The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900

THE

ROMANCE

OF

REUNION

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

GARY W. GALLAGHER,

EDITOR

THE

ROMANCE

OF REUNION

NORTHERNERS

AND THE SOUTH,

1865-1900

NINA SILBER

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS    CHAPEL HILL & LONDON

© 1993 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Silber, Nina.

The romance of reunion : northerners and the South, 1865–1900 / by Nina Silber.

p. cm. — (Civil War America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-2116-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-2116-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-4685-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-4685-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Reconstruction. 2. Sectionalism (United States)—History—19th century. 3. Northeastern States—Civilization. 4. Southern States—Civilization—Public opinion—History—19th century. 5. Public opinion—Northeastern States—History—

19th century. I. Title. II. Series.

E668.S57 1994    93-18626

973.8—dc20        CIP

06  05  04  03  02    7  6  5  4  3

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

To my parents,

Irwin and Sylvia,

and to the memory of

Frances Hutchins

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1    Intemperate Men, Spiteful Women, and Jefferson Davis:

Northern Views of the Defeated South

Chapter 2    A Reconstruction of the Heart:

Reunion and Sentimentality during Southern Reconstruction

Chapter 3    Sick Yankees in Paradise:

Northern Tourism in the Reconstructed South

Chapter 4    The Culture of Conciliation:

A Moral Alternative in the Gilded Age

Chapter 5    Minstrels and Mountaineers:

The Whitewashed Road to Reunion

Chapter 6    New Patriotism and New Men in the New South

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Gen. Lee Surrendering to Lieut. Gen. Grant

Jeff in Petticoats: A Song for the Times

The Head of the Confederacy on a New Base

Jefferson Davis as an Unprotected Female

Sketches at the White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia

Diven Rowing Us up Peter’s Creek, Wed., April 26th, Fla.

A Reminiscence of the White Sulphur Springs

Jesse Coxey riding at the front of Coxey’s Army

Promotional flyer for Held by the Enemy

Program cover for The Planter’s Wife

Poster for Bearing’s Decoration Day cycle races

Tableau depicting the reunion of Union and Confederate veterans in defense of Little Cuba

The Blue and Gray Together

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This manuscript, first in the form of a dissertation and then in its present incarnation, has been a touchstone in my life for several years. It has often been the focus of all my energy; it has occasionally been a distraction; it has frequently opened up intellectual horizons and new lines of communication. Most happily, it has brought me into contact with many people who, I believe, have enriched this work.

The ideas for this study first took shape during my graduate student years at the University of California at Berkeley. Here, several professors helped to awaken my curiosity about the mysteries of cultural history, southern history, and issues of race and gender, including Lawrence Levine, Barbara Christian, Mary Ryan, Carolyn Porter, and James Gregory. As my adviser on this project, Leon Litwack not only offered me his knowledge and expertise in southern history and the history of race relations but also communicated to me a method and approach for understanding history and the people who make it.

In many ways I may have learned the most from my fellow graduate students at Berkeley, a truly outstanding group of scholars whose goodwill never ceases to amaze me. I will always appreciate the advice and encouragement I received from Jeffrey Lena, Michael O’Malley, Elizabeth Reis, and Anita Tien. Thanks are also due to Steve Aron, who introduced me to the wonders of the thesaurus, and to Sharon Ullman, who ultimately impressed upon me the crucial importance of gender in all historical analysis. I am grateful to the History Department at the University of California at Berkeley for the fellowship support I received while working on my dissertation, and to the Western Association of Women Historians, who honored me with their graduate student fellowship in 1987.

In the summer of 1987 this manuscript, which was then only a glimmer of an idea, led me on a transcontinental journey from the fragrant eucalyptus groves and cappuccino dives of Berkeley to the muggy swamp that is Washington, D.C. Thanks to a Smithsonian Fellowship and the modern miracle of central air-conditioning, a dissertation finally took shape. In Washington I was again lucky to stumble upon an exceptionally warm and forthcoming group of scholars who, through weekly seminars, afternoon volleyball games, and Tuesday night revelries, made researching and writing extremely bearable. Nancy Bercaw, Pete Daniel, Christine Hoepfner, Karen Linn, and Mary Panzer all made a difference in terms of my work and my appreciation of the nuances of history.

