SOURCE: Gray, Richard. “Holding the Line in the Old South.” In Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, pp. 31-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

[In the following excerpt, Gray studies the antebellum novels of William Gilmore Simms and his contemporaries as they valorize the South while occasionally depicting the region as slowly but continuously disintegrating.]

TO SPEAK OF ARCADIA: WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS AND SOME PLANTATION NOVELISTS

At the time when people like [John C.] Calhoun, [Jefferson] Davis, and [Alexander] Stephens were attempting a political defence of their region, another group of men were responding in a rather different (if analogous) way to the South's search for an identity. Being storytellers, they did not pretend that the people they talked about actually existed somewhere. But being serious storytellers, they did presume on a kind of imaginative truth; that is to say, they did believe they were exposing and examining something of the character of their place and time. Were they correct in this belief? Hardly, since they tended to use either the patriarchal or the populist model as their means of understanding their chosen world; experience was mediated for them by the vocabularies of feudal plantation or simple, self-subsistent farm. As a result, it was not so much the lineaments of their region they exposed as its mind, or at least some significant aspect of it, its mental and mythical structures—and, to the extent that they participated in and endorsed those structures, their own minds, the shape of their own beliefs and means of perception too. In this, quite possibly, they had no choice. For, as Dorothy Lee observes,

A member of a given society—who, of course, codifies experienced reality through the use of the specific language and other patterned behaviour characteristic of his culture—can actually grasp reality only as it is presented to him in this code. The assumption is not that reality itself is relative, but that it is differently punctuated and categorized by participants of different cultures, or that different aspects of it are noticed by, or presented to, them.¹

What these writers and storytellers did, in effect, was largely accept their locality on its own terms, and then try to use those terms as a way of explaining its strengths and deficiencies. The punctuation marks, the systems of patterning they used were the ones supplied for the region, in the first instance, by the pamphleteers or the first families of Virginia; and they began by accepting them, assuming that the ante-bellum South did more or less reproduce the society imagined by William Bullock, say, or William Byrd. The interest their work holds is, as a result, nicely double-edged; since, however tough their specific, local criticisms of Southern life may be, that criticism is subverted by their original willingness to accept some part of the South's own image of itself.

Of those writers who used the patriarchal model in an effort to understand and occasionally criticise the South, none embarked upon the task with more enthusiasm or more energy than William Gilmore Simms. Simms's personal background was modest, in some senses even deprived. “My immediate ancestors were poor”, he wrote once in a letter to a friend. “My father was unfortunate in business. My mother died while I was an infant in the arms of a nurse.” Brought up in Charleston, South Carolina by his grandmother, Simms attempted for most of his adult life to earn a living from his pen: something that was not helped, he felt, by the blithe indifference of the South, and more specifically Charleston, to his work. “Here”, he complained,

I am nothing and can be and do nothing. The South don't care a d—n for literature or art. Your best neighbour and kindred never think to buy books. They will borrow from you & beg, but the same man who will always have his wine, has no idea of a library. You will write for & defend their institutions in vain. They will not pay the expense of printing your essays.²

However, that is to tell only one part of the story. Although Simms's father failed in business, he was not ruined: when he left Charleston, without his son, to seek a new life in Mississippi he still owned over five hundred acres of land, while in Mississippi he acquired a plantation and slaves. And Simms's mother left her son a not inconsiderable inheritance, consisting of two houses and about twenty-five slaves—an inheritance that Simms then proceeded to lose trying to establish a newspaper in Charleston. This was enough, perhaps, to predispose him towards the landholding and slave-owning class: despite his feeling, expressed more than once, that “there never will be a literature worth the name in the Southern States, so long as their aristocracy remains based on so many heads of negroes and so many bales of cotton”. And the predisposition was undoubtedly reinforced by Simms's second marriage, by virtue of which he became a member, of sorts, of the planter class. Thereafter, most of his life was to be spent at his wife's home, “Woodlands”, an estate of nearly three thousand acres; and his life was to take on at least some of the characteristics of the country gentleman—a type that apparently he found it equally easy to defend and despise.

“To hunt, to ride, to lounge, and to sleep,—perhaps to read a few popular novels conducing to repose,—is the sum and substance of our country performances.” This, from an essay entitled “Country Life Incompatible with Literary Labor”,³ is the voice of Simms the professional man of letters, forced to make his way in a world where he felt, as he put it once, like a “blooded horse locked up in the stable, and miles away from the Course”: Simms the orphan and prickly arriviste, Simms the prophet without honour in his own country. But it was not by any means his only voice. Indeed, it could be argued that the very reluctance of the Southern ruling class, and that of Charleston in particular, to recognise and honour him drove him on all the more fiercely to assert its claims and defend its institutions: to adopt the voice—especially in his fiction—not of dispossessed outsider but of defender of the faith. It would not be the first time in literary history, after all, or history of any kind, that a particular club found one of its stoutest defenders in someone it chose to exclude—or, at least, to whom it offered only the most restricted and temporary of membership cards. Be that as it may, Simms was in the position—as he only too clearly and bitterly realised—of being ignored or underestimated by the very region, and more specifically the very interests, that he chose to describe, commemorate, and support. Consciously, he chose the path of sectionalism (“to be national in literature”, he once declared, “one needs be sectional”) only to find himself less popular and esteemed in his own section than in other parts of the nation. “It is an old story”, as his friend the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne observed, “but not on that account the less melancholy.”⁴

During the course of his literary career, Simms published over eighty books, including a series of long romances—written between 1834 and 1854—that are based on the actual history of the South from its settlement to the middle of the nineteenth century. Divided, in turn, into Colonial, Revolutionary, and Border Romances, these show Simms trying to take over the pattern first developed by Scott and later adapted by Cooper to native American materials. It was a pattern which among other things allowed him a good deal of imaginative latitude in the treatment of historical fact: “the poet and romancer”, he declared in one of his essays,

are only strong where the historian is weak, and can alone walk boldly and with entire confidence in those dim and insecure avenues of time which all others tremble when they penetrate.⁵

And Simms used this latitude to incorporate legend and tradition into his narratives. To be more precise, he used it to shape his raw historical material as a whole in accordance with an overriding thesis, one central organising principle: which was based on his belief in the patriarchal model, a hierarchical system that found its summit and embodiment in what he called “the Southern aristocrat—the true nobleman of that region”. This is seen most clearly and effectively in Simms's seven Revolutionary Romances which are usually regarded as his best imaginative work—and which taken together constitute, in the words of one critic, “an exemplary epic story for the South”.⁶ For in them Simms used the story of the American Revolution in South Carolina as a kind of mirror for his own times: as a means of foregrounding contemporary intersectional problems, celebrating current regional achievements, and providing a standard for which, in his own opinion, his fellow Southerners could and should fight.

In effect, Simms tended to regard the American Revolution as a conflict between two fundamentally antagonistic social systems, an anticipation of the conflict between North and South. So it is that, without exception, all his Revolutionary officers are depicted as young Carolinian cavaliers. This, for example, is the description of one such character, Colonel Walton in The Partisan, the first book in the Revolutionary series:

Colonel Richard Walton was a gentleman in every sense of the word: simple, unpretending, unobtrusive, and always considerate, he was esteemed and beloved by all around him. Born to the possession of large estates, his mind had been exercised happily by education and travel; and at the beginning of the revolutionary struggle, he had been early found to advocate the claims of his native colony.⁷

Fighting, as this passage suggests, for their “native colony” rather than some larger, national or philosophical, abstraction, these gentlemen-officers were very often compared to knights of the Middle Ages—or, as Simms puts it in Katharine Walton, to the “masters” of “merry old England”. In The Forayers, for instance, the penultimate novel in the series, a feast prepared by Simms's most famous character, Captain Porgy, for his fellow officers, is presented in terms of a medieval banquet. Never mind that the feast is held in a forest: Simms uses the long set piece of a dinner just as many later plantation novelists were to do—to celebrate Southern manners, the region's commitment to ceremony and ritual. With “the proper welcome for each as he drew nigh”, the meal opens in state, with martial music accompanying the arrival of each guest. The guests “disposed … without confusion”, a long and elaborate meal then follows, to be concluded with speeches and toasts, prayers for victory and battle hymns “worthy to be sung in the hall of Odin” (performed by Porgy's ensign, the “bard” of the regiment), and “with merry jest, jibe, and story, till the hours grew something smaller than the stars”. A portrait in miniature of Southern order, the scene occurs towards the end of The Forayers; and it is surely no accident that Eutaw, the final Revolutionary Romance and a sequel to The Forayers, presents the reader, in its first chapter, with something very different—the dining customs or rather the lack of them, among the Tory irregulars:

There was little talk among the party …, except such as took place with small groups … Words were spoken, as if not calling for an answer. Those who spoke, with the hope of amusing the company, or provoking response, were rarely successful … There was no song after supper.⁸

Simms's portrait of the civilians in sympathy with the Revolutionary movement helps to flesh out this idea of a proud nobility fighting for its independence. For nearly every young officer involved in the movement, for instance, there is a plantation belle, a focus for romantic interest who combines the domestic and the social virtues with an aristocratic appearance and graceful behaviour. Flora Middleton, in The Kinsmen, is a good example of the type:

Flora Middleton … was a noble specimen of the Anglo-Saxon … She belonged to that wonderful race of Carolina women … who could minister, with equal propriety and success, at those altars for which their fathers, husbands, and brothers fought … She had her tastes, and might be considered by some persons as rather fastidious in them—but this fastidiousness was nothing more than method. Her love of order was one of her domestic virtues. But, though singularly methodical …, she had no hum-drum notions …⁹

And so on. The older officers, in turn, are matched (in terms of relationship or just sympathy) with some plantation matron, like a certain Mrs Singleton in Katharine Walton:

This old lady was a woman of Roman character, worthy to be a mother of the Gracchi. She was sprung of the best Virginia stock … She was firmly devoted to the Revolutionary movement—a calm, frank, firm woman, who, without severity of tone or aspect, was never seen to smile.¹⁰

And, almost invariably, there on the periphery of the action are the lower levels in this essentially hierarchical system: the diverse body of merchants, artisans, farmers, and frontiersmen whose “blood” and training prevent them acting as leaders but who are more than willing to follow. At the very bottom, of course, are the slaves: who in Simms's perception are as devoted to the system and, more particularly, to those who embody it as any of the more privileged are. This, for example, is the response of Captain Porgy's Negro cook Tom when he is offered his freedom:

“No! no! maussa”, he cried, with a sly shake of his head, “I kain't t'ink ob letting you off dis way. Ef I doesn't b'long to you, you b'longs to me … and you nebber guine git you free paper from me as long as you lib.”¹¹

Precisely what old Tom is so reluctant to be free of is described in loving detail in those moments when Simms takes some time off from skirmishes, battles, intrigues, and hair-breadth escapes. As in many other plantation romances, the home of the gentleman-planter, for instance, is presented as an extension and material expression of its owner's nobility, an architectural emblem of his moral achievement. Thus, the description of Colonel Walton in The Partisan quoted earlier is preceded by this portrait of his house:

… from a block-house station at first it had grown to be an elegant mansion, improved in European style, remarkable for its avenues of solemn oaks, its general grace of arrangement, and the lofty and considerate hospitality of its proprietors …¹²

Within these noble structures—some of them, we are told, “not ill planned for a palace”—an elegant social life is maintained despite the war. The house of Mrs Singleton in Katharine Walton, for instance, is portrayed as “a favourite point of reunion among the patriots of both sexes”. In propitious time, Simms adds, “the days were … consumed in ‘fêtes champêtres’ and the nights in lively reunions”, while, at less favourable moments:

