The literature of the South

Foreword

The title selected for this book is one wherein a policy of exclusion could be systematically adopted; for, while there is a distinctive literature of the South, there is and has been much literary activity in the South which has contributed little or nothing to the sectional development. Many of the Southern manuals and estimates reveal too generous an inclination to include within their pages the names of those whom sentiment conjured up beyond the real measure of their importance. A local notoriety, a limited influence, an occasional inspiration, a sporadic paper — all these tend to swell into misguiding proportions a conscientious list of Southern writers. Many there have been of pleasing talents, and of exceptional powers as far as they have gone — but somewhere the amateur spirit soon reveals their momentary character.

The greatest enemies of any literary movement are those who carry adulation in criticism to an excess. Southern literature has, until recently, found itself handicapped through a deplorable lack of any discriminating standards by which to judge it. However unified the fundamental interests of this country may be, the South — as well as any other section — has had a growth peculiarly its own. We would not deny the individuality of New England, even though that individuality be recognized as an element only in the evolution of the nation. So it is with the South — a section wherein the social forces have conserved a distinct type of people upon its soil — one which, temperamentally as well as geographically, claims for itself a difference from its neighbors which is deeper viii FOREWORD

than dialects or superficial prejudices, and which is coincident with the life that fostered it.

By the literature of the South, the idea to be conveyed is, that certain conditions have conduced to develop a species of writing which is born directly of these social conditions. The civilization of the Old South — the re-forming into a New South upon the basis of a large inheritance — these two civilizations, different from their neighbors in temperament, in certain problems of vital moment, in the structure of their social fabric, have produced an unmistakable literature, duly reflecting the mental, moral, and emotional view-points of time and place.

In the following pages an attempt has been made to indicate this close connection existing between the Southern life and its literature. Only those dominant figures are dwelt upon who had it within them to sound a sustained note — if they were poets; to stem or to encourage the tide of public or sectional feeling — if they were public men ; to create or to reflect the true atmosphere of locality — if they were novelists. To apply a rigorous critical standard is the only just way of approaching an extensive subject. And there is no denying that the field of Southern literature is a large one. Yet if we discard that body of writing which, though sincere, is beset by the stupendous sin of mediocrity, if we remain persistent in dwelling only upon that writing which affects or has influenced Southern thought and culture, we shall find, perhaps in some cases to our surprise, that the development of Southern letters has not been insignificant. The greatest hindrance to a clear understanding of this fact has been, undoubtedly, the provincial manner in which that literature has been regarded by the people of the South in general. Only within very recent years has a comparative method been adopted, wherewith the South has been made to recognize that its literature, as an

FOREWORD ix

expression of life, possessed an organism distinctly its own. The culture of the North has always been vigorous because of its plastic nature; it was influenced by forces outside of itself — by coming- into greater contact with diverse people, whether in this country or abroad. The culture of the South was, during the old regime, well-nigh fixed by the conservative lines of a classical education. But the new outlook changed all this; to that culture which the South has always had, a larger interest is now added, which transcends sectional barriers.

It is to be hoped that the following studies will emphasize this close contact of letters with the life of the South. The aim has been throughout, however, to escape the stigma of sectionalism. The South, per se, retains its individuality — ^but its significance, as part of the nation, should have a wider understanding. For it will be found that the South has contributed to American literature, both by example and by accomplishment; that it has been original, even though much of its writing is imitative. The literature of the South is the literature of a people, and those people — after an evolution from the aristocrat to the democrat, taken in a wider sense — are themselves Americans as well as Southerners.

The bibliographies contained in the Appendix will bespeak my indebtedness to the many sources of an historical and social nature. It is a pleasure here to express my deep appreciation of the unfailing courtesy given to me by the authorities of Columbia University Library, who have placed at my disposal every facility ; in especial, I would thank Mr. Frederic W. Erb, whose personal interest and watchfulness have done much to enrich my bibliographies. To the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library I also wish to extend my grateful acknowledgment.

