Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature

J. V. Ridgely

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780813154404
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813194981
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

SEVEN

The New South:
The Past Recaptured

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-ondertakin’ 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 evildoer,—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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Prolog / The Southron
• One / The New World and the Southern Garden
• Two / The Growth of Southern Separatism
• Three / The Southern Romance: The Matter of Virginia
• Four / The Southern Way of Life: The 1830s and ’40s
• Five / On the Eve of War: The Crucial Decade
• Six / The Confederacy and the Martyred South
• Seven / The New South: The Past Recaptured
• Epilog / The Legacy
• Bibliographical Note
• Index