SOURCE: Page, Thomas Nelson. “Authorship in the South Before the War.” In The Old South: Essays Social and Political, pp. 57-92. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892.

[In the following essay, Page discusses the paucity of a truly Southern literature prior to the Civil War and summarizes the principal Southern novelists, short story writers, and poets of the antebellum period.]

Discussion of Southern literature during the period which preceded the late war naturally resolves itself into a consideration of the causes which retarded its growth, since the absence of a literature at the South during a period so prolific in intellectual energy of a different kind, is one of the notable conditions of a civilization which was as remarkable in many respects as any that has existed in modern times.

The object of this paper is to set forth the probable causes which conduced to this absence of literature, to place the responsibility where it properly belongs, and at the same time to direct attention to those courageous spirits who, imbued with love of Literature for herself alone, against the inexorable destiny of the time, unrecognized and unencouraged, aspired and struggled to give the South a literature of her own.

The limitations of this paper, which it is proposed to devote to the development of work of a purely literary character, preclude the possibility of embracing in it any discussion or even mention of professional and economical works, which constitute so large a proportion of the writings of the South,—such, for example, as the writings of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, Calhoun, Benton, Rives, Legaré, Scott, and others; the legal works of the Tuckers, Lomax, Holcomb, Davis, Robinson, Benjamin, Minor, Daniel, and others; the scientific works of Audubon, Wilson, the Le Contes, Courtenay, Talcott, and others; the works of the great Maury; the historical works of writers in nearly every Southern State; the philosophical works of the Alexanders, Bledsoe, Breckinridge, Thornwell, and many others. Owing to the environment, much the larger portion of the writing done by the South was philosophical or polemical, only a small portion being purely literary.

It has been generally charged, and almost universally believed, that the want of a literature at the South was the result of intellectual poverty. The charge, however, is without foundation, as will be apparent to any fair-minded student who considers the position held by the South not only during the period of the formation of the government, but also throughout the long struggle between the South and the North over the momentous questions generated by the institution of slavery. In the former crisis the South asserted herself with a power and wisdom unsurpassed in the history of intellectual resource; throughout the latter period she maintained the contest with consummate ability and with transcendent vigor of intellect.

The causes of the absence of a Southern literature are to be looked for elsewhere than in intellectual indigence. The intellectual conditions were such as might well have created a noble literature, but the physical conditions were adverse to its production and were too potent to be overcome.

The principal causes were the following:—

1. The people of the South were an agricultural people, widely diffused, and lacking the stimulus of immediate mental contact.
2. The absence of cities, which in the history of literary life have proved literary foci essential for its production, and the want of publishing-houses at the South.
3. The exactions of the institution of slavery, and the absorption of the intellectual forces of the people of the South in the solution of the vital problems it engendered.
4. The general ambition of the Southern people for political distinction, and the application of their literary powers to polemical controversy.
5. The absence of a reading public at the South for American authors, due in part to the conservatism of the Southern people.

Instead of being settled in towns and communities, as was the case at the North, the bent of the people from the first was to hold land in severalty in large bodies, and to continue the manorial system after the custom of their fathers and their kinsmen in the old country, with whom they even after the Revolution still kept up a sort of traditional association. The possession of slaves, often in large numbers, and the imperative responsibilities of their regulation and no less of their protection which such possession entailed, fostered this inherent tendency and eventually made the Southern people¹ agricultural to the almost total exclusion of manufactures.

No merely agricultural people has ever produced a literature. It would appear that for the production of literature some centre is requisite, where men with literary instincts may commingle, and where their thought may be focussed.

The life of the South was in the fields, and its population was so diffused that there was always lacking the mental stimulus necessary to the production of a literature. There were few towns, and yet fewer cities. But these few—Baltimore, New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond, and Louisville—all attested the truth of this observation. From them radiated the occasional beams of light which illumined the general darkness of the period, and there from time to time appeared the infallible signs of literary germination, in the form of magazines, which, struggling against adverse influences, unhappily perished in the process of birth or faded untimely in early youth. For example, Niles's Register, which was the first magazine of any permanence, was published in Baltimore from 1811 to 1849. The Pinkneys,—Edward Coate, William, and Ninian,—John P. Kennedy, Francis Scott Key, and others received its vivifying influence. Elliot's and Legaré's Southern Review was conducted in Charleston from 1828 to 1832, and was followed in 1835 by The Southern Literary Journal, which existed only two years, and in its turn after an interval was succeeded in 1842 by The Southern Quarterly Review, which expired in 1856. Besides which, there was Simms's Southern and Western Magazine and Review. After these the earnest Hayne established Russell's Magazine. These literary ventures, with a dozen or so of less note, such as The Southern Literary Gazette, The Cosmopolitan, The Magnolia, etc., contributed to the evolution and development of William Gilmore Simms, Hugh S. Legaré, Paul H. Hayne, the Timrods, Porcher, De Bow, and others, and became the organs of their thought. They created a literary atmosphere of a higher quality than existed generally, and supported the claim of Charleston to be the chief literary focus of the South. De Bow's Review, though scarcely to be classed as a mere literary exponent, yet with other transitory periodicals subserved the literary spirit of New Orleans from 1846 to the outbreak of the war.

