Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920

of the spit he browns each one nicely like a roasted goose. His descriptions strip off the gay plumage and reveal the naked fowl. He makes a good job of it, as witness these bits: There supple Sumner, with the Negro cause, Plays the sly game for office and applause; What boots it if the Negro sink or swim? He wins the Senate--’tis enough for him.... He heeds nor court’s decree nor Gospel light, What Sumner thinks is right alone is right.... There Greeley, grieving at a brother’s woe, Spits with impartial spite on friend and foe.... To each fanatical delusion prone, He damns all creeds and parties but his own, Brawls, with hot zeal, for every fool and knave, The foreign felon and the skulking slave; ... And faction’s fiercest rabble always find A kindred nature in the Tribune’s mind; Ready each furious impulse to obey, He raves and ravens like a beast of prey.... There Seward smiles the sweet perennial smile, Skilled in the tricks of subtlety and guile; The slyest schemer that the world e’er saw; Peddler of sentiment and patent law; Ready for fee or faction to display His skill in either, if the practice pay.... (_Ibid._, pp. 38-40.) As he contemplates Mrs. Stowe his full wrath is stirred. He does not spare her sex. Southern chivalry serves the pure and good in lovely woman, not the malignant and selfish. An unsexed woman is hateful to it, and after extolling the true womanliness of Florence Nightingale, angel of mercy, Grayson pays his compliments to the Yankee propagandist thus: Not such with Stowe, the wish or power to please, She finds no joy in gentle deeds like these; A moral scavenger, with greedy eye, In social ills her coarser labors lie; On fields where vice eludes the light of day, She hunts up crimes as beagles hunt their prey; Gleans every dirty nook--the felon’s jail, And hangman’s mem’ry, for detraction’s tale, Snuffs up pollution with a pious air, Collects a rumor here, a slander there; With hatred’s ardor gathers Newgate spoils, And trades for gold the garbage of her toils. In sink and sewer thus, with searching eye, Through mud and slime unhappy wretches pry; In fetid puddles dabble with delight, Search every filthy gathering of the night; Fish from its depths, and to the spacious bag Convey with care the black, polluted rag; With reeking waifs secure the nightly bed, And turn their noisome stores to daily bread. (_Ibid._, pp. 42-43.) _The Hireling and the Slave_, is vigorous propaganda, carefully documented and pointed with modern instances, the work of an intelligent and humane writer who might be blind to certain evils in slavery but whose eyes were open to the social ills that grew rankly in the muck of industrialism. Outside of the South few in America had as yet come to understand so much--a handful of New England idealists, Parker and William Henry Channing and Emerson and Wendell Phillips, and Orestes Brownson, and a handful of Utopians, Albert Brisbane and George Ripley and Horace Greeley. The inadequacy of southern thought was identical with that of northern: blinded by sectional economic interests, they saw only half the truth. They beheld the mote in a brother’s eye, but considered not the beam that was in their own. Footnotes [406] The same argument was made use of by northern supporters of slavery. Gordon Bennett’s _New York Herald_, for example, “printed a description of slum life in Liverpool, remarking that compared with the English laborer, ‘the slave lived like a prince.’ He had his cabin, neat, clean, and weather-proof: he had his own garden patch, over which he was lord paramount; he was well fed, well lodged, well clothed, and rarely over-worked; sleek, happy, contented, enjoying his many holidays with gusto, he lived to a great age” (quoted in Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism_, p. 271). [407] See Jeannette Reid Tandy, “Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American Fiction in the Fifties,” _South Atlantic Quarterly_, January-March, 1922. See also Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The Southern Plantation_, Chapter III. Chapter IV • Adventures in Belles Lettres I • Old Charleston In the year 1825 the little city of Charleston, with its fourteen thousand whites and more than fourteen thousand blacks, was perhaps the most delightful spot in America. The Mecca of plantation fashion and the capital of plantation politics, it prided itself on its genial and distinguished society. It was the last stronghold in America of the older pride of aristocracy. The tone of society still remained pretty much what it had been before the schism of ’76. Social lines were rigid and an old-fashioned conservatism of temper marked the upper class. Despite the large admixture of French Huguenot blood the manners and prejudices of the aristocracy retained the pronounced British cast that came down from pre-Revolutionary times, and if Dr. Johnson could have stepped from the Fleet Street of 1780 to the Charleston of 1825 he would have felt almost at home. “We are decidedly more English than any other city of the United States,” said Hugh Legaré, whose love of the English character was second only to his love of Charleston. It was a gay world with its country squires and their horses and racing, its Madeira drinking, its promenades and dancing and assemblies; one to win the affection of all who liked lighthearted ways. But underneath this gay life was a more serious Charleston, which in certain of its aspects was not unlike Boston. From both the Huguenot and Scotch-Irish strains came a sobering Puritanism that gave a serious cast to thoughtful natures and disciplined them in a strict morality. Calhoun was far more Puritan than Fisher Ames, and Hugh Legaré than Edward Everett. Life was likely to be a serious business to these southern Puritans, filled with weighty