150 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865called “the Southern aristocrat – the true nobleman of that region,” shows just how
much he chose to follow his own advice.
While Simms turned mainly to fiction to defend the South and slave society,
Grayson used poetry. In 1856 he published a long poem in heroic couplets, “The
Hireling and the Slave,” devoted to the theme that the transplanted African slave
enjoyed a far better lot than the supposedly free worker who labored for
bare subsistence. On the one hand, Grayson offered an idyllic portrait of “Congo’s
simple child” learning “each civilising art” under the tutelage of his master; “schooled
by slavery,” he was also “fed, clothed, protected many a patient year.” On the other, he
painted a harrowing picture of the place and plight of the hireling, the “wage slave.”
This was a bleak vision of capitalism, framed within a decidedly conservative version
of American pastoral. And even when those who argued for slavery took what they
regarded as a more forensic, scientific approach, that strange version of pastoralism
remained. Both Hughs and Ruffin, for instance, wrote what they saw as learned
treatises. Hughes called his A Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (1854);
Ruffin titled his, even more impressively, The Political Economy of Slavery; or, The
Institution Considered in Regard to its Influence on Public Wealth and General Welfare
(1853). Learned they might have been, at least in appearance and general tone. But
that did not stop Ruffin from portraying the old plantation as a center of culture,
devoted to “social and mental occupation” and “the improvement of mind and
manners.” Nor did it prevent Hughes from anticipating the day when slavery, to
which he gave the euphemism “warranteeism,” would be accepted everywhere in the
United States – and so the sweet benefits of Southern pastoralism would be enjoyed
nationwide. The bizarre vision Hughes embraced and prophesied issued from the
impulse that animated the central argument for the South and slavery. And it both
recollected and anticipated many other, similar visions: many other occasions in
American thought and writing on which the slave society of the South was
rehabilitated, transformed into a garden paradise.
Of course, Ruffin and Hughes did try to construct an argumentative framework for
their visions. So did Dew in his Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831
and 1832 (1832). So did Hammond, in his speeches in the Senate: most famously, in
one delivered in 1858, where he argued that slaves were the “mud-sill,” the material
foundation on which “the civilisation, the refinement” of white Southern culture was
built. So, for that matter, did Hammond, Dew, Simms, and many others in a seminal
document for the cause, a collection of essays published in 1853 called The Pro-
Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern
States. The societies of the South and the North were seen, according to this frame-
work, as alternative social models: as respectively, a garden or a jungle, an organic
society or a brutally competitive one, a world of benevolent paternalism where slaves
lived secure in their homeplace or one of oppressive anarchy where wage slaves
fought, in a sense consumed, each other for personal gain: these were the maps of the
two regions charted by Southerners writing in support of their peculiar institution.
And it says much for their rhetorical power, if not for their historical accuracy, that
they exercised considerable influence, and perhaps still do. Even those who attackedGGray_c02.indd 150ray_c 02 .indd 150 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM