Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
art he had no philosophy and no programs and no causes. He got from
Virginia what was bad rather than good, and his alienation from the
more generous southern ideals did him harm. It was perhaps harder to be
an artist in that slack southern society than in New England--harder
to be a romantic concerned only with twilight melancholy. It would
have been hard enough anywhere in Jacksonian America. His romanticisms
were of quite another kind than those his countrymen were pursuing;
and the planter sympathized with them no more than did the New York
literati, or the western men of letters. In a world given over to
bumptious middle-class enthusiasms, there would be scant sympathy for
the craftsman and dreamer. There was no unearned increment to be got
from investments in “the misty mid-region of Weir,” which Poe threw
on the market. The technician concerned with the values of long and
short syllables would find few congenial spirits in a world of more
substantial things; and the purveyors of shoddy tales would not take
it kindly if their shortcomings were pointed out and a more competent
craftsmanship insisted upon. And so, like Herman Melville, Poe came to
shipwreck on the reef of American materialisms. The day of the artist
had not dawned in America.
So much only need be said. The problem of Poe, fascinating as it is,
lies quite outside the main current of American thought, and it may be
left with the psychologist and the belletrist with whom it belongs.
It is for abnormal psychology to explain his “neural instability
amounting almost to a dissociated or split personality,” his irritable
pride, his quarrelsomeness, his unhappy persecution complex, his
absurd pretentions to a learning he did not possess, his deliberate
fabrications about his life and methods of work, his oscillations
between abstinence and dissipation, between the morbidly grotesque and
the lucidly rational, his haunting fear of insanity that drove him to
demonstrate his sanity by pursuing complex problems of ratiocination.
Such problems are personal to Poe and do not concern us here. And it is
for the belletrist to evaluate his theory and practice of art: his debt
to Coleridge and Schlegel; the influence of the contemporary magazine
on his conception of the length of a work of the imagination; the
value of his theory of the tyrannizing unity of mood in the poem and
short story; the provocation to the craftsman of the pretentiousness
of contemporary American literature, joined to a flabby and crude
technique; the grossness of the popular taste and the validity of his
critical judgments. Whatever may be the final verdict it is clear that
as an aesthete and a craftsman he made a stir in the world that has
not lessened in the years since his death, but has steadily widened.
Others of greater repute in his day have fared less prosperously in
later reputation. He was the first of our artists and the first of our
critics; and the surprising thing is that such a man should have made
his appearance in an America given over to hostile ideals. He suffered
much from his aloofness, but he gained much also. In the midst of gross
and tawdry romanticisms he refused to be swallowed up, but went his own
way, a rebel in the cause of beauty, discovering in consequence a finer
romanticism than was before known in America.
Footnotes
[401] The characteristic title is _Quodlibet: Containing some Annals
thereof, with an Authentic Account of the Origin and Growth of the
Borough and the Sayings and Doings of Sundry Townspeople: Interspersed
with Sketches of the Most Remarkable and Distinguished Characters
of that Place and its Vicinity. Edited by Solomon Secondthoughts,
Schoolmaster, from original MSS. Indited by him, and now made Public at
the Request and under the Patronage of the Great New Light Democratic
Central Committee of Quodlibet._
Part Two: The Renaissance of Slavery
Chapter I • Southern Imperialism
I
By the year 1824 a change was becoming evident in the South that was
to affect profoundly the course of southern thought in regard to
her peculiar institution. The passing of the long Virginia hegemony
was a sign that southern opinion was undergoing a revolutionary
overturn, and that leadership henceforth would rest with men of a
different philosophy. The humanitarian spirit that marked the thought
of the preceding generation was dying out, to be replaced by a frank
recognition of local economic interests. Expectation that slavery was
on the way to natural extinction was yielding to the conviction that
the system was too profitable to the South to permit its extinction,
and this in turn bred an imperious desire to spread it westward to
the Pacific. With this significant shift from apology to imperialism,
it became clear to ardent pro-slavery men that lukewarm Virginians of
the old tradition were not the spokesmen to entrust with the fortunes
of the South, and leadership passed to the South Carolina school. In
that momentous shift much was implied. It was more than a shift from
Jefferson to Calhoun, from humanitarian idealism to economic realism.
It marked the complete ascendancy of a small minority of gentleman
planters over the inarticulate mass of southern yeomanry, and the
assertion of the aristocratic ideal as the goal of southern society.
It denied the principle of democracy as that principle was understood
in the North and West, and it rejected the new humanitarian spirit of
western civilization. It abandoned the Jeffersonian equalitarianism
that was so deeply rooted in the southern mind from Kentucky to
Georgia; it cast aside the agrarianism of John Taylor and the older
Virginians; and it set up in place of these congenial conceptions the
alien ideal of a Greek democracy. More momentous still, it threw down
the gauntlet to the ideals of the middle class, then in the first
flush of a triumphant career, and in the armed clash that eventually
resulted, it was destroyed by that class.
