the new south essay

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Course: US history > Unit 6

Life after slavery for African Americans
The origins of Jim Crow - introduction
Origins of Jim Crow - the Black Codes and Reconstruction
Origins of Jim Crow - the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
Origins of Jim Crow - Compromise of 1877 and Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson
The Compromise of 1877

The New South

The South after the Civil War

Proponents of the New South envisioned a post-Reconstruction southern economy modeled on the North’s embrace of the Industrial Revolution .
Henry W. Grady , a newspaper editor in Atlanta, Georgia, coined the phrase the "New South” in 1874. He urged the South to abandon its longstanding agrarian economy for a modern economy grounded in factories, mines, and mills.
Although textile mills and tobacco factories emerged in the South during this time, the plans for a New South largely failed. By 1900, per-capita income in the South was forty percent less than the national average, and rural poverty persisted across much of the South well into the twentieth century.

Rural agrarian poverty

An economic vision for a new south, successes and failures of the new south, what do you think.

For more on the sharecropping system, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
For more on the New South, see C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).
See Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
On Grady, see Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 1354.

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The New South

Economic Diversification

King Cotton was once the heralded “ruler” of the South, but following the Civil War this King shouldered the blame for the South’s losses. Many southern leaders believed that their reliance on one crop had made them vulnerable to the Union’s advances, and they pledged to diversify what they called the “New South.”

Henry W. Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, promoted the vision for the New South at a meeting of the New England Society of New York. Grady shared an optimistic view of the New South’s potential—a strong core, economic diversity, and healthy growth over time. Grady, and other intellects of his time, foresaw an agricultural society based around the growth of several crops. They also saw the importance of following the North’s example and turning toward industrialization.

Proponents of the New South first turned to secondary crops that could thrive in southern soil. Tobacco was the second most vital crop after cotton to the pre-war South. Several factors led to a resurgence in tobacco production following the Civil War. Two new varieties, bright leaf and burley were identified, and a new method for curing tobacco so that it had less “bite” was discovered. As the Union troops came south during the war, they were introduced to this tobacco, which opened up a new export market for southern tobacco production.

In addition, rice and Louisiana cane sugar became critical elements of the South’s agricultural identity. This boom was due in large part to an agriculturalist named Seaman A. Knapp. He moved to Louisiana and used the demonstration method of agriculture education to show farmers how to select the most appropriate crops for their soil and how to care for those crops. His educational exhibitions led way to the development of a network of local and regional extension offices that supported agriculture education and production.

However, Southerners were not willing to turn their backs on King Cotton completely, and that proved to be a wise move. With the textile industry beginning to boom and industrialization in full force, the number of cotton mills in the south increased from 161 to 400 after the Civil War. Partly as a cause of this boom and partly as a result, cotton consumption increased from 182,000 bales to 1,479,000 per year in the late nineteenth century.

Cotton and other crops benefited from the ever-growing rail service. With additional railroad lines crossing the country, both the North and the South were able to profit from the other’s productivity. Additionally, the advent of refrigerated rail cars allowed other southern produce to reach northern markets, which further diversified the southern economy.

Field crops were not the only industry to take advantage of improved transportation. The area around Birmingham, Alabama became known for its iron, limestone, and coal production. Coal was especially important as an energy source for the trains that transported it. Between 1875 and 1900, southern coal production increased by 44 million tons per year, from 5 million to 49 million tons.

Another important energy source revitalized the South. Hydroelectricity, or electricity generated by water, was a growing force in the southeast region of the United States. This power source provided another important step in the industrialization process.

The South also offered Southern Pine trees, which were in demand for their soft, multi-use lumber—which was used in great quantities to restore homes damaged during the war. Lumber camps grew exponentially in the south after 1870, and tree cutting rose to new heights. If not for the warm climate and quick renewal of the Southern Pines, the mass destruction of these trees might have rendered the south an ecological wasteland. Fortunately, scientific forestry grew alongside the lumber camps, and the first forestry school opened in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1898.

A host of other industries also developed in the south. The lumber industry carved the way for a bustling paper commerce. Clay, glass, and stone products were in high demand. Vegetables that were not sold fresh and transported on refrigerated railway cars were canned at one of several canneries in the south. And of course, the mint julep and moonshine reputation of the South perpetuated a thriving beverage industry.

Political Changes

Along with a changing economic profile, the political atmosphere was also being transformed in the New South. With the loss of the Confederate government, southern residents turned to leaders within their community. These local leaders came to be known collectively as “Redeemers,” both for their efforts to redeem the South from being dominated by Yankees, as well as their redemption of the South from a one-crop society.

Republicans, Independents, and Populists alike called the Redeemers “Bourbons,” a derogatory label meant to imply that the Redeemers were not proactive but reactive. These critics believed that the Bourbons had learned nothing from the Civil War. As most Bourbons were Democrats, this label became entrenched in the Southern vocabulary to signify a leader of the Democratic Party.

Furthermore, the Redeemers’ detractors pointed out a major truth about this group—their true purpose was to undue the “progress” achieved by the Civil War and to reassert their dominance over blacks. Although as a group they did not participate in or advocate violence against blacks as did the KKK, the Redeemers benefited from those kinds of aggression. Their main goals were to repress blacks at the expense of whites and to increase their political power.

To that end, the Redeemers brought about a mini political revolution in the south. They believed strongly that a laissez-faire federal government would be more productive than the militarily enforced Reconstruction. This ideology was influenced by their desire to regain local control. The Redeemers also believed that education was important, but the cost should be borne by private benefactors rather than state governments. Most southern states did not have government funds for public education prior to the Civil War, and after the war the Redeemers felt that there were more pressing needs in the Reconstruction effort, such as business and industry.

Several philanthropists did come through with the funds to keep southern education afloat. London banker George Peabody was a major supporter of education through his Peabody Fund, which provided over $3 million to public schools in the south. Another philanthropist, John F. Slater, donated another $1 million, which was designated for the development and maintenance of black schools.

J.L.M. Curry, a former soldier, preacher, and educator, served as the manager of both these funds and developed many programs that are still in effect today, including teacher’s associations and summer schools. With the help of Curry’s programs, literacy increased to 88 percent for the native white population and 50 percent for the southern black population. In addition, the Redeemers’ influence led to teacher education schools, agricultural and mechanical colleges, and even black colleges.

Democrats campaigned for Congressional seats during the election of 1874 on the strength of programs such as the public education initiative and other Redeemer programs such as boards of agriculture and public health. The public bought into the platform of the Redeemers, and with their votes they gave the Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives as well as several prime seats in the Senate.

The changing mindset of the South allowed for several black politicians to emerge as leaders, if only of other blacks. South Carolina and Georgia both had black representatives in Congress throughout the late nineteenth century, although they always represented areas with a high density of black residents.

Most white people, although claiming racial superiority, wished no ill-will upon their black counterparts because they did not see them as threats to their social structure. Even as the white Redeemers were preaching racial superiority, they were practicing tolerance. For a brief period in the 1880s and 1890s, the black population was able to coexist with the white population in relative peace in the south.

Race Relations in the New South

There was a tentative peace in the south between blacks and whites, but it had severe limitations. White Southerners expected blacks to keep to themselves, to socialize and worship in separate venues, to work for white people in menial jobs and for meager wages, and to never request or demand anything, including equal rights.

When slaves were emancipated, the white South lost its labor supply and the slaves lost their shelter. Instead of owning the slaves, white men became landlords, charging high rent to slave families who often could not pay with cash. These slaves effectively became indentured servants to their former owners as they tried to pay off their debts through service—an impossible task, with the interest tacked on by the landlords.

Freedmen also encountered the difficulties of sharecropping. With little land available to purchase and few skills other than knowing how to work in the fields, former slaves participated in the sharecropping system that provided a share of the crop for the worker’s service. A similar practice was known as crop liens, in which the owner of the land—usually a freedman or a poor white man—would offer a lien on his crop to a merchant in exchange for cash or supplies. Sharecropping and crop liens were idealistic plans used by crooked bookkeepers and white land owners who kept black men in perpetual debt.

Blacks did have some allies, albeit self-serving ones. The Populist Party of the 1890s needed numbers to gain power, and blacks were numerous. Populists brought blacks en masse into their folds, even giving them prominent leadership positions. Not surprisingly, these actions stirred up the Redeemers who wanted to repress the northern influence of equality for former slaves. They also did not want to lose elections to the growing Populist Party.

Since the Fifteenth Amendment ensured that the Redeemers could not outright disenfranchise blacks, they had to be crafty. Redeemers developed voting rules for their states that were known as “literacy tests,” although they were impossible tests meant solely to weed out black voters. In addition, the Redeemers implemented poll taxes that they knew many blacks could not afford to pay. While this did eliminate most of the black vote, it also kept many poor, uneducated whites from voicing their opinions at the polls. Still, the narrow-minded Redeemers considered this a victory for the South.

The Redeemers felt further justified when Mississippi took their actions a few steps further. In 1890, at a state constitutional convention, harsher voting requirements were enacted. The first of these requirements was a residency rule, which stated that all voters had to have lived in the state’s borders for a minimum of two years. Furthermore, each voter had to prove residency within their election district for a minimum of one year. Since many blacks were transient, moving to follow jobs throughout the south, few met the strict residency requirements and lost their voting privileges under the Mississippi Plan.

Those who had maintained a proper residence in Mississippi also had to meet other requirements. All taxes had to be paid by February 1st of the voting year. Even those who met this requirement were sometimes not allowed to vote when election officials “lost” the receipt in the months prior to the election. Under Mississippi’s rules, voters also had to pass a literacy test and not have been convicted of certain crimes. Again, these rules prohibited some poor white voters from participating in elections, although the rules were sometimes not enforced for the white constituency. Regardless, it was apparent to all that the harsh rules targeted blacks.

The Mississippi Plan was adopted by seven additional states over the next 20 years. Many of these states added their own exceptions that would qualify white voters who were kept from voting under Mississippi’s rules. For example, South Carolina’s literacy requirement had a loophole that exempted voters from this requirement if they owned $300 worth of property. Likewise, Louisiana invented the “grandfather clause” in 1898, which allowed illiterates to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been eligible to vote on January 1, 1867. This excluded blacks since blacks did not have voting rights at that time. Exceptions like this were the norm as governments attempted to exclude only black voters without violating the Fifteenth Amendment.

This exclusionary attitude infused the South. A series of seven cases before the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination against blacks by corporations or individuals was in violation of federal Civil Rights laws. However, their rulings did not prohibit states from enacting segregation laws.

Proponents of the New South took up the “Separate but Equal” battle cry. Under this agenda, segregation of blacks and whites became common as long as each had “equal” facilities. However, although blacks and whites might both have facilities that served the same purpose, such as public restrooms, railroad cars, and theater seats, the facilities were rarely equal. The railroad cars for white patrons would typically be cleaner and more comfortable than the car for blacks. The state laws legalizing this practice were known as “Jim Crow laws,” named after a black character in old minstrel shows.

These segregation laws were first tested in a case known as Plessy v. Ferguson, which went before the Supreme Court in 1896. Homer Plessy was a man with one-eighth black ancestry who was ordered to leave the whites-only railroad car. He refused the order and was arrested and later convicted of this crime. He appealed the case all the way to the highest court, but the Supreme Court validated Plessy’s conviction, and the southern states took that as a green light to enact segregation laws on a wide scale.

One Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, dissented in the Plessy verdict. He believed that validating Plessy’s conviction would promote aggressive attitudes toward blacks. Such attitudes were already firmly entrenched in Southern society, and as Harlan predicted, the ruling increased the violence. Lynchings, already a common practice, hit record highs in the late 1800s, with nearly 90% of the victims being black.

Two black men, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, risked their lives to stand up against the violence and lead their fellow blacks, albeit in opposite directions. Washington, a former slave, had overcome the odds to receive an education at Hampton Institution, and he later built the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington encouraged blacks to keep to themselves and focus on the daily tasks of survival, rather than leading a grand uprising. He believed that building a strong economic base was more critical at that time than planning an uprising or fighting for equal rights. Washington also stated in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895 that blacks had to accept segregation in the short term as they focused on economic gain to achieve political equality in the future.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born after the Civil War and the first African American to earn a Harvard PhD, was one of Washington’s harshest critics. He believed that Washington’s pacifist plan would only perpetuate the second-class-citizen mindset. Du Bois felt that immediate “ceaseless agitation” was the only appropriate method for attaining equal rights, especially for those he dubbed the “talented tenth” of African Americans who deserved total equality immediately. As editor of the black publication “The Crisis,” Du Bois publicized his disdain for Washington and was instrumental in the creation of the “Niagara Movement,” which later evolved into the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Eventually, Du Bois grew weary of the slow pace of racial equality in the United States. He renounced his citizenship and moved to Ghana in 1961, where he died two years later.

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Lincoln’s plan

The radicals’ plan, johnson’s policy, “black codes”.

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Reconstruction and the New South, 1865–1900

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Reconstruction, 1865–77

Reconstruction under abraham lincoln.

The original Northern objective in the Civil War was the preservation of the Union—a war aim with which virtually everybody in the free states agreed. As the fighting progressed, the Lincoln government concluded that emancipation of enslaved people was necessary in order to secure military victory; and thereafter freedom became a second war aim for the members of the Republican Party . The more radical members of that party—men like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens —believed that emancipation would prove a sham unless the government guaranteed the civil and political rights of the freedmen; thus, equality of all citizens before the law became a third war aim for this powerful faction. The fierce controversies of the Reconstruction era raged over which of these objectives should be insisted upon and how these goals should be secured.

Lincoln himself had a flexible and pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, insisting only that the Southerners, when defeated, pledge future loyalty to the Union and emancipate their enslaved persons. As the Southern states were subdued, he appointed military governors to supervise their restoration. The most vigorous and effective of these appointees was Andrew Johnson , a War Democrat whose success in reconstituting a loyal government in Tennessee led to his nomination as vice president on the Republican ticket with Lincoln in 1864 . In December 1863 Lincoln announced a general plan for the orderly Reconstruction of the Southern states, promising to recognize the government of any state that pledged to support the Constitution and the Union and to emancipate enslaved persons if it was backed by at least 10 percent of the number of voters in the 1860 presidential election. In Louisiana , Arkansas , and Tennessee loyal governments were formed under Lincoln’s plan; and they sought readmission to the Union with the seating of their senators and representatives in Congress.

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Radical Republicans were outraged at these procedures, which savoured of executive usurpation of congressional powers, which required only minimal changes in the Southern social system, and which left political power essentially in the hands of the same Southerners who had led their states out of the Union. The Radicals put forth their own plan of Reconstruction in the Wade–Davis Bill , which Congress passed on July 2, 1864; it required not 10 percent but a majority of the white male citizens in each Southern state to participate in the reconstruction process, and it insisted upon an oath of past, not just of future, loyalty. Finding the bill too rigorous and inflexible, Lincoln pocket vetoed it; and the Radicals bitterly denounced him. During the 1864–65 session of Congress, they in turn defeated the president’s proposal to recognize the Louisiana government organized under his 10 percent plan. At the time of Lincoln’s assassination , therefore, the president and the Congress were at loggerheads over Reconstruction.

Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson

At first it seemed that Johnson might be able to work more cooperatively with Congress in the process of Reconstruction. A former representative and a former senator, he understood congressmen. A loyal Unionist who had stood by his country even at the risk of his life when Tennessee seceded, he was certain not to compromise with secession; and his experience as military governor of that state showed him to be politically shrewd and tough toward the enslavers. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” Radical Benjamin F. Wade assured the new president on the day he took the oath of office. “By the gods, there will be no trouble running the government.”

Such Radical trust in Johnson proved misplaced. The new president was, first of all, himself a Southerner. He was a Democrat who looked for the restoration of his old party partly as a step toward his own reelection to the presidency in 1868. Most important of all, Johnson shared the white Southerners’ attitude toward African Americans , considering Black men innately inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights. On May 29, 1865, Johnson made his policy clear when he issued a general proclamation of pardon and amnesty for most Confederates and authorized the provisional governor of North Carolina to proceed with the reorganization of that state. Shortly afterward he issued similar proclamations for the other former Confederate states. In each case a state constitutional convention was to be chosen by the voters who pledged future loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. The conventions were expected to repeal the ordinances of secession, to repudiate the Confederate debt, and to accept the Thirteenth Amendment , abolishing slavery. The president did not, however, require them to enfranchise African Americans.

Given little guidance from Washington , Southern whites turned to the traditional political leaders of their section for guidance in reorganizing their governments; and the new regimes in the South were suspiciously like those of the antebellum period. To be sure, slavery was abolished; but each reconstructed Southern state government proceeded to adopt a “ Black Code ,” regulating the rights and privileges of freedmen. Varying from state to state, these codes in general treated African Americans as inferiors, relegated to a secondary and subordinate position in society. Their right to own land was restricted, they could not bear arms, and they might be bound out in servitude for vagrancy and other offenses. The conduct of white Southerners indicated that they were not prepared to guarantee even minimal protection of African American rights. In riots in Memphis (May 1866) and New Orleans (July 1866), African Americans were brutally assaulted and promiscuously killed.

Henry Grady's Vision of the New South

When I moved to Charlotte, NC, in 1986, I visited local museums to learn about the city. One museum caught my eye – the Levine Museum of the New South . Its permanent exhibit – Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers – “uses Charlotte and its 13 surrounding counties as a case study to illustrate the profound changes in the South since the Civil War.” The “New South” – a term Atlanta newspaperman Henry W. Grady coined in a speech to the New England Society of New York on December 21, 1886 – is familiar to many American history teachers. In his speech, Grady, the first southerner to speak to the Society, claimed that the old South, the South of slavery and secession, no longer existed and that southerners were happy to witness its demise. He refused to apologize for the South’s role in the Civil War, saying, “the South has nothing to take back.” Instead, the dominant theme of Grady’s speech, according to New South historian Edward L. Ayers , “was that the New South had built itself out of devastation without surrendering its self-respect.” Tragically, Grady and most of his fellow white southerners believed maintaining their self-respect required maintaining white supremacy.

Grady, then the 46-year-old editor-publisher of the A tlanta Constitution , was one of the leading advocates of the New South creed. In New York, he won over the crowd of prominent businessmen, including J.P. Morgan and H.M. Flagler, with tact and humor. He praised Abraham Lincoln, the end of slavery, and General William T. Sherman, whom he called “an able man” although a bit “careless with fire.” Grady reassured the northern businessmen that the South accepted her defeat. He was glad “that human slavery was swept forever from American soil” and the “American Union saved.” He urged northern investment in the South as a means of cementing the reunion of the war-torn nation. He claimed progress in racial reconciliation in the South and begged forbearance by the North as the South wrestled with “the problem” of African Americans’ presence in the South. Grady asked whether New England would allow “the prejudice of war to remain in the hearts of the conquerors when it has died in the hearts of the conquered?” Grady’s audience cheered his call for political and economic reunion – albeit at the cost of African American rights.

The term “New South” was used in the 20th century to refer to other concepts. Moderate governors of the late 20th century – including Terry Sanford of North Carolina, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and George W. Bush of Texas – were called New South governors because they combined pro-growth policies with so-called “moderate” views on race. Others used the phrase to summarize modernization in southern cities such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Richmond, and Birmingham, and the region’s increasing economic and demographic diversity. However, all uses of the term have suggested the intersection between economic development and racial justice in the South during Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, the Civil Rights Era and today.

This intersection included three main ideas for Henry Grady and other southern boosters of the New South in the 1880s. First, the Old South of slavery and secession was gone. Two, a New South, of unlimited economic potential welcomed investments from northern capitalists to transform the region into an industrial powerhouse. Third, and by no means last, the white South was best qualified to answer the question: what share in the new economy would be given to the formerly enslaved people?

In his New York speech, Grady described the South’s post-Civil War success, the long road ahead, and the economic disparity between the North and South. He believed this disparity threatened reunion. Though he did not deny his belief in white supremacy, Grady was not as blunt when talking to New Yorkers in 1886 as he was in Dallas, Texas, one year later. Speaking to his fellow southerners, Grady cited two problems the South faced in 1887, the “Race Problem” and the “Industrial Problem.” In addressing the “race problem,” Grady bluntly declared: “the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards – because the white race is the superior race.” Grady’s wording reveals his fear that the Black population of the South, if granted actual voting rights, could wield significant power due to its sheer size. The Texans Grady addressed in 1887 had less to fear from this perceived threat than the whites of his native Georgia. Texas whites comprised over 70% of Texas’s total population, while African Americans in Georgia constituted 47% of its population. South Carolina’s population was not majority white until 1920. “The worst thing … that could happen” Grady believed, would be an alliance between white and black voters threatening the fragile stability of the South as it continued its recovery from the Civil War.

In addressing the economic challenge, Grady bragged to his Texas audience about the South’s enormous growth. Cotton production was up. So was timber, wool, and iron. What the South now needed were Southern factories hiring southern workers that converted cotton into textiles, timber into furniture, and iron into tools.

From which racial group did Grady expect Southern factories to hire the labor they would need? In December of 1889, Grady returned to the North to deliver a speech in Boston’s Faneuil Hall on “The Race Problem in the South.” Grady argued that African Americans in the South had lost faith in the promises of Reconstruction. “Discouraged and deceived, [the Southern African American] … realized at last that his best friends are his neighbors, with whom his lot is cast and whose prosperity is bound up in his.” Did Grady expect that Black workers might eventually be hired alongside white workers in the new Southern factories? It is hard to say, because this speech was Grady’s last. Upon returning from Boston, the newspaperman developed pneumonia and died on December 23, 1889. He was only 49 years old.

American history teachers will note the similarity between Grady’s Boston rhetoric and that of the prominent southern African American leader Booker T. Washington. In a speech excerpted in Teaching American History’s Core Document Collection: Race and Civil Rights (now available in the tah.org bookstore ) known as the “ Atlanta Compromise ” speech, Washington used the metaphor of a ship desperate for fresh water and finding it after casting its buckets down where it was, unknowingly at the mouth of the Amazon River. Washington urged both blacks and whites to cast their buckets down in the South to draw up the fresh water of economic progress. But he did not suggest that blacks and whites work alongside each other in the same jobs. His Tuskegee Institute gave vocational training to Southern blacks, teaching skills that he hoped would raise the price of their labor, or even allow them to start their own businesses.

Today, Washington receives a lot of criticism for this speech. He is viewed as an accommodationist, someone willing to accept political and social discrimination in exchange for Black economic progress. However, Peter Myers’ excellent introduction to Washington’s speech in TAH’s Race and Civil Rights document volume suggests readers note Washington’s subtle rhetoric in opposition to the South’s racial status quo. One example is Washington’s advice to make friends with the surrounding white race “in every manly way.” Perhaps Washington did not believe that manly acceptance of friendly relations required African Americans to accept being denied the ballot. Arguably, if African Americans gained economic power through their skilled labor, they might eventually compel the white power structure to grant them political power as well. Perhaps Washington was dropping such hints to African Americans in his audience while seeming to reassure his white audience that Blacks had no such ambitions.

American history teachers may challenge their students to think about the concept of the New South with some of the following questions. What would Henry Grady say if he toured the Levine Museum’s exhibit and downtown Charlotte today? Would he be surprised to learn that national financial institutions such as Bank of America now make Charlotte their headquarters? Would he be surprised that the economic growth the South experienced in the late 20th century was propelled in large measure by the integration of the Southern work force? How would Grady react upon learning that the Staff Historian of the Levine Museum of the New South was Dr. Willie Griffin, an African American scholar native to the South? Would he renounce the white supremacy he endorsed during his lifetime as the political nonsense required of white public figures of his era? Would Grady claim to be proud of the racial progress the South has made, and recognize the work that remains?

Additional Resources

Theodore roosevelt launches the great white fleet, a full-throated defense of federal protection for civil rights – in 1875, join your fellow teachers in exploring america’s history..

The Writings of Carl Schurz/The New South

New York City: G. P. Putnam's Sons, pages 368–400

THE NEW SOUTH

Introduction

Twice during the last twenty years I had occasion to travel extensively over the Southern States, and to become acquainted with their condition. In 1865, a few months after the close of the civil war, I visited all of them, except Texas and Florida, and last winter all of them, except Mississippi. Each time I came into contact with a great many persons of all shades of social position and of political opinion. I improved my opportunities of inquiry and observation to the best of my ability. My object was, not to verify the correctness of preconceived notions, but to gain, by impartial investigation, a true view of things. Of the view thus obtained these pages are to give a brief and plain account.

New York , April, 1885.

In 1865, immediately after the close of the civil war, Southern society presented the spectacle of what might be called a state of dissolution. The Southern armies had just been disbanded, and the soldiers, after four years of fierce fighting, had returned home to shift for themselves. The Southern country was utterly exhausted by the war. Even where there had been no actual devastation, the product of labor had, ever since the spring of 1861, been mostly devoted to the support of armies in the field—that is, economically speaking, wasted. The money in the hands of the people had become entirely valueless. Thus the people were fearfully impoverished. The slaves, who had constituted almost the whole agricultural working force of the South, had been set free all at once. The first and very natural impulse of a large number of them was to test their freedom by quitting work and wandering away from the plantations. The country roads swarmed with them, and with a vague anticipation of a great jubilee they congregated in the towns. Thus the South was not only in distress and want, but the complete breaking up of the old labor-system and the difficulty of getting to work on a new basis made the prospect of recovery extremely dark. The negroes behaved on the whole very good-naturedly. There were few, if any, criminal excesses on their part, except pig and chicken stealing. But the negro did not yet know what to do with his freedom, and the whites had not yet learned how to treat the negroes as freemen. The former masters were easily infuriated at the new airs of their former slaves, and resorted to all sorts of means to make them work. A great many acts of violence were committed by whites on blacks. But for the interposition of the National power much more blood would have flown, and the South might have become the theater of protracted and disastrous convulsions. The Freedmen's Bureau, an institution which subsequently became discredited by abuses creeping into it, did at the beginning most valuable service in evolving some order from the prevailing chaos, and in preventing more serious catastrophes. The passions of the war were still burning fiercely, and the restored Union, which manifested itself to the defeated Southerners only in the shape of victorious “Yankee soldiers” and liberated negro slaves, was at that time still heartily detested.

The contrast between the condition of things existing then and that existing now, cannot well be appreciated without a review of the developments which have brought it forth. No greater misfortune could, in my opinion, have happened to the South at that time than the death of Mr. Lincoln. He was the only man who, taking the perplexing problem of reconstruction into his hand, would have stood between the North and the South, looked up to with equal confidence by both. His moderation and charity would not have aroused suspicion at the North, nor would his tenacity of purpose with regard to emancipation and the rights of the negro have appeared vindictive to the South. He could have prevented the passions of the war from disturbing the work of peace. While thus President Lincoln would have been the best man for the business of reconstruction, President Johnson was, perhaps, the worst imaginable. During and immediately after the war his uppermost thought was that treason must be made odious by punishing the traitors. But a few months after his accession to the Presidency he insisted with equal vehemence that the government of the late insurgent States, then in a state of dangerous confusion, must be virtually turned over to the same class of men whom but recently he had denounced as traitors fit to be hanged. His ill-balanced mind was incapable of seeing that what might be wisdom some time afterwards, was folly then. The passionate temper with which he plunged into a bitter quarrel with Congress and the Republican party about these questions produced two most unfortunate effects. The minds of Southern men were turned away from the only thing that could put them on the road of peace, order and new prosperity, namely, a prompt and sincere accommodation of their thoughts and endeavors to the new order of things. They were made to delude themselves instead with the false hope of reversing in some way the emancipation of the slaves, at least partially, by legislative contrivances—their false hopes begetting false efforts in many directions, and these efforts leading to bitter, futile and wasteful struggles, which the poor South might and should have been spared. And secondly, Mr. Johnson's proceedings made the Northern people seriously afraid of a disloyal pro-slavery reaction in the South. He irritated the majority in Congress by defiant demonstrations, and thus he caused the most intricate problem of the time to become the subject of a passionate party broil, which seemed to render men heedless as to the consequences of their doings. The Republican majority in Congress, thinking itself betrayed by the President, went faster and farther in their measures to protect the rights of the freedmen, and to procure loyal majorities in the Southern States, than they might have thought necessary to do had they not distrusted the executive. And, on the other hand, Mr. Johnson, by intemperate utterances, stirred up opposition in the South to the measures enacted by Congress. Negro suffrage was introduced, instantaneous and general, thus thrusting a mass of ignorance as an active element into the body politic, while at the same time a large number of those who had taken a more or less prominent part in the rebellion, constituting the bulk of the property and intelligence of the South, were disfranchised and debarred from active participation in public affairs.

I do not say this to criticise the reconstruction measures in general. I have always believed that they were adopted from good motives and for good purposes; that in the light of history some of them appear ill-judged, but that reconstruction was one of those tangled problems in solving which any policy that may be adopted will in some way bring forth unsatisfactory consequences, and in some respects look like a mistake. Here were a number of insurgent communities just reconquered by force of arms; in them four millions of negroes liberated from slavery by the Government against the will of their former masters; that former master class exasperated by defeat and material distress, and face to face with the former slaves; these elements, with a fierce and apparently irreconcilable antagonism between them, to be brought into peaceful and mutually beneficial relations under a new order of things, so that the weaker might be permanently safe in the presence of the stronger. That was the perplexing task to be accomplished. Was it to be done by the constant interposition of a superior power? That would have been putting off indefinitely the restoration of local self-government in the Southern States. Was it to be done by at once restoring the States to their functions, leaving all the political power in them exclusively in the hands of the whites? That would have been surrendering the late slaves, emancipated by the act of the National Government, helpless to the mercy of their former masters, whose natural desire at the time was to reduce them to slavery again. Was it to be done by arming the late slaves with political rights so as to give them the means of self-protection, and by curtailing at the same time the political rights of the late master-class, so as to weaken their means of aggression? That would expose those States to all the evils of a rule of ignorance. Thus neither of these systems, nor any mixing of them, could in all respects have worked satisfactorily as to immediate consequences. But here I have to do only with actual results.

The great mass of negro voters fell promptly into the hands of more or less selfish and unscrupulous leaders, and the scandals of the so-called carpet-bag governments followed. The Southern whites might, perhaps, have exercised a stronger influence for good upon the negroes had they at once frankly and cordially accepted the new order of things. But the old passions and prejudices did not yield so quickly, and, moreover, I repeat, President Johnson's ill-advised doings had inspired them with delusive hopes of some sort of reaction. It would be wrong to class all who during that period—from the close of the war until 1877—acted as Republican leaders in the South among the demagogues and scoundrels. There were very honorable and patriotic men among them. But, on the whole, the corruption and public robbery going on under those governments can hardly be exaggerated. A mimicry of legislation, carried on by negroes, in part moderately educated, in part mere plantation hands, and led in many cases by adventurers bent upon filling their pockets quickly—that was for years what they had of government in several Southern States.

This, of course, could not last long. A change was sure to come. Unfortunately, the carpet-bag governments were, in a measure, sustained by party spirit in Congress, while, on the other hand, the reaction against them in the South took a lawless character. The Ku-Klux organization was first started for the suppression of disorder, and then became itself an element of lawlessness. Efforts were made to overcome the negro majorities by terrorism. Negroes who were politically active, suffered cruel maltreatment. A good many murders occurred. No doubt, of the “Southern outrage” stories, some were manufactured for political effect in the North, but others were unquestionably founded on truth. When the National Government ceased to uphold the carpet-bag governments by force of arms, the “Southern outrages” of the bloody kind gradually ceased. But the efforts to keep the negroes from exercising political control continued, although by different means. Force was supplanted by ruse. In some places negro majorities were overcome by tissue ballots. In others, registration was made difficult. In others, the voting places were so arranged as to put the negroes at a disadvantage. In others, where many offices were voted for at the same time, it was provided by law that there should be a separate ballot-box for each office, and that ballots put by voters into the wrong boxes should not be counted, the effect of which was that persons unable to read, and thus to identify the boxes, would be apt to lose their votes—an arrangement working somewhat like a disqualification of illiterates. In still other places efforts were made to influence the negro vote as it is influenced here and there in the North. Thus, while at the beginning of the reconstruction period the negroes were enfranchised and a large number of whites disfranchised by law, which brought forth Republican majorities and the carpet-bag governments, subsequently the negro vote was in a large measure neutralized, first by force and then by trickery, thus, by means wrong in themselves and eventually demoralizing in effect, making Democratic majorities to put an end to the carpet-bag governments, prevent the return of negro domination and secure honesty in the administration of public affairs.

There has been, concerning these facts, much crimination and recrimination between the North and the South, partly just and partly unjust. “By your reconstruction acts,” said the South, “you subjected us to the rule of ignorant and brutal negroes led by rapacious adventurers, who mercilessly plundered us at the time when the South, exhausted and impoverished, was most in need of intelligent and honest government.” “We could not help that,” answered the North, “for we were in justice bound not to leave the emancipated negro helpless at the mercy of his former master; we had to arm him with rights, and if you had been in our places, you, as an honorable people, would have been bound to do, and would have done, the same thing.” “You have terrorized voters,” said the North, “and controlled the ballot-box by force and fraud, and thus got political power which did not belong to you.” “We could not help that,” answered the South, “for the government of combined ignorance and rapacious rascality stripped us naked, and threatened us with complete ruin. No people could have endured this. We had to get rid of negro domination at any cost, and if you had been in our places you would have done the same thing.”

While this discussion was going on, a non-political but most powerful influence asserted itself. The Southern people got to work again. Immediately after the war the average Southerner was laboring under the impression that the emancipation of the slaves had brought the whole economic machinery of the South to a complete standstill, and that, unless some system of compulsory labor were restored, there was nothing but starvation and ruin in the future. Encouraged by President Johnson's erratic manifestations, he made all sorts of reactionary attempts, but failed. He had, after all, to try what could be done under the new order of things, and he did try. Gradually he discovered that the negro as a free man would work better than had been anticipated. He discovered also that white men could, and under the pressure of circumstances would, do many kinds of work to which formerly they had not taken kindly and readily. As work proved productive, hope revived, and with hope, energy and enterprise. The Southern man became aware that his salvation did not depend upon a reversal of the new order of things, but upon a wise development of it. He found that this new order of things was opening new opportunities and calling into action new energies. So his thoughts were more and more withdrawn from the past, with its struggles and divisions and resentments, and turned upon the present and future with their common interests, hopes and aspirations. While the professional politicians of the two sections were still storming at one another, the farmers, and the merchants, and the manufacturers, and the professional men, had found something else to occupy their minds. Many of them came into contact with Northern people and met there with a much friendlier feeling than they had anticipated. It dawned upon them that this was, after all, a good country to live in, and a good government to live under, and a good people to live with. And it is this sentiment, grown up slowly but with steadily increasing strength and spreading among all classes of society, even those whose feelings against the Union were bitterest during and immediately after the war, that has made the New South as we see it to-day.

It is not my purpose here to show in detail the economic growth of the South since the war. The Northern visitor will still be struck with the enormous difference between the South and the North in the matter of wealth. Travelling from State to State and attentively looking at country and town and people, he will be apt to ask two questions. One is: How could Southern men, considering the sparseness of their population and their comparative poverty, be so foolhardy as to urge the South into that war with the rich and populous North? And the other is: How was it possible for the Southern people, considering the enormous disparity of means and resources, to maintain that war for four long years?

But, although still poor, the South is decidedly richer than it was before the war, while, of course, its wealth is differently distributed. New industries have sprung up and old ones are better developed. The mineral resources are gradually drawn to light. In the iron regions of Alabama new towns are growing up, the appearance of which reminds one of Pennsylvania. Cotton mills are multiplying. Manufacturing establishments of various kinds are rising in many places. While the sugar interest in Louisiana has much declined, other branches of agriculture, such as tobacco in North Carolina, have taken a new start. The cotton crop is constantly growing larger. The question of decisive import is no longer only how the negroes will work, for the white people themselves are working much better than before. The number of young men in the villages and small towns standing idle around the grocery corners is steadily decreasing. Among young people the tendency to devote themselves earnestly to useful and laborious occupations is becoming much more general. The poor whites of both sexes are in many places found to make industrious and faithful operatives in manufacturing establishments.

About the working habits of the colored people different judgments are heard. One planter and one manufacturer will praise them while another complains. After much investigation and inquiry, I have formed the conclusion that the employers who treat the negroes most intelligently and fairly are usually satisfied with their work, while the employers who complain most are usually those who are most complained of. The question of negro labor seems to be largely a question of management. There may be exceptions to this rule, but not enough to invalidate it. The number of colored men who have acquired property is not very large yet, but it is growing. I have seen negro settlements of a decidedly thrifty and prosperous appearance. A few colored men have become comparatively wealthy and live in some style. It is generally said of them that they are “improvident.” This is doubtless true of a large majority of them; but they are only somewhat more improvident than their former masters who used to live on next year's crop. It is a question of degrees between them. Since their emancipation they have shown much zeal for the education of their young people. Here and there this zeal is said to have cooled a little, but, as far as I have observed, it has not cooled much. Their educational facilities are still scanty in the agricultural districts, where school is kept only three months in the year. A large portion of the colored country population is therefore still lamentably ignorant.

