Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
state are even farther apart than in Virginia. Here, there is one
immense chasm from the rich to the abject poor. In the valley
of Virginia, or in the country where you are, there are regular
gradations. The very happiest, most useful, and most industrious
class of a well-regulated community, is here wanting. Their place
is filled up by negroes; in consequence of which, your aristocrats
are more aristocratic, and your poor still poorer. The slaves
create an immeasurable distance between these two classes, which
can never be brought together until this separating cause be
removed. You know I am no _abolitionist_, in the incendiary meaning
of the term; yet I cannot deny from you and myself, that they
are an incubus upon our prosperity. This we would boldly deny,
if a Yankee uttered it in our hearing; but to ourselves, we must
e’en confess it. If I am, therefore, an abolitionist, it is not
for conscience-sake, but from policy and patriotism. (Vol. I, pp.
76-77.)
With us [in Virginia] slavery is tolerable, and has something
soothing about it to the heart of the philanthropist; the slaves
are more in the condition of tenants to their landlords--they are
viewed as rational creatures, and with more kindly feelings....
_Here_ slavery is intolerable; a single individual owning a hundred
or more, and often not knowing them when he sees them.... The
slaves here are plantation live-stock; not domestic and attached
family servants, who have served around the person of the master
from the childhood of both.... Here, besides your white overseers,
you have your black _drivers_;--an odious animal, almost peculiar
to the far south. It is horrible to see one slave following another
at his work, with a cow-skin dangling at his arm, and occasionally
tying him up and flogging him when he does not get through his two
tasks a day.... I do not observe much difference between the North
and South Carolinians, except in the case of those who inhabit the
most southern portions of the latter state. There your rich are
more princely and aristocratic, and your poor more wretched and
degraded; but to tell you the plain truth, many of your little
slaveholders are miserably poor and ignorant; and what must be the
condition of that negro who is a slave to one of these miserable
wretches? (Vol. II, pp. 115-119.)
To the solution of the difficult problem Caruthers offers no easy
plan. He cannot go with the northern “enthusiasts” who propose
immediate emancipation. They do not comprehend the complexity of the
problem. “We cannot set slaves free among us. Such a course would
dissolve the social compact. It would set at defiance all laws for the
protection of life, liberty, and property, either among them or the
whites.” He foresaw clearly what happened during the unhappy days of
reconstruction. “Would it be any reparation of an hereditary wrong, to
plunge the subjects of that wrong, with ourselves, into irretrievable
ruin, to attain nominal justice?” The free negroes would constitute a
menace more serious than the northern city mobs, which latter Caruthers
had no liking for. “These city mobocracies, composed as they are,
principally of wild Irish, are terrible things”; how much worse would
be a negro mobocracy? A confirmed agrarian, he finds his chief hope in
a vigorous yeomanry, and until the South shall develop that, matters
must go ill with it. In the midst of the Carolina system his thoughts
return fondly to his native state. He is under no illusion in regard
to the tide-water region of Virginia. It has lived a generous life,
but spendthrift and wasteful, and has come to evil days. But in the
West, beyond the mountains, a newer and more vigorous age is rising
that “will sweep away the melancholy vestiges of a former and more
chivalrous and generous age.”
Poor, exhausted eastern Virginia! she is in her dotage. Her
impassable roads protect her alike from the pity and contempt
of foreign travellers; but with all her weakness, with all the
imbecilities of premature age upon her, I love her still. (Vol. II,
p. 194.)
Of this more vigorous age the prototype is the title-hero of the
volume, the stalwart Kentuckian whose native intelligence and racy
speech delight the Carolinian. This free son of the untamed West is
portrayed with bold strokes, and if his talk leans somewhat heavily
on the current convention of frontier humor, if Montgomery Damon in
his picturesque exaggerations suggests Davy Crockett, the result is
none the less salty. Caruthers does not descend to caricature, but
writes with gusto, and the Kentuckian’s single letter is a little
masterpiece in the vein of the free frontier humor that was competing
with the cavalier romantic for popular approval. His whimsicalities,
Caruthers tells us, he hopes will encourage “a smile of good-humor”
so that this maiden product of the author’s pen may find its way into
the good graces of the reader--a course reckoned “the more necessary
by a southern aspirant, as there is evidently a current in American
literature, the fountainhead of which lies north of the Potomac, and in
which a southern is compelled to navigate up the stream if he jumps in
too far south” (Vol. II, p. 218.)
