[In the following excerpt, Ridgely observes myth-making qualities in the novels of the Old South—romantic works that elaborate themes of Southern uniqueness, manifest destiny, and separatism.]

THE SOUTHERN ROMANCE: THE MATTER OF VIRGINIA

Readers of magazines like the Messenger were often treated to nostalgic glimpses of olden times; the sight of the ruined church tower at Jamestown was good for any number of columns of sentimental posturing, and the fate of the red man, now that he was no longer any real peril, was a natural theme for weepy elegiac verse. But the full-scale revivification of southern history was the province of the writers of long romances, and they quickly developed a gratifying thesis: a noble past prefigured a glorious future. William Gilmore Simms would make a hyperbolic claim for the genre in his preface to The Yemassee: “The modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic.” All of American history had seemed pretty barren soil in which to plant the flower of romance; Nathaniel Hawthorne was still bemoaning its commonplaceness in the 1850s. But Simms was entirely serious in discerning “epic” possibilities in native materials. In the few years since Scott had initiated the vogue for historical romance with Waverley (1814), northern writers like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and a host of minor imitators had been gratifying literary nationalists with an outpouring of vividly imagined scenes from colonial times through the Revolution. Now it was the turn of the South to give its own special embellishment to the country's annals.

From the 1830s through the 1850s, the romance—that fictional form which is characterized by the free exercise of the imagination rather than by strict fidelity to actuality—was the most ambitious of the South's literary endeavors. This body of fiction, it should be said at once, offers few purely esthetic pleasures, and it is generally arduous going for the modern reader. Yet these prolonged tales have a special usefulness in the study of the growth of the mind of the South. Collectively they form a psychological record of the developing conviction of separatism; they are more revelatory of inner hopes and fears than their creators could have known. In helping to give form to the southerner's sense of personal and regional identity, they performed a real social function. The legend—the myth—of the uniqueness and ordained role of the plantation South was to be relatively short in the making. But its pervasiveness and its durability in the American, even the foreign, consciousness have been extraordinary.

It was fitting, perhaps inevitable, that Virginia writers should take the lead in developing a fiction which would reorder the past in the service of the present, for here the roots were deepest. Among the earliest to contribute was William Wirt (1772-1834), Maryland-born but a Virginia lawyer by adoption. In 1803 he published The Letters of the British Spy, a series of essays cast in the form of the “foreign traveler” genre. Narrative interest is minimal, but these “letters,” which purport to be from a young Englishman of rank to a friend in the English Parliament, reveal Wirt's conviction that Virginia had been preeminent in the nation's history. As a child of the eighteenth century, he expressed some doubt that the rising generation could live up to the monumental figures of the Revolutionary age. But as a budding romanticist and zealous patriot, Wirt tended toward the celebratory rather than the satirical mode. He paraded before his readers emotionally charged scenes which he intended to inspire prideful response. The most notable, and the most rhetorically embellished, of these inspirational outbursts are those which deal with the initial confrontation of Englishman and Indian at Jamestown. Wirt's “Spy” spends a good bit of time in the area; in one passage, as he travels over the lands where the young Pocahontas had frolicked, he cannot “help recalling the principal features of her history; and heaving a sigh of mingled pity and veneration to her memory.” He goes on, rather breathlessly:

Good Heaven! What an eventful life was hers! To speak of nothing else, the arrival of the English in her father's dominions must have appeared (as indeed it turned out to be) a most portentous phenomenon. It is not easy for us to conceive the amazement and consternation which must have filled her mind and that of her nation at the first appearance of our countrymen. Their great ship, with all her sails spread, advancing in solemn majesty to the shore; their complexion; their dress; their language; their domestic animals; their cargo of new and glittering wealth; and then the thunder and irresistible force of their artillery; the distant country announced by them, far beyond the great water, of which the oldest Indian had never heard, or thought, or dreamed—all this was so new, so wonderful, so tremendous, that I do seriously suppose, the personal descent of an army of Milton's celestial angels, robed in light, sporting in the bright beams of the sun and redoubling their splendour, making divine harmony with their golden harps, or playing with the bolt and chasing the rapid lightning of heaven, would excite not more astonishment in Great Britain than did the debarkation of the English among the aborigines of Virginia.

Wirt's effusive words turn the pencil strokes of historical fact into a huge allegorical canvas; the moment is made epic. But the “Spy” knows the subsequent cost to the Indians themselves, and he drops the appropriate tear over their sufferings. He suggests that Virginians might partially redress these grievances by instituting an annual festival to honor the aid given by Pocahontas, the first American heroine:

Unfortunate princess! She deserved a happier fate! But I am consoled by these reflections: first, that she sees her descendants among the most respectable families in Virginia; and that they are not only superior to the false shame of disavowing her as their ancestor; but that they pride themselves, and with reason too, on the honour of their descent; secondly, that she herself has gone to a country, where she finds her noble wishes realized; where the distinction of colour is no more; but where, indeed, it is perfectly immaterial “what complexion an Indian or an African sun may have burned” on the pilgrim.

The “Spy” is scarcely less dithyrambic when, switching the point of view, he ruminates at the site of Jamestown itself on the portent in its founding:

Where is Smith, that pink of gallantry, that flower of chivalry? I fancy that I can see their first, slow and cautious approach to the shore; their keen and vigilant eyes piercing the forest in every direction, to detect the lurking Indian, with his tomahawk, bow and arrow. Good heavens! what an enterprise! how full of the most fearful perils! and yet how entirely profitless to the daring men who personally undertook and achieved it! …

It is curious to reflect, what a nation, in the course of two hundred years, has sprung up and flourished from the feeble, sickly germ which was planted here! Little did our short-sighted court suspect the conflict which she was preparing for herself; the convulsive throe by which her infant colony would in a few years burst from her, and start into a political importance that would astonish the earth.