The most unsatisfactory feature of their condition as a class is a disinclination to work, shown by many of their young people who have grown up since the abolition of slavery. There is said to be a notion spreading among them that it is the aim and end of education to enable people to get on without work. This tendency is exciting a prejudice against the education of negroes not only among certain classes of whites, but also with some of the more thrifty among the negroes themselves. I heard of a prosperous negro farmer in Alabama owning a well-stocked farm of 500 acres, worked by him with his children, who refuses to send his boys to school because learning would spoil them for farm work, and who permitted only one of his girls to learn reading and writing, so that she might be able to keep his accounts. Here is a field for missionary work, which those whose public spirit is devoted to the elevation of the colored race should keep well in view. The relation of grammar to industry must be made tangible to the young mind, as it is at the Hampton Institute and several others. The addition of industrial teaching to the common school is in this respect of especial importance. Among those who have been slaves there are a great many skillful mechanics—blacksmiths, carpenters, harness-makers, shoe makers, etc. Their sons, raised in freedom, seem to be less inclined to devote themselves to these laborious trades; and yet the negro, with his mechanical aptitudes, might, properly trained and guided, furnish the South all the handicraftsmen necessary for ordinary work. As it is, the negroes constitute, and will for a long period to come continue to constitute, the bulk of the agricultural laboring force in the principal cotton States, and every sensible Southern man recognizes them as a most valuable and, in fact, indispensable element in developing the resources and promoting the prosperity of the South. They are there to stay, and must be made the best of by just and wise treatment.

The visitor will be struck with the generally hopeful and cheery tone prevailing in Southern society. Their recovery from the disasters of the war has been more rapid than at first they expected. They are proud, and justly proud, of what they have accomplished in that direction. They are glad to have strangers observe it. Having done so much, they feel that they can do more. While business is in many respects depressed in the South, less complaint of this is heard than at the North. The general spirit prevailing in the South now is very like that characteristic of the new West: a high appreciation of the resources and advantages of the country; great expectations of future developments; a lively desire to excite interest in those things, and to attract Northern capital, enterprise and immigration; a strong consciousness and appreciation of the importance to them of their being a part of a great, strong, prosperous and united country.

The political effect of the steady growth of such feelings has been a very natural one. It is the complete disappearance of all “disloyal” aspirations. However strong their desire to destroy the Union may have been twenty years ago, I am confident, scarcely a corporal's guard of men could be found in the South to-day who would accept the disruption of the Union if it were presented to them. Those were right who predicted in the early part of the war that the abolition of slavery would not only break the backbone of the rebellion, but also remove the cause of disloyalty from the South. This it has completely accomplished. In fact, never in the history of this Republic has there been a time when there was no disunion feeling at all in this country, until now. Ever since the revolutionary period until within a few years there have always been some people who, for some reason or another, desired the dissolution of the Union, or who thought it possible, or who speculated upon its effects. Now, for the first time, there is nowhere such a wish, or such a thought, or such a speculation. By everybody the “Union now and forever” is taken for granted. The South is thoroughly cured of the mischievous dream of secession, not only by the bloody failure of its attempt, but by the constantly growing conviction that success would have been a terrible misfortune to themselves. Many a Southern man who had been active in the rebellion, said to me in conversation about the war: “It is dreadful to think what would have become of us if we had won.” They would fight now as gallantly to stay in the Union as twenty-two or three years ago they fought to get out of it. There is no doubt, should any danger threaten the Union again, the Southern people would be among its most zealous defenders.

There has been a suspicion raised at the North that this loyal garb is put on by Southern men merely for the purpose of concealing secret disloyal designs. This is absurd. Before the war they plotted and conspired, it is true. But they did not keep their purposes secret. On the contrary, they paraded them on every possible occasion. They were outspoken enough, and it was not their fault if they were not believed. Whatever may be said of our Southern people, they have never been deep dissemblers. When they say they are for the Union, they are just as honest as they were when they pronounced themselves against it.

As to the abolition of slavery, the change of sentiment is no less decided. However desperately they may have fought against emancipation, but few men can now be found in the South who would restore slavery if they could. It is said that there are some, but I have not been able to find one. The expression: “The war and the abolition of slavery have been the making of the South,” is heard on all sides. It is generally felt that new social forces, new energies, have been called into activity, which the old state of things would have kept in a torpid condition. There is, therefore, no danger of another pro-slavery movement. The relations between the colored laborer and the white employer are bound to develop themselves upon a bona-fide free-labor basis. Of the social and political relations between the two races, something more will be said below.

The distrust among Northern people as to the revival of loyal sentiments in the South, while in some cases honestly entertained, has in others been cultivated for political purposes. The question is asked: “Why, if they are loyal, do they select as their representatives men who were prominent in the rebellion? What about their reverence for Jefferson Davis?” and so on. Every candid inquirer will find to these questions a simple answer: In the “Confederate States,” a few districts excepted, nearly all white male adults entered the military service. They were all “rebel soldiers.” When after the war the Southern people had to choose public officers from among themselves, they were in many places literally confined to a choice between rebel soldiers and negroes. In other places they were not so confined. But they followed the natural impulse of preferring as their agents and representatives men who really represented them, who had been with them “in the same boat” in fair weather and in foul. This companionship in good and ill fortune has in all ages and in all countries been a strong bond to bind men together. One rebel soldier could hardly be expected to say that another rebel soldier was unworthy of public trust because of his service in the rebel army, for he would thus have disqualified himself. Nor was there necessarily any disloyalty in this—not even a remnant of it; for a rebel soldier who after the war had “accepted the situation” in perfectly good faith and sincerely resolved to accommodate himself to the new order of things, might naturally prefer as his representative another rebel soldier who had “accepted the situation” with equal sincerity, for the representation would then be more honest and, probably, more efficient.

A peculiarly terrific figure in partisan harangue is the “Rebel Brigadier.” From the descriptions made of him the “Rebel Brigadier” might be supposed to be an incurably black-hearted traitor, still carrying the rebel flag under his coat to bring it out at an opportune moment, still secretly drilling his old hosts on dark nights, and getting himself elected to Congress for the purpose of crippling the Government by artfully contrived schemes to accomplish the destruction of the Union as soon as his party is well settled in power. Now, what kind of man is the “Rebel Brigadier” in reality? He belonged in the South, originally, to the same class to which the Union brigadiers belonged in the North. After the close of the war he found himself as poor as the rest of his people. At first he moped and growled a little, and then went to work to make a living—as a farmer, or a lawyer, or a railroad employee, or an insurance man, or a book agent. Being a man of intelligence, he was among the first to open his eyes to the fact that the war had been—perhaps a very foolish venture for the South, because it was undertaken against overwhelming odds—and certainly a very disastrous one, because it left nothing but wreck and ruin behind it; one of those enterprises which a man of sense may delude himself into once, but never again. He is now very busy repairing his fortunes in the civil walks of life, and the better he succeeds, the more conservative he grows, for the more clearly he perceives that his own fortunes are closely linked to the general prosperity of the country, and that everything hurtful to the country hurts him. He is in many instances drawn into public life by the choice of his neighbors. His views on questions of public policy may frequently be mistaken—they probably are. He may also be always ready to jump up in defense of his record and the record and character of his associates in the war. He shows pride of his and their gallantry in the field, as every soldier will do, and he is unwilling to have it said that his motives were infamous a thing which but few men, and those not the best, are willing to hear or admit. But having learned at his own cost what civil war is, he would be among the last to think of rebellion again. He has that military honor in him which respects the terms of a capitulation; and if he has any ambition to show his prowess once more, it will be for the restored Union and not against it.

But what does the affection for Jefferson Davis mean which is occasionally displayed? The candid inquirer will find that those demonstrations of affection have a sentimental, not a practical significance. Southern men do not attempt to shift the responsibility for the rebellion. They discriminate little among themselves as to the proportion of guilt, and in treating Jefferson Davis and other leaders with respect after their downfall, they think they are in a certain sense acting in self-defense. I have heard the most thoroughly “reconstructed” Southerners say that, if after the close of the war they had made haste to tear one another to pieces and to cover their leaders with disgrace, they would not feel themselves entitled to the respect of Northern gentlemen. To illustrate the compatibility of such sentiments with thorough loyalty to the Union I may quote a conversation I had with a young Southerner who had grown up since the war, graduated at Harvard and become in all respects a thoroughly national man without the least tinge of sectional feeling or prejudice.

The Southern people [said he] really trouble themselves little about Jefferson Davis. They have no confidence in his judgment, and would not think of following him again as a leader. But they do not like to hear it said that the leader they once followed was an infamous rascal. The Northern people ask too much of us when they insist that we should brand all such men with infamy. Look at my case. My father was a Confederate general. I was a baby when the war broke out, and have studied the matter since. I think the secession movement was the craziest thing ever attempted, and its success would have been one of the most horrible misfortunes in the history of the world. Now, my father talked, and agitated, and fought on that side. He is as guilty as any of them. And yet I know him to be a very kind, honorable and good man in every respect, the best man I ever saw. Would you ask me to call my father a black-hearted traitor? I cannot do it. He is a good and honest man, and is my father.

I repeat, the young man who said this is one of the most enthusiastic Americans that ever cheered for the Stars and Stripes, a man who would willingly let his State go to the bottom to serve the Union.

As to Jefferson Davis, the question of practical importance is whether he would find any followers if attempting to lead another movement against the National authority. He would not only not find any number worth speaking of, but such an attempt would destroy the last remnant of his prestige in the South at once. If he were suspected of having any ambitious designs involving the political action of the Southern people, he would instantly reveal himself as what he really is: a powerless old man who, having once led the Southern people into disaster and ruin, is now treated with the respect usually thought due to eminent misfortune, because it is believed by all that he will never try to do so again. The sentimental demonstrations in his favor, while they do sometimes touch a sore point at the North, are, therefore, beyond that, really of no practical consequence whatever.

More pertinent is the question why the Southern whites, with the revival of loyal sentiment, did not in large numbers join the Republican party, but remained in mass on the Democratic side. Men of standing and influence in the South would, in my opinion, indeed have rendered a valuable service to their people had they put themselves into friendlier communication with the dominant party immediately after the war, thus to gain more of the confidence of the freedmen who naturally looked to the Republican party for guidance. Many difficulties might thus have been avoided. But, unfortunately, it was just then that President Johnson's indiscreet conduct turned their thoughts in a different direction. And, moreover, the character and conduct of many of the Republicans in places of power in the South at that period did not invite such a movement. Some of the latter preferred to organize the negroes as a political force under their own absolute leadership. And thus the Republican party, in some of the Southern States at least, became that organization of ignorance led by rapacity, by which the Southern whites felt themselves virtually forced, in spite of the divergencies of political opinion among them, to rally under the Democratic banner. The bond which held them together was the common fear of negro domination. This fear exercised an influence more or less strong as the danger of negro predominance was locally more or less threatening. But for this one element of political cohesion, that which is called “the Solid South” would ere this have dropped to pieces. And as that element of cohesion loses its strength, the South will, no doubt, gradually cease to be “solid.”

Of this the premonitory symptoms are already apparent. The common interest, as Southern men conceive it, of preventing negro domination in their own borders, is essentially of a defensive character. But the Southern States have no longer any common object to carry aggressively against the interests of the rest of the country, as they had, for instance, when they were fighting for the expansion of slavery. There is, therefore, no longer any distinctive “Southern policy” in the old sense. The economic interests of the South and of the North are becoming more and more alike. There is no longer any essential difference between them as between two countries whose material development requires, respectively, different means and policies. Economic questions are no longer discussed between the sections, but within them. As to the tariff, for instance, it looks as if the protection sentiment were gaining ground in the South as it is losing ground in the North. Although the “cause of silver” is strong in the South, yet nobody will pretend that there is unanimity about it or that it is felt to be a peculiarly Southern interest. About these things, as well as the matter of internal revenue, the subject of banking, civil service reform, temperance legislation etc., there is enough difference of opinion among Southern men who now call themselves Democrats, to produce serious effects as soon as the apprehension of common danger disappears.

The “time-honored principles” of the Democratic party, as far as they refer to theories of government, have become somewhat obscure as to their identity in the Southern mind, and are correspondingly weakened as to their influence in Southern politics. Many of the older men there, indeed, still delight in an argument about a point of “strict construction,” and in quoting Jefferson's first inaugural. But to the common run of mankind in the South the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798 have ceased to be known by name, and even a good many of the older men, when it comes to a practical application of their political principles, are not at all disinclined to admit considerable latitude in the exercise of the National power, if it promises them any local advantage. Indeed, it might even be said that many Southern men in these days seem inclined to favor—perhaps not in theory but certainly in practice—rather too loose than too strict a construction of the Constitutional functions of the General Government.

Moreover, there is a generation of young men growing up in the South who, when the present and prospective condition of the South is discussed at the North, are in most cases left altogether out of view. And yet, in point of fact, in a very few years an absolute majority of the voters of the South will consist of men who never saw a Confederate flag, who never in their lives saw a negro that was not a freeman, and who know of slavery only as a thing of mere historic interest, which in its day did a great deal of mischief to the country, and upon which the enlightened opinion of mankind has recorded its judgment. Whatever foolish attempts may have been made by some persons in the South immediately after the war to educate their posterity in hatred of the North and of the Union, these young men draw their ideas and aspirations entirely from the new order of things. The political battlecries of old times are to them almost meaningless vociferation; their minds are absorbed by present cares and interests of far greater importance to them. A good many of them are ambitious to accomplish something in the world, to make their abilities tell, and to that end to infuse some new life into the old Southern communities. They grow impatient at the slow pace of the old-time “war horses,” and of the solemn dignitaries who still cling to traditional notions and ways; they speak with remarkable irreverence of the antiquated pretensions of the old “chivalry,” and have as little sympathy with the narrow views of the farmer politician who would rather see a good system of public instruction go to the bottom than make a decent appropriation of money for the support of it. A good many young men answering this description are beginning to show an active interest in public affairs; not a few have already become members of Southern legislatures, and they will, of course, in rapidly increasing numbers push to the front, and at no distant day occupy the places of controlling influence. Their feelings are throughout strongly national, and in several places I found among them evidences of a very intelligent and stirring public spirit. They have so far “gone with the party,” but there is much independent thinking among them, which, no doubt, in the course of time will determine their political action. Some exceptions may be found, but not many.

In this respect the change taking place in the political attitude of the colored people can scarcely fail to produce far-reaching effects. The two races in the South have been kept in relations of mutual fear by the apprehension on one side that negro domination meant ruin to the people, and that the continued ascendancy of the Republican party threatened a return of negro domination, and, on the other side, that a victory of the Democratic party in a National election would mean the restoration of slavery. The latter belief had been industriously kept alive by Republican politicians and colored preachers, and was much more generally entertained among the negroes than might be thought possible. In fact, as soon as the result of the late Presidential election became known in the South, very many of the former slaves went to their former masters to offer themselves anew for service.

Of this fear the colored people are now thoroughly cured. They looked upon the Republican party as the natural protector of their freedom, and upon that protection as necessary to them. They have now discovered that this necessity no longer exists, and that, as to their freedom, they need not be afraid of the Democrats. This experience has set a good many of them to thinking about some other things, especially about their social status, and the means by which to improve it.

There are two different standards by which to judge the treatment the negro receives in the South: one is a comparison with the treatment white people mete out to one another, and the other is a comparison with the treatment the negro receives at the North. Applying the first standard, we find the difference undoubtedly very great in all those relations of life which are not effectively regulated by law. But comparing, in this respect, the South with the North, the difference will be found small, and it is accounted for in a great measure by the obvious difference in the mental and moral condition of the colored people, and their significance in the social body at the North and the South respectively. The Northern negroes have, with few exceptions, been freemen all their lives, and their parents before them; most of them are tolerably well educated, and they form only a small percentage of the population, so small, indeed, that as a constituent element of society they are scarcely of any consequence. While there are in Southern towns not a few negroes comparing very favorably with those we see in the North, a large part of the colored population of the South consists of plantation hands, a class of persons entirely unknown in the Northern country. Emancipation found many of them only a few removes from absolute barbarism, and no educational efforts could have lifted them very high above that state in one generation. The colored population, with such elements in it, forms in some of the Southern States a majority, in others a strong minority of the people, heavily preponderating in certain geographical districts. The negro in the South is, therefore, a very different being from the negro in the North in point of quality and of quantity, and of his practical relations to the interests of society. As to the spirit in which the negro is treated the two sections correspondingly differ somewhat, but not very much. As a matter of fact, there is among the white people of the North as well as of the South a wide-spread feeling that the two races do not belong together. In neither of the two sections do they, therefore, mingle socially upon an equal footing. But as to those public accommodations and conveniences, the equal enjoyment of which is usually put under the head of “civil rights,” a difference in the treatment colored people receive is perceptible between the North and the South; it is, however, mainly one of degrees, and not very great. Neither is the treatment of negroes the same in all the Southern States. I have travelled with negroes—I mean colored persons travelling independently, not as servants accompanying their employers—in first-class railway cars as well as street cars, not only in the North, but also in the South—in some Southern States at least. In Georgia the railroad companies have to provide for the colored people separate cars, of the same quality, however, as furnished to white people paying the same fare, while in Tennessee, as I am informed, colored passengers are invariably turned into the smoking-cars. I found at several railroad stations in the South separate waiting-rooms for colored people, a discrimination which is not made at the North. I have never met any colored people as guests in the dining-rooms of first-class hotels, either at the South or at the North. I have seen colored people sitting in the same rows with whites at lectures, in at least one or two instances in the South, and several times in the North. In the South the two races do not attend the same churches and schools, and this, as I have been assured by colored and white people alike, in accordance, not only with the wishes of the whites, but also with the preference of the colored people themselves, who in many places have shown a desire even to have their white teachers supplanted by persons of color. In the North, whites and negroes have sat together in schools and churches, and here and there do so now; but, if I am rightly informed, in most places where the number of colored people is considerable, they have separated. This separation is, of course, more voluntary in the North than in the South, but it is generally favored by colored preachers and teachers for business reasons. We hear, from time to time, of inoffensive colored people being brutally ejected from public places and means of conveyance, and such stories come unquestionably oftener from the South than from the North. The spirit which prompts such brutalities is, of course, the same everywhere. It is more frequently met with in the South, partly because the contact between the two races is more frequent, and partly because there is still a larger class of whites in the South who feel so little confident, and therefore so restless, concerning their superiority over the negro, that they avail themselves of every chance to make sure of it by some outward demonstration. And the frontier tone still prevailing in the sparsely-settled districts of the South is apt to make such demonstrations peculiarly rude. There is but little, if any, difference between the North and the South as to the sentiment prevailing about such things in what may properly be called the best society, for a gentleman of genuine self-respect will never fear any danger for his dignity in meeting with people of ever so lowly a station, or in respecting their rights.

It has frequently been asserted, and probably not without reason, that on the whole the colored race meets with more cordial kindness among the white people of the South than among those of the North. The difference may be defined thus: In the South more kindness, in the North more justice. Kindness is warm, but arbitrary; justice is cold, but impartial. I am, however, inclined to think that, but for the low moral and intellectual condition of the plantation negroes, and the dread inspired by their number, and the race-antagonisms on the political field, the general relations between the colored people and the whites would indeed be more satisfactory, more agreeable, in the South than in the North, and I believe that as the negroes become better educated, and as the change in their political attitude takes place to which I shall refer below, their “civil rights” will, even without further legal machinery, find fully as much protection in the South as in the North, and perhaps more.

The election of a Democratic President has been to the negro a great blessing, for it has delivered him from two dangerous delusions: one, that the success of the Democratic party in a National election would make him a slave again, and the other, that by acting together as a race the negroes could wield in politics a controlling influence with much profit to themselves. They know now that their freedom is assured whatever party wins, and that it is not necessary for them to herd together in a political party of their own for self-defense. They know also that they can never hope again to become the ruling power in politics as they felt themselves to be for a time under the leadership of Republican adventurers, and that, therefore, negro politics in the old way will never pay them again. This will help them to understand that they will best serve their race by identifying themselves closely with the general interest.

The state of mind produced among the negroes by this revelation can scarcely be better expressed than in the language of an address delivered by an intelligent colored politician, a United States mail agent, before a colored debating club in a Southern city during my visit there. Of this address I was fortunate enough to secure the manuscript. The title was “The Effect of the Incoming Administration upon the Negro Race.” After setting forth that the election of a Democratic President did not, as had been apprehended, threaten the freedom of the negro, it proceeded:

Man cannot live upon bread alone, nor can a race achieve civil and political success by politics alone. Education, wealth and morality must keep pace with political progress in order for that progress to be of a lasting and permanent character. Having given nearly twenty years to vain endeavors to secure full and complete civil and political rights under Republican rule, and having failed, Democratic restoration destroys all hope of securing them with the ballot; therefore, the negro will eliminate himself from the body-politic. His ambitions and aspirations will naturally turn to the obtaining of money, property, education and the improvement of his morals. And when he shall have spent as much time and consideration upon these subjects as he has upon politics, his condition will be advanced a hundred per cent. The bugbear “negro domination” being removed by national Democratic success, will bring about a better local feeling between the two races, and also be the means of producing division in the ranks of the party that is now held together by fear and race prejudices. That Democratic success will benefit rather than injure the negro race is fast making itself manifest to every thoughtful reader of the signs of the times. Too much politics and not enough of the other substantialities of life has done the race more harm than Democratic opposition.

This, no doubt, expresses the general sentiments of educated colored people in the South. It means the end of race politics. But it does not mean the end of negro voting. About this, too, the orator here quoted had something to say:

Hereafter the negro, in casting his vote, will be governed by his immediate interest. If A, a Democrat, runs for office against B, a Republican, he will not vote for B, simply because he is a Republican, nor for A, simply because he is a Democrat; but he will vote for the one who will do that which will be to his interest. No one can call this ingratitude on his part, for he has more than paid the debt of gratitude he owed the Republican party for his freedom.

Indeed, the phrase that the debt of gratitude to the Republican party was more than paid, I heard from so many colored men in nearly the same language, that it seemed almost as if the word had been passed around among them. This simply signifies a strong tendency among the negroes of the South to go over to the Democrats, and to put themselves in accord with “their white neighbors and friends.” Many of them openly avow this intention.

The consequences will inevitably be what they always are under such circumstances. In most of the Southern States the Democratic party will be substantially without opposition. The common dread of negro domination, which held it together in spite of internal differences of opinion on other points, will have vanished. These differences will make themselves felt more strongly and widely. Independent movements will multiply. Most of these will probably at first not turn on National politics, but on home questions. Instead of driving the negro away from the ballot-box, each Democratic faction will try to strengthen itself by getting as much as possible of the colored vote. The negro will thus be virtually dragged to the polls again by Democratic hands. In stances of this on a small scale, in local contests, have already been witnessed. When different candidates or factions of the Democratic party, or two different parties, outbid one another for the colored vote, the negro's rights will, of course, find the most efficient protection in that very competition for their political favor, and the effect will also be gradually to soften the harshness of civil discrimination in the way above indicated. Thus the original object for which negro suffrage was instituted, the protection of the freedman's rights, will, indeed, have been accomplished by it. Of course, as soon as the colored vote breaks up, it will cease to be a political force on the side of the Republican party. Republican politicians complain already that the introduction of negro suffrage has served only to give the Southern States a larger proportion of votes in Congress and in the Electoral College than they otherwise would have had, and that this increase tells almost wholly in favor of the Democrats. It has, indeed, had that effect with regard to the relative strength of parties; but there is nothing surprising in this. When the matter of negro suffrage was under discussion there were far-seeing men enough who predicted that, as is usually the case with a population at the same time ignorant and poor and dependent, the vote of the negro would, for a long period to come, really not be his own; that it would virtually be cast by the political leader, probably a demagogue, or by the employer. This prediction, in the very face of which negro suffrage was introduced, stands justified. The demagogue cast the bulk of the colored vote as long as the negro was in dread as to his freedom. That apprehension being dispelled, the employer, or rather the employer class, will control the bulk of it now—until the negro shall have become sufficiently educated and independent to think and act for himself. This may be considered a grievance by the Republican politician. But the Republican of conscience and principle will not forget that just in this way negro suffrage has accomplished the paramount object for which the true Republican desired its introduction, namely, the protection of the freedman's rights, and that it was probably the only way in which that end could be reached.

But as the old antagonisms cease and the negro vote is bid for by different interests among the employers, it will be apt to become a regular article of trade, and an element of gross corruption in Southern politics. In casting about for remedies to be applied, Southern men will do well to consider that, consistently with the new order of things, this evil can be mitigated only by bringing the colored people under the best possible educational influences, and by encouraging among them the acquisition of property, and thereby the creation of a conservative interest calculated to bring the responsibility of voters home to them.

The accession of a large body of colored voters will, of course, make the Democratic party in the South much stronger than before. But it is probable that, in the absence of the cohesive power of common fears and of a distinctively Southern policy, the divisions on local questions which have already taken place will facilitate the formation of new groupings on questions of a National character, and that the South, at a day not very distant, will cease to figure as a “solid” quantity in our National elections.

But whether this takes place in four, or in eight, or in twelve years, no unprejudiced observer will fail to recognize the fact that the Rebellion is really over, and that those who still speak of the white people of the South as “unregenerated rebels, as disloyal and as bitter as ever,” betray either lamentable ignorance or something much worse.

I think it safe to affirm that to-day, twenty years after the close of the war, the Southern people are as loyal to the Union as the people of any part of the country, that they fully understand and profoundly feel the value of their being part of it, and that a disunion movement would find no more adherents in South Carolina than in Massachusetts. I think it also safe to say that, whatever atrocities may have happened during that terrible period of sudden transition from one social order to another, the relations between the white and black races are now in progress of peaceful and friendly adjustment, and that the disappearance of race antagonism on the political field will do more for the safety of the negro's rights and the improvement of his position in human society than could be done by any intervention of mere power.

If there are any dangerous political tendencies perceptible among the Southern people, they are not such as are frequently used as bugbears to frighten the loyal sentiment of the North, but rather lie in the opposite direction. There is no longer any danger of a stubborn adherence to State-rights doctrines of an anti-national character. The danger is rather in an inclination to look too much to the National Government for benefits to be conferred upon the people of the Southern States—an inclination cropping out in a variety of ways of far greater practical significance than mere discussions on theories of government. Neither is there any danger that in consequence of the Democratic victory in the National election the negro will be deprived of his right to vote; the danger is rather that, as the Democrats divide among themselves, the negro will be drawn to the polls and made to vote more than he otherwise would, by demoralizing inducements.

It is also to be apprehended that large numbers of people in the South, under the influence of their struggle with poverty or with chronic embarrassments, will long be subject to those delusions on economic questions which are at the bottom of the fiat-money idea and the silver movement, and that, as they see a prospect for an industrial development in the South, extreme protection theories may grow strong there by the time the North is through with them. But these things are not peculiar to the South. There is nothing of a “peculiar institution,” of a “Southern policy” in them. A “friend of silver” in Texas cannot possibly be hotter than a “friend of silver” in Colorado. The fiat-money man in Mississippi borrows his arguments from the fiat-money man in Ohio; and the free-trader in South Carolina or the protectionist in northern Alabama is substantially of the same mind with the free-trader in Minnesota or the protectionist in Pennsylvania. There is no longer any division of political aims and motives marked by Mason and Dixon's line. The errors which the Southern people are liable to commit with regard to all these things may be grievous enough, but they will not be peculiarly Southern errors; and in the eyes of sensible men they will not furnish even a plausible pretext for keeping alive sectional suspicions and animosities.

The election of a Democratic President, whatever else may be hoped or apprehended from it, has certainly had two immediate results of great importance. It has convinced every candid man in the country that the Southern people were not, as had been apprehended by some, waiting for the advent of the Democratic party to power to put forth disloyal sentiments and schemes, but that the victory of the party supported by them was rather esteemed by them as an opportunity for a demonstration of national feeling; and, secondly, it has proven to the country in general, and in particular to the negroes, that the freedom and rights of the late slave do not depend upon the predominance of any political party, but are safe under one as well as under the other.

These points being settled, the public mind may henceforth rest in the assurance that the period of the rebellion is indeed a thing of the past; that the existence of the Government and the legitimate results of the war are no longer in jeopardy, whatever political party may carry the elections, and that the American people can, without fear of any darkly lurking danger, give themselves to the discussion of questions of political ethics, or of administration, or of political economy, treating them upon their own proper merits. This consummation may be unwelcome to that class of politicians whose main stock in trade has long consisted in unwholesome sectional distrusts and animosities carefully nursed, and who, therefore, make it a business to blow up any savage freak of a Southern ruffian into a crime of the Southern people, or the harmless lunacy of any Southern “crank” into a serious danger to the Union. But to the patriotic American the welfare of the Republic is after all dearer than the political capital of any party. The more enthusiastic he was as a Union man, the more sincerely happy he will be to see the Union fully restored, and held together, not by force of arms, but by a common national pride and common interests and hopes and aspirations. The more earnest he was as an enemy of slavery, the more he will rejoice to find the rights of the freedman secured by his friendly relations with his white neighbors. Instead of eagerly seizing upon every chance for sowing suspicion and bitterness between the North and the South, he will hail with gladness all evidences of returned fraternal feeling, and he will not be ashamed to own that even those who during the war stood against him as enemies, had, as fellow-citizens, his sympathy in the calamities they had brought upon themselves, and that his heartiest wishes are with them for the success of every honorable effort to repair their fortunes and to resume their places in the citizenship of this Republic.

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Defining the New South: Faulkner, Williams and Wright

Flannery O’Connor, the doyenne of Southern Literature, famously said that literary portrayals of the South must ‘distort without destroying’; Lindsay Parnell looks at how this dictate was followed by three iconic Southern writers: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright. The South is plagued by a historical hangover of failure and ‘well-publicized sins’, said O’Connor in a lecture to students on ‘the Regional Writer’. The literature of the South must therefore interrogate these historical sins, as well as confronting their legacy; the bigotry that for some has come to define the region. Writers and artists must play a pivotal role in the attempt to re-craft a progressive ‘New South’ or risk being subsumed by the regressive cultural norms of their day. Southern writers have thus articulated the often silenced voices of marginalized identities in the American South. This concept has been explored in the revolutionary work of writers William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright, whose work examines a resurrected but broken South. Born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897, William Faulkner has maintained his reigning deity status of Southern Literature since the publication of his first novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926). The fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi is home to many of Faulkner’s novels (14 of his 19 are set there). His most productive period, from 1929 until 1942, featured the publication of novels including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942), all of which have been acclaimed as classics of both of Southern writing, and canonical works of English Fiction.

Throughout all of his fiction, Faulkner explored the idea of the American South as breeding a sense of the abject within impoverished communities. In his work this region is plagued by ‘others’, deviants that threaten the structure of society and law, who have subverted the codes of normal society. He did this through a narrative lens of historical and regional tension, incorporating war, poverty and racial injustice into the seams of his fiction. Faulkner’s astounding articulation of the South’s cultural pathology sees the region as one which is haunted by the crimes of its past, and characters as having internalised the pathology of guilt, until history itself becomes a wilful and pernicious presence. It was a body of respected work that earned Faulkner a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. A brilliantly dominating presence of American theatre, Tennessee Williams explored the ‘New South’ for the stage in his forty-year literary career. Born Thomas Lanier in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams’ relocation at a young age from St. Louis proved damaging as it distanced him from his home. This move however would assist him in discovering the founding principals of what would become his dramatic canons—characters victim to psychologically debilitating isolation and detachment from any society or community to which they could belong.

Williams’ prominent dramatic scripts highlight the underlying humanity of the South, often buried under discrimination and intolerance. His examination of the conflict existing between the public and the private defines his numerous works of drama and prose alike. His stage plays famously explore deeply dysfunctional families in a post-Civil War South. Along with inquisitions into the role of religion and sexuality, Williams’ characters seek out the boundaries of their own self-hood while simultaneously seeking out a regional identity. The playwright’s preoccupation with the emergence of a ‘New South’ is depicted most famously in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). This Pulitzer Prize winning drama tells the story of the ‘expired’ Southern Belle, Blanche DuBois, who has moved in with her sister Stella and violent brother-in-law Stanley in New Orleans. Nearly a decade later, Williams published Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer Prize for Drama) in which a birthday celebration for Big Daddy’s birthday on the family plantation in Mississippi turns sour when his two sons wives return home. The domestic turmoil is tangible in a tangled matrix of anger, resentment and the lies of family secrecy. With an acclaimed canon of novels, poetry, memoir, screenplays stage plays, Tennessee Williams still remains an incontestable dramatic force investigating still relevant questions for the South. Williams’ courageous exploration of sexuality is comparable to the stirringly inspiration investigation of racial prejudice in the work of fellow Mississippian, Richard Wright.

Born at the turn of the 20th century, novelist and short story writer Richard Wright experienced an impoverished childhood in Mississippi. His family moved from Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee only to witness the tragic death of Wright’s father. Shortly after the death of his father, Wright’s mother moved her children to Chicago. After school Wright became a member of the Communist party before relocating to the famous cultural hub of Harlem in 1937. This move would prove to be one of the most influential and creatively inspiring events of Wright’s life as he was consumed by the artistic spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Wright also spent time abroad in Paris befriending fellow literary expat and novelist James Baldwin. Questioning the state of race relations in the United States was the nucleus of Wright’s literary preoccupations. Wright’s most distinguished and critically acclaimed work, Native Son , was published in 1940. Native Son is the story of the greatly impoverished Bigger Thomas, a young man living in Chicago. Bigger feels the pressure to provide financially for his family. He becomes involved in a life of petty theft to protect and provide for his family and is a victim of racial prejudice. The racial injustice plaguing his life forces him to commit unspeakable acts in the name of survival. Wright never excuses Bigger’s behavior throughout the novel, but presents a captivating character study of someone who is a victim of his own social conditions. Faulkner, Williams and Wright all present enthralling and challenging multifaceted portrayals of the Southern identity. An understanding of the American South calls for an explicit recognition of a culture defined by its violent oppositions and a reality removed from its antebellum notions of plantation wealth and Southern grandeur. This is evident in the work of these three great writers, who, by interrogating the prejudices of their native land, redefined what Southern culture would come to mean.

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The American Yawp Reader

Henry grady on the new south (1886).

Atlanta newspaperman and apostle of the “New South,” Henry Grady, won national recognition for his December 21, 1886 speech to the New England Society in New York City.

“There was a South of slavery and secession — that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom — that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour.” These words, delivered from the immortal lips of Benjamin H. Hill, at Tammany Hall, in 1866, true then and truer now, I shall make my text to-night.

The old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth. The new South presents a perfect democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement; a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core; a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace; and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age.

The new South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life. The light of a grander day is falling fair on her face. She is thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because, through the inscrutable wisdom of God, her honest purpose was crossed and her brave armies were beaten.

This is said in no spirit of time-serving or apology. The South has nothing for which to apologize. She believes that the late struggle between the States was war and not rebellion, revolution and not conspiracy, and that her convictions were as honest as yours. I should be unjust to the dauntless spirit of the South and to my own convictions if I did not make this plain in this presence. The South has nothing to take back.

In my native town of Athens is a monument that crowns its central hill — a plain, white shaft. Deep cut into its shining side is a name dear to me above the names of men — that of a brave and simple man who died in brave and simple faith. Not for all the glories of New England, from Plymouth Rock all the way, would I exchange the heritage he left me in his soldier’s death. To the foot of that shaft I shall send my children’s children to reverence him who ennobled their name with his heroic blood. But, sir, speaking from the shadow of that memory which I honor as I do nothing else on earth, I say that the cause in which he suffered and for which he gave his life was adjudged by a higher and fuller wisdom than his or mine, and I am glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty hand, and that human slavery was swept forever from American soil — that the American Union was saved from the wreck of war.

This message, Mr. President, comes to you from consecrated ground. Every foot of soil about the city in which I live is sacred as a battle ground of the Republic. Every hill that invests it is hallowed to you by the blood of your brothers who died for your victory, and doubly hallowed to us by the blood of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat — sacred soil to all of us, rich with memories that make us purer and stronger and better, silent but stanch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms, speaking an eloquent witness in its white peace and prosperity to the indissoluble union of American States and the imperishable brotherhood of the American people.

Source: Life and Labors of Henry W. Grady, His Speeches, Writings, Etc. (Atlanta: J. C. Hudgins & Co., 1890), 99-116.

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Origins of the new South, 1877-1913

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6.4 The "New South"

3 min read • january 17, 2023

Ashley Rossi

Eshal Warsi

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The South continued to struggle to find its new place in the country after the Civil War and Reconstruction. The days of the “ Old South ”-- The Lost Cause , chivalry, slavery as a “positive good”, etc ( Gone With the Wind, anyone?) were over. Despite some small areas of industrialization and some rallying calls to construct a “New South,” the south struggled to rebuild.

Some southerners promoted a new vision for a self-sufficient southern economy built on modern capitalist values, industrial growth, and improved transportation. Railroads and the expansion of markets led to increased industrial production and new city development. Henry Grady , the editor of the Atlanta Constitution spread the gospel of the New South with editorials that argued for economic diversity and laissez-faire capitalism.

