SOURCE: "The Politics of a Literary Movement," in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, Little, Brown and Company, 1959, pp. 46-72.

[In the following excerpt, Lynn describes the political context in which Southern humorists wrote, and analyzes how Jacksonian politics influenced their works.]

If one would read a noteworthy humorist of [the late eighteenth century], one must turn away from imaginative writing to the letters and speeches of John Randolph, the "wittiest man of his age." For a generation and more, Randolph defended his vision of the "Old Republic" with brilliantly sarcastic characterizations of the men who, he felt, were wrecking it. Thomas Jefferson was "that prince of projectors, St. Thomas of Cantingbury." John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay were "Blifil and Black George—the Puritan and the blackleg." The lawyer and merchant Edward Livingston was "a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks." Fighting with his back to the wall, lashing out in all directions, Randolph was a man whose enemies (this was his proudest boast) were legion. If he had friends, they were apt to be amongst the Jacksonians—men like Thomas Hart Benton, for instance—who respected Randolph's intransigent republicanism. In the eyes of conservative Southerners of the next generation, however, Randolph's states' rights philosophy made him the martyred hero of a sacred cause. Under attack in a hostile House of Representatives, this wealthy, brilliant man, known to be sexually impotent and rumored to be insane, arose from his seat and sneered at his enemies:

The little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart,
See, they bark at me!

In the South, in days to come, that moment would be recalled and cherished.

Appropriately enough, it was in or around the year that Randolph died, 1833, that the long drought in humorous writing in the South came to an end, almost as if his death had been required to produce the literary movement that would so often invoke his name. All at once, almost in chorus, men all over the South—but most particularly in the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi, which was then called the Southwest—began to write comic sketches. It was a movement without a manifesto or a capital city; which had neither a recognized elder statesman nor an official journal. Yet the Southwestern humorists of the antebellum period were more cohesive in spirit, and more readily definable as a group, than the Transcendentalists, say, who were their contemporaries, and they were destined to influence later American writing in precisely definable ways. Scattered and out of touch with one another as they were, the Southwestern humorists were nevertheless bound together by all the things that counted: by a devotion to the same literary gods; by a common set of literary principles; and by the similarity of their social views. These writers were in fact so much alike that it is even possible to construct a biographical archetype that bears a fair resemblance to the lives of all of them. The ideal Southwestern humorist was a professional man—a lawyer or a newspaperman, usually, although sometimes a doctor or an actor. He was actively interested in politics, either as a party propagandist or as a candidate for office. He was well educated, relatively speaking, and well traveled, although he knew America better than Europe. He had a sense of humor, naturally enough, and in a surprising number of cases a notoriously bad temper. Wherever he had been born, and a few were of Northern origin, the ideal humorist was a Southern patriot—and this was important. Above all, he was a conservative, identified either with the aristocratic faction in state politics, or with the banker-oriented Whig party in national politics, or with both. To call the roll of the best-known Southwestern humorists in the twenty-year period from 1833 to 1853—Longstreet, Thompson, Kennedy, Noland, Pike, Cobb, Thorpe, Baldwin, Hooper—is to call in vain for a supporter of Andrew Jackson. No other fact about these writers is quite so significant.

In the 1820s, the men who would become humorists a decade later had fervently believed in Jackson. They yearned, as did most Southerners, for the end of the Adams administration and the accession of Jackson to the Presidency. The squire of the Hermitage would surely furnish the South a measure of relief from the unfavorably high tariff of 1828. The high tariff legislation of 1832 was thus a considerable shock; when South Carolina, under Calhoun's direction, declared the bill null and void, it was even more shocking to see Jackson push a bill through Congress empowering him to force compliance. Out of such shocks came, among other things, a new form of American literature. For it is not merely coincidental that the outpouring of Southwestern humor after 1830 began at the very moment that the Nullification crisis was reaching fever pitch, or that the most influential of all the humorists of the antebellum South, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, idolized John C. Calhoun and was a diehard Nullifier. The fantastically bitter dispute over the tariff, beginning with Calhoun's famous Exposition of strict constructionist theories in 1828 and culminating with the Force Bill five years later, had momentous literary consequences because it inaugurated—even in those states where sympathy for South Carolina's extremism was not strong—the South's consciousness of itself as a collective entity, as a region that was apart and different from the rest of the nation. William Byrd had thought of himself as an English gentleman; Randolph had proclaimed that "When I speak of my country I mean the Commonwealth of Virginia," a sentiment in which Robert Munford would have concurred. But the flowering of Southwestern humor in the 1830s was the product of a new awareness. The humorous customs of local people in Georgia and Arkansas, and in Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi, were to be recorded in literature because they were Southern customs, aspects of the life of a separate civilization, and therefore highly significant.

When to the tariff fight one adds the fact that the early 1830s saw the beginnings of a new and energetic abolitionist movement in the North, as well as a dramatic upturn in profits from slave-breeding and cotton culture, the defensive self-consciousness that inspired Southwestern humor becomes even more understandable. Many Southern writers turned, of course, to the "plantation novel" in order to justify the slavocracy, as if by pointing with pride to Greek Revival houses they hoped to make the world forget Uncle Tom's unspeakable cabin. Looting the novels of Walter Scott for a feudalistic symbolism, the plantation novelists amplified and extended the gentlemanly myth of Hugh Jones and William Byrd to gigantic proportions. Little more than a hundred years after Jones had implied that Williamsburg was another London, the plantation novelists suggested that the only proper comparison to the civilization of the cotton kingdom was the courtly life of the medieval lords. Launcelot and Guinevere, Ivanhoe and Rowena, now loomed in the Southern mind as the heroes of the Golden Age had in Don Quixote's. The humorists were equally fascinated by Scott—for they, too, were myth-makers. (Indeed, at least one Southern author, John Pendleton Kennedy, wrote both novels and comic stories in order to promote the Southern myth.) What the humorists learned from Scott was, first of all, the uses of history. Beginning with Longstreet, who subtitled a collection of sketches Characters, Incidents, &c, in the First Half Century of the Republic, the humorists attempted to foster a sense of the Southern past for the same reason that Scott had recorded Scotland's past: it was a means of asserting a national identity. Scott further taught them that "low" characters could serve their mythology as readily as could chivalrous heroes. Scott had turned to Scotch peasants and servants for his comic materials because the special flavor and peculiarity of, say, Andrew Fairservice, the gardener in Rob Roy, or of Jenny Dennison, Miss Bellenden's maid in Old Mortality, helped to define Scotland's distinctiveness; by being humorously "low," such characters also made Scott's aristocrats seem more grand by contrast. The Southwestern writers exploited the antic life of the poor white with analogous ends in view. Thanks in considerable part to the example of Scott, humor as well as romance was enlisted in the Southern cause.

As the symbol of an encroaching national power, then, Andrew Jackson came to be hated and feared by the new generation of humorists. There were other reasons, however, why Old Hickory loomed like a demon in their minds, reasons which perhaps go even further toward accounting for the startling exfoliation of Southwestern humor that began while Jackson was in the White House.

Describing, in The Valley of Shenandoah (1824), what life in Virginia had been like in the 1790s, the Virginia aristocrat George Tucker depicted a group of common roughnecks blocking the roads and insolently upsetting every carriage that attempts to pass. To conservative Southerners of the middle 1820s, this was not simply an isolated incident in the remote past; it was also the terrible image of what might happen to them at any moment, if they were not careful. Behind their insecurity lay certain hard facts. From the day that Jefferson had entered the White House in 1800, popular agitation had begun to build up in the Southern states for constitutional reforms to abolish religious and property qualifications for voting and holding office; to base representation on population rather than on county units; to widen popular control, in sum, over all the instruments of government. These changes could be accomplished, the reformers felt, only by means of specially summoned state conventions. For thirty years, efforts were made to call such conventions into being; and for thirty years, the conservative ruling class in the several states managed to hold the reformers at bay.

Then, quite suddenly, the reformers could no longer be denied. In 1829, a constitutional convention was called in Virginia; in 1833, a convention met in Georgia, and another in 1839; there was a convention in North Carolina in 1835, and a "Revolution of 1836" in Maryland. The democratic movement that swept Andrew Jackson into the White House in 1828 also penetrated the local defenses of the old order from Tidewater Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1860, every Southern state except South Carolina would have a democratic constitution.

