Idea! which bindest life around
With music of so strange a sound,
And beauty of so wild a birth,—
Farewell! for I have won the Earth.*
In June 1849, Georgia Congressman Thomas Butler King traveled to San Francisco to survey the political and economic prospects. California was poised on the brink of statehood, and King wanted to sample the region’s ripeness for himself. The overland routes to San Francisco were so fraught with perils that most men of standing made the trip by steamer—itself a somewhat harrowing journey. The first leg took travelers from New York or Savannah to the Caribbean coast of Panama, where they picked up a flatboat on the Chagres River. The second leg took them downriver to the Camino de Cruces, where they mounted small ponies for the marshy overland route to Panama City on the Pacific coast. There they boarded another steamer, which carried them up the coast to California. In King’s case, the men spent three days and three nights on the Chagres in water so low that they often had to switch from oars to poles to make any progress. They spent their evenings, King noted, in “Palm leaf huts” in real “negro villages,” supping on “hard biscuits & coffee” and occasionally having to “drive out pigs & cattle to get a place to hang up” their hammocks. Traveling the Camino de Cruces was, if possible, worse. King was given so puny a pony that the animal sank to its knees in the mud, and once threw him “head over heals…ten feet into a deep ditch,” soiling his new white hat. The weather was typically tropical—hot and rainy—and when King finally arrived in Panama City he was “wet to the skin & completely fagged out.” His wife, who was accustomed but not resigned to his long absences, marveled at his stamina. What could he be chasing that would carry him so far from home? What could be driving him that he would prefer a muddy ditch to her own loving company? But under all such deprivations and hardships, King remained positively buoyant. The country was beautiful, the air was clean, and the sense of adventure palpable. The ditch may not have suited him to the nines, but the life of a man of influence did, and a bedraggled hat was a small price to pay. Moreover, unlike his wife, King knew what he was chasing; he had a name for it: éclat.1
It is telling that King had to go outside his own language to describe how he felt. The comparable words in English—eminence, fame, glory, celebrity—sound pompous, self-serving, and vain. Éclat has an altogether different timbre—ephemeral yet manly, hinting at Old World breeding and New World energy. Wary of ambition, disdainful of vanity, and suspicious of accumulated power, Southerners liked their leading men not to make money but to be somehow affluent, not to work but to be somehow accomplished, not to give orders but to be somehow followed. Éclat had exactly this sort of conveniently vague flamboyance.
This chapter examines the éclat-based culture of men like Thomas Butler King. Here the focus is on ambition, one of James Henry Hammond’s “two things,” a constituent element of the antebellum male life. Like love or hate or hope, ambition has been a part of the human experience for time out of mind. This does not mean, though, that it remains unchanged through time or that it plays the same role in every age and culture. In the case of the Old South, I will argue, men’s ambitions were grander, more appalling, and more personally destructive than is usually allowed.
Southern men generally—and Southern planters especially—tend to be seen as petty tyrants, animated by desires for authority, mastery, or, as one variation has it, “despotic sway.” This is undeniably true in part, and men of the Old South could often be found perched on their self-conceived thrones like great birds atop a promising egg. As patriarchs, men were expected to provide a varied constituency—slaves, women, children, and (in some measure) poorer whites—with an array of goods and services: food, shelter, clothing, justice, moral leadership, and a sense of common identity and direction. To the degree that a man could convince himself that he was providing these things, he became (in his own mind) provider, lawgiver, governor, autocrat. To be sure, many of his dependents penetrated the fiction. Casting her eyes about the mulattos in her midst, Mary Chesnut was staggered by the degree to which she was forced to participate in a kind of male make-believe. Men not only fathered children by their slaves but then expected their wives not to notice. “And all the time they seem to think themselves patterns,” Chesnut marveled, the very “models of husbands and fathers.” Ludicrous and easily penetrated, the paternalist fiction was nevertheless meticulously groomed and thoroughly enforced. In its capacious folds, a man found ample space to explore his selfishness and his depravity, and enough delusional self-belief to feel affronted or hurt if anyone pointed them out.2
This does not mean, however, that the man himself could not have pointed them out; he could, and in all likelihood did, in bouts of self-recrimination and pleas to the Almighty for guidance and strength. The antebellum man may not have allowed others to question his authority, but he questioned it, deeply and often, cultivating the good within him and lamenting the bad. His was a sinning nature, and he knew it; he was compromised daily by compulsions made all the more irresistible by the fact that he could get away with them so easily. This sinning was something he pursued on the side, however, a lurid life he did not want others to notice because he did not want to notice it either. In the main, he wanted to do better, to be better, to link his name to something extraordinary. These men had power; they coveted and they abused it, but that does not mean that the lust of it constituted their reason for being. “They who liken us to the Giants of the school books,” warned one planter acerbically in 1846, “and think of us as of a race of tyrants rejoicing in the clank of chains… can scarcely have reflected on the life of a tyrant.” Paternalism had its vanities but also its headaches, and for each instance in which manhood was wielded like a rod of iron there is another in which it was poured out like water. Power can be mediated variously—by carnality and greed, decency and love, frustration and failure—and Southern planters ran the gamut of that variety. To the extent that any generalizations can be made, it is safe to say that these men did not seek power for its own sake; their moral philosophy was too strong, their vision too grand, even when awfully so.3
Neither is it fair to say that Southern men were fixated on honor. They may have been touchier and more hot-headed than their Northern brethren. Their culture, after all, was more rural and therefore more primal, closer to the bone. Then too it was a culture situated atop the explosive possibility of slave insurrection, which made any slippage of authority seem potentially perilous. Quite probably, this made Southern men more sensitive to the respect accorded them by others, a sensitivity that could fairly be called an attention to matters of masculine honor. Although these attentions contributed to a Southern way of life, they did not constitute a reason for living. “Ask ninety-nine men in a hundred what honor is and they will give no intelligible answer,” noted one Southern magazine in 1857. “There is nothing about which there is so much loose talk and confused thinking.” Honor, its chivalric incarnation to the contrary, was not a code; it did not come with a handbook or guide. All Southerners had to determine what the word meant to them, and they did so with considerable variety and finesse. “There is a great difference between a desire for honor and a desire to deserve honor,” noted one discriminating young Southerner in 1843. “There is no motive more elevated than that of desiring to merit the love of your fellow men, because honor can alone be merited by a truly moral and virtuous course of conduct, indefatigable application and perseverance.” Here honor is not primal or rigid; it is not something to be taken by force or won by act of will but earned by dint of hard work. Writing to a young man entering the navy, South Carolina’s leading lawyer, James Petigru, made the same point. He reminded the lad that not all could expect brilliant opportunities in life and that few would sail into Charleston harbor with a wreath of victory suspended from their prow. “It will require all your fortitude to keep from repenting of your choice, and to bear up under privation and weariness of spirit,” Petigru reminded him, “but, honor is not honor for nothing.”4
If the motive element of the male life was not power or honor, what was it? This is exactly what Thomas King was wrestling with when he hit upon éclat—a term comprising power and honor but bigger than both of them. At first glance, King might seem a mercenary capitalist. He campaigned to improve the commercial attractiveness of the port of Darien, Georgia, where he happened to own land. He lobbied the Texas legislature to finance the Southern Pacific Railroad, in which he happened to have a promissory percentage. But his schemes were not about making money per se (fortunate because King did not make but rather lost a fortune); they were about extension, about breadth of imagination, about building an empire, personal and national, about surrendering to something so much bigger and better than the self that a man might be treasured up forever. Thomas Butler King got out of the ditch, adjusted his hat, and blithely remounted his scrubby little pony not because he was on a personal power trip but because he could feel a nation’s destiny surging through him. The advance man of an entire civilization, King channeled the energy of that multitude—and, like most great conductors, it ran through him resistless and immense. One might argue, of course, that these are exactly the sort of robust rationalizations in which the best mercenary capitalists have always sought their succor. But the country needed a better port at Darien, and it needed a transcontinental railroad. How else could it fulfill its destiny? King’s self-interest and the country’s bid for majesty were identical; King had long since ceased to distinguish between the two, except perhaps to notice that he had himself been made majestic by the pursuit.5
This spirit of éclat, while not peculiar to the South, ran deepest in places where mastery over environment and slaves lent a certain grandness to a man’s vision. To be sure, slaveholding could degrade the quality of a man’s conscience. The presence of a subject class on whom depravity could be practiced with impunity offered to all and provided to many a tempting descent into a dark demimonde of violence and sin. But the presence of a subject class also elevated a man’s ambition, calling on him to conceive in terms of extent and exercise power in terms of majesty and domain.
When British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse traveled to Pleasant Hill, Alabama, in 1838, he found a crude community where even the planters lived in log homes of warped timbers and where every man was in such a hurry to plant that he did not bother to cut down the trees that hampered his fields—he simply girdled them and moved on. But Gosse could see that, despite their surroundings, these Alabamians were not rustics or rubes; their aspirations were grand, even preposterously so, and their simple communities, replicated hundreds of times over across the Southwest, were transforming the ecology of the region. “The Americans,” he noted, “in commencing a hamlet or village, always look forward to its becoming a city; and hence the plan is laid out with an amplitude and grandeur that seems ridiculous.” Less ridiculous, of course, was the effect of such amplitude on the land. American forests were expansive and unforgiving, to be sure, but so were the Americans intent on taming them. “This custom of girdling the trees instead of cutting them down,” Gosse wrote, “gives the fields a most singular appearance. After the twigs and smaller boughs have dropped off, and the bark has dried and shrunk, and been stripped away, and the naked branches have become blanched by the summer’s sun and winter’s rain, these tall dead trunks, so thickly spread over the land, look like an army of skeletons, stretching their gaunt white arms… across the fields.” Here was Pleasant Hill in its truest colors—the pipe-smoking planter, kicked back to watch the sun set on an army of slaves or an army of dead trees, each in its own way a passable index of his own accomplishments. Such men, from Alabama backwater to Carolina estate, spoke King’s language of éclat. “I am Columbus! Cortez!” exclaimed James Henry Hammond of his own efforts at Cowden plantation. “If I have been active & industrious, it has always been for higher purposes than to accumulate…. I delight to accomplish, for accomplishment gives [me] all the emotions of a Discoverer & a Conquerer.”6
In the nineteenth century, the Southern frontier was awash with such empire builders. Aaron Burr, a former vice president, set the tone for the century’s imperial free-for-all when he rafted down the Mississippi in 1807, perhaps scheming to cut off a large swath of the Louisiana Purchase to rule as his own kingdom. The plan failed, but Burr’s unflappable audacity captured the country’s heart; instead of being convicted of treason, he was coddled and plied with expensive wine for most of his trial. In the 1830s, John Murrell made land piracy a national cause célèbre in a series of intrigues along the Natchez Trace. Lacking Burr’s aplomb, Murrell was strung up for his crimes, but his manly pluck lived on in the stories Americans liked best to tell about themselves. By the 1850s, swaggering imperialists bent on personal kingdoms rose and fell with stunning frequency. Filibustering forays against Mexico, Nicaragua, and Spanish holdings, especially in Cuba, kept the American government in a nearly constant state of international embarrassment. Every year, it seemed, a crew of scofflaws would set off in a rickety boat under the broad banner of manifest destiny and attempt to “liberate” a swath of foreign soil and rule it as their own. In 1850, for instance, William Walker led forty-five men into lower California. Capturing the Mexican governor at La Paz, Walker proclaimed himself president of the new republic of Sonora and began issuing edicts with all the pomposity of a Roman emperor. Walker and his men were eventually chased back across the border by Mexican troops, but in his subsequent trial, Walker was toasted and released to continue his scheming. Such episodes may seem ludicrous in retrospect, but this new class of roving adventurers acted as a sort of advance guard for America’s more concerted imperial impulses. Exactly such skirmishes, after all, had proceeded and made possible the acquisition and domination of Texas, which, despite its titanic size, seemed to many just the beginning of the country’s prospects to the South. “Gentlemen, what a vista does this open!” intoned James Hamilton before the Texas legislature. “[To the west and south of you lies a] country which by comparison dwarfs the imaginary nations for which Alexander may have sighed, and which stretches over a greater number of degrees of latitude, and through a greater variety of climate, soil and surface than the sword of Caesar ever measured in his boasted conquest of the world.”7
