In the South and for the South : southern mind and character in the Southern Literary Messenger : 1852-1860
Date
1995
Authors
Parker, Joyce Doreen
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Abstract
Much has been written about the antebellum South and the search continues for those overarching themes that have created a popular conception of the region as particularly distinctive. As the last slaveholding region in the Western world, the Old South has been invested with many characteristics that seem to stem from its involvement with this one defining institution. When antislavery activists in the North began to focus upon the South denouncing the
slave system and those who perpetuated it as cruel, immoral and anti-Christian, Southerners felt compelled to speak out in their own defense. This study deals with the nature of that response at it was expressed in the literature of the South in the decade before the Civil War.
In order to learn more about the South through its literature, a study was made of the material published in the antebellum South's most prominent literary journal, the Southern Literary Messenger. During the 1850's, the Messenger published material that not only denounced outside interference in the South's domestic affairs by a strident antislavery faction in the North but enforced rather than questioned the section's ideological belief system. Slavery was adressed only by indirection and the South's defense came to rest upon the traditional values through which Southerners had found validation in the past.
When, in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, an inflamatory antislavey novel that deeply angered the South, the Messenger came to the defense of its section. Its response to Stowe's work provided a significant point of departure for this study as Southern writers were encouraged to promote their section through its literature. Thus, the Southern literary imagination can be seen to reveal recurrent themes, motifs and situations that not only provide a unique insight into the workings of the Southern mind when placed on the defensive but define the relationship between the historical reality and the literary interpretation of the South.
It becomes clear that the Messenger's contributors felt the need to defend the concept of slavery rather than slavery itself. Their work shows the antebellum South to be a conservative society that placed great emphasis on a traditional value system that not only provided support for the section in the face of attack but also provided comfort and reassurance to its inhabitants. This study, therefore, shows the role that a Southern journal played in creating a definitive portrait of Southern life and character in answer to the calumnies promoted by its enemies in the North.