The nascent literary feeling of the West found expression for a brief period in the Western Review in Lexington, Kentucky, but was not strong enough to maintain it above a year. But George D. Prentice opened the Courier Journal to literary aspiration, and made Louisville the literary centre of that section. The genius of Prentice himself found an outlet in his columns, and the instinct of many others, such as O'Hara, the poetess Amelia B. Welby, Mrs. Betts, Mrs. Warfield, and Mrs. Jeffrey, was inspired by Prentice's sympathy and fostered by his encouragement.

In Richmond, Virginia, appeared perhaps the most noted literary magazine which the South produced,—The Southern Literary Messenger. It was undertaken as a mere business venture in 1835, and through the inspiring genius of Poe, who began immediately to write for it and shortly became its editor, it promised for a time to bring a literature into being. Although it was supported by the best literary writers not only of Virginia but of the South and survived until 1864, like its fellows it contended against forces too potent to be successfully resisted, and never attained a very high mark of literary merit. However, it had much to do with sustaining the unstable Poe, and with developing nearly all of those writers of the South whose names have survived.

The editors of these periodicals appear to have possessed a sufficiently correct appreciation of what was requisite, and to have striven bravely enough to attain it; but failure was their invariable lot. They besought their contributors to abandon the servile copying of English models and address themselves to the portrayal of the life around them with which they were familiar; they enlisted whatever literary ability there was to be secured; but they received no encouragement and met with no success.

The habits of life and the exigencies of life at the South were against them.

The constituency which should have sustained them was not only too widely diffused, but was too intent on the solution of the vital problems which faced it at its own doors, to give that fostering encouragement which literary aspiration in its first beginning absolutely demands. The South was so unremittingly exercised in considering and solving the questions which slavery was ever raising that it had neither time nor opportunity, if it had the inclination, to apply itself to other matters. The intellectual powers of the South were absorbingly devoted to this subject, and in consequence of the exigencies of life at the South generally took the direction of spoken and not of written speech. Where writing was indulged in, it was almost invariably of the philosophical, polemical character.

“Literature,” says Carlyle, “is the thought of thinking souls.” Accepting this definition, the South was rich in literature. There was sufficient poetry and wisdom delivered on the porticos and in the halls of the Southern people to have enriched the age, had it but been transmitted in permanent form; but wanting both the means and the inclination to put it in an abiding form, they were wasted in discourse or were spent in mere debate.

Owing to the position which the South occupied because of the institution of slavery and the difficulties engendered by that institution, the whole fabric of life at the South was infused with politics, and oratory was universally cultivated. Thus the profession of the law, which afforded the opportunity at once for the practice and for the application of oratory, and which was the chief highway to political preferment, became the general avenue by which all aspiring genius sought to achieve power and fame, and writing was in consequence neglected, as too indirect a mode to accomplish the desired end.

There was much writing done, but it was of the kind which is not deemed incompatible with proper loyalty to the law, taking the invariable form of political disquisition or of polemical discussion. In these, indeed, the Southerner indefatigably indulged, and attained a rare degree of perfection. Thus, the philosophical works of such men as Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, Calhoun, etc., and the public prints of the day generally, exhibit powers which abundantly refute the charge that the absence of a literature was due to mental poverty. In the city of Richmond alone were four writers for the daily press whose brilliant work is a guarantee of the success they would have achieved in any department of literature they might have chosen. These were Thomas Ritchie, John Hampden Pleasants, Edward T. Johnston, and John M. Daniel. In their time the editorial columns of the Enquirer, Whig, and Examiner possessed a potency which is at this time well-nigh inconceivable. They may be said to have almost controlled the destinies of the great political parties of the country. The Whig and the Enquirer were the bitterest antagonists, their hostility resulting finally in a fatal duel between Pleasants, the editor of the Whig, and a son of his rival, “Mr. Ritchie,” of the Enquirer. But this antagonism may be as well shown by a less tragic illustration: the Enquirer was accustomed to publish original poetry in a column at the head of which stood the legend, “Much yet remains unsung”; the Whig kept standing a notice that “poetry” would be published at a dollar a line.

It would indeed appear that, with the potency of intellectual demonstration so constantly and so forcibly illustrated throughout the land, the Southerner would have been irresistibly impelled to seek a wider field, a more extensive audience, and would inevitably have sought to put into permanent form the product of his mind.

What might not the eloquence and genius of Clay have effected had they been turned in the direction of literature, or what the mental acumen, the philosophic force, the learning, of Calhoun, of whom Dr. Dwight said when he left college that the young man knew enough to be President of the United States! How much did literature lose when Marshall, Wirt, the Lees, Martin, Pinkney, Berrien, Hayne, Preston, Cobb, Clingman, Ruffin, Legaré, Soulé, Davis, Roane, Johnston, Crittenden, devoted all their brilliant powers to politics and the law! John Randolph boasted that he should “go down to the grave guiltless of rhyme,” yet his letters contain the concentrated essence of intellectual energy; his epigrams stung like a branding-iron, and are the current coin of tradition throughout his native State two generations after his death.

Literature stood no chance because the ambition of young men of the South was universally turned in the direction of political distinction, and because the monopoly of advancement held by the profession of the law was too well established and too clearly recognized to admit of its claim being contested; and once in the service of the law there be few with either the inclination or the courage to assert any independence. Even now the Southerner will not believe that a man can be a lawyer and an author. Yet it was not unnatural that the major portion of such literary work as was done at the South was done by lawyers.

Their profession called forth the exercise of the highest intellectual powers, and necessarily they occasionally strayed into the adjoining domain of letters. The pity of it is that their literary work was in the main but the desultory “jottings down” in their hours of recreation of fragmentary sketches, which were usually based on the humorous phases of life with which their profession made them familiar, and almost the best is stamped with the mark of an apparent dilettanteism.

Chief Justice Marshall took time to write a life of Washington, but there was little biography attempted. William Wirt early in the century entertained himself amid the exactions of practice by contributing to the Richmond Argus The Letters of a British Spy, and subsequently wrote his Old Bachelor and his Life of Patrick Henry, on the last of which his present fame rests more than on his reputation as a great lawyer, even though he was one of the most distinguished advocates the nation has produced, was counsel in the most celebrated case which the legal annals of the country contain, and was among the ablest Attorney-Generals of the United States. Indeed, almost the only recollection of the great Burr trial which survives to the general public is the extract from Wirt's speech, preserved as a literary fragment, describing the Isle of Blennerhassett. Happily for his fame, Wirt held that, though a lawyer should strive to be a great lawyer, yet he should not be “a mere lawyer.”

Among other writers of the South who were lawyers were the Tuckers of Virginia,—St. George (Sr.), who was a poet and an essayist as well as a jurist, George, the essayist, Henry St. George, Nathaniel Beverley, author of The Partisan Leader, and St. George (Jr.), author of Hansford, a Tale of Bacon's Rebellion. There was also John Pendleton Kennedy, of Maryland. These might have retrieved the reputation of the South in respect to literature if the Tuckers had not devoted all their best energies to the law, and if Kennedy had not been, as Poe said of him, “over head and ears in business” relating to the bar, his seat in Congress, and his seat in the Cabinet.

William Gilmore Simms began life as a lawyer, but his love for literature proved irrepressible, and in an evil hour for his material welfare he abandoned the profession and devoted himself to literature.

Others who were lawyers were Richard Henry Wilde, the poet, Joseph G. Baldwin, author of Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, Augustus B. Longstreet, author of Georgia Scenes, Philip Pendleton Cooke, the poet, John Esten Cooke, the novelist, the Pinkneys, Edward Coate and Frederick, Francis Scott Key, Thomas Hart Benton, Hugh Swinton Legaré, Alexander B. Meek, Francis Gilmer, the essayist, Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré, the historian, dramatist, and novelist, Henry Timrod, Paul H. Hayne, John R. Thompson, James Barron Hope, and many others.

It is a full list, nearly complete, and comprises poets, novelists, essayists, and historians. Poe and Lanier were almost the only notable exceptions. With Poe, as he declared, poetry was “not a purpose, but a passion”; and in whatever else his besetting weakness made him fickle, he at least never wavered in his loyalty to his first and best love.

It was not remarkable that the law was preferred to literature, for in sober truth it required sterner stuff than most men were compounded of, and a more absorbing passion than most men were animated by, to follow literature as a pursuit. To do so was to take the vow of poverty. When Poe, even after having made a name, was receiving only four dollars and a half per printed magazine page for his marvellous work; when as editor of the magazine he thought himself generously rewarded by a salary of $520 per annum; when “The Gold-Bug,” written at almost the height of his fame, brought only $52 and “The Raven” only $10, it must have been apparent to every sensible man that, whatever the rewards of literature might be, a reasonable support was not among them. Reducing the question to the unromantic level of fair compensation, there were few who were willing to give for a contingent interest in a niche of Fame's temple, which, in the language of the law, was, at best, potentia remotissima, the bread and butter and bonnets and equipages which were assured at the bar.

William Gilmore Simms, who was one of the very first who had the temerity to brave the hardships of a literary life, complained that he had never held the position which rightfully belonged to him, because he made his living as a writer.

The responsibility for the want of a literature was not with the writers, but with the environment. There was lacking not only the mental stimulus of contact between mind and mind, but also that yet more essential inspiration, sympathy with literary effort, which is as necessary to literary vitality as the atmosphere is to physical existence. One of Philip Pendleton Cooke's neighbors said to him after he became known as the author of “Florence Vane,” “I wouldn't waste time on a damned thing like poetry: you might make yourself, with all your sense and judgment, a useful man in settling neighborhood disputes and difficulties.”

It is matter for little wonder that the poet declared that one had as much chance with such people as a dolphin would have if in one of his darts he pitched in among the machinery of a mill.

As a consequence of the South's position during this period, there was another barrier to literature. The standard of literary work was not a purely literary standard, but one based on public opinion, which in its turn was founded on the general consensus that the existing institution was not to be impugned, directly or indirectly, on any ground or by any means whatsoever.

This was an atmosphere in which literature could not flourish. In consequence, where literature was indulged in it was in a half-apologetic way, as if it were not altogether compatible with the social dignity of the author. Thought which in its expression has any other standard than fidelity to truth, whatever secondary value it may have, cannot possess much value as literature. The Partisan Leader was secretly printed in 1836, and was afterwards suppressed. It was again republished just before the beginning of the war, and was a second time suppressed or withdrawn. Augustus B. Longstreet, although he subsequently became a preacher, was at the bar when he wrote Georgia Scenes. He was so ashamed of having been beguiled into writing what is one of the raciest books of sketches yet produced, a book by which alone his name is now preserved, that he made a strenuous effort to secure and suppress the work after its publication. Even Richard Henry Wilde, who was a poet, and who should have possessed a poet's love for his art, did not conceive his best poem, “My Life is like the Summer Rose,” worthy of acknowledgment. It was “The Lament of the Captive” in an epic poem which was never finished, and was published without his authority, and he was hardly persuaded to assert his claim to its authorship when, after it had been for a score of years merely “attributed” to him in this country, and in Great Britain had been known and admired as “a poem by an American lawyer,” it was unblushingly claimed and stolen by several more ambitious versifiers, who, if they failed to recognize the obligation of the eighth commandment, at least appreciated the value of literary talent higher than the real poet. The poem was a hoax translated into Greek by Barclay, of Savannah, and was attributed to a poet called Alcæus, and a controversy having arisen as to whether it was really written by an Irishman named O'Kelly, who had published it in a volume of his poems as his, or whether he had stolen it from the old Greek, Mr. Wilde, who was then a member of Congress from Georgia, was finally induced to admit that he had written the poem twenty years before. This he did in a letter characteristic of the time, declaring that he valued “these rhymes” very differently from others, and avowed their authorship only in compliance with the wishes of those he esteemed.

This attitude on the part of the South, taken in connection with the diffusion of its population, furnishes the only reasonable solution of the singular fact that the South produced so little literature notwithstanding its culture; for culture it possessed, and of the best kind,—the culture of the classics, the most fertilizing of all intellectual forces. If the lower classes were ignorant, the upper class universally emphasized the distinction between them by giving their children the best education that could be obtained. Jefferson deplored the fact that over one-half of the students at Princeton were Virginians, and he founded the University of Virginia that Southerners might be able to secure the best education at home. Upon this sure foundation of a university training was laid the superstructure of constant association with the best classical authors.

These established the standard, and the Southerner held in contempt any writer who did not at once conform to their style and equal their merit.

Poe in his early manhood bitterly declared that “one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel, their having crossed the sea is with us so great a distinction.”

To any good in what was penned and published on this side the Atlantic the Southerner was, as a general thing, absolutely and incurably blind. If the work was written south of Mason and Dixon's line it was incontinently contemned as “trashy”; if it emanated from the North, it was vehemently denounced as “Yankee.” In either case it was condemned.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that, with all the intellectual resources of the South, so few writers should have been found with the inclination or the temerity to attempt a work thus sure to terminate in failure, if not to incur contempt. If one should attempt it, where could be secure a publisher? There were few at the South, and to seek a publisher at the North was to hazard repulse there and insure criticism at home.

Thus, the true explanation of the absence of a Southern literature of a high order during this epoch was not the want of literary ability. There was genius enough to have founded a literature, but there were no publishers generally, and there was never any public.

Yet from the untoward conditions delineated issued a literary genius of the first rank.

Notwithstanding the coldness and indifference which he encountered in this State, Poe ever declared himself a Virginian; and, with all due respect to certain latter-day critics, who assert the contrary, it must be said that to those familiar with the qualities and with the points of difference between the Northern and Southern civilizations, Poe's poems are as distinctly Southern in their coloring, tone, and temper as Wordsworth's are English. The wild landscape, the flower-laden atmosphere, the delirious richness, are their setting, and a more than tropical passion interfuses them as unmistakably as the air of English lawns and meadows breathes through Tennyson's masterpieces. We find in them everywhere

Dim vales and shadowy floods,
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can't discover
For the trees that drip all over.

Poe, however, was limited by no boundary, geographical or other. The spirit-peopled air, the infernal chambers of fancied inquisitions, the regions of the moon, the imagined horrors of post-mortem sentience, were equally his realm. In all his vast and weird and wonderful genius roamed unconfined and equally at home. In all he created his own atmosphere, and projected his marvellous fancies with an originality and a power whose universal application is the undeniable and perfect proof of his supreme genius.