In a work of this nature, the student is necessarily

X FOREWORD

dependent upon that encouragement which comes from correspondence and consultation. It is a privilege to indicate in this manner the many services rendered me in the preparation of this work by Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, Professor W. P. Trent, Mr. Henry Lanier, Mrs. Frank Jordan, Judge J. B. Gaston, of Montgomery, Ala., and Mr. J. Walker McSpadden. Finally, I cannot pass by the constant advice and unfailing interest of the members of my family, whose unswerving loyalty to the South is not to be questioned.

M. J. M.

Contents

CHAPTE8 PAGE

Foreword vii

I. Social Forces: The Character of the

Chapter I

The Character of the Southern Pioneers; Class Distinctions; the Cavalier and the PtJRiTAN Spirits in the South; Geographical Distribution of the People.

The South has ever been bound up in its economic, poHtical, and social interests. Conditions have molded character, environment has fused varied elements, climate has affected temperament, until the type, the tradition, the mental attitude and the verbal expression have become products of the soil on one hand and dutiful servants of the civilization on the other. The social forces as they apply to the South particularly, rather than to America at large, are such that they stretch far back into colonial beginnings; during this early period, it is true, the observation was purely an external one, but if the chronicles, reports, and letters of the adventurers, colonizers, and royal representatives be examined closely, a distinct economic consciousness will be traced, no longer measured in terms of dependency upon a foreign influence, but in terms of local interest and independent development.

Nearly every feature typical of Southern life and distinctive of Southern history becomes evident during the colonial existence ; the cohesive substance later seems to have been political sanction. No historian can define the boundaries of the human stream of life; the adventurous spirit of the explorer passes imperceptibly into the practical spirit of the settler. The Anglo-Saxon blood surged through the veins of the pioneer; the Teuton checked the spread of the Latin, and with a v^onderful power of absorption added unto himself new blood and ever-increasing energy. By their fruits shall they be known, and so the economic indications which were accentuated, even in the colonial era, drew the first line of distinction between the North and the South. In part, this was due to climatic differences, to political unlikeness ; but it was equally as much the result of the different motives of colonization, and the dissimilarity of social institutions brought over from the mother country. It is hard to say where the colonial writer first sounds the American note ; it is still more difficult to tabulate those social forces which gave rise to a distinctively Southern Literature.

For that reason, the critic, while resorting to the historical method, must be wary for fear of losing the literature in the life. The Southerner as a type is very much greater than the Southerner as a literary artist ; in fact, nowhere can we afford to lose the man in the writer, so strong is his inheritance, so individual his personality, so typical his action, so peculiar his cast of thought. The art value is in no way to be compared with the life value of Southern Literature.

Considering the limitations placed upon the South by time and circumstance, limitations which at first were not strong enough to prevent the development of the constructive statesman, but which later changed the constructive into a destructive statesman ; considering the fact that the incubus of slavery, at first only an economic factor, affected the whole life of a people from within, likewise modifying the dominant practical interest of that life, agriculture — the life, one must confess, exceeded its limitations by a very superior, a very rare type of manhood and womanhood. Its culture was distinctively Old World; its law, its rehgion, its social demarcations, were British long after the political severance which Virginians did so much to bring about. Slavery helped to keep the South in a feudal state.

The fusion of peoples is one of the mysteries of nature ; it is the dominant force which kept the South of colonial times from being no more nor less than a checkerboard upon which the moves of English, French, and Spanish colonizers were prompted by the state of European politics. There were two facts about England's territorial acquisition: first, there was a determination to keep the French of Louisiana and the French of Canada from meeting across the Ohio and Illinois territory ; and second, there was the Anglo-Saxon spirit of the pioneers, of whom none were greater than the English traders who pushed across the Allegheny ridge, almost to the very picket fences of the French trading posts. The Teuton spirit persisted for a long while with the Latin, but the English were not content with the territory between the mountains and the sea. Colonial history indicates the manner in which the French and Spaniards left their impress upon Southern soil; to-day, New Orleans, Mobile, and St. Augustine bear visible traces; the Creoles have developed an independent literature which has never been adequately valued, though the life has afforded picturesque opportunity to Cable.