Hither … came the Routledges, the Laurens, the Izards, and most of the well-known and famous families of the Low Country of Carolina, to consult as to the future.¹³

“Thousands of instances are recorded”, says Simms in The Partisan talking of the Revolutionary forces, “of that individual gallantry … refined by courtesy which gives the only credentials of true chivalry.” And it seems obvious that Simms regarded the partisans as chivalric principally because they devoted themselves to the defence of a patriarchal system—a system that, as he saw it, sustained and ennobled his own place and time. Not that the system was entirely inflexible: he could imagine some rising, like himself, as a result of natural merit and innate nobility. One of the characters in The Forayers seems to speak for him, in fact, when he declares:

“No one, more highly than myself, esteems the claims of social caste. It is a natural condition, and rightly possesses authority; but God forbid! that I should sullenly and sternly reject the occasional individual, whose personal claims put him above his condition in society! He has received from nature his badges of nobility …”¹⁴

But, as this passage suggests, such people were to be regarded as exceptional; on the whole, the system remained unmoving, strictly hierarchical, and self-perpetuating.

It could hardly have escaped the notice of Simms's Southern readers, and especially those from his own state, that implicit in his Revolutionary Romances was a call to arms. South Carolina had fought once, the message was, to defend its institutions and should be prepared to do so again: not necessarily with sword and cannon, of course, but at all events with stern moral determination and resolute political action. The message was veiled in his fiction, perhaps partly because of his dependence on the Northern market, but in his private correspondence his tone became more and more openly defiant and secessionist (“I have long since regarded the separation as a now inevitable necessity”, he wrote to a friend in 1850). And, when one thinks about it, the message was not as veiled as all that even in his fiction: for just as the Revolutionary forces embodied for him the virtues of the Southern system, so the Tories seemed to represent the worst features of the North. In simple terms, while Simms's partisan officers reproduced the familiar image of the gentleman, the feudal planter, the Tory officers and troops were like nothing so much as the Yankee: that Southern stereotype of Northern vices which, as W. R. Taylor has shown, was gradually gaining ascendancy during the time when Simms was writing. The Tories, we are informed in The Partisan, were mostly

of the very lowest class, and just the sort of men to fight, according to the necessity of the case, on either side … Without leading principles and miserably poor—not recognised, except as mercenaries, in the social aristocracies which must always prevail in slave-holding nations—they had no sympathy with the more influential classes—those who were the first to resist the authority of England. The love of gain, the thirst for rapine, and that marauding and gipsy habit of life which was familiar to them, were all directly appealed to in the tory mode of warfare.¹⁵

“You're one of the bloody, proud, heathen harrystocrats”, declares a Tory soldier to one of his prisoners, in The Forayers,

“that look upon a poor man, without edication, as no better than a sort of two-legged dog … But thar's a great change, thanks to the king's marcies! and the good time for the poor man's come at last!—and now, we've got a-top of the wheel! We've got the chance at the good things of this life; and we kin pay off old scores, wagon-whip and hickory, agin your nice goold-headed cane!”¹⁶

Speeches like this seem to focus all Simms's fears concerning the “great change” he and many other Southerners saw occurring about them: thanks to the North's exploitation of its numbers and its crafty way of using democratic ideas to impose a colonial status on the region. And the principal villains in most of these books tap the sources of these fears even more powerfully, by uniting within themselves the complex vices of the Yankee figure: cunning disguised by claims to philanthropy, greed masquerading as democratic enthusiasm, abstract idealism linked in an unholy alliance with very concrete forms of selfishness. Richard Inglehardt, an important character in both The Forayers and Eutaw is one of the most memorable examples of this type. The son of an overseer, Inglehardt, Simms informs the reader,

was a new man; an ambitious man, anxious to shake off old and inferior associations … He had abandoned his caste, an unforgivable offence, which moved the dislike of all its members; and he had not quite succeeded in forcing himself upon the affections … of that other circle which he sought to penetrate …¹⁷

Sharing in the legendary mobility of the Yankee figure, his separation from and lack of sympathy for the strictly regulated class structure of the South, Inglehardt also shares in that figure's coldness, manipulativeness and rabid industry—his ruthless pursuit of whatever he desires. He is “a cool, selfish politician”, we are told, “subtle as a serpent”, “wonderfully shrewd and cunning”, but knowing nothing of “generous affections … glorious impulses … and noble frenzies”. In fact, Simms's lengthy analyses of him are calculated to make him seem the mirror opposite of the partisans in nearly every respect. Here, by way of illustration, is just part of one of them:

He had shown himself … cunning, but not wise; calculating, but not profound; able in the performance of ordinary duties, but not nobly adventurous … Talent he had; an adaptable capacity for the work before him; he was a shrewd judge of common men … but enthusiasm failed him; he could never comprehend the worth of impulse, generous self-sacrifice, ardent adventure, eager and impetuous zeal … He not only did not quite understand them, he did not believe in their existence …¹⁸

“Coldness of heart was the great and terrible infirmity of Richard Inglehardt”, Simms declares; and combining this coldness with ruthlessness, while concealing both beneath the mask of a friend of the people, he presents an intimidating enemy for most of the course of the two narratives. True, like all villains in romances he is defeated in the end: but it is only occasionally that he is outfaced and humiliated as he is at the moment when he tries to make John Rutledge, the rebel governor of South Carolina, his prisoner. Rutledge's response is brief, and to the point: “You know neither me—nor yourself”, he declares defiantly. “If you know either of us, sir, you would know that I am not to be taken prisoner by you!” And just for once, Simms makes Inglehardt aware of his moral blindness and consequently embarrassed by what he has attempted to do. “Inglehardt's cheek flushed”, we are told:

He could feel the sentiment of scorn. He, the son of the overseer and grazier, felt the sting of sarcasm from the born gentleman.¹⁹

The element of wish-fulfilment here, brought on by Simms's need both to allay his fears and whistle up some support, is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. If only the aristocrat would stand up for himself, the implication is, and assert his superiority, his enemies would feel compelled to accept his case.

