Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 151the South, many of them, tended to see it in terms of feudalism – although, of course,
in terms of feudal darkness: “the South,” Wendell Phillips claimed, for instance, “is the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.” Those many Southerners, in turn, who defended
the vision of the South as a feudal paradise not only paid it lip service. When the time
came, they were ready to fight for it, and even pay for it with their blood.
Two women writers who offer intriguing variations on this idea of the pre-Civil
War South as a model of paternalism are Caroline Lee Hentz (1800–1856) and Mary
Boykin Chesnut (1823–1886). Hentz was born in the North; however, she moved
south, to North Carolina, then later Kentucky, Alabama, and Florida. She wrote
many novels to support herself and her husband: “I am compelled to turn my brains
to gold and to sell them to the highest bidder,” she complained once. But the novel
for which she remains best known is The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854). The
interest of the novel lies in the way, in painting an idyllic portrait of life on the old
plantation, it replicates the pro-slavery argument in fictional form. In this, it is
typical in some ways of plantation novels from The Valley of Shenandoah (1824) by
George Tucker (1775–1861) and Swallow Barn by John Pendleton Kennedy through
to many of the romances of William Gilmore Simms. It is typical, too, in other ways,
of stories announcing the special status and even Manifest Destiny of the South, like
The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851) and The
Cavaliers of Virginia (1834–1835) and The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe (1845) by
William A. Caruthers (1802–1846). Above all, though, it is typical of the legion of
novels written in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Of Stowe,
Hentz once said, “slavery, as she describes it, is an entirely new institution to us.” She
felt she knew the institution far better than the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, having
lived in the South; and she was determined to show her readers how. The story
contains the usual retinue of characters attending the plantation romance, including
young men full of “magnanimity and chivalry,” “pure and high-toned” young
women, and interfering abolitionists who are determined to free the slaves even
though they do not want to be freed. But what supplies the argumentative core of
the book is the hero, a Southern planter called Mr. Moreland, and his faithful
personal “servant,” Albert, “a young mulatto.” Moreland is described as “intelligent
and liberal”; Albert is “a handsome, golden-skinned youth,” “accustomed to wait on
his master and listen to the conversation of refined gentlemen.” As a result of such
service, the reader is told, Albert “had very little of the dialect of the negro, and those
familiar with the almost unintelligible jargon which delineations of the sable
character put into their lips, could not but be astonished at the propriety of his
language and pronunciation.” This relieves Hentz of the burden of writing such
dialect herself for a relatively important character with much to say. But it has the
further advantage of supplying one small but crucial illustration of the benefits of
slavery. The slave system, its defenders were inclined to argue, not only supported
and protected the slaves, it helped to educate and refine them; and Albert’s distinctive
manner of speech supposedly shows just that.
The way that Hentz goes about her business of writing a fictional defense of the
South in general, and slavery in particular, is indicated by the opening chapters of theGGray_c02.indd 151ray_c 02 .indd 151 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM