The Southern Hospitality Myth

Ethics, Politics, Race, and American Memory

Anthony Szczesiul, Jon Smith, Riché Richardson

• Editore: University of Georgia Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820350738
• Argomento: Literatura
• Categoria: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance of­ten seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country.

Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region's historical legacy of slavery and segregation.

CHAPTER ONE

A Virginian Praises
“Yankee Hospitality”

Rethinking the Historicity of
Antebellum Southern Hospitality

In the early years of the sectional crisis between the northern and southern states, a southerner could still praise the hospitality of northerners and even suggest that “Yankee hospitality,” though admittedly different, was possibly more sincere and meaningful than the hospitality of the South. Lucian Minor’s “Letters from New England” were published in the first volume of the Southern Literary Messenger, appearing in five installments between November 1834 and April 1835. His second letter opens with the following extended comparison between “Yankee hospitality” and “good old Virginia hospitality”:

Of Yankee hospitality (curl not your lip sardonically—you, or any other Buckskin,)—of Yankee hospitality there is a great deal, in their way—i.e. according to the condition and circumstances of society. Not a little more can be said of Virginia hospitality. Set one of our large farmowners down upon a hundred, instead of a thousand, acres; let him, and his sons, cultivate it themselves; feed the cattle; rub down and feed the horses; milk the cows; cut wood and make fires; let his wife and daughters alone tend the garden; wash, iron, cook, make clothes, make the beds, and clean up the house; let him have but ten acres of wood land, in a climate where snow lies three, and frost comes for seven, months a year; surround him with a dense population—80, instead of 19, to the square mile; bring strangers, constantly, in flocks to his neighborhood; place a cheap and comfortable inn but a mile or two off; give him a ready and near market for his garden stuffs, as well as for his grain and tobacco—and ask yourself, if he could, or would, practice our “good old Virginia hospitality?” To us, who enjoy the credit and the pleasure of entertaining a guest, while the drudgery devolves upon our slaves; the larger scale (wastefully large) of our daily rations, too, making the presence of one or more additional mouths absolutely unfelt;—hospitality is a cheap, easy, and delightful virtue. But put us in place of the yankees, in the foregoing respects, and any man of sense and candor must perceive that we could not excel them.¹

While I am attracted to the sheer anecdotal novelty provided by an antebellum southerner praising the hospitality of the North, I begin this chapter with Lucian Minor for more substantive reasons. On the one hand, Minor’s comments on the unique material and social circumstances of southern hospitality confirm many of the main assertions that cultural historians have made about the origins of the social practices that came to be identified as “southern hospitality,” so his portrayal of southern hospitality provides a convenient opportunity to review what historians have had to say about the material circumstances, complex motivations, and cultural meanings of these practices.² On the other hand, Minor’s comparative comments on northern and southern hospitality can also complicate our understanding of southern hospitality in important ways. First, the opening lines of his essay, in which he anticipates his readers’ incredulous response to the mere suggestion of northern hospitality, suggest the already-legendary status of the hospitality of southerners, its importance as a defining trait of “the South.” Indeed, he later refers to hospitality as “our most prominent virtue” and admits that allowing northerners to be compared with southerners in this regard amounts to “audacious heresy.”³ But considering Minor’s comments on hospitality in light of the overall context to “Letters from New England” also shows that southern hospitality was an adaptable discourse, a well-recognized story that allowed northerners and southerners to imagine an amicable interregional social union in spite of, or instead of, sectional political animosity. As I discuss later, this discourse of southern hospitality was both a symptom of and, often, a proposed remedy to sectional suspicion and animosity. Second, Minor unsettles our regionalist understanding of hospitality by placing southern hospitality in a national context, reminding us that hospitality was an important subject throughout antebellum America and not just in the South. Antebellum discourses of hospitality were multiple, wide-ranging, and mobile, sliding along shifting boundaries that defined the stranger or foreigner and along lines of region, race, and class. Discourse on southern hospitality was only one strand of discourse among many. To understand how antebellum Americans imagined and understood southern hospitality, it is essential to consider it amid these broader, more disparate discourses on hospitality, a topic I take up in chapter 2. Finally, by linking southern hospitality directly to slavery, Minor implicitly—though no doubt, unintentionally—raises fundamental ethical questions about what actually constitutes hospitality. For if antebellum southern hospitality is—in Minor’s words—an “easy virtue,” one that is contingent on slave labor, is it a virtue at all?