It is no wonder that Wirt's book proved widely popular; he saw the colonial history of Virginia as providential and he adumbrated a theme which would be thundered by writers yet to come: the manifest destiny of the region. He also caught the mood of a transitional period when literary taste was beginning to reject dry and rationalistic prose in favor of the more personal and emotional. What his “letters” lacked was a strong story line. It was an auspicious beginning, but some two decades would elapse before Virginia writers would develop a sustained fictional mode. By then the models were more plentiful.

The “Matter of Virginia,” which Wirt was one of the earliest to seize upon, was taken up by an authentic English observer, John Davis, who published in 1805 a long novel on the Smith-Pocahontas legend, The First Settlers of Virginia. In this tale and in several other writings, Davis sketched a recognizable locale, and he may well deserve the title of father of the Virginia novel. But 1824 really marks the start of a continuing tradition. Of two works issued in that year, the anonymous Tales of an American Landlord, with a frame story set in the 1790s, is a somewhat jumbled gathering of a number of stories; George Tucker's The Valley of Shenandoah, on the other hand, is a full-blown performance.

Like Wirt, Tucker (1775-1861) was neither a Virginian born nor a born novelist. A native of Bermuda, he immigrated at the age of twenty and attended the College of William and Mary. He was to have a long and uneven career in the law and politics, but with Jefferson's approval he was granted life tenure of the professorship of moral philosophy in the University of Virginia. In later years he was known mostly for studies of American history and political economy; his modest creative talents were to be exhibited in his Valley romance and in a satire in the Swiftian mode, A Voyage to the Moon (1827).

The Valley of Shenandoah is a rather tedious two-decker, but it is not without its surprises. These do not include its plot, which is a mélange of generic types currently popular in England and America, especially sentimental-domestic fiction and the tale of seduction. Tucker had written to a friend that he hoped his book would win him the fame and fortune which Cooper was enjoying, but it drew little notice and fewer dollars. The failure was not entirely unmerited. Tucker had a sharp eye for the state in which he matured and a serviceable if old-fashioned style; he simply would not venture away from tired story lines.

Because the book reveals so much about what Tucker thought would draw an audience, its narrative deserves brief summation. Set in 1796, it opens as young Edward Grayson, son of a Revolutionary War hero, returns to an estate at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley in the hope of recouping the family fortunes, now at low ebb because of his late father's improvident benevolence. With him comes a fellow student at William and Mary, a New Yorker named James Gildon, who had been sent south by his merchant father to keep him from wedding an undesirable—because impecunious—city belle. Tucker had a chance to be original in contrasting the newer Valley settlements where Edward's mother and sister are now residing with the old Tidewater culture in which the family had originated. Unhappily, though, he allowed the story of the bankruptcy of this proud clan to become tangled in a melodramatic complication which weakens his social criticism. This steamy part of the tale turns upon the love affairs of the two young men. Grayson is smitten with Matilda Fawkner, daughter of the owner of a nearby estate; their union is being blocked by Matilda's mother, who takes a dim view of the Graysons' sinking fortunes. Gildon, who, despite a sharp tongue, is first presented rather sympathetically, turns out to be a traitorous seducer; his victim is Grayson's sister, the pallid Louisa, whose ingrained virtue proves an ineffectual barrier against the strategems of the sophisticated northerner. Before Gildon is aware of the biological consequences of his conquest (Tucker is so circumspect that the reader is similarly kept in the dark), he returns to New York, ostensibly to win his father's consent to marriage with Louisa; but he soon turns his attentions to his first love, now an heiress. Edward, finally learning of his friend's treachery, follows him to New York and attacks him on the street; in the ensuing scuffle Gildon stabs Grayson to death. The novel ends with the tying up of this lurid plot: Gildon's low character becomes public knowledge and he dies a sot; Grayson's love, Matilda, enters a Catholic convent; Louisa dies after a long illness; and old Mrs. Grayson lives on to become the Lady Bountiful of the neighborhood.

All this is tedious stuff, though it is a sort of index of contemporary popular taste. For us The Valley of Shenandoah remains of value only in its freezing a moment in Virginia history before defense of slavery turned the plantation romance into a more radically self-serving document. The story, it is true, makes a rather simplistic contrast between Yankee and southerner, between the eye-on-the-main-chance Gildon and the handsome, honor-proud Grayson. But Tucker's general view of Virginia society is anything but simple-minded. He comments accurately on the wasteful habits of the gentry; he deplores the decay of the old Tidewater; and he records the conflicts accompanying the growth of the western settlements. He even breaks the narrative to allow Grayson a considerable disquisition on the new “foreign” intrusion of Scotch-Irish and Germans, who, says Grayson, “will have some effect in forming the compound that is hereafter to make our national character.”