The intellectual capital of southern imperialism was Charleston, but
its numerical strength lay in the Black Belt, with South Carolina to
the east and Texas to the west, a compact territory the heart of which
was Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. In this new South that
was rapidly passing through its frontier development, the patriarchal
system of Virginia gave way to a system of negro exploitation, more
naked as it passed further westward. It was here that the proportion
of slaves to whites was greatest; it was here that slave labor was
most profitable; and it was here in consequence that the slave economy
was most militant. The Black Belt became the native habitat of the
southern Fire Eater. In the late twenties and early thirties South
Carolina provided the outstanding leaders of the new school; but the
philosophy of imperialism spread rapidly and western men came more and
more to the front. George McDuffie and Bob Toombs, perhaps the boldest
of the loquacious tribe of Fire Eaters, came from Georgia; Alexander
H. Stephens was bred in the same turbulent state; L. Q. C. Lamar and
Jefferson Davis were from Mississippi. For the most part self-made,
products of a frontier environment, these western extremists had got
from Jefferson little more than an assertive individualism that easily
espoused the states-rights philosophy and prompted them to defend their
immediate interests. It was this vigorous group that largely created
the new southern psychology and prodded the southern mind along the
path marked out for it to travel. Democratic in their attitude towards
the white voter, middle class in their love of exploitation, they
retained little of the spirit of the Virginia school.
The expansion of the South to the Gulf region came a generation later
than the settlement of the Ohio valley. The Creek Indians who clung
tenaciously to the rich lands of Mississippi were long an obstacle to
the white advance, and the settlers filtered in slowly. Moreover the
slave economy was ill fitted to the business of pioneering. It was
difficult to transport negroes and establish great plantations in a
wilderness; there was too little security in a region that offered
every temptation to the slave to run away. The plantation system could
prosper only after a considerable degree of development had been
effected and sufficient negroes provided. On the other hand, the rich
soil, virgin and productive, offered every inducement for large-scale
production of cotton, tobacco and sugar. Here the economics of slavery
could be fairly tested, and if the system were found to be profitable
it would spread of its own impulse beyond the Mississippi, becoming
more imperialistic with every extension, ambitious to seize Texas with
its filibusters, looking as far as California and the Oregon territory
for future expansion. But while planning for such expansion it must
secure its strategic front at Washington, making certain that no rival
economy should control the central government to its disadvantage. It
was an ambitious program, but it was all implicit in the evident fact
that slavery in the Black Belt proved to be profitable.
The explanation of this sudden prosperity of the Black Belt is a
matter of familiar knowledge. Coincident with the first westward
expansion of slavery came a revolution in the technique of the English
cotton industry that brought about corresponding changes in southern
agriculture. The production of cotton textiles in England had long
been held back by the difficulty of spinning a fine and even thread.
When this problem was solved at the beginning of the century by the
invention of new machines, the cotton industry at once developed
amazingly, making heavy demands upon the supply of American raw
materials. This supply in turn was greatly increased by the invention
of the cotton gin, and the combined result of these inventions was
an upheaval in southern agriculture. In the eighteenth century the
southern staples were tobacco, rice and indigo; by 1825 the staples
had become cotton, tobacco and sugar. Almost in a decade cotton had
become king. In 1791, three years after Andrew Jackson settled in
Nashville, the total export of cotton was only 200,000 pounds. In 1803
it had risen to 40,000,000 pounds, and by 1860 the export for the
year was of the value of nearly two hundred millions of dollars. Such
figures provide a sufficient explanation of the militant spirit of the
slave economy after 1820. Here was an enormous vested interest, the
economic life of the South, that could not suffer its present or future
profits to be put in jeopardy by any political party on any pretext.
Its well-being and its prestige were both at stake. The peculiar
institution, which a generation before was commonly believed to be in
the way of natural extinction, had the South by the throat.
It was the strategic weakness of the South that the spirit of
exploitation, which following the peace of 1783 had spread through
America like the itch, should there have assumed its most hateful
form, far more revolting to the humanitarian sense and far less
justifiable to uneasy consciences than wage slavery. With every
extension the system became necessarily more brutal in exploitation.
As new plantations were opened the natural increase of negroes was
inadequate to meet the pressing demands for slaves. Since the abolition
of the traffic with Africa the occasional smuggling by venturesome
runners--many of whom were respectable New England church members--had
provided a totally inadequate supply of raw material; the price of
slaves rose steadily, and this in turn led to increasing speculation
in negroes. Buying and selling by middlemen went on briskly, to the
horror of northern humanitarians and the concern of southern. So