“In due time,” promised a tongue-in-cheek editorial in the Southern Literary Messenger, “our planet will be under the control of two Governments. The entire continent of America, with the West India Islands, Polynesia, Australia, and Western Europe… will constitute its Republic. The rest of the world, leaving out Interior Africa, will be under the dominion of one man, and that man a Russian.” The Russian regime, the article claimed, would be totalitarian in character, and would encompass those races—Turk, Persian, Tartar, Hindoo, Malay, Chinese, and Japanese—who, history proved, could only function within an autocratic system. Under a Russian tsar, such races could “continue to make toys and lacquer-ware; to raise tea, rice, and opium; to worship idols and commit suicide, with a felicity of uninterruption of which they have long since ceased even to dream.” The planet’s other government, while republican in character, would not only sanction slavery, but extend it benevolently to the rest of the world’s unworthies. Southern gentlemen would of course constitute the master class in the New Republic, but they would be attended by Negro domestics, French cooks, Italian entertainers, Spanish butchers, German brewmeisters, and British butlers. Yankees, of course, would need to be subjugated as well. “Cowardly, thievish, superstitious, fanatical, destitute of a moral sense, or any fixed idea of civil polity,” the article concluded, “[the Yankee] possesses all the worse and none of the better traits of the Negro, and stands more in need of a master.” The problem, of course, was that the Yankee was not fit for much. Unable to distinguish right from wrong and generally atheistic, he could not be a preacher. “Too cruel and too morbidly energetic to be allowed authority over flesh and blood,” he could not make a good overseer. Finally the author concluded that in “supervising machinery” the Yankee would probably “always find enough to do.” Naturally, the name of the New Republic would be Virginia.8
The article is intended to be humorous. The accompanying editor’s note describes it as a capital “piece of fun,” and he hopes “that it will be read with enjoyment by our friends at the North not less than by the Virginians who are so exalted in its views of the future.” Like most humor, however, the article is funny because, while distorted, it contains a germ of truth. By 1850, Southerners, like Americans generally, possessed an absolutely swaggering sense of expansionism. Unlike Americans generally, Southerners viewed slavery as an integral part of that expansion, a view that put them at odds with their Northern neighbors and provided a backdrop for the coming of the Civil War. This should not distract, though, from the degree to which Southern expansionist rhetoric was consistent with American expansionist rhetoric generally. In its tendency to view the world as poised on the brink of revolutionary consolidation, and in its penchant for viewing race as the organizing principle of that revolution, the Republic of Virginia article offers a perspective as much American as Southern. The article’s racism, too, owes more to race-based imperialism than to militant slavocracy. The author takes a relatively kindly view toward blacks: “The Negro, having been our earliest slave, and reared as it were under our own roof, will forever retain a more intimate relation to us than any other slave.” And a much harsher view of southern Europeans: “With our Italians, we need anticipate no trouble. Popery being cast into the sea, they… will become at once manageable. It will be necessary to use fumigants and disinfectants freely, to rid them of vermin and the stench of garlic, but, after that, they will be very available as opera singers, fresco painters, and for the mechanical labour of sculpture.” Slavery here has burst the confines of the plantation system to become a conceptually flexible, ideologically sophisticated aspect of manifest destiny in the Southern style. Placing the South’s defense of slavery on the same foundation as the country’s defense of imperialism, the article couches Southern peculiarities in an American idiom, making slavery seem the normative status for all of the world’s lesser peoples.
Nor was this article particularly exceptional. An editorial in the December 1857 issue of Charleston’s Russell’s Magazine restated in all seriousness much of what the Messenger’s Virginia superpower piece noted in jest. “The sum of the matter appears to be this,” Russell’s informed its readers. “The grand result toward which social events seem to be progressing, is the complete subjugation of the physical earth to the dominion of human intellect. The only portion of mankind capable of rising to this conception is that which composes the European-American civilization. Hence, in the grand progress, this portion must be the master-worker, and the law-giver, and every race not capable of attaining to this broad conception, must either assume a position, as under-worker, commensurate with its intellectual capacity, or as the only alternative, must yield the room it uselessly occupies to those who can be made to do so.” For Southerners, then, “grand progress” began but did not end with the enslavement of Africans. Eventually all of the world’s peoples would have to learn their place, serving according to their ability and receiving according to their unfortunate but innate disabilities. Historians, it appears, have sold Southerners rather short in suggesting that they were motivated primarily by a desire to defend their peculiar institution. True, the South’s leadership sought to protect slave property, expand slave territory, and prevent class warfare by ensuring that land and slaves were available to nonslaveholders. But they believed they were—alongside their Northern brethren at first, better than their Northern brethren ultimately—building a Civilization.9
To the Victorians, “Civilization” was a word of vast, poetic power. Where an empire was measured in extent, a civilization was measured in majesty, and mid-century Victorians were nearly obsessed with the moral dimension of their sovereignty. “The term civilization,” an author for the Messenger intoned, “has a philosophical signification—a signification fixed by history, developed by moral sciences, containing wide, boundless elements, and implying a compendium of man’s best and noblest ideas.” Admittedly, this definition is a trifle ungainly. The “signification,” however fixed, and the “elements,” however boundless, are left hanging in air; the compendium of ideas, despite the reassuring superlatives, is discomfitingly thin on specifics. As with éclat, however, Civilization gained much of its grandness from an unwillingness to ground itself in petty details. Comfortable in the clouds, Civilization had a gauzy celestiality, a quality that could not be defined by men precisely because it loomed so high above them.10
The Messenger’s take on Civilization betrays more than a telling vagueness, however. This definition could only be the product of an antebellum education. Moral philosophy, progressive history, and noble ideas constituted something like the core curriculum of most colleges of the period, and this author mentions all three in one sentence. If he had added dead languages, he would have captured the full course load of the average antebellum freshman. While a complete examination of university curricula is impossible here, the basic contours are straightforward. Dead languages, especially Latin and Greek, opened the door to dead civilizations, which functioned as tutorials on the dos and don’ts of civilization building generally. The rise and fall of each of the world’s once-great powers was understood as a moral tale whose narrative arc resembled that of a grand epic. Each empire functioned as a heroic character, glorious and flawed, doomed from the beginning and destined to live forever in the memories of men who appreciated the poetry of making a play for it all. Thus the Athenian Greeks were an object lesson in the dangers of unrelieved esoterica, the Romans a paradigm for the pitfalls of rampant militancy. Although the message drawn from each hero’s story was different, the moral was always the same—a perfect Civilization was possible, and a man was to search within himself to determine how he might best contribute to its attainment.11