The presence of the Latin did not materially enhance the fusion of which we speak ; it occurred in the unifying of the various elements of the Teutonic race. This fusion hardly involved the Latins at all; as a nation our foreign diplomacy in its first years was concerned with ridding the country of continental ownership; consciousness of an economic demand opened, however unconstitutionally, the vast stretch of the Mississippi Valley; the Spanish possessions involved us in war, and our final acquisition did not reflect credit on our transaction, though it gave us undisputed possession from ocean to ocean. It is rather significant that up to the period of the Civil War, the South in its territorial boundaries was very unsettled. The Southern states carved from the original colonies were born only after a travail which involved the political protection of slavery through a political distribution of the balance of power, and which also impressed the South with the need for more land to satisfy the extravagant demand of one absorbing product — cotton. " The Civil War," writes Dr. Ballagh, " was but a logical sequel to the economic development of the i8th century."

From the very outset, the South was pledged to an agricultural life; the easy cultivation of the land, the beneficent, almost prodigal influence of the climate, together with the commercial policy of England tended to make it the only course. It was likewise in consonance with the natural inclinations of a landed gentry, whose large estates and plantations encouraged a wide dispersion of population and a consequent lack of city life. The rural character of the people, therefore, had much to do with the general measure of culture which flourished, despite the land system and the labor system, but which, in its classical character, in its unprogressive character, was not hospitable to experiments in thought, any more than its economics welcomed time-saving devices to compete with its slave labor which represented, per se, not only labor but invested capital.

In all these things which the South was. New England was not ; thus early we can see how unevenly the future exactions and benefits of tariff, of any protection of things outside of the raw material, would fall on the Southern trader — an inequality which was one of the chief causes of irritation in ante-bellum congressional debate. The land system encouraged extravagance and lavishness on a broad scale. The Southern planter was a center unto himself ; owning large tracts in the tidewater district, he most generally had his own wharf from which his product was shipped, to which his English purchases were sent. This neither encouraged road building, nor intercourse, nor consequent exchange of ideas ; he would cultivate perhaps fifty acres out of a probable fifty thousand acres comprising his estate.

The colonial South is very largely the early history of Virginia; here were not only rooted English traditions, social, economic, and religious, but likewise there emanated from her those streams of emigrants which were to enrich the land, even as she gave of her own accord from her grants to make other territories. Unlike New England, she came to the western world, not in dissent from the Established Church; but, in turn, around her and within her were to be found those other sects which later helped, through a less rigid aristocratic society, to differentiate the Upper from the Lower South, In Virginia were defined those gradations of land values which made the tidewater ownership a mark of social distinction, even as, to a lesser degree, they so became in the Black Belt district after the invention of the cotton gin.*

A study of the several forms of colonial establishment, of the distinctive characteristics of " home rule " during this initial period which distinguished France from Spain, and both from England, and finally of the Indian difficulties which beset the pioneers, may be dispensed with as belonging to the historian. We need to concern ourselves chiefly with the migration and fusion of peoples, which affected the character of the

* See my article, " The Social Life in the Lower South/' in " The South in the Building of the Nation."

Southern pioneers, raising- class distinction on a transplanted feudal system — a system which inculcated those narrow prejudices of a merely external nature, and which put upon the mind certain formal strictures inimical to freedom of thought and to originality of view-point. The Southerner was great despite his environment; he was great even though oligarchical tendencies, inherent in slavery and in isolation, were a constant source of temptation, as well as a personal menace.