responsibilities, to be lived, like Milton’s, as ever in the great Taskmaster’s eye. Aristocrat though he was, young Hugh Legaré was no gay cavalier treading the primrose path, but as serious-minded as any Roundhead. Victorian in manners, he would have found the bluff speech of the old revolutionary, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney--“more pregnant with meaning than prudish in dress”--somewhat too “salt” for refined ears. It was this note of Puritanism that marked the finest characters in Charleston and gave its tone to society; but it was a Puritanism of conduct rather than dogma. Charleston gentlemen were of the English church, and their Puritanism, unwarped by Calvinism, assumed a moral rather than a theological cast. The lawyer came to assume the position of intellectual leadership taken by the minister in New England. A profound respect for law dominated the Charleston mind. Blackstone was the Charleston Bible, and the lawyer who was master of dignified oratory was looked upon with high regard. The aristocracy opened its doors to young James Louis Petigru, an Irish-Huguenot lawyer with his own way to make, but it closed them tightly against young Gilmore Simms, apprentice to an apothecary and unread in the classics. Ambitious youths therefore turned to the law as a congenial career, for there reputations lay, and political influence. A pronounced cult of the law, and regard for orderly procedure, went hand in hand with the old English respect for individual rights. Charleston gentlemen could not be coerced, even by their own politicians, and Legaré was bitter against the Nullifiers because the spirit of dictation was “alien to our old habitudes, to the gentle courage, the courteous hostility, the mild and merciful justice, the proud submission to _law_ and respect for right, which once distinguished our low country society from and above all other American society” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 211). Politically Charleston was of the old Federalist tradition, as that Federalism was embodied in the picturesque figure of General Pinckney. Outside the narrow circle of the aristocracy, Federalism had long since given way to a democratic faith with its background of states-rights Jeffersonianism; but it lingered amongst the gentry and provided the nucleus of the later Union party. Grayson tells a story of Petigru that suggests the bitterness of the back-country democracy towards the old Federalism. The latter one day was being abused by a swamp-sucker “who lavished on him all the foul epithets and appellations he could remember or invent, of which rogue and scoundrel were among the most moderate.” At last he hit upon a term of reproach “which at that day comprised everything hateful--he called him a ‘damned Federal,’” and was promptly knocked down for the insult (William J. Grayson, _James Louis Petigru_, pp. 83-84). But the Charleston vintage of Federalism was little more than a stout conservatism that idealized the Union and preached the sufficiency and sacredness of the law. It was social rather than political or economic--the assertion of the prescriptive right of gentlemen to govern the state. Jeffersonianism never took possession of the first circles of Charleston as it did in Virginia, and French revolutionary philosophy found there an uncongenial soil. The profound conservatism of the aristocracy is sufficiently expressed in a comment of Hugh Legaré--“The politics of the immortal Jefferson! Pish!” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 207.) Physiocratic agrarianism found few advocates amongst Carolina gentlemen. The Charleston mind was political and legal rather than economic in its interests, and as a commercial port Charleston was more sympathetic with capitalism than with agrarianism. Its politics, in which it found much diversion, it preferred highly seasoned, and when Nullification divided the state into hostile camps, the Nullifiers and Unionists brought Charleston to the verge of civil war. Respect for law and the amenities vanished before the hot demands of partisanship. The culture of Charleston was as conservatively old-fashioned as its politics. Such a renaissance as it enjoyed before the Civil War wrought its destruction was delayed by its rejection of French romantic thought until the beginning of the thirties, and synchronized with the renaissance of New England. When the romantic spirit appeared about 1825, it was primarily English, of the school of Tom Moore. There had never been any literature in Charleston worthy of the name, except such as had come from London, bound in calfskin and tooled morocco. Those who affected a love of letters were still enamored of the heroic couplet and the Addisonian essay. Not until he went to Brussels in 1832 did Legaré, the most brilliant southern linguist, take up the study of German. The classics still dominated education, and literary taste inclined to a mingling of wit and sentiment. Young and Ossian and Mrs. Radcliffe held honored places on Charleston bookshelves. The young poets were deep in Byron, and Sir Walter was in high repute. But Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats were scarcely mentioned, and Carlyle could not hope to gain a hearing. Nevertheless by the year 1828 the example of the _North American Review_ proved so stimulating an incentive that the scholarship of Charleston collaborated to establish the _Southern Review_, which ran a sober course for four years, providing a medium for learned articles on law, letters and politics. It was a serious venture that concerned itself little with _belles lettres_, but the intellectual resources were inadequate, and on Legaré’s departure for Europe _The Review_ came to an end. Later, Gilmore Simms labored to the same purpose, but even his enormous energy was insufficient to sustain a magazine esteemed worthy of