The rise of Jacksonian democracy transformed Southern politics. The planter-politician who in Munford's time had condescended to the electorate now had to scramble for votes, inasmuch as in most contests the margin between victory and defeat was slim. According to one student of the subject, the vote of the Southern states was very nearly equally divided between the Whig and Democratic parties in every Presidential election from 1836 to 1852; according to another, Southern Democrats won an aggregate total of 234 seats in the five Congressional elections between 1832 and 1842, as opposed to 263 for their opponents, a difference of less than thirty seats in a ten-year period. Not until the slavery controversy reached the height of its fury in the 1850s did the South become anything like the monolithic society of legend.

In the economic sphere, life became equally competitive. Jackson's destruction of the Bank inspired other struggles against corporate privilege, until the "race for the top" had been blown wide open. Especially in the Southwest, a new breed of men emerged. Small-time stock speculators; clerks knowledgable in the mysteries of paper money and land prices; courthouse loungers with glib tongues and a smattering of law: they seemed to come out of nowhere, these men, even as Faulkner's Snopes clan would do after the Civil War. Bold, imaginative, oftentimes ruthless, sometimes unscrupulous, they were more at home in the flush-times atmosphere of Alabama or Mississippi than many a well-born émigré from South Carolina or Virginia, while even the cleverest and toughest nouveau banker or planter dared not grow soft or careless, lest he find himself no longer riche. The historian Richard Hildreth noted in 1836 that the poor whites in the South "are at once feared and hated by the select aristocracy of the rich planters," and these emotions were generated to a great degree by the terrific emotional cost of remaining king of the mountain in a wide-open economy devoid of rules or even precedents. Joseph G. Baldwin, one of the most accomplished of the Southwestern humorists, has left a memoir of the era which nicely captures the anxiety felt by many sons of the planter class that they simply could not compete in business with men who did not play the game the gentlemanly way. Baldwin is speaking of Mississippi and Alabama in the mid-1830s:

Superior to many of the settlers in elegance of manners and general intelligence, it was the weakness of the Virginian to imagine he was superior too in the essential art of being able to hold his hand and make his way in a new country, and especially such a country, and at such a time. What a mistake that was! . . . . All the habits of his life, his taste, his associations, his education—everything—the trustingness of his disposition—his want of business qualifications—his sanguine temper—all that was Virginian in him, made him the prey, if not of imposture, at least of unfortunate speculations . . . . If he made a bad bargain, how could he expect to get rid of it? He knew nothing of the elaborate machinery of ingenious chicane,—such as feigning bankruptcy—fraudulent conveyances—making over to his wife—running property—and had never heard of such tricks of trade as sending out coffins to the graveyard, with negroes inside, carried off by sudden spells of imaginary disease, to be "resurrected," in due time, grinning, on the banks of the Brazos.

To hold on to a world that seemed in danger of slipping from their grasp, Southern conservatives flocked into the newly-formed Whig party. Generally speaking, the merchants and bankers of the towns became Whigs, as did the majority of the planter class. Their allies among the professional groups, particularly the lawyers and newspaper editors who depended for their livelihood on the fees and good will of the merchants and planters, also joined the party. Inasmuch as the typical Southwestern humorist was a professional man, it is not surprising that the overwhelming percentage of those about whom political data exist were Whigs. As for the minority who were not, they might be called Whigs manqués: anti-Jacksonians who were too deeply committed to low tariffs and states' rights to accept the nationalist, high tariff policies fastened into the Whig platform by the Northern wing of the party. The Whiggery of the humorists is worth insisting on, for it tells us much about their entire cast of mind, including their comic imagination. In a preeminently political era, political allegiance was as important a key to American writing as religious belief once had been. About no group of American writers in the age of Jackson is this generalization more true than it is about the Southwestern humorists.

To the Whig mind, the quality of violence inherent in Jacksonianism was what made the movement so disturbing. The quality could be sensed at once in Democratic rhetoric. Taking up arms against Nicholas Biddle, the Democrats denounced his Bank as a "Monster," spewed out upon it the same sky-vaunting threats and curses, the same hyperbolic humor, that had appalled a generation of well-bred visitors to the trans-Allegheny West. The Democratic program was as violent in its effect as the oratory which put it across; wherever the Democrats touched American life, they galvanized the entire nation. There was a boldness about Democratic ideas, a pragmatic willingness to take risks, to commit the nation to untrod paths, that the Whigs found frightening. ("They desire," cried the American Whig Review, "a freedom larger than the Constitution.") Hoping to avoid a repetition of the Panic of 1837, Jacksonians in the Southwest audaciously called for the abolition of all bank charters, not merely Biddle's. In the 1840s, the Democrats took up the daring theme of an American imperium that would extend southward into Mexico and as far west as the Pacific, while Whig orators timorously invoked the specter of Caesarism and the doom of all empires. The schemes of the Democrats, whatever their shortcomings, had a reckless grandeur; Whig ideas, by contrast, were prudential and cautions.