Emigration in colonial times was prompted by the adventurous spirit in part, but chiefly because of the political difficulties besetting nations on the Continent and because of the religious dissensions which fluctuated between Protestantism and Catholicism. Every change among the nations which affected the map and history of Europe, had its consequent effect upon the colonies. Escaping persecution, the 'colonists were far from reaching a land of religious toleration, and many a bitter experience had to be gone through before Patrick Henry's plea for religious liberty in the 1 6th article of the Declaration of Rights (1776), or Jefferson's more far-reaching efforts in the same cause.

The South was peopled through pioneer restlessness, through economic necessity, through lack of religious toleration. In broad statement, the dispersion took three courses: into North Carolina from Virginia, thence in a southwesterly direction; across the Appalachian mountains, opening the Middle West; and again to the southwest through the Mississippi Valley. The movement into Kentucky was the beginning of the march to the Pacific slope.

The comparative historian will say that one of the fundamental differences between early Virginia and Massachusetts was " the greater homogeneity of the English stock in New England," due to the predominance of a middle class. Indeed, it would seem at first as though the aristocratic South would allow of no intermediate life ; but not only did the migration from the tidewater district take away from the inherent strength of, although not at first affecting, the landed prestige, but it likewise afforded opportunity for energy which otherwise would have become stagnant. With the trend of population toward the southwest, even though social and economic traditions were carried from Virginia, there began that democratization of character, if not of political structure, which Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy analyzes so carefully.

The tidewater aristocracy was pledged to the Established Church; so assured was this fact in the minds both of the people at home and abroad, that the Virginia clergy grew lax in their morals and careless in their practice of doctrine. Perhaps the earnestness and fervor of the Dissenters, who sought entrance into Virginia and so obtained strong foothold in the Lower South, found advantage in this deplorable condition. In the over-accentuation of Cavalier romanticism, the modern reader is prone to lose sight of the fact that Puritanism was a strong factor in the formation of Southern civilization.

The struggle for religious liberty in Virginia was a long and bitter one. At the same time that we treasure the remark of Governor Berkeley concerning free schools and printing, as a measure of educational encouragement in 1650, it were as well to bear in mind the reasoning of Governor Gooch (1738) who, while welcoming Presbyterians and Quakers into the Shenandoah Valley in his desire to people the territory west of the Blue Ridge, was none the less calculating upon placing a defense between himself and the Indians. As one authority claims, the Presbyterians were a "buffer" sect, who had to pay toll to the Church of England.

The sectarian movement has been a strong one in the South ; it was not only one of the prime impulses of colonial diffusion, but it likewise was one of the chief sources, later, for the extension of educational matters. The Scotch-Irish strain which to-day persists in the Shenandoah Valley was not confined alone to that section, and Presbyterianism itself soon became somewhat of a formidable proposition for the Established Church to consider. Virginia history is full of pre-Revolutionary petitions to eliminate legislation against sect, and to prohibit the persecutions which were of common occurrence. As late as April, 1774, Monroe wrote to Bradford, of Philadelphia: " The sentiments of our people of fortune and fashion on this subject are vastly different from what you have been used to. That liberal, catholic, and equitable way of thinking, as to the rights of conscience, which is one of the characteristics of a free people, and so strongly marks the people of your province, is little known among the zealous adherents to our hierarchy." We shall see later from what type of mind emanated the tendency to criticise the South from within her very civilization.

"While in breadth,'* writes Mr. Hamilton, "the Southern character may owe more to Virginia, in intensity it looks to Carolina. The later commonwealth of Georgia had an independent English origin, while Kentucky and Tennessee were the second growth, the new start beyond the mountains, of the new Americans." Across the borders of Virginia, cutting through virgin forest, came those who, on one hand, were unwelcome dissenters, and who, on the other hand, were pushed away from the tidewater district because of inability to obtain land holding. There were in the South three ranks of peoples described in terms of their economic location : the large plantation owners ; the men either dependent in a feudal manner upon an overlord, or else relegated to

COLONIAL PERIOD ii

soil upon which it was a struggle to raise plentifully ; and the scrub settler, who either took to the mountains or was pent up in mind and body among the pine barrens.* The North Carolinian therefore was tempered more democratically, a rougher element of civilization in comparison with the South Carolinian below, or the Virginian above ; nor did he possess the flavor that existed to the immediate South, brought by the Huguenots, who arrived after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes ( 1685).

