SOURCE: Werner, Craig. “The Old South, 1815-1840.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 81-91. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Werner presents an overview of early nineteenth-century Southern literature, arguing that the Old South played a crucial role in the cultural growth of the fledgling United States despite producing few writers of enduring significance during this time.]

Literature written in the South around 1815 shared most of the basic concerns of that written in the North. By 1840 the increasing divergence of economic, political, and social conditions had created a specifically Southern literature reflecting the distinctive concerns and attitudes that were to survive as constituting elements of Southern literature in later eras. A complex concern with slavery generated numerous white defenses of Southern culture and sectional autonomy, distinctive Afro-American forms including slave narratives and a complex folk literature, and a romantic plantation tradition in fiction. Southern romanticism, developing out of Cooper, Byron, and Scott, differed sharply from the philosophical romanticism of Northern writers in its emphasis on the mythic elements of history rather than the metaphysical dilemmas that fascinated the transcendentalists. Although few major figures wrote during the period—Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms are the only exceptions—a number of talented lyricists, romancers, and essayists contributed to the development of a uniquely Southern sensibility.

A growing consciousness of the South as a distinct region, reflected in the titles of periodicals such as the Southern Literary Messenger (founded 1834), the Southern Review (founded 1828), and the Southern Literary Gazette (founded 1828), accompanied the political polarization sparked by the issues of slavery, states' rights, and tariff policy. Between 1815 and 1840, the sectional alignment of the United States shifted, gradually and incompletely, from East-West to North-South. During the Monroe administration, commentators spoke with conviction of an “Era of Good Feelings” predicated on the development of a unified American culture distinct from that of England. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 suggested, at least momentarily, the possibility that the divisive political potential of slavery could be handled without open conflict. Returns from the presidential election of 1824 provide little evidence that Virginia perceived its interests to be more closely aligned with those of Mississippi than with those of Pennsylvania. By 1832, however, the South had united strongly (if, on the part of the seaboard areas, somewhat grudgingly) behind Andrew Jackson in opposition to Henry Clay's “American System,” which was widely interpreted as an attempt to advance Northern manufacturing interests at the expense of the South. Subsequent events of the 1830s shattered all hope of diminishing sectional animosities. The Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831 destroyed the movement toward voluntary emancipation in Virginia. A year later the nullification controversy, marking the transition of John Calhoun from nationalist to sectionalist, highlighted the political and economic issues that would force the sections farther and farther apart until the Civil War.

The primary source of these political tensions, which had profound literary implications, lay in the emergence of cotton as the primary focus of the Southern economy. In addition to its reliance on low tariffs and cheap labor, the cotton economy encouraged the development of the typical Southern pattern of sparsely settled regions organized into isolated farms or large plantations that modeled themselves loosely on what they imagined to be the pattern of English country estates. Perhaps the most important literary consequence of this pattern of social organization concerns education. Throughout the antebellum period, public schooling was almost unknown in the South, especially in the rural areas. Despite the emphasis placed on education by Southern leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, most white Southerners were educated by tutors in “old-field” schools, or in academies supported by tuition payments and staffed by teachers of widely varying capability. Although the educational system of the Old South often involved classical subjects in addition to the basics of mathematics and literacy, most observers reported an extremely erratic, and generally low, level of achievement. Academies for girls also offered instruction in reading and writing but they concentrated primarily on “refined” subjects such as French, piano-playing, and painting. Limited almost entirely to whites and upper- or middle-class children, the educational system precluded the development of a large literary audience in the sparsely populated South. As late as 1830 nearly one-third of the Southern adult population remained illiterate.

While the basic educational system languished, Southern colleges and universities provided a substantially better opportunity for the region's literary and political leaders, who attended Southern institutions as readily as those of New England. Most of the Southern colleges operating in 1815 were supported by religious denominations, especially the Presbyterians (Hampden-Sydney, East Tennessee, Washington—later Washington and Lee—and Transylvania) and the Episcopalians (William and Mary, St. John's, the College of Charleston). Several church-related schools, notably Transylvania (in Lexington, Kentucky), received substantial state aid; East Tennessee eventually evolved into the University of Tennessee. The close relationship between church and state in education helped maintain colleges in the face of declining enrollments (William and Mary had only eleven students in 1824), but it also subjected them to pressure from the conservative religious movement that spread through the South beginning in the 1820s. Despite the widespread acceptance of deism among educated Southerners early in the century, by 1827 the Presbyterian clergy was able to force the theologically liberal Horace Holley out of the presidency of Transylvania. Nevertheless, several Southern colleges compared quite favorably with their Northern counterparts in both the classical and the professional areas of study. The University of Virginia, founded 1825, probably ranked as the second best university in the United States, surpassed only by Harvard. With its international faculty, extensive curriculum, and Jeffersonian educational philosophy, the University of Virginia exercised a decidedly cosmopolitan influence on Southern culture throughout the 1830s. Among the notable scholars of the Old South were William Munford, the first American translator of the Iliad (published in 1846, nearly twenty years after his death); Wilkins Tannehill, whose Sketches of the History of Literature, from the Earliest Period to the Revival of Letters in the Fifteenth Century (1827) demonstrates an extensive knowledge of the classics; Francis Walker Gilmer, whose Sketches of American Orators (1816) reflects the importance of oral forms in Southern and American culture; and George Tucker, who taught philosophy, economics, and literature at the University of Virginia.

Most students at the Southern universities intended to practice law or medicine, and viewed literature primarily as a gentleman's avocation. The literary communities that developed in Baltimore around John Pendleton Kennedy, in Lexington (sometimes called the “Athens of the West”), and especially in Charleston around Hugh Swinton Legaré and William Gilmore Simms consisted largely of lawyers who met to discuss political and literary issues and published their writing in various newspapers and magazines, many of them quite ephemeral. As sectional tensions heightened, these periodicals took on an increasingly Southern character, reflecting a widespread dissatisfaction with Northern publishers, who nonetheless continued to dominate the book-publishing business without serious competition. Southern periodicals such as Niles' Weekly Register of Baltimore (founded 1811), the Southern Review of Charleston (supported by Legaré and Stephen Elliott) and the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond published the work of nearly every significant antebellum Southern writer, but never developed any aesthetic (as contrasted with political) position distinct from those of the Northern periodicals. The Messenger, which employed Poe from 1835 to 1837, flourished until the Civil War, attracting contributions from Northern literary figures such as James Russell Lowell and Lydia Huntley Sigourney. In addition to these publishing activities, the urban literary circles, which included numerous members with fine personal libraries, supported groups such as the Library Society of Richmond and the Charleston Library Society. Both public and private collections typically emphasized English and classical writing but also included works by Americans such as James Fenimore Cooper and the New Englander William Ellery Channing, who was one of many to come under attack as the political situation worsened in the 1840s and 1850s.

The forces that led to Southern repudiation of the North can be traced through the changing emphasis of political writing of the period. During the 1810s and 1820s, statesmen-writers such as Jefferson, William Wirt, John Marshall, and John Taylor continued to advance the vision of a unified America typical of the colonial and revolutionary periods. Even the young John Calhoun echoed their sentiments. By the 1830s, however, Calhoun's sectionalist speeches both reflected and helped create the widespread shift in the tone of political discourse. Despite his contact with Jefferson and Madison, George Tucker, University of Virginia professor, editor of the Virginia Literary Museum (founded 1829) and minor novelist, emphasized the South's particular needs in his numerous books, such as Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy (1822) and The Life of Thomas Jefferson (1837). Albert Pike, who was born in Boston but moved to the Southwest in 1831 and became an active proslavery spokesman, adopted a more extreme sectionalist position and eventually served as a Confederate general. Before becoming the editor of the Arkansas Advocate in 1835, Pike composed his Prose Sketches and Poems, Written in the Western Country (1834), which includes descriptions of frontier life similar to those of the early Southwestern humorists. While Pike and others vigorously defended the slave system, several attacks on the institution appeared, notably David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829). Written by David Walker, a freeborn black raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, Appeal calls for violent slave uprisings and anticipates the abolitionist emphasis on slavery as an immoral institution inviting the wrath of God. Especially after the events chronicled in The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), an account of one of the bloodiest slave revolts in United States history written by Virginia lawyer Thomas R. Gray after interviewing Turner in his cell, the racial situation deteriorated rapidly and many Southern periodicals thereafter began to exclude all antislavery sentiments.