They might even be said to have been nonexistent. Henry Adams has remarked that "Of all the parties that have existed in the United States, the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas." To fight against economic and social mobility by means of ideas was, after all, excruciatingly difficult for a party composed largely of self-made men who agreed with Webster that "intelligence and industry ask only for fair play and an open field." Hamstrung intellectually, the Whigs counted on a series of emotional appeals to overcome the rampant Democracy. In an America made anxious, as Tocqueville observed, by the ceaseless competition of equals, the Whigs celebrated harmony and unity; denying reality, they offered the nation psychological relief in the genial vision of America as one big, happy family. In the North, the Whigs answered the class conflict analysis of a Seth Luther or an Orestes Brownson by preaching an identity of interest between merchant and mechanic (did not the Lowell mills, as Edward Everett suggested, have all the comforts of home?). In the South, the Whigs depicted gentle masters, happy yeomen, and grinning darkies living together in an atmosphere of domestic bliss. The log cabin and the white-pillared mansion were in the Whig iconology the two faces of the same charismatic image, for if the former signified democratic aspiration and the latter aristocratic pretension, both stood for the American Past, when conflicts of interest had been unknown, and both were Homes. Amidst the gathering storm of the slavery controversy, the Whigs insisted that the Union itself was a family; differences of opinion existed, of course, but as long as both North and South could go on loving the Flag and the Constitution, as long as both could look to Mount Vernon, which that fine Whig lady, Sarah Josepha Hale—author of The Good Housekeeper, sponsor of Thanksgiving Day, and editor of Godey's Lady's Book—was busily trying to have declared a national shrine, there was no sectional split that could not be healed. As for the manifold problems engendered by the headlong development of the country, the Jacksonians might agitate if they wished for political and economic reforms; the Whigs preferred to get behind the Infant School movement, do charity work, and above all, campaign for temperance. Because, to the Whig mind, the temperance movement was not simply a battle against alcoholism; it was a character ideal and a way of life. If temperance workers took George Washington as their patron saint—if somehow the Constitution crept into their discussions of juvenile drinking—if a Whig lawyer (it was Abraham Lincoln) could suddenly broaden the scope of a speech to the temperance society of Springfield, Illinois, and imagine a "Happy day, when, all appetites controlled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of Fury: Reign of Reason, all hail!"—the reason was that the temperance campaign, to the political conservatives who were engaged in it, was the battle for America in microcosm. The checks and balances of the Constitution; the calm orderliness of George Washington's Virginia; the unity of the family—wild men had endangered this sacred heritage, but temperance would preserve it. Seeking to contain the violence of Jacksonian America, the Whigs spoke in praise of moderation in all things.

By now it should be clear why the literary hero developed by the Southwestern humorists was a Self-controlled Gentleman—the very model of Whiggery's ideals. His first notable appearance occurs in the comic sketches of A. B. Longstreet.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet had grown up in comfortable circumstances. He was educated at Moses Waddel's fashionable academy in Willington, South Carolina, where Calhoun had been a student, and then followed in the footsteps of his idol to Yale and to Tapping Reeve's law school at Litchfield, Connecticut. Like his father, William Longstreet, the graduate of Yale and Litchfield had a savage temper. When an actor in a Georgia theater sang a song one night which made light of William Longstreet's belief that he was a talented inventor, the subject of the parody, who was in the audience, got up from his seat, blind with rage, and stalked out. Angry withdrawals became one of his son's most conspicuous habits. Campaigning for Congress in 1824, he suddenly withdrew his candidacy, and eight years later he canceled his plans to run for the state legislature with equal abruptness. All during his later years as president of the Georgia temperance society and of various academic institutions, Longstreet constantly held above his trustees' heads the threat of resignation. Even as an old man, he issued warnings to his family that he was about to walk out of the house for good. That he backed Calhoun during the Nullification crisis, was a fervent supporter of states' rights, and eventually a convert to the cause of secessionism, only completes the pattern of vindictive withdrawals that shaped Longstreet's whole life.

