Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
the encroachments of a democratized federal government seemed to him
the urgent business of the southern planters. Unless a move were made
speedily it would be too late, for the power of the northern democracy
was fast outstripping the confederate power of the South.
Tucker’s intense prejudices color every judgment, and in consequence
his misunderstanding of the North was colossal. He imagined a
profit-mongering clown whom he dubbed Yankee, and solemnly assured
himself that it was an authentic likeness. The Abolitionist was a
Yankee with an added Puritan malignancy. In his defense of slavery
Tucker has corrected the sentimental mistake of Jefferson in assuming
the extinction of slavery to be desirable, but he professes an equally
humanitarian spirit. His benevolence toward the negro is so warmly
generous that one is ready to weep at the sad fate of the faithful
slave who is in danger of being turned out into the cold world by the
wicked Abolitionists. The loyal attachment between master and servant,
he argues, is too finely generous to be understood by the mercenary
North. The Yankees “have not the qualities which would enable them to
comprehend the negro character. Their calculating selfishness can never
understand his disinterested devotion. Their artificial benevolence is
no interpreter of the unsophisticated heart.... They know no more of
the feelings of our slaves, than their fathers could comprehend of the
loyalty of the gallant cavaliers from whom we spring; and for the same
reason. The generous and self-renouncing must ever be a riddle to the
selfish” (p. 205, edition of 1861). Hence it is the clear duty of the
magnanimous planter to keep his generous and self-renouncing slaves out
of the clutches of the selfish Abolitionists.
Something of the ardency of Beverley Tucker’s convictions is revealed
in certain fragments of his letters to Gilmore Simms, to whom he
poured out his heart in uncensored words, and whose magazine, _The
Southern Quarterly Review_, he made use of to further the cause. In
those letters he writes himself down a frank and whole-hearted Tory.
There is an inveterate and ingrained aristocracy of temperament that
will not mince words when it comes to dealing with democracy. In his
comment on the growing democratic spirit he is virulent. He has lost
all hope for Virginia in the year of grace 1851. “She is sunk in the
slough of democracy, which has no sense of honor, no foresight, and is
never valiant but against its own instruments” (W. P. Trent, _William
Gilmore Simms_, p. 186). Georgia is in an even worse way. His spleen
at the commonwealth of Stephens and Toombs--“filled as that State is
with Yankee traders”--spits out venom: “She has been bought, and her
price is in the pockets of those she trusted.” He quotes sardonically
the comment of a Georgia senator: “The State of Georgia is a damned
rascal. I bought and sold her, and will buy her and sell her again
when I please” (_ibid._, p. 182). His only hope is in South Carolina,
and he pleads with Simms for decisive action. Calhoun’s kingdom is
singularly blessed, for no base democracy there sullies the purity of
manly councils. As early as 1820 Tucker had come to realize that the
Union was a curse to the South. “I vowed then, and I have repeated
the vow, _de die in diem_, that I will never give rest to my eyes nor
slumber to my eyelids until it is shattered into fragments.... Time
was when I might have been less desperate, because I could have sought
refuge under some emperor or king. But all such refuges are broken up,
and there is now no escape from the many-headed despotism of numbers,
but by a strong and bold stand on the banks of the Potomac.... If we
will not _have_ slaves, we must _be_ slaves.” He then makes his great
appeal:
And what are our democracies but mobs? South Carolina alone can
act, because she is the only State in which the gentleman retains
his place and influence, and in which the statesman has not been
degraded from his post. You are fast coming to that hopeless and
irreclaimable condition; and then all hope of action is gone. Work
now.... The twilight is already upon you, and hence I fear you will
not act even _now_. And if not now--never, never, never! (_Ibid._,
p. 187.)
It was not granted to Beverley Tucker to know what harvests were to be
gathered from his sowings. He did not live to see the fields of his
beloved commonwealth drenched in the blood that he had done more than
his share to let. In that bitter struggle it is certain that he would
have borne his part valiantly. He had sown to the wind, and he would
have welcomed the whirlwind. But the outcome must have broken his proud
heart, and it is well that he was not spared to see his hopes turn to
ashes in his mouth.
Footnotes
[400] For an excellent study, see Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The
Southern Plantation_, 1925.
Chapter V • Adventures in Romance
I • William Alexander Caruthers • A Virginia Liberal
In the early thirties came the transition in Virginia from the
essay-sketch that had prevailed since the appearance of _The British
Spy_, to the full blown romance of love and adventure. The older
type had been a blend of nature description, social observation,
character sketches, with somewhat injudicious portions of sentiment
and moralizing, and with frequent resort to the old letter-form of
fiction that lingered out a surprising old age. Not only is the
transition revealed in the work of John P. Kennedy, whose _Swallow
Barn_, written in 1832, was followed in 1835 by _Horseshoe Robinson_,
but quite as strikingly in the work of Dr. William Alexander Caruthers,
whose _Kentuckian in New York, or, the Adventures of Three Southerns_,
published in 1834, was followed at once by _The Cavaliers of Virginia_,
1834-35.