Grayson's rather elitist tone in his survey of ethnic traits gives his auditor, Gildon, the chance for a query about Edward's own self-image: “‘Don't you feel, Edward, when riding over these vast domains of yours, something like a feudal Baron?’” Grayson recognizes that Gildon is casting him in the role of southern despot, so he carefully outlines the woes of the slaveholder: “‘We, of the present generation, find domestic slavery established among us, and the evil, for I freely admit it to be an evil, both moral and political, admits of no remedy that is not worse than the disease. No thinking man supposes that we could emancipate them, and safely let them remain in the country.’” Schemes for transportation or resettlement of slaves in Africa he holds to be impractical, and he outlines the problem as many Virginians would have seen it in the 1820s:

“In this choice of difficulties what are we to do? What can we do, but to select the least formidable? and since we cannot confer on them, or restore to them (if you will) some of those rights which we ourselves so highly prize, without endangering not only these, but every other we possess, we must even set down contented, and endeavour to mitigate a disease which admits of no cure. Because we do not indulge in idle declamation about the injurious consequences of domestic slavery, yet do not infer that our politicians are not insensible to them. The theme is an ungrateful one—like any other natural defect or misfortune which is incurable. We are fully aware of its disadvantages—that it checks the growth of our wealth—is repugnant to its justice—inconsistent with its principles—injurious to its morals—and dangerous to its peace. Yet after giving the subject the most serious and attentive consideration, and finding it admitted of no other safe remedy but what time may bring some centuries hence, they are fain to acquiesce in their inevitable destiny, and now consider all speculations on rights which cannot be enforced, but at the expense of still higher and dearer rights, either as the ebullitions of well-meaning but short-sighted enthusiasm, as sheer folly, or the hypocritical pretences of lovers of mischief.”

Gildon turns to another sort of question: “‘You think, then, that considered merely with the eye of an economist, slavery is not a national evil.’” Grayson's reply epitomizes Tucker's sensitivity to the effects of the system on whites as well as blacks:

“Far from it,” replied Edward. “It does operate to lessen very greatly the productive labour of a country—but not, I think, in the way it is commonly supposed. It is obviously the interest of the slave to make as little and consume as much as he can, if you attribute to him the first feelings of our nature, the love of ease and enjoyment—and this seems a sufficient cause why their labour, and skill, and care, should be less than that of freemen. … No; it is in the effect which slavery has on the whites, that the chief mischief is produced. It consigns this half of the population to idleness, or tends to consign them, both by making their labour less necessary, and by making it degrading. You observe that twice the number of menials are necessary to a man of small fortune here that are so to a man of large fortune with you. For none of our citizens, male or female, will perform the smallest domestic duties for themselves.”

Tucker's critique of the indolence of slaveholders does not quite offset his vision of the bondage of the blacks for “some centuries,” and perhaps he felt the duplicity of his presentation; for in the latter half of his story he sets up an emotionally charged scene of a slave auction. Grayson is forced by the pressure of his father's debts to sell off a number of old family servants. Such an auction would become a favorite target of the abolitionists, and later plantation novelists naturally avoided depicting it, until the clamor over Uncle Tom's Cabin made its actuality impossible to ignore. But Tucker is forthright. He sympathetically pictures the slaves as they are forced to mount a pine table and listen to the auctioneer broadcasting their physical characteristics before an unfeeling mob of bidders. His comment on the scene is proof that such treatment could at this period be openly discussed as a cause for Southern shame:

One not accustomed to this spectacle, is extremely shocked to see beings, of the same species with himself, set up for sale to the highest bidder, like horses or cattle; and even to those who have been accustomed to it, it is disagreeable, from their sympathy with the humbled and anxious slave. The weight of his fetters, the negro, who has been born and bred on a well regulated estate, hardly feels. … But when hoisted up to public sale, where every man has a right to purchase him, and he may be the property of one whom he never saw before, or of the worst man in the community, then the delusion vanishes, and he feels the bitterness of his lot, and his utter insignificance as a member of civilized society.

The emotional crosscurrents of this scene are characteristic of The Valley of Shenandoah as a whole. Tucker clearly was proud of his Virginia gentry and the beauties of the lands which they inhabit, yet he deplored their improvidence and hotheadedness. He called slavery inhuman and economically unsound, yet he foresaw no quick end to it. His book leaves us with the sense that there are smouldering fires in this society which are going to prove more tragic than are the events of the melodramatic tale which he actually tells. The melodrama finally can be seen as a mask placed over emotions with which he could not deal frankly.

Similar conflicting pressure in the literary portrayal of the slaveholding South can be found in the work of John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870). Like Tucker, Kennedy could picture a culture which he knew from his own close observation. He was born in Baltimore to an Irish immigrant father and a Virginian mother allied to an old Tidewater clan; the heritage would be reflected in the son's dual attraction to go-ahead mercantilism and the rootedness of an agrarian South. His place in southern letters rests on three works: Swallow Barn (1832), set on a Virginia plantation; Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835), an early contribution to the legendry of the South's role during the Revolution; and Rob of the Bowl (1838), a rather labored tale of political and religious rivalries in seventeenth-century Maryland. Of the three, the first proved to be the most significant in reflecting the image of a self-conscious South.

As a work of fiction, Swallow Barn broke no new ground; Kennedy's literary taste was conservative, founding itself on the work of Irving and recent British novelists. But his subject matter was relatively new, capitalizing upon the growing interest in Virginia's past. He knew the state well from his frequent visits to his mother's relatives; like Tucker, he saw the possibilities in contrasting southern and northern cultures. His narrator, therefore, is made a New Yorker, who has been invited by a Virginia cousin to spend some months on a Tidewater plantation. The frame story of the foreign visitor is thus similar to that which Wirt (whose biography Kennedy would later write) had employed in The Letters of the British Spy. The book opens with an expository epistle describing the narrator's voyage up the James River—with expostulations over the ruins of the colonial village and the nobility of Captain John Smith—and his overland trek to Swallow Barn itself. He then introduces the inhabitants of the plantation in leisurely character sketches before getting down to the thin narrative backbone. One plot line is a rather conventional recital of a comically inept wooing; another, which deals with a feud between two families over some worthless swamp property, allows a bit more originality as Kennedy gently mocks his Virginians' delight in litigation and legal verbiage and their inordinate pride in family and place. Neither of these narratives was capable of sustained development, and in the latter half of the book Kennedy had to resort to further sketches of the plantation locale and to digressions that take the form of self-contained short stories. But the discursiveness of this section did allow Kennedy to have his northern narrator confront the base upon which the plantation world rests: chattel slavery. The problems of the system are analyzed by Swallow Barn's lord and master, and his words both echo and differ in subtle ways from those of Grayson in The Valley of Shenandoah. The existence of slavery is unequivocally called “theoretically and morally wrong.” But immediate emancipation and schemes for transportation, unfortunately, would wreck the South's social structure and leave the blacks “in greater evils than their present bondage.” Instead, the master recommends radical improvements in the slave code. More strikingly, he proposes choosing a few of the older and more trustworthy men and forming them into a “feudatory”—in effect, serfs who could work for themselves as tenant farmers. How seriously we are meant to take this scheme as “solution” is unclear in Kennedy's treatment; but the whole discussion betrays a deep unease. Behind the apparently pastoral world of Swallow Barn is a garden of evil which the South must find a way to eradicate.

