned when primitive, and much was primitive in modern man’s mind. Comte’s tidy historical eras were, rather, mingled and inexclusive. Above all, though Holmes was attracted to Comte because the latter promised synthesis, Holmes could not eradicate a skepticism of the venture. ‘‘It is a vain effort to endeavour to reduce all knowledge to a single precise and unvarying form.’’ Indeed, the passion for synthesis, Holmes thought, arose not because there was order in the world, but because men needed it. It arose ‘‘from the almost hopeless incapacity of the human mind to contemplate in their coexistence and interdependence the complex multiplicity of natural phenomena, whence men are driven to seek for a delusive simplicity by a necessary exclusion of those data which refuse to be systematized.’’ 156 Near the heart of Holmes’s skepticism was his belief that Comte was passionately anti-theist, while Holmes was insistent that man needed a space for religion: ‘‘Comte’s Positive Philosophy is the last word of modern infidelity.’’ Further, Holmes thought that Comte was inclined to relegate metaphysics and logic to the intellectual childhood of man or to think that they mattered only at times of intellectual crisis and transition. But Holmes had come to believe that metaphysics—partly by being indispensable to theology—was persistently relevant to human needs, though he conceded its especial urgency during a crisis when ‘‘we are irresistibly thrown back upon a renewed examination of the first principles of our knowledge.’’ Comte thought that metaphysics had been stagnant since ancient times, while Holmes saw a modest increment of understanding: ‘‘however close may be the analogy between the philosophies of Kant and Aristotle, of Hegel and Plato, of Schelling and the Neo-Platonists, of Comte and Hippias, none will allege that the modern systems are not in advance of the ancient, because the points of view respectively may be identically the same.’’ Indeed, one might apply this insight to Comte himself, many of whose ideas could be found in Bacon or Hume, but who represented an advance nonetheless: ‘‘Indeed we regard his inductive philosophy, as systematized by Mr. Mill, to be the only considerable enlargement of Logic, which has been effected since the writings of Aristotle,’’ however foolishly Comte had formally disavowed the relevance of logic. Rather, Comte put his faith in mathematics, as the queen science upon which to found a new world, as the discipline that had greatest access to ‘‘absolute, eternal, infinite, and immutable truth.’’ But Holmes saw no reason why mathematics escaped the familiar problem, the inability of the mind ‘‘to go out of itself.’’ 157 156. GFH, ‘‘Faith and Science: 1,’’ 29–33. 157. GFH, ‘‘Faith and Science: 2,’’ 199, 173, 179, 176, 180–81, 189.

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So what did Holmes admire in Comte? His system was ‘‘eminently efficacious within its own peculiar sphere in producing larger, wider, and healthier views of science.’’ Much could be learned from Comte’s arrangement of the human and natural sciences, especially his elaboration of that discipline ‘‘in great measure created by himself, Sociology or Social Physics . . . the crowning stone to his simple, systematic, and comprehensive plan.’’ Best were the fourth and sixth volumes of the Cours de philosophie positive, ‘‘in which the application of the historical method to the philosophy of society is developed, and the outlines and conditions of the new science of Sociology are laid down.’’ 158 In general, ‘‘we accord our almost entire assent to Comte’s criticism of the speculative and practical errors of the times.’’ 159 Holmes was deeply convinced of the necessity for an instauratio nova for intellect to meet the crisis of the times. He had looked over the candidates for the new Bacon and found them all wanting. Comte, too, was flawed and narrowly missed being Bacon,160 but he seemed the best candidate, most worthy of exposition and dissection. Informally, Holmes was drawn by what can only be described as an aesthetic pleasure in Comte’s daring, ‘‘his genius and learning, the ponderous strength of his intellectual powers, their graceful and easy play, his fearlessness, sincerity, and simplicity.’’ Symmetry, compactness, boldness, ambition, insouciance, all these qualities seem to have had an almost sensual attraction for Holmes, the myopic, awkward, isolated, discursive rusticant in western Virginia, who wrote ‘‘with anxious diffidence.’’ In that sense, Comte was what Holmes was not, but he was also a purification of some things that Holmes was. That Comte had suffered from poverty, ‘‘uncertain and limited’’ means, neglect, and had had an academic career of much instability was an occasion for sympathy in Holmes. When the two exchanged letters, Holmes sent Comte fifty francs by way of support, and observed, ‘‘Like yourself, Monsieur, I am poor, and have often been almost destitute of the means of a sufficient daily support.’’ 161 Likewise Holmes had qualities of learning, ponderous strength, sincerity, and simplicity, as well as a mind of subtlety and critical power. At a deeper level, Holmes’s ruthless dissection of Comte’s failings was 158. Ibid., 196, 195. Cf. Heilbron, Rise of Social Theory, 195–266, on Comte. Heilbron suggests that Comte’s greatest originality lay in seeing ‘‘the formation of knowledge as a historical phenomenon,’’ and arguing that science was not a single type of knowledge, but a group of sciences needing differentation, with each having different subject matters and so different methods. Of the two, the latter was much the more original contribution. 159. GFH, ‘‘Instauratio Nova,’’ 340. 160. GFH, ‘‘The Bacon of the Nineteenth Century [Second Paper],’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 5 (October 1853): 489–513, worries through this claim and ends by a refusal. 161. GFH, ‘‘Faith and Science: 2,’’ 198; GFH, ‘‘Instauratio Nova,’’ 334; GFH, ‘‘Faith and Science: 1,’’ 18; GFH to Auguste Comte, 22 March 1852, in Hawkins, Positivism in the United States, 99–100.

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some consolation for the former’s own marginality. It was some comfort for him to know that a little man might see problems and needs where a greater man had not. Soon after first developing his views between 1851 and 1853, and getting his hands on the Systéme de politique positive, Holmes lost his hold on many of these virtues in Comte. For in that work Comte elaborated his humanist replacement for Christianity, which should have a new calendar, a pantheon of intellectual saints, and rituals of social sacraments. In this new religion Comte appointed himself as ‘‘high-priest, prophet and pope’’ in ‘‘an ingenious but revolting travesty of the Christian faith.’’ For this, Holmes said, ‘‘ridicule seems the only appropriate weapon, and contempt the only fitting judgment.’’ 162 This Gnostic debacle had turned Comte’s narrow miss of being the new Bacon into a grotesque pretension. Holmes’s revulsion was, no doubt, assisted by a correspondence with Comte, which showed the old man to be prickly, vain, and condescending. Thus disappointed, if not surprised (for he had discerned these tendencies in Comte’s earlier work), Holmes turned in two directions for a solution to a crisis; to Aristotle and Roman Catholicism. To Thornwell, he said in 1856, ‘‘The more I study Aristotle, the less necessity do I discover for any other philosophy than modernized and Christianized Peripateticism. Aristotle is still, as in the Thirteenth Century, ‘il maestro di che chi sanno.’ ’’ 163 Thereby Holmes became one of the first intellectual Southerners to take this step, not because they had a deep belief in God, but because Christianity seemed a plausible refuge from a frightening and disorienting modernity.164 At the same time, George Fitzhugh was taking this same step, for the same reasons. In this sense, Holmes was the cousin of Allen Tate, as much as Tate thought Poe was.165 That Holmes turned to Catholicism, and not to Thornwell’s Protestantism, can be explained in different ways. A clue is given by Holmes’s speaking of ‘‘the tendency of Pietism to degenerate into a mere selfish reverie.’’ For Holmes, Protestantism was too much tinged with the gnostic, too introspective and individualistic, and he wanted a solution that was communal, traditional, synthetic. Nonetheless, his turn to Rome was a backhanded compliment to Comte, who had suggested to Holmes that ‘‘in the middle of the nineteenth century, the only mode of renovating society—of 162. GFH, ‘‘Bacon of the Nineteenth Century: 2,’’ 504, 502. His most sustained discussion of this phase of Comte’s thought is GFH, ‘‘Positive Religion.’’ 163. GFH to JHT, 16 September 1856, JHT Papers, PHS. 164. Cf. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985). 165. Cf. Allen Tate, ‘‘Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,’’ in Essays of Four Decades (1959; reprint, New York: William Morrow, 1970), 385–400.

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regenerating the sentiments, of removing the anarchy of the intellect—which M. Comte can discover, is the revival of a spiritual despotism more crushing, more exclusive, and more arbitrary, than anything the world has yet seen.’’ Yet Comte’s priesthood was but ‘‘an expanded and thinly disguised resuscitation of the Roman hierarchy.’’ Why bother with imitations? If one had a taste for system, why not Thomas Aquinas, whom Holmes began to study just after Comte had failed him? 166 James Henley Thornwell, at least, knew why not, or thought he knew.

166. GFH, ‘‘Positive Religion,’’ 352, 357–58; Gillespie, Collapse of Orthodoxy, 104.

Chapter Twenty

Theology for the South

Persuasions Different from Her Own 1 The Southern religious scene was complex, with as many faiths as there were peoples, as many theologies as there were individuals. Native Americans had a myriad of religions, some of them Christian, some not. Black Christianity was fractured between varieties of Protestantism, but there were also African Americans who were Roman Catholics, Moslems, or adherents of beliefs brought from Africa or invented in America. The Jews were divided between Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Reform. The Shakers had two communities in Kentucky, at Pleasant Hill and South Union, and the Unitas Fratrum (or Moravians) controlled Salem, North Carolina.2 The Roman Catholics were, in theory, unified, but in practice the French Catholics, the Irish Catholics, and the German Catholics treated one another with marked suspicion. The white Protestants were dizzyingly denominational, and growing more so. To the older sects that had migrated from Reformation Europe (Anglicans, PresTitle from John B. Adger to JHT, 10 September 1857, JHT Papers, PHS: ‘‘As teacher of Theology for the South & S. West your influence would not be bounded even by this broad fair South land, nor even by this Union.’’ 1. ‘‘Living in a small village, her father’s the only family of Israelites who reside in or near it, all her juvenile friendships and attachments have been formed with those of persuasions different from her own; yet each has looked upon the variations of the other as things of course—differences which take place in every society’’: Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, 7 August 1815, in The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth, ed. Edgar E. MacDonald (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 6, 8. 2. Priscilla J. Brewer, Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986); Julia Neal, By Their Fruits: The Story of Shakerism in South Union, Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947); Michael Shirley, From Congregation Town to Industrial City: Culture and Social Change in a Southern Community (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

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byterians, Lutherans) had been added those invented subsequently (Quakers, Methodists, Baptists) and those born of recent schism (Unitarians, the Church of Christ, Cumberland Presbyterians, Republican Methodists, Hardshell Baptists, African Methodist Episcopal, Landmark Baptists, Stoneites, Primitive Baptists). Then there were those who experimented with beliefs which the orthodox found to be heretical and tendentious. All Christians were obliged to grant a spirit world, but many skeptics of Christianity began to think that ghostly forms inhabited a realm beyond that described by the Bible and John Milton. James Henry Hammond and William Gilmore Simms both took up Spiritualism, and Simms went to a medium in New York to interrogate the dead with questions that he and his friend had drafted. Hammond, in particular, was dismissive of Christianity as resting ‘‘on fear of the Devil & hatred of all who differ from us,’’ ridiculed ‘‘the Divine pretensions of the Bible,’’ while seeing some value in its disciplining of the masses: ‘‘Let the priests reign a while yet over those who require hell & devils to restrain them.’’ 3 A belief in spirits and dreams marked the Swedenborgians, too. The New Church had been born in a Calvinist culture and was, in many ways, Protestantism suddenly grown optimistic and imaginative. It had an especial appeal to restless Presbyterians.4 So it is not surprising that the South had its share of Swedenborgians, for its Presbyterianism specialized in restlessness. One of the New Church’s most prominent figures in the late nineteenth century was William Frederick Pendleton of Georgia, whose father Philip C. Pendleton had been among the founders of the Magnolia.5 In Charleston, Nathaniel Russell Middleton took an interest in Swedenborgianism, partly from having read Henry James Sr., and so did Marcellus Hammond, James’s brother.6 Daniel Whitaker, the first editor of the Southern Quarterly Review, published several articles recommending the New Church and was a proponent, as was James Wood Davidson, the literary critic.7 3. James Henry Hammond to WBH, 2 April 1850, James Henry Hammond Mss, DU; Carol Bleser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 262; Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 262. 4. ‘‘Most of Swedenborg’s followers in the 1830s and 1840s were well-educated Protestants who were engaged in slipping their orthodox tethers’’: Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 229. There is a good, brief account of Swedenborgian doctrine in Mary Ann Meyers, A New World Jerusalem: The Swedenborgian Experience in Community Construction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 21–34. 5. Meyers, New World Jerusalem, 9–11. 6. See his sermon ‘‘Matter and Spirit: Hints from Henry James’ ‘Substance and Shadow,’’’ Nathaniel Russell Middleton Papers, ColC; on Marcellus Hammond, see James Henry Hammond to WBH, 2 April 1850, James Henry Hammond Mss, DU. 7. ‘‘The Life and Writings of Swedenborg,’’ SQR 4 (October 1843): 414–66; ‘‘Mesmer and

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These beliefs spread by personal influence. John C. Calhoun’s personal secretary and editor, Richard K. Crallé, became converted early in his life, when he drafted an explanation and apologia for Swedenborg, which explained: ‘‘Ever since I became convinced of the truth of the doctrines of the New Church, the writings of Em. Swedenborg have, almost exclusively, engrossed my attention . . . [and] I began to cherish to apply myself exclusively to the study and to the communication of the truths contained in the divine word, according to the explanations thereof, received in the new Church.’’ Crallé had lived for three years in the Brooklyn household of a Dr. Doughty, who had been Swedenborgian and, in turn, been in correspondence with a Dr. Cabell (presumably Dr. Landon Cabell)8 in Lynchburg, Virginia. Cabell was likewise Swedenborgian and needed someone versed in the doctrines to evangelize in his area. Doughty sent down Crallé, who married into Cabell’s family.9 Later Crallé was to write an introduction to a book by Nathaniel Francis Cabell on Swedenborgianism.10 Crallé then converted James P. Holcombe, who became a lawyer, political writer, and professor at the University of Virginia from 1851 to 1861. (William Campbell Preston was later to find him clever, agreeable, but also ‘‘somewhat mystic in his tone of thought.’’)11 James influenced his younger brother William Henry, who migrated in time to Natchez where (as we have seen) he kept a diary full of sharp Swedenborgian enthusiasms and perspectives, which contributed to his becoming a homeopathic doctor, for the medical and the religious ran together in his mind as a vision of regeneration. ‘‘The present race of the Church theologians and of Allopathic doctors has to die out before the good seed can spring up in the place of those weeds in the garden of the world,’’ he put it in 1855. Holcombe even lent Swedenborgian tracts to Joseph Davis, the brother of Jefferson Davis and the utopian experimenter in slave management.12 Swedenborg,’’ SQR 11 (January 1847): 212–44; ‘‘The Philosophical Character of Swedenborg,’’ SQR 13 (April 1848): 427–69. For Davidson’s assertion that ‘‘I am a Swedenborgian, so called,’’ see James Wood Davidson to CG, 20 January 1874, CG Papers, LSU. John Pendleton Kennedy seems also to have taken an interest, at least as far as reading about it: see entries for 3 November 1847 and 24 April 1851, in JPK Journal, JPK Papers, PLB. 8. See Joseph C. Cabell to David Bailie Warden, 19 March 1834, David Bailie Warden Papers, MHS. 9. Draft autograph letter on Swedenborg, undated, Richard K. Crallé Papers, UVA. William Henry Holcombe makes clear that Crallé was Swedenborgian and converted others. 10. Nathaniel Francis Cabell, Reply to Rev. Dr. Pond’s ‘‘Swedenborgianism Reviewed’’ (New York: J. Allen, 1848). 11. On the conversion, see William Henry Holcombe Autobiography, William Henry Holcombe Papers, SHC; see also E. Lee Shepard, ‘‘James Philemon Holcombe,’’ in W. Hamilton Bryson, ed., Legal Education in Virginia, 1779–1979: A Biographical Approach (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982), 290–95; WCP to FL, 11 June, n.d., FL Papers, SCL. 12. Entries for 3 March and 2 June 1855, William Henry Holcombe Journal, William Henry

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All this religious diversity is too much to encompass, but a look at four traditions will help to indicate a range, if inadequately: the Jewish, the Roman Catholic, the Episcopalian, and the Presbyterian. These, in turn, are narrowed to four interpreters and organizers of these traditions: Isaac Harby, John England, James Warley Miles, and James Henley Thornwell. Indeed, the range is still narrower, for all four inhabited South Carolina. But this confinement is deliberate. Religious diversity was a local thing; each Southern space echoed with different voices, with broken conversations about God, with insistent hostilities and the occasional ecumenical gesture. In 1820 Charleston had the largest group of Jews in North America, a distinction that was to slip away by 1830. The community was an old one, almost as old as the city itself, and much complicated and enriched by ethnicity. There had been two synagogues in the mid-eighteenth century, one for the Portuguese (Beth Elohim Unveh Shalom) and another for the Germans (Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim). This schism had healed by 1794, when a new and united synagogue, which retained the latter name, was built on Hasell Street. The first five trustees consisted of three Sephardic and two Ashkenazic Jews, but the liturgy conformed to the Portuguese Sephardic tradition, ‘‘as practised in London and Amsterdam.’’ The first hazan or cantor (there was not yet a rabbi) was Abraham Azuby (1785–1805), and thereafter Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, Jacob Suares, Emanuel Nunes Carvalho, Hartwig Cohen, Solomon Cohen Peixotto, Gustavus Poznanski, Julius Eckman, and Maurice Mayer (who was in office in 1859). As the names indicate, the drift was from Sephardic Jews of Spanish-Portuguese origins to Ashkenazic. But, for most of the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, services were in Hebrew and Spanish, perhaps even partly in Ladino, ‘‘a Spanish dialect that includes many Hebrew words.’’ 13 The community was various in its origins. In the colonial period, of the 478 Jews who had been born in the Old World, 131 were from Germany, 114 from England, 83 from Poland, 57 from Prussia, 28 from the Netherlands, 18 from France, 14 from Russia, then a scattering from Ireland to Algiers. Another 40 came from the Caribbean. The English, French, and Dutch Jews were usually Sephardic, originally from Spanish and Portuguese families, who bore names Holcombe Papers, SHC; ‘‘Spent one half day of this beautiful, bracing day in a long Louisiana ride. Came back with Mr. Davis in his buggy and held a pleasant confab on New Church matters. He seemed very much impressed with the novelties of the system, and asked for something to read—I shall send him Barrett’s Lectures.’’ On Davis, see Janet Sharp Hermann, Joseph E. Davis: Pioneer Patriarch (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). 13. James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 14–17, 58–64, 74, 81.

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like Carvalho, Loryea, Mordecai, Cardoza, DaCosta, D’Azevedo, Esdra, Rodrigues, Sasportas, Torres, D’Oliveira. The central and eastern Europeans were usually Ashkenazic, with names like Weiskopf, Bernstein, Goldberg, Petska, Seckendorf, Goldstein, Mintz. Of male newcomers from abroad who arrived in Charleston between 1801 and 1825, 51 percent came from England, 21 percent from Germany, 13 percent from the Netherlands, which helps to explain why the Sephardic tradition strengthened before it waned. For, in the comparable figures for 1826–50, the Germans accounted for 33 percent, the Polish for 23 percent, and the English for only 18 percent. But Jews were not only immigrant. Of the 3,083 Jews who inhabited Charleston before the Civil War, 57 percent were born in South Carolina, and of those two-thirds were born in Charleston itself.14 Tensions in the Jewish community revolved around the divisions of the Old World, as they interacted with the difficulties and promises of assimilation to an American, English-speaking world. What was to happen in Cincinnati and New York later in the century happened first in Charleston. In 1824 the first American congregation of Reform Judaism, the Reformed Society of Israelites, was established there. Their reforms centered on the liturgy. Sabbath services at Beth Elohim had been long, about three hours. Indeed, if the prayers had not been rushed, five hours might not have sufficed. Much was unintelligible to the congregation, not only because of linguistic obscurities, but because its attention wandered amid intermittent traffic and sporting children, for the synagogue worked like an early modern theater. The reformers desired brevity, English translations that repeated Hebrew passages, a sermon that might foster moral instruction, and missionary endeavor among lapsed Jews. They were conscious of the precedent of Moses Mendelssohn, the German Jewish philosophe, who had translated the Torah into High German, had urged Jews to leave the ghetto, and had counseled the seizure of ‘‘the magnificent opportunity of entering the world of western culture that was at last open to receive them.’’ They pointed to reformations that had been enacted in German and Dutch synagogues. They wanted cogency, decorum, focus, efficiency, not the ramshackle discursiveness of an ill-assorted tradition, not ‘‘bad Spanish and Portuguese.’’ 15 On the whole, the reformers can most readily be explained by demography. In 1820 the Adjunta or board of trustees of Beth Elohim had had 25 members, of whom 18 had been born outside the United 14. Ibid., 11. I rely upon Hagy’s statistics. 15. ‘‘The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,’’ in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (1979; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 244; Hagy, This Happy Land, 128–42; Isaac Harby, ‘‘Discourse before the Reformed Society of Israelites,’’ in A Selection from the Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Isaac Harby, Esq., ed. Henry L. Pinckney and Abraham Moise (Charleston, S.C.: James S. Burges, 1829), 62.

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States, and among whom the average age was 56. The 43 who supported the 1825 constitution of the Reformed Society had an average age of 33, and 60 percent of them were American-born, with six of their foreigners being from England. These facts alone explained a greater willingness for change, especially the insistence upon the centrality of the English language.16 Yet traditionalists and reformers alike presumed the benignity of Southern culture. There were some grounds for this trust. There was no ghetto in Charleston, indeed no civil disabilities in South Carolina at all. John Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions had, backhandedly, granted freedom of religion to ‘‘Jews, Heathens, and other Dissenters from the purity of the Christian Religion.’’ So Jews had been accorded citizenship and voted in South Carolina for almost as long as there had been elections to vote in, though the legalities of the situation were complicated. But not all Southern colonies were as complaisant, and even South Carolina had given ground in 1776 by requiring Protestantism for high office. By 1787, in the United States as a whole, only New York and Virginia had granted full Jewish emancipation. (The new federal constitution and its government ignored the issue, since control of the franchise was reserved to the states.) By the end of the eighteenth century in the South, however, Virginia had been joined by Georgia, South Carolina, and Delaware in a liberality towards Jews. In 1826 Maryland (which had long permitted Jews to vote) permitted them to hold political office, serve on juries, and join the militia as officers, after a campaign that had lasted eight years. (Atheists were less favored.)17 The new states to the west all gave Jews full civil rights by 1840, usually in their first constitutions. By then, only North Carolina in the South did not grant civil equality and it would not do so until 1868, though efforts to remedy this were made and defeated in the 1850s.18 In practice, however, Jews could be elected to office, as was Jacob Henry to the House of Commons in 1808, because almost no one cared to enforce the exclusion. In this, the Jewish case in North Carolina was similar to that of Roman Catholics, who were to gain legal equality only in 1835 but had served before then, by a nod and a wink.19 Anti-Semitism was scarcely unknown. Jesse Burton Harrison (‘‘a Jew is 16. Hagy, This Happy Land, 133–36. Hagy also argues that the reformers held more modest positions in society and hence were less ‘‘middle class’’ than their conservative opponents. But this may be more a function of age. 17. Ibid., 30–32; Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634–1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 259; Gary Phillip Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788– 1828: Jewish Reformer and Intellectual (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 118. 18. The other states that denied Jews equality were New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. 19. Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776–1985, 4 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989–93), 1:494–525.

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toutes choses egales a filthy brute’’) and Elisha Mitchell were markedly antSemitic. Louis Manigault, young and in school in 1843, was then observing: ‘‘There is another jew at our School, his name is Tobias. I dont think Cotes is right to take those boys because we do not associate with him.’’ When Robert Massengill Porter was in Rome in 1846, he ‘‘walked into the Jews quarter— exceedingly filthy, the Jewish features strongly marked, not less so their love of filthy lucre; so they seize passersby by the arm & almost force them into the shops to buy.’’ But the complicity of Judaism in Christianity and the intellectuality of the Jewish tradition could soften even the anti-Semitic, even the Christian who thought the Jew was a murderous Christ-killer. In 1823 David Swain attended a service in Raleigh given by a converted Jew, the Rev. Joseph Frey, ‘‘this son of Abram,’’ and wrote of it: ‘‘Mr. F. . . . is best described by saying that he is a Jew, & exhibits all the striking characteristics of this strange race. . . . He is of low stature, dark skinned, & has a high well-turned forehead.’’ On the other hand, Swain ‘‘was impressed with the solemn & interesting manner of his delivery, & instructed by the relation of historical incidents, which enlightened and adorned his discourse, & which no man but a Jew, could have handled with so much ease, ingenuity & advantage.’’ 20 On the whole, anti-Semitism seems to have been a variety of ethnic prejudice, not more marked than many others. It was relatively absent from racist theory in the South. Josiah Nott, in fact, followed Gobineau, whom he helped to introduce to American culture, in a respect for Jewish culture.21 There seems to have been a working cultural distinction (sadly familiar in other cultures) that, while Jews in general might be suspect, particular Jews were acceptable. Mary Chesnut’s narrative journal has this entry for 22 January 1864, when she was in Richmond: ‘‘Saw a lovely Jew. Elsewhere Jews may be tolerated. Here they are the haute volée. Everybody everywhere has their own Jew exceptions. I have two—Mem Cohen, Agnes DeLeon. Mary Preston has her Rachel Lyons.’’ 22 Several of the more aggressive expressions of anti-Semitism were elicited 20. Entry for 1 May 1830, in JBH European Diary, 1829–30, Francis B. Harrison Papers, UVA; Elisha Mitchell to J. J. Summerell, 26 January 1857, Elisha Mitchell Papers, SHC; Louis Manigault to Charles H. Manigault, 2 October 1843, Louis Manigault Papers, DU; Robert Massengill Porter Journal (1845–1846), Miscellaneous Collection, TSLA; David L. Swain to George Swain, 1 March 1823, David L. Swain Papers, SHC. On Frey, see Zola, Isaac Harby, 115–16. 21. Cf. Josiah C. Nott, ‘‘Physical History of the Jewish Race,’’ SQR n.s. 1 (July 1850): 426– 51, with Arthur de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of the Races, ed. and trans. Henry Hotz, appendix by Josiah C. Nott (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1856), 210. On Gobineau’s undeserved reputation as an anti-Semite, see Michael Denis Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideolo : The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 124–25. 22. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 547.

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in Europe, where Southern travelers encountered Jews en masse, wearing traditional clothing, speaking Yiddish or Hebrew. In the South, Jews were few and unintimidating, they dressed like everyone else, and they conformed to Southern customs and civic beliefs. They might slip into synagogues on a Saturday, but the synagogues looked remarkably like Episcopalian churches. Thereby Jews posed a modest challenge to the limits of Southern toleration. Invisibility helped. When Judah P. Benjamin lived in Beaufort, he disliked what was not his Christian name and complained to his mother, ‘‘You might as well have had written Jew across my forehead.’’ But Benjamin was ambitious, and worried that being a Jew would impede his rise. In Louisiana, however, ‘‘anti-Semitism had never been a strong local tradition,’’ and did not prevent him from becoming the first Jew to sit in the United State Senate. Later, during the Civil War, when the stakes were higher, his prominence in Jefferson Davis’s cabinet elicited brutal outbursts, notably from Henry Foote of Mississippi, who raged against ‘‘this swarm of Jews,’’ the Shylocks who (as Senator Hilton of Florida added) ‘‘flocked as vultures to every point of gain.’’ Many, including Basil Gildersleeve, complained along these lines: ‘‘The wink or nod of a speculative Jew, on the Bourse at Paris, or at Hamburg, is the sole ratification of bargains involving thousands and thousands of dollars. Is the word of a Christian gentleman of less weight than the mere beck of a circumcised Hebrew?’’ 23 Nonetheless, antebellum Southern Jews seldom complained of discrimination, a tradition their historians have followed.24 (But, then, it has seldom been wise for a Jew in a Christian society to complain.) Contentment might have been sincere. In 1815 Rachel Mordecai of Warrenton, North Carolina, sat down with nervous temerity to write a letter to the famous Maria Edgeworth, the Irish novelist. Mordecai and her family had, for many years, read Edgeworth’s works. The Practical Education (1798) of Edgeworth and her father had had a marked influence on the running of the girls’ school operated by Rachel’s own father, Jacob Mordecai. In 1812, Edgeworth had published a 23. Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: Free Press, 1988), 29, 201; ‘‘Demoralization,’’ editorial in the Richmond Examiner, 3 May 1864, reprinted in Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War, ed. Ward W. Briggs Jr. Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 304–7 (quotation on pp. 306–7). 24. Hagy has but two references to anti-Semitism, one of them about its European manifestations. See also Barnett A. Elzas, The Jews of South Carolina from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1905); Nathan M. Kaganoff and Melvin I. Urofsky, eds., ‘‘Turn to the South’’: Essays on Southern Jewry (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979); Eli N. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York: Atheneum, 1974); and Eli N. Evans, The Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993).

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Washington Allston, Isaac of York (Courtesy Greenville [S.C.] County Museum of Art)

novel called The Absentee, which had found its way to Warrenton. Rachel did not like what she had read and decided that, after prefatory remarks of exquisite courtesy, she ought to tell Miss Edgeworth of the problem. ‘‘Relying on the good sense and candour of Miss Edgeworth I would ask,’’ she wrote, screwing her courage to the sticking point, ‘‘how it can be that she, who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice into the minds of youth! Can my allusion be mistaken? It is to the species of character which wherever a Jew is introduced is invariably attached to him. Can it be believed that this race of men are by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled?’’ This was bold. A distinction was necessary. ‘‘In those parts of the world where these people are oppressed and made continually the subject of scorn and derision, they may in many instances deserve censure; but in this happy country, where religious distinctions are scarcely known, where character and talents are all sufficient to attain advancement, we find the Jews form a respectable part of the community.’’ They were ‘‘liberally educated,’’ became lawyers and doctors, associated with ‘‘the best society our country affords.’’ Miss Edgeworth would realize, by now, that ‘‘it is a Jewess who addresses her.’’ ‘‘Living in a small village, her father’s the only family of Israelites who reside in or near it, all her juvenile friendships and attachments have been formed with those

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of persuasions different from her own; yet each has looked upon the variations of the other as things of course—differences which take place in every society.’’ Edgeworth was impressed by this: ‘‘It was impossible to remonstrate with more gentleness or in a more convincing, as well as persuasive manner than you have done.’’ She promised reform. A remarkable correspondence developed, which was to last until the young Jewess died a Christian in 1838. In all this, Rachel had a sense of ease in Southern society, she claimed that being a Jew in America was different from the position of Jews elsewhere, and she displayed a sense of community with the Enlightened spirit of the improving Miss Edgeworth.25 A similar spirit can be found in the writings of Isaac Harby, the Charlestonian gadfly of letters who struggled to reform the Old World tenacities of Beth Elohim. Rachel’s father, Jacob, thought that Harby was too little a Jew to have earned the right to reform Judaism. There is something to the criticism. Harby was an assimilated American before he was a Jewish reformer. This, in fact, was what gave energy to his critique. He was born in 1788, the descendant of Spanish Jews who had lived in Fez, Morocco, whence another Isaac Harby had migrated to England a little before 1742, where he married an Italian woman of the Frangipini family. His son Solomon was born in London in 1762, migrated to Jamaica in 1778, then to Charlestown in 1781. There he became a butcher, then an auctioneer, and finally a merchant who coowned ‘‘a rather substantial schooner’’ in 1800. Solomon did marry a Jewess, Rebecca Moses, but seems not to have been devout and did not join the synagogue until 1803, in which year the adjunta fined him for lapses. Indeed, in 1798 he and others had purchased land for a Jewish cemetery that might accommodate those ill-disposed towards the congregation’s cemetery on Coming Street. He was a Freemason, an enthusiasm that was transmitted to his son, though this was very far from being incompatible with being Jewish. The cornerstone of the new Beth Elohim on Hasell Street was ‘‘laid in accordance with Masonic regulations.’’ 26 Isaac Harby’s education was broad and secular, if mostly informal. He studied at William Best’s academy, where he learned the usual classics. Like most Jews, he did not go to college, since such institutions usually demanded the study of Christian theology and were places where chapels and ministers were commonplace. But Harby became a member of Charleston’s Philomathean Society, which held weekly debates; in these, he eulogized printing, 25. Rachel Mordecai to Maria Edgeworth, 17 August 1815; Edgeworth to Mordecai, ca. 4 August 1816, both reprinted in MacDonald, Education of the Heart, 7, 8. The best study of the Mordecais is Emily Simms Bingham, ‘‘Mordecai: Three Generations of a Southern Jewish Family, 1780–1865’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1998). 26. Zola, Isaac Harby, 5, 130, 4–8.

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Isaac Harby

argued that moral causes had more influence on national character than physical ones, defended the classics, compared Caesar and Bonaparte, considered yellow fever, remembered William Fraser, argued for the regulation of interest, rhapsodied on the benefits that had flowed to mankind from the discovery of America, and delivered a deistic meditation on truth. He was, in short, a very model of the young Charlestonian philosophe, the contemporary of Jews like Jacob Cardozo, but also of Charles Fraser and William Elliott, who were all members of the Society. If Harby’s surviving library is any guide, his reading was concomitantly eclectic: classics like Aeschylus, Homer, Terence, Plutarch, and Horace; poets and dramatists like Tasso, Milton, Molière, Byron, and Wordsworth; philosophers like Berkeley, Stewart, and Bentham; philosophes like Rollin, Lavater, and Voltaire. By contrast, he owned few books of Jewish provenance and much of his knowledge of ancient Judaism came from Josephus, the Roman Jew who supported the Roman suppression of the Jewish rebellion. When Harby wished to find a judge to pronounce what was ‘‘the most glorious period of the Hebrew annals,’’ it was to Gibbon that he turned.27 Harby had a checkered career. After a brief attempt to make himself a law27. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:410; Zola, Isaac Harby, 16–19, 11–12; Harby, ‘‘Discourse,’’ 68, 65.

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yer under Langdon Cheves, he was most often a school teacher and a journalist. At various times, he taught in an academy on Edisto Island and then ran one for himself in Charleston, which catered to Jews and Gentiles alike; later he owned and edited The Quiver (1807) and the Southern Patriot and Commercial Advertiser (1814–17). The latter periodical was political, intended to advance Harby’s Jeffersonian opinions. The former was literary, full of essays, poetry, fiction, and criticism, some of it original, much not. Harby himself appeared in its pages, as did David Ramsay, but so did Plutarch, Ossian, Erasmus Darwin, Voltaire, and Herder. Local theatricals were much reviewed, for Harby’s ambition was to be a dramatist, though he was thwarted by what he regarded as trivial theater owners and actors, and by his own modest talent. He was to write several plays, mostly on classical and Renaissance themes: Alexander Severus (1806), The Gordian Knot, or Causes and Effects (1810), and Alberti (1819). At his death in 1828 (he had moved from Charleston just before) he was the drama critic of the New York Evening Post. Through much of his life, he gave fairly serious thought to the business of the critic, ancient and modern. So he read Aristotle and Longinus, but also Lord Kames. He rated the value of the critic extravagantly: ‘‘It is evident, that upon the critical exercise of judgment, and a sincere love of truth, depend the perfection of human philosophy, and consequently of human happiness.’’ 28 In general, Harby’s views were typical of the liberal Enlightenment, as it began to wander into the more emotional landscapes of Romanticism. He spoke the language of reason with passionate urgency. He mistrusted priests and superstition, he believed in science and progress, he had faith in the New World, he felt that there was a central value to vernacular language, he desired toleration, he trusted the natural. ‘‘If we slight the language of the heart, and oppose to its dictates the cold and backward exertions of reason,’’ he wrote in 1806, ‘‘we will soon [lose] sight of truth & nature, and be ruled by arbitrary decisions, and methodical frailty. Where we begin to reason, we cease to feel, is an observation of Rousseau, which is as firmly grounded in truth, as its belief leads to virtue and happiness.’’ 29 His most famous effort, the ‘‘Discourse before the Reformed Society of Israelites’’ in 1825, bears the marks of all of these beliefs. The discourse begins with universalism and continues with transatlantic distinctions. Mankind’s great cause, Harby contended, is ‘‘improvement in government, in religion, in morals, in literature.’’ Despots might try to thwart this, ‘‘but the consuming beams of truth must drive them back to their original darkness.’’ It is most dark in the Old World, for ‘‘in this happy land . . . 28. Zola, Isaac Harby, 35; ‘‘Essay on Criticism’’ (1810), in A Selection from the Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Isaac Harby, Esq., ed. Henry L. Pinckney and Abraham Moise (Charleston, S.C.: James S. Burges, 1829), 184. 29. Zola, Isaac Harby, 24.

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you have no such obstacles to oppose.’’ Here were legal equality and freedom of conscience. Just as Luther had reformed Christianity, so the Reformed Society might better Judaism, first in America, perhaps later even in Europe. But that prospect is remote. ‘‘Our sphere of action is at present limited to home,’’ that is, ‘‘Charleston, and—in its more immediate consequences—in the United States.’’ Knowing the criticisms, Harby disclaimed any intention to emulate that great consequence of Luther, schism: ‘‘Let other systems of religion split into a thousand schisms; let other modes of faith present to your eyes the motley scene at which philosophy may smile, and true piety must weep,’’ the divisions that led to religious warfare. Israel must be one.30 What was first necessary? Voltaire and common sense, Harby’s listener would have inferred: écrasez l’infâme. Sweep away ‘‘rabbinical interpolations’’ and ‘‘useless repetitions,’’ ‘‘bad Spanish and Portuguese’’ and the ‘‘idle comments of the Rabbis.’’ Purify and abstract, take away ‘‘whatever is offensive to the enlightened mind.’’ Introduce English to accompany and explain Hebrew. In effect, the cluttered nonsense of the Gothic had to go, the harmony of the neoclassical had to be introduced: ‘‘This is stripping it [‘our venerable faith’] of foreign and unseemly ceremonies; divesting it of rubbish, and beautifying that simple Doric column, that primal order of architecture, which raises its plain but massy head amid the ruins of time and the desolation of empires!’’ 31 This was to evoke Constantin Volney’s Ruins, but also to praise Gabriel Manigault’s rebuilding of modern Charleston.32 It is little wonder that Harby felt closer to Byron, ‘‘the first poet of the age’’ and the liberal nationalist who admired Alexander Pope, than to Walter Scott, the Tory.33 Language was crucial to Harby. Judaism could only flourish by a coupling of the antiquity of Hebrew and the modernity of English, at least for Jews in an English-speaking culture. Words narrated meaning, and meaning needed to be clear. The Pentateuch itself was ‘‘not only a series of lessons in justice and charity between man and man, but a sacred record of history.’’ Since time had darkened the faith, reason must bring light. To this end, Harby provided a brief résumé of Jewish history from the destruction of the Temple; Jews’ diaspora, their contribution (with the Arabs) to medieval scientific thought, and their fate in Spain. There had been much Jewish suffering and bloodshed, courage and patience, but not all was the fault of Gentiles. Also responsible was ‘‘the craft and ambition of their own teachers [who] gradually broke down 30. Harby, ‘‘Discourse,’’ 57–59. 31. Ibid., 60–63. 32. Harby had reviewed Volney’s Voyage en Syrie et en E pte (1787) for the Charleston Times: see Zola, Isaac Harby, 26. 33. Harby, ‘‘The Field of Waterloo’’ and ‘‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,’’ in Pinckney and Moise, Writings of Harby, 225–45.

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their high intellectual character, and rendered them the blind servants to expounders and commentators on the Bible.’’ These were the rabbis, the ‘‘fabulists and sophists,’’ the men who were closeted, useless, shut away from the light, spreading darkness, the ‘‘men, who nursed and fed in the lap of idleness like the monks of the middle ages, converted into mystery and absurdity what God intended his people should plainly read and rationally understand, and practically follow.’’ (From this indictment, Harby exempted only Maimonides, who worked with his own vernacular, Arabic.) From this ‘‘Egyptian darkness’’ had emerged Jewish bringers of light, Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Isaac D’Israeli.34 Harby saw a dialectical relationship between oppression and rabbinical bigotry. American freedom had released the rabbis to enjoy the equality of reason, for a remnant had escaped the unrelenting hostility of Christian Europe over ‘‘the western horizon.’’ America was Zion, ‘‘truly . . . the land of promise spoken of in our ancient scriptures.’’ Jews should come westward, ‘‘not to some stony desert, or marshy island, or inhospitable clime.’’ That is, lush Charleston was a better Zion than ‘‘the comparatively barren land of Palestine.’’ Whatever Israel had been of old, now it consisted of ‘‘the few scattered Arabs, the few Israelitish families, and the lazy population in this district, which belongs to the Ottoman empire, [with] barely the means of feeding themselves or their cattle, and numbers insufficient to resist aggression.’’ The biblical land of ‘‘flocks and herds, of waters and fruitfulness, of plenty and of exceeding excellence’’ was not to be found, any more, beside a Dead Sea, but in that ‘‘portion of God’s beautiful creation, more favoured by nature,’’ America.35 Harby’s apparently obscure reference to a ‘‘marshy island’’ as Zion would not have been misunderstood by his audience. Mordecai Manuel Noah, an old friend of Harby’s, once briefly a Charlestonian but in 1825 a New Yorker, had made himself a prominent Zionist. In 1820 Noah had petitioned the New York legislature for the purchase of Grand Island in the Niagara River as a colony for Jews, which might serve as a staging post for the greater ambition of a return to Palestine. Noah, orthodox in his theology, wanted separation. But Harby talked of Charleston as ‘‘home,’’ praised Gentiles, blamed Jews, wanted to use English as the means of enlightenment, desired to mingle and remain.36 Mingling and assimilation often meant, in the South, the ownership of 34. Harby, ‘‘Discourse,’’ 64–78. 35. Ibid., 78–83. 36. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:473–75; Harby, ‘‘Discourse,’’ 59.

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Billy Simmons (Courtesy Avery Research Center, College of Charleston)

slaves. Slavery was a bond, connecting ancient Israel and modern America. Christian thinkers ransacked Harby’s ‘‘sacred record’’ for evidence about Israel’s slaves, and Southern Jews welcomed this evidence of their relevance. The Southern Patriot under both Harby and Cardozo was proslavery; in its pages, abolitionists were condemned and Denmark Vesey feared. Reform or Orthodox made no difference. Shoeless Billy Simmons, a slave who delivered newspapers in battered evening clothes, might slip into the synagogue on Yom Kippur and claim to be a Rechabite, but he could not be a member, since this was forbidden to ‘‘people of color’’ by the constitution of Beth Elohim. In 1830, 83 percent of Jewish households in Charleston had slaves, which was barely below the average for everyone else. Beth Elohim itself owned a slave in 1814, for it advertised to have him recaptured.37 The case was little different 37. Hagy, This Happy Land, 101, 91; Zola, Isaac Harby, 221 n78.

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for the Jewish communities of Richmond and New Orleans. Slavery was part of the meaning of belonging, part of the content of home. Curiously, the opportunity to belong came more readily to the Jew than to the Roman Catholic. John England, bishop of Charleston, moved with less ease in a Southern world than did Isaac Harby. Anti-Catholicism ran deeper, was more habitual than anti-Semitism, mattered to far more people. The bishop was familiar with such hostility, which he had in his time mocked, with no small gift of mimickry: The Pope was the beast of the apocalypse, the church was the harlot who made the nations of the earth drunk with the cup of her abominations, Rome was the great custom-house of sin, at which a stipulated tariff was to be paid, for leave to commit with impunity, every crime by which man could be stained or God could be offended; incest, sodomy, murder, parricide might be perpetrated upon a trifling composition! Every Catholic was a sworn and devoted slave of the cruel tyrant who presided in this pest-house of abominations; an admirable contrivance of wicked moral mechanism, enabled the monster to touch the springs by which his orders were secretly and securely and infallibly executed at the same moment, in a thousand places upon the surface of the globe, and by which he as infallibly learned all that occurred.38 John England had known such stuff in the Old World, in the Ireland in which he (the son of a surveyor) had been born, where Catholics had been civilly disabled. And he came to know it in the New World, too, where they were legally citizens but barely tolerated. Anti-Catholicism was in the marrow of the cultural tradition that Britain had bequeathed to the United States and its South.39 Much of John England’s life was spent in finding a way between the likes of Southern Protestants and, sometimes as awkward, Popes like Gregory XVI, and in journeying around a transatlantic world whose corners rested in Charleston, Baltimore, Cork, and Rome, and which, for a time, stretched to Haiti. This was not an easy combination of places. He was something of a wunderkind, bishop in 1820 at only 34. His apprenticeship had been spent in the turbulent and dangerous world of Irish Catholicism in the days of the Protestant Ascendancy, he having been born in Cork 38. ‘‘The Republic in Danger: Letter V’’ (1831), in The Works of the Right Rev. John England, First Bishop of Charleston, ed. Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds, 5 vols. (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1849), 4:32. 39. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, 1707–1837 (1992; reprint, London: Pimlico, 1994), 11–54.

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in 1786 and become a priest in 1808.40 He grew up amid war, famine, rebellion, and the new Union with England. From this experience, he seems to have learned an impatient energy, which was often to get him into trouble. As for his formal education, it was mixed. He attended a day school in which he was the only Catholic and where he was cruelly taunted for a Papist.41 He later enrolled in St. Patrick’s College, Carlow, as a seminarian, where he was taught not only by Irish priests but by French emigrés who brought, it is said, ‘‘a diluted form of Jansenism and . . . a subdued sort of Gallicanism.’’ 42 He learned to respect the works of Continental divines, to study his classics, and to abominate John Locke. From Carlow, he returned to Cork to hold many positions, religious and secular, educational and charitable.43 In addition, England founded a periodical, the Religious Repertory, which was ‘‘intended to be a literary agent of reform for the ‘lower orders of society.’ ’’ The journal’s editorial tone shifted from 1809 when it stressed the passive virtues of survival, to 1815 when it preached activism. At the heart of this transformation was the dispute over ‘‘the Veto,’’ the proposition that the Irish Catholic hierarchy should, in exchange for Catholic Emancipation, grant to the British government a veto over episcopal appointments. On this matter, the Vatican (in and out of Napoleonic captivity) wavered, as did Irish leadership, with Henry Grattan its firmest advocate and Daniel O’Connell, John England’s friend, its warmest opponent. These issues were directly debated, not in the Religious Repertory, but in the Cork Mercantile Chronicle, of which England became a trustee in 1813. Indeed, the young priest, before and after his removal to a parish in Bandon, was directly involved in politics, even to the point of being a campaign manager in 1818 for a Parliamentary candidate who endorsed Emancipation.44 In the school of Irish Catholic life, John England learned several things: that the separation of church and state was sound, especially if the state was owned by Protestants; that religious lib40. Still the best biography of England is Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John England, First Bishop of Charleston (1786–1842), 2 vols. (New York: The America Press, 1927). 41. William George Read, ‘‘Memoir of Bishop England,’’ in Reynolds, Works of John England, 1:5. 42. Carlow College was an innovation; such seminaries were only legal after the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 partially remedied disabilities that had for centuries compelled Irish seminarians to study abroad: see Guilday, John England, 59–75 (quotation on p. 67). Patrick Carey, An Immigrant Bishop: John England’s Adaptation of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism (Yonkers, N.Y.: U.S. Catholic Historical Society, 1982), 38, doubts that the Irish needed French priests to teach them Gallicanism. Certainly John England’s later career shows a marked coolness towards the French influence in the American Catholic Church. 43. John England to Henry Conwell, 18 September 1822, in ‘‘Documents of the Hogan Case,’’ in Reynolds, Works of John England, 5:134. 44. Carey, Immigrant Bishop, 35, 11–26.

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erty and toleration were desirable; that voluntarism connected hierarchy and laity, who ought to work out a formal contract that granted legitimacy to each other’s roles; that some resistance to Rome was occasionally necessary, because the Vatican seldom understood a local situation.45 He was, therefore, a bold choice when Rome went looking for a bishop for the newly created diocese of Charleston, whose scope was the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. He was perhaps little pleased to be chosen, but Rome was not to be readily disobeyed and miters were not prudently disdained. Still, Charleston was far, the diocese was impecunious and ridden with schism, its priests were scandalous, its communicants few, its buildings and institutions fewer. The larger American church was in a vast minority and in 1800 could number but 50 priests. The hierarchy was divided between those of ‘‘native’’ birth like the first archbishop of Baltimore, John Carroll; those connected to the worlds of Canada and Louisiana whose priests came from France; and those newly arriving from Ireland; in time, a German Catholic tradition would intrude, as cities like Cincinnati grew more important. The archdiocese of Baltimore, the senior jurisdiction in the American hierarchy whose domain had once been the whole United States, after Carroll’s death in 1815 was for several incumbencies deeply influenced by the French tradition. Ambrose Maréchal (1817–28) was ‘‘a prélat of the old French school.’’ James Whitefield (1828–34) was English-born but French-educated, while his successor, Samuel Eccleston (1834–51) of Maryland, had studied at Issy under the guidance of the Society of Saint-Sulpice, the dominant influence on French seminary education. Such men did not trust Irishmen like the bishop of Charleston, who mistrusted them back. John England was to flatter himself that an Irishman could more readily accommodate himself to American conditions, for the ‘‘French never can become American. Their language, manners, love of la belle France, their dress, air, carriage, notions, and mode of speaking of their religion, all, all are foreign. . . . The French clergy are generally good men and love Religion, but they make the Catholic Religion thus appear as exotic, and cannot understand why it should be made to appear assimilated to American principles.’’ 46 John England, guardian of an ancient and vast tradition, came to Charleston as a modest and odd intruder. The wealth and establishment that surrounded him was Protestant. His own diocese, he was to explain to Rome in 1833 with a little hyperbole, ‘‘is one of the largest, and perhaps it is the poorest, in all Christendom. Comprising a vast territory it covers a measureless extent 45. I am summarizing the argument of Carey, Immigrant Bishop, 45–81. 46. Brugger, Maryland, 148; Guilday, John England, 1:221, 2:385–86, 1:482; John England to Michael O’Connor, 25 February 1835, quoted in Guilday, John England, 1:481–82.

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John England (From I. A. Reynolds, ed., Works of the Right Rev. John England [1849])

of insalubrious swamps in a warm climate, where every summer and autumn deadly fevers prevail.’’ (This he knew to his cost, for his own sister, a nun, had died of the yellow fever.) ‘‘Its boundaries enclose nearly two million inhabitants, of whom about one half are negro slaves. In all this population there are but a little more than ten thousand Catholics. . . . Probably one thousand of the Catholics are slaves belonging to Protestant masters.’’ Everywhere he had been obliged to start from almost nothing. He had to struggle to wrest possession of St. Mary’s, the city’s Catholic Church, from its lay trustees. He had few priests of any worth and no nuns, no seminary, no parish schools, no organs of publicity, no organizing principles for his diocese, and no inventory of its resources or obligations. Gradually he pieced together the foundations of a Roman Catholic establishment, partly with subventions from Catholic charities in Europe, notably the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Lyons and the Leopoldine Association in Vienna. But Baltimore remained uncooperative and resistant to his ideas, especially for a Provincial Council that would gather together all the American bishops. And Rome was often a problem. The Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, with which he mainly dealt, was ill informed on American affairs, was inclined to listen to the last American or other priest who passed through or wrote to Rome with plausible opinions about a missionary church that was not unusually plagued by fac-

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tional disputes and priestly backbiting. From 1825 to 1830 England was persona non grata with Propaganda as a result of a malignant letter from the Bishop of Philadelphia.47 But England was young, eloquent, strong, indeed headstrong. Jasper Adams, the president of the College of Charleston, observed with mixed acracy in 1828: ‘‘We have a Catholic Bishop who is an irishman & probably a jesuit, a turbulent fellow, & who carries his manner with a high hand.’’ 48 By the time of his death in 1842, England had more than bankrupted the diocese by his initiatives. And he was inclined to meddle in other bishop’s affairs, which was partly why, outside his own diocese, he was uninfluential as an ecclesiastical politician; Baltimore too saw to that. But as a publicist for his faith, he was preeminent. He wrote well and often in his own journal, the United States Catholic Miscellany, which from 1822 issued weekly from Charleston and made itself the leading Catholic publication. It lasted, indeed, until the Civil War and arguably was the most stable periodical in the South, perhaps one of the most durable in the country; it predated by more than a decade its main competitor, the Southern Literary Messenger. The five volumes of England’s Writings, published posthumously in 1849 by his successor, were chiefly mined from its pages. From John England’s standpoint, the difference between North and South was not crucial. All was Protestant, most was hostile. The Methodist, the Presbyterian, the Bostonian, the Charlestonian, concurred in abominating the Papist. There was the same depressing round of vilification and selfcongratulatory reasoning everywhere he looked. The difference between Italy and the United States, however, was all his world. This was so physically, as well as ideologically. He was obliged constantly to travel back and forth. Certainly the Vatican did not much concern itself with the niceties of the MasonDixon line, which it showed abundantly when in 1833 Gregory XVI made England his Apostolic Delegate Extraordinary to Haiti, with little regard to the resonance of the word ‘‘Haiti’’ to England’s Charlestonian parishioners and neighbors. What did the pope know or care that his bishop dined each Wednesday with Madame Talvande, the schoolteacher who had fled the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue? 49 All the pope knew was that England was competent, a bishop, and fairly close to a Haiti where the Catholic Church was 47. Guilday, John England, 1:526, 505, 523, 362–64. 48. Jasper Adams to the Rev. Sewall Harding, 8 November 1828, SCL, reproduced in The University South Caroliniana Society: Sixty-Fourth Annual Meeting (Columbia, S.C.: South Caroliniana Library, 2000), 29. 49. For a semifictional account of his visits, see Mary Boykin Chesnut, ‘‘Two Years—Or the Way We Lived Then,’’ in Two Novels by Mary Chesnut, ed. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 166.

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in terminal decay and needed resuscitation. So the bishop packed his bags and went. England understood why this had to be. In 1832, he had pointed out how, in Charleston, Catholic worlds mingled. In the cemetery of its old church was ‘‘the evidence of the Catholicity of those whose ashes it contains. You may find the American and the European side by side; France, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, England, Portugal, Massachusetts, Brazil, New York, and Mexico, have furnished those who worshipped at the same altar with the African and Asiatic: during life they were found all professing one faith, derived from a common source; after death their remains commingle.’’ 50 In the matter of slavery, the Catholic Church had been dealing with the issue since St. Peter had come to Rome; it had been developing policies about it in the New World since Columbus. From the standpoint of the Vatican, the arguments between William Lloyd Garrison and Thomas Dew, let alone the disputes between Frederick Douglass and Thomas Smyth, were minuscule and recent squabbles among heretics, which scarcely impinged upon the majesty of dogma. It was more important to John England to stand in a right relationship to his church than to his neighbors, though he tried to please both. In 1840, for example, the pope issued an Apostolic Letter on slavery, which some read as a condemnation of the institution and used to embarrass Catholics in slaveholding states; among them, awkwardly for John England, was Daniel O’Connell, speaking at the World Antislavery Convention in London.51 In particular, John Forsyth, Secretary of State to Martin Van Buren, addressed the people of Georgia, his own state, with slashing words about ‘‘the brutal O’Connell’’ and intimations that British abolitionists were conspiring with the Vatican. John England replied in eighteen letters, published in the United States Catholic Miscellany in late 1840 and early 1841.52 At one level, his task was simple. The Apostolic Letter had, in fact, condemned not slavery but the slave trade, and those from among the faithful who ‘‘basely blinded by the lust of sordid gain, in remote and distant lands, reduced to slavery Indians, negroes, or other miserable persons; or, by traffic begun and extended in those who had been made captive by others, did not hesitate to add the shameful crime of the latter.’’ It was easy enough for John England to show that, in this, the Vatican did no more than had the Constitution of the United States. The Vatican, in 50. ‘‘A Brief Account of the Introduction of the Catholic Religion into the States of N. Carolina, S. Carolina, and Georgia’’ (1832), in Reynolds, Works of John England, 3:252. 51. The text of ‘‘Litterae Apostolicae de Nigritarum Commercio Non Exercendo’’ is given in both Latin and English in Reynolds, Works of John England, 3:108–12. 52. These ‘‘Letters on Domestic Slavery’’ are republished in ibid., 113–91; some seem to be misdated.

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South America and elsewhere, numbered many slaveholders among the faithful and, as England patiently explained, a papal edict condemning slavery would have necessitated the withdrawal of communion from these, which was something that neither the Vatican nor the Archbishop of Baltimore nor the bishops of Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, Bardstown, Nashville, and St. Louis had any interest in doing. Equally, it was easy though laborious for England, like his Protestant contemporaries, to demonstrate that slavery had been a biblical institution, entailed by God upon man for his sins. To add to this Scripture, he had at hand a battery of Church fathers, popes, councils, canon lawyers, Catholic historians, saints, and bishops who had spoken and legislated upon the subject. Abraham, Christ, Paul, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, all were brought in evidence to prove that slavery and natural law, slavery and God’s dispensation, had been compatible since the Fall, and to argue that Christianity had served to ameliorate the institution. These greater and many lesser authorities were trotted out: St. Ambrose of Milan, Pope Gelasius I, St. Polycarp, Osius the bishop of Cordova, ‘‘the good and erudite Salvanius, a priest who died in Marseilles, about the year 484,’’ Flodoardin the historian of the Church of Rheims who ‘‘gives us the will of St. Remi, its bishop, who baptized Clovis.’’ It was pedantic, no doubt. Perhaps he intended a dry joke, when he began Letter 16 with, ‘‘I proceed with the capitularies of Charlemagne.’’ 53 But the point was forceful. Eighteen letters, which come to about 90 pages of double-columned text in his Works, had enabled England to reach the tenth century in his explication, before he stopped. The problem of slavery was very old; many great men had pondered it. Yet ancient precedent was useful, partly because it deflected attention away from the present-day South. But John England could not evade everything contemporary with his erudition. He had to say a few words about modern circumstances, albeit evasively: ‘‘Slavery it is true, continues amongst us, and whatever may be the opinions and desires of the South upon the subject, it is impossible that it should be abolished for a considerable time to come, without the most injurious results, not merely to property but to society.’’ The ‘‘intermeddling of northern abolitionists’’ was deprecated, though partly because it had served to retard reformist impulses within the South. ‘‘Whatever our own wishes respecting slavery may be, we are firmly of the opinion that in all of the South there is less cruelty and injustice committed against the slave by his owner, than there is committed by the American abolitionists against the American slaveholders.’’ What were his wishes? England was pressed on the matter. At the very end, after pages of centuries of canonical authority, 53. Ibid., 111, 116, 134, 135, 176.

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he added this brief postscript. ‘‘I have been asked by many, a question which I may as well answer at once, viz.: Whether I am friendly to the existence or continuation of slavery? I am not—but I also see the impossibility of now abolishing it here. When it can and ought to be abolished, is a question for the legislature and not for me.’’ 54 This, too, had ancient precedent. Render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. It was not only John Forsyth who needed correction. The Reverend Richard Fuller of Beaufort, with sundry others, in 1839 while petitioning the legislature to endorse Temperance, had expressed the belief that ‘‘the time shall come, when the legislators of a Christian community will regard an enactment to license the retail of ardent spirits, with the same abhorrence which they feel toward the statute formerly passed by the Roman Chancery, making assassination and murder, and prostitution, and every crime, subjects of license and taxation, and regulating the price at which each might be committed.’’ The bishop asked, in the Charleston Courier and elsewhere, that this misinformation be retracted. The Reverend Fuller was puzzled; he assured the bishop that he and his committee had ‘‘no design to reflect upon the present regulations or polity of the Roman Catholic Church,’’ that these were old abuses, though demonstrable. He referred the bishop to a book first published in Rome in 1514, entitled Regulae, Constitutiones, Reservationes Cancellariae S. Domini Nostri Leonois Papae Decimi ‘‘&c,’’ where one could find ‘‘the sums to be paid for absolution from the crime of murder, parricide and incest, and all other enormities.’’ ‘‘Do you mean to deny these things?’’ the Baptist politely, self-confidently, inquired. The bishop did. The minister objected. They argued backwards and forwards from July to October, until the newspapers grew weary of them.55 Boston was as bad as the Sea Islands. As early as 1824, the North American Review had slandered the church’s policy in South America, in particular had said that the pope had granted dispensations to crusading missionaries ‘‘for the zeal they displayed in exterminating the infidels.’’ 56 This needed much straightening out. In 1825, a correspondent in Savannah asked skeptical questions about papal infallibility, to which England had to respond.57 In 1826, a Episcopal minister in Augusta, the Rev. Hugh Smith, more broadly assaulted the Church for failing to acknowledge the literal truth of the Bible; this re54. Ibid., 112, 190–91. 55. ‘‘Memorial to the Hon. Members of the Senate, and House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina,’’ 22 July 1839, and ‘‘Letters Concerning the Roman Chancery,’’ ibid., 14, 13–106 (quotations for the latter on pp. 14, 17). 56. ‘‘Strictures on Some Misstatements of the North American Review,’’ ibid., 181–223 (quotation on 192). 57. ‘‘An Essay and Letters on Infallibility’’ (1825), ibid., 1:57–85.

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quired a lengthy response.58 There was then the egregious Blanco White, the renegade priest, whose Practical and Internal Evidence Against Catholicism had been republished in Georgetown, D.C., in 1826; of him, immense refutation was called for.59 John Bachman, the Lutheran minister of Charleston, needed correction in 1838 on the doctrine of transubstantiation.60 All these and more found themselves abundantly reproved: a writer in the Boston Gospel Advocate in 1822;61 a Unitarian minister in Washington in the same year;62 the Rev. William Hawley, the editor of the Theological Reporter, an Episcopal periodical in Washington, in 1824;63 the editor of the Mount Zion Missionary in Georgia in 1824;64 the governor of Georgia, George M. Troup, in 1826;65 a writer in the Boston Patriot in 1827;66 Chancellor DeSaussure of South Carolina in 1827;67 the Right Rev. Dr. Bowen, bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of South Carolina in 1828;68 the Southern Religious Telegraph of Richmond in 1831;69 Nathaniel Parker Willis, the popular novelist, in 1833;70 Duff Green, editor of the Baltimore Pilot and Transcript, in 1840.71 John England, therefore, was an indefatigable controversialist, even within his own church.72 So many of his contacts with the culture beyond his flock were adversarial, though he seems to have made tangential connections with the intellectual culture of Charleston. He published an essay in the Southern Review upon the ‘‘Religion of the Aboriginal Americans’’ (1828), which began life as an address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina, of which he was a member.73 To that same society, he spoke in 1832 on the 58. ‘‘Letters on the Judicial Office of the Catholic Church’’ (1826), ibid., 86–104. 59. ‘‘Letters on the Calumnies of J. Blanco White against the Catholic Religion’’ (1826–28), ibid., 106–347. See also Guilday, John England, 2:66. 60. ‘‘Letters on the Catholic Doctrine of Transubstantiation’’ (1838), Reynolds, Works of John England, 1:347–474. 61. ‘‘On the Dispensing Power of the Pope’’ (1822), ibid., 2:400–421. 62. ‘‘On the Moral Character of Several Sovereign Pontiffs’’ (1822), ibid., 436–72. 63. ‘‘Letters on Various Misrepresentations of the Catholic Religion’’ (1824), ibid., 213–77. 64. ‘‘A Series of Controversial Pieces on Several Catholic Doctrine’’ (1824), ibid., 277–332. 65. ‘‘Letter on the Relations of the Catholic Church and Feudalism’’ (1826), ibid., 472–76. 66. ‘‘On the Origin of Ecclesiastical Privileges in England’’ (1827), ibid., 421–36. 67. ‘‘Letters to Chancellor DeSaussure’’ (1827), ibid., 4:163–66. 68. ‘‘Letters to Right. Rev. Dr. Bowen’’ (1828), ibid., 2:19–88; ‘‘Letters in Reply to Essays, Controverting Several Statements Made by B. C. in his Letters to the Right Rev. Dr. Bowen’’ (1829), ibid., 89–184. 69. ‘‘The Republic in Danger’’ (1831), ibid., 4:13–68. 70. ‘‘Misrepresentations of N. P. Willis’s ‘First Impressions of Europe’’’ (1833), ibid., 149–59. 71. ‘‘Calumnies against Catholic Voters Refuted’’ (1840), ibid., 69–103. 72. See, for example, ‘‘Documents Relating to Case of Rev. William Hogan, and the Schism in St. Mary’s Church, Philadelphia,’’ ibid., 5:109–213. 73. John England, ‘‘Religion of the Aboriginal Americans,’’ SR 2 (November 1828): 305–

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merits of a classical education. In 1838, he delivered an oration on the character of George Washington to the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, of which he was an honorary member. These were tokens of a modest inclusion, as were, in a broader context, addresses at Franklin College in 1840, to the Hibernian Society in Savannah in 1824, and to the Anti-Duelling Society of Charleston in 1828. In the mid-1830s, he published an essay on Vergil in the Southern Literary Journal in Charleston.74 The mission to Haiti was an especial problem, as he knew it would be. Abolitionists in New York sent a petition to Haiti for signatures, which found its way to its president, Jean Pierre Boyer, ‘‘requesting that no communication should be held with me as envoy from . . . Pope Gregory XVI, upon the ground that he was not averse to southern slavery, and that I was an enemy to Daniel O’Connell, and an enemy to negroes.’’ Conversely, his going to Haiti occasioned unease in South Carolina. Before his departure, he went to the state legislature in Columbia, to effect what would normally have been a routine incorporation of Church property. He traveled there with Robert Y. Hayne, James Hamilton, and James L. Petigru, ‘‘all my most intimate acquaintances, and, although Protestants, by no means bigoted.’’ Usually on these visits, the House of Representatives asked him, by a unanimous vote, to preach to them. On this occasion, 40 voted for the invitation, the rest against him. A friendly member renewed the motion, spoke for it, but only succeeded in increasing the negative vote. Worse, his incorporation bill languished in committee, while ‘‘those for Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists’’ did not. With some lobbying, he managed to get his bill reported out, though only upon the casting vote of the chair. The Senate was more friendly and asked him to speak, an occasion at which some members of the lower house attended. He spoke well enough and talked them around, but it had been a humiliation.75 To many, John England was a Papist threat, to others a mere curiosity. In North Carolina in 1823, David Swain (he of the vague anti-Semitism) attended a wedding ceremony presided over by the bishop: ‘‘for the first time in my life, I have seen a miter, a stole, & witnessed the 1000 peculiarities which distinguish the Catholic from the protestant in the performance of this interesting ceremony.’’ 76 This was not intimidating, but James G. M. Ramsey, on a visit to Charleston from Tennessee in 1829, was less urbane about witnessing Roman Catholic rites, which he regarded with a mix of curiosity and disgust, 48, reprinted in ibid., 4:462–84; ‘‘An Essay on the Religion and Customs of the Tribes of American Indians’’ (1827), ibid., 454–62. 74. ‘‘Descent of Aeneas to the Shades,’’ ibid., 5:78–89. 75. ‘‘Letters on Domestic Slavery,’’ ibid., 3:116; Guilday, John England, 2:296–97. 76. David L. Swain to George Swain, 3 May 1823, David L. Swain Papers, SHC.

