Masters, slaves, and the "Mind of the South".

Donaldson, Susan V.

WHENEVER THE PHRASE "THE MIND OF THE SOUTH" CROPS UP, POOR feckless Roony Lee nearly always seems to get trotted out as a prime example of white Southern mindlessness--although he was anything but poor and feckless to the half-envious Henry Adams, who recalls in The Education of Henry Adams the Virginian student's initial popularity and "habit of command" during their Harvard College years. The son of Colonel Robert E. Lee of the Second United States Cavalry, Roony was notable for his handsome demeanor and his singular absence of self-consciousness, not to mention his stupidity. "Strictly, the Southerner had no mind," Adams muses, again not without a certain envy; "he had temperament." An air of command might define him, but he was, ultimately, "simple beyond analysis" (57). That very simplicity, though, suggested something of a unified sensibility, linking intellect and emotion, the self and society, for which an entire generation of modernist writers--and not just white Southerners longed. Simple he might have been, but he nonetheless has served as a shorthand of sorts for an image of the Old South as organic, traditional, static, resistant to modernity, and sequestered from the pressures of time. This was the image that enticed the Southern Agrarians in their war against the ills of industrialism and modernity in I'll Take My Stand--and in particular Allen Tate, who defined his own modernity time and again in opposition to what he thought was that lost world of organic stability and tradition, a world both alluring and ultimately elusive.

It was, though, very much an illusory world, the creation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century white conservative Southerners who had far more in common with Henry Adams than with Roony Lee. There are a good many fiches to be drawn from Michael O'Brien's magisterial Conjectures of Order, but chief among them is his thorough demolition of that most lasting of Southern myths--the strangely persistent conviction that there actually existed in the Old South an ordered, traditional, homogeneous society sequestered from the world at large and above all from modernity. The antebellum white South that he limns is far more like the fluid world of mobility, uncertainty, and change that William Faulkner's great-grandfather found in Tennessee and North Mississippi and that Faulkner himself recreated in the frontier town of Jefferson, Mississippi, into which Thomas Sutpen rode in the early 1830s. The white intellectual life that O'Brien paints for us is very much that of a postcolonial society hesitating between the doubt and uncertainty that peripheral status conveyed upon it and the momentum toward nationalism and imperialism that "sanctified a sense of mastery" (6). Emerging from these triple pressures of postcolonialism, nationalism, and imperialism in the sixty years leading up to the Civil War was a ferment of intellectual activity, O'Brien argues, marked not by the security of firmly held conviction and tradition but by migration, mobility, change, fluidity, and great cultural anxiety above all, fostered in no small part by the necessity of maintaining and defending the institution of slavery. For the region was as implicated in modernity, we are told, as was the North, however inflected Southern modernity was with the institution of slavery and its defense. Hence the region's purported traditionalism, coherence, stability, and organicism said a great deal more about the failings and desires of the modern intellectuals who revered that image of coherence than it did about the society and the mind of the Old South.

It would, in fact, be far more accurate, O'Brien suggests, to see the

Old South as something very like the "forlorn demon in the glass" that Allen Tate feared so much, his cousin Mr. Poe, whose lineaments were distressingly modern and hence all too close to his own (387; see also Gray 122). For the primary feature of this world was change, and it is significant, accordingly, that this argument for the region's implication in modernity is preceded with an epigraph from the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, quoted in an 1851 issue of the Southern Presbyterian Review. "There is absolutely nothing permanent, either without me, or within me, but only an unceasing change" (qtd. in O'Brien 1). O'Brien reminds us among other things that "the South had one of the fastest rates of urbanization of the first half of the nineteenth century," and that the region fairly percolated with people on the move and with foreign travelers--as well as a generous portion of white French refugees, along with slaves and people of color, from the Haitian Revolution (18). For an exemplar of tradition, it was a markedly "polyglot culture," one in which "perhaps only a bare majority of the population for the southeastern United States spoke English as a first language." Those languages ranged from the multitude of indigenous languages in the Southern back country to the emergence of Gullah along the southeastern coast as well as a chorus of West African languages and pockets of German, Spanish, and French. It takes only a quick survey of those multiple voices and languages and of many people on the move, O'Brien notes, to underscore the validity of Robert J. C. Young's observation in Colonial Desire. "The need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a counter sense of fragmentation and dispersion" (qtd. in O'Brien 12, n. 27).

Charting his way through those multiple voices and people amid bewildering change, O'Brien maps out a blueprint of sorts for the region's emerging economy of ideas, exchanges, and letters, an economy that extended deep into Europe as well as the Middle East, Africa, and Asia and made significant inroads into the Caribbean and Latin America, the latter of which were viewed as promising prospects for extending and consolidating the U.S. South's dreams of empire. The links and vehicles of exchange and distribution in this economy were varied, complicated, and ever-shifting: extensive travels abroad, education pursued in the U.S. North and in Europe, dialogues on the ongoing project of classifying the cultures and peoples of those multiple encounters, literary experiments responding to the new genres of Romanticism, debating societies, conversation clubs, pamphlets, correspondence, diaries, periodicals, ventures into the writing of history, political economy, government, philosophy, and theology, and above all the accelerating war of words over slavery, which cast an ever-lengthening shadow over all that was spoken, written, and argued about in the antebellum South. What emerges from this fury of activity and exchange was a vibrant public sphere constantly replenished by "torrents of print" that poured into private and academic libraries, bookshops, conversation circles, subscription lists, and eventually into the correspondence, journals, and belles lettres of the region (488). A region that could produce some 850 periodicals in the space of a mere fifty years, then, could hardly be characterized as intellectually feeble or indifferent to literary creation, however much intellectuals elsewhere, or those within, for that matter, might pronounce on the region's literary and creative shortcomings. Much of that intellectual activity would even take the form of highly self-conscious commentary on its production of voices, exchanges, and the identities and communities produced by those exchanges. "Indeed, the emergence of voices in Southern writing, the growth of dialogue as a way of telling stories and conveying meaning until in William Faulkner there came to be little else," O'Brien observes, "is one of the crucial themes of the South's literary history" (410-11).

That multitude of voices as well as the fluidity they evoked, necessitated the effort of asserting control and mastery, for the more white Southerners entered into exchange with the rest of the world and with themselves, the more conscious they became of slavery as something like the only real constant in their lives--something like "a still point" amid flux, as O'Brien notes of theological ventures in particular--and one that fell under mounting attack as antislavery forces gained momentum, in Haiti, in Britain, and in the U. S. North (1051). "Slavery," he adds, "was comprehensive, strict, formal, effective, an iron curtain between them and us." Everything else--even the emerging discourse on race--seemed "fluid, uncertain, contentious" (249). Increasingly, slavery came to direct the force and flow of those "torrents of print" and to shape the form and content of the region's public sphere--the way white women were defined, the gauges by which economic exchange was defined and measured, the form and content of autobiography, the growing preoccupation with etching out reassuring outlines and categories of race, the theory and practice of religion, and even scrutiny of the past, which, as O'Brien notes, paraphrasing David Lowenthal, was beginning to look distinctly like another country altogether. Throughout the length and breadth of those words was the imperative of defining the boundary between them and us, an imperative motivated in part by the very fluidity of those pronouns as they shifted under the weight of writers' uncertainty about the audience they were addressing. Fifteen years after Appomattox, George W. Cable would illustrate that imperative and that uncertainty in the words of one of his characters in The Grandissimes, one who sounds suspiciously like the French Creole historian Charles Gayarre. Tutoring an outsider in the racial mores of early nineteenth-century New Orleans, Cable's spokesman for those mores frankly acknowledges that "when we say 'we people,' we always mean we white people. The non-mention of color always implies pure white; and whatever is not pure white is to all intents and purposes pure black. When I say the 'whole community,' I mean the whole white portion; when I speak of the 'undivided public sentiment,' I mean the sentiment of the white population" (59).

To define "us," then, required what O'Brien calls "the plain, brutal exclusions of the world before 1861," and he points out the lengths to which white Southerners went "to silence their Africans, by denying them education, access to the printed word, and hence to writing, even in manuscript form." It is that policy of exclusion, he asserts, that requires the focus of his study on "those who were associated in the governing of the Southern world" and "only obliquely" on "those whom, chiefly, they tried to govern" (13). For those who did indeed suffer that silencing, whether slave or free--among them Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and William Wells Brown--did not, by O'Brien's lights, see themselves as participants in a culture and a community that so deliberately and coldly excluded them and had done so, as Philip Morgan suggests in Slave Counterpoint, since the eighteenth century. They might have formed a chorus of sorts, O'Brien adds, "in the white South's House of Atreus," but ultimately their place was offstage, beyond the circle of community (13). But O'Brien is nothing if not scrupulously honest about the dangers of replicating these exclusionary strategies, and he notes uneasily that it very probably would have been easier to have written this kind of book a generation or two earlier, before our contemporary age of multiculturalism and inclusiveness.

