Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
suggest some of the elements from which Davy was created:
Though usually taciturn in the presence of strangers, [the
frontiersman] is communicative to his friend or guest, has often
strong colloquial powers, with quaint, singular, figurative,
and even eloquent forms of expression. His language, which is
commonly brief, sententious, and abrupt, becomes, when excited by
the interest of the subject or by passion, highly expletive, and
redundant with exaggerated forms and figures of comparison. When
he swears--and he is probably not more given to this exceedingly
vulgar vice than other men--but when he does swear in earnest, his
philology becomes concentrated, and explodes with an appalling
energy, which would have astonished even the celebrated army in
Flanders. (_Ibid._, Introduction, p. xii.)
In his last collection, _The Wilderness and the War Path_, published
in 1846 and including some earlier tales, Hall contributed little that
was new. There is the same heavy romance with touches of realism, and
by way of reply to Bird’s interpretation of the Indian character he
exploits the romantic qualities of the red man; but his failures are
commoner than his successes, and his work as a whole must be regarded
as a sacrifice to the bad taste of his generation. From this judgment,
perhaps, should be excepted his _Romance of American History_, which is
still pleasantly readable.
II • The Realistic Frontier
Far more vital than these literary tales with their heavy coating
of romance are the few realistic sketches--only too rare in those
exuberant days of the high-flown--that preserve the authentic ways
of backwoods life in their rude vernacular. Of such sketches those
that most faithfully reveal the impress of the frontier, preserving
down to the present the note of verisimilitude, are _Georgia Scenes_
by Augustus B. Longstreet, and the _Autobiography of Davy Crockett_,
to which may be added, perhaps, Joseph G. Baldwin’s _Flush Times of
Alabama and Mississippi_.
1 • Augustus Longstreet • The Georgia Frontier
For some reason no glamour has ever gathered about the Georgia
frontier. It may be that fate conspired against it in bestowing
no idealizing historian to throw a romantic haze over life in the
pine woods. Or perhaps it was the Georgians themselves who did the
commonwealth an evil turn. As a matter of sober fact what could even
romance do with the raw materials that went to the making of this
crude southern Yankee state? How could the most confirmed romantic
discover rare graces in the indigenous Cracker, or weave poetry about
the ubiquitous peddler with his pack of Yankee notions? Any honest
historian could hardly avoid taking into account the ungainly throng
that attended a gander pulling, or depict Ransy Sniffle as other than
a pallid, pot-bellied, clay-eating grotesque. Crude, uncouth, drab,
with primitive passions and unlovely manners, Georgia offered scanty
materials for the most ardent eulogist. Frontier life there ran a
petty round between fist fights and horse races, between politics and
religion. These were the staples of everyday existence, as necessary
to the natural man as whisky and salt pork; and the honest Georgian
preferred his whisky straight and his politics and religion red-hot.
The Jeffersonian hated the Federalist vindictively; and Presbyterian,
Baptist, and Methodist regarded each other malignantly, convinced that
the devil was stoking his fires for the lost neighbor who persisted in
sitting under the wrong preaching. Denominationalism on the Georgia
frontier was as harsh and unforgiving as political partisanship.
Alexander H. Stephens believed that the plain people of Georgia were
the most democratic on the face of the earth, and the kindliest;
yet the pugnacious little democrat was himself nearly butchered by
a democratic neighbor. In depicting such a society realism was the
only honest method; but to make it palatable it must be well seasoned
with humor. If it were garnished with moralizing, so much the better.
There must be no subtleties in the treatment, no literary touches. The
humor must be in the backwoods vernacular, and the preaching open and
aboveboard--frank pulpit-thumping lessons to awaken the surliest sinner.
For such business Gus Longstreet was ideally fitted. A true child of
the Georgia border, he never quite outgrew his early environment.
Born in Augusta in 1790 of New Jersey parents, Holland Dutch but with
a large admixture of English blood,[414] he came of plain stock. A
driving, robust, energetic fellow, never squeamish, with a ready
wit, he was at home amongst the plain people, the greatest wag in
every gathering. He could knock a man down or shoot out a squirrel’s
eye with any champion of them all; he could enter into a dance or a
revival meeting with equal ardor, or take the stump against a seasoned
campaigner. A fellow must be simple-minded who would expect to get the
best of him in swapping horses, or in the way of a practical joke. It
came hard for so vigorous a plebeian to settle down as a substantial
citizen, and the dignified titles that he gathered in the course
of a long and prosperous career--judge, doctor of laws, doctor of
divinity--fitted him somewhat incongruously. On the whole one prefers
the plain Gus Longstreet to Judge Longstreet, but his neighbors, who
thought they knew a man when they saw one, thrust his titles upon him.