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and which he attended because friends urged that the spectacle would furnish entertainment. At St. Finbar’s Cathedral, he saw the bishop ‘‘walking about through the gaping crowd—who seemed to think his shadow falling on them or a touch of the hem of his garment would be a salve to soul & body.’’ For Ramsey, the sight occasioned, instead, prim regret at ‘‘the degradation of the human intellect implied in the scene before me.’’ Still, ‘‘an excellent organ accompanied by good female voices was playing a lively air.’’ But it troubled him that the priests stood behind a railing, to protect them from ‘‘the vulgar approach,’’ on whom their backs were turned, and read ‘‘aloud all at one time different portions of the Testament in Latin.’’ As for the bishop, his ‘‘very theatrical’’ performance was a disappointment. ‘‘As he had no ideas worth communicating it became necessary to give those he did exhibit all the aid of ‘foreign ornament.’ His action is unnatural & forced & his arguments (assertions) addressed to the presumed ignorance of his hearers.’’ Ramsey’s response was not merely religious, but also political. For ‘‘the Catholics are all strong Jackson people & that is all I can say for them.’’ 77 To be surrounded by such reflexive hostility seems to have told on the bishop, as did the strain of traveling to Haiti, Ireland, France, Austria, Rome, always back to Charleston. He grew inattentive to diocesan matters, more isolated when in the city, older faster than his years. The incessant pressure of controversy, of justification and explanation, engendered bitterness and alienation. When Francis Lieber accepted his position at South Carolina College in 1835, at the height of the Haiti controversy, England wrote him a savage letter of advice. Though he wished the German well, the bishop thought it best if Lieber stayed away from the Irishman. Even ‘‘your own most respectable supporters,’’ he noted, would find an ‘‘acquaintance with me [to] be no favourable recommendation.’’ For, in Charleston, he had become ‘‘a voluntary exile from society.’’ He had attempted to belong, but failed. ‘‘Carolina has not a son more attached to her than I have been . . . but I found that my religion was never to be forgiven.’’ He had tried, he explained, to found a school dedicated to a rigorous classical education and free of religious instruction. He had thought himself encouraged, but had been abandoned by ministers of other denominations, who had left him with no pupils and debts, from which only ‘‘years of endurance’’ had extricated him. He hoped that Lieber would be happy and useful in Columbia. But, if he could give one word of advice, ‘‘it would be, keep free of political & religious parties, preserve discipline & order in the establishment—turn the abilities you have to account for your 77. James G. M. Ramsey to Margaret B. C. Ramsey, 21 January 1829, James G. M. Ramsey Papers, Special Collections Department, James D. Hoskins Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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students,—answer no attacks made upon you & you must succeed.’’ 78 Lieber only half-managed this. The bishop was a theologian, if orthodox, for he had his oath of obedience. This, too, did not help. In general, religious people in the South shared a suspicion of theology. In this, they did not differ from other Americans, indeed many Europeans. Many in eighteenth-century England had been very doubtful about the value of teaching theology to undergraduates, lest too much thought and learning should spoil and confuse the simpler belief that vicars needed to be effective pastors in their country parishes. Some denominations in the South, especially the Baptists, had been determinedly anti-intellectual and spoken against ‘‘the learned gentry of the day, who swarm out of the theological institutions like locusts, and are ready to devour the land.’’ As late as 1856, Basil Manly could write: ‘‘I tell you, these off hand, sharp-shooters, these extempore preachers are going to be the men required by the times. We must have something cheap, to go into places that can’t pay;—we must have something sharp & angular, not polished off ‘according to Gunter,’ that will knock people on the other side of the head, where they don’t expect it,—& knock them out of this routine—this killing tendency to formalism. The spirit of piety is fast oozing out, every where, under the influence of regular bred theologians. The-o-lo-gians!—beautiful word! D.D. i.e. dwarf divine.’’ 79 Revivalism had been inattentive to the life of the mind, but, rather, had massaged the emotions of fear and hope, anxiety and catharsis. Yet even the starkest backcountry preacher had been the prisoner of some defunct theorist, whether it was Augustine, Calvin, or Wesley. And revivalism was never as important to Southern religion as many thought, though it had jarred complacencies, briefly challenged conservatisms, and drawn fascinated voyeurs like Frances Trollope, who saw it as sexual theater and democratic frenzy. But revivalism dwindled (save as its own formalized ritual) as the nineteenth century went on, as cities grew, churches were built, schools were founded, bank accounts opened, and property acquired. Religion became a boom business.80 In 1860, an urban Southern minister might expect to earn quadruple the average in78. John England to FL, 27 October 1835, FL Papers, SCL. 79. ‘‘Brother’’ Scott of Cow Marsh, Delaware, quoted in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian South: A Study in Regional Folk Culture,’’ Journal of Southern History 36 (November 1970): 519, itself quoting Richard B. Cook, The Early and Later Delaware Baptists (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1880), 93; BM to A. Bowie, 18 September 1856, Manly Family Papers, UA. 80. On early radicalisms, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); on later formalism, Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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come for a free, adult, white American. As Benjamin Morgan Palmer put it in 1839 to a friend contemplating a career, ‘‘There is, dear J, a tremendous call for ministers: & there is no call for candidates into any other profession. Weigh the fact that the harvest is ripe, & that there are not laborers enough to reap it.’’ 81 For good or ill, theology mattered even to the abominator of the worldly and the lettered. Palmer saw pastoralism and theology as interdependent. In 1853 he observed, ‘‘Instruction should be given. . . . [on the] systematic study of experimental religion grounded upon doctrinal Christianity, with a view on one hand to the students own growth in holiness, & on the other hand to fit him for the guidance of distressed & tempted souls.’’ For theology was ‘‘a science so comprehensive & intricate & involves so many branches of knowledge,’’ which addressed the fundamental issues of why things were as they were, which often structured the matter of how the religious should conduct their lives, as pastors, congregants, givers or withholders of charity, masters or slaves, men or women.82 When once-marginal preachers became important and well-paid men whose views mattered on great public issues, intellectual sophistication (in uneasy alliance with emotional force) became a new standard. Places of learning and discourse proliferated. Periodicals grew legion: the Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine (1818), the Protestant Episcopal Pulpit (1835), the Southern Baptist Preacher (1839), the Quarterly Review of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (1846), the Southern Presbyterian Review (1847), these were just a few among many, growing to be more. Seminaries and church-sponsored colleges were much founded. The Episcopalians had had the College of William and Mary since the late seventeenth century, but they founded the University of the South at Sewanee in 1857. The Presbyterians had the Union Theological Seminary (1812) in Richmond and the Columbia Theological Seminary (1828) in South Carolina; for colleges, they long had had Hampden-Sydney (1776), which added a seminary in 1807, and Transylvania (1784), though the denomination ceased support in 1818; they took over chief responsibility for Centre College in Kentucky in 1824, added Davidson (1836) near Charlotte in North Carolina, as well as Westminster (1851) in Missouri, and they took over in the late 1850s what began life as the Clarksville Academy and became Stewart College in 1855 (after the war, it in turn became Southwestern College). The 81. E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theolo in Southern Culture, 1795– 1860 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978), 28; Benjamin Morgan Palmer to Joseph B. Jones, 14 March 1839, Joseph B. Jones Papers, EU. 82. Benjamin Morgan Palmer to Abner Addison Porter, 13 August 1853, Abner Addison Porter Papers, PHS; Benjamin Morgan Palmer to Joseph B. Jones, 14 March 1839, Joseph B. Jones Papers, EU.

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Methodists continued to shun the idea of seminaries, but they liked colleges: Randolph-Macon (1830) in Virginia, Emory and Henry (1838) in the same state, and Emory (1838) in Georgia. The Baptists founded the Furman Institution in South Carolina in 1826, Mercer in Georgia in 1833, and Wake Forest in North Carolina in 1834; they did not have a formal seminary until the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1859, but earlier the University of Richmond (1832) had been concerned to train Baptist preachers. For the Catholics, there were seminaries in Maryland, Charleston, New Orleans, and Bardstown.83 Further, of course, secular state institutions like South Carolina College came increasingly under religious influence, though cautiously, for denominations had to be balanced against one another. In the seminaries, theology was abundantly taught, but the denominational colleges were skittish about the subject. Davidson College had a curriculum indistinguishable from secular colleges, that is, theology made its appearance only in courses on moral philosophy and in those on the ‘‘evidences of Christianity.’’ 84 The same was broadly true of Wake Forest, although it added study of natural theology and Hebrew. Loyalty to the denomination was subtler; it consisted in personnel, patronage, ritual, and the standing of the chapel in the campus’s official life, although even Emory and Henry College defined its purposes only as ‘‘the instruction of youth in the various branches of science and literature, the useful arts, agriculture and the ancient and modern languages,’’ and specified that ‘‘a majority of the said Board of Trustees shall at no time consist of one religious denomination,’’ and no one should be excluded ‘‘on account of his religious tenets.’’ The statutes of the University of the South were more forthright; the senior bishop of the denomination was always to be its chancellor; it had a chaplain and required professors and students to attend morning prayers; it had a school dedicated to Theology, and another to Moral Science and the Evidences of Christianity, and specified that all students had to study in the latter for graduation. But, otherwise, its curriculum was most notable for expanding the realm of secular knowledge. Likewise, the Furman Institution specified that its head had be a Baptist minister, though one ‘‘able to instruct in all the branches of a literary education, necessary for admission into the higher classes of the most respect83. Sam G. Riley, Index to Southern Periodicals (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 21, 38; Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians, 44–45; Charles Reagan Wilson, ‘‘Religion and Education,’’ in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 261. 84. See Mary D. Beaty, A History of Davidson College (Davidson, N.C.: Briarpatch Press, 1988), 20, which says moral philosophy was taught there, although Edgar W. Knight, ed., A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949–53), 4:308–9, reprints the details of the curriculum, and such a course is not listed.

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able Colleges in the United States.’’ But its professors had only to be ‘‘men of irreproachable morals, competent attainments in science, and if not Baptists, friendly at least in their feelings and sentiments to the Baptist denomination.’’ On the other hand, Furman did have a theological division, which grew in importance when the institution migrated and reorganized itself in the mid-1840s, when separate departments (modeled after the Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts) were created, dedicated to Biblical Literature and Interpretation, Biblical Theology, Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Duties, and Ecclesiastical History. Doubling on the obligations of Sewanee, prayers were said twice daily, at sunrise and sunset. But, in the 1850s, when the Institution finally settled in Greenville, theology was separated into a distinct department and the broader curriculum became very similar to that at ordinary colleges, indeed was modeled on those of Brown University and the University of Virginia.85 Even among those who taught it, there was much ambivalence about theology. ‘‘In the present age of profound bib. criticism & erudition in the sacred languages, neither you nor I,’’ William Hooper told James C. Furman in 1837, ‘‘have been in the way of raising ourselves to a par with the professors of similar institutions in Europe, or even in this country. But in the sphere in which we shall be called to act, more moderate attainments will answer a good purpose and meet the wants of our denomination. . . . I fear that for some years to come, perhaps during our generation, we shall have in our hands half-educated young men, who are hurrying on to the pulpit, & who would not have youth or patience enough to wait for us to impart our stores to them if we had the erudition of a Horseley or a Neander or any of the rest of them.’’ In the state colleges, theology as such was thought to be proscribed by the separation of church and state. Jefferson had banned divinity completely from the University of Virginia, upon his own instinct and the advice of Thomas Cooper, who had long since told the ex-president: ‘‘Where there exists a national system of religion, there ought to be a church establishment to support it, and regular seminaries in which should be taught the dogmata and their defences, which the nation has thought fit politically to adopt. If religion be politically necessary, then teach it without regard to the truth of the adopted system: but if you are to teach theology in your university on the ground of its truth, who is to judge which system is true?’’ To Jefferson, the sects were wrangling and ambitious: the ‘‘ambition and tyranny’’ of the Presbyterians especially ‘‘would tolerate no rival if they had power.’’ But this exclu85. Knight, Documentary History of Education, 4:324, 321–22, 488–500; Robert Norman Daniel, Furman University: A History (Greenville, S.C.: Furman University, 1951), 16, 18–19, 39, 41, 58–62.

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sion was accepted even by the pious. Thornwell in 1853, discoursing to Governor Manning of South Carolina, presumed that sectarianism had to be shut away from public education, that they should ‘‘leave creeds and confessions to the fireside and church, the home and the pulpit.’’ Rather, colleges should have ‘‘godly teachers,’’ the ‘‘spirit of religion’’ not its dogma, moral influence and Sunday prayers, from which the conscientious might gain exemption. Indeed, Thornwell accepted the logic of his old teacher, Cooper: ‘‘The difficulty of introducing religion is, indeed, rather speculative than practical. When we propose to teach religion as a science, and undertake by precise boundaries and exact statutory provisions, to define what shall and what shall not be taught, when by written schemes we endeavour to avoid all the peculiarities of sect and opinion without sacrificing the essential interests of religion, the task is impossible. The residuum, after our nice distinctions, is zero.’’ In his own life, Thornwell practiced these principles. He performed services in the college chapel, but he lent books to the skeptical, held ‘‘a meeting in his recitation room every Wednesday evening open to any of the Students that wish to come,’’ where the Bible was read, prayers said, and instruction administered to as many as thirty students, some of them present ‘‘only for curiosity,’’ some with earnest intent freshly awakened.86 Despite these ambivalences, theology was a Southern preoccupation, indeed unusually was even an export trade. At Princeton, Archibald Alexander of Virginia, from 1812 to his death in 1851, was the dominant figure in the nation’s dominant Presbyterian seminary and ‘‘shaped the theology at the university for over a century.’’ 87 Within the South itself, works of theology found a ready publication and a market. Were one to undertake a thorough survey, these works, at least, would require analysis and appraisal: from the Methodists, Thomas Ralston’s Elements of Divinity (1847), Henry Bidleman Bascom’s Posthumous Works (1855), and Richard Henderson Rivers’s Elements of Moral Philosophy (1859); from the Baptists, John Leadley Dagg’s Manual of Theolo (1857); from the Presbyterians, Archibald Alexander’s many works, perhaps most notably his posthumously published Outlines of Moral Science (1852), George Howe’s Discourse on Theological Education (1844), Thomas Smyth’s writings in the 86. William Hooper to James C. Furman, 8 August (1837), James C. Furman Papers, FU; TC to Thomas Jefferson, 22 September 1814, TC Papers, SCL; Thomas Jefferson to TC, 2 November 1822, in Knight, Documentary History of Education, 3:213; JHT, Letter to His Excellency Governor Manning on Public Instruction in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: R. W. Gibbes, 1853), 22–23; Francis Peyre Porcher to Isabella S. Porcher, March 1843, Porcher Family Papers, SCHS. 87. Mark A. Noll, ed., The Princeton Theolo , 1812–1921: Scripture, Science and Theological Method from Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1983), 13.

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ten volumes of his Complete Works (1909–12), Robert J. Breckinridge’s Knowledge of God (1858–59), the various periodical writings of Robert Lewis Dabney, latterly gathered into the four volumes of his Discussions (1890); from the Episcopalians, John Stark Ravenscroft’s two-volume Works (1830), Jasper Adams’s Elements of Moral Philosophy (1837), Albert Taylor Bledsoe’s Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will (1845) and Theodicy (1854); from the Catholics, John England’s five-volume Works (1849), and Martin Spalding’s Miscellanea (1855); from the Unitarians, Samuel Gilman’s posthumous Contributions to Religion (1860); from the Lutherans, John Bachman’s Defence of Luther and the Reformation (1853). On the whole, intellectual sophistication was in inverse proportion to popularity. In numbers of adherents, the sequence from high to low ran Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. But, from most to least complex in dogma, it probably ran Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, and Baptist. So, an intellectual history might best be served by a look at the Presbyterians and Episcopalians. James Henley Thornwell was certainly the former’s most sophisticated thinker and prominent conservative, but also their most influential churchman: on this, almost everyone agreed at the time, and posterity has not changed this opinion. Among the Episcopalians, preeminence is less clear, but James Warley Miles was their most advanced thinker and perhaps the most liberal theologian the South produced before 1861. But this is a sampling, not a representation of Southern religious opinion. When it came to theology, no individual opinion stood for more than a single person, nor one denomination for another. There is no record of Thornwell’s opinion of James Warley Miles, though it is unlikely to have been flattering. But, like most people, Miles regarded Thornwell with a mix of admiration, fear, and mistrust. He spoke of the latter’s ‘‘undoubted intellectual ability,’’ but also complained of being damned as infidel by Presbyterians and articulated a defiance: ‘‘I would rather be called infidel in the noble company of Neander and Arnold, than be lauded for the narrow-minded orthodoxy of Thornwell.’’ Their differences were profound, wider than the mere distinction between Calvinist and theological liberal. Thornwell was polemical and sectarian, while Miles aspired to a gentle ecumenism. Thornwell did not like to stray too far from his theological and philosophical interests, while Miles was broadly a man of letters, a theologian but also an essayist on history, social theory, belles lettres, and the classics, as well as a minor poet and memoirist. Thornwell was a career man, bent on rising, and a patriarch; Miles drifted from job to bankruptcy and back again, and was a lonely and depressed bachelor, who wrote overwrought letters to married ladies and languished in a Pre-Raphaelite gloom. Thornwell was very

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much the pedagogue who wanted to mold minds and be admired for it, but Miles recoiled from influence; the one wished for power and, in his own way, possessed it, while the other fled the very idea and preferred the obscurity of being a librarian. ‘‘My highest ambition as to place,’’ Miles wrote to David James McCord in 1851, ‘‘is a situation with access to books, and where my work will lie in the study—not in a position obliging me to exercise authority and discipline.’’ But, in his own way, Miles was the bolder spirit, if the weaker temperament. It is hard to imagine Thornwell going as a missionary to the Near East or spending two years in Berlin to clarify mind and spirit, as Miles did. And, while Thornwell was fearfully respected, Miles was loved and pitied, cosseted and praised, regarded by many in Charleston almost as a holy man. Alfred Huger said of him, ‘‘I love his purity and simplicity as an Individual! and I reverence the ability and the profundity, which mark his every step, as a Teacher and Expounder of that which I am instructed ‘to believe’!’’ This was not a worldly eminence, but ‘‘the simplicity of a child.’’ 88 Miles’s life was a string of brief distracted employments and abandonments. He was born in 1818 in St. Matthew’s Parish, where his father, James Sanders Miles, was a considerable planter. The family was of mixed English and Huguenot extraction.89 He attended the Willington Academy, then South Carolina College (where he studied under the newly arrived Lieber) before being expelled in 1837 for challenging a fellow student to a duel, a strange prelude to a life of pained civility. He studied law for a few months, then went to the General Theological Seminary in New York until 1841, when he was ordained a deacon and, for two years, served in various South Carolina parishes—Bradford Springs, Pineville, Upper St. John’s, Cheraw. In late 1843, he went to the Near East as a missionary and returned in 1847. For about four months, he was rector of Saint John’s Church, Colleton, on John’s Island, before resigning and becoming temporarily assistant minister at St. Michael’s in Charleston for another few months. But he found the weekly sermon irksome, so he left and loitered unemployed for a few more months, before being elected Professor of the History of Intellectual Philosophy and Greek Literature at the College of Charleston in February 1850. But, though he liked the young, he did not like policing their disorders. In 1853, without giving up his chair, he resumed a position as assistant minister for St. Michael’s, but 88. JWM to David James McCord, 24 April 1851, McCord Mss, SCHS; Alfred Huger to Robert Newton Gourdin, 31 May 1853, Robert Newton Gourdin Papers, EU; Alfred Huger to MK, 12 October 1853, Alfred Huger Papers, DU. 89. I take the following biographical facts from the account in Ralph Luker, A Southern Tradition in Theolo and Social Criticism, 1830–1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Warley Miles, William Porcher DuBose and Edgar Gardner Murphy (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), 16–184.

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lasted only three months. He hung on at the college until the spring of 1854, but grew more and more depressed, so he resigned, sold his great library for $3,000, and fled to Holland briefly, then Berlin. (In fact, his friends had secretly bought the books and kept them for him.) He was to stay in Germany until late in 1856, when traveling Charlestonians scooped him up in Paris and returned him home, where with pleasure he found his library intact and a job arranged, as librarian of the College of Charleston, which had few duties and little salary.90 He was still in Charleston when the war began, continued to serve at the college until 1863, when he refugeed with his family in Anderson. After the war, he came back to his old college, now as Professor of Ancient Languages, but grew more and more ill, resigned in 1871, went briefly to Boston (the first time he had left South Carolina since the 1850s), came back to desultory pastoral duties at St. Michael’s and St. Paul’s, Radcliffeborough, then at Grace Church, Charleston, lastly in 1874 to the rectorship of another Grace Church in Camden. He died in 1875, being just 57 years old. ‘‘The Grave is his early destiny’’ had been Alfred Huger’s opinion as early as 1853.91 Stability was not his gift, ambition not his vice. He always felt himself inadequate, seldom expected anything but the worst, and usually managed to elicit kindness. Sometimes he drifted close to madness, or so he and his friends thought, especially in the dark days of 1853–54. ‘‘My friend is very unhappy,’’ Lieber told Ticknor in 1853. ‘‘He lives without sympathy and, in one word, feels wretched. . . . I fear that it will end in madness. This is fearful but I see it coming.’’ He was fortunate in his family and friends, who looked out for him, knew his limitations, and realized that to expose him brutally to the world’s usual cruelty would be too crushing. This was so, in big and little things. In 1856, when a crowd of Gourdins, Hugers, and Ravenels found him pointlessly in Paris, they ‘‘undertook to have his baggage, remaining at Berlin, forwarded to a friend in Hamburgh and to arrange for his passage to America by any conveyance the most agreeable to him,’’ and he trotted along. In the late 1850s, his publications in Russell’s Magazine were arranged for him by Anna Rebecca Young, widow of an Episcopalian minister and his acolyte, who took his manuscripts to the editors, upon the condition that his writings be anonymous and he not be troubled by proofreading. ‘‘I feel a tender interest in him,’’ Robert Newton Gourdin told William Porcher Miles in 1856. ‘‘He is a man to be cared for, and to be sympathised with, and should never be without cheerful friends around him. I am sure that society is more essential to him than he is aware of, or may be ready to admit. . . . The simplicity of 90. He earned $600 p.a. ‘‘Many a common house-servant brings better wages,’’ he noted: see JWM to Anna Rebecca Young (ca. 1856), beginning ‘‘I was glad that,’’ JWM Papers, DU. 91. Alfred Huger to Robert Newton Gourdin, 13 May 1853, Robert Newton Gourdin Papers, EU.

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his nature renders him unfit to move & jostle on in the world as other men do and his friends must always regard him as an object of their care.’’ 92 Certainly, he dwelled on being alone, poor, dependent, and weak. In Charleston, he called himself ‘‘a sort of tolerated shadow . . . a stranger and foreigner,’’ to whom ‘‘the city and its doings have . . . a sort of mythical vagueness.’’ He could say of himself that he had ‘‘no plan—no hopes—no future.’’ He listlessly wrote of ‘‘starvation—neglect—blame,’’ and flattered himself that he had endured years of self-denial for his scholarship: ‘‘For the purchase of books, I have denied myself common comforts—necessaries—; I have been obliged to decline invitations to dinner—because I had not a [suit?] of dress clothes—all that I could spare given for books.’’ He had the usual Romantic theory about the value of this deprivation. ‘‘We have always been disposed to call in question the existence of the ‘mute, inglorious Miltons,’’’ he wrote in 1849. ‘‘The heart ‘pregnant with celestial fire’ must and will find utterance, and, in spite of every impediment and obstacle—in spite of penury, suffering, contempt and neglect—will, like Burns and Chatterton, ‘wake to ecstacy the living lyre’—saddened though its melody be by the groans which keen agony alone can wring from such souls.’’ 93 Elsewhere he announced, ‘‘The man who is pursuing any avocation, with the energy and the internal unity which such an idea of life must give to his whole being, and to the direction of all his powers, can never fail.’’ He admired these strugglers, the independent thinkers, men like Giordano Bruno, Hugh Miller, John C. Calhoun, Robert Peel, Thomas Arnold, Frederick Denison Maurice. Persecution was taken as evidence of virtue. So, Fichte ‘‘was actually persecuted by the clergy of his day, because his religion was too earnest and real for their cold formalism.’’ Like his contemporary Trescot, Miles thought struggle and antagonism necessary: ‘‘Progress can only be achieved through contest and successive conquest of error and opposition.’’ Indeed, he flirted with Comtean vanities in the late 1850s, when he prophesied that most current orthodoxies would ‘‘in a future age, be exhumed from libraries as literary fossil remains,’’ while independent thinkers would ‘‘no longer, as now, be isolated, but will as a class constitute a ruling power in the world.’’ 94 92. FL to George Ticknor, 18 June 1853, FL Papers, HEH; Robert Newton Gourdin to William Porcher Miles, 17 October 1856, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC; JWM to Anna Rebecca Young (ca. October–November 1858), beginning ‘‘Many thanks, my dear Friend,’’ JWM Papers, DU. 93. JWM to J. D. B. De Bow, 25 March 1854, J. D. B. De Bow Mss, DU; JWM to Robert Newton Gourdin, 8 July, 10 August 1854, Robert Newton Gourdin Mss, DU; JWM, ‘‘The Philosophy of the Beautiful,’’ SQR 16 (October 1849): 138. All Miles’s quotations are from Thomas Gray’s Ele Written in a Country Churchyard (1750). 94. JWM, Annual Oration, Delivered before the Chrestomathic Society of the College of Charleston, February 22, 1850 (Charleston, S.C.: E. C. Councell, 1850), 14; JWM, ‘‘On Independent Think-

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But did he have the celestial fire? He was not sure; he was conscious of something weak in himself. He once called himself an ‘‘intellectual cripple.’’ There was even a death wish. ‘‘I had no hope for the future, and had only looked to expend my present means, and then—die,’’ he observed of why he went abroad. He had been too cosseted once to bear loneliness later. He was ‘‘always accustomed to have an Aunt or some blessed one to care for me, to do for me; now—in utter isolation—I am helpless,’’ he said from Berlin. (One of these aunts, Anne Warley, had even joined him in Constantinople.) ‘‘You may call this unmanly weakness—; but—Merciful God!—all the hard names in the world can’t change the hard fact. I am unmanned—weak,’’ he lamented to Gourdin. When he found sympathy, he blossomed. Without it, he shriveled and gave in to ‘‘a feeling of my own nothingness.’’ 95 Why this Keatsian melancholy, the mood he called ‘‘The Dark Hour’’? 96 He had physical difficulties. His eyes could be bad, he slept badly, and worked late. No doubt, he had unrealistic hopes and standards. He disliked the rote of the weekly sermon because he desired only inspiration, which did not come on schedule. He wanted college students to study only for love of learning: ‘‘I must lecture to those only who come voluntarily to hear me—who wish to profit by what I can impart.’’ He had Platonic hopes for friendship, so he found the ordinary fallibilities and hypocrisies of society unsatisfying, even repulsive: ‘‘As for the mere, polite, acquaintanceship, with which most people are satisfied, and which is all that nine-tenths of the world ever cultivate— or comprehend—,—it is, to me, worse than valueless. For my own part, I desire no acquaintance who can not be a friend; and I would infinitely prefer knowing nobody—, being an utter—literal—stranger among all,—isolated—solitary—, than have any number of good acquaintances—who were nothing more.’’ He had a slight touch of paranoia. So, the editors at Russell’s Magazine were ‘‘not friendly to me, & least of all is Mr. Grayson,’’ though the former published him freely. But there seems to have been a deeper wound, to which he could not or would not give a name. His language was often inexplicitly dark: ‘‘Deformed and deforming will be the crazy moral tenement which that soul must evolve, whose life is dissipated in the shallow soil of passing things’’ is one example, among many.97 As he once said to Gourdin, ing,’’ Russell’s Magazine 2 (May 1858): 101, 106; JWM to Anna Rebecca Young (ca. October– November 1858), beginning ‘‘Many thanks, my dear Friend,’’ JWM Papers, DU; JWM, ‘‘The Aggressive Nature of Christianity,’’ Russell’s Magazine 3 (June 1857): 194. 95. JWM to Anna Rebecca Young (ca. 1856), beginning ‘‘I was glad that,’’ JWM Papers, DU; JWM to Robert Newton Gourdin, 21 and 10 August 1854, Gourdin Papers, DU; Luker, Southern Tradition, 33–34. 96. JWM to Anna Rebecca Young (ca. 1856), beginning ‘‘I am glad that,’’ JWM Papers, DU. In this, he speaks of George Borrow’s experience of the same despair. 97. JWM to Anna Rebecca Young, n.d. [1854?], beginning ‘‘This morning I gave,’’ and

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he was ‘‘writing to you as I would to a brother of whose heart [I] felt sure, even if I suspected that his judgment would condemn me. You shall have then a glimpse into the secret chambers of my soul, although there is a darkness there into which I dread to look.’’ 98 Miles’s standing as a theologian rested squarely on a single, brief work, the Philosophic Theolo ; or, Ultimate Grounds of All Religious Belief Based in Reason, which John Russell published in 1849, and which Johann Neander himself praised and had translated into German, after James Johnston Pettigrew gave him a copy in Berlin in 1850. When younger, Miles had been influenced by the Oxford Movement, but his farewell sermon at St. Michael’s in 1843 clarified his renunciation of ‘‘the mists of a new-fangled Theology from a distant Island, [which] cast around all my views a cloud, and placed me in a position as vacillating to myself, as it seemed ambiguous, and perchance uncandid to others.’’ This was to reject the impulse towards Rome, often the Episcopalian temptation. Formally, Miles objected to the Oxford reformers because their views conflicted with ‘‘the doctrine of justification as delivered by St. Paul, and defended by Luther and the other Reformers, a doctrine in the experimental apprehension of which, the sinner can alone find true peace and the spirit of adoption.’’ In this, Miles did not dissent from Thornwell, for whom justification was also crucial, because it underpinned the prospect of man’s adoption by God.99 But Miles was much more drawn to the idea of God and Christ’s willing grace, which appeared glowingly and gladly in his discourse.100 The Episcopalians, by their origins in Anglicanism and its establishment as a national church, tended towards the ecumenical and moderate, to blurring the finer points of doctrine so as not to exclude those who might drift into its rituals. (In 1849, Miles hazarded that establishment made sense for (ca. 1858) beginning ‘‘I can only now thank,’’ JWM Papers, DU; JWM to Robert Newton Gourdin, 10 August 1854, Robert Newton Gourdin Papers, DU; JWM to James Johnston Pettigrew (May 1854 is written on it by a later hand), Pettigrew Family Papers, NCSA; JWM, Chrestomathic Society Oration, 22. 98. JWM to Robert Newton Gourdin, 10 August 1854, Gourdin Papers, DU. The most plausible suggestion might be that Miles was homosexual, repressed or not. Much in the pattern of his life makes sense upon this hypothesis. But there is no proof for this. Just being a lonely bachelor, taken care of by maiden aunts, is scarcely evidence enough. 99. Luker, Southern Tradition, 47–49; JWM, Farewell Sermon, Preached by the Rev. James W. Miles, (Missionary of the Prot. Epis. Church to Mesopotamia,) in St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, on the Evening of August 20th, 1843 (Charleston, S.C.: B. B. Hussey, 1843), 11; John B. Adger et al., eds., The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, 4 vols., reprint, 1871–75 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 1:267. 100. It has been rightly pointed out that Miles, though more radical than Thornwell, was more traditional than Emerson by believing in miracles, Christ, the Trinity, and by disbelieving in ‘‘the divinity of the individual self.’’ See Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians, 70.

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England, though not for the different culture of the United States.) Miles’s experience in Constantinople much strengthened this impulse, for there he had had to deal with wrangling among the missionaries, but also with a bewildering range of Christian sects, Monophysite, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Syrian, Chaldean, and many others. In the Near East, belief became a linguistic and anthropological problem of communication. What would the Armenians make of translating the Book of Common Prayer, for example? ‘‘I am under the impression,’’ he wrote in 1847, ‘‘that the omission of the Invocations to the Saints would not be objected to [nor of pictures in our churches]; and that probably the chief objections would be to insertion of ‘and the Son’ in famous passage in Nicene Creed; to the expression ‘one person’ in the second Article. I am inclined to think, however, that they would not regard our doctrine as heretical. . . . [T]he mass of the Armenians would rather regard our Prayer-Book as defective, than positively erroneous.’’ What to do with ‘‘an Armenian Vartabed’’ (the name given to an unmarried Orthodox priest) ‘‘on a visit to Constantinople, from the mountains of Kurdistan . . . a wild-looking fellow, with all the independent, abrupt bearing of a free mountaineer,’’ who came clutching an incomplete version of the Gospels in Kurdish, which he wanted Miles to print? 101 In such a world, dogma would mean only isolation and failure. And language was Miles’s passion. Though his own practice belied it, he valued the acquisition of languages, not for its own sake, not to make a man into ‘‘a living catalogue of books—a sort of locomotive bibliographical lexicon,’’ but ‘‘as an instrument for furthering our knowledge of man.’’ His own competence grew legendary. Did he know thirty languages? or forty? He himself deprecated his own ability. On Greek, for example, he claimed that his ‘‘dabbling . . . has been merely that of an amateur. . . . [E]xtensive superficially, they cannot have been profound or very critical.’’ But then self-deprecation was Miles’s way; he was, to himself, ‘‘a poor ignorant creature.’’ 102 The physical evidence of his library shows works in or about roughly twenty languages: of the European, these included Latin, Greek, German, French, AngloSaxon, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Swedish, Dutch; of the Near Eastern, ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Turkish, Chaldean, Syriac, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian; of the Asian, Persian, Sanskrit, and Chinese. It is 101. JWM, ‘‘Union of Church and State,’’ SQR 15 (July 1849): 311–33; JWM to the Foreign Committee of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, August 1847, reprinted in ‘‘Bishop Southgate’s Report,’’ Spirit of Missions 12 (November 1847): 413–59 (quotations on pp. 453, 449). 102. JWM, ‘‘Oriental Studies,’’ SQR n.s. 7 (April 1853): 331; JWM to William James Rivers, undated, William James Rivers Papers, SCL; JWM to Lewis R. Gibbes, undated, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC.

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a reasonable inference that he knew most of the European languages well, with the probable exception of Basque, Russian, Swedish, and Dutch. He had made a special study of the Near Eastern languages, so of those he probably had a reasonable mastery of Turkish, about which he wrote, and Arabic, which he studied with James Johnston Pettigrew in 1854.103 Of the Asian, it is likely that Chinese was only scantily if earnestly explored, but that his command of Sanskrit and Persian was more accomplished.104 In 1848, when daydreaming what a Southern university ought to teach, he sighed for ‘‘the grand Epic of the Shah-Nameh’’ by Firdusi, ‘‘or one of the magnificent episodes of the Mahabharatah.’’ 105 For he was very much the heir of the revolution in philology wrought by Sir William Jones,106 Friedrich von Schlegel, Franz Bopp, and all those who took the careful linguistic analysis accomplished by classical scholars in the early modern period into new realms by expanding the range beyond Latin and Greek towards Sanskrit and Persian, and thereby invented the idea of the Indo-European. In this expansion, they had threatened dispersal and disorder, so had been obliged to argue for a new unity, which became involved in racial taxonomies. Of this intellectual tradition, Miles was sharply aware.107 In Miles’s version, language was ‘‘the expression of connected thought, [which] implies an internal and organic unity springing from mental laws involving, by implication, the very structure of language itself.’’ On the question that had much vexed eighteenth-century philology, as to whether language and reasoning were given fully formed by God to man, or was subsequently invented by humans, Miles inclined to the middling, historicist view that ‘‘man did not invent the process of reasoning from utterly disjointed 103. See JWM, ‘‘A Grammar of the Turkish Language,’’ SQR 13 (January 1848): 54–78; on Arabic, see JWM to Lewis R. Gibbes, 25 April 1854, Lewis R. Gibbes Papers, LC; JWM to James Johnston Pettigrew (May 1854 is written on it by a later hand), Pettigrew Family Papers, NCSA. 104. His survey of languages from the Near East to China speaks of his close study of ‘‘Morrison’s Chinese Dictionary’’—i.e., Robert Morrison’s Dictionary of the Chinese Language, originally published in Macao, 1815–22—and J. P. A. de Rémusat’s Elemens de la grammaire Chinoise (Paris, 1822). See JWM, ‘‘Oriental Studies,’’ 324–31. Neither are listed in his library catalog. 105. Firdusi, the Persian poet whom Jones and Schegel especially celebrated, flourished ca. 1000; the Shahnameh is a history of the Persian kings. See JWM, ‘‘Turkish Language,’’ 70. On the broader context, see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), esp. 115–61, and Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 106. Miles owned a first edition of Jones’s Persian Grammar (London, 1771): see George Walton Williams, ed., Catalogue of the Library of the Reverend James Warley Miles (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1955), 5. 107. He offers a brief sketch of its intellectual history in JWM, The Student of Philolo (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1853), 40–44.

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and independent elements—nor did God give him a set of logical rules; but reasoning was the necessary development of faculties implanted in man by God.’’ Rather, philological research made it seem improbable that God had granted man ‘‘a formal grammar and vocabulary,’’ but only the mental constitution to make language. Such unity as there was lay in the commonality of human nature, rather (here Miles was noncommittal) than upon diverse languages deriving from a single language. That diversity, as in ‘‘the immortal work of Wilhelm von Humboldt,’’ Miles understood to be a historical development: ‘‘[T]hat identical [human] nature, modified by the laws which individualize and distinguish the races as races, will manifest a corresponding diversity.’’ 108 This diversity might be reduced by grouping languages by what Miles called their ‘‘psychological, grammatical, and ethnical characteristics,’’ that is, their syntax, grammar, and social configuration. Indeed, the greatest value of philology was historical. In studying words, ‘‘We may follow the organic growth of languages, and the filiation of tongues; and thus, not only discover the Laws or Forms of the Language-faculty, but also the progress of Nations in periods when historical records fail us, but where the extant fragments of a language, like fossil remains, enable the scientific Philologist to re-construct the character, relations, and migrations, of a people.’’ 109 In all this, Miles followed the line elaborated by Hugh Legaré (whom Miles much admired and quoted), in seeing nineteenth-century classical and philological studies as having transcended the more static work of the seventeenth century, and thereby having made possible the studies of scholars like Barthold Niebuhr and Augustus Boeckh.110 Certainly, Miles believed, ‘‘the character and spirit of a Nation are expressed more distinctly in its Language, than in any other of its productions; for the Language is the immediate product and embodiment of the Intellectual Life of the Nation: it is, in fact, the objective side of the Nation’s essential Being.’’ Like animals, like vegetables, man and his language developed organically. Miles’s chief exposition of this standpoint, his 1853 oration to the literary societies of South Carolina College on The Student of Philolo , is im108. JWM, ‘‘Lieber, Nordheimer, and Donaldson, on the Philosophy of Language,’’ SQR 20 (October 1851): 392, 393, 403; JWM, Student of Philolo , 30. He especially praises Humboldt’s introductory essay on the philosophy of language in the Über die Kawisprache auf der Insel Jawa of 1836–39: see JWM, Student of Philolo , 26. For a modern edition, see Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (1836; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 109. JWM, ‘‘Philosophy of Language,’’ 404; JWM, Student of Philolo , 28–29. 110. On this, see JWM, Student of Philolo , 30–38. Cf. HSL, ‘‘The Public Economy of Athens,’’ SR 8 (February 1832): 265–326. For Miles on Legaré, see JWM, Student of Philolo , 48, 50–51. The quotation is Legaré’s apostrophe to the value of scholarship: see HSL, ‘‘Classical Learning,’’ SR 1 (February 1828): 47.

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pressively littered with Teutonic Capitalization and was a hymn of praise to German scholarship. ‘‘The same Law of Life or Power of Organic Production . . . developes the organism of the plant or the man, the vegetable or the animal circulatory system or limb, the Rose, the Oak, the Horse, or the Caucasian . . . according to the Constitutive Conditions of Vegetable or Animal, Species or Individual, and according to the more or less opposing and disturbing hindrances, to which that material basis is subjected, upon and through which the Law of Life manifests itself.’’ But these laws were not fixed, but shifted, were ‘‘a Becoming,’’ a continuance. As with life, so with language, which was ‘‘the organ, or Plastic Instrument, of Thought.’’ Language, too, was ‘‘a living process, a continuous Becoming.’’ When a society died, its language died with it; when it migrated to a new land, it became something else. In so arguing, Miles showed himself skeptical of the widespread tendency to see languages begetting other languages, as Schlegel had thought Sanskrit had begotten Greek. Languages arose each in their own place, but ‘‘they cannot be explained by derivation from one another. . . . [T]hey rest back in those unfathomable depths of diversities of characteristics which define each People to be what it is, and which constitute the impassable boundaries of its development and peculiarities.’’ Upon this reasoning, each individual, nation, and language were trapped together in their own worlds, but they interacted little with other worlds and had only ‘‘their peculiar modes of envisaging the Universe.’’ Cultures were like scholars, that is, poor, struggling, solitary, knowing ‘‘no assistance and no sympathy.’’ This was a surprisingly uncosmopolitan vision, which perhaps spoke to Miles’s failure satisfactorily to touch other cultures when in Constantinople. But it spoke much more to his own lifelong sense of loneliness and disquiet. ‘‘Isolation he must expect,’’ he said of the scholar, who was himself. ‘‘A deep despondency oppresses my spirits’’ are the first words of his chief theological treatise.111 This sense of the incommensurability of cultures seems to have affected his understanding of slavery. For one thing, he was unusually (for a cleric) tempted by the idea of polygenesis; this was of a piece with his theological liberalism, which could afford skepticism about the Mosaic account. ‘‘The question about the negro,’’ he once said, ‘‘will never be clear, until the world comes to recognize, (as it will do yet), the diversity of the races. The doctrine of the unity of the races, makes God the author of necessary incest at the beginning; makes people commit gross errors as to the nature and treatment of inferior races; causes unworthy, narrow, and carnal conceptions of the nature of redemption and of the mission of Christ; and is not to be harmonized— 111. JWM, Student of Philolo , 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 11–16; JWM, Philosophic Theolo ; or, Ultimate Grounds of All Religious Belief Based in Reason (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1849), 3. More strictly, they are the first words of the main text, after the prefatory matter.

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(except by violent, one sided distortions—) with science, or critical interpretation of the Bible.’’ Moreover, Miles was little interested in the biblical case for slavery, because he believed that the Bible clearly sanctioned slavery for whites, while collaterally ‘‘the whole spirit of Christianity tends to bring about the abolition of white slavery, by elevating the white man and fitting him for freedom.’’ So, for the Southern case, the Bible was ‘‘a foundation of sand,’’ not least because it said nothing about the slavery of Africans. Rather, Miles rested his proslavery argument on racial theory, upon the case that ‘‘the Negro is a totally different man from the white man,’’ given in bondage by Providence and Nature’s Law. So, in his only full-dress discussion of slavery, an 1861 pamphlet on The Relation Between the Races at the South, he bizarrely but logically declined to call the Southern institution slavery at all, but insistently called it ‘‘(so called) African slavery,’’ because he defined slavery as ‘‘the compulsory subjection, through conquest or superior force, of a race equally endowed with the subjecting people.’’ Such people, when enslaved, either perished (as did Native Americans) or freed themselves, but Africans had settled down to their servitude and prospered in their condition.112 Philosophic Theolo began life as lectures at St. Michael’s in Charleston, given in the summer of 1849. A remarkable number of Miles’s publications started as sermons or orations, which was odd considering his diffidence about speaking. But others held a higher opinion of his speaking skills than he did; an obituary speaks of ‘‘a feeble voice,’’ but also ‘‘the art to hold his auditors entranced.’’ 113 Philosophic Theolo was quickly written and haphazardly formed: the first part consists of letters exchanged between ‘‘a sceptic and his friend,’’ the second takes up ‘‘sundry points’’ of theology in no particular order (the idea of God, the role of reason, miracles, the character of Christ, the psychology of religion, faith, and the Scriptures). As will be come apparent, it is a work at marked odds with Thornwell’s theology, not least in its different appraisal of recent German philosophy and theology. John Morell’s Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, which was Thornwell’s whipping boy, was Miles’s guide. The distinction between reason and understanding, which Thornwell refused, Miles took as an axiom. Christ, whom Thornwell slighted, was central to Miles, to whom God was less important. The Higher Criticism, which Thornwell regarded as an impiety, was formative of Miles as a philologist and theologian. Above all, the Philosophic Theolo was a trusting book; it found kindness in God’s order, not putrefaction. 112. JWM to Anna Rebecca Young, undated, 23 and 24 July 1864, JWM Papers, DU; JWM, The Relation between the Races at the South (Charleston, S.C.: Evans & Cogswell, 1861), 5, 8. 113. ‘‘Death of the Rev. James W. Miles,’’ Charleston News and Courier (15 September 1875).

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Miles begins with the psychological reality of atheism, a condition he understood to be marked by frustration and paradox, by the impulse to find God but the inability to do so, which led to a sense of nihilism. Like most in his era, Miles could not imagine someone indifferent to the idea of God; an atheist was only a failed theist, who was repulsed by the spectacle of the religious disagreeing so violently about the principles of their own religion. So, ‘‘Atheism is no solution of the queries [about final things], it is a mere denial that they can be solved at all.’’ True to this, Miles’s skeptic is not very skeptical, indeed seems willing to believe at the slightest prodding. Nonetheless, Miles did think that any thinking man must have felt the depression occasioned by doubt, and so presumed that being religious involved having first proved that atheism was unnecessary. Perhaps alone among Southern theologians of his time, Miles understood that widespread atheism was about to become a historical possibility, perhaps a probability. This meant he had grasped that the coming struggle with atheism would be more profound than that with the deist skepticism of the eighteenth century. This prospect alone made denominationalism supererogatory: ‘‘The true and all-absorbing danger is really in the ominous contest which is drawing near, for the very existence of christianity itself,—of morals,—of belief in a personal God,—a contest which will render utterly insignificant all disputes between different christian communities, and will swallow up the small squabbles about ‘Catholicity’ and ‘Evangelicalism,’ and High’ and ‘Low,’ and ‘Church’ and ‘Schism,’ and ‘Calvinism’ and ‘Arminianism,’ . . . in the vast contest for any revelation whatever.’’ 114 In a society like that of the South, where Christianity was so ebulliently expansive, this was an odd pessimism, more prescient of what was to happen in European culture than of what was to happen in the United States. Pessimism was of a piece with an impulse in Miles towards resignation. Though he argued that the finite could not grasp the infinite, to know this limitation should not occasion anger or mysticism, but only a resting ‘‘placidly and contentedly before a barrier.’’ Knowing the limited ought to be enough. So Miles was bemused at those who imagined the afterlife, for ‘‘the mode of existence after death is absolutely unknown. . . . In itself, death is as veiled a mystery to us as it was to the ancient pagan.’’ Hence, ‘‘We can only regard with amazement, the self-confident levity exhibited in those representations and details of another life which are given by many, upon the authority of the Bible, as they affirm, but really upon their own imaginary interpretations, based upon notions drawn necessarily from the only sphere of experience possible to them.’’ 115 114. JWM, Philosophic Theolo , 83, 220. 115. Ibid., 8; JWM, ‘‘Marcus Aurelius,’’ SQR n.s. 6 (October 1852): 410.

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But how do we know? Miles was uncomplicated about this: ‘‘We possess a direct intuition of the existence of the objective universe.’’ Man has understanding, a logical faculty which ‘‘by reflection forms conceptions, distinguishes and compares relations, generalizes, classifies, judges and reasons.’’ Understanding offered ‘‘the forms of thinking,’’ but only acted upon what the senses furnished of knowledge of the external world. Reason, a higher thing, was what the mind furnished from within itself: its qualities included ‘‘perception of the beautiful, of moral truth, of the absolute goodness, the effort to grasp the real, the highest unity, beneath all the diversity of phenomena, the instinctive effort to solve the problems of the universe, of existence, of God, of immortality, the conceptions of eternity, of the infinite, of ultimate, universal, necessary truths.’’ This was Hegelian, but also drew upon Friedrich Schleiermacher, for Miles understood religion to be an emotional and psychological fact, a ‘‘sensibility implanted in our nature’’ by God. It was not that atheism or pantheism were wrong, per se, but that they were unsatisfying ‘‘to the religious wants and instincts of humanity, which can never cease feeling after a Personal God.’’ This God revealed himself in history and so could be understood through historical evidence, the Gospels preeminently in their account of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. In this belief, Miles was much influenced by Andrews Norton’s Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (1837–44). Norton, a Unitarian who taught at Harvard, was a cautious exponent of the Higher Criticism, who stopped short of David Strauss but who nonetheless believed that the Scriptures were answerable to historical evidence external to the texts.116 Miles himself was less interested in the Old Testament, a ‘‘jewish history . . . half fabulous,’’ but most in the New, even if it embodied ‘‘imperfect memoranda of Christ.’’ Indeed, an appendix to Philosophic Theolo argues that Christ nowhere sanctioned the Pentateuch as divinely inspired,117 and during the Civil War, Miles was to write a long letter explaining his belief that the first chapters of Genesis were a compilation from three distinct sources. Rather, the great value of the Bible lay in ‘‘the immortal visions of men whose spiritual intuitions were awakened to see moral and religious ideas,’’ not in ‘‘myths and false notions, and narrow 116. JWM, Philosophic Theolo , 11–13, 15, 16. On Norton, see Herbert Hovenkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 60, 66– 69, and James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21–31. 117. ‘‘No believer in the Scriptures can doubt that Moses was an inspired Delegate of God, and that the Pentateuch contains an account of his life; but it appears to us evident that our Saviour pronounced no opinion which can interfere with the freest critical research as to the age and authorship of the Pentateuch, and the amount of uninspired matter which it may contain’’: JWM, Philosophic Theolo , 234.

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national prejudices, and human follies . . . all that venerable rubbish.’’ Miles wanted love and merciful clarity from God, not the ‘‘dark traps of enigmatical oracles.’’ 118 So denominational and theological wranglings were, to Miles, beside the point, just a sad record of man’s meddling understanding overweaning his reason. As a scholar of language, Miles the theologian believed that Revelation was a linguistic phenomenon: ‘‘[R]evelation thus necessarily passing into the sphere of language, must be judged as all other communicated information is, by the laws of language and reason.’’ Revelation was, after all, known through eyewitnesses and their testimonies were expressed in words, which may or may not have been reliable. For Revelation to be of transhistorical significance, it had to appeal to what was constant in human nature, to be able to go beyond that first century in a corner of the Mediterranean, to ‘‘our state of development, our intellectual, moral, and religious wants.’’ For, though Miles took history seriously, like most theologians he wanted finally to transcend it, for God lived where there was transcendence. Moreover, by believing in Revelation, Miles also believed that Christianity marked a Providential discontinuity and could not be understood as merely an organic historical development from what antedated Christ. For all his being deeply influenced by Romanticism, Miles had an older faith in the ‘‘universal wants of a common nature.’’ The means and purpose of the appeal to this nature lay in Christ, whose wonder was so great as to survive even Strauss’s deconstructions of the historical evidence, which Miles found ‘‘hyper-sceptical and fanciful.’’ 119 Being more interested in grace than in what required grace, that is, sin and the ‘‘frequent and unjust triumph of evil and vice,’’ Miles showed no concern for Adam and the Calvinist doctrine of federal representation. But he was absorbed, even entranced by ‘‘the root from whence grows all development of the christian religious element . . . reconciliation through a Personal Redeemer.’’ In this sense, Miles came close to the modern evangelical sensibility, for he was confident that the ecstatic knowledge and acceptance of Christ would be healing, even though he was conscious that man’s apprehension of this relation of sonship varied. Miles was even more conscious that the religious instinct could take many forms: ‘‘From the sublime anticipations of Plato, to the dim gropings after the supernatural in the fetishism of the African, there is still recognized the deep cry and wail of humanity for its veiled and absent father. In the ancient science of Etruscan Augury, in the dark oracle of degraded Obiism, humanity has exhibited its indomitable and irrepress118. JWM to Anna Rebecca Young, 28 June 1864, JWM Papers, DU, discussed in Luker, Southern Tradition, 140–41; JWM, Philosophic Theolo , 30–31, 33. 119. JWM, Philosophic Theolo , 54, 55, 88, 122.

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ible want of guidance from God.—Through the manifestations of Vishnoo, and the endless incarnation of the Dalai Lama, there gleams the imperative demand of humanity for union with divinity.’’ 120 A New Age beckoned. Miles’s metaphysics were relatively simple, asserted rather than argued. Man is self-aware, is conscious of external reality, presumes causation, and necessarily comes to conceive of the infinite and of God. Man has reason and moral freedom, by which he comprehends right and wrong. This was a rationalist position, even if Miles did believe that the religious instinct arose from despair at ‘‘the barriers of this dark and narrow earthly circle,’’ against which man beat ‘‘like an imprisoned bird.’’ For it is reason which apprehends God, not a mystical faith that abandons rationality as hopeless. Knowing God arises from ‘‘a fundamental and original law of the intellect.’’ Miles, trusting little to logic, was not disillusioned by its failure and so could readily imagine that reason was competent, just as he was untroubled by the idea of man’s dependence upon God. Indeed, Miles believed that Christianity’s psychological rootedness in man’s reason meant that the Christian acquired a purified and amplified reason: ‘‘When we are taken and elevated to the summit of the mountain ridge, and the atmosphere is cleared and purified, we find our visual powers piercing far into infinity.’’ Nonetheless, since God is apprehended by Reason, but Reason (unlike the Understanding) does not come directly into contact with the external world, it follows that we believe in God, but have no concrete experience of him. For truths ‘‘do not come from without,’’ and so ‘‘it is only by coming within . . . that God can reveal himself in the world as an object of human knowledge.’’ So God does not appearing shining and real in the world—each person will see him differently, anyway—but is a voice in each man’s nature, manifesting itself in a million men’s intellects, and is felt as an intuition. This might threaten chaos, if each man’s intuition makes God, but Miles had faith that ‘‘the entire range of nature demonstrates that the idea of life involves that of a complex law, necessarily involving unity in complexity.’’ There are individuals, but they embody the generality of mankind, organically evolving as an organized form of life: ‘‘Human nature is not a mere aggregate of individual men, it has a certain objective validity as a universal humanity, of which each individual partakes.’’ 121 These arguments were, in many ways, a radical way of arriving at fairly orthodox conclusions, for Miles mistrusted the alternatives of ‘‘a mighty pantheism of nature’’ and ‘‘a vast subjective idealism,’’ though he certainly came closer to the latter than he seems to have imagined. Rather, religion mediated between ‘‘the fleeting, the changing, the weak, the erring, the human’’ and 120. Ibid., 85, 60, 89–90. 121. Ibid., 80, 82, 91, 96–98, 100, 105, 171.

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‘‘the fixed, the absolute, the eternal, the true, the divine,’’ or tried to. Man alone could not manage such a synthesis, for he was trapped in self, in the toils of the Understanding: ‘‘Unless we can get beyond the field of the logical and controversial understanding, we are inevitably shut up to the conclusion that truth is merely subjective; that is, that whatever is true for the individual, is the only truth we can know; and in thus multiplying absolute, individual truth, its essential unity is destroyed, and any thing and every thing is equally true.’’ 122 But Revelation and Christ could achieve the synthesis, by offering a helping hand to the imprisoned bird, beating against the bars of its cage. These propositions lie at the heart of the Philosophic Theolo , the second half of which becomes episodic. There Miles reiterates the possibility of the Incarnation. He defends the reality of miracles, by using and abridging John Stuart Mill’s refutation, in the System of Logic, of David Hume, by arguing that a miracle is not a suspension of known experience (and so incredible), but only a new experience subject to the usual rules of experience. He meditates on the distinction between consciousness and personality, before gliding into a defense of the Trinity (‘‘plurality in the Divine Essence’’), without the idea of which one must either ‘‘land in the material pantheism of Comte, or the immaterial pantheism of Hegel,’’ a dilemma that Schelling’s later writings had moved to recognize and resolve with trinitarianism. He offers a reading of Christ’s character that was much informed by the Higher Criticism, since it carefully distinguishes among the disparate historical evidence offered by the differing Gospels, but that is finally ecstatic. He considers the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, warmly expounds Plato, and speaks of Heraclitus with a shudder. In the Greeks, he finds much that anticipated Christianity and modern philosophy, but still concludes that they had offered but intelligent conjectures, necessarily sterile because unconfirmed by Revelation. He elaborates on the nature of Reason, as a refuge from the controversialism engendered by the Understanding, and repeats his dislike of polemical dogmatism wrapping itself in the vain claim of divine inspiration. He reimagines the bleak dilemma of the skeptic and insists upon the moral pertinence and consistency of the Bible, against which minute historical inquiries are, however pedantically accurate, ‘‘paltry.’’ Miles was untroubled by the problem of geology and the Mosaic account of Creation, for he did not see the Bible as an empirical guide to history or science, but as ‘‘spiritual nourishment of the soul.’’ 123 Few theologians, in short, could have been appeared much further in standpoint from Thornwell, who was busy in Columbia on modernizing not Episcopalianism, but the starker logics of Calvinism. Yet their difference 122. Ibid., 125, 180. 123. Ibid., 134–35, 201, 205.

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eventuated in a paradox. Miles’s theological liberalism eventuated in Christocentric evangelical doctrines, with which many Southerners were comfortable. Thornwell, on the other hand, though he avowed his orthodoxy, was much more radical than Miles and, as we shall see, finally less available to Southern Christians, if they had but noticed his nuances.

The Adoption of Sons 124 James Henley Thornwell was an overseer’s son and his father died when he was eight. We do not know the details, the ‘‘stern necessities,’’ but there was much poverty. When young he was short, thin, sallow, with skin like parchment. He prospered because he was taken up by two rich local men who gave their patronage to the gifted, ‘‘poor, dirty-looking, malarial-looking boy,’’ and provided him with an education. In later years he would refer only lightly to all this. Indeed, he liked to stress his transcendence of this beginning by always having the best, in cigars, in clothes, in horses, and he used to sport a natty beaver hat.125 The scars were not self-evident. Clerical friends found him amiable, even bantering, but he also had his street-fighter side. Many feared him for relentless logic, sarcasm, and a streak of intellectual brutality. In his own way, he was rooted. He was born on a plantation in the Marlboro District of South Carolina, went to the state college and remained to become a professor and then its president. He held ministries in Charleston and Columbia; at his death in 1862, he held a chair at the Columbia Theological Seminary. Yet he was much traveled. He studied at the Andover Seminary in Massachusetts in 1834, and at Harvard Divinity School, though briefly and nervously. He twice made long trips to Europe and, within the United States, the business of the church and its synods carried him hither and yon. And he nearly left South Carolina in 1845 when he accepted a ministry in Baltimore, but was held when the college insisted on a year’s notice and managed, by pressure and wiliness, to keep him.126 He was, in truth, rather restless; in the twenty-seven years between his first adult job and his death, he held seven positions and dallied with more. There was something soothing about being asked to come or stay. Still, his rootedness was not tactile. Though he had 124. ‘‘He has always proposed a fundamental change in their attitude toward Him, and that change has consisted in the adoption of sons—in the substitution of filial for legal ties’’: Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:486. 125. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, D.D., LL.D. (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1875), 13, 135; J. Marion Sims, The Story of My Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1865), 107; James Oscar Farmer Jr., The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986), 60. 126. Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 267–84.

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William Scarborough, James Henley Thornwell (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

little discomfort at his state’s social relations and defended them, he was not given to local references, to talking about people or places around him, for he was very abstract, fearfully so to others less entranced by logic. So he was a parvenu, who mostly accepted the world which had invited him in, but he remade it subtly in his own image. He took little for granted; he watched and certified. He wished to belong, but on his own terms; to be orthodox, but in his own way, which grew more distinctive the older he got and the more assured he became. He was a Presbyterian by intellectual conviction, not by birth or instinct. His mother, poor and illiterate, was a Baptist; William Robbins, his first patron, was a Unitarian who became an Episcopalian; General James Gillespie, his second patron, was marked by ‘‘unbelief.’’ 127 Thornwell betrayed few immortal longings when young. He studied law for a while before going to college. Though he announced in 1829 that he wished to forswear Mammon and was ‘‘determined to adopt theology as a profession,’’ his undergraduate career was more marked for its secularism. He read philosophy, belonged to the de127. ‘‘I was not born in your department of the kingdom of God,’’ he told the Columbia Theological Seminary in his inaugural address as Professor of Didactic and Polemical Theology in 1857: Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:575. On Robbins, see Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 34–35; JHT to General James Gillespie, 4 March 1837, JHT Papers, SCL.

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bating society, admired Thomas Cooper, avidly read worldly periodicals like the Southern Review and the North American Review, to which he aspired to contribute. Many thought he might go into law or politics, which was what the alumni of South Carolina College mostly did. J. Marion Sims, who was his contemporary, was to observe that Thornwell ‘‘was no more religious than I was when he was in college.’’ Certainly he lacked then a prerequisite for being a Calvinist, for in 1832 he could write: ‘‘Man is not that vile—selfish—unfeeling wretch which the philosopher of Malmesbury [Hobbes] represents him to be. He is a social being—born and reared in society; all the principles of his nature—all the sympathies of his heart chime in unison with the welfare and prosperity of social institutions.’’ 128 Sims thought Thornwell became converted to get a girl. It is true that early letters show a marked interest in young ladies. In 1832, Thornwell observed to a friend, ‘‘We enter into matrimony, not for the good of society— not to perform those high and sacred duties which we owe to our God, but for the sensual gratification which we hope to receive from roseate virginity.’’ In Sims’s account, a classmate invited Thornwell to visit his home in the Sumter District. Richard Baker’s sister was beautiful, Thornwell fell for her, and he aspired to marriage. But ‘‘she was a rigid member of the Presbyterian Church, and they talked a great deal about religion, and he professed to be inquiring the way of salvation.’’ To impel the conversation, he obligingly read pious books, but ‘‘at last he was as far from the convincing evidences as ever.’’ Certainly, he was besotted. In a contemporary letter, he was writing, ‘‘It would positively craze me should she marry before I see her again,’’ and noting that he would often think of her, when in bed, or reading ‘‘some fine passages in the Greek and Latin writers.’’ In time, she told him that ‘‘if he would take the ordinary Confession of Faith, and study that, she thought that there he would see the truth.’’ And so he did, as he often liked later to recall, though without mention of the young lady’s role in prompting him. But he had disadvantages as a suitor. He was, to be sure, brilliant and obliging, but also scrawny and poor, so she turned him down, despite his holding the Westminster Confession of Faith in hand. This experience of a panting chase and a refusal seems to have been troubling for him. When he did marry in 1836, he remained vexed by the pressing matter of the flesh. His 1836 diary speaks against his ‘‘inordinate affection’’ and ‘‘evil concupiscence.’’ ‘‘I have made resolution after resolution on this subject—but my strength is perfect weakness. My soul is chained down to sensual gratification.’’ Later, he deprecated these temptations: ‘‘There cannot be a greater obstruction to the pursuit of real happiness 128. JHT to William Robbins, January 1829, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 47; Sims, Story of My Life, 107; JHT, ‘‘Nullification—No. IV,’’ Columbia Hive (2 June 1832).

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than the love of pleasure. It relaxes and debilitates the mind, destroys the tone of the spirit, superinduces languor upon all the faculties; it is the grave of energy.’’ 129 This Augustinian beginning—‘‘give me chastity and continency, only not yet’’—marked him. Later in life, he hazarded that he had succeeded in only one thing, persuading others to duplicate his own personal history of conversion: ‘‘In only one aspect of the case, do I feel that I have done a valuable work: and that is, in breaking down the spirit of infidelity, which had largely taken possession of the State.’’ This was to repudiate Thomas Cooper, but also himself. Thornwell had the mind of a convert, more ultra than the ordinary believer. but also insistently concerned that all the parts of belief and reality should work, fit together, make sense, as though he were poised to disbelieve if logic faltered. For Thornwell, unlike many of his Christian contemporaries, ‘‘the cheerless darkness of Atheism’’ was not unimaginable but possible, for one could provide proofs of the nonexistence of God and ‘‘set aside the Jehovah of the Bible.’’ 130 So Thornwell never had ease or smiling Episcopalian comfort, but rather was drawn to what marked Calvinism, anxiety and the iron will. Mind had to be satisfied, before faith could be licensed. It took him some while to hit his stride. His early writings, from the late 1830s to the mid-1840s, were often sermons, pastoral efforts sometimes published, sometimes not.131 They were exhortatory, close to the Scriptures, expository of the elements of Presbyterian doctrine. They betrayed a man anxious to distance himself from the philosophical reading of his youth, as though conversion necessarily carried one into a separate realm and a different language. He was then drawn to what to believe, not to how belief and knowledge might be explicable; the latter was to become the great theme of his mature theology. His later writings—they change in the late 1840s—were to be much more deeply engaged by the problems of modern philosophy, which he now understood not only from the English and Scottish tradition 129. JHT to Alexander Pegues, 15 March 1832, JHT Papers, SCL; Sims, Story of My Life, 107–8; JHT, Journal (2 April 1836–16 September 1836), JHT Papers, PHS; Adger, Thornwell Writings, 2:465. 130. JHT to Robert C. Breckinridge, 12 March 1847, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 301; Adger, Thornwell Writings, 2:106, 1:458. 131. Notably, ‘‘The Nature of Salvation’’ (undated early sermon, unpublished); ‘‘Christian Effort’’ (undated early sermon, unpublished); ‘‘A Tract on the Doctrines of Election and Reprobation’’ (1840, pamphlet); ‘‘Antinomianism’’ (1840, published ‘‘among other doctrinal tracts’’); ‘‘The Gospel, God’s Power and Wisdom’’ (1840ff., sermon, unpublished); ‘‘The Vanity and Glory of Man: A Sermon’’ (1842); ‘‘The Personality of the Holy Ghost’’ (1843/1845, sermon, unpublished); ‘‘The Necessity of the Atonement’’ (sermon in 1844, pamphlet 1845). With the exception of ‘‘The Vanity and Glory of Man,’’ these are reprinted in Adger, Thornwell Writings, 2:105–216, 301–80, 397–407.

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(Locke, Hume, Reid), but also from the French and German (Cousin, Kant, Schleiermacher). His later thought was still determined to sustain the verities of Calvinism, but much had rubbed off in his dialogue with modernity, such that by the end he was deeply unusual as a Calvinist, perhaps even elusively heterodox. Certainly he sharply understood what intellectual modernity was about, even as he feared its tendency, even as he half-respected its drift. His ideas were worked out in a number of articles for the Southern Presbyterian Review and, when he became briefly its editor, the Southern Quarterly Review, as well as in lectures and sermons. Most notable are his two long essays, published in 1849 and 1850, on John Daniel Morell’s Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century; his critique of William Paley in 1853; the Discourses on Truth of 1855, which began life as sermons delivered in the chapel of South Carolina College; his two 1856 essays on miracles and on Plato’s Phaedo; and his lectures on theology at the Columbia Theological Seminary, which (from internal evidence) seem to have been given in about 1860. At the same time, mostly after 1849, and not coincidentally, he began to hazard opinions on secular matters (slavery, education), though these were always peripheral matters for him, a small proportion of his intellectual output and care. Thornwell was an Old School Presbyterian, instrumental in keeping the New School marginal in his national church. In the 1840s the Baptists and the Methodists had split south from north, conservative from liberal, but an orthodox hegemony had been maintained among the Presbyterians, a process in which Southerners had been prominent. Indeed, because Princeton dominated and Southerners from Archibald Alexander of Virginia onward were so influential there, Presbyterian theology was a world in which, unusually, a Southern thinker might feel in medias res, not remote from the rest of the American world. For an Old School proponent, Presbyterian doctrines gave the appearance of having been fairly stable since at least the seventeenth century, though Jonathan Edwards had introduced nuances during the early eighteenth for the American branch. The old words were still in use. Thornwell used Calvin’s Institutes as his textbook at the Columbia Theological Seminary in the late 1850s.132 Thornwell’s writings and teaching grapple with Augustine, Aquinas, Francis Turretin (whose Institutio Theologicae Elencticae of 1679–85 was the text at Princeton),133 Bernard de Moor and Gisbert Voetius of the Dutch School, these and many others. Though Thornwell was influenced by the historicist imagination, the worldview of his theology was neutral in 132. See ‘‘Appendix B: Questions upon the Lectures in Theology,’’ ‘‘Appendix C: Analysis of Calvin’s Institutes, With Notes and Comments,’’ and ‘‘Appendix D: Questions on Calvin’s Institutes,’’ ibid., 1:583–650. 133. Noll, Princeton Theolo , 28–29.

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the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. The problem of man’s relationship to God was an old one, touched by historical events. But the thinkers who had most subtly meditated on these matters could be seen as removed from time, as surviving, talking to one another, making their contributions, being subject to refutation or confirmation; they were not significant or minor because they lived in one century rather than another, one place rather than another. Times stood equal in the face of God, all flawed, all hopeful, most doomed. It would be well to start with what was most conventional in Thornwell: his adherence to the federalist school of theology, his attitude to science, his separatism, and his intolerance. As was the norm in the Calvinist tradition, Thornwell’s was a Godcentered Christianity, in which Christ was a marginal figure. He was thus very far from the twentieth-century tradition of Southern evangelicalism, whose every second word was to become ‘‘Jesus.’’ Thornwell’s ‘‘Lectures on Theology’’ of the late 1850s barely mention Christ. Most of what mattered— the Sublapsarian doctrines of the creation, the Fall, election, redemption, vocation, and imputation—had occurred long before the second Revelation, though Christ was the messenger of the doctrine of grace, even if the Presbyterians drastically constrained the scope of God’s grace. In this theology, God was all-powerful, personal, the maker of Heaven and Earth, unintelligible to man except in fragments licensed by God to man’s feeble capacities. The universe was not ‘‘a vast clock of complicated machinery’’ as William Paley and the Supralapsarians believed, but a living, continuing creation of God’s inscrutable will, active not only in the beginning, but now and always. God made nature ex nihilo, but made it a thing separate from himself. ‘‘There are but five conceivable hypotheses upon which the relations of the finite and infinite can be adjusted,’’ Thornwell explained. Atheism ‘‘denies the existence of the infinite, and acknowledges the reality only of the world.’’ The Eleatics denied ‘‘the existence of the world, and [admitted] only the reality of the infinite.’’ Pantheism admitted both, but resolved them ‘‘into unity by making them phenomenal modifications of the same substance.’’ The Dualists ‘‘recognize two eternal substances, mind and matter, of which the one is essentially passive, the other active.’’ Lastly, ‘‘a genuine Theism . . . makes God the creator of the world, and makes the world a real thing, separate and distinct from God.’’ 134 Thornwell’s language about God was often ecstatic, almost sensually masochistic, and centered more on God’s power and will than on his love. Thornwell spoke glowingly of God’s omnipotence, of the fact that God ‘‘simply 134. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 2:22, 1:206.

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wills’’ and things happened: ‘‘The only efficient cause which exists in the universe is the fiat of the Deity. . . . His will is the spring of universal motion, the cause of every effect.’’ Indeed, ‘‘He must be able to enforce His will or He ceases to be God.’’ For God’s law was ‘‘not a deduction of reason to be questioned, but a Divine command to be obeyed.’’ This thrilling spectacle, this occasion for man’s servitude, gave Thornwell much satisfaction. So he bubbled that ‘‘the Bible is without a rival when it speaks in the language of command.’’ 135 Predestination, for example, was (he admitted) a thing hard to fathom, given that someone was predestined for redemption by God not because of any human action but because God willed it, not arbitrarily but for reasons known only to God: ‘‘He chooses one and passes by another, not because one is better or worse than another, but because such is His sovereign will.’’ It was God’s otherness that was his majesty and wonder. One cannot know the mind of the Lord, for ‘‘[w]hen we reach the will of God we must stop; we can go no farther.’’ Indeed, this was the point of refusing the doctrine of salvation by works (impiously urged by the Roman Catholics), a doctrine that made providence the plaything of man’s choosing and, as Turretin had argued, so made God dependent on man’s will. It was hard but true, that ‘‘God has no purpose of salvation for all’’: indeed, it seems to have been the truer for Thornwell, because hard.136 The federal principle contended that, as Thornwell put, God has never had a direct contact with men (‘‘as in all probability He [has] dealt with angels’’). But, ‘‘He has, in both of the covenants which the Bible makes known, dealt with men collectively through a common representative. The Covenant of Works was entered into with Adam as the federal head of his race, and the Covenant of Grace was entered into with Christ as the federal head of His seed.’’ Adam was created as a man, not an infant nor a barbarian nor in state of nature, but ‘‘endowed with knowledge, righteousness and true holiness.’’ For Adam was made in the image of God, with his reason ‘‘enlightened in the spiritual knowledge of God as that knowledge was mediated through the creatures, with a will prone to obey the dictates of reason thus enlightened and therefore in accordance with the spirit of the Divine law.’’ He had the natural ability for holiness, but also the potentiality to fall, for God had implanted a defect in man from the beginning. Theologians varied in their opinion as to the nature of this defect. The Pelagians had hazarded that ‘‘because man at his creation had no character,’’ he could choose good or evil indifferently, but this suggestion was contrary to the notion that man was made in God’s image. 135. Ibid., 2:192, 212–13, 242, 460. 136. Ibid., 25, 197, 126–27, 161.