Despite progress, the South remained a largely agricultural section and also the poorest region in the country. The poverty of the majority of southerners was not caused by northern capitalists. Two other factors were chiefly responsible:

The South’s late start at industrialization

A poorly educated workforce.

Agriculture in the "New South"

Although slavery has been outlawed, landowners continued to employ African Americans on their plantations through tenant farming and sharecropping .

Sharecropping is a type of agricultural system in which the landowners provide resources to farmers in return for a portion of the profits the farmers make from their crops. While this may sound reasonable, many former slaves had no choice but to work as tenants for white landowners. They could not legally own land and had to work for others.

Tenant Farming was another similar system. The landowners would rent out pieces of their land to a tenant farmer. They would pay the landowner rent through the crops they harvested that season.

Social Status for Former Slaves

There was little to no social mobility and economic opportunity for many African Africans due to racial segregation . The KKK continued using violence to keep African Americans out of the polls and legislative offices. Lynching was widespread. Literacy tests , grandfather clauses , and poll taxes were also used to restrict voting rights.

Supreme Court and Civil Rights

The Supreme Court ⚖️ made a series of decisions that severely limited the nature of the Fourteenth Amendment .

In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 , the Court ruled that Congress could not legislate against racial discrimination practices by private citizens, which included railroads, hotels, and other businesses. This meant that anyone but the government could discriminate against African Americans.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/%22Colored%22_drinking_fountain_from_mid-20th_century_with_african-american_drinking.jpg

Image Courtesy of Wikimedia

The most important of these cases was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The case stemmed from a challenge to a Louisiana law that required separate railway cars for white and black passengers. Homer Plessy, an African American man, refused to leave a whites-only railway car and was arrested. He argued that the law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantee equal protection under the law and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race.

The Supreme Court ruled that segregation was constitutional under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” This ruling ushered in the Jim Crow Era , and allowed the government institutions to practice segregation.

Voter Suppression

Various political and legal devices were invented to prevent blacks from voting. The most common were literacy tests . They were extremely difficult tests meant to stop African Americans from voting. Since many could not obtain formal education, they could not pass the test and vote in elections. Poll taxes and political party primaries for whites only ( white primaries ) also prevailed. Many southern states adopted grandfather clauses , which allowed a man to vote only if his grandfather had cast ballots in elections before Reconstruction.

Still, many brilliant minds (such as Booker T. Washington , W.E.B. DuBois , and Ida B. Wells ) continued to debate the nature of racial relations and advocate for civil rights.

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The New Deal and the South

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The first comprehensive treatment of the impact of the Roosevelt recovery program on the South

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With essays by Alan Brinkley, Harvard Sitkoff, Frank Freidel, Pete Daniel, J. Wayne Flynt, and Numan V. Bartley

The New Deal and the South represents the first comprehensive treatment of the impact of the Roosevelt recovery program on the South. In essays dealing with the New Deal's overall effect on the South, its influence on southern agriculture, labor, blacks, and politics, and its significance as a turning point in the region's history, the contributors provide readers with an opportunity to develop a more complete understanding of an era which a number of historians now mark as the period in which the New South actually began to become new.

Each of the essays in this collection was presented at the Ninth Annual Chancellor's Symposium on Southern History, held in October 1983, at the University of Mississippi. In the introductory essay, Frank Freidel identifies the New Deal period as one of the most important phases in the modernization of the South, one which linked the wishful thinking of the New South era to the much-publicized contemporary Sunbelt South. Pete Daniel describes the New Deal's role in the mechanization, consolidation, and corporatization of southern agriculture, a phenomenon that swept thousands of southerners from the land and paved the way for an all-out crusade to industrialize the region. In his analysis of the New Deal's impact on southern labor, Wayne Flynt assesses what the New Deal did and did not mean for southern industrial workers. Alan Brinkley stresses the tensions induced in southern politics during the New Deal era, particularly those caused by the Democratic Party's increased responsiveness to blacks and organized labor. Harvard Sitkoff, in surveying the New Deal's impact on black southerners, cites the limited nature of that impact but points to the seeds of future progress sown by the Roosevelt Administration and its policies. In the concluding essay Numan V. Bartley emphasizes the collapse of a paternalistic labor system and the shift of power from small town to urban elites and suggests that the years 1935–1945 may soon be seen as the “crucial decade” in southern history.

The New Deal and the South provides both the serious student and the general reader with an up-to-date assessment of one of the most critical transitional periods in southern history.

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The term "New South" entered public discourse in the United States after 1877, the year Reconstruction ended and the last federal occupation troops were withdrawn from the former Confederacy. State governments (often called the "redeemer" governments) across the South could finally reassert the power of the white majority, but the whole region faced systemic problems deriving from the Civil War , Reconstruction, and an outdated agrarian economy that had lost its chief labor unit, the slaves. Intentionally a politically neutral slogan behind which a wide range of individuals and groups could line up, the New South suggested a future-oriented, pragmatic, and conciliatory vision that could move the region beyond the trauma of the defeat of the Confederacy and into alignment with the rest of the nation. Its governing ideas were free-enterprise economics, a meritocratic social hierarchy, and harmonious (but not equal) relations between whites and African Americans .

The modernizers of the New South—those businessmen, political leaders, and journalists who wanted to direct the region toward the industrial model of the North—had to be cautious when it came to the sensitivities of many of their fellow southerners. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, a significant number of people throughout the South saw their feelings and attitudes reflected in a more powerful term, the "Lost Cause." The name designated a particular Southern motif launched in 1866 by the Richmond newspaperman Edward A. Pollard (1831–1872). The meaning of the Lost Cause was abundantly clear: in the Civil War the South had fought a legitimate battle for the cause of states' rights, one that had not been compromised by the surrender at Appomattox, but had, if anything, been glorified in defeat. The Lost Cause drew upon the memory of the blood sacrifice of the war and an inflexible belief in the superiority of Southern agrarian civilization. The New South idea was, in their view, an attempt "to "corrupt Southern principles by bringing material prosperity to the South" (Wilson, Baptized, p. 84). The partisans of the Lost Cause took an uncompromising position on any transformation that involved jettisoning a social order based on the concept of honor, an evangelical moral code, and the maintenance of a clear racial hierarchy. Whether or not these ideals were useful or appropriate for postwar southern society, they were articles of faith for many people, and those who proposed an alternative path for Dixie had to proceed with caution.

A GEORGIAN IN NEW YORK

When Henry Woodfin Grady (1850–1889), the managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, stepped off the train in New York in December 1886 to deliver a speech to the annual banquet of the New England Club, he faced a major opportunity. As a young newspaper owner in the southern metropolis, itself only recently arisen from the ashes of General Sherman's punitive campaign twenty-two years earlier, he arrived in the North uncertain of his status. On his side Grady had relative youth (born in 1850, he had not served in the war), commercial and journalistic achievement, and the sense that he would have a curious, if not sympathetic, audience. Working against him, however, was a subsoil layer of Northern beliefs about the South that still carried some of the animosity of the war years and the early Reconstruction period. Grady knew also that his words would find their way back to Atlanta and the wider South, where sensitivities could be offended by even a mild note of criticism of the Confederate past, particularly from the editor of the Constitution.

Grady's speech, "The New South," is in many ways a masterpiece of tightrope walking. In its course he plays with motifs of New England moral rigor, Virginia liberality, the efforts of Confederate veterans to revitalize their devastated farms, amicable race relations, and most importantly the idea of a region committed to a commercially and industrially progressive future. He paints a picture of a defeated South conscious of the honorable struggle in which it had engaged, but prepared to face the future without rancor. Grady also cleverly turns the direction of his speech toward the one region of the country that had contributed the most to the decades-long battle against slavery, when he asks

Now, what answer has New England to this message? Will she permit the prejudice of war to remain in the hearts of the conquerors, when it has died in the hearts of the conquered? Will she transmit this prejudice to the next generation, that in their hearts which never felt the generous ardor of conflict it may perpetuate itself? Will she withhold, save in strained courtesy, the hand which straight from his soldier's heart Grant offered to Lee at Appomattox? (Pp. 40–41)

This was, to an extent, humbug. In no sense could the "prejudice of war" be said to have "died in the hearts of the conquered." If anything it was sharper in 1886 than it had been in 1866. Neither did the gesture toward Grant echo a southern consensus; rather, more southerners were concerned (and would continue to be for many decades) with reducing the status of Grant in every way in order to elevate the historical reputation of Robert E. Lee.

Nevertheless Grady was successfully articulating an important strand in postwar southern thinking. Behind the sentimental invocations of plantation life in popular fiction and the obsessional nurturing of pieties regarding the military prowess of the Confederacy was a recognition that the economic, commercial, and infrastructural lag visible across much of the South had been the principal reason for defeat, and that a livable future would come only through increased—and increasingly harmonized—connections with the rest of the country. That meant finding some way of improving agricultural efficiency, expanding the rail network, and exploring new industrial relations in a region largely dominated for generations by a mentality that despised the economic and social model represented by the North.

"BAWN IN A BRIER-PATCH!"

The most memorable cultural manifestation of the theory of the New South involved the popularization of the rich assets of southern black folklore through the work of Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), a white journalist who had grown up as the child of an unmarried mother in the poverty of rural Georgia. Originating in a series of sketches Harris began writing for the Atlanta Constitution in the late 1870s, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) is one of the best-loved literary works in American history. The collection is centered around allegorical stories written in Harris's rendition of the speech of plantation slaves and recounted by the fictional Uncle Remus, a former African American slave, now a trusted servant and farmworker in the postbellum South. In Harris's framing narrative the audience for Uncle Remus's tales of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit is the young son of the southern lady and the former Union soldier who are now Remus's employers. One of the more substantial pieces in the book is a short narrative called "A Story of the War," in which Uncle Remus saves the life of his master, a Confederate soldier about to be shot by a Union soldier. Though in the newspaper version of the tale Remus kills the Union soldier, in the book's revised version the Union soldier is only injured by Remus's bullet, losing an arm as a consequence. After the war the Union soldier marries the woman who nursed him through his injury—the sister of the Confederate he almost killed (Sundquist, p. 325). The couple's son is the boy enthralled by Remus's folktales and songs.

The implications of the Uncle Remus stories are manifold, touching on issues of culture, folklore, anthropology, and the range of national attitudes regarding the status of African Americans in the decades after the Civil War. The dynamic of the tales reflects Harris's dual role as conscientious folklorist and creative writer, and the implications of the work—both Uncle Remus's natural intelligence and the moral architecture of the Brer Rabbit narratives—could be construed both to support and to attack efforts at black self-improvement and the exercise of political rights. The ambiguity of the New South is unmistakably present in Harris's writing. The narrative atmosphere is a heady mix of genuine affection for faithful black servants, belief in an established social hierarchy, commitment to economic improvement, paternalistic respect for folkloric authenticity, and a sense that the South had something particular—a warmth and feeling for local human experience—to offer an increasingly depersonalized and standardized American nation.

It was a winning combination. The character of Remus and his stories brought Harris wealth and fame, propelling him from his niche as a shy and inarticulate amateur folklorist working in an obscure corner of feature journalism into the exposed position of a nationally known writer. After the success of Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, nine more volumes of Uncle Remus stories were published up to and past Harris's death in 1908. Their popularity with several generations of both children and adults, both in the United States and abroad, seemed to defy changing social history and the invention of twentieth-century entertainment technology: the stories reemerged, for example, in sentimental and nostalgic triumph in the 1946 Walt Disney movie Song of the South. Despite the strand of cultural resistance in Uncle Remus, the stories embody what almost all white Americans wanted to believe about the consequences of the Civil War: that reconciliation between North and South was achieved; that a constructive relationship between former slaves and their masters was possible; and that the racial hierarchy was stable. With its dramatic allegories and emotional clarity, the black folklore newly packaged by Harris became for many years an important part of American children's literature.

WASHINGTON AT ATLANTA

The New South was not, however, an exclusively white southern vision. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the Tuskegee educator and one of the most influential black Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century, was the most tenacious promoter of the ideal of the New South among African Americans. Himself philosophically and politically conservative in important ways, he recognized nevertheless that an expanding and technologically innovative southern economy could protect the emancipated slaves, as increasing prosperity would mitigate racial tensions and the South would become a place where the African American worker could prove himself and gain a command of useful skills.

Washington was suspicious of the kind of rhetoric that pushed black professional and political ambitions in a way that failed to recognize either the debilitating legacy of slavery or the potential for a racist backlash from southern whites. Washington looked to a stable environment in which basic economic security could be achieved by a large number of individuals. The most dramatic platform from which he expounded his ideas was at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in September 1895, when he offered himself as a spokesman on behalf of the African Americans of the South. The Exposition was itself one of the achievements of the New South, as it sought to reopen connections between the region and the wider nation and the world. Washington's speech and its motif of fingers and hand became famous: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers," he declared, "yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress" (p. 148).

Washington expressed in those few words the idea of the New South, this time from a black leader's perspective. His vision was, however, broadly the same vision as that of the white southerners who wanted an exit from the hatreds and resentments of the postwar era and to steer the economy and political structure of the South toward that of the rest of the United States. The idea of an economic and social harmony between blacks and whites that would benefit all, without any revolutionary disruptions from angry parties on either side, was at the heart of the New South paradigm. Like many of the key elements of the New South vision, it was presented well but foundered ultimately on the rocks of southern history and a defensive racial order.

The New South was never as popular a slogan as the more poetic evocations of Confederate memory, but a wide spectrum of people—including not only entrepreneurs but also a folklorist from rural, working-class origins like Joel Chandler Harris , a moderate opinion maker like Henry Grady, and a conservative African American leader such as Booker T. Washington—worked toward manifesting this vision of the New South. The New South project was a courageous attempt to get past the legacy of frustration and intransigence that had dogged southern life after the humiliating defeat of 1865. It also represented the unavoidable arrival of modern American capitalism in an agrarian society. It had its own internal contradictions, but it embodied at its best a spirited ideal and signaled, if not a reality, then at least a viable hope for a different future.

see also Jim Crow ; Reconstruction ; Regionalism and Local Color Fiction ; Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings ; Up from Slavery ; The Voice of the People

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary works.

Grady, Henry Woodfin. The New South and Other Addresses. New York : Maynard, Merrill, and Co., 1904.

Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings. 1880. Edited by Robert E. Hemenway. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1900. In Three Negro Classics. Introduction by John Hope Franklin . New York: Avon Books, 1965.

Secondary Works

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Gaston, Paul M. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Genovese, Eugene D. A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War . New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1951.

Martin Griffin

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NEARBY TERMS

Literature of the New South

James w. sewell (essay date 1903).

SOURCE: Sewell, James W. “A Closing Summary.” In Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies. Vol. 2, pp. 379-92. Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, 1903.

[ In the following essay, Sewell assesses the work of several Southern fiction writers of the late nineteenth century. ]

With the period of recuperation and readjustment which came soon after the Civil War, there began a sort of literary revival in the South. After Sidney Lanier had sung out his life amid barren and unappreciative surroundings, and Irwin Russell, almost unknown, had opened the rich vein of negro dialect and song, the world began to take notice of the possibilities of Southern literature. Soon Cable and Grace King began to tell of the Creoles of the quaint old city of New Orleans and of the flower-laden prairies and bayous of Louisiana; Page began his stories of the war, of the old-time negroes and their devotion to their aristocratic masters; Richard Malcolm Johnston was picturing the Georgia Cracker in realistic colors; Miss Murfree was lifting the blue veil of the Tennessee mountains and disclosing to us lank mountaineers—drawling, ignorant, heroic; and Joel Chandler Harris, with his immortal “Uncle Remus,” was leading us into the arcana of negro folklore. The furore over everything Southern was at its height.

This sudden discovery of fields which though fresh were limited must necessarily be followed by their complete or partial exhaustion; so that for some years there has been seen a tendency toward abandonment of these narrow limits. Without drawing chronological lines too hard and fast, we may say that for the past dozen or fifteen years two classes of writers have been at work among us. First, there are the older writers mentioned: they have for the most part continued the same style of work in which they won success—that is, tales and dialect stories of certain limited regions. Then there are the younger writers, whose reputations have been made within the period under discussion, and whose labors differ somewhat in aim and scope from those of the first-named class. The past fifteen years have brought before the world Harry Stillwell Edwards, Sarah Barnwell Elliott, John Fox, Jr., Miss Ellen Glasgow, Miss Mary Johnston, Amélie Rives, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and others. The writers of this group seem to be advancing into the wide field of a literature which shall prove of a more general interest than mere local sketches or incidents.

Harry Stillwell Edwards, of Macon, Georgia, has written stories and novels that have been collected into four volumes. Two Runaways and Other Stories was published in 1886. The interest in this series of stories is mostly because of the subject-matter, some phases of the old Southern life being passed in review. The lines are broadly sketched; the humor is of the thigh-pounding and guffaw character. In places it seems that the author felt more than he succeeded in expressing, as in “Ole Miss an' Sweetheart.” Fineness of sentiment is not revealed by an artistic touch.

The Marbeau Cousins is one of the two novels. It deals with Southern life only incidentally, for the purpose obviously is to find a familiar ground for the incidents of the story, not to furnish a picture of the times or of the section. The scenes are all in a lurid light. A deep-reaching and comprehensive plot is formed, but the results in general are not proportionate to the labor evidently bestowed. The book seems to occupy a place between the detective story and the romance. It seeks to present a startling novel touching the ghostly and mysterious, yet remaining...

(This entire section contains 2698 words.)

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on the side of the possible.

Sons and Fathers, which took the Chicago Record 's ten-thousand-dollar prize a few years ago, is based upon Southern life of the period just after the Civil War. The lofty and fragrant chivalry of the Old South appears in Col. Mountjoy and Gen. Evan, who rally to the support of the persecuted Morgan. The struggles of a soul in the anguish of doubt are relieved by the mellowing and ennobling force of a woman's love. Again, an intricate plot is constructed, and the story follows smoothly its various and remarkable ramifications. At the close, when all the true souls are rewarded, all the evil are disappointed or softened, and the scenes of two continents are searched for material to make all tight and fair, the reader is once more constrained to feel the lack of literary art, which is needed to balance the weight of ingenious and broadly laid plot.

His Defense and Other Stories reaches a higher level than “The Two Runaways,” etc. It is a collection of short stories, mostly grouped around the figure of Maj. Crawford Worthington and his man Isom. The excellent Major takes position as one of the distinct and admirable characters of Southern fiction. Of the broad, roaring humor of the first book of stories, not much remains. More natural situations and more aptly chosen language indicate better balance and a firmer hand.

Sarah Barnwell Elliott is another Georgia writer. For some time she has resided in New York, where much of her work has been done, but she is thoroughly Southern in sympathies and in personality. A novel and a volume of short stories are products of her pen.

Jerry is one of the long list of problem novels that recently were so plentiful. It is an incoherent portrayal of an extremist, an example of those many books which show the worst of a system without suggesting a remedy. Powerful as the realism of such books may appear, the prime fault is lack of strength—the strength that would grapple such questions with the seer's vision and the scientist's logic. There is too much prosing and philosophizing if the book is to be a story; and there is too much story if it is to be a treatise.

An Incident and Other Stories forms a pleasing contrast to the volume just considered. In this series of stories and sketches we have true outlines of Southern life. The effect is gained, too, rather by self-restraint and the power of suggestion than by laborious details.

John Fox, Jr., one of our younger writers, was born in the midst of the blue grass region of Kentucky, and the varied life of his native State has been his principal theme. Most of his volumes comprise stories of the Kentucky mountaineers, the fiercest of all the Southern mountaineers. One novel treats of mountain life in its contact with the life of the blue grass.

“ A Cumberland Vendetta, ” says the Critic, “is the best analyzation we know of the motives which move to vindictive bloodshed that race of sturdy mountaineers.” In The Kentuckians Fox shows how thin is the partition which separates the “chivalrous” blue grass aristocrat, who shoots to death because of quick anger or wounded sense of honor, from the semi-savage mountaineer, who shoots because his fathers did and because of his mere love of the human chase. How this thirst for human blood is nourished by the very children and passed from one generation to another, is vividly shown in the “Cumberland Vendetta,” “The Last of the Stetsons,” etc. It is made very plain that the feuds are a genuine savage instinct, not fed by insult or even by hatred.

“A Mountain Europa” is by no means so clever, although the Critic calls it “the most powerful story of mountain life yet given us.” The author does a better piece of work in The Kentuckians, in one respect. The blunder of mating two such natures as the cultured young engineer from the metropolis and the wild girl of the hills is glaringly apparent. The author is drawn away by a situation in “A Mountain Europa,” and extricates himself only by a horrible tragedy.

A series of thumb-nail sketches compose the little volume entitled Hell fer Sartain. The customary self-restraint of the author goes almost too far in the way of brevity and suggestion.

The Kentuckians traces the progress of rivalry between two men who seek the hand of the Governor's daughter. It does more: it represents in these men two forces which constantly overshadow each other and clash—in Marshall all the brilliancy and all the faults of the old blue grass school of aristocrat-politicians; in Stallard the simplicity and elemental strength of the mountaineer. Both characters are strongly drawn. The book is admirable in its intellectual force. Especially is this observed in its analysis of the surface difference between the blue grass civilization and the mountain life. Such a play of light on men's ways and motives is Fox's best work.

Ellen Glasgow is a Virginian. Reared in the most exclusive social atmosphere, one might have looked for the usual “society novel” from her pen. But an early interest in sociological and economic studies showed the bent of her mind; and The Descendant, published in 1897, the Voice of the People, published in 1899, and The Battle Ground, published in 1902, may be considered most representative of her literary labors.

The Descendant, while it shows intellectual power and a desire for the good of humanity, is another of the wild and ineffectual books of a recent cult. It is a story of a fevered life under diseased conditions—a pitiful life of a pitiful nature, one that began in scorn and contempt, flourished in fanaticism and breadless theories, and ended in a prison cell. Down with it was dragged a woman of great promise, whose heart was true underneath all the surface of artificiality—dragged down, but not soiled.

The Voice of the People is a saner, cleaner, and better-balanced book than the preceding novel. It is constructed somewhat broadly on the same lines, but it seems that the author's theories have become adjusted to a better knowledge of the world.

The Battle Ground shows in general the same mental tendencies of the author. The same close study of heredity and of social conditions is manifest. In Betty, the heroine, we have pictured just the kind of sane, tender, practical, wholly womanly nature that was given us in the character of Eugie in the preceding novel. The portrayal of the grandiose, chivalrous life of the testy old planter is hardly surpassed by any other author; while the beautiful fellowship between the old-time master and slave has never been more vividly brought before the mind of the younger generation than in the pages telling of Dan and Big Abel. It is a book of power and of poise.

Mary Johnston, a native of Virginia but for some time a resident of Birmingham, Alabama, has written three novels that have attracted unusual attention.

Prisoners of Hope, her first book, gave a vivid picture of some features of early colonial life in Virginia. It had a freshness and vigor that promised still better work from its author. The two critical faults of the book are immaturity of powers, and lack of intellectual force and balance. These faults account for over-description, cant expressions, stereotyped female character, sensations.

To Have and to Hold is in many respects similar to its predecessor, but is a distinct improvement. Both books represent early Virginia life; each has a haughty, petted woman who after vicissitudes becomes gentle and womanly; each has a long sea voyage and a storm; each has an attack by Indians; each has a friendly Indian to help the colonists. But, although the second book depends largely upon sensation and bizarre incident, it shows better judgment. The first book ends in a way that must be considered ludicrous; the second ends in a way that is artistic and just.

Audrey is the latest of her volumes, being published in 1901. This story also moves upon familiar ground, but the plot shows more departure from the preceding books. The narrative possesses more of unity, therefore more of strength and maturity. The characterization of Audrey is even and consistent, notwithstanding that the heroine seems now and then perilously near to being feeble-minded. However, the progress of the story does no real violence to the conception of the worldly aristocrats of that day nor of the simple and innocent forest waif who met a fate so tragic.

Amélie Rives, of Virginia, has produced some works of a quality so peculiar as to have a place almost alone.

In the once famous The Quick or the Dead she failed of one object. Wishing, as she said, to delineate “a sensitive and morbid woman who feels that she is being disloyal to her dead husband in loving a living man,” the result most distinctly attained is a brilliant light upon the woman's sensuous nature.

A second volume called A Brother to Dragons contains a story with this title, followed by “The Farrier Lass of Piping Pebworth” and “Nurse Crumpet Tells the Story.” All these ring changes on the same theme—guilty love.

Tanis the Sang-digger is a book that grows in interest and strength despite the strong repulsion of the opening pages. A wild creature of impossible beauty and incredible coarseness is, by skillful touches, altered into a woman who receives with deep gratitude the refinements of civilized life. But the spark of savagery is still there, and the strange being is at last lured away by a cunning, passionate, merciless brute of her own class of “sang-diggers.”

Ruth McEnery Stuart, a native of Louisiana and a descendant of the choicest strains of Southern aristocrats, is an author whose work calls for the most sympathetic criticism by any Southern reader. Almost all her productions are short stories. Accurate to the life, almost flawless in taste, deft and graceful in touch, they will appeal to every artistic nature; at the same time, her delineation of old-time life in the South will undoubtedly form a valuable part of the library of the future historian and sociologist.

The very best work from Mrs. Stuart's pen is certainly her portraiture of the poorer classes. She is the laureate of the lowly. All the pretty side of even the blackest rag-picker's nature is given. A sane and sunny genius has observed and reproduced what is most worthy to live.

Free from all malice, superior to all triviality, her humor brightens all it touches. Whether it is the fat bachelor Ki bemoaning the possibility of a fat wife, the sparkling wit of the Irishman Rooney, or the guileless devotion of the old-young father of “Sonny,” the humor is equally kindly, keen, and true. Not less effective is her power of pathos. Never obtrusive, it steals upon one like a strain of music, and leaves an effect all as peaceful and gentle.

Her delineation of negro life is always satisfactory. In two respects are both sides given: the old-time darky's devotion to his master and mistress, as well as the uprightness of the half-starved old “mammy” and “uncle” of to-day as they live in seclusion and pride apart from others; also the frailties of the negro in general as well as his fine qualities—his exaggerations, his petty thefts, his shiftlessness, his divorcement of religion from morality, his superstition, as well as his sense of honor, his loyalty, and his inborn reverence for authority.

To throw such charming lights as she does upon the great currents that sweep around and beneath our daily life, shows the hand of a true artist and the heart of a wise and kindly-souled student.

The limits of this paper forbid more than a bare mention of several writers of reputation: In prose—“Octave Thanet” and Mrs. M. E. M. Davis, both writing stories of the Southwestern States; Will Allen Dromgoole and John Trotwood Moore with their stories of Tennessee; Molly Elliott Seawell and Julia Magruder, of Virginia. In poetry—Robert Burns Wilson and Madison Cawein, both of Kentucky; Samuel Minturn Peck, of Alabama; Father Tabb, of Maryland; Frank L. Stanton, of Georgia. These offer a tempting field for study, not only for a Southerner, but for any student of American literature; for, to judge by the tendencies of present-day writers in the South, the time is at hand when we shall not speak of “Southern literature,” but of American literature as developed in the South.

Cite this page as follows:

"Literature of the New South - James W. Sewell (essay date 1903)." Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Lynn M. Zott, Vol. 114. Gale Cengage, 2003, 16 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/literature-new-south/critical-essays/criticism-overviews#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-james-w-sewell-essay-date-1903>

Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (essay date 1970)

SOURCE: Rubin, Louis D. Jr. “Southern Writing, 1865-1920: Introduction.” In Southern Writing, 1585-1920, edited by Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 635-46. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1970.

[ In the following essay, Rubin surveys Southern literature of the post-Reconstruction period, concentrating on the local color movement, literary depictions of blacks, and the state of poetry. ]

In 1873, Scribner's Monthly sent the journalist Edward King southward to prepare a series of articles for its readers, describing the people and scenes of a region which, its editors said, was “almost as little known to the Northern States of the Union as it is to England.” While in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, King met a young cotton exchange clerk and sometime journalist, George W. Cable, who showed him a story he had written. Impressed, King took it back to New York with him, and soon Cable sent him another. The second story, “'Sieur George,” was accepted by Scribner's and published in October, 1873. With its publication there was launched, for all intents and purposes, the southern local color movement. Soon Cable's lead was being followed by others, and the national magazines were filled with southern material. Along with Cable, such resident southern writers as Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Richard Malcolm Johnston, Mary Noailles Murfree, Sherwood Bonner, James Lane Allen, and others won national prominence. Page's faithful Negro retainers and Harris's Uncle Remus replaced the image of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom in the popular imagination as the embodiment of the southern black man. Mark Twain, at first seemingly a western tall-tale humorist, began producing his great fiction—work deeply drawn out of the southern experience and very much in the local color genre even while transcending it. By 1888, the onetime Abolitionist Albion W. Tourgee could write in vexation that “not only is the epoch of the war the favorite field of American fiction today, but the Confederate soldier is the popular hero. Our literature has become not only Southern in type but distinctly Confederate in sympathy.”

Now that the southern writer was free from the self-imposed obligation to rally to the defense of slavery, he was at liberty to develop and examine conflicts within his society, and to reveal its inner nature through them. It soon turned out that insofar as the southern writer was able to take advantage of such freedom, what he produced was often much more successful as sectional justification than literature which had ignored the existence of such conflict. The tremendous impact of Thomas Nelson Page's idealization of the Old South, and its implied defense of the South's post-Reconstruction racial attitudes and policies, was possible in part because he could display and then resolve a division of loyalties within the society. By depicting a secessionist as a hothead, Page could make the Unionist hero of his influential “Marse Chan” into a powerfully-rendered testimonial to southern aristocratic wisdom and virtue. His fictional eulogies of the Old South, with their fond portrayal of master-slave relationships, were far more effective as propaganda than all the labored attempts of the prewar southern patriots to counter the strictures of Harriet Beecher Stowe by describing a slaveholding society without flaw or blemish.

Much of the success of southern letters in the later years of the nineteenth century can also be attributed to the fact that, where in the prewar period rising sectional tensions had militated against acceptance by the northern reading public of any sympathetic depiction of southern society, conditions in the 1870's and thereafter were such as to work almost equally as powerfully in favor of just such acceptance. The odd ways, quaint customs, and variant character types of the far-flung American regions might now be savored with pleasure; a South whose deviation from the national norm no longer constituted a threat to political union might at last be enjoyed for the ways in which its life-styles differed from those of the Northeast. At the same time, now that the fight was over and tempers were receding, factors of kinship and union reasserted themselves. Thus both regional differences and regional similarities operated, during the decades following the Civil War, to make the sections of the United States interested in each other. A literature, therefore, which could show the variety and diversity of cultures and institutions available to Americans within their common country, and also demonstrate that underneath the surface differences there was an essential kinship of attitude and belief, was very much in demand. This was what the southern literature of local color provided.

And the South was different—it contained a variety of subcultures and subregions of fascinating surface complexity. There was Old Virginia with its once-proud plantations, Tidewater Carolina with its rice fields and its mysterious swamplands festooned with trailing Spanish Moss, the flat, semitropical lowlands of Florida, the remote mountain fastnesses of the Appalachians with their rugged, primitive, and often violent ways, the vast cottonfields of the Deep South, the languorous, sultry Creole society of New Orleans, the picturesque Cajuns of the Louisiana bayous. No standardized region, the South. In addition, there now existed the romantic potentialities of a genuine Lost Cause—so very and so satisfactorily Lost, as both sides now agreed. Such a heritage of defeated valor could be most enthusiastically exploited.

Then, too, there was present in the South, as almost nowhere else in the nation, the black man—some four million Negroes, most of them former slaves. The war had freed the slaves, and had also marked the virtual end of the Abolition movement. The crusading zeal of the foes of slavery, the fervent resolve that “as He died to make men holy, we shall die to make men free,” had been dissipated in the waste and carnage of Civil War. The experiment of Reconstruction had been a failure, or so it now seemed to most northerners. There had been enough bloodshed and suffering on the black man's account; it was time to leave him alone, let him make his own way if he were capable of doing so, and get on with the nation's business. The Negro was the South's problem, not the nation's.

The literature of southern local color, through its depiction of the Negro, was admirably tailored to reinforce such a position. The typical Negro as presented in local-color literature was utterly devoted to his “quality” white superiors (and contemptuous of poor-white trash), improvident but cheerful, ignorant yet wise in folkways, fervently religious but comically superstitious, faithful unto death to his white folks even though a trifle careless of the rights of property when it came to stray chickens or watermelons, essentially goodhearted, and benevolent. In short, he was a happy peasant, content to exist in a condition of inferiority provided that his material wants were attended to, and best treated with gentle understanding and affection. He must be humored in his foibles, not held to the same standards of behavior, honesty, and probity that would be expected of white men, and by no means entrusted with the responsibilities of full citizenship (which he didn't really want, anyway).

To leave so childlike, so improvident a creature to the care of his former owners, who, after all, knew him best, was no doubt the best solution—or so the literature of local color (with a few notable exceptions, to be sure) assured the northern reading public. This was exactly what strife-weary Americans wished to read. Thus by presenting the former slave as a docile and devoted child, southern local-color literature helped importantly to reunite North and South and to dispel any lingering feelings of guilt and resentment. And as for those black men who did not conform to the childlike peasant stereotype, and who insisted upon the right to vote and to speak out, they were shown as “uppity,” as brute animals apeing human behavior, who deserved to be suppressed.

In addition to all these factors, there was yet another advantage that accrued to the southern writer of the post-Reconstruction years. For he was writing, for the most part, of a rural and small-town society, essentially preindustrial, simple in its tastes and elemental in its virtues and vices, with a homogenous population, very much a settled community, religious and church-going, with a defined system of caste and with deference paid to the best families, and generally leisured in the pace of its daily life. His stories, however, were written for and read by the citizenry of a country which was, save in the defeated South and certain enclaves of the North and West, increasingly an affair of cities, dominated by the industrialism that the needs of war had vastly intensified, and faced for the first time with all the vexing problems of the modern industrial world. With the Gilded Age, America had entered upon a new kind of society, and one that in its strangeness seemed infinitely less simple and less spiritually satisfying. The dynamics of nostalgia operated powerfully upon the consciousness of a society only a generation removed from the farm and the village. It was reassuring to read of areas still remaining in the nation in which society was simple, great wealth unknown, a man was an individual and not a statistic, and people still lived, thought, and died in terms of the old verities.

Freed of the onus of slavery, therefore, the South could serve as nostalgic solace and pastoral rebuke to the urbanized North. The Confederate heritage, only recently the symbol of treason and rebellion, took on a glamor and a romance that would have astounded a passionate secessionist of ante-bellum days such as Beverley Tucker, had he lived to witness it. Southern war memories, in the form of the Lost Cause, caught at the heartstrings of American readers. Reconciliation became the order of the day. The fiction writers, led by Page, capitalized on the vogue, with story after story in which Union officers of good family saved the old plantation from greedy carpetbaggers and knavish scalawags, saw and understood the southern side of the matter, proposed to the proud southern belle and, after giving proof of ideological soundness, was accepted and lived happily ever after in reconstructed bliss. The formula that John W. DeForest had used in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, in which it was the southern girl who changed her opinions, was thus totally reversed, and for good.

Northern magazines and northern editors asked of the southern postwar writer only that he praise reconciliation and not disturb old wounds. Though he must not seek to justify secession, he could testify to the abundant good intentions and pure motives of those who had seceded. He need not in any way apologize for the Lost Cause, provided he agreed that now that it was lost, he was glad the Union had been preserved. With these restrictions, the columns of the national magazines were open to the South to tell its story.

It was a time when such magazines were attaining mass circulations of previously unheard-of proportions. An urbanizing America had produced a vast middle-class audience with leisure to read and a desire to be educated and uplifted. A new kind of “quality” magazine evolved, very much geared to popular tastes, copiously illustrated, offering fiction and nonfiction in almost equal proportions, and with one or more novels serialized from issue to issue. Scribner's Monthly, renamed The Century in 1880, became the most successful of these magazines. Its editor, Richard Watson Gilder, delighted in sectional reconciliation and the discovery of new southern authors. He published Cable, Page, Harris, Sidney Lanier, Hayne, Irwin Russell, Richard Malcolm Johnston, Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, James Lane Allen, Harry Stillwell Edwards, and others.

With mass circulation, however, came certain responsibilities. Dependent as such magazines were on popular acceptance, they could not afford to offend or antagonize many readers. The reading public of the day was predominantly feminine, and the editors of magazines were careful to publish nothing that might embarrass the most tender of sensibilities. The 1870's, 1880's, and 1890's were the era of the Genteel Tradition in American letters. The waning idealism of an earlier day was joined to the sentimentality and prudishness of a new middle class greatly coveting refinement and respectability to produce a literary ethos in which anything smacking of coarseness, ugliness, overt sensuality, or debauchery was rigorously excised. What this meant for southern literature was that the new-found opportunity to look realistically at southern society, now that the defense of slavery was no longer a factor, remained considerably tempered by a prohibition against the inclusion of any very distressful subject matter. The first of the local colorists to begin publishing in the mass magazines, Cable, ran into this prohibition from the start. His first story, “Bibi,” the account of an enslaved African prince who was brutally punished and mutilated, was rejected. On another occasion his editor, Gilder of The Century, advised him to “write something intensely interesting—but without the terrible suggestion you so often make use of.”