Not that Simms's presentation of that case was entirely uncritical. It frequently was, but in at least one of his Revolutionary Romances he allowed himself some reservations. This was The Sword and the Distaff, subsequently entitled Woodcraft, which is the best of the series and arguably Simms's finest novel. The principal character in the book is Captain Porgy, who is a Falstaffian figure in some ways, described in The Partisan as “one of the fat, beefy class, whose worship of the belly-god has given an unhappy distension to that … member”. Porgy's physical appearance constitutes something of a departure from the normal run of Simms's gentlemen-officers (“His person was symmetry itself” is the opening phrase used of one of them), and it alerts the reader to the author's rather more mixed, critical assessment of the moral and mental qualities of at least this plantation hero. A “bon viveur” as well as a gentleman and a soldier, Porgy has deficiencies and, to some extent, is even aware of them. Even more important, Porgy is also aware that in this, his imperfections, he is by no means alone: “I was always one of that large class of planters”, he admits at one point in the novel, “who reap thistles from their planting. I sowed wheat only to reap tares.” In plain terms, Porgy is profligate: the reverse side of his dashingly romantic, aristocratic qualities—his bravery, his generosity, and his impulsiveness—is that he is hopelessly lacking in common sense, thrift, and those qualities of application and dogged industry that would enable him to achieve success in business—and farming, Simms suggests, is, at least to some extent, a business. At the beginning of the novel, in fact, Porgy is pictured returning home after the Revolution to an exhausted plantation and a dilapidated mansion. Some of the blame for this decay is placed on the war itself, but even more is laid at Porgy's door; the plantation had been declining even before the military conflict began, we are told, and ironically Porgy saw that conflict as a way of escaping from his financial problems—an opportunity to try his hand at something which he, “the most sprightly of cavaliers”, had been trained to deal with. “Porgy … had never been taught the pains of acquisition”, Simms explains, “… he had too soon and fatally learned the pleasures of dissipation”; and, having once gone into financial decline thanks to his carelessness, “he possessed no conscious resources, within himself, by which to restore his property, or even to acquire the means of life”. The full pathos of his situation, and the principal reason for it, are beautifully caught in one of Porgy's many speeches (among other gentlemanly qualities, he enjoys “a liberal endowment of the gift of language”)—when he tries to think of what to do now that, as it seems, his plantation is irretrievably lost:

“The property? Yes! I suppose after a while, I shall have to surrender; but we'll make a d—d long fight of it, hence; and we'll get terms, conditions, when we give in—go off with our side arms, flag flying, and music playing …”²⁰

Translating simple destitution into heroic military defeat, and disguising a failure of responsibility beneath a series of flamboyant gestures, Porgy demonstrates here that very romanticism, that evasion of ordinary day-to-day realities, that got him into trouble in the first place.

Eventually, Porgy manages to escape ruin. The Sword and the Distaff is, in fact, principally concerned with the process of restitution and recovery, the means by which what seemed to be inevitable turns out not to be. Not all of these means need concern us here, since they involve some fairly conventional intrigue and the unmasking of a pretty commonplace villain: but one of them, at least, is worthy of a little more attention. Porgy is persuaded to appoint his former corporal, a man named Millhouse, to be his overseer. Millhouse is a very different person from his old captain: a man of crassly limited vision, in some ways, who nevertheless knows how to work hard and drive a good bargain and who imposes a strict limit on Porgy's expenses. Two conversations between them, in particular, focus the difference. In the first, Millhouse argues that Captain Porgy does not need a pointer for hunting since he can shoot as many birds as he likes while they are still on the ground; and to Porgy's objection that this is not the way “a gentleman and a sportsman” hunts, he replies simply and forcibly:

“Look you, Captain, them's all notions; and when a man's wanting flesh for the pot … it's not reasonable that he should be a sportsman and a gentleman. That's the sort of extravagance that's not becoming to a free white man, when he's under bonds to the Sheriff.”²¹

The second conversation, or rather argument, develops along similar lines, and includes one of Millhouse's most powerful speeches. This is part of it; it is, of course, addressed to Porgy:

“You don't know what's useful in the world. You only know what's pleasant, and amusing, and ridiculous, and what belongs to music and poetry and the soul; and not about the wisdom that makes the crops grow, and drives a keen bargain, and swells the money-box … Now, I reckon, you'd always git the worst of it at a horse-swap … Now, if there's wisdom in the world—that is raal wisdom—it is in making a crop, driving a bargain, getting the whip hand in a trade … As for music and po'try and them things, it's all flummery. They don't make the pot bile … ef there's one music in the world that's more sweet than another to the ears of a man of sense, it's the music that keeps tune to the money coming in.”²²

The interest of this speech lies in the fact that, while some of it—like the closing remarks concerning “music”—is clearly intended to reveal the limitations of Millhouse's vision, his lack of taste, imagination, and refinement, other parts of it have a colloquial power, an earthy poetry that makes much of Porgy's own idiom seem fragile, evasive, and even ridiculous. The point is not, of course, that in the long run Millhouse seems superior to Porgy, more accomplished or of better understanding. It is simply that, for once in his work, Simms admits a more critical look at the patriarchal mode and even admits a different language, a separate verbal perspective, in order to give that criticism some bite.