As I began to present and polish my initial ideas in the form of papers and articles, I again came in contact with many generous scholars who gave me valuable insights and ideas about various parts of this manuscript. Henry Abelove, Edward Ayers, Gail Bederman, Anne Boylan, Catherine Clinton, Drew Faust, Gaines Foster, Richard Fox, Gary Kulik, and Jeffrey Sammons stand out in this group of supportive individuals. I am also grateful to the Boston University Humanities Foundation for the generous support I received which allowed me to complete this manuscript in the spring of 1992.

It has been a rare pleasure to work with the folks at the University of North Carolina Press. It would be hard to assemble a more helpful and considerate group of people. No young scholar could have a better editor, able to steer one through the mysteries of the publishing process with intelligence and compassion, than Lewis Bateman.

My husband, Louis Hutchins, whom I first met at the microfiche table in the Berkeley library, was not my toughest critic nor my sharpest editor, nor even my most proficient typist (although he did offer some tough criticisms and sharp editorial remarks). He was, however, my rock of support and gave me the confidence and encouragement which convinced me that I could see this project through to its conclusion.

In light of all this manuscript has taken me through, it is, perhaps, fitting that the final revision was sent to the Press only two weeks before my son, Benjamin Silber Hutchins, was born. In some strange and unexplainable way, he has actually lightened my load in these past hectic months. His joy has given my life and my work a new perspective.

I am sorry that my mother-in-law, Frances Hutchins, did not live to see this work completed. Her sparkling curiosity always challenged me; her deep and abiding compassion always warmed my soul. I dedicate this book, in part, to her memory.

I also dedicate this work to my parents, Irwin and Sylvia Silber. Early on, they instilled in me an intellectual curiosity and a commitment to understanding the social and cultural forces which have shaped the lives of ordinary people. I will always be grateful.

THE

ROMANCE

OF

REUNION

INTRODUCTION

The war, proclaimed the New England author Charles Dudley Warner, twenty years after Appomattox, is over in spirit as well as in deed. Modern readers might well be skeptical of Warner’s excessive optimism, yet in the late nineteenth century such enthusiastic forecasts became something of a mind-numbing mantra in American society. One could find evidence in both North and South, among Civil War veterans, journalists, novelists, and countless other Americans, of an intensifying plea for sectional accord. On this occasion, Charles Warner’s remarks were prompted by that writer’s 1885 visit to the southern states and, more specifically, by his stop at the Cotton Exposition in New Orleans. Here, at this enormous showcase for the industrial opportunities of the New South and for feelings of sectional accord, Warner added his voice to the swelling refrain for harmonious reunion.¹

Ten years later a group of southerners reversed the direction of Warner’s travels, but not of his sentiments. A number of southern politicians, former soldiers, and business leaders traveled to Chicago in 1895 in order to attend the unveiling of a Confederate memorial. Dedicated to the Rebel prisoners of war who were buried in that city, the memorial and the event attracted a considerable amount of local and national attention and offered a pivotal symbolic moment for once again measuring the progress toward national unity. Even more, it became a moment when reunion prompted the possibility of patriotic reflection, when orators declared that America’s greatness was revealed in this uniting of former enemies. The scene presented here to-day, declared former Confederate and South Carolina politician Wade Hampton, is one that could not be witnessed in any country but our own.²