The wave of population pulsed South along the Atlantic coast, injecting strains of the Scotch-Irish, the German Protestant, the French Huguenot into the web and woof of Southern life. This power of assimilation is the vital force of Anglo-Saxon inheritance. The Lutheran Swiss, preserving their German tongue, persisted in Carolina ; the Presbyterians, some of whom were known as backwoods Virginians, moved with the current; redemptioners increased the flow. It was a mixture of social, economic, and religious causes that populated the South. Georgia, asylum for dissenters and for the social outcast, received likewise Salzburgers, Lutherans, and Moravians, and first nurtured the propagators of Methodism. Wherever the Spaniard touched, wherever the French, with their effective methods of colonization, blazed a trail, there were left permanent and salient evidences of Catholicism'. The Jesuit as explorer, as pioneer, is a most important figure.

The establishment of a Catholic community to the north of Virginia did much to raise suspicion of the Protestant English, who often brought forward accusations against Maryland's sympathy with the French. Probably this opposition was due equally as much to the jealous realization of a lack of political privileges which were extended to the Calverts by the Crown. Writing of this palatinate, the historian calls attention to the preservation therein of ancient Teutonic customs.

It is not to be inferred that this migratory activity occurred at concerted times in the colonial period alone; after the Revolution, after cotton in its way offered through the cotton gin the same extensive opportunity for trade that tobacco had offered in Virginia, the stream percolated southward from Tennessee. To repeat, the South geographically during the initial period, when its extension or restriction meant either the maintenance or curtailment of its political influence, when the strength of its social system depended upon the conviction that slavery had a right to spread, was not a fixed quantity. In the South, territorial adjustment began at a critical national moment.

It has been pointed out by social students that the Calvinism of colonial New England was more conducive to originality of mental attitude than adherence to an already established form; that the Northerner came to a virgin land to make a different law rather than to uphold traditional law which in the South was one of the requirements of colonization. The Puritan with his Protestant spirit, was, according to Professor Shaler, " leading a great body of men out of this castellated state of mind toward more modern ways of thought. The feudal system, although it had noble qualities, was essentially hedonistic; it was based on an elevated savagery; under its dominion, men were forced to shape their lives mainly on personal considerations." It will be seen, when the time comes to discuss the state of colonial culture, as typified in the establishment of schools and the publication of newspapers, how the laws of economics thus practiced, of society thus founded, and of religion thus transplanted and thus imposed, reacted upon the character of the Southern colonist who was to become the Revolutionist. The contest for religious liberty, the demand for just representation, while actuated by the increase of local interest, were nevertheless representative of the basic characteristics of Englishmen, rather than of typical Southerners or Americans. It was not a difficult matter, under the social system, for city life — the little that existed — to be predominantly aristocratic; Charleston very early surpassed Williamsburg in that respect. It was most logical, in the face of the wastefulness of natural advantages, that the planter, early imbued with the mistaken idea that labor was not for the gentry, should grow proud, conservative, aloof: content with a primitive neighborhood, improvident in his trading method, unfriendly toward the idea of colonial commerce, and more dependent — because of his isolation and his disregard for the artisan, the small farmer — upon English supplies.