To be sure, O'Brien is highly sensitive to the politics of representation in general and the consequences that lay in the exclusion of African Americans from the public sphere of antebellum white Southern discourse. However much slavery shaped the warp and woof of the region's tapestry of words and ideas, slaves themselves were curiously absent in novels and letters, theories of government and political economy, theological dissertations, diaries, and poetry. With the notable exception of poetry by George Moses Horton and William Grayson, slaves made the briefest and most fleeting of appearances in the region's white belles lettres--and in this respect there are curious correspondences to be weighed and considered with visual representations of the period, with those strangely empty plantation landscapes that John Michael Vlach examines to such good effect in The Planter's Prospect. In the region's emerging visual culture--in lithographs, engravings, miniatures, daguerreotypes, and paintings--slaves were virtually invisible, and here it would be well to remember that visual representations of slaves in this period were often associated with abolitionist publications skilled in incendiary polemics and with African American artists, like Robert Scott Duncanson, who publicly allied themselves with the abolitionist cause (see in general Stauffer and Hartigan). In the economy of words and ideas created in the antebellum white South, African Americans, admittedly, had little if any say in the control and distribution of discursive exchanges--but they could from time to time disrupt those mechanisms of control and distribution--as did a subversive network of black sailors, maroon communities, and even missionaries allied with Native Americans who resisted Indian Removal when copies of David Walker's Appeal were distributed up and down the southeastern seaboard (see in general Hinks). Here again, though, it is notable that Southern white discourse time and again resisted acknowledging those efforts, except through strategies of blockades, bans, and censorship. Perhaps more to the point the length and breadth of white antebellum writing in the region seemed to become increasingly pockmarked with those omissions and silences about slaves themselves--in literature, in writing about government and political economy, even in racial theory and the proslavery argument itself. "Indeed, by the end," O'Brien concludes, "it became habitual to deny that Southern social relations constituted slavery at all. In truth, real slaves had never been central. The genre had been a way for white Southerners to articulate a theory for society and they had always been more preoccupied with how whites related to one another in politics, economics, and society than how whites related to African Americans" (991).

Those omissions and silences, though, haunt the mind of the Old South in ways that resemble nothing so much as the Africanist presences that Toni Morrison sees as defining whiteness in the American literary imagination. They dog the conversations and writings of the intellectuals O'Brien portrays here with a persistence that very nearly makes their silences audible because ultimately these are men and women who have indeed defined themselves and their world, as O'Brien himself notes, within "the dialectics of modern cultural identity," requiring exchange, interaction, dialogue, debate, and finally contention (147). One of those silences even erupts into noisy rebuttal early on in Conjectures of Order, in the tense exchange through lawyers between Frederick Douglass, lecturing in Ireland and Britain in the mid-1840s, and Thomas Smyth, a white Charleston Presbyterian minister visiting in Britain who took umbrage at being confronted with Douglass's high visibility and conspicuous oratorical presence and perhaps even more emphatically at being called to account by a man he considered a slave. Douglass, if anything, based his life, writing, and career on challenging the world from which Thomas Smyth emerged, and nowhere in his work is the sustained power of that challenge represented more forcefully than in the celebrated confrontation with the slavebreaker Covey in the 1845 narrative. So too did a host of other slave narrators, whom O'Brien discusses at some length as pioneers in Southern autobiography--and as forceful trespassers into the public sphere that tried so strenuously to keep them out. In narrative after narrative former slaves took issue with the representations of slavery that played no small role in shaping the public sphere of the antebellum Southern world, and in this respect one can make a strong argument for their shaping--and dialectical--role in the proslavery argument itself, which sought at every turn to articulate a justification for the system of bondage that those slave narrators had fled and that abolitionist publications assaulted with accelerating ferocity. The war over slavery, it can be argued, played just as crucial a role in the "dialectics of modern cultural identity" for the antebellum South as did, for that matter, former slaves and their abolitionist allies, from David Walker to William Lloyd Garrison. One has only to look back at that startling episode of confrontation, albeit through lawyers, between Frederick Douglass and Thomas Smyth that O'Brien probes and ponders, to consider the consequences of the silences and omissions marking the world of the antebellum white South and to perceive something very like the naked outline of the master-slave dialectic, which underscores, like nothing else, the interdependence of slaveholder and slave, white and black. If Hegel tells us anything--and I would suggest that a good deal of Hegelian thinking shapes the contours of this sweeping survey of white Southern intellectual life--it is that one's own sense of subjectivity and identity is dependent, as political philosopher Charles Taylor maintains, "on ... dialogical relations with others" (34). More specifically, another commentator on the politics of recognition, Eimear Wynne, suggests that one's identity ultimately depends on "viewing oneself as an addressee or interlocutor of other subjects" (3). Indeed, self-consciousness, Wynne adds, "depends on the other" and on "recognition of the other, for that matter," recognition that also serves as "a requirement for understanding" (3).

