Imperfectly Imperial: Northern Travel Writers in the Postbellum U.S. South, 1865–1880

Abstract

Travel accounts of the Reconstruction U.S. South (1865–1880) played a formative role in the process of determining where the region fit within the nation-state after the Civil War. Postbellum travel narratives by northern men and women, in particular, dealt with the South's contradictory placement as both an occupied territory of the North/nation and part of the national body itself through a discourse of imperialism that translated a North-South regional binary into a colonizer-colonized distinction and framed the South as an imperial holding of the U.S. This article uses postcolonial studies and postcolonial geographies of North America to examine three textual themes that sustained this imperial framing of the South within northern travel narratives: discourses of civilization, descriptions of nature, and discussions of whiteness. The first two themes bolstered northern travelers' positioning of the South as an imperial holding, although gender contoured how northern travelers participated in a civilizing mission directed toward newly emancipated African Americans and how easily these travelers assumed the role of imperial explorer in rural and marginal southern sites. By contrast, white rural poverty in the postbellum South, through its simultaneous racial similarity to and class difference from white northern travelers, problematized a clean separation of North from South and highlighted the imperfections and contradictions of the postbellum South as an imperial holding of the North/nation. This article argues for more critical attention to the production of southern difference in the mid-nineteenth century and the postbellum South's place in relation to future American imperial projects.

Key Words:

• travel writing
• whiteness
• gender
• American South
• postcolonial studies

Acknowledgements

I thank Richard Schein, Geraldine Pratt, Derek Gregory, and Paola Bachetta for commenting on various drafts of this paper. I also am grateful for the helpful comments provided by the editor and four anonymous reviewers on this article.

Notes

1. I use the phrase “North/nation” to reference the slippage between the North and the nation, particularly in a mid-nineteenth-century context.

2. Paired with the tendency to speak and write about the South as a unified region is a line of scholarship focused on the region's geographical and cultural diversity (see Inscoe 1995; Hill and Beaver 1998; Reid 1999). I thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to stress this point.

3. Despite these challenges to traditional representations of a South at odds with the rest of the nation, some scholars continue to locate a cultural lag that, in the face of the region's changing political economy, maintains “the South of the imagination” (Gray 1996; Gretlund 1999). This “fissure or divide between material change and mental alteration” (Gray 1996, 226), however, reproduces images of a South mired in its past and unable to keep pace with the remainder of the U.S.

4. Said's argument is founded on a one-way line of influence from “the West” to “the Orient,” and his work has been criticized for silencing resistance to the West's representations of the Orient (Bhabha 1990; Sprinkler 1992). Although this unidirectional framing has less purchase in a postbellum U.S. South that participated in its own representation in various ways (see, for example, Hoge and Bayne 1879), the mechanisms, if not the specifics, of Said's argument provide a theoretical framework for my analysis.

5. Although not deploying postcolonial theory, Joseph Persky (1992) has analyzed the characterization of the South as a colonial dependency in discussions of the region's economic standing. His analysis does not consider the Reconstruction era.

6. In his examination of American empire, David Slater (1999) moves from the 1848 War with Mexico to the 1898 annexation of Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine archipelago. Although this historical tracing of American imperial activities is not uncommon, it overlooks the role of the Reconstruction era in the South as both a time period and a space within which the U.S. worked out some of the details of how to be an imperial nation-state within the confines of its own territory.

7. An exception is Anne Rowe (1978), who traces temporal changes in approaches to the South but does so through novels. Christopher Mulvey (1983) looks at southern lands through the writings of British travelers. An extensive bibliography of postbellum travelers exists (Clark 1962), although it is not entirely accurate.

8. This historical narrative demands a caveat, as it creates a one-way transfer of knowledge, money, and power onto a passive and captive region. While making a nice story that northern travelers themselves liked to tell, things were not actually that simple in the South (Foster 1987).

9. Sidney Andrews (1837–1880) traveled through North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in 1865, writing for the Chicago Tribune and Boston Advertiser and publishing his travels in book form in 1866. By his own admittance, Andrews focused primarily on the political activities of black and white southerners but wrote extensively of other aspects of southern society, particularly the white middle class and underclass. Andrews held an especially negative view of a postwar South and wrote bitterly of what he considered “Southern barbarism.”

10. Because of the postbellum South's ambiguous place within the nation-state, the immediate postwar era was a particularly important time for the production and reiteration of a regional distinction between North and South. Although a regional binary did not capture every aspect of the postbellum relationship between North and South, in the travel accounts under discussion here, the distinction between the two regions seemed not only entirely natural but also in need of no justification for its ability to capture intranational postwar relations.

