A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 149

At the same time as Whittier and his colleagues were arguing for the abolition of

slavery, another group in the South was arguing quite the contrary: that slavery was

not only an economic necessity but a positive good. As these Southerners saw or

claimed to see it, slavery was an integral part of the established, agrarian mode of life

enjoyed by all the states below the Mason–Dixon Line. These defenders of slavery,

and by extension of the social system of the South, included the writer and social

philosopher George Fitzhugh (1806–1881), the novelist William Gilmore Simms

(1806–1870), the poet William J. Grayson (1788–1863), the lawyer and writer Henry

Hughes (1829–1862), the scientific agriculturist and fanatical secessionist Edmund

Ruffin (1794–1865), a professor of political philosophy Thomas Dew (1802–1846),

and the politician James Henry Hammond (1807–1864). Some of the arguments

these defenders of slavery used were drawn from the Bible, purporting to find a

theological warrant for the slave system. Others involved supposedly scientific

theories concerning the separate, inferior origins of the “Negro race.” Central to

their defense, however, was the contention that Frederick Douglass, among many

others, found so offensive – that the South was a feudal society, an extended family

in which the master acted as patriarchal head. Everyone, black and white, had their

part to play in this family. And to the slave was given the role of child, dependant.

Incapable of looking after himself, the slave depended on the plantation patriarch –

and, to a lesser extent, the mistress or matriarch of the house – for support and

guidance: the security of work and a home, a basic moral education, and care in

infancy, sickness, and old age.

This defense of slavery as a fundamentally benevolent institution, and of slave

society as feudal, hierarchical, and harmonious, was articulated in various ways and

forms. Fitzhugh wrote several polemical works, among them Sociology for the South;

or, The Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All!; or, Slaves Without Masters

(1857). In these, he argued that the South was “the most prosperous and happy

country in the world” because it embraced a “protective philosophy, which takes

care of the weak while it governs them.” Simms published over eighty books. These

included The Yemassee (1835), a story of Indian warfare set in his home state of

South Carolina, and a long series of romances – written between 1834 and 1854 and

known as the Border Romances – that are based on the actual history of the South

from its settlement to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the Border Romances

set during the Revolution, in particular, Simms used the past to foreground

contemporary concerns: with the Revolutionaries of the South depicted as heroic

cavaliers, fighting for an essentially aristocratic civilization, and the British shown as

vulgar surrogates for the Yankees, with nothing to motivate them except “the love of

gain.” So, in the most striking of these works, The Sword and the Distaff (1853;

revised as Woodcraft (1854)), he places his cavalier hero, “a gentleman and a sports-

man” and “a center of parish civilisation,” against men who think in nothing but

crassly utilitarian terms. As one of these foils to the aristocratic hero puts it, talking

of the destiny of man, “He’s to go on gitting, and gitting, and gitting to the end of the

season, untill Death gits him.” “To be national in literature,” Simms once declared,

“one needs to be sectional”; and his fictional work, where he celebrated what he

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