By 1850, American men, North and South, were caught up in the éclat of Civilization building. Inspired by women (embodied at right), men embarked on their quest to erect on the still primeval landscape a Civilization to stand for all time. As the painter shrewdly notes, however, they were mostly just building castles in the sky. Thomas Cole, Voyage of Life (Youth), ca. 1839–40, oil on canvas 8⅜ in. × 10 ⅞ in. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York. 55.106
By the 1850s, America had already made impressive progress as a would-be Civilization. The country’s size doubled with the Louisiana Purchase and then doubled again with the Mexican cession. As important, the country’s commercial development had been astonishingly rapid. To be sure, much of this development took place in the North, but the South’s transformation was not without its own impressive features. The fact that two-thirds of the railway miles in the United States in 1860 were in the North, for instance, should not blind us to the remaining one-third stretched out across the South, amounting to some 10,000 miles. As in the North, these were miles that seemed to spring up over night. In 1850 Missouri sported a paltry four miles of track; by 1860 it had 817. Tennessee, similarly, went from 48 to 1,253 miles; Mississippi from 60 to 862; Alabama from 112 to 743; and Virginia from 341 to 1,743. More importantly, the rapid pace of development gave Southerners, as well as Northerners, a giddy sense of their own national prospects. “This railroad business is the dispensation of the present era,” remarked South Carolinian William C. Preston, “and is to be the harbinger of mighty events, no less than a change—at least a very decided modification—of the plan of civilization. There have been two great dispensations of Civilization, the Greek & Christian, and now comes the railroad, or rather Locomotive.” This was not the empty rhetoric of a stump speech; Preston had penned these words in a letter to a friend, and they were exactly the sort of terms in which Americans (Southerners included) had begun to think by the 1850s. Others might dicker with Preston’s three pillars but probably not much: in the Greeks Americans had found their humanity, in Christianity their faith. Now they had the tool to implement them, the machine of all machines, the locomotive. More hung in the balance than getting cotton to market or fine fabrics from New York. A new world was being born, and Americans all were to be participants at the birth.12
The South’s demographic maturation was as startling as its economic growth. In the 1830s, the South’s population had been extremely unstable. The older states of the tidewater endured massive outmigration while the newer states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi were overrun with new residents. North Carolina’s sagging numbers made it the “Ireland of America,” and one resident described it simply as “one vast camping ground” on the way from one place to someplace else. For those who stayed behind, this “migratory fever” constituted something of a crisis. “Scarcely have [these migrants] squatted down,” groused one South Carolina editor, “and built up their little ‘improvements’ than they hear of a new purchase, where corn grows without planting, and cotton comes up five bales to the acre, ready picked and packed—they pull up stakes and boom off for the new Canaan.” “I cannot but think,” he continued, that “every remove into the wilderness lessens the hold which refinement and society have hitherto held upon individual man.” Such grumblings ought to have had a familiar ring. Decades earlier the Founding Fathers had been just as ambivalent about the wave of migration that sent Americans tumbling over the Appalachians and into the Ohio Valley. Washington hoped a good part of the settlers would be killed by Indians. Madison figured that the West would just have to become its own country. Monroe, seemingly forgetting himself, suggested that the east rule the west as a colony “similar to that which prevail’d in these States previous to the revolution.” No such drastic measure was necessary, of course; the new states of the Northwest replicated and complemented the older states much more than they threatened them. The South had its own version of this crisis in the Southwest of the 1830s, and it witnessed a similar stabilization by the 1850s. Older states grew steadily and propitiously—in the towns no less than in the country—and newer states transformed their backwater settlements into prosperous communities. Just as the North had civilized the old Northwest, the South had transformed the Old Southwest from frontier outpost to a “future seat of empires.” There was, to be sure, no Chicago in Alabama, but then neither was there a Natchez in Indiana. And the main point is a more general one: after a decade of transplantation Southerners set about the business of putting down roots, elaborating communities rather than transporting them.13
One did not have to be a city dweller to feel the effects of the South’s rapid maturation. When John Shofner and his father came to Bedford County, Tennessee, in 1809, they confronted “a thick forrest of heavey timber and the powerfullest cain brake that was eaver saw.” The round trip from Nashville to New Orleans took three months, there were no grain mills, no place to market cattle or pigs (except when the drovers drifted in), sugar was twenty-five cents a pound, and women had to spin their own thread. When, in 1810, Governor Lewis took a trip up the Mississippi on “the first steemboot that eaver run the river,” he caused a sensation. But by the time John Shofner had reached middle age, there were so many steamboats on the Mississippi he could not count them; sugar was ten cents a pound; “weving factorey[s]” did most of the spinning; and it took twelve days to make the round trip from Nashville to New Orleans (including the time to load and unload 200 tons of cargo). There were grain mills wherever there was water power, and where there wasn’t water power there was steam. Railroads were springing up everywhere, and Shofner was confident the day was not far off when he could put his “hole crop in the cares [railcars] and in three days go to markit, sell out, lay in, and come home.” “Histrey cold not relate aneything to excell the progress,” Shofner goggled proudly, and “we are still going ahead.”14
John Shofner was (with the exception of his spelling) absolutely right. His country had made a startling debut and seemed determined to take its show all the way to the top. The South was fully a part of that project. However cavalier their attitudes toward the Union during the secession crisis (a subject to be taken up in due time), Southerners right up to the Civil War believed that America either was or would soon become the greatest civilization ever to grace the earth. Ancient Greece had its intellectual attainments, Rome its empire; but America might have it all, and its progress had been stunning to behold. Traveling to New York in September 1858, South Carolina planter William Elliott was present for a two-day celebration of the laying of the first Atlantic cable (between Ireland and Newfoundland). Looking down from the upper window of his hotel on “the thronging multitudes that—filling the streets—were distributed on the very house tops,” he began to sob. “[I] remembered this City as I had known it in 1806,” he wrote his wife, and “whether it was patriotism or what other feeling—I know not—but the tears streamed down from my eyes. Possibly it was a commendable pride at witnessing the extraordinary progress of the Country.” And Southerners had every right to be proud. They had participated fully in the besting of the redcoats, the founding of the Republic, the rise of American military and commercial power, and the steady conquest of a western empire. Americans, Southern and Northern alike, had for years told brazen tales about their special destiny as a people; by 1850 it was beginning to seem as if the tales might be true. No longer a passive exemplar—a City upon a Hill—America began to dream itself an empire for the ages.15