On one level, of course, there is nothing all that remarkable in either Charles Warner’s or Wade Hampton’s pronouncements. Both, after all, were made in the context of celebratory events which sought to broadcast precisely these types of conciliatory statements. Yet, when one recalls the intensity of the sectional conflict and the four years of war that caused more loss of life and property than all previous American wars combined, it is noteworthy that, in only two decades since Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the context for uttering these ideas had been created. It is also noteworthy just how little the remarks of Warner and Hampton tell us about actual events. Indeed, in both cases there is a subtext that is left unstated, for what both men were witnessing, to a great extent, was less an emotional bonding of northern and southern people and more a financial bonding between investors and business leaders in both regions. The New Orleans exhibition, like other world’s fairs held in the South, was organized precisely as a vehicle for showing off southern economic potential to northern investors. The Chicago event, financed primarily by men like Philip Armour and Cyrus McCormick, offered a prime opportunity for Chicago business leaders to develop a commercial relationship with the South. But, in the climate of reconciliation that had emerged in the late nineteenth century, few chose to stress these types of crass, commercial links. Politicians, journalists, and even financial leaders usually raised the bridge of sentiment and emotion in elaborating on the ties that now bound the people of the sections together. They all, in effect, paid homage to a romantic and sentimental culture of conciliation that characterized the North-South relationship in the Gilded Age years.³

This book is about that conciliatory culture that blossomed in the late nineteenth century. More specifically, it is about the idea of reunion as it was imagined, and occasionally acted upon, mostly by northerners and especially by those of the middle and upper classes. This work gives particular emphasis to the metaphors and cultural images of reconciliation, and to northern images of the South, attempting to locate those images in the context of the political, social, and economic transformations that swept over American society in the Gilded Age. Consequently, it has less to say about the real-life South and more to say about the ideal and desired South. At the same time, it is not an examination of ethereal images and rarefied myths. Rather, this study works to understand those images as tangible products and powerful mechanisms in late-nineteenth-century culture, to see how the northern vision of reunion and of the South was both a reflection of and a factor in the political and social realities of the northern people. I have sought, in other words, to understand why a sentimental rubric took hold of the reunion process, indeed, within ten years of the war’s conclusion, and to understand how and why that romantic framework shaped the thoughts and actions of a good number of Yankees while it was strenuously dismissed by others.

Surprisingly, there is little in the historical literature that speaks directly to the reconciliation question. Paul Buck offered the first, and in many ways the last, synthesized and scholarly consideration of postwar reunion over fifty years ago in his seminal study, The Road to Reunion. Since Buck’s writing, numerous historians of the South have pondered the postwar posture of that region, thus drawing out one side of the reunion question. Like many, they have been fascinated by the experience of white southerners who were forced to come to terms with the extremely un-American experience of defeat, and by how that sense of defeat did or did not hinder their conciliatory feelings.⁴

In contrast, the northern view of the reunion process has received considerably less scrutiny. My own research interests have been prompted by a desire to round out the study of the reunion process, extending the consideration which scholars have given to the South to the northern side of the equation as well. Thus, whereas southern historians have focused their scholarship on the southern experience of defeat, I have tried to understand the northern experience of victory, specifically, how the northern people interpreted the significance of their triumph and how they came to terms with a victory that necessarily entailed the defeat of fellow Americans. Unlike Buck, who accepted all compromise as a sign of progress and emerging nationalism, my own objective has been to look for the meaning which northerners gave to their victory, to the idea of reconciliation, and, by extension, to the South. My goal, in part, has been to understand the crucial historical transformation in which, as some have said, the North won the war, but the South won the peace.

In many ways, this has turned out to be a study about remembering, especially of how northerners remembered the Civil War and the southern past. Aside from reexamining the work of Buck, I have also turned to a number of scholars who have recently begun to consider the question of historical memory. These scholars have made the point that a historical study of memory should not emphasize the accuracy of individual recollections but should explore how people together searched for common memories to meet present needs, how they first recognized such a memory and then agreed, disagreed, or negotiated over its meaning, and finally how they preserved and absorbed that meaning into their ongoing concerns. I have tried to understand northern memories of the Civil War in terms of what they tell us about the social and cultural realities of the northern people in late-nineteenth-century America, especially in terms of who did the negotiating and how that negotiation process unfolded.⁵