The taboo on unpleasant material, one must add at once, was by no means resented by most southern authors, who were generally in sympathy with the ideals of the Genteel Tradition and were, as writers, determinedly idealistic themselves. Like his northern and western counterparts, the southern writer of the period was largely unfamiliar with the harsher surfaces that marked the work of European realism and naturalism. The literature he produced, viewed in retrospect, suffered exceedingly from this deprivation. For it was unable to image large areas of southern experience, much of which was hardly composed exclusively of the sweetness and light that constitutes so much of the fiction of local color. The defeated South knew poverty and misery that hung on for decades. Led by the eloquent and inspirational Henry W. Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, the South resolved to change from an agricultural, one-crop, backward society into a New South, a bustling, business-minded, industrializing region of prosperous cities and towns. But despite much brave talk, most southern cities remained small, and the one-crop system, tenant farming, and inadequate marketing facilities kept most of the rural South in bondage.

Yet very little indeed of this experience is discoverable in the novels and stories that southerners were writing; for the most part the literature of local color told of a land where life was a pastoral idyl, and villages and towns were simple, tranquil communities in which God-fearing folk led lives of quiet satisfaction. Little of the spirit of critical realism, which in the North and West was producing the beginnings of a literature that would expose for scrutiny the actual conditions of American life, was present in the southern writers. Though the local-color genre encouraged particularized description of the details of experience, coupled with it was a reliance upon romantic plotting and on techniques of characterization that emphasized quaint types and did not encourage deepened psychological portrayal.

In the work of the best of the southern writers of the time, of course, such limitations could be transcended. Clemens, by far the greatest, built his best fiction on the recreation of his earlier rural and village experience, but the delineation of life in town and farm and the display of quaint character types abruptly deepened into mordant satire and, at key points, savage denunciation. In Adventures of Tom Sawyer, nostalgia and remorse joined to produce an account of a small boy imaginatively engaged in a humorous but urgent battle against the mundane circumstance of village life, while in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the falseness and pettiness of society in the towns and farms along the great river are progressively exposed to view in the course of a young white outcast's and a Negro slave's developing quest for freedom. Writing from the North, without fear of offending southern racial views, the transplanted southerner who called himself Mark Twain took up the issue of the violated humanity of the black man in a compelling portrait of a runaway slave. Though Jim exhibits many of the accustomed clichés involved in the depiction of the Negro in local-color fiction, he emerged as a human being possessed of stature and dignity that give the lie to any justification of his servile status.

George W. Cable, too, sought to use the local-color genre for purposes of social criticism; “I meant,” he wrote, “to make The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called.” Into his depiction of romantic Creoles and exotic New Orleans ways he introduced a vigorous denunciation of racial injustice. In his later work he broke away from the trappings of local color and strove to confront the economic, social, and racial issues facing southern society even more directly, though he was never able to escape from the romantic plotting and sentimental characterization of the local-color genre. Cable's insights into the nature of racial injustice has given his work renewed importance during our own time.

Time has not dealt as gently with the writings of Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus stories earned him widespread fame during his lifetime. Nowadays the tales of the curious adventures of Brer Rabbit and the other inhabitants of the southern countryside back in the days when the creatures could talk have receded in popularity, while Harris's picture of the kindly old black man who recounted them has been seen as the embodiment of the local-color stereotype of the childlike, docile “uncle,” content with his inferior status. No doubt the Negro dialect in which the tales are told, which in the 1880's and the decades following constituted one of their foremost charms, has proved a detriment to their ultimate popularity, for readers of a later day have little patience for the difficulties of reading dialect. Yet it seems unlikely that the Uncle Remus tales are headed for oblivion. There is too much fine humor in them, and it may well be, too, that objections to Uncle Remus as an example of racial stereotyping are too facile. For it is the rabbit, not Remus, who is the hero of the stories, and the manner in which, living in a world populated by bears, wolves, and foxes and with only his wits and his ability to dissemble to protect him, he slyly and zestfully outwits his more puissant foes, is more than a little suggestive of the black man's situation in a society controlled and dominated by white men. Of the Negro, Harris himself declared that “it needs no scientific imagination to show why he selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox.” It was not that Harris, associate of Henry W. Grady and editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution, consciously dissented from the racial views of his time and place, but rather that through an instinctive identification with the underdog, the sympathetic insight of his artistic imagination may have helped him to transcend as an artist the assumptions bequeathed him by his society.

Toward the close of the heyday of local-color writing, The Atlantic published Charles Chesnutt's “The Goophered Grapevine.” Not until later was it revealed that the author was a Negro. Thus appeared upon the American literary scene the first important fiction to be composed by a black writer. Chesnutt's early stories were squarely within the local-color tradition, but in later writing he took up the situation of the black man more directly and explored, in novels that draw much closer to protest literature, his plight in a society predicated upon white supremacy.

Another southern Negro writer, James Weldon Johnson, also began publishing poetry at about the same time. In 1912, he published a provocative novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson also won fame as a writer of songs for Broadway musical comedy. In 1919, with a poem entitled “The Creation,” an imaginative recreation of an old-time Negro preacher's sermon, he achieved an important language breakthrough for future black literature. Thus, while other and perhaps better authors than Chesnutt or Johnson might come later, here already was ample evidence that the black writer was capable of producing work that could hold its own in the company of white literature. Another dimension was thus added to the southern literary scene, while the presence of such articulate voices was a harbinger of change for the monolithic structure of almost total racial segregation that marked southern life of the period. The change would yet be awhile in coming, but Chesnutt and Johnson swiftly gave evidence that the southern Negro would not forever acquiesce in a system that kept him disfranchised, poorly educated, and impoverished.

Of the leading southern writers of the late nineteenth century, it was Clemens, Cable, and Harris who wrote most memorably of the Negro in the South. Harris alone of the three remained a southern resident throughout his life. Significantly, it is only in the fiction of the other two that overt criticism is registered of southern racial practices. For though the southern writer no longer had to tailor his work to the defense of slavery, it was another matter entirely to attack the racial status quo. This was not condoned; any writer who ventured such criticism was branded a traitor selling out his birthright for northern gold.

If there was little room in the southern aesthetic for the kind of critical realism William Dean Howells was espousing in the columns of Harper's Magazine, whether dealing with questions of race or other aspects of society, there was none at all for the bleak literary naturalism that Crane, Norris, and Dreiser began introducing during the 1890's and the early 1900's. In general, literary naturalism was an affair of cities; tenements, not tenant farms, were its milieu. And southern life was not yet importantly dominated by an urban consciousness. The towns and villages of the region were still essentially orthodox in religious attitudes; what Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and others had to say about the descent of man and the survival of the fittest made few inroads upon southern theological doctrine before the turn of the century. The southern writer of the period, still very much a part of his society, was not often tempted toward the obloquy and ostracism that any rigorous depiction of the harshness and inequities of regional life would surely bring about. Thus, when the vogue for local-color writing began to wane in the 1890's, it was to the historical costume-romance that the southern author most often turned. Such novels as Mary Johnson's To Have and To Hold and Prisoners of Hope, with their colorful dramatizations of heroic Virginians of colonial times engaged in exciting adventures, proved enormously popular.

Not until Ellen Glasgow's third novel, The Voice of the People, in 1900, did a southern writer other than Cable and Clemens begin a serious critical examination of the premises of regional life and regional society. This young Virginia woman had read her Darwin and her Herbert Spencer, she had read the French naturalists, and now she began bringing to bear the insights of biological science and social determinism to the experience of her region. In a series of novels, she set out in the 1900's and 1910's to produce an extended critique of the various phases of Virginia society, past and present. Few were the aspects of Old Dominion life that Ellen Glasgow did not touch upon. “Realism,” wrote Stuart Sherman later, “crossed the Potomac twenty-five years ago going North.” But though a handful of others, notably Will Harben of Georgia, sought to follow her lead, the modes of critical realism and naturalism remained basically uncongenial to the southern literary temperament, and only after the First World War would southern writers engage in any important dissection of the lower depths of southern society.

It is this temperamental incompatibility that helps to account for what most critics agree is the pervading lack of vitality in southern writing during the first two decades of the twentieth century. At a time when critical realism and naturalism were the dominant modes of discovery in American fiction, and when American opinion, prompted by the muckraking journalists, was engaged in an intensive, reformist scrutiny of the discrepancy between national ideals and the realities of actual conditions of everyday life, the southern literary impulse was at a low ebb, seemingly unable to draw nourishment and creative impetus from the chief literary currents of the time. It was not that the desire for reform was completely absent from the southern scene, or that southerners were not beginning to perceive the nature and the extent of the ills that afflicted their society—though it is true that the immense presence of the racial status quo lay as a pall over any efforts toward reform. Rather, it would appear that the view of the nature of man, and the attitude toward society and the relationship of the individual within it, that went along with critical realism and naturalism were essentially foreign to the southern literary imagination. For the southern temperament would seem, in the twentieth century as well as the nineteenth, to involve an attitude toward human life and experience that is basically religious in nature (though not necessarily sectarian). It has not envisioned the human being as ultimately an environmental product, and has been unable to view social conditions as the primary determinant of human conduct. Though in southern literature man is usually inextricably and properly involved in society, he is not, finally, defined by property, caste, or political status. Thus for the southern writer, the kind of bare, unornamented scientific searching out and delineation of environmental actualities, with the accompanying suspicion of any high-sounding evocation of moral absolutes, that both critical realism and naturalism seemed to demand, was not a congenial creative mode. To use Hawthorne's terms, not the Novel, with its “very minute fidelity … to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience,” but the Romance, with its affinity for the Marvellous and its license to “bring out or mellow the limits and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture,” would seem to be the fictional form most hospitable to the southern imagination. And thus it would not be until the 1920's, when fashions changed and environmental emphases yielded to a more cosmic consideration of man's potentialities and necessities, that southern fiction began emerging from the comatose state it had been in since the waning of the local-color movement. Then it was that Faulkner, Wolfe, and a host of other southern writers began producing fiction of new significance. And, despite her achievements of the 1900's and 1910's, Ellen Glasgow's most lasting work would appear to be that composed in later years, when she turned to the novel of manners.

There remains to note the condition of southern poetry during the half-century between the end of the Civil War and the coming of the First World War. Not only in the South, but in American poetry as a whole, the decades that followed the Civil War were a period of low poetic yield. In the South, of the poets who had shown such incipient promise in the years just before 1861, only Paul Hamilton Hayne survived into the post-Reconstruction period. But though Hayne wrote much verse, enjoyed a measure of acclaim, and though his struggle against poverty during those dreary years was heroic enough, he never attained to the first rank among poets, and very little of his verse retains interest for readers of a later day. So steeped is his work in the ideality and abstraction of the period, and so little imbued is his language with concrete specificity of detail, that the modern reader finds it verbally unexciting and sentimental.

The leading southern poet of the period, by all odds, was Sidney Lanier. His best work possesses what Hayne's lacked: enough richness and concreteness of language to give definite, evocative form to what is being described. Yet even Lanier's poetry is vitiated by an overreliance upon lofty ideas for its structure and meaning, and though rich and even lush, his language is commonly imprecise. Like most southern poets before and since, Lanier was insistent upon the importance of sound in poetry; in his book The Science of English Verse he sought to substitute a system of musical stress for the traditional metrics of poetry in English. Much of whatever connotative richness Lanier's language possesses is due to this insistence. In his best poem, “The Marshes of Glynn,” he succeeded in weaving a suggestive texture of language and atmosphere to embody his vision of the coastal marshland of South Georgia. But along with the concentration on tonal effects went a carelessness of meaning; he was all too willing to choose a word for its sound without reference to its sense, and even his best lines are often rendered vague and fuzzy.

Why, one may wonder, did poetry fare so poorly, when southern fiction was experiencing a resurgence? A plausible explanation may be that the reliance upon abstract ideality that governed the language of American poetry of the day served to bar the southern poets of the period from any real participation in the vitality of the local-color movement, grounded as the latter was on detailed observation of local particularities. Through his concentration on sound, Lanier came closest to a language that allowed for concrete particularity. One need only compare “The Marshes of Glynn” to a poem such as Hayne's “Aspects of the Pines” to realize how abstract and generalized is the language of the poetry of ideality, and how much more poorly adapted to the description of place. Not only might Hayne's South Georgia pine trees be growing almost anywhere else in the world, but they could as easily be poplars, cypresses, tulips, or any other tall trees.

A form of local color that did realize itself in poetry was dialect poetry. Beginning with Irwin Russell's “Christmas Night in the Quarters” and Thomas Nelson Page's “Uncle Gabe's White Folks,” there was a flood of southern poetry written in Negro dialect. Though it continued to be produced well into the new century, almost nothing of lasting literary value was accomplished in the medium, for the obvious reason that the built-in limitations of such an overly simplified approach to language precluded either verbal complexity or subtlety of thought. The best of it is little more than truisms made to seem like folk wisdom by being expressed in primitive language. When black poets such as James Weldon Johnson and the Ohioan Paul Lawrence Dunbar turned automatically to dialect poetry in order to image black experience, they too came immediately up against its limitations. Dunbar's sole alternative was to try to make use of the ornate diction of the poetry of ideality. Much of Johnson's early verse is in this form too, but with the composition of “The Creation,” as previously noted, he achieved what proved to be a crucial discovery for black poetry, in his demonstration that the cadences of Negro experience could best be rendered through diction and choice of imagery rather than through dialect distortion.

The fin de siecle poetry of the English Decadents possessed considerable appeal as a model for some southern poets during the early decades of the new century. The world weariness, aestheticism, and pagan attitudinizing of such English poets as Dowson, Wilde, Johnson, and others found echo in the work of Madison Cawein, Cale Young Rice, William Alexander Percy, and the early John Gould Fletcher. Fletcher went on to England, where he discovered imagism, and subsequently played a useful role in the revitalization of the language of poetry in English that came with the 1910's. But it was not until after the First World War that either he or Percy turned to the southern scene for subject and metaphor, and then they were speedily eclipsed by the young Fugitives of Nashville. As for the kind of poetry that the Chicago poets—Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay—began publishing in the 1910's, with its matter-of-fact diction that often approached the condition of prose and its affinity for strident social commentary, that seemed to hold no attraction whatever for southern poets, in part perhaps for the same reason that critical realism and naturalism did not appeal to the prose writers.

Poetry in the South, like fiction, had come upon lean days in the 1910's and 1920's. When H. L. Mencken, in his famous castigation of southern cultural aridity, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” declared that “down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician,” he did not exaggerate. Poets in number there would soon be in the South, and novelists in even greater number; in the decade to come they would begin appearing in undreamed-of profusion. But as the South, now once again fully a part of the American Union, prepared to play its role in the nation's venture into the Second World War, its writers were still waiting in the wings.

"Literature of the New South - Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (essay date 1970)." Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Lynn M. Zott, Vol. 114. Gale Cengage, 2003, 16 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/literature-new-south/critical-essays/criticism-overviews#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-louis-d-rubin-jr-essay-date-1970>

J. V. Ridgely (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: Ridgely, J. V. “The New South: The Past Recaptured.” In Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature, pp. 89-111. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

[ In the following essay, Ridgely presents an overview of Southern literature between 1879 and 1899, emphasizing major figures and works in the era of local color. ]

The South's strong resistance during Reconstruction to a complete reordering of its way of life was less valorous than its wartime performance, but it was more successful. As the scars of occupation faded, its writers embarked upon a popular program of sectional justification that would have astonished the editors of scores of dead little southern journals. For northern editors were now not merely tolerating writing from the South; they were demanding it. And they not only sought it; they bought it. This episode in American literature is usually called the emergence of the “local color” school. Not only the South was involved in it, to be sure, but it was the South that ultimately proved to be richest in its materials and most prolific in its celebrants. By the 1880s the still unreconstructed must have been baffled: the South had become the most popular setting for American fiction. The wry reaction of the northern novelist Albion W. Tourgée, who had described his experiences during Reconstruction in A Fool's Errand (1879), is revealing. American writing, so he charged in the Forum magazine in 1888, has become “not only Southern in type but distinctly Confederate in sympathy. … A foreigner studying our current literature without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America, and the African the chief romantic element of our population.”

Tourgée's sour remarks tell only part of the truth; the South was simply the chief beneficiary of a mood and a literary trend that had characterized the whole nation in the years after the close of the Civil War. In fighting for the preservation and the strengthening of the Union, the North necessarily had attacked sectionalism and campaigned for the homogenization of the American people. In constructing its giant war machine for this purpose it had stimulated industry and manufacture. The technological superiority of the Union forces was a bitter fact to the defeated Confederacy. By the 1880s some southern leaders, like Henry W. Grady, who spoke through his influential Atlanta Constitution, were urging that the only hope for a truly reconstructed South lay in the adoption of laissez-faire capitalism and the development of industry throughout the region. Only Grady's scarcely hidden racism—his reliance on white domination for the success of his programs—ameliorated his policy in the eyes of die-hard upholders of the old regime.

It sometimes surprises modern readers of local color fiction to observe how little the “New South” enters the picture. But this is to misunderstand its real nature. For literary taste was now strongly nostalgic. In the midst of the Gilded Age there were many who remembered what seemed to have been a less complicated, a freer, even a happier time. The war had opened a great gulf in national history; on the other shore the colors now appeared brighter, the skies more open, the people more individualistic. An age of simple elegance had vanished in an all-conquering mechanistic modernism. Where were the self-contained and pleasant little New England villages? And where now were the courtly stock who had given the South its peculiar tone?

The situation was a godsend, a boon that the defeated nation could hardly have expected. Except for the work of the humorists of the Old Southwest, northern periodicals had not been particularly receptive to tales from the South. Now northern editors were beginning to accept as fact what the South had been insisting for decades: that it was the only “romantic” society America had produced. The West—with its gunfighters, its outlaws, its cowboys and Indians—had color; what it lacked was “charm.” The West was open and awe-inspiring; the South was cozy and “home.”

The southern writer seized the day. No longer required to defend slavery as an institution, he could now, without giving offense, depict the black as the happy-go-lucky darky, still benevolently cared for by the white man he once had to call “master.” The Negro was considered to be the South's own special problem. Increasingly strict Jim Crow laws were evidence of how he was being contained in fact. In fiction, with the notable exceptions of Cable, Harris, and Twain, this type of continued enslavement was largely ignored. The blacks were a picturesque peasantry; their comic speech, their superstitions, their penchant for stolen watermelon or chicken were “realities” everyone could now laugh at—benevolently, of course. And now that the South presented no threat to the body politic, its quixotic attempt to establish an aristocratic empire could take on the special glamor reserved for lost causes. Domiciled amid the ruins of its artifacts, the southern writer could dream of the never-never land—the pillars of its plantations grown prodigious, its ladies more classically beautiful, its men more dashingly gallant, its gardens more lovely in the moonlight, its field songs more melodious and soothing. Alas for the fled, alas for the fallen!

The plantation South was the most popular version of the myth of the past because its high-toned life now could be enjoyed without guilt. But there were other Souths, and writers from several sections were quick to stake out their claims. One of these areas which was largely unexplored was the high upland and mountainous Appalachian chain; though the mountaineer had long since appeared as character in early romances and southwestern tales, there had been little attempt to picture him in his own setting of lonely hill cabins, hardscrabble fields, dark hollows. The authors who first penetrated this thicket were in no sense sociologists or fieldcollecting folklorists. These latter would come later and would preserve a rich store of ballad, song, and tale—folkways that revealed much of the character of the original European settlers. The local colorist observed some of this same material, but he sentimentalized, softened—or, conversely, melodramatized—the true culture of the region.

One of the most successful of these exploiters of a pocket in time was a crippled Tennessee spinster, Mary Noailles Murfree, who rejoiced (if that is the word) in the pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock. She had already become known in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly before she published a first collection of tales, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). Murfree capitalized on the brooding peaks, the strong vein of superstition in her people, and the fiercely independent concepts of justice and propriety which contrasted so sharply with those of the lowlander. She also, like her fellows in the field, depended heavily upon dialect, often intentionally comic but sometimes surprisingly eloquent and moving. Murfree's skill at dialog as well as her reliance on melodramatic plot line can be sampled in one of her best stories, “The ‘Harnt’ that Walks Chilhowee.” The dominant character of the story is one Reuben Crabb, “a stunted, one-armed little critter a-onder-takin' ter fight folks and shoot pistols.” In one scene the site of his house is remembered, but, as an acquaintance remarks in summarizing Reuben's life and death, it

“ain't thar now, 'kase Sam Grim's brothers burned it ter the ground fur his a-killin' of Sam. That warn't all that war done ter Reuben fur killin' of Sam. The sheriff run Reuben Crabb down this hyar road 'bout a mile from hyar,—mebbe less,—an' shot him dead in the road, jes' whar it forks. Waal, Reuben war in company with another evil-doer,— he war from the Cross-Roads, an' I furgits what he hed done, but he war a-tryin' ter hide in the mountings, too; an' the sheriff lef' Reuben a-lying thar in the road, while he tries ter ketch up with the t'other; but his horse got a stone in his hoof, an' he los' time, an' hed ter gin it up. An' when he got back ter the forks o' the road whar he had lef' Reuben a-lyin' dead, thar war nuthin' thar 'ceptin' a pool of blood. Waal, he went right on ter Reuben's house, an' them Grim boys hed burnt it ter the ground; but he seen Reuben's brother Joel. An' Joel, he tole the sheriff that late that evenin' he hed tuk Reuben's body out'n the road an' buried it, 'kase it hed been lyin' thar in the road ever sence early in the mornin', an' he couldn't leave it thar all night, an' he hedn't no shelter fur it, since the Grim boys hed burnt down the house. So he war obleeged ter bury it.”

This is a ruse; Reuben has survived and, hiding out from the law, becomes the “harnt” that walks the mountain. At the story's close an old acquaintance persuades Reuben to stand trial, gets him acquitted, and takes him to live in his own house, where Reuben proves to be a troublesome and thankless guest. The host is himself an uncouth and ignorant man, but he has performed an act of selfless charity. This “moral gallantry” allows Murfree a final sentimentalizing note of the kind that gratified readers of these “low” tales: “The grace of culture is, in its way, a fine thing, but the best that art can do—the polish of a gentleman—is hardly equal to the best that Nature can do in her higher moods.”

The dialect story was also the forte of Joel Chandler Harris, who erased the image of the black as the pious and suffering Uncle Tom by creating the sly and engaging Uncle Remus. Harris's region was the Middle Georgia of the old Cotton Belt, and while he dealt with other types, particularly poor-whites, it was his portraits of plantation blacks that brought him international renown. As a writer for Grady's Atlanta Constitution, Harris tried to promote reconciliation and supported the tenets of the New South. But his own roots were strictly rural. The illegitimate son of a woman named Mary Harris and an Irish laborer with whom she lived until he deserted her, young Joel had no hopes for bettering himself until a nearby planter, who was also a lawyer and newspaperman, took on the boy as an apprentice. In his early years Harris witnessed slavery and its abolition; he even got a glimpse of the war as Sherman's army passed by on its march to the sea. He could also directly testify to the plight of both black and white in the harsh years of Reconstruction. His association with ex-slaves opened up for him a body of oral lore which had been largely untouched by earlier southern writers. Though generations of southern children had heard “mammy's” tales and though both southern and northern auditors were often moved by black spirituals and work songs, such material was considered too subliterary to warrant recording. Besides, it was argued, weren't they simply garbled versions of what slaves had heard from whites? The notion that a black could draw from a cultural tradition of his own people was self-evidently false; he had to be taught everything, and most masters had found him a slow learner indeed.

Harris himself long was diffident about the literary merits of the poems and tales which he had printed in the Constitution and which he first collected in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). In a letter to Mark Twain, he low-rated himself: “I am perfectly well aware that my book has no basis of literary art to stand upon; I know it is the matter and not the manner that has attracted public attention and won the consideration of people of taste at the North.” What attracted attention, of course, was both matter and manner. The matter was pastoral: a way of life that was not grand and snooty but warm, loving, familial. The manner was more artful than it appeared: the accurately rendered accents of an unlettered black man presented without condescension. Harris's skillful use of speech tune and folk metaphor is a far cry from the “Sambo” strain of most earlier black talk in fiction. Something of his appeal still comes across in this passage from the end of “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox.” The scene is familiar. Brer Fox, having gotten Brer Rabbit impossibly tangled up with the Tar-Baby, listens to his victim's pleas not to fling him into the brier-patch. Uncle Remus explains:

“Co'se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch 'im by de behime legs en slung 'im right in de middle er de brier-patch. Dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox sorter hang 'roun fer ter see w'at wuz gwineter happen. Bimeby he hear somebody call 'im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin' cross-legged on a chinkapin log koamin' de pitch outen his har wid a chip. Den Brer Fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad. Brer Rabbit wuz bleedzed fer ter fling back some er his sass, en he holler out: “‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox—bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’ en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.”

How far Harris was aware of his materials as concealed black protest has been a matter for lively debate in recent years. In answering the question as to why the rabbit and not the fox is the trickster-hero, Harris gave an insightful response in the preface to his first collection: “It needs no scientific investigation to show why he [the Negro] selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox.” And he did recognize black sources: “It would be presumptious in me to offer an opinion as to the origin of these curious myth-stories; but, if ethnologists should discover that they did not originate with the African, that effect should be accompanied with a good deal of persuasive eloquence.” But a nagging question remains: did Uncle Remus outwit his own creator? Is the violent, treacherous, amoral, competitive animal world of the tales a direct analog of black-white relationships? Was Harris psychologically unable to face the deep racial implications of the stories which he so successfully retold? Such questions cannot be answered with certainty. But, because they have been raised, Harris himself has emerged more clearly in the twentieth century as a man deeply torn by the conflicts of the Reconstruction era, by the desire for “progress” and the attractions of a more Edenic South.

At the height of the local color movement, every southern state could boast of having added strokes to the general panorama. Richard Malcolm Johnson followed Longstreet's lead in finding the Georgia cracker a source for rustic humor. Irwin Russell, who specialized in Negro dialect poetry, produced a great favorite with “Christmas Night in the Quarters” (1878). Even northern writers felt the pull of the Southland. As early as 1873 Mrs. Stowe wrote of her Florida homestead in Palmetto Leaves ; and Cooper's grandniece, Constance Fenimore Woolson, remembered her days in the Carolinas and Florida in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). But only natives really excelled. Two widely separated locales, Old Virginia and Creole Louisiana, finally produced the two most significant writers to come out of the rejuvenation of southern letters. They were Thomas Nelson Page and George Washington Cable—and they could not have been more different.

Cable's Louisiana is dense, violent, and dominated by its racist attitudes; Page's Virginia is a land of faded glamour and lost dreams, but redeemed and elevated by its harmonious black-white relationships. Of all the defenders of the Lost Cause, Page was the one most beloved by his contemporaries and most scorned by the liberal southern writers who reacted against him in the twentieth century. Born in 1853, Page himself saw little of the Old South in which Nelsons and Pages had flourished; in the years of Reconstruction he sought to restore family prestige and power not by returning to the plantation but by practicing law. Yet the tale of Virginia's legendary past—a Golden Age brought to an end in chivalrous but futile combat—continued to haunt him. His sentimental and highly idealized stories depicting the defeat of southern principles successfully colored and softened attitudes in all sections of the restored Union. Page produced many stories, novels, and other works before his death in 1922; but his classic book, one indispensable in examining the national literary mood, is the collection of six tales, In Ole Virginia, published in 1887. Page's forte, like Harris's, was the tale told in Negro dialect. However embarrassing (and sometimes difficult to comprehend) such a rendering of dialog may seem to the reader of today, it was vital in giving the ring of “reality” to his favorite characters, the faithful black servants who knew—and would not give up—their places. The wide success of the book suggests how easily his readers could accept the doctrine of paternalism—though, in fact, ex-slaveholders had been shocked by the “uppity” attitudes of their former property.

The opening story of In Ole Virginia, one of the most popular he ever composed, is an epitome of Page's world—and his appeal. The central narrative of “Marse Chan” is framed by a well worn device: a lone traveler on horseback meets a stranger, asks a few perfunctory questions, and is rewarded with a long and stirring narrative. The setting here is the eastern Virginia of many earlier tales; but the time is 1872 and the once splendid mansions which line the narrator's route are falling into decay. His ruminations on mutability are broken into by a mild domestic incident: a Negro is calling home a “noble-looking old orange and white setter,” but one now “gray with age, and corpulent with excessive feeding.” The dog is “Marse Chan's,” and when the narrator inquires about the owner he is given a tale with plot incidents enough to fill a novel.

The story is an unabashed tear-jerker which gains its effect—if it succeeds at all—by the reader's willingness to accept the fundamental goodness of the world which Sam, the black man, recalls so elegiacally. Marse Chan was the heir of a great plantation owner; Sam had been assigned to him as body servant and they had grown up, like brothers, in close association. There appears to be no irony in Sam's words, and certainly none in Page's, as he describes the joys of the old order: “‘Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes' Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac'! Niggers didn' hed nothing 't all to do—jes' hed to 'ten' to de feedin' an' cleanin' de hosses, an' doin' what de marster tell 'em to do; an' when dey wuz sick, dey had things sont 'em out de house, an' de same doctor come to see 'em whar 'ten' to de white folks when dey wuz po'ly. Dyar warn' no trouble nor nothin'.’”

Now enters the love interest. Chan is smitten at an early age with the charms of Miss Anne, daughter of a neighboring plantation owner, “Cun'l Chahmb'lin.” But the story takes on a Romeo and Juliet turn, as the fathers of the pair split over politics. Chan, after being publicly insulted by the colonel, is even forced into a duel with him; with true nobility he refuses, after the colonel's shot has missed him, to return the fire, saying only (in Sam's words): “‘I mek you a present to yo' fam'ly, seh!’” Something of a stickler in matters of honor, the colonel proclaims himself not satisfied; and bad blood continues between the two families, until even Miss Anne denies she ever loved Chan. Chan now escapes into the Civil War, where he rises to a captaincy, but both he and Anne are physically suffering from their thwarted romance. Finally the colonel relents. Anne writes Chan that she wants him, and he plans to marry her on the furlough he will receive after the next big battle. Naturally, Chan is killed; his homecoming is his burial. Anne becomes a Confederate nurse, but shortly before Richmond falls she dies of a fever. The tale ends on a motif out of the ballad of “Barbara Allen” and a thousand other tales of frustrated lovers: they are buried side by side in the old churchyard. But Page adds another, more Victorian, note of weeping religiosity. Sam asks: “‘An' will yo' please tell me, marster? Dey tells me dat de Bible sey dyar won' be marryin' nor givin' in marriage in heaven, but I don' b'lieve it signifies dat—does you?’” The narrator reassures Sam with “the comfort of my earnest belief in some other interpretation” and gives him a little money, “for which he seemed humbly grateful.” As Sam goes into his cabin, the narrator hears him call to his wife, “‘Judy, have Marse Chan's dawg got home?’”

Even northern readers like Mrs. Stowe's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, and Emily Dickinson's “mentor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, gladly confessed that they had shed tears over the tale; and their watery response would seem no more than was appropriate to this calculatedly doleful tale of love cut short. Yet something else is at work in Page's story. The plot contained nearly every stereotype of the southern legend: the gallant young man who falls for his nation; the chilly but eventually faithful lady; the proud colonel; the duel; the well treated darky; the good times on the old plantation. Chan and his Miss Anne sprang out of a vanished time; their deaths symbolized the passing of a never-to-be-resurrected social order of grace and honor. Surely these were not the people whom the North had sworn to destroy. They had not created the slave system; they had only defended their homeland and their way of life. Had the South alone been at fault in the conflict in which such people had given their lives?

For all the derivative quality of his work, for all the choke in the voice when he spoke of the old régime, Page was writing what for him was sacred history. As late as 1887 he gave a famous address on “The Old South” at Washington and Lee University, which he had attended and where the great General of the Confederacy now had his shrine. He undertook, he told his auditors, to prove that “the New South is, in fact, simply the Old South with its energies directed into new lines.” Reviewing the history of the slave trade, he charged that the North had hardly been guiltless and that actually it was southerners like Thomas Jefferson who had fought to abolish it. The extinction of slavery seemed assured, Page said, but it “was prevented by the attitude of the Northern Abolitionists. Their furious onslaughts, accompanied by the illegal circulation of literature calculated to excite the negroes to revolt” caused the temper of the South to change. For Page the issue was quite clear: “The real fight was whether the conservative South should, with its doctrine of States' rights, of original State sovereignty, rule the country according to a literal reading of the Constitution, or whether the North should govern according to a more liberal construction, adapted, as it claimed, by necessity to the new and more advanced conditions of the nation.” The South had a sacred duty to fight to maintain its institutions, which had produced “a civilization so pure, so noble, that the world to-day holds nothing equal to it.” In a few paragraphs, Page summarized the South's case and demanded recognition of its unique achievement:

After less than a generation it has become among friends and enemies the recognized field of romance. Its chief attribute was conservatism. Others were courage, fidelity, purity, hospitality, magnanimity, honesty, and truth. Whilst it proudly boasted itself democratic, it was distinctly and avowedly anti-radical—holding fast to those things which were proved, and standing with its conservatism a steadfast bulwark against all novelties and aggressions. … Slavery itself, which proved the spring of woes unnumbered, and which clogged the wheels of progress and withdrew the South from sympathy with the outer world, christianized a race and was the automatic balance-wheel between labor and capital which prevented, on the one hand, the excessive accumulation of wealth, with its attendant perils, and on the other hand prevented the antithesis of the immense pauper class which work for less than the wage of the slave without any of his incidental compensations.

After this traditional attack on northern economy, Page brought himself to endorse reconciliation, but only with the understanding that the Lost Cause be recognized as having been constitutionally sanctioned:

No section of this country more absolutely, loyally, and heartily accepts the fact that slavery and secession can never again become practical questions in this land, than does that which a generation ago flung all its weight into the opposite scale. But to pretend that we did not have the legal, constitutional right to secede from the Union is to stultify ourselves in falsification of history. If any portion of this nation doubt the South's devotion to the Union, let it attempt to impair the Union. If the South is ever to be once more the leader of this nation, she must cherish the traditional glory of her former station, and prove to the world that her revolution was not a rebellion, but was fought for the principle upon which she was established as her foundation-stone—the sacred right of self-government.

It is no wonder that, with the command of such rhetoric, Page was widely hailed as the keeper of the flame. On the other hand, it would be the lot of Page's contemporary, George Washington Cable, eventually to be branded a “Southern Yankee.” There was nothing in Cable's upbringing to suggest such apostasy. Born in 1844 in New Orleans, son of a businessman, Cable had no connection with the plantation culture that Page had made sacred. But he and his family dutifully became Confederates, and young Cable served in the southern army from 1862 to the end of the war. By the postwar years, however, he had begun to doubt that the South had had any legal right to secede, and with this break from the conservative creed he began a steady march toward a liberal view of the slavery issue. Yet little of his crusading zeal is evident in his first book, Old Creole Days (1879), a collection of local color stories which had appeared in Scribner's. Cable had observed in his native city a kind of exoticism and high melodrama which he rightly guessed would be broadly appealing. Creole culture, with its roots in the Indian, French, and Spanish occupations of the area, was new to American letters, and he became its chief interpreter. That he implicitly—and rather prudishly—condemned its mores was a factor which rubbed nerves at home; but outside readers reveled in the freshness of acquaintanceship with an aristocratic society that owed nothing to the Old Dominion.

By his second book, The Grandissimes (1880), Cable had nerved himself to write of something stronger than the peccadilloes of this class-conscious society; he was ready to confront the morality of slavery and the fate of the blacks in the postwar world. His attack was somewhat oblique; he posed the problem through an intricately plotted romance set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The situation was a classic one for a sociopolitical novel: that moment when an alien power is about to disrupt an isolated culture smugly secure in the hierarchical structure which it had created over many decades. The American “invaders” are correctly seen by the Creoles as destroyers of their world. Before they are brought under the reign of the new society they are forced to test unchallenged beliefs: their social codes, their pride in family, their land titles, their contemptuous treatment of those of mixed blood. The temporal displacement of the plot line, which allowed for a more colorful backdrop, was not, however, intended to disguise the immediacy of the racial issue; conditions at the time of the Purchase and in Cable's own day clearly were parallel. The worst of contemporary southern prejudice was but an inheritance from the cream of Creole society.