Lucian Minor was a graduate of the College of William and Mary, a Virginia commonwealth attorney, and a public southern intellectual from the 1830s until his death in 1858. In 1833 he had been Thomas Willis White’s first choice for the editor’s position at the fledgling Southern Literary Messenger, a magazine whose expressed hope was to establish for the South its “just rights” and “proper representation in the republic of letters.”⁴ When Minor refused White’s offer to head the Messenger for eight hundred dollars a year—a decent salary at the time—White offered the position to the struggling Edgar Allan Poe at a much lower rate of ten dollars per week. Still, Minor maintained close ties with White and the Southern Literary Messenger, and he would be one of its “best and most frequent contributors” in the years that followed.⁵ As can be gleaned from his five “Letters from New England,” Minor could in many ways be classified as a progressive southern intellectual of the period, and his often-approving observations of New England range through topics such as public education, local government, architecture, the judicial system, agriculture, public lyceums and lectures, and the treatment of women, among other things. He states that his goal in writing the letters is to “draw . . . [southern] attention to some traits of Yankee life which we may advantageously copy,” and to “disabuse” southerners “of a few of the prejudices, which ignorance and misrepresentation have fostered against our northern brethren.”⁶ In his other writings, Minor was known to advocate public education reform, prison reform, and temperance. Though he certainly opposed the abolition of slavery (in his first letter he rails against “Garrison, and his will-o’-the-wisp, the Liberator”), he did write approvingly of the colonization of Liberia by former American slaves in an 1836 essay written for the Southern Literary Messenger.⁷

By the time Minor wrote his “Letters from New England,” the hospitality of southerners had already achieved legendary status in American culture, having been celebrated by travelers to and citizens of the South for well over a century. As early as 1705, for example, Robert Beverly in his History of Virginia offered this description: “A stranger has no more to do, but to inquire upon the road, where any Gentlemen or good House-keeper Lives, and there he may depend upon being received with Hospitality. This good Nature is so general . . . that the Gentry when they go abroad, order their Principal Servant to entertain all Visitors. . . . And the Poor planters, who have but one bed will very often sit up, or lie upon a Form or Couch all Night, to make room for a weary Traveller.”⁸ According to Rhys Isaac in The Transformation of Virginia, many of the early social practices on which the legends of southern hospitality were based—particularly the “open-house customs” that conjured up legends of planters actively seeking out strangers to entertain—went out of fashion as early as 1800. Even so, hospitality was consistently identified by southerners and nonsoutherners alike as a distinguishing social characteristic of the wealthier planter classes and, increasingly in the 1800s, as a defining trait of the South more generally.⁹

Still, by portraying “Virginia hospitality” as a circumstance of the unique environmental and social circumstances of the South, Minor attempts to dispel some of the legendary aura surrounding southern hospitality, as well as the reciprocal stereotype that northerners are inhospitable. In doing so, he perhaps hoped to create a common ground of benevolence and goodwill between northerners and southerners. At the same time, his analysis also confirms many of the assertions that cultural historians of the antebellum South have made about the origins and social practices of southern hospitality—as well as their complex cultural meanings. For example, Minor cites the denser population patterns in the North as well as the common availability of inns for travelers as reasons why hospitality is not so readily associated with the North. Historians have similarly argued that the southern practices of hospitality were in part the consequence of the distances between and general isolation of plantations. If one made the effort to travel a great distance to visit, it seems logical that one was more likely to stay for a while. The South also had far fewer public inns than the North, so some instances of southern hospitality were the result of necessity; in these cases, strangers were often expected to pay for services rendered. At the same time, having strangers visit could provide a personal benefit to slave owners living in relative isolation, alleviating what some of them described in diaries and letters as the numbing boredom of a life without work. Entertaining strangers and learning news from travelers could alleviate the ennui of plantation life. Hence we have the accounts of planters sending their slaves to nearby inns to invite any guests to dine at their plantation, as well as the apocryphal anecdotes of planters forcing their hospitality on strangers at gunpoint.¹⁰

Hospitality between Men of Honor

According to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, many of the social practices of hospitality in the antebellum South were primarily “family-centered,” and this can be tied to the unique social conditions of the South, relative to the North (notice how Wyatt-Brown’s reference to “Yankeefied” traits in the following quote relies on the very sort of regional stereotypes that Minor’s essay attempts to dispel):

The planter of means was obliged to share the good fortune with less well-fixed kinfolk or be severely criticized for Yankeefied tightfistedness. When no other agency existed to care for the weak, the family was the first and often sole resort. Northerners likewise felt obliged to lend the helping hand, and did so with no less and no more willingness than Southerners. However, there was, one may speculate, a sense of deeper obligation in the South, if only because the slave holding states were slow to find public means to house the dependent and indigent—asylums, hospitals, poorhouses, or rooming houses. Moreover, it was much more dignified for a widowed distant cousin . . . to accept an invitation for a visit that lasted over a year than to request a handout.¹¹

But benevolence surely was not the primary impulse behind the polymorphous social practices that gave rise to the legendary southern hospitality of the antebellum South. Steven M. Stowe argues, for example, that many of the rituals of planter society in the Old South were an important way of establishing “legitimacy and dominance[,] . . . the knot that the planters had to keep tight if they were to survive, and, as they steadily came to understand by the 1830s, if their survival was to have the strength of tradition.” With the intensifying political climate and the changing economic and social conditions that emerged during the sectional crisis, such rituals became more and more attractive to “an increasingly embattled elite.” As Stowe concisely explains, “There were . . . advantages in a slave society to one’s appearing larger-than-life and smoothly in charge.” In other words, it was important to the elite planters that they had the opportunity to exhibit their power, privilege, and mastery, for mastery was, “after all, the final measure of things” in this particular social order.¹² Inviting guests and strangers into one’s home provided just such opportunities to display one’s self.