His first sketches appeared in a newspaper in Milledgeville, Georgia, until Longstreet himself bought a paper. In 1833, the political faction in Georgia that supported Jackson and the Union had emerged more strongly than ever before. Longstreet, an aristocrat, a states' righter, and never a man to hide his opinions, decided to go into the newspaper business to defend his principles. Purchasing a paper in Augusta, he renamed it the State Rights Sentinel. Literary critics have often remarked the Southern vindictiveness of Poe's journalistic criticism, and Mark Twain's sketch of "Journalism in Tennessee" makes it abundantly clear that the tone of newspaper editorializing in the antebellum South was, as Twain said, "peppery and to the point," to say the least. Yet even when the journalistic temper of the times has been taken into account, one stands amazed in the furious presence of Longstreet's editorials. Corruption and filth—the words are Longstreet's—were all about him, and he attacked them with every verbal weapon he could muster, including defamation of character. One citizen who had incurred the editor's wrath found himself described in the Sentinel as having "two negro wives." As Longstreet's biographer has rightly observed, such editorials were the work of a fanatic.

By way of comic relief to the fury of his opinions, Longstreet supplied his newspaper with humorous sketches of Georgia life, culled mainly from his recollections of the days when, as a young lawyer, he had ridden circuit in the backwoods of Middle Georgia. As had been true of Fielding, whose vocation as Justice of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex had taken him out of the cultivated world of Eton and Leyden where he had been educated and exposed him to what Maynard Mack has called the "vivid and barbarous life of country inns and alehouses"—an experience which formed the basis for both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones—Longstreet the Yale man discovered in the strongly colored, highly flavored speech of the piney woods people, in their grotesque expressions and cruel sense of fun, a rich source of humor. No more than Fielding is to be equated with Black George, is Longstreet to be identified with the life he described, despite the careless confusions of numerous critics. The work of a highly self-conscious man, Longstreet's sketches were a comic version of the remorseless editorials beside which they appeared, an integral part of a continuing effort to impose the political opinions of the author and his aristocratic friends on the Georgia community, and beyond Georgia, on the whole South. Whatever its defects as a general theory, Bergson's insistence that comedy stands midway between life and the "disinterestedness" of most art in that it "accepts social life as a natural environment," and even has a "scarcely conscious intention to correct and instruct," says a good deal about Longstreet's sketches. As well as William Byrd did, Longstreet knew his Addison, the purpose of whose Spectator had been "to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain"; destined to become a Methodist minister in later years, Longstreet in the early 1830s believed with the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley that laughter could guide the moral destiny of society as effectively as a sermon.

When George Bancroft observed in 1840 that Joseph Addison belonged by rights to the party of Daniel Webster, he was thinking not merely of the number of conservative writers in America who called the Englishman master, but of Addison's "reasonableness," which was so closely akin to the temperate ideals of American Whiggery. Certainly the Self-controlled Gentleman of Southwestern humor is the American cousin of Addison's Man of Reason, and the fact of the Gentleman's moderate nature is established by a variety of Addisonian means. The most important of them is the use of a "frame." The literary device of introducing a speaker who then tells us a story that comes to his mind was not new when Addison employed it, nor even when Boccaccio did, but Addison was the writer from whom Longstreet borrowed it. That the frame device eventually became the structural trademark of Southwestern humor is because it suited so very well the myth-making purposes of the humorists. For Longstreet and his successors found that the frame was a convenient way of keeping their first-person narrators outside and above the comic action, thereby drawing a cordon sanitaire, so to speak, between the morally irreproachable Gentleman and the tainted life he described. Thus the fact that the Gentleman found recollections of violence and cruelty both interesting and amusing did not imply anything ambiguous about his own life and character. However hot-tempered the author might be in private life, the literary mask of the Southwestern humorists was that of a cool and collected personality whose own emotions were thoroughly in hand.