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Some Roman Catholics felt the fault lay ‘‘in the blindness of our impulses,’’ in concupiscence, but this was to deny ‘‘that to be sin which the Scriptures affirm to be sin.’’ For Bishop Butler, man also had a blindness of impulse: ‘‘The emotion is awakened without the intervention of the will, without the deliberation of the understanding or the verdict of reason. The mere apprehension of the object does the work.’’ But this was to think man only passively virtuous, drawn into sin by pressing inclarities in his knowledge of the world.137 Thornwell took a harder line. For him, it was implausible that the Fall had happened through inadvertence or confusion, through mere weakness. Rather, it was ‘‘a falling away from God; a deliberate renunciation of the claims of the Creator; a revolt from God to the creature, which involved a complete inversion of the moral destiny of man.’’ The problem lay in man’s will, which was free, had chosen sin, and so had defied God. Adam’s transgression was voluntary and so deliberate. This path once chosen, the will had become corrupted: ‘‘If he chooses the evil, he also grounds that in the will; it becomes a part of his very person; he becomes a slave, and can never more, by any power in himself, will the good or attain to it.’’ Worse, will and mind cooperated in this corruption: ‘‘The reflective man, when the ground or root of action was to be himself, perverted the spontaneous man whose ground of action was in God. The will did not first make a character, but change a character; did not first give man a moral disposition, but perverted the dispositions which God had given.’’ 138 On sin, Thornwell was chillingly unforgiving: ‘‘One sin brings the soul into darkness and terror. If a man had obeyed for years and then in an evil hour had been tempted into an act of disloyalty, that one act would have changed his whole relations to the lawgiver and have effaced the entire merits of his past life.’’ Sin weighed man down even at the moment of grace, Christ’s sacrifice, that ‘‘terrible tragedy enacted before the eyes of all creatures to display the holiness of God and illustrate the transcendent enormity of sin.’’ The knowledge of sin was the awful obligation even of the elect; the purpose of preaching itself was ‘‘that which aims at thorough and radical convictions of sin.’’ Sin broke the link between God and man, made the sinner ‘‘an alien and an outcast . . . for ever estranged from good.’’ Sin was not, as Augustine had argued, a privation or mere absence of holiness, just a weakening of rectitude, but a real force in man ‘‘interwoven in the very texture of his soul,’’ and much connected to the perverting power of Satan, with whom ‘‘our nature is in such intimate alliance.’’ (Thornwell gave Miltonic credence to the reality of the Devil.) For ‘‘there is a power of evil as intensely real as the energy of holi137. Ibid., 320, 1:237–42. 138. Ibid., 1:243–46.

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ness. Malice is as intensely real as love; revenge as intensely real as gratitude; avarice as intensely real as liberality.’’ At the heart of sin was self-love, and its consequences were ‘‘all those afflictions and sufferings of the present life which terminate in the dissolution of the body,’’ such as fatigue, pain, disease, aging, eventually death and (for many) the final punishment of hell.139 Malignity, putrefaction, carnality, corruption, depravity, disease, deformity, loathsomeness, putridness, these were Thornwell’s words for what man’s will to sin had made. The sinner ‘‘is morally ulcerated from head to foot; he is one universal mass of gangrenous matter. No holy being can look at him without disgust.’’ In shame and guilt, then remorse, was born the faint hope of redemption. But the wonder of God’s grace had to be understood in the context of man’s wretched record: ‘‘The amount of human guilt collectively, the amount of each man’s own personal, individual guilt, is beyond anything that has ever entered into the consciousness of the race. The revelation that is to be made is appalling beyond the power of language to express; and when the roll is unfolded and the reality bursts upon each man’s vision, the agony which it will produce, apart from any direct penal inflictions, will be inutterable.’’ 140 All this was conventional Presbyterian doctrine, though Thornwell felt the thrill of depravity with especial eagerness. Here and there, he was unorthodox. He was conscious, for example, that the federal principle worked better than other theologies, rather than that it was perfect. There were ‘‘serious drawbacks.’’ Most troubling was the cold fact that, as a consequence of Adam’s sin, each man was born with these instincts of depravity, without ever having acted or chosen; depravity made man first, before man in turn deepened depravity. These instincts manifested themselves immediately in children, who ‘‘as soon as they begin to act . . . begin to show that self-will and self-affirmation are as natural as thought and reflection.’’ (Thornwell had no truck with Victorian sentiment about childish innocence.) But this was a problem for a theology that made much of man’s free will and his residual capacity for holiness. As Thornwell put it, ‘‘It must be borne in mind that the fall has destroyed no one faculty of man. It has not touched the substance of the soul. That remains entire with all its endowments of intelligence, conscience and will. These faculties have all, too, their laws, which determine the mode and measure of their operation—principles which lie at their root and which condition the possibility of their exercise.’’ To partially resolve the conundrum, Thornwell fell back on Wordsworthian mysticisms about preexistence and an organic unity that transcended time: ‘‘I am free to confess that 139. Ibid., 255–56, 305, 80, 382, 296–97, 2:80, 100, 248, 471–72. 140. Ibid., 1:402, 415.

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I cannot escape from the doctrine, however mysterious, of a generic unity in man as the true basis of the representative economy in the covenant of works. The human race is not an aggregate of separate and independent atoms, but constitutes an organic whole, with a common life springing from a common ground. There is an unity in the whole species; there is a point in which all the individuals meet, and through which they are all modified and conditioned.’’ 141 As we shall see, this mysticism helped to form Thornwell’s social thought. Calvinism was a supremely intellectual doctrine, not only in its complexity, but in its respect for man’s intellect. To be sure, it stressed that man’s mind was insignificant in the face of God’s. But, still, man’s mind was much, perhaps the best of him. Indeed, ‘‘We are not to look . . . for the highest and most glorious displays of Divine power in what is obvious and sensible— in the whirlwind and the storm, the starry heavens or the expanded firmament—but in the minds which He has formed with active principles, rendering them capable of obedience or rebellion, of happiness or woe.’’ Man’s passions—‘‘hunger and thirst, the appetite of sex and the desire of repose’’— were in themselves indifferent, until shaped into meaning by the mind. It was the thinking man of will and understanding who had the best chance of transcending sin: ‘‘The moral and intellectual natures of man are so intimately connected . . . that confusion of understanding is always accompanied with a corresponding lubricity of principle; and he whose perceptions of truth are not remarkable for clearness and precision will most surely be distinguished by an equal obscurity in his conceptions of rectitude.’’ Certainly, Thornwell mistrusted those emotions which had not first been licensed by mind. Hence his dislike of the cruder manipulations of contemporary evangelists, the weeping and ecstasy elicited by Baptists like Basil Manly, who counted success by the number of damp handkerchiefs in a congregation. Rather, Thornwell thought, one should be equidistant between ‘‘the extreme of a dead and spiritless formality’’ and that of ‘‘the extravagant follies of a rabid enthusiasm.’’ He spoke scathingly of ‘‘these days of morbid excitement and reckless enthusiasm,’’ of ‘‘a counterfeit spirit,’’ of ‘‘measures . . . adopted and encouraged and defended which manifest more of the cunning and dexterity of worldly-minded policy than the honest simplicity of an unsophisticated Christian.’’ In seeking conversion, one needed simplicity, decorum, and sobriety.142 This respect for human intelligence made Calvinists into natural allies of Francis Bacon, when Baconianism came to elaborate the utility of empiricism 141. Ibid., 348, 313, 319, 349. 142. Ibid., 2:308, 478, 481, 357, 405.

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while still respecting the claims of Revelation.143 To this tendency, Thornwell was no exception, at a time in American theology when Baconianism was an orthodoxy.144 Bacon was the author of an inductive philosophy which had ‘‘found order, law, a plan; it has discovered design, the operations of intelligence and will, and penetrated beyond nature to nature’s God, as the author and finisher of all.’’ The scientist discerned nature, but did not seek to control it (or so Thornwell oddly thought). Empiricism made man an interpreter of reality, not its legislator. Still, Thornwell detected odd moments of weakness even in Bacon. He disagreed with Bacon’s claim that morality was only supernatural in origin. More worryingly, because more fundamental, he was troubled that Bacon bore an oblique responsibility for encouraging ‘‘the prevailing tendency of some modern speculations to aspire at universal truths—truths which shall contain the seeds of all possible knowledge, the principles of all philosophy, and from which universal science may be deduced, by strictly a priori processes.’’ For Bacon had given ‘‘countenance to the possibility of some such universal science—attained, however, by induction, and not from necessary maxims of pure reason—in his curious speculation upon what he denominates the first philosophy.’’ 145 Still, if modern science was Baconian, all was going well, for thereby science became a doxology, a singing of hymns to God. When science became Darwinian, the gulf became harder to bridge, as it did for Thornwell’s successor at the Columbia Theological Seminary, James Woodrow, who flirted with Darwinism and ended up in the mid-1880s expelled from his professorship for this dissidence. But there were cracks even in Thornwell’s day, opened up by a geology which called into question the Mosaic chronology. Thornwell papered over the cracks with remarkable insouciance, even complacency. Considering that he took the challenge of modern philosophy with careful seriousness, he turned aside that of modern science with a blithe spirit. For he believed that geology showed the interventions of God in the discontinuous violence with which transformation had occurred. (His geology was the catastrophist version of Cuvier.) So science had turned from infidelity and ‘‘turned the whole strength of its resources against the fundamental principle of Rationalism.’’ Indeed, ‘‘Future generations will wonder that in the nineteenth century men gravely disputed whether God could interpose in the direct exercise of His power in the world He has made. . . . The earth can never turn traitor to its God, and its stones have already begun to cry out against those who attempted to extract from them a lesson of infidelity or 143. So, Thornwell agreed with Bacon in the Advancement that Revelation was an independent source of ideas: on this, see ibid., 3:200. 144. On this, see Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science. 145. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:502, 3:84–85, 212–13, 217–18.

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Atheism.’’ 146 So there was no inconsistency between geology and the Mosaic cosmogony, for the latter ‘‘contradicts not a single fact of descriptive geology.’’ By inventing hypotheses, geologists might quarrel with Moses, but not geology with religion. ‘‘It is a war of theories, of speculation and conjecture, against the historical fidelity of a record supported by evidence in comparison with which they dwindle into the merest figments of the brain.’’ This was feeble, but Thornwell had a slim excuse. Unlike Thomas Cooper in Thornwell’s undergraduate days, the younger geologists of the South were in the 1840s and early 1850s making reassuring noises. It seemed barely plausible then to be relaxed on this score. The geologist Richard Trapier Brumby, who came to South Carolina College in 1848, argued that nothing in Genesis contradicted the findings of modern science, even if the world did seem to be much older than it was conventional to assume.147 Many pious people in many places had been working out escape routes. Benjamin Silliman at Yale, Hugh Miller in Scotland, and Albert Knapp in Tübingen had favored reinterpreting the six ‘‘days’’ of creation to mean geological epochs. William Buckland in England, Thomas Chalmers in Scotland, Siegmund Baumgarten in Halle, and Thomas Ralston in Kentucky inclined to the view that between ‘‘In the beginning’’ and God making the heavens and earth, millennia of geological change had intervened. Indeed, so confident of all this was Thornwell that in 1859 he sanctioned the creation at the Columbia Theological Seminary of the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revelation, whose purpose was ‘‘to evince the harmony of science with the records of our faith and to refute the objections of Infidel Naturalists.’’ This was the chair from which James Woodrow was later to be expelled.148 In his views on separatism, Thornwell was likewise orthodox. The Church was Godly, and she spoke in the language of Canaan, not that of Caesar: her strong spiritual vocation made her ‘‘different from all other societies among men.’’ Though she had ‘‘ethical and political relations’’ with the institutions of the family and the state, ‘‘yet in her essence, her laws, and her ends she is diverse from every other institute,’’ because ‘‘the ties which bind men together 146. Ibid., 1:64, 3:275–76; Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 120–21. On Woodrow, see Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, vol. 2, 1861–1890 (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1973), 456–90. 147. Richard Trapier Brumby, An Address on the Sphere, Interest and Importance of Geolo . Delivered December 8, 1849, in the Hall of the House of Representatives (Columbia, S.C.: A. S. Johnston, 1849); see also Richard Trapier Brumby, ‘‘The Pre-Adamite Earth: Relations of Geology to Theology,’’ SQR n.s. 5 (January 1852): 48–71. On the general issue, see Farmer, Metaphysical Confederacy, 119. 148. Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians, 99; Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South, vol. 1, 1607–1861 (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1963), 504, 507. The chair was endowed with $30,000 from a Judge Perkins of Columbus, Mississippi.

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in other societies are only mediately from God and immediately from man; she is immediately from God and mediately from man.’’ So in 1859, in the general Assembly in Indianapolis, Thornwell was resolute that the church should take no position on African colonization. As he observed in 1860 when apologetically delivering himself of his political philosophy, ‘‘During the twentyfive years in which I have fulfilled my course as a preacher . . . I have never introduced secular politics into the instructions of the pulpit. It has been a point of conscience with me to know no party in the State. . . . The angry disputes of the forum I have excluded from the house of the Lord.’’ 149 So separatism gave him a fierce protectiveness about the inner workings of the Church, even when dealing with other Presbyterians. Being ‘‘immediately from God’’ could create priggishness, the sin of vanity, of which he was often accused by his peers. Beyond his own church, separatism likewise bred a remarkable intolerance, which it would be too polite to call anti-ecumenical. The Roman Catholics he abominated, but even by the standards of his denomination’s rote hostility he was relentlessly inimical. He wrote two long polemics in the late 1840s. The first was on ‘‘The Validity of the Baptism of the Church of Rome’’ and arose because the Presbyterian General Assembly in Cincinnati in 1845 had ruled that the Roman Catholic rite of baptism was invalid, and Charles Hodge in the Princeton Review had disagreed; to Hodge, Thornwell replied in the Richmond Watchman and Observer in 1846, in essays republished in the Southern Presbyterian Review in three parts during 1851 and 1852. The second, ‘‘The Arguments of Romanists for the Apochrypha,’’ had first been requested for the Baltimore Visitor in 1841 by Thornwell’s close ally, the Reverend Robert J. Breckinridge, to help in a controversy with the Archbishop of Baltimore, and then was much pirated. Both interventions were startlingly condescending, so much so that even the postbellum editors of his Collected Writings felt obliged to edit out from the ‘‘Arguments of the Romanists’’ some of Thornwell’s ‘‘very strong language’’ and ‘‘considerable asperity.’’ Thornwell himself was said to have expressed regrets, though only of what he had said personally about the opponent he had acquired when his essay had been republished, the Reverend Patrick Lynch of Charleston, not of what he had denounced in ‘‘the Romish system.’’ 150 Many of Thornwell’s objections were technical, disputes of dogma. Presbyterians understood baptism to be a sign, the Catholics that it was a physical regeneration. Presbyterians affirmed that justification was by grace, by which ‘‘they mean that it proceeds from the mercy of God in Christ Jesus, without any reference to personal obedience or inherent righteousness,’’ but 149. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 2:45, 4:472–78, 511. 150. Ibid., 3:279–82.

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the Catholics thought grace might be earned by works. To Thornwell, this last ‘‘resolves our justifying righteousness into personal holiness, damns the doctrine of imputation, audaciously proclaims the figment of human merit, both of congruity and condignity, and makes Christ only the remote and ultimate cause of pardon and acceptance.’’ 151 There were, of course, disagreements over matters of governance, the whole fabric of the Roman hierarchy as it stood opposed to the Presbyterian system of ministers and elders, about which Thornwell was very fastidious, much to the annoyance even of other Presbyterians who saw things differently.152 Thornwell, in the Protestant way, made much of the individual’s direct connection to God, and so little of how (he thought) the Roman church by its authority interceded between the Christian and God. So, ‘‘the constitution of the Papacy is an enormous excrescence which has grown from the Church of Christ,’’ and ‘‘the theory of private judgment . . . must have some little probability in its favour,’’ since Newton, Bacon, Locke and Chillingworth thought well of it and ‘‘multitudes of the race have sealed their regard for it at the stake, the gibbet and the wheel.’’ And, likewise, Thornwell had the old objections about the idolatry of Catholic churches, all the relics, the worship of saints and the Virgin Mary, the elaborate rituals, the ‘‘grotesque images’’ of God as an old man and the Holy Spirit as a dove, all the ‘‘centaurs, gorgons, mermaids, with all manner of impossible things’’ that crowded the worshiper’s eye when he was asked to participate in the ‘‘disgusting fetichism’’ implied in the doctrine of Transubstantiation.153 But things ran deeper than this. To speak of ‘‘the slime of the Papacy’’ might be regarded as a conventional pleasantry. To say that ‘‘the creed of Rome cannot be a saving one’’ was mild, though to assert that such a creed ‘‘robs God of His glory and the Saviour of His honour; gives us ashes for bread, a scorpion for an egg, and death for life’’ was not. But more was at stake when Thornwell argued that Catholic belief made psychological casualties, created people ‘‘tortured by conscience . . . groaning in spirit under the intolerable burden of aggravated guilt, [who] multiply devices of superstition and will-worship, in the delusive hope of bringing peace to their troubled and agitated breasts.’’ Still more, when he suggested that the obedience of Catholics ‘‘is the effort of a slave to propitiate a tyrant, and after a life dragged out in galling servitude, death comes to them clothed with tenfold terror. Eternity is shrouded in insupportable gloom, and the dismal tragedy of life closes with an awful catastrophe.’’ 154 Even more when, in imitation of John Ogilvie, 151. Ibid., 322, 348–51, 361. 152. See, for example, the section on ‘‘Church Officers,’’ ibid., 4:14–142. 153. Ibid., 3:407, 417–18, 459, 373, 375. 154. Ibid., 2:46, 3:361, 370.

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Thornwell ingeniously suggested that scholasticism was the godparent of modern skepticism: ‘‘The Schoolmen, indeed, did not hesitate to maintain the assertion that opinions might be philosophically true and yet theologically false, or theologically true and at the same time philosophically false. In other words, they maintained that truth might consist with open contradictions, which is equivalent to saying that its existence was impossible, or at least inconceivable.’’ In this lay the origins of ‘‘philosophical infidelity in modern times.’’ 155 But, worst, Thornwell argued that Catholicism was the instrument of Satan, literally so: ‘‘Mohammedanism and Popery are in truth successive evolutions in a great and comprehensive plan of darkness, conceived by a master mind for the purpose of destroying the kingdom of light and perpetuating the reign of death.’’ When pagan Rome fell, ‘‘with his characteristic subtlety and fraud the Great Deceiver . . . began another structure in the corruption of the Gospel itself, which should be equally imposing and more fatal, because it pretended a reverence for truth.’’ 156 So it rang hollow, when Thornwell ventured the dry courtesy of conceding that Papists were Christians, not ‘‘ ‘in the same category’ ’’ with Mohammedans, Pagans, Jews, infidels, and Turks. Nonetheless, they were heretic Christians, like the Pelagians, Arians, Universalists and Socinians. But strictness might and ought to go further, for ‘‘Christian denotes a peculiar relation to Christ, and is confined exclusively to those who believe, or profess to believe, the fundamental doctrines of the Gospel, or what is distinctively styled the way of salvation. To be entitled to this application of it, something more is required than a general belief in Jesus of Nazareth as the author of a new dispensation of religion.’’ 157 This intolerance ran very deep in Thornwell. He was not impressed with the idea (favored by James Warley Miles) that God might be found in many ways, that spirituality was Protean. Still less did he respect the Enlightenment conjecture, elaborated by certain Romantics, that heathenism was the religion of mankind’s childhood. This was a fundamental error, for ‘‘heathenism is a crime, or rather a combination of crimes, so enormous and aggravated that the marvel is how a God of infinite justice and purity could endure it for a single day.’’ Possessing their ‘‘countless rabble of gods,’’ heathens were ‘‘the spawn of a whorish fancy by a corrupt heart,’’ men of brutal lusts and Bacchanalian revels, whose ways were ‘‘unnatural and monstrous.’’ 158 Strangely, this contempt was partly born of Thornwell’s weak histori155. Ibid., 3:498. A footnote commends Ogilvie: see John Ogilvie, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Scepticism of the Times (1783; reprint, New York: Garland, 1975). 156. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 3:419. 157. Ibid., 330. 158. Ibid., 1:76, 99–101.

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cal sense and his high regard for human intelligence. Like Catholics, heathens were, after all, ‘‘men like [our]selves, moral, religious.’’ As such, they faced the same choices as Thornwell, but they chose wrongly, even as he in the 1830s had chosen rightly. Yet Thornwell’s intolerance was also born of a fierce respect for the value of tension and controversy. He once gently reprobated Breckinridge for trying to separate dogma from polemic. ‘‘Is it best to teach the truth apart from its contrasts with error?’’ he asked. Christian doctrine was ‘‘the product of many and protracted controversies, and all the creeds of Christendom, with the exception perhaps of that which goes by the name of the Apostles, are at once a confession of the truth and a protest against error.’’ Heresy nurtured truth, for ‘‘in contradicting the spontaneous life of the Church, [it] led to reflection upon the roots and grounds of that life.’’ So Thornwell’s own truth needed the grist of polemical violence, which included assaults upon other Presbyterians, unappreciative of this service. Charles Hodge, for one, was not amused to be told that he ‘‘was no Presbyterian.’’ Naturally, this brutality constrained Thornwell’s standing in the world. Tolerant gentlemen frowned at the wrangling overseer’s son and pointed the contrast with the urbane. George Hillard wrote to Lieber in 1852 of Thornwell’s appearance at a Harvard alumni celebration: ‘‘Dr. Thornwell . . . does not seem to be a very succulent person,’’ in contrast to John S. Preston, who ‘‘spoke gracefully & cordially.’’ Lieber incessantly complained of Thornwell’s ‘‘bitter, biting, acrid, scratching, tearing, grating, grinding, harrowing, inflaming, Hyper-Calvinism.’’ To be sure, those within the circle of the devout could be dazzled by their champion. His admirers could spot his anonymous articles by his ‘‘usual amount of bellicose pugnacity,’’ the mark of ‘‘an unrivalled logician and peerless intellectual gladiator.’’ 159 But those outside saw something crabbed and narrow, something ‘‘hard-shell.’’ 160 When Thornwell became a professor at South Carolina College in 1840, though he was elected unanimously, it was said that this was deceptive, for there was ‘‘a good deal of feeling against him on the grounds of his being an intolerant zealot.’’ As Lieber put it, Thornwell was ‘‘a man, of whom Mr. Breckinridge once printed, that since Calvin there had been no man like him. I hope so.’’ 161 159. Ibid., 99, 482; Hodge, ‘‘Presbyterianism,’’ reprinted ibid., 4:617; FL to George S. Hillard, 12 February 1854, FL Papers, HEH, quoted in Michael Sugrue, ‘‘South Carolina College: The Education of an Antebellum Elite’’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1992), 201; R. Stuart to JHT, 5 June 1856, JHT Papers, SCL. 160. FL to George S. Hillard, 1 December 1855, in The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber, ed. Thomas Sergeant Perry (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882), 285. See D. H. Hill to JHT, 13 December 1857, JHT Papers, SCL, for the indignant response of an author, in this case a mathematician, to one of Thornwell’s lacerating book reviews. 161. William Hooper to John DeBerniere Hooper, 8 December 1840, John DeBerniere Hooper Papers, SHC; FL to George S. Hillard, 25 December 1851, FL Papers, HEH.

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He being so committed to mind, the nature of consciousness was deeply important to Thornwell’s theology, which in turn compelled him increasingly to engage secular philosophy. For a minister, this had some awkwardness. When he gave his inaugural address to the Columbia Theological Seminary in 1857, he had to promise to be good: ‘‘The security which you have exacted from me, that I shall not indulge a licentious liberty of speculation, nor teach for doctrines the commandments of men; the restraints which you have put upon the excursions of philosophy or the conjectures of fancy; the limits within which you have wisely and righteously bound me, are no oppression to my spirit.’’ He had, after all, spent most of his adult life in a secular college, so they must have been a little worried about him, the man whose library was so suspiciously full of the texts of modern philosophy. But even in the same address, Thornwell showed why they were right to worry, why he was not a safe man, for he explained to them why philosophy was needful: ‘‘We may carp and cavil at philosophy as we will, but it is a fundamental want of the human soul and cannot be dispensed with. Reflect man must and will, and religion has no sanctity to protect it from the touch of a searching inquiry into its principles.’’ No doubt, his years at South Carolina College did help to explain this temerity, this willingness to strip religion of untouchability. His former role as president of South Carolina College had pushed him more into the public realm. In the 1840s he had helped to found the Southern Presbyterian Review, a periodical whose title page proclaimed itself as ‘‘conducted by an association of ministers.’’ In 1856, however, he assumed the editorship of the Southern Quarterly Review, whose founding editor in 1842 had been insistent that the periodical would ‘‘sustain and advocate the claims of no party in Religion, of none whatever.’’ Thornwell saw matters more diffidently: ‘‘Religion and philosophy touch at every point; and we agree with Suarez that no man can be an accomplished theologian who is not, at the same time, an accomplished metaphysician, and that no man can be an accomplished metaphysician without imbibing principles which should lead him to religion. Faith and reason are distinguished, but not opposed; and though a superficial culture may have the effect which Strauss ascribes to it, of alienating the mind from the Sacred Records, yet a deeper and sounder philosophy will correct the aberration.’’ 162 Preventing this alienation was not simple; one needed to keep an iron grip on philosophy, for metaphysics was slippery, seductive in its complexity, unexpected in its implications. Danger lurked in every stone of the edifice. Elsewhere in this book is an account of Thornwell’s philosophy, mostly as 162. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:575, 582, 3:228; Daniel K. Whitaker, ‘‘The Newspaper and Periodical Press,’’ SQR 1 (January 1842): 64.

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it was explicated in his lectures. There, speaking at a little distance from his theological obligations, he was inclined to be more radical than he showed in his theology, though the difference was largely cosmetic. Here it is relevant to focus on how his conception of human consciousness was made to accord with his theism. Thornwell was a student of modern philosophy, as Calvinists had tended to be since the Reformation, for Calvin had instigated a creed that had wished to step over the bankrupt realism of the Scholastics and, in trying to get back to the Primitive Church, often reached towards Humanist flexibilities about the grounds of knowledge. Calvinists had shadowed modern philosophy, from Petrus Ramus onwards, picking up what was useful, rejecting what was heretic, but always concerned to comprehend how things were going as a test of their own intellectual cogency. So, Thornwell once reviewed Samuel Baird’s Elohim Revealed and came as close to jocundity as he ever did, in expressing astonishment that Baird (however unwittingly) had a sympathy with medieval realism, that is, the doctrine that matter had an existence independent of mind, with inherent properties; that there might be whiteness separable from something that was white. ‘‘When we read Dr. Baird’s [writings] . . . we almost felt that we had been transported by some mysterious power of enchantment, across the track of centuries, to the cloisters of medieval monks to the halls of medieval universities, and were listening again to the everlasting jangles about entities and quiddities, genera and species which John of Salisbury so graphically describes. Dr. Baird’s sympathies are with the buried Realism of the past. He has proclaimed an open revolt against the whole spirit of modern speculation, and has endeavoured to remand philosophy to the frivolous discussions from which we had hoped that Bacon had for ever redeemed it.’’ Modern thought was Nominalist, and all the better for it: ‘‘The progress of human knowledge, in every department of inquiry, since the thorough installation of the inductive method, is a sufficient proof that the death of Realism is the resurrection of truth.’’ Whatever doubts Thornwell entertained about modern philosophers—Locke, Hume, Reid, Kant, Hegel —he did not question the cogency of their chief tendency, to demonstrate the nature but also the limits of the human ability to comprehend external reality. Indeed, for Thornwell, the point of religion was that, though consciousness could not prove reality, religion offered a structure of faith that made the presumption of reality compelling. But, at bottom, the problem of knowing God and knowing anything was the same: ‘‘[T]he knowledge of God is . . . not different in kind from the knowledge of any other being.’’ 163 So, for Thornwell, mind did not grasp ‘‘things as they are in themselves, 163. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:520, 107.

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but things as they appear,’’ certainly not any transcendent reality. ‘‘We know matter, we know mind, not absolutely as matter or mind, but as that which appears to us under the forms of extension, solidity, figure, motion, etc., or that which appears to us under the forms of thinking, feeling, willing.’’ It followed that how man understood God was founded on the limits of human consciousness. Where do we get our concepts of God? ‘‘Most evidently they spring from our own minds. Our own consciousness is the storehouse from which they are drawn. We can conceive no intelligence but the human; we can think no power but that which is suggested by the energy of our own wills; we can have no moral intuitions but those which are given by our own consciences. Man, therefore, sits for the picture that he sketches of God.’’ 164 This was to flirt with annihilating reality and, with it, the God that had made reality. For, importantly, Thornwell felt that Hume has saved metaphysics from a fundamental error, the analogy of subject and object: ‘‘The ideal theory was the offspring of this simple proposition; and it might even yet retain its ascendency in the schools, if the skepticism of Hume, at once the indication and cure of the disorder, had not arisen and prepared the way for a sounder metaphysics.’’ Still, Thornwell believed there was such a thing as reality: ‘‘It is not . . . a sham, a dream, a mere shine. . . . [A] phenomenal or a relative is none the less a real knowledge; it is the knowledge of real existence as that existence is manifested to us. The existence is independent of us; the manifestation is in and through the relation of the object to our consciousness.’’ 165 Thornwell also believed that mind had a structure, a constitution: ‘‘There must be certain primary truths involved in the very structure of the mind, which are admitted from the simple necessity of admitting them.’’ These truths were not propositions, but tendencies: ‘‘They are the standard of evidence, the light of the mind, and without them the mind could no more be conceived to know than a blind man to see. Being in the mind, a part of its very structure, they are not the product of experience.’’ This was to split the difference between Locke’s sensationalism and Reid’s doctrine of direct apprehension. The followers of the former gave this account of mind, which Thornwell found inadequate: ‘‘It comes into the world unfurnished, an empty room, and the world furnishes it. There is, on the one hand, a capacity to receive, and on the other a power to communicate; and the relation of the two constitutes experience. Upon the materials thus given the mind can operate— it can combine, compare, decompose and arrange—but it can add absolutely nothing to the stock which has been imparted to it as a passive recipient. Ex164. Ibid., 107–8, 112. 165. Ibid., 2:505–6, 1:129.

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perience is restricted exclusively to sensation; the mind is a machine, and its various faculties the tools with which it works up the materials afforded in sensible phenomena.’’ But Reid was no better, by inventing faculties of the mind, which one might call Common Sense.166 In this, Thornwell was going with a modified version of Sir William Hamilton’s melding of German and Scottish philosophy. This emulation was not unsurprising, since Hamilton’s intellectual career so mirrored the characteristic influences that bore upon the mid-nineteenth century Southerner of philosophical interests. He had, in youth, imbibed Scottish realism by studying at Glasgow and Edinburgh; he had acquired at Oxford a classical education, especially in Aristotle; he had then traveled in Germany, where he had studied Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; he was an inheritor and critic of Thomas Brown’s Humean revision of the psychology of common sense.167 With a learning that many contemporaries admired and many others came to regard as random antiquarianism, Hamilton had stood at the confluence of turbid philosophical streams (the Scottish and German) and had struggled to quiet them into an orderly flow. It was the verdict of posterity that, in this, he had failed, that this could not be done, and it was to make cruel jokes that it was fitting that Hamilton died of a congestion of the brain.168 He was, after all, a man who, even his admiring biographer acknowledged, lived in a house of bibliophilic chaos, a man who ‘‘neglected to return his books to their shelves, or to keep them in any sort of order’’ and who was obliged to migrate from room to room in search of less disordered spaces. Later, Hamilton tried to classify and order his library, but he was much hindered by his habit of reading the books when he placed them on the shelf, ‘‘frequently standing all the while on the steps of the ladder,’’ so that things ‘‘advanced very slowly.’’ Knowing this of him, one might not be surprised to learn that Hamilton was to argue that human nature demanded we connect cause to effect, and that we aspire 166. Ibid., 3:81; ‘‘Lecture Third’’ JHT Papers, PHS. 167. Of late, there is relatively little written on Hamilton, but especially useful is the short account in Richard Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 1750–1880: A Study in the Foundations of the Victorian Scientific Style (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 131–53. Olson stresses Hamilton’s debt to Brown, though one should note that Veitch stresses the antagonism between them: see John Veitch, Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, Bart., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1869), 84. 168. Mill argued this, as did J. H. Stirling, who in 1865 began the assault on Hamilton’s philosophical credibility. See James Hutchison Stirling, Sir William Hamilton: Being the Philosophy of Perception, an Analysis (London: Longmans, Green, 1865); and, on this matter, Ouren, ‘‘Mill on Hamilton,’’ 19–21, 33. Ouren remarks, ‘‘Stirling . . . presents a Hamilton impaled on the horns of a single dilemma. Either Hamilton is a noumenalist (or realist) allowing a knowledge of the object-in-itself or he is really a phenomenalist (or idealist) since the object is known only in us—tertium non datur. This is Hamilton’s main contradiction.’’

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to unity, because ‘‘[w]e are lost in the multitude of the objects presented to our observation, and it is only by assorting them in classes that we can reduce the infinity of nature to the finitude of mind.’’ Universality was not found, but made by the mind. Further, like Thomas Brown, Hamilton believed that ‘‘the form of all our knowledge is determined by human limitations and that paramount among these limitations is an inability to think about things except relationally.’’ Nothing was known by itself, only as it related to other things. Hence the significance of analogy.169 For Hamilton, Thornwell had a high regard, extravagantly so to subsequent opinion,170 but his was a respect not uncommon in the 1850s, when John Stuart Mill felt Hamilton worth an elaborate critique. Hamilton’s long review of Victor Cousin in the Edinburgh Review of 1829 had been rightly regarded as the most professional of introductions to British intellectual circles of the issues raised by Kant and his successors; even Victor Cousin had thought so.171 Samuel Tyler of Baltimore, perhaps the most prominent American Baconian, who was also Thornwell’s friend and correspondent, in 1855 was extravagant in his praise of Hamilton in the Princeton Review.172 Many more, including George Frederick Holmes, believed or hoped that Hamilton had found a way to reconcile faith and reason.173 In fact, though he did not know it, Hamilton reciprocated this admiration, for in 1853 he was visited in Edinburgh by Noah 169. Veitch, Memoir of Hamilton, 135, 139; William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, ed. Henry Mansel and John Veitch, 2 vols. (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), 1:47, quoted in Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 133; Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 137, 146–49. 170. The Cambridge philosopher W. R. Sorley spoke in 1925 of his ‘‘almost total eclipse’’ and of the ‘‘vaunted ‘quantification of the predicate’ . . . as but a lame attempt in the direction of a symbolic logic.’’ See W. R. Sorley, ‘‘Preface,’’ to S. V. Rasmussen, The Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1925), 7–8. Rasmussen was a Danish Kantian; his book sees Hamilton as being in an incomplete transition from Reid to Kant. 171. Veitch, Memoir of Hamilton, 147. Veitch reprints much of the correspondence between Hamilton and Cousin, but see especially Cousin’s letter of 1 June 1836, in which he recommended Hamilton as a candidate for the Professorship of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh; Veitch, Memoir of Hamilton, 187–90. 172. On this, see Peter Hicks, The Philosophy of Charles Hodge: A 19th Century Evangelical Approach to Reason, Knowledge and Truth (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 1. On Tyler, see Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 26–27, 30. 65–69. Tyler wrote for the Southern Quarterly Review when Thornwell was editor, and was given an honorary degree by South Carolina College at Thornwell’s urging (or so William Campbell Preston believed): see Samuel Tyler to JHT, 13 July 1857, JHT Papers, SCL; WCP to FL, 19 December 1858, FL Papers, SCL; Tyler, ‘‘History of Philosophy.’’ (The attribution for this is GFH to JHT, 1 December 1856, JHT Papers, SCL.) 173. See GFH, ‘‘Sir William Hamilton’s Discussions,’’ SQR n.s. 8 (October 1853): 290–337; GFH, ‘‘Remains of Sir William Hamilton,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 9 (January 1857): 9–34; GFH, ‘‘Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton,’’ Methodist Quarterly Review 9 (April 1857): 175–201; also GFH to JHT, 30 December 1856, in Palmer, Life of Thornwell, 407–8.

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Porter of Yale, they fell to speaking of American writings, and Hamilton expressed ‘‘his surprise at having read in the ‘Methodist Quarterly Review’ a series of very able papers on Comte,’’ which were by Holmes.174 In theological circles, Hamilton was a controversial figure.175 The Princeton theologians, notably Charles Hodge, were for some years his enthusiast. But, when the implications of Hamilton’s thought were teased out in the Bampton Lectures of 1858 on The Limits of Religious Thought, given by Hamilton’s disciple the English theologian Henry Mansel, Princeton turned against Hamilton.176 Thornwell, significantly, did not.177 T. H. Huxley was to remark of Mansel’s theology that it was like the Hogarth painting of a man sawing off the sign on which he sat.178 Other critics charged that, in denying that reason could apprehend the Absolute, Mansel had removed reason from religion and thrown man back upon irrationality for any conviction of the truth of God. But Thornwell was used to this idea and seems always to have found an odd comfort in the thought that the inadequacy of mind occasioned the necessity of faith. For Thornwell, Hamilton was a rival to Aristotle, a match for Leibniz, and an equal to Bacon: ‘‘His work on Reid has filled us with amazement at the prodigious extent and critical accuracy of his reading. . . . He is an honour to Scotland and an ornament to letters.’’ Indeed, Thornwell sent Hamilton a copy of his own Discourses on Truth and got back a brief but polite letter, full of blushing thanks. Not that Hamilton was without faults. No one was, in Thornwell’s world. So, ‘‘Sir William Hamilton . . . has yet, at times, expressed himself in terms which justify the remark of Professor Fraser, that ‘the Scottish philosopher seems to cut away every bridge by which man can have access to God.’ To maintain the absolute incognoscibility of God is to maintain the absolute impossibility of religion.’’ 179 Hamilton was more skeptical of the 174. Veitch, Memoir of Hamilton, 355. 175. The best discussion of the role of Hamilton in American thought is J. David Hoeveler Jr., James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From Glasgow to Princeton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 55–62, 111–79. 176. On Mansel, see Kenneth D. Freeman, The Role of Reason in Religion: A Study of Henry Mansel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969); Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 245–46. 177. For Thornwell on Mansel, see Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:114, 128, 134, 137, 181. Tyler, too, stood by Hamilton and Mansel, or was only politely critical of the latter. On this, see Hicks, Philosophy of Charles Hodge, 19–23. 178. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1901), 1:235. 179. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 3:96, 1:106–7; Hamilton to JHT, 23 July 1855, ibid., 2:452. A note indicates that Thornwell meant Alexander Fraser, Essays in Philosophy (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1856), 222. Fraser was Hamilton’s successor at Edinburgh; Thornwell met him when in Scotland in 1860: see JHT to Nancy Thornwell, 19 July 1860, JHT Papers, SCL.

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scope of human intelligence than Thornwell preferred.180 Robert Breckinridge once maintained that man could not know the infinite, but could know there was such a thing as the infinite. On this, Thornwell had commented: ‘‘Cousin was wrong in maintaining that the relations of the finite and infinite are eternal, necessary and fully intelligible; Sir William wrong in maintaining that they are wholly and completely unknown. Cousin arrogated too much, Sir William too little, to intelligence.’’ Nonetheless, to admire Hamilton was to stray from some of the old verities of Calvinism. Hamilton himself, being a Scot, had to grapple with the legacy of Calvinism and had his opinions. As his biographer was to observe, ‘‘He thought he harmonized the difference between the Calvinist and the Arminian, by taking away the bone of their contention; and while he regarded Calvinism as the more philosophical system, and spoke with the highest respect of its author, he protested against its alliance with philosophical necessity.’’ 181 Upon Hamiltonian logic, Thornwell argued that knowledge was structured by mental faculties, and ‘‘the conditions of consciousness are such that we can never directly apprehend aught but the phenomenal and relative.’’ Hence ‘‘the infinite is never apprehended in itself; it is only known in the manifestations of it contained in the finite. . . . We know that it is, but we know not what it is.’’ So all knowledge of this kind was analogical, pieced together, ‘‘the transmutation of a series of negations into delusive affirmations.’’ What saved the idea of God was human belief: ‘‘We do not know His perfections, consequently, as they are in themselves or in Him, but as they appear to us under finite forms and symbols. This analogical conception, however, is accompanied, with the belief that the relative necessarily implies the absolute; and therefore in the very act of imperfect thought our nature protests against the imperfect as an adequate or complete representation.’’ Intelligibility and God was a protest against the idea of the imperfect, which much of history seemed to force on man: ‘‘Amid the seeming irregularity and confusion which distract the world, amid all the failures in human schemes and calculations which are daily taking place, amid the horrors of war, the fall of kingdoms and the ruins of empire, there is one grand, unchangeable purpose which never fails, but which meets its accomplishment alike in the frustration or success of all other purposes.’’ 182 That ‘‘the relative necessarily implies the absolute’’ was fundamental to Thornwell and denoted his edging away from the starker relativism of Hamilton and Mansel, just as the word ‘‘implies’’ suggested the tentativeness of this intellectual move. Hence, as Thornwell thought, there were two parts of ‘‘our knowledge of the finite.’’ First, there was ‘‘the relative and phenomenal, 180. There are a number of dissents: see Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:57, 114, 3:94. 181. Ibid., 1:468–69; Veitch, Memoir of Hamilton, 272. 182. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:123–24, 2:193.

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which can be conceived and known; this is the proper object of thought.’’ Second, there was ‘‘the substance or substratum, the quasi absolute, which cannot be represented in thought, but which is positively believed as existing.’’ The former spoke to human intelligence, the latter to faith. So, ‘‘Without the infinite, no finite—without the absolute, no relative, is as clear and unambiguous an utterance of human reason as no properties without a subject.’’ The conception of God as Absolute and Infinite ‘‘has not only ever been a positive and regulative principle of the human mind, but is an irresistible affirmation of the human reason.’’ Even Kant had known this. For ‘‘to say that God is wholly unknown, and wholly incapable of being known, is to annihilate the possibility of religion.’’ 183 So religion arose, not from any confidence in the reality of God, but from doubt about the sufficiency of reason and knowledge. Hence Thornwell could affirm ‘‘that our relative analogical knowledge of God is not only true and trustworthy, but amply adequate for all the purposes of religion. It does not satisfy the needs of speculation, but it is admirably adapted to the ends of devotion.’’ Because philosophy offered few assurances, God was necessary. An ignorance of God would make worship supererogatory, but ‘‘if there were an absolute knowledge, we should be the equals of God, and consequently free from all obligation to worship. It is our dependence, marking us out as finite beings, which renders us creatures of religion.’’ Yet there had to be something real upon which dependence could fasten itself, for religion was ‘‘not a vague sense of dependence, nor a blind craving, nor an indefinite feeling of emptiness and want.’’ It was better than that, more rigorous. ‘‘It consists of determinate states of consciousness, which can be logically discriminated as those of intelligence, emotion and will; and these states are conditioned by conscious relations to an outward object.’’ There had to be the external thing: ‘‘There must . . . be something known; something perceived as beautiful; something acknowledged as supreme.’’ Nonetheless it was a leap, not quite into the dark, but into the gloom.184 This was an act of will, something that ‘‘must’’ be done. Indeed, no single word occurred more often in Thornwell’s writings than ‘‘must.’’ It was a word that signaled not only the authoritarian tone of a moralist, but also a sharp awareness that meaning was made only by effort, and was a driven thing. This awareness of how limited was human knowledge lay at the heart of Thornwell’s dissent from modern German philosophy, which he regarded as pantheist and arrogant, though interesting and full of insights. (This stood in contrast to Basil Manly, who once observed, ‘‘[A]s to Theology [in Germany], where you find one sound evangelical Divine among them, you find a 183. Ibid., 1:109, 469–470. 184. Ibid., 129, 135, 39–40.

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hundred, either of disguised infidels or of crazy transcendentalists & enthusiasts.’’) Thornwell had, no doubt, the usual objections to German obscurity of expression and complained of ‘‘the misty ideas of Germany, which its own authors have seldom been able to render intelligible in a dialect of amazing flexibility and compass,’’ and urged that ‘‘any ideas which refuse to be marshalled in English sentences, or to be obedient to English words, are unsuited to our soil, and had better be left to vegetate or perish on the banks of the Rhine.’’ Nonetheless, the Germans were worthy opponents, who unusually inspired Thornwell to a sense of humility: ‘‘We always return from the study of the great problems of human knowledge with a conviction of littleness, incapacity and ignorance.’’ Reading philosophy ‘‘teaches us to commiserate rather than denounce the errors of others, and makes us feel that our position must always be that of humble and teachable inquirers.’’ He was aware that too many dismissed the Germans without bothering to understand them; they saw only ‘‘extravagant conclusions’’ expressed in ‘‘uncouth and barbarous dialects,’’ or (a little better) ‘‘abstract and rugged formulas.’’ In fact, Thornwell found himself ‘‘brought in contact with men of the highest order of mind, the severest powers of logic and the utmost coolness of judgement. They do not rave, but reason. They do not dream, but think; and that, too, with a rigour of abstraction, an intensity of attention, and a nicety of discrimination, which he is obliged to respect while he laments the perverseness of their application.’’ 185 Still, they were wrong. If Hamilton underestimated the competence of reason, the Germans grossly overestimated it: ‘‘They seem to think that the human faculties are competent to all things, that whatever reaches beyond their compass is mere vacuity and emptiness, that omniscience, by the due use of their favourite organon, may become the attainment of man, as it is the prerogative of God, and that, in the very structure of the mind, the seeds are deposited from which may be developed the true system of the universe.’’ And, in truth, they were wrong partly because they carried to a logical conclusion those philosophical premises that Thornwell himself had granted, but refused to apply. John Morell, for example, had ‘‘plunged into the depths of consciousness and fetched from its secret recesses the materials for proving that, in the very nature of the case, every system of doctrine not only is, but must be, human in its form and texture.’’ Narcissism nourished the illusion of pending omnipotence. Stewart, Reid, and Brown had been the Newtons of mind, modest ‘‘inductive psychologists’’ picking up a pebble on the seashore, while Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were ‘‘bold and rampant ontologists, unfolding the grounds of universal Being from the principles of pure reason.’’ While the former had restricted themselves to the phenomenal and relative, 185. BM to BM Jr., 29 May 1846, Manly Family Papers, UA; Adger, Thornwell Writings, 3:16– 17, 78, 98.

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the latter had essayed the absolute and infinite. ‘‘From Locke to Hamilton, English and Scotch philosophy has been for the most part, a confession of human ignorance; from Leibniz to Hegel, German philosophy has been for the most part an aspiration to omniscience.’’ Only Kant could be exempted from this stricture, for ‘‘the ‘ontology of pure reason’ he has remorselessly demolished in his celebrated Critique.’’ 186 Otherwise, the Germans were quixotic: ‘‘They seek to verify the deposition of our faculties by gazing upon the things themselves with the intuition of God and grasping them in their true and essential existence. Hence, their endless quest of the absolute as the unconditioned ground of being. They suppose that, if they can once comprehend in its inmost essence what it is to be, they have the data for ‘the absolute intelligence and absolute explanation of all things.’ ’’ Hence they opted for the ideal, when they ought to have accepted the representative: ‘‘To affirm that the representative does not truly mirror the original is to invalidate the only conceivable process by which we can pass from the ideal to the actual’’ and thereby ‘‘lay the foundations of universal skepticism.’’ The modernist terror here was that, consciousness being so mutant, man would be left only with the transient and could never imagine anything synthetic: ‘‘To say that the understanding cannot compass other realities beside the precise identical ones which have been or are present in consciousness is to pull down the entire fabric of human science, to leave us nothing of nature but the small fragment of its objects within the immediate sphere of our faculties, to make us, without a figure, the creatures of the passing moment.’’ 187 Thornwell wanted nothing of the world of self that Virginia Woolf was to imagine, though he knew of its possibility. In refuting the Germans, Thornwell often found himself driven towards a firmer theory of reality than he was wont to express when refuting the Scots. Partly, this was because he had read some Germans who were not transcendentalist, or only mildly so. His late writings and lectures draw much upon German theologians and critics who were themselves often critical of the Kantian and Hegelian tradition or were trying to find a way to reconcile it to older theological traditions: among these were Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–69), Johann Friedrich Kurtz (1809–1890), Julius Müller (1801–78), and Carl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787–1868). Hengstenberg, in particular, had been long known in the South: his most influential work, the Christolo of the Old Testament, had been translated by Reuel Keith of Virginia in 1836, and James Warley Miles knew enough to damn Hengstenberg as ‘‘the selfish, narrow minded tool of despotism.’’ 188 From these, Thornwell took a strength186. Ibid., 11, 24, 85–86. 187. Ibid., 98–99, 113, 116–17. 188. For Thornwell’s references to these, see ibid., 1:96, 224, 299, 322, 342, 361, 411, 431–

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ened sense that the mind had shapes that could represent external reality, if obliquely: ‘‘The operations of the understanding, though primarily and immediately about its own acts, are remotely and mediately about other objects. Its acts are representative, and hence it deals with realities through their symbols.’’ This insight grounded Thornwell’s dissent from Kant, who ‘‘knew nothing of the distinction betwixt presentative and representative knowledge.’’ For Kant, conceptions, as Thornwell read him, were ‘‘purely the products of the mind, and corresponded to nothing beyond the domain of consciousness.’’ Thereby he had not seen that ‘‘every intellectual act is cognitive, and every act of the understanding representative.’’ It was true that Kant had valuably understood that ‘‘space and time are native notions of the mind and not generalizations from experience.’’ What he had missed, however, was that ‘‘the understanding is as truly conversant about things as intuition—that the only difference betwixt them in this respect is, that the one deals with them and apprehends them directly, the other, through means of representatives, and that, consequently, the conclusions of the understanding, legitimately reached, must have a counterpart in objective reality as truly as the cognitions of science.’’ 189 This desire to demonstrate the ability of the mind to represent reality could wander into a disinclination on Thornwell’s part to give the mind much leeway, to restrict the scope of imagination, because he worried that too much freedom permitted error. So, he contended, ‘‘the laws of thought enable the mind . . . to think a thing which is not before it, but they do not enable it to invest it with a single property which it does not possess; and they are violated whenever a thing is thought otherwise than as it actually exists. The mind as intelligent, and things as intelligible, are adapted to each other.’’ 190 This belief helps to explain Thornwell’s hostility to Coleridge, who made much of fancy and imagination.191 Thornwell was troubled by ‘‘the irregular influence of imagination.’’ It ought to be ‘‘a handmaid to the understanding, vivifying its conceptions and imparting a glow of life and beauty to the knowledge of nature,’’ but nothing more. Indeed, ‘‘We may say with Hume [in the Treatise of Human Nature], that ‘nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights 32, 437, 3:271; Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Christolo of the Old Testament, and a Commentary on the Predictions of the Messiah by the Prophets, trans. Reuel Keith (Alexandria, D.C.: W. M. Morrison, 1836); on Hengstenberg and the South, see Holifield, Gentlemen Theologians, 95–96; JWM to Anna Rebecca Young (ca. October–November 1858), beginning ‘‘Many thanks, my dear Friend,’’ JWM Papers, DU. 189. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 3:119–20. 190. Ibid., 122. 191. Also relevant was Thornwell’s thinking Coleridge a plagiarist: ‘‘[W]e do not regard Coleridge as authority for anything but literary theft’’ (ibid., 102).

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of imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.’’’ 192 So Thornwell felt the Germans had slid into pantheism, ‘‘the prevailing tendency of modern philosophy,’’ whose error was to overlook the nature of Creation. ‘‘Deny creation, and you can conceive of no higher existence of the world than as a thought of the Eternal Mind. . . . Postulate creation, and these eternal thoughts . . . become realized in finite substances, which have a being, dependent to be sure, but still a being of their own. They are no longer the consciousness of God himself.’’ Creation refuted Spinoza and Hegel. In their pantheist world, however, God was seen as infusing himself into all things, including man, and so man became Godlike. But pantheism, by blurring man into wider realities, put him out of focus. Thornwell wanted something firmer: ‘‘The Scriptures teach explicitly that we live and move and have our being in God; but they just as explicitly teach that we do live and move and have a being. We are not a sham—we are a something; and, as being a something, can do something.’’ Action was at stake. Reality made it possible for man to act morally, to worship God, to be in the world. This was an ethic: ‘‘Each man may be required to stand or fall for himself alone. There is no principle of justice which necessitates the complication of others in our guilt or obedience.’’ 193 But Thornwell was deeply hesitant about individualism. He did not want his individuals to be too firm in their outlines, too much in focus, for his idea of individualism was also social. This premise of sociability emerged from his conception of mind, for ‘‘one of the most mysterious attributes of mind [is] the power by which it can impart to others the knowledge of what passes within itself.’’ This lay at the foundation of society itself. ‘‘If each soul existed only as an individual, and there was no medium by which its thoughts and feelings and affections could be communicated to other souls, there might be contiguity in space, but there could be no such moral unions among men as those which are presented in the Family, the Church and the State. Intense individualism would be the law of all human life.’’ And it was not, or should not be. For individualism would vitiate the theology of federal representation: ‘‘There can be no redeemer if each man is to be treated exclusively as an individual. If we cannot sin in another, we cannot be redeemed by another.’’ 194 This belief created a theory of society. God ‘‘constituted our species a race connected by unity of blood, and not a collection of individuals belonging to 192. Ibid., 1:87–88. 193. Ibid., 207, 387, 257, 3:265. 194. Ibid., 1:186, 270.

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the same class, simply because they possess the same logical properties. He made Adam the root, because He designed to make him the head; the father, because He designed to make him the representative of all mankind. . . . We are one by birth, because we were destined to be one by covenant.’’ Indeed, as has been seen, Thornwell wandered into mystical notions that lifted the individual beyond his or her time and space: ‘‘The moral history of the individual does not begin with his own personal manifestation in time; that manifestation has evidently been determined by moral relations to God which have preceded it.’’ 195 But this impulse brought Thornwell ominously back to that Romantic organicism which tended to the pantheist. And he had temptations to think in that manner. He could write of ‘‘the organic unity of life’’ and fashion sentences of Hegelian resonance. So, ‘‘Subject and object, mind and matter, as revealed in consciousness, through real substances, are limited, conditioned, dependent. They reciprocally condition each other.’’ So, ‘‘The world presents an aspect of mutability, a successive influence of cause and effect, a constant interchange of action and reaction.’’ But he hesitated, he lurched away from the fence. For Thornwell could also insist that seeing the universe ‘‘as a living organism’’ was a disfiguring belief that had marred even the ‘‘masterly’’ Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt. Individuals were connected, but remained individual. Still, organicism did explain culture. Humanity was ‘‘not an aggregate of separate and independent atoms, but . . . an organic whole, with a common life springing from a common ground.’’ There was unity, ‘‘a point in which all the individuals meet, and through which they are all modified and conditioned.’’ But the dialectic was not symmetrical. Society had the upper hand: it ‘‘exerts even a more powerful influence upon the individual than the individual upon society, and every community impresses its own peculiar type upon the individuals who are born into it.’’ This explained the reality of national character, which explained the Greeks, the ‘‘Asiatics,’’ the Romans. So, ‘‘The Englishman is easily distinguished from the Frenchman, the Chinese from the European, and the Negro from all.’’ 196 Thornwell took the idea of the social so seriously that it informed his idea of God. Just as man was individual but connected to those around him, so God was personal but connected, not only to himself in the mystery of the Trinity. ‘‘I confess that, to my mind, absolute solitude of Being is wholly incompatible with the actual exercise of moral qualities. Society is the element of virtue, and hence I turn with delight to those representations of the Scriptures in which it is implied that God is necessarily social as well as holy—that 195. Ibid., 270–71, 303. 196. Ibid., 44, 218, 349–50, 3:267.

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such is the nature of His essence that while absolutely one it exists eternally in the threefold distinction of Persons.’’ Likewise, as the Bible said, ‘‘Man was evidently created a social being and with the gift of speech. . . . He was born in society and for society; it is not a condition which he has voluntarily selected from a calculation of its conveniences and comforts; it is the condition in which God has placed him, and from which he cannot be divorced.’’ 197 This belief in sociability helps to explain why Thornwell was interested in the ethics of Ciceronian humanism, puzzlingly so for so stern a Presbyterian. He thought well of manners and courtesy. He wrote, for example, ‘‘There is an intimate alliance, no doubt, between integrity of heart and a delicate refinement of manners. . . . The two combined make up that gracefulness of character which Cicero so warmly commends in his Offices.’’ No doubt, this amiability had its limits, as a letter to William Campbell Preston demonstrated: ‘‘I attended to the speaking last night according to your request and will cheerfully do any thing else that you desire, except dine with you. . . . [M]y principles are fixed in regard to the expediency of ministers of the Gospel taking part in entertainments of the kind unless upon extraordinary occasions.’’ Still, Thornwell’s savage disregard for pagans was much mollified in his estimate of the Greeks and Romans, especially when they were compared to various erring moderns: ‘‘There is a tenfold nearer approximation to the teachings of the Bible in Aristotle than there is in Paley; more affinity with the Gospel in Cicero than in the whole tribe of utilitarians.’’ For the ancients— Aristotle, Cicero, the Stoics—knew that ‘‘all virtue is a species of truth.’’ Likewise, ‘‘Aristotle, among the ancients, was unquestionably in advance of every age which preceded the introduction of Christianity, and is still in advance of many who call themselves Christians, in his clear and steady perception of the indissoluble connection betwixt the cogitative and practical departments of man’s nature in reference to duty.’’ 198 Much of this regard for Aristotle lay in Thornwell’s deep respect for logic, which had been much cultivated at South Carolina College. Thornwell once boasted that he had ‘‘probably, the largest collection of works on the subject to be found in any private library in the whole country.’’ For him, little could be true that was not logical, unified, and coherent. So it mattered that he could say: ‘‘No one will deny that revealed truths constitute a logical and coherent system. They are mutually dependent and connected, and capable of being digested under concatenated heads.’’ On the other hand, Thornwell did concede that logic was a lower form of truth. Logical riddles could ‘‘prove nothing but the impotency of reason, and the incompetency of philosophy to transcend 197. Ibid., 2:234, 524. 198. Ibid., 607, 462, 492, 481–82; JHT to WCP, undated, Preston Family Papers, SCL.

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with its logical forms the sphere of existence.’’ This was, no doubt, the usual escape hatch for neo-Aristotelian Christians when logic threatened to expose any contradictions inconvenient to Revelation. Thornwell knew, for example, that the predestined sovereignty of God’s will and the idea of man’s free will ill-comported and was a contradiction difficult to resolve. ‘‘But what question is there touching the relations of the infinite and finite which does not transcend our capacities?’’ he conveniently asked. ‘‘Both doctrines are revealed, and both are evident to reason and consciousness, and we should accordingly accept both, and wait for a higher form of knowledge for the solution of the mystery.’’ 199 With this leap, one might be free from any bind. Nonetheless, unity was constantly on Thornwell’s mind. He spoke of ‘‘the unity of a higher energy,’’ of ‘‘the mysterious unity in our race,’’ of how holiness gave unity to disparate virtues, of ‘‘a higher unity in which all these laws are ultimately grounded.’’ Above all, he stressed that ‘‘truth is one, and the end of philosophy is the intuition of unity.’’ Here, again, he was nicely poised, in Hamiltonian fashion. The world we experienced was contingent, but we made a unity of it. So, human ‘‘government itself may be contingent and arbitrary, susceptible of change, relaxation or amendment.’’ But ‘‘the scheme of His government is one; and though there be wheels within wheels, plans within plans, all move on in unbroken harmony and tend to a common result.’’ This amounted to a fear of chaos, or rather a fear of experiencing chaos without the consolation of God. So ‘‘the supernatural world is not a chaos. Redemption is not an arbitrary series of events.’’ 200 There was also, compellingly, the fear of alienation. For Thornwell, Christianity was the means by which man had been offered the chance of ending loneliness and marginality. Here his position as a parvenu, as someone who as a child had lived at the edges of society, seems richly to have inflected his theology and language. So he spoke, when discussing the arbitrary doctrines of election and reprobation, of how characteristically cruel were human inequities: ‘‘Even amongst us some are born to affluence, honour and distinction, while others by the sweat of their brow can hardly procure a scanty subsistence for themselves and their families.’’ So he often seemed sensitive to ‘‘arrogant pretensions,’’ the pompous claim that anyone might speak for all, whether that anyone was the pope or Hegel. Above all, Thornwell understood that the doctrine of federal representation meant that, when the bargain created by Adam had been superseded by that offered by Christ, man had passed from being a servant to being a son to God: ‘‘It was always God’s purpose to turn the servant into a son.’’ But what was a servant? Someone who lacked will and 199. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 4:232, 1:37, 211, 388. 200. Ibid., 2:51, 64, 467–68, 504, 219, 227–28, 1:52.

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morality, who was remote from love and benevolence, who was judged only by deeds never by the indulgent standards of paternal care, who was commanded in duties, who lived in ‘‘slavish fear.’’ Since ‘‘the will of a servant must coincide with the will of his master,’’ it followed that ‘‘the peculiarity of the servant is that his holiness is not confirmed . . . [and] exists rather as impulse than habit.’’ Hence, ‘‘the access to God is less full and free in the case of a servant than in that of a son. There is not the same richness of communion. There is not the same nearness, the same unreserved confidence.’’ 201 Crucially, Thornwell understood man’s status as a process of adoption, of passing from the servant’s quarters (where his father the overseer had lived) to the warmth of the household. To be a servant is lesser, inglorious: ‘‘It is contrasted in the Scriptures with the relation of a son, and when we have obtained a clear conception of the distinguishing peculiarities of adoption into the family of God, we shall perceive in what respects the condition of a servant is humbler and less glorious.’’ The purpose of God’s order is ‘‘to adopt the servant into the family and make him an heir.’’ But adoption depended upon the servant having behaved himself and proved himself: ‘‘Adoption . . . depends upon justification, and justification is unintelligible without the contraction of the period of trial. The very moment trial ceases the attitude of a servant ceases, a new relation must necessarily supervene; and God has constituted that new relation according to the riches of His grace.’’ So Adam had refused adoption. So, after God’s grace had been granted through Christ, man had been given a second chance, could cross the porch without cap in hand, enter the parlor, sit by the fire, be cosseted and loved while also being subject to paternal discipline. He might be ‘‘confirmed in holiness; admitted into the closest communion with God; treated as a child; honoured as an heir.’’ So God ‘‘has always proposed a fundamental change in their attitude toward Him, and that change has consisted in the adoption of sons—in the substitution of filial for legal ties.’’ In these ties was a glorious freedom, ‘‘the liberty of the sons of God,’’ bred by ‘‘that glorious spirit of adoption which the sense of acceptance generates.’’ In this adoption, love supplanted dependence. Thornwell once dissented from Schleiermacher for misunderstanding this: ‘‘Schleiermacher was right in making the essence of religion, subjectively considered, to be feeling . . . but he was wrong in making that feeling a sense of absolute dependence upon God. Had he put love for dependence, and distinguished between it as a pervading tone of the mind and as manifested in special operations, his analysis would have coincided substantially with that of the beloved Apostle.’’ 202 201. Ibid., 2:147, 3:417, 1:264, 259, 248, 251, 258. 202. Ibid., 1:258, 265, 267, 290, 485–86, 3:370, 2:470.

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Such language had many layers, for Thornwell had been, in his own life, many of these things. He was the overseer’s child, he was taken into the households of General Gillespie and William Henry Robbins, he became himself a father and a master of servants. In his theology, however, he was anxious that this process be truncated. Man became a son to God, but never himself a master. Indeed, it was the burden of Thornwell’s objection to modern thought that it imagined the possibility of such mastery. It was especially the burden of Thornwell’s theology that the modern propensity to reduce religion to psychology be resisted, and hence that his own experience not be made the explanation for his faith. Thornwell skittered away from the private, even though he knew that ‘‘all truth must be individually apprehended’’ and ‘‘private judgment is always and on all subjects the last appeal.’’ He knew that there were ‘‘crises in the history of each of us,’’ that there were agonies as each debated which way duty lay, as each experienced a crisis of inner conflict, as each made decisions and was obliged to accept the irrevocability of choices made.203 Nonetheless, ‘‘To us, we frankly confess, it is amazing that the essence of mind as mind should consist in something that is not common to all minds.’’ He shrank from ‘‘the idiosyncrasies and oddities of individuals.’’ He did so, because he thought idiosyncrasy led to the abolition of reality, led to the notion that only we make reality, never to the notion that reality makes us. He quoted Fichte with a shudder, when Fichte asserted, ‘‘There is absolutely nothing permanent, either without me or within me, but only an unceasing change. I know absolutely nothing of any existence, not even my own,’’ except images, dreams. He especially shuddered, when he related Madame de Staël’s anecdote of Fichte beginning a lecture with the words, ‘‘We shall proceed to make God.’’ 204 This was nihilism, entrapment in a self. Thornwell equally skittered away from the historical, though on this he was inconsistent. When refuting the Roman Catholics, he was happy enough to scour the records of early Christianity for evidences useful to anti-Papist polemics. Here and there, he talked about the events of the Reformation, but only as events that produced Godly texts, seldom as events that had compelled meaning into those texts. This resistance to history was not untypical of the Calvinist Protestant, who resisted the Catholic insistence that religious truth had been formed historically and was a tradition that had been transmitted from God to Man through apostles, saints, popes, councils, edicts and bulls. Rather, for Thornwell, man listened to God through God’s word and might be more casual about history: ‘‘If [the Church’s] customs have at any time departed from the law and the testimony, let them be condemned; if they have 203. Ibid., 3:136, 2:297. 204. Ibid., 3:87, 150, 1:502.

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been something essentially different from what God had enjoined, let them be denounced as spurious.’’ Continuity in time did not matter, was indeed but ‘‘a figment of Papists and Prelatists.’’ Rather, ‘‘conformity with the Scriptures, and not ecclesiastical genealogy, is the true touchstone of a sound churchstate; and if our fathers were without the ordinances, and fed upon ashes for bread, let us only be the more thankful for the greater privileges vouchsafed to ourselves.’’ 205 Precisely this ahistoricism made Thornwell not a literalist about the Scriptures. True, the Protestant doctrine was that ‘‘the true principle, the only infallible source and measure of religious truth, is the Word of God,’’ and that Word was to be found in the Scriptures. But the Bible had more in it than God’s words: it ‘‘incidentally treats of history, geography and ancient manners, but these are not the things which give it its value.’’ Thornwell thought there was a danger in taking these historical incidentals too seriously, as the Higher Critics in Germany did: ‘‘Allusions to the events, manners, customs and institutions of an age long since past, to places of which no trace can be found, to scenery which is not familiar to us, and to modes of thought into which we find it difficult to enter . . . are the sources of no little perplexity and labour to their modern readers. But these things affect the costume, not the substance, of revelation—the body, not the soul. Its life must be sought in its supernatural discoveries.’’ 206 Nonetheless, there was much in Thornwell’s theology consistent with a historicist vision, for he did argue that God worked through history, or rather that God had decided to permit man to have a history, while reserving the right of miraculous intervention.207 For God was personal and so the universe was a product of will, a contingent thing dependent upon ‘‘the choice, the purpose, the plans of the Creator.’’ Hence, ‘‘Philosophy becomes an inquiry into the designs of God, and these designs, as in every other case, must be determined by the appearances submitted to the scrutiny of experience.’’ Establishing this contingency required induction: ‘‘Speculation, upon this hypothesis, is the reduction to unity of the facts of observation, the elimination of the laws which create and preserve the order which the will of God has established. Though the universe is a contingent effect, it is not the offspring of caprice or arbitrary power.’’ This was to argue (as Ranke was then arguing) that man needed to study history to know God, for history showed the footsteps of God.208 205. Ibid., 3:295. 206. Ibid., 1:48, 3:196–97. 207. For Thornwell’s defense of miracles, contra-Hume and others, see JHT, ‘‘Miracles,’’ SQR 2 n.s. 1 (August 1856): 343–82, reprinted in Adger, Thornwell Writings, 3:221–76. 208. Ibid., 1:500. Cf. ‘‘On the Character of Historical Science,’’ reprinted in Leopold von

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Hence it was odd that Thornwell seldom bothered with the concrete sequences of history, just browsed here and there, as the needs of argument and logic required. But not so odd, when one looks closely at where he used history, where not. The further from essential matters of faith he went, the more he used history; the closer, the less. So his account of the history of metaphysics was much more nuanced and precise than his account of the history of theology, which was in turn more precise when he dealt with Roman Catholic and modern German theology, with which he disagreed, than with Calvinist theology, in which he believed and upon which he drew. This was a tacit acknowledgment that history was hard to control, for the world’s ‘‘history [was] a history of vicissitudes.’’ 209 His casualness about history is still less odd when one remembers that Thornwell had a marked aversion from the concrete, the immediate, the tactile. He spoke of sin or punishment, but he did not relate the history of a sinner or describe a prison; there are no Fagins or Newgates in his narratives. Thornwell was not a political thinker, or very little so. In his youth, under the inapt pseudonym of ‘‘Clio,’’ he had written a few newspaper articles on the Nullification Crisis for the Columbia Hive; these had taken the Unionist line, deprecated the radicalism of interposition, feared civil war, spoken in Burkean fashion of ‘‘a natural veneration for prescriptive authority,’’ doubted the sovereignty of the states, but spoke for that of the people of the Union. But, from then until the late 1840s, he preoccupied himself with Godly things. To be sure, the business of the Church resonated with political philosophy, for Presbyterians flattered themselves that the American constitution was but their principles of governance applied to public life, was but an imitation of the church’s commonwealth. ‘‘As a political system Presbyterianism has always been in advance of the age,’’ Thornwell observed in 1848, ‘‘and it is only in recent times, under the plastic hand of modern refinement and civilization, that some of its characteristic principles, embodying a deep political philosophy, have developed their power and found their way into the Constitutions and governments of States.’’ So he spoke of the Presbyterian system as using the representative principle to avoid the perils of democracy (‘‘the passions and the ignorance of the people’’), of monarchy (‘‘the caprices, the tyranny and the ambition of the king’’), and of oligarchy (‘‘the selfishness incident to privileged orders’’). He insisted that majoritarianism should always be subject to the moral judgment of these representatives: ‘‘The State is a Divine ordinance, a social institute, founded on the principle of justice. . . . The will Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. George C. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (1973; reprint, New York: Irvington Publishers, 1983), 33–46. 209. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 1:218.