In addition to their political interests, some of the urban literary circles supported theater groups that, despite intermittent opposition from Puritanical clergymen, broadened the region's cultural perspective. Productions of classic British plays, especially by Shakespeare and the eighteenth-century comic playwrights, exerted a significant influence over the characters created in the fiction of Simms, Kennedy, and other romancers. Relatively few Southern playwrights enjoyed literary or popular success, however, and none of their plays survive as anything other than historical curiosities. Throughout the entire period, Southern drama closely resembled that written in the North, emphasizing nationalistic themes, and historical events. George Washington Parke Custis wrote numerous plays on American themes including The Indian Prophecy (1827), The Eighth of January (1834), a celebration of the Battle of New Orleans, and Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia, which capitalized on the widespread popular interest in the legend and was extremely popular when produced at the National Theatre of Washington in 1836. Most of the notable playwrights of the Old South, however, lived and worked in Charleston, where Simms, Isaac Harby, William Ioor, and John Blake White wrote on a variety of topical and romantic themes. Harby, whose dramatic criticism was included in an 1829 collection of his work, demonstrated his commitment to democratic principles and his concern with the practical problems of dramatic structure in The Gordian Knot (1810) and Alberti (1819). Similarly, Ioor's Independence; or Which Do You Like Best, the Peer, or the Farmer (1805) and White's The Triumph of Liberty (published 1819) celebrate the democratic values of Jefferson and Jackson respectively. Outside of Charleston, Southern theater emphasized performance much more strongly than dramatic writing. James Caldwell, an actor born in England, founded several theaters in the lower South, most notably the St. Charles Theater of New Orleans (1835). Traveling companies such as that managed by Sol Smith toured the South throughout the first half of the century, performing melodramas and farces more frequently than the classics.

More important to the long-range development of Southern literature than the formal playhouses were the minstrel shows, which began to appear in the 1830s. Combining elements of the popular theater with musical adaptations of slave songs “composed” by white minstrels such as Thomas D. Rice, these shows helped fix the black stereotypes so important to the plantation tradition in fiction. Equally importantly, however, they testified to a white fascination with Afro-American culture that could not be expressed directly, given the dominant racial beliefs of the Old South. Among the first important demonstrations of popular culture's ability to contribute to cultural pluralism, the minstrel shows drew freely on the extensive body of Afro-American oral expression that has proved a rich source of material for Southern writers of both races. Although the first major collection of Afro-American folk literature, Slave Songs of the United States, edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, was not published until 1867, most of its sources indicate that the real dawning of interest in Afro-American culture took place several decades earlier. Although the Native American tribes of the South also possessed a distinct oral literature, it exerted little influence on the written literature of the region until much later.

The 1820s and 1830s also saw the first examples of writing in formal genres by Southern blacks. Some of this writing appeared as poetry. Vastly more significant, both for Southern and American (as well as Afro-American) literature were the slave narratives, a small flood of which were published between 1830 and the Civil War. All tended to be abolitionist tracts, purportedly by bondsmen who had fled the South. The heavy hand of a white antislavery editor to whom the narrative had been “dictated” was easily perceptible in a number of them. What may well be the best of them, however, were written by their announced authors. Of these, increasingly informed opinion regards as finest of all Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845), in which the abolitionist polemics ingratiatingly accompany an absorbing personal history. Other narratives of note were written by, among others, William Wells Brown (1848), America's first black novelist; Henry Bibb (1849); James W. C. Pennington (1849), the “Fugitive Blacksmith”; Josiah Henson (1849, 1858, and 1879), the not altogether proven prototype for Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Uncle Tom”; Henry “Box” Brown (1851), who actually escaped from his master in a box; Samuel Ringgold Ward (1855); and William and Ellen Craft (1860). As a class the antebellum slave narratives sold well, partly because in a day when popular literature flourished on sensationalism and sentimentality the slave narratives presented a goodly measure of both. Yet, a strong element in the success of the slave narratives was their sympathetic representation of a subculture, largely through an effective resort to a picaresque mode of fiction. In virtually each of its distinctive features the antebellum slave narrative has affected all black American literature subsequent to it.