By containing their stories within a frame, the humorists also assured their conservative readers of something they had to believe in before they could find such humor amusing, namely, that the Gentleman was as completely in control of the situation he described as he was of himself. As Maynard Mack has shrewdly observed, "even a rabbit, were it suddenly to materialize before us, . . . could be a frightening event. What makes us laugh is our secure consciousness of the magician and his hat." The frame device furnished an equivalent consciousness. When Longstreet concluded "The Fight," a particularly violent sketch, by saying, "Thanks to the Christian religion, 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," he reassured his readers that all was well. By asserting that barbarism was a thing of the past, the Gentleman tacitly affirmed that temperate Whig institutions were in control of the present, and in so doing released the laughter of those who might otherwise have shuddered at the comic spectacle. Finally, the frame device was a way of driving home, explicitly and directly, the social values of the author. "The peace officers," reads the last sentence of "The Fight," "who countenance . . . [barbarism and cruelty] deserve a place in the Penitentiary." To convert the entire community to the temperate values of Whiggery was the ultimate purpose of Southwestern humor, and the frame was the place where those values were most overtly insisted on.

The least successful of Longstreet's sketches are those in which his impulse to lecture the community in explicit terms carries over from the frame to the story itself. The same tendency mars much of the work of his successors as well. In "Darby, the Politician" for instance, Longstreet has barely thought through his story, or reflected on his characters; like John Pendleton Kennedy's Quodlibet, a dull, endless tale about good Whigs and bad Democrats, "Darby" comes closer to being a political speech than a short story. Darby Anvil is a blacksmith, "the first man who, without any qualifications for the place, was elected to the Legislature of Georgia." Instances of his ignorance and of the drunkenness of his supporters are cited with the mechanical regularity of the points in a lawyer's brief; in the end, the blacksmith is shown to be much worse off in every way than before he overreached himself by presuming to run against a Gentleman for office. One hardly needs to know that Longstreet's own political ambitions had come to naught in order to sense that "Darby" is the work of a man bent entirely on self-justification, and not at all on creating a meaningful fiction.

In his best work, however, Longstreet buries his meanings deep within the concrete action of the comedy. His finest stories are parables, not tracts. As Longstreet finally understood, the Self-controlled Gentleman was defined more convincingly by his ability to perceive eccentricity than by his habit of condemning it, and "Georgia Theatrics," "The Horse-Swap," "The Fight," and two or three other sketches which constitute the Longstreet canon, are distinguished by an intense observation of character.

In "Georgia Theatrics," the briefest of the sketches in Georgia Scenes (the collection of his humor that Longstreet published in 1835), the Self-controlled Gentleman is a minister of the cloth who tells us of a trip he once took through the backwoods county of Lincoln in the year 1809. Speaking in a calm and elevated tone, he remembers that the natural (although, alas, not the moral) condition of the county in those bygone days had been a thing of splendor, and he recalls his initial delight in the "undulating grounds, luxuriant woodlands . . . sportive streams . . . [and] blushing flowers." His mood of enchantment, however, had been suddenly broken by the sound coming from behind a clump of bushes of what seemed to be a terrible fight:

"You kin, kin you?"

"Yes, I kin, and am able to do it! Boo-oo-oo! Oh, wake snakes, and walk your chalks! Brimstone and—fire! Don't hold me, Nick Stoval! The fight's made up, and let's go at it.—my soul if I don't jump down his throat, and gallop every chitterling out of him before you can say 'quit!'"

The humor of the story is contained in the revelation that the commotion was not what it sounded like. Instead of the two brutes whom the minister had expected to find tearing each other apart, he had found instead a single eighteen-year-old boy, "jist seein' how I could 'a' fout." The story ends with the minister recollecting how he had examined the ground from which the boy had risen—"and there were the prints of his two thumbs, plunged up to the balls in the mellow earth, about the distance of a man's eyes apart; and the ground around was broken up as if two stags had been engaged upon it."

The minister's illusory contentment with the sylvan scene, his startled disillusionment, and finally his realization that his disillusionment is also an illusion, are represented with skill and economy. It is the youth, however, who makes the story. As he claws at the earth, he is a ridiculously quixotic figure, and we laugh, but the knowledge that Poe was fond of this story helps to call our attention to the darkness in the boy's life that it exposes. Victimized by the violent society of which he is a member, the boy's mind is thronged with images of violence; his fantasies of gouging out some ruffian's eyeballs with his fingernails are so real to him that he must take to the lonely woods to act them out. The subject of "Georgia Theatrics," as of Poe's "The Black Cat," is the psychology of aggression.