These practices of hospitality among antebellum southern planters were also deeply embedded within the complex social codes and rituals of southern honor. Many social exchanges of hospitality in the antebellum South—ranging from buying drinks and extending and accepting invitations to meals and entertainments to offering assistance to gentlemen in need—took place among men of honor seeking to establish their place in a hierarchical social order ; consequently these exchanges could be fraught with a deep sense of competition, coercion, and potentially insulting meanings. As Wyatt-Brown explains, “Hospitality could not be divorced from honor, nor honor separated from the coercions of public opinion. . . . In all the coercions and obligations that surrounded the custom of hospitality there ran an undercurrent of deep mistrust, anxiety, and personal competition.”¹³ Kenneth Greenburg similarly approaches southern hospitality through the cultural lens of southern honor, arguing that the rites of hospitality provided an essential form of gift exchange among men of honor. According to Greenburg, gift exchanges—rather than, say, market transactions—were the most meaningful interactions among members of the wealthy planter class, helping to create a sense of community and belonging. This explanation is very much in line with Marcel Mauss’s seminal work The Gift: The Form and Function for Exchange in Archaic Societies. According to Mauss’s comparative analysis, the most important social aspect of a gift is the sense of indebtedness and obligation it creates in the recipient, an important means of creating a sense of solidarity and community. While gifts such as hospitality may seem “voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily.”¹⁴

According to Greenburg, in the patriarchal world of southern honor, even the relationship between a master and his slaves was imagined in these terms, with the “benevolent” master providing the slave the “gifts” of security, a home, and all the necessities of life; in fact, to be a master in the cultural economy of slavery was to be a giver of gifts: “Gifts flowed in only one direction in the master-slave relationship. Men of honor, on the other hand, both gave and received gifts. To be immersed in a system of reciprocal gift giving was to be part of a community of free men. In fact, gift exchange was one of the defining features of that community.”¹⁵ While a community of gift givers may sound pleasant on the surface, southerners often viewed gifts with suspicion. Certainly there is a coercive aspect in the giving of any gift because the recipient of the gift feels obliged to reciprocate. And among men of honor in the antebellum South, one had to have the means to reciprocate in style if one wanted to maintain one’s status. In light of the insights of both Wyatt-Brown and Greenburg, it is no wonder, perhaps, that some economic historians have described the practices of hospitality among wealthy planters in terms of conspicuous consumption.¹⁶ Whatever terms we use to describe the phenomena, without doubt the public display of personal wealth—whether through a home and its furnishings or the ritualized practices that occurred within—played an important role in defining one’s place in the social order of wealthy southern planters. Or, as Rhys Isaac explains, “the stress on hospitality arose from and contributed to the sacred importance attached to the house. A man’s homeplace—his plantation and house—were special extensions of the self.”¹⁷

A fascinating and particularly disturbing example of this logic may be found in the diaries of James Henry Hammond, the South Carolina politician, virulent supporter of states’ rights, and uncompromising defender of slavery based on white supremacy. In a long diary entry dated December 9, 1846, Hammond momentarily enters into a diatribe against his brother-in-law (Wade Hampton) and his political enemies, and his invective reveals the deep sense of competition that could often be the primary impulse behind hospitality: “The truth is he [Hampton] felt, and so did all his set, Manning, Preston, etc., my great superiority over them, and they could not ordinarily brook it. He threw away $30,000 to make his house . . . finer than mine. And he was galled, all of them were, that, besides every thing else, I beat them in their own line, furniture, balls, and dinner parties. All were exceedingly jealous of me. . . . Manning could not conceal it. He built his fine house in Clarendon to beat me.”¹⁸ The passage indicates the potentially competitive undercurrent of hospitality among wealthy southerners, but the entire context of this particular diary entry makes the solace Hammond takes in his hospitable displays of wealth especially disturbing. For the majority of Hammond’s diary entry on December 9 is devoted to the circumstances surrounding his serial molestations of his four nieces (Wade Hampton’s daughters), and the fact that his transgressions have recently become known to the Hampton family. As Hammond ponders the appropriate course of action, it becomes apparent that he can live quite comfortably with his guilty conscience—indeed, he often seems to feel justified in his appalling behavior ; what he cannot abide is losing his place in the social order:

Notwithstanding my letter to Hampton and my announcement of my intention to leave Columbia their low and cowardly malignity led them to...