To the observers living through it, however, the country’s rapid growth seemed often more frenetic and disorienting than directed and progressive. The attainments were lofty, the rhetoric loftier, but still there was something in the speed of the advancement which seemed reckless in itself. Americans were a simple, republican people at heart. Their progress, while fortuitous, had overtaken their ability to assimilate and make sense of it. To North Carolinian Robert Morrison, American advancement seemed less like an unfolding destiny than a “Go a-head mania.” “The reckless, growing & insatiable thirst to drive every thing at Steam Speed,” he griped in 1853, “produces disregard for law, order, safety, and human life.… Cautious men, moderate measures, wise counsel, prudent forethought, and common sense are commodities too old for consideration & too contracted for this expanding age.” To a writer for the Messenger, the alterations were so profound they threatened the very nature of man. “To one that can look back for the last thirty years,” he noted in 1854, “the changes… are beyond the wildest imaginings. The new and extended powers… together with the wonderful inventions of man, have added to his nature [and] made him almost another being.” Underlining this angst, of course, the deepening sectional crisis tainted each national success, giving the American project an awful, self-defeating aspect. With each new conquest, a manifest destiny that might have been expected to bring national unity brought deeper division. With each new development in transportation, manufacturing, and communications, North and South became more deeply engaged, more deeply implicated, in each other’s appalling peculiarities. Poised to achieve greatness, America was instead threatened with self-destruction.16
The constrictions of the 1850s were a particular problem for coming-of-age males. More educated than their fathers, they were also under more pressure to live up to the version of civilized patriarchy that had become so integral to the South’s sense of self and to its defense against the North. In the face of such constrictions, young men did what they always do when times are tight and opportunities few and beneath them—they hung around the house, living lavishly on their parents’ ample account. Needless to say, this did not go over well with the parents themselves. “The babe of to day,” griped one Southern editorialist, “whilst it gazes admiringly at little sister Sue in trains and a hoop; opens its eyes approvingly at the youthful Fanny’s declaration, that the great purpose of her life is to be a ‘fast woman,’ and pats brother Georgy encouragingly on the back, as he swaggers into the nursery, redolent of cigar smoke.” While such indictments suggest in part that Southern children were growing up too fast, the real anxiety was that Southern children were not growing up at all, creating a generation of perpetual infants, incapable of controlling their urges and unwilling to accept responsibility for actions which were typically childish and destructive.17
This concern was especially common in the planting class, where wealth allowed young men to display their impertinence in all its foppish finery. Hammond, for instance, called his sons “dead weights” who “growl, grumble, sulk and do nothing.… They don’t pull off their coats and go at it. They shoot birds, buy fish, and gerrymander the County… they are mere dillitanti—theatrical planters… [and] negroes, overseers, and neighbors see that as plainly as I do.” Of course, such subjective disgruntlement proves very little; it’s quite possible that Hammond’s father said the same things of him. But in the late antebellum South such complaints were rife, and men more farsighted than Hammond correctly discerned that the problem was not the young per se, but the steady constriction of the prospects they faced. “The time I fear is past,” noted William Elliott in 1849, “when a Gentleman can succeed as a planter. The pains taking of an operative manufacturer must be added to the duties of the agriculturist—or he will reap nothing but disappointment and vexation.” The master of fourteen plantations spanning several states, Elliott practiced diversified farming, experimented with different systems of crop rotation and irrigation, and not only kept up with the agricultural journals but contributed to them. And still he could claim in 1854 that he felt like a man on a treadmill: “Though I have not squandered, but on the contrary have trebled my paternal inheritance—such is the unproductive state of our agriculture that our incomes are reduced to almost nothing….A new order of things prevails and young men of the first families must work or starve.” The crisis then (to the extent that it could be called one) was not so much generational as systemic. Slave prices had ballooned, the international cotton competition had stiffened, and land seemed ever scarcer, dryer, poorer. None of this is to say that the planting life was somehow doomed; the Southern economy, with or without slavery, would likely have adapted and continued to expand. But it does not take a market breakdown to set the mind of a master class to turning; in an era of ever-rising expectations and ever-collapsing opportunities, relatively small constrictions tend to take their psychic toll. “Oh for a snug little farm,” Hammond lamented in 1853, “where I could indulge my fondness for the country… without the anxiety created by the idea that the ‘main chance’ depends on having every screw tight & and the whole machinery moving on clock-work principles.” And so here at last we have Hammond’s real complaint—it was not that his sons worked so little but that he worked so much. He resented their ease because he was himself ill at ease in a world where the gap between planter and clock maker had closed.18
This antebellum cartoon captures the emerging distinction between Northern and Southern adolescents. The Northern boy is penitently posed, worshiping at the altar of capitalism, devoted to learning a trade, and respectful of his elders. The Southern boy is a fop and a rake, all lacy cuffs and careful coiffeur, content to ride a barrel of brandy to his destiny. Note the suggestive position of his hand and riding crop. Clearly, smoking and drinking are but two of his many destructive appetites. “Envelopes of the Great Rebellion,” Southern Historical Collection, UNC.
Why couldn’t Southern men content themselves as clock makers? Unfortunately, while economic modernization in their region had proceeded far enough to make Southerners anxious, it had not proceeded so far as to make them adjusted. As a result, North and South diverged not merely on the role slavery would play in American Civilization but on the role men should play in Civilization’s attainment. In the North, boys were encouraged to pattern themselves after what might be called civilized manhood. Men were supposed to exemplify and embody the effects of civilization, underscoring their self-possession and self-restraint by holding up to the world a paragon of gentlemanly conduct, abstemious habits, and Christian rectitude. In the South, boys were supposed to follow a subtly different pattern, one of civilizing manhood. Southern men were obliged not merely to affect Civilization but to cause it, the emphasis falling on not merely the composition but the imposition of the self.
