“Running like the Mischief”: Civil War Louisiana in the Southern Magazine

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Notes

¹ For Louisiana’s postwar politics and mounting disturbances, see Foner 262–63, 547–48, 550–52, and 554–55; Schafer 212–226; Marler 171–230, a discussion that includes this observation: “Far from epitomizing the New South, Reconstruction-era New Orleans constituted one of the region’s foremost sites of revanchist sentiment and counterrevolutionary resistance” (172). In occupied territory, reconciliation was only skin-deep.

² In correspondence with the author (July 9, 2017), Canter Brown noted that the stretch of Marsdale’s greatest activity coincided with Bryan’s “relatively fallow period” during the early 1870s, and he added, “She seems to have had trouble placing her material during those years so, perhaps, a pen name made her work seem fresher.” Brown also pointed to Bryan’s appetite for romantic novels during her youth; later, he observed, she would draw pen names from such sources, perhaps including Thomas Peckett Prest’s The Lone Cottage; or, Who’s the Stranger? (1845) and one of that novel’s principal characters, Lady Caroline Marsden. For further biographical information, see Wells, Susan Sutton Smith, and Patty’s three accounts (“A Georgia Authoress Writes Her Editor”, “A Woman Journalist in Reconstruction Louisiana”, “Bryan, Mary Edwards”).

³ On October 20, 1870, editor Browne wrote to poet Paul Hamilton Hayne about the Southern Magazine’s “very good subscription list” but he lamented that too many had not paid up. By March 25, 1872, Browne was confessing to Hayne, “If we had but 10,000 circulation (and what is that out of 8,000,000 [Southern] people?) we could give such prices to contributors as would bring the best work of the best men” (qtd. in Hubbell 718). By comparison, Harper’s Weekly claimed a readership of 300,000 for the issues of the early 1870s in which Thomas Nast’s attacks on New York City’s Tammany Hall, wood engraving after wood engraving, helped bring down the Democratic Ring’s Boss Tweed (Exman 88). Still, thousands read “Cousin Jack” at a time when a challenge to Federal prerogatives would never have appeared in the Republican newsmagazine.

⁴ For engaging discussions of the White House as it was perceived during the nineteenth century, see Baker as well as Seale, The President’s House 1: 76–601.

⁵ For the suggestion of similarities to Washington’s Mount Vernon, see Phillips-Schrock and Dalzell and Dalzell.

⁶ The Oxford English Dictionary defines “the mischief” as the Devil, a euphemism in regional phrases that were widespread during the nineteenth century. The first U.S. usage appeared in an article by Anthony Evergreen for New York’s Salmagundi during 1807, and the second in Maine writer’s John Neal’s Brother Jonathan: Or, The New Englanders (1825).