A second “invisible” literary tradition—that of Southern women—also began to assume its outline during the 1830s. Southern women such as Eliza Wilkinson, whose Letters (published 1839) provides an account of the British invasion of Charleston in 1779, frequently wrote letters and diaries that offer valuable insight into both major historical events and the everyday conditions of Southern life. Few of these women wrote in generic forms, however, and the region's leading periodicals published very little writing by Southern women prior to 1840.

One important exception to the pattern of unpublished women was Caroline Howard Gilman, who was born in Boston but lived and worked in Charleston throughout her adult life. In addition to founding a children's magazine, the Rose Bud (later the adult Southern Rose) in 1832, Gilman wrote numerous stories, poems, and novels, including Recollections of a Housekeeper (1834) and Recollections of a Southern Matron (1837). The latter, sentimental and didactic like most Northern women's fiction of the era, focuses on the experience of a plantation girl growing into womanhood, the first Southern fiction on the theme that would become a standard feature of the tradition. Along with her dramatic poem “Mary Anna Gibbes, the Young Heroine of Stono, S.C.” (1837), an account of a girl's heroic actions during the Revolution, Gilman's novels establish her as the single most important predecessor of the numerous women who began publishing in the South during the 1840s and 1850s.

Most literature of the Old South, however, was written by the white upper- or middle-class males connected with the literary circles of Charleston, Richmond, Baltimore, and Lexington. Like their counterparts in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, these writers read and emulated the works of English romantic writers, particularly Byron, Thomas Moore, and Walter Scott. While regional tastes and style were generally similar in 1815 when James Fenimore Cooper was adapting Scott's style of historical romance to specifically American conditions, by 1840 clear differences had appeared between Northern and Southern romanticism. To a large extent, these differences reflect the social and political pressures that encouraged Southerners to develop a romantic view of plantation life and discouraged the philosophical/theological speculation evident in New England transcendentalism.

The one unquestionably major writer of the Old South, Edgar Allan Poe, both contributed to and transcended the attitudes of his contemporaries. Although Poe defended his native region's institutions and encouraged the work of many Southern writers through favorable reviews, his poems and stories rarely confront social issues. Poe's psychological vision of evil, rooted in the Gothic tradition and frequently tinged with comic irony, aligns him more strongly with Hawthorne and continental romanticism than with Kennedy or Simms. Certain of Poe's works, notably “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (1838), can be seen as repressed allegories concerning the anxiety, guilt, and fear emanating from slavery. At best such interpretations cast an interesting sidelight on the sources of Poe's images of torment, incest, and madness; at worst, they distract attention from the imaginative landscape Poe actually created for his psychological and aesthetic speculations.

The only other writer of the era with a strong claim to lasting significance, William Gilmore Simms contrasts sharply with Poe and seems much more typical of his place and time. Moving from a nationalistic opposition to nullification in the early 1830s to an active defense of slavery in the 1850s, Simms's political beliefs parallel the changing Southern consensus. Appropriately, Simms's novels, obviously derivative of Scott and Cooper but nonetheless important examples of the genre of the historical romance, treat both national and sectional themes. These related, but increasingly distinct, interests permeate the two substantial series of novels Simms worked on throughout his career: the Revolutionary War romances, beginning with The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution (1835), and the border romances, beginning with Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia (1834). The Yemassee (1835), perhaps his finest novel and one of the better Southern examinations of the multiracial heritage of the region, combines elements of both the Revolutionary and the border romances in its description of the Carolina Indian conflicts of the eighteenth century.

