The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (4 page)

Home-grown
belles-lettres
for the most part amounted to a romantic celebration of contemporary Southern life or of the “Southern” features of the American past. Some Southern writers expressed these things well—John Pendleton Kennedy of Maryland and William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, for example. Kennedy, in “plantation romances” such as
Swallow Barn,
portrayed the nobler features of the slaveholders’ society and paternalistic harmony in relations between masters and slaves. Simms’ best works, his melodramatic tales of the American Revolution, lauded patriotic planters and made Tories of meaner folk. His most memorable characters, though, were backwoods adventurers who modeled a classless “hell-of-a-fellow” spirit.
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Simms actively involved himself in South Carolina politics and consciously used his creative talents to project favorable images of the South, though without ever quite finding acceptance in the Charleston society he championed. So much did he give to Southern propaganda that he wrote in the epitaph he composed for himself, “Here lies one who, after a reasonably long life, distinguished chiefly by unceasing labors, has left all his better works undone.”
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While Kennedy and Simms projected a romantic South, the Southern writer who was perhaps the epitome of Southern romanticism was Edgar Allan Poe. As Vernon L. Parrington wrote:

His ideals ran counter to every major interest of the New England renaissance: the mystical, optimistic element in transcendentalism; the social conscience that would make the world over in accordance with French idealism, and meddled with its neighbor’s affairs in applying its equalitarianism to the Negro; the pervasive moralism that would accept no other criteria by which to judge life and letters—these things could not fail to irritate a nature too easily ruffled. The Yankee parochialisms rubbed across his Virginia parochialisms.
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As critic, short story writer, and poet, Poe alone among ante-bellum Southerners attracted an enduring readership. He did so by indulging his taste for form and beauty and by absorbing “the indolent life of the planter gentry, shot through with a pugnacious pride of locality, with a strong dislike of alien ways, with haughtiness, dissipation, wastefulness, chivalry.”
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Southern poets, too, generally indulged romantic tastes and reinforced their readers’ appreciation of things Southern. Obvious examples include William Grayson
(The Hireling and the Slave),
Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Henry Timrod.
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About the South, Timrod wrote in
The Cotton Boll:

Although traditional intellectuals in the Old South (Poe excepted) did not produce much of lasting merit, it would be a mistake to dismiss the South as a cultural wasteland. Beneath the level of
belles-lettres,
Southern cultural life was rich and richly in tune with the Southern life style. The Southern people—planters, plain folk, and slaves—were accustomed to active lives in the outdoors. They rode, raced, hunted, and for the most part spared little time for systematic contemplation of life beyond their experience and their immediate physical world. Southern popular culture reflected this focus and in some of its aspects creatively enhanced the Southern life style.
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Southerners supported indifferent theater and in the late ante-bellum period indulged in the general banality of minstrel show comedy and music, yet even minstrel companies, to the degree that they appropriated the zest of “bottom-rail” humor and generated a mood of carefree abandon in “walk-around” numbers, were a link between formal culture and authentic popular culture of Southern people.

Predictably, Southern architecture was an art form more often developed in private homes than in public buildings. The influence of Thomas Jefferson faded during the middle third of the nineteenth century, and Southerners turned to Greek Revival, adapting the columned Greek temple to functional as well as esthetic purpose. In cities like Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, Southerners constructed spacious homes with columns, verandas, and courtyards in relatively small spaces with a maximum sense of privacy. In the country, Southerners built homes which combined aristocratic pretense with openness to nature. At its best Southern architecture blended form and function, took advantage of natural surroundings, and gave expression to the individuality of the builder and owner.
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Among the plain folk, the “three P” house was a good example of the harmony which often existed between form and function. “Three P” stood for two pens and a path. The home started out as one log or board “pen” with a roof. Later the family built a second pen near the first, and still later connected the two pens with a covered breezeway. The family cooked and ate in one wing of the house, slept in the other, and used the breezeway as a sort of outdoor living room in pleasant weather.
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Eventually the owner might add a second story and columns. And at each stage Southerners reconciled the reality of outdoor life in a warm climate with their romantic vision of Greek grandeur.

Some of the people who spent leisure time on the verandas or breezeways read books. More of them, like their black neighbors in slave quarters or cabins, simply told stories. Flannery O’Connor once said about traditional Southern conversation, “I have Boston cousins and when they come South they discuss problems, they don’t tell stories. We tell stories.”
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In the Old South stories were an authentic cultural form. Among illiterate Southerners, many poor whites and most blacks, folk tales were the only “literature” available. From this source came the Uncle Remus tales, the Davy Crockett legend, and more.
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Southern humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
(Georgia Scenes),
William Tappan Thompson
(Major Jones’s Courtship),
Johnson J. Hooper
(The Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs),
and George Washington Harris
(Sut Lovingood’s Yarns),
created a popular literature of stories about crude characters and absurd situations.
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One of the most revealing examples of the importance of stories in Southern culture is the relatively obscure work of John B. Lamar. Planter and political confidant of his brother-in-law Howell Cobb, Lamar was a man of cosmopolitan tastes. He traveled widely in North America and Europe and managed several plantations belonging to himself and his relatives. Significantly, however, this urbane man of the world who once contemplated moving to France was also the author of a collection of
Homespun Yarns
published during the 1840s. Lamar’s yarns linked planter aristocrat with storytelling tradition and revealed the earthiness (polite earthiness in Lamar’s case) that lay just beneath the somewhat artificial facade of formal culture in the Old South.
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In music, as in literature, popular culture was more creative than sophisticated forms. Folk songs and black spirituals, which may be the most important American contributions to music, were genuinely Southern, part of a distinctive regional culture. Folk tunes were usually simple. Plaintive or sad lyrics often provided a counterpoint to happy tunes. Spirituals and worksongs, too, contained an internal paradox: they spoke of deliverence in the next world but often meant liberation in this. Through their music, black and white Southerners expressed a common emphasis upon concrete life situations.
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Cultural life in the Old South, then, celebrated the Southern world as it was and linked the Southern reality to romantic visions of courtly love, chivalry, Greek temples, feudal knights, cheerful peasants (slaves). Because of their religious beliefs more than anything else, Southerners did not expect too much of themselves and appreciated nobility all the more when it surfaced in flesh and blood. Hence they dreamed not of an abstract world as it might become in the future but of their real world as it resembled model civilizations of the past.