That he failed of his immediate audience was due, in part, to his own unfortunate disposition, but yet more to the time and to the blindness which visited upon works of incomparable literary merit the sins of physical frailty: the creations of his genius, by reason of their very originality, were contemned as the ravings of a disordered and unbalanced mind, and, unrecognized at home, Poe was forced to wander to an alien clime in search of bread.

With his personal habits this paper is not concerned. His life has been for more than a generation the object of attack and vituperation which have raged with inconceivable violence. From the time that Griswold perpetrated his “immortal infamy,” vindictiveness has found in Poe's career its most convenient target. Yet the works of this unfortunate have caught the human heart, and are to-day the common property of the English-speaking races, whether dwelling in Virginia or Massachusetts, Great Britain or Australia, and have been translated into the language of every civilized nation of Europe. A recent interview with the English publishers, the Routledges, showed that twenty-nine thousand copies of Poe's Tales had been sold by them in the year 1887, as against less than one-third of that number of many of the most popular and famous of our other American writers.

The obligation to Poe has never been duly recognized. It is said that the Latin poems of Milton first opened the eyes of the Italians to the fact that the island which Cæsar had conquered had become civilized. The first evidence of culture which was accepted abroad, after the long night of silence which covered the South after the departure of the great fathers of the Republic, was the work of Edgar A. Poe. It is not more to the credit of the North than of the South, that when the latter threw him off starving, the former failed to give him more than a crust.

“The Raven” created a sensation, and still thrills every poetic mind with wonder at its marvellous music and its mysterious power, but, though it secured for its author fame, it brought him only ten dollars' worth of bread. If literature has not advanced since that day, at least the welfare of literary men has done so. The writer of a short story or paper which is deemed worthy of a place in one of the modern monthly magazines of the better class, even though he may have no reputation, receives at least ten dollars per printed page; whilst, if he be at all well known, he may expect double or quadruple that sum. Poe received for some of his immortal works four dollars per printed page.

Poe's poetry discovered a fresh realm in the domain of fancy; but his prose works are, if possible, even more remarkable. His critical faculty installed a new era in criticism. Up to this time the literary press, too imbecile to possess, or too feeble to assert independence, cringed fawning at the feet of every writer whose position was assured among what was recognized as the literary set, and accepted with laudation, or at least with flattering deference, all publications which bore the talismanic charm of an established name. Poe undoubtedly was at times too much influenced by personal feeling, but, with the courage of one who had vowed his life to truth, he stripped off the mask of dull respectability, and relentlessly exposed sham and vacuity under whatever name they appeared.

“If,” as Mr. Lowell said, “he seems at times to mistake his vial of prussic acid for his inkstand,” yet he lifted literary criticism from the abasement of snivelling imbecility into which it had sunk, and established it upon a basis founded on the principles of analysis, philosophy, and art.

If in discussing the works of female writers his susceptible nature and his chivalrous instinct unduly inclined him to bestow praise on what was mere trash, yet no less an authority than Mr. Lowell said of him that he was “the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has ever written in America.”

His own imaginative works created a new school, and have never been equalled in their peculiar vein, or surpassed in any vein whatever in the qualities of originality, force, and art.

Edgar A. Poe died at the age of thirty-nine, when the powers and faculties are just matured. What might he not have done had he lived out the full span of man's allotted life!

He was not prolific either in prose or in verse, his health or his habits frequently incapacitating him from work; but both his poems and his tales not only evince his genius, but exhibit the highest degree of literary art.

It has become the fashion to decry Poe and to disparage his work; but the detraction which has been expended upon him for a period extending over nearly two generations has only made his literary fame brighter. As Mr. Gosse has aptly said, he has been a veritable piper of Hamelin to all American writers since his time.

If we are compelled to admit that he is the one really great writer of purely literary work that the South produced under its old conditions, it is no reflection on the South or its civilization, for the North during the same period, with an educated population many times larger, can claim only three or four, whilst England herself, “with all appliances and means to boot,” can number hardly more than a score.

There were other writers besides Poe who braved the chilling indifference of the time, and who wrote and strove, devoting labor and life to the endeavor to awake the South to a realization of its literary abilities.

But few of them have survived to more than mention in works of reference, and the most that can be done is to mention those whose work was distinctive in its character or scope, or who by their diligence and ardor may be deemed to have forwarded the cause of Southern literature.

Excepting Poe, who stands pre-eminent above all others, the three leading literary men of the South during the period which extended down to the war were John Pendleton Kennedy, of Maryland, William Gilmore Simms, of South Carolina, and John Esten Cooke, of Virginia.

There were others who, in prose or in verse, in a short sketch or a lyric, struck perhaps a higher key than these did, but the effort was rarely repeated, and these were the leading literary men of the South, not merely as authors, but as the friends and promoters of literature.