Criticism of the closed mind is carried on in the novel largely through dialogs between a young outsider, an apothecary named Joseph Frowenfeld, and the scion of one of the proudest of the Creole dynasties, Honoré Grandissime. Frowenfeld, a northern immigrant to New Orleans, is the only member of his family who has survived a fever epidemic; he is, therefore, entirely on his own in taking on a man he suspects is incapable of change. Frowenfeld is given to rather platitudinous homilies on slavery and the caste system, and he is particularly censorious of the free sexual alliances which have doomed offspring to be ranked according to their degree of black blood. Even Honoré has a halfbrother, a “free man of color,” who bears the same name. The “f.m.c.,” as he is called, loves a quadroon woman who, to complicate matters, loves the white Honoré. This is all melodramatic enough, and even daring for its period, but Cable is not out to titillate his readers. Frowenfeld gets a lesson—and a surprise—when he and the white Honoré come upon the despondent “f.m.c.” as he is attempting to drown himself, and they foil the attempt. The white Honoré's comment on the intended act reveals his own growing awareness of the horror at the core of Creole culture:

“Ah! Mr. Frowenfeld,” said the Creole, suddenly, “if the immygrant [as Frowenfeld is] has cause of complaint [about Creole exclusivity], how much more has that man! True it is only love for which he would have just now drowned himself; yet what an accusation, my-de'-seh [my dear sir], is his whole life against that ‘caste’ which shuts him up within its narrow and almost solitary limits! And yet, Mr. Frowenfeld, this people esteem this very same crime of caste the holiest and most precious of their virtues. My-de'-seh, it never occurs to us that in this matter we are interested, and therefore disqualified, witnesses. We say we are not understood; that the jury (the civilized world) renders the decision without viewing the body; that we are judged from a distance. We forget that we ourselves are too close to see distinctly, and so continue, a spectacle to civilization, sitting in a horrible darkness, my-de'-seh!” He frowned. “The shadow of the Ethiopian,” said the grave apothecary. M. Grandissime's quick gesture implied that Frownfeld had said the very word. “Ah! my-de'-seh, when I try sometimes to stand outside and look at it, I am ama-aze at the length, the blackness of that shadow!”

Frowenfeld is finally given the ultimate revelation of that “blackness” when he hears the full story of Bras-Coupé, a slave whose history obsesses the whole Grandissime clan. The tale, which Cable sets at the very center of the book, is too intricate to allow easy summation; what must be said about it, however, is that it remains the most penetrating and powerful parable of slavery written by a southerner in the postwar period. It tells of a true noble savage, an African prince brought in bondage to the Louisiana fields, where it is fated that he will clash with the white owners who try to strip him of his manhood. Eventually he commits a capital crime, striking his master; after putting a curse on the land, he takes refuge in the swamps. The land rots under the spell of the black man, but inevitably he is captured and undergoes the terrible punishment of being lashed and hamstrung—a symbolic castration. The end of the story suffers somewhat from Cable's penchant for the melodramatic and sentimental, but the racial theme is powerful enough to redeem it. Bras-Coupé's master, dying under the curse which the slave has cast, asks to be forgiven. The plea is seconded by the master's wife, who comes to the maimed Bras-Coupé and places her baby within “the hollows of the African's arm.” It puts “its hand upon the runaway's face, and the first tears of Bras-Coupé's life, the dying testimony of his humanity, gushed from his eyes. … He laid his [hand] tenderly upon the babe's forehead, then removing it, waved it abroad, inaudibly moved his lips, dropped his arm, and closed his eyes. The curse was lifted.” Bras-Coupé's death occurs soon after; asked if he knows where he is going, he whispers, “‘To—Africa—’ and was gone.”

The retelling of this violent tale has become an annual ritual among the Grandissime clan; what Cable implies is that they—by a verbal reenactment of the slave's life, death, and act of forgiveness—are attempting to expiate the guilt of the past which still hangs over their own lives. But they miss the ironic central point: the black man must set the whites free.

In a later essay, Cable remarked, “I meant to make The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called. … I wrote as near to truth and justice as I knew how, upon questions I saw must be settled by calm debate and cannot be settled by force or silence.” Cable felt that journalists and politicians did not accurately present the more moderate racial views of his people, and he tried to address a “silent South” which might be encouraged to speak and act more openly. But his reasonable plea for “civil equality” for blacks was too advanced for the mood of the time. It appeared to parrot the old northern line, and it was generally understood that the North would now stay out of the South's handling of its own peculiar social problem. Cable continued to express his liberal ideas both in fiction and in tracts like The Negro Question, but his work was to decline in power. In 1885, largely disowned by his own region, he settled in Northampton, Massachusetts. Like Page, he had acknowledged the curse of slavery, but he had argued that the South could now cast off the burden of racism. Like Page, he had urged reconciliation between former enemies. But, unlike Page, he had taken the injunction quite literally: he had turned himself into a northerner.

In late 1884 Cable joined forces with Mark Twain on a four-month lecture tour. The jaunt was a great success—Cable regaled audiences with Creole songs and Twain read from his new book Huckleberry Finn —but Cable's primness and piety galled the free-thinking Twain. He had found, he wrote to Howells, that “Cable's gifts of mind are greater & higher than I had suspected”; but he added: “You will never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know & study Cable daily & hourly. … in him & his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it.”

By the time of this tour Mark Twain had lived away from the South since 1861, and he had moved toward contempt for the South's “religion”: its code of chivalry which masked horrors like feuds and lynchings under the proud badge of “honor.” Of course, like all his views, Twain's attitudes toward the region were marked by riotous contradictions, by conflicting emotions which drove him to picture the South both as the pastoral Eden of his boyhood and as a present-day cultural and moral wasteland. In the 1880s and '90s the latter view was predominant. This Twain thundered and blasted away as a self-proclaimed anti-“Southron,” but it is obvious that he could not have been so caustically brilliant if he had not himself once embraced the South's dogmas about race and caste. His father was a Virginian with the airs of the gentry, his mother a Kentuckian; the family had moved on to the slave state of Missouri, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. The young man emigrated to the West, where he made his reputation; in later years he built homes in the East, where he made his fortune. But three of his best books— Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson —are set in the Southland he had known; and one fat volume of previously unpublished writings is devoted to “the Matter of Hannibal,” the small river town of his youth. He had missed the Civil War because, after a brief stint as a Confederate militiaman, he had decamped to join his Unionist brother in Nevada. His imaginative return to the place of his youth was not to come until 1875, when he contributed to the Atlantic Monthly a series of sketches called “Old Times on the Mississippi,” which glorified the cub pilot days when he first learned to “read the book” of the great river. There is little direct confrontation of the slave-holding South here; and in his “boys' book” of the next year, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, nostalgic recollections of his river town are disturbed by terrors which are more melodramatic than sociological.

Twain's continuation of his memoirs, however, is another matter. Life on the Mississippi (1883), written after he had toured the South for the first time since 1861, contains untrammeled assaults on the flossier versions of southern chivalric legend which had been flooding postwar periodicals. In his view, the South had been the victim not only of chattel slavery but of a slavishness of mind which Twain largely attributed to the enthralling prose of Sir Walter Scott. In a characteristic reading of history, he argued that, though the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars had involved real crimes, the world was in their debt for “great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.” In a familiar passage which prefigures the style and technique of H. L. Mencken, Twain then ripped into the Old South's cherished romancer:

The comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization, and so you have practical common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and mediæval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a major or a colonel, or a general, or a judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

It is admittedly a “wild proposition,” Twain went on, but “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”

Twain's diatribe is without real substance as historical analysis; but it is eloquent proof of an author's belief that his works create, rather than reflect, the mood of a period. Scott had been, after all, but one element in the medieval revival which had swept over much of Europe and America. What his romances did, fundamentally, was to confirm for many Southerners the essential rightness of a caste system and a chivalric ideal; that confirmation came, however, from other sources as well.

In his eagerness to diagnose the “Sir Walter disease,” Twain was not very perceptive or accurate about past and present southern writing. He scorned the “wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence’” of much antebellum American writing, and he had to confess that it “was the fashion in both sections of the country.” But he had to twist literary history to bring his final charge against the pernicious effect of romanticism upon the South. In prewar days, he asserted, “the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could.” “But,” he went on, “a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it—clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms and a dead language.” Was Twain really so blind about the enormous vogue for a southern literature about the southern past? Probably he had simply come to hate the widespread acceptance of the content of southern writing; critique of style was a poor argument, for even in the North “realism” was hardly the dominant mode in most popular fiction. Twain reserved praise only for Cable and Harris—“two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style.” Yet, illogically, it was their command of local dialects that he praised unreservedly. What he did not mention was the attraction for him of their relatively radical beliefs on the racial issue.

In his next major work, Huckleberry Finn (1885), Twain managed to make his points less frenetically by adopting a new distancing device, allowing an unsophisticated boy to speak his thoughts in a rough vernacular tongue. Though the novel rises above the southern scene to pose the large philosophical issue of man's freedom to choose his own course, its satirical attack is often quite specific and local. The world of Huck Finn's vision is a moral desert, where slavery and bigotry are the bedrock of “sivilization.” Huck's own movement toward humaneness—toward his recognition that Jim, though black and a slave, is a man—is slow in pace; and, in the crucial scene where he decides not to report Jim as a runaway, he still acknowledges the weight of his culture's central beliefs. Conscience, the instilled voice of society, tell Huck that to aid Jim is a damnable act; and he makes his decision in defiance: “‘All right, then, I'll go to hell.’” As Twain sets up the mood of the scene, we are clearly meant to applaud Huck's act; but all the events of the river journey make it certain that Huck already is in hell, that once off the river he and Jim are forever outcasts from Christian society. Twain knew this landscape from his own early and recent experiences, but his choice of targets also shows the pressure upon him of several decades of the South's endeavor to create a favorable self-image. Romantic tastes are mocked in the name of the wrecked steamboat aboard which Huck and Jim have their first adventure—the “Walter Scott.” The intellectual aridity and cultural shallowness of the gentry are pilloried in the chapter devoted to Huck's description of the “taste-fulness” of the Grangerford home. But Twain's greatest scorn is expended on the Old South's pride in its stratified society, and he makes Huck the mouthpiece for some ironically edged words: “Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that's worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town.” Their code of honor has involved the Grangerfords in a bloody feud with the Shepherdsons—“another clan of aristocracy” which is as “high-toned and well born and rich and grand.” Huck tries to learn from young Buck, one of the Grangerford lads, what initiated the quarrel; and he gets a lesson in the niceties of aristocratic behavior when Buck tells him: “‘It started thirty year ago, or som'ers along there. There was trouble 'bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle it; and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the man that won the suit—which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody would.’” Huck flees the scene as the two families are wiping each other out in a culminating gunfight; but his raft drifts him into another locale in which Twain makes his most ferocious assault upon caste—the Boggs-Sherburn episode.

Boggs, a harmless old drunk, has publicly mocked Colonel Sherburn, and the colonel, after warning Boggs of retaliation if he doesn't shut up, has shot him dead on the street. A lynching party is gotten up and confronts Sherburn at his home. Sherburn's defiance of the mob, and his denunciation of the southern code of justice, is all the more cutting because it comes from the mouth of one who had been raised in the system:

“The idea of you lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man ! … Why a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him. “Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward. … Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you're just as brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it's just what they would do. “So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks. … Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they'll bring their masks and fetch a man along. Now leave —.”

The high rhetoric and the sneering analysis of mob psychology are more than a Huck could have managed; and Twain returns us to Huck's voice in his toneless comment: “I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.”

The final chapters of Huckleberry Finn —the elaborate plot to “free” Jim from his mock captivity at Phelps Farm—have seemed to many readers only a tediously extended parody of the Scott-Dumas school which degrades the character of Jim himself. But they properly take us back to the world of Tom Sawyer, that “good bad boy” who can face life only by turning its horrifying realities into containable illusions. At the end of the book Huck stands defeated: he knows that the Tom Sawyers of this world will prevail and that their ethic will never allow blacks and whites to live together in a bond of brotherhood. Twain allows him only a futile gesture of escape; he will, Huck tells us, “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.” So had Twain. And, by this time, so have we.

Twain's last major use of southern material was in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a near-botch of a book which is saved largely by his unusually frank portrayal of a mulatto woman character, Roxana. Twain tells us that he had started to write a farce about Siamese twins; the farce had begun to turn into a tragedy when he introduced Roxana and had her switch her illegitimate baby with the newborn son of her master. The “tragedy” is said to be that of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the freethinker and longtime outcast citizen of the village who, by the end of the book, has made himself a hero by winning a sensational murder case and has become a “success.” But the real tragedy is man's notion that he can escape his heredity and environment, and Twain again employs the South's illusions about its society to illustrate his case. The boys exchanged in the cradle meet suitably ironic fates: the “base-born” Tom, raised as a white, is betrayed by the “nigger” in him, is unmasked, and is literally “sold down the river.” The “high-born” Chambers, raised as a slave, succeeds to a white man's estate; but he cannot free himself from the manners and attitudes of the black he has thought himself to be.

For once Twain had the temerity to expose the most embarrassing, and the most hushed-up, aspect of slavery: the sexual exploitation of the black woman by white masters. Roxana herself is the offspring of miscegenation: “Only one-sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show. … To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave and salable as such.” Roxy has had a liaison with one of the white grandees of the village; their child, therefore, was “thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a negro.” Twain's contempt for the Old Dominion's chivalry—the “F.F.V.'s” who dominate the town's society—now had grown to the point where he could treat them with pure mockery, burdening them with fanciful names like “Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex” and “Percy Northumberland Driscoll.” Against such people Roxy tries to act as a moral foil; she works herself out of slavery and tries—by placing her own baby in the white heir's cradle—to tilt the balance of her black/white world. Yet Roxy too remains in thrall to the pervasive racism. In a scene in which she reveals to her son the truth of his parentage, she tells him proudly: “‘You ain't got no 'casion to be shame' o' yo' father, I kin tell you. He wuz the highest quality in dis whole town—ole Virginny stock. Fust famblies, he wuz.’” And later, when her son refuses to fight a duel, she stings him with the taunt that blood will tell: “‘It's de nigger in you, dat's what it is. Thirty-one parts o' you is white, en on'y part nigger, en dat po' little one part is yo' soul. ’”

Mark Twain was a humane man, and in his private life as Samuel Clemens he was a steadfast advocate of civil rights for black people. But philosophically he increasingly became skeptical that anyone in the whole “damned human race” was capable of salvation. The notion of individual freedom was the final folly of a species which could escape neither history nor biology. Twain may well have seemed what William Dean Howells called him: “the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew.” But his fictions betray the real truth: he could not go home again, but that home forever burned in his blood. It was “the Southerner” in him that gave him his most powerful themes.

The last years of the nineteenth century saw the fading of the local color movement; but they were marked by two ironic events in southern letters. The first was that a black man won fame by writing about black people without revealing his own racial identity. The other was that a woman won notoriety by frankly revealing what it meant to be a woman in her time and place.

The black author, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), had broken into print in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887 with a local color story set in North Carolina. A number of other tales followed, and in 1899 he issued the two collections upon which his present reputation rests: The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth. That his publishers did not reveal Chesnutt's color was not, as one might suspect, the result of any fear of prejudicial reaction. Their silence was meant as compliment: his work was just as good as that of any white author. Chesnutt himself did not wish to be known as a “Negro writer”; he sought recognition as a person who had mastered the literary craft of the local colorists as it had been practiced in prestigious periodicals. Yet he did manage to present a black point of view without creating the direct emotional confrontation quite possible in this decade of stricter “Jim Crow” laws. Chesnutt was not the first southern Negro to write fiction (a fugitive slave named William Wells Brown had produced a sensational protest novel as early as 1853) but he was the first to have his work initially judged on its own merits. He wrote on into the twentieth century, but his later and more frankly “black” productions were a disappointment, both to favorable critics like Howells and to Chesnutt himself, who had hoped to contribute to the bettering of racial relations.

The continuing conservatism of taste was to be felt by Kate Chopin (1851-1904), who dared to make the sexual desires of a woman the main subject of her novel The Awakening (1899). Before this book Chopin had published a number of local color stories of the French-American South, which had been collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her work in this vein is best illustrated by the frequently anthologized “Désirée's Baby,” a story of unwitting miscegenation in which the mother is cast out by her husband and drowns both herself and her child. But the story is given an unexpected twist: not the mother but the father turns out to have been the carrier of Negro blood. In 1890 Chopin experimented with longer fiction in At Fault, but this rather weak production would be forgotten in the attention given The Awakening. This second novel, which details the life and death of a woman who, tiring of her husband, seeks sexual satisfaction outside marriage, proved too “European” for contemporary critics; after one reprinting it disappeared, only to be rediscovered and properly reevaluated in recent years. Its frankness and its cool attitude toward extramarital gratification make it unique for its period. Chopin had been born in Missouri during the days of the Old South; she lived through the whole of the New South and dutifully did her part for her region in her short stories. But in her last novel she had the courage to look toward a newer South, one in which women writers could at last free their characters from that stultifying stereotype, the Southern Lady.

Bibliographical Note

In the past few decades the study of southern literature in all periods has become a major academic undertaking. Though the chief research centers are southern-based, they are far from being southern-biased; scholars are finally able to examine a regional literature dispassionately without undergoing the criticism of regional patriots. The criticism, biography, and history which they have produced is immense; a basic aid to sorting it out is Louis D. Rubin, Jr., A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, 1969). A follow-up volume is Southern Literature, 1968-1975, edited by Jerry T. Williams (Boston, 1978). An annual bibliography, published in the spring issue of the Mississippi Quarterly, brings this information up to date. Useful information about current activities can also be found in the News-Letter of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (currently issued by Mississippi State University).

In writing a concise survey of literature in the South before 1900, I have been very conscious of how much I have had to omit. I have attempted to put together a coherent essay by concentrating upon those whom I take to be key figures, whatever the intrinsic quality of their work. I have emphasized what seems to me most “southern” in the authors I have surveyed; inevitably, this approach has meant neglect of the work which many did in other areas. Fortunately there is a long and authoritative study which will help to fill in these and other gaps: Jay B. Hubbell's The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (Durham, N.C., 1954). I am indebted to this work throughout my own essay; a number of brief quotations, otherwise unidentified, are taken from this source. I have also quoted texts from one of the best one-volume anthologies, Southern Writing, 1585-1920 (New York, 1970), edited, with excellent introductions and headnotes, by Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. A later anthology, The Literary South (New York, 1979), is edited by Rubin alone. Two earlier collections remain standard: Edd W. Parks, editor, Southern Poets (New York, 1936) and Gregory L. Paine, editor, Southern Prose Writers (New York, 1947). A guide to the whole range of southern authors is Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baton Rouge, 1979), edited by Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. A useful discussion both of accomplishment and of remaining problems in the field is Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities, edited by Rubin and Holman (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975). Of the journals which regularly print articles on the South, I especially recommend the Southern Literary Journal (Chapel Hill, N.C.); its review section is both dependable and stimulating. In the notes on individual chapters which follow I have identified the sources of my quotations; because of space limitations, I have listed only those articles and books which have most directly contributed to my remarks. …

Historical works which I have used are C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1951) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1966). Two anthologies of local color writing contain the texts which I have quoted: Harry R. Warfel and G. Harrison Orians, editors, American Local-Color Stories (New York, 1941) and Claude M. Simpson, editor, The Local Colorists (New York, 1960). The Harris story is from Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (New York, 1880). Page's address is reprinted in The Old South (New York, 1892). Passages from The Grandissimes are from the original edition; for Cable's political writings I have used Arlin Turner, editor, The Negro Question (New York, 1958). Twain's letter to Howells is in Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, editors, Mark Twain-Howells Letters (New York, 1960); the texts of the novels are from the “Author's National Edition” (New York, 1907-1918). The fullest and most convincing study of Twain and his region is Arthur G. Pettit, Mark Twain and the South (Lexington, Ky., 1974).

"Literature of the New South - J. V. Ridgely (essay date 1980)." Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Lynn M. Zott, Vol. 114. Gale Cengage, 2003, 16 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/literature-new-south/critical-essays/criticism-overviews#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-j-v-ridgely-essay-date-1980>

Thomas Richardson (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: Richardson, Thomas. “Local Color in Louisiana.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 199-208. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

[ In the following essay, Richardson describes the work of the major local color writers of the New South. ]

When the journalist Edward King visited New Orleans in early 1873 as representative of “The Great South” series for Scribner's, he discovered more for his Northern audience than he or his editors, J. G. Holland and R. W. Gilder, could have expected. “Louisiana to-day is Paradise Lost,” he wrote. “In twenty years it may be Paradise Regained. … It is the battle of race with race, of the picturesque and unjust civilization of the past with the prosaic and leveling civilization of the present.” King was perceptive, and the conflicts he described—past versus present, Creole versus American, black versus white, traditional versus progressive values—would help to stimulate a significant literary movement, what Warner Berthoff calls a “New Orleans renaissance in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.”

To King's famous discovery of George Washington Cable, whom King assisted in placing “'Sieur George” with Scribner's, one may add Grace King, Kate Chopin, Ruth McEnery Stuart, the Creole historian Charles Gayarré, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Lafcadio Hearn, who lived and wrote in New Orleans from 1877 to 1887. These writers together produced a unique literature, considerably more complex than much other work of the local-color era. The books they wrote about Louisiana are not only numerous but impressive, including Cable's Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880), Hearn's Chita (1889), and Chopin's The Awakening.

The Louisiana writers owed much of their contemporary popularity to the quaint, quasi-foreign setting that Creole New Orleans and Acadian Louisiana offered a curious Northern public. Perhaps more than any other American locale, the bayou country with its rich French history and complicated social texture satisfied local-color impulses. The new national spirit after 1865, with its accompanying industrial and urban growth, stimulated a growing number of eager readers of emerging magazines both to celebrate sectional peculiarities and to escape from a world of growing complexity. As Americans looked back down the road not taken, the entire South was generally rediscovered as a field for fiction, for the vanished Old South had special appeal. Louisiana writers were especially successful, since the vanished community they portrayed was far removed from the reality of living in America. Louisiana, more than any other Southern state, and New Orleans, more than any other American city, worked to the writer's advantage. “After Louisiana,” Robert Penn Warren would say years later, “nothing has been real.”

Louisiana writers could immediately combine a tropical setting of magnolias, oleander, and ancient architecture with a social and economic cauldron. Because of its location at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans was a city of all classes and customs, with a “polyglot variety” in its population—“Spanish, Creole, Acadian, Negro (with gradations of field hand and house servant, octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto), Italian, German, Yankee, Sicilian, mountain white and river tawny” (Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1918 [1965]). The flatboatman from Kentucky milled in New Orleans streets, as did the Creole aristocrat, Caribbean sailor, American entrepreneur, and a sizable number of gens de couleur libres. Outside New Orleans there were French Acadian settlements, transplanted to Louisiana swamps and prairies, with colorful dialects among farmers, trappers, and fishermen. Finally, there was the Mississippi River itself, traveled by steamboats and river rats, and bordered by Negro shacks, antebellum homes, and fields of sugarcane. For the writer interested in sectional peculiarities, here were riches indeed. Louisiana local colorists were also in possession of historical material far more racy and challenging than the Old South alone could afford. By the 1880s, writers had nearly two centuries of Creole history, yellow-fever epidemics, quadroon balls, duels, the Code Noir, and characters like Jean Lafitte to use as source and background. Not only did writers draw directly on Louisiana history and legend for their stories, they found it so fascinating and so much a source of pride that considerable energy went into writing history itself.

The cankerous secrets revealed in Louisiana history, combined with the tensions in the contemporary postwar culture, help explain why this local-color literature has extraordinary strength and significance. As Shirley Ann Grau suggests, the Creole heritage in New Orleans reveals “the decline of an aristocracy under the pressure of circumstances”; it also mirrors the pressures that wracked the South after 1865. The classic conflict in New Orleans culture between the Creoles (the white descendants of the original French and Spanish settlers) and the invading Americans after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, had been decided by the 1870s. By then, the Creole community was well past its zenith, though the city continued its polarization between the older, French-speaking Vieux Carré and the newer, more commercial American sections. The passing of the Creole community, its best values as well as its worst, afforded Louisiana local colorists appropriate themes of transience, defeat, and a tradition more authentic than history.

Cable's treatment of the Creoles has been variously criticized, but he, like Grace King and Gayarré, had roots in New Orleans. His stories, and theirs, develop a genuine attractiveness in the Creole culture—family, a sense of place, warm friendships, and personal dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. At the same time, the Louisiana literature generally avoids the shallow idealism so often found in local color. Cable saw the connections between the decline of the Creoles and their self-destructive racial pride, and his best work makes it clear that such racial arrogance has direct application to broader problems of Southern history, especially the black-white conflict after 1865. Although it is true that none of the other Louisiana local colorists matched Cable's awareness of the shadow in the Southern garden, the complexity of New Orleans' racial background is as important to the strength of the literature as is the Creole heritage.

Perhaps the most important Southern artist working in the late nineteenth century, George W. Cable (1844-1925) is now praised for his courageous essays on civil rights, such as The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1890), as well as for his early fiction about New Orleans, especially Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880). Not a Creole himself, Cable nevertheless knew his subject well. He was born in New Orleans, grew up there, served as a Confederate soldier, and returned to work there until 1884, when he moved north. As a clerk in the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, he began to study the colonial history of Louisiana while writing sketches for the Picayune ; and his stories followed, he later told F. L. Pattee, because “it seemed a pity for the stuff to go so to waste.” In his essay “My Politics,” Cable tells how his reading of the Code Noir caused him such “sheer indignation” that he wrote the story of Bras-Coupé, first submitted through Edward King to Scribner's as “Bibi,” but rejected because of its brutality. Later the story was incorporated as the foundation of The Grandissimes.

Cable's best stories from Old Creole Days illustrate his preoccupation with a doomed Creole community. Living in aged, ruined settings, his major characters often are isolated and self-destructive, yet their dignity in the face of defeat makes them attractive. In “'Sieur George,” where the achievement is in the relation of setting and character, the reader glimpses the decay of two old men who slip along the “cobwebbed iron” of the Vieux Carré and up “rotten staircases that seem vainly trying to clamber out of the rubbish.” “Belles Demoiselles Plantation” demonstrates the consequences of past sins on the De Charleu family, as an old Creole who “will not utterly go back on ties of blood” watches his mansion and seven beautiful daughters sink into the Mississippi. Old Jean-ah Poquelin, once an “opulent indigo planter,” now lives isolated in a horrible swamp in an ancient house “half in ruins.” He fails in his attempt to protect family secrets (his brother is a leper living on the grounds) from the callous Americans who are bent on developing his property, but his loyalty is more admirable than the materialism of his adversaries.

The Grandissimes, according to Louis D. Rubin, Jr., is “the first modern Southern novel,” because it attempts “to deal honestly with the complexity of Southern racial experience.” Like the best stories of Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes balances between sympathy for and judgment on New Orleans and the South, but it is stronger because it contains, as Cable says, “as plain a protest against the times in which it was written as against the earlier times in which its scenes were set.” Here, Cable examines the connections between the decline of the best values in the Creole community, its self-destructive pride, and the farreaching effects of its sins on the contemporary South. These themes achieve full significance in Cable's creation of Honoré Grandissime, a Creole who attempts to reconcile his sympathy for the Southern community, represented by his own family, with his judgment on its evils, especially slavery and racism. By setting his novel in New Orleans in 1803, Cable caught the conflict between Honoré's Creole family and the Americans. The arrogance of the Grandissimes is bearing dark fruit—especially “the length, the blackness” of the “shadow of the Ethiopian.” Honoré must deal with his literal shadow, a half-brother, who is a free man of color also named Honoré Grandissime, and his family's brutal treatment of blacks, especially Bras-Coupé, whose curse continues to blight their fortunes. Honoré is also responsible to those traditional family values embodied in his uncle Agricola Fusilier, described in the novel as “the aged high priest of a doomed civilization.”

Cable continued to write about New Orleans and Louisiana throughout his long career, in Madame Delphine (1881), Dr. Sevier (1884), The Creoles of Louisiana (1884), and the Acadian novel Bonaventure (1888). In all, he would publish fourteen more novels and collections, and his last book, Lovers of Louisiana (1918), written seven years before his death, returns to his original themes and subject matter. Curiously, The Grandissimes, his first novel, is also his best. Not enough has been said about the polarization in the world Cable and others knew after 1865. During Reconstruction, tensions between past and present were expressed dogmatically by what C. Vann Woodward calls “the doomed generation,” those who remained loyal to the principles of the Old South, and another group who advocated the philosophy of the New South. Honoré Grandissime's dilemma mirrors Cable's own conflict as an artist working in the South after 1865. “As I watched the Great Reconstruction agony from its first day to its last,” Cable says, “I found my emotions deeply torn—with my sympathies ranged upon the pro-Southern side of the issue and my convictions drifting irresistibly toward the other.” In his career after The Grandissimes, Cable would be unable to reconcile his love for the South with his abhorrence of its evils. The result is a split in his life and art, social reform versus romantic escape. In his polemical essays, Cable the reformer and New South advocate assumes that the past can be redeemed in the present. In the pastoral Bonaventure and the romances beginning with The Cavalier (1901), he attempts escape through retrieval of an idyllic past, where the problems of racism are not present. Even in The Grandissimes, Honoré's dilemma shares importance with Cable's moral voice, represented by Joseph Frowenfeld, a character who exists outside the novel's major themes.

Grace Elizabeth King (1851-1932) has recently begun to receive the critical treatment she deserves, in part because of the appearance of Robert Bush's anthology, Grace King: A Selection of Her Writings (1973) and his Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983). Rescued from her traditional role as a lesser figure who sought to correct Cable's views on New Orleans, King is seen by Bush as a writer whose work was influenced by her feeling about Cable's popularity, her French education, her allegiance to her family during Reconstruction, and the Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884-1886, which brought outsiders like Richard Watson Gilder and Charles Dudley Warner to New Orleans. In her Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (1932), King recalls her 1885 interview with Gilder about Cable. Cable, she said, had “stabbed the city in the back … to please the Northern press,” proclaiming “his preference for colored people over white” and “quadroons over the Creoles.” Gilder had replied, “if Cable is so false to you, why do not some of you write better?” King was so motivated to answer Gilder's challenge that she climbed the attic stairs the next morning and began “Monsieur Motte.” King had deep personal feelings about the humiliation suffered by her family after the Civil War. She was not a Creole, but her aristocratic family had been intimate in circles that Cable knew mostly through observation and research. Like the Creoles, her education and background were exclusively French; like them, she had lost home and property to a new regime. Her “grand theme,” Bush says, was “defending the character of New Orleans and upholding … its traditions.” She naturally shared the anger of Creoles like Adrien Rouquette and Charles Gayarré toward Cable and his work.

However, “Monsieur Motte” and subsequent stories do not simply idealize the past; nor are they only important as “the defense of the Creoles.” Anne Jones has recently made the point that King's portrayal of women (both black and white) is her real subject. In addition, King's reading of French realists stimulated her irony and her choice of contemporary subject matter. While the quadroon Marcélite of “Monsieur Motte” assumes a fictitious white identity to support the education of her former master's child—a devotion that readers might conclude “was the deserved reward of benign treatment”—her role as a black woman (and the role of other women in the work) is treated with surprising complexity. King draws back from uncomfortable conclusions about the traditional roles of blacks and women, but Jones finds a “cognitive dissonance” in her work, a “rebellious opposite” to orthodoxy. Likewise, in her later novel The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard (1916), King does not merely portray affectionate black-white relationships in the return of the former slaves Jerry and Matilda as servants to their old master; instead, “she is the sympathetic and … melancholy interpreter of the sorrows of Jerry's family as she sees it disintegrate.”

King's cultivated friendship with Charles Dudley Warner led to the magazine publication of “Monsieur Motte” (1885) and to its expansion into a book (1888). As her stories continued to appear in magazines, she visited among friends in the Northern literary establishment and worked in Europe. Her collections of short stories, Tales of a Time and Place (1892) and Balcony Stories (1893), preceded a remarkable number of histories: a biography of Bienville (1892), for which she had done research in Paris; a textbook of Louisiana history (1893); New Orleans, the Place and the People (1895); De Soto and His Men in the Land of Florida (1898); Stories from Louisiana History (1905); and Creole Families of New Orleans (1921). King's final novel, La Dame de Sainte Hermine (1924), has received little attention. Until recently she has been remembered chiefly for Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (1932), a disappointing book because, as Bush says, “it brought out the polite side of Grace King the lady rather than the perceptive … writer at her best.”

One of Grace King's most significant friendships was with the Creole historian Charles Gayarré (1805-1895), an elder statesman in Louisiana society after 1865. Judge Gayarré is probably best known for his impressive History of Louisiana, but he is also remembered as an important representative of the culture which had to face tremendous social change in the years following the war. From a distinguished family, Gayarré was a well-traveled lawyer-planter whose political career before 1860 had included election to the United States Senate (a term cut short by illness in the 1830s) and service to Louisiana in a variety of important state offices. During the local-color era, he remained a well-known public figure, but one without power or privilege. He had lost his large personal fortune in the war, for he invested about ＄500,000 in the Confederate cause. Like other elderly aristocratic Southerners, he found the economic and spiritual climate after 1865 devastating.

With his friend Paul Hamilton Hayne, Gayarré has been described as the last of the literary cavaliers, but his historical work is professionally done. He wrote a history in French, Histoire de la Louisiana (1846-1847), and the Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848). His best work, however, is the multivolume History of Louisiana. The French Domination (2 vols., 1854) covered the years to 1769, The Spanish Domination (1854) to 1803, The American Domination (1866) to 1816, with a supplement sketching the history from 1816 to 1861. His political and historical novels, The School for Politics (1854), Fernando de Lemos (1872), and Aubert Dubayet (1882), are lightly regarded, but his articles written for magazines and newspapers after the war are rewarding. Hubbell especially praises “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Régime,” which describes Gayarré's childhood on the plantation of his grandfather Etienne de Boré. Gayarré reacted even more strongly than King to Cable's portrayal of the Creoles in The Grandissimes. Angry that Cable became respected as the formal authority on Louisiana culture while his own credentials were overlooked, Gayarré published a lecture, The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance (1885), which is perhaps the best definition of the adverse Creole reaction to Cable.

Even among specialists in Afro-American literature the memory of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) has grown dim. But in her day, Dunbar-Nelson was recognized as a worthy colleague of Charles W. Chesnutt. Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, a descendant of the proud colony of free Negroes in New Orleans which numbered no less than eighteen thousand at the beginning of the Civil War, she was educated through college in her hometown. In 1878 she married Paul Laurence Dunbar and never returned to the South. She and Dunbar separated by mutual consent in 1902, and after Dunbar's death she remarried. From 1902 until 1920 in Wilmington, Delaware, she headed a high school English department. From 1924 until 1928 she was a parole worker and teacher at a state industrial school for girls near Wilmington. She died in a Philadelphia hospital, still nationally prominent among Negroes, if only because of her connection with Dunbar and her associations with the Republican party.

Dunbar-Nelson wrote short stories, of which two collections appeared, Violets and Other Tales (1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899). Her fictive world is distinctly Creole. The characters she shapes speak French or, when they must, a broken English, and they live in or near New Orleans. Yet, rarely are they black. Racially typical of her protagonists are an aging violinist who loses his position in the orchestra of the New Orleans opera and a young girl who fortunately discovers before it is too late that nunneries are not for her. Dunbar-Nelson's nearest approach to the social protest that might be expected of her is a somewhat oblique indication of her approval of the conduct of some Negro stevedores who are involved as scabs in a strike. Romantic love, not always ending happily, and the Gallic culture in her native state are her two main themes. Of them she speaks sympathetically and gracefully, even though in muted tones and with a voice quickly permitted to cease once she no longer lived in the land of her childhood.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), the literary sojourner who lived in New Orleans from 1877 to 1887, estimated Cable more highly than Gayarré had. He was drawn to Louisiana, in part, by his impressions of “Jean-ah Poquelin,” and he praised Cable's work in “The Scenes of Cable's Romances.” As Lewis Simpson has suggested, the central problem in dealing with Hearn is his “literary and spiritual identity,” for his ten years in New Orleans was only one stop in an international career that later carried him to the West Indies, New York, and, especially, Japan. Hearn had been born on a Greek island, and he had grown up in Ireland and France before being sent to America. In New Orleans Hearn found a culture more suitable to his interests than that of Cincinnati, where he had lived from 1869 to 1877.

Hearn's letters to his Cincinnati friends reveal a great deal of the sensuous appeal he found in the local color of New Orleans, as do his articles sent back to the Cincinnati Commercial. However, without money or employment, Hearn's first months in New Orleans were starving ones, and he was in desperate circumstances when he was hired by the Item. Yet his employment by the Item, and his later work for the Times-Democrat, were doubly fortunate, for the papers not only gave Hearn the means to live, they offered a flexible and creative outlet for his work. In a column called “The Foreign Press,” in editorials, and in later collections, Hearn was able to offer his cultivated New Orleans readers translations from Gautier, Flaubert, and others, as well as a variety of exotic stories, collected as Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884) and Some Chinese Ghosts (1887). He also immersed himself in New Orleans culture; in his columns and in Northern magazines, he published a variety of local legends, street scenes, character sketches, and Creole songs. These are well represented in Creole Sketches (1924) and in The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (1949). Further documentation of the New Orleans culture he found so charming are the famous recipes he assembled in La Cuisine Créole (1885) and his “ Gombo Zhèbes ” (1885), a dictionary of Creole proverbs.