Contemporary reviews record that Swallow Barn gratified American readers by proving that another writer besides Irving and Cooper could find humor, pathos, and story interest in the commonplaces of the countryside. But Kennedy's split heritage produced a book with deeper currents than his original readers could have appreciated. As a man who responded emotionally to his own early travels, he inclined toward portraying an “ancient,” aristocratic, amiable Virginia; as a budding businessman and politician who would later choose national over sectional interest, he was concerned with exposing the dangers of pride in state, family, and plantation system which led to scorn of all that lay outside its immediate orbit. As a result of these internal pulls, a good part of Swallow Barn is backward-looking and “historical.” It counts upon legend—including a long excursus on Captain John Smith which was cut from later editions—and loaded words like “antique” and “aristocratical” to produce an atmosphere of age, status, and solidity. Kennedy even indulges in a version of the “Cavalier myth” as he lets his New Yorker reflect: “[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 vigourous 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 that state.”

What the modern Virginian has inherited from this English gentlemanly background Kennedy dramatizes through his characters: pride in a long family line; personal honor and bravery; love of individual liberty; belief in land-holding as the only secure basis for an enduring social system; chivalric behavior toward women; conservatism in religion and politics; participation in public affairs; dislike of outside interference, especially that of a central government; recognition of an aristocracy founded upon inherited property. This is a catalog of all that seemed good in the developed plantation world. And yet—from an opposing angle of vision—Kennedy also insists on the necessity of progressivism and argues for the continuity of social change, including an eventual end to slavery. The book satirizes the provinciality of the closed Virginia society, lets its members condemn themselves through their tirades against outside interference and internal improvements, and mocks cherished states' rights. Swallow Barn, then, lets us see directly into the mind of a border-state writer who could be attracted both to a vision of the uniqueness of the southern past and to the hope of a glorious national future in which the South would not be forced to take a separate road. The book has long been categorized as the “first plantation novel”; it ought to be noted that it was written by a man who had no financial stake in an agrarian system.

In Kennedy's view of the Old Dominion, as in George Tucker's, the state is viewed as a sort of ideological arena in which the issues of caste, states' rights, and slavery could be argued by men of goodwill. Both writers foresaw a very gradual elimination of the slave system; neither dreamed of armed conflict as the alternative to public debate over southern claims. No such man was Beverley Tucker, who would fire the guns of civil war as early as 1836 in a romance called The Partisan Leader. Tucker (1784-1851) was schooled at William and Mary and early absorbed the states' rights doctrines of his brilliant half-brother, John Randolph of Roanoke. Between 1816 and 1833 he saw frontier life as a landholder and circuit judge in Missouri; the experience gave him a local color background for a first novel, George Balcombe (1836). This tale, though praised by both Poe and Simms, is a drearily conventional narrative which is only partially redeemed by some genre pictures of the border territory. Its predictable approval of slavery and its homage to the planter class, however, in no way prepare us for The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future, probably the most spectacular piece of fire-eating secessionism published before the 1850s. In every aspect the book is a curiosity. Though issued in Washington in 1836, it bore on its title page the spurious date of 1856 and the pseudonym of Edward William Sydney. Despite this suggestion of futuristic fantasy, though, the book was designed by Tucker, now back home again as a law professor at his old college, as a warning to his state that it must oppose the presidential bid of Martin Van Buren. It is clear that for Tucker this pro-Whig message was all; his disdain for narrative technique is such that he introduces the presumed protagonist in the opening pages, drops him until nearly the close, brings in the narrator as a new character at the very end of the book, and cuts off the story without bringing any of the plot lines to a conclusion. But the banner of secession is paraded throughout with drum rolls and huzzas; if the plot is murky, the theme is fairly yelled in the reader's face. The internal time of the action is put at 1849; Van Buren is about to run for his fourth term; and the commonwealth of Virginia is in the worst dilemma of its long history. The lower states have already formed a southern Confederacy and peacefully left the Union—not because of the slavery issue but because of their adamant stand against the tariff. The North is ruled by Van Buren, pictured as an oily and crafty tyrant who works his villainies from the sanctuary of his “mansion” in Washington. Virginia is caught in between; having hesitated in joining its sister states, it is now in danger of being occupied by Van Buren's men. By the end of the book, the Virginians, under the leadership of Colonel Douglas Trevor, a United States Army officer who travels the route from loyalty to secession, have launched guerrilla warfare against northern forces. In the closing pages we learn that Trevor has become Van Buren's prisoner in Washington. What will happen to the stalwart Partisan Leader? No devotee of romance can doubt that he and his brave men will outwit the despot, but Tucker defeats such frivolous story interest by returning to his narrator, who has been compiling a history of the rebellion. Here are his concluding words: “I have been interrupted in my narrative. I have hesitated whether to give this fragment to the public, until I have leisure to complete my history. On farther reflection, I have determined to do so. Let it go forth as the first Bulletin of that gallant contest, in which Virginia achieved her independence; lifted the soiled banner of her sovereignty from the dust, and once more vindicated her proud motto, which graces my title page,—Sic semper tyrannis!”