Of these Kennedy was first in time, whilst Simms was first in his devotion to literature and in the work he accomplished. Indeed, no one in the history of Southern literature ever applied himself more assiduously and loyally to its development than Simms. Both of these exercised a wider influence upon the literary spirit of the South than that which proceeded immediately from their works. Kennedy, who was born in 1795 in Baltimore, where he lived all of his long life, had not only made his mark as a lawyer and man of affairs, but as the author of “Swallow Barn” had already acquired a reputation as a literary man, when in the autumn of 1833 the two prizes offered by the proprietors of the Saturday Visitor, a weekly literary journal of Baltimore, were awarded, by the committee of which he was chairman, to an unknown young man named Poe. It was not deemed proper to give so much to one person, so he received only one prize. It was owing to Mr. Kennedy's interest and kindness that the young author, who was in the most desperate straits, was secured an opening in the columns of the Southern Literary Messenger and subsequently became its editor; and the prosperous littérateur was the friend and encourager of the indigent genius as long as the latter lived.

Mr. Kennedy's novels, Swallow Barn, a story of rural life in Virginia; Horseshoe Robinson, a tale of the Tory ascendency in South Carolina; and Rob of the Bowl, a story of Maryland, gave him position among the leading novelists of his day, and placed him first among the Southern literary men of his time.

His other works than those named are a satire entitled Annals of Quodlibet, a memoir of William Wirt, in two volumes, etc. He continued to write until his death, long after the war.

William Gilmore Simms, of South Carolina, was not only the most prolific, but, with the exception of Poe, was the chief distinctly literary man the South has produced. The measure of his industry was immense. His ability was of a high order, and his devotion to literature was, for the time, extraordinary. As poet, novelist, historian, biographer, essayist, he was not surpassed by any one of his compeers; and if his whole work be considered, he was first. From 1827, when he brought out in Charleston his first venture, a volume entitled Lyrical and Other Poems, to the time of his death in 1870, he was assiduously and earnestly engaged in the attempt to create a literature for the South. His first devotion was to poetry, and he published three volumes of poems before he was twenty-six years of age. Although he continued to write poetry after this, it is chiefly as a writer of fiction that he made his reputation and that his name is now preserved. Poe declared him the best novelist after Cooper this country had produced, and, although to us now his works have the faults of that time, too great prolixity, too much description, and the constant tendency to disquisition, they are of a much higher order as romances than books of many of the novelists of the present day whose works receive general praise. His works comprise a series of novels, most of them based on the more romantic phases of the old Southern life, several volumes of poems, several dramas, and several biographies. The Yemassee is perhaps the best of his novels, but many of them had a considerable vogue in their day, and the renewed demand for them has recently caused a new edition to be published.

John Esten Cooke, the third of the trio, was like the other two both a novelist and a biographer. He possessed a fine imagination, and under more exacting conditions he might have reached a high mark and have made a permanent name in our literature. His publications before the war were Leather Stocking and Silk (1854), The Virginia Comedians (2 vols., 1854), The Youth of Jefferson (1854), Ellie (1855), The Last of the Foresters (1856), and Bonnybel Vane, or The History of Henry St. John, Gentleman (1859). In addition to these, he wrote numerous sketches. Candor compels the admission that, although very popular, these earlier works are not of a very high order. The war, however, in which the young novelist served honorably on the staff of General J. E. B. Stuart, the celebrated Confederate cavalry leader, gave him a new impulse, and his later works, such as Surry of Eagle's Nest, Mohun, Hilt to Hilt, Hammer and Rapier, and Wearing of the Gray, are very much better than the earlier; whilst his biographical and historical works are probably best of all. These, however, were written under the new conditions, and belong properly to the post-bellum literature of the South. Cooke wrote of Virginia life as Simms wrote of South Carolina life, with affection, appreciation, and spirit, but, like both Simms and Kennedy, he failed to strike the highest note. The same may be said of Dr. William A. Caruthers, also a Virginian, who had preceded Cooke and Simms, and who is entitled with the latter and Mr. Kennedy to the honor of first discovering the romantic material afforded the novelist in the picturesque life of their own section. His first book, The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown, an Historical Romance of the Old Dominion, appeared in 1832. It dealt with the most romantic episode in the history of the South, if not of the entire country,—Bacon's Rebellion. This was followed in 1845 by the novel on which his name now rests, The Knights of the Horseshoe, a Traditionary Tale of the Cocked-Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion. He also wrote a volume of sketches entitled The Kentuckian in New York, or the Adventures of Three Southerners, and a Life of Dr. Caldwell. This same romantic period was likewise the subject of a novel by St. George Tucker (the younger), entitled Hansford, a Tale of Bacon's Rebellion, which was published in 1857 by George M. West, of Richmond, Virginia, and which had much popularity in its day.

These books are so good, or, more accurately, they have in them so much that is good, that one cannot but wonder they are not better. These writers possessed the Southerner's love for the South; they perfectly comprehended the value of the material its life furnished, and recognized the importance of preserving this life in literature; they earnestly endeavored to accomplish this; and yet they failed to preserve it in its reality. It is melancholy to contemplate, and it is difficult to comprehend. They wrote with spirit, with zeal, with affection, and generally in the chastest and most beautiful English, but somehow they just missed the highest mark. It is as if they had set their song in the wrong key.