The most important work to spring from Hearn's Louisiana experience is Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889), his first book of fiction. As Arlin Turner points out in the introduction to his recent edition, the book drew from Hearn's several vacation experiences at Grande Isle, from the variety of trips Hearn had made among the islands of the Gulf Coast, and from his reading of Herbert Spencer. Hearn had heard from Cable the story of a child saved from the complete destruction of L'Ile Dernière, a resort much like Grande Isle, in the hurricane of August 10, 1856, and he had read newspaper accounts of the event. Chita has three parts, “The Legend of L'Ile Dernière,” a powerful description of the gathering storm, climaxed by the tide flooding the island and sweeping the hotel away; “Out of the Sea's Strength,” which tells of the girl's rescue; and “The Shadow of the Tide,” which brings the girl's real father, a wealthy Creole doctor, to the island ten years later. The first section, describing the awesome power of the sea, is so well done that Lewis Leary thinks it deserves a place beside “Old Times on the Mississippi.” Chita has also been praised by Beongcheon Yu in An Ape of Gods (1964) as Hearn's “mastery of the … local color technique,” especially regarding “primitive folkways” and “the exotic rhythm of outlandish dialects, especially Creole and Spanish.”

Like Hearn, Cable used various dialects—Creole, German, Negro, Acadian—in his early fiction to capture accurate pictures of Louisiana; Grace King did not, since she sought realism in contemporary subject matter. Perhaps she was wise, for the dialect writing of the local-color era, more quaint than realistic, quickly became dated. Ruth McEnery Stuart (1852-1917), one of the most popular and prolific of the dialect writers of the 1890s, has, to some extent, been victimized by it. In twenty books and more than eighty magazine stories, Stuart used dialect to portray life as she remembered it in Louisiana and Arkansas. She grew up in a country home near New Orleans, married A. O. Stuart, a wealthy Arkansas planter, in 1879, and was widowed in 1883. Like Grace King, she was friendly with Charles Dudley Warner; and it was through him that she launched a successful writing career, moving to New York in 1888.

From her first magazine stories of the late 1880s and her first novels, The Story of Babette (1894) and Arlotta's Intended (1894), Stuart moved quickly to the subject matter that made her popular—her portrayal of rural whites in Arkansas and her pictures of Southern blacks. Her books about the Arkansas farmers include Sonny (1896), one of the best representatives of dialect fiction during the local-color movement, and In Simpkinsville (1897), a collection focusing on the themes of courtship and marriage. Humorous treatments of marriage are also at the center of her fiction about blacks, as in A Golden Wedding and Other Tales (1893) and Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches (1898). Although Joel Chandler Harris told Stuart, “You have got nearer the heart of the Negro than any of us,” her treatment of blacks is generally idealized—faithful, smiling, sentimental. Her best book, Napoleon Jackson: The Gentleman of the Plush Rocker (1902), at least acknowledges the serious undercurrent in black-white relations after 1865.

Warner Berthoff says, correctly, that Louisiana local color has kept its “savor better than the work of any other regional school in late nineteenth-century American writing.” In part, our continued reading of this surprising number of books reflects the reason for their popularity in their own era. The Louisiana culture the local colorists portray makes interesting reading. The French background, especially the decline of the Creole aristocracy, tells a story that “runs the gamut from sublime romance to smelly sordidness.” More important, however, we continue to sense an unusual complexity in these works, a complexity not found in more idealized local color. Such strength springs directly from the tensions in Louisiana culture. Anne Jones finds in New Orleans after 1865 a commingling “of conflicts and resolutions that made [it] almost a perfect city for a writer.” What Edward King really discovered in the Paradise Lost of 1873 Louisiana was the well-spring of a literary movement that would do considerably more than dominate the market-place for over thirty years. The best books written in and about Louisiana during the local-color era— Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes, Chita, The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard, The Awakening —comprise a significant literature, well worth our attention a century later.

"Literature of the New South - Thomas Richardson (essay date 1985)." Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Lynn M. Zott, Vol. 114. Gale Cengage, 2003, 16 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/literature-new-south/critical-essays/criticism-overviews#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-thomas-richardson-essay-date-1985>

Richard Gray (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: Gray, Richard. “The New South, the Lost Cause, and the Recovered Dream.” In Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, pp. 75-121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

[ In the following excerpt, Gray concentrates on developments in the literature of the New South from the romance and nostalgia of early writers, to the cultural expressions of Sidney Lanier's poetry and the autobiographical satire of Mark Twain. ]

LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER: WRITERS IN THE NEW SOUTH

If there was one thing most travellers in the South were agreed on just after the Civil War, it was that the old economic and political system of the region had broken down irretrievably. One observer, for instance, claimed to have seen “enough woe and want and ruin and ravage”, during a visit of fourteen weeks to Georgia and the Carolinas, “to satisfy the most insatiate heart”; “enough of sore humiliation and bitter overthrow”, he added, “to appease the desire of the most vengeful spirit”. Another has left us this vivid account of the Valley of Tennessee:

It consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin, and plantations of which the ruin is total and complete … The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin houses, ruined bridges, mills and factories, of which latter the gable walls only are left standing, and in large traces of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long neglected, are in disorder … Borne down by losses, debts, and accumulating taxes, many who were once the richest among their fellows have disappeared from the scene, and few have yet risen to take their places.

“A dead civilisation and a broken-down system” was how another traveller described the region after the war; and, melodramatic though the phrase may sound, it was not without a grain of truth. For the planters who had retained most of the wealth and power in the Old South found themselves in a hopeless position: economically ruined and very often excluded from participation in politics. Control shifted from them to new forces, openly committed to industrialisation, accomplished under Northern direction by Northern capital, reducing the South to a colonial status and fastening on it a colonial psychology. Even with the ending of Radical reconstruction in the late 1870s, the pattern did not significantly alter, since very few of the new “Bourbon” leaders were primarily interested in agriculture. As a group, they had very few connections with the plantation regime, and were committed to the building of a new order of things, not the recovery of the old. 1

And yet despite all this—perhaps even because of it—the old order kept its grip on the Southern imagination; and, in particular, the patriarchal image still held sway, still defined the terms in which many Southerners preferred to see themselves. There were different motives for this, depending of course on what kind of Southerners they were: where their interests lay and what their condition and aims were after the war. For example, those who found themselves ruined, and, as they felt, victimised and humiliated, naturally turned back to the good old days before the conflict—which, suitably apotheosised by distance, came to represent all they had suffered for and lost. Those Southerners in turn, who benefited from the changed conditions—the shopkeepers who extended credit, the merchants and bankers who represented Northern interests—lost no time, once they had acquired wealth, in looking back to those days and trying to imitate them: acquiring land with the same indefatigable industry that William Fitzhugh once had, discovering ancestors among once-prominent slave-holding families, and in general reinventing their own past along with that of their region. Finally, those who swept to power in the “Bourbon” reaction did so through an adept use of the patriarchal image: their interests might have aligned them with the New South, and the gospel of Progress and Profits, but they and their message were given colour and glamour by being wrapped in the pseudo-aristocratic trappings of the old. Naturally, there was no reason why these different motives should not overlap: a successful merchant, having made his money and adopted the role of patriarch, made an ideal member of the new political order but so, too, did someone with a suitably imposing name, redolent of times past, who was ready to allow that name to be used to restore white supremacy and drive the Republicans back where they belonged. Motives were mixed, as they always are: the same Southerner could, at one and the same time, look back with nostalgia to the rural past and forward with hope to the industrial future, and cloak everything—past, present, and future—in the language and imagery of the patriarchal model. But one ingredient in the mixture remained simple, constant, and unchanging: which was the willingness, or rather the fierce compulsion, to identify the great days of the patriarchal order with the time before the war. Aspects of that order might be recovered, people felt, its essential spirit might not be dead, but in itself in its entirety it was gone for ever. 2

This willingness to locate the feudal ideal firmly in the past had several consequences, some of them obvious and others perhaps less so. It meant, first of all, that those many writers who chose to celebrate that ideal—like John Esten Cooke and Thomas Nelson Page—were no longer hampered by any sense of contingency, any restricting concern for the ordinary details of day-to-day life. Nostalgia could run riot, distance could give a romantic blur to everything, while if any gap was perceived between ideal and reality, word and thing—and, not surprisingly, there sometimes was—it could be equated with the gap between past and present; once things were perfect, the argument went, and, if they do not seem so now, then the war is entirely to blame. On top of that, this placing of the centre of interest in times past helped to blur the moral and intellectual focus as well. Since writers such as Page were concerned with a world that was, as one commentator has put it, “so irrevocably and satisfyingly lost”, 3 what they had to say had no direct or obvious implications for the present and future. Like the planters who had fallen victims to the war, never to recover, they might have been lamenting the disappearance of the old system as the one, truly human way in which to live, and so by implication have been castigating the new system of things. Or, like the Bourbon politicians and their accomplices, they might have seen no inconsistency between their hymns to the past and hopes for the future; since to memorialise something, in however fulsome a way, is not necessarily to offer it as a viable design for living. They might in short, as some critics have suggested, have been offering a pastoral rebuke to an increasingly urban present; or they might, as at least one critic has argued, have been indirectly promoting the industrial ethic by placing its rural alternative in a picturesque vacuum. 4 The point is, really, that we, the readers, cannot say for certain which of these two things they thought they were doing, because there are so few references of any significance to the emerging order of things. The patriarchal model is presented to us in a sealed container: that interest in applying it to the contemporary experiences and problems of the South which we find—in however crude or occasionally misdirected a form—in the novels of Simms, Paulding, Caruthers, and Tucker is for the most part missing from the plantation fiction written after the Civil War. So instead of historical romance we are left with romance, pure and simple.

Just how romantic that could be is suggested by these writers' frequent use of an ex-slave as memorialist, the commemorator of the lost pieties and sanctions. Colonel Carter of Cartersville, for example, by F. Hopkinson Smith, includes this elegy from the Colonel's faithful servant Chad:

“Dem was high times. We ain't neber seed no time like dat since de war. Git up in de mawnin' an' look out ober de lawn, an' yer come fo'teen or fifteen couples ob de fustest quality folks, all un horseback ridin' in de gate. Den such scufflin' round. Old marsa and missis out on de po'ch an' de little pickaninnies runnin' from de quarters … An' den sich a breakfast an' sich dancin' an' cotin'; ladies all out on de lawn in der white dresses, an de gemmen in fair-top boots … Dat would go on a week or mo', an' den up day'll all git an away de'y go to der nex' plantation …” 5

“Dem wuz laughin' times”, declares another and more famous of these elegists, Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, “an' it looks like dey ain't never comin' back.” This use of a narrator to recall the “good ole times” before the war even made nostalgia dramatically permissible, since it could be presented as an aspect of character as well as a quality of the text. It was not that these writers wished to dramatise the process of remembering as later Southerners like Tate, Ransom, and Faulkner were to do, to show how the mind perseveres to turn things recalled into legend; it was simply that this narrative frame helped them to distance themselves still further from their material. In the Preface to one of his novels, Red Rock, Thomas Nelson Page declared that his story was set “in the vague region partly in one of the old Southern states and partly in the yet vaguer land of Memory”; 6 and it was clear from his tone that Page regarded this vagueness as a positive asset. Ideally, the assumption was, the “old courts and polished halls” of the ante-bellum South should be seen through a series of receding frames: of which one could be provided, when necessary, by a Negro so involved with the old times and so loyal to their memory that he refused to acknowledge his emancipation—or, if he did so, often felt himself lost and anchorless as a result.

One of the more curious aspects of this blurring and softening of the plantation image was the way in which aspects of the patriarchal character that had once been construed as faults, or at the very least weaknesses, were now transmuted, by the distorting mirror of time and loss, into positive merits. Rashness, impetuosity, and foolhardiness were now marshalled unhesitatingly under the banner of “courage”. 7 The lavishness and financial carelessness for which Simms's Colonel Porgy had been criticised was now praised, when it was noted in Cooke's gentlemanly characters, or Page's, as a symptom of generosity of spirit; 8 and that lack of practicality for which Colonel Dangerfield in Westward Ho! had been mocked was presented as the most endearing—which is to say, the most chivalrous, romantic, and archaic—feature of Colonel Carter of Cartersville. In order to register the change, one has only to compare the comments on Porgy's indolence or Dangerfield's … with these words from Gabriel Tolliver, a book by Joel Chandler Harris:

The serene repose of Shady Dale no doubt stood for dullness and lack of progress in that day and time. In all ages of the world, and in all places, there are men of restless but superficial minds, who mistake repose and serenity for stagnation … when you examine the matter, what is called progress is nothing more nor less than the multiplication of the resources of those who, by means of dicker and barter, are trying all the time to overreach the public and their fellows in one way and another. 9

“The civilisation which existed … in the old days before the war has perished”, declared Page in On Newfound River :

The Landons [the heroes of the novel] and others of their kind ruled unquestioned in an untitled manorial system; their poorer neighbours stood in a peculiar relation to them, part friend, part retainer, the line between independence and vassalage being impalpable; and peace and plenty reigned over a smiling land. 10

In such a world, with its noble mansion, verdant lawns, and broad acres, there was no place for doubts or reservations—nor even for those drastically restricted kinds of social criticism and historical analysis that one finds in plantation stories from before the war.

So the patriarchal model was accepted by these writers in a more or less wholesale fashion: with only a slight variation provided by the challenge of war. Plantation mistresses were seen according to type as uniformly thoughtful, caring, and efficient, and in time of conflict offering the appropriate rebuke to those Yankees who dared to invade their homes. 11 Situated around them and their husbands were all the familiar dramatis personae of plantation fiction: the plantation belle whose physical perfection issued from her “old blood and gentle breeding”, the young squire “playing in the court of love” but “a stout-hearted and stout-armed cavalier” 12 into the bargain, the faithful banjo-playing darkies, the wise old Uncle Toms, and the kindly black Mammies. Very often, the narratives, too, seemed to have a preordained structure to them: with set-scenes that evoked the life of the old plantation—the tournament, the ball, the hunt, the horse-race, the dinner, the duel—leading eventually to some conflict that threatened to bring this life to an end. Even if this structure was missing, the villains of the piece tended to fall into certain familiar types just as the heroes did. In detail, they might be coloured according to period—the Puritan extremist, the fanatical Abolitionist, the “lowly-born and lowly-bred” overseer who rises to power and influence after the Civil War: but, in general, they were associated with all the conventional vices of the Yankee—cunning and vulgarity, greed and hypocrisy, and an unparalleled appetite for cant. 13 Again, a comparison with the early plantation romance is worth making. For, whatever their deficiencies, writers like Caruthers and Simms were not unaware of the strengths of the Yankee case: Caruthers, after all, made one of his heroes a cross between the Puritan type and the Cavalier, while in The Sword and the Distaff Simms had provided Millhouse (who, although a Southerner, is given all the traditional “Yankee” ammunition) with his own vision, his own vocabulary, and his own indispensable part in the recovery of the plantation way of life. In later plantation fiction, however, the equivalents of Millhouse are people like one Hiram Still in Red Rock or Wash Jones in Joel Chandler Harris's story, “Ananias”. Like Millhouse, both men are overseers; and, like Millhouse too, both men are thrifty, energetic and, when necessary, cunning. Unlike Millhouse, however, both are viewed with an absolute lack of sympathy, and use their talents, such as they are, not to help their masters but to rob them. “He did not hesitate to grind a man when he had him in his clutches”, Harris declares of Wash Jones, “… he often, in a sly way flattered the colonel [the owner of the plantation] into making larger bills than he otherwise would have made.” 14 Still demonstrates the same rapacity and ruthlessness in tricking and supplanting the man he is supposed to be working for and ends up, like Jones, living in the plantation mansion, at least for a while. “Here I am settin' up”, Still observes at the moment of his triumph,

“a gentleman here in this big house that I used to stand over yonder on the hill in the blazin' sun and just look at, and wonder if I ever would have one even as good as the one I was then in as my own.” 15

This is a far cry from the earthy poetry and utter self-confidence of Simms's character: even the lowly-born in Page's work and Harris's judge things, and in particular themselves, according to the patriarchal model—and struggling for the place and prerogatives of a gentleman show, in the process, just how hopeless that struggle is. Millhouse retains a healthy scepticism towards Porgy's aims even while he is helping him to achieve them; whereas Still and Jones evidently revere the very standards that, in practice, they assault. Consequently, while he strikes the reader as a kind of double agent, rebuilding the patriarchal framework yet all the time inviting us to question its adequacy, they come across as little more than two further propagandists for the cause: pleading the aristocratic case directly, in what they desire, and indirectly—that is, by negative example—in what they do.

Mention of the overseer character, and more specifically those stories in which he is seen rising to power on the back of his master, leads to another point worth emphasising: that by no means all these later plantation romances were set in the period before the war. One common way of commemorating the old order was to concentrate on its vestiges, the few reminders of the patriarchal regime that had survived the conflict. Although such stories might literally be set in the present, however, they were just as much imaginatively committed to the past as other, more obviously elegiac plantation fiction was. Their purpose was to invoke the patriarchal model by implication, as it were: by showing what remained of the old order and how anachronistic—how charmingly, comically, or tragically inappropriate—it was in the new context and system of things. The lighter side of this particular brand of nostalgia is illustrated by this passage from John Esten Cooke's The Virginia Bohemians describing one, fictional neighbourhood in the Old Dominion after the war:

Once the families had lived in affluence … and carriages stood at the door at any and all hours of the day … There was a plenty of hospitality still, but few servants were seen now, and the wolf was at the door much oftener than the coach … The good people in the old country homes accepted their reduced fortunes cheerfully … Certain persons, it is true, called them aristocratic and “exclusive” … they were a poor aristocracy now … A rich aristocracy ought, of course, to be saluted respectfully—certain advantages may be derived from conciliating it … a poor aristocracy … is an effective anomaly and has no right to exist … You can laugh at it, and despise it even—no inconvenience will result—since nothing is to be expected from nothing. 16

What is particularly interesting about this passage is its gradual alteration of tone as it proceeds: from gentle humour, it moves through a sardonic reference to the criticism of “certain persons” to a bitter résumé of the total lack of esteem in which “a poor aristocracy” is held—and (a not unconnected issue) its utter powerlessness. The echo of King Lear at the end is surely neither unintentional nor inappropriate, since it invites the reader to make a connection between Lear in his decline and the Southern gentry in their poverty: the greatness of both being, by implication, measured by the size of their fall. The imaginative thrust of the entire piece is, in effect, backwards: back to the heights from which “the Virginia Bohemians” have toppled, back from a resigned, smiling acceptance of the shabby present to an angry—if partially suppressed—awareness of what has been lost, back to wealth, better days, and, even beyond that, to a far more ancient and revered example of patriarchal power. And in this it neatly summarises the movement and concerns of most plantation stories that permit the contemporary world to intrude on to their pages. In the last analysis, they are hardly interested in that world at all; it exists only as a palimpsest, as it were, through which, if we read carefully, the messages of earlier times appear.

But not every Southern writer after the war was willing to locate his version of the pastoral idyll in the past and in the dream of a feudal patriarchy. For some, at least, the collapse of the plantation system was a basis for hope. Destruction, in their opinion, could and should be followed by the recovery of the Jeffersonian ideal; the turmoil of the immediate post-war years might very well act as a prelude to the return of the yeoman farmer, and the revival of those simple pieties and steadfast principles with which that figure was traditionally associated. One writer who thought very firmly along these lines was the poet, Sidney Lanier. Lanier was born in the small but bustling city of Macon, in Middle Georgia, and did not have any personal stake in plantation society. This may have been one reason why he was so willing to embrace the populist image in so much of his writing, but it was by no means the only one. Just as important, really, was his considered belief, as strong as Jefferson's in its own way, that subsistence farming was the true basis of personal independence and republican ideals. Some of this comes out in an early dialect poem of Lanier's, entitled “Thar's More in the Man Than Thar is in the Land”. 17 The poem depends on the contrast between a man named Jones who “couldn't make nuthin' but yallerish cotton” from his land, and Brown, the man who buys Jones's property from him eventually. Convinced that it is the poverty of his land that is to blame, Jones travels west to Texas to farm cotton there. Meanwhile Brown, we are told,

Within five years, Brown, having abandoned the exclusive cultivation of cotton, has grown prosperous and “so fat that he couldn't weigh”; while Jones's venture into commercial farming has failed once again, and he returns to Georgia seeking work. Invited to share Brown's “vittles smokin' hot”, he is also treated to some homely wisdom from his host. “Brown looked at him sharp”, the narrator tell us,

The reader is left to speculate about what else, if anything, Brown said to Jones, but there can be no doubt about the substance of his message or indeed the thrust of his example: in order to prosper or even survive on the land, the implication is, a man had better abandon dependence on commercial farming.

A similar lesson is taught, in slightly different ways, in several of Lanier's other poems. In “Jones's Private Argument”, 18 for instance, we are reintroduced to the hapless commercial farmer, who seems to have learned little either from his own experiences or the wise words of Brown. Publicly, the narrator tells us, Jones now embraces the gospel of self-subsistence. “Farmers must stop gittin' loans”, he declares, “And git along without 'em.” “The only thing to do”, Jones goes on,

Privately, however, he continues to believe that he can make a success of producing cotton. In the very last stanza, in fact, the narrator overhears Jones reasoning that, if most farmers listen to the advice being given them to plant corn (which, it should perhaps be said, is a kind of shorthand in much of Lanier's work for subsistence farming in general), then cotton will be in short supply and the price will rise. “ Tharfore ”, he concludes triumphantly, “ I'll plant all cotton!” Old habits die hard, it seems: Jones's instinct for self-destruction has not been substantially altered by the evidence—or indeed by the arguments that he has learned to reproduce with such facility. And the reader must assume that, at the very best, he will continue to sink further and further into debt: like a farmer called Ellick Garry, who is the subject of another of Lanier's dialect poems, with the intriguing title “Nine From Eight”. 19 The title, as it turns out, refers to the arithmetic of misery: Garry has learned that his debts for the year of over nine hundred dollars outweigh his earnings of roughly eight hundred dollars from his cotton crop. As he puts it,

So, at the end of the year, he is left with the bitter wisdom that “nine from eight / Leaves nuthin'”, and with the fear that he may never escape the clutches of his creditors and “Them crap-leens, oh, them crap-leens!”

The crop-lien or sharecropping system that Lanier has his character refer to here was one of the things that anyone interested in the state of the real South after the war had to deal with—if only, like Lanier, to attack and dismiss it. It was a system that made it possible for planters to obtain labour without paying wages and for landless farmers to obtain land without buying it or paying cash rent; in other words, it was a system that enabled commercial farming to function at a time when the usual commercial institutions had virtually disappeared from the South. Instead of exchanging money, owner and tenant agreed to share the proceeds of the crop. And in order to meet the immediate demand of the farmer for food and appliances, the crop-lien merchant appeared, who provided credit against the prospective harvest. The merchant in turn obtained advances from a wholesale dealer or jobber, and the chain of credit ran back eventually to a Northern manufacturer or his banker—with, of course, everyone making more than a little profit along the way. Once enmeshed in this chain, the farmer—who was being charged high rates of interest, obliged to obtain all his goods from the credit merchant, and buying in the highest possible market—found it difficult, if not impossible, to escape. If, as usually happened, he failed to cancel his debt with the proceeds from his crop, the contract bound him to renew his lien for the next year under the same merchant. The arrangement was bad enough in itself, but it was made worse by other factors. Normally, the farmer did not control the marketing of his own crop, and so while he was buying in the highest market he was more than likely selling in the lowest. As even Jones recognised, the laws of supply and demand were not totally irrelevant, and since so many farmers in the region depended on cotton for their livelihood, they tended to drive the price down; pathetically, their usual response to this was to increase cultivation, and so drive the price down even further. Quite apart from all this, the victorious Federal government could now favour industry with impunity, through those policies of high tariffs and currency contraction that the farming interests had always feared and opposed. In nearly every respect, then, the sharecropping system encouraged what one contemporary observer described as “helpless peonage”; 20 and it was a system to which, by 1880, more than one-third of all Southern farmers had fallen victim.

This rather brief summary of sometimes immensely complicated financial arrangements is necessary for at least two reasons. In the first place, it says something for the enduring strength of the populist model that it was able to survive all this: not only survive it, but find stimulus and challenge in it. Writers and politicians did not abandon the idea of the simple husbandman, tilling his few acres with not a care for the storms and changes of the market-place; on the contrary, they struggled all the more fiercely to retain that idea and its supporting vocabulary—as, for instance, the arguments and rhetoric of the Populist movement make only too evident. 21 And, in the second, it helps to explain something like the fierceness of Lanier's commitment to the notion of “corn” and, equally, the unbounded intensity of his hatred of “trade”. “Trade, Trade, Trade”, he wrote to a friend,

pah, are we not all sick? A man cannot walk down a green valley of woods, in these days, without unawares getting his mouth and nose and eyes covered with some web or other that Trade has stretched across, to catch some gain or other. 22

Writers such as Lanier celebrated the yeoman almost as an act of desperation: because of the fear, eloquently touched upon here, that the alternative was imprisonment within the spider's web of urban capitalism and the destruction, eventually, of everything that was humanly worthwhile—everything that, for a man of Lanier's learning and interests, could be accommodated under the heading of culture.

Just how much could be accommodated under that heading, and just how powerful were the opposing forces, is the subject of one of Lanier's finest and best-known poems, “Corn”. 23 The poem begins with a richly atmospheric description of the poet walking through some woods on a summer morning. These are the opening lines:

The clotted vocabulary, the luscious verbal music, the evocative allusions to the touch, texture, and smell of things, and not least the only partially veiled pattern of erotic references: all these things recover for us both the sensuous details of a particular scene and a more general sense of the riotous abundance of nature. In this vivid, synaesthetic, and on occasion slightly claustrophobic world, there is little concern, it seems, for order, arrangement, or proportion. Everything melts into and mingles with everything else; throbbing with life, “With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring / And ecstasy of burgeoning”, nature seems to attack the senses, almost, and invite us to participate in its “ambrosial passion”.

Then, “with ranging looks that pass / Up from the matted miracles of grass”, the poet moves slowly to the edge of the woods,

He has come, in fact, to the edge of a cornfield. Looking at the green, growing corn, he notices one stalk towering above the rest: “one tall corn-captain”, which he takes as an emblem of “the poet-soul sublime”. Odd though the comparison may seem to the reader at first, Lanier proceeds to give it substance, to justify it. Like the “poet-soul”, Lanier insists, the “tall corn-captain … leads the vanward of his timid time”, he is a leader. Like, the poet-soul, too, he grows “By double increment, above, below”: drawing sustenance from the earth, and strength and inspiration from the sky. There are further analogies. Both bring together the many elements of which life is composed and metamorphose them, make of them a new synthesis—or, as Lanier puts it, addressing the “corn-captain” but also thinking, clearly, of his own function as poet:

Above all, perhaps, both in their different ways preach reverence for the simple life: the pieties of hearth and home, the value of independence, the importance of depending on oneself for one's needs. Again, the direct address is to the corn, but the implications embrace the poet:

“The march of culture”: this is the phrase with which the second movement of “Corn” begins, and it is evident from the lengthy comparison of the “tall corn-captain” and the “poet-soul” that comprises most of this movement that Lanier wishes this phrase to be interpreted in the widest possible sense. “Culture” here clearly embraces cultivation of both the land and the spirit; indeed, Lanier seems to believe that the one kind of culture grows out of the other—that “chivalry”, “courtesy”, and the things of the heart depend for their support and sustenance on the proper care of the soil and the “substantial spirit of content” that care fosters. It is not a startlingly novel idea, of course, but Lanier gives it a special purchase on the imagination in this poem through the dramatic encounter of poet and landscape, and through a series of analogies that are very often as densely rendered as they are ingenious. And it is given additional point and focus by the frame in which the cornfield first appears to us: the woodland scene, with its rich confusion of sense-impressions, “setting limb and thorn / As pikes against the army of the corn”. This, we are led to infer, is the raw material of both the farmer and the poet; both try to tame nature, not by denying its plenitude and vitality, but by channelling its energies—enabling it to acquire fresh life, purer blood, and clearer direction. The farmer erects his fence, the poet arranges his language, rhyme, and metre; and, in doing so, both become cultivators, leavening “Strength of earth with grace of heaven”, the power of the soil with the purposes of the mind. For both, too, there is a harvest, a “wondrous yield”: on the one hand, the “cool solacing green” of the fields and, on the other, the rich evocations of language and enlargment of spirit that, so Lanier hopes, this movement of his poem achieves.

It is in the light of this idea of culture—and, more specifically, of the links indissolubly binding the simple farmer to the poet—that the third and final movement of “Corn” has to be read. This last movement has often been criticised: William Dean Howells, in rejecting the poem for publication in Atlantic Monthly, was only the first of many to complain that in itself it seemed overly rhetorical and that its connection with the earlier movements was at best obscure, if not non-existent. 24 The criticism is misguided, however. The alteration of perspective is in fact made very carefully and effectively. From the closeness and intimacy of the woodland scene, the poet has moved to the field of corn laid out before him; now he looks across the cultivated valleys to a barren and deserted hill, where once upon a time, we are told, “Dwelt one … who played at toil / And gave to coquette Cotton soul and soil.” This leads him, almost inevitably it seems, into an attack on those who turn “each field into a gambler's hell” by dependence on commercial farming—and, by extension, on “trade” in general. Certainly, as the poet's vision extends into the distance, there is a change of tone and vocabulary—the language is much more combative here, much thinner and much less richly metaphorical—but the change, as it turns out, is part of the point. Lanier's subject now is barrenness and desertion: a subject that hardly requires the evocative imagery and lyric impulse of the second movement, still less the sensuous abandon of the first. “Corn” has moved us steadily from nature through culture to the sterile abstractions of trade—metaphorically, at least, we could say that we have travelled from the wilderness past the homestead and the clearing to the streets of the city; and the verbal equivalent of this has been our journey from the densely figurative language of the first movement, through the imaginative poise of the second, to the thoroughly small and dry idiom of the third.

All of which is not to say that the final movement of “Corn” is flawless. Unfortunately, Lanier cannot leave us where we are at the end of our journey, with this vision of abandonment and decay. He feels compelled, for some reason, to append sixteen lines in which he expresses the hope, or rather the dream, that even the “old hill” will one day yield “golden treasures of corn”, thanks to the efforts of someone, anyone, willing to use “antique sinew and … modern art”—that is, presumably, native strength and scientific methods of crop cultivation. In a way, this is characteristic of both Lanier and his time. As far as Lanier himself is concerned, he never lost his optimistic belief that the yeoman would become a dominant force in the South. Admittedly, his later verse is less immediately or insistently concerned with the need for subsistence farming: but poems like “The Symphony” continue the attack on Trade, while others such as “The Marshes of Glynn” 25 develop the contrast between the rural life and the “terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain” associated with other forms of existence. More to the point, his last essay of any consequence, “The New South”, 26 expresses his firm belief that “the quiet rise of the small farmer in the Southern states” had been “the notable circumstance of the period, in comparison with which the noisier events signify nothing”. Lanier claimed to base this belief on contemporary evidence, in the form of “a mass of clippings” from Georgia newspapers. Significantly, however, as his biographer has noted, his essay seems to depend less on any knowledge of contemporary conditions than on his reading of earlier, English celebrants of the yeoman. One-third of it, in fact, draws on the sort of material with which the Virginia pamphleteers were familiar, such as the sermons of Bishop Latimer, describing the plight and potential of the “backbone of England.” And just as significantly, the essay concludes, not with a programme for action, but with a gently nostalgic portrait of Middle Georgia, the land where he was born, “It is a land”, Lanier declared,

where there is never a day of summer nor of winter when a man cannot do a full day's work in the open field; all the products meet there, as at nature's own agricultural fair; … within the compass of many a hundred-acre farm a man may find wherewithal to build his house …, to furnish it in woods that would delight the most curious eye, and to supply his family with all the necessaries, most of the comforts, and many of the luxuries of the whole world. It is the country of homes. 27

It is a moving portrait, but it is moving precisely because of its use of a rich mine of personal memory and traditional ideas. For an essay whose avowed subject is the present and future, “The New South” seems remarkably backward-looking—preoccupied, to the point of obsessiveness, with the past.

“The New South”, Lanier insisted, “means small farming”; and “small farming”, he added, “means diversified farm-products ”. He could hardly have been more wrong: both in his failure to recognise that the real thrust of the New South was towards the growth of towns and factories, and in his unwillingness to recognise that Southern farmers were just as fatally and irretrievably enamoured of “coquette Cotton” as ever. In this, however, he was hardly alone. While writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and John Esten Cooke continued the regional infatuation with the gentlemanly image and the vocabulary of paternalism, there were others besides Lanier who drew on the populist model. For some, that model, like its patriarchal equivalent, was expressly associated with the good old days before the war. Richard Malcolm Johnston, for example, set his tales, reminiscent of Southwestern humour, in what he termed “the Grim and Rude, but Hearty Old Times in Georgia”; “it is a grateful solace”, he admitted,

to recall persons whose simplicity has been much changed by subsequent conditions, chiefly the Confederate War. Growth of inland towns and multiplication of outside acquaintance have served to diminish, or at least greatly modify, striking rustic individualities; and labour, become more exacting in its demands, has made life more difficult, and therefore, more earnest. 28

Others, however, seemed to believe along with Lanier that the populist model defined the present and future rather than the past: that the New South could in fact be described in terms of the old pieties. As late as 1911, for example, an undeniably gifted and intelligent writer like Ellen Glasgow could say this about what she termed “the rise of the working man in the South”:

The land which had belonged to the few became after the war within the reach of many. At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of slavery. The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the shadow of the old names—the old customs. This mole-like blindness of the poorer whites persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the awakening was possible only after the new generation had come to its growth. 29

For all her attempts to appear temperate by putting things back a generation, Glasgow clearly belonged—at least, in the earlier part of her career as a novelist—with those who believed in the resurrection of the yeoman: who were convinced, in fact, that the old and supposedly feudal order could be replaced, perhaps had been replaced, by the “plain man … building the structure of the future”. 30 That she and they were mistaken in their belief goes without saying: the New South belonged to quite different forces. That they believed it nevertheless suggests how powerfully encoded the South had become by this stage in its history: which was a decidedly mixed blessing for those who wanted to write about the region, its past, its problems, and its possibilities.

A SOUTHERN AUTOBIOGRAPHY: MARK TWAIN

Of all the writers born and raised in the South during the nineteenth century, Mark Twain was the only one to achieve greatness; and it was not until he came to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that this greatness was clear. For it was not until then that he came to successful creative terms with the most significant part of his own life—and, by extension, with that region that helped mould his personality as a child and youth and haunted his dreams when he became a man. “My books are simply autobiographies”, 31 Twain insisted once. True of every American writer, perhaps, the remark seems especially true of him: partly because he relied so much and so frankly on personal experience (as early works like Innocents Abroad and Roughing It amply testify) and partly because even those works by Twain that were the results of strenuous imaginative effort can be read as attempts to resolve his inner divisions and create some sense of continuity between his present and his past. The inner divisions and the discontinuity were, in fact, inseparable. For virtually all of Twain's best fictional work has to do with what Henry Nash Smith christened “the matter of Hannibal”: 32 that is, the author's experiences as a child in a small town in the slave-owning state of Missouri and (even if only by extension and implication) his years as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. This was not simply a matter of nostalgia for the good old days before the war, of the kind that one finds in, say, the stories of Thomas Nelson Page or Richard Malcolm Johnston. Nor was it simply another example of the Romantic idealisation of youth: although Twain did firmly believe that, youth being “the only thing worth giving to the race”, to look back on one's childhood was to give oneself “a cloudy sense of having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far off land, & of being in exile now, & desolate”. 33 It was rather, and more simply, that Twain recognised intuitively that his years in the South had formed him for good and ill—organised his perceptions, shaped his vocabulary, and defined what he most loved and hated. So to explore those years was to explore the often equivocal nature of his own vision; to understand them was to begin at least to understand himself.

Not that Twain ever began drawing on the matter of Hannibal in a deliberate or self-conscious way: he was not that kind of writer. He frequently claimed, in fact, that he was only interested in writing a book if it would write itself for him. Like Poe's claim that he composed “The Raven” from back to front this was, of course, something of a lie, but it did nevertheless point to a deeper truth: that he wrote best when he allowed his imagination free rein, in a relatively impulsive and unpremeditated manner. As if by way of illustrating this, Twain's first significant venture into his Southern past started as a series of articles for Atlantic Monthly, undertaken—at least, according to his own account of it—at the suggestion of a friend. “Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods”, Twain wrote to William Dean Howells, the editor of Atlantic Monthly,

& I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steamboating glory & grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years) from the pilot house. He said “What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!” 34

So Twain hurled his virgin subject into Howells's magazine: “Old Times on the Mississippi”, as the essays were called, appeared in 1875, describing in colourful detail Twain's experiences as a steamboat pilot. They were well received, and Twain was reasonably pleased with them. Nevertheless, he turned to writing other things, among them The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and part of Huckleberry Finn, before using them as the basis for a book. In adding to the essays when he did come to write the book, Twain used his favourite motif of a journey, in this case one taken by himself up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St Paul, in order to see how things had altered since his childhood and steamboating days. Further padding was provided by passages taken from the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn, material left over from A Tramp Abroad, and long passages quoted from travel books by other writers. Twain's attitude towards this rather cavalier method of composition was disarmingly frank. “I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning”, he wrote to Howells during this period,

and went to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day, (mainly stolen from books, tho' credit given) 9,500 words. So I reduced my burden by one third in one day. 35

Cobbled together in this fashion, Life on the Mississippi finally saw the light of day in 1883.