As a forecast of the actual War for Southern Independence, Tucker's narrative is not very prescient. But, curiously, it did play a part in that conflict. In 1861 it was published in New York with the seductive tag “A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy” displayed on the title page; an “explanatory introduction” counseled the reader that he would “learn from the following pages that the fratricidal contest into which our country has been led is not a thing of chance, but of deliberate design, and that it has been gradually preparing for almost thirty years.” Nor was the book forgotten in the South; in 1862 a Richmond publisher reissued it as “A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy.” Thus, with their opposing emphases, did both sides agree on the accuracy of Tucker's trumpeted message: that the successful assertion of state sovereignty would inevitably lead to disunion.

The struggle of the loyalist Virginian against the outsider was also the theme of the second novel by another son of the Old Dominion, William A. Caruthers (1802-1846). Dr. Caruthers, a physician who spent the last nine years of his short life in Georgia, began a minor career in letters in 1834, when he published The Kentuckian in New-York. The work had a mild success as a sentimental romance; its setting of scenes in both New York and the South, and its attack on the abuses of slavery, probably justify its also being called an early example of the “intersectional novel.” Caruthers, however, struck a richer vein the next year with The Cavaliers of Virginia. The title is a bit misleading, since the tale is essentially a romantic fantasy woven about the figure of Nathaniel Bacon, the eponymous leader in 1676 of “Bacon's Rebellion.” The plot, with its typical interweaving of elements from historical and Gothic romance, is of little consequence; what is striking is Caruthers's conception of Bacon as a champion of individual liberty. The book revels in scenes of battle as the redoubtable Nathaniel engages a host of enemies; first, a group of former Cromwellian soldiers who are staging a revolt at Jamestown; next, the Indian Confederation; and, finally, the forces of the dictatorial Governor Berkeley. Not untypically in a work of this sort, Caruthers disregards history by rewarding the hero with his lady's hand and the prospect of a happy life to come. In reality, Bacon was already married and died of disease shortly after burning Jamestown to the ground. The character of the real Bacon and the consequences of his “rebellion” are still debated by historians; but, though he did do some research, Caruthers was not bound to being scrupulous in presenting any true motivations behind his hero's actions. What he felt the myth of Virginia needed was a prototypical—a pre-Revolutionary War—defender of the rights of the Virginia colonists against enemies foreign and domestic. As a romancer, it was not difficult, though quite unhistorical, for Caruthers to portray his Bacon as both a “Cavalier” and a leader of the people.

The early days of the colony provided Caruthers with an even loftier hero and a grander theme for his third and last romance, The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe, which he subtitled A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion. Published first as a serial in the Savannah Magnolia during 1841 and then in book form by an Alabama printer in 1845, the tale inevitably had less circulation than The Cavaliers. The fact was unfortunate for Caruthers's reputation, for here he developed a theme which would agitate southern leaders through the Civil War period: the “manifest destiny” of the South to expand into western territory. The historical fact upon which Caruthers grounded his most ambitious romance was the horseback expedition led in 1716 by the lieutenant governor of the Virginia colony, Alexander Spotswood, across the Blue Ridge into the Valley of Virginia. The primary mission, according to Spotswood's own account, was “to satisfye my Self whether it was practicable to come at the [Great] Lakes”—that is, to see if the boundaries of Virginia could be extended westward in order to forestall the incursions of New France into the territory. The settlement of the Valley was a reasonable political, military, and economic objective; under Caruthers's treatment the rather prosaic 1716 expedition becomes a true knightly quest through constant physical trials and Indian skirmishes, until the obsessed Spotswood at last looks down from a peak upon the great valley and sees the pathway to empire. The knightly—even saintly—character of Spotswood is established early as he proclaims his objective: “I will lead an expedition over yonder blue mountains, and I will triumph over the French—the Indians, and the Devil, if he chooses to join forces with them.” It takes Spotswood many pages (the romance has the usual thicket of plots) to establish his “Tramontane Order” and to get it into mountain country; but in the closing pages Caruthers rises to his theme. With a Walter Scott whoop, he transmutes the historical Spotswood's band of sixty-three riders into a gaudy chivalric pageant:

It was a gallant sight to behold that bright and joyous band of cavaliers, in their plumes and brilliant dresses and fluttering banners, not yet soiled by the dust and toil of travel, as they wound through the green vistas fresh from the hands of nature, and their prancing steeds still elastic and buoyant with high blood and breeding. It cheered the heart of the veteran warrior, their commander, to see the columns file off before him as he sat upon his horse and received their salutes. The expedition numbered in its ranks some of the most hopeful scions of the old aristocratic stock of Virginia, some, whose descendants were destined to make imperishable names in the future of their country, and many whose descendants still figure honorably in the highest trusts of the republic.

As this band of paragons nears its objective, Caruthers sets Spotswood at stage center to attest to the international importance of their sally into this wild New World Eden:

After the saddles of venison, wild turkeys and pheasants, had all disappeared, the Governor led the way to the festivities of the evening by his standing toast, as in duty bound, now altered of course by the ascension of a male Sovereign to the throne [i.e., George I]. It was varied also by the services which he supposed himself to be rendering to his royal master. Every one rose up with him, as he filled his glass and gave, “Our new Sovereign! may the ‘Tramontane Order’ push the boundaries of his empire in America to the banks of the Mississippi.”