In 1858 Josiah Gorgas, later Confederate chief of ordnance, reread a biography of Benjamin Franklin he had first plumbed as a boy of thirteen. Then the book had been part of his father’s library, one of a host of biographies that acted as national models for manhood. Gorgas had devoured the book then, reading it more than a dozen times, each time coming to a greater admiration for the subject. But when he read the biography in 1858, he found that he did not like Franklin’s character as he once had. “There is throughout his life too much of the sense of worldly success,” Gorgas noted. “Nearly all his maxims relate to success in life, & many of his precepts, in fact most of them, are too deeply tinctured with policy. It is not a brave, open and generous nature that lies open before us in these pages and stirs us with sympathy for its struggles, & with admiration for its success.” Franklin’s was a Yankee sort of manhood. Caught up in the pennies and the precepts, he had known nothing of éclat, nothing of the good a man could do when he had the mettle to run wide open. Franklin’s maxims for success, while functional, were too stingy, too tight in the shoes, the pockets, the pants. Successful in his lifetime, Franklin was nonetheless a poor model for boys because he had been unwilling to give fully and openly of himself in a great gamble to build, love, live.19
The problem with this Southern model was that it bore little relationship to the changing reality of men’s occupational lives. By the 1850s, planting families were sending increasing numbers of their sons to college, where they blithely glutted themselves on the poetics of Civilization building. At the same time, these same sons were with increasing frequency entering professions other than planting, where they came up against mundanities of a workaday world that little comported with the models for manhood they had been taught in school. How could Southern men live up to increasingly romantic ideals of civilizing manhood when the expansive work of winning the empire was giving way to the more mundane work of administrating it? How could they be contented clerks and mechanics—as their Yankee brethren seemed to be—when their expectations for themselves ran always toward energy and éclat? “To be great, there must be a great work to be done,” Mississippian Joseph Baldwin complained. “Talents alone are not [enough].… Great abilities… need a great stimulus.” These stimuli had certainly been present in the founding period, and they had been present right through the 1830s and the South’s great land boom. “In a new country the political edifice, like all the rest, must be built from the ground up,” Baldwin observed. “While nothing is at hand, every thing must be made. There is work for all and a necessity for all to work.” By the 1850s, however, the Old Southwest had been tamed; society had stabilized and grown respectable; rules governed behavior and competition for positions and resources had become stiff. Greatness was no longer to be seized but earned and then, Baldwin noted, after a “long and tedious novitiate.”20
Across the South in the late antebellum period, young men faced such novitiates with a sort of dejected resolve. Contemplating his 1853 graduation from West Point, for instance, J.E.B. Stuart had little notion how the grand ideals he had learned were to be applied in the world as it was. “After next June I have not the remotest idea what will become of me,” he wrote his cousin. “If you are good at divining I wish you would try the art to determine my fate.” Ticking off the possibilities, however, Stuart realized there was only one avenue open to him. The life of a farmer had a certain nobility but “presupposes the possession of a farm which…is not always practicable [for] the young man for whom capital has not already been accumulated.” This left what Stuart called derisively the “hireling professions… Law, Medicine, Engineering, and Arms.” “The lawyer has his cases but seldom receives his fees. The physician has his patients & his sleepless nights but his patients are very patient in waiting to pay him.” And the Engineer was in an altogether impossible situation: “[He] must first have a reputation before he can get desirable employment” and, of course, he couldn’t establish a reputation without first being employed. For Stuart, this left only arms. “The officer has his toils but he [also] has his rewards.” Stuart concluded, “There is something in ‘the pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious war,’ which makes ‘Othello’s occupation’ the most desirable of all.”21
Stuart was relatively lucky in finding a profession that comported with his notion of what a man should be. Most of the South’s college graduates were not so fortunate. They went out into the world armed only with unachievable ideals and dreams of greatness so lofty they had little practical application. The brashest men compensated for such circumstances with sheer pluck, but men of melancholy or sensitive disposition sometimes gave way to despair. In “Leaves from a Dreamer’s Diary,” a writer for Russell’s admitted that his education had almost ruined him for real life. “Of all the places on earth in which to settle an indolent youth,” he noted, “an American College is the worst.” There, he claimed, boys were indulged and coddled; they basked in the shade of magnificent oaks and, when they did make it to class, were plied with fanciful stories until their imaginations became almost “morbidly acute.” Nothing in their boyhood or education prepared these young men for the sharp constriction of circumstance and insipid grind of their mundane professional lives. “I had pictured to myself, with fancy’s vague pencil, some great obstacles, which determination and energy would overcome,” noted the writer of his college years, and “I was unprepared then for the slow, consuming cares which gathered around me….the little cares of life… which [would] waste away [my] heart.”22
Tennessean John Lincoln suffered a similar shock as he left college. For three years, he said, his days were spent in alternating bouts of reverie and depression. He would imagine himself a teacher and the toast of a college, delivering a powerful oration before the whole student body. Then he would fancy himself a great lawyer, standing “two feet and a half taller than [renowned jurist William] Wirt.” But from this dizzying height, he would always come crashing down in a spell of the blues that left him indifferent, torpid, and “distant to the whole human race.” “You’ve no idea, Sue, how much I suffered by the nasty blue (black they were to me) devils,” John wrote his cousin. “They were caused by the bodily weakness attendant upon a student’s life…. My mind dwelt in the ideal world so much that it chafed at the sober realities of life. I was full of happiness and full of misery, sometimes the one, sometimes the other….I dwelt…in golden castles of the delusive future,…my mind… more enlarged by great and noble views of life, yet,… strange as it may seem, the vividness of my conception of the responsibilities of life made me wish to shun them…and the brightness of my ideal made me despair of reaching it.” College had raised Lincoln’s expectations and his ambition to an almost dizzying altitude, leaving him little grounding in the practical everydayness of manhood as it really was. Stuffed to the gills with Napoleon, Washington, and Hale, Lincoln had barely a first notion of how to set about being contented as a clerk.23