Nor does Porgy's return to his former prosperity at the end of the novel brush this criticism away entirely. “Freed of anxiety”, we are told, “Porgy resumed his ancient spirit” and his estate “became a sort of centre for parish civilisation”. This is all very heartening, but the reader is not likely to forget that the credit for much of this recovery must go to Millhouse—in other words, that Porgy's charm and refinement depend for their exercise on his overseer's not very charming and totally unrefined approach to things. Of man, Millhouse says, at one point in the novel:

“He's to go on gitting, and gitting, and gitting to the end of the season, until Death gits him. As he gits, he kin increase his comforts—git better bread … git wine, git better clothing, hev' his horse to ride; perhaps his carriage, and just make himself a sort of king …”²³

And this recognition of the strictly utilitarian base on which culture rests—with its implicit criticism of those romantic cavaliers like Porgy who deny that base—is confirmed rather than contradicted by what eventually happens. Simms's other Revolutionary Romances may well have expressed unwavering confidence in the superiority and strength of the Southern position. In The Sword and the Distaff, however, he permitted himself a note of uncertainty and anxiety—even, of warning. The threat to the patriarchal system, he seemed to be saying, did not come just from outside.

Several writers other than Simms were aware of the problems of deterioration and decay that he explored in the story of Captain Porgy. Like him—like, for that matter, Calhoun and the constitutionalists—they were disturbed and unnerved by the feeling that the South was in a potentially terminal state of decline. Their feelings were summed up by the Virginian writer, William Alexander Caruthers, writing of his home state but thinking, obviously, of other states besides his own:

There are the dilapidated houses, and overgrown fields, and all the evidence of a desperate struggle with circumstances far beyond … control … Poor, exhausted Virginia! she is in her dotage.²⁴

Building upon this, they tried just as Simms did to find the reasons for this decay: distancing their enquiry sometimes, as in The Sword and the Distaff, by setting it in the past but at others concentrating on the immediate present or even the future. Nor did they stop there: diagnosis was frequently accompanied by the tentative formulation of some remedies, suggestions for the projected revival of the South and its people. And all this was done, perhaps it should be repeated, in the same way as Simms had conducted his defence and occasional criticism of his region—in terms, that is, of the patriarchal model, by first accepting and then exploring one of the South's own images of itself.

No specific cure for the decline of the seaboard South had greater appeal than that of westward emigration. The qualities of energy, enterprise, and daring that characterised the very first settlers might, it was felt, reappear in their effete descendants, if those descendants were called upon to settle and civilise another New World; culture might be revived by means of a renewed contact with nature. This was the central assumption of, for example, Westward Ho!, a first novel by James Kirke Paulding, a Northerner who managed, like many converts, to become more fervent than many of those born into the regional faith. Westward Ho! is set among what Paulding calls “the ancient gentry of old Virginia” in colonial times but it is fairly clear, from his description of that gentry, that like Simms what he has principally in mind are contemporary plights and problems; as in The Sword and the Distaff, the past is being used as a mirror, a warning, and an example to the present. The action begins on a decaying plantation the owner of which, “Colonel” Cuthbert Dangerfield, is presented as the sad remnant of a “high-spirited” race—one of many who seem to have forgotten that they are planters as well as gentlemen and have consequently ruined themselves. “Plenty, nay profusion, reigned all around” these people, Paulding declares,

yet many lived, as it were, by anticipation. They were almost always beforehand with their means, and the crops of the ensuing year were for the most part mortgaged to supply the demand of the present … they have almost all disappeared from their ancient possessions …²⁵

As with many others, Paulding argues, Dangerfield's own carelessness and extravagance have impoverished him. He has exhausted his land using improvident agricultural methods and dissipated his capital by maintaining an “open house” for “all comers, rich and poor”; and when called upon to pay his debts his reaction, characteristically, is to challenge the creditor to a duel. Again, his response when advised to exercise prudence is seen as typical: “Prudence!” he declares, “Prudence is a beggarly virtue.”

It is for want of this “beggarly virtue”, however, that Dangerfield is compelled to sell his plantation—he has no Millhouse to save him—and then, together with his wife and faithful slaves, move westward to Kentucky. Curiously, from the moment Dangerfield sets down in his new homeplace a miraculous transformation occurs: a transformation that the reader is, for the most part, asked to take on trust. “Our intention”, Paulding loftily proclaims,

is not to detail the particulars of that struggle which … takes place between the patient industry of man and her [nature's] wild luxuriance … Suffice it to say, that the traveller who, some ten years after the sound of the first axe was heard in the woods, chanced to visit it, would have been charmed with the little settlement of Dangerfieldville, its rural beauties, and its air of rustic opulence.²⁶

Certainly, Paulding suggests that a change of environment helps to explain the change of personality: the character of the old colonel, we are told, “rose with the exigencies of the occasion”, responded to the demands of a new paradise awaiting civilisation, and revealed a “native sagacity and vigour which wealth, indulgence and above all, idleness, had lulled to sleep”. But, on the whole, Paulding concentrate attention on the effects rather than the process of recovery: the effects on the colonel, that is, and on his even more spirited daughter and even more energetic and enterprising son. As a result, Westward Ho! reads less like a creative inquiry into the region's ills and their possible cures than a simple fantasy, in which a sense of decay and death engenders the dream of resurrection.