Dr. Caruthers was a genial and cultivated Virginian from the Piedmont
region, with a ready wit and a clever pen, who had pretty well rid
himself of the intense and narrow parochialisms that restricted the
sympathies of Beverley Tucker. He was a Virginia liberal of the older
school, before the renaissance of the slave cause transferred southern
leadership to the South Carolina group, and he shared none of Tucker’s
partisanship for Calhoun. He had traveled widely both south and north,
and had discovered that human nature was much the same on both sides
of Mason and Dixon’s line. This experience qualified him to become a
shrewd and kindly interpreter of both sections of the country, and his
_Kentuckian in New York_ was an excellent contribution to the cause of
intersectional good-will. He sends two young South Carolinians just out
of college on a trip north, who fall in with a Kentuckian on the way,
and together they enjoy life in New York City, lose their hearts and
meet with divers romantic and amusing adventures. A fourth character,
a young Virginian, he sends to South Carolina, likewise to lose his
heart and encounter adventures; and the copious letters that travel
between them are filled with intelligent comment on unfamiliar ways.
The writers are generous-minded young liberals with keen eyes, and
their observations still make excellent reading after nearly a hundred
years.
The South Carolinian who falls romantically in love with a New York
girl is far from a Calhoun Fire Eater. He can see good even in the
Yankee, whom he defends against the common southern prejudice by
arguing that Yankee chicanery has resulted from a niggardly environment
and the competition that comes with overpopulation, a competition that
Virginia has been spared by the draining off of her population west;
and as for the Yankee “canting and sniveling,” “tell me,” he remarks,
“if you have not, in the very bosom of your great valley, as genuine
Presbyterians and Roundheads as ever graced the Rump Parliament, or
sung a psalm on horseback? And to give the devil his due, these same
Presbyterians are no bad citizens of a popular government” (Vol. I, p.
72). Virginia has judged the North out of her prejudices rather than
knowledge, and the advice Caruthers gives his Virginia neighbors, as an
antidote to the suspicions of Beverley Tucker, is to travel beyond the
boundaries of the Old Dominion.
Every southern should visit New-York. It would allay provincial
prejudices, and calm his excitement against his northern
countrymen. The people here are warm-hearted, generous,
and enthusiastic, in a degree scarcely inferior to our own
southerns.... Many of these Yorkers are above local prejudices, and
truly consider this as the commercial metropolis of the Union, and
all the people of the land as their customers, friends, patrons,
and countrymen. Nor is trade the only thing that flourishes.
The arts of polished and refined life, refined literature, and
the profounder studies of the schoolmen, all have here their
distinguished votaries,--I say distinguished, with reference to the
standard of science in our country. (Vol. I, p. 181.)
The material prosperity of the North contrasts painfully in his mind
with the condition of his native Carolina, and there is a note of
apprehension in his comment:
The more I see of these northern states, the more I am convinced
that some great revolution awaits our own cherished communities.
Revolutions, whether sudden or gradual, are fearful things; we
learn to feel attachments to those things which they tear up, as
a poor cripple feels attached to the mortified limb, that must be
amputated to save his life. A line of demarkation in such a case is
distinctly drawn between the diseased and the healthy flesh. Such a
line is now drawing between the slave and free states, I fear. God
send that the disease may be cured without amputation, and before
mortification takes place. I know that this latter is your own
belief. What think you now, since you have seen the greater extent
of the disease? (Vol. I, p. 165.)
The question is addressed to another young man on his travels, a young
Virginian who has gone south, and who is even more troubled at what he
finds. He cannot bring himself to think well of the sacred institution
as he sees it in South Carolina. There it is laid bare in all its naked
exploitation. The humaner relations between the races that he has known
in Virginia have been destroyed by the absentee system with its drivers
and overseers--“to these animals,” he says, “I have always had an utter
aversion.” The evils of the large-scale system have carried farther;
slavery in the Carolinas has destroyed the middle class of yeomen,
unduly exalted the aristocracy and utterly debased the poor white. The
single spot he heartily approves in the two commonwealths is Salem,
a Moravian settlement where no slavery exists, where all work, and
where education is thought so well of that the daughters of the first
southern families go there for their schooling. In Salem he found an
answer to the southern problem far more competent than Nullification.
_Here_, then, is a triumphant answer--an answer in deeds, instead
of words--in the happiness, and the substantial wealth of these
simple and primitive Moravians. Here ... is an industrious,
intelligent, and healthy community, in the very heart of all the
misery I have described. Let us then improve by the lesson, seek
out the sources of their prosperity, find the point where their
plans diverge from ours, and, my word for it ... we become a great,
a flourishing, and a happy people. (Vol. I, p. 80.)
To the problem of slavery he returns constantly, and his views may
perhaps be sufficiently understood from the following passages:
The poor of a slave-country are the most miserable and the most
wretched of all the human family. The grades of society in this