Mindful of the aspirations of his own day, Caruthers appends a footnote at this point: “The Governor was too modest by half—he ought to have said to Mexico.”

A few pages later the “knights” reach the pinnacle:

What a panorama there burst upon the enraptured vision of the assembled young chivalry of Virginia! Never did the eye of mortal man rest upon a more magnificent scene! … For hours the old veteran chief stood on the identical spot which he first occupied, drinking in rapture from the vision which he beheld. Few words were spoken by any one, after the first exclamations of surprise and enthusiasm were over. The scene was too overpowering—the grand solitudes, the sublime stillness, gave rise to profound emotions which found no utterance. … 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 that virgin soil, from the beginning of the world. …

Governor Spotswood carried his thoughts into the future, and imagined the fine country which he beheld, peopled and glowing under the hands of the husbandman, and all his bright anticipations were more than realized. At length he turned to [a young officer], who sat near him not less entranced, and said, “They call me a visionary, but what imagination ever conjured up a vision like that?”

As history this gorgeous scene is nonsense, since it is entirely conjured up by the vision of Caruthers himself. But as a sacred moment in national myth—the point at which the questers reach the threshold of unimagined wealth and power—it has its own sort of truth. Caruthers now adds one further inspired touch, lifting this minor episode into the stuff of courtly romance. From the Valley the governor writes back to the capital, exulting over the feats of the expedition and ordering a suitably knightly accolade for his gallants: “I wish you to have a Golden Horse-Shoe made for each of them to wear upon the breast, as a distinction for meritorious services: with the motto on one side, ‘Sic juvat transcendere montes,’ [Thus does he rejoice to cross the mountains] and on the other, ‘The Tramontane Order.’” Caruthers did not live to see his expansionist dream fulfilled, but he did see its beginnings. When he died on August 29, 1846, the first battles of the war against Mexico had already been won.

The writers just surveyed were very amateur novelists but very professional Virginians. As practitioners of the craft of fiction, they were content to serve up what fetched audiences South and North: sentimentality, Gothic shudders, rousing adventure, patriotic proclamations of the glory of the North American scene. They shunned innovation, generally wrote a leaden prose, and peopled their plots with waxwork figures. But as Virginians, they obviously felt it a duty to announce their own pride of place in the American colonial venture. They had, of course, real justification: the settlements at Roanoke and Jamestown, the development of Tidewater culture, the notable political and military contributions to the new nation. But what they were expressing was something stronger than simple vanity. Such writers were engaged in what was fast becoming a peculiar reading of history and culture: the idea that Virginia aristocrats were the foreordained leaders in the coming destiny of America itself. As yet, a novelist like Beverley Tucker was aberrant in suggesting separatist action, in fomenting a second American revolution in which the South would break away to continue the “true America.” But, by gazing back selectively over the past of Virginia and by exalting early leaders like John Smith, Bacon, and Spotswood, these authors were giving a providential meaning to their own “errand into the wilderness.” Unlike the New England Puritans, whose vision was intellectually and theologically far denser, they did not cast themselves as actors in a final stage of God's redeeming plan for humanity. The course of the South's future was not yet entirely clear, but—given its past—who could doubt that it would be wonderful?

The arrogance of the Virginian was often as annoying to other southerners as it was to most northerners, yet it was inspirational. Now that the way had been set for self-glorification, there was yet another “aristocratic” region which would demand equal recognition. As early as The Valley of Shenandoah, George Tucker had introduced a young South Carolinian, a very foppish Mr. Belmain, whose dandified ways arouse both jealousy and contempt in Valley society. After one exchange on the difference in social practices between the two states, the South Carolinian is taunted by a Virginian: “‘You are not before us in everything, I see.’” “‘Oh, sir,’ said Belmain, ‘we yield to the old dominion in most things’—but with an air that showed how little his opinion agreed with his words.” Tucker shrewdly observed that the Virginians' claim of superiority would not go unchallenged. It would have startled him to see it go largely ignored in the work of that rising son of the low-country South, William Gilmore Simms.

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THE SOUTHERN WAY OF LIFE: THE 1830S AND '40S

William Gilmore Simms was the South's one-man literary movement. Born in Charleston in 1806, he was for several decades his region's most powerful and prolific representative in national letters; he alone, in a culture which accorded low social status to the litterateur, aspired to make himself a true professional. Though he was quite popular in both North and South, he never gained the financial independence of an Irving or a Cooper; at his death in 1870 he was a broken, bankrupt, and defeated old man. In 1865 stragglers from Sherman's army had burned his plantation, with his extensive library and art gallery; in the rising smoke he had watched his dream of an ideal southern nation die forever. But his efforts for it had been truly heroic: over eighty published books, including thirty-four works of fiction, nineteen volumes of poetry, three of drama, three anthologies, three volumes of history, two of geography, six biographies, and a number of gatherings of reviews and addresses. There were also uncollected tales, poems, reviews, and essays scattered through a shelf of northern and southern periodicals; finally, many hundreds of letters, which constitute the most complete record of the few pleasures and the myriad frustrations of the southern author.

For the modern reader, Simms's most impressive contribution to the Old South's self-image is the series of long romances which he published between 1834 and 1859. Most of his plots he based on the actual history of the lower South from its settlement to the 1850s; because of this sweep it has been convenient to classify his tales either as “colonial,” “Revolutionary,” or “border.” He prided himself on his knowledge of the facts, and he occasionally interrupted his narrative flow to set his readers straight on knotty points; but he also freely incorporated legend and tradition in what became his grand design—his own interpretation of the forces which would in time drive his state to be the first to declare itself independent of the American Union.