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of the people should be done only when the people will what is right.’’ So resistance to an Athenian democracy was not merely expedient, but virtuous: ‘‘It is not because the people cannot meet, but because they ought not to meet, that the representative council, in modern times, is preferred to the ancient convocations in the forum or the market-place.’’ (In this, curiously, he was echoing and praising Francis Lieber’s Political Ethics, which Thornwell quoted at length, as well as Brougham’s Political Philosophy.) Electors should be divided into small communities, whose representatives served the interests of their narrow section but also the wider State. Legislatures should be bicameral. Yet there should be a movement away from localism, as in the Middle Ages when ‘‘independent communities and petty principalities and estates became fused into the national mass and imbued with a national life.’’ Representatives should be ‘‘chosen from comparatively small sections, that the condition of the whole country may be adequately known; but as the interests of the whole society are supreme, as right and justice are the highest expediency, each representative, while he makes known the wants and exigencies of those who have immediately sent him, is bound to act for the collective community, and to do what . . . his constituents ought to desire.’’ 210 So Thornwell was a conservative Whig and, for a while in the 1850s, was a Know-Nothing, unsurprisingly so for so fierce an anti-Catholic. To him, ‘‘dwarfish politicians’’ could be destructive liars. He condemned ‘‘the small politician, the brawling demagogue, the wire-worker in elections, the intriguing schemer and the plausible manager.’’ Though he did boast of American constitutionality, was a bullish proponent of Manifest Destiny and spoke of progress, he was too bleak to be a Jacksonian. ‘‘The future will always be blacker than the present—the night ahead more appalling than aught behind,’’ he once announced. ‘‘Those ingenious theories which undertake, from principles of human nature, to explain the history of man’s progress from barbarism to refinement, are nothing better than speculative romances,’’ he said in 1853. So he was much irritated by perfectionist reformers and, as a Presbyterian, stood firmly against the organization of voluntary societies, ‘‘aiming at the promotion of universal good,’’ and against those prone to ‘‘organizing the girls of a township into a pin-cushion club.’’ 211 Naturally, this hostility encompassed abolitionists. Thornwell on slavery was complex. His writings were few: a discussion of the religious instruction of slaves in the Southern Presbyterian Review in 1847 that 210. Columbia Hive, 31 March, 6 April, 14 April, and 2 June 1832; Adger, Thornwell Writings, 4:56, 58–59, 60, 62, 63, 99. 211. J. P. Thomas, ed., The Carolina Tribute to Calhoun (Columbia, S.C.: Richard L. Bryan, 1857), 119; Adger, Thornwell Writings, 2:508, 47, 1:447, 414–15; JHT, Letter to His Excellency Governor Manning, 19.

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became a pamphlet, a sermon in 1850 at the dedication of the Zion Church in Charleston (built by Presbyterians and Episcopalians for a black congregation) that was expanded into an article for the Southern Presbyterian Review and then became a pamphlet, a report to the Synod of South Carolina in 1851, and some remarks occasioned by the secession crisis. The first of these was an endorsement of the merit of giving religious instruction to slaves, and of the plan to create annexes to existing congregations (not separate churches) where this instruction might be safely conducted by whites; it was also an insistence that this experiment need not be feared, as it was by many, but would tend ‘‘to elevate and improve the intellectual and moral character of the negro,’’ because ‘‘we want this people made better, more intelligent, industrious, tractable, trusty, better men, better servants, better Christians.’’ To those who were concerned that Christianity might intimate revolutionary doctrines, Thornwell replied that ‘‘Domestic Servitude is an institution not inconsistent with Christianity’’ (the emphasis was his own), and the Christian religion itself taught no egalitarian doctrines: ‘‘The Bible . . . teaches that God puts one above another. The Bible is conservative, Christianity is a religion of peace, order and law. Its object is not to overturn the existing forms of government, and then recombine political elements, but it is to dispense the elements of saving truth.’’ So, while the Bible gave slaveholders privileges, it also gave duties. Indeed, the institution would not survive without these duties being undertaken: ‘‘Our domestic institutions can be maintained against the world if we but allow Christianity to throw its broad shield over them. But if we so act as to array the Bible against our social economy, then our social economy must fail.’’ This was so because, if the religious felt that slaves were being quarantined from the Bible, the former might begin to feel alienated from slavery. Rather, the problem was that slaves did not understand Christianity aright; they were ‘‘a mass of religious ignorance and superstition.’’ Thornwell was troubled by this as a prudent slaveholder, someone who worried that this ignorance was ‘‘so much explosive material exposed to the incendiary’s touch.’’ But it also troubled him, perhaps more so, as a theologian, for the slaves knew only Christian heresy: ‘‘Their religion consists, in a great measure of forms and ceremonies and excitement. Conversion is with many of them a dream, a trance, a vision, a voice from heaven. . . . He who carries the Gospel to them, encounters depravity entrenched in ignorance, both real and pretended. He discovers deism, skepticism, universalism.’’ Errors, which he was accustomed to combating elsewhere, flourished in the slave quarters: ‘‘Extremes here meet on the natural and common ground of a darkened understanding and a hardened heart.’’ Fortunately, the slave was a dependent. According to Thornwell, whites made black religion: ‘‘Our will regulates, to a great extent, the character and amount of their religious

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privileges.’’ Blacks got from ‘‘sources of their own’’ only ‘‘religious error, and religious excitement.’’ Hence, the duty of religious instruction.212 The Anson Street Church, founded as an extension to the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston, was the embodiment of this middling vision for a ‘‘partial separation.’’ 213 At its dedication on 26 May 1850, Thornwell delivered a sermon to an audience exclusively white, so that he might speak candidly about, if not to, African Americans.214 This was a testier piece, which started with a sustained complaint about isolation and of ‘‘the ban of the publick opinion of the civilized world’’ upon Southerners as ‘‘traitors to our race, and rebels against God.’’ 215 It also spoke against abolitionists and those who in the ‘‘insane fury of philanthropy’’ sought to incite servile insurrection. His urgency of tone—words like ‘‘monstrous,’’ ‘‘fanaticism,’’ ‘‘the taint of leprosy,’’ ‘‘madness and confusion’’ litter his text—may be explained by the sermon’s being given in the midst of the separate secession crisis of 1850, less than two months after the death of Calhoun, five weeks after Thornwell’s own eulogy to the senator, and only a few days before the Nashville Convention was to meet. This crisis had deeply troubled Thornwell, had even caused him to lose sleep; he said in his Calhoun sermon, ‘‘Never in the annals of our confederation has there been a more critical period than this.’’ 216 But this political prolegomenon in his sermon belied a more moderate and ambivalent text, which begins with the suggestion that Southerners had overreacted to the world’s pressure, that ‘‘we [have] indulged too much in the language of defiance, and permitted ourselves to yield to suggestions of policy which, in our calmer moments, neither the reason nor the conscience of the country should approve.’’ Still, that pressure had forced Southerners to think, to look ‘‘more narrowly into the nature and organization of society,’’ so that they ‘‘have contributed our full proportion to the philosophy of government—that we have done much to expose the fallacies and dangers of prevailing theories in regard to the scope and purpose of political institutions— that we have been eminently conservative in our influence upon the spirit of the age.’’ Like Fitzhugh later, Thornwell felt that the world’s ideological disorder—socialism, unchecked democracy, as well as absolutism—would abate 212. JHT, ‘‘The Religious Instruction of the Black Population,’’ Southern Presbyterian Review 1 (December 1847): 103, 104, 107, 108, 112, 118–19. 213. JHT, ‘‘Slavery and the Religious Instruction of the Coloured Population,’’ Southern Presbyterian Review 4 ( July 1850): 107. This was reprinted as ‘‘The Christian Doctrine of Slavery,’’ in Adger, Thornwell Writings, 4:398–436. 214. Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 192. 215. JHT, ‘‘Slavery and the Religious Instruction,’’ 108–9. 216. John Barnwell, Love of Order: South Carolina’s First Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Thomas, Carolina Tribute, 108.

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and all would turn back to principles long sustained by the South. Slavery, in that sense, was just one dimension of a larger struggle, that of ‘‘the relations of man to society—of States to the individual, and of the individual to States.’’ Here, Thornwell waxed Gothic, with the European events of 1848 much in his mind. On one side were ‘‘atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins,’’ on the other ‘‘the friends of order and regulated freedom,’’ which was the Christian side. The former saw society as ‘‘the machinery of man’’; the other saw it as the ordinance of that God who had made a world full of puzzling irregularity. But man ‘‘can never make that straight which God hath made crooked.’’ 217 This was Thornwell’s usual blistering partisanship. For all that, he felt restrained. Indeed, he argued that the Southern response to external pressure had been remarkably moderate in steering between the Scylla of polygenist infidelity and the Charybdis of repression, in avoiding the argument that ‘‘our safety depended upon the depression and still lower degradation of the black race.’’ (The other context for this sermon was the sustained debate between Josiah Nott, John Bachman, and Moses Ashley Curtis on polygenesis in the Southern Quarterly Review in the late 1840s, in which naturally Thornwell stood against the anticlerical and skeptical Nott.) For Thornwell was adamant that a black was ‘‘of one blood with ourselves,’’ was made in God’s image, and that he was ‘‘not ashamed to call him our brother.’’ More, ‘‘there will be no bondage in Heaven.’’ Further, he was insistent that slavery needed to comport with Christianity, or else Southerners as Christians would feel obliged to ‘‘labour for its destruction.’’ 218 But did it comport? On this, Thornwell was uneasy. He quoted William Ellery Channing: ‘‘The very idea of a slave is that he belongs to another, that he is bound to live and labour for another, to be another’s instrument, and to make another’s will his habitual law, however adverse to his own.’’ William Whewell had argued similarly in the Elements of Morality. Thornwell conceded that, if this was the meaning of slavery, that ‘‘the slave ceases to be a person—a man—and becomes a mere instrument or thing,’’ slavery was wrong and must go, for this would be a system ‘‘which contradicted every impulse of nature, every whisper of conscience, every dictate of religion.’’ But this was not so. Slavery was ‘‘a relation of man to man—a form of civil society, of which persons are the only elements, and not a relation of man to things.’’ Slaves were moral agents, within God’s law, not blindly passive instruments of the master’s will. By the same token, the master was a moral agent. Both might blunder in the discharge 217. JHT, ‘‘Slavery and the Religious Instruction,’’ 110, 111, 114. 218. Ibid., 111–12, 126, 116.

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of their duties: ‘‘[T]he master might prostitute his power by tyranny, cruelty and iniquitous exactions—the servant might evade his duty from indolence, treachery or obstinate self-will.’’ Masters did not buy souls, did not even buy men as property, but only bought labor: ‘‘What is it that makes a man a slave? We answer the obligation to labour for another, determined by the Providence of God, independently of the provisions of a contract. . . . The essential difference betwixt free and slave-labour is that one is rendered in consequence of a contract—the other is rendered in consequence of a command. The labourers in each case are equally moral, equally responsible, equally men.’’ So a master sold, not a man, but ‘‘the property in his services.’’ It followed that a master whipped a slave, as a free laborer might be punished for breach of contract. And, like an employer, a master was not a despot, but someone answerable to the external authority of the law. So—here Thornwell’s argument grew very strained—slavery was not even involuntary servitude, for to it the slave needed to consent: ‘‘The service, in so far as it consists in the motions of the limbs or organs of the body, must be voluntary or it could not exist at all.’’ Indeed, God’s law enjoined upon the servant ‘‘hearty consent’’ and ‘‘cheerfulness.’’ For all men were God’s slaves, were slaves to sin, and only God could offer liberation from this. Masters waited for and hoped for this freedom, just as their servants might, but neither had the right or the ability to hasten God’s will. Either, acting true to God’s law, might achieve a sense of dignity and rectitude, but both might betray the demands of virtue. Given the Calvinist scheme, almost all would.219 In granting so much humanity to the slave, Thornwell left himself with a difficult question, which he understood to be ‘‘the whole moral difficulty of slavery.’’ Did slavery place ‘‘a limitation upon the moral freedom of the slave’’? Did slavery ‘‘preclude him from discharging his whole duty as a man; and, therefore, whether the relation is not ultimately destructive of the full complement of human rights’’? 220 The answer seems to have been yes, though Thornwell gave it obliquely. Slavery arose from man’s Fall and would cease only with the millennium, when this transgression would be purged from the earth: ‘‘In this sense, slavery is inconsistent with the spirit of the Gospel, that it contemplates a state of things—an existing economy which it is the design of the Gospel to remove. Slavery is a part of the curse which sin has introduced into the world; and stands in the same general relations to Christianity as poverty, sickness, disease or death.’’ So ‘‘the most devout defender of slavery’’ should argue for the institution as ‘‘not absolutely a good—a blessing,’’ but as ‘‘a natural evil which 219. Ibid., 116–23. 220. Ibid., 126.

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God has visited upon society, because man kept not his first estate, but fell, and under the Gospel, is turned, like all other natural evils, into the means of an effective, spiritual discipline.’’ 221 It was an impiety in abolitionism to wish to change this state of affairs, to make by man’s will a moral perfection that only God could make. This was clear Calvinist doctrine. Thornwell’s other arguments were more slippery, as though he were conscious that stark Calvinism might discomfit his white listeners, might even discomfit himself. The overseer’s son and parvenu could plausibly argue, ‘‘The distinctions of ranks in society . . . is an evil; but in our fallen world, an absolute equality would be an absolute stagnation of all enterprise and industry.’’ The preacher was on more dubious ground in asserting what later times would call situational ethics: ‘‘Good and evil . . . are relative terms, and what may be good for one man may be an evil to another— or what is good at one time, may be hurtful to the same individual at another.’’ Governments, social arrangements, all varied. The ‘‘free citizen of England and America’’ could not endure slavery, but the African could, just as Asians endured despotism. ‘‘When we consider the diversities of moral position, which sin has been the means of entailing upon the race, we may be justified in affirming that, relatively to some persons and to some times, slavery may be a good, or to speak more accurately, a condition, though founded in a curse from which the Providence of God extracts a blessing.’’ 222 This was weak, for a Calvinist. But this did not really answer Thornwell’s troubling question, to which he circled back. ‘‘The question is—not whether it is the state most favourable to the offices of piety or virtue—but whether it is essentially incompatible with their exercise. That is the true issue.’’ Again, he meandered away: men had differing kinds of duties, circumstances were diversified, trials varied. But, finally, he buckled to the task, to the assertion that slavery ‘‘is no abridgment of moral freedom; the slave may come from the probation of his circumstances as fully stamped with the image of God, as those who have enjoyed an easier lot. . . . Let him discharge his whole duty in the actual circumstances of his case, and he is entitled to the praise of a perfect and upright man. The question with God is—not what he has done, but how—man looketh at the outward circumstances, but God looketh at the heart.’’ The words were clear enough, but the body language of the prose, the shape of Thornwell’s argument, were more uncertain. More positive were his concluding arguments that duties justly discharged were the guarantors of social order and human progress, that all had a differing but important stake in the stability of the 221. Ibid., 127. 222. Ibid., 128.

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commonwealth. So the slave ‘‘may be fitted in his humble, and if you please, degraded lot, for shining in the firmament of heaven. . . . He is an actor on the broad theatre of life.’’ So it was the obligation of the state to police the benevolent administration of slavery, so that in turn the slave (feeling this justice) would feel impelled to discharge his own duties faithfully. So slaves ought to be afforded education, ‘‘the right of the family,’’ access to religion. This would afford protection against ‘‘insurrection, anarchy, and blood shed,’’ better than repression. Christianity would soften hearts, forge bonds, which was better than ‘‘physical force . . . the parent of ferocity, of rashness, of desperate enterprizes.’’ 223 So this was a mixed effort. Thornwell was clear on the issue of social conservatism, on the proposition that slavery was part of the stability of the American order. He was as clear on the issue of the slave as a Christian and a moral agent, who merited justice from masters. He was much more obtuse, however, on the problem of whether slavery impeded the moral freedom of the slave. His final words said no. His meandering argument hinted yes. That in 1850 he was citing William Paley approvingly and calling him ‘‘a man pre-eminently marked by perspicuity of thought and vigour of expression’’ showed how Thornwell was reaching out for whatever help he could find, for there was almost no one whom Thornwell abominated more than Paley. Though he used the Natural Theolo and Evidences of Christianity in his South Carolina College classes in the 1840s, it was mostly so as to demolish ‘‘Paley’s wretched system’’ and ‘‘abominable principles.’’ 224 So it may be significant that Thornwell’s 1851 report on slavery to the South Carolina Synod avoided the question of the slave’s moral freedom, but was a more conventional piece, asserting that the Bible sanctioned slavery, that abolitionists had decided against the institution and then sought vainly in the Scriptures for sanction, that the South asked only to be left alone, that slavery ought to be judged ‘‘upon considerations of policy and prudence’’ and ought only to be opposed as inexpedient, not sinful. Its most original note was to import into the proslavery argument Thornwell’s recent quarrel with John Morell and the modern spirit of ‘‘rationalism,’’ though doing this was only giving a philosophical name to his familiar quarrel with ‘‘visionary theo223. Ibid., 129, 131, 134, 136, 138, 140–41. 224. JHT to President of South Carolina College, 18 November 1841; JHT to WCP, 23 November 1846; JHT to WCP, 1 May 1847, all in JHT Papers, SCL. For Thornwell’s most sustained critique, see JHT, ‘‘Paley’s Moral Philosophy,’’ Southern Presbyterian Review 7 (July 1853): 1–52. William W. Freehling, ‘‘James Henley Thornwell’s Mysterious Antislavery Moment,’’ Journal of Southern History 57 (August 1991): 383–406, makes more of Paley’s influence on Thornwell than I find plausible, though his argument that Thornwell flirted with antislavery is persuasive.

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ries of human nature and society.’’ Nonetheless, one cannot be surprised that in 1861 Thornwell countenanced gradual emancipation. In Palmer’s memory, ‘‘Dr. Thornwell said to him, in 1861, that whilst in Europe he had made up his mind to move, immediately upon his return, for the gradual emancipation of the negro, as the only measure that would give peace to the country, by taking away the external cause of irritation. ‘But,’ he added, ‘when I got home, I found it was too late; the die was cast.’ ’’ Certainly Thornwell’s commitment to slavery was contingent, was too much committed to the just behavior of the masters and the wise legislation of the state, to offer a blanket approval of the institution as it actually worked. In 1860, delivering his sermon on National Sins, in the days after the secession of South Carolina, he asked, ‘‘Have we rendered to our slaves what, if we were in their circumstances, we should think it right and just in them to render to us?’’ and could not bring himself to give an answer, which he probably felt was no. To be sure, he argued that slavery was not a sin, or no more a sin than anything else man did, and should not be abolished on those grounds. But he had also said in 1851 that slavery ought to be judged as policy with prudence, and if the crisis of 1861 suggested a decisive shift in those considerations, then so be it. For slavery was, as he said in 1860, ‘‘In its last analysis . . . nothing but an organization of labour, and an organization by virtue of which labour and capital are made to coincide.’’ 225 To be sure, Thornwell was a racist, not in the formal sense of believing much in the scientific doctrines of race, but in casually presuming that blacks were inferior. He seems, at least in Palmer’s unreliable account, to have been an easy master on the plantation near Lancaster acquired upon his marriage, as well as in his household in Columbia. South Carolina College itself owned slaves, who were his charge when president; he was much troubled by the need to prevent the undergraduates from abusing those who waited on them, as they commonly did.226 In Lieber’s notebooks of the late 1830s was this entry, which seemed to endorse Palmer’s assessment of Thornwell’s benignity: ‘‘Thornwell the new professor owns a cook. Left her behind because her husband belongs as usual to another. He must now hire one here for higher wages than he gets from her.’’ 227 But these were white men’s judgments. What Thornwell’s slaves felt about him, we do not know. Nonetheless, Thornwell on slavery was most guided by his broader theological presumptions, which gave him mixed signals. As he saw it, man was God’s servant, who might hope to become God’s adopted son. Insofar as Thornwell admitted slaves to the circle of Christian humanity, this was their 225. Adger, Thornwell Writings, 4:387, 393, 544, 539. 226. JHT to Trustees, 4 May 1852, JHT Papers, SCL; on this, see Sugrue, ‘‘South Carolina College,’’ 79. 227. FL, notebook marked ‘‘Slavery’’ (cataloged as LI28), FL Papers, HEH.

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situation, too. But slavery was what man (black and white) had; adoption was what man might get. Slavery or freedom, fact or aspiration, sin or redemption, these were the polarities. One must buckle down if adoption did not come, as it probably would not. But, then again, deliverance and emancipation were not something to turn one’s face away from, as long as it was demonstrably God’s will and not something faked by man. So Thornwell necessarily wavered between resignation and action, between proslavery and the impulse to reform slavery, which could easily slip into a willingness to end it. For it was not that, in principle, he objected to freedom for slaves, it was that he was afraid to surrender man’s slavery to God (which was all man had) upon a spurious and reckless promise of liberation announced by another man, also God’s slave. Too much might be lost in losing Thornwell’s own slavery to God, if thereby he did not gain adoption into God’s household. Best to be safe, but hard not to be disquieted in this caution when he knew that, as he wrote in his spidery hand in his college study, around the corner a student might be beating a Christian slave.

epilogue


he Imprisoned Bird

Chapter Twenty-one

Cool Brains

So, on the eve of the Civil War, intellectuals in the South had reasoned and felt their way towards some propositions: that mind helped to form reality, but dialectically; that blending mind and emotion was of the essence of life; that society and government organically emerged from the interaction of individuals and the community; that freedom was insecure and that mastery was incomplete, but necessary; that God was real, but difficult to comprehend; that the world moved and, to survive, Southerners needed to move with it; that much depended on keeping your nerve, on the adequacy of the will. The 1850s was to see a younger generation who knew these premises, which their elders had struggled to clarify, almost as an instinct. Those who had gone before had hoped that the choice between power and morality was escapable. Those in the 1850s knew that choice was the burden of survival. Further, they were inclined to think that survival lay, not in the old robustness of republican individualism, but in identifying the self with something larger. A state, a religion, a race, the Union, and the South, these were among the candidates as places to belong. But what happened if the choice was made and survival failed anyway? As it did, as the Civil War brutally showed that it must. Four younger writers, two women and two men, best laid out the options: Augusta Jane Evans, James Johnston Pettigrew, William Henry Trescot, and Mary Chesnut. Evans said, Go for God and duty. Johnston urged, Try the South and the warmth of belonging. Trescot argued, Cold power is the only reality. Writing in the 1850s, all these faced the future. Since the passing of John Randolph’s generation, which had pined for the old order of the eighteenth century, this forward-looking had become the Southern way. But Mary Chesnut, during the Civil War, came to live urgently in a present that raced catastrophically by her. After 1865, she seemed only to have the past. In in[ 1161 ]

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Augusta Jane Evans (From M. Forrest, Women of the South Distinguished in Literature [1866])

habiting that retrospect, she came to see that there had never really been a choice, that the world had never made much sense, that mere strength of will could not ensure efficacy. Augusta Jane Evans’s Beulah was published in 1859, but not only timing argues for its summing up much of the antebellum South’s intellectual and moral experience. This was not the less so because, in this book at least, Evans was uninterested in contemporary political controversy and ignored slavery, and, though she made a little of landscape and Southern bowers, she did so unobtrusively. One could almost read Beulah without having much sense that it was written by a Southerner about the South, and doubtless many have over the years.1 But it is the novel that best answered Henry Timrod’s contempo1. She was the daughter of a planter near Columbus, Georgia, but also a merchant whose business failed. This had forced a speculative move to Texas and more failure, then his working as a cotton factor in Mobile. There she spent all of her adult life. See ‘‘A Note on Augusta Jane Evans,’’ in Augusta Jane Evans, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (1864; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), ix–x.

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rary request for a work that might, by a ‘‘thousand nameless touches,’’ express an author’s grounding in her own culture. In Beulah, a sky is blue and cloudless, a ‘‘negro waiter’’ opens a door, a harbor glitters, there are chinatrees bordering the pavements, moonlight passes through honeysuckle to silver a piazza floor, someone goes up the river to a plantation, someone else is ‘‘going off to the North,’’ a couple disappear to ‘‘fashionable watering-places on the Gulf.’’ Explicitness about place is rare, however, as when there is an apostrophe to ‘‘a balmy moonlight June night in our beautiful sunny South.’’ But Mobile and Alabama are never specified. Evans’s slaves speak only with a bare hint of dialect and are called only maids or coachmen. They have no names, are not Pompeys and Dilsys. Beulah is an urban novel, which knows nothing of slave cabins and cotton gins, and in it the problems of race and social order put no pressure on events. Rather, the distinctions of class matter, for Beulah’s characters are much preoccupied with status, of who calls upon whom, of how wealth sneers at frugality. The sister of Beulah Benton, the heroine, is adopted into a wealthy family, and Beulah is told brutally not to call, for ‘‘when you remember the circumstances, you ought not to expect to associate with her as you used to do.’’ 2 In one sense, Beulah was a conventional novel, a variant on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.3 In it, an ugly but intelligent orphan girl finds her way into the care of a guardian with a troubled past, their relationship grows closer, she draws back, he travels to the Orient to ease his Byronic melancholies but returns, and they marry. But Beulah is also Middlemarch before its time, a meditation on the intellectual problem of modern knowledge, for Beulah is preeminently a novel of ideas, a work of such high intellectual and abstract seriousness that it is impossible to find its companion in antebellum American literature.4 In a well-ordered world, Europeans were deemed to be licensed to think about philosophical problems more than Americans, Northerners more than Southerners, writers of essays more than novelists, and men more than women. A Southern female writer of fiction was scarcely supposed to hazard these matters at all, and it is little surprise that Evans had difficulty in finding a publisher, though perhaps more so that she found so many readers, for Beulah was quickly popular. Nonetheless Beulah was one of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan explorations of the problem of knowledge in Southern intellectual life before the Civil War, in many ways summing up debates 2. ‘‘Literature in the South’’ (1859), in The Essays of Henry Timrod, ed. Edd Winfield Parks (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1942), 88; Augusta Jane Evans, Beulah (1859; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 13, 25, 28, 43, 96, 118, 145, 342, 51, 32. 3. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Evans, Beulah, xviii. 4. George Eliot’s Middlemarch was published in 1871–72. One might note, however, that Evans evidently disliked Adam Bede: see Fox-Genovese, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xv.

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that had vexed Southerners for decades, in others pushing the discussion into new realms. Moreover, its style is strikingly cool, spare, and assured, tending to deny by its voice the emotion that its plot formally sanctions. For Evans, like Thornwell, passion seems to exist when intellect permits it. Evans shows a very good grasp of the social patterns of Southern thought, especially of the 1850s. In her book, young men go to study at Heidelberg, married couples take themselves off to Paris and Florence, men wander in Syria, homes have large libraries, publishing is a hit-and-miss confusion, intelligent minds grapple with atheism and metaphysics. But, concomitantly, Evans knew that travel could narrow the mind, and young men back from Germany might lose the thread of intellectual ambition, marry brainless belles, and drink themselves to oblivion. (Evans was sniffy about drinking and had an atypical contempt for commerce.)5 Like Simms, Evans had the disdain of the petit-bourgeois intellectual for the fripperies of fashionable society, but unlike him she did not feel threatened by its existence, or imagine that her intellect was illegitimate because not praised or understood by such people. Self-confidence is all in Beulah, though it is a mystery where this confidence came from, and it was dearly bought, against the odds. Evans has a funny passage—in a book not remarkable for humor—about Beulah going to the editor of a Southern periodical to have an essay published, which she notes was a matter for ‘‘audacity’’ in a woman. She finds him in ‘‘the business part of the city’’ and ‘‘a small back room.’’ He is ‘‘a tall, spare man, with thin, cadaverous visage,’’ whose hair is unkempt, grizzled, short, and bristly, whose look is cold. She offers him an essay and the possibility of regular contributions. The following dialogue ensues, which is worth full quotation: A gleam of sunshine strayed over the countenance, and the editor answered, very benignly: ‘‘If the article meets with our approbation, we shall be very happy to afford you a medium of publication in our journal. Can we depend on your punctuality?’’ ‘‘I think so. What are your terms?’’ ‘‘Terms, madam? I supposed that your contribution was gratuitous,’’ said he, very loftily. ‘‘Then you are most egregiously mistaken! What do you imagine induces me to write?’’ ‘‘Why, desire for fame, I suppose.’’ ‘‘Fame is rather unsatisfactory fare. I am poor, sir, and write to aid me in maintaining myself.’’ ‘‘Are you dependent solely on your own exertions, madam?’’ 5. See, especially, Evans, Beulah, 220.

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‘‘Yes.’’ ‘‘I am sorry I cannot aid you; but nowadays there are plenty of authors, who write merely as a pastime and we have as many contributions as we can well look over.’’ ‘‘I am to understand, then, that the magazine is supported altogether by gratuitous contributions?’’ Beulah said, unable to suppress a smile. ‘‘Why you see, authorship has become a sort of luxury,’’ was the hesitating reply. ‘‘I think the last number of your magazine contained, among other articles in the ‘editor’s drawer,’ an earnest appeal to southern authors to come to the rescue of southern periodicals?’’ ‘‘True, madam: southern intellect seems steeped in a lethargy, from which we are most faithfully endeavoring to arouse it.’’ ‘‘The article to which I allude, also animadverted severely upon the practise of southern authors patronizing northern publishing establishments?’’ ‘‘Most certainly, it treated the subject stringently.’’ He moved uneasily. ‘‘I believe the subscription is the same as that of the northern periodicals?’’ A very cold bow was the only answer. ‘‘I happen to know that northern magazines are not composed of gratuitous contributions; and it is no mystery why southern authors are driven to northern publishers. Southern periodicals are mediums only for those of elegant leisure, who can afford to write without remuneration. With the same subscription price, you cannot pay for your articles. It is no marvel that, under such circumstances, we have no southern literature. Unluckily, I belong to the numerous class who have to look away from home for remuneration. Sir, I will not trouble you with my manuscript.’’ Rising, she held out her hand for it; but the keen eyes had fallen upon a paragraph which seemed to interest the editor, and knitting his brows, he said, reluctantly: ‘‘We have not been in the habit of paying for our articles, but I will look over this, and perhaps we can make it worth our while to pay you. The fact is, madam, we have more trash sent us than we can find room for; but if you can contribute anything of weight, why, it will make a difference of course.’’ 6 This is nicely done: the seedy Dickensian setting, the deft levels of dialogue, the hypocrisy, Beulah’s pride and manipulativeness, the awareness of 6. Ibid., 240–42.

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cliché. It is, of course, an author’s view of the problem, not an editor’s. Such a passage in Simms would have read differently, partly because Simms sat on both sides of the desk, and worked a system that cheated himself. Notable in Beulah is that the heroine, Beulah Benton, is emotionally clumsy but intellectually sophisticated, which was the obverse of the heroines in Caroline Lee Hentz, writing elsewhere in Alabama. Indeed, both the heroine and the hero of Beulah are flawed, since ‘‘proud, gifted and miserable’’ Guy Hartwell has a face ‘‘repellently cold and grave’’ and a ‘‘calm, frigid smile,’’ in which the reader is invited to discern ‘‘a volume of hieroglyphics,’’ and a charm beyond the physical. Beulah’s leitmotif is independence, moral and social, the old dream of John Taylor. She does not rush towards a rich man with a warm heart but a feeble mind, as does Eulalia in The Planter’s Northern Bride. Rather, Beulah stays single, chooses to become a teacher against the world’s sneers, makes her own money, reads, thinks, and sets the tone of the intellectual society in her world. The novel and its men wait upon her, as she reasons out the complicated issues that she explores in Emerson, Coleridge, Carlyle, Feuerbach, Cousin, Goethe, and many others, including Thomas Brown, Victor Cousin, even Hegel at second hand.7 Beulah’s starting point is doubt, loneliness, awkwardness, all the qualities that John Taylor had not discerned in the condition of the individual. ‘‘She leaned over the vast whirring lottery wheel of life, and saw a blank come up, with her name stamped upon it.’’ Beulah has lurid dreams, in which she drifts on a sea, ‘‘strewed with wrecks, and hideous with the ghastly, upturned faces of floating corpses,’’ in which, like Palinurus, she is sucked drowning into the deep and all helping hands are snatched away. She thrills to ‘‘The Ancient Mariner’’ and ‘‘its weird supernatural realms.’’ She reads Poe and is drawn to his phantasmagoria; ‘‘his unique imagery filled her mind with wondering delight, she shrank appalled from the mutilated fragments which he presented to her as truths, on the point of his glittering scalpel of logic.’’ Poe ‘‘coolly informed her that she was her own God,’’ and Beulah is ‘‘mystified, shocked, and yet admiring.’’ This admiration strikes an unusual note in Southern literature, which usually saw atheism distantly, as something external, a rumor drifting in from dissolute places. But Miles, too, had seen the raw possibility of atheism, and so had Thornwell. In Beulah one Southerner, Edgar Allan Poe, instructs another in the arts of atheism and yet another in the novel, Guy Hartwell, never does accept religion, but coldly speaks to Beulah of life as ‘‘that dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable zone of blackness the jewel of the glittering universe is set, and buried forever.’’ Evans herself, being 7. Ibid., 50. A footnote on p. 357 indicates that she knew of Hegel from a discussion of Victor Cousin in Morell’s Speculative Philosophy of Europe.

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half in love with easeful skepticism, donates this doubt to Beulah’s friend Cornelia, who is allowed to die, having debated the merits of God and godlessness, and deliberately preferred the latter. Cornelia calmly sees herself as the ‘‘doomed prisoner of Poe’s ‘Pit and Pendulum,’ who saw the pendulum, slowly but surely, sweeping down’’ upon her. ‘‘I wish I could help you, Cornelia. It must be terrible, indeed, to stand on the brink of the grave and have no belief in anything,’’ Beulah says, but adds, ‘‘I have no truth to offer you; I have yet discovered nothing for myself.’’ 8 There was something in that ‘‘yet.’’ Beulah wants to believe that ‘‘chance does not roam, like a destroying angel, through that ‘snow-powder of stars!’ ’’ But she must prove it to herself. This is not quick work; it would not come from a rapid conversion in a pew at a revival meeting, nor flow from easy exhortations about faith and Christ given from the pulpit. Indeed, one of the novel’s few descriptions of a church service is used to explain why one might be an atheist, why one might be revolted by fashionable people with ‘‘their gossiping, slanderous chit-chat,’’ and their smug, hypocritical ministers, and their ‘‘Mammon worship,’’ and ‘‘the aggrandizement of their particular denomination,’’ which together adds up to mere ‘‘pharasaism and delusion.’’ Rather, it is an extended course of reading, meditation, and debate that is at the heart of the novel. Ideas matter in Beulah, but they and she are suspected of pride, which destroys. Still, Evans tried to convey the excitement of ideas, which are accepted with more alacrity than men. So, ‘‘She grasped books of every description with the eagerness of a famishing nature.’’ Emerson, Carlyle, Goethe worked on her ‘‘like the waves of the clear, sunny sea, they only increased her thirst to madness.’’ Eagerly, ‘‘she plunged into the gulf of German speculation,’’ where she ‘‘found the ‘true processes,’ and with renewed zest, continued the work of questioning.’’ She confronts, through Sartor Resartus, ‘‘a howling chaos’’ and stands ‘‘with a shivering dread, as of a young child separated from its mother, and wailing in some starless desert.’’ In Emerson, she contemplates pantheism, its ideas ‘‘aimed at the doctrines of Christianity,’’ but she finds his works Pyrrhonist, ‘‘dim and contradictory,’’ confused and fragmentary: ‘‘He knows not yet what he believes.’’ In Beulah’s debates with Cornelia, the fundamental question is asked, ‘‘How do I know that all truth is not merely subjective?’’ In her other debates with Hartwell, he gives the modern answer: ‘‘I stand on the everlasting basis of all skepticism, ‘there is no criterion of truth!’ All must be but subjectively, relatively true.’’ 9 Eventually, a preacher explains to Beulah ‘‘that human reason was utterly inadequate to discover to man his destiny, that human learning was a great 8. Evans, Beulah, 74, 28, 158, 120–21, 127, 231, 309. 9. Ibid., 128, 231–32, 209–11, 228–30, 232, 263.

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cheat, and that only from the pages of Holy Writ could genuine wisdom be acquired.’’ At this point, Beulah refuses the argument, but she does listen to him because the minister has a command of the philosophical issues, knows not only his Greeks, but his Germans and ‘‘the Helvetian and D’Holbach systems,’’ and his ‘‘reasoning was clear and forcible, the philosophic allusions seemed very apropos, and the language was elegant and impassioned.’’ No old-time religion would convince her. Beulah wants to be Christian, but the religion has to prove itself to her, and she says to Hartwell, who did ‘‘not accept the holy men of Galilee,’’ that she would follow another truth if he knew of ‘‘surer prophets.’’ But she is passionate to resist the cold conclusion that ‘‘death is annihilation.’’ And she is helped in this resistance because the metaphysicians were divided, spiteful, and rancorous, and their historians little better. So, ‘‘Sick of systems, she began to search her own soul. . . . She constituted her own reason the sole judge; and then, dubious of the verdict, arraigned reason itself.’’ Her problem was the modern one: ‘‘On every side she saw the footprints of skepticism; in history, essays, novels, poems, and reviews.’’ In her time, ‘‘Old Faiths had crumbled away; she stood in a dreary waste, strewn with the wreck of creeds and systems; a silent desolation!’’ But, ‘‘A belief in something she must have; it was an absolute necessity of the soul.’’ 10 So Beulah inhabits the world of Matthew Arnold’s ‘‘Dover Beach,’’ or at least of Tennyson’s ‘‘In Memoriam.’’ (Very much au courant, she even read John Ruskin.) Her atheists, Cornelia and Hartwell, all warn Beulah away from their path. Hartwell cautions Beulah not to read too deeply in his library. On her deathbed, Cornelia says, ‘‘Beulah, do not follow me to the end! Take my word for it, all is dark and grim.’’ Later, she adds, ‘‘Don’t live as I have, believing nothing.’’ So there is nothing glad about Beulah’s atheists. One dies and the other wanders miserably in the Orient and can find comfort only in a woman’s devotion. Beulah never faces the more severe test of an atheism that gladly worked, so the conclusion of the book is, doubtless, rigged. No one wants Beulah to be atheist, not Beulah, not Cornelia, not Hartwell, certainly not the ordinary characters in the novel who mistrust an intellectual woman, so it is little wonder that at length Beulah refuses the option. Still, in a curious way, it is the atheists who are given the casting vote in favor of the Christian way, though Whiggishly, since they see it as the option for ordinary people, not themselves. So it is a contradiction that Beulah, so touted for her strength and independence, is deemed too weak to stand the pain of skepticism. This is not a gendered accusation, for Cornelia too is a woman and has the grim strength not to believe. Immediately before Cornelia’s death, 10. Ibid., 254–55, 263–64, 287–89.

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Beulah feels ‘‘that atheism, grim and murderous, stood at the entrance to her soul,’’ and ‘‘her courage forsook her.’’ Indeed, it is the very idea of individualism that Beulah comes to question, this business of thinking for oneself and being alone with one’s beliefs. ‘‘How far was ‘individualism’ allowable?’’ she asks herself. It was Feuerbach’s question, but his answer, that ‘‘Religion is merely the consciousness which a man has of his own, not limited, but infinite nature; it is an early form of self-knowledge,’’ is not sufficient for Beulah, as it had not been for Thornwell. She rejects it as she had rejected Emerson, and for the same reason. In Emerson, self was a rich thing, which touched and opened out the world; in Evans, it was a lonely thing, which cut off and killed hope. Cornelia dies, not so much regretting her unbelief, so much as the loneliness it had occasioned: ‘‘If I had a friend to go with me, I should not shrink back, but oh, Beulah, I am so solitary. It seems to me I am going out into a great starless midnight.’’ 11 Fear of the solitary self is near the heart of the novel. So seriously does Evans take ideas, and so clearly does she enact them, that one can forget that she grounded philosophy upon psychology. So, Beulah ‘‘had arrived at the conclusion that ethical and theological truth must be firmly established on psychological foundations, hence she plunged into metaphysics.’’ In some ways, this had been the way of the Scotch doctors. What we were as humans determined what we need and can know. ‘‘Faith in some creed is an absolute necessity of human nature,’’ Beulah explains towards the end of the novel, when she is offering her final, not her preliminary thoughts. And the emotion of ‘‘faith is based on mental conviction.’’ Here modern philosophy, as evidenced by Sir William Hamilton, and Christianity concurred: humans are too finite to grasp the world, and so all learning is necessarily ignorant, because incomplete, fragmentary. So the attempt to transcend human limitation is, finally, too exhausting, too difficult, too futile. More seriously for Evans, it is too proud. Still, at the moment she describes her heroine accepting Christianity, the phrasing is very careful: ‘‘Her proud intellect was humbled, and falling on her knees, for the first time in many months, a sobbing prayer went up to the throne of the living God; while the vast clockwork of stars looked in on a pale brow and lips, where heavy dews of moisture glistened.’’ God is living, but the stars have not ceased to be clockwork. Beulah is a Christian because it makes her happier: ‘‘Her face reflected the change which a calm reliance on God had wrought in her feelings. The restless, anxious expression had given place to quiet.’’ 12 At the last, Evans wavered. Sometimes her language is plain and orthodox. 11. Ibid., 324, 311, 319, 312–13. 12. Ibid., 287, 360, 371, 379. The discussion of Hamilton is in Chapter 35.

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God acted in the world and had agency. Beulah tells Hartwell that she has prayed ‘‘that God would melt your hard, bitter heart, and give you a knowledge of the truth of the Christian religion.’’ But elsewhere, she seems to argue, not that religion is true, just that it works, and for her. So Beulah flirts with being an existential book, one of the first in American thought, and even comes close to anticipating William James on the varieties of religious experience. Finally, though, Evans’s and Beulah’s choice seems orthodox, if a choice achieved so laboriously can be orthodox. Beulah explains to Hartwell that she respects natural science and expects that, in due course, there would be a reconciliation between science and religion: ‘‘I believe that every scientific fact will ultimately prove another ramp, planted along the path that leads to a knowledge of Jehovah!’’ Like many an intellectual converted, she calls her religion and the universe a ‘‘mystery,’’ because it is the human inability to explain the universe coherently which has necessitated her religious conversion. So it is not understanding she seeks, but its absence. Mind licenses emotion, and emotion in turn gives comfort to mind.13 In Beulah, tension matters. There seems little reason to doubt that, even after her embrace of marriage and Christianity, Beulah Benton would have remained tense and found it hard to pray or love with an easy, laughing trust. Anxiety is not so readily dismissed. James Johnston Pettigrew, perhaps from being a man, freer to move through the world, offered a different vision, more exuberant about the relationship between self and society. He did so in a neglected, unexpected place. His Notes on Spain and the Spaniards is one of the more remarkable travel accounts written by an American in the midnineteenth century. Remarkable and little read, since it was published in a privately printed edition of only 300 copies and issued in Charleston in the summer of 1861, as inauspicious a moment for literary celebrity as any offered by Southern culture. The book was occasioned by two trips. After his academic studies in Germany, Pettigrew had spent the winter of 1851–52 in Spain.14 In the summer of 1859, he had returned there after a too-tardy attempt to aid the Sardinian army in its war with Italy. In between these visits, he had passed from being a young North Carolinian to being a Charleston lawyer and politician. These experiences blended in his mind and his book, which became a meditation on culture and individuality. In this narrative, he pointed to many of the same issues that Evans and others had debated, but in a different spirit. In Pettigrew, both individuality and society could be more trusted, if one could but choose the right society. 13. Ibid., 412, 419. 14. Clyde N. Wilson, Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 206, 58–59.

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James Johnston Pettigrew (Courtesy Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

For a Southerner, Pettigrew’s sense of identification with Spain was unusual, but beginning to be characteristic of his generation, which included writers like Paul Hamilton Hayne, who were more drawn to the sensuality that places like Spain were supposed to embody. ‘‘For an American what country possesses such attractions as Spain?’’ Pettigrew asked. It was an ‘‘enchanted garden,’’ both in itself and as a ‘‘remembrance.’’ ‘‘Was it the transitory effect produced by contrast with the cheerless regions of the North, where my previous years had been passed?’’ he asked. ‘‘Was it reality? Elsewhere in Europe there was little to compensate for the moss-draped oaks, the sweet-smelling magnolias, the flowering vines of my own home: for the sensitive honor running at times into extremes, which is yet the main-spring to the character of a gentleman: for the enthusiasm, sincerity, and gentle nature of our own beautiful women.’’ 15 Boston against Charleston, Berlin against Cordova, were thus pitted in his imagination. Spain and the Spaniards is narrated in a voice, intimate and specific, which 15. James Johnston Pettigrew, Notes on Spain and the Spaniards, in the Summer of 1850, with a Glance at Sardinia (Charleston, S.C.: Evans & Cogswell, 1861), 17–18.

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suggests that particularities make a culture. Inns, hosts, customs, food, architecture, painting, women (especially women) all are urbanely, smilingly described in a ‘‘mixture of personal and public concerns, of fact and reflection.’’ In Pettigrew, incidents matter. So, in his book, a woman vomits from seasickness on his voyage from Genoa to Marseilles. An Aragonese guide wears hempen sandals.16 Pettigrew sees a woman on a donkey, whose ‘‘delicate foot peeped out from the stirrup’’ and his spirits rise. From his balcony in Barbastro, he observes the young enjoying the evening: ‘‘One party was engaged in a rampant game of miniature bull-fight. Another collection of six-year olds had a quiet game of cards. . . . Here came a boy with a tambourine, leading two blind old guitar-players; there a lady with a mantilla and fan, gliding along from vespers.’’ He eats a partridge. Passengers on a diligence, bumped down a precipice, leap from the carriage ‘‘like frightened birds.’’ He sees yet another woman with ‘‘a transparent, rich, blonde complexion (not the peach and apple of Northern climes), exquisitely chiselled mouth and chin, mild but expressive blue eyes, glossy raven locks, and a grace of person betrayed in every attitude—truly an apple of gold in a net-work of silver.’’ 17 So much is gladly Romantic in Pettigrew’s story. ‘‘It was Spain! noble, romantic Spain!’’ he exclaims upon cresting the Pyrenees. But he knew, too, the limitations of the gilding imagination. A page later, he is writing: ‘‘A descent of a half hour brought us to the Spanish hospitalet at the head of the valley, a vile concern into which I did not enter, being quite content with the odor and the sight of the woman preparing tripe in a neighboring rivulet. I preferred strolling off to the Esera, and taking an icy bath in the shade of the Maladetta. A bath is certainly not romantic.’’ This mixture of realism and romanticism is, perhaps, nowhere more evident than in his long, thoughtful, and wary description of a bullfight in Seville, which merited a whole chapter.18 Along the way, to make the idiosyncratic intelligible, the peninsula’s history is unobtrusively narrated, its literature appraised, academic disputes about its character quietly arbitrated, its contemporary politics discussed. Though there was most in the narrative that was only about Spain, Pettigrew wished also to implicate Spain in American debates. After his apostrophe to the nobility of romantic Spain, he writes of the land to his back, northern Europe: ‘‘Adieu to a civilization which reduces men to machines, which sacrifices half that is stalwart and individual in humanity to the false glitter of centralization, and to the luxurious enjoyments of a manufacturing, money 16. Ibid., 58. 17. Ibid., iii, 27, 58, 67, 68, 84, 87. 18. Ibid., 51, 52, 208–27.

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age!’’ 19 This was a reproach to the France of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III, as described by Honoré de Balzac, but also to the United States of Henry Clay and Lowell, Massachusetts. Pettigrew praises how the Spanish take pride in their localities. He disagrees with modern philosophers, who construe this God-given instinct as a relic of ‘‘barbarism, ignorance and prejudice.’’ Perhaps, ‘‘the time may come when prejudices may disappear, when one’s country will have no greater claim upon him than China or Hindostan, and the sufferings of the Bushmen will arouse as lively a feeling of sympathy as those of his fellow-citizens.’’ Happily, ‘‘this millennium has not yet reached Spain.’’ This is a Burkean voice, but a Southern one, too, though Pettigrew goes on to blame the English for combining natural patriotism with an odious ‘‘depreciation of others.’’ 20 Later, he singles out Aragon for its contractual theory of government and cites, with approval, its famous coronation oath: ‘‘We, who are as good as you, and together more than you, make you our King and Lord, upon condition that you respect our privileges and liberties; and if not, not.’’ Indeed, Pettigrew even argues that ‘‘Aragon and the United States are the only countries in the world that have ever embodied the true conception of a free Government, viz: a machine which shall preserve order and protect the nation, while guarantying the rights of the minority against the power of the mere majority.’’ Thus John C. Calhoun becomes Aragonese. Indeed, even the bullfight becomes a Southern morality play, for it teaches ‘‘the skill, the cool courage, the triumph of man over mere brute force’’ and inculcates ‘‘the great lesson of freedom— self-reliance and individuality.’’ 21 Pettigrew praises Spanish religion in language that George Santayana might later have used. Pettigrew goes to Zaragoza and to the Cathedral of Nuestra Señora del Pilar and bends down before the Virgin Mary to enjoy ‘‘a pure, placid emotion,’’ though he believes little in such a Christianity. Did not everything depend upon faith? he asks. ‘‘Some Protestants regard such ceremonies and those who participate in them with a species of aggressive contempt. I cannot sympathise with them. Every revealed system must rest for its foundation upon either reason or faith. Reason decides upon evidence, scrutinised by the light of a critical intellect; faith seeks its ‘evidence of things unseen’ only in the heart.’’ But reason is complicated, exhausting, beyond the capacity of the ordinary person. Catholics and Protestants alike accept the unexamined life, ‘‘because we have been told so in our youth by persons of 19. Ibid., 51. 20. Pettigrew, Spain and the Spaniards, 55–56. He is at pains to rehabiliate the Spanish role in the resistance to Napoleon, as more than a minor adjunct to the armies of Wellington; ibid., 404. 21. Ibid., 79, 80, 224–25.

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learning and probity, in whom we have confidence.’’ No doubt, Protestantism is ‘‘better fitted for the affairs of this world, as it dwells more upon the fulfilment of our duties towards our fellow-man.’’ It is good for the strong, who ‘‘need no assistance.’’ But it offers little consolation ‘‘for the broken in spirit, for those who, disappointed in their hopes, and crushed beneath an unrelenting fate, would fain turn from the world and forget its pleasures and sorrows alike.’’ 22 That is, though Pettigrew did not yet know it, Protestantism might be inapt for the South that would survive Appomattox. Spain and the Spaniards defends the Goths against the growing nineteenthcentury fashion for the Anglo-Saxons. Pettigrew insists that, in the Middle Ages, the Goths and the Catholic Church had preserved civilization, by adopting the civil and canon law but also by resisting the pretensions of the papacy.23 Nor is Pettigrew slow to admit an admiration for Arab and Jewish contributions to Spanish culture, though the subject embroiled him in the complexities of racial theory. He acknowledged that ‘‘the violent prejudice still entertained by the Spaniards against any admixture of Arab or Jewish blood’’ was irrational, because both were ‘‘of the true Caucasian stock,’’ even marked by ‘‘purity of descent.’’ In the United States, indeed, few ‘‘have an idea that a Moor is a sort of negro.’’ For Pettigrew, to present Othello ‘‘with a most suspicious coloring . . . [was] a stage absurdity.’’ 24 Moors were ‘‘no darker than the Italians or Spaniards, and those from the mountains are as fair as the Jewesses from the mountain of Libanus.’’ So, from the Gothic strain, Spain got ‘‘fierce courage, valor, the sentiment of personal honor, the duel, the judgment of God, fidelity to his chieftain.’’ From the Arab, valor too, but also ‘‘poetry, grace, elegant horsemanship, skill in weapons, gallantry, fidelity to plighted word, and mercy to the conquered.’’ From this fusion came chivalry, ‘‘which spread gradually over Europe, and contained the first germs of civilization.’’ 25 As a soldier, soon to be a Confederate general, the interconnection of civilization with the military was important to Pettigrew, who devotes many pages of his book to the Spanish army. Pettigrew is at great pains to soften and repudiate the conventional AngloAmerican condemnation of Spain, even to the extent of saying kind words for Spain’s grandees. No doubt, Spain had an aristocracy, he thought, but 22. Ibid., 77, 78. 23. Ibid., 125. 24. Cf. Tilden G. Edelstein, ‘‘Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,’’ in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 179–97. In the 1820s in the United States, it was customary to play Othello as a mulatto. Edwin Forrest had, after 1840 or so, played him as an octoroon. Edwin Booth after 1849 lightened the general still further to an ‘‘Arabian’’ of ‘‘glittering Oriental splendor.’’ 25. Pettigrew, Spain and the Spaniards, 310, 330.

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its modern version was very different from that of the Middle Ages. It was proud, but so were the poor and the middling classes. It took satisfaction in birth, but not in money, and was even unostentatious, to a degree that earned foreign disapprobation and puzzlement. It was so large that it lacked cohesion and, without this, it forfeited the right to automatic power. Like all aristocracies, it consisted mostly of drones, but noble drones. Even the peasantry was relatively uncorrupted, a people ‘‘really worthy of admiration,’’ with ‘‘manly but uneducated virtues.’’ Hence all of Spain’s classes were conservative. Resistance to modernity and skepticism of material reward as the only legitimate object of life were Spanish dogmas: ‘‘If the result of progress is to be the elimination of this element from Spanish character, better a thousand times for them to remain as they are.’’ To be sure, such virtues could be extended into vices: nobility could become excessive pride and jealousy, a contempt for trade become mere laziness, religious cohesion become Inquisitorial intolerance. Most notably, a Stoic ability to stand pain had, in Spanish culture, become a ‘‘want of appreciation of human suffering.’’ As Pettigrew saw it, the growth of compassion, so evident elsewhere in European and American culture, was as yet absent from Spain, which was indifferent to the goring of the bull or the matador. But this was evidence of the Spanish lagging behind the movement of modern history. ‘‘Our ideas of humanity are entirely things of the last hundred years,’’ Pettigrew observed. ‘‘So completely has the change of society altered the relations which exist between man and man, that we think the Spaniards ferocious because they act pretty much as their and our ancestors did a half century ago.’’ This lag Pettigrew deprecates. He is less enthusiastic about other aspects of modernity, the ‘‘atheism, deism, and philosophistic religion, so prevalent in the soi-disant enlightened countries.’’ He renders the opinion that John Crowe Ransom was to reiterate more than sixty years later, that a God without thunder made a pale religion, scarcely deserving of the name: ‘‘The spirit of the age is entirely against not only superstition, but, I am sorry to say, religion, that is religion in the vital sense of the word, and the real ground of apprehension at present is from a deficiency, not an excess of belief.’’ 26 Like many Southerners educated in Germany, especially those who valued the American revolutionary tradition, Pettigrew was anxious to assault the English. The virtue of Spain was its unimpeachable credentials as an Anglophobic power. For nothing nettled Pettigrew more than the cult of the AngloSaxon. ‘‘There has sprung up a class,’’ he observes in conclusion, ‘‘proclaiming that we are only an off-shoot of the Anglo-Saxons, and that the Revolution cut no cord but the umbilical. There is, doubtless, a sufficiency of Anglo26. Ibid., 385–88, 390, 395, 403. Cf. John Crowe Ransom, God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).

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Saxon blood in America; but there is probably a still greater amount of Celtic and Teutonic.’’ True, Americans had inherited the English language, which for Pettigrew seems to have been no boon, for ‘‘a poor [language] it is, fit for serpents only.’’ Trial by jury, he acknowledged to be a gift. (Elsewhere he quotes a Spaniard as observing that such juries would be impossible in Spain, because ‘‘if twelve of his countrymen were shut up in a room to discuss a given subject, only one would come out alive.’’) But what else had America kept of the English heritage? It had rejected English law ‘‘in substance,’’ turned to the French military system, and to the Germans for ‘‘the freedom of the intellect and the inquiring spirit that characterize the race.’’ 27 Above all, Americans had rejected the English class system and its worship of money, or they should. So Pettigrew cautioned his countrymen to beware perfidious Albion and embrace her natural enemies, among them the Spanish. But the price of this friendship must be the abandonment of acquisitive designs upon Cuba. Patience was a better strategy; the colonial age was passing, Cuba would eventually be detached from Spain. The United States need only wait. Or, if patience was too thin, the itch for action too great, then better to negotiate for Cuba in exchange for material aid to Spain in its two great ambitions, the expulsion of the British from Gibraltar and the reunion of Spain with Portugal. This assault upon the English was a familiar aspect of the cause of the Mediterranean South. At its root was sensuality, a recoiling from fogs and sleet and cold hearths. In the final sentences of his book, Pettigrew listed the things he most liked about Spain: the ‘‘flowery vales of Andalusia and the tawny mountains of Aragon,’’ prayer in a cathedral, promenades by moonlight, ‘‘prancing horses and pawing bulls,’’ fandangos and olés, guitars and ‘‘wild, plaintive melodies,’’ oranges and pomegranates, marble courts and fountains, the bravery and elegance of the men, and the Spanish language itself. ‘‘But far above all these do I adore its women—the immortal, the everbeautiful!’’ 28 So, sensuality was the answer. One should mistrust mind and look to the body. This would be the salvation of Southern culture, to be less English and more Mediterranean, more dashing and less calculating. This opinion was to be popular enough when the Civil War began, though it was hard put to survive Gettysburg. So both Evans and Pettigrew made their suggestions, not so very different, for faith and sensuality both required a willingness of the heart. But William Henry Trescot took another line, more engaged by the intellect. In Trescot, 27. Pettigrew, Spain and the Spaniards, 412, 415–16. 28. Ibid., 430.

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Washington Allston, The Spanish Girl in Reverie (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Lyman G. Bloomingdale, 1901)

agreeable pieties dissolved, weakness was despised, morality itself all but disappeared, leaving only historical necessity behind. As Mary Chesnut was later to observe, ‘‘Mr. Petigru said of that brilliant Trescot, ‘He is a man without indignation.’ He and I laugh at everything.’’ 29 29. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 36.

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Among Southern historians, Trescot was of the generation younger than that of Hugh Blair Grigsby. Trescot was born in 1822 in Charleston, Grigsby in Norfolk in 1806. The difference in time and place is significant. Grigsby was a postrevolutionary man, looking back. Trescot grew up in a South Carolina debating secession and was, in consequence, an antebellum man, looking forward and trying to see shapes. As Trescot was to remember after the Civil War, secession ‘‘had been the subject of household talk and public discussion, which . . . young men had grown up expecting to see.’’ His father, Henry, was an officer in the State bank of Charleston; his mother, Sarah McCrady, belonged to a legal and political family. His education was local, more than was usual: Charleston academies, the College of Charleston, legal apprenticeship to his uncle Edward McCrady. He seems to have belonged to this world with ease, to have been a man with many friends, the rising men who shared jokes, cigars, and women. He married richly in 1848, when he was twenty-six, to Eliza Natalie Cuthbert, an alliance that brought him a Beaufort cotton plantation and $10,000 or so a year. Trescot had wit, ability, leisure, sometimes rural boredom, but also a platform for worldly forays. He liked to travel and especially enjoyed his brief time in 1853 as secretary to the American legation in London, where he knocked around with Thackeray, met Macaulay, interviewed Prince Albert, and flitted over to the continent. Among his familiars were Bancroft Davis, the historian’s nephew, and Henry Shelton Sandford, who later wrote to him in reminiscence: ‘‘Davis, I and Thackeray discussed a day or two since some of that claret you remember at the Café de Paris. You were lovingly remembered.’’ 30 He was, on the whole, an aspirant mandarin. Scrambling for public office seems never to have held any attractions for him and he argued for the necessity of an urbane civil service. But, apart from his stay in London, before 1861 he was only to hold office once, as Assistant Secretary of State under James Buchanan from June 1860 until South Carolina’s secession eventually obliged his resignation in December, though for most of that time (Lewis Cass being ill), he in effect ran the foreign policy of the United States and conducted a shuttle diplomacy between Buchanan and South Carolina. In the 1850s, Trescot published two histories—The Diplomacy of the Revolution: An Historical Study (1852) and The Diplomatic History of the Administrations of Washington and Adams, 1789–1801 (1857)—works important enough to be admired by Macaulay and to earn him a posthumous accolade as ‘‘the father of the writing 30. William Henry Trescot, Memorial of the Life of J. Johnston Pettigrew, Brig. Gen. of the Confederate States Army (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1870), 45; David Moltke-Hansen, ‘‘William Henry Trescot,’’ in American Historians, 1607–1865, ed. Clyde N. Wilson, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 30 (Detroit: Gale Publishing, 1984), 311–13; William Henry Trescot to William Porcher Miles, 4 December 1853, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC.

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of diplomatic history in the United States.’’ 31 That he was one of the first historians to use the archives of the Department of State is less important here than his analytical standpoint, which in turn may be less important than his tone. Grigsby had seen history as the refuge of those disappointed of power, a retirement, but Trescot saw it as a means to power. Trescot was drawn to diplomatic history, because he was and wanted to be a diplomat. As Mitchell King had prescribed, Trescot wanted to learn something about a relevant past, in order to use it in the molding of the future. He felt that diplomacy—at crucial moments in history—offered an intoxicating mingling of characteristics: it both reflected and directed the status of a nation; it was representative but required ‘‘in its sphere as thorough a concentration of power into individual hands as is compatible with national safety.’’ 32 Diplomats sat at the interstices of history, where nations collided and worked out new orders. For history was dialectical. As Trescot explained it, ‘‘The leading fact of modern history is—to borrow a philosophical phrase almost generalized into common use—its progress by antagonism. For if any period be selected for special examination, while it will be found to have a general tendency, a uniform character, and a precise result, yet all this will have been attained by the conflict of opposing national interests; and in each nation, the governing interest will have been matured through the contest of opposing parties.’’ To map these patterns, ‘‘these great stages in human progress’’ was history’s ‘‘highest value, for here we learn the point which has been reached, and strive to learn the course which will be travelled.’’ At the end of convulsive eras, such as that of the American Revolution, ‘‘the diplomatists . . . have been gathered together to determine the objects of national desire, count the cost of national success, and readjust the respective values of national power. In the record of their deliberations there should be found the justest estimate of national necessities, the strongest reflection of national sentiment, the truest summary of national history.’’ Trescot assumed that modern history—by which he seems to have meant two things, the disparate order of vernacular nations that succeeded the Roman Empire, and more restrictedly the years since the Peace of Westphalia—was characterized by the necessities of the balance of power, which arose from the failure of Empire; ‘‘The civil code of no mighty capital 31. Samuel Flagg Bemis and Grace Gardner Griffin, eds., Guide to the Diplomatic History of the United States, 1775–1921 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), 306. The only extended study of Trescot is Robert Nicholas Olsberg, ‘‘A Government of Class and Race: William Henry Trescot and the South Carolina Chivalry, 1860–1865’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1972), which, though full of elegance and insight, says surprisingly little about Trescot himself. 32. William Henry Trescot, The Diplomacy of the Revolution: An Historical Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1852), 2.

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has ever been elevated into the supreme law of a subject civilization; the vigorous spirit of no one people has controlled the direction and form of modern thought.’’ Progress had been born precisely of these preconditions, ‘‘the constant conflict of equal nations.’’ 33 Indeed, Trescot was inclined to give his encomia only to this system of balance, and the international law by which it was sometimes governed and always judged. Selfishness drove history, but also restrained and challenged it, because nations checked one another. The system was conservative, but it always changed. Such a vision of Realpolitik was deeply revisionist, as Trescot well knew, a thing very far from Grigsby’s pietas. It was Trescot’s argument that the United States was born in this system of nationalist antagonism, was governed by its laws, and would only flourish by recognizing its course and position within the system. Nothing could have been further from traditional Southern and American interpretations of the United States’s founding Revolution and its Manifest Destiny. On this, Trescot was blunt: ‘‘It is the mistaken pride of present opinion that we stand apart from the world, intrusted by God’s Providence with our peculiar and separate mission; that our wisdom is the summary of the world’s experience, and our future independent of the world’s control.’’ Of this, the opinion of almost all his countrymen, Trescot was dismissive. ‘‘If history forces upon us any one conclusion, it is, that we belong as much to the past as to the future; that we are an essential and inseparable portion of that Christendom whose deliberations are common because their interests are one; and that our progress can neither be safe nor wise unless we realize, not only our value in, but our connexion with that world.’’ Economics alone dictated that membership—‘‘we are now placed between the two highways of the world’s commerce’’—but also all European history since the Peace of Westphalia, which established the system of periodic Congresses, and since that of Utrecht, which ‘‘declared the existence of an European balance of power not dependent upon dynastic rights nor feudal constructions, but regulated by the exigencies of great national interests.’’ 34 Thus, both of Trescot’s volumes were designed to show, not how in its birth the United States had broken from European history, but how it had assumed its proper place in a system of antagonistic interdependence. Vital to this analysis was the Romantic historicism of nationality. Nations earned their place in this system by their social reality, their claim to being distinct. It is abundantly obvious from Trescot’s essay, ‘‘The Position and Course of the South,’’ published in 1850, that he believed the South to be such a nation. It is further clear that he wrote his diplomatic histories, not only or 33. Ibid., 5–6. 34. Ibid., 8–9, 11–12.

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not even to inform any future American diplomacy, but to learn how a diplomatist could contribute to the birth of a nation, in this case a Southern nation. As Trescot saw it, the legitimacy of a government depended upon its sympathy with ‘‘the social institutions of a nation’’; slavery had made the South socially distinct; this had led to sectional antagonism; hence, ‘‘in such a political crisis the only safety of the South is the establishment of a political centre within itself; in simpler words, the formation of an independent nation.’’ Here Trescot was attentive to the principle of antagonism, which later he was to identify as the progressive engine of modern history. Loose empires, loose confederations might serve a certain purpose, as witness Russia and Austria, but ‘‘where the administration is . . . the representative of conflicting interests, the decided strength of any one great interest must, of necessity, explode the machine, or re-adjust its arrangements.’’ 35 Just as the British Empire had exploded in 1776, so would the United States, and for the same reason, a lack of social homogeneity. Trescot’s historicism had none of Herder’s cheerful populism, no benign belief that a world could be made where distinct peoples would respect one another and dwell in their own moral worlds, speaking different languages, singing different folk songs, reading different literatures, occasionally getting on the ferry from Folkestone to Boulogne for an amiable shopping expedition. To the contrary, Trescot believed that history, being driven by antagonism, was necessarily marked by war. Indeed, in 1850, he replied to those who argued that secession would bring civil and servile war, that it was probably so, that war was the price: ‘‘This world is not one of peace—its wisest and highest teacher brought into its troubled life ‘not peace but a sword,’ and nothing of national greatness or individual good has been achieved without sacrifice and sorrow. It is a truth of history, untouched by an exception, that no nation has ever yet matured its political growth without the stern and scarring experience of civil war.’’ And so, unlike David Ramsay who saw polite unanimities in the American Revolution, Trescot saw necessary and ugly division. And unlike Ramsay, Trescot refused to acknowledge that the United States had made any significant contributions towards advancing the world’s morality. ‘‘The independence of the United States,’’ he wrote in 1852, ‘‘. . . introduced into history a new power, not a new principle,’’ an assertion that would have been unintelligible to Grigsby.36 Trescot elaborated later, 35. William Henry Trescot, The Position and Course of the South (Charleston, S.C.: Walker & James, 1850), 7. 36. Trescot, Position and Course, 16; Trescot, Diplomacy of the Revolution, 148. Trescot’s most elaborate statements on the continuity of American with European culture can be read in Trescot, J. Johnston Pettigrew, 21–23. By the same token, Trescot believed American literature to be an extension of English literature: see William Henry Trescot, Oration of the Hon. Wm. Henry

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‘‘The United States then took their places in the world as the inventors of no new political doctrine, as the disturbers of no old political rights, but, like any other nation, to influence and be influenced by the circumstances of the time.’’ 37 Republics, after all, were nothing new under the sun; the United States (whether the phrase was plural or singular) offered no novus ordo seclorum. The cool impertinence of these views could easily lead to a neglect of a basic aspect of Trescot’s historicism. He saw the past as something instructive, but different. Patterns repeated themselves, but new conditions mandated fresh analysis and fresh action. Most of his contemporaries, when they wrote of the American Revolution, saw it as a living heritage, even when they thought themselves unequal to the gifts of the Founders. For Trescot, only the lessons of the Revolution were alive, and even they had a force similar to those of many other episodes in history. For Trescot—and the phrase was startling in an American of the 1850s—to go back to the time of Revolution and the early republic was to visit ‘‘our old days and . . . ancient rulers.’’ He spoke of the difficulty, for someone living in the late 1850s, of imagining the situation of 1783, with its different conditions, its different men: and this statement, presupposing as it does the mutations of time that call forth the effort of historical imagination, is the mark of the historicist. And like a good historicist, he tried to describe and puzzle out those differences. But—and this confusion, too, was typical of the historicist—Trescot believed that, though history changes, nations are somehow continuous. As Grigsby had said, some Virginians were dead, but Virginia was immortal. As Trescot saw it, ‘‘However perplexed at times has been the political history of the world, there is one great fact evident in its progress,—that although temporary necessities may compel a nation to occupy unusual positions, there is an individual character stamped on the policy of each nation, which can be traced through its whole career; that Providence seems to have trusted certain interests to each large combination of political society, in obedience to which it should govern its political life, and its fidelity to which is the measure of its general prosperity.’’ 38 This was as true of the sections of the United States as of nations, because those sections were but nations which had yet to ascertain their positions and Trescott, Delivered before the Alumni of the College of Charleston, June 25, 1889 (Charleston, S.C.: Walker Evans & Cogswell, 1889), 8–9. 37. Trescot, Diplomacy of the Revolution, 151. 38. William Henry Trescot, The Diplomatic History of the Administrations of Washington and Adams, 1789–1801 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1857), vi, 7–8; Trescot, Diplomacy of the Revolution, 156–57. It is worth stressing, however, that unlike many historicists, Trescot saw the lifespan of all nations as limited, a standpoint that—in head, if not heart—made him peculiarly well prepared for the destruction of his own nation in 1865.

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fix their place in the system of international life. Thus Trescot once wrote of the settlements of Plymouth and Jamestown, the founding progenitors of North and South: ‘‘For every point of likeness in the history of the two plantations, points of difference might be multiplied, and from the quaint freshness of the old chronicles might be drawn, passage after passage, expressing, in language, their ancient, continued, and present variance.’’ As with the Revolution, these were ‘‘ancient’’ things. The usefulness of the historicist, like that of the diplomat, was to understand what was ancient and necessary, what was contingent. And understanding could change. The Pinckneys in the 1780s thought the stream of the South’s history was intermingled with that of Massachusetts and acted accordingly. Trescot saw differently and thought new action necessary. The Union, he said in 1850, has done useful things, ‘‘fertilized a wilderness,’’ began a commerce, spread Anglo-Saxon law and language, grown in population, given birth to thirty-three states: ‘‘It has given to history sublime names, which the world will not willingly let die—heroic actions which will light the eyes of a far-coming enthusiasm. It has achieved its destiny. Let us achieve ours.’’ 39 As a diplomatist, Trescot must be accounted in the tradition of the Machiavellis and Metternichs. He had the intellectual pride of the realist. He said to his readers, I have looked coolly upon reality—on selfishness, carnage, the interests of labor and capital—and seen where truth and prudence rests. It is not pretty, but it is necessary. Put away your dreams, look steadily on yourself, and you will have, if not happiness, then at least a better chance of survival. Obviously, there was no radical epistemology in all this: no realist can be Humean. Steadiness of gaze is not born of wondering whether there is a gaze to be steadied. But Trescot’s tone was not that of early historicism, certainly not Herder, not even Ranke, and very far from George Bancroft. The trusting quality of that early historicism, the sense that one could find times and societies that would be reliable and emotionally adequate, was almost—not quite—gone from Trescot. Mitchell King had said to the historian, know thyself. Trescot had followed the advice and said, this is not much, this history and this self, but it is all that we and I have. It was no accident that when in 1876 Henry Adams, as editor of the North American Review, wanted to find a Southerner to give a dispassionate account of ‘‘The Southern Question,’’ he turned to Trescot. There were marked similarities between the two men, the one having written a Diplomatic History of the Administrations of Washington and Adams, the other going to write a History of the United States in the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison; the one having scoured the manuscripts of the State Department, the other about to do so; 39. Trescot, Position and Course, 9, 20.