The reputations of Poe and Simms rest primarily on their fiction, but both also composed lyric poetry that typifies that of the Old South in its emphasis on the picturesque elements of romanticism. Poe's psychic landscapes such as “The Haunted Palace” and “The City in the Sea” and Simms's evocative “The Edge of the Swamp” clearly share an underlying sensibility with Southern lyricists such as Edward Coate Pinkney, Richard Henry Wilde, and Thomas Holley Chivers. Most of these lyricists wrote poetry only as a sideline to their professions and were unconcerned with developing rigorous philosophical or aesthetic stances. Nonetheless, many showed technical proficiency while working in lyrical, and on occasion narrative, modes. Wilde, who was born in Dublin, and Pinkney, who was born in London and died at age twenty-five, were probably the most talented after Poe. Wilde's “Lament of the Captive,” a hauntingly musical lyric, evokes the Byronic image of the isolated individual wandering amid scenes of natural beauty. Similarly, Pinkney echoes the Byronic sensibility in poems such as “The Voyager's Song,” which expresses a yearning for a “sublunary paradise” where love and beauty will be protected from “human transiency.” The real strength of Pinkney's poems, however, reflects his ability to create a verbal music resembling that of the Cavalier poets. Even the titles of his best poems—“Serenade,” “The Widow's Song,” “A Picture Song,” and several titled simply “Song”—suggest their suitability for musical setting. One of the few Old South lyricists who was not also a lawyer, Chivers shared Poe's and Pinkney's concern with the music of poetry. In fact, Chivers' friendship with Poe led to charges of plagiarism in the 1850s. Nonetheless, Chivers' eleven volumes of poetry and drama include enough polished work and their prefaces state his critical positions clearly enough to support the contention that the influence between him and Poe was to some degree reciprocal.

Given the concern with the music of poetry evident in the works of Poe, Pinkney, Wilde, and Chivers, it is not surprising that many lyrics of the Old South are better known as songs than as poems; Francis Scott Key's “The Star-Spangled Banner” is of course the most famous, but others such as Samuel Henry Dickson's “I Sigh for the Land of the Cypress and the Pine” also enjoyed popular success in their time. Several minor poets of the Old South worth noting are the painter Washington Allston (The Sylphs of the Seasons, with Other Poems, 1813), Philip Pendleton Cooke (best known for “Florence Vane” and “Life in the Autumn Woods”), William Crafts (best known for “The Raciad,” a poem on life in Charleston written in the manner of Pope), and William Maxwell, whose work resembles that of the Connecticut Wits more closely than that of his Southern contemporaries. One intriguing, if aesthetically undistinguished, departure from the typical Southern lyric was Daniel Bryan's The Mountain Muse: Comprising The Adventures of Daniel Boone; and The Power of Virtuous and Refined Beauty (1813), an attempt to create an American epic, notable primarily for its moving evocations of the landscape of Kentucky.

The fiction writers of the Old South shared the poets' preference for romantic literature, modeling their historical romances on the work of Scott and Cooper. Simms's introduction to The Yemassee provides an accurate description of the romance as it developed in his own works and in those of William A. Caruthers and John Pendleton Kennedy. Arguing that the romance should be clearly distinguished from the domestic novel, Simms declares that “it does not confine itself to what is known, or even what is probable … it hurries … through crowding and exacting events.” Caruthers' The Cavaliers of Virginia (1834-1835) and The Knights of the Horse-Shoe (1845), and Kennedy's Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835) and Rob of the Bowl (1838) differ from Hawthorne's romances in their lack of explicit concern with psychology and aesthetics, and certainly correspond to Simms's definition. The first literary treatment of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, The Cavaliers of Virginia includes a multitude of events rendered even less “probable” than the historical material would dictate by Caruthers' reliance on a transparent Gothic plot. Nonetheless, Caruthers' treatment of several Gothic motifs partially compensates for the book's structural and stylistic deficiencies. In addition to presenting the cavalier myth of Southern ancestry in exceptionally clear form, The Cavaliers of Virginia manipulates the motifs of hidden guilt and ancestral sin in a manner that suggests the cultural thesis and antithesis explored in depth by later writers such as George Washington Cable and William Faulkner.