Yet any student of northern ideology in the late nineteenth century quickly realizes that forgetfulness, not memory, appears to be the dominant theme in the reunion culture. The past is dead, explained the editor of the Trenton State Gazette in 1882. Let us live in the present and act the part of men. Here, indeed, was a telling yet typical observation that was voiced by many northerners in the postwar years. Nonetheless, as scholars have noted, forgetfulness, just as much as memory, requires an analytical and contextual approach. Historian David Blight finds, for example, that black activist Frederick Douglass placed himself at the center of the national debate over Civil War amnesia and struggled courageously to make Americans remember the causes and the lessons of the Civil War while so much of the country had apparently embarked down the path of neglecting and forgetting. As Blight shows, the struggle over memory, or lack of it, greatly contributed to the northern relationship with the South and the entire process of reunion.⁶

Indeed, in many ways the late nineteenth century was one of those notorious twilight zones, periods, as C. Vann Woodward has said, between living memory and written history which became favorite breeding places of mythology. As the Civil War faded from the collective memory of Americans, a vast array of myths, especially about the South, seized the popular imagination. These were not, as David Thelen explains, disembodied values, but rather creations of people with real needs. Among white southerners the myths were inextricably linked with the psychological repercussions of defeat. In the post-Civil War period, former Confederates learned to accept their loss by turning the old South into a land of idyllic plantation settings, heroic men, and elegant women. They transformed the system of slavery into a happy and mutually beneficial arrangement which offered enjoyment and contentment to all of its participants. In short, an army of southern novelists, journalists, and dramatists assumed command of a far-reaching campaign which resuscitated many antebellum stereotypes and deployed a romantic image of the white and wealthy antebellum South throughout the cultural landscape. In creating this lost cause ideology, they provided white southerners with an emotional vehicle that had profound religious, psychological, and social functions—functions that were especially suited for a society that suffered from defeat, humiliation, and internal dissension.⁷

Northerners, too, were caught up in the creation of this regional iconography in the post-Civil War period and used this romanticized image to reinforce the mawkish and sentimental view of reunion. But it would be misleading to suggest that northerners completely accepted the South’s lost cause ideology. A number of different northern constituencies—veterans, blacks, former abolitionists—opposed the forget and forgive mentality and continued to keep questions of black oppression and the South’s infringement of civil and political rights at the forefront of their concerns. Even those who joined the reunion bandwagon and accepted the myths did so with certain qualifications. In short, northerners used the southern image not in the way that southerners did, but to soothe their own specific set of social and psychological needs.

Not unlike the southern proponents of the New South revolution described by C. Vann Woodward, northerners, too, often possessed a divided mind about building up a new South while longing for the old. Northern elites longed to travel to the old, patriarchal retreats of the plantation class even as they effaced the plantation landscape with the new railroads and factories of the industrial society. Of course, as Woodward has pointed out, the New South movement failed to make the complete and total transformation that its advocates had promised. Consequently, throughout the late nineteenth century, northerners could still see just enough of that old southern lifestyle—the ruins of old plantation estates, the gray-haired veterans of the Confederate army, and the old-time servants who had lived in the days befo’ the wah—to reflect mournfully on its passing away. In this regard, the ambivalence of southern society was perfectly suited to the ambivalence of the northern mind-set. Confronted with the haunting specters of class conflict, ethnic strife, and alienation that their own industrialized society had produced, many northerners remained unconvinced about the benefits of industrial progress and about obliterating whatever remained of the old southern legacy; in many ways, they were unconvinced as to the unqualified benefits of the Union victory. Sectional union thus could offer a bridge for northern ambivalence, between a modern and premodern world.⁸

When northerners looked at the South in the postwar years, they cultivated specific types of images and promoted a specific version of reunion that was best suited to Yankee needs. They transformed their anger against the southern aristocracy into feelings of pity and respect, ultimately sentimentalizing the unhurried and leisurely lifestyles of the planter class. Moreover, in light of the social turbulence of the Gilded Age, northerners were not unmindful of the type of class and racial authority which southern planters had apparently exercised over their subordinates; they learned to respect the southern elite for what they saw as an authoritative yet harmonious relationship with their slaves. Not surprisingly, northerners also replaced their wartime concerns for southern blacks with a less political and more sentimental interest in the African American as a picturesque element on the southern landscape or as a pathetic and entertaining performer. Northerners eventually cast southern blacks outside their reunion framework altogether, portraying them as strangers and as foreigners, as a people who were best placed under the supervision of those southern whites who knew them best.