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the one a disaffected and impoverished remnant of a destroyed social order, the other a disaffected and affluent remnant of an alienated social order; the one having been bored with Beaufort, the other with Quincy. Adams and Trescot were to know each other better, when Adams married and moved to Washington, where he numbered several Southerners among his friends, including Richard Taylor and L. Q. C. Lamar. But Adams judged Trescot well enough in 1876 to expect from him writing on the condition of the South that would be different from that of most other Southerners, who ‘‘seemed possessed with the literary theories of fifty years ago, and let their feelings get the better of them.’’ Rather, Adams wanted science: ‘‘We are nothing if not scientific. We analyze like chemists; we dissect like surgeons; we construct like architects; we never lose our temper; we are never ornate; we are always practical.’’ We ‘‘respect the calmness of intellectual power.’’ 40 By ‘‘we’’ Adams claimed to mean the Northern reading public, though it was easy to know that he meant himself. And, as significantly, he expected this of Trescot. In this, Adams was right, both as to substance and tone, both as to Trescot and himself. Writing during his most scientific phase as a historian, Adams was famously to use the image of history as a Heraclitean river. Jefferson and Madison, Adams observed, ‘‘appear like mere grass-hoppers, kicking and gesticulating, on the middle of the Mississippi River. . . . This I take to be the result that students of history generally reach in regard to modern times. The element of individuality is the free-will dogma of the science, if it is a science. My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.’’ Significantly, Trescot had used the same image in 1852, though with a variance. For Adams, history was the river. For Trescot, ‘‘System alone as it founds itself on the nature of things’’ was the river, for only such a system ‘‘if there is a spirit in the people correspondent to it, commands fortune.’’ The stream might pass through ‘‘the ever varying series of events’’ of history, it might be flooded, endure drought, pass through rapids, be briefly diverted, ‘‘but its general course flows uniform with itself, conforms to the nature of the country it passes through, and maintains the general direction which its issue bears to the source.’’ 41 But the difference 40. Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1958), 27–28; Henry Adams to William Henry Trescot, 9 August 1876, in The Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, 1868–1885, ed. J. C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, and Viola Hopkins Winner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1982), 286. 41. Henry Adams to Samuel J. Tilden, 24 January 1883, in Levenson, Henry Adams Letters, 2:491; Trescot, Diplomacy of the Revolution, 158–59.

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was more apparent than real. Trescot’s ‘‘system’’ was intellect, but intellect could only be efficacious if it conformed to the landscape: the reward of commanding fortune was not changing the landscape, so much as surviving to the sea. The nuance of difference between Adams and Trescot lay in their varying experiences. Though Trescot was never as powerful politically as he wished, he more decisively aspired to power than Adams and had more power. Consequently Trescot had more pride in power, more interest in its capacities, was more entranced by the moments of detachment when the maker of treaties analyzed and settled the fate of nations. Trescot saw himself on the boat with Jefferson and Madison, while Adams saw himself on the river bank. But, in both places, the historians put a sort of faith in analysis and detachment, in gathering documents, in constructing narratives and, in both places, they were not sure of efficacy. Out of this doubt came, for Adams, the radical skepticism of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. Out of it, for Trescot, had come armed revolution, a different sort of art. There had been pride in all these, in Evans, Pettigrew, and Trescot. They had said that one could decide upon love and faith, on sensuality and community, on power and nationhood, and the world would respond to the will. Of course, it did not. Their generation had resolved to act, to cut the old Gordian knots, but the splendid moment of resolution yielded to many more moments of irresolution, death, and defeat. There had been, as Trescot was to admit in 1870, a ‘‘terrible mistake.’’ Pettigrew himself did not survive the war. In July 1863, not long after the battle of Gettysburg in which he had commanded a brigade, he was standing in a garden in Pennsylvania when a troop of the Sixth Michigan Cavalry charged down. He tried to mount his horse, but it shied and he fell. He saw a Union corporal shooting several of his men, he advanced to kill the assailant but his pistol misfired, and he was himself shot in the stomach. Since his brigade was in retreat, he could not be left to recuperate, but was carried for eighteen miles in a jostling litter until they reached Berkeley County in what had been Virginia. Perhaps the experience of a world at war had begun to instruct him in limitations. A minister came to administer the sacraments. but Pettigrew refused. ‘‘It is not from a want of faith or a want of disposition,’’ he said, ‘‘but from a feeling of unworthiness. I fear to incur the guilt of presumption.’’ 42 But Mary Chesnut was to remember him for the older instinct of decisiveness: ‘‘He was so much in earnest. He did not waste time haranguing ‘Kentucky resolutions,’ ‘states rights,’ ‘cotton is king’—&c &c. That fatuous style left the talkers [looking] imbecile when the 42. Trescot, J. Johnston Pettigrew, 64; Wilson, Carolina Cavalier, 202–4.

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time for action came and the time for talk was over.’’ 43 Trescot, too, thought Pettigrew was ‘‘essentially an earnest man,’’ someone who ‘‘desired to be, and not to seem.’’ But Trescot also saw that Pettigrew’s life, like his own, had come to show that the dogma of the will had been a vanity: ‘‘We are always working either better or worse than we can know; and whether by victory or defeat, we are always achieving or sacrificing ends that we never purposed.’’ 44 But the will had seemed to hold history together. If it failed, or if it proved only to occasion irony and instability, what was left? Mary Chesnut worked her way towards an answer, as she spent the years of the war and its painful aftermath meditating on the fate of her culture. She was, in many ways, a typical member of her generation.45 She was the daughter of a parvenu, Stephen Miller, who became a rich planter and politician, indeed governor of his state. She studied at Madame Talvande’s school in Charleston. She married prosperously to James Chesnut, the son of a ‘‘lordly’’ planter, who eventually became a U.S. senator. The marriage was not a success; she was childless, and there was between them a grievance, unnamed but formative. But James Chesnut gave her an assured place in society and access to the political world she loved to know. She was a member of Trescot’s conversable generation. Most of its other members would come to appear in her writings: William Porcher Miles, Henry Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Varina Howell Davis, Susan Petigru King, James Johnston Pettigrew, L. Q. C. Lamar, and Trescot himself. Like her, these were skeptical people, putting up with their privileged lot with a half-smile, very much interested in the salon and scandal (some of which they occasioned), fashionable, witty, analytical, acting from necessity more than hope, a little sad. They were very conscious of themselves as a generation, at odds with but polite towards their elders. Above all, they were clever. This became Mary Chesnut’s favorite adjective. ‘‘Agreeable men, clever and cultivated men, seem to spring up from the sands of the sea,’’ she was to write. The word seems to have meant force of mind, touched with some irresponsibility and much wit. Cleverness was usually associated with being a man. For a woman like Mary Chesnut, there was a price for possessing a mind and showing it. ‘‘Another personal defeat,’’ she was to write about an incident in 1862. A child called Kate came to her and said, ‘‘Oh, Cousin Mary, why don’t 43. Entry for 6 June 1862, in Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 367. This passage does not occur in the original Civil War diary. 44. Trescot, J. Johnston Pettigrew, 63, 3. 45. The following is partly drawn from Michael O’Brien, ‘‘The Flight Down the Middle Walk: Mary Chesnut and the Forms of Observance,’’ in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, ed. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 109–31.

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you cultivate heart? They say at Kirkwood that you had better let your brains alone awhile and cultivate heart.’’ 46 She had come omnivorously to read many of the books that her culture had abundantly furnished. She was accomplished in modern languages, in French and German, though she seems to have read the classics only in translation.47 She was only unusual in being so Anglophile, someone who later described herself as ‘‘intensely English in all my sympathies.’’ She read the usual English authors, old and very new, and one, Jane Austen, seldom read in America.48 Russian literature was largely unknown to her, though later (in 1880) she was to offer the editor of the Charleston News and Courier a translation of a ‘‘novelette’’ by Pushkin, presumably taken from the French.49 The Germans featured more, but did not matter much to her, with the usual exception of Goethe, and (a little) Schiller and Richter. By the 1850s, these were old-fashioned tastes, unlike those she had in French literature, which were contemporary; Honoré de Balzac, Georges Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue, although Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Gustave Flaubert seem not to have made an impression on her. Balzac became especially important; she aspired to writing a Southern comédie humaine, swarming with vignettes of character, sensitive about social nuances. But she also had a taste for older French authors like Michel Montaigne, Molière, above all Blaise Pascal. She came to aspire to the epigrammatic, to distilled moments of wisdom or observation, that might help to comprehend life’s hurly-burly; she was to scatter things like, ‘‘In a revolution shy men are run over. No one stops to pick them up,’’ or, ‘‘Jealousy of the past is most women’s hell.’’ 50 In all this reading, Mary Chesnut preferred narratives of social interaction with a marked edge, things that flirted with cynicism. This taste revolted at the usual feminine taste of the mid-nineteenth century, the literary domestic novel, which was for her too much the occasion for ‘‘piety and pie-making’’ and too little candid. Rather she preferred Thackeray. Shakespeare, she once observed of King Lear, was good for ‘‘laying bare the seamy side—going behind the pretty curtain of propriety. . . . He preceded Thackeray in that tearing off of shams. [Old] Mrs. Chesnut set her face resolutely to see only the pleasant things of life and shut her eyes to wrong and said it was not there. The 46. Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 358, 393. 47. She seems to have known her Seneca; see Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 302, on Medea. 48. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, ed., Two Novels by Mary Chesnut, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 191, 185. 49. Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, xxiii. Russian novelists like Turgenev and Tolstoy were barely making it into English by the time of Chesnut’s death. 50. Ibid., 271, 449.

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most devoted, unremitting reader of fiction I ever knew—everything French or English that came to hand—would not tolerate Thackeray. ‘He is a very uncomfortable, disagreeable creature.’ ’’ She, too, hoped to prove uncomfortable. From Thackeray, she learned much. He was, of all the Victorian writers, least committed to the principles of realism. It was Thackeray who understood that, whatever fiction did, it did not mimic real life. He was an author who began his career by writing parodies, someone who debated genre and style: ‘‘We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner,’’ he cheerfully explained to his readers in Vanity Fair. Most importantly, Thackeray observed in Pendennis: ‘‘Ah sir—a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine. All things in Nature are different to each: the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other. You and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.’’ 51 Mary Chesnut was sociable, but she did not belong. She was a childless wife who came to be skeptical about God, so the choice imagined by Augusta Evans was not open to her, or rather had proved to be a cul-de-sac. She was a woman, so she could observe Trescot’s game of public power, not play it. She could admire Pettigrew’s military earnestness, not emulate it, and she was skittish about sensuality. But she shared their sense that one started with alienation. What she came to lose was any sense that the will could transcend alienation. In so doing, she moved beyond realism, almost to the brink of the literary modernism that was to come in the twentieth century. For Mary Chesnut was involved in advancing the process that created modernism, that is, in stripping Romanticism of the consolatory hope that human intelligence could make moral patterns out of the world’s disorder, in hazarding the contrary conjecture that the direction of the human condition could be downward or meaningless, but fleetingly intelligible in art. At the beginning of the Civil War, she began to keep a diary. How consistently she kept it is unclear, for she was later to destroy many manuscripts. What remains are the entries from 18 February to 8 December 1861, and from late January or early February 1865 to 26 June of the same year. That there were other volumes is evident, for she used them as the basis for the vastly expanded narrative of the span of the war, which she was to cast in form of a 51. Ibid., 65, 761–62; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1847–48; reprint, London: Thomas Nelson, 1901), 52; William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy (1848–50; reprint, London: Thomas Nelson, 1901), 176. On Thackeray and representation, see A. Savkar Altinel, Thackeray and the Problem of Realism (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986), and J. Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964).

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Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut and James Chesnut (Courtesy Mulberry Plantation, Camden)

diary, written in the 1870s and 1880s. But only the passages from 1861 and 1865, in both versions, survive to indicate how she reappraised her understanding between 1865 and 1880, and the evidence of how she began to see differently during the war itself is even more elusive. But there are indications, even in the fragments of the original diary, that she understood her world in 1865 very differently from what had been apparent to her in 1861.

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The words of the two versions of the diary point the moral. The first began where her generation had begun, with the idea of the will and the future. Her first words were: ‘‘I do not allow myself vain regrets or sad forebodings. This southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm deliberation—& cool brains. We have risked all, & we must play our best for the stake is life or death.’’ The second ends, ‘‘And—and the weight that hangs upon our eyelids—is of lead.’’ Intention gave way to blindness, which was the truer state of anyone trying to understand the unintelligibility of the human condition. As she ruefully observed in February 1865, ‘‘Nearly all my sage prophecies have been verified the wrong way—& every insight into character or opinion I have given as to men turned out utter folly.’’ 52 It seems likely that what became a philosophical stance started as a personal grievance. She entered 1861 discontented with the betrayals inherent in human relationships. Her unhappy marriage and problematical relationship to the self-satisfied matrons around her was much of her alienation. ‘‘We had some terrible matrimonial squalls last night—being away in the woods does not bring peace’’ is an entry for 19 February 1861. On 17 March 1861, she wrote, ‘‘Every body (women I mean) despise a childless old woman. In the gall of bitterness once more. The Trail of the Serpent is over it all.’’ A few days later, she wrote: ‘‘Talked all night—exhausted. & nervous & miserable today—raked up & dilated & harrowed up the bitterness of twenty long years—all to no purpose. This bitter world.’’ She squirmed when her mother-in-law boasted to ‘‘me a childless wretch’’ of having twenty-seven grandchildren, and reflected, ‘‘God help me—no good have I done—to myself or any one else— with the [power] I boast so of—the power to make myself loved. Where are my friends. I am allowed to have none.’’ 53 Social customs were involved in this. She was much troubled by the propensity of Southern men, including her father-in-law, to form liaisons with slave women and she came to complain, like an abolitionist, that the South was a sort of brothel, that slavery was a ‘‘monstrous system.’’ But she understood society as consisting of many tangled and bitter interrelationships, and she seems then to have retained a sense (as any cynic must) that there was a moral order to be betrayed. As Leslie Stephen was once to observe of Thackeray: ‘‘A man may be called a cynic not as disbelieving in the value of virtue, but as disbelieving in its frequency. He may hold that the tender emotions have a smaller influence in actual affairs than easy-going people maintain, and that a purely virtuous person is a very rare phenomenon indeed.’’ Ches52. C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 3, 233; Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 836. 53. Woodward and Muhlenfeld, Private Mary Chesnut, 8, 41, 44–45.

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nut herself went to church regularly, though she was alert to how religion could be hypocritical. ‘‘How dare men mix up the Bible with their own bad passions,’’ she asked in June 1861. Nonetheless, at times, she seemed to believe in something. In October 1861, she reproached David Hume for having observed in the History of England that much in life was occasioned by accident and a lack of human foresight: ‘‘For ‘accident,’ Mr. deistical Hume, read ‘Christian Providence.’ Lamartine says, ‘Dieu est Dieu! et ce que les hommes appellent rencontre, les anges l’appellent Providence!’ ’’ But she felt awkward around the truly pious. A Catholic lady called Munro began a religious discussion in Chesnut’s presence in February 1865 and ‘‘seemed to find me a worldling—& my christian doctrines utterly crude & undigested. I ran away as she had so much the best of the argument—knowing I was right, but failing for want of practice in talking on that subject.’’ 54 At other times, Chesnut lost her hold on belief. She could write, as she had in March 1861, ‘‘I got up nearly frantic with all my own thoughts after that one glimpse of certain misery, hoping nothing, believing nothing that this world can now bring! Fearing all.’’ In time, the latter instinct grew to predominate. In the revised version of her passage on Hume, she moved not to reprove but to endorse his insight, in the light of the Confederacy’s experience: ‘‘We have seen the building of one [a government] lately with no end of Jefferson and a constant sprinkling of Calhoun, &c&c&c Which is the wisdom—where the accident and foresight? Somebody said Jefferson and Calhoun were the stern lights and did not help us to see what is before us.’’ She still quoted Lamartine on Providence, but no longer in refutation of the deist, for she softened her reference to Hume to read, ‘‘Hume, after his kind, talks of accident.’’ 55 The part of her that in 1861 could say, ‘‘[T]he ways of this world are never to be divined,’’ and that ‘‘no body understands the under current of unseen motives,’’ was to furnish the insight that structured her postwar literary efforts. God and the South, cool brains and calm deliberation, had not worked. What she came to realize, what perhaps no one else in her culture realized as fully, was that failure required a new technique of narration. A discordant and unintelligible world mandated a literary form that suggested, not life’s order, but its disorder. It was not that Mary Chesnut became Dadaist. Her revised diaries were to keep the backbone of chronology; day followed day, year followed year, most things happened in sequence, the bombardment of Fort Sumter preceded Gettysburg. Time was not an illusion she wished to shed, 54. Leslie Stephen, ‘‘The Writings of W. M. Thackeray’’ (1878–79), in Thackeray: The Critical Heritage, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Donald Hawes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 377; Woodward and Muhlenfeld, Private Mary Chesnut, 42, 82, 184, 231–32. 55. Woodward and Muhlenfeld, Private Mary Chesnut, 40; Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 220, 221.

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because time explained how men, especially her men, had failed. Time explained her own self, too, for she was the product of history’s damage. She once met an old lover, whom she had once thought hideous. Now he was handsome, but she was not. ‘‘I saw he constantly drew nearer, I fancy to see the ravages made in me by the battle of life. I have been pretty severely damaged by its wounds & fevers.’’ 56 So she wished to show how the world occasioned such damage and thereby to pull ‘‘ostrich heads out of the sand.’’ 57 She was anxious to be candid: old Colonel Chesnut’s mulatto children, Buck Preston’s cruel and innocent flirtations, sexually frustrated soldiers grabbing at their nurses, the murder of an old woman by slaves, the beating of a pregnant slave by a mistress, a man mimicking the grins of the dead to amuse a dinner table, another gleefully fishing out a tumbled oyster from between a startled woman’s breasts, the incessant human folly of society.58 Few were spared, including herself. Chesnut became a character in her own narrative, one who was mocked as ‘‘the Explainer General,’’ full of foible and weakness, shown ‘‘spinning my own entrails,’’ taking her opium, exercising her ‘‘power to hide trouble.’’ Though Chesnut policed these self-revelations and toyed with omitting herself, with being merely ‘‘objective,’’ she confessed all but the most intimate.59 She made it possible, for example, for the reader to understand the pain of her childlessness, though not its cause. Very early in her narrative, she wrote: ‘‘I did Mrs. Browne a kindness. I told those women that she was childless now, but that she had lost three children. I hated to leave her all alone. Women have such a contempt for a childless wife.’’ She confessed, baldly, ‘‘Of course, I know nothing of children. In point of fact am awfully afraid of them.’’ And there was this: ‘‘Women need maternity to bring out their best and true loveliness,’’ a commentary on herself, the belle who was never beautiful, but who admired feminine beauty extravagantly, even sensually. ‘‘Oh—I have been to see a delicious married beauty! So soft, so silly, so lovely, so kindly! Forbear!’’ Elsewhere, ‘‘Clear brunette she is, with the reddest lips, the whitest teeth, and glorious eyes—there is no other word for them.’’ 60 Likewise, she was habitually skeptical about the pieties of her culture. She poked fun at honor: ‘‘The Hampton Legion all in a snarl about I forget what —standing on their dignity, I suppose. I have come to detest a man who says, ‘My own personal dignity—self-respect requires.’ ’’ In her novel Two Years, she mocked the religious literalists: ‘‘Without a murmur, down on his knees went 56. Woodward and Muhlenfeld, Private Mary Chesnut, 45, 142. 57. Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 762. 58. Ibid., 31, 430–31, 414, 368, 189–227, 646–47, 626, 484. 59. Ibid., 172, 23, 29. 60. Ibid., 28, 488, 105, 572, 146.

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my late chatty interlocutor. I listened in amazement if I did not pray. / It was an eloquent appeal to the Almighty to keep his covenant. He had promised. We had his promise; he was a covenant God. There was his bond. We had it in black and white. Those exact followers of Calvin, they like documents legally executed—be the parties who they may.’’ Similarly, she incessantly made fun of the rituals of courtship, condemned beauty for its ruthless hardheartedness, amused herself at the feebleness of conventional oratory, and savaged Southern integrity.61 The thing that most distinguished the original diary from the narrative journal, however, was its use of voices. Chesnut mingled her own thoughts with a narration of incoherent events, but she also offered snatches of conversation and solitary voices not in conversation, who comment meaningfully on events, but often incoherently. These were much of what she added and wanted to realize. They embodied her quasi-modernist leanings, par excellence, because they are fragmentary, intentionally so. People say things. Often it is unclear who is speaking. One quotation does not always follow logically from its predecessor. Voices are not always answered. The profound and the trivial lie next to one another, unreconciled. Contemporary voices sit next to literary quotations; Medea is adjacent to someone called Albert. Subject matters change abruptly. Consider this passage, long enough to give the flavor. It is February 1865. She is in Lincolnton, North Carolina, and inter alia starts on the subject of Virginians. These people are proud of their heroic dead and living soldiers—but are prepared to say with truth that [they] always preferred to remain in the Union and are ready to assure the first comers of Yankees that they have always hated South Carolina seceders and nullifiers as much as the Yankees do. ‘‘You say Miss Giles is as clever as she is beautiful. Nonsense. Clever! She was out of the Confederacy and then came rushing in. Fool or mad, that was.’’ ‘‘Conduct of a fool. Most women atone for their sins when they marry.’’ ‘‘Spinsters and vestal virgins—how do you know? You have not tried it.’’ ‘‘We have ears to hear, eyes to see, and a heart to understand, all the same. Lookers-on see more of the game than players—&c&c.’’ F.F.’s have a dialect. Her cousin said ‘‘mighty little’’ for very small. She called a ball or a tea party ‘‘only a little company’’—and another 61. Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 102, 229, 231, 638–39; Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Chesnut Novels, 204.

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form of the simple word ‘‘very’’ was ‘‘right much.’’ And she lived in a house where Mrs. Mat Singleton used English as pure as that of Victoria Regina. ‘‘How I like to hear Mrs. John Singleton’s clean-cut sentences, every word distinctly enunciated.’’ ‘‘I should say she was the delight of her friends, the terror of her foes. I am afraid of those words dropped one by one with such infinite precision—drops of vitriol, sometimes.[’’] Remember that night as the train stopped—a ponderous bank president filled the door of the car. ‘‘What was the use of bank presidents? We have no money.’’ ‘‘He says he paid himself his salary in gold, so there is money somewhere for the stay-at-homes. He is a descendent-in-law of the pretender branch of the Stuarts.[’’] ‘‘And he is as loud as a centaur.’’ ‘‘You mean stentor. He said, ‘Miss , yes, yes—I come for yer— Huddy come ‘long.’ Now, this was only a slovenly habit of speech. He writes admirably.’’ What a look she gave me then. ‘‘Worse, that ‘right much’—eh?’’ ‘‘What did you do?’’ ‘‘Nothing.’’ Terebene lamps do not disclose blushes. We had been bragging of South Carolina’s purity of accent—Mrs. Mat’s well of English undefiled, Mrs. Richardson Miles’s sweetest and softest of voices, Miss Middleton’s sweet low voice and wit and wisdom. ‘‘Galore.’’ ‘‘Then came the rough boatswain’s hoarse bawl.’’ 62 Who is Miss Giles? The reader is not told. She rushes late into the Confederacy, it seems, doubling for Virginia, foolishly marrying the Deep South, somehow unaware like a vestal virgin. The actions of Virginians bring up their speech, idiosyncratic and worthy of reproach. A bank president abruptly appears. Why? To point to fiscal dishonesty, partly. Mostly because, eventually, it is implied that he is a Virginian and his dialect is mimicked. Someone is offended. But who? Someone blushes. Why? For doing nothing. What requires action? It is unclear. South Carolina’s linguistic purity is boasted of. But this is designated ‘‘bragging,’’ so the reader knows not to believe in it. ‘‘Mrs. Mat’’ is mentioned in the words of Spenser’s praise of Chaucer, Miss Middleton in Lear’s commendation of Cordelia. Then a boatswain hoarsely bawls. Why? The allusion demands guesswork. Throughout, the personal and 62. Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 302, 743–44.

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the social are artfully interwoven, while Chesnut manages to convey the disjointed, crablike quality of conversation. Chesnut’s narrative journal everywhere speaks that she understood what would become Virginia Woolf ’s complaint, that the three-decker novel had let the definition of human character go unrecorded; out of evasion ‘‘spring those sleek, smooth novels, those portentous and ridiculous biographies, that milk and watery criticism, those poems melodiously celebrating the innocence of roses and sheep which pass so plausibly for literature at the present time.’’ 63 This could pass for a description of most of the Southern literature that came Mary Chesnut’s way in Camden in 1880.64 Certainly Chesnut seems to have realized the shift more than Augusta Jane Evans, whose novels, however much they dealt with subjects usually forbidden or inaccessible to women, held to a traditional narrative form. Chesnut knew that the matter of self was implicated in the sea-change, though she found it awkward: ‘‘Those Tarleton memoirs, Lee’s memoirs, Moultrie’s, Lord Rawdon’s letters—self is never brought to the front. I have been reading them over and admire their honesty and good taste as much as their courage and cleverness.’’ 65 Narrative did not break down for Chesnut because she was incapable of coherence. Her narrative journal is full of stories, vignettes, anecdotes that were as coherently fashioned and told as any traditional Southern storyteller or Victorian novelist could have wished. The tale of the ‘‘Witherspoon Murder Case,’’ the old lady murdered in her bed by slaves, is a chillingly effective allegory that has stuck in the mind of generations of readers. The old patriarch, James Chesnut, is a character whom his daughter-in-law described and invented with stiletto care, to stand as the ‘‘last of the lordly planters who ruled this Southern world.’’ Chesnut admired him, hated him, knew his passing was for the good even as she regretted it; she shows him in all his strength and weakness, ‘‘blind, deaf—apparently as strong as ever, certainly as resolute of will.’’ The following scene about his grief captures her stance: Mrs. Chesnut was only a year younger than her husband—he is ninetytwo or three. She was deaf. He retains his senses wonderfully for his great age. I have always been an early riser. Formerly I often saw him, sauntering slowly down the broad passage from his room to hers, in a flowing 63. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Character in Fiction’’ (1924), in Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 436. 64. Consider this backhander: ‘‘In England Mr. Gregory and Mr. Lyndsay rise to say a good word for us. Heaven reward them. Shower down His choicest blessings on their devoted heads—as the fiction folks say’’ (Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, 72). 65. Ibid., 194.

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flannel dressing gown when it was winter. In the spring he was apt to be in shirtsleeves, with suspenders hanging down his back. He had always a large hairbrush in his hand. He would take his stand on the rug before the fire in her room, brushing scant locks which were shining fleecy white. Her maid would be doing hers, which were dead-leaf brown—not a white hair in her head. He had the voice of a stentor. And there he stood, roaring his morning compliments. The people who occupied the rooms above said he fairly shook the window glasses. This pleasant morning greeting and ceremony was never omitted. Her voice was ‘‘low and sweet’’ (the oft quoted). Philadelphia seems to have lost the art of sending forth such now. Mrs. Binney, Mrs. Chesnut’s sister, came among us with the same softly modulated, womanly, musical voice. Her clever and beautiful daughters were criard. Judge Hare said, ‘‘Philadelphia women scream like macaws.’’ This morning, as I passed Mrs. C’s room, the door stood wide open. And I heard a pitiful sound. The old man was kneeling by her empty bedside, sobbing bitterly. I fled down the middle walk—anywhere out of reach of what was never meant for me to hear.66 This is skill of a high order: the definition of time, the casualness of the opening (‘‘I have always been an early riser,’’ ‘‘sauntering’’), the old ways observed by the young interloper, the man’s vanity and indifference to all but his own ritual, his booming at his wife’s deafness, their physical separation mitigated by the regularity of courtesy, the delaying paragraph (beginning ‘‘Her voice’’) so that the reader does not reach the climax too soon, the brevity with which the pitiful moment is portrayed, the anticlimax of Chesnut’s recoil. There is a world of social history, and of character realized, in this story, which Chesnut perfectly understood. Mary Chesnut understood narrative. Her voices were artful, their incoherences intended. Why? Because, finally, she had concluded that the world had not added up to a smooth story with an ordered moral. Rather, it was ‘‘full of strange vicissitudes, and in nothing more remarkable than the way people are reconciled, ignore the past, and start afresh in life, here to incur more disagreements and set to bickering again.’’ In fact, Chesnut disbelieved for the reasons classically adduced to explain the onset of modernism. She had no faith in the old gods of Christianity, in the new ones of science, in the justice of her society, in the goodness of human beings and the probability of happiness for them. She did not even trust herself. But she knew that these 66. Ibid., 814–15, 610.

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skepticisms did not disavow the vitality of life—‘‘so excited and confused— worthy of me’’—but made it more urgent, more necessary to be portrayed.67 Life and art might persist, even when power and philosophy failed. The fate of Mary Chesnut and her manuscripts came to mirror what happened to antebellum understandings when transmitted to later generations. She herself went to live in genteel impoverishment in Camden, South Carolina, which even during the war she knew would be her fate, if the Confederacy should lose. In her journal, few moments are more chilling than that when, at the end of things in 1865, she has her husband express the sentence and the doom, ‘‘Camden for life.’’ 68 The wealth from slaves gone, the land yielding little income, they lived on odd legacies and her selling of eggs and butter.69 Her father-in-law’s will had specified that the land transmitted to James Chesnut could not pass to her and, so, when her husband died in 1885, she came to an annual income smaller than the amount she was used to spending in 1859 upon a single cape of Alençon lace. Such shabby gentility—she would wear her husband’s old trousers when gardening and a relative described her, when wearing ‘‘an old western mackintosh and a funny old hat,’’ as looking like ‘‘an old market woman’’ 70—partly impelled her interest in writing, for she entertained hopes of making money from it. Over the years, she fiddled with three novels, did a little translating from the French, but her last years were preoccupied with the million words of her narrative journal. Little found print and, upon her death in 1886, the manuscripts passed into the hands of Isabella Martin, a Methodist schoolteacher in Camden, whom Chesnut had liked and from whom she had extracted a promise to try and publish them. But Martin was not worldly about publishers and, to be sure, the manuscripts were in some confusion, so little or nothing happened for nearly twenty years, until Myrta Lockett Avary came along. She was a Virginian, a journalist, and latterly a New Yorker, who had published in 1903 A Virginia Girl in the Civil War. She knew the firm of Appleton’s, knew about marketing Civil War memoirs, and she took on the project of seeing Mary Chesnut into print. So the manuscripts were briskly butchered down to a manageable size and an in-house editor at Appleton’s manufactured chapters, furnished footnotes, rewrote passages, and assisted Avary in making sure that the journal said nothing inconvenient to the sentimental legends of the Old South and 67. Ibid., 29, 216. 68. Ibid., 792. 69. The following account is drawn from Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 130–223, and Woodward, Chesnut’s Civil War, xv–xxix. 70. Muhlenfeld, Mary Boykin Chesnut, 5, 221.

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the Confederacy that had been selling books so agreeably for the last twentyfive years. The Saturday Evening Post, which serialized some of it, decided to call it A Diary from Dixie, though Chesnut herself disliked the term and the song. The book itself bore an even more inapt full title, for Mrs. Avary (unlike Mary Chesnut) seems to have respected patriarchy. Her own book had designated itself as A Record of the Actual Experiences of the Wife of a Confederate Officer, and she in turn made Chesnut disappear into a husband. The full title of the 1905 edition reads, A Diary from Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Wife of James Chesnut Jr., United States Senator from South Carolina, 1859–1861, and Afterward Aide to Jefferson Davis and a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army. The book was a great success, though its readers were never told that they were reading a postbellum revision of a war diary, and they were not to be illuminated further when a novelist called Ben Ames Williams revised the book further in the late 1940s, added some more material from the manuscripts, altered punctuation, moved passages around, added his own prose, and ensured that Mary Chesnut was left in possession of no thoughts and no rhetoric that might confuse a reader of Gone With the Wind or draw an aficionado of To the Lighthouse.71 At least Mary Chesnut had survived the war, enough to meditate on it. Others did not make it through, being old like King or Grayson, or ill like Thornwell and Hammond, or vulnerable to the war’s violence and disease, like Hughes and Pettigrew. A few of advanced years lasted a while, in varying degrees of impoverishment or bitterness. Louisa McCord took herself off to Canada as a political exile, but returned to live and die in 1879 with her daughter in Charleston. Simms resumed writing, but his market was gone and in 1869, the penultimate year of his life, he traveled to New York in the summer (as he had always done) to deal with publishers, but the venture was fruitless and he had to borrow the money to get back to Charleston. Fitzhugh, who had served as a minor clerk in the Confederate Treasury, showed some flexibility in working as a court agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Richmond, wrote a few articles on Reconstruction policy, and even published articles in Lippincott’s Magazine in Philadelphia, but he had little money and, after his wife’s death in 1877, he went to live briefly with his son in Frankfort, Kentucky, and then in 1880 permanently with his daughter in Texas; he died in 1881. Gayarré, in stark poverty and overwhelming resentment, hung on for decades until, ancient and virtually blind, he died in 1895. But others, younger, were crippled by the experience of the war. Sidney Lanier, the Georgian poet and musician who contracted tuberculosis in a federal prison, be71. Ben Ames Williams, ed., A Diary from Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1949).

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came the elegiac symbol for these and furnished the quintessential quotation for those Victorian Southerners, for whom death had acquired exquisite charms. ‘‘Perhaps you know,’’ he told Bayard Taylor in 1875, ‘‘that with us of the younger generation in the South since the War, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not-dying.’’ 72 Elegy is seductive, but would be mistaken. For many others adapted, even flourished. Josiah Nott moved to New York in 1868, set up a successful practice, and became president of the New York Obstetrical Society. Trescot, though it took him a decade and more to clear his debts, ended up as a senior diplomat for the State Department, a special emissary used to handle tricky problems, such as the Halifax Fisheries dispute, American rights in the Isthmus of Panama, a commercial treaty with Mexico, and the Pan-American Conference held in Washington in 1889–90. Augusta Evans married a rich widower, just like Beulah Benton, and continued to have a very successful career. Her novel St. Elmo became a best-seller third only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur, in time becoming a play and, in 1923, even a film. Judah P. Benjamin, though in political exile, became a Queen’s Counsel in London, raked in guineas by the bagful, became so grand that he declined to appear in any cases not before the House of Lords or the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and died in resplendence in his own Parisian mansion.73 But elegy is inapt for another reason. The intellectuals of the Old South had helped to invent, administer, and advance an imperial regime of ruthless ambition, which had conquered an empire, enslaved millions, and had seldom hesitated to shed others’ blood for the sake of its own comfort. They had been intelligent, learned, creative, even self-aware, but they had gambled to sustain their own power which, they had carefully explained to themselves and the world, needed to be exercised at someone else’s expense. For playing the game of power and losing, they do not invite pity. For replaying the game in 1875 and 1900 with equal brutality, still less do they invite sympathy. Still, they do invite understanding. This, in later days, they were not to 72. Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, Publications of the Southern Texts Society (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 30–35; John Caldwell Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 316– 17; Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South (1943; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962), 308–40; Sidney Lanier to Bayard Taylor, 7 August 1875, in Sidney Lanier, Letters, 1874–1877, ed. Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey H. Starke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), 230. 73. Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 313–36; Moltke-Hansen, ‘‘Trescot,’’ 317–18; William Perry Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835–1909: A Biography (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1951), 128–65; Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: Free Press, 1988), 325–403. Between 1867 and 1882, Benjamin earned £143,900.

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William Henry Trescot after the Civil War (Courtesy South Caroliniana Library)

receive. This was partly their own fault. In painful retrospect, some among them reinvented their earlier experience. Paul Hamilton Hayne, who ended up in rural isolation in Georgia and scraped a living as a writer, reimagined Charleston as a vanished idyll, partly to fend off those Northern (and some New Southern) critics who dismissed ‘‘the whole department of Southern ante-bellum literature [as] a desert of antiquated rubbish, with nothing of permanent beauty or power.’’ 74 Others did not bother to defend or understand the mind of the defeated order, but found it safer to change the subject. Such critics preferred to minimize slavery, admire manners, praise valor, and stress whiteness. The old instinct of survival now advised that it would be prudent to read Emerson and let Fitzhugh go, considering the intellectual power of Harvard College and the materialist promises of the United States Steel Corporation. The old, ill-organized texts drifted away. The novels went out of print, the periodicals sat on neglectful shelves, the manuscripts were stuffed into armoires and then went into archives, to be visited by scholars who cared 74. PHH, Ante-Bellum Charleston (1885; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: Southern Studies Program, University of South Carolina, 1978), 4.

Death mask of Charles Gayarré (Courtesy Special Collections, Tulane University Library, New Orleans)

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for little but fathoming Pickett’s charge. Certainly, it was simpler for Southerners and Northerners alike to believe that the Old South had defied the American way out of ignorance, or guilt, or stupidity, or romantic innocence. There was little to be done in 1910, even in 1960, with the insight that the Old South had chosen its own way with clarity of mind, had even understood things about the intractability of the human condition, and had done much consistent with the later trajectory of the American republic, which usefully flattered itself that aristocracy, illiberalism, and rapacity had died in 1865 and could be killed.

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Bibliography George Bancroft Papers Jacob Bigelow Autograph Book Thomas Cooper item (in Miscellaneous Papers) Dana Family Papers Charles Deane Papers Theodore F. Dwight Papers Edward Everett Papers James T. Fisher Papers C. E. French Collection Samuel A. Green Papers Norcross Collection Francis Parkman Papers William Hickling Prescott Papers Quincy-Wendell-Holmes-Upham Papers Leverett Saltonstall Papers Shattuck Papers Lemuel Shaw Papers J. C. Warren Papers Winthrop Papers Joseph E. Worcester Papers Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi George D. Alexander Collection David M. Ballard Notebook Walker Brooke Letters Zebulon Butler item J. F. H. Claiborne Papers Levin Covington Diary Clem Dorsey Commonplace Books Ellett-Jefferies Family Papers Charles Gayarré and Family Papers Henry Hughes Papers Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar Papers Mayes-Dimitry-Stuart Papers Samuel M. Meek and Family Papers John Wesley Monette Papers John A. Quitman and Family Papers Robert L. Stanton Papers James Hardeman Stuart Papers Oscar J. E. Stuart and Family Papers Michael Tuomey item James Alexander Ventress and Family Papers B. L. C. Wailes Diaries Edward R. Welles Diary Yazoo Library Association Minute Book

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Acknowledgments

I need, first, to thank those institutions that, over the many years it took to write this book, helped to carry me through, by giving me either semipermanent or permanent employment, by helping with research expenses, and by offering sometimes the opportunity of leaves. These were, in chronological order, the Michigan Society of Fellows of the University of Michigan, the University of South Carolina, the University of Arkansas, the University of Alabama, Miami University (including its Dolibois Center in Luxembourg), the University of Cambridge, and Jesus College, Cambridge: to the various administrators of these places, I am under an obligation. I am especially indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gave me a generous Interpretive Research grant in the late 1980s to undertake manuscript research and collect pertinent texts and then a Fellowship for University Teachers in the mid-1990s to begin writing. Second, I need to thank the libraries, institutes, and librarians that made my research possible. These included the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library at the University of Alabama, the Charleston Library Society, the Special Collections Department of the College of Charleston, the Strom Thurmond Institute of Clemson University, the Manuscripts and Rare Book Room at Columbia University, the Manuscript and Special Collections Department at Duke University, the Special Collections Department at Emory University, the Special Collections Department at Furman University, the Georgia Historical Society, the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscripts Library of the University of Georgia, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Huntington Library, Special Collections in the Department of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives at the Johns Hopkins University, the Library of Congress, the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections at Louisiana State University, the Maryland Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Historic New Orleans Collection, [ 1293 ]

1294

Acknowledgments

the North Carolina State Archives, the Southern Historical Collection and the North Carolina Collection of the University of North Carolina, the George R. Peabody Library, the Presbyterian Historical Society, the South Carolina Historical Society, the South Caroliniana Library, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Special Collections Department of the University of Tennessee, the Manuscripts Department at Tulane University, the Virginia Historical Society, the Archives and Manuscripts Department of the Library of Virginia, the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia, and the Special Collections Department of the College of William and Mary. For more general purposes, I have been helped by the staff of the Hatcher Library of the University of Michigan, the Mullins Library of the University of Arkansas, the King Library of Miami University, the Cambridge University Library, and the Quincentennial Library of Jesus College. Among the librarians of these places, I would most like to single out Allen Stokes, Richard Shrader, Frances Pollard, Jenny Presnell, and Rhona Watson. At the universities at which I have recently worked, I owe great debts for intellectual stimulation, encouragement, and friendship to Mary Frederickson, Jack Kirby, Jeffrey Kimball, Yihong Pan, Judith Zinsser, Carl Pletsch (now in Colorado), and Robert Thurston at Miami University, and to John Thompson, Betty Wood, William Dusinberre, Keith Wrightson (now of Yale), Steven Tuck, and Lizzie Collingham (now here, there, and everywhere) at Cambridge. I am especially indebted to Tony Badger, for his generosity of spirit and acumen, and for helping me to find a way home. I need to indicate my gratitude to many of the people who have, over the last fifteen years or so, been regular attendants at the annual meetings of the Southern Intellectual History Circle, especially Ray Arsenault, Vernon Burton, David Chappell, Jane Dailey, Susan Donaldson, Drew Gilpin Faust, Sarah Gardner, Paul Gaston, Maryemma Graham, Sheldon Hackney, Ben Johnson, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Charles Joyner, Steven Kantrowitz, Richard King, Michael Kreyling, John Mayfield, Michael Perman, Dale Reed, John Shelton Reed, Houston Roberson, Beth Barton Schweiger, David Shields, Johanna Shields, Daniel Singal, Mitchell Snay, Mills Thornton, James Turner, Sam Webb, Charles Reagan Wilson, the late C. Vann Woodward, Ann WyattBrown, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Patricia Yaeger. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, though it is doubtful that they will agree with much said in this book, have always been helpful, sympathetic, and trenchant. To various degrees, in differing forms (letters, e-mails, conversations, critiques), in different places, these people have meant much to me, taught me much, and given me a sense that what I have studied and how I have studied it might have some value, though not too much.

Acknowledgments

1295

None of the above saw this book in manuscript, but it was read by Richard Lounsbury, whose command of the intractabilities and possibilities of the English language has been a great resource to me for many years. A full reading was given by David Moltke-Hansen, whose knowledge of Southern culture, care for its future, and energy are a standing wonder, and who since 1980 has helped my scholarly purposes in many places (Columbia, Charleston, Chapel Hill, Philadelphia) with an abundance of enthusiasm, laughter, skepticism, and ingenuity. Last, Steven Stowe submitted the manuscript to a searching examination, which immeasurably improved it. Steve has rare gifts of sympathy, clarity, and grace, but also of friendship, from which I have long been a beneficiary. The dedication of this book helps to express my deep obligation to Patricia O’Brien for having introduced me to her family, which for forty years has treated me with kindness, hospitality, and affection, and whose members embody what is best in the spirit of Devon and Cornwall. I would wish to change nothing in them, except perhaps Peter’s dubious loyalty to Arsenal Football Club and Brian’s backswing.

Index

Abercrombie, John: Intellectual Powers, 1007 Abolitionism (and abolitionists), 15, 32, 35, 39, 41, 43, 46, 53, 61, 67–68, 77–78, 84, 184, 267, 268, 269, 273, 275, 281, 308, 387, 420, 433, 455, 467, 510, 543, 572, 580, 677, 733, 740, 769, 771, 772, 861, 903, 937, 948, 955, 1081, 1087–88, 1091, 1149, 1151, 1154, 1155, 1190 Abstraction (and the abstract), 7–8, 14, 78, 258, 424, 556, 619, 641, 663, 737, 761, 790, 798, 801, 805–6, 808, 822, 824, 854, 902, 923, 938, 943–46, 956, 962, 964, 967, 976, 982, 987–88, 996, 1004, 1018, 1030, 1038, 1044, 1046–47, 1052, 1079, 1115, 1138, 1163 Abyssinia, 239 Acadia (and Acadians), 142, 155, 292, 413 Acapulco, 192 Accomack, 400 Acton, John Emerich Edward DalbergActon, first baron, 587, 828 Adam, 1121–22 Adams, Charles Francis, 81 Adams, Henry, 41, 57, 142, 158, 468, 639, 1183–85; Education of Henry Adams, 1185; History of the United States, 1183; Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 1185 Adams, Jasper, 1086; Elements of Moral Philosophy, 1098 Adams, John, 112, 573, 666, 708, 787, 790–91, 819, 1019, 1178; Defence of the Constitutions, 787 Adams, John Quincy, 134, 172–73, 196, 198, 398–99, 418, 796, 817, 820, 860, 909, 917, 927–28, 952, 980 Adams, Nehemiah: South-Side View of Slavery, 579

Addison, Joseph (and Addisonian), 257, 402, 492, 553, 665, 689, 755 Adger, Elizabeth Shrewsbury, 170 Adger, James, 63, 169 Adger, John Bailey, 24, 169–72, 179, 246, 431, 433, 450, 489 Adulthood (and adults), 91, 95, 263, 287, 302, 341, 455, 459, 571, 688, 690, 754, 759, 761, 770, 800, 807, 812, 840, 842, 878, 1017, 1094, 1114, 1130 Aeschylus, 985, 1077 Aesop, 323 Africa (and Africans), 5, 14, 24, 90, 170, 173–86, 207, 211, 225–28, 237, 239, 245, 287, 387, 442, 500, 504, 608, 621, 679, 735, 771, 803, 823, 883, 936, 939, 944, 963–64, 991, 1067, 1087, 1108, 1111, 1126, 1151 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1068 Agassiz, Louis, 56, 178, 243, 246, 437 Agincourt, battle of, 385 Agnesi, Maria Gaetana, 259 Agnosticism, 14, 606, 910, 991, 1050 Aguilar, Grace: Women of Israel, 473 Alabama (and Alabamians), 6, 8, 15, 20, 34, 36, 44, 53, 70, 89, 115, 145, 149, 237, 243, 250, 257, 286–87, 324, 330, 335, 341–43, 351–53, 362, 371–72, 378–80, 414, 432, 442, 448, 468, 513, 515–17, 520, 543–44, 546, 576–77, 624–25, 631, 633–34, 636, 722–23, 758, 770, 816, 1163, 1166 Alabama Baptist, 335 Alabama Educational Journal, 335 Alabama Historical Society, 624–25 Alamo, 763 Albania, 165 Albany, N.Y., 42, 72, 515

[ 1297 ]

1298

Index

Albany Evening Journal, 42 Albemarle County, Va., 95, 355, 560 Albert, Prince, 1178 Alberti, Count Mariano, 154 Albigensians, 482 Albinus, Bernard, 226 Alembert, Jean Le Rond D’ 116, 504, 1009 Alexander, Archibald, 1118; Outlines of Moral Science, 1097 Alexander, George D., 233, 322, 468 Alexander, James Waddell, 417–18 Alexander, John McKnitt, 648 Alexander I (of Russia), 146 Alexander Severus, 843 Alexander the Great, 423, 462, 710 Alexandria (and Alexandrian), 164, 167, 175, 965, 995, 1059 Alexandria, Va., 513, 579 Alfred the Great, 968, 989 Algeria, 330 Algiers, 123, 173, 1070 Algonquian language, 287 Alhambra, 159–60 Alibert, Jean Louis, 232 Alien and Sedition Acts, 785, 819 Alienation, 342, 348, 350, 395, 397, 724–25, 795, 861, 1092, 1130, 1144, 1188, 1190 Alison, Archibald, 257, 459, 479, 619, 893, 1013; Nature and Principles of Taste, 684 Allan, John, 755 Allegory, 413, 687, 709–10, 712, 718, 722, 726, 776, 1195 Allen, Horatio, 163 Allen, Mary M. Simons, 163, 171 Allibone, Samuel, 82, 474 Allix, Pierre: Ancient Churches of Piedmont, 482 Allston, Washington, 110, 146, 193, 709–13, 718, 723, 750, 752, 1043; Monaldi, 583; Sylph of the Seasons, 584 Alps, 103, 145–46, 709, 718, 906 Alston, Philip W., 325 Alvord, Thomas Gold, 29 Amateurism, 49, 143, 466, 538, 559, 566, 570, 724, 1104 Amazon River, 192, 891 Ambrose, Saint, 1088 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 516 American Beacon, 637

American Bible Society, 169 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 516 American Colonization Society, 181–82 American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 241 American Museum of Literature and the Arts, 135 American Party. See Know-Nothings American Review, 479 American Revolution, 6, 43, 91, 92, 95, 197, 221, 291, 294, 307, 317–18, 349, 368, 501, 503, 505, 596, 598, 619, 626, 660, 679, 723, 747, 783, 790, 834, 882, 917, 953, 974, 1175, 1179, 1181–82 American System (of Henry Clay), 817, 824, 844, 892, 900, 913, 919, 927–29 Amherst, Mass., 515 Amoor River, 225 Amoy, 192 Amphictyonic Council, 798 Amsterdam, 112, 228, 289, 483, 487, 496, 693, 931, 1070 Amyot, P., 583 Anacharsis, 503, 863 Anamaboo, 177 Anatolia, 172 Ancestors (and ancestry), 18, 43, 50, 90, 107, 125, 136, 185, 200, 208, 234, 236, 250–51, 290, 295, 298, 314, 319–21, 349, 357, 368, 381–83, 385, 387, 636, 640, 646, 655, 661, 668, 759, 840, 866, 952, 977, 980, 1175 Andalusia, 295, 1176 Andes, 194, 196 Andover Theological Seminary, 35, 179, 515, 681, 1114 Andromache, 686 Angles, 647, 685 Anglicanism, 77, 172, 383, 581, 887, 892, 1045, 1067, 1103 Anglophilia, 41, 109, 299, 306–8, 319, 1045, 1187 Anglophobia, 305, 565, 567, 839, 854, 887, 913, 1175 Anglo-Saxons, 43, 235, 237, 241, 285, 316, 321, 330, 414, 617, 646–47, 650, 1104, 1174–75, 1183 Animal, 109, 139, 157, 219, 222, 238, 244–45, 227, 229, 244–45, 248, 262, 269, 277, 279, 407, 411, 443, 867, 885, 912, 949, 967, 971, 977–78, 983, 990, 1010, 1018, 1106–7 Annan, Reverend (of Baltimore), 1013

Index Annapolis, Md., 128, 513–15, 553 Anonymity, 48, 76, 85, 117, 122, 275, 480, 499, 505, 519, 526, 540, 553–57, 559–61, 860, 967, 1016, 1100, 1129 Anquetil, Louis-Pierre: Universal History, 504 Anson Street Church (Charleston, S.C.), 1151 Antevil, 1019 Anthropological Society of London, 24, 243 Anthropological Society of Paris, 24, 243 Anthropology (and anthropologists), 24, 181, 222, 233, 242–43, 245, 530, 606, 608, 623, 803, 1104 Anticlericalism, 116, 898, 1152 Anti-Duelling Society of Charleston, 1091 Antigone, 324 Antigua, 545, 946 AntiJacobin Review, 488 Antiquarianism (and antiquarians), 155, 202, 371, 483, 489, 512, 515, 623, 635, 663, 1133 Antiquity, 41, 108, 143, 151–52, 165, 185, 235– 36, 244, 314, 440, 521, 596, 604, 611, 623, 695, 749, 787, 811, 922, 938, 1038, 1079 Anti-Semitism, 138, 1072–74, 1082, 1091 Antislavery, 10, 35, 68, 76, 78, 139, 248–49, 268–69, 273, 309, 464, 577, 677–78, 759, 812, 816, 823, 832, 942, 948, 951, 1087 Anti-Slavery Society of Edinburgh, 68 Antonines, 597, 613 Antwerp, 111, 129, 135 Apocalypse, 1082 Apochrypha, 561, 1126 Appalachians, 351, 770, 774 Appleton, D. (publishers), 80, 454, 576, 582, 674, 1197 Appleton’s Cyclopedia, 674 Appomattox, Va., 41, 1174 Aquart, Jean Marie, 114 Aquinas, Thomas, 1066, 1088, 1118 Arabic language, 173, 175, 177, 179, 1080, 1104–5 Arabs (and Arabia), 24, 167–68, 172, 203, 236, 870, 883, 1174, 1079–80 Aragon, 1172–73, 1176 Archaeology, 95, 132, 599, 623 Architecture (and architects), 37, 92, 105, 124, 177, 343, 601, 608, 651, 679, 686, 706, 753, 789, 885, 1079, 1172, 1184

1299

Archives, 155, 159, 339, 442, 508, 601, 622, 632–33, 648, 1179, 1200 Arctic, 502, 730 Arden, Forest of, 723 Argentina, 3, 93, 196, 631 Arians, 1128 Ariosto, Ludivico, 331, 503 Arisdages, Baron, 170 Aristides, 157 Aristocracy, 8, 34, 36, 43, 64, 108, 147, 183, 264, 298, 310–14, 317, 321, 367–68, 370, 372, 375, 381–82, 387, 504, 524, 575, 611–12, 614, 616–18, 620, 647, 754–55, 777, 786, 788–90, 796, 798, 802, 813, 821, 843, 851, 868–70, 882, 890, 900, 919, 980, 1174–75, 1202 Aristophanes, 488, 985; Nubes (or The Clouds), 326 Aristotle (and Aristotelianism), 22, 50, 86, 144, 225, 372, 389, 503, 687, 696, 746, 922, 948, 963, 967, 974–75, 1004, 1007, 1009, 1024–25, 1058–59, 1063, 1065, 1078, 1133, 1135, 1142–44 Arkansas, 6, 15, 20, 179, 182, 335, 343, 468, 514, 543, 722, 756 Arkansas Baptist, 335 Arkansas Magazine, 335 Arkwright, Richard, 601 Armada, Spanish, 160, 622 Armenia (and Armenians), 170–72, 1006, 1035, 1104 Arminianism, 34, 1006, 1033, 1035, 1109, 1136 Arnold, Matthew, 923, 1168 Arnold, Thomas, 613, 1098, 1101 Arrian, 488 Artselaer, Henri Joseph Stier d’, 128 Aryanism, 189, 240 Ashantis, 181 Ashburton, Alexander Baring, first baron, 309 Asheville, N.C., 259 Ashkenazic Jews, 285, 1067, 1070–71 Ashland, Va., 513 Ashley River, 725 Asia (and Asians), 90, 172, 175, 186, 189, 203, 210–11, 225, 228, 236–37, 239, 442, 500, 606–8, 614, 621, 936, 1087, 1104–5, 1142, 1154 Aspasia, 611, 769 Assyrians, 239

1300 Astor, John Jacob, 454, 517 Astor House, 36 Astor Library, 74, 515, 517, 525 Astrakhan, 147 Astronomy, 236, 242, 498, 521 Atheism (and atheists), 620, 681, 767, 1000, 1028, 1037, 1040, 1050–52, 1072, 1109–10, 1117, 1119, 1125, 1164, 1166–69, 1175 Atheneum, 500 Atheneum Society of Baltimore, 135 Athens (and Athenians), 51, 86, 107, 144, 162–63, 167, 326, 360, 417, 601, 609, 611–12, 787, 1149 Athens, Ga., 351, 513, 515, 545, 632 Atlanta, Ga., 917 Atlantic Monthly, 580 Atlantic Ocean, 91, 148, 210, 291, 361, 582, 586, 816, 920 Atreus, House of, 13 Attica, 162, 610 Atticus, Titus Pomponius, 440 Audubon, John James, 582; Birds of America, 585; Scenes de la nature dans les États-Unis; (with John Bachman) Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, 582 Augsburg, 492 Augusta, Ga., 153, 165, 505, 513, 578–79, 757–58, 966, 1089 Augusta County, Va., 422 Augusta Female Academy, 758 Augustan literature, 20, 553, 673, 732–33, 735–36, 738–39, 957 Augustine of Hippo, 1088, 1093, 1117–18, 1121; Confessions, 654 Aurelius, Marcus, 325, 449 Auschwitz, 387 Austen, Jane, 446, 762, 1887; Lady Susan, 446; Northanger Abbey, 762; Sense and Sensibility, 762 Austill, Jeremiah, 634 Austin, Sarah, 454 Austin, Tex., 514, 516 Australia, 3–4, 93, 190, 225, 288 Austria, 78, 146, 1092, 1181 Autobiography (and autobiographers), 9, 33, 129, 209, 266, 273, 503, 560, 593, 653–54, 668, 671–82, 735, 737 Avary, Myrta Lockett, 1197–98; Actual Experiences, 1198; Virginia Girl, 1197 Avezac, Jules d’, 208 Avezedo, Benjamin Cohen d’, 163, 1070

Index Ayrshire, 102, 499 Aztecs, 201–3, 242 Azuby, Abraham, 1070 Babcock, W. R., 477 Babel, Tower of, 222, 414 Babylon, 270, 487, 607 Bachelors, 90, 116, 133, 352, 641, 665, 667, 977, 1098 Bachman, John, 66, 121, 243, 246–48, 429, 433, 435, 450, 582, 734, 1090, 1152; Defence of Luther and the Reformation, 482, 1098; Unity of the Human Race Examined, 431 Backcountry, 354, 370, 473, 642, 1093 Bacon, Francis (and Baconianism), 257, 319, 380, 522, 604, 645, 704, 887, 894, 996, 1000, 1007, 1009, 1022–23, 1025, 1038, 1046, 1059, 1062–65, 1123–24, 1127, 1131, 1134–35, 1044, 1051, 1123–24 Bacon College, 380 Badwell, S.C., 415 Bagehot, Walter, 551 Bahamas, 177 Bailey, Henry, 430 Bailey, Philip James, 739; Festus, 740 Bailly, Sylvain: L’histoire de l’astronomie, 236 Baird, Samuel: Elohim Revealed, 1131 Baker, Richard, 1116 Baldwin, Briscoe, 806 Baldwin, Henry, 840 Baldwin, James, 15 Baldwin, Joseph Glover, 351, 380, 548, 756, 758; Flush Times, 582 Ball, Charles, 678 Ballads, 32, 160, 237, 419, 557, 719, 728, 737, 739, 843 Ballston Springs, N.Y., 36 Baltimore, Md., 14–15, 51, 54–55, 106, 119, 128, 135, 153, 158, 163, 165, 169, 186, 201, 203–4, 208, 254, 310, 339, 363, 372, 381, 405, 426, 429, 511, 513–15, 518, 534–35, 543, 547, 562, 576, 581, 630, 741, 758–59, 905, 946, 1013, 1082, 1084–86, 1088, 1090, 1114, 1126, 1134 Baltimore Pilot and Transcript, 1090 Baltimore Visitor, 562, 1126 Balzac, Honoré, 1173, 1187 Bancroft, George, 50, 126, 130, 290, 341, 448, 459, 547, 631, 638, 648–50, 703–4, 1043, 1178, 1183 Bank of the State of South Carolina, 216

Index Banks (and bankers), 95, 101, 103–4, 112, 122, 125, 216, 229, 342, 423, 434, 576, 630, 637, 681, 707, 735, 792, 796, 860, 881–82, 891, 898, 911, 915, 917–19, 927, 931–35, 979, 1138 Bannockburn, battle of, 102 Baptists, 34–35, 147, 169, 187–88, 250, 288, 304, 335, 371–72, 377, 380, 383, 396, 412, 436, 500, 509, 530, 863, 959, 969, 1068, 1089, 1091, 1094–98, 1115, 1118, 1123 Barbados, 207 Barbastro, 1172 Barbour, James, 1009 Barbour, Mrs., 259 Barbour, Philip, 371, 407, 642, 806–7, 810, 813 Barbour, Philip Pendleton, 644 Barca, Angel Calderon de la, 631 Barca, Frances Calderon de la, 454 Barcelona, 585 Barclay, John, 1017 Bardstown, Ky., 513–14, 1088, 1095 Barings Bank, 517 Barlow, Joel, 665 Barnard, Frederick A. P., 70 Barnwell, S.C., 81, 421, 521, 671, 744 Baroque, 104, 216, 689 Barringer, Daniel Moreau, 159 Barry, Mme du, 620 Bartlett, David, 29 Bartlett & Welford, 37, 486, 633 Bartram, William: Travels, 501, 505 Barwell, Louisa Mary; Mamma’s Birthday, 473 Bascom, Henry Bidleman: Posthumous Works, 1097 Basel, 483 Basque, 1104–5 Bassett, John Young, 106, 109, 115–16, 332, 395 Bastiat, Frédéric: Sophisms, 888, 905 Batavia, 190 Bates, Joshua, 517 Bath, 496 Bath, Va., 474 Baton Rouge, La., 343, 513, 515 Baudelaire, Charles, 585–86, 714, 1187 Baumgarten, Siegmund, 1125 Bayard, Jane Elizabeth, 180 Bayle, Pierre, 166, 1009 Bayly, Thomas, 815, 856

1301

Beard, John R., 543 Beatrice, 157 Beattie, James, 999, 1001, 1007, 1017, 1029 Beattie, William, 654; Waldenses, or, Piedmont and Dauphiny, 482 Beaufort, S.C., 32, 262, 355, 545, 1074, 1089, 1178, 1184 Beaufort Volunteer Artillery, 528 Beaumont, Francis, 87, 122, 465, 740 Bechuanas, 387 Becket, Thomas, 91 Bede, Venerable, 593 Bedouins, 168, 228 Bee, Thomas (elder), 509 Bee, Thomas (younger), 407, 509; Omnium Gatherum, 509 Beecher, Henry Ward, 388, 507 Beirut, 169 Belfast, 62–64, 66–69, 106 Belgium (and Belgians), 112, 128, 226, 288, 496, 704 Belin, Allard H., 509 Belknap, Jeremy, 596, 623: American Biography, 501 Bellini, Charles, 330 Bellini, Vincenzo, 5 Ben (slave), 286 Benecke, Georg Friedrich, 130, 132–33 Benjamin, Judah P., 55, 1074, 1199 Bentham, Jeremy, 796, 902, 1039–41, 1077; Church-of-Englandism, 482 Bentivoglio, Paulina, contessa, 95 Bentley, Richard, 581, 583 Benyowsky, Maurice Auguste, 504 Béranger, Pierre-Jean, 327 Berbers, 173, 175 Bering Straits, 189 Berkeley, George, 990, 996, 1003, 1005, 1012, 1020–21, 1028, 1030, 1038, 1060, 1077 Berlin, 73, 130, 134, 138, 140, 142–43, 249, 330–31, 392, 416, 454–55, 483, 525, 584, 693, 999, 1043, 1099–1100, 1102–3, 1171 Berlioz, Hector, 115 Bermuda, 15, 209, 310, 545, 909, 939, 1000 Bernays, Jakob, 144 Berrien, John M., 565, 629 Berry, William T., 477, 480 Berthelsdorf, 302, 304 Beth Elohim Unveh Shalom, 1070 Betsy (slave), 74 Bettner, George, 360

1302

Index

Beverley, Robert, 45, 595; History and Present State of Virginia, 309 Bey, Ali: Travels, 504 Beza, Theodore, 145 Biafra, 176 Bible, 18, 34, 40, 165, 169, 171, 176, 188–89, 240, 242, 244–45, 248, 257, 269, 273, 305, 334, 352, 434, 457, 459, 473, 479, 482, 492, 504, 530, 607, 654, 681, 741, 823, 942– 43, 945, 958–59, 974, 1050–51, 1068, 1080, 1088–89, 1097, 1108–10, 1113, 1117, 1120, 1143, 1147, 1150, 1155, 1191, 1096 Biddle, Nicholas, 28, 919, 933 Bigelow, D. J., 473–74 Bigelow, Jacob, 433–34 Bigottini, Emilie, 103 Bill of Rights, 858 Biloxi, Miss., 287 Bingham, William, 324 Binney, Mrs, 1196 Biography (and biographers), 9, 17, 21, 135, 155, 175, 307, 311, 318, 358, 435, 444, 462, 479, 493–94, 498–500, 502, 505, 522, 538, 549, 564, 593–94, 596, 599, 639, 641, 646, 653–71, 673–75, 674, 679, 688, 701–2, 983, 999, 1133, 1136, 1195 Biology, 8, 215, 218, 222, 237, 250–51, 387, 599 Birmingham, 108 Biscay, Bay of, 226 Black, John, 692 Blackburn, George, 392 Blackford, Abraham, 186 Black Oak, S.C., 440 Blackstone, Sir William, 18, 398, 422, 463, 548, 641, 961 Blackwood, William, 581 Blackwood’s Magazine, 104, 479, 542, 547 Bladensburg, Md., 128, 310 Blaettermann, Georg, 330, 523 Blair, Hugh, 22, 260, 415, 478, 684–85, 687– 91, 705, 738; Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 478, 684–85, 687–91, 738 Bland, Theodorick, 195, 444, 572 Bledsoe, Albert Taylor, 450, 966, 1035–39; Examination of President Edwards’ Enquiry, 1035, 1098; Liberty and Slavery, 578 Bledsoe, Harriet Coxe, 1036 Blenheim, battle of, 316 Blenkinsop, William, 478 Bligh, William, 228

Blood, 67, 69, 77, 116, 124, 221, 252, 289–90, 300, 318, 322, 351, 371, 387–88, 617, 647, 707, 721, 731, 754, 772, 784, 839, 958, 987, 1141, 1152, 1155, 1174, 1176, 1199 Bloomington, Ind., 516 Bluemantle, Bridget: Monte Video, 501 Bluffton, S.C., 360 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 22, 132–33, 137, 222–33, 237–39, 243, 245, 248, 250, 253; De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, 132, 223–31 Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron, 492, 503 Bocock, John Holmes, 339, 351 Boeckh, Auguste, 143–44, 1106; Public Economy of Athens, 144 Boeotia, 351 Bohn, Christian, 518–19 Bohn, Henry, 483, 518, 582, 1048–49 Boleyn, Ann Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, first viscount, 319, 342, 488, 493, 594, 775, 798, 1049; Reflections of Exile, 342 Bologna, 91 Bolton, Curtis, 506 Bombay, 191 Bonaparte, Joseph, 99 Bonn, 134, 137, 143, 330–31, 483, 603, 621, 693 Book of Common Prayer, 172, 1104 Bookshops (and booksellers), 9, 18, 22, 37, 100, 117, 395, 436, 455, 473, 476–77, 480– 81, 485, 487–88, 512, 524, 567, 577–79, 581, 632–34, 666, 741, 898 Boone, Thomas and William (publishers), 584 Bopp, Franz, 1105 Bordeaux, 114, 290, 507 Borgo, Pozzo di, 147, 336 Bossange, Hector, 487 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 257, 478, 493, 594 Boston, Mass. (and Bostonians), 8, 29, 32– 33, 37, 39, 42, 44, 46–48, 50, 53, 59, 65, 75–76, 78–79, 170, 285, 307, 350, 368, 378, 391, 419, 426, 429, 434, 440, 448, 454, 483, 496, 514–17, 531, 543, 547, 555, 572–73, 576–80, 582, 681, 708, 721, 764, 766, 946, 1044, 1050, 1086, 1089–90, 1100, 1171 Boston Atheneum, 514–16 Boston Courier, 33 Boston Gospel Advocate, 1090 Boston Library Society, 516

Index Boston Patriot, 1090 Boston Society for Natural History, 516 Boswell, James, 398, 401, 403, 602, 641, 653–55, 684, 983; Life of Johnson, 501 Botany, 61, 101, 215–17, 222, 232, 254, 260, 347, 521, 789 Botetourt, Norborne Berkeley, baron de, 412 Botetourt Springs, Va., 397, 412 Botsford, Edmund: Sambo and Toney, 412–13 Botta, Carlo: War of the Independence of the U.S.A., 503 Boujah, 171 Boulanger (dance), 358 Boulogne, 1181 Boulware, William, 149, 164, 356 Bourbons, 234 Bourdaloue, Louis, 257 Bourg, Louis Guillaume Valentine de, 208 Bourgers, Alphonse, 586 Bourne, Vincent, 482 Bouterwek, Friedrich, 133, 159, 698; Spanish and Portugese Literature, 133 Bowdoin, James, 555 Bowdoin College, 330, 515, 520 Bowen, Reverend Dr., 1090 Bowen, Francis, 146, 878 Boyce, Mrs., 1049 Boyer, Jean Pierre, 1091 Boyhood (and boys), 55, 112–13, 181, 255, 258, 302, 327, 358, 400, 407, 422, 463, 556, 564, 662, 664, 724–26, 743, 766, 772, 811, 868, 916, 970, 1073 Brabant, 128 Brackett, Gilbert Robbins, 64 Bradford, Alexander: American Antiquities, 239 Bradford Springs, S.C., 1099 Branchville, S.C., 77 Brashear, R. B., 364 Brazil, 4, 93, 192, 195, 1087 Brazos River, 286, 342 Breckinridge, Robert J., 28, 1126, 1129, 1136; Knowledge of God, 1098 Bremen, 217 Bremer, Fredrika, 52, 629 Brentsville, Va., 972 Breslau, 483 Bretons, 235 Brevard, Ephraim, 430 Brewster, Sir David, 1024

1303

Breydenbach, Bernard de: Des Sainctes Perigrinations Jherusalem, 492 Brissot, Jean-Pierre, 403 Bristed, Charles Astor, 449 Bristol, 110 Britain (and the British): 62, 96, 165, 167, 178, 189, 190, 203, 207, 210, 234–35, 248, 308, 320, 343, 378, 413, 417, 493, 617–18, 624, 631, 648, 704, 774, 781, 800, 823, 826, 853–54, 861, 917, 935, 937, 941–42, 953, 968, 1000, 1056; Britons in the South, 53– 58, 721; intellectual life in, 102, 221, 231, 499–500, 502, 542–43, 548, 550, 553, 580– 81, 585–86, 594, 651, 654, 666, 712, 888, 953, 957, 1008, 1043–45, 1082, 1087, 1134, 1176, 1181; as opponent of U.S., 106–7, 142, 199–200, 295, 299–301, 305, 309, 312, 321, 423, 565–67, 639, 650, 652, 707, 735, 774, 839, 848, 892–93, 915, 930, 935, 953, 998; and slavery, 207, 308, 309; visits to, 55, 64, 106–11 British and Foreign Bible Society, 176 British and Foreign Evangelical Review, 176 British Critic, 550 British Museum, 175 Britton, Edward H., 535 Broca, Paul, 243, 248; Phenomena of Hybridity, 243 Brockenborough, Mary Metcalfe, 973 Brokmeyer, Henry C., 1054 Bronte, Charlotte, 744; Jane Eyre, 1163 Brooke, John M., 189 Brookes, Iveson, 250, 448, 1012 Brookes, Martha, 743 Brooklyn, N.Y., 1069 Brougham, Henry, 551, 564; Political Philosophy, 1149 Broussais, François Joseph Victor, 232, 241, 1015, 1055, 1060; On Irritation and Insanity, 1015–16 Brown, Charles Brockden: Wieland, 747 Brown, Edward, 940–43, 948, 956; Origin and Necessity of Slavery, 940–42 Brown, James, 102–3, 135, 137 Brown, John, 33 Brown, John Carter, 517 Brown, Mrs., 1192 Brown, Nancy, 103 Brown, T. C., 477 Brown, Thomas, 62, 105, 912, 1000–1001, 1008–10, 1013, 1017, 1024, 1026–27,