Kennedy's two romances recast events and legends drawn from the Revolutionary War era and set in the upper South. Kennedy surpasses Caruthers in his ability to create memorable characters; in Rob of the Bowl, for example, he places familiar Shakespearean types in an American setting to enliven a well-crafted plot. Both Kennedy and Caruthers, like most of their contemporaries North and South, suffered from their failure to create a style appropriate to their American materials, relying on elevated diction or on a dialect derived more directly from the comic stage than from their linguistic surroundings. Despite this shortcoming, the works of both Caruthers and Kennedy stand apart from formulaic Gothic romances such as Allston's Monaldi: A Tale (1841) and fictional essays such as Tucker's The Valley of Shenandoah, or, Memoirs of the Graysons (1824).

While Caruthers' and Kennedy's historical romances unquestionably represent the dominant tendency in Southern fiction during the 1830s, their books with contemporary settings identify the basic concerns that separate Southern from Northern fiction during the remainder of the antebellum period. Caruthers' epistolary novel The Kentuckian in New York (1834) contrasts life in the North and South, taking a conciliatory stance on most divisive issues. Caruthers notes the disparity between economic and social conditions in the manufacturing North and the agricultural South but refuses to condemn the character of Northerners. Similarly, he defends the paternalistic slavery of Virginia while condemning the cruelties that he associates with slavery in South Carolina. Despite these efforts to increase sectional harmony, however, The Kentuckian in New York realistically portrays the numerous sources of discord that forced the South into increasingly defensive positions.

Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832), despite its pastoral surface, provides even clearer evidence of the divergence of North and South. A leisurely description of life on a Virginia plantation, the novel is the first major work of the plantation tradition. Kennedy populates his Old Dominion with comic eccentrics, cultured gentlemen, gracious ladies, and contented childlike slaves. Although he concerns himself much more directly with picturesque local legends than with political issues, Kennedy implicitly defends slavery as an institution beneficial for both races. Far more significant as cultural myth than as aesthetic creation, Swallow Barn can be seen legitimately as the first major statement in the literary battle over the image of slavery that includes works as disparate as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings, The Conjure Woman, The Clansman, Gone with the Wind, and Roots.

Kennedy cast Swallow Barn in the form of a traveler's report, capitalizing on the interest in Southern and Southwestern ways reflected in the vogue of travel books such as New York native James Kirke Paulding's Letters from the South (1817) and Joseph Holt Ingraham's The South-West, by a Yankee (1835). In addition, Southwestern humorists, many of them journalists, willingly fed the national appetite for sketches set in the frontier areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834), composed by Crockett and Thomas Chilton and far more valuable as a source of tall tales than as historical biography, helped fix the image of the uncultured but insightful backwoodsman in the American imagination. The first important literary collection of Southwestern humor, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, Etc. in the First Half Century of the Republic (1835), earned substantial popular acclaim while contributing to the image of a raucous lower South quite different from Kennedy's cultured seaboard. Perhaps the most important contribution of humorists like Longstreet to the Southern tradition lay in their use of a vernacular style less stilted than that of the romancers and lyricists.

If the Old South produced relatively few writers of lasting importance, it nevertheless occupies a crucial position in the cultural history of the United States. For the first time, Southern writers developed concerns clearly distinct from those of their Northern contemporaries, generating a romantic tradition based on historical mythology rather than philosophical speculation. Many of the constitutive elements of later Southern literature—the plantation tradition, Southwestern vernacular humor, the Afro-American narrative of ascent—first assume during the 1820s and 1830s the forms so important to writers such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright. By 1840 Southerners who a quarter-century before would have seen themselves as part of a nationalistic American mainstream were consciously creating and defining the characteristics that gave their region a literary identity clearly its own.