Nationalism is a compound of many interdependent elements. In the Old South a unique social economy combined with a distinctive “mind,” religious spirit, life style, and culture to produce a nascent nationalism. Almost imperceptably during the nineteenth century, hopes, values, fears, preconceptions, and beliefs in that portion of the United States dominated by slaveholding planters diverged from national norms. Still, Southerners remained Americans as long as it was politically possible.

Politics concerned ante-bellum Southerners as a statement of power relationships, and was the vehicle through which they expressed their ideology and attempted to transform it into action. The nineteenth century was still fairly young when some Southern Americans foresaw their section as a minority bloc with special interests. As a consequence, Southern politicians increasingly occupied themselves in national councils with defending and advancing sectional interests, while Southern political thinkers dealt often and deeply with the dilemma of a democratic minority.
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Like the ideology it asserted, Southern politics expressed the persistent tension between Southern and national emphases. Southern political leaders and thinkers were at the same time advocates of a sectional interest and of the national interest. Two factors were critical determinants of the Southern political stance. First, during the nineteenth century the South moved from the center of the American political mainstream to the backwater as an increasingly self-conscious minority bloc. Second, the Old South had never been a monolith politically or otherwise, and even as members of a minority bloc, Southern politicians often had difficulty acting in concert.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the dynamic involved in the South’s political relationship with the rest of the Union was the career of John C. Calhoun. He was born in the South Carolina back country during the Revolutionary era; his father had fought in the Revolutionary War and was a planter of moderate means. As a young man, Calhoun enjoyed one of the best educations available (Moses Waddell’s academy, Yale, and Judge Tapping Reeve’s law office in Litchfield, Connecticut) and entered state politics as an upcountry opponent of the hegemony of low-country planters in South Carolina. He soon established himself in the state legislature and in Charleston society, and in 1810 won election to the United States House of Representatives.

Calhoun entered national politics as a nationalist. He was a War Hawk who supported James Madison’s war with England. He continued a nationalist after the War of 1812, voting for the protective tariff of 1816 and introducing the bill which chartered the Second Bank of the United States. Calhoun served as secretary of war in the administration of the last of the Virginia dynasty of presidents, James Monroe. In 1824 and 1828, he won election as vice-president and at the outset of Andrew Jackson’s term was heir apparent to the presidency.

By the end of Jackson’s first administration, however, Calhoun had resigned the vice-presidency and abandoned his nationalist political stance. He stood with South Carolina in the Nullification Crisis and spent most of the rest of his career in the Senate defending Southern sectional interests. Calhoun changed, as did the South’s political relationship with the rest of the country during those crucial two decades between 1810 and 1830. When Calhoun first went to Congress, the South was in tune with national politics. By 1830, the South was in the minority on such issues as tariffs and slavery. Southern politicians in increasing numbers were falling back upon the state rights political philosophy to defend sectional interests. By the time Calhoun died in 1850, the section of slaveholders and plantations had become a permanent minority in a nation increasingly characterized by free labor capitalism, reform enthusiasm, and social democracy.
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Such political circumstances led Calhoun and other Southern political thinkers to ask hard questions about the structure of American politics. In the name of slaveholding planters, Calhoun questioned the potential tyranny of a democratic majority over the rights and property of a minority and sought answers in the construction of “concurrent majorities”—that is, majorities based upon more than raw numbers of voters, majorities of classes and sections combined with that composed of ballots. George Fitzhugh carried Calhoun’s analysis a step further. During the 1850s the Virginia planter wrote books
(Cannibals All
and
Sociology for the South)
in which he struck at the basic assumptions of free labor and contended that the masses might fare better under some form of benevolent despotism, which Fitzhugh believed already existed on Southern plantations. Such discussions, rendered moot by the advance of liberal democracy in the nineteenth century, were nonetheless important. By dissenting and proposing alternatives, they revealed the essendally un-American side of Southern political thought.
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Like Southern writers, Southern political thinkers ultimately saw a romantic vision: the reincarnation of Greek democracy in the nineteenth-century South. Again Calhoun led the way. To Americans, already conditioned by their recent struggle for independence to admire the Greeks, he offered the South as a replica of Greece in its golden age. Like ancient Athenians, Southerners held slaves; like the Greeks, Southerners lauded the equality of free people who in terms of wealth and status were anything but equal.
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The Greek model seemed to justify slavery at the same time that it spoke to the aspirations of yeoman democrats in the words of Pericles: “… we enjoy, as between [free] man and [free] man complete equality of legal status. In our public life individual talent is the one thing valued. Preferment depends on merit, not on class; nor does obscurity of rank prevent any from making his contribution to the common weal.”
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