1304

Index

1030–32, 1042, 1055, 1133–34, 1138, 1166; Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1001 Brown, William Wells, 13, 52, 209, 678; My Southern Home, 13 Browne, Henry Kirke, 345 Brown University, 71, 514, 517, 878, 1054, 1096 Bruce, Sir Frederick, 167 Brumby, Richard Trapier, 1125 Bruno, Giordano, 1101 Brunswick, 130, 332, 515 Bruslé, Aimée, 114 Brussels, 111, 331, 488 Brutus, Lucius Junius, 152, 235, 506–7 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 152, 593 Bryan, Daniel, 641 Bryan, George S., 430, 436–37 Bryan, Mary, 440 Bryant, William Cullen, 49, 565, 703 Buchanan, George, 820 Buchanan, James, 167, 432, 741, 1178 Buckingham County, Va., 400 Buckland, William, 607, 1125 Buenos Aires, 8, 190 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 82, 215, 219, 222, 225, 231, 233, 504 Buist (student), 1049 Bullard, Henry Adams, 547, 625 Bunsen, Christian Charles Josias, baron, 87 Bunsen, Theodora, 454 Bunwell, William M., 534–35, 561 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress, 678 Burckhardt, Jacob, 614 Burdick, A. B., 582 Buren, Martin van, 449, 769–70, 918, 935, 1087 Burges, Tristan, 560 Burges & James, 576 Burghley, William Cecil, first baron, 601 Burke, Edmund (and Burkean), 10, 124, 140, 257, 375, 379, 403, 601, 610, 618–19, 641, 670, 802, 805, 811, 816–17, 822, 868, 871, 894, 934, 943, 962, 974, 987, 1009, 1044, 1148, 1173 Burke, William C., 184 Burk’s Garden, Va., 1056 Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques, 897 Burlington, N.J., 1036 Burlington, Vt., 515 Burnet, Gilbert, 471, 594

Burney, Fanny: Cecilia, 499, 501; Evelina, 499, 501; The Wanderer, 109 Burns, Robert, 102, 107–8, 499, 737, 739, 1101 Burr, Aaron, 136, 160, 399, 630, 664, 845 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 179 Burton, Sir Richard, 168 Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine, 549 Burwell School, 256 Bussy-Rabutin, Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, 441 Butler, Andrew Pickens, 440, 528 Butler, Joseph, 62, 260, 360, 1121 Buttman, Phillip: Greek Grammar, 414 Büttner, Christian Wilhelm, 223 Byrd, William, 410; Histories of the Dividing Line, 439 Byron, George Gordon, sixth baron (and Byronic), 88, 104, 129, 147–48, 154, 156, 163, 257, 307, 390, 443, 445, 462–63, 501–2, 557, 564, 586, 654, 667, 670–71, 676, 697, 709, 721–22, 725, 728, 739–41, 750, 866, 987, 1077, 1079, 1163; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 37, 152, 155; Corsair, 129; Giaour, 129; Manfred, 671, 697 Cabanis, Georges, 1015, 1019, 1060 Cabell, James Lawrence, 123 Cabell, Landon, 121, 1069 Cabell, Nathaniel Francis, 1069 Cabet, Étienne, 905 Cabot, John, 86 Caen, 94 Caesar, Julius, 64, 151, 251, 325, 344, 423, 462, 503, 1077, 1089, 1125 Cairo, 163–65, 167 Calais, 112 Calcutta, 190–91, 249, 483, 496 Caldwell, Charles, 448, 519; Original Unity of the Human Race, 241 Caldwell, Joseph, 72 Caldwell, Liberia, 182 Caldwell Institute, 346 Calhoun, John Caldwell, 2, 10–11, 16, 28, 31, 54, 78–79, 83, 100, 122, 251, 333, 354, 370, 398, 404, 418, 442, 449–50, 454, 485, 507, 532, 548, 587, 671, 674, 782–83, 797, 807, 818, 820, 824–25, 827–33, 835–36, 839– 40, 844–45, 848–66, 873–74, 876, 881, 894, 914–15, 917, 919, 921–37, 955, 960,

Index 978, 982, 1007, 1069, 1101, 1151, 1173, 1191; Discourse, 355, 849, 854–62; Disquisition, 849–56; Exposition, 807, 827–31, 858, 930 Calhoun, Patrick, 370 Calhoun, Simeon Howard, 169 Calhoun Debating Society, 421, 423 California, 202, 206, 295, 322 Calliopean Society, 29–30, 517, 528 Calmet, Augustin: Dictionary of the Holy Bible, 504 Calvary Church, 43 Calvert, Rosalie Eugenia, 128 Calvert, George, 128 Calvert, George (first Lord Baltimore), 681 Calvert, George Henry, 128–37, 139–40, 223, 547, 560; Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, 582; Herbert Barclay, 560; Scenes and Thoughts in Europe, 582 Calvin, John, 5, 10, 145, 466, 866, 1093, 1118, 1129, 1131, 1193 Calvinism, 10, 64, 66, 81, 83, 100, 105, 125, 291, 346, 389, 434, 570, 678, 681, 866, 943, 1016, 1020, 1022–23, 1032–33, 1051, 1068, 1098, 1109, 1111, 1113, 1116–18, 1123, 1131, 1136, 1146, 1148, 1153–54 Cambridge, Mass., 37, 39, 84, 129, 515 Camden, Ark., 468 Camden, S.C., 1100, 1195, 1197 Camden, William, 234–35, 594 Camoens, Luiz Vaz de: Lusiad, 503 Campbell, Alexander, 806, 813 Campbell, Charles, 44, 316, 320, 341, 374, 397, 444, 537–38, 548, 557, 572, 574, 577, 595, 629, 634–35, 638, 700; History of Virginia, 577 Campbell, George, 691, 1025; Philosophy of Rhetoric, 684–85 Campbell, John, 240 Campbell, John A., 209 Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 559 Campbell, Thomas, 459, 654 Campen, 584 Camper, Pierre, 227, 229, 231 Campidoglio, 151 Canaan, 665, 1125 Canada, 6, 36, 185, 288, 581, 679, 834, 1056, 1084, 1198 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), 147 Cannae, battle of, 707 Canning, George, 199, 399

1305

Canova, Antonio, 96, 116, 344 Canton, 93, 186–89, 190, 192, 936 Cape Fear, 60, 355 Capers, William, 673 Capodimonte, 104 Capuchins, 586, 708 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 147 Cardozo, Jacob, 881, 897, 900, 906, 917– 21, 928, 930, 1077, 1081; Notes on Political Economy, 917–21; The Tariff, 919 Carew, Thomas, 566 Carey, Henry C., 281, 572 Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 575 Carey, Matthew, 473, 477, 548 Carey & Hart, 582 Carey & Lea, 572, 575 Careysburg (Liberia), 182 Caribbean Sea, 20, 114, 207, 209–10, 677, 839, 1070 Caribs, 237 Carleton, William: Valentine M’Clutchy, 479 Carlisle, Pa., 515 Carlisle, William B., 484 Carlow, 1083 Carlyle, Alexander, 688 Carlyle, Thomas (and Carlylean), 21, 56, 58, 125, 135, 139, 142, 316, 465, 619, 692, 716, 743, 783, 866, 975, 984–85, 1050, 1052–53, 1166–67; Life of Schiller, 135; Sartor Resartus, 1050, 1167 Carolina Art Association, 730 Carolina Journal of Medicine, Science and Agriculture, 335 Carolina Law Journal, 335 Carolina Planter, 335 Carr, Dabney, 663–64 Carrera, Jose Miguel, 196 Carrington, Eliza, 682 Carrington, Mary Venable, 637, 682 Carrington, Virginia Preston, 104 Carrol, James, 416 Carroll, Bartholomew R.: Historical Collections of South Carolina, 459 Carroll, Charles (of Carrollton), 42; Journal, 631 Carroll, John, 42, 1084 Carter, Elizabeth, 499, 501 Carter, St. Legere Landon, 356, 560 Carthage, 811, 982 Cartwright, Samuel A., 247, 448, 966

1306

Index

Caruthers, Mrs., 501 Caruthers, William Alexander, 48, 309–10, 315, 425, 501, 576–77, 582, 596, 629–30, 748; Cavaliers of Virginia, 310, 576, 582; Kentuckian in New York, 48, 576; Knights of the Horse Shoe, 576, 748, 774–77 Carvalho, Emanuel Nunes, 1070 Cary, Archibald, 318 Caryatids, 163 Casanova, Giacomo, 524 Casas, Bartolomeo de Las, 215 Caspian Sea, 236, 239 Cass, Lewis, 1178 Cassel, 139 Cassville, 263 Caste, 183, 198, 205, 239, 320, 369–70, 416, 611, 978 Castile, 203, 295 Catalonia, 330 Catalini, Angelica, 103 Catawbas, 287 Catherine the Great, 86 Cato, Marcus Porcius, 402, 885, 887 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 493, 785 Catskills, 37 Caucasians, 76, 228–31, 233, 238–40, 242, 245, 249, 302, 608, 1107, 1174 Caucasus, 147, 228, 236 Cavaliers, 250, 286, 309–10, 312–13, 315–20, 322, 381, 383, 576, 582, 647, 650, 667, 775, 981 Caxton, William, 492 Cayuga, Lake, 37 Celle, 130 Cellini, Benvenuto: Life of Benvenuto Cellini, 654, 672 Celts (and Celtic), 91, 234–37, 235, 238, 388, 510, 699, 1176 Central Presbyterian, 142 Centre College, 1095 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 479; Don Quixote, 504 Chagres River, 192 Chaillu, Paul Belloni du: Western Africa, 179 Chaldeans, 239, 1104 Chalmers, Thomas, 64, 67–69, 1125; Treatises of Faith, 67 Chambeisi, hill of, 99 Champollion, Jean-François, 242, 599

Chanche, John M. J., 478 Channing, William Ellery, 78, 154, 961, 964, 1152 Chantilly, 92 Chantreau: Travels in Russia, 504 Chapman, John, 582 Chappellier, F., 479 Chappuys, Gabriel, 441 Charlemagne, 321, 492, 1088 Charles I, 318, 423, 617 Charles II, 334 Charleston, S.C., 2, 29, 34, 53, 63, 67–69, 79, 112, 158, 171, 176, 185, 196, 216, 241, 249, 254, 269, 271, 273–74, 285, 288–89, 322, 329, 343, 350, 352, 355, 358–59, 368, 386, 424, 445, 449, 489, 525, 536, 564, 579, 587, 719, 764–66, 827, 873, 922–23, 931, 955, 1079–81, 1088, 1101, 1150–51, 1076, 1186, 1200; culture in, 119, 208, 244, 331– 32, 339, 408–9, 425–37, 450, 477, 480–83, 488–89, 491, 508–10, 524, 532, 554, 586, 632, 648, 701, 709, 738, 981, 1070–72, 1079, 1087, 1090, 1095, 1108, 1114; persons associated with, 15, 54, 61, 65–66, 69, 71, 92, 95, 111, 123, 126, 134, 137, 142, 147, 169, 193, 195, 209, 216, 232, 243, 267–68, 285, 325, 327, 346, 351, 360, 362, 370, 372, 395, 407, 455, 457, 481, 533, 628, 630–31, 648, 708, 717, 720, 769–70, 940, 946, 1001, 1051, 1053, 1068, 1076, 1082, 1084, 1090, 1099, 1126, 1178, 1198; publications in, 8, 47, 362, 363, 474, 477, 484–87, 532, 534, 543–46, 570, 573, 576–78, 584, 743, 917, 965, 1086, 1091, 1170; visitors to, 41–42, 56–57, 165, 217 Charleston, College of, 61, 414, 490, 514, 516, 518, 525, 527, 533, 903, 1051, 1086, 1099–1100, 1178 Charleston Conversation Club, 56, 66, 246, 406, 426–37, 562, 628 Charleston Courier, 477, 1089 Charleston Library Society, 42, 217, 402, 494–95, 503, 505, 508–11, 513, 515–16, 522, 525, 591, 628, 633 Charleston Mercury, 484, 533, 555 Charleston News and Courier, 1187 Charleston Observer, 142 Charlotte, N.C., 648, 1094 Charlotte County, Va., 356, 397, 445, 472, 637

Index Charlottesville, Va., 31, 51, 87, 139, 326, 330, 341, 407, 506, 513, 515, 519, 522–24, 652, 700, 759, 912, 1008, 1010–11, 1036, 1056 Charlton, Robert Milledge, 629–30 Chartists, 108 Chartres, 1185 Chasles, Philaret: Anglo-American Literature and Manners, 409 Chateaubriand, Vicomte François: Atala, 736; Recollections, 504; René, 736 Chatham County, N.C., 740 Chatham, William Pitt, first earl of, 601, 784 Chatterton, Thomas, 1101 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 493, 594, 728, 739, 1194 Chekhov, Anton: Cherry Orchard, 5 Chemistry, 70, 72, 125, 237, 259, 326, 495, 498, 504, 630, 897, 920, 988, 1015, 1026, 1184 Cheops, Pyramid of, 111 Cheraw, S.C., 705, 1099 Cheraws, 287 Cherokees, 287, 413 Chesapeake Bay, 20, 207, 776–77 Chesnut, James, 1195 Chesnut, James, Jr., 1186, 1197, 1198 Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 11–12, 16, 53, 100, 189, 208, 262, 267, 285, 290, 408, 450, 606, 763, 960, 992, 1073, 1161, 1177, 1185–98; Diary from Dixie, 1198 Chester, 108 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of, 443; Letters, 501 Cheves, Anna Maria, 255 Cheves, Charles Manly, 255 Cheves, Charlotte McCord, 81, 454 Cheves, Langdon, 267, 280–84, 717, 927, 1078 Cheves, Langdon, Jr., 49, 282–83, 446–47 Cheves, Robert Hayne, 282 Chicago, Ill., 15, 179, 380, 386 Chickasaws, 287 Chile, 93, 190, 194, 196, 198 Chillingworth, William, 1127 China (and Chinese), 111, 170, 173, 186–89, 191–92, 228, 236–38, 242, 368, 607, 612, 713, 798, 965, 1104–5, 1142, 1173 Chisolm, Robert, 325 Chivalry, 40, 125, 295, 311, 315, 321, 352, 367, 607, 614, 704, 728, 774, 1174

1307

Chivers, Thomas Holley, 738 Choctaws, 287, 706 Choiseul, Étienne François, duc de, 510, 620 Choisy-le-Roi, 160 Chopin, Frédéric-François, 114–15 Christ, Jesus, 34, 66, 69, 80, 94, 188, 274, 278, 396, 478, 484, 500, 615, 662, 720, 878, 969, 1016–17, 1068, 1073, 1088, 1103, 1107–8, 1110–11, 1113, 1119–21, 1126–28, 1144–45, 1167 Christendom, 1084, 1129, 1180 Christian Magazine, 500 Christy, David, 579, 966 Church, Alonzo, 630 Church, Frederick, 193 Church of Christ, 1068 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (and Ciceronian), 144, 254, 257, 260, 325, 414, 440, 443, 462, 477, 494, 503, 562, 610, 666, 1143; De Oratore, 311; De Republica, 556 Cid, El (Diaz Ruy, Count of Bivar), 159 Cilla (slave), 283 Cincinnati, Ohio, 378, 548, 576, 579, 758, 770, 773, 923, 931, 966, 1036, 1053, 1071, 1084, 1126 Cini, Beatrice, contess, 95 Circassia, 225 Citadel Academy, 95, 528 Civil War, 7, 12, 19, 56, 80–81, 90, 95, 114, 119, 135, 158, 167, 187, 192–93, 293, 300, 329–30, 343, 352–53, 355, 426, 508, 531, 581, 639, 655, 676, 679, 763, 799–800, 879, 917, 996, 1051, 1053, 1070–71, 1074, 1086, 1110, 1161, 1163, 1176, 1178, 1188, 1197 Claiborne, J. F. H., 297–98, 701 Claiborne, William C. C., 296–99, 301 Clapp, Dexter, 281 Clapp, John Milton, 533–34, 536 Clapp, Theodore: Autobiographical Sketches, 362, 681 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, earl of, 257, 594, 618 Clariosophic Society, 528, 1021 Clarke County, Va., 321 Clarkson, Asher, 55 Clarkson, Thomas, 308, 442, 455, 948, 952–53, 955, 957–58 Clarksville Academy, 1094 Classics (and classical), 29–30, 32, 48, 70,

1308

Index

125, 143, 151, 225, 322–23, 326–27, 331, 341, 417–18, 482–83, 493–96, 500, 521–22, 531, 533, 552, 593, 616, 621–22, 691, 693, 695– 96, 698, 702–4, 707, 769, 922, 1020, 1045, 1057, 1076–78, 1083, 1091–92, 1098, 1187, 1196, 1105–6, 1133 Clavigero, Francisco, 203–4 Clay, Cassius Marcellus, 942 Clay, Henry, 11, 16, 54, 100, 118, 136–39, 173, 181, 251, 286, 345, 418, 565, 722, 797, 824, 826–27, 841, 860, 862, 881, 889, 891, 893, 900, 905, 913–17, 919, 923–24, 927–31, 935, 969, 1173 Clay Ashland (Liberia), 181 Clementine (grisette), 117 Clemson, Thomas Green, 106 Cleopatra, 706 Clifton (estate), 92 Climate, 65, 107, 110, 145, 148–49, 154, 158, 200, 222–23, 225–27, 229–30, 233, 238–39, 244, 349, 384, 558, 608, 615, 623, 700–702, 722, 773, 790, 823, 831, 844, 883, 885, 891, 923, 944, 1085 Clio, 1148 Clionian Debating Society, 424 Cliosophic Society, 553 Clovis, 1088 Coalter, John C., 811, 813 Cobb, Thomas R. R., 965; Inquiry, 964; Historical Sketch of Slavery, 622, 964 Cobbett, William, 926 Cobden, Richard, 87, 917 Cockburn, Henry Thomas, Lord, 551, 685 Codification, 533, 822, 898 Cogswell, Joseph, 104, 126, 144, 454, 525 Cohen, Hartwig, 1070 Cohen, Moses I., 163 Cohen, Mrs. Lawrence (‘‘Mem’’), 1073 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 901 Coleman, Frederick, 324 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 133–34, 136, 390, 419, 465, 557, 692, 696, 709, 712–13, 725, 728, 737–39, 885, 950, 1042–44, 1047, 1049–50, 1053, 1140, 1166; Aids to Reflection, 1043; ‘‘Ancient Mariner,’’ 737, 1166; Biographia Literaria, 1042–43, 1047; Theory of Life, 134; (with William Wordsworth) Lyrical Ballads, 419, 557 Coles, Edward, 101–2 Coligni, Gaspard de, 291

College d’Orléans, 113 Collins, William, 739, 766 Cologne, 492 Colombia, 196 Colonialism (and colonies), 3–4, 6, 22–24, 96, 154, 181–85, 190, 197, 202–3, 206–7, 209, 237, 249, 286, 290, 294–95, 305, 308, 310–13, 315–18, 320, 333, 337, 365–66, 368, 372, 430, 438–39, 545, 595–96, 607, 630, 645–47, 650, 652, 661, 707, 755, 759, 762, 774, 781, 799, 826, 835, 839, 855, 900, 916, 930, 942, 960, 981–82, 994, 1000, 1070, 1072, 1080, 1126, 1176 Colporteurs, 473–74 Columbia, Mo., 516 Columbia, S.C., 6, 36, 48–49, 53, 66, 71–72, 74, 77–79, 81–83, 88, 166, 178, 239, 240, 281, 327, 343–45, 351, 356, 360, 397, 407, 453, 486, 488, 490, 512–13, 515, 520–22, 525, 532, 534–35, 543–45, 578, 582, 821, 823, 827, 897, 903, 946, 948, 955, 1007, 1016, 1022, 1044–46, 1049, 1091–92, 1113–14 Columbia, Tenn., 514 Columbia College (New York), 70, 515, 517, 520 Columbia Hive, 1148 Columbian Orator, 741 Columbia Temperance Advocate, 356 Columbia Theological Seminary, 179, 489, 513, 1094, 1114, 1118, 1124, 1125, 1130 Columbus, Christopher, 86, 159, 196, 515, 702, 770, 1087 Comanche, 722 Combe, George, 232, 1019 Comedy, 306, 465, 762, 987 Commerce (and commercial), 2, 18, 45, 51, 77, 135, 157, 177, 194, 199, 204–5, 210, 350, 360, 365, 374, 378, 380, 423, 438, 457, 511– 12, 529, 535–36, 571, 583, 600, 614–15, 643, 701, 707, 730, 734, 737, 742, 755, 810, 816, 823, 835, 842, 853, 855, 881, 891, 899–900, 908–9, 915–19, 926, 933, 940, 943, 982, 1040, 1062, 1078, 1164, 1180, 1183, 1199 Commonwealth, English (and its tradition), 18, 339–40, 493, 770, 784–86, 823, 837, 841, 844, 881, 927, 936, 983 Communists, 387, 905, 975, 1152 Comstock, John Lee: System of Natural Philosophy, 478 Comte, Auguste, 221, 499, 504, 619, 969,

Index 1057–58, 1061–66, 1101, 1113, 1135; Cours de philosophie positive, 1061; Système de philosophie positive, 1061–62, 1064–65 Concord Academy, 324 Condillac, Étienne de, 1006, 1008 Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de, 806, 887, 896; Progress of the Human Mind, 504 Confederacy of the Six Nations, 854 Confucius (and Confucianism), 187, 215, 321, 989 Congaree River, 287 Congo, 114, 178, 181, 183, 735 Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, 151, 1085 Congregationalism, 61–64, 369 Connecticut, 28–29, 31, 45, 70–71, 142, 195, 240, 535, 766, 810, 816 Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, 878 Constant, Benjamin, 122, 611–12, 694; Adolphe, 504 Constantinople, 15, 74, 171–72, 228, 787, 1102, 1104, 1107 Conversation, 9, 17, 20, 22, 55, 66, 77, 81, 85, 91, 104, 112, 177, 246, 256, 260, 264– 65, 326, 354, 370, 374, 391, 395, 397–98, 400, 402–4, 406, 408–9, 411–12, 425–26, 433–35, 437, 439, 453, 508, 510, 562, 586, 592, 628, 634, 646, 658, 681, 708, 893, 948, 970, 987, 1044, 1060, 1070, 1116, 1193, 1195 Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1053 Cook, Eliza, 739 Cook, Minerva Hynes, 396, 405, 415 Cooke, George, 351 Cooke, John Pendleton, 309 Cooke, John Esten, 55, 309, 315, 404, 537, 706, 762; Virginia Comedians, 762 Cooke, John R., 784, 808–9 Cooke, Philip Pendleton, 321, 369, 537, 555, 560, 728, 742; Froissart Ballads, 728 Cooper, James Fenimore, 135, 138, 538, 548, 557, 564, 581, 586, 703–4, 763; The Pilot, 499, 501; The Pioneers, 37 Cooper, Thomas, 11, 47, 49, 72, 84, 110, 122, 166, 168, 236, 240–41, 247, 305, 328–29, 342, 355, 379, 403, 445, 490, 493–95, 519, 532–33, 539, 555, 558, 574, 582, 704, 782, 784, 793, 796, 817–24, 826–27, 829, 832, 837, 855, 866–67, 877–78, 881, 888, 892, 895–903, 905, 912, 915, 921, 928, 1014–21, 1023, 1030, 1040–41, 1055, 1096–97, 1116–

1309

17, 1125; Connection between Geolo and the Pentateuch, 582; Consolidation, 122, 796, 818, 820, 823, 837; Elements of Political Economy, 582, 878, 895–903; Institutes of Justinian, 901; Letters on the Slave Trade, 823; Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley, 1015; Scripture Doctrine of Materialism, 1016; Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 826; Tracts, 1014 Cooper, Thomas Abthorpe, 721 Copenhagen, 483 Coppet, 99 Copyright, 83, 564–71, 573, 581, 1047 Copyright Club, 565 Corderius, 323 Cordova, 159, 1088, 1171 Coriolanus, Gnaeus Marcius, 32 Cork, 101, 107, 1082–83 Cork Mercantile Chronicle, 1083 Corn Laws, 919 Cornwall, 289 Coromantee, 178 Correggio, Antonio Allegri da, 147 Cortes, Hernando, 159, 201 Cosmopolitanism, 5, 27, 70, 74, 96, 128, 172, 241, 248, 337, 343, 348, 359, 440, 454, 582, 584, 704, 721, 759, 798, 817, 915, 983, 998, 1009, 1020, 1163 Cosmos Club, 454 Costa Rica, 195 Cosway, Maria, 410–11 Cotton, 7, 20, 32, 106, 165, 175, 342, 350, 360, 380–84, 467, 473, 526, 533, 578–79, 726, 757, 890, 909, 915–17, 930, 936, 953, 956, 966, 1163, 1178, 1185 Cotton is King (1855), 579 Cotton is King (1860), 578, 966 Couper, James Hamilton, 54, 176–77, 448 Courrier de la Louisiane, 208, 286 Courrier Français, 479 Courtship, 267, 408, 456, 761, 768, 775, 1193 Coushatta, 287 Cousin, Victor, 604, 999, 1012, 1029, 1034, 1041, 1048, 1050, 1058, 1118, 1134, 1136, 1166 Couturier, John J., 359 Covent Garden, 55 Covington, Ky., 770 Cowper, William, 499, 740 Coxe, Harriet, 1036 Crabb, George: English Synonymes Explained, 234

1310

Index

Crafts, Williams, 425, 451, 554, 708–9, 718; Miscellaneous Writings, 445 Crallé, Richard K., 397, 522, 849, 1069 Craven County, S.C., 357–59 Crawford, James, 839 Crawford, Sarah Gayle, 158 Crawford, Thomas, 154, 344 Crawford, William B., 149, 150–52 Crawford, William H., 153, 418 Creagh, Girard W., 634 Crebillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de, 504 Crecy, battle of, 647 Creole, 3, 114, 203–5, 287, 292–94, 297–99, 302–3, 421, 423, 573 Crèvecouer, Michel-Guillaume, Jean de, 870 Crimean War, 167 Croatia, 76 Crockett, David: Narrative, 582; Sketches and Eccentricities, 582–83 Cromwell, Oliver, 312, 320, 388, 422, 492, 592, 618, 784, 786 Croom, C. Stephens, 28 Cruger, Henry, 158, 628 Crummell, Alexander, 180, 736 Crusades, 335, 614–15 Cuba, 113, 160, 192, 196, 199, 207, 209–11, 288, 892, 1176 Cudworth, Ralph, 1042 Culloden, battle of, 288 Cumberland Presbyterians, 1068 Cumming, Henry H., 118, 150, 160, 415 Cumming, John, 506 Cummings, Jeremiah, 151 Cunningham, J. W., 500 Curchod, Suzanne, 98 Curtis, George, 580 Curtis, Moses Ashley, 44, 52, 59–61, 70, 73, 87, 243–47, 325, 332, 347, 364, 440, 460, 464, 506, 546, 556, 1152 Cushing, Caleb, 33 Cushing, Jonathan Peter, 628 Cuvier, Georges, 82, 105, 120, 231–32, 239, 245, 400, 504, 1124 Cuzco, 192 Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 45 Cyrus the Great, 324 Dabney, Richard, 641 Dabney, Robert Lewis, 87, 360, 414; Discussions, 1098

Dagg, John Leadley: Manual of Theolo , 1097 Daily Southern Argus, 321 Daily Telegraph, 166 Dakar, 936 Dalai Lama, 1112 Daniel, John M., 388, 534–35 Dante Alighieri, 148, 155, 157, 331, 465, 503, 654, 740; Vita Nuova, 654 Danube River, 734 Danville, Ky., 65, 513 Darien, 572 Dartmouth College, 514–15, 955, 1042 Darwin, Charles (and Darwinism), 5, 240, 243, 1124 Darwin, Erasmus, 1025, 1078 Das Rheinische Museum fur Philologie, 143 Davidson, James Wood, 1068 Davidson College, 514, 879, 1094–95 Davies, Samuel, 500 Davis, Bancroft, 1178 Davis, Jefferson, 167, 466, 1069, 1074, 1198 Davis, John, 747 Davis, Joseph, 466, 1069 Davis, Mr. (librarian), 77 Davis, Varina Howell, 1186 Davy, Humphrey, 601 Day, John: Remarks on American Affairs, 365 Day, Thomas: Sandford and Merton, 501 Deas, Ann, 257 Deas, Joseph, 402 Debating societies, 29, 260, 264, 324, 388, 421–25, 459, 744 De Bow, J. D. B., 45, 56, 83, 160, 289, 364, 450, 474, 476, 533, 535–36, 542, 546, 553, 583, 625, 632, 701, 919, 981, 1054; Trade and Commerce of the United States, 583 De Bow’s Review, 216, 275, 288, 293, 476, 481, 531, 534, 542, 544, 549, 556, 561, 571, 604, 632, 703, 705, 888, 980–81, 984 Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage, 367 Declaration Of Independence, 94–95, 113, 132, 185, 430, 499, 629, 647, 651, 662, 680, 834, 853, 948 Dédé (slave), 286 Dedé, Edmond, 114 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 579 Deism, 457, 652, 866, 991, 1051, 1077, 1109, 1150, 1175, 1191 DeLancey, Alice, 91

Index DeLancey, Peter, 91 Delano, E. and J. B., 533 Delany, Martin, 736 Delaup, François, 208 Delaware, 5, 14–15, 93, 340, 1072 DeLeon, Agnes, 1073 DeLeon, Edwin, 58, 163–64, 166–68, 325, 346, 561, 784, 1057, 1073 DeLeon, Mordecai Hendricks, 166 DeLeon, Thomas Cooper, 166 Demarara, 1056 Democracy (and democratic), 7, 10, 14–15, 43, 47, 53, 65, 71, 78, 145, 157, 172, 199– 200, 295–97, 307–8, 321, 356, 368, 370, 443, 463, 528, 552, 568, 596, 609, 611–12, 643, 662, 707, 755, 782, 789–90, 792, 798, 800–802, 808, 811–13, 819, 835–37, 842–44, 848, 852, 855, 857, 865, 871, 920, 939, 963, 965, 979, 1093, 1148–49, 1151 Democratic Party, 166, 183, 304, 380, 449, 722, 819, 860, 966, 979 Democratic Review, 479 Democritus, 1014 Demosthenes, 5, 143, 503, 610, 701 Demosthenian Debating Society, 421, 744 Denant, Dominique Vivant, 504 Denham, Dixon, and Hugh Clapperton’s Travels in Africa, 500 Denmark, 208, 235, 288, 483, 677, 1081 Derby, Mrs., 99 Desault, Pierre Joseph, 504 DeSaussure, Henry W., 265, 1090 DeSaussure, William, 77 Descartes, René, 997–98, 1002, 1009, 1025, 1029, 1046 Deutschen Gesellschaft, 288 Devaney, Francis, 182 De Veaux, James, 149, 151, 157 Devonshire, 419 Dew, Thomas Roderick, 1, 11, 16, 257–58, 265, 316, 356, 375–76, 391, 408–9, 450, 482, 485, 529, 546, 548, 576, 578, 587, 602, 606–21, 623, 878, 881, 888–97, 903, 905–6, 914, 919, 923, 935, 942–49, 951, 953, 955– 56, 960–61, 966, 1045, 1087; Digest of . . . Ancient and Modern Nations, 576, 602, 606– 21, 1045; Lectures on the Restrictive System, 1, 576, 878, 888; Review of the Debate (sometimes called Essay on Slavery), 482, 485, 942–46

1311

Diaries, 9, 11, 30, 51, 82, 125, 138, 233, 254, 266, 321, 323, 325, 354, 367, 388, 396–98, 400, 405, 410, 424, 434, 438–39, 443, 456–71, 474, 481–82, 484, 510, 641, 675– 76, 955, 958, 960, 966–67, 969, 992, 1069, 1116, 1188–91, 1193, 1198 Dickens, Charles (and Dickensian), 53–54, 57, 305, 309, 390, 457, 470, 477, 563–65, 744–45, 759, 1165; American Notes, 57, 563; Little Dorrit, 470; Martin Chulewit, 360; Pickwick Papers, 453, 744 Dickinson College, 515, 520 Dickson (missionary), 168 Dickson, Samuel Henry, 119, 429, 434, 437, 451, 484, 536, 648 Dictionaries, 117, 166, 180, 413–14, 435, 479, 482, 493–94, 504, 521, 698, 740, 886 Diderot, Denis, 116, 1009 Dilettantism, 342, 724, 911 Dimitry, Alexander, 195, 548 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 597, 698 Disraeli, Benjamin: Vivian Grey, 501 D’Israeli, Isaac, 641, 672, 1080 District of Columbia, 6, 238, 543–44, 573 Dix, Dorothea, 354, 454 Dix, William, 480 Doddridge, Philip, 808–9, 811 Donizetti, Gaetano, 486 Dorians, 132, 431, 611 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 670 Doughty, Dr., 1069 Douglas, Stephen, 380 Douglas, William, 430 Douglass, Frederick, 12, 52, 68–69, 273, 420, 455, 677–78, 741, 1087 Downes, David, 29 Draper, Lorenzo, 122 Draper, Lyman, 625 Drayton, William, 121; View of South Carolina, 355, 505 Dresden, 138, 483 Druids, 236, 251, 555 Drury Lane, 366, 734 Dryden, John, 417, 465, 566, 738 Duane, William, 487 Dublin, 102, 106, 153, 482, 496, 584 Duchesnoise, Catherine-Joseph, 103 Dudley, Edward B., 59 Duelling, 83, 128, 377, 614, 769, 862, 1091, 1099, 1174

1312

Index

Dulau, A. B., 583 Dulles, Joseph, 549, 556 Dumas, Alexandre, 115, 1187 Dumont, Étienne, 1041 Duncan, William: Elements of Logic, 1006, 1023 Dundee, 496 Dunglison, Robley, 70, 482 Dunkers, 958 Dupaty, Charles M.-J.-B. Mercier: Travels Through Italy, 500, 504 Dupin, Charles: Great Britain, 504 Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 896 Dusenberry, James L., 745 Dussert family, 114 Duyckinck, Evert, 45, 315, 481, 565 Duyckinck, George, 45 Dwight, Henry, 134; Travels in the North of Germany, 135, 1042 Dwight, Timothy, 28, 72, 500–501; Conquest of Canaan, 665; Travels in the United States, 500, 501 Dyck, Anthony Van, 130 Early, Miss, 501 East India College, Haileybury, 878 Eaton, John Henry: Andrew Jackson, 505 Eaton, Peggy, 845 Eaton Hall, 108 Eatonton, 377 Ebenezer Academy, 323 Ebo, 178 Eccleston, Samuel, 1084 Eckman, Julius, 1070 Eclecticism, 233, 720, 739, 1004, 1041, 1058–59 Economics (and economists), 10, 267, 304, 494, 507, 577, 606, 610, 644, 661, 877– 937, 881, 896, 914, 917–20, 928–29, 935, 968, 991, 1009, 1180 Ecuador, 193–94, 196 Eddystone Lighthouse, 712 Eden, Garden of, 41, 66, 222, 695 Edgefield, S.C., 256, 355, 502 Edgehill, battle of, 637 Edgerton, Thomas, 487 Edgeworth, Maria, 287, 446, 482, 499, 501, 744, 767, 1074–76; The Absentee, 1075; Practical Education, 1074; Tales of Fashionable Life, 499, 501

Edina, 182, 185 Edinburgh, 5, 8, 22, 62, 64, 66–68, 102, 104–5, 107, 119, 126, 134–35, 195, 216, 253, 290, 360, 378, 477, 482–83, 488, 496, 554, 584, 603, 688–89, 700–701, 943, 998, 1000–1001, 1008, 1013, 1134 Edinburgh Review, 46, 104, 360, 500, 531, 533, 538, 542, 547, 551, 554–55, 557, 618, 1011, 1015, 1134 Edisto Island, 359, 1078 Edwards, Jonathan, 21, 501, 1000, 1033, 1034–36, 1098, 1118; Works, 500 Edwards, Madaline, 262, 460 Edwards, Tryon, 29 Edwards, Weldon Nathaniel, 351 Egypt (and Egyptian), 93, 158, 163–68, 175, 201, 216, 227, 236–37, 239, 244, 492, 502, 504, 606–7, 1049, 1080, 1104 Egyptology, 165, 243–44 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 133 Elba, 126 Eleatics, 1058, 1119 Elegy, 143, 227, 357, 359, 716, 719, 760, 868, 1199 Eliot, George, 744; Middlemarch, 1163 Elizabeth I (and Elizabethan), 249, 272, 500, 594, 641, 750 Ellet, Elizabeth, 70, 81, 83, 455, 547 Ellet, William, 70, 83, 455 Elliott, E. N., 966 Elliott, Stephen (the elder), 8, 36, 135–36, 216–21, 232, 241, 243, 425, 440, 450, 494– 95, 522, 531–33, 535–36, 539, 545, 557–58, 789, 1042; Botany of South-Carolina and Georgia, 216–17 Elliott, Stephen (the younger), 32, 36, 83, 455, 521–22, 528, 532, 539, 540, 554, 556, 630 Elliott, William, 28, 32–33, 145–46, 355, 450, 532, 539, 555–56, 575, 734, 1077; Carolina Sports, 32, 355, 734 Ellis, A. G., 356 Ellis, George: Early English Poets, 501 Ellis, Shotwell & Company, 477 Ellis Island, 14 Ellsworth, Oliver, 816 Elmore, Franklin, 428 Elsa (slave), 74–75, 79 Elward, Richard, 477–80 Elzevir (publishers), 487, 493, 496 Emerald Isle Society, 288

Index Emerson, Edward, 42 Emerson, Frederick, 478; North American Almanac, 478 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 21, 41–43, 134, 426, 448, 480, 673, 1010, 1053, 1166–67, 1169, 1200 Emerson, William, 134 Emigration, 16, 77, 86, 128, 182–83, 233, 254, 318, 332, 341, 361, 468, 470, 492, 620, 770, 777, 891, 901, 944, 1083 Emory and Henry College (Va.), 513, 1095 Emory College (Ga.), 1095 Empiricism, 7, 240, 573, 756, 822, 850, 898, 1007, 1012, 1044, 1057–58, 1060, 1011–12, 1113, 1123–24 Encyclopedia Americana, 73, 1044 Encyclopedia Britannica, 488, 999 Encyclopédie, L’, 504, 1058 Engels, Friedrich, 378 England (and the English), 4, 35, 41, 70, 72, 76, 86, 94, 102–4, 114, 128, 130, 133, 137, 147, 158, 160, 167, 179, 183, 192, 195, 201, 207, 226, 237, 239, 249, 251, 288, 290– 91, 296, 305, 310, 312–17, 333, 356, 358, 365, 374, 379, 383–82, 403, 405, 422, 504, 554– 55, 559, 587, 594, 607, 617–19, 648, 651, 659, 681, 693, 704, 718, 735, 747, 754, 759, 784–85, 789, 802, 819–20, 822, 831, 896, 920, 941, 950–51, 953–54, 978, 1056, 1070– 72, 1076, 1083–84, 1099, 1142, 1154, 1173, 1187–88; influence on Virginia, 305–22, 647, 651, 704; intellectual life in, 15, 36, 54, 57, 96, 108, 139, 148, 217, 233, 235, 300, 307, 309, 379, 399, 418, 445, 478–79, 482, 492–93, 496–97, 500–501, 540, 545, 574, 594, 641, 684, 686, 692, 696, 698, 703, 705, 735, 755, 784, 865, 878, 888, 922, 953, 995–96, 1014, 1042, 1044, 1046–47, 1093, 1104, 1117, 1125, 1135, 1139, 1191; sojourns in, 46, 87, 91, 95, 108–11, 195, 306–7, 342, 509, 584, 694, 712, 1076; visitors from, 72, 88, 305, 403, 827 English, George Bethune, 164 English Civil War, 291, 594, 617 English language, 96–97, 123, 130, 133–34, 200, 202, 223, 234, 242–43, 248, 255, 285– 87, 292–93, 296–98, 324–25, 332, 402, 412–21, 441, 478, 482, 489, 502–3, 510, 521, 576, 582, 596, 604, 653–54, 672, 690–91, 693, 713, 738, 740, 755, 766, 796, 855, 905,

1313

986, 1048–49, 1061, 1071–72, 1079, 1081, 1138, 1176, 1194 Enlightenment, 6–7, 9–11, 17, 20–23, 116, 215, 238, 502, 597, 603, 609–10, 614, 684, 691, 694, 698, 754, 788, 822, 854, 880, 891, 939–40, 942–43, 949, 974, 987, 998, 1078–79, 1080, 1128 Eno, 287 Epic, 155, 603, 665, 684, 687, 725, 742, 746, 1105 Epicurus (and Epicureanism), 21, 125, 866, 997, 1040 Épinay, Louise-Florence, Mme d’, 265, 410 Episcopalianism (and Episcopalians), 10, 171–72, 368, 371, 457, 530, 615, 866, 873, 892, 943, 947, 990, 1036, 1070, 1074, 1094, 1098, 1100, 1103, 1113, 1115, 1117, 1150 Epistemology, 912, 961, 1183 Equality (and egalitarianism), 16, 47, 71, 233, 253, 266, 269, 271, 273, 313, 349, 358, 376, 416, 487, 612, 742, 777, 782, 803, 809, 814, 843, 853, 869–70, 873, 884, 901–2, 911, 941, 948–49, 977, 1072, 1079–80, 1150, 1154 Equiano, Olaudah: Interesting Narrative, 574 Erasmus, Desiderius, 323; De Conscribendis Epistolis, 441 Erskine (Yale student), 29 Erskine, Thomas: Truth of Revealed Religion, 501 Esménard, Madame d’, 103 Essays (and essayists), 17, 32, 217, 267, 390, 423, 425, 448, 496, 532–33, 536, 539, 554, 576, 584, 641, 654, 665, 684, 724, 799, 820, 903, 907, 966, 998–99, 1010, 1020, 1035, 1078, 1098, 1118, 1126, 1163, 1168 Essequebo, 1056 Ethics (and ethical), 85–86, 134, 256, 303–4, 453–54, 494, 522, 536, 556, 583, 592, 622, 688, 707, 756, 888, 896, 901, 942–43, 949, 952, 966, 968, 971, 974, 999, 1014, 1044–45, 1125, 1141, 1143, 1149, 1154, 1169 Ethiopia (and Ethiopians), 76, 151, 220, 224–26, 228–30, 239, 245, 248 Ethnicity, 4, 8, 221, 234, 237, 250–51, 285– 322, 364, 371, 386, 411–12, 529, 971–72, 1070, 1073, 1106 Ethnography, 24, 176, 182, 205, 215–16, 231, 242, 250–51, 269, 387, 498, 533, 607, 965–66

1314

Index

Eton College, 95, 110 Etruscans, 1111 Etymology, 234, 707, 897 Eulogy, 400, 442, 449, 485, 504, 639–40, 644–45, 658, 671, 707, 722, 848, 863, 1007, 1076, 1151 Euphradian Society, 528, 1021 Evangelicalism (and evangelicals), 20, 64, 68, 169–71, 187, 261, 304, 366, 371–72, 385, 410, 505, 548, 584, 615, 772, 775, 866, 959, 1069, 1094, 1109, 1111, 1114, 1119, 1137 Evans, Augusta, 11, 255, 267, 451, 576, 743, 748, 763, 770, 1161–70, 1176, 1185, 1188, 1195, 1199; Beulah, 267, 573, 743, 748, 1162–70, 1199; Inez , 763; Macaria, 576 Eve, 124, 242, 269 Eve, Paul Fitzsimons, 124 Evelyn, John: Diary, 482 Everett, Alexander, 546 Everett, Edward, 48, 129, 137, 154, 391, 431, 575, 1043 Evolution, 215, 219–20, 230, 240, 617, 686, 690–91, 829, 873, 975, 1128 Exile, 13, 73, 81, 89, 136, 156, 194, 268, 341– 42, 348, 372, 497, 584, 693, 725, 896, 1092, 1198–99 Expansion (and expansionism), 336, 833, 839, 965 Expatriation, 2, 13, 48, 69, 91, 153–54, 156, 186, 340–41, 517, 543, 584, 1054 Faery, 706, 710, 712–14, 721, 728, 731 Fairbairn, Henry: Political Economy of Railroads, 923 Fairbanks, Calvin, 678 Fairmount Water Works, 37 Falconer, William, 250–51 Falconnet, Jean-Louis, 95, 104 Fame, 275, 443, 462, 534, 560, 562, 579, 655, 659, 666, 704, 776, 839, 966, 984, 1164 Fanaticism, 33, 82, 291, 300–301, 350, 401, 433, 613, 811, 861, 874, 881, 1151 Farel, William, 145 Farmington, Conn., 70–71 Farrar, C. C. S., 604 Faulkner, William, 12, 357, 411, 703, 748 Fauquier County, Va., 807 Featherstonhaugh, George, 827 Federalist Papers, 500, 505, 553, 800, 819, 825, 856, 922

Federalists, 92, 305, 372, 553, 598, 644, 755, 819, 835, 859–60, 901, 948, 965 Felton, Cornelius, 45, 548 Female Literary Institute of Edina, 182 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe-, 82, 478, 499, 504, 891; Telemaque, 478 Fenland, 413 Ferdinand of Aragon, 159, 423 Ferguson, Adam, 594, 609, 698, 999; Institutes of Moral Philosophy, 496 Ferrara, 155 Feudalism (and feudal), 109, 296, 606–7, 311, 314, 317, 614, 742, 788, 896, 910, 974, 1180 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1051, 1166, 1169 Fez, 1076 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1, 1042, 1045, 1048, 1050–51, 1057, 1101, 1133, 1138, 1146 Field, Joseph M., 758 Fielding, Henry, 745–46, 762; Tom Jones, 313, 357, 881 Fields, James T., 578 Fiesole, 147 Fife, 63 Fillmore, Millard, 76, 734 Filmer, Robert, 784, 802, 820 Finns, 239, 647 Firdusi, Abul Qasim Mansur, 1105 First Presbyterian Church (Charleston, S.C.), 63 Fisk, Abijah, 512 Fisk, Alvarez, 512 Fitzhugh, George, 11, 100, 247, 326, 368, 391, 450–51, 470, 487, 578, 587, 654, 783, 938, 943, 946, 948, 951, 957, 959–62, 965–66, 971–91, 1056, 1065, 1151, 1198, 1200; Cannibals All!, 980–81, 983–84, 987; Sociolo for the South, 975, 984, 987 Fitzhugh, William H., 815 Flanders, 909 Flaubert, Gustave, 117, 1187 Fletcher, John (English playwright), 465, 740 Fletcher, John: Studies on Slavery, 948 Fleurance, 113 Flodoardin, 1088 Flood, 244, 607 Florence, 104, 110, 139, 147, 153–57, 208, 283, 295, 483, 496, 593, 598, 728, 770, 787, 1164

Index Florida, 6, 14–15, 20, 63, 155–56, 256, 259, 286, 335, 381, 545, 624–25, 758, 770, 839, 1074 Florida Historical Society, 625 Flourens, Jean Pierre, 227 Flournoy, John J., 636 Folkestone, 1181 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de, 504 Force, Peter, 123 Foreign, the (and foreigners), 2, 24, 52–54, 74, 83–89, 103, 114, 167, 171, 175–76, 187– 88, 199–200, 243, 266, 296, 349, 376, 416, 442, 489, 516, 528, 546, 567, 584, 662, 703, 721, 766, 807, 894, 903, 953, 974, 1072, 1101 Forsyth, John, 159–60, 1087, 1089 Forsyth County, N.C., 303 Fortia, Marquis de, 492 Fort Donelson, 80 Fort Moultrie, 587 Fort Sumter, 468, 1191 Forum, 147, 151 Foubert, Henri, 117 Foucher, M. (book agent), 487 Foulah, 177–78, 181 Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Freiherr de la Motte: Undine, 501, 503 Fourier, Charles (and Fourierists), 463, 586, 905, 958, 969, 975 Fox, Charles James, 802 Frampton, Lingard A., 518 France (and the French), 71, 76, 85–86, 91, 93, 112, 128–29, 132, 142, 150, 156, 183, 190– 91, 193, 210, 225, 234, 238, 264, 285–86, 288–89, 291, 294, 296–300, 333, 350, 379, 388, 403, 405, 409, 445, 468, 502, 586, 617, 619–20, 650, 657, 662, 707, 720, 770, 774, 784, 810–11, 814, 886, 893–94, 901, 905, 941, 983, 998, 1041, 1070, 1083–84, 1087, 1142, 1173, 1176; intellectual life in, 24, 82, 176, 217, 227, 231, 240, 441, 481, 492, 496– 97, 504, 521, 533, 566, 580, 585–86, 594–95, 672, 686, 693, 696, 698–99, 705, 745, 878, 888, 896, 905, 953, 987, 996, 1008–9, 1013, 1015, 1029–30, 1041–42, 1054, 1058, 1118, 1187–88; sojourns in, 92, 94, 98–99, 102, 105, 111–25, 293, 409, 483, 500, 597, 1092 French language, 10, 91, 96–97, 103, 105, 114, 130, 142, 163, 208, 242, 254–56, 267,

1315

286–87, 290, 292–93, 297, 325, 327–31, 409, 413, 415–16, 479, 491, 503, 548, 576, 582, 584–85, 633, 684, 1048, 1104, 1187, 1197 Frangipini family, 1076 Frankfort, Ky., 343, 345, 513, 515, 1035, 1198 Frankfurt, 228, 483 Franklin, Benjamin, 19, 233, 908 Franklin, La., 511 Franklin, Sir John Franklin: Journey to the Polar Sea, 500 Franklin College, 457, 513, 515, 520, 1091 Franklin Debating Society of Richmond, 424 Franklin Society of Lexington, 423–425 Fraser, Alexander, 1135 Fraser, Charles, 50, 263, 402, 431, 434, 437, 451, 555, 1077; Reminiscences of Charleston, 362, 484 Fraser, William, 1077 Fredericksburg, Va., 38, 185, 316, 962 Fredericksburg Arena, 38 Frederick the Great, 501 Frederick William IV, 86, 454 Fredet, Peter, 478 Free Church of Scotland, 64, 67 Freedmen’s Bureau, 1198 Freiburg, 331 French, Benjamin Franklin, 512 French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 82 French Benevolent Society, 288 French Revolution, 91, 128, 133, 139, 207, 221, 375, 378–79, 387, 403, 408, 496, 504, 558, 597, 605–7, 619–20, 680, 785, 789, 805–6, 811, 819, 871, 884, 915, 958, 999 Fries, Francis, 303–4 Fries, Henry, 303 Fries, William, 303 Frisian language, 112 Froissart, Jean, 728 Frontier, 10, 21, 146, 184, 210, 232, 248, 342, 448, 634, 682, 707, 756, 759, 816, 853, 1035 Froriep, Friedrich Ludwig, 134, 137–38 Frost, Henry, 431, 436–37 Fuller, Margaret, 272, 275 Fuller, Richard, 948, 959, 1089 Fuller, Thomas: History of the University of Cambridge, 482 Fulton (Yale student), 30

1316

Index

Furman, James C., 362, 1096 Furman, Richard, 413 Furman, Thomas F., 339, 351 Furman Institution, 1095–96 Gadsden, Christopher, 56, 555 Gaels (and Gaelic), 287, 510, 690–91 Gaillard, Dr., 431 Gaillard, Peter, 359 Gaines, Richard M., 479 Galatia, 235 Gales, Joseph, 480 Galignani’s Messenger, 123, 584 Galilee, Sea of, 1168 Galilei, Galileo, 609 Gallatin, Albert, 86, 102, 639 Gallicanism, 1083 Gall, Franz Joseph, 1018 Galt, John: The Ayrshire Legatees and The Entail, 499 Galvani, Luigi, 348 Ganges River, 225, 239, 891 Garden, Alexander: Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War, 634 Garden, Alexander (‘‘Commissary’’), 216, 232 Garland, Hugh A., 431, 444, 546, 655, 667–71 Garnett, James Mercer, 641 Garnett, M. R. H., 327, 877, 905, 932, 1047 Garrett, Thomas Miles, 458, 463, 523 Garrett, William, 352 Garrick, David, 721 Garrick Club, 58 Garrison, William Lloyd, 32, 39, 420, 733, 769, 1087 Gaspey, Thomas: The Lollards, 499 Gaston, William, 506–7 Gattegna, Benjamin, 228 Gaudot, François, 99–100 Gaul, 235 Gautier, Théophile, 115 Gay, John: Bear’s Opera, 735 Gayangos y Arce, Pascual de, 159 Gayarré, Charles Étienne Arthur, 113, 159, 195, 208, 289, 292–301, 340, 451, 464, 487, 490, 548, 576, 625, 632, 746–47, 763, 1198; Essai historique sur la Louisiane, 293; Histoire de la Louisiane, 293; History of Louisiana, 294–302 Gayle, John, 456

Gayle, Sarah, 456 Gelasius I, 1088 Genealogy, 91, 234, 291, 318, 320, 384–85, 682, 896, 981–82, 1147 Genesis, 269, 1110, 1125 Geneva, 92, 95–96, 98, 105, 145, 453, 597 Genius, 48, 55, 65, 132, 148, 222, 251, 319, 349, 390, 403, 406, 452, 465, 560, 563, 569, 578, 586, 609–10, 640, 651, 659, 670, 689, 700, 706–7, 724, 731, 737, 756, 769, 784, 914, 1064 Genlis, Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, Mme de: Memoirs, 504 Genoa (and Genoese), 86, 103, 150, 1172 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 235, 593 Geography (and geographers), 181, 198, 202, 225, 227, 254–56, 259, 324, 337, 355, 414, 482, 494–95, 498, 504, 521, 543–44, 592, 601, 630, 700, 796, 831–32, 859, 988, 1147 Geology (and geologists), 54, 89, 105, 157, 227, 232, 237, 240, 242–44, 247, 250, 334, 352, 440, 482, 533, 539, 582, 607, 623, 1113, 1124–25 George III, 5, 130, 305, 499 Georgetown, D.C., 77, 172, 576, 1090 Georgetown College (Washington, D.C.), 316, 513, 515, 520 Georgetown College (Ky.), 513 Georgia (and Georgians), 5–6, 20, 35, 61, 84, 171–72, 176, 216, 228, 232–33, 259, 288, 335, 343–44, 377, 384, 386, 419, 457, 477, 508, 513, 515, 523, 532, 545, 563, 595–96, 599, 623–24, 629, 636, 738, 747, 770, 813, 879, 930, 1001, 1072, 1084; persons associated with, 15, 29, 118, 121, 123–24, 150, 153, 160, 267, 286, 351, 353, 383, 543–44, 546, 556, 565, 630, 632, 648, 758, 770, 955, 1068, 1087, 1090, 1095, 1200 Georgia (in the Caucasus), 228–30, 233, 1104 Georgia Analytical Repository, 335 Georgia Blister and Critic, 335 Georgia Botanic Journal and College Sentinel, 335 Georgia Christian Repertory, 335, 477 Georgia Citizen Advertiser, 335 Georgia Constitutionalist, 335 Georgia Female College, 259 Georgia Historical Society, 508, 513, 515, 599, 629, 632, 636; Collections, 624, 632 Georgia Home Gazette, 335 Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader, 335 Georgia Reporter and Christian Gazette, 335

Index German Friendly Society, 288–89 German language, 50, 73–74, 88, 130, 132, 135, 137, 142–43, 162, 242, 286, 288–89, 327, 329–32, 493, 503, 548, 567, 584–85, 684, 717, 1043, 1046, 1048–49, 1052, 1071, 1103–4, 1118, 1187 German Museum, 503 German Society, 288 Germantown, Pa., 128 German Volunteers, 288 Germany (and Germans); 76, 83, 85–87, 114, 202, 235, 238, 285–88, 310, 312, 318, 330, 412, 429, 436–37, 449, 453, 482–83, 522, 524, 545, 169, 647, 726, 752, 874, 1067, 1070–71, 1087, 1092, 1094; intellectual life in, 10, 98–99, 133–34, 176, 217, 222– 32, 240, 247, 305, 388–89, 407, 435, 468, 492, 496–97, 504, 552, 560, 566, 580, 586, 595, 672, 684, 691–97, 699, 703, 705, 753, 920, 953, 983, 988, 996, 1022, 1035, 1041– 54, 1057, 1060, 1107–8, 1133, 1137–39, 1141, 1147–48, 1164, 1167–68, 1176; sojourns in, 74, 91–92, 110, 125–45, 233, 331, 483, 616, 1100, 1133, 1170, 1175 Gettysburg, battle of, 43, 1176, 1185, 1191 Geuns, Stephanus Gosuini, 228 Ghent, 137, 483, 915 Gibbes, George, 121 Gibbes, Lewis R., 54, 122, 246, 433, 537–38 Gibbes, Morgan, 121 Gibbes, Robert Wilson, 88, 178, 210; Fossil Squalidae, 583 Gibbon, Edward, 98, 145, 147, 173, 257, 325, 459, 463, 470, 493, 499, 594, 596–97, 602, 604, 613, 672, 704, 922, 1077; Miscellaneous Writings, 493 Gibbons, L., 543 Gibbs, Colonel, 353 Gibraltar, 1176 Giddings, Joshua Reed, 733 Gielgud, John, 452 Gildersleeve, Basil, 142–45, 327, 360, 484, 1074; De Porphyrii, 145 Gildersleeve, Benjamin, 142 Giles, William Branch, 640, 781, 814, 893 Gillespie, James, 1020, 1115, 1146 Gillies, John, 594 Gilman, Caroline Howard, 8, 16, 37, 267, 337, 368–69, 371, 451, 542, 548, 552, 573, 576, 676, 717, 745, 747, 764–71; Curiosity, Indulgence, and Affectation, 583; Oracles

1317

from the Poets, 582; Recollections of a Housekeeper, 764; Recollections of New England Bride, 764; Recollections of a Southern Matron, 764–69, 747 Gilman, Samuel, 37, 42, 66, 107, 368–69, 428–31, 434, 448, 451, 547–48, 577, 691, 717–18, 1013; Contributions to Religion, 1098 Gilmer, Francis Walker, 100, 216, 351, 413, 519, 663, 666, 1019 Gilmor, Robert, Jr., 630 Girard, Marie Drivon, 114; Histoire des États Unis, 114 Girard College, 74, 85 Girard House, 36 Girardin, Emile, 115 Girardin, Louis Hue, 641, 646 Girlhood (and girls), 36–37, 60, 79, 98, 100, 112–13, 116, 118, 186, 208, 228–29, 254–55, 258, 271, 274, 286, 302, 327, 350, 422, 534, 677, 678, 688, 731, 745, 749, 768, 775, 916, 966, 1074, 1116, 1149, 1163, 1197 Glasgow, 63–64, 67, 69, 102, 107, 496, 584, 763, 996, 1133 Gliddon, George, 165, 242, 245–46 Gnosticism, 958, 1014, 1029, 1065 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, comte de, 221, 239, 248, 1073 Gobright, John C.: Monumental City, or Baltimore Guide Book, 363 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 479, 538, 978 Godolphin (horse), 387–88 Godwin, William, 641, 789, 806, 880, 887, 908; Political Justice, 791 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 21, 133–37, 142– 43, 147, 331, 500–501, 503, 560, 582, 672, 693, 696, 739, 1009, 1045, 1048, 1166–67, 1187; Autobiography, 135, 500, 672; Faust, 133; Hermann und Dorothea, 137; Werther, 503 Gold Coast, 176 Goldsmith, Oliver, 151, 225, 417, 594, 739– 40, 760; Citizen of the World, 501; Vicar of Wakefield, 486, 501 Golgotha, 227 Gooch, Philip Claiborne, 117 Gordon, Charles George, 168 Gordon, Thomas, 785, 837 Gordon, William F., 812, 814–15 Gordon, Yorick Sterne, 358 Gore, Christopher, 517 Gorham, John Warren, 168

1318

Index

Gosse, Philip Henry, 53 Gothic (genre), 10, 108, 159, 314, 343, 710, 722, 747–50, 752–56, 760, 762, 932, 1079, 1152 Goths (and Gothic), 125, 200, 235–38, 690, 788, 1174 Göttingen, 5, 22, 123, 126, 130, 132–34, 136– 40, 143, 223, 227–28, 331, 336, 483, 514, 595, 693, 1015 Gottschalk, Edward, 114 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 114–15, 208 Gourdin, Robert Newton, 290, 406, 1100, 1102 Gracchus, Caius, 482, 716–17 Grady, Henry W., 722, 970 Graham’s Magazine, 479, 538, 542, 549 Grammar (and grammarians), 173, 180–81, 259–60, 323–24, 327, 330, 412–15, 418–19, 478, 493, 510, 521, 596, 691, 740, 766, 897, 983, 1106 Granada, 226 Grand Bassa, 182 Grand Tour, 90–91, 105, 126, 140, 682 Grant, Ann McVickar: Memoirs of an American Lady, 499 Grant, Elizabeth, 104 Granville, N.C., 366 Grattan, Henry, 1083 Gray, Thomas: Ele in a Country Churchyard, 716 Grayson, William John, 355, 372, 375, 377, 391, 410–11, 416–18, 425, 484–85, 561, 673, 682, 705, 719, 732–41, 947, 957, 1102, 1198; Chicora, 736; The Country, 418, 732, 736; Hireling and the Slave, 418, 485, 732–36, 738 Great Dismal Swamp, 374 Grebo language, 180–81 Greece and Greeks (ancient), 22, 51, 125, 130, 132, 144, 155, 178, 201, 235–36, 254, 270, 311, 422, 503, 510, 592–93, 595, 607–13, 615, 620, 694–96, 698, 721, 811, 982, 995, 1012, 1044, 1058, 1099, 1113, 1116, 1143, 1168 Greece and Greeks (modern), 73, 92–93, 114, 162–64, 167, 169, 504, 564, 721 Greek language, 62, 88, 129, 142–43, 173, 254–55, 258–60, 274, 322–27, 355, 413– 44, 493, 503, 530, 593, 673, 684, 914, 1105, 1107 Greek Orthodox Church, 1104 Greek Revival, 343 Greeley, Horace, 548

Green, Duff, 1090 Green, William Mercer, 740 Greene, George Washington, 154 Greene, John Bulkeley, 122 Greene, Nathanael, 154, 499 Greenland, 225 Greenleaf, Simon, 43, 81 Greenough, Horatio, 154 Greensboro, N.C., 260, 346 Greenville, S.C., 1095–96 Greenville, Va., 422 Greenway, E., 253 Greenwich, 55 Gregory, Dr., 1017 Gregory XVI, 1082, 1086, 1091 Gregory the Great, 1088; Moralia in Job, 492 Grenada, 160 Griesbach, Johann Jakob, 530 Grigsby, Elizabeth Blair, 637 Grigsby, Hugh Blair, 11, 16, 29–32, 36–38, 45, 51, 129, 147, 307, 319–22, 325, 339, 350– 51, 354, 356, 388, 397–98, 400–401, 406, 416, 418, 424, 442, 450, 464, 485–87, 490–91, 493, 548, 556, 595–96, 603, 635– 54, 669, 784, 800, 1009, 1178–79, 1180–82; Letters of a South-Carolinian, 442, 640–42; Virginia Convention of 1776, 485, 645–53; Virginia Convention of 1788, 646 Grigsby, Mary Venable Carrington, 637 Grimball, J. Berkeley, 509 Grimké, Angelina, 267–69, 271, 273–74 Grimke, Frederick, 388, 448, 865, 1053 Grimké, John Faucherand, 267 Grimké, Sarah, 15, 254, 255, 261, 267–76, 1048; Equality of the Sexes, 269–73 Grimké, Thomas Smith, 28, 29, 48, 235–36, 265, 325–26, 425, 447, 451, 507, 576–77, 593, 698–99, 703 Grimm, Frédéric-Melchior, baron de, 504 Grimm, Jakob, 727 Grimm, Wilhelm, 727 Grimshaw, William, 254 Griswold, Rufus W., 430, 433–34, 579, 1047 Grotius, Hugo, 897, 943, 961 Guadeloupe, 228 Guerrero, Vincente, 199 Guesclin, Bertrand du, 582, 622, 719 Guiana, 342, 1056 Guicciardini, Francesco, 493, 496, 594 Guildford County, N.C., 346 Guinea, 181, 228, 286

Index Guizot, François, 82, 316, 470, 482, 599, 603, 605, 614, 616, 618 Gulf of Mexico, 6, 158, 210 Gullah, 178, 287, 415 Gunning, Susannah: Delves: A Welch Tale, 501 Gurie, 178 Gutzlaff, Karl, 187–88 Habersham, Robert, 217, 499 Haiti, 185, 207–9, 286, 302, 496, 720, 883–84, 1082, 1086, 1091–92 Hakka, 187 Hale, Sarah, 548 Halifax Fisheries dispute, 1199 Hall, A. Oakey: Manhattaner in New Orleans, 363 Hall, Basil, 52–53, 291, 305, 533, 953 Hall, Francis: Travels in France, 500 Hallam, Henry, 257, 594, 614, 618, 621; Constitutional History of England, 594; Europe in the Middle Ages, 594 Halle, 483, 1125 Hallé, Charles, 114 Halle, P-Étienne Herbin de: Conquêtes des Français en E pte, 504 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 49 Haller, Albrecht von, 1009, 1015 Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O.: Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 482 Ham, 182, 184, 244, 953 Haman, 846 Hamburg, 74, 79, 331, 483, 1074, 1100 Hamilton, Alexander (the diarist), 410; Ancient and Honourable Tuesday Club, 439, 553 Hamilton, Alexander (the politician), 86, 785, 792, 797, 819–20, 856, 860, 882 Hamilton, Anthony: Memoirs of Count Grammont, 504 Hamilton, James, 54, 122, 533, 540, 825–26, 1091 Hamilton, Lady Emma, 500–501 Hamilton, Sir William, 1001, 1133–39, 1144, 1169 Hamilton College, 35 Hamlin, Cyrus, 170 Hammond, James Henry, 89, 100, 108–9, 147, 182, 327, 340, 372, 398, 404, 442, 450, 474, 578, 812, 833, 863, 948, 953–60, 966, 1068, 1198; Two Letters, 442, 953–59

1319

Hammond, Marcellus C. M., 1068 Hampden, John, 318, 422, 592, 784 Hampden-Sydney College, 38, 136, 231, 628, 1043, 1094 Hampton, Frank, 57 Hampton, Sally Baxter, 57 Hampton, Wade, 88 Hampton Legion, 1192 Han Chinese, 336 Hanckel, Christian, 392 Hannibal, 553 Hanover, 126, 130, 515, 693, 809–10 Hanoverian dynasty, 618, 770, 774 Harby, Isaac, 11, 331, 359, 445, 1070, 1076– 82; Alberti, 331, 1078; Alexander Severus, 1078; Gordian Knot, 1078; Miscellaneous Writings, 445 Harby, Isaac (ancestor), 1076 Harby, Rebecca Moses, 1076 Harby, Solomon, 1076 Hardeeville, S.C., 359 Hardeman, Ann, 255, 405, 463, 473 Hardeman, William, 473 Hardshell Baptists, 1068 Hare, Judge, 1196 Harmonica, 501 Harper, William, 11, 578, 587, 946–53, 956–57, 959, 966, 977 Harper and Calvo, 573 Harper Brothers, 550, 572, 575–76 Harper’s Ferry, 33 Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 307, 542 Harrington, James, 18, 337, 365–66, 805, 820, 1045; Oceana, 784 Harris, George Washington, 755 Harris, Mr., 633 Harris, William Torrey, 1054 Harrison, D. W., 477 Harrison, Gessner, 326, 327, 332, 593 Harrison, Jesse Burton, 118, 125, 128, 136– 40, 233, 286, 305, 331, 340, 529, 942, 1043–44, 1072–73 Harrison, Samuel Jordan, 136 Harrodsburg, Ky., 380 Hart, Joel Tanner, 345 Hart, Samuel, 477, 481 Hartford, 299, 301 Hartley, David, 996, 1014–15, 1025, 1031; Observations on Man, 1014 Hartwell, Henry, 309; Present State of Virginia, 309

1320

Index

Harvard College, 29, 31–33, 41–42, 45, 47– 48, 56, 73–74, 128–29, 136, 146, 164, 267, 330, 352, 380, 509, 514–17, 520, 533, 572, 577, 708, 841, 878, 1043, 1110, 1114, 1129, 1200 Hassan (‘‘the Nubian’’), 228 Hassell, Mrs., 77 Hasty Pudding Club, 32 Hathway, G. W., 61 Havana, 158, 192 Hawes, Henrietta, 946 Hawkesworth, William, 510 Hawks, Francis, 43–44, 165, 189, 341, 648– 50, 662 Hawley, William, 1090 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 463, 573; Scarlet Letter, 470, 579 Hay, Matthew, 685 Haydn, Joseph, 500 Hayne, Isaac, 721 Hayne, Mrs., 455 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 39, 100, 157, 361, 370, 395, 404, 428, 447, 451, 481, 484, 535, 537, 573, 577, 580, 728, 730–32, 1171, 1186, 1200; Sonnets, 573 Hayne, Robert Young, 46, 48, 531, 533, 558, 575, 700–701, 818, 825, 1091 Haynesworth, Richard, 150 Haywood, John, 623–24 Hazen, Edward: Grammatic Reader, 478 Hazlitt, William, 465 Heath, James Ewell, 44, 47, 700–701 Heathens, 87, 956–57, 965, 974, 1072, 1128– 29 Hebe, 972 Heber, Reginald, 239, 530 Hébert, Michel, 423 Hebrew Benevolent Society, 288 Hebrew Harmonic Society, 288 Hebrew Orphan Society, 288 Hebrew Young Men’s Literary Association, 288 Hebrides, 228 Hedrick, Benjamin Sherwood, 39, 70, 332, 340, 372, 426, 563 Hedrick, Mary Ellen Thompson, 39, 372, 380, 392 Heeren, Arnold H. L., 130, 132, 257, 599, 607–9, 613, 1045, 1047 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (and