11. I also reviewed a handful of accounts by southern and British writers to contextualize the northern travel accounts on which I focus, although I do not discuss these other accounts here for lack of space.

12. In his bibliography of postbellum travel accounts of the South, Clark (1962) lists Mary Ames as Mary Clemmer Ames, a well-known journalist and author of the time period. This connection seems unlikely, however, since Mary Clemmer Ames retook her maiden name after divorcing her husband, Daniel Ames, in 1874. In addition, Mary Clemmer (Ames) died in 1884, and the Mary Ames under discussion here participated in the preparation of her diary for publication in 1906.

13. Within the context of poor black communities, white northerners' class standing also bolstered their position. Outside this context, they, like other colonial men and women (Memmi 1967/1991), retained only a weak connection to middle-class social and economic privilege.

14. John Trowbridge (1827–1916) traveled through the South in 1865 and 1866 to see southern cities and Civil War battlefields. Best known for his friendship with Walt Whitman, Trowbridge wrote for Stebbin's Publishing House, which sold his travel narrative by subscription. His account is one of the more popular writings of a Reconstruction South.

15. Mary Balkun (1998) notes a similar absence of autobiographical information in the published account of Sarah Kemble Knight's New England journeys in the early eighteenth century.

16. Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), a journalist and Republican politician and diplomat, wrote for the Cleveland Herald and Cincinnati Gazette and gained wide acclaim for his Civil War coverage under the pseudonym “Agate.” He toured the postwar South on three occasions between April 1865 and January 1866, sometimes in the company of dignitaries like Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and sometimes alone. After his travels, Reid assumed the editorship of the New York Tribune and held this position for many years. In 1889, he became minister to France and eventually returned to the U.S. to accept the vice-presidential nomination on the unsuccessful Harrison Republican ticket. In 1905, Reid was named ambassador to Great Britain, where he remained until he died. Reid's travel account of a postbellum South has been widely cited, although he is primarily known for his political affiliations.

17. Ralph Brown (1948) notes that in South Carolina, the physical placement of roads along higher ground made the land seem thinly populated to visitors unfamiliar with the country, thus raising the possibility that, at least in South Carolina, these descriptions could be not only strategic but also inaccurate.

18. John Paterson Green was born in North Carolina in 1845 but moved at an early age to Ohio. In 1870, he returned to the South and settled in South Carolina. Traveling through the Carolinas in the summer of 1872, Green wrote much of southern black lore but very little of the actual places through which he traveled. Highly critical of southern white treatment of blacks, he supported black migration to northern and western states, advice he himself took when he returned to the North at the end of his travel account. The authenticity of Green's account has been doubted by Clark (1962), who suggests that Green's travel narrative may be an example of nineteenth-century Republican propaganda, based on a letter found in one of the few remaining copies of the book.

19. King's 1875 text falls in the middle of what Gail Bederman (1995) considers a transition from “manliness,” defined in terms of restraint and Victorian middle-class morality, to “masculinity,” defined in terms of physical prowess and virility in the late-nineteenth century. Bederman connects this fin-de-siecle redefinition of manhood to discourses of racial dominance particularly around “civilization” in the era.

20. This harsher view of poor white southern women can be found throughout these travel narratives. See, in particular, the account of John William De Forest (1968), an author and Freedmen's Bureau agent in Greenville, South Carolina, from 1866 to 1867.

21. See also Andrews 1886, 183, 334–35, 338; Green 1880, 150; King 1875,; 340; De Forest 1968, 63–64.

22. “White trash” emerged as a derogatory term for poor white southerners in the early nineteenth century through use by African American slaves. Over time, the label was incorporated into early twentieth-century discussions of racial degeneration and eugenics (Newitz and Wray 1997).

23. “Cracker” was also a popular derogatory term for poor southern whites. It, however, carried a stronger connotation of uncouth behavior and attitudes and, at times, was used to distinguish this group from poor white southerners more generally.

24. Traveler and author Mary Abigail Dodge (1833–1896) was born in Massachusetts and educated briefly at Cambridge University. Dodge was an early critic of domesticity and “white women's subordination within middle-class homes” (Newman 1999, 74), although she was also an active “anti-suffragist.” Writing under the pseudonym Gail Hamilton, Dodge “emerged full-blown on the national journalistic scene in the 1860s” (ibid., 73) as one of the first female political correspondents and contributed to journals such as the Atlantic Monthly and the Congregationalist. In 1867 she traveled across the U.S. through various northern cities but south only as far as Chattanooga, Tennessee.