The trip to Charleston took place a few months into Ted’s rustication, the consequence of his overzealousness in the ritual feud between the campus newspaper and the humor magazine. As he packed his belongings, he presented me with his fine copy of David Donald’s Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960). My mentor’s masterpiece, the brilliant but problematic book was the stuff of which academic ambition is made. The gift also served as an inside joke. During our first year of college, Ted and I had shared with two other roommates the suite in which Sumner had lived during his senior year at Harvard. Ted was from South Carolina and I was from Massachusetts, but he had never beaten me over the head with a cane. Perhaps the Civil War was finally over.

Shortly after the Charleston visit I gave Ted a copy of C. Vann Woodward’s new Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981). We had loved reading an earlier edition of the text in our undergraduate course on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Woodward’s vastly expanded, superbly annotated version was an epic feast for someone with Ted’s appetite for anecdotes. While living in Columbia during law school, he immersed himself in the setting for much of the chronicle. Chesnut fled the city only days before one-third of its buildings burned in February 1865 as General William T. Sherman took control of the state capital. The family mansion of Chesnut’s symbolic young southern belle, Sally Buchanan “Buck” Preston, had survived to become a house museum that Ted and I toured during my visit to Columbia. We speculated on exactly what Napoleon III might have had in mind when he chose to present Buck with the gift of a riding crop while the Prestons lived in Europe during the late 1850s.

Our errand in the cemetery of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral at this late point in the night was to visit sites associated with Chesnut’s book. Buck Preston was now in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston with her husband, but most of her family was at Trinity. Chesnut had attended many funerals here during the war. After one of those occasions, she sat with a friend on the front steps of the South Carolina statehouse, across the street from the church, and mourned “our world, the only world we cared for, literally kicked to pieces.” Ted and I began at the monument to Buck’s cousin Preston Hampton, a Confederate cavalry officer killed on the front lines before the eyes of his father and commanding general, Wade Hampton III. Trinity warden and state military surgeon general Robert W. Gibbes decreed that space considerations would not permit fulfillment of the father’s wish to bury his son alongside the boy’s mother. Gibbes ordered another grave dug nearby, only to be overruled after the work was completed. During the funeral, the unused grave yawned in anticipation of the next Confederate casualty. Chesnut sighed that the “evil augury” compounded the gloom of the occasion. Her young friend Isabella Martin fumed that the pit should be used to bury alive the socially ambitious Gibbes, who “would be so proud to be in the Hampton graveyard.” Ted observed with glee that the Gibbes family plot was fifteen paces further toward the back of the cemetery than the prime corner location occupied by the Hamptons and Prestons.¹

We drifted among the headstones, matching the monuments to other poignant stories from Chesnut’s saga. A melodramatic broken column, decorated at the top by a stone garland and at the bottom by a relief of a palmetto tree, marked the grave of States Rights Gist. Chesnut had felt obliged to clarify that Gist was “a real person—and not an odd name merely.” Destined from his christening to become a Confederate general, he was killed leading a charge at the Battle of Franklin. An imposing obelisk projected from the lot of Daniel Heyward Trezevant, the Chesnuts’ local doctor. Louisa McCord, who organized a Confederate hospital on the college grounds across the street from her Columbia house, told Chesnut that Trezevant believed wholeheartedly in spirit rappings even before the physician unexpectedly found his son’s name on a bulletin-board list of Columbia soldiers killed in the Seven Days Battles. A relief of an urn and a weeping willow marked the final resting place of Robert Woodward Barnwell’s family. The chaplain and history professor at South Carolina College had volunteered to work in Confederate hospitals in Virginia, where he contracted typhoid fever and lost his mind. Within twenty-four hours of his death in a Staunton mental hospital, his wife and baby died in childbirth in Columbia. All three were buried together in a single funeral, leaving behind three orphans.²

Near the high brick wall at the rear of the churchyard, we came to an iron fence surrounding the small family lot of Henry Timrod, known since the war as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. These rough-hewn headstones were the most rustic monuments in the cemetery. A three-foot-tall piece of granite marked the grave of Timrod and his infant son. Two smaller stones remembered the poet’s mother and sister. Ted loved contemporary poetry more than anyone else I knew. His grief at the sudden death of Robert Lowell had startled me during our festive freshman week of college. His proudest achievement at the University of South Carolina was to have staked out a position on the periphery of the circle that surrounded writer-in-residence James Dickey. One member of this group regularly brought poets visiting Columbia to see Timrod’s grave, located only a few blocks from the campus. Years ago, Lowell had theatrically fallen to his knees before the landmark. Warming up with the established tour script, Ted explained to me that the 1829 birthdate inscribed on the stone was wrong. The poet had at some point shaved a year from his age because he was disappointed that he had not accomplished more.³ The glimpse of Timrod’s ambition and frustration was typical of cemeteries, Ted continued. He firmly believed that a visit to a grave provided indispensable insights into history. This monument was particularly revealing.