Hegelianism), 17, 23–24, 138, 395, 694, 867, 872, 875, 999, 1001, 1038, 1041, 1044– 46, 1048–49, 1051–54, 1058, 1063, 1110, 1113, 1131, 1138–39, 1141–42, 1144, 1166; Phenomenolo , 1038; Philosophy of History, 138, 1048 Heidelberg, 95, 140, 454, 483, 1164 Heine, Heinrich, 132, 134, 692–93, 1051 Helper, Hinton Rowan, 340; Impending Crisis, 582 Helvétius, Anne-Catherine de Ligneville, 1019 Hemans, Felicia Dorothea, 676, 718, 740 Henderson, Richard, 809–10 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 1139 Hennebert, Jean-Baptiste-François: Histoire naturelle, 224 Henry (slave), 74 Henry, Jacob, 1072 Henry, Joseph, 631 Henry, Patrick, 18, 311–12, 341, 345, 444, 500, 501, 610, 641, 646–47, 650, 652, 655, 658–63, 665–66, 680, 784, 871 Henry, Robert, 331, 407, 451, 559, 604, 606, 1001–10, 1012, 1014–15, 1020–21, 1023, 1030, 1038, 1042 Henry III, 617 Henry V, 706 Henry VIII, 478, 600 Hentz, Caroline Lee, 267, 563, 573, 576, 740, 747–48, 770–74, 1166; Linda, 573; Planter’s Northern Bride, 747, 770–74, 1166 Hentz, Charles, 464 Hentz, Nicholas, 329 Heraclitus, 1113, 1184 Herbelot, Barthélemy d’, 173 Herbemont, Nicholas, 71 Hercules, 153, 234 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 598, 603, 606–7, 693, 788, 803, 1050, 1057, 1078, 1181, 1183 Heriot, Edwin, 534 Hermann, Karl Friedrich, 143–44; Political Antiquities of Greece, 144 Herodotus, 503, 593, 607 Herschel, John, 1061 Hertford County, N.C., 458 Hessians, 139 Hewat, Alexander: Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, 595 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 595

Index Heyward, Nathaniel, 93, 192, 408 Hibernian Society, 56, 288, 1091 Higgins, Godfrey, 236, 555; Celtic Druids, 236 Highlands, Scottish, 102, 107, 256, 701, 734, 756, 770 Hildebrandt, Georg Friedrich, 228 Hill, John Henry, 163 Hillard, George, 74–75, 78, 81, 83, 148, 397, 448, 453–54, 1129 Hilliard, Henry, 257 Hillsborough, N.C., 256, 740 Hilton, Robert Benjamin, 1074 Himalayas, 236 Hindostan, 270, 1173 Hindus, 189, 236, 239, 1046 Hippias, 1058, 1063 Hippocrates, 226 Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida, 335 Historical Society of Louisiana Historicism, 11, 22, 132, 201–2, 215, 295, 598– 99, 603–6, 698, 798, 811, 870, 935, 943, 1056, 1118, 1147, 1180–83 Hobart, John Henry, 488 Hobbes, Thomas (and Hobbesian), 482, 685, 802–3, 808, 831, 853, 862, 974, 1008–9, 1045, 1116 Hobson, J. A., 935 Hodge, Charles, 966, 1126, 1129, 1135 Hodgson, William Brown, 24, 123, 172–77, 181, 448, 507 Hofland, Barbara: Patience and Perseverance, 501 Hogarth, William, 715, 735, 1135 Hoge, John Blair, 103, 105–6, 109, 112, 124, 155 Hoge, Moses Drury, 366 Hogg, James, 104 Hohanissean, Sarkis, 170 Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron d’, 116, 1168 Holbrook, John Edwards, 119, 429, 431; Ichthyolo of South Carolina, 485 Holcombe, James P., 1069 Holcombe, Thomas Berkeley, 524 Holcombe, William Henry, 184, 323, 332, 367, 407, 464–68, 540, 654, 740, 1069 Holmes, George Frederick, 10–11, 48, 83, 88–89, 144, 190, 327, 342, 356, 391, 455, 535, 537, 540, 547, 549, 551, 559, 571, 578, 599, 603, 605, 745–46, 763, 903, 973,

1321

1024–25, 1040, 1042, 1047–48, 1053–66, 1134–35 Holmes, Henry, 1056 Holmes, Isaac, 565 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 32 Holyrood, palace of, 107 Home Missionary Magazine, 500 Homeopathy, 367, 466–68, 1069 Homer, 257, 323–24, 496, 552, 641, 689, 740, 1077 Homosexuality, 19, 459 Hong Kong, 192 Hong Xiuquan, 187–89 Honor (and the honorable), 31, 35, 98, 100, 125, 168, 174, 176, 251, 265, 298, 302, 308, 313, 318, 325, 350, 354, 377–78, 410, 418, 422, 430, 439, 482, 527, 529, 553, 556, 614, 642, 649, 653, 655, 666, 669, 746, 769, 772, 838, 840, 932, 958, 978, 1171, 1173–74, 1187, 1192 Hooker, Edward, 70–73, 87 Hooker, Richard, 493 Hooper, Frances Pollock Jones, 407 Hooper, George, 61 Hooper, Johnson Jones, 380, 388, 756, 758 Hooper, William, 407, 654, 1096 Hopeton Plantation, 54 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 260, 324, 456, 494, 499, 548, 642, 686, 705, 738, 985, 1020, 1077 Horn, Cape, 193 Horne, Thomas H.: Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, 500–501 Horsley, Samuel, 1096 Horton, George Moses, 739–41; Hope of Liberty, 740; Poems of a Slave, 740; Poetical Works, 740 Hospitals (in Paris), 119–20 Hottentots, 237, 689 Hottinger family, 95 Hotz, Henry, 248 Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 344 Houston, James, 323 Houston, Samuel R., 169 Howard, C. W., 263 Howard, Mary W., 501 Howe, George: Discourse on Theological Education, 1097 Howe, Hezekiah, 576 Howison, Robert Reid, 316, 397

1322

Index

Hubbard, Fordyce Mitchell: North-Carolina Reader, number II, 346 Hubbard, Oliver Payser, 29 Hudson River, 15, 37, 814 Huger, Alfred, 28, 111, 290, 339, 406, 484, 1099–1100 Huger, Daniel Elliott, 436 Huger, E. P., 502 Huger, W. H., 150 Hughes, Henry, 11, 16, 450, 462–64, 578, 948, 952, 959–60, 966–72, 991, 1056, 1198; Treatise on Slavery, 578, 966–72 Huguenots, 8, 91, 195, 285–86, 288–92, 318, 357–58, 381, 383, 434, 533, 594, 647, 1099 Humanism, 616, 1065, 1131, 1143 Humanity, 77, 90, 98, 194, 229, 318, 357, 409, 434, 453, 599, 608, 654, 663, 720, 790, 798, 840, 842, 867, 874, 890, 908, 939, 961, 964, 967, 978, 1006, 1061–62, 1110–12, 1142, 1153, 1156, 1172, 1175 Humboldt, Alexander von, 24, 88, 196–97, 227, 331, 1009, 1045–46, 1048, 1142; Cosmos, 227, 1142; Essai politique, 196; Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland, 196 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 130, 132, 138, 607, 1106 Hume, David (and Humeanism), 7, 21, 105, 107–8, 134, 222, 237, 399, 459, 470, 493, 496, 500, 594, 596, 599, 602–3, 608–9, 614, 618, 684–86, 688, 691, 701, 704, 781, 790, 799, 880, 908, 990, 996–1000, 1002, 1007–13, 1014, 1020–21, 1026–28, 1032, 1034, 1038, 1040, 1042, 1045, 1049, 1052, 1054–56, 1063, 1113, 1118, 1131–33, 1140, 1183, 1191; Correspondence, 496; Essays, 496; History of England, 496, 500; Treatise of Human Nature, 1020, 1140 Hume, David (seventeenth-century historian): House and Race of Douglas and Angus, 234 Hume, William, 134 Humor, 54, 354, 372, 380, 404, 411, 415, 451, 476, 539, 642, 727, 747–48, 755, 759, 795, 987, 1164 Hundley, Daniel, 15, 352, 375, 379–82, 384–88 Hundley, Elisha, 380 Hundley, Malinda Robinson, 380 Hungary (and Hungarians), 146, 325 Huns, 236

Hunter, Anne, 95 Hunter, John, 229, 231 Hunter, Miss (of Savannah), 499 Hunter, Mr., 326 Hunter, Robert M. T., 973 Hunter, Rowland, 582 Huntsville, Ala., 115, 380, 442, 624 Hus, Jan, 302 Hutcheson, Frances, 998, 1010; Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1001 Hutchings, Andrew J., 263 Hutchinson, Thomas, 596: Province of Massachusetts Bay, 482 Hutton, Catherine: Oakwood Hall, 501 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1135 Hybridity, 223, 226, 241–43, 245, 347, 528, 971 Hygiene, 968, 971–72 Hyperborean race, 238 Iberians, 204, 510 Idealism (as a philosophical position), 874, 996, 1000–1001, 1013, 1046, 1060, 1112 Immigration (and immigrants), 8, 85, 87, 91, 202, 285–86, 291, 305, 429, 431, 628, 942, 944, 965, 1054, 1071 Imperialism (and empires), 2–3, 5–6, 22, 24, 43, 109, 139, 159, 173, 182–83, 207, 211, 228, 250, 294, 301, 308, 462, 483, 492, 523, 557, 607, 609, 613, 707, 723, 731, 736, 774, 800, 833, 839, 909, 916, 924, 926, 929, 936–37, 953, 974, 982–83, 1079, 1179, 1181, 1199 Independent Order of the Sons of Ham, 182 India, 3, 63, 93, 138, 165, 170, 189, 191, 239, 248, 496, 607 Indiana, 62, 65, 337, 516 Indianapolis, Ind., 515, 1126 Indian Ocean, 191 Indians (in Mexico), 725, 736, 774, 775, 807, 839–40, 854, 927, 957, 1087 Indians (Native Americans), 2, 6, 37, 228, 233–34, 242, 266, 270, 287, 479, 516, 533, 623, 625, 628, 630, 634, 703, 707, 723, 725, 736, 774–75, 807, 839–40, 854, 867, 927, 949, 957, 1067, 1087, 1108 Indonesia, 93, 328 Ingersoll, J. B., 28 Ingham, Samuel, 928 Ingraham, D. N., 167

Index Ingraham, Edward D., 486 Ingraham, Joseph Holt, 583, 750; Sunny South, 442 Innocent III, 492 Inquisition, Holy, 160 Institut Afforty, 114 Intolerance, 85, 160, 205, 268, 889, 1016, 1119, 1126, 1128–29, 1175 Ionia, 343, 611 Iowa, 337, 516 Iredell, James, 325 Ireland (and the Irish), 8, 15, 62–63, 65, 67, 89, 101, 106–7, 121, 285, 287–90, 307, 310, 312, 314, 318, 370, 383, 413–14, 479, 496– 97, 499, 545, 596, 647, 758, 842, 848, 1067, 1074, 1082–84, 1086 Irish Jasper Greens, 288 Irish Union Society, 288 Iroquoian, 287 Irving, Alexander, 105 Irving, Edward: Judgments to Come, 501; Oracles of God, 500 Irving, John Beaufain, 111; Day on Cooper River, 342 Irving, Henry, 559 Irving, Peter, 102 Irving, Washington, 41, 102, 150, 159, 314, 391, 499, 557, 564, 581, 586, 593, 703, 760, 762; Bracebridge Hall, 314, 760; George Washington, 41; Salmagundi, 760; Tales of a Traveller, 499 Isaac (slave), 74 Isabella of Castile, 159, 423 Islam (and Muslims), 164, 171, 173, 176–77, 181, 189, 270, 1067, 1128 Israel (and Israelites), 348, 473, 629, 1057, 1071, 1078–81 Issy, 1084 Istanbul, 167, 170–72, 174 Italian language, 91, 96, 105, 142, 154, 242, 288, 327, 329–31, 496, 503, 593, 684, 699, 1104 Italy (and Italians), 15, 88, 92, 95–96, 99– 100, 103–5, 111, 114, 145, 147–58, 161, 172, 235, 285, 288, 331, 483, 492, 496–97, 500– 504, 521, 584, 615–16, 622, 638, 672, 694, 696, 722, 883, 982, 1045, 1086–87, 1170, 1174 Iturbide, Agustín de, 196–97 Ives, Levi Silliman, 61

1323

Ivry, 291 Izard, Alice DeLancey, 91, 97–100, 109, 216, 264–65, 328, 407, 409, 445, 594 Izard, Elizabeth Middleton, 94 Izard, Emma Middleton, 94 Izard, Henry, 94 Izard, Mary, 94 Izard, Mary C., 81 Izard, Ralph (the elder), 91–92, 444 Izard, Ralph (the younger), 94 Izard, Walter, 94 Jackson, Andrew, 2, 10, 16, 153, 160, 173, 263, 298–301, 306, 350, 418, 472, 499, 505, 722, 782, 801, 818, 827, 830, 833, 836–49, 852, 854–55, 859–60, 862, 871, 917, 928–29, 933 Jackson, Andrew (senior), 839 Jackson, Elizabeth Hutchinson, 839 Jackson, Henry Rootes, 742 Jackson, Miss., 343, 473, 513, 516, 578, 624 Jackson, Thomas Jonathan (‘‘Stonewall’’), 425 Jacksonianism, 368, 372, 381, 422, 550, 553, 568, 612, 637, 643, 772, 782, 796, 911, 919, 923, 931, 1149 Jacobean, the, 314, 750, 796 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 1048, 1059–60 Jacobins (and Jacobinism), 78, 375, 620, 670, 810, 819, 822, 896, 962, 1152 Jacobites, 172, 381, 687, 770, 774–75 Jacobs, Harriet, 52, 677–78; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 678 Jaffa, 168 Jamaica, 3, 166, 207, 224, 496–97, 1076 James, Allen, 421 James, G. P. R., 389–90, 403 James, Henry, 15, 90–91, 96, 157 James, Henry, Sr., 1068 James, William, 22, 1170 James I, 500 Jamestown, 333, 1183 Jamison, David Flavel, 355, 560, 622; Bertrand du Guesclin, 582, 622; Bertrand Du Guesclin et son époque, 582 Jansenism, 1083 Japan, 189, 798 Japtheth, 244 Java, 128, 499, 765 Jay, John, 856

1324

Index

Jefferson, Martha, 661 Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 18, 31, 45, 70, 72, 87, 91, 101–2, 122, 126, 136–37, 167, 185, 189, 197, 216, 222, 233, 255, 260, 264, 294, 297, 305, 309, 313, 316, 328, 330–31, 339, 343, 345, 406, 410–11, 417, 430, 443–44, 466, 488, 513, 516, 518–19, 522, 524, 563, 576, 583, 585, 595, 598, 617, 625, 634, 638–39, 641, 644–48, 650, 652–53, 655, 659–62, 665–66, 670, 682, 783, 785, 788, 796–97, 800, 802, 817, 820, 832, 843, 847, 860, 866, 868, 871, 878–80, 887, 893, 907, 921–22, 934–35, 940–41, 942, 945, 947, 967, 977, 992, 1001, 1011, 1016, 1019, 1055, 1069, 1074, 1096, 1183–85, 1191, 1198; Anas, 652; Memoirs, 680; Notes on the State of Virginia, 232, 439, 485, 505, 883 Jeffersonianism, 139, 305, 308, 320–21, 422, 608, 637, 640, 644, 652, 783, 787, 803, 820, 830, 887, 892, 925, 934, 974, 983, 1078 Jeffrey, Francis, 104, 538–39, 551, 557, 559, 1011, 1013, 1015 Jena, 137, 483, 693 Jenkins, Mrs., 146 Jenne, 177 Jeremiads, 338, 705, 798, 931 Jerusalem, 163, 168–69, 348, 492 Jesuits, 203, 1086 Jesus Christ. See Christ, Jesus Jewett, Charles, 512, 514, 521, 524 Jews. See Judaism, Jews, and Hebrews John of Salisbury, 1131 Johnson, Chapman, 798, 813–14 Johnson, Joseph, 430, 648 Johnson, Samuel, 158, 258, 307, 398, 501, 566, 602–3, 641, 644, 654, 665, 740, 871, 985 Johnson, Thomas P., 169 Johnson, William, 479 Johnston, Edward W., 49, 89, 319, 361, 392, 397, 405, 454–55, 522, 524–25, 554, 704, 784 Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 544 Johnston, William E., 449 Johnstone and Hunter, 66 Jones, Charles Colcock (the elder), 171, 486 Jones, Charles Colcock (the younger), 630 Jones, Eliza Catherine, 481 Jones, Henry F., 323, 459, 460 Jones, Hugh, 309–10; Present State of Virginia, 309, 595 Jones, James V., 368

Jones, John Paul, 86 Jones, John W., 643 Jones, Louisa, 740 Jones, Skelton, 641 Jones, Sir William, 499, 698, 1105 Jonson, Ben, 465, 566, 740 Josephus, Flavius, 459, 503, 593, 1077 Jouffroy, Simon-Théodore, 1029 Journalism (and journalists), 18–19, 49, 122, 166, 179, 202, 380, 533, 535, 692, 758, 917, 901, 919, 1078, 1197 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1054 Judaism, Jews, and Hebrews, 10, 62, 114, 134, 138, 163, 166, 201, 228, 237, 239, 270, 285–86, 288–89, 303, 329, 348, 470, 473, 510, 530, 607, 720–21, 917, 1067, 1070–82, 1095, 1104, 1110, 1128, 1174 Judiciary Act of 1789, 859, 861 Juggernaut, 107 June (slave), 283 Justinian, 901, 961 Juvenal (Decius Junius Juvenalis), 260, 985 Kahal Kadosh beth Elohim, 1070, 1076, 1081 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 62, 222, 224, 257, 260, 684–89, 691–92, 695, 705, 732, 738–39, 763, 1000, 1078; Elements of Criticism, 62, 685–88; Historical Law Tracts, 684; Sketches of the History of Man, 686 Kant, Immanuel (and Kantianism), 134, 231, 389, 436, 463, 616, 1029, 1031, 1041–43, 1045, 1047–49, 1050–51, 1053, 1057, 1059– 60, 1063, 1118, 1131, 1133–34, 1137, 1139–40; Critique of Pure Reason, 463, 1048–50, 1139 Keats, John, 147, 154, 728, 739, 1102 Keith, Reuel, 622, 1139 Keitt, Lawrence, 83 Kemble, Frances Anne, 305 Kempis, Thomas à, 478 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 51, 54–55, 165, 189, 193, 254, 309–11, 314–15, 317, 321, 340, 364, 367, 372, 391, 405–7, 412, 420, 426, 430, 437–38, 444, 451, 464, 474, 490, 502, 518, 525, 564–65, 571–72, 575, 581, 583, 630– 31, 655, 662–66, 674, 702, 747, 759–62, 769; Horse Shoe Robinson, 572, 575, 581, 583; Quodlibet, 575; Rob of the Bowl, 572, 575, 583; Swallow Barn, 193, 254, 310, 314–15, 363, 572, 575, 581, 583, 667, 747, 759–62, 769 Kent, 15

Index Kentucky, 5, 14–15, 20, 53, 113, 119, 179, 181, 189, 334–35, 340, 343, 345, 380, 416, 508, 518, 543–45, 548, 624–25, 664, 682, 770, 781, 816, 825, 860, 913–14, 922, 1035–36, 1054, 1067, 1094, 1125, 1185, 1198 Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, 781, 825, 860, 922, 980, 1185 Kentucky Campaign, 335 Kentucky Family Journal, 335 Kentucky Farmer, 335 Kentucky Historical Society, 625 Kentucky Missionary and Theological Magazine, 334 Kentucky New Era, 335 Kenyon College, 1035 Kianah, 177 Kiawahs, 747 Kiel, 483 King, Grace, 362, 763; New Orleans, 362 King, Mitchell, 37, 54, 56, 63, 66, 100, 121, 123, 339, 389, 397, 402–3, 406, 426, 428– 29, 433–34, 437, 464, 481–84, 486, 490, 510, 518, 599–603, 605–6, 630, 674–75, 742, 922, 1179, 1183, 1198 King, Rufus, 306 King, Susan Petigru, 56–57, 408, 770, 1186; Lily, 53 Kingsley, Charles, 243, 457; Alton Locke, 978; Water Babies, 978 Kingsley, Zephaniah: Patriarchal or Cooperative System of Society, 960 Kingston, Tenn., 343 Kinloch, Francis (the elder), 95, 98–99, 145, 367, 597; Letters from Geneva and France, 98 Kinloch, Francis (the younger), 95–96, 154 Kinloch, Frederick, 509–10 Kinloch, Mildred Walker, 95 Kipling, Rudyard, 200 Kirk Alloway, 102 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlob, 133; Messiah, 503 Klügel, George Simon, 231 Knapp, Albert, 1125 Kneeland, Abner, 582 Knight, Charles, 583 Knight’s Bookstore (Baltimore, Md.), 741 Know-Nothings (and American Party), 85–86, 1149 Knox, Robert, 249 Koberger, Anthonius, 492 Kollock, Henry, 268, 505

1325

Kollock, Shepard, 640 Koran, 173, 177, 504 Kossuth, Louis, 325, 969 Kru, 181 Kuban, Khan of, 147 Kurdistan, 1104 Kurtz, Johann Friedrich, 1139 L’Abeille de la Nouvelle Orléans, 114, 208, 286 Lacey, Edward, 583 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 745; Les liaisons dangereuses, 328, 441 Ladies (and the ladylike), 5, 36, 38, 57, 62, 104–5, 130, 150, 153, 198, 253–54, 256, 258, 260, 271, 274, 328, 365, 370, 374–75, 390– 91, 407–9, 412, 451, 458, 478–79, 499–501, 510–11, 552, 559, 564, 573, 592, 633, 643, 654, 669, 688, 714, 718, 723, 728, 741–42, 749, 760–62, 957, 1041, 1098, 1116, 1172, 1191, 1195 Ladies Benevolent Society of Monrovia, 182 Ladies Dorcas Society, 182 Ladino, 1070 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph, marquis de, 86, 102, 504, 620, 812 Laffert family, 130 La Harpe, Jean-François de, 178, 257; Cours de littérature ancien et moderne, 698 Laing’s bookshop (Edinburgh), 488 Lamar, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, 1184, 1186 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 5, 219, 221 Lamartine, Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de, 115, 327, 1191 Lamb, Lady Caroline: Glenarvon, 501 Lamb, Charles, 465 Lambert, Lucien, 114 Lamboll, Thomas, 633 L’Ami des Lois, 286 Lancashire, 823, 953 Lancaster, Mass., 770 Lancaster, S.C., 457, 1156 Lancet, The, 479 Landmark Baptists, 1068 Landscape, 37, 107, 125, 145, 193, 197, 222, 225, 311, 349, 353, 357, 373, 380, 425–26, 440, 445, 448, 454–55, 486, 505, 520, 561, 573, 644, 679, 709, 714, 718, 722–23, 725, 733, 735, 741, 775–76, 802, 852–53, 967, 1078, 1162, 1185 Lanier, Sidney, 1198

1326

Index

Lanneau, Bazile, 142 Lanneau, John Francis, 169 Lansdowne, Sir Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, third marquis of, 307 Laocoon, 721 La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, comte de: Voyages and Adventures, 504 Lapland, 253, 689 La Renaissance Louisianaise, 299 Las Cases, Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné, comte de: Napoleon, 504 Latin language, 50, 113, 129, 142–43, 151, 234, 236, 255, 258–59, 274, 322–26, 328, 348, 413–14, 482, 493, 503, 684, 690, 695, 698, 766, 914, 1092, 1104–5, 1116 Lauderdale, James Maitland, eighth earl of, 898, 917 Laurens, Henry, 19, 444 Lausanne, 98 Laussat, Pierre, 296–97 Lavater, Johann Casper, 503, 1077 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 504 Lawrence, Sir William, 231, 239, 245 Lawson, James, 447, 452 Lawson, John: History of North Carolina, 595 Lawyers, 18, 63, 71, 75, 105, 110, 137, 153, 209, 240, 267–68, 326, 335, 346, 353, 366, 371, 383, 398, 401, 424, 429, 463, 479, 482, 533–34, 559, 592, 630, 650–51, 660, 662, 664–65, 674, 682, 684–85, 708–9, 717, 720, 722, 758, 840, 864–65, 898, 922, 943, 946, 966, 970, 972, 980, 982, 986, 1036, 1069, 1075, 1088, 1170 Lea & Blanchard, 572, 575 Lebanon, 37, 169, 323, 513 Lee, ‘‘Light Horse’’ Harry, 500, 505, 553, 641, 658, 1195; Memoirs of the War, 499, 500, 505 Lee, Henry: Napoleon Bonaparte, 584, 622 Lee, Mary Custis, 184 Lee, Mary Elizabeth, 16, 428, 451, 717–20, 1047; Poetical Remains, 431 Lee, Richard Henry, 646 Lee, William, 717 Lee, William H. F. (‘‘Rooney’’), 41 Legaré, Hugh Swinton, 11, 16, 18, 31, 48, 50, 83, 102–5, 109–10, 112, 123, 125–26, 136–37, 139–40, 142, 144, 159, 237, 240, 285, 290– 91, 322, 324, 327, 331, 336, 346, 371, 378, 388, 390, 403, 409, 418, 447–49, 483, 488, 490–91, 493, 517, 532–33, 535–36, 539–40,

547, 554, 556–58, 562, 594–95, 604, 609– 12, 619, 621, 641, 688, 692–93, 697–99, 701, 703–4, 708–9, 712, 817, 820, 868, 885, 899, 911, 923, 945, 953, 1011, 1020, 1039– 40, 1042–44, 1053, 1106; Writings, 443, 576 Legaré, James M., 579–80, 738 Legaré, Mary, 449, 576 Leghorn, 147 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 1005, 1009, 1135, 1139 Leiden, 483, 496 Leigh, Benjamin Watkins, 354, 487, 491, 645, 805, 807–8, 810, 812, 814, 816 Leipzig, 138, 330, 483, 584, 586, 1045 Leman, Lake, 99 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 936 Leo X, 501 Leo XIII, 95 Leonard, Edward L., 479 Leonardo da Vinci, 709–10 Leopoldine Association, 1085 Lepsius, Karl Richard, 242 Lerdo, Francisco, 206 Leroux, Pierre, 905 Le Sage, Alain-René: Gil Blas, 747, 504 Lesser Antilles, 114 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 721 Letters of Junius, 559 Le Vaillant, François: Interior Part of Africa, 504 Levant, 169, 186, 483, 615 Levering (of Philadelphia), 38 Le Vert, Octavia, 54, 158; Souvenirs of Travel, 563 Leviathan, 808, 838, 953 Lewes, Ellen, 501 Lewis, Meriwether, 345 Lexington, Ky., 65, 425, 448, 513, 515, 519, 524, 915 Lexington, Mass., battle of, 648 Lexington, Va., 425, 513, 776 Leyburn, George, 169 Liang Afa, 187 Libanus (mountain), 1174 Liberalism, 48, 134, 787, 862, 1107, 1114 Liberator, 39 Liberia, 2, 76, 178, 180–86, 209, 645 Liberia Lyceum, 182 Librarians, 49, 77, 338, 480, 498, 506–8, 510–12, 522–25, 672, 746, 1099–1100

Index Libraries, 5–6, 9, 18, 22, 24, 37, 40, 42, 51, 74, 100, 105, 122, 135, 138, 154–55, 166, 172, 176, 191, 216–17, 227, 242, 259, 264, 307, 315, 328, 332, 339, 358, 402, 423, 425, 434– 35, 453, 480, 483–84, 472, 488–525, 552, 564, 573, 582, 586–87, 591, 625–26, 628–31, 633–35, 640, 642, 648, 738, 784, 885, 1020, 1077, 1100–1101, 1133, 1143, 1164, 1168 Library Company of Baltimore, 513, 515, 630–31 Library of Congress, 154, 488, 514–15, 520 Libya, 736 Lieber, Francis, 28, 49, 51–52, 73–87, 136, 146, 162, 166, 238, 249, 329, 331, 339, 346, 352, 354, 360, 367, 377, 388–89, 391, 397, 415, 448–49, 451, 453–54, 456, 474, 488, 490, 521, 524–25, 527, 565, 569, 581, 583, 622, 878, 903, 906, 922, 1044–47, 1092–93, 1099–1100, 1129, 1149, 1156; Civil Liberty, 581, 583; Political Ethics, 453–54, 583, 1045, 1149; Stranger in America, 459 Lieber, Hamilton, 75, 80 Lieber, Matilda, 76, 79–81, 83, 85, 87, 407, 456 Lieber, Norman, 77 Lieber, Oscar, 80, 88, 331, 352, 389, 419 Liège, 128 Lima, 192–93, 936 Limbird, John, 582–83 Lincoln, Abraham, 43, 57, 189, 578, 839, 848, 1036 Lincolnton, N.C., 1193 Lindsley, Philip, 480, 547 Lindsly, Harvey, 234, 238–39 Lingard, John: History of England, 478 Linlithgow, 102 Linnaeus, Carl, 215–16, 218–19, 225, 228, 231–32, 503–54, 789; Systema Naturae, 225, 232 Linonian Society, 517 Lippincott (publishers), 578–79, 582 Lippincott’s Magazine, 1198 Lisbon, 194, 483 Literary and Philosophical Society of South Carolina, 332, 425, 533, 1090 Literary and Social Club of Monrovia, 182 Literary Gazette, 500 Literary World, 481 Little, John Peyton: Richmond, 362 Liverpool, 7, 18, 102, 105–6, 108, 110, 126, 135, 158, 179, 526, 759, 895, 953

1327

Livingston, Edward, 293 Livingston, Robert, 99 Livingstone, David, 179, 387 Livy (Titus Livius), 5, 259–60, 494, 500, 503, 593–94, 597, 787 Locke, John, 105, 215, 337, 425, 463, 507, 641, 645, 691, 756, 781, 784, 802, 808, 820, 912, 963, 978, 982, 987, 996–98, 1007–9, 1012, 1017, 1025, 1029, 1034, 1045, 1050, 1072, 1083, 1118, 1127, 1131–32, 1139; Human Understanding, 425, 691 Lockhart, John Gibson, 557; Walter Scott, 479, 654–55 Lodoli, Carlo, 672 Loganian Library, 514, 516 Loire, 232 Lollards, 499 Lomax, Matilda Skipwith, 183 Lombardy, 149, 560 Lomond, Loch, 102 London, 8, 24, 40, 46–47, 56–57, 62–63, 68, 70, 78, 92, 95, 102, 106, 108–10, 133– 34, 139, 175, 190, 193, 223, 241, 243, 249, 308, 350, 358, 360, 367, 378, 414, 419, 422, 454, 477, 483, 487–88, 492, 496–97, 518, 564, 566, 570, 572, 581–86, 595, 621, 628, 631, 692, 772, 787, 909, 950, 982–83, 1039, 1041, 1048, 1070, 1076, 1087, 1178, 1199 London and Westminster Review, 552 Long, Edward: History of Jamaica, 224 Long, George, 70, 139 Longfellow, Fanny Appleton, 80, 454 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 74, 81, 84, 159, 348, 397, 426, 454, 538, 548, 577, 703, 739 Longinus, 659, 689, 1078 Longman (publishers), 487 Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 48, 289, 380, 450, 548, 580, 674, 703, 755–58, 903; Georgia Scenes, 419, 563, 747 Longstreet, Hannah, 757 Longstreet, William, 757 Lopez-y-Nuñez, Rebecca, 166 Louis XIV, 594, 983 Louis XVI, 680, 871 Louis XVIII, 124 Louisiana, 6, 15, 20, 28, 44, 102, 113–14, 119, 155, 159–60, 195, 207–8, 247, 260, 264, 286–88, 292–302, 307, 327, 330, 335, 340, 343, 350, 364, 371, 381, 384, 402, 421, 423, 479, 487, 511–12, 543–44, 546, 548,

1328

Index

624–25, 632, 652, 681, 758, 763, 839, 1074, 1084 Louisiana (Liberia), 182 Louisiana Law Journal, 335 Louisiana Recorder and Literary Gazette, 335 Louisiana State Medical Society Journal, 335 Louisville, Ky., 119, 287, 345, 407, 512–13, 625 Louvre Museum, 103 Lovett, M. S., 560 Low, Sampson, 582 Lowell, James Russell: Fable for Critics, 48, 580 Lowell, Mass., 37, 916, 1173 Lowell, Mr. (Boston Unitarian), 368 Lowland Scots, 413, 690–91 Lowndes, William, 338, 927 Loyall, George, 640, 642 Lubberland, 374, 755 Lucian of Samosata: Dialogues, 324; Misanthropos, 324 Luden, Heinrich, 137 Luke, Saint, 176 Lunenberg, 356 Luther, Martin (and Lutherans), 66, 85, 243, 285, 435, 482, 616, 734, 1045, 1068, 1079, 1090–91, 1098, 1103 Lycée Imperiale, 92 Lycée Republicaine, 1042 Lyceums, 40, 163, 182, 293, 339, 421–22, 506, 512, 514, 516, 629 Lycurgus, 989 Lyell, Sir Charles, 52, 54, 157, 240, 243, 305, 560, 607 Lyman, Theodore: Rambles in Italy, 501 Lynch, Patrick, 247, 402, 484, 510, 1126 Lynchburg, Va., 121, 136, 843, 962, 1069 Lyons, 492, 1085 Lyons, Rachel, 1073 Lyrical Ballads, 419, 557 Lytton, Bulwer, 392, 482, 548, 744; Confessions of a Water Patient, 482; My Novel, 392 Macao, 190, 192 Macaulay, Catharine, 618 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 139, 317–18, 320, 463, 465, 470, 621, 990, 1023, 1178 Macbride, James, 359 Macedonia, 417, 601 Machiavelli, Niccolò (and Machiavellian),

7, 137, 331, 337, 493, 496, 593–94, 597, 602, 787–88, 798, 868, 1183; Discourses on Livy, 593–94, 787; The Prince, 593 Mackenzie, George, 1013 Mackenzie, Henry: Julia de Roubigné, 499, 501 Mackintosh, Sir James, 257, 594 Macmillan Company, 362 Macon, Ga., 259, 368, 386, 477, 513, 549 Macon, Nathaniel, 796, 830, 847–48, 859 Madeira, 313, 447 Madison, James, 2, 102, 200, 232, 305, 317, 319, 444, 516, 518–19, 553, 610, 639, 643– 44, 646, 651, 653, 682, 783–85, 792, 796– 97, 800, 810–11, 816–17, 819–20, 825, 844, 846, 851–52, 955–56, 858–60, 862, 866, 873, 879–80, 921, 1183–85 Madison, James (bishop), 878 Madrid, 95, 159, 483, 632 Magdalene, Mary, 147 Maggiore, Lake, 146 Magliabechi, Antonio, 155 Magna Carta, 291, 617 Magnolia, 540, 549, 1068 Mahabharata, 1105 Maham, Hezekiah, 358 Mahan, D. H., 87 Maimonides, Moses, 1080 Maine, 5, 61, 168, 259, 515, 723 Maison Carrée, 343, 800 Maitland, Samuel Roffey: Ancient Albigenses and Waldenses, 482 Malacca, 190–91 Malaya (and Malays), 230, 239 Malebranche, Nicolas, 997, 1042 Mallet, Paul-Henri: L’histoire de Dannemarc, 235 Malta, 63 Malte-Brun, Conrad: Geography, 504 Malthus, Thomas (and Malthusianism), 107, 378, 599, 789, 878–80, 886–88, 892, 896, 899, 903, 907–8, 910–11, 917–18, 940, 951; Principle of Population, 887 Mamelukes, 167 Manchester, 69, 108, 378–79, 543, 574, 820–23, 896–97, 916, 965, 1014 Manchester Constitutional Society, 822 Manchester, Va., 962 Mandeville, Bernard de, 821, 1040 Mandingo, 178, 181, 288, 413 Mangum, Willie P., 739

Index Manicheanism, 789, 935 Manifest Destiny, 6, 833, 952, 1149, 1180 Manigault, Charles Izard, 93, 96, 112–13, 124, 164–65, 190–91, 290, 328, 491 Manigault, Elizabeth Heyward, 93, 113 Manigault, Gabriel, 92–93, 1079 Manigault, Gabriel Edward, 93, 112–13 Manigault, Henrietta, 112–13 Manigault, Henry, 92 Manigault, Louis, 93, 125, 190, 192, 322, 1073 Manigault, Margaret Izard, 92, 97, 99–100, 216, 328, 408, 445, 749 Manila, 190–92 Mankind, 8, 68, 110, 187, 165, 215–16, 225, 230–31, 234, 237, 239–40, 242, 245, 252, 275, 278, 297, 366, 400, 425, 434, 569, 582, 597–98, 601, 605–6, 731, 756, 762, 787, 836, 839, 867, 869, 893–94, 899, 941, 943, 956, 989, 1011, 1058, 1077–78, 1112, 1128, 1142 Manliness, 98, 238, 265, 391, 410, 417, 463, 703, 734, 970, 1175 Manly, Basil, Jr., 33–36, 38–39, 332, 701, 744–45 Manly, Basil, Sr., 34, 39, 47, 89, 262, 330, 341, 354–55, 362, 372, 377, 389, 396, 414, 451, 624, 922, 1093, 1123, 1137 Manly, Sarah, 456 Manning, John L., 1097 Mansel, Henry, 1135–36; Limits of Religious Thought, 1135 Mansfield Female College, 260 Maraccius, Ludovicus, 173 Marathon, battle of, 609 Marbury v. Madison, 859 Marcot, Mr., 423 Maréchal, Ambrose, 1084 Marey, Charles, 329 Marietta, 157 Marion, Francis, 334, 358 Marion, Robert, 359 Marmontel, Jean-François: Italy, 504 Marryat, Frederick, 53, 305 Mars, Anne, 103 Marseilles, 103, 173, 1088, 1172 Marsh, James, 136, 1042–43 Marshall, John, 28, 257, 345, 505, 596, 627– 28, 641, 643–44, 657–58, 781–82, 797, 800, 825–26, 859; George Washington, 505 Marshall, Miss, 478 Marston Moor, battle of, 291, 309

1329

Martens, Franz Carl: Plusieurs espèces de Fucus, 217 Martin, Isabella, 1197 Martin, William T., 479 Martin, François Xavier: History of Louisiana, 293 Martineau, Harriet, 52, 272, 275, 564, 957 Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 825 Martyn, S. Craig, 476 Marx, Karl (and Marxism), 22, 375, 935, 953, 975–76 Mary. See Virgin Mary Mary I (‘‘Bloody Mary’’), 478 Maryland, 5, 14–15, 20, 47, 69, 128, 132, 171, 181–82, 189, 203, 310, 333, 335, 381, 473, 487, 513–15, 543, 545, 573, 622, 629–30, 662, 755, 915, 995, 1072, 1084, 1095 Maryland State Colonization Society, 182 Maryland Medical Recorder, 335 Mary Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots), 423, 510 Maryville, Tenn., 513 Mason, George, 318, 345, 595, 647, 650–52, 680 Mason and Dixon’s line, 44 Mason Brothers (publishers), 579 Masonry, 182, 199, 289, 335, 479–80, 486, 637, 962, 1076 Massachusetts, 7, 34–35, 50–51, 59, 61, 70– 71, 81, 179, 185, 200, 268, 275, 285, 309, 319, 336, 482, 515–16, 542, 546, 596, 623, 625, 632, 639, 648, 666, 681, 712, 758, 765, 770, 829, 835, 955, 1087, 1096, 1114, 1173, 1183 Massachusetts Historical Society, 51, 516, 625, 639 Massillon, Jean-Baptiste, 116, 257, 488, 493 Massina, 177 Massinger, Philip, 740; Bondman, 465 Masson, Henri, 468 Materialism, 662, 987, 1005, 1019, 1025, 1055, 1014–17, 1019–21, 1030, 1039, 1046, 1105, 1200 Mathematics (and mathematicians), 30–32, 62, 70–71, 84, 129, 254, 330, 392, 498, 521, 524, 805, 879, 905, 942, 969, 985, 1003, 1018, 1036, 1040, 1063 Maum Jute (slave), 286 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 1101 Mauritius (Isle of France), 190–91 Maury, James, 102

1330

Index

Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 425, 546, 548 Maxcy, Jonathan, 71, 519 Maxwell, Miss, 499 Maxwell, William, 628, 640–41 Mayer, Brantz, 149, 158, 186, 195, 201–7, 487, 489, 490, 494–95, 537, 581, 630; Captain Canot, 583; Capitaine Canot, 583; Mexico as It Was, 201, 203; Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, 201–7; War between Mexico and the United States, 582 Mayer, Maurice, 1070 Mayhew, Henry, 78, 110, 772, 926 Mayrant, Miss, 478 Maysville, Ky., 838, 844 Mazatlan, 192 McBride, James, 325, 447 McCall, Hugh: History of North Carolina, 596 McCarter, James J., 431, 433–34, 436 McCauley, Daniel Smith, 164 McCay, Charles, 84 McClintock, John, 578 McClung, Spot, 323, 326 McCord, David James, 45, 81, 83, 178, 182, 184, 279–80, 325, 351, 356, 403, 428, 439, 445, 452–53, 481, 520, 525, 533, 555, 783, 816, 880, 888, 900, 903, 905, 914–15, 932, 1099 McCord, Louisa Susanna Cheves, 11, 16, 83, 100, 208, 248–49, 254–55, 267–68, 274– 84, 390, 408, 416, 446–47, 451–53, 520, 548, 576, 714–18, 722, 734, 888, 905, 921, 932, 1198; Caius Gracchus, 482, 716–17; My Dreams, 714–16 McCosh, James, 66 McCrady, Edward, 1178 McCrady, Sarah, 1178 McCulloch, James Ramsay, 893, 896 McDonogh, Henrietta Fuller, 186 McDonagh, Washington W., 186 McDuffie, George, 507, 533, 916, 919, 928–29 McGavock, Randal William, 164; Tennessean Abroad, 442 McGuffey, William Holmes: Spelling Books, 478 McIntosh, Maria, 573 McKenney, Thomas Loraine: History of Indian Tribes, 479 McLean, John, 929–30 M’Clurg, James, 232 McMurray, Margaret, 70

McNutt, Alexander, 758 McPherson, Lilias Blair, 637 McQueen, Mrs., 500–501 McRee, Griffith John, 325, 556 Mecca, 177 Mechanics’ Apprentices Library (Boston, Mass.), 516 Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence, 356, 430, 638, 647–49, 662 Medea, 1193 Medes, 239 Medical College of South Carolina, 119, 514 Medical Journal of North Carolina, 335 Medicine (and the medical), 18–19, 44, 70, 115–20, 122, 124, 134, 195, 216, 223, 330, 335, 367, 407, 421, 435, 467, 479, 482, 493, 498, 511, 519, 533, 985, 990, 998, 1015–16, 1069 Medievalism (and the medieval), 147, 356, 365, 384, 386, 450, 482, 492, 502, 593, 596, 614–16, 654, 678, 977, 1022, 1079, 1131 Mediterranean Sea, 93, 125, 162, 167, 176, 674, 1111, 1176 Meek, Alexander Beaufort, 285, 417, 450, 548, 636, 701, 703, 728, 733, 1047–48; Songs and Poems, 722–23 Meek, Samuel, 702 Mehemet Ali, 165, 175 Meherrin, 287 Meiklejohn, J. M. D., 1048 Meinecke, Friedrich, 132 Meiners, Christoph, 231 Melancholy, 106, 149, 155–56, 200, 227, 299, 357, 385, 396, 406, 525, 611, 661, 667, 712, 748, 753, 820, 970, 1102 Melanchthon, Philipp, 610 Melchizedek, 189 Melish, John, 36 Melville, Herman, 581 Memminger, Christopher, 429, 431 Memoirs, 55, 78, 104, 135, 137, 265, 269, 280, 336, 362, 378, 410, 428, 431, 496, 499–500, 504, 508, 524, 560, 584, 641, 654–55, 672– 73, 675–77, 679, 682, 948, 951, 1001, 1015, 1195, 1197 Memory, 28, 156, 236, 273, 288, 290, 331, 338, 359, 376, 404, 459, 471, 524, 649, 653, 658, 674, 710, 718, 725–26, 767, 897, 947, 985, 997, 1004, 1006, 1015, 1018, 1020, 1156 Memphis, Tenn., 20, 287, 325, 511, 543

Index Mendelssohn, Moses, 1071, 1080 Meninski, François: Lexicon Turcico-ArabicoPersicum, 173 Mercantilism, 881, 896, 905, 915 Mercer, Charles Fenton, 783–84, 802 Mercer University, 35, 513, 1095 Merchants, 7, 18, 71, 90, 93, 128, 136, 153, 176, 179, 182, 190, 312, 339, 364, 371, 376, 383, 429, 476, 480, 487, 492, 517–18, 645, 693, 708, 735, 755, 881, 901, 903, 945, 962, 1076 Mérimée, Prosper, 1197 Merryweather, F. Somner: Bibliomania in the Middle Ages, 482 Mertens, Franz Carl, 217 Mesopotamia, 171 Messina, 147 Mestastasio, Pietro, 503 Methodist Quarterly Review, 549, 577–78, 1135 Methodists, 72, 78, 169, 178, 259, 288, 304, 335, 371, 424, 466, 530, 549, 577, 673, 758, 863, 959, 961–63, 1035, 1068, 1086, 1091, 1094–95, 1097–98, 1118, 1197 Methuselah, 607 Metternich, Prince Klemens Lothar Wenzel von, 1183 Metzger, Johann Daniel, 231 Meunier, Isabelle, 586 Mexico (and Mexicans), 20, 114, 192, 195– 207, 210–11, 288, 292, 333, 343, 448, 500, 505, 582, 585, 703, 723, 774, 1087, 1199 Mexico City, 43, 198–99, 201, 585 Meyerbeer, Jacques, 291 Mézeray, François de, 594 Miami University, 377, 520, 548, 1036 Miccosukee, 287 Michaelis, Johann David, 595 Michaelowitz, Edward, 329 Michaux, André, 217 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 652, 710, 712 Michelet, Jules, 599, 603–4, 1057 Michigan, 516, 1185 Mickle, William Julius, 503 Middleton, Alicia Hopton, 96, 396, 441 Middleton, Arthur, 94 Middleton, Arthur, II, 95, 147 Middleton, Conyers: Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, 500 Middleton, Eliza Augusta Falconnet, 95, 100, 104, 749–50

1331

Middleton, Harriet Kinloch, 95 Middleton, Henry (1797–76), 96–97 Middleton, Henry (‘‘Governor’’), 95, 147 Middleton, Henry Augustus, 95, 109 Middleton, Henry Bentivoglio Van Ness, 95 Middleton, John, 390 Middleton, John Izard, 95–96, 99–100, 104, 148, 162, 584, 622, 747–50, 754; ‘‘The Confessional,’’ 748–49; Grecian Remains, 622, 584 Middleton, Nathaniel Russell, 96, 390, 396, 441, 510, 594, 903, 1068 Middleton, Ralph Izard, 152 Middleton, Sarah, 94 Middleton, Williams, 390 Midwest, 512, 577 Mignet, François-Auguste, 619 Mignot, Louis Rémy, 24, 193 Migration (and migrants), 3, 19–20, 22, 31, 35–36, 52, 59, 61–63, 70, 72, 87, 89, 113, 121, 169, 183, 185, 187, 192, 209–10, 240, 267, 293, 302, 305, 310, 312, 341–43, 356, 359, 364, 371, 380, 387, 430, 438, 468, 481, 523, 533, 546, 548, 664, 682, 697, 703–4, 719–20, 735, 757, 773, 822, 839, 891, 897, 908, 917, 968, 1000, 1064, 1106 Milan, 146, 150, 1088 Miles, James Sanders, 1099 Miles, James Warley, 83, 144, 171–72, 176, 190, 326–27, 332, 388, 402, 404, 406, 455, 483, 485, 490, 493, 518, 525, 540, 555–56, 584, 865, 872–76, 1047, 1050–52, 1070, 1098–1114, 1128, 1139, 1166; Discourse on Calhoun, 872–76; Philosophic Theolo , 485, 584, 1103, 1108–14; Philosophische Theologie, 584; Relation Between the Races, 1108; Student of Philolo , 1106–7 Miles, William Porcher, 262, 278, 284, 290, 325, 408–9, 449–50, 706, 1100, 1186 Mill, James, 896 Mill, John Stuart, 275, 463, 1039, 1061, 1063, 1134; System of Logic, 1113 Millar, John, 609, 618, 621, 684, 698 Milledgeville, Ga., 343–44, 422 Millennialism, 278, 462, 736, 880, 938, 969, 991 Miller, A. E., 532 Miller, Hugh, 1101, 1125; Foot-Prints of the Creator, 482 Miller, John, 582

1332

Index

Miller, Mr. (plasterer), 479 Miller, Stephen, 1186 Miller, Stephen F., 87–88 Millerism, 958 Millington, John, 88–89 Millsburg (Liberia), 182 Milman, Henry Hart, 459 Milner, John: Letters to a Prebendary, 479 Milner, Joseph: History of the Church of Christ, 500 Milton, John, 16, 91, 257, 306–7, 319, 348, 459, 482, 507, 526, 533–34, 540, 556, 737, 739–40, 784, 820, 1020–21, 1068, 1077, 1101; Paradise Lost, 465, 713 Minerva, 343, 396, 415 Minnegerode, Charles, 88–89 Minor, Benjamin Blake, 534–35, 537, 554, 701 Minor, James C., 185 Minor, John, 595 Minor, Lancelot B., 178 Minor, Lucian, 38–39 Minos, 709 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel de Riquetti, comte de: 585, 619–20, 896; Lettres à Sophie Miscegenation, 459, 968 Mississippi, 15, 17, 40, 70, 88, 117, 164, 233, 255, 297–98, 322, 343, 352, 356, 363, 415, 417, 462, 468, 473, 479, 514, 516, 520, 523, 543–44, 575, 624, 681, 702, 720, 733, 777, 879, 886, 966, 984, 1036, 1039, 1056, 1074 Mississippi Free Trader, 477 Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Advocate, 477 ‘‘Mississippi in Africa,’’ 182 Mississippi Palladium, 335 Mississippi River, 6, 20, 179, 292, 342, 757, 891, 908, 957, 984, 1184 Mississippi Territory, 6 Mississippi Valley, 548, 625, 758 Missouri, 6, 14–15, 43, 166, 306, 342, 468, 516, 544, 546, 624–25, 823, 860, 946, 1053–54, 1094 Missourias, 287 Missouri Crisis of 1820, 43 Missouri Historical and Philosophical Society, 625 Mitchell, Donald Grant (‘‘Ik Marvel’’): Reveries of a Bachelor, 570–80 Mitchell, Elisha, 518, 1073 Mitchell, Margaret: Gone With the Wind, 1198 Mitford, William, 608–9

Mittermaier, Karl, 1045 M’Morris and Wilson, 582 Mobile, Ala., 54, 158, 165, 216, 241, 243, 248, 267, 287, 330, 360, 445, 513–14, 543–46, 563, 634, 758, 763, 770, 917, 1088, 1163 Mobile Franklin Society, 241, 514 Modernism, 240, 1139, 1188, 1196 Mohammed, 431. See also Islam Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, second earl of, 165, 1195 Moise, Penina, 16, 720–22; Fancy’s Sketchbook, 720–22; Hymns, 720 Moise, Sarah, 720 Molesworth, Robert, 235 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 379, 501, 504, 1077, 1187 Molucca, 228 Monday Club, 426, 429 Monette, John Wesley, 479, 548; Valley of the Mississippi, 298, 575 Mongols (and Mongolia), 158, 229–30, 238–39 Moniteur, Le, 122 Monmouth, James, duke of, 320 Monroe, James, 101, 181, 195, 208, 642, 797– 98, 800, 810, 812–14, 816, 820, 860, 928, 930 Monrovia, 182–83, 185 Monrovia Atheneum, 182 Monrovia Ladies Literary Institute, 182 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 493, 654, 1056, 1187 Montcontour, battle of, 291 Monterey, Calif., 192 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 82, 222, 253, 504, 595, 599, 603, 639, 781, 784, 787–98, 802, 921, 939–40, 961; Persian Letters, 310, 442, 640 Montgomery, Ala., 372, 431, 487, 633, 758 Monticello, 18, 305–6, 339, 407, 639, 662 Montmartre, 587 Montserrado (Liberia), 182 Moor, Bernard de, 1118 Moore, Samuel, 266, 807–8 Moore, Thomas, 155, 445, 564, 654, 708, 739; Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 443 Moors (and Moorish), 159, 200, 237, 295, 423, 1174 Moravians, 187, 286, 302–4, 1067 Mordecai, Emma, 422 Mordecai, Jacob, 289, 1074

Index Mordecai, Rachel, 446, 1074–76 Mordecai, Samuel, 39, 464; Richmond in By-Gone Days, 362 Mordecai family, 259 More, Sir Thomas, 805 Moreau-Lislet, Louis Casimir, 208 Morel, William, 498 Morell, John Daniel, 1138, 1155; Speculative Philosophy of Europe, 1048, 1108, 1118 Moret, Alfred, 582 Morey, J. B., 578 Morgan, Charles, 813 Morgan, J. C., 486 Morgan, Lady: The Princess, 499, 501 Morley’s Hotel (London), 109 Mormonism, 166, 482, 957–58, 975 Morocco, 1076 Morris, Gouveneur, 19 Morris, Richard, 809 Morrison, Jane, 478 Mortimer, Charles, 534–35, 561 Morton, George, 245–46; Crania Americana, 241 Morton, Mr. (of Bordeaux), 507 Moscow, 147, 228, 237 Moses (and the Mosaic account), 133, 220, 242, 244, 607, 989, 1107, 1113, 1124–25 Moses, Rebecca, 1076 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von: Ecclesiastical History, 503, 595 Moultrie, James, 431, 434, 437 Moundville, Ala., 117 Mount Vernon, 41 Mount Zion Missionary, 1090 Moutrie, William, 1195 Moxon, Edward, 484, 583 Moyle, Walter: Essay on the Constitution, 785 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 5, 500 Mpongwe, 181 Muhamed the Bedouin, 228 Mulattos, 74, 113, 183, 205, 226, 241, 245, 300, 479, 807, 883, 955, 971–72, 1192 Mulberry Plantation, 486 Müller, Julius, 1139 Müller, Karl Otfried: Scientific System of Mytholo , 132 Mulock, Dinah: John Halifax, Gentleman, 744 Munich, 138, 140 Munro, Mrs., 1191 Munroe, James, 37, 573, 576 Murfreesboro, Tenn., 343, 458

1333

Murray, Sir George, 555 Murray, John, 148, 484, 581 Murray, Lindley: Grammar, 740 Muskogean, 287 Muslims. See Islam Nag’s Head, 349, 355 Nanjing, 188 Nantes, 113, 492 Naples, 95, 100, 104, 139, 147, 149, 164, 356, 749–50 Napoleon I (and the Napoleonic), 86, 92, 103, 124, 126, 139, 150, 207, 216, 264, 294, 423, 462–63, 492, 499, 504, 558, 584, 597, 620, 622, 693, 721, 878, 880, 892, 976, 1077, 1083 Napoleon III, 388, 1173 Napoleonic Code (in Louisiana), 264, 479 Naseby, battle of, 291 Nash, Richard (‘‘Beau’’), 725 Nashville, Tenn., 123, 237, 343, 360–61, 476– 77, 480, 513, 515, 543, 623, 673, 836, 1088, 1151 Natchez, Miss., 15, 20, 184, 350, 464, 466, 476–79, 632, 740, 1069 Nationalism, 10, 13, 107, 566, 704, 759, 784, 819, 844–45, 855, 891, 914, 929, 1079, 1180 Nationality, 3, 6, 31, 87, 91, 206, 237, 294, 296, 336, 503, 567, 580, 615–16, 696, 698, 706, 824, 826–27, 833, 853, 890, 897, 916, 982–83, 1180 National Magazine, 479 Native Americans. See Indians Nativism, 85, 329, 953 Naturalists, 56, 121, 132, 218–19, 231–32, 243, 249, 435, 1125 Natural rights, 266, 803, 806, 897, 963, 974 Nauplia, 163 Nauvoo, 166 Navajo, 722 Naylor, William, 810 Neander, Johann August Wilhelm, 584, 1048, 1096, 1098, 1103 Nebraska, 157 Necker, Jacques, 98–99, 496 Nehemiah, 348 Nelson, Elizabeth Kinloch, 95 Nelson, Hugh, 95, 159 Nelson, William, 345 Neoclassicism, 331, 418–19, 553, 616, 695–97, 732, 983, 1079

1334

Index

Nepos, Cornelius: Lives, 323–24 Neptune, 776 Neptunian geology, 607 Nestorians, 172 Netherlands (and the Dutch), 101, 103, 112, 190, 193, 223, 228, 288–89, 328, 350, 483, 496–97, 503, 584, 693, 710, 798, 998, 1070–71, 1100, 1104–5, 1118 Neville, Henry: Plato Redivivus, 785 New Bern, N.C., 43, 74, 256 Newcastle, 496 New England, 30–31, 38–40, 46, 48, 72, 119, 126, 157, 169, 186, 189, 267, 291, 299, 301, 304–5, 309, 358, 416, 418, 430, 512, 533, 545, 547, 571, 579, 628, 681, 708, 722, 734, 764, 765, 769, 772–73, 798, 875, 886, 905, 1042, 1050, 1053–54 New Hampshire, 32, 216, 535, 596, 834 New Haven, Conn., 28, 36, 38, 515, 576, 577, 681, 948 New Jersey, 29, 63, 72, 747, 757, 1036 New Lebanon, 37 Newman, A. K., 582 New Monthly Magazine, 500 New Orleans, La., 2, 15, 20, 55, 58, 109, 113– 14, 116, 118–19, 156–57, 159, 165, 179, 208, 262, 286–89, 292–94, 296, 298–301, 309, 330, 343, 345, 355, 359, 362–63, 385–86, 443, 457, 460, 462, 466, 476, 486–87, 511–13, 515, 525, 529, 534, 542–46, 576, 582, 625, 632, 634, 679, 681, 701, 758, 839, 886, 966, 970, 972, 1054, 1082, 1088, 1095 New Orleans Commercial Library Society, 512 New Orleans Public Library, 512 Newport, R.I., 36, 46, 95, 547 Newspapers, 38, 76, 78, 83, 116, 123, 208, 286, 293, 321, 337, 346, 355, 405–6, 442, 476–77, 480, 507, 526, 530, 550, 563, 570, 575, 578, 585–86, 625, 637, 645, 709, 763, 959, 648, 758, 852, 889, 917, 1035, 1081, 1089, 1148 New Texas Reader, 346 Newton, Isaac (and Newtonianism), 218, 602, 1002, 1025, 1030, 1038, 1060, 1127, 1138 Newton, Thomas, 640 Newton Theological Institution, 34–35, 38, 1096 New York, 6, 20, 28–29, 36–38, 43–45, 48, 50–51, 53–54, 57, 65, 70–72, 81, 91, 101,

105–6, 136, 154, 158, 169, 179, 180, 186, 192–93, 197, 240, 243, 249, 255, 301, 307, 310, 336, 341, 350, 363, 367, 372, 395, 400, 449, 473, 483, 485–88, 490, 496–97, 517, 535, 542, 545, 547, 549, 559, 562, 565, 570, 572, 575–80, 582, 585–86, 633, 638, 648, 680, 730, 758, 760, 816, 886, 917, 975, 984, 1012, 1068, 1071–72, 1080, 1087, 1091, 1099, 1197–99 New York Evening Post, 433, 1078 New York Herald, 179 New York Historical Society, 448 New York Medical College, 121 New York Obstetrical Society, 1199 New York Review (religious), 43, 662 New York Review (secular), 135, 144 New York Society, 515 New York State Library, 515, 629 New Zealanders, 228 Niagara Falls, 37, 53, 1080 Nicaragua, 192, 195, 210–11 Nicea, Council of, 482 Nicene Creed, 1104 Nicholas, Erasmus, 186 Nicholas, Philip, 805–6 Niebelungenlied, 133 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 87, 135, 331, 595, 599, 603–5, 613, 621, 828, 1106 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 143, 462, 603, 952 Nigeria, 3 Niger River, 177 Nile River, 164 Niles’ Register, 479, 914 Nîmes, 800 Ningpo, 192 Niobe, 733 Nisbet, Eugenius A., 340, 546 Nitzsch, Carl Immanuel, 1139 Noah, 240, 244 Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 1080 Nominalism, 1004, 1131 Nordhausen, 233 Norfolk, Va., 31, 38, 356, 389, 397, 403, 421, 424, 464, 488, 637, 639–40, 642, 645, 652, 664, 962, 1178 Norman, Benjamin Moore: New Orleans and Environs, 362 Normandy (and Normans), 77, 80, 193, 237, 250–51, 321–22, 383, 482, 617, 647, 690 North, Sir Dudley, 896 North, James Heyward, 447

Index North, Jane Caroline, 36, 37, 416, 447, 762 North American Review, 32, 46, 47, 135, 500, 531, 538, 547, 666, 1089, 1116, 1183 North British Review, 482, 549 North Carolina, 5, 20, 39, 43, 44, 59, 61, 74, 164, 169, 189, 256, 286, 302–4, 324, 340– 41, 343–44, 346–51, 366, 372, 385, 543, 545, 624, 638, 647–48, 650, 662, 740, 758, 839, 847, 1067, 1072, 1074, 1084, 1091, 1094–95, 1193 North Carolina Common School Journal, 335 North Carolina Historical Magazine, 626 North Carolina Historical Society, 625 North Carolina Journal of Education, 335 North Carolina Magazine, 335 North Carolina Manumission Society, 209 North Carolina Presbyterian, 335 North Carolina Telegraph, 335 Northcote, James: Joshua Reynolds, 641 Northumbria, 685 Northwest (U.S.), 516, 577, 861 Norton, Andrews, 20; Genuineness of the Gospels, 1110 Norton, Charles Eliot, 147, 157, 449 Norway, 907 Norwich, 310, 496 Nostalgia, 30, 183, 317, 325, 437, 550, 645, 663, 667, 776, 865 Notre Dame, Cathedral of, 124 Nott, Abraham, 539, 240 Nott, Henry Junius, 32, 49, 83, 100, 158–59, 259, 329, 391, 442, 451, 453, 519, 533, 540, 683–84, 699, 704, 784, 899, 903, 1007; Thomas Singularity, 583 Nott, John Broussais, 241 Nott, Josiah, 24, 54, 66, 81, 121, 165, 216, 240–48, 250, 286, 351, 360, 371, 546, 556, 978, 1019, 1073, 1152, 1199; Indigenous Races, 582; Types of Mankind, 165, 237, 242, 582 Nottaway, 287 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 693 Nova Scotia, 142 Novelli, Niziero, 154 Nubia, 228 Nullification (and nullifiers), 34, 122, 153, 398, 531, 533, 721, 770, 796, 817–18, 820, 824–25, 827, 829–33, 844–45, 848–49, 852, 859, 862, 903, 916–17, 922, 929, 934, 947, 980, 982, 1148, 1193 Nuns, 749–50, 760, 1085 Nuremburg Chronicle, 492

1335

Oates, George, 477 Obiism, 1111 Occaneechis, 287 O’Connell, Daniel, 1083, 1087, 1091 Oemler, Augustus G., 506 Ofo, 287 Ogilvie, John, 1127 Oglethorpe University, 513 Oglevie, James, 506 Ohio, 53, 192, 337, 377, 515, 548, 577, 678, 758, 770, 811, 813, 865, 891, 1035–36, 1053 O’Keeffe, Adelaide: Dudley, 501 Old Bachelor, The, 62, 665 Oldmixon, John, 618 Oligarchy, 422, 550–51, 613, 650, 776, 807, 823, 902, 920, 1148 Olivier, Laurence, 559 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 52, 980 O’Neall, John Belton: Bench and Bar of South Carolina, 674–75 Oneida, 975 Ontology, 1011, 1017, 1138, 1044 Opera, 103, 105, 112, 114, 117, 137, 150, 208, 291, 457, 735, 968 Opium, 175, 1192 Orangeburg, S.C., 560 Oratory (and orations), 30, 53, 129, 151, 264, 293, 311, 326, 345–46, 362, 403, 421–22, 431, 434, 451, 500, 506, 527–29, 639–40, 644, 690, 698, 740–41, 806, 899, 952, 1091, 1106, 1108, 1193 Oregon, 228, 233 Orient (and Orientalism), 24, 162, 166–67, 172–73, 189, 192, 236, 247, 329, 402, 493, 496, 507, 1014, 1044, 1163, 1168 Orleanists, 114, 124 Orloff, Count Gregory, 147 Osage, 287 Osborne, John D., 116, 341 Osius (bishop), 1088 Ospedale degli Innocenti (Florence), 154 Ossian (James MacPherson), 107, 235, 237, 496, 650, 691, 740, 1078 Ostend, 111 Ostrogoths, 235 Oswald, James, 1001, 1029 Otaheitans, 228 Otho, 163, 167, 686 Otis, George Alexander, 503 Otis, Harrison Gray, 43, 129 Otis, James, 499, 504, 666

1336

Index

Ottoman Empire, 173, 1080 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso): Metamorphoses, 314, 324 Owen, Robert, 78, 104, 880, 975 Owens, Parson, 40 Oxenstierna, Count Axel Gustafsson, 601 Oxford, Ga., 514 Oxford, Miss., 40, 514, 516, 356 Oxford, N.C., 346 Oxford English Dictionary, 414 Oxford Movement, 134, 1103 Pacific Ocean, 170, 189, 192, 228 Padang, 170 Paganism, 149, 180–81, 236, 615, 736, 774, 1109, 1128, 1143 Page, Robert M., 183 Pagus, Mount, 171 Paine, Thomas, 802, 820, 822; Common Sense, 132; Rights of Man, 802, 820 Painting (and painters), 50, 100, 103, 105, 111–12, 130, 147, 155, 193–94, 260, 368, 584, 638, 686, 709–10, 712–13, 749, 753, 784, 1010, 1018, 1135, 1172 Paisley, 1000 Palestine, 164, 843, 1080 Paley, William, 260, 377–78, 901, 903, 961, 967, 990, 1040, 1118–19, 1143; Evidences of Christianity, 1155; Natural Theolo , 1155 Palinurus, 1166 Palladianism, 418, 796, 1010 Palmer, Benjamin Morgan, 360, 457, 563, 1049, 1094, 1156 Palmer, Ezra, 29 Palmer, William, 482 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, third viscount, 180 Pamlicos, 287 Pampas, Argentine, 190, 196 Panama, 192, 1199 Pangwe, 181 Pantheism, 1050–51, 1110, 1112–13, 1119, 1137, 1141–42, 1167 Pantheon, 115 Papacy, 95, 479, 1082–83, 1086, 1088–89, 1091, 1127–28, 1146 Paris (and Parisians), 5, 15, 18, 20, 24, 40, 55, 58, 91–93, 95–97, 102, 104–6, 110–24, 126, 134–35, 137, 139–40, 150, 154, 160, 175, 211, 215–17, 223, 240–41, 243, 249, 286, 290–

91, 331, 336, 341–42, 350–51, 360, 367–68, 378, 395, 409, 411, 415, 454, 477, 479, 481, 483, 487, 492, 496–97, 519, 543, 548, 582– 86, 655, 680, 693, 700, 750, 765, 878, 886, 896, 907, 983, 1019, 1039, 1041, 1074, 1100, 1164, 1178, 1199 Paris Conservatoire, 114 Park, Mungo: Travels in the Interior of Africa, 501 Park, Thomas, 71, 524 Parker, Richard Green: Progressive Exercises, 478 Parker, Theodore, 43–44 Parmenides, 1058 Parody, 325, 762, 1188 Parthians, 239 Parvenus, 320, 370, 381, 421, 429, 434, 723, 897, 957, 980, 1115, 1144, 1154, 1186 Pascal, Blaise, 184, 257, 493, 1187 Pastoralism, 41, 155–56, 457, 509, 600, 733, 749, 885, 940, 1094, 1096, 1100, 1117 Paternalism, 289, 297, 465, 551, 765, 796, 848, 872, 888, 969, 1145 Paternoster Row, 582 Paterson, N.J., 63 Patriarchy (and patriarchs), 113, 178, 255, 270, 273, 281, 304, 607–8, 760, 769, 795, 806, 820, 823, 885, 937, 958–60, 974, 977, 1098, 1195, 1198 Patriotism (and patriots), 193, 297–98, 307, 311, 318, 336–39, 342, 346–49, 351, 527, 531, 537, 602, 646, 649–50, 653, 657, 659, 667, 687, 704–5, 721–22, 727, 790, 797, 808, 810, 853, 856, 863, 885, 917, 923, 934, 1078, 1081, 1090, 1173 Patronage (and patrons), 31, 172, 181, 297, 299, 337–38, 343, 348, 367, 460, 539, 562, 575, 580, 613, 645, 677, 684, 740, 758, 786, 788, 819, 820, 844, 860, 882, 933, 1020, 1095, 1114–15 Paul, Saint, 273 Paulding, James K., 49, 52, 548; Letters from the South, 500, 505 Payne, John, 178–79 Pazzi Conspiracy, 331 Peabody, George Foster, 518, 525, 631 Peacock, Thomas Love, 760; Headlong Hall, 760 Peale, Charles Willson, 37 Pearl, Joshua, 478

Index Peasants (and peasantry), 102, 149, 154, 365, 386, 616, 734, 812, 839, 898, 1175 Pedee, 287 Pedraza, Gómez, 199 Peel, Sir Robert, 1101 Pegasus, 465 Pegues, Alexander H., 352 Peixotto, Solomon Cohen, 1070 Pelagians, 236, 1120, 1128 Pelham, Charles, 88, 151, 163 Peloponnesian War, 611 Penang, 190, 249 Pendleton Messenger, 442 Penington, John, 37, 486, 490 Pennsylvania, 38, 72, 85, 128, 302, 516, 623, 649, 813, 901, 928, 1015, 1185 Pensacola, Fla., 287 Pentateuch, 247, 539, 582, 901, 1079, 1110 Pepys, Samuel, 470 Percival, James G., 742 Percy, Thomas: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 235 Percy, Walker, 670 Percy, William Alexander, 670 Pernambuco, 190 Péron, François, 231 Perrault, Paul, 71 Perry, Benjamin Franklin, 354 Perry, Matthew, 189 Persia (and Persians), 147, 172–73, 236–37, 239, 310, 368, 609, 640, 1104–5 Peru, 3, 175, 190, 192, 194, 196, 215 Peter the Great, 499, 504 Peterloo Massacre, 374, 893 Peter Parley, 42 Petersburg, Va., 95, 146–47, 228, 259, 397, 421, 423, 576–77, 638, 962 Petersburg Franklin Society, 424 Petigru, Caroline, 255 Petigru, James Louis, 51, 53, 56, 81, 83–84, 255, 289–90, 398, 401–2, 408, 428, 449–50, 484, 636, 770, 1091, 1177, 1186 Petrarch, Francesco, 156, 441, 676, 708; View of Human Life, 503 Pettigrew, James Johnston, 11, 16, 100, 112, 146, 159–61, 250, 366, 389, 457–58, 464, 584, 1103, 1105, 1161, 1170–76, 1185–86, 1188, 1198; Notes on Spain, 161, 1170–76 Pezron, Paul-Yves, 235 Pharsalia, battle of, 707