The chief fault of their books was a certain imitativeness, and adherence to old methods. [Sir Walter] Scott had set the fashion, and it was so admirable that it led all the writers to copying him. G. P. R. James gave him in dilution. Cooper had attained immense popularity, and was more easily followed; but to imitate Scott was a perilous undertaking. The stripling in the king's armor was not more encumbered.

Yet must this be said in defence of all these writers, that we are looking at their work through a different atmosphere from that in which they wrote. Fashion in writing, where it is not informed by genius, passes away, as in other things. Only art remains ever new, ever fresh, ever true. Just as Miss Burney and Richardson doubtless appeared antiquated to these, so they now appear to us, who are accustomed to a different treatment, stilted and unreal.

After these authors came the sketch-writers, who, if Poe's dictum that a short story is the most perfect form of prose literature is correct, should be placed before them. The chief of these, excepting Poe himself, were Joseph G. Baldwin, Augustus B. Longstreet, William Tappan Thompson, St. Leger L. Carter, and George W. Bagby.

Joseph G. Baldwin was the author of Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, which is perhaps the raciest collection of sketches yet published in America. This volume within a year of its first publication in 1853 had run into its seventh edition. “Ovid Bolus, Esq.” and “Simon Suggs, Jr., Esq.” became at once characters as well known throughout the South as was Sam Weller or Micky Free; whilst the case of “Higginbotham versus Swink, Slander” became a cause célébre.

Augustus B. Longstreet, of Mississippi, was the author of Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, etc., in the First Half-Century of the Republic, and other sketches. He also wrote a long story entitled “Master William Mitten.”

William Tappan Thompson was the author of “Major Jones's Courtship,” “Major Jones's Chronicle of Pineville,” “Major Jones's Sketches of Travel,” and other sketches.

Yet another was Dr. George W. Bagby, of Virginia, who succeeded John R. Thompson as editor of The Southern Literary Messenger, and who wrote before the war over the nom de plume of “Mozis Addums.” The quality of his serious work was higher than that of the other sketch-writers enumerated; and, being wider in its scope, its value was greater than theirs, though his writings were never published in book form until after his death, when two volumes were brought out in Richmond, Virginia. Much of his writing was done after the war, but prior to that period he had accomplished enough to entitle him to the credit of being a literary man at a time when literature in the South was without the compensations by which it was subsequently attended.

No one has ever written so delicately of the South, and his “Old Virginia Gentleman” is the most beautiful sketch of life in the South that has ever appeared.

Besides these classes of writers there existed another class whose writings not only far exceeded in volume those of the authors who have been mentioned, but were also far more successful.

The chief of these were Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mrs. Catherine Ann Warfield, and Miss Augusta J. Evans. They were followed by a sisterhood of writers far too numerous for mention, whose work, whatever its permanent value, is entitled to honorable notice as evidencing an ambition on the part of the Southern women to create a Southern literature. There were about two hundred in all, who have written novels, books of travel, sketches, and volumes of poems. If they have not generally soared very high, they have at least lifted themselves above the common level, and are entitled to the respect of the South for their loyal endeavor to do their part towards her elevation. Both Mrs. Hentz and Mrs. Southworth wrote many novels and yet more numerous sketches, the popularity of which in their day was extraordinary. Perhaps the best of Mrs. Hentz's romances are The Mob-Cap (1848), Linda (1850), Rena (1851), and The Planter's Northern Bride. Mrs. Southworth has written over fifty novels, besides shorter stories. Her first book, Retribution, written for the Washington National Era, was subsequently published in a volume in 1849, and had an immense sale. It was rapidly followed by The Deserted Wife, The Missing Bride, Love's Labor Won, The Lost Heiress, Fallen Pride, Curse of Clifton, etc., to the number above stated. In all of these novels the element of romance is emphasized. Some of Mrs. Southworth's books were vehemently assailed, but, as the public is much more intent on being entertained than on being elevated, they generally attained an extensive popularity. The Southern life is utilized by both these writers, but in so exaggerated or unreal a form that the pictures are too untrue to be relied on. Both authors were of Northern birth, whilst their lives were spent at the South. Is it significant of the fact that the Northern literary press was not in “old times” open to writers of Southern birth, or that public sentiment was against Southern women publishing, or of both?

Mrs. Terhune (“Marion Harland”) is entitled to stand in a class by herself, since her books Alone, The Hidden Path, Moss Side, and Nemesis, which were published before the war, as well as those which have appeared since that time, are in a much higher literary key than those of the authors named. Like the others, she has used the Southern life as material in her work; but she has exhibited a literary sense of a far higher order, and an artistic touch to which the others are strangers.