Taking up the practicalities of manhood had a similar effect on Mississippian Everard Baker. “Here of late, a change has come over me,” he noted in his diary, a change “which is in its nature anything but agreeable.” Baker’s youth had been “interspersed with… many scenes glowing with the merriment & hillarity of a gay & sportive disposition.” But when he compared “that view with the life that now feebly glimmers in these long expected years of manhood—which allured in the distance with such flattering anticipations—” he conceived, he said, “almost a hatred for myself.” “Now I am a dull, insipid being,” he confessed in his diary. “My days pass in a state of torpid[ity] & sluggish[ness]. Unable to entertain company with dignity or pleasure & a drag upon those whose company I seek, [mine is] a listless, lethargic state of mind, unable to pursue a profitable train of thought or to follow the suggestions of another. [This] unaccountable debility… disables me from anything like mental employment & very often sheds a brooding melancholy hue over my whole self.” Unable to adduce one good cause for his disagreeable thoughts, Baker felt himself “to be aught but a happy man.”24
Any college student, of course, experiences some despondency when he turns finally to the problems of building a career and raising a family. These problems were exacerbated, however, by an antebellum system that almost monomaniacally stressed the glorious histories of the world’s great men—even as the opportunity for glory began to fade. As it did, children raised to emulate great men began instead to envy them. “[Napoleon] grew up in a time of turmoil, and had a chance to fight his way to the Consulate and Empire,” Richard Elliott griped. “I grew up in a quiet time, when there was no chance to pick up a crown at the point of one’s sword.” For depressives like Stuart, Lincoln, Baker, and Elliott manhood seemed almost a quiet curse; raised to project their aggressions outward an untold number began to redirect them inward upon themselves.25
To be sure, women suffered from fits of despondency too. But when a woman’s world was not as she wanted, she still had hope to comfort her. Unhappy women, of whom there were undoubtedly many, lived much of their lives in a counterfactual future where the passage of time had reordered their circumstances and happiness had returned, as if of its own accord. Wearily accustomed (though never resigned) to surrendering themselves to the will of men and the whims of fate, women had one great advantage over men—they could surrender themselves to the march of events without losing their self-esteem. For the powerless, hope becomes a touchstone, the future a magical alternate world, which, if it never comes to pass, is still an endless source of comfort. “What would we be without hope,” noted Anna King in a letter to her daughter. “Hope which concerns this world—& hope which concerns the world to which we are all hastening!” Men, however, tended to find hope an unsatisfactory solution to the problem of present unhappiness. Hope was too passive, requiring a kind of patience and submission to fate that ill-comported with the male ideal. Men did not wait for things to change; they changed them. They understood themselves, and were understood by others, to be in command of their own destinies; the fault for adversity lay, as often as not, at their own door. To be sure, men prayed for good luck and railed at bad, but they could never fully abandon the idea that it fell to them to deal with the difficulties and dissatisfactions that beset them. Hope, then, was a weak man’s refuge, and indulging it was as likely to bring self-recrimination as satisfaction. “What is hope itself but a happy sort of discontent,” grumbled William Gilmore Simms, “tell[ing] us of unattained objects and conditions.” “You call it hope—that fire of fire!” noted Edgar Allan Poe in Tamerlane. “It is but agony of desire.”26
But if men could not turn to hope, neither could they turn easily to other men. Given the Southern male’s prickly sense of self, relationships between them had a peculiar dynamic. On the one hand, the emphasis on the difference between male and female concerns meant that men, and especially young ones, were often in each other’s company, engaged in male pastimes and pursuits. They played together, hunted together, went to college together, and often managed farms and businesses together. On the other hand, men were constantly on their guard, watching each other for signs of respect and disrespect, competing with each other for mates, honors, and distinctions. Even in friendship, there was a standoffishness, an unwillingness to appear weak, vulnerable, or emotionally needy. “I have always been afraid of committing myself in talking even to my friends,” noted Wallace Cumming, “not that I would have said more than I meant but that from some (imaginary) cause or other I might receive a rebuff.” To be sure, there was a rough camaraderie between males, especially between college chums. But most understood that when they left the university for their respective destinies, they were unlikely to continue such friendships on anything like an intimate level. As William Elliot explained somewhat sadly: “There is something of mutual self-deception, and exaggeration in early friendships, which the experience of after life dispels. And while the conflicts of interest or ambition estrange us from some—and the grave separates us from others—we seek not to replace those broken links with others that may prove as brittle.”27
Unable to hope without appearing idle and fatuous, unable to seek counsel from other men without appearing vulnerable and weak, men often heaped blame on themselves for their perceived failure to live up to standards for manhood they all recognized as surely as their own face. Turning against the standards was not an option; all knew from the beginning that a bid for greatness would be cold going, all agreed that its legitimacy as a life goal was beyond reproach.
The case of Giles Patterson illustrates the degree to which antebellum men of a certain caste actually preferred being failures to giving up the dream of immortality whose standards had made them failures in the first place. As a student at South Carolina College, Patterson would lie in his dorm room for days, drifting dreamily, indulging equally in vainglory and self-reproach. He wanted to be an orator or a poet, and he believed he had abilities in these arts. His parents and professors believed so too, and Patterson admitted that he had received his share of “plaudits and praises.” But he knew also that the chance of ever exercising his abilities in a bold and open arena was remote. He had little confidence that the world would give him such an opportunity, less confidence that he had the brass to seize such an opportunity if it was offered. Thus the encouragements heaped on him by others seemed wasted—instead of “nerv[ing] up” his “young heart to desperate struggles and new efforts to gain distinction in the world” they had rather the opposite effect, teaching Patterson that “my futile attempts at honor or immortality are vain, and that I must give up the pursuit.” But he did not give it up; he merely shifted the arena of that pursuit to a land of fanciful dreams. Having steeled himself to the fact that he hadn’t the moment or the mettle ever to become great, Patterson allowed the realization to slip quietly from his hand, like the book of a child grown drowsy, and fell instead “into a reverie of some happy chance that will be offered which if it did really come to pass would be as miraculous as a fairy tale.”28