Did such a story have a political purpose? By its very artistry, "Georgia Theatrics" challenges the hypothesis that politics is the key to Southwestern humor. Yet the fact is that the conservative political allegory inherent in the sketch was recognized at once. Two years after the publication of Georgia Scenes, the Whig author of Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas reproduced "Georgia Theatrics" as one of the episodes in the life of Whiggery's favorite backwoodsman. The author's sole adornment of Longstreet's tale was to suggest that the boy's assault on the mellow earth rather closely paralleled Andrew Jackson's ridiculous war on Biddle's Bank. The underlying political strategy of Longstreet's humor was thus clearly revealed by the more obvious literary intelligence which created Crockett's Exploits: if this author's allegorization reduced the richness of Longstreet's sketch, he nevertheless brought its political energies out into the open, enabling us to understand that just as the Self-controlled Gentleman who tells the story embodies a conservative political ideal, so the violent boy represents what to the Whig mind was the central quality of Jacksonism.

The moral contrast between the Gentleman and the youthful Clown is brought out in several ways. First of all, by the cordon sanitaire of the frame; secondly, by the superior point of view from which the story is told, a device which coerces the reader into laughing at—rather than sympathizing with—the boy; and finally—and most importantly—by the language. The language of the narrator is as urbane as Addison's; the cool elegance of the diction, the measured rhythms, the familiar yet reserved tone, are the credentials of an impeccably civilized man. Exemplifying a whole constellation of values, the narrative style speaks to us of order and rationality, of good taste, and of optimism tempered by wisdom; it is the style of "Christianity and the colleges," of sobersided and temperate adulthood—of Whiggery, in a word. The backwoods child, on the other hand, speaks in the vernacular. His idiom is not the hoked-up, synthetic mixture which the Whig propagandists represented Davy Crockett as speaking, but a barbarously authentic dialect, for Longstreet's purpose in employing the vernacular was to demonstrate the social and political incapacities of the barbarous Democracy, rather than to affirm the natural gentlemanliness of a backwoods Whig, as Crockett's ghost writers were attempting to do. By the same logic that compelled the Crockett myth-makers to be dishonest about how their pet backwoodsman talked, the myth-making humorists were encouraged to be blisteringly accurate in their representations of popular speech. The exigencies of Southern Whig politics, which forced the writers of the Southwestern tradition to lift the ban on the vernacular, thus precipitated the linguistic revolution that led eventually to Huckleberry Finn. The sole consideration which restrained the Southwestern humorists in their use of the vernacular was the one which had caused William Byrd to keep the Clowns of North Carolina quiet: if the backwoodsman was too often allowed to speak out of his own grotesque nature, then perforce the language of the story would no longer present quite so clear an image of the Gentleman's values. That the vernacular menaced the moral didacticism of his style was clearly recognized by Longstreet. Trained in the classics of Roman antiquity as well as steeped in the literature of Augustan England, he did not need to be told what the reasons were for holding firm to a formal narrative mode. The formula worked out by Longstreet was to use the vernacular sparingly, and never to allow its uncouth accents to interrupt for very long the bland flow of the narrator's language. The Clown in "Georgia Theatrics," therefore, has fewer lines than the Self-controlled Gentleman, but when he does speak we hear a genuine backwoods voice. The language of the youth is a language of cruelty and violence; it tells of quixotic hallucinations and irrational fears; it is full of misspellings, bad grammar and crude expressions. In other words, it beautifully exemplifies what, to the Whig mind, were the reckless spirit and childish ignorance of Jacksonian America. Someday Mark Twain would rewrite "Georgia Theatrics" as one of the scenes in Tom Sawyer—which reminds us not only of how well he knew A. B. Longstreet's work, but also of how much the comic symbols of the Southwestern tradition meant to Twain's art, albeit he radically altered their moral evaluations.

Longstreet's best story is "The Fight," which Poe praised as "unsurpassed in dramatic vigor and vivid truth to nature." This sketch introduces Longstreet's most intensely observed character: first of a long line of unforgettable Southern grotesques, Ransy Sniffle anticipates—in the satiric brilliance of his name, in the comic ugliness of his appearance, and in the utter malevolence of his soul—Faulkner's Flem Snopes. He was "a sprout of Richmond," says Longstreet's narrator,

who, in his earlier days, had fed copiously upon red clay and blackberries. This diet had given to Ransy a complexion that a corpse would have disdained to own, and an abdominal rotundity that was quite unprepossessing. Long spells of the fever and ague, too, in Ransy's youth, had conspired with clay and blackberries to throw him quite out of the order of nature. His shoulders were fleshless and elevated; his head large and flat; his neck slim and translucent; and his arms, hands, fingers, and feet were lengthened out of all proportion to the rest of his frame. His joints were large and his limbs small; and as for flesh, he could not, with propriety, be said to have any. Those parts which nature usually supplies with the most of this article—the calves of the legs, for example—presented in him the appearance of so many well-drawn blisters. His height was just five feet nothing; and his average weight in blackberry season, ninety-five.