1337

Phi Beta Kappa, 32, 646 Philadelphia, Pa., 18, 20, 28–29, 36–38, 46, 53, 65, 70, 92, 113, 119, 128, 190, 197, 209, 216, 240–41, 243, 254, 268, 293, 365, 403, 426, 473, 483, 486–87, 496, 540, 545, 547, 566, 572, 575–79, 582, 585, 631, 637, 682, 740–41, 747, 749, 758, 798, 825, 886, 907, 909, 957, 1010, 1016, 1086, 1196, 1198 Philadelphia Library Company, 514–16 Philanthropy, 55, 108, 248, 289, 517–20, 734–35, 775, 823, 874, 884, 939, 950, 1151 Philbrick, Samuel, 507 Philhellenes, 163, 721 Philippines, 93, 191, 228 Philistines, 239, 360 Philology, 138, 142–43, 173, 176, 327, 330, 414, 498, 521, 595, 598, 693, 788, 1051, 1105–6, 1108 Philomathean Society, 1076 Phoenicians, 236, 239, 607, 982 Photius, Saint: Lexicon, 482 Phrenology, 232, 430, 448, 468, 1008, 1018– 19 Physicians (and doctors), 18, 72, 74, 91, 110, 119, 121, 183, 227–28, 231–32, 240, 335, 371, 380, 383, 401, 407, 429, 434, 464, 637, 650, 718, 898, 945, 970, 982, 1069, 1075 Physics, 400, 478, 498, 984, 1011, 1064 Physiocrats, 896 Physiognomy (and the physiological), 123, 181, 205, 224–25, 229, 231–32, 237, 241, 247, 381, 383, 386–87, 503, 657, 669, 697, 710, 891, 964, 998, 1003, 1008, 1015–19, 1046 Pickens, Francis, 256–57, 633 Pickett, Albert James, 36–37, 362, 372, 431– 32, 476, 486–87, 510, 631–34, 636, 746; Eight Days in New Orleans, 362; History of Alabama, 432, 633 Pickett’s Charge, 1202 Picot family, 254 Pictet, Benedict, 145 Piedmont, 303, 482 Pierce, Franklin, 166 Pietism, 1059, 1065 Pike, Albert, 703, 722, 725 Pillsbury, Parker, 420 Pinckney, Charles, 94, 159 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 94 Pinckney, Eliza Lucas, 94

1338

Index

Pinckney, Frances Motte Middleton, 94 Pinckney, Sarah Middleton, 94 Pinckney, Thomas, 94 Pindar, 144, 985 Pineville, 358–59, 391, 1099 Pinkerton, John: Scythians or Goths, 235–36 Pitcairn’s Island, 245 Pitt, William (the younger), 132, 343, 403, 901 Pitti Palace, 96 Pittsboro Debating Society, 423 Pittsburgh, Pa., 20 Pittsylvania County, N.C., 350 Plaquemine, La., 421, 423 Plato (and Platonism), 18, 143, 402, 435, 668, 785, 805, 1002, 1004, 1014, 1024, 1058–59, 1063, 1102, 1111, 1113, 1118; Phaedo, 402, 1118; Republic, 18 Plautus, 143, 488, 686 Playfair, John, 105 Pleasants, John H., 340 Pleasants, Samuel, 487 Pliny, 225, 503 Plumer, William, 32–33 Plumer, William S., 360–61 Plunkett, Caroline Mordecai, 287 Plutarch, 459, 501, 503, 653–54, 657–58, 740, 1077–78 Plymouth, Mass., 1183 Poe, David, 754–55 Poe, Edgar Allan, 11, 16, 24, 48, 289, 309, 389, 450, 538, 542, 547–49, 560, 569, 579– 80, 585–87, 692, 713–14, 718, 722, 731, 747, 752, 754–55, 1065, 1166; Arthur Gordon Pym, 24, 422, 592, 730; Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym, 586; Eureka, 586; Histoires extraordinaires, 586; Nouvelles choisies d’Edgard Poe, 586; Histoires grotesques et sérieuses, 586; Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires Poe, Eliza, 754 Po River, 103, 891 Poindexter, Carter B., 147 Poinsett, Ann Roberts, 195 Poinsett, Elisha, 195 Poinsett, Joel Roberts, 24, 99, 146–47, 194–202, 204, 210, 407, 547, 585; Notes on Mexico, 196–200, 500, 505, 585 Poitiers, battle of, 647 Poland (and Polish), 124, 146, 288, 504, 854, 1070–71, 1087

Pollok, Robert, 739 Polybius, 593 Polycarp, Saint, 171, 1088 Polychronicon, The, 492 Polygamy, 180, 608, 970, 975 Polygenesis, 165, 240–41, 248, 250, 431–33, 607, 951, 1107, 1152 Polytheism, 608, 615 Pompadour, Antoinette Poisson, marquise de, 620 Pompeii, 147 Pope, Alexander, 20, 348, 465, 480, 553, 566, 704–5, 708, 721, 738, 803, 1079; Dunciad, 733 Pople, W., 584 Population, 3–4, 6, 40, 47, 52, 82, 106, 120, 165, 182–83, 198, 200, 203–4, 245, 251, 285– 87, 293, 296–300, 302–4, 312, 315, 322, 339, 349, 360, 365–66, 374, 378, 476, 542, 641, 647, 798, 800, 810, 812, 814, 840, 844, 853, 872, 882, 886–87, 892, 896, 900, 907–11, 928, 936–37, 942, 944, 979, 1054, 1080, 1085, 1183 Populism, 782, 1181 Porcher, Francis Peyre, 238, 356, 464, 744 Porcher, Frederick Adolphus, 28–30, 64, 356–59, 376, 390, 414, 428–31, 434–37, 451, 484–85, 508–11, 682, 699 Porcher, Jane, 415 Porcher, Samuel, 359 Porphyry, 144–45 Porter, Alexander, 529 Porter, Benjamin F., 633–35 Porter, David, 174 Porter, Sir David, 500 Porter, Jane: The Pastor’s Fireside, 501; Thaddeus of Warsaw, 763 Porter, Mary, 962 Porter, Noah, 1134–35 Porter, Sir Robert: Travels in Russia and Sweden, 500 Porter, Robert Massengill, 116, 123, 125, 1073 Porter, William T., 758 Port Folio, 907, 500 Port Royal, Va., 391, 973, 979 Portugal (and the Portugese), 92, 101, 133, 161, 194, 239, 483, 503, 1070–71, 1079, 1087, 1104, 1176 Positivism, 996, 1060, 1062

Index Postcolonialism, 2–3, 6, 22, 210–11, 232, 587, 774, 915 Postmodernism, 20, 366, 986 Pothier, Jean, 463 Potomac River, 27, 41, 48, 50, 136, 310, 313, 351, 499, 505, 706, 814 Potowmack, 72 Poughkeepsie, 564 Powell, Alfred, 809 Powers, Hiram, 154, 157 Powhatans, 287 Pownall, Thomas, 231 Poznanski, Gustavus, 1070 Prague, 483 Prentiss, Sergeant S., 479 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 728, 1098 Presbyterian Church of the C.S.A., 180 Presbyterianism (and Presbyterians), 35, 40, 50, 61–64, 67, 69, 84, 105–6, 142, 145, 163, 170, 179–80, 231, 268, 288, 335, 346, 360, 371, 383, 457, 466, 474, 489, 530, 561, 584, 603, 636, 675, 681, 842, 866, 879, 901, 1007, 1016, 1049–50, 1068, 1070, 1086, 1094, 1096–98, 1115–19, 1122, 1126–27, 1129–30, 1143, 1148–51, 1150 Prescott, William Hickling, 159, 202, 448, 470, 631, 703 Prescott & Fleming, 477 Preston, John, 102 Preston, John S., 88, 1129 Preston, Louise Penelope Davis, 77, 166, 253–54, 923 Preston, Mary, 1073 Preston, Sally Buchanan (‘‘Buck’’), 1192 Preston, William Campbell, 31, 49, 51, 77, 81–84, 88, 100–107, 109, 112, 122, 126, 135, 139, 150–51, 166, 253, 336–37, 339, 341, 360, 371, 397, 402, 410, 419, 449, 453–54, 529, 564–65, 593, 679, 682, 700, 903, 922, 1041, 1047, 1069, 1143 Price, Richard, 164, 820 Prichard, James Cowles, 231, 239, 245, 250 Priene, 343 Priestley, Joseph, 122, 605, 820, 897, 1014–15, 1019, 1025 Priests (and the priesthood), 104, 106, 113, 116, 151, 189, 241, 247, 251, 285, 453, 479, 608, 690–91, 867, 932, 940, 957, 1016, 1065–66, 1068, 1078, 1083–85, 1088, 1090, 1092, 1104

1339

Primitive Baptists, 1068 Primogeniture, 367, 646, 652, 910 Primrose, Mary Ann, 256 Princeton, 28–30, 35, 37, 63, 66, 72, 142, 169–70, 231, 316, 514–15, 517, 520, 553, 966, 972, 1000, 1097, 1118, 1126, 1134–35 Princeton Review, 1126, 1134 Pringle, Mary, 195 Printers, 28, 418, 442, 452, 477, 480, 528, 534–35, 561, 567–68, 622, 898 Prioleau, Samuel, 378 Procrustes, 643, 1031 Prometheus, 167, 569 Proslavery argument, 10, 13, 78–79, 81, 178, 186, 247–49, 269, 455, 462, 578–79, 587, 719, 732, 734, 738, 765, 771, 823–24, 872, 938–99, 1081, 1108, 1155, 1157 Pro-Slavery Argument, The, 578, 959 Prospero, 450 Prosser, Gabriel, 208 Protagoras, 1058 Protestant Episcopal Pulpit, 1094 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 905, 975 Prussia (and Prussians), 5, 15, 28, 73, 76, 86, 146, 367, 605, 687, 1041, 1045, 1070 Pryme, George, 878 Pseudonymity, 356, 482, 553–54, 560, 677, 770, 1148 Psychology, 388, 436, 910, 912, 942, 945, 990, 998, 1008, 1011, 1015, 1017, 1055, 1106, 1108–10, 1112, 1127, 1133, 1138, 1146, 1169 Publishers, 9, 36, 53, 85, 301, 472–74, 476, 480, 483–86, 497, 518, 526, 531–32, 534, 537–38, 550, 564–67, 571–82, 586, 622, 700, 760, 917, 965, 986, 1163, 1165, 1197–98 Pufendorf, Samuel, Freiherr von, 503, 943 Pulaski, Casimir, 124 Pulpit, 500 Puritans (and the puritanical), 149, 251, 262, 291, 304, 317, 320, 325, 396, 409, 430, 457, 602, 617, 704, 743, 773 Pusey, Edward (and Puseyites), 64, 134 Pushkin, Alexander, 1187 Putnam, George P., 550, 575, 582, 760 Putnam’s Magazine, 577, 580 Pynson, Richard, 492 Pyramids, 111, 165, 196 Pyrenees, 158, 1172 Pyrrho (and Pyrrhonism), 997, 1052, 1167 Pythagoras, 435

1340

Index

Qing Dynasty, 189 Quakerism (and Quakers), 137, 268–69, 823, 884, 1068 Quapaws, 287 Quarterly Review, 500 Quarterly Review of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 549 Quash, Frank, 509 Quebec, 581 Queensberry Rules, 831 Queen’s College (Belfast), 62 Quesnay, François, 896 Quincey, Thomas de, 465, 1049 Quincy, Josiah, 499 Quito, 194 Quiver, The, 1078 Quotidienne, La, 585 Racine, Jean: Letters, 504 Radcliffeborough, S.C., 1100 Raffles, Thomas: History of Java, 499 Railroads, 20, 43, 110, 166, 169, 303, 336, 373–74, 453, 466, 473, 577, 582, 653, 923, 931, 968, 980 Raleigh, N.C., 460, 480, 514, 740, 1073 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 349, 784 Ralston, Thomas, 1125; Elements of Divinity, 1097 Ramsay, David, 123, 137, 501, 505, 576, 596, 598, 621–22, 633, 640, 655–57, 659–61, 663, 668, 675–76, 721, 1078, 1181; George Washington, 505, 585, 655; History of South Carolina, 505, 577, 633; History of the American Revolution, 501, 505, 584, 622; History of the United States, 576; Martha Laurens Ramsay, 584, 675–76; Revolution in South Carolina, 584–85; Universal History, 505, 576, 621 Ramsay, David (grandson), 336–37 Ramsay, John, 684 Ramsay, Martha Laurens, 675–76 Ramsey, J. G. M., 323, 406, 648, 682, 1091– 92; Annals of Tennessee, 339, 485 Ramus, 1131 Randall, Henry Stephens, 320–21, 638–39, 661 Randolph, Edmund, 651 Randolph, J. W., 485–86 Randolph, John, 11, 160, 306–8, 323, 350, 371, 398, 400–401, 416, 431, 444, 472,

487, 491, 493, 640, 642–43, 655, 667– 71, 673, 785, 796, 798, 800, 805, 809–10, 812, 816, 838, 840, 847, 852, 862, 865, 868, 870–71, 914, 957, 979, 1161 Randolph, John (the Loyalist), 650 Randolph, Peyton, 650 Randolph, Richard, 491 Randolph, Robert, 321 Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, 444 Randolph-Macon College, 513, 739, 962, 1095 Ranke, Leopold von, 155, 201, 604, 1045, 1048, 1147, 1183 Ransom, John Crowe, 1175 Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzio), 96, 147–48, 652, 710 Rapin (Paul de Rapin de Thoyras), 594 Rappahannock River, 882, 885 Rappists, 958 Ratisbon, 483 Raumer, Friedrich von, 1045 Ravenel, Beatrice St. Julien: Charleston, 362 Ravenel, Daniel, 434 Ravenel, John, 359 Ravenel, Henry W., 440 Ravenscroft, John Stark: Works, 1098 Raymond, Daniel: Elements of Political Economy, 905–6 Raynal, Guillaume, Abbé: Deux Indes, 504 Reade, Winwood, 182 Realism (literary), 7, 11, 413, 678, 763, 1172, 1188 Realism (philosophical), 996, 1000–1001, 1004, 1007–8, 1011–12, 1020, 1030, 1038– 39, 1044, 1046, 1131, 1133 Rebecca, 269 Récamier, Juliette, 100, 749 Rechabites, 1081 Reconstruction, 334, 782, 835, 1198 Redfield, J. S., 485, 576 Reed, William B., 631 Reeve, Joseph (History of the Holy Bible), 479 Reformation, Protestant, 20, 145, 149, 478, 482, 594, 607, 616, 698, 775, 991, 1067, 1098, 1131, 1146 Regulae, Constitutiones, Reservationes Cancellariae, 1089 Reid, Edward, 67 Reid, James Seaton, 67 Reid, Robert Hardin, 459

Index Reid, Thomas, 62, 641, 996–1003, 1005, 1007–13, 1017, 1021, 1024, 1028–29, 1031, 1034, 1037, 1041–42, 1052, 1054, 1118, 113– 33, 1135, 1138; Active Powers of Man, 998–99; Inquiry into the Human Mind, 996–98; Intellectual Powers of Man, 998 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard, 1059 Relf, Samuel: Infidelity, Farmer of New Jersey, and First Settlers of Virginia, 747 Religious Repertory, 1083 Rembrandt van Rijn, 712 Remi, Saint, 1088 Remusat, Jean-Pierre-Abel, 173 Renaissance, Italian, 148, 151, 331, 441, 496, 593, 614–15, 1078 Renan, Ernst, 24, 243 Rennes, 113 Republicanism, 47, 65, 146, 326, 376, 609, 783, 810, 823, 832, 844, 882 Republican Methodists, 1068 Republican Party, 372 Republican Party (Liberia), 182 Reputation, 31, 47, 55, 133, 242, 245, 331, 370, 389–91, 401, 435, 509, 529, 555, 557, 577, 602, 652, 728, 746, 898, 912, 923, 955, 986, 1013, 1047 Restoration, English, 318 Restoration, French, 893 Retz, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de, 504 Revelation, 232, 241, 424, 875, 956, 1006, 1050, 1111, 1113, 1119, 1124–25, 1144 Revivalism, 1093 Revolutionary War. See American Revolution Revue des Deux Mondes, 122 Revue Louisianaise, 335 Reynolds, James L., 89 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 6, 641 Reynolds, Thomas Caute, 140, 159, 250, 327, 366 Rheims, 1088 Rhetoric, 62, 260, 321, 368, 399, 416, 478, 495, 498, 587, 623, 659, 678, 683–89, 733, 738, 761, 899, 914, 957, 966, 970, 983, 1096, 1198 Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 81, 398, 671, 848 Rhine River, 111, 125, 145, 752, 1138 Rhode Island, 71, 95, 661, 810 Ricardo, David, 599, 879, 886, 888, 896, 899, 903, 912, 917–18

1341

Riccardi Library, 155 Rice, John Holt, 490, 493, 518, 628, 640 Rice, Mr. (of Miss.), 164 Richardson, John, 830 Richardson, Samuel: 441, 745, 830; Pamela, 501; Sir Charles Grandison, 499 Richelieu, Armand du Plessix, Cardinal, 413, 601 Richland County, S.C., 40 Richmond, Va., 30, 54–56, 58, 122, 142, 249, 287–88, 311, 316, 340, 343–44, 352, 361– 62, 397, 411, 422, 424, 473, 485–87, 513–15, 518, 534–35, 543, 547–49, 554, 576, 578, 642, 664, 682, 755, 760, 800, 805, 836, 959, 1035, 1073, 1082, 1090, 1094–95, 1126, 1198 Richmond Atheneum, 628 Richmond College, 1056 Richmond Enquirer, 962 Richter, Jean Paul, 135, 1187 Riegelsdorf, 227 Riggs, Elias, 170 Rimbaud, Arthur, 1187 Ringgold, Cadwalader, 189 Riobamba, 194 Rio de Janeiro, 194, 211 Risorgimento, Italian, 156 Ritschl, Friedrich Wilhelm, 143–44 Ritter, Heinrich, 143 Rivers, Richard Henderson: Elements of Moral Philosophy, 1097 Rivers, William James, 327, 429, 431, 623; Sketch of the History of South Carolina, 623; Topics in the History of South Carolina, 431 Rives, William Cabell, 123, 317–19, 335–36, 338, 388, 444, 548, 628 Rivière, Mercier de la, 896 Rivoli, 124 Roane, Archibald, 703, 705 Roanoke River, 356 Robbins, William Henry, 543, 1020, 1115, 1146 Robert I (‘‘Robert the Bruce’’), 704 Roberts, Issachar Jacobs, 187–89 Robertson, James, 69 Robertson, William, 107, 470, 488, 594, 599, 614, 691, 999; Charles V, 745; History of Scotland, 501 Robespierre, François-Maximilien-Joseph de, 403, 453, 619, 822 Robinocracy, 884

1342

Index

Robinson, Hanson, 340 Robinson, Joseph, 511 Rochester, John Wilmot, second earl of, 566 Rodgers, Robert, 169 Roe, Miss, 501 Rogers, Randolph, 345 Rogers, Robert, 169 Rollin, Charles, 459, 504, 594, 659, 1077 Romance (genre), 10, 107, 125, 159, 202, 293, 295, 342, 363, 424, 450, 498, 564, 604, 629, 668, 695, 703, 746–49, 754, 760, 763, 775, 1149 Roman de la Rose, 492 Romans (ancient), 107–8, 143, 148, 201, 235–36, 254, 297, 478, 503, 507, 521, 558, 592–93, 604, 607, 613–14, 690, 696, 698, 707, 785, 798, 854, 977, 981, 983, 1044, 1077, 1142–43, 1179 Romans (modern), 103, 748, 755 Romanticism (and Romantic), 6–8, 10–11, 20, 23–24, 37, 41, 106–7, 112, 116, 132, 145, 149, 152, 155, 159, 235, 237–38, 342, 389, 462, 557, 568–69, 599, 608–9, 616, 667, 670–71, 673, 684, 691–94, 698, 701, 703, 705, 707, 712, 715, 725, 728, 736, 738–39, 749, 754–55, 760, 858, 864–65, 902, 983, 987, 1101, 1111, 1128, 1142, 1172, 1180, 1188 Rome (ancient), 5, 91, 151–52, 178, 181, 311, 359–60, 422, 592, 595, 598, 601, 606, 613– 14, 616, 700, 787, 811, 861, 977, 982, 1087, 1128 Rome (modern), 73, 86, 95, 100, 104, 124, 139, 148, 150, 153–56, 162, 330, 345, 483, 492, 593, 734, 748, 1065, 1073, 1082, 1084–85, 1089, 1092, 1103 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 482 Romulus, 159 Roncesvalles, battle of, 159 Roscoe, William: Life of Leo X, 501 Rose Bud, 542 Rosellini, Ippolito, 242 Rose of Sharon Union Daughters of Temperance, 182 Rosetta Stone, 216 Rossetti, Dante Gabriele: La Beatrice di Dante, 157 Rossini, Gioachino: William Tell, 145 Roszel, S. A., 1 Rouquette, Adrien, 113, 396; Les Savanes, 582, 584

Rouquette, Dominique: Meschacebeenes, poèsies, 584 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 115, 658, 670, 672, 676, 806, 1078; Confessions, 504; Emile, 504; Nouvelle Héloîse, 504; Sur l’inégalité, 224 Routh, Martin Joseph: Reliquiae Sacrae, 482 Routledge (publishers), 582–83 Royal Asiatic Society, 175 Royall, Anne: Letters from Alabama, 442 Royal Mint, 106 Royal School of Mines, 106 Royston, Charles Philip Yorke, viscount, 147 Rubens, Peter Paul, 103, 111, 129 Rubini, Giovan Battista, 117 Rucker, Robert, 326 Ruffin, Edmund, 16, 18, 45, 100, 307–8, 376, 400, 419, 437, 439, 450, 464, 468–71, 490, 536, 548, 556, 579, 596, 679–80, 988; Calcareous Manures, 485 Ruffin, Elizabeth, 9, 37, 266, 415, 458, 463, 743, 763 Ruffner, Henry, 407, 425 Ruffner, William Henry, 320, 422 Ruggles, Samuel B., 84 Ruins, 28, 62, 155–56, 263, 283, 308, 329, 341, 415, 504, 827, 848–49, 943–44, 1079 Rush, Benjamin, 1019 Ruskin, John, 1168 Russell, D. L., 38 Russell, John (the bookseller), 477, 480–86, 528, 531, 582, 584, 632, 1103 Russell, Lord John, 784 Russell, John, fourth duke of Bedford, 784 Russell, William, 594 Russell’s Magazine, 481, 484–85, 531, 537, 540, 549, 556, 561, 580, 705, 730, 736–37, 1100, 1102 Russia (and Russians), 92, 86, 102–3, 136, 146, 195, 217, 228, 479, 496, 500, 504, 694, 1070, 1104–5, 1181, 1187 Rutherfoord, John Cole, 116, 414 Rutherford, Samuel, 66, 961 Rutledge, Edward, 95 Rutledge, Harriet Horry, 327 Rutledge, John, 19, 338, 509 Rutledge, Martha, 95 Saalfeld, Friedrich, 133, 137–38, 140 Sabran, Elzéar de, 100

Index Sachtleben, Augustus, 332, 429, 436–37 Sackville, Charles, 566 Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, 1085–86 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-Françoise, comte, 951–52 Sahara Desert, 176, 964 Said Pasha, 167 St. Andrew’s Society, 288 St. Augustine, Fla., 625 Sainte-Domingue. See Haiti Sainte-Romes, J. C. de, 208 St. Finbar’s Cathedral, 1092 St. Hilaire, Geoffrey, 120 St. Louis, Mo., 14, 758, 1053–54, 1088 St. Louis Academy, 208 St. Louis Library Association, 511 St. Louis Philosophical Society, 1054 St. Mary Academy, 208 St. Patrick’s College (Carlow), 1083 St. Patrick Society, 288 St. Paul River (Liberia), 182 St. Petersburg, 95, 146–47, 228 St. Peter’s (Rome), 151 St. Philip’s Church (Charleston, S.C.), 719, 873, 875 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 114 Saint-Simon, Henri, 953, 975 Salamanca, 748 Salem, 189 Salem, Miss., 233, 468 Salem, N.C., 302–4, 349, 1067 Salem, S.C., 179 Salem Academy, 322 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius), 260, 593 Salvanius, 1088 Salzburgers, 286 Sanballat, 348 Sanderson, John: Signers of the Declaration of Independence, 499, 505 Sandford, Henry Shelton, 501, 1178 Sandhillers, 281, 386 Sandusky, Ohio, 1036 Sangay, Mount, 194 Sanskrit, 173, 189, 1104–5, 1107 Santayana, George, 1173 Santee, 287, 358, 363 Santiago, 196 Saponis, 287 Saracens, 237

1343

Saratoga Springs, N.Y., 36, 46, 109, 166, 634 Sarmatians, 239 Satan, 1121, 1128 Saturday Evening Post, 1198 Sauvignat, Librarie, 584 Savannah, Ga., 15, 54, 81, 165–66, 172, 175, 210, 217, 281, 287–88, 310, 338, 343, 351, 355, 421, 454, 473, 492, 494–95, 497–98, 502–3, 505–8, 513, 515, 522–23, 543, 599, 629–30, 636, 765, 776, 784, 917, 1089, 1091 Savary, Claude Étienne: Letters on Greece, 504 Savigny, Friedrich von, 482 Savoy, 99 Sawyer, George: Southern Institutes, 578 Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Karl Bernhard, prince of, 52 Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Karl Friedrich, grand duke of, 137 Saxons, 235, 251, 317, 322, 383, 386–87, 647, 690, 699 Saxony, 302 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 122, 878, 887, 896– 97, 899, 903, 985, 1039; Traité d’économie politique, 880 Saybrook, Conn., 240 Scaliger, Joseph, 144 Scandinavia, 146, 235 Scardino (painter), 147 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 693, 1042, 1045, 1049–53, 1058, 1063, 1113, 1133, 1138 Schenectady, N.Y., 71, 179 Schiller, Friedrich, 582, 693, 696, 1048, 1187; Don Carlos, 135, 560; Thirty Years War, 503 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 20, 135, 137, 147, 331, 503, 603, 609, 691–98, 703, 1048; Lectures on Dramatic Art, 503, 694–97 Schlegel, Caroline von (later Schelling), 693 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 603, 609, 672, 691, 693, 698, 1044, 1048, 1057, 1105, 1107 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 1110, 1118, 1145 Schneidewin, Friedrich Wilhelm, 143 Scholasticism, 689, 998, 1004, 1009, 1022, 1024, 1128, 1131 Schwartzburg, 223 Schwegler, Albert: History of Philosophy, 1048 Scotch-Irish, 8, 63, 285, 288–89, 310, 312, 318, 370, 383, 647, 842

1344

Index

Scotland (and the Scottish): 63, 134, 233, 285, 288, 290, 318–20, 381, 388–99, 413–15, 429– 30, 434, 445, 465, 637, 647, 745, 755, 878, 907; intellectual life in, 10, 17, 62, 217, 234, 249, 388, 496–97, 499, 501, 603, 609– 10, 684–92, 694, 698, 701, 739, 763, 853, 878, 912, 920, 940, 953, 995–1014, 1016– 22, 1028–30, 1033, 1038–39, 1041–42, 1044, 1051–52, 1056–57, 1059, 1117–18, 1125, 1133– 37, 1139, 1169; visits to, 64–70, 102, 104–9, 483, 584, 700 Scott, John, 307–8, 807 Scott, Walter, 102, 104, 107, 145, 166, 237, 257, 313–15, 320, 390, 457, 479, 492, 499, 501, 533, 539, 555, 557, 559, 564, 619, 654, 685, 744, 746, 756, 760, 762–63, 770, 775, 914, 1079; Anne of Geierstein, 145, 539, 575; ‘‘The Fire-King,’’ 712; Guy Mannering, 499; Heart of Midlothian, 320; Ivanhoe, 237, 762; Kenilworth, 320, 501; Lady of the Lake, 499; Marmion, 499; Napoleon, 558; Peveril, 499; Redgauntlet, 685; Rob Roy, 102, 501; Waverley, 320, 499, 557, 654, 770; Woodstock, 313, 499 Scott, Winfield, 838 Scottish Anti-Slavery Society, 69 Scylla and Charybdis, 612, 827, 1060, 1152 Scythians, 235–36, 239 Seabury, Samuel, 50, 172, 579 Second Bank of the United States, 267, 817, 837, 860, 911, 918, 931, 933, 935 Second Presbyterian Church (Charleston, S.C.), 63, 1151 Sedgwick, Catharine: Redwood, 499, 501 Ségur, Philippe-Paul, comte de: Memoirs, 499, 504 Seidel, Günther K. F., 137 Seine River, 124 Selma, Ala., 237, 405 Seminaries, 36, 72, 87, 169, 179, 203, 489– 90, 513, 515, 520, 1083–85, 1091–96, 1097, 1099, 1114, 1118, 1124–25, 1130 Seminoles, 287, 845 Semiramis, 272 Semple, John William, 134 Senegal, 226 Senegambia, 176, 229 Senior, Nassau, 878 Sephardic Jews, 166, 285, 917, 1067, 1070–71 Serfdom (and serfs), 136, 178, 316–17, 386, 615, 617, 938, 975

Serra, Abbé Correa da, 101, 216 Severn River, 630 Sevier, John, 842 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, 259, 441, 443, 504 Seville, 112, 1172 Sewee, 287 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of: Characteristics, 493 Shakers, 37, 958, 1067 Shakespeare, William, 102, 257, 306, 418, 459, 465, 566, 693, 696, 703, 706, 721, 737, 739–40, 914, 940, 983, 1187; Antony and Cleopatra, 706; Hamlet, 871; Henry V, 706; King Lear, 686, 1187, 1194; Merchant of Venice, 301, 384, 1074; Othello, 223, 750, 1174; Romeo and Juliet, 914; Troilus and Cressida, 940 Shaler, William, 173 Shame, 172, 282, 348, 543, 715, 717, 1122 Shanghai, 192 Sheffield, Mass., 70 Shelby College, 513 Shelbyville, Tenn., 187, 513 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 202, 746, 989 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 95, 147, 154, 167, 723, 728, 739–40; Alastor, 731; Omandias, 945 Shepherd, Samuel, 576 Sheridan, Thomas, 413, 416 Sherman, Roger, 19 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 508, 512 Shiloh, battle of, 179, 189 Shylock, 301, 384, 1074 Siamese Twins (Chang and Eng), 400, 1012 Sibree, John, 1048 Sidney, Algernon, 770, 781, 784, 820, 921 Sidney, Sir Philip, 159, 704 Siéyès, L’Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph, 619 Sigourney, Lydia, 718, 739 Silliman, Benjamin, 1125 Simkins, Maria, 257 Simmons, James Wright, 1013 Simmons, ‘‘Shoeless’’ Bill, 1081 Simms, William Gilmore, 11, 16, 45, 48, 201, 207, 210, 247, 267, 332, 362–63, 369, 373, 389–90, 403–4, 412–13, 417, 428, 447, 450–55, 457, 474, 482–85, 489, 491, 510, 534–38, 540, 542, 544, 547–50, 552, 554, 556, 559, 561–62, 565–73, 576–77, 580, 582–83, 631–32, 636, 674, 701–3, 705–6, 714, 723–28, 730–31, 738, 743, 746–47,

Index 763, 966, 1068, 1164, 1166, 1198; Areytos, 484; Border Beagles, 363; Charleston and Her Satirists, 363; Charleston Book, 362, 570, 702; Damsel of Darien, 572; Lays of the Palmetto, 485; Marie de Berniere, 363, 482; Mellichampe, 363; Partisan Leader, 769; Poems, 485; The Prima Donna, 363; Views and Reviews in American Literature, 582; The Yemassee, 363, 746 Simpkin, Marshall (publishers), 583 Sims, J. Marion, 1116 Sind, 957 Siouan, 287 Sismondi, Léonard Simonde de, 615–16, 698, 717, 893, 896, 899; Literature of the South of Europe, 159, 698, 717; Nouveaux principes, 378; Républiques italiennes du moyen âge, 482 Sisters of the Mysterious Ten, 182 Skipwith, Diana, 183 Skipwith, Matilda, 183 Skipwith, Peyton, 183–85 Slavs, 184 Slidell, John, 363 Slidell, John McKenzie: Year in Spain, 159 Sloan, James and Theodore Lyman: Rambles in Italy, 501 Small, William, 430 Smets, Alexander Augustus, 492 Smith, Adam, 107, 275, 365–66, 378, 488, 599, 604, 684–85, 688, 691, 808, 853, 863, 879–81, 887, 890, 896, 897–98, 902–3, 908, 912, 914, 917–18, 921, 951, 974–75, 996, 999, 1009, 1013; Moral Sentiments, 808, 912; Wealth of Nations, 878, 912 Smith, Ann Magee, 62 Smith, Archibald, 499, 500–501 Smith, Carlos, 324 Smith, Charlotte Georgina Izard, 92 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes: Woman and Her Needs, 275 Smith, Gerrit, 733 Smith, Horace: Gaieties and Gravities, 499 Smith, Hugh, 1089 Smith, James Harvey (later James Smith Rhett), 378, 436, 1013, 1051 Smith, John, 311, 315, 595, 747 Smith, John Augustine, 878 Smith, Joseph (of Mormons), 166 Smith, Joseph (of Ulster), 63 Smith, Joseph Allen, 92, 99

1345

Smith, Margaret Bayard: Winter in Washington, 505 Smith, Samuel, 62 Smith, Samuel B., 486 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 28; Variety of Complexion and Figure, 231 Smith, Sydney, 551 Smith, William, 643 Smith, William A.: Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, 948, 960–65 Smith, William Loughton, 92 Smithfield, Va., 122, 321 Smithsonian Institution, 512, 514, 516, 524, 631 Smith W. (publishers), 583 Smollett, Tobias, 479, 594, 745–46; History of England, 479 Smyrna, 169–71 Smyth, Margaret, 63, 170 Smyth, Thomas, 52, 61–70, 73, 87, 170, 246, 428–30, 434–35, 437, 450, 484, 488–89, 491, 493, 520, 584, 1087; Complete Works, 1097–98; Mercy and Holiness, 484; Unity of the Human Race, 67 Smythe, Lousia McCord, 409, 447 Snider, Denton J., 1053–54 Sociability, 66, 134, 405–7, 439, 707, 709, 850, 1141, 1143, 1188 Socialism (and socialists), 104, 278, 381, 387, 782, 902, 905, 920, 958, 975–76, 1151–52 Société de Géographie, 175 Society of Saint-Sulpice, 1084 Society for the Advancement of Learning, 948 Society for the Advancement of Literature and Science in the State of Tennessee, 361 Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 1085 Socinians, 1128 Sociology, 317, 387, 578, 606, 867, 942, 966, 969, 975, 979, 984, 987, 991, 1062, 1064 Socrates, 163, 326, 609 Soler, Mariano Cubí y, 330 Solomon, 985 Solon, 863, 989 Somers, John, 651 Sömmerring, Samuel Thomas, 227, 245 Sophists, 1004, 1058 Sophocles, 324, 985 Sorbonne, 87, 120 Soto, Hernando da, 295, 632

1346

Index

South Africa, 3, 4 South Carolina, 5, 14, 20, 40, 47, 61, 63, 80– 81, 83, 91, 102, 142, 157, 180, 182, 207, 262, 275, 291, 294, 337–38, 341, 343, 345, 353–54, 362, 381, 402, 430–31, 470, 486, 505, 508, 519, 533, 543–45, 551, 558, 577, 624, 632, 671, 734, 758, 784, 816, 840, 845–48, 861, 874, 916–17, 921, 928–29, 950, 1012, 1016, 1070, 1072, 1084, 1091, 1150, 1178, 1193–94, 1197–98; persons associated with, 32, 57, 89, 92, 93, 95, 99–100, 110, 122, 140, 147, 154, 164, 169, 171, 178–79, 195, 199, 240, 248, 256, 267, 286, 290, 299, 324, 339, 341– 42, 359, 371, 397, 440, 454, 533, 545–47, 633, 708, 839, 1056, 1071, 1090, 1097, 1100; political philosophy of, 817–36 South Carolina College, 36, 47, 49, 70, 73, 79, 84–85, 88–89, 163, 166, 238, 240, 327, 329, 389, 392, 415, 416, 449, 459, 513, 514, 515, 517, 519–21, 524–25, 622–23, 683, 827, 878, 899, 901, 946, 955, 1001, 1007, 1020– 21, 1092, 1095, 1099, 1106, 1116, 1118, 1125, 1129, 1130, 1143, 1155, 1156 South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute, 257 South Carolina Gazette, 648 South Carolina Historical Society, 336, 401–2, 628, 636 South Carolina Methodist Advocate, 335 South Carolina Society, 288, 719 South Carolina Temperance Advocate, 335 Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, 187 Southern Baptist Preacher, 1094 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1095 Southern Centinel, 505 Southern Intelligencer, 500 Southern Literary Journal, 531, 533, 1091 Southern Literary Messenger, 1, 38, 48, 55, 135, 148, 166, 238, 250, 258, 309, 316, 351, 356, 366, 391, 417, 479, 522, 531, 534, 535, 537, 542, 547, 549, 552, 554, 556, 560, 565, 571, 578, 580, 628, 692, 700, 701, 713, 740, 1086 Southern Patriot, 917, 1078, 1081 Southern Presbyterian Review, 1, 50, 561, 584, 1049–50, 1094, 1118, 1126, 1130, 1149–50 Southern Quarterly Review, 33, 47, 48, 70, 116, 144, 149, 166, 201, 243, 246–47, 275, 356, 360, 370, 389, 431, 449, 452, 459, 474,

530–31, 533–34, 536, 542–44, 546–47, 549– 51, 555–56, 560, 569–71, 597, 606, 670, 701, 1034, 1050, 1052, 1068, 1118, 1130, 1152 Southern Religious Telegraph, 1090 Southern Review, 46, 47, 49, 111, 137, 139, 144, 216–17, 232, 305, 426, 529–33, 536, 539, 543, 545–47, 551, 553–58, 560, 575, 604, 640, 692, 698, 700–701, 816, 906, 922, 1013, 1018, 1020, 1042, 1044, 1090, 1116 Southern Rose, 717 Southey, Robert, 654, 672, 728, 739; Roderick, The Last of the Goths, 237 Southgate, Horatio, 171–72 Southwell, Robert, 739 Southwest, 60, 113, 386, 467, 516, 544, 747–48, 755, 759–60, 1035–36, 1094 Southwestern College, 1095 Southworth, E. D. E. N., 477, 573, 583 Spalding, Martin: Miscellanea, 1098 Spalding, Randolph, 177 Spain (and Spaniards), 63, 86, 94–95, 112, 158–61, 226, 285–89, 292–302, 423, 483, 496, 625, 703, 748–49, 1070, 1076, 1079, 1087, 1170–76 Spanish (in the New World), 6, 75, 159–60, 194–210, 294, 296–98, 333, 381, 454, 631, 725, 774, 839, 840 Spanish language, 133, 142, 159, 202, 237, 286, 287, 288, 297, 327, 329–30, 521, 587, 633, 684, 696, 698–99, 728, 750, 1070–71, 1079, 1104, 1176 Sparks, Jared, 572–73, 632, 648; Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, 444; Writings of George Washington, 444 Sparta (and Lacedemon), 169, 260, 429, 544, 608–9, 611, 787, 811, 798, 801, 811, 861 Spartanburg Female College, 260 Spectator, The, 418, 689 Speculum Vitae Humanae, 492 Speece, Conrad: Mountaineer, 641 Spenser, Edmund, 704, 739, 1194 Spinoza, Baruch, 1080, 1141 Spirit of the Times, 758 Spiritualism, 435, 1068 Sport (and sporting), 32, 318, 348, 355, 382, 385–86, 391, 493, 529, 708, 726, 734, 758, 775, 1071, 1114 Spotswood, Alexander, 774–76 Springfield, Ill., 516, 1036 Springville, S.C., 1012

Index Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, 232, 245, 1018– 19 Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Mme de, 4–5, 97–100, 147, 149, 155, 259, 272, 408–10, 504, 691, 693–94, 749, 1042; Corinne, 97, 100, 148–49, 154–55, 504, 773; De L’Allemagne, 98–100, 497, 504, 691, 693, 1041; Delphine, 501, 504; French Revolution, 496, 504; Memoirs of Necker, 496; Ten Years of Exile, 497 Stallo, John B.: General Principles, 1053 Stamaty, Camille, 114 Stamp Act, 645, 680 Stanard, Robert, 815 Stanard, Robert C., 54 Stanley, Henry Hope, 179 Stanley, Henry Morton, 179 State-Papers and Letters Addressed to William Carstares, 482 States rights, 122, 153, 670, 796, 835–36, 838, 844–45, 860, 928, 982 Staughton, Dr., 640 Steele, Richard, 553 Stendhal (Henri Beyle): Vie de Haydn, 500 Stephen, Leslie, 1190 Stephens, Alexander, 416 Stephens, John Lloyd, 202 Stephens, Marcus Cicero, 256–57 Sterne, Laurence, 307, 492; Tristam Shandy, 986–87 Steuart, Sir James, 896 Stevens, Charles, 359 Stevens, Edwin, 187 Stevens, William B., 507, 629–30, 632, 636; History of Georgia, 623 Stewart, Dugald, 62, 604, 641, 691, 894, 996, 999–1000, 1008–13, 1015, 1017–20, 1024, 1030, 1041–44, 1050, 1055, 1077, 1094, 1138; Active and Moral Powers of Man, 999; Outlines of Moral Philosophy, 999; Philosophical Essays, 999; Philosophy of the Human Mind, 894, 999, 1019–20; Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, 999 Stewart, Henry B., 186 Stewart College, 1095 Stirling, 102 Stith, William, 595 Stockholm, 216 Stoddard, Richard, 580

1347

Stoics (and stoicism), 148–49, 578, 790, 866, 1143, 1175 Stokes County, N.C., 303 Stoneites, 1068 Stone Mountain, 723 Story, Joseph, 449, 825–26, 829, 833–35, 845, 922 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 52, 53, 58, 416, 770, 771; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 58, 75, 78, 275, 416, 577, 770, 1199 Strabo: Geography (ed. William Falconer), 482 Strasbourg, 720 Stratford-upon-Avon, 109 Strauss, David Friedrich, 484, 1061, 1110, 1130 Streeter, Sebastian Ferris, 631 Strickland, Agnes: Lives of the Queens of England, 482 Stringfellow, Thornton, 578, 959–60, 966; Brief Examination of Scripture, 960 Strother, David Hunter (‘‘Porte Crayon’’), 100 Stuart, Benjamin R., 474 Stuart, James, 102 Stuart, John, 539 Stuart, Moses: Commentary on the Epistles, 530 Stuart dynasty, 234, 317, 602, 618, 784, 1194 Stuttgart, 483 Stylites, Saint Simon, 613 Suares, Jacob, 1070 Suarez, Francisco, 1130 Suburban, the, 349, 980 Suckling, Sir John, 566 Sue, Eugène, 457, 1187 Suetonius, Tranquillus, 593, 658 Suez, 167 Suffrage, 273, 308, 800, 803, 807, 811–13, 831, 842, 851, 853, 860, 872, 893, 902 Sulla Felix, Lucius Cornelius, 597 Sullivan’s Island, S.C., 267, 359 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de, 162, 368, 504 Summerhauzen’s bookshop (Brussels), 488 Sumner, Charles, 14, 44, 78, 81, 84, 154, 391, 426, 454, 733–34 Sumter, Thomas, Jr., 194 Supreme Court of Ohio, 1053 Supreme Court of the United States, 565, 792, 796, 819, 823, 825–26, 829, 857

1348

Index

Sutherland, Harriet Leveson-Gower, duchess of, 58, 734 Swabian, 130 Swain, David Lowry, 43, 89, 320, 329, 341, 350, 460, 523, 625–26, 638, 646, 648–49, 701, 740, 879, 1073, 1091 Sweden (and the Swedish), 129, 216, 232, 330, 500, 503, 694, 907, 968, 1104–5 Swedenborg, Emanuel (and Swedenborgianism), 389, 398, 464–66, 504, 1068–69 Swift, Jonathan, 553, 739, 865, 1020 Swinburne, Algernon, 309 Switzerland (and the Swiss), 56–57, 92, 95, 98–99, 102, 104, 111, 125, 139, 145–46, 154, 223, 227, 288, 310, 483, 496–97, 503, 616, 694, 798, 1015, 1168 Sylvester, James Joseph, 87 Symmes, Frederick W., 442 Syria (and the Syrian), 111, 164, 169, 172, 1104, 1164 Syriac, 1104 Tacitus, Cornelius, 503, 686; Germania, 235, 593 Tagus River, 891 Tahitian, 228 Taintor, G. S., 478 Taiping, 188–89 Tales of an American Landlord, 499, 501, 505 Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon, 465 Tallahassee, Fla., 514, 516 Talley, Susan Archer, 450 Talma, François Joseph, 103 Talmage, Samuel K., 630 Talvande, Anne-Marie, 208, 285, 1086, 1186 Tamburini, Antonio, 117 Taney, Roger, 372, 837 Tappan, Lewis, 733, 758 Tariff, 138, 401, 540, 721, 770, 799, 814, 816– 18, 827, 829, 841, 860, 879–80, 886, 892, 911, 916, 919, 924–25, 928–31, 934–35, 1082 Tarleton, Banastre, 1195 Tartars, 173, 237, 239 Tartarus, 608 Tarzan, 179 Tasso, Torquato, 154–56, 331, 496, 503, 622, 670, 1077 Tate, Allen, 12, 562, 1065; Ode to the Confederate Dead, 357

Tauchnitz (publishers), 586 Taveau, Augustin Louis, 107, 116–17, 150, 525, 534, 537, 540, 571, 573, 706 Tayloe, Sarah, 316 Taylor, Ann: Retrospection, 501 Taylor, Jeremy, 493, 530 Taylor, John, 10–11, 16, 18, 45, 145, 275, 305, 371, 576, 782, 785–99, 811, 817, 820–21, 825–26, 832–33, 837, 840, 844, 851, 853, 857–58, 866–68, 873, 876, 881–87, 890, 893–94, 898–99, 905, 907, 920, 931–32, 937, 979, 1166; Arator, 881–87; Inquiry, 785–96, 887; New Views, 769; Tyranny Unmasked, 796, 798, 887 Taylor, Richard, 44, 1184 Taylor, Robert, 637, 640, 642, 801–2, 808 Taylor, Sophia Childress, 1035 Taylor, William: University of Dublin, 482 Taylor’s Bookshop (Baltimore, Md.), 581 Tazewell, Henry, 647, 651 Tazewell, John, 31, 87, 319, 398, 1011 Tazewell, Littleton Waller, 31–32, 323, 354, 368, 398, 400–401, 556, 575, 639–40, 642–43, 645, 664, 801, 928, 1011 Tchaikovsky, Pytor Ilyich, 671 Tefft, Israel Keech, 629 Telfair, Alexander, 501 Telfair, Robert James, 29 Templars, 182 Tennessee (and Tennesseans), 5, 15, 20, 116, 164–65, 187–89, 210, 299, 303, 323, 326, 335, 339, 343, 353, 356, 361, 386, 442–43, 468, 480, 485, 513, 516, 543–44, 623, 840, 842, 1091 Tennessee Antiquarian Society, 623 Tennessee Farmer, 335 Tennessee Historical Society, 480 Tennessee Journal of Education, 335 Tennessee Organ, 335 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 5, 58, 309, 463, 705, 728, 730, 738, 970, 1168; Idylls of the King, 728; In Memoriam, 1168; Morte d’Arthur, 728 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), 1077 Terhune, Mary Virginia, 573 Tetroode’s bookshop (Amsterdam), 487 Teutons (and the Teutonic), 130, 234–35, 690, 695, 1044, 1107, 1176 Texas Freemason, 335 Texas Methodist, 335

Index Texian Monthly Magazine, 335 Textbooks, 18, 42, 137, 334, 346, 478, 482, 571, 766, 858, 879, 903, 922, 1012, 1118 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 52, 54–58, 305, 309, 426, 437, 548, 725, 744, 762, 1178, 1187–88, 1190; Newcomes, 55, 57; Pendennis, 762, 1188; Vanity Fair, 55, 1187; The Virginians, 55; Yellowplush Papers, 55 Thames River, 110, 232 Theater (and plays), 5, 62, 98, 103, 105, 125, 137, 160–61, 171, 208, 258, 326, 331, 503, 539, 665, 678, 693, 696, 716–17, 721, 758, 940, 1071, 1078, 1093, 1155, 1173, 1178, 1199 Theological Reporter, 1090 Thermopylae, 609, 622 Thierry, Augustin, 599 Thirlwall, Connop, 607–8 Thomas, Ella Clanton, 458, 460, 463 Thomas, Mrs. Evan Philip, 108 Thompson, J. C., 360 Thompson, John: Letters of Curtius, 641 Thompson, John (father of J. R. Thompson), 535 Thompson, John Reuben, 54–56, 100, 122, 146, 148, 152, 309, 340, 356, 391, 440, 525, 534–35, 537, 540, 552, 571, 579, 586, 702, 713, 743 Thompson, Lucas, 813 Thompson, Waddy, 195, 199–202, 204, 341, 360; Recollections of Mexico, 199, 201 Thompson, William Tappan, 758 Thompson and Howard, 487 Thomson, James, 348, 459, 739–40 Thoreau, Henry David, 42, 580 Thornwell, James Henley, 11, 16, 47, 50, 77, 81, 83–84, 100, 106–8, 110, 125, 145, 163, 332, 339, 351–52, 354, 397, 407, 410, 414, 449, 457–59, 474, 489, 517, 530–31, 534– 36, 540, 543, 547, 554–55, 561–62, 584, 592, 833, 943, 991, 995, 1001, 1007, 1020–35, 1037–40, 1042, 1047–50, 1052, 1056, 1060, 1065–66, 1070, 1097–99, 1103, 1108, 1113– 57, 1164, 1166, 1169, 1198; Collected Writings, 1127; Discourses on Truth, 1020, 1118, 1135 Thorpe, Thomas Bangs, 758 Thucydides, 144, 422–23, 503, 593, 596–97 Thurocz, Johannes de: Chronicon Regum Hungariae, 492 Tiber River, 749 Ticknor, George, 31, 50, 104–5, 126, 128–

1349

30, 136–37, 159, 514, 517, 525, 1043, 1100; Spanish Literature, 159 Ticknor and Company, 579 Ticknor and Fields, 577–78 Tidyman, Philip: De Orysa Sativa, 126 Tieck, Ludwig, 693 Tiedemann, Friedrich, 227, 245 Tighe, Mary: Psyche, 501 Timbuctoo, 177 Timor, 190 Timrod, Henry, 359, 404, 484, 705–6, 728, 730–32, 737–40, 1162, 1186 Tippah County, Miss., 322, 468 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 116, 147 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 52, 82, 87, 122, 221, 252, 370, 454, 620, 866, 869–71 Todd, L. B., 340 Toledo, 587 Tom (slave), 74 Tooke, John Horne, 605, 897 Tracy, Destutt de: Treatise on Political Economy, 880 Traintor, G. S., 478 Transcendental Club, 426 Transcendentalism, 426, 465, 738, 958, 996, 1039, 1041–42, 1050–51, 1053–55, 1057, 1138 Transylvania University, 113, 513, 515, 518, 524, 1094 Trapier, Paul, 484, 554, 673, 682 Trappists, 396 Trastevere, 748, 752 Treadwell, Oliver Wolcott, 28 Treadwell (drunk politician), 448 Trebizond, 169 Trench, Richard Chevenix: Fitness of Holy Scripture, 482 Trenchard, John, 785, 837 Trenck, Friedrich, Freiherr von der, 503 Trent, Council of, 479 Trescot, Eliza Nathalie Cuthbert, 1178 Trescot, Henry, 1178 Trescot, William Henry, 11, 58, 83, 90, 289, 262, 265, 291–92, 334, 336–39, 401–2, 428, 435, 451, 484, 527–28, 573, 606, 971, 1101, 1161, 1176–86, 1188, 1199; Annual Address, 528; Eastern Question, 528; Few Thoughts, 528; Letter to A. P. Butler, 528; Position and Course of the South, 528, 1180; S. C. Historical Society Oration, 528; Washington and Adams, 573, 1178, 1183

1350

Index

Trezvant, James, 813 Trinidad, 207 Trist, Hore Browse, 380 Trojans, 235, 814 Trollope, Frances, 53, 770, 1093 Troost, Gerard, 237 Trossachs, 102 Troubadours, 235 Troup, George M., 153, 1090 Trubner (publishers), 582–83 True Whig Party, 182 Trumbull, John: M’Fingal, 665 Tucker, Daniel, 209 Tucker, George, 100, 121, 209, 310, 312–14, 411–13, 417, 420, 442, 450, 546, 670– 72, 704, 769, 782–83, 796, 843, 864–72, 876, 981; Essays on Various Subjects, 576, 907; History of the United States, 576; Law of Wages, 576; Letters from Virginia, 64, 442, 576; Thomas Jefferson, 583; Valley of the Shenandoah, 310–11, 410, 442, 502, 583, 585, 641, 659, 664–65; Voyage to the Moon, 576 Tucker, John, 510 Tucker, Louisa A. Thompson, 407 Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley, 11, 16, 83, 88, 109, 232, 316, 340, 350, 366, 368, 372, 391, 451, 546, 670–72, 704, 769–70, 782– 83, 796, 843, 864–72, 876, 981; Science of Government, 83, 865–72 Tucker, St. George, 493, 658, 940, 942, 947, 961, 991; Dissertation on Slavery, 939 Tuckerman, Henry T., 444, 548, 662 Tuileries, 124 Tull, Jethro, 558 Tunis, 175 Tuomey, Michael, 44, 54, 64, 89, 440 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 871, 896 Turin, 103, 388, 483 Turkey (and Turks), 92, 168, 171–72, 174, 228, 237, 428, 721, 765, 854, 1128 Turkish language, 173, 1104–5 Turnbull, Robert J., 796, 818, 825–26; Crisis, 824 Turner, Nat, 12, 60–61, 364, 677, 769, 945 Turno, Kazimierz, 124 Turretin, Francis, 145, 1120; Institutio Theologicae Elencticae, 1118 Tuscaloosa, Ala., 8, 15, 70, 343, 362, 513, 515, 723, 770 Tuscany, 92, 604 Tuscarora, 287

Tuskegee, 770 Tutelos, 287 Tutwiler (student), 326 Twain, Mark, 442, 755 Twiss, Thomas S., 392 Tyler, John, 376, 449, 471, 548, 643, 647 Tyler, Samuel, 47, 995, 1134 Tyler, Wat, 617, 647 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 594 Uhazy (Hungarian politician), 325 Ulster, 15, 63–64, 70, 169, 429, 839 Ulysses, 728, 730, 940 Union College, 71, 179 Unitarianism, 42, 66, 267, 368–69, 429, 434, 662, 681, 769, 866, 1020, 1068, 1090, 1098, 1110, 1115 United States Steel Corporation, 1200 Universalists, 1128 University of Alabama, 34, 70, 89, 330, 341, 513, 515, 517, 520, 624 University of Berlin, 73, 138 University of Cambridge, 87, 91, 94–95, 378, 391, 482, 496, 878 University of Durham, 1056 University of Edinburgh, 687, 999, 1008, 1011, 1039, 1041, 1133 University of Georgia (and Franklin College), 84, 457, 513, 515, 520, 523, 623, 879, 1001, 1091 University of London, 70, 139 University of Louisiana, 247, 512 University of Maryland, 622 University of Mississippi, 70, 88, 514, 516, 520, 879, 1036, 1056 University of Nashville, 123, 237, 480 University of North Carolina, 28, 44, 72, 89, 513, 515, 323, 329, 346, 483, 517, 518, 625, 879 University of Oxford, 40, 70, 87, 94, 134, 346, 356, 414, 496, 514, 516, 878, 1103, 1133 University of Pennsylvania, 516–17 University of Richmond, 1095 University of the South, 480, 1094, 1096 University of Virginia, 27, 31, 70, 87, 89, 116, 140, 142, 209, 326, 352, 380, 392, 488, 513, 514, 515, 517, 518, 520, 530, 535, 593, 662, 796, 878, 901, 1000, 1011, 1036, 1069, 1096 Upshur, Abel P., 334, 400, 560, 803–6, 808,

Index 828, 831, 833–36, 840, 855, 858, 863, 866, 870, 876, 923, 981; Brief Enquiry, 833–36 Ursulines, 478 Urubamba, 192 U.S. Catholic Miscellany, 531, 1086–87 Ussher, James, 242, 244 Utilitarianism, 326, 567, 605–6, 821, 897, 902, 1039–40, 1046, 1143 Utrecht, 228, 483, 1180 Vacca, Cabeza da, 633 Vallambrosa, 91 Valparaiso, 192 Valpy Classics, 482–83 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 306 Vasari, Giorgio, 482, 654 Vatican Palace, 153, 155, 1083–84, 1086–88 Vattel, Emmerich de, 943 Vattemare, Nicholas Marie Alexandre, 123, 487 Vedenmeyer family, 130, 137 Velino, 37 Venable, Abraham Watkins, 439 Venezuela, 196 Venice (and the Venetian), 79–99, 104, 139, 147, 156, 158, 331, 360, 483, 492, 564, 787 Ventress, James Alexander, 117–18, 1039 Venus, 96, 351, 507 Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 257, 260, 342, 359, 479, 496, 503, 740, 1020, 1091; Aeneid, 324; Georgics, 324, 359 Vermont, 515, 520, 1043 Verot, Father Augustine, 203 Verplanck, Gulian C., 49 Vertot, René, 594 Vesey, Denmark, 208, 677, 1081 Vicksburg, Miss., 396, 460, 473, 758 Vico, Giambattista, 598, 603 Victor Emmanuel II, 95 Victoria (and the Victorian), 47, 56, 69, 79, 366, 375, 379, 618, 678, 719, 966, 977, 1122, 1188, 1194–95, 1199 Vienna, 146, 155, 483, 692, 694, 1085 Vincennes, Ind., 62 Viret, Pierre, 145 Virey, Julien-Joseph, 231–32, 241 Virginia, 5–8, 10, 14, 18, 20, 30, 38, 42, 45, 51, 53, 55, 137, 139, 155, 158, 182–83, 185, 208, 226, 249, 286–87, 291–92, 294, 305– 22, 333–45, 350–53, 355, 366–67, 371, 376, 381, 383, 386, 390, 397–98, 404, 406, 411,

1351

415, 417, 421, 423–25, 439, 442, 444, 470–71, 473–74, 493, 505, 514, 532, 543– 46, 571, 595–96, 609–10, 612, 616, 618, 621, 624, 626, 636, 661–62, 665–69, 678, 680, 710, 723, 759–60, 770, 773–77, 781– 818, 820, 834, 870–71, 880, 882, 885–86, 889, 890–93, 911, 921, 939, 942–46, 948, 980–81, 983–84, 988, 1009, 1054, 1064, 1072, 1182, 1185, 1193–94; persons associated with, 1, 29, 38, 41, 49, 95, 100–101, 117, 122, 136, 140, 162, 164, 169, 178, 181, 184, 189, 195, 209, 231–33, 299, 305, 310, 320, 324, 341, 364, 379–80, 391, 400, 413, 451–52, 455, 464, 468, 485–86, 534–35, 546–48, 560, 573, 577, 636–53, 658, 728, 747, 758, 762, 864, 868, 913–14, 959, 961– 62, 972, 980, 1053, 1056, 1069, 1097, 1139, 1197 Virginia (Liberia), 182 Virginia Advocate, 335 Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30, 266, 353, 371, 400, 642–44, 798–816, 836, 856, 865 Virginia Declaration of Rights, 651, 799, 808, 810 Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine, 1094 Virginia Farmer, 335 Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society, 626–27 Virginia Historical Register, 335–36, 628 Virginia Historical Reporter, 335, 628 Virginia Literary Museum, 530 Virginia Plan of 1787, 832 Virginia Register, 335 Virginia Religious Magazine, 334 Virginia Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, 626 Virginia Spectator, 335 Virgin Mary, 1127, 1173 Vishnu, 1112 Visigoths, 237 Voetius, Gisbert, 1118 Volga River, 147 Volney, Constantin, comte de, 945; Ruins, 504, 1079 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 82, 115– 16, 215, 222, 224, 468, 470, 478, 497, 594, 609, 784, 788, 985, 1009, 1077–79; Henriade, 478; Peter the Great, 499, 504 Volumnia Cytheris, 613

1352

Index

Waccamaw, 510 Wachovia, 302 Waddel, James Pleasants, 457 Waddel, Moses, 457, 1001, 1007–8 Wailes, Benjamin L. C., 548, 624 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon: England and America, 953 Wake Forest College, 513, 1095 Wales (and the Welsh), 91, 102, 108, 179, 235, 288, 310, 647 Walker, James Murdoch, 955 Walker, John: Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, 413–14 Walker, William, 210 Walker & Burke, 527 Walker & Evans, 528 Walker & James, 528 Walker & Richard, 965 Wall, John, 359 Wallace, A. D., 922 Wallace, Cranmore, 247 Wallace, James, 392 Wallace, Lew: Ben Hur, 1199 Wallace, William, 704 Wallachians, 76 Wallis, Severn Teackle, 630 Walpole, Horace, 456; Castle of Otranto, 712, 764 Walpole, Sir Robert, 618, 881 Walsh, Robert, 548; Appeal from the Judgements of Great Britain, 305, 953 Walter, Thomas, 358 Waltham, Mass., 916 Walton, Izaak, 734 Ward, Henry George, 199 Ward, John Elliott, 630 Ward, Miss, 669 Ward, Mr. (of Baltimore), 165 Warden, David Bailie, 121–22, 360, 481; Account of the United States, 122 Warley, Anne, 171, 1102 War of 1812, 703, 785, 818, 915, 924, 927 Warren, John, 168 Warrenton, N.C., 259, 1074–75 Warrington, 496 Warsaw, 124, 763 Warton, Thomas: History of English Poetry, 698 Warwick, 108 Washington, D.C., 51, 53, 55, 58, 76, 128, 134,

146, 151, 166, 172, 174–75, 195–96, 199, 301, 309, 325, 337, 343, 353, 405, 422, 425, 440, 449, 487, 515, 547, 554, 564, 576, 631, 652, 814, 840, 915, 923, 930, 934, 980, 984, 1090, 1184, 1199 Washington, George, 7, 41, 197, 316, 318, 334, 339, 344–46, 350, 444, 462, 505, 573, 576, 585, 596, 647, 655–58, 660–61, 663, 675, 678, 682, 708, 719, 810, 841, 871, 1091, 1178, 1183 Washington, Henry Augustine, 316–19, 333, 444, 572, 606 Washington, Lawrence, 316 Washington, Miss., 479, 514 Washington, William Townshend, 162 Washington College, Miss., 514 Washington College, Va., 310, 323, 414, 425, 513, 517, 520 Washington Light Infantry, 527, 1091 Washington races, 266 Watchman and Observer, 142, 1126 Wateree, 287 Waterloo, battle of, 84, 90, 124 Watson, James, 582 Watson, Seth B., 134 Watt, James, 601 Watts, Isaac: Logic, 501 Waxhaw, 287 Wayland, Francis, 260, 878–79, 903, 948, 959; Elements of Political Economy, 878, 922 Wayne, James M., 507, 629 Weber, Carl von, 753; Oberon, 137 Webster, Daniel, 81, 251, 254, 309, 333, 564, 722, 797, 825–26, 833, 969 Webster, Noah, 417–18 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 309 Weems, Mason Locke, 358, 473, 577, 657 Weimar, 8, 52, 134, 136–37, 139, 603, 693 Weir, William, 134 Weld, Theodore, 267, 269; American Slavery as It Is, 274 Weller, Henry, 465 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, first duke of, 555 Wertenbaker, William, 524 Wesley, John, 298, 479, 501, 575, 946, 1093 West, Jane: Tale of the Times, 501 Westchester County, N.Y., 91 West Indies, 75, 128, 207, 288, 320, 546, 581, 957, 979

Index Westminster, 598, 774 Westminster, Robert Grosvenor, first marquis of, 108 Westminster College, 1094 Westminster Confession of Faith, 1116 Westminster Review, 275, 552 Westminster School, 94 Westmoreland County, Va., 316 Westphalia, 1179–80 West Point, 927, 1035 Wetumpka, Ala., 576 Whaley, Edward Mitchell, 332 Wheaton v. Peters, 565 Whedon, Daniel, 578 Wheeler, John H., 210 Whewell, William, 391, 961, 1061; Elements of Morality, 1152 Whigs (antebellum), 55, 153, 304, 317, 319– 21, 346, 349, 368, 436, 449, 451, 464, 556, 612, 618–20, 666, 722, 682, 759, 770, 776, 935, 969, 1013, 1149, 1168 Whigs (British), 104, 235, 551, 618, 774, 784, 786, 844 Whigs (in American Revolution), 95, 650, 682 Whitaker, Daniel K., 48, 530–31, 533–34, 540, 571, 1035, 1037, 1068 White, Blanco, 1090 White, Eliza, 501 White, Thomas W., 534, 537, 541, 549, 576, 628, 700 Whitefield, James, 1084 Whitehead, Coburn, 29 Whitehead, Elizabeth McPherson, 654 Whitehead, Nathan Colgate, 637 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 43, 348 Wickham, John, 399 Wightman, William M., 673 Wilberforce, William, 308, 952 Wilde, Mary, 153 Wilde, Richard Henry, 15, 37, 83, 88, 153–57, 331, 396, 443, 548, 622, 670, 703, 722–23; Hesperia, 155–56; Torquato Tasso, 154–55, 622, 670 Wiley, Calvin H., 346–50, 355, 389, 570, 582; North-Carolina Reader, 347–50; Old Dan Tucker, 583 Wilkinson, James, 28, 296 Willcocks, Mr., 190–91 William and Mary, College of, 36, 88, 89,

1353

316, 321, 330, 397, 430, 513, 514, 516, 519, 520, 606, 622, 633, 652, 680, 775, 866, 878, 888, 894, 972, 1000, 1056, 1094 William of Orange, 112 Williams, Ben Ames, 1198 Williams, Matthew J., 77, 392 Williamsburg, 2, 80, 109, 343, 368, 391, 408, 513, 516, 524, 611, 626, 649–50, 652, 892–93, 1056 Williams College, 59 Williamson, Hugh, 648; History of North Carolina, 596 Williamson, Jacob, 643 Willich, Anthony: Lectures on Diet and Regimen, 503 Williman, Alexander Baron, 389, 403, 742–43 Willington Academy, 758, 1099 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 457, 703, 1090 Willoughby (publishers), 583 Wilmington, N.C., 60–61 Wilson, Alexander: American Ornitholo , 500 Wilson, Jane Elizabeth Bayard, 180 Wilson, John: Noctes Ambrosianae, 104 Wilson, John Leighton, 178–81; Western Africa, 179–81 Wilson, Margaret, 38 Wilson, Robert, 511 Wilton, Conn., 31, 765 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 86; Art Among the Ancients, 147 Windermere, Lake, 725 Winkler, John, 436 Winston, N.C., 304 Winthrop, John, 50 Winthrop, Robert C., 50–51, 319, 635 Wirt, Henrietta, 310 Wirt, Jacob, 310 Wirt, William, 310–13, 326, 442, 444, 500, 502, 505, 583, 639, 641, 646, 655, 658–60, 662–66, 674, 679; British Spy, 310–11, 410, 442, 502, 583, 641, 659, 664–65; Patrick Henry, 500, 505, 658–60 Wisconsin, 337, 516 Wise, Henry A., 195, 392, 980 Wiseman, Nicholas: Twelve Lectures, 243 Wistar Club, 426 Witherspoon, John, 72, 482, 1000, 1195; Works, 482

1354

Index

Woburn Abbey, 492 Woccons, 287 Wolfit, Donald, 452 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 275 Wolof, 181 Women’s rights, 39, 262, 273–76, 278 Women’s Rights Convention, 275 Woodlands Plantation, 404, 453 Woodrow, James, 1124–25 Woodson, Pascal, 184 Woodville, Miss., 477 Wooley family, 289 Woolf, Virginia, 1139, 1195; To the Lighthouse, 1198 Worcester, Joseph: Elements of History, 478 Wordsworth, William, 5, 20, 139, 155, 348, 419, 557, 667, 705, 718, 725, 731, 736–39, 978, 1077, 1122; Tintern Abbey, 737; (with Samuel Taylor Coleridge) Lyrical Ballads, 419, 557 Wright, Chauncey, 1024 Wright, Frances, 53, 975 Wright, Sir James, 648 Wright, Thomas: Early Mysteries, 482 Wurdemann, J. G. F., 209 Wythe, George, 650, 658 Xenophobia, 87, 89, 349, 974 Xenophon, 260, 324, 503, 593 Xerxes, 422 Ximénez de Cisneros, Cardinal, 601 Yadkin, 287 Yale College, 28–30, 36, 44, 70, 134, 187, 325,

418, 514–15, 517, 520, 577, 637, 758, 841, 879, 972, 1054, 1125, 1135 Yancey, Charles, 576 Yancey, Major, 400–401 Yangzi River, 188–89 Yazoo Library Association, 421–24, 523 Yearsley, Ann: Poems, 672 Yeatmen, Mr. (of Tenn.) 165 Yemassee, 363, 746 Yeomanry (and yeomen), 312–13, 365, 380– 81, 385, 613, 659, 882 Yiddish, 1074 Yorkshire, 5 Yorktown, battle of, 109 Yoruba, 181 Young, Anna Rebecca, 1100 Young, Arthur: Travels, 886 Young, Dr., 62 Young, Edward, 739, 740 Young, Thomas, 599, 607 Young Men’s Literary Association of Buchanan, 182 Yuchi, 287 Zaragoza, 1173 Zell, Ulric, 492 Zeno, 228 Zimmerman, Johann George: National Pride, 503, 566 Zimmermann, Eberhard August Wilhelm von, 231 Zion and Zionists, 1080 Zion Church, 1150 Zoology, 218, 623 Zouaves, 95