In a romance that appeared a few years after Westward Ho!, The Cavaliers of Virginia by William Alexander Caruthers, the qualities of adventurousness and industry were again seen as the prerequisites of revival. In Caruthers's book, however, the actual process of transformation involved not so much a change of place as a change of opinion: a confrontation with and partial absorption of, not nature, but another and alien culture. Caruthers was very much a nationalist in his allegiances; indeed, in one of his novels he had a character argue that “Every southern should visit New York. It would allay provincial prejudices, and calm his excitement against his northern countrymen.”²⁷ And his suggestion in The Cavaliers of Virginia was quite simply that “the aristocracy which prevails … to this day” would be improved if it were to adopt some of the characteristics traditionally associated with the Northerner. Like Paulding, Caruthers set the action of his romance in colonial Virginia: to be more exact, in the late seventeenth century, at the time of “Bacon's Rebellion”. Like Paulding, too, and for that matter Simms, he clearly had contemporary issues in mind and, more particularly, the worrying state of at least some parts of the South. Unlike Paulding, however, he seems to have been somewhat less than totally impressed by the potential of “that generous, fox-hunting, wine-drinking and reckless race of men”²⁸ he chose as his subject: less than impressed by them, that is, when taken in isolation and considered specifically in terms of their capacity for hard work. This comes out notably in his portrait of Sir William Berkeley, the Governor of the colony, and his retinue, whom Caruthers adjudges “the first founders” of the Southern ruling class on the grounds of both genealogy and style. Berkeley and his companions demonstrate all the familiar attributes of an old, honourable but decaying, gentry. Naturally, Caruthers allows them their merits. They are, we are informed, gallant and courteous, showing “the most courtly and deferential humility” in their meetings with equals or superiors and “refined and polished” manners when dealing with those whom they consider to be socially beneath them. But there is no doubting his fairly severe judgement of their limitations, weaknesses, and faults: their “turbulent and impetuous temperament”, their occasionally “cold, haughty, and sneering” behaviour, their excessive “pomp and formality”, their stiff pride and indolence. Far from idealising his “Cavaliers”, Caruthers shows them warts and all and, in the process, calls into question the adequacy of the aristocratic mode.

Set against Berkeley and his companions are the Puritan members of the colony, forerunners of the conventional Yankee figure. Of these, the most notable is a character called “the Recluse”, a Cromwellian in hiding, whose detachment, enthusiasm, and self-control are suggested by, respectively, his “exile” from ordinary society, his “half-puritanical, half-military” costume, and the indications of “sensuality … tempered … by some other fierce and controlling passion” in his features. The Puritans are seen as everything that the Cavaliers are not: forceful, intellectual, energetic—but also contentious, ungenerous, and hypocritical. Something of their less attractive side is suggested by one Cromwellian veteran, Ananias Proudfit, who when he speaks often sounds like a crudely satirical anticipation of an Abolitionist:

“Here am I”, said … Ananias Proudfit, “whom the Lord hath commissioned … to take away the wicked from the land, and to root out the Amadekite, and the Jebusite, and the Perrizite, and the Hittite …”²⁹

Inclined, as one character puts it, “to pervert the word of God” to their “unholy and murderous purposes”, they are seen to be no more capable than their enemies are of providing an appropriate model, an adequate design for living.

Of course, there is a character who provides this model; and of course, since this is a romance, it is the hero, Nathaniel Bacon. The Cavaliers of Virginia is not simply a romance, however; and, although Bacon bears many resemblances to the run-of-the-mill hero of romantic fiction, he bears even more to the wavering hero in the Scott tradition. He is, in fact, an example—however crudely drawn, at times—of the figure that tends to occupy centre stage in what Georg Lukács has called “the classical form of the historical novel”. It is the task of such a figure, Lukács argues,

to bring the extremes whose struggle fills the novel, whose clash expresses artistically a great crisis in society into contact with one another. Through the plot, at whose centre stands this hero, a neutral ground is sought and found upon which the extreme, opposing social forces can be brought into a human relationship with one another.³⁰

Towards the beginning of the story, Caruthers actually refers to Bacon as a man occupying “a neutral position”, and the point is underlined by his personal and familial associations. While he is attached to the family of Gideon Fairfax, a Cavalier and a friend of the Governor, there are rumours that he has leanings towards the other side and of a “connexion with the Recluse”. At one point, the Recluse even believes Bacon to be his son. Finally, it is revealed that Bacon does indeed have a mixed heritage; since his father was, he learns, an officer in the Commonwealth army and his mother was an English lady. What is more, the mixture has turned out to be a blessing. For from his mother, Caruthers suggests, he has inherited refinement, and a sense of honour so highly developed that it even seduces him into a duel; while to his father he owes his “prompt and decisive” character and a self-discipline that enables him to surrender power, once he has seized it by force of arms, to a convention of the people. At one moment of crisis, Bacon is given a long speech in which he attacks “fratricidal conflict” and asks:

“Who can tell how far to the mighty west the tide of civilization and emigration would have rolled their swelling waves, but for the scenes of personal rivalry and contention like the present, which have disgraced our annals?”³¹

And at the end of the novel, this spokesman for reconciliation begins to answer his own question. Jamestown, associated with the torpor and corruption of the old regime, is left behind in ruins; and Bacon goes forth to help found a new society “at Middle Plantations”. As Caruthers must have realised, the name is an appropriate one, since this new society—set in the past but clearly intended to provide a signpost for the future—seems to have achieved a perfect accommodation between South and North, the generous-hearted but lazy gentleman and the energetic but uncultivated entrepreneur. In the traditional manner of the classic historical novel, in fact, conflict between extremes leads, not to a débâcle, but to a fresh, hopeful order of things; thesis and antithesis are followed by synthesis.

But not all Southern writers felt, like Caruthers, that the Southerner would benefit from the acquisition of certain supposedly Northern characteristics. Some even felt the opposite to be true: that the South could only be saved by an act of complete political, economic, and moral separation from the North. This was, for instance, the clear belief of the Virginian Nathaniel Beverley Tucker: who gave it imaginative expression in The Partisan Leader, a novel published shortly after The Cavaliers of Virginia. Of the Union, Tucker once said:

I will never give rest to my eyes nor slumber to my eyelids until it is shattered into fragments … there is now no escape from the many-headed despotism of numbers, but by a strong and bold stand on the banks of the Potomac.³²

And, in true Utopian fashion, Tucker begins his story in the future with most of the South already separated from the rest of the United States—having been driven to this, we are informed, by “the fierce attacks of rapacity and fanaticism”, the “usurpations” and “oppressions of the northern faction”. As a result of this separation (accomplished without conflict, Tucker explains) the South has become “once more the most flourishing and prosperous country on earth”. For the leaders of the region, “men … of cool heads, long views, and stout hearts”, have established free trade with Great Britain, to the advantage of both parties. Meanwhile, the South's “envious rival in the North” has seen its “artificial prosperity engendered by the … plunder of the southern states”³³ vanish, evidently for ever. The only Southern state that has not so far seceded is Virginia; and it is with that state's gradual movement towards secession, and the military conflict which follows, that the action of the novel is mainly concerned.