These are issues, I would suggest, that shadow the last pages of Conjectures of Order, where O'Brien ponders the failures of his white Southern intellectuals to order their world and put an end to the doubts and uncertainty originating to a great extent in slavery and the necessity of maintaining and justifying it amid a world of change and interconnection. With George Fitzhugh, for one, the proslavery argument, O'Brien suggests, "exploded into paradox" as Fitzhugh resorted to the language of sentimentalism and to antebellum millennialism for a defense of slavery that also represented "a refusal of imperialism," of the very effort to assert mastery inspiring that defense (991, 974). In doing so, though, he undermined, as O'Brien maintains, "the proslavery argument's strongest suit, its cold cynicism about the intrinsic brutality of the human condition" (978). Indeed, the shadow of slavery and the exclusions it required played some part at least in the theological writings of Presbyterian minister James Henley Thornwell, whose Calvinist perspective revealed human beings not as masters but as prisoners of a disordered universe radically dependent on God's grace and slaves themselves as both human chattel and "moral agent[s]" in their own right (1155). These were tensions and contradictions that revealed, O'Brien concludes, something of Thornwell's own entrapment, writing on theology and serving as President of South Carolina College with the knowledge that just out of sight some of his college charges, white South Carolinians, might well have been abusing their authority and their mastery over the slaves that they owned. This shadow--along with the failures and doubts it evoked--hangs over the four portraits with which his monumental study concludes, of novelist Augusta Evans, whose 1859 novel Beulah, a novel of a woman's crisis of faith, was a modest bestseller in the region; of James Johnson Pettigrew, whose 1861 volume Notes on Spain and the Spaniards evokes the same longings for tradition, stability, and order that Allen Tate articulated; of historian William Henry Trescot, who finally saw history itself as dialectical and contentious; and most of all of Mary Boykin Chesnut, whose famous Civil War diary contemplates the failures of her world and the boundaries of its intelligibility. She is, ultimately, unable to read the faces of her slaves even as she contemplates the way they are utterly disregarded and unacknowledged by her fellow white Southerners. She is unable as well to make sense of the multiplying and seemingly unidentifiable voices and conversations that surround her as the war draws to an end. These are voices that she records, O'Brien eloquently argues, in ways that evoke nothing so much as a proto-modernist fragmentation of narrative order, but they are also voices, I would argue, that evoke something like those unacknowledged subjectivities of the slaves she uneasily contemplates at the start of the war--the voices requiring repression and exclusion in the world whose shattering Chesnut records in her extraordinary diary--in both form and content--with all its anticipations of the modernist disorientation that would come to define Alien Tate and his colleagues.