No weakness of character encouraged the conditions which mark the colonial South; neither did the colonists themselves premeditatedly determine the trend of emigration. The myriad forces of life, the immediate necessities of existence shaped the course. However speculative one may regard the statement, it is very probable that had the Puritan, as Professor Shaler believes, settled in the South he would have fallen into the same channels — the soil, climate, and physical demarcations determining the line of least resistance. Slavery was marked for the South simply because New England conditions were unfriendly to its firm establishment. As an adventurer, as a representative of English interests, the first settler came more in the spirit of visitor, of observer, of speculator, than of resident; his literary expression was wholly practical, wholly external; his spiritual requirements were secondary to his physical needs. His conscience was not disturbed like that of his far-off neighbor in

Massachusetts, who gathered with his fellows in meeting houses, and upheld the rigorous life rather than ease and comfort. The New Englander did for himself; the Virginian relied on his agent for transactions, never certain whether the value of tobacco would cover the expense of his needs, and wasting much more because of his dependency on others than he would have had to pay for his dependency on himself.

The colonial writer was hardly literary in his product; he saw with a keen eye, sometimes a vivid eye; if he showed feeling, it was the accident of the occasion rather than the art instinct. He was an English observer, until he became established and until his personal interests were bound up in the soil around him. Then his writing exhibited an interpretation of affairs in terms, not of English advantage, but of colonial advantage; then he sounded a note which indicated clearly that he was identifying the rights of Englishmen closely with the rights of the colonists, while gradually the political gulf widened.

Colonial literature in the South is of more historical value than of literary excellence ; it is rich in fact and attitude, it is warm in personality. Occasionally, the English culture of the 17th century predominates over the inventory style, and the reason is usually found in the life, the education of the authors. As a general rule, each represented a particular phase of colonial life; none of them typified any great expression of life or art; their imagination hardly went beyond their immediate vision, but their humor was often of quaint and human quality, debarring a coarseness characteristic of the age. Some of the literature was purely the transplanted commodity, here and there tempered probably by the environment, as in the case of Sandys.

The student must take this period in bulk as an

English beginning, on new soil, of some literary expression; to brush it aside would be a loss to social estimate, for in Blair there is the epitome of the best colonial activity in the direction of culture; in Byrd, the symbol of the landed gentry, one detects, from his biography and from his personal manuscripts, all the charm and all the evil underlying colonial life. The men who are discussed in the following section, in their several ways, represent expression in different fields, and, what is more, indicate a certain local difference. Never intended for literature, such writing is of value because being English it is part of the American inheritance. Until the Civil War laid the country in devastation, this English stamp was evident visually; even to-day the Southerner has not lost his Anglo-Saxon bearing.

A source book of American Literature cannot ignore these men, even though, in the realization that France plays small part in American character, the historical writer gives but small consideration to the body of French material produced by the French explorer and settler, especially the letters of La Salle and Iberville, and the numberless French histories and memoirs. These records, these diaries, these " relations " are not dull reading, though they often repeat; they present the land attitude, the slave attitude, the plantation attitude in all their diverse elements. In its incipiency you will detect the Southern attitude, in so far as social forces molded the Southern life. It is not strange that the practical account should dominate over fanciful imagination; nor is it hard to determine why the intensity of spiritual expression was greater in Massachusetts than in Virginia. The Bible influenced whatever style existed in New England; literature was there handed out with direct injunction and personal effect.

Professor Tyler has epitomized the incentives to writing- in the colonies, incentives which in themselves suggest a legitimate reason why in the primeval forest there was scarcely reflected any of the literary brilliancy and spontaneity at home. The colonist was as yet not acclim.atized ; he needed to communicate across seas; the terms of his crown privileges attached him legally to the mother country; he had to defend the new land against evil report; he had to satisfy English curiosity as to the strange customs of the Indians; he had to describe the natural benefits close at hand. He was an observer on the surface, and did not immediately take root. As I have said, a study of the colonial life in the South, economically, socially, and spiritually, will clearly indicate the ingredients of Southern civilization as they developed up to the Civil War. With a sufficient historical knowledge, one will instantly detect how these forces are further reflected even in a body of literature which professed to be nothing more than it was — a record of beginnings.