Timrod’s literary friends eulogized him in different ways. William Gilmore Simms, whose warm generosity had not prevented him from privately attributing his friend’s tribulations to laziness and intemperance, published a strident, frustrated appreciation. Offering a humoral postmortem that surviving relatives of the consumptive deemed insensitive, Simms sighed that the pessimistic Timrod “had none of the sanguine in his system. His blood worked languidly and gave no proper support, stimulus, or succour to his brain.” Nevertheless, he had produced “verse far superior to anything that could or can be done in Boston, by any or all of the sweet-singing swans of that American Olympus.” Simms’s anthology War Poetry of the South (1867) had recently presented his younger colleague to the restored Union as the star of a Confederate literature “essentially as much the property of the whole as the captured cannon” of the war. He now urged fellow southerners “to see that a graceful tablet shall indicate to posterity the sleeping place of the bard.” William J. Rivers, one of Timrod’s schoolteachers in Charleston before taking the faculty position in classics at South Carolina College coveted by his former student, delivered a tribute before a “crowded and select audience” at the college chapel. Physician and litterateur J. Dickson Bruns, a friend of Timrod’s since childhood, presented an elaborate lecture in his new home city of New Orleans that he later reprised on a visit back to Charleston.⁵

Paul Hamilton Hayne, Timrod’s closest friend since the two young men shared a desk at Christopher Cotes’s school in Charleston, took charge of preparing a verse collection for posthumous publication. Like Simms, he understood his editorial project to be in part a literary phase of Reconstruction politics. Hayne, however, cast himself as a sectional diplomat rather than a defiant champion of Confederate achievement. Building on friendships formed on a trip to Boston during the 1850s, he saw that his role as Timrod’s representative provided an opportunity to cultivate the goodwill of the New England literati, not least because his late friend was a better poet than he was. Hayne focused his efforts on the politically conservative Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., to whom he sent his threnody, “Under the Pines,” for publication in Boston, along with a letter describing the sad fate of Timrod and the continued destitution of the white South. His preface to the collection published in 1873 lamented that Timrod had not managed to travel after the war to the North, where “such high-hearted men as Bryant, Whipple, Holmes, and Whittier, would have recognized the genius of the man” and helped him survive. But if the foster son of Robert Hayne proposed to unite in a postwar republic of letters with the intellectual heirs of Daniel Webster, he expected sympathy in exchange for his loyalty. The unmarked grave in the Trinity churchyard was a silent reproach, he declared, “in the ruined capital of his native State, whence scholarship, culture, and social purity have been banished to give place to the orgies of semi-barbarians and the political trickery of adventurers and traitors.” That outburst served as a prelude to Hayne’s “South Carolina to the States of the North” (1876), a plea for acquiescence in the violent overthrow of Republican government in the state that he dedicated to “redeemer” gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton. Holmes told Hayne that the poem filled him with “a thrill of sympathy and an aching of regret that my fellow countrymen of your proud record and sensitive race should be doomed to such suffering.”⁶