Besides he had gone to college and was thereby lifted to a place of
distinction which he could not avoid. The process of scraping off the
bark of the frontier followed orthodox southern lines. A few years’
schooling at Dr. Moses Waddell’s celebrated Academy, where at different
times Calhoun, Crawford, McDuffie, Petigru and Legaré prepared for
college, and two years at Yale, provided him with a stock of rusty
Latin to suffice a college president; and a winter or two at the law
school in Litchfield, Connecticut, following Calhoun’s high example,
furnished him with enough Blackstone to meet the demands of Georgia law
courts. Thus provided intellectually, he went forth boldly to cope with
the Georgia world as he found it.
It was a plebeian world that approved his plebeian qualities. There was
nothing of the southern patrician in Gus Longstreet, nothing of the
ascetic Puritan that marked so deeply men like Calhoun, Legaré, and the
Grimkés. In his strong instinct of acquisitiveness, his canny thrift
that never failed to seize advantage by the forelock, his desire to
get on in the world while serving God, he was a Georgia Yankee, with
an emotional religion that took comfort in discovering that God was
always on his side of any controversy. Yankee also was his knack of
doing many things well enough to impress his less capable neighbors. He
was a frontier jack-of-all-trades, passing easily from one profession
to another, lawyer, newspaper editor, writer, minister, politician,
teacher, and between times busying himself with all sorts of odd jobs,
doing everything readily and nothing thoroughly well. A good talker,
his chief interests were politics, religion, and money-making. He wrote
much in careless haste, apologizing always for the lack of finish; but
except for the sketches which were gathered under the title of _Georgia
Scenes_, he produced nothing that needs to be remembered. At the age of
forty-eight he quitted the law for the Methodist ministry, proved to be
a mediocre preacher, and was soon given the berth of president of Emory
College, a denominational school then recently established at Oxford,
for which his literary reputation and his reputed scholarship seemed to
fit him. Later he was president for a few months of Centenary College,
Louisiana, but found the place uncongenial, resigned, and was chosen
president of the University of Mississippi, where he served seven years
and made full use of the opportunity to speculate in real estate. At
the age of sixty-six he was made president of the University of South
Carolina, where he ruled patriarchally till the school was closed by
the war.
How great a man he was judged to be by his fellow Georgians is hard
for us to realize today. Throughout his later years he was regarded
by his friends as the brightest ornament of Georgia society, a
Christian gentleman who was a model to southern youth, a scholar who
had brought honor to the commonwealth, an author who had silenced
the reproach that the state had produced no literature. Yet it must
be confessed that the Judge shrinks in compass when taken out of his
native environment. Beside John P. Kennedy or Hugh Legaré, he lacks
distinction either of mind or manner; compared with Gilmore Simms he
is only an amateur in letters. His latest biographer[415] has sifted
a mass of material to prove the solid and eminent worth of the man;
yet no impression of intellectual vigor emerges from the analysis;
one must take it on the authority of somewhat incompetent witnesses.
The figure that emerges from the clutter of contemporary estimate is
that of a capable, expansive, middle-class soul, disputatious in the
lordly southern manner, genially domineering, magnificently superior
to logic, given to erecting an imposing structure of convictions on
the slightest of foundations, impatient of contradiction and inclined
to lose his temper when the argument went against him--a witty,
agreeable gentleman, at home amongst mediocre preachers, and an oracle
to admiring friends. He was on terms of intimacy with not a single
first-class mind. He had no intellectual curiosity and was incapable of
rigorous intellectual processes. Yet good fortune had marked him for
her own. A small investment in letters, made at odd moments between
law cases and farming operations, returned him such dividends in the
way of contemporary fame that for forty years thereafter he lived in
the sunshine of a literary reputation. No other American, unless it
were William Wirt, ever drew such ample revenues of popular praise from
a casual investment, and certainly none ever expanded with greater
self-satisfaction. To the end of his life he was the much-sought-after
author of _Georgia Scenes_, and the most ambitious southern magazines
were glad to publish his frequent effusions; in all of which the Judge
delighted, for he was a simple soul and accounted himself an apostle of
southern culture, a mentor of southern taste, and he loved to see his
name in print.
As a man close to the people Longstreet reflected the current Georgia
views on politics. He was an idolatrous admirer of Calhoun and George
McDuffie. The former he rated “above William Pitt, or any other premier
who ever lived before or since his day” (Wade, _Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet_, p. 124) and the latter he regarded as “hardly inferior to
him in anything.” Calhoun’s innate Hebraisms, so deeply imbued with a
patriarchal spirit, fitted to a nicety his own Hebraized conception of
a Jeffersonian order. Writing of Calhoun, in after years, Longstreet
remarked with evident approval:
I believe that he regarded the government of the children of
Israel in the wilderness, the most perfect that ever existed on
earth. Be that as it may, he called my attention to it more than
once as exactly the government ours ought to be, or was intended
to be. “There,” said he, “each tribe had its place on the march
and in the camp, each managed its own concerns in its own way,
neither interfered in the slightest degree, with the private
affairs of another, nor did their common head interfere with any of
them in any matters, save such as were of equal interest to all,
but unmanageable by them as separate and distinct communities.”
(_Ibid._, p. 60.)
The background of his political thought was Jeffersonian agrarian.
He was always a countryman at heart, and his dearest interests were