Nor were class and race the only considerations in the North’s reunion ideology. In the symbolic and iconographic representations of reconciliation, gender served as a central metaphor which shaped northern society’s understanding of the relations between the sections in the postwar period. Indeed, it has become almost commonplace to talk of the northern rape of the South during the Civil War, of how the northern army ravaged and ruined that willful feminine entity of Dixie. In fact, the South’s feminine identity appeared and reappeared in many different contexts—in the antagonistic discourse of the immediate postwar years as well as in the softer and more sentimental rhetoric of reconciliation. In the 1860s, for example, northerners connected the very essence of the Confederacy with southern women and assaulted the spiteful southern woman as the ultimate object of their anger and retribution. By the 1870s, however, the southern female had become the tempestuous and romantic belle, the object of the northern man’s desires, and, ultimately, the feminine partner in a symbolic marital alliance which became the principal representation of sectional reunion. This image of marriage between northern men and southern women stood at the foundation of the late-nineteenth-century culture of conciliation and became a symbol which defined and justified the northern view of the power relations in the reunified nation.

Gender, in other words, was not just another factor in the reunion ideology. Images of gender have frequently appeared in various forms of political discourse, and they have been, according to historian Joan Scott, a primary way of signifying relationships of power. Because of its association with natural and immutable functions, gender has offered a potent metaphor for legitimizing political relationships, for making power arrangements seem basic and fundamental. Moreover, notions about gender have also frequently served as a gauge for such subjective concepts as culture and civilization, as a way to measure one’s own and one’s enemy’s society. Thus, as several scholars have noted, gender not only emerged in the postwar dialogue between the sections, it also figured prominently in the pre–Civil War discourse as well. Because women were assumed to be the moral caretakers of the age, southern female characters in antebellum fiction often embodied the antimaterialist sensibilities of the region and the prewar era. But in other contexts, especially as the sectional dialogue became increasingly bitter, the feminine metaphor was not always meant to be so flattering. Indeed, northern antislavery literature frequently cast the South in the role of other, transforming the entire region into a land of women and blacks. Abolitionist discourse isolated the South through a variety of metaphors which indicted all southerners, whether white or black, male or female, as weak, feminine, and out of control. Finally, some scholars have suggested that the feminine image of the South loomed large not only in abolitionist ideology but also in the political thinking of antebellum southerners. Relying on female iconography to suggest powerlessness and alienation, southerners used the image to underscore their increasing marginalization from the political process.⁹

Yet, when abolitionists compared the antebellum South to a brothel or when postwar cartoonists lampooned the spiteful attitude of plantation belles, they had not simply chosen a common and convenient metaphor. Rather, in shaping their discourse in this way, they had drawn on the very different notions of gender which characterized the North and the South in the mid-nineteenth century. The symbolic, regional representations of gender reflected the contrasting sexual conventions of the North and the South, conventions which were rooted in distinctive antebellum social structures. In her recent study of antebellum southern womanhood, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese explains how the divergent social systems of the antebellum North and South gave rise to distinctive views of men’s and women’s roles. Caught in an expanding industrial economy, northern middle-class society participated in the formation of a system which increasingly separated work and home and made a corresponding split between men’s and women’s spheres. The southern plantation economy, in contrast, never made such sharp distinctions and never relegated southern women to their own, autonomous sphere. Instead, elite southern white men ruled supreme over house and field, over black men and women as well as white women. Because the southern system rested on the labor of slaves, southern gender conventions, whether for upper-class men or for upper-class women, did not demand the commitment to labor which infused the northern code of economic responsibility in both the home and the workplace. Southern white women, explains Fox-Genovese, to be ladies, had to have servants.¹⁰