Vitriolic as its depiction of Reconstruction was, Hayne’s view from Timrod’s grave touched off a conservative protest in Columbia. Northern newspapers noted Hayne’s emphasis on Timrod’s “grim encounters with starvation” and suggested that the poet’s death reflected an inadequate southern appreciation for art. The Boston Globe observed that “in Massachusetts we contrive to honor equally such a citizen as Charles Sumner and such a citizen as Henry W. Longfellow” and speculated that “had [Timrod] lived in the North he would have been valued, respected and read, as Whittier is valued, respected and read.” South Carolina newspapers retorted that “if the Boston critics could have looked upon the destitution and desolation then prevailing in Columbia, they could better understand how he parted with his silver plate to procure the means of living. He was more fortunate than many others, in having saved the plate, to be thus used, from Sherman’s bummers.” Young schoolteacher Isabella Martin reported that Wade Hampton had asked her father, a Methodist minister, to attend to Timrod as a special case for alms in December 1866. Though the poet had initially refused to accept the charity, Martin alleged, he had eventually recognized the necessity and remained under the protection of the community leadership until disease killed him. Hayne rose to defend the accuracy of his account and its implications. Although complimentary to “the General’s cordial and sympathetic spirit” and disavowing any blame of “individuals or communities,” he insisted on the economic as well as medical harshness of Timrod’s fate. Hayne was an unimpeachable patrician, but he strongly believed that his region undervalued the arts. As editor of Russell’s Magazine in the late 1850s, he had published one of the most forceful statements of that position, Timrod’s essay on “Literature in the South.”⁷

Hayne composed another religious meditation in 1874, “By the Grave of Henry Timrod,” but Carlyle McKinley’s “At Timrod’s Grave” (1877) became a classic in the political verse of redemption. A cheerleader for the Red Shirt campaign as Columbia correspondent for the Charleston News and Courier, McKinley looked back across Reconstruction from Timrod’s “last sad home / Of all memorial bare / Save for a little heap of leaves / The winds have gathered there!” He argued that South Carolina had shown its resistance to postwar restructuring by declining to produce a successor to the poet laureate of the Confederacy: “Our one sweet singer breaks no more / The silence sad and long / The land is hushed from shore to shore, / It brooks no feebler song!” With the restoration of Democratic control in sight, even Timrod’s grave joined in a hopeful regeneration as “one tender, tearful bloom / Wins upward through the grass, / As some sweet thought he left unsung / Were blossoming at last!” McKinley’s closing exhortation applied equally to the fallen soldiers of the Confederacy and their bard: “‘Hold up the glories of thy dead!’/ To thine own self be true, / Land that he loved! / Come, honor now / This grave that honors you!”⁸

The first monument for Timrod followed a few years later. His friend Hugh S. Thompson, state superintendent of education since the Democratic victory of 1876, coordinated the project. Donors received a printed copy of William J. Rivers’s lecture on his former student, to which Rivers appended his 1870 poem “Eldred,” about a former Confederate soldier vowing to remain at home and “help foul wrong descend into her pit” rather than emigrate from occupied South Carolina to seek fortune and freedom. The gravestone was a six-foot-high marble obelisk inscribed with quotations from Timrod’s “Vision of Poesy.” A newspaper commentary described the belated shaft as indicative of the post-Reconstruction “change from barbarism to civilization.”⁹

The memorial boulder now in the Trinity churchyard resulted from a separate initiative. Felix G. de Fontaine, chief editor of the Daily South Carolinian during Timrod’s tenure on the staff, helped to plan the undertaking shortly before his death in 1896, but the dominant force was William Ashmead Courtenay. Mayor of Charleston during the 1880s, Courtenay was a leading figure in many South Carolina historical enterprises. He had begun his career as a bookstore owner in the 1850s and worked briefly for the Charleston Mercury before enlisting in the Confederate army. Through these literary experiences he came to know Hayne, who despised him. Evidently the antipathy was mutual, and Courtenay did not hesitate to circulate the report that Hayne, who died in 1886, had failed to turn over to Timrod’s widow the profits from the 1873 collection. Courtenay had told Timrod in January 1865 that he would gladly seek to arrange publication of the volume set in proof sheets during the war. He tried to broker such a deal after Timrod’s death and was miffed when the poet’s sister turned the project over to Hayne. Apart from these animosities, Courtenay personified the so-called New South of Henry Grady, which Hayne regarded with deep skepticism. President of the Charleston Chamber of Commerce before his election as mayor, Courtenay had later opened a cotton-textile mill. He brought a self-consciously modern commercial orientation and middle-class constituency into the turn-of-the-century cultural campaign that he branded the Timrod Revival.¹⁰

In contrast to Hayne’s literary diplomacy, the Timrod Revival was a mass-marketing operation. Courtenay’s initial plan was to arrange for publication of a new edition of Timrod’s poetry and use the profits to “provide a handsome tomb at his grave.” By the time South Carolina chartered the Timrod Memorial Association in November 1898, with Courten...