Using a device that was to become a familiar one in novels of the Civil War, that of a family divided by civil conflict, Tucker paints a large historical canvas—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a broad-brushed portrait of two opposing legends. On the one side, there are the forces of the North led by Van Buren who, we are told, has exercised more or less absolute power ever since the retirement of Jackson. Van Buren himself, referred to sardonically as “King Martin the First”, is presented as an effete, corrupt, and above all effeminate monarch. “He was daintily dressed”, Tucker says,

his whole costume being adapted to his diminutive and dapper person … the place of hair was supplied by powder … he seemed, too, not wholly unconscious of something worthy of admiration in a foot, the beauty of which was displayed to best advantage by the tight fit and high finish of a delicate slipper …³⁴

“When a people become corrupt”, one character observes, “they must learn to be fastidious, and invent safeguards to prevent vice, and blinds to conceal it when it is indulged.” This is the case, we are led to believe, with Van Buren's “kingdom”, where the effeminacy and prissiness of the “palace” (as the White House is now called), and even more important its “prurience” and self-deceiving moral nicety, have been diffused “through all grades and ranks”. The result is a society steeped in hypocrisy and cant: one in which, apparently, people say they are going to “retire” rather than use the word “bed”, and in which children are used like animals in factories while being kept strictly segregated according to sex. And, for Tucker, the epitome of such a society is not so much the businessman as sexually ambiguous figures like Van Buren—or, more simply, what is referred to, at more than one point in the novel, as “our Yankee school-mistresses”.

In drawing this portrait of the Northern states, Tucker seems to be playing on a contrast made by many Southern politicians: between what they saw as the essentially “feminine” notions of the North and the more “masculine” principles of their region. It was, of course, a contrast full of irony in a culture that claimed to revere women; the reverence, it turned out, had severely restricted limits. Just how severe they were was nicely illustrated by one politician from Mississippi who—in the course of a speech denouncing Abolitionism and notions of equality between white and black—asked rhetorically,

if it be true that all men in a republican Government must help to wield its power, and be equal in rights, I beg leave to ask …—and why not all the women?³⁵

The assumption, of course, was that this gentle enquiry was so manifestly absurd that it left the entire Abolitionist argument in ruins. Tucker is not quite as direct and crude about things as this, but a similar bias is at work in The Partisan Leader: prompting him to present the North as a culture dominated by “female” notions and, sometimes more literally, by the sort of women who (we are told) “write book; patronize abolitionist societies; or keep a boarding-school”.³⁶ Sentimental, hypocritical, utilitarian, and self-righteous: Van Buren's kingdom, as Tucker describes it, is a misogynist's nightmare—a matriarchal world perceived with, and distorted by, a mixture of humour, hatred, and fear.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that the Southerners in Tucker's romance, and more specifically the Virginians, are defined in terms of opposition to all this. “If Virginians can be fooled into identifying themselves with the Yankees”, one character declares,

“—a fixed tax-paying minority with a fixed tax-receiving majority—… they will continue to hold a distinguished place among [those] … that have been gulled into their own ruin ever since the world began.”³⁷

And the political and economic irreconcilability is sustained, Tucker insists, on the level of character: a point nowhere more forcibly shown than in the portrait of the men who eventually feel compelled to fight for Virginia against the Union. A “noble” force in which, “every man is an officer”, the army of Virginia consists principally of those driven by “outrage to the laws, outrage to the freedom of election, outrage to those respected and beloved” to defend their principles, their “independence”, and their land against the oppressor. It is perhaps worth emphasising that, like many spokesmen for the region before and after him, Tucker chooses to associate the struggle for Southern “liberty” and “rights” with the American Revolution. At the end of the book, the battle for Virginia is not yet over. But, Tucker insists, leaving us in little doubt as to the eventual outcome,

old Virginia would yet show itself in the descendants of the men who had defied Cromwell, in the plenitude of his power, and cast off the yoke of George the Third, without waiting for the co-operation of the other colonies …³⁸

It is difficult to think of two proposals for regional recovery more drastically opposed than those of Caruthers and Tucker. Opposed as they were, however, they shared with each other and with the imaginative arguments of Paulding and Simms one crucial and seminal impulse: a willingness to accept the patriarchal model as an adequate explanation of the South—a readiness to believe that there was such a thing as “the Southerner”, recognisably different from other Americans, and that this difference could be defined almost entirely in terms of the South's feudalism, its commitment to an antique, gentlemanly way of life. The Southerner was an aristocrat: that was the initial assumption. Some writers, like Tucker, might then go on to see him as the sum total of aristocratic virtues, while others, like Simms, Paulding, and Caruthers might choose to see in him a few of the aristocratic weaknesses and vices as well. But there could be no doubts entertained about the assumption itself: Southerners, it was felt, could be accommodated quite comfortably within it—in their deficiencies as well as their merits, their strengths and their weaknesses, their former prosperity and foreseeable decline. In this, of course, they were not alone. Even Abolitionist writers like Harrier Beecher Stowe tended to start by accepting the feudal explanation of things and then tried to adjust their criticisms to fit it; even foreign novelists like G. P. R. James were willing to take the South on its own terms, regardless of whether they had been there or not.³⁹ Nor was this entirely unfortunate. After all, it enabled people like Simms, and to a lesser extent Paulding and Caruthers, to offer some searching criticisms of the region without creating too much disturbance—at a time, that is, when disturbance was only too easy to create. And it allowed a writer like Tucker to offer a version of the enemy that was not absolutely wrong, not totally unconvincing—that possessed, in fact, some of the persuasive power of legend. It was not entirely unfortunate, then: but it did mean that all these writers were saddled from the first with a partial and debilitating idiom, a mythic vocabulary that did not meet all of their needs. For, in effect, people like Simms, Paulding, Caruthers, and Tucker tried to perceive and know the Old South using tools that necessarily distorted perception and that could block knowledge just as much as facilitate it: tools, it should be added, that the Old South, as courteous, obliging, and insidious as ever, had been only too ready to provide.