Given the way Life on the Mississippi was written—which was haphazard even by Twain's own standards—it is not surprising that the chapters originally prepared for Atlantic Monthly —that is, chapters iv-xvii—are easily the most deeply felt and compelling. Their fascination stems, at least in part, from the fact that they represent Twain's first serious attempt to map the geography of his spiritual home. The map that emerges, however, is a far from clear one. The famous description of what, in Twain's own opinion, he gained and lost by becoming a steamboat pilot illustrates this. In becoming a pilot, Twain explains, he learned to read “the face of the water” as though it were “a wonderful book”—a book, he adds, “that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve”. Twain's attitude towards books and literature in general remained painfully ambivalent throughout his life (Huck Finn, for example, like Sut Lovingood, invariably associates books with “study” and “Sunday school”); so it is hardly surprising to find that this painfully acquired mastery of the alphabet of the Mississippi River is not regarded as an unmixed blessing. “I had made a valuable acquisition”, Twain admits:

But I had lost something too, I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river … All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. 36

In effect, Twain argues, an attitude founded on a kind of innocence and illiteracy was replaced once he became a pilot by a more knowledgeable, and in a sense more useful, but sadly disillusioned one.

Several points need to be made about this distinction. In the first place, as a distinction of fact it is not strictly true. As one critic has pointed out, 37 Twain did not lose the ability to appreciate the “grace” and “beauty” of the Mississippi and its surroundings— Life on the Mississippi is, after all, full of rather florid passages describing that grace and beauty: all he did lose was the belief that the simply aesthetic stance, and the vocabulary the aesthete deploys, could do justice to the empirical realities of the river. In the second place, as an imaginative distinction, a way of defining possible attitudes or structures of feeling, it is painfully inadequate. Twain presents his education as a process whereby one form of myopia, one drastically limited code or set of preconceptions, simply replaces another. The vision of the romantic dreamer, who sees the river in terms of an embarrassingly conventional landscape painting, is displaced by that of the gruff, commonsensical realist, who thinks of it as no more than a tool, something to be used and exploited. And finally, as a small piece of mythmaking, what Twain says here provides him with a frame for the entire book and a way of relating his own history to the history of his region. For in distinguishing between the South of his childhood and steamboating days and the South of his adult years—the South, in particular, that he had seen in his trip from New Orleans to St Paul—Twain falls back on the tired, and ultimately unsatisfactory contrast he establishes here between (to put it crudely) the romance of the past and the realism of the present.

This may make Twain sound like some of the plantation novelists of the post-war years, and make the distinction on which both this passage and the book as a whole depend sound like Sidney Lanier's elaborate comparisons between “culture” and “trade.” In a way, this is true. Life on the Mississippi uses roughly the same codes, starts with broadly the same vocabularies as, say, The Virginia Bohemians and “Corn”. There is a difference, however, and it is not simply that Twain, unlike John Esten Cooke or Lanier, chooses to suggest a connection between his own personal story and the history of his region. It is that, in addition, in suggesting this connection and in describing the contrast between the Old South and the New, Twain is—as anyone who notices the contrast in the first place will confirm—uncertain, his sympathies fiercely divided. There are, certainly, frequent criticisms of the “romantic juvenilities” of the Old South, and of poor Sir Walter Scott in particular, who is blamed for encouraging Southerners to fall in love with the “grotesque ‘chivalry’ doings” and “windy humbuggeries” of the past. There are constant and approving references, too, to “the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century” and the way Twain's homeplace seems to have become an integral part of that civilization since the Civil War—“evidencing”, we are told, “progress, energy, and prosperity”. Yet, time and again, there is also a profound nostalgia, a sense of loss noticeable in Twain's descriptions of the world that is gone or the few, lingering traces of it that remain. Describing the changes that have occurred in the riverside towns since his own steamboating days, for instance, Twain ruefully admits, “a glory that once was [has] dissolved and vanished away”. 38 And his actual descriptions of the old steamboats themselves, and the period when they reigned supreme on the Mississippi, convey an irrepressible joy, involvement, and affection—feelings that are conspicuously lacking whenever Twain turns his attention to the “quiet, orderly” river traffic and men of “sedate business aspect” associated with the needs and demands of a more “wholesome and practical” age. No attempt is made to resolve this contradiction: the glamour of the past is dismissed at one moment and then recalled with elegiac regret the next, the pragmatism and progress of the present is welcomed sometimes and at others coolly regretted. Even if such an attempt were made, however, it is difficult to see how it could be successful. For at this stage of his career, at least, Twain lacked the language to accommodate and reconcile his different attitudes to the past. All he could do, evidently, was take over the familiar vocabularies of his region, with their patriarchal dreams of the past and their populist hopes for the future, and their confused mixture of progressivism and nostalgia, utopianism and elegy; apply these vocabularies with far more enthusiasm, frankness, and energy than any of his contemporaries; and, in doing all this, offer his readers what can only be described as a verbal equivalent of double vision.

Similar, if not precisely the same, confusions of language and perception are to be found in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was published in 1876. According to contemporary accounts, Twain began the book “with certain of his boyish recollections in mind” 39 and gradually wove together three quite separate strands: the “love story” of Tom and Becky Thatcher (which, among other things, parodies the rituals of adult courtship), the story of Tom and his brother Sid (which inverts the many Sunday school stories popular at the time about the Bad Boy who ends up in trouble and the Good Boy whose maturity is crowned with success), and the melodramatic tale of Injun Joe (which illustrates Twain's love of popular literature, the “dime novel” and the “court-room drama”). From the beginning, however, Twain seems to have been doubtful about the exact nature and age of his audience. Would it appeal primarily to children or to adults? Quite simply, he was not sure, although he did try to assume an appearance of certainty when the book was completed. “It is not a boy's book at all”, he insisted in a letter to Howells. “It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.” Howells was not convinced. “Treat it explicitly as a boy's story”, he insisted; Twain's wife, Livy, agreed; and so, in the Preface to Tom Sawyer, the author hedges his bets. The book, he declares, “is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls”. Nevertheless, he goes on:

I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were … 40

The uncertainty of purpose and perspective implicit in these opening remarks is uncomfortably obvious when we turn to the story. Certain elements of Tom Sawyer certainly do seem to identify it with the best kind of children's literature, in that they involve the dramatisation of common childhood fantasies or the cathartic exploration of childhood nightmares. Tom Sawyer himself, for example, discovers hidden treasure. He becomes “a glittering hero …—the pet of the old, the envy of the young”, when he identifies Dr Robinson's murderer. And he enjoys the delicious pleasure of feeling wronged, apparently dying, and then returning in secret to hear penitent adults lament their treatment of him and admit that “he wasn't bad, so to say—only mischeevous”. 41 Injun Joe really belongs to this area of the book, too, in that he is not so much a fictional character as a bogey-man, designed to give protagonist and reader alike an almost voyeuristic thrill of terror: it is noticeable, for instance, that he is nearly always seen from a hidden point of vantage, so that the threat he offers is framed and contained. But while all this serves to confirm the opening claim in the Preface, certain other aspects of the story seem to assume a more adult and sophisticated audience, looking back on the past—their own past, the author's past, and the past of the South—from a distanced, sometimes amused and sometimes regretful, standpoint. The parodic element in Tom and Becky's courtship, for example, presupposes an adult audience that can appreciate the nature of the parody. This is also true of the inversion of popular sentiment and genteel literary convention implicit in the contrast between Tom and Sid. Quite apart from that, there is the simple fact that Twain as a narrator tends to maintain a distance, a lot of the time, between himself and the reader, on the one hand, and, on the other, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, their friends and enemies, and the unsophisticated folk of St Petersburg.

This last point is the important one. At times, as when for instance Twain is describing Tom and Huck's adventures on Jackson's Island, the language has the kind of immediacy that one associates with, say, Sut Lovingood's Yarns : an immediacy that presupposes and implies that the world of St Petersburg is available to us—because we are children, perhaps, or because simplicity, although it may be lost, is not irrecoverable. But for the most part it manages to create a sense of distance between character and reader because the narrator is clearly a person of some sophistication, maturity, and refinement, who is trying to make us aware of this through his vocabulary. In Tom Sawyer, people do not spit, they “expectorate”; they do not wear clothes, but “accoutrements”; breezes are “zephyrs”, and buildings are “edifices”. There is a measure of self-directed irony contained in such genteel diction, of course, but the irony acts as no more than a qualification. Twain may be slightly embarrassed and uncomfortable about the contrast between simple characters and sophisticated narrator (and to this extent shows himself to be a far more sensitive writer than Longstreet, say, and some of the other Southwestern humorists); the contrast remains, however, and is even insisted upon. We are constantly being reminded, in fact, that he and we are no longer a part of the “kingdom” of the child or, for that matter, of a small, “simple-hearted” rural community. Along with explicit statements to that effect, this message comes to us via the narrator's constant tendency to step back from the action to elicit a moral of some sort, and his placing of all the characters on a stage, as it were, with a “curtain of charity” and footlights between them and us. It comes, also, but with rather different implications, via a passage like the following (which acts as an introductory sketch to the second chapter):

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young, the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face, and a spring in every step … Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, resposeful, and inviting. 42

“Just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land”: the reader is reminded, perhaps (if he has read them) of Richard Malcolm Johnston's tributes to the simplicity of earlier times and Sidney Lanier's fond recollections of “the country of homes”—or, for that matter, of some of the stories of Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris, with their hushed invocations of “a smiling land” situated somewhere in the vague territories of memory. St Petersburg may on the whole be closer to the populist model than the patriarchal: “simplicity” may be its dominant feature rather than gentility. Just the same, the traces of elegiac affection that seep into Twain's accounts of it here belong exclusively neither to post-war reminiscences of the plain farmer in the Old South nor to their equivalents in the plantation romance. They were part of the idiom of the times, part of the South's structure of feeling at that moment in its history. And they are there unmistakably in Twain's second imaginative venture into his region and its past, tempering and often even directly contradicting his gestures of condescension and mockery.

All of which is by way of saying that, in Tom Sawyer, the confusions of Life on the Mississippi are even worse confounded. There is immediacy and there is distance; there is the stuff of childhood fantasies and the staple of adult discourse; there is the tendency to be ironic and patronising and there is the impulse towards elegy. There is also, as it happens, a desperate attempt on Twain's part to impose some kind of coherence on his material, to create concord out of all this discord: an attempt which perhaps owes more to his own personal history at the time of composition than it does to the actual exigencies of the narrative. For it may not be entirely irrelevant that Twain's earliest reminiscences about his boyhood, which provided the beginnings of Tom Sawyer, coincided with the first year of his marriage to Livy. Whatever else may be said about their relationship, it seems fairly clear now that he used his wife as a civilising agent, the embodiment of his conscience, the more respectable side of himself. “You will break up all my irregularities when we are married”, he wrote to her shortly before the wedding, “and civilize me, and make of me a model husband and an adornment to society—won't you … ?” 43 Quite apart from offering a parody of his own courtship, therefore, the story of Tom Sawyer and his friends seems to have acted as a kind of safety-valve, a way of releasing rebellious feelings and indulging in evidently unrealisable dreams of freedom before committing himself to orthodoxy, respectability, and success. The three narrative strands of the book tend to reflect this cathartic process: for the pattern Twain tries to give to each of them is the pattern of rebellion followed by conformity, abandonment and adventure leading eventually to a sober acceptance of duty. As far as the love story goes, Tom finally assumes the conventional male protective role with Becky, by accepting a punishment which should by rights have been hers. As far as the contrast between Tom and Sid is concerned, Tom, it gradually emerges, is the really good boy—any of his more dangerously subversive appetites having apparently been satisfied by the time out on Jackson's Island. And as for the tale of Injun Joe: Tom, it emerges, is not an outlaw at all but the very embodiment of social justice. Like his creator Tom ends up, in fact, by accepting the disciplines of the social norm. Injun Joe, who seemed for a moment to be a projection of Tom's darker self, is killed; the integrity and sanctity of the community is confirmed; and Tom is even ready, it seems, to offer brief lectures on the advantages of respectability. Here again, as in his account of his education as a steamboat pilot and the contrast between Old South and New, Twain tries, really, to solve problems by imposing on his material the notions of personal development and social betterment—in a word, the myth of progress. And here again he is unsuccessful: Tom Sawyer, in fact, like Life on the Mississippi, is interesting precisely because of its discontinuity—to the extent, that is, that it reveals its author's inner divisions and (something not totally unrelated) the contradictions inherent in the New South's image of itself.

Only one character stands outside this pattern of rebellion, release, and moral improvement; and that, of course, is Huckleberry Finn. When Huck first appears in the book, he is seen from the outside, and almost with disapproval. Gradually, however, he is given his own voice, allowed to speak for himself and his own, profoundly anti-social values: so that, by the end, he is even beginning to hold his own in debate with the newly respectable Tom. The ground is prepared, in effect, for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Twain's greatest work, in which he moved even more fully back into the past—not merely remembering steamboat days or even childhood now, but speaking in and from the person of a child. The full significance of this movement seems to have been lost on Twain at first; for when he began Huckleberry Finn in 1876 it is fairly clear that he saw it simply as a sequel to Tom Sawyer. Several narrative threads are carried over, and in the opening pages at least, although Huck is now permitted to be the narrator, much of the comedy is as uncomplicated as it was in the earlier book. It took nearly a year, in fact, for Twain to realise that things were heading in a direction other than the one he had originally intended—and that, in particular, Huck and Jim, under the pressure of their relationship and the problem of Jim's slavery, were growing into complicated and even difficult characters, requiring more than just a series of set comic routines. When he did realise it, his response was characteristic: he put the manuscript aside, leaving Huck and Jim on a suitably apocalyptic note with their raft smashed up by a riverboat, and turned to writing other things.

Critics are divided as to exactly how long it was before Twain returned to the Huck Finn manuscript. 44 One thing is certain, however: when he did, his entire attitude to the project had changed. As nearly everyone who now reads Huckleberry Finn is aware, he decided—instinctively, of course, rather than with all due deliberation—to embark on a more serious kind of comedy, which would explore the conflict between (to use his own later description) “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”. 45 As not everyone seems to realise, however, Twain somehow understood that the best and, perhaps, the only way in which he could dramatise this conflict was by using his Southern background, the years on or near the Mississippi, and the rich treasury of idioms and perceptions that background had given him. In Huckleberry Finn, and especially in the chapters written after Twain had returned to the manuscript, we are confronted with two radically different ways of looking at the world, two utterly opposed structures of thought and feeling; and Twain seems to have recognised that he could project both those visions, give flesh and blood to the two structures, without straying very far from his own regional past.

As far as Twain's portrait of society, the particular system that has deformed Huck's conscience, is concerned, Twain seems to have been helped by his reading. In between writing the first and second parts of the manuscript, Twain had been involved in the preparation of a collection of comic tales and sketches: which had required him, among other things, to reread the work of the Southwestern humorists. As several commentators have pointed out, this almost certainly encouraged Twain in his formulation of a new plan for the Huck Finn story; it could be, he saw, a series of comic scenes from old Southern provincial life along the lines of Georgia Scenes and Sut Lovingood's Yarns. 46 Not that Twain had been unaware of writers like Longstreet and Harris before this, or indeed of the possibilities of comic portraiture: Pap Finn, for instance, who dominates some of the earlier episodes of the story, is in many ways like a figure out of Southwestern humour. In his rapacity and cunning he recalls, perhaps, Simon Suggs, in his violence and earthiness Sut Lovingood, while his sheer garrulousness, his verbal energy and love of hyperbole, echo any number of tall tale-tellers, backwoods boasters, and front-porch philosophers in the stories of Longstreet and his kind. “Call this a govment!” declares Pap Finn during the course of one of his many orations:

“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger … from Ohio; a mulatter … He had the whitest shirt on you ever see …, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in the town that's got as fine clothes, as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfullest old grey-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was a p'fessor in a college … and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? … I says I'll never vote again …” 47

And yet this brief passage already begins to indicate, perhaps, the difference of achievement between Twain and his Southwestern predecessors: because it is at once more sharply satirical and more comically exuberant than anything we are likely to come across in earlier humour, more savage and dispassionate and at the same time more intimate. Pap Finn is a classic, comic portrait of the poor white, that is clear enough: in his fear of the unknown, his habitual drunkenness followed by equally habitual bouts of repentance, his inverted Calvinism, his violence, and his bigotry. 48 But for all the venom with which he is drawn, there is no denying the delight his creator takes in him: for instance, in his comically revealing juxtapositions of thought and speech (“he … knowed everything. And that ain't the wust ”), his absurdly exaggerated notion of his own importance (“I'll never vote agin”), as well as the sheer, abandoned exhilaration, the helter-skelter quality of his rhetoric. Pap Finn, in short, is a character created out of love as well as hatred, or at least out of joyful fascination as well as disgust and despair. It is from this that his colour and power derives, and it is upon this that his credibility depends; for Twain, the reader feels, really knows this man, as if he were a loved and loathed member of his own family.

Quite apart from this difference of quality as far as the creation and analysis of particular characters are concerned, Twain also goes beyond his humorist predecessors in two other respects: in the sheer range of his vision and the coherence and clarity of his perspective. None of the old Southwestern humorists had ever attempted a portrait of Southern life anywhere near as rich and detailed as the one that gradually emerges in Huckleberry Finn —or, for that matter, established a critical vocabulary, a way of arranging and viewing his imagined world, that even begins to approach Twain's in the clarity of its focus or the incisiveness of its judgements. The inclusiveness of Twain's vision of the Old South is perhaps the first thing that strikes any reader. In the course of the book, we are offered an account of every level of ante-bellum society: from planters with aristocratic pretensions, like the Grangerfords, through plain farmers like the Phelps family who own a little land and, at the most, only two or three slaves, to the poor whites of Bricksville and, below even them, the blacks. 49 With each additional detail, too, we understand more about the system that seeks to control Huck's mind and Jim's body: that tries to contain reality by controlling every possible form of language, thought, and behaviour—in short, by imposing its own, patently inadequate version of things. In this sense, the “style” that Huck innocently admires when he observes it in, for example, the Grangerfords infects every aspect of life: it dictates the words people use, the clothes they wear, the opinions they form. It is the essence of Twain's criticism, in fact, that the patterns ordained by this—or, indeed, by any—culture are at once intricate, interconnected, and inclusive: the Grangerfords are controlled by the same inexorable laws whether they are making a fine speech, writing sentimental poems, killing their enemies in the name of “the feud”, or enslaving their fellow human beings. Florid words, fine clothes, and the exploitation of others all issue, Twain insists, from the same false consciousness: a consciousness which manages to be at once sentimental and crudely opportunistic—justifying its economic base, and the major historical crime on which that base was built, in terms of an absurdly romantic myth of gentility.

The contrast between this portrait of the Old South and the possibilities offered by Huck Finn is commonly explained in terms of illusion versus reality. 50 This is a seductive explanation, not least because Twain almost certainly thought of it in these terms himself: but it is hardly a satisfactory one. Whatever else it may be, the portrait of Huck and Jim's Adamic life on the river can hardly be squared with even the most capacious definitions of realism; and to call Huck's response to life “realistic” is to ignore the very problems about the nature of the relationship between experience and perception, life and language, with which Twain himself was to become increasingly obsessed. 51 There is, of course, a conflict between Huck and Jim on the one hand and most of the other characters on the other: but it is a conflict not between illusion and reality, fiction and fact, or whatever—but, quite simply, between two different systems of language and thought. The false system, the system that Twain attacks, grows out of the darker side of both the patriarchal and the populist myths. It offers a world in which Colonel Grangerford and Pap Finn are equally at home: where, one might say, Colonel Carter of Cartersville and Simon Suggs could meet and shake hands. Its patterns of language range from the high-flown to the demotic but are all alike in their radical exclusions and inconsistencies, the degree to which the words people use do not even begin to relate to things. And its patterns of thought can accommodate both cavalier pretensions and what W. J. Cash called “the helluva fellow” complex, the false consciousness of the planter pretending to be a feudal overlord and the equally false consciousness of the poor white who plays the role of vigorous, self-reliant yeoman. In many ways, it is a system that recalls the false opposites on which a book like Life on the Mississippi is founded; since it involves a paradoxical mixture of the genteel and the utilitarian, romantic dreams and crudely opportunistic motives. And this in itself is a measure of Twain's achievement in his third major journey into his Southern past. For, in effect, he has resolved the contradictions of his earlier work by the simple expedient of making those contradictions his subject rather than his premise: by subjecting them to creative analysis, that is, instead of allowing them to dictate his perceptions or provide a conceptual framework for his book.

But Twain's use of the Southern myths is not simply negative: for the true system—the system that he sets against all this and which finds its embodiment and apotheosis in the book's hero—is quite as much indebted to his creative use of his regional inheritance. In nearly every respect, Huck Finn brings together and synthesises the warring opposites of Twain's earlier work. Huck is a focus for all his creator's nostalgia, all his yearnings for childhood, the lost days of his youth, the days before the Civil War and the Fall; 52 and he is also, quite clearly, a projection of Twain's more progressive feelings, the belief in human development and perfectibility—he suggests hope for the future as well as love of the past. Among other things, this is indicated by Huck's language, in that it is precisely Huck's “progressive” attention to the use and function of things that gives his observations such colour and immediacy. His words do not deny the beauty of things on the Mississippi River—beauty that Twain claimed had vanished for ever for him when he became a steamboat pilot—but neither do they deny that things are there for a purpose. On the contrary, they acknowledge that each particular in the river scene has a reason for being there and a message to communicate, and they derive their grace and force from that acknowledgement. In a passage like the following, for example, it is no more and no less than Huck's ability to read the face of the water that enables him to pay homage to its fluent shapes and lively configurations. He is at once an interpreter and a celebrant, someone for whom the signs at dawn on the Mississippi are there both to decipher and to appreciate:

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and wasn't black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows and such things; and long black streaks—rafts … and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes the streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up … 53

This is neither the language of the “realist” in Life on the Mississippi nor that of the “romantic”, but another form of speech entirely which accommodates both of those languages and then raises them to a higher power. In the process, it reconciles the demands of the pragmatist with those of the dreamer, the progressive impulse with its nostalgic equivalent—and manages to treat the alphabet of the river as a medium of communication and as an object with its own peculiar beauty.

“Where the philosopher seeks certitude in the sign”, wrote Burckhardt,

—the p of the propositional calculus—and the mystic in the ineffable—the “OM” of the Hindoos—the poet takes upon himself the paradox of the human word, which is both and neither and which he creatively transforms in his “powerful rhyme”. 54

In this respect, Huck Finn truly is—as he has often been called—a poet of the river; because for him the language of the Mississippi is clearly at once referential and substantial, a means and an end, something with a precise, paraphrasable meaning and something with its own intrinsic symmetry and grace. And, not unrelated to this, Huck is at one and the same time a figure of utter simplicity of the kind that Jefferson and, before him, the Virginia pamphleteers often celebrated—and someone with all the innate nobility of Simms's plantation heroes, say, or the popular Southern image of Robert E. Lee. In short, he is a populist hero with all the best patriarchal qualities. For he is easily the most honourable and, indeed, the most chivalric character in his world simply because he sticks far closer than anyone else to his own, independent version of things; he is self-reliant, like all good yeomen, and this self-reliance enables him to behave with what Chaucer would call “Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie” 55 in all his dealings with others. A résumé of his character reads in some ways like a denial of all those distinctions on which much of Twain's earlier work rested, and much of the Southern argument as well. He is courteous, it seems, without being unctuous, noble without appearing priggish, chivalrous without ever becoming sentimental. He is plain and he is gracious; he is straightforward and he is mannerly; he is at once a frontier hero and a “parfit gentil knyght”. In fact, if Pap Finn and Colonel Grangerford between them suggest the dark side of the populist and patriarchal models then Huck Finn enables us to see its bright opposite. And if most of the characters in the book demonstrate Twain's powerful capacity for analysis, for dissecting the Southern myths and exposing their faults and weaknesses, then its hero reveals something more heartening: which is to say, Twain's equally powerful capacity for celebration—the way he can unravel the best possibilities of those myths and out of them formulate a legend of his own, a coherent vocabulary and a positive vision of things.

On these and related developments see, Thomas D. Clark and Henry W. Grady, The South Since Appomatox (New York, 1967); J. S. Ezell, The South Since 1865 (New York, 1963); Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South.

For fuller discussions of some of the issues raised here see, Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914 (Baltimore, Md., 1972); Gaines, Southern Plantation ; Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970); Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980).

Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, p. 8.

Compare, e.g., Lucinda H. Mackethan, The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 10 and Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, p. 31.

Francis Hopkinson Smith, Colonel Carter of Cartersville (London, 1891), pp. 61-2. See also, Joel Chandler Harris, Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (London, 1905), p. 59; Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia”, in In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887; London, 1889 edition), p. 10.

Preface to Thomas Nelson Page, Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (London, 1898).

See, e.g., Page, “Marse Chan”, p. 38.

See, e.g. Smith, Colonel Carter, p. 134; Joel Chandler Harris, The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (London, 1899), p. 73.

Joel Chandler Harris, Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction (London, 1902), p. 18.

Thomas Nelson Page, On Newfound River (London, 1891), p. 2.

See, e.g., Marion Harland, His Great Self (London, 1892), pp. 35-6; Smith, Colonel Carter, pp. 62-83.

John Esten Cooke, Fairfax; or, The Master of Greenway Court (New York, 1868), p. 132. See also, Harland, His Great Self, p. 11; Virginia F. Boyle, Serena (New York, 1905), p. 88. For other examples of the character types mentioned here see, James Lane Allen, The Choir Invisible (New York, 1898), pp. 193-4; John Esten Cooke, Justin Harley: A Romance of Old Virginia (Philadelphia, Pa., 1875), pp. 24, 156; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus; or Mr. Fox, Mr. Rabbit, and Mr. Terrapin (London, 1883), pp. 204, 240, and Uncle Remus and His Friends (London, 1892), p. 255; Thomas Nelson Page, “Polly: A Christmas Recollection”, in In Ole Virginia, pp. 198, 205.

See, e.g., Mary Johnston, Prisoners of Hope (London, 1899), pp. 53, 92; Page, “Unc' Edingburg's Drowndin': a Plantation Echo”, in In Ole Virginia, pp. 41ff., and Red Rock, p. 35.

Joel Chandler Harris, “Ananias”, in Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories (London, 1891), pp. 127, 128.

Page, Red Rock, p. 178.

John Esten Cooke, The Virginia Bohemians (New York, 1880), p. 48. See also, James Lane Allen, “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky”, in Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances (New York, 1900), p. 112; Joel Chandler Harris, “The Old Bascom Place”, in Balaam and His Master, p. 293; Thomas Nelson Page, “Ole 'Stracted”, in In Ole Virginia, p. 154; Smith, Colonel Carter, p. 60.

Sidney Lanier, The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier edited by Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey H. Starke (10 vols; Baltimore, Md., 1945), 1, 3-4. The most useful discussions of Lanier are to be found in Jack A. De Bellis, Sidney Lanier (New York, 1972); Mackethan, The Dream of Arcady ; Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement ; Louis D. Rubin, William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination (Baton Rouge, La., 1975).

Lanier, Works, i, 24-5.

Ibid., i, 194-6.

Mathew B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry: An Essay in American Economic History (New York, 1897), p. 149. For fuller discussions of the developments mentioned here see, e.g., Alex M. Arnett, The Populist Movement in Georgia (New York, 1922); John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer's Alliance and the People's Party (Minneapolis, Minn., 1931); Frederick A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture 1860-1897 (New York, 1945); Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South.

See, e.g., Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955).

Lanier, Works, viii, 224. To Paul H. Hayne, April 17, 1872.

Ibid., i, 34-9.

Cited in Aubrey H. Starke, Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study (1933; New York, 1964 edition), p. 189.

Lanier, Works, i, 46-56, 119-22.

Ibid., v, 334-58.

See Starke's discussion of this essay in Sidney Lanier, pp. 152-3, 394-6.

Richard Malcolm Johnston, Preface to The Primes and Their Neighbours: Ten Tales of Middle Georgia (New York, 1891). See also, Dedication to Dukesborough Tales (New York, 1871).

Ellen Glasgow, The Miller of Old Church (New York, 1911), p. 48. See also, The Woman Within (New York, 1955), pp. 180-1.

Ellen Glasgow, The Builders (New York, 1919), p. 112.

Cited in Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston, 1952), p. 67. Of the many discussions of Twain, the ones I have found most useful as far as the Southern dimension is concerned are, Arthur G. Pettit, Mark Twain and the South (Lexington, Ky., 1974), and Arlin Turner, “Mark Twain and the South: An Affair of Love and Anger”, Southern Review, iv (April, 1968), 493-519.

Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

Mark Twain-Howells Letters edited by H. N. Smith and W. M. Gibson (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass, 1960), ii, 534. To Howells, July 21, 1885. See also, The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider (New York, 1959), p. 121.

Twain-Howells Letters, i, 34. To Howells, Oct. 24, 1874.

Ibid., i, 417. To Howells, Oct. 30, 1882.

Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York, 1961 edition), pp. 67-8.

Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder (Cambridge, 1965), p. 120.

Life on the Mississippi, p. 142. See also, pp. 144, 237, 266, 331.

Brander Mathews, cited in Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), p. 51.

Preface to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876; London, 1968 edition), p. 23. See also, Twain-Howells Letters, i, 91, 110; Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn, p. 51.

Tom Sawyer, p. 101. See also, p. 140.

Ibid., p. 29. See also, pp. 34, 41, 47, 66, 70.

On this relationship see, in particular, Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain (New York, 1931), pp. 13-23, and Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, 1966), pp. 76-93.

Bernard De Voto ( Mark Twain's America (Boston, 1932)) claims that Twain did not return to the manuscript until 1882; whereas Smith ( Mark Twain ) and Blair ( Mark Twain and Huck Finn ), who are probably more reliable on this as on other matters, say that the rest of the book was written between 1879 and 1883.

See Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, p. 198; also, Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn.

See, e.g., Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn ; Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humour. For a different view see, David E. Sloane, Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian (Baton Rouge, La., 1979).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885; London, 1968 edition), pp. 222-3.

For an account of the image of the Southern poor white in literature see, Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor-White: From Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Okla., 1939), and Sylvia Jenkins Cook, From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1976).

See, e.g., Huckleberry Finn, 284-5, 291-2, 317-18, 385.

Or by some variant on this formula such as “individual freedom” versus “the restraints imposed by convention” (Edgar Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (Urbana, Ill., 1950)) or “moral intuition” versus “the mores of the folk” (Gladys Bellamy, Mark Twain as Literary Artist (Norman, Okla., 1950)). See, e.g., the discussions in Smith, Mark Twain and Tanner, Reign of Wonder.

See Mark Twain's “Which Was the Dream” and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years edited by John S. Tuckey (Berkeley, Calif., 1967).

See Henry James on this, in Hawthorne (1879; Ithaca, N.Y., 1956 edition), p. 114.

Huckleberry Finn, p. 299.

Cited in Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry (London, 1969) p. 36. Compare the notion of the Czech linguist Jan Mukarovsky that “The function of poetic language consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance … in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.” (Jan Mukarovsky, “Standard language and poetic language”, in A Prague School Reader on Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style selected and translated by Paul L. Garvin (Washington, D.C., 1964), pp. 43-4); or the Russian formalist Roman Jakobson's notion that “the distinctive feature of poetry” is that “a word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst of emotion, that words … acquire weight and value of their own”. Cited in Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (1955; The Hague, 1965 edition), p. 183.

This comes, of course, from Chaucer's description of the Knight in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, line 46. See also, line 72.

"Literature of the New South - Richard Gray (essay date 1986)." Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Lynn M. Zott, Vol. 114. Gale Cengage, 2003, 16 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/literature-new-south/critical-essays/criticism-overviews#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-richard-gray-essay-date-1986>

Kenneth Wayne Howell (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: Howell, Kenneth Wayne. “Dixie Historiography Unchained: Old South, New South, or No South?” Southern Studies 7, no. 4 (1996): 21-52.

[ In the following excerpt, Howell summarizes modern historical assessments of the New South, focusing on such themes as Southern distinctiveness, identity, industrialization, economics, populism, and race relations. ]

The history of the New South is a diverse and ever growing field of study that continues to capture the attention of scholars and laymen alike. 1 Historians have labored diligently to explain why the South seems to be distinctively different from the rest of the United States. In their efforts to describe these differences, scholars have established an elaborate body of literature which surveys Southern history from colonial times through the twentieth century. Modern scholars face certain common issues and problems in their quest to define the New South. The most basic issue that writers of Southern history confront is “What is the South?”

Historians generally agree that the South is a distinctive part of the United States. However, they have failed to reach any consensus on an exact definition. Scholars have assigned a plethora of definitions to the term “Southern distinctiveness.” Found within their works are common themes of ethnicity, ideology, occupation, religion, and language. A few scholars, however, suggest that there is a lack of evidence which proves that the South is a unique region within the United States. It is, they assert, merely a state of mind.

C. Vann Woodward s The Burden of Southern History defines “southernism” as the collective experiences shared by Southerners. Woodward reminds his reader that Southern history is filled with one catastrophic event after another, especially between the Civil War era through World War II. He convincingly argues that events, such as a decisive military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction, set the region apart from the rest of the United States. Woodward also points out that these common experiences produce potential problems in writing Southern history, because scholars tend to romanticize and exaggerate them. 2

Richard Gray agrees with Woodward, arguing that Southerners have responded to various crises they have faced by rewriting their history to satisfy modern questions. His Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region concludes that two social models have come to exist in Southern society—the patriarchal and the agricultural. According to the author, writers reinvent the Southern historical experience by using these two primary character types. For example, during times of racial differences, a Southern writer, who supports the ideas of “white supremacy,” might look at the history of slavery and attempt justify the actions of his forefathers by stressing the patriarchal theme of the “peculiar institution.” By doing so, the writer tries to vindicate his own racist views. 3

F. Garvin Davenport's The Myth of Southern History: Historical Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature also addresses the problem of literature written from a nostalgic point-of-view. Davenport claims that the myth of Southern history is evident in its historical interpretation. The South, according to the author, has experienced a transformation from images of agrarian innocents to images of tragic guilt. Four concepts are present in the myth of Southern history—the Union, Southern uniqueness, Southern mission, and Southern burdens. Davenport defines Southern distinctiveness as the reaction to rapid urban industrialization. Thus, the South, having gone through the tragic experiences of the Civil War and Reconstruction, was perceived as the only region within the United States strong enough to incorporate industrial life into agrarian beliefs. Like The Burden of Southern History, Davenport concludes that Southern history can do little to provide guides for solving racial and urban problems until certain myths, such as “white supremacy,” are dispelled. 4

A slightly different interpretation of the Southern identity is found in Carl Degler's Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness. He states that the South is different from the rest of the United States because of its unique features—agriculture, poverty, biracialism, homogeneous white society, a lack of urban centers, commitment to fundamentalist religion, and conservative political views. Using these features, Degler concludes that there are three dominant themes within Southern society. The first is that Southern distinctiveness originated in the South's plantation society, which was racially defined. Shallow internal markets, diminished opportunities for new arrivals, and the need to defend slavery continued in the Reconstruction era. Next Degler suggests that this continuity was not the result of white supremacy, but the institutionalization of white supremacy through such legal vices as segregation and disfranchisement. Finally, Degler finds that Southern distinctiveness is limited because institutionalized white supremacy existed everywhere throughout the United States. Thus, the author seems to somewhat contradict himself in his conclusion of Southern uniqueness. 5

It should be noted that Degler s study is reminiscent of a theme established in Ulrich B. Phillips “The Central Themes of Southern History.” In his article, Phillips concludes that the white Southerners' determination to maintain a biracial system was the foundation of “southernism.” 6 Degler's argument is also consistent with David M. Potter's “The Enigma of the South.” Potter, however, is more direct in his thesis that the South is an enigma based upon a distinctive folk culture. Potter contends that “southernism” and “agrarianism” are nothing more than myths. In his analysis, Southern society was the antithesis of an agrarian society. Potter's argument is logical considering his definition of agrarianism. He states that agrarianism by definition is an escape from commercial pursuits. Thus, because the South grew commercial crops, it was impossible for the region to claim an agrarian status. 7

Some historians have defined the South as a region lacking community cohesion. One such study is The Lazy South written by David Bertelson, who argues that the South's disunity and disorganization can be explained by looking at societal patterns within the South. His study suggests that Southerners have historically sought to satisfy their own personal aspirations and, as a whole, have neglected to shoulder society's responsibilities. The need for autonomy, according to Bertelson, does much to explain the South's isolation from the rest of the United States and also aids in understanding why the region rejected the idea of urban industrialization, which economically forced individuals to work in collective arrangements. 8 The Lazy South offers a logical definition of Southern distinctiveness, but it fails to stress that individualism and materialism are common traits found in all Americans—not just Southerners.