There existed yet another class, whose work, although not extensive in amount, was yet of a quality to enlist the attention and evoke the respect of American readers. The Southern poets were not numerous: poetry even more peculiarly than prose demands a sympathetic atmosphere. Such was not to be found at the South. The standards there were Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope; no less would be tolerated. Before Wilde could admit his authorship of “My Life is like the Summer Rose” he had to establish himself as a fine lawyer and an able politician; Philip Pendleton Cooke, as an offset to “Florence Vane” and the “Froissart Ballads,” found it necessary to avouch his manhood as the crack turkey-shot of the Valley of Virginia. Yet the poets wrote, if not much, still real poetry, and poetry which will live as a part of the best American literature. In this domain, as in others, Poe soared high above all the rest. He was not profuse; but he was excellent, pre-eminent. He is one of the poets of the English-speaking race. Wilde, Cooke, Pinkney, Key, Meek, Lamar, Lipscomb, Vawter, and others have been already referred to. The “Sonnet to a Mocking-bird” by the first is as fine as his other more popular poem already mentioned. Mr. Wilde resided in Italy for some time, and published the result of his researches there in a work in two volumes, entitled Conjectures and Researches concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso, which contains fine translations from Tasso and is otherwise valuable. He also wrote a Life of Dante, and a long poem entitled “Hesperia,” besides a number of translations of Italian lyrics which were not published until after his death.

Cooke, besides “Florence Vane,” which Poe declared the sweetest lyric ever written in America, and which has been translated into many foreign languages, wrote many other lyrics, of which the most popular and perhaps the best are the “Lines to my Daughter Lily” and “Rosa Lee.” He also wrote a number of sketches, among which are “John Carpe,” “The Gregories of Hackwood,” and “The Crime of Andrew Blair.”

He died at the age of thirty-three, when his brilliant powers were still in bud.

Edward Coate Pinkney was a member of a family distinguished for literary taste and ability. His uncle, Ninian Pinkney, as early as 1809 published a book of Travels in the South of France and in the Interior of the Provinces of Provence and Languedoc, of which Leigh Hunt said, “It set all the idle world to going to France to live on the charming banks of the Loire.”

His brother Frederick was also a poet. Pinkney's poems were so exquisite that after their first publication in 1825 he was requested to sit for a portrait to be included in a sketch of “The Five Greatest Poets of the Nation.” “A Health” and “The Picture Song” have an established place in our literature.

Lanier and Ticknor, of Georgia; John R. Thompson, of Virginia; Dimitry, of Louisiana; Ryan, etc., belong to a later time. Sidney Lanier was easily the next Southern poet to Poe, and has not been surpassed by any other that this country has produced.

Perhaps Henry Timrod and Paul H. Hayne also more properly belong to that period, but before the war they had done work which by its worth and volume entitles them to be ranked of all Southern poets next after Poe.

Hayne in South Carolina was, with Simms and others, inspiring just before the war an emulation which promised a brighter literary future than there had previously been ground to hope for. John R. Thompson, as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, was performing the same work for Virginia. Had Hayne and Thompson received greater encouragement, their fine talents might have yielded a return which would have made their native land as proud of her brilliant sons as they deserved.

Besides the authors mentioned in this paper, there were very many others who, by occasional essays at literature in prose or in verse, attained something more than a local reputation, but they were distinguished rather in other professions than in literature, whilst most of those which have been mentioned are now chiefly distinguished for the literary work they accomplished.

If it shall appear from this very imperfect summary of the literary work done by the South, and of the causes which influenced it, that the amount produced was small, attention should be called again first, to the insignificant number of the slave-holding whites of the South, from whom alone, as the educated class, a literature could come; and secondly, to the intellectual energy which that limited population displayed throughout the entire period of their existence. The intellectual work they accomplished will compare not unfavorably with that of a similar number of any other people during the same period; and the thoughtful and dispassionate student, to whatever causes he may deem to be due the absence of a literature among the Southern people, will not attribute it to either mental indigence or mental lassitude.

Notes

1. It is well to remember that this term “the Southern people,” although ex vi termini general in its meaning, is applicable in this paper and in all discussion of this subject only to the land-owning or better class of whites, as contra-distinguished not only from the negroes, but also from the lower class of whites, who neither possessed the advantages nor incurred the responsibilities of the upper class.

   This distinction is ordinarily overlooked in the discussion of this matter. The importance of the limitation will be apparent-however, when it is considered that by the census of 1850 (which is assumed as a fair standard because then the growth of literature at the North was about at its zenith) the entire slave-holding and slave-hiring population of the South was only 347,525.

   This embraces all white artisans and working people, whether in the towns or in the rural districts, who hired one negro servant.

   This was the population of the South from which alone could spring a literature. Nothing was to be expected from the lower class of poor whites, and of course nothing from the negroes, for they had no advantages of education, a large percentage of the former, and nearly all of the latter, being unable to read and write.

   This ignorance on the part of the lower classes was a necessary concomitant of slavery, for which institution, notwithstanding the long-established popular belief of the outside world, the South was not responsible.