_The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown_, announced
in the postscript to the _Kentuckian in New York_, and published
soon afterwards, is a full-fledged historical romance, with Bacon’s
Rebellion for a background and a somewhat melodramatic figure of
a recluse warrior for its romantic hero. There is brisk action,
dramatic Indian fights, much ruffling of young cavaliers, and a fine
aristocratic swagger, but Caruthers’ sympathies seem to incline to the
more democratic elements and in the end his rebellious hero proves
himself a match for the brisk young blades. There is excellent reading
in it, as there is in his last work, _The Knights of the Horse-Shoe;
a Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion_,
published in 1845, and reissued as late as 1909; a genial story of
Governor Spotswood’s time. Caruthers deserved a better fate than fell
to his lot. In spite of his excellent work surprisingly little is known
about him; even the spelling of his name and the date of his death
are matters about which there is disagreement. From a slight sketch
contributed to _The Knickerbocker Magazine_ for July, 1838, _Climbing
the Natural Bridge_, it is known that he was a student at Washington
College, now Washington and Lee, at Lexington, Virginia, in the year
1818, and the signature affixed carries only one “r.” He seems to
have removed later to Savannah, Georgia, an enthusiastic description
of which he gives in the _Kentuckian in New York_. No doubt he there
practiced medicine and died in his prime, perhaps in the year 1846.
Virginia historians have inconsiderately neglected a cultivated and
open-minded writer who embodied the finer spirit of the Old Dominion
and whose stories have contributed their portion to the plantation
tradition.
II • John Pendleton Kennedy • A Southern Whig
A far more prosperous course was run by John P. Kennedy, whose
sympathies drew him north rather than south, and who early learned
that it is better to serve a rising than a decaying order. Very like
Caruthers in temperament and gifts, a liberal in all his sympathies, he
found the ties that bound him to the Old Dominion more fragile, and the
drift of circumstance carrying him with the stronger current. It was a
kindly fate that took him in charge, bringing him abundant prosperity
and contemporary fame.
One of the most attractive figures of his generation was this son
of a Maryland father and a Virginia mother. A gentleman of much
personal distinction, high-minded and of wide culture, endowed with
a pleasant wit, easy manners and generous nature, he is an agreeable
representative of the _ante bellum_ Southerns, an American Victorian of
the Cobden-Bright school, standing midway between the northern radical
and the southern Fire Eater. Like Henry Clay, he was a Whig engrafted
on a Jeffersonian root. Born and educated in Baltimore, he was a son of
the borderland, with strong ties of kinship and love that drew him to
the Old Dominion, and even stronger ties of intellectual, social and
financial interests that drew him towards Philadelphia and New York,
Saratoga and Newport. As a young man he found his inspiration in the
life of William Wirt, whose biography he afterwards wrote. Like Wirt,
he dreamed of combining law and letters and adopting the life of a
southern gentleman; but he discovered little that was congenial in the
exactions of the law, and in spite of considerable success as attorney
for certain Baltimore interests, he largely abandoned the profession.
He loved his Chaucer and Shakespeare more than his Coke and Blackstone:
he was more interested in Dickens and Thackeray and Carlyle and Irving
and Scott than in John Marshall’s decisions, and he followed the more
congenial path. He tried his hand likewise at politics. He was a member
of Congress for six years, was Secretary of the Navy during the last
months of President Fillmore’s administration, and was of service to
the Whig party as spokesman on dignified occasions. But he was never
a practical politician, and the rough and tumble of political life
he found utterly distasteful. As he grew older he unconsciously drew
further away from his southern antecedents. In his later years there
was little to distinguish him from Irving and Robert C. Winthrop and
other northern friends. He had left the world of Beverley Tucker far
behind him. He had severed all ties with Virginia and South Carolina,
and during the Civil War he was a militant Unionist, though it cost him
much grief and the loss of old friendships.
Kennedy’s life ran an usually placid and prosperous course, greatly
unlike that of Gilmore Simms. His father was a Scotch-Irish merchant
of Baltimore who married Nancy Pendleton, daughter of an excellent
Virginia family with many honorable connections. His early years
were not unlike Irving’s--a little Latin and Greek and much outdoor
life, with a desultory education got from vagrant books. The course
of study at the local college afforded far less intellectual stimulus
than _Tristram Shandy_, over which he pored of evenings, dissecting
the prose style to discover the secret of its charm, and filling his
notebooks with elaborately colloquial sentences, highly seasoned with
dashes and exclamation points. Graduating at eighteen, he enlisted in a
Baltimore regiment to fight the British, who were preparing their raid
on Washington. He went through the campaign as a summer lark, emerging
unscathed from the single skirmish. The field was lost, but whether the
honor of the crack Fifth was left on the battle ground may be judged
from Kennedy’s humorous comment. “Soon we had the famous ‘trial of
souls’--the battle of Bladensburg. The drafted militia ran away at the
first fire, and the Fifth Regiment was driven off the field with the
bayonet. We made a fine scamper of it. I lost my musket in the mêlée
while bearing off a comrade” (Tuckerman, _Life of Kennedy_, p. 79).
Throughout his twenties Kennedy was a studious dilettante in letters
and politics and law. He married but lost his wife and son within the
year; with his friend Peter Hoffman Cruse he published a series of
Baltimore sketches in two volumes entitled _The Red Book_; and at the
age of thirty-four married again. His second wife was the daughter
of Edward Gray, a wealthy Baltimore cotton-spinner who at the age of
eighteen had emigrated from northern Ireland to Philadelphia, became
a bank clerk and a Federalist simultaneously, adopted Washington and
Hamilton--whom he occasionally met in a professional way--as his