During the 1830s and '40s Simms worked in all three of his main fictional categories, capitalizing on both the appeal of the past and interest in the contemporary southern frontier. As the row of his books lengthened, Simms came to see a providential pattern revealed in the historical record. His region had undergone a “heroic” period in colonial and Revolutionary years. In the postwar period it had strengthened itself through expansion into the border areas; by the time in which he was writing, it was emerging as a structured society with the assurance of perfecting itself into an absolutely stable order. Through the crowded pages which he devoted to this reading of history moved a cast which included every type which had played a vital role over some three centuries—a dramatis personae unmatched in scope by any of his contemporaries.

Simms's method of control over this material was dedication to a central organizing principle: the South as a unique social structure. What was peculiar to the South was its hierarchical system, its insistence that on a chain of being each individual had to perform a specific function. At the top of this chain stood the aristocratic order—largely the planter class of wealth and “good family.” Below it ranged the diverse body of merchants, artisans, yeoman farmers, frontiersmen—those whose “blood” and education precluded their playing a leadership role. At the bottom of all these were the slaves, whose position Simms saw as inexorably fixed, and those misfits (outlaws and the like) whom society would gradually winnow out. All three groups were closely bound in a complex system of interaction. Some flexibility could be granted as a talented individual of the second order sought a rightful place somewhat higher in the scale, but Simms considered the South as moving toward a stable and self-perpetuating state.

For years Simms managed a difficult task in his fiction; he had to avoid alienating a northern audience, which he needed to survive at all as a writer, but he also desired to instill a sense of identification with region among his own southern followers. This he did chiefly by portraying his South as an order in the process of becoming. The Golden Age still loomed ahead; unlike some other southern apologists, Simms did not make the claim, at least in his romances, that perfection had already been achieved. It is true that, as war between the states approached, he became increasingly shrill and dogmatic in public utterances; but in the realm of his fancy he tried to portray the disparities, the tensions, and the violence out of which a more perfected society would inevitably evolve. It was a self-serving dream, and it would prove a tragically delusive one. But the achievement still deserves recognition: alone of his countrymen Simms created an imaginative whole out of the materials of the southern experience.

Simms laid the foundation for his legend of the South in 1834-1835, when he published his first three long romances. The first of these, Guy Rivers, was set in the Georgia gold fields; it introduced the series of contemporary border tales which would extend to several other states. The Yemassee, a story of Indian warfare, was the initial and most successful of the colonial romances. The third volume, The Partisan, was his earliest attempt to treat guerrilla warfare in the Carolinas during the Revolution; it and the six volumes on the topic which followed over the years comprise the most sustained effort by a southern writer to see in the conflict an epic theme. All of these books, which he had published by northern firms, had surprisingly wide sales for an author of his place and time; soon he was being dubbed the “Southern Cooper,” partly on the strength of his Indian romance, which invited comparison with the Leatherstocking series.

The Yemassee is not Simms's most accomplished work, but it has remained the most popular, with regular reprinting into the twentieth century. Perennial interest in the red man as both bloody marauder and noble savage probably accounts for its long survival. But, in terms of Simms's overall pageant, it has more significance as a “foundation myth,” an account of that period when the Carolinians won permanent possession of the land from the only other claimants. The pivotal year was 1715, when the Indians, fearing further white encroachment and incited by the Spanish in Florida, mounted a war of extermination. The uprising was real enough, though hardly as crucial as Simms makes it; it is his imagination alone that lifts it into the stuff of lofty drama.

Simms's major theme is the clash of two cultures, European against aboriginal; the triumph of the invaders will doom the Indian. But the colonials themselves will be transformed by their victory; they will be “Americanized” by their assumption of control over the land. Throughout the story Simms switches the point of view from one side to the other. The Indian position is represented by Sanutee, the Yemassee chief who had once welcomed the white men and their gifts. Only now, as the tale opens, has he come to realize that he has thereby corrupted his closely knit tribal structure. The altered condition of his society is symbolized by the degradation of his own son, Occonestoga, whose body and will have been sapped by the settlers' liquor. In an effort to redeem his leader class, Sanutee dooms the youth to expulsion from the tribe and orders that the Yemassee tattoo be cut from his living flesh. Occonestoga will then be an outcast from both worlds, a man shorn of all identity. Simms saves him from this fate by an act of high melodrama. As the ceremony of expulsion is being carried out, Sanutee's wife breaks in and fatally tomahawks her son before he loses his tribal badge. But Occonestoga is the last of the Yemassee ruling dynasty. With Sanutee's own death in the final battle with the whites, the whole nation falls.

Simms exhibits sympathy for the Indians whose ancient culture is wiped out, but he assumes no guilt for the act. Though they have a prior claim to the land, history has overtaken them; their reign as “the nation” is fated to end. But what of their future? Unlike the blacks, they cannot be turned into slaves, and they are too treacherous to be taken into society on any other footing. As one colonist, an early white supremacist, remarks: “‘It is utterly impossible that the whites and Indians should ever live together and agree. The nature of things is against it, and the very difference between the two, that of colour, perceptible to our most ready sentinel, the sight, must always constitute them an inferior caste in our minds.’” The solution offered is an extreme one: “‘The best thing we can do for them is to send them as far as possible from communion with our people.’” Note that their color makes them an “inferior caste”; God has marked them as he had marked the race of Ham. In this book Simms reads the Indians forever out of his developing southern society.