And, according to historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, southern white men, to be men, needed not only slaves but also their code of honor. As lords and masters of all that they surveyed, as the protectors of women and as the possessors of slaves, southern white men relied on a code which counseled both chivalry and violence, both deferential respect to white womanhood and the forceful passions and energies that shaped their social power. They were men who constantly had to demonstrate their superior strength and force to the surrounding community, whether through dueling, drinking, or gambling. Northern middle-class men, in contrast, lived in what Edward Ayers has called a culture of dignity, in which institutions figured more prominently than notions of honor and community. These men abhorred many of the vices of southern men and committed themselves to individual self-improvement, to economic responsibility, and, most of all, to self-control. Certainly, this is not to suggest that all northerners and southerners always adhered to these distinct conventions. Still, as many northerners and southerners understood their positions on the eve of the Civil War, the two societies rested on two completely different patterns of behavior and codes of morality, all of which was filtered through opposing forms of gender behavior.¹¹

During the 1850s and 1860s northerners berated southern manhood and southern womanhood from the standpoint of these opposing notions of gender. Northern antislavery advocates assaulted the brute force and pugnaciousness of southern men, indicting them for their worship of seemingly masculine, but extremely distasteful, vices. They also attacked white southern men and women for their apparent disregard for any and every form of honorable labor, for their devotion to a system which rested on idleness and slothfulness. This awareness of contrasting gender conventions continued to influence northerners in their choice of metaphors in the postwar period. During the 1860s their depiction of the southern woman as the Union’s prime enemy offered not only a metaphoric assault on the Confederacy, but also an explicit condemnation of southern womanhood, a critique of the weak moral fiber and poor work habits northerners connected to the southern female. At the same time, northerners demonstrated their opposition to southern manliness through their images of an emasculated and feminized Jefferson Davis and, later, through their depictions of weak and effeminate southern men who were mired in their impotent devotion to the lost cause. Amidst the heat of the postwar sectional debate, such metaphors encapsulated both northerners’ overall critique of the South and their specific condemnation of the unrestrained vices and habits associated with the southern aristocracy.

Northerners gradually transformed their understanding of southern gender in the context of the emerging reunion culture and developed new metaphors which reflected their changing views of the South and which were, once again, indicative of the social tensions and anxieties that pervaded northern society in the Gilded Age. In effect, northerners began to view the South, and the reunion process more generally, from the perspective of Victorian nostalgia, from a standpoint of growing concern regarding their own society’s declining Victorian standards. Indeed, in the 1880s and 1890s middle-class northerners constantly fretted over the waning of proper gender etiquette, voicing their fear that men had lost the independence and authority that had previously been a hallmark of their manhood and that women had moved beyond their proper feminine sphere. To many, previous gender distinctions had apparently collapsed as men and women seemed no longer to occupy their separate roles and spaces. Northerners also expressed concern over an apparent loss of sexual mores, noting a tendency toward a more open and public display of sexuality, especially among the less well-to-do. Ultimately, Yankees sought to re-create the Victorian ideal through the reconciliation process. Their image of the South conformed to their image of the idealized feminine sphere; in northern eyes, the South became a region of refined domestic comfort, and the union of North and South restored the sense of domestic harmony that northern society no longer possessed. Southern women, who seemed to have discovered the joys of domesticity precisely when northern women had grown weary of them, became the feminine ideal of many northern men. Finally, the specific pairing of a Yankee husband with a southern wife offered the northern man a symbolic vehicle for reasserting authority, for recapturing the sense of manly accomplishment which the Union soldier or the independent businessman had once known. He was once again victorious, not only over the South, but also over womankind.¹²

This gendered view of reunion and of the South had several noteworthy ramifications. On one level, it offered a comfortable and familiar rubric, emphasizing as it did traditional notions of domestic harmony, through which northerners could reunite with former enemies. Yet it was a rubric