Patterson’s preference for oratory and poetics is revealing in itself. The orator was the South’s ultimate public man, capable of “rais[ing] armies” or “subvert[ing] governments” through “the potent agency of [his] tongue.” The greatest orators, of course, did not deploy such power wantonly; rather they crusaded for truth, tearing from their own breast the passion and the commitment they hoped to instill in others. “The man of purest motive, of sincerest conviction,” reported the Messenger, “will be [the] greatest orator. The earnestness of a mind fully convinced, spreads to and through an audience with the rapidity of [an] electric spark,” holding listeners “spell-bound, as if entranced by a heavenly vision.” The poet had similar abilities—heavenly visions and electrifying acts of imagination were his stock in trade. This is probably why orator and poet made such tempting choices for young men like Patterson. Both immortalized their passions in a high tongue; both pursued an intellectual agenda with a purity impracticable among the “hirelings.” There were, however, some critical differences between the poetic and oratorical arts. The poet was a solitary figure, an orator in spirit, but turned inward upon himself. He would never draw the world into his lungs and bellow it forth in an exuberant rush of air. What he drew into himself tended to stay there, haunting and caged; his words blasted through his vitals only to emerge in silence to take up their careful positions on a page. Then too the orator’s primary concern was Truth, a slippery, contested thing in any age, but never more so than when a country is drifting toward civil war. The poet’s muse, on the other hand, was Beauty—a softer mistress who invited a man to behold for himself, without backchat or bother. Patterson’s inward turn to the land of dreams and his poetic proclivity were part of the same impulse that drove the depression of Everard Baker and John Lincoln. Unsure that he would have the chance to be an orator, unsure that he would be equal to it if it came, Patterson redirected his orator to the indulgent audience that awaited within, ever receptive and respectful. Patterson had not lost his desire to create something intellectually pure, had not lost his impulse for empire building, but in a world as sullied and as complicated as his had become, he was relieved to think that he might build that empire on the relatively uncontested terrain of his own self-loathing imagination.29
The éclat-based culture of Thomas King, then, had a dark and destructive flipside. For all the promise of immortality and indulgence it held out to men, it also instilled in them an unconscious and irresolvable resentment of standards for manhood that could not reasonably be met. As men struggled vainly against the omnipresent possibility of failure, they occasionally fashioned imaginary empires out of their own self-hate. No Southerner better represents this tendency than Edgar Allan Poe. To everything he was ever accused of, Poe bleakly responded, I did it—not merely because he did do it but because, having pointed the finger at himself so long and so ably, he was ever ready to confess to anything. When the Boston Daily Star charged Poe with appearing at the Lyceum in a “gentlemanly condition of liquor obfuscation,” Poe was furious. “In the first place,” he told his readers, “why cannot these miserable hypocrites say ‘drunk’ at once and be done with it? In the second place we are perfectly willing to admit that we were drunk—in the face of at least eleven or twelve hundred Frogpondians [Poe’s nickname for Bostonians] who will be willing to take the oath that we were not. We are willing to admit either that we were drunk, or that we set fire to the Frogpond, or that once upon a time we cut the throat of our grandmother. The fact is, we are perfectly ready to admit anything at all.” Poe’s point, exaggerated for effect, is accurate—a man can’t very well be accused of something he has already admitted to, and Poe’s tales, poems, and essays read like one long, terrible confession.30
But the perversity that plays out so prominently in Poe’s life and fiction masks a feature far more chilling: an authorial control as tight and total as a death grip. His themes were hot passions—murder, obsession, torment, and madness—but he always rendered them coolly, with precision, discipline, and a discomfiting sanity. His subjects were often fantastic—balloon rides and voyages off the edge of the world—but he always described them in meticulous detail, with objectivity, authority, and compelling reasonableness. “You often revolt at his subjects,” remarked an 1854 review in the Messenger, “but no sooner does he enter on them, than your attention is riveted.… [Held in] his glittering eye…you forget everything—your home, your friends, your creed, your very personal identity, and become swallowed up like a straw in the maelstrom…. And during all the wild and whirling narrative, the same chilly glitter has continued to shine in his eye, his blood has never warmed and he has never exalted his voice above a thrilling whisper.” Poe had not given up the project of being a man, had not given up his imperial impulse, his rigid control, or his expansive vision. Rather, like Patterson and countless other Southern men, Poe had turned these drives inward upon himself, seeking to erect a personal empire of sorrow, a kingdom of pain over which he had sole mastery. The self-destructiveness so often associated with him was simply the creative drive working in reverse; out of destruction and death he fashioned an anti-empire with all the appointments and glories he had been cheated out of by life. Thus his House of Usher collapses into the tarn, his City Upon the Sea slips quietly beneath the dark water, never to reemerge. In the decline of Civilization lay a Civilization all Poe’s own; here he was an aristocrat, not declining but expanding, a dark prince presiding over a collapse of the universe as magnificent as its birth. His rage, he admitted, was a “sacred fury,” a sort of alternate religion in which he indulged his dream of a release more permanent than death. Poe, a contemporary critic marveled, had somehow slipped “below the suicide point [where] death open[ed] up no hope for him [because] his quarrel [was] not with life on earth [but] with being anywhere.” But even in his vast condemnation of being, Poe did not turn against the ideals for manhood that had been taught him in his Virginia boyhood. “I only beg you to remember,” Poe wrote his stepfather at nineteen, “that you yourself cherished the cause of my leaving your family—Ambition. If it has not taken the channel you wished it, it is not the less certain of its object. Richmond & the U. States were too narrow a sphere & the world shall be my theatre…. My father do not throw me aside as degraded. I will be an honor to your name.” In building an empire of his “sacred fury,” Poe created the mightiest Civilization of all, a Civilization of decay at war with God himself.31
From Alabama backwater to Carolina estate, Southern men also spoke Poe’s language of éclat. “I came into this world without my knowledge or consent,” noted planter James Henry Hammond in his diary. “If…a Superior and Designing Being created me and placed me here; if this is all or the best, I do not thank him. I wish I had been let alone. I should not object—hating the pain and lurking fear of death, to be remanded at once to my original nothingness, for this is a world of ineffable misery and from my experience I abominate it and most that it contains. If there is a Hereafter, then the God who placed me here owes me large compensation for the sufferings I have involuntarily undergone on Earth.” Hammond, like Poe, has slipped below the suicide point, indulging an appetite for self-destruction as voracious as his appetite for self-aggrandizement. Throughout his life, Hammond built up his personal and political empire, only to then preside over its dismantling. As governor of South Carolina, he was poised to spring into national politics, but preferred instead sticky fumblings with his nubile nieces, resulting in disgrace. From his disgrace, he threatened to rise again, only to alienate his wife and society in sexual forays in the slave quarter that none could be expected to ignore. Hammond’s cycle of self-destruction and resurrection was in perfect sync with the imaginative cycle of the antebellum male more generally. The bid for immortality took them from a bloated to a despairing sense of self and back again; unable to live up to their own standard for manhood, they often indulged a depressive melancholy as romantic, as fanciful, as self-involved, as the notion of immortality itself.32