With the end of the Yemassee war, the colonists may now begin to develop the old hunting grounds. Town and plantation are yet to develop, but Simms manages to outline the evolving class structure. Aristocracy enters the plot in the person of Governor Craven, an Englishman of noble rank who spends much of the book in disguise in order to prowl the backcountry and assess the Indian threat. Craven is the scion of a proud old English family, and Simms obviously wants his readers to see that Virginia has no exclusive claim to patrician origins. Light-hearted in manner and comparatively racy in speech, he is the epitome of the Cavalier spirit, and he occasionally annoys some of his more sober-minded followers. But that he is the leader, charged with the preservation of the colony in a time of extreme peril, is never in doubt. Blue blood will tell. As he moves on his secret mission among the Indians, Craven bears the burden of a people's destiny.

The emerging middle class is represented here mostly by Indian traders, small farmers, and those who make up the militia band who finally defeat the Yemassees; they are loyal followers, but only a few are given differentiated characters. It is the slave who gets fuller attention. Craven has a black body servant named Hector, and through him Simms is able to forecast the role of the black in a settled society. In a spotlighted scene, which reveals Simms's fear of the abolitionist movement, we are shown a loving master-slave relationship. Toward the close of the tale, Craven attempts to reward Hector for having saved his life during battle: “‘Yes, Hector,—you are now free. I give you your freedom, old fellow. Here is money, too, and in Charleston you shall have a house to live in for yourself.’” But the black man only pours out his fear of manumission:

“I d—n to h-ll, maussa, ef I guine to be free!” roared the adhesive black, in a tone of unrestrainable determination. “I can't loss you company. … 'Tis onpossible, maussa, and dere's no use for talk 'bout it. De ting ain't right: and enty I know wha' kind of ting freedom is wid black man? Ha! you make Hector free, he turn wuss nor poor buckrah—he tief out of de shop—he get drunk and lie in de ditch—den, if sick come, he roll, he toss in de wet grass of de stable. … No, maussa—you and Dugdale [Craven's dog] berry good company for Hector. I tank God he so good—I no want any better.”

This sort of protest would become a staple in the plantation novel, but here it is anachronistic. In his allusion to shop, ditch, and stable, Hector talks exactly like the black of Simms's own day. But by 1835 Simms already knew the problem: how to present a southern viewpoint without alienating a national audience. The passage is hardly subtle, yet a contemporaneous reader would likely have found it sentimentally satisfying rather than offensively political. It is Hector who rewards his paternalistic master with true devotion.

This was the technique which Simms learned in his earliest fiction: to propagandize for the southern system by letting such scenes appear to grow naturally out of the plot development. His own authorial voice he kept low-keyed. In the books to come he would occasionally speak out more freely. But the time was not yet ripe in the 1830s and '40s to defy the critics of his beloved South openly.

Because he was concerned with establishing the necessity for a privileged leader class, Simms set the affairs of the gentry at the center of most of his plots. One of their problems, at this stage of southern history, was the borderers. From his own observations on tours across the area, Simms recognized that the sprawling frontier abounded in types whose free-wheeling spirits would conflict with the expansionist aims of the large landholders. Some of these he depicted as mere bandits—the “land pirates” who preyed upon the homesteader; other, less hostile, characters he sometimes treated in the vein of frontier humor. But he also early discovered another figure who would rise to a sort of heroic status in national legendry; this was the scout, and, like Cooper before him, Simms explored the nature of this advance guard of civilization. In Simms's scheme of things he was a “natural noble,” a sort of white counterpart of the noble savage. His destiny, as Cooper saw, was ambiguous. Simms, however, assigned him a specific functional role. His frontiersmen, beginning with Mark Forrester in Guy Rivers, usually ride as squires to their more knightly leaders. But they are far from being mere subservient aides; with their superior knowledge of the terrain, their contempt for sham, and their physical superiority, they serve as a rein on the gentry's impetuosity and occasional pomposity. The scout and the young gentleman, then, are depicted as parts of a developing whole—the ideal southern leader. Only their close interrelationship could bring about the full development of latent capabilities. John Pendleton Kennedy, too, had observed the scout; and in the titular hero of his Revolutionary War romance, Horse-Shoe Robinson, he had treated him as an exemplar of the spirit of rebellion against unfairly imposed authority. But neither Simms nor Kennedy fully captured the poignancy inherent in the figure of Cooper's Natty Bumppo, the prototype of the anarchic individualist fated to vanish with the westward advance of civilized society—but not without some loss to the national character.

Bibliographical Notes

The Southern Romance: The Matter of Virginia

Quotations are drawn from William Wirt, The Letters of the British Spy (Chapel Hill, 1970), with an introduction by R. B. Davis; George Tucker, The Valley of Shenandoah (Chapel Hill, 1970), introduction by Donald R. Noble; John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn (New York, 1962), introduction by William S. Osborne; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader (Chapel Hill, 1971), introduction by C. Hugh Holman; William A. Caruthers, The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe (Chapel Hill, 1970). My commentary draws from the introductions to these volumes, from my own John Pendleton Kennedy (New York, 1966), and from Curtis Carroll Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers (Richmond, 1953).

The Southern Way of Life: The 1830s and '40s

I have used material from my William Gilmore Simms (New York, 1962); quotations are from my edition of The Yemassee (New York, 1964). Of the many recent articles, I have found a particularly good survey and critique in Simone Vauthier, “Of Time and the South: The Fiction of William Gilmore Simms,” Southern Literary Journal (Fall, 1972). For the Southwestern humorists I have relied on three anthologies: Kenneth S. Lynn, The Comic Tradition in America (Garden City, 1958); Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, editors, Humor of the Old Southwest (Boston, 1964); and John Q. Anderson, With the Bark On (Nashville, 1967).