Perhaps the best modern study of the New South is Edward L. Ayers' The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. Adopting Woodward's theme of discontinuity, Ayers contends that following 1877 the South held unprecedented promise. Many whites sought to lead the South into prosperity, and many blacks looked forward to the chance to show their loyalty to Christianity, democracy, and enterprise. By examining everyday life in the South, the study suggests that post-Reconstruction politics was extremely unstable and that the Southern economy was growing rapidly. This instability and growth provided the foundation for the Populist movement. Populism, according to Ayers, was the result of rural peoples' claim to a share of the New South's promise—an attempt to gain a place in the new emerging order. 9

There are many more definitions of the Southern distinctiveness, but it is enough to say here that most historians agree that the South exists and holds a unique place in American history. By the end of the Reconstruction era, Southern sentiments ran high that a new order could be built upon a foundation of industrial and economic progress. Proponents of this ideology promoted change throughout the South. Everywhere Southerners were encouraged to turn from their agricultural roots and adopt the Northern practices of urban life. By 1900 a notable change had occurred within the South. Industrial development was minimal by Northern standards, but evidence of growth existed. Historians often look at this period with specific questions in mind. What hopes did the New South hold for those who promoted industrial change? What individuals were seeking change in Southern society? What was the extent of change? Finally, the most difficult question historians try to answer, as we have already seen, “How different was the Old and New South?”

One of the classical studies of this period in Southern history is C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Woodward s primary thesis is that a new class of Southern industrialists endeavored to turn the South into a modern industrial society. This new class of leaders, coming for the most part from middle class families, was largely exclusive of the powerful Southern aristocracy that once dominated Southern society during the antebellum era. As the new group of elites increasingly took steps to enhance rapid industrialization, farmers gradually grew more dissatisfied. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Farmers Alliance and Populist Party gained support from this disgruntled block of voters. As poor agrarians and menial laborers, both black and white, began to drift toward these third parties, Democrats increasingly sought ways to disenfranchise them. The Democrats successfully achieved their goal through such tactics as poll taxes, literacy test, and terrorism. With the agrarians held at bay, the industrialists began to change the Southern landscape. However, as the author points out, the South remained firmly entrenched in its agrarian tradition. 10

Laurence Shore's Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885 directly challenges Woodward's interpretation that a rising middle class of elite industrialists had gained control the New South. Shore argues that Southern leadership remained virtually unchanged after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Southern Capitalists focuses on the political economy of the era and attempts to explain it based on various modifications of Adam Smith's economic theories. Shore's work is less convincing than that of Woodward because of several weaknesses. The most obvious flaw in the study is that the author fails to explain how the political economy related to society as a whole. Also, Shore does not make a clear distinction of how Southern elites actually deviated from Adam Smith's ideas. 11

A good collection of essays dealing with the continuity of the South is Walter J. Fraser, Jr., and Winfred B. Moore, Jr's From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South. Though the essays represent a wide range of historical thought, the collection as a whole argues in favor of continuity in Southern leadership. Of the essays included in the book, several deserve mention. David Donald states that the breakdown in race relations just before the turn of the century can be contributed to Confederate veteran s reverence for the “Lost Cause.” David Carlton, like Woodward, presents evidence to suggest the old planter leadership was being replaced by a new entrepreneurial class. Ronald Davis contends that following the Civil War many Southern farmers were literally forced into the system of sharecropping because freedmen readily accepted this form of labor over all others. Finally, David Bodenhamer suggests that the rise of white crime is better defined in terms of rural and urban areas, as opposed to prewar and postwar eras. 12

The New South was clearly industrializing by the end of the nineteenth century. However, industry alone did not determine the future of the region. As rising discontent among farmers proved, the South's progress would depend heavily upon agricultural developments. After Reconstruction, a characteristic style of labor was created based on sharecropping and the lien system. Prior to 1900, poverty in the rural South steadily increased mainly due to the drop in cotton prices. Thus, the question becomes why did Southerners rely upon cotton production at the turn of the century? Many scholars contend that the answer lies in the sharecropping system itself, which tied farmers and workers into producing the economically hopeless crop. Naturally, in order to understand this economic dependence on cotton, historians have sought to explain the basics of sharecropping. What was it? What role did landowners, laborers, and merchants play in the system? How did the sharecropping system affect race relations? Finally, did the system benefit the common laborers or create an opportunity for landowners to abuse them?

According to Gerald David Jaynes, the genesis of Southern sharecropping and the lien system was scarcity of credit directly attributed to the Southern planters' loss of capital resulting from emancipation of the slaves. The author's quantitative analysis, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in American South, 1862-1882, argues that payments in shares, as opposed to wages, was common in the South after emancipation. This method of payment eventually developed into the emergence of tenant farming and finally sharecropping. Jaynes also suggests that this system of farming greatly limited the lives of freedmen and poor whites. Former slaves were well aware that sharecropping once again put them under the control of landowners. They would have rather been paid in cash at short intervals, which would have given them greater autonomy and mobility throughout the year. Furthermore, Jaynes finds that it was 35 percent more cost effective for landowners to pay their employees cash wages. So the question becomes why did employers prefer the sharecropping system. The answer, according to the author, is simple. The planter class lacked sufficient amounts of cash or credit with which to pay their laborers. As the author points out, by 1880, this farming system was well established in the South and impoverished whites and blacks were locked into it. 13

Gavin Wright's Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War is similar to Jaynes' study in that it attempts to explain why the South clung to its agrarian tradition even as crop prices were falling. 14 Wright argues that widespread poverty, racial biases, tradition, an underdeveloped educational system, and a constrictive system of agricultural labor were the main causes of the South's isolated labor markets. In other words, the region's low-wage economy remained virtually untouched by national and international economic forces. Like Woodward in the Origins of the New South, Wright contends that the South functioned as if it was a separate entity from the rest of the country. Failure in becoming part of the national economy greatly reduced the amount of Northern capital coming into the South. It was only after the Great Depression when New Deal programs freed workers from the tenant farming system that the South became a significant part of the national economy. The New Deal, states the author, forced Southern laborers out of their local regions and into the broader job market. The reduction of laborers led to greater mechanization in the South, and eventually to the complete destruction of the old Southern economy. An example of the effects of mechanization in the South during this era was the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in 1944. Ultimately, this machine was the death-knell of sharecropping in the South.

Another study which centers on the economic plight of the South's lower class is Pete Daniel's The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. Daniel found that rural blacks continued to live within the confines of slavery even after emancipation. The author states that wide-scale peonage predominately existed in the rural areas of the South prior to the turn of the century. Landowners were able to force poor agrarians to stay on the land due to the continuous debts farmers owed to the planter class. Thus, the author argues that poor Southerners, especially blacks, increasingly became part of a neoplantation system. 15

Consistent with Daniel's arguments is White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia. The author, Charles L. Flynn, Jr., stresses that racism was the central factor in the creation of a neoplantation order in Georgia which allowed the Old South's racial caste system to continue. However, the author contends that even though freedmen found themselves in a constricted position in Southern society, they enjoyed more freedom than they had experienced in slavery. According to the author, it was this increase in freedom that caused the nonplanter class of Southern whites to oppose the neoplanter system. This opposition first found a voice through the Ku Klux Klan but later culminated in the agrarian protest movement of the Farmer's Alliance. Thus, Flynn challenges the commonly held view that the Alliance's crusade was a biracial coalition based on the shared economic interests of black and white farmers alike. The movement was instead a cry for “white only” democracy and agricultural reform designed to improve the situation of white, small-farm owners. Though Flynn's study is a solid study, one should be careful in assuming that sharecropping in Georgia is representative of the South as a whole. 16

Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply, written by Stephen J. DeCanio, takes exception to the traditional interpretation that tenant farmers, both black and white, were unable or unwilling to practice diversified agriculture despite falling crop prices. This, according to conventional wisdom, sent the majority of farmers into a state of unending poverty. DeCanio states, however, that “impressionistic” interpretations do not adequately explain the continued practice of the sharecropping system. Thus, the author legitimizes his quantitative approach in explicating the Southern economy. In his final analysis, DeCanio concludes that farmers in the South were not exploited but received profitable returns. Those farmers who experienced less productivity were not the victims of an economic system based on the old plantation model, but rather, were living in areas that had less fertile soil. Also, DeCanio suggests it was natural for Southern farmers to concentrate on growing cotton, considering it was the most profitable crop grown in the region. Finally, DeCanio describes the agrarians as efficient managers, stating they were alert to changes in the market and were capable of quickly adjusting their crops according to predicted commercial values. 17

Southern farmers soon tired of the harsh economic environment of their region. As a result, the agrarians banded together in a political revolt—the Populist movement. The Democratic party immediately recognized the potential political threat the Populists posed. After all, the farmers' demand for changes in the nation's financial system struck at the heart of the Democrats' constituency, bankers and the rising class of industrialists. The Populists, hoping to strengthen their political position, soon began courting the black vote. Thus, Populism not only involved the issue of economic disparity between the farmers and the Southern elite, but the movement also threatened “white superiority.” Populism, because of its complexities, has evoked a continuing debate among historians. Scholars primarily focus on the following questions: Who were the Populists? Why did Populism initiate a deep rift in Southern society? Did the leaders of the agrarian movement exploit black voters, or did they truly want to help their position within society? Why did Populism fail?

The first serious examination of the Populism was The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party by John D. Hicks. This study contends that the agrarian movement was ushered in by the slowing of westward migration. According to the author, the continual influx of European peoples into the United States and the disappearance of free land in the West led to increasing economic difficulties in Southern agricultural regions during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most important aspect of this study is the analyses of Populist contributions in society. The author argues that reformers, who later followed in the footsteps of the Populists, were able to enact many of the measures espoused by the agrarian movement. Such reforms included broadened political participation, improvements in the nation's credit system, regulation of big business, and conservation. In closing, the author sums up the agrarian revolt by stating the Populists had initiated an effort to save the nation's agricultural endeavors from the “evils” of industrial America. 18

The next major analysis of Populism, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America was published nearly fifty years after Hicks' study. Many modern scholars have labeled Lawrence Goodwyn's study the definitive work on the agrarian movement. In identifying the national Populist, the author states that movement has its roots in the Southern Alliance and originated in the state of Texas. Democratic Promise, like most histories of the New South, finds that the lack of investment capital is the most important factor in explaining the agrarian revolt. Goodwyn's study shows how the Greenback and Populist movements joined forces and thoroughly examines the Alliance in Texas. Goodwyn concludes from his analysis of the Texas Populist that the Alliance's cooperation with members of the Greenback movement created the politics of the subtreasury, which in turn created a foundation for the People's Party. 19

Considering that Goodwyn's study traced the origins of the Populist movement to Texas, it is only natural that other historians have examined more closely the Lone Star state's connection with Populism. An example of such a study is Donna A. Barnes' Farmers in Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmers Alliance and the People's Party in Texas. Barnes, a sociologist, rejects the concept of “structural strain” in defining the Populist movement in Texas. She contends, based upon the sociological theory of “resource mobilization,” that the agrarian movement, instead of being a disorganized response to societal changes prompted by industrialization, was actually a well planned and well-led protest against prevailing political and economic institutions of society. Barnes study is innovative in its discussions on the organizational abilities of rural Texas farmers, but the author fails to make a strong connection between Texas and national Populism. 20

In addition to the above cited works, any serious student of Populism should consult two important historiographical essays. They are James Turner's “Understanding the Populist” and William F. Holmes' “Populism: In Search of Context.” Both articles are well written and thoroughly cover the literature of Populist history, especially Holmes' article. 21

As the Populist movement waned, the black Southerners increasingly became the target of regional political leaders. Disfranchisement and segregation replaced the political freedoms the blacks had gained during the Reconstruction era. Institutionalized “white supremacy,” the result of antebellum racist attitudes, brought about drastic changes in the legal, social, and political status of Southern blacks. Jim Crow laws and black disfranchisement, crucial to the understanding of the New South, have been at the center of consequential historical debates. These debates are often framed around questions such as the following: What were the roots of segregation in the South? How did Jim Crow laws affect black Southerners? Did white racism create the new system, or was it a case of Southern political leaders manipulating the voters by using racism as a central issue?

An original study of segregation and disfranchisement was C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. This study was ground-breaking in that the author dispelled the long believed myth that segregation was the handiwork of the “Redeemers” who, according to the myth, restored white supremacy in the former Confederate states. Woodward contends that social contact between the races was somewhat cordial following Reconstruction. A few black Southerners during this period even found it possible to achieve “middle class” status. Glenda Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow: Women and Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 seems to confirm much of Woodward's analysis. However, Gilmore advances her argument by showing that black women were crucial, at least in South Carolina during the 1870s and 1880s, in advancing the black Southerners' status. The author states that this period of friendly relations was necessary because the black vote was strong enough to influence political elections. Only at the turn of the century did segregation and disfranchisement laws begin to appear in significant numbers. Thus, Woodward views the disfranchisement of black voters as part of the Progressive movement. Contemporary Progressives argued that they were purifying the democratic process, since black voters were often swayed to political parties through financial means. After white southerners effectively took the vote away from Southern black voters, racially motivated segregation legislation easily found its way into Southern society. As a result, race relations became increasingly strained. 22 It should be noted that many scholars disagree with Woodward's conclusions regarding segregation. Critics of The Strange Career of Jim Crow have correctly argued that the author based his study on too many examples in the area of public transportation. Historians, such as Joel Williamson, have convincingly argued that segregation and its harsh consequences began to develop throughout the South during the Reconstruction years.

A more recent study which focuses on the disfranchisement of black Southerners is The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. The author, J. Morgan Kousser, follows the same basic arguments of Woodward—the South went through a transitional period where blacks experienced limited liberties. However, this period of “new freedom” began to disappear in the 1890s. The author's quantitative approach to this topic strongly suggests that changes in the electoral laws were significant in shaping the Southern political system of the New South. Disfranchisement of the blacks was accomplished by incorporating several methods including registration laws, secret ballots, constitutional restrictions, and the highly effective poll tax. 23

Studies more narrow in scope include Howard C. Rabinowitz's Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890, Elizabeth Rauh Bethel's Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community, and Nell Irvin Painter's Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. 24 Rabinowitz's study focuses on race relations in five major Southern cities—Richmond, Raleigh, Atlanta, Montgomery, and Nashville following the Civil War. The author disagrees with Woodward's contention that segregation began at the turn of the century. He suggests that segregation, at least in the urban setting, first appeared during Radical Reconstruction. Radical white Republicans, who were not immune to racism, initiated the segregation movement as an alternative to exclusion. Thus, segregation was not the invention of the Redeemers or a tactic used to punish black Southerners. Redeemers, the author argues simply allowed segregation to continue in a de factor matter until it became legally entrenched in the South at the end of the century. As for disfranchisement, Rabinowitz states that white Southerners began in the 1890s to seek ways of subverting the black vote because of the assertiveness of a younger generation of blacks raised during the post-Reconstruction era.

The author greatly appreciates Dr. James Smallwood at Oklahoma State University and Dr. Julia Blackwelder at Texas A & M University for reading this paper and making valuable suggestions for its improvement.

C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960).

Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

F. Garvin Davenport, Jr., The Myth of Southern History: Historical Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970); Another important study in southern mythology is Patrick Gester and Nicholas Cords Myth and Southern History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Gester and Cords study is a collection of eleven essays from prominent historians of the New South. The essays thoroughly introduce the reader to the controversies surrounding the scholarship of the New South.

Carl N. Degler, Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,” The American Historical Review, Volume 34, Issue 1 (Oct., 1928), 30-43.

David M. Potter, “The Enigma of the South,” The Yale Review 51 (1961): 142-51.

David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).

Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

Walter J. Fraser, Jr. and Winfred Walter B. Moore, Jr., From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Traditional South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).

Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986).

Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972).

Charles L. Flynn, Jr. White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

Stephen J. DeCanio, Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975).

John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931).

Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Donna A. Barnes, Farmers in Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmers Alliance and People's Party in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).

James Turner, “Understanding the Populists” The Journal of American History, Vol. 67, Issue 2 (Sept., 1980), 354-373; William F. Holmes, “Populism: In Search of Context” Agriculture History Vol. 64, number 4 (1990), 26-58.

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910.

Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 198); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

"Literature of the New South - Kenneth Wayne Howell (essay date 1996)." Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Lynn M. Zott, Vol. 114. Gale Cengage, 2003, 16 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/literature-new-south/critical-essays/criticism-overviews#critical-essays-criticism-overviews-kenneth-wayne-howell-essay-date-1996>

Representative Works

Criticism: The Novel In The New South

For the sake of the story. For the love of the South.

Patterson Hood on The New(er) South

A long time ago, i wrote this thing about growing up in the south in the ’70s and all the baggage and complexities that accompanied such. it was part of a larger work that culminated with an album that my band drive-by truckers made. we called it "southern rock opera.".

I spent the better part of five years writing it, a year attempting to record and release it, and two years touring all over the world promoting it. As a band, that work defined us, for better or for worse. We are all fiercely proud of “SRO” for what it is, was and did. But we've also spent a good part of the 12 years since it was first released attempting to move past it.

A couple of months ago, my friend Chuck called and asked me to write this piece for his new site, The Bitter Southerner. My first inclination was to run and hide. I wasn't sure I wanted to get back into all of that. But I got what Chuck was trying to do, and so I agreed.

The centerpiece of my writing on that album (my partner Mike Cooley wrote a fair share, including the two best songs, but I digress) was a spoken-word piece called "The Three Great Alabama Icons," which talked about George Wallace, Bear Bryant and Ronnie Van Zant. (Ronnie wasn't from Alabama, but thanks to “Sweet Home Alabama,” he was greatly beloved by the folks I grew up around.) In my song, I discussed the dualities of being from a region that is known for great music and literature and art and something called “Southern hospitality,” but is also known for Jim Crow laws, slavery, racism and the Ku Klux Klan. I talked about being fiercely proud of the good parts of my heritage and mortified and ashamed of the bad parts, the ones that too often define how other people perceive us.

The narrator of the piece claimed to have lived most of his life down South, running away from the things he was ashamed of, only to move up North at some point and to miss the other parts of his upbringing. In truth, I still have never lived above the Mason-Dixon Line. I never claimed “SRO” to be my true story, but a lot of my story is in there. It was an intentionally naive piece of work, partly because a large part of it was about the main character's teenage years and all of the misguided pitfalls that come with that period of life. I wrote a large part of it on the road while touring behind the three previous albums from my band. Some of it was written from a perspective of naiveté because I was fast learning new things about the world around me every day.

In the years since, we have toured all over the world and probably spent more time in other regions than in our own neck of the woods. I've found that people really aren't all that different, wherever they are from. Certainly some towns are cooler or more fun or more beautiful than others. Some towns do seem to give off a vibe of one type or another, but basically people are people. I have fallen in love with some cities, not so much some others. I have received random acts of kindness on a sidewalk in New York City. I’ve had a beloved guitar stolen (and then returned) in Columbia, Mo. I've made lifelong friends in Holland, London, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, two Portlands (Oregon and Maine), Chicago, Texas and Boston. I get tired of the constant travel and missing my family, but I do love my job and I love visiting my friends from all over creation.

It is, overall, a pretty kickass life.

As for my love/hate/love relationship with my home region, it's still an ongoing process. I have lived in Athens, Ga., for 19 years. It's a beautiful town with warm and creative people, a super-sized music and arts scene and very liberal politics. It's a great place for my kids to grow up and a pretty wonderful place to come home to after a long tour. It's also a nice liberal enclave, providing a little bit of shelter from the right-wing rhetoric that is so prevalent down here.

In movies and TV, there is one Southern accent that is used interchangeably in any setting, whether it's by an ignorant asshole or a homespun sage whose fatherly wisdom keeps Mayberry peaceful. But in actuality, every region of the South has a distinct and different version. To my ears, the Georgia Drawl is a more pleasing sound than the Alabama Twang I grew up hearing (and possessing). In Athens, the drawl often delivers progressive thought and idealistic visions of how we could better ourselves (if Atlanta's suburbs would just stop encroaching). We have great bars and a couple of award-winning, world-class restaurants where I would be proud to take any visitor.

But in the occasional event that I turn my TV on and actually watch the news, I remain mortified that the most idiotic people in Washington usually seem to have one of our Southern accents. In fact, thanks to Republican redistricting, my beloved Athens is represented in Congress by the worst of the worst. Rep. Paul Broun never met a stupid statement he didn't embrace. He's a “birther,” and even though he was once a practicing medical doctor, he calls evolution “lies from the pit of hell.” I hear he's going to run for the Senate. He'll probably win. Southerners love electing dumbasses, and then we complain when comedians take the “easy way” and make fun of us for being backwoods and stupid.

If the Mason-Dixon Line provided the cultural and political dividing line in the 19th and most of the 20th century, now the divisions are more between rural and urban, blue state and red state. The political divide is as fierce as at any time since the abolition of slavery, and both sides are becoming less inclined to compromise. W hat all of this means to Southerners, I'm not sure. A large majority of Southerners fall on the red state side of most issues, but there is an ever growing faction of people who feel very strongly opposed to that, not only in big Atlanta or liberal little Athens, but also in more rural areas. I was amazed and very pleased to see the number of Obama signs I saw in my North Alabama birthplace last fall.

I recently had the pleasure of revisiting my old hometown, Florence, Ala. I lived there for 28 turbulent and often troubled years. My relationship with my hometown was as complex as it could possibly be and probably shaped me in ways I'm only now becoming mature enough to fully realize. Florence is a small town of roughly 60,000, nestled on the northern bank (or shoal) of the beautiful (and somewhat polluted) Tennessee River, which nearly a hundred years ago became the site of the first dam built in what became known as the Tennessee Valley Authority project. Wilson Dam, completed in 1921, turned a previously unnavigable river into an artery for shipping. And thanks to FDR, Wilson Dam provided hydroelectric power that brought electricity to one of the poorest regions of the country.

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On the south side of the river lie three towns, geographically connected, but politically separate from each other. Sheffield, the biggest of the three and birthplace of my father, was a blue-collar community that often looked quite bleak by the time of my youth. Tuscumbia, a little further to the south and landlocked away from the river, is a beautiful small southern town that looks ripe for use as a set for a film about the Old South. Best known as the birthplace to Helen Keller, Tuscumbia is still where young drama students perform “The Miracle Worker” every summer by the well at Ivy Green, where Helen spoke her first words. Muscle Shoals is the more infamous and smallest of the cities. It was the original home of TVA and in the ’60s and ’70s became famous as "the hit recording capital of the world" due to the unbelievable number of classic records recorded there in a handful of humble recording studios.

I grew up as a living part of the legacy of Muscle Shoals music. My father, David Hood, is a bass player and was part of the infamous Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section that played on records by Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel, Willie Nelson, Rod Stewart and tons more. In 1969, the Rolling Stones came and recorded "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses" in my Dad's tiny studio, which was once the site of a casket factory. Their visit was kept a secret from most of the locals, and the world's biggest rock and roll band came, recorded and left (headed for infamy at Altamont, no less) without the conservative townsfolk even knowing they had been there.

A big part of my viewpoint in "The Three Great Alabama Icons" stems from my father, a white southerner born during World War II who made his living backing up African-American R&B legends in my Bible Belt hometown during the height of the civil rights struggle and the horrific racist events of the '60s. Church bombings, beatings of peaceful marchers and turning police dogs on children in places like Selma and Birmingham. George Wallace on TV all over the world for standing in the doorways of schools and blocking progress. All this was happening while my father played bass on the Staple Singers' "I'll Take You There" and Etta James' "Tell Mama." Wallace died while I was writing “SRO,” and I wrote a song about him that was set in hell, where the Devil is welcoming him and telling him why he's there. Wallace's grandson, George Wallace III, is a huge DBT fan and thanked me for writing a fair assessment of his grandfather. Such is the duality of the Southern Thing.

There, I said it.

I grew up fiercely proud of my hometown and my father and the beautiful music they made. I grew up ashamed of politicians like Wallace and some of the later governors who were actually worse, but at least no one outside of Alabama had to know much about them. I grew up loving music and politics. My beloved punk rock showed me a way to blend both things and rebel against the more oppressive forces of my hometown's religious conservative mores. Unfortunately, my coming of age coincided with the Muscle Shoals R&B scene ending, or at least losing its worldwide relevance. I got to the door just as it was slamming shut, and my punk rock leanings did nothing to endear me to my father's peers and associates, most of whom thought I was a spoiled, ungrateful, disrespectful prick. (I plead about 50 percent guilty on that, but I'll save that for a later essay).

I left my hometown at 27, in 1991, after spending six years fronting a very unsuccessful band that was locally more infamous than famous. We had been "banned for life" from the two local music festivals the Muscle Shoals area hosts every year: the Helen Keller Festival and the W.C. Handy Music Festival. I lived in Memphis for about 15 minutes and spent a couple of years in Auburn before settling in Athens a week after my 30th birthday. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Suddenly, I was living in a town with a thriving music scene that put its emphasis on being original and a little outside the mainstream. I thrived and began Drive-By Truckers and have had an amazing adventure and a wonderful life.

Meanwhile, since I've been gone, my hometown has had an amazing transformation. It happened very slowly, and I'm sure that some of the roots were sown before I left, but it's only been in the last five years that you can really see, hear and feel the place beginning to blossom. I visit home, and there are bands playing all over. Some of them are really fucking great. A handful of them are making music that is being loved the world over. Two of today’s most influential and successful clothing designers live and work in Florence. When I grew up, Florence was the seat of a “dry county,” but now, they even have Sunday sales. Riverkeeper has started working to clean up the Tennessee River with some success. There seems to be a renewed pride and local swagger. Two years ago, DBT was even invited to play the Handy Festival (they said it would never happen), and we sold out the big auditorium where my partner Mike Cooley and I had once opened for the likes of Night Ranger and the Producers (the band, not the play). When I got into town for that festival, I saw a band play in a record store to about 25 people. That band was Alabama Shakes, from the small town of Athens, Ala., about 30 miles from home. They have since earned a gold record and played the Grammys and “Saturday Night Live.” They are one of the best bands on the planet right now, and people back home are rightly proud of them.

From left: Chef Hugh Acheson & his wife Mary Koon, Billy Reid, Brittany Howard, Chef Sean Brock, Natalie Chanin; click here for photo credits

Alabama Chanin and Billy Reid are designing clothes and winning international fashion awards from names like Vogue and GQ and Esquire. Billy has opened his anchor store right on Court Street in downtown Florence, leading what is becoming a massive revitalization of our beautiful main street and local economy. Billy has recently designed clothes for people of local prominence to wear at the Oscars and the Grammys. When I win my Oscar, I'll certainly be wearing some Billy Reid.

Speaking of acclaimed films, a new documentary film about Muscle Shoals and its incredible musical history has just been released. My Dad has attended screenings at Sundance and at SXSW in Austin, and the film was just picked up by a distributor (a good one at that). Watch out for “ Muscle Shoals .”

If chefs are the new rock stars (and I think they are), my hometown is still lacking for most culinary options. We do have a sushi restaurant downtown (I never thought I'd live to see that), but most of our best foods are barbecued. Not true, however, in many towns across the southland. Thanks to brilliant chefs like Hugh Acheson, whose Five and Ten and The National are doing my adopted home proud, as well as Sean Brock, whose Husk in downtown Charleston is a James Beard Award-winning favorite. He’s opening a second location in Nashville, where it can stand up alongside City House, which is outstanding.

The paradigm is shifting in the South. There is plenty to dislike or feel bothered by, but there is also more to be excited about down here than ever before. Several of the midsized cities considered among the best places to live in the country are Southern. Louisville, Ky., boasts great art and food and a diverse music scene (anchored by My Morning Jacket, certainly one of the most vital bands of the last two decades). Birmingham, Ala., is in a bankrupt county and has more than its shares of issues, but it also boasts incredible restaurants and art and music and some beautiful old architecture.

Possibly the greatest success story of the newer south is what’s happening in Nashville, Tenn. Nashville has truly become the world-class Music City it always said it was. It’s home to Jack White and his Third Man empire, Dan Auerbach and Black Keys and their new studio, the Ryman Auditorium and tons of newer venues, and literally hundreds of up-and-coming bands. Great restaurants, a major sports franchise and fairly progressive (for the region) city government have made Nashville a great travel destination and an especially livable metropolis. The New York Times and many others have been saying this for a couple of years now, and my recent times there totally back it all up.

As Southerners, we still have plenty of work to do and lots more to accomplish, but I can't help but feel positive about the general direction things seem to be taking down here. By our very nature, we will always be a culture with more than its share of dualities, but these complexities also make our part of the country an interesting place, so ripe for the art and literature and music for which we are rightly respected and loved. If we can continue to move forward (however slowly though it sometimes seems) and learn from and incorporate the newer cultures moving into the region, we can truly be the best part of the country to live in and raise a family.

The Side Bar

Through the Lens: With the Drive-By Truckers

Stacie Huckeba takes us front row with Patterson & DBT. View Gallery

Stars of The New(er) South

We do roll call with some of the south's most influencial taste makers. View Gallery

Muscle Shoals : The Trailer

Do not miss the chance to see the full feature, as soon as you can. Until that opportunity arises, this should put you in the groove. Watch Trail er

Essay by Patterson Hood Patterson Hood, DBT & Brittany Howard photos (top) by Maria Ives Muscle Shoals photos via muscleshoalsmovie.com Photo of David & Patterson Hood courtesy of P. Hood Through the Lens photo gallery by Stacie Huckeba

Next: We Begin a New Version of an Old Tradition

You know we like to drink. Thanks to some the South's best barkeeps, we're building a special series of cocktails, custom concoctions for Bitter Southerners like you. Next week, we’ll offer up The Bitter Southerner No. 1, a deep, dark and delicious number from Jerry Slater at Atlanta’s H. Harper Station.

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Lynda Bessay

South Wales, New York

1935 - 2024

Bessey, LyndaMar 15, 1953 - Jun 10, 2024Lynda Bessey (nee Schneckenberger) of Elma; Beloved wife of Mark for 46 years, loving mother of Kristen (James) Trombley and Ryan (Lindsay) Bessey; cherished Nana of Violet, Grace, Raegan, Sarah, and Olivia; loving daughter of Arlene and late Wayne...

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Deepest sympathy for the loss of one of the most gracious persons I have ever known. Never failing kindness and welcome, I always looked forward to seeing her at Golden Retriever events. Our prayers are with you for your great loss. --Paul Post

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Opinion Lydia Polgreen

South Africa Is Not a Metaphor

Credit... Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times

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By Lydia Polgreen

Ms. Polgreen is an Opinion columnist. She reported across South Africa for 10 days for this column.

June 1, 2024

If you want to understand why the party that liberated South Africa from white rule lost its parliamentary majority in the election this week, you need to look no further than Beauty Mzingeli’s living room. The first time she cast a ballot, she could hardly sleep the night before.

“We were queuing by 4 in the morning,” she told me at her home in Khayelitsha, a township in the flatlands outside Cape Town. “We couldn’t believe that we were free, that finally our voices were going to be heard.”

That was 30 years ago, in the election in which she was one of millions of South Africans who voted the African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela, into power, ushering in a new, multiracial democracy.

Nelson Mandela holding up his fist to a crowd of supporters in 1994.

But at noon on Wednesday, Election Day, as I settled onto a sofa in her tidy bungalow, she confessed that she had not yet made up her mind about voting — she might, for the first time, she told me, cast a ballot for another party. Or maybe she might do the unthinkable and not vote at all.

“Politicians promise us everything,” she sighed. “But they don’t deliver. Why should I give them my vote?”

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The New South Essay.docx
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Reconstruction in the South
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COMMENTS

The New South (article)
The most notable New South initiative was the introduction of textile mills in the South. Beginning in the early 1880s, northern capitalists invested in building textile mills in the southern Appalachian foothills of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, drawn to the region by the fact that they could pay southern mill workers at half ...
The New South
Economic Diversification. King Cotton was once the heralded "ruler" of the South, but following the Civil War this King shouldered the blame for the South's losses. Many southern leaders believed that their reliance on one crop had made them vulnerable to the Union's advances, and they pledged to diversify what they called the "New ...
The New South, 1945-1980: An Essay Review
The New South, 1945-1980: An Essay Review. This eleventh volume is a worthy addition to the esteemed History of the South series. Numan V. Bartley deserves high praise for a well written and impressively researched synthesis of perhaps the most revolutionary period in the region's history.
United States
United States - Reconstruction, New South, Industrialization: The original Northern objective in the Civil War was the preservation of the Union—a war aim with which virtually everybody in the free states agreed. As the fighting progressed, the Lincoln government concluded that emancipation of enslaved people was necessary in order to secure military victory; and thereafter freedom became a ...
Henry Grady's Vision of the New South
The term "New South" was used in the 20th century to refer to other concepts. Moderate governors of the late 20th century - including Terry Sanford of North Carolina, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and George W. Bush of Texas - were called New South governors because they combined pro-growth policies with so-called "moderate" views on race.
New South
New South, New South Democracy or New South Creed is a slogan in the history of the American South first used after the American Civil War.Reformers used it to call for a modernization of society and attitudes, to integrate more fully with the United States as a whole, reject the economy and traditions of the Old South, and the slavery-based plantation system of the prewar period.
THE MYTH OF THE NEW SOUTH
The New South spokesmen expended much of their early effort on dis pelling the backward attitudes instilled by slavery and agrar ianism. Yet Gaston acknowledges the irony in the simultane ous rise of the New South creed and the romantic image of. the Old South during the 1880's and the "vital nexus" be tween the two, the paradoxical way in ...
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C. S. New York, April, 1885. In 1865, immediately after the close of the civil war, Southern society presented the spectacle of what might be called a state of dissolution. The Southern armies had just been disbanded, and the soldiers, after four years of fierce fighting, had returned home to shift for themselves.
Defining The New South: Faulkner Williams And Wright
Southern writers have thus articulated the often silenced voices of marginalized identities in the American South. This concept has been explored in the revolutionary work of writers William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright, whose work examines a resurrected but broken South. Born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897, William ...
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The Emergence of the New South: An Essay Review. By DAVD M. POTTER. PROBABLY NO ONE CAN OFFER AN EXACT DEFINITION OF WHAT THE. "New South" is, but Vann Woodward gave us a better under- standing of the nature of the indefinable by his treatment of its Origins, and George B. Tindall now brings another major seg- ment of the subject into order ...
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Introduction. Literature of the New South. By the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in 1877, a few Southern politicians, thinkers, and writers had begun to critically examine the ...
Henry Grady on the New South (1886)
The new South presents a perfect democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement; a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core; a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace; and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age. The new ...
How did the New South parallel and differ from the Old South?
Cite. There are two important differences between the New and Old Souths. First, there was of course the fact that the New South did not have slavery. Second, the New South had an economy that was ...
Origins of the new South, 1877-1913
Bibliography: p. 482-628 The redeemers -- The forked road to reunion -- The legacy of Reconstruction -- Procrustean bedfellows -- The industrial revolution -- The divided mind of the New South -- The unredeemed farmer -- Mudsills and bottom rails -- Southern Populism -- Revolt against the East -- The colonial economy -- The Mississippi Plan as the American way -- The Atlanta Compromise ...
Literature of the New South
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. [ In the following introduction to her book-length study, MacKethan details the post-Reconstruction literary vision of the Old South as a ...
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Some southerners promoted a new vision for a self-sufficient southern economy built on modern capitalist values, industrial growth, and improved transportation. Railroads and the expansion of markets led to increased industrial production and new city development. Henry Grady. , the editor of the. Atlanta Constitution.
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The New Deal and the South provides both the serious student and the general reader with an up-to-date assessment of one of the most critical transitional periods in southern history. With essays by Alan Brinkley, Harvard Sitkoff, Frank Freidel, Pete Daniel, J. Wayne Flynt, and Numan V. BartleyThe New Deal and the South represents the first ...
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NEW SOUTH. The term "New South" entered public discourse in the United States after 1877, the year Reconstruction ended and the last federal occupation troops were withdrawn from the former Confederacy. State governments (often called the "redeemer" governments) across the South could finally reassert the power of the white majority, but the whole region faced systemic problems deriving from ...
Literature of the New South Criticism: Overviews
For an essay whose avowed subject is the present and future, "The New South" seems remarkably backward-looking—preoccupied, to the point of obsessiveness, with the past. "The New South ...
Patterson Hood on The New(er) South
My father, David Hood, is a bass player and was part of the infamous Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section that played on records by Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel, Willie Nelson, Rod Stewart and tons more. In 1969, the Rolling Stones came and recorded "Brown Sugar" and "Wild ...
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Lynda Bessay passed away in South Wales, New York. Funeral Home Services for Lynda are being provided by Comfort Funeral Home Inc.. The obituary was featured in Buffalo News on June 11, 2024.
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Elektrostal is a city in Moscow Oblast, Russia, located 58 kilometers east of Moscow. Elektrostal has about 158,000 residents. Mapcarta, the open map.
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Moscow Oblast ( Russian: Моско́вская о́бласть, Moskovskaya oblast) is a federal subject of Russia. It is located in western Russia, and it completely surrounds Moscow. The oblast has no capital, and oblast officials reside in Moscow or in other cities within the oblast. [1] As of 2015, the oblast has a population of 7,231,068 ...
Opinion
South Africa Is Not a Metaphor. Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times. 69. By Lydia Polgreen. Ms. Polgreen is an Opinion columnist. She reported across South Africa for 10 days for this column ...