Notes

1. Dorothy Lee, “Lineal and nonlineal codifications of reality”, in Explorations in Communication edited by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston, Mass., 1960), p. 136.

2. Cited in Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature (Durham, N.C., 1954), p. 582. All quotations from Simms's correspondence are either from Hubbell's book or from The Letters of William Gilmore Simms edited by Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred T. Odell, and T. C. Duncan Greaves (Columbia, S.C., 1952-6). Biographical information is drawn from J. V. Ridgely, William Gilmore Simms (New York, 1962). One discussion of Simms I have found especially useful is Simone Vauthier, “Of Time and the South: The Fiction of William Gilmore Simms”, Southern Literary Journal (Fall, 1972).

3. Cited in Hubbell, South in American Literature, p. 585.

4. Ibid., p. 580.

5. William Gilmore Simms, “The Epochs and Events of American History”, in Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction (1845; Cambridge, Mass., 1962 edition), p. 32.

6. Ridgely, Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature, p. 68. See also, William Gilmore Simms, Guy Rivers, The Outlaw: A Tale of Georgia (3 vols.; New York, 1835), iii, 71.

7. Simms, The Partisan: A Tale of Revolution (2 vols.; New York, 1835), i, 122.

8. Eutaw; or, A Sequel to the Forayers (New York, 1856), p. 12. See also, Katharine Walton; or, The Rebel of Dorchester (Philadelphia, 1851), p. 59; The Forayers; or, The Raid of the Dog-Days (New York, 1855), pp. 540-53.

9. The Kinsmen; or, The Black Riders of the Congaree (2 vols.; Philadelphia, Pa., 1841), i, 209-10.

10. Katharine Walton, p. 86.

11. The Sword and the Distaff; or, “Fair, Fat, and Forty” (1852; Philadelphia, Pa., 1853 edition), p. 53.

12. The Partisan, i, 121.

13. Katharine Walton, p. 80. See also, pp. 33, 110.

14. The Forayers, p. 86. See also, The Partisan, ii, 10.

15. The Partisan, i, 100. See also, William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (London, 1963). passim.

16. The Forayers, pp. 140-1.

17. Ibid., p. 291.

18. Ibid., p. 294. See also, pp. 347-8, 381.

19. Ibid., p. 408. See also, p. 293.

20. The Sword and the Distaff, p. 123. See also, pp. 54, 111, 195, 210; The Partisan, i, 21, 115. Also, Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 287-91.

21. The Sword and the Distaff, p. 213.

22. Ibid., pp. 327-8.

23. Ibid., p. 330. See also, p. 580.

24. William Alexander Caruthers, The Kentuckian in New York; or, The Adventures of Three Southerners (2 vols.; New York, 1834), ii, 193-4.

25. James Kirke Paulding, The Banks of the Ohio; or, Westward Ho! (2 vols.; 1832; London, 1833 edition), i, 15-16. See also, i, 14, 28-9. Other stories that use the solution of westward emigration include, William Alexander Caruthers, The Knights of the Horse-Shoe: A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion (2 vols.; Wetumpka, Ala., 1845); William Gilmore Simms, “Oakatibbe; or, The Choctaw Sampson”, in The Wigwam and the Cabin (2 vols.; New York, 1845-1846).

26. Westward Ho!, i, 149. See also, ii, 39, 172.

27. Caruthers, The Kentuckian in New York, i, 108. Among the discussions of Caruthers I have found particularly useful are Curtis Carroll Davis, Chronicler of the Cavaliers: A Life of the Virginia Novelist, Dr. William A. Caruthers (Richmond, Va., 1953), and Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 205-24.

28. The Cavaliers of Virginia; or, The Recluse of Jamestown (2 vols.; New York, 1835), i, 16. See also, i, 76, 95, 99; ii, 161. Much of this analysis draws on Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, although Taylor argues that Caruthers did not have any “separate and distinct Southern destiny” in mind (p. 216). My belief, however, is that Caruthers was primarily concerned with that destiny: that, like Paulding, Tucker, and Simms, he was preoccupied with the decline of the region—and its possible recovery.

29. The Cavaliers of Virginia, i, 118. See also, i, 33, 137; ii, 245.

30. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1962; London, 1969 edition), p. 36.

31. The Cavaliers of Virginia, ii, 179. See also, i, 77; ii, 120, 245.

32. Cited in Hubbell, The South in American Literature, pp. 424-5.

33. The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future (1836; Richmond, Va., 1862 edition), p. 36.

34. Ibid., pp. 74-5. See also, pp. 73, 144. Tucker is relying here, to some extent, on the image of Van Buren fostered by his political opponents: see Oliver P. Chitwood and Frank L. Owsley, A Short History of the American People (2 vols.; New York, 1943), i, 472.

35. Annals of Congress (16th Cong., 1st sess.), 414. See also, Anne Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics (Chicago, 1970).

36. The Partisan Leader, p. 69.

37. Ibid., p. 136.

38. Ibid., p. 23. See also, pp. 141, 194. For another example of the Revolutionary analogy, see Laura A. White, Robert Barnwell Rhett: The Father of Secession (New York, 1930), p. 24.

39. See, e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (New York, 1852) and G. P. R. James The Old Dominion (3 vols.; London, 1856). For a fairly comprehensive discussion of Southern and Northern novels dealing with the aristocratic Old South see, Francis P. Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and Accuracy of a Tradition (New York, 1924). An interesting recent account of the Cavalier myth, and its relation to Victorian culture is to be found in Daniel J. Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), pp. 11-36.