At the end of the description comes the most telling detail of all: "He never seemed fairly alive except when he was witnessing, fomenting, or talking about a fight. Then, indeed, his deep-sunken gray eye assumed something of a living fire, and his tongue acquired a volubility that bordered upon eloquence." Infinitely more degraded than the youth of "Georgia Theatrics," Ransy Sniffle cannot set his mind at rest with mock violence; blood must flow in order to satisfy this back-country sadist. Living only for violence, he willingly subverts the stability of society to satisfy his thirst for blood.

The figure of a sinister subversive who engineers the destruction of peaceful communities recurs often in Southwestern humor, indeed in all pre-Civil War Southern literature. As abolitionist pressure mounted, this subversive came more and more to be identified as a Yankee, and Southern variations on "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" quickly multiplied toward infinity. As a Nullifier, Longstreet was early into the field with a story of a Yankee, called "The Village Editor." The sketch begins with a description of the "harmony" of life in Natville, the "good feeling" that prevails, the "temperate character" of all discussions, the presence in all families of "all the good things, and sweet things, and pretty things, that were found in one family." Into this Whig Utopia drifts a Connecticut Yankee named Asaph Doolittle; establishing a newspaper, he so agitates the townspeople with his editorials that soon good friends are at one another's throats. Before he is finally forced to leave Natville, "the village was completely revolutionized. The street meetings were broken up, the social parties discontinued, and many long years passed away before the citizens of Natville returned to their former friendship." The story makes its editorial point—that the North has no business interfering with the South—with awesome vigor; but as a study of character it is a failure. Doolittle derives from Longstreet's acquaintance with Ichabod Crane, rather than from his own observation. When, however, Longstreet turned from "foreign" to local subversives, he created the first memorable Clown in the Southwestern tradition. Kennedy's Flan Sucker, the "distinguished loafer"; Thompson's cadaverously ugly Sammy Stonestreet; Johnson Hooper's Simon Suggs; G. W. Harris's Sut Lovingood—these are the great Clowns of the tradition, and they all trace their ancestry back to Ransy Sniffle.

The Georgia county depicted by the gentlemanly narrator of "The Fight" is unified and peaceful—until Ransy Sniffle finds a way to tap its latent violence. Skillfully playing on hot Southern tempers, Sniffle provokes a fight between the two strongest men in the county, who previous to his machinations had had a "wonderful attachment" to one another. Soon the entire community is divided into two hostile camps. In the course of the ensuing battle, the two combatants, whose very names—Billy Stallions and Bob Durham—suggest their colossal strength, claw and tear at one another until one of the fighters has lost his left ear and a large piece of his cheek, and the other is minus a third of his nose. Ransy Sniffle is obviously well pleased by the bloodshed; but to the Self-controlled Gentleman the brawl has been a "hideous spectacle," and he concludes his story with a strong paragraph of moral condemnation. As for us, we emerge from "The Fight" as from a bad dream. Through the Gentleman's eyes, we have been witness to a vision of evil, a vision at once realistic and incredible, and made so largely by the character of the demonic Ransy Sniffle. While the clay-eater is in some basic sense a "true to life" character, as Asaph Doolittle was not, he can hardly be described as the fictionalized version of some backwoods lout whom the author had encountered during his circuit days. His weight of ninety-five pounds, for instance, is as much of a tall tale as is the fabulous strength of Durham and Stallions. Although decked out in realistic detail, Sniffle is a creature of fantasy, like Poe's nightmarish Mob. No more than Simon Suggs would be, is Longstreet's Clown a detached and objective study of the Southern poor white; he is, rather, a projection, in outrageous caricature, of a political conservative's exacerbation. Behind the Self-controlled Gentleman's cool and collected pose was an outraged editorialist who savagely despised the new Democracy for the divisions that its upsurge had created in Southern life; and the strange story of a sadistic clay-eater who split the community in two is the product of that savage feeling. To the Whig humorists who came after Longstreet, the diabolic humor of Georgia Scenes would be a source of inspiration in the hard political years ahead.