Hence I take issue--respectfully but firmly--with O'Brien's primary focus on the white proslavery South and the public realm of letters it created through the very strategies of exclusion and repression that Mary Chesnut uneasily and obliquely ponders and that haunt the theological writings of James Henley Thornwell. To be sure, O'Brien strains against those self-imposed boundaries as much as humanly possible in a dauntingly comprehensive survey of this world that also includes writers of slave narratives and dissidents like Sarah Grimke, and other women writers as varied as Mary Chesnut, Augusta J. Evans, and Louisa McCord, who make but rare appearances in a good many earlier intellectual and literary histories. It is much to his credit that he makes a place in this world for a writer like Augusta Evans, whose novel Beulah seemed to have struck a chord among a good many readers besieged by something like that same doubt that worried Evans herself and her protagonist--and all the more so because Evans has been pilloried as a matter of course by twentieth-century writers ranging from Allen Tare himself to Eudora Welty. But I would argue that the very content and form of O'Brien's magnum opus alludes to the voices that required suppression, censorship, and silencing in the making of the antebellum white South and its economy of letters--to the curious, mounting silences about the slaves themselves, to the growing dependence on slavery as a point of orientation, and to the dialectical structuring of identity and community so emphasized through this entire study. In many respects, I think, the eloquent ending, which ponders, if only implicitly, how distant Augusta Evans, Mary Chesnut, Trescot, and Johnson are from Roony Lee and how close they are to Allen Tate, underscores the failures and limits incurred by three generations of white Southern intellectuals who could not, in the end, acknowledge or recognize the very human beings who helped define their most basic sense of selves, community, and language. They were, in the end, masters without slaves, whose self-consciousness was ultimately circumscribed by the recognition they withheld from their slaves and, paradoxically, by their dependence upon those they designated as human chattel. Nearly a century later Frantz Fanon would ably define that very dilemma:

 Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his
 existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long
 as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other
 will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being,
 on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and
 reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his
 life is condensed. (216-17)

It is, on some level, the failure to recognize those possibilities, that dependence, that intersubjectivity, that Mary Chesnut contemplates in a diary that records mounting disorder, incoherence, and finally, unintelligibility. Like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, she is propelled backward into the future by the blast of time and "progress" as she surveys the wreckage of her past and her world, no longer offering any semblance of order or intelligibility, and in this respect she serves as something very like O'Brien's own angel of history, presiding over these two volumes, charting the course of a failed and dismantled public sphere. But there is another figure that could preside nearly as well, and it is one that in some respects more directly illustrates the master-slave dialectic: Edgar Allan Poe's hero of Indian wars, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith in the story, "The Man That Was Used Up." Subtitled "A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign," the story offers one of those needling, satirical portraits in which Poe delighted, this time of a hero of "the late tremendous swamp-fight away down South, with the Bugaboo and Kickapoo Indians"--a not too subtle allusion to the Second Seminole War with its associations of Indian Removal and slave rebellions (309). He is a hero whose reputation precedes him, constructed as it is by accolades and gossip, but somehow the descriptions and snatches of praise that the first-person narrator hears never quite add up to a sum total, a whole portrait that extends beyond the words, "He's the man--." The narrator learns why when he finally comes to meet the great man, who is, after all, nothing but a pile of rags, bits, and pieces, the multiple outcome of one battle after another, until his black servant Pompey begins to assemble him--with cork leg, wig, teeth, eye, and palate. Under Pompey's careful ministrations the general emerges as the hero of the late Indian wars, famous for his handsome demeanor and rich voice--but he is a hero, the narrator now realizes, who is utterly dependent upon the devoted attention of his servant, who literally puts him back together each and every day. With more than a little justification, then, the narrator is able to finish that fragmentary sentence, for he learns that the general "was the man--was the man that was used up" (316). It's a description in many respects, I think, that can serve nearly as well as Mary Chesnut's own meditation upon fragmentation and failure as an epitaph for the lost world, exclusions and all, of the slaveholding South.

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. 1918. Introd. D. W. Brogan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961.

Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In Illuminations. 1955. Ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253-64.

Cable, George W. The Grandissimes. 1880. Introd. Michael Kreyling. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.

Gray, Richard. Writing the South: Notes on an American Region. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Hartigan, Lynda. Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America. Washington, D. C.: National Museum of American Art/Smithsonian Institution P, 1985.

Hinks, Peter P. To A waken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.

Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/U of North Carolina P, 1998.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign." In Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. By Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G. R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 307-16.

Stauffer, John. "Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures." Unpublished paper delivered at the Gilder Lehman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, Feb. 2005.

Tate, Allen. "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe." In Essays of Four Decades. Chicago: Swallow P, 1968. 385-400.

Taylor, Charles. "The Politics of Recognition." In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. and introd. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP, 1994. 25-73.

Vlach, John Michael. The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Painting. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.

Wynne, Eimear. "Reflections on Recognition: A Matter of Self-realization or a Matter of Justice?" Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vienna 9 (2000): 1-11. http://www.iwm.at/publ-jvc/jc-09-06.pdf

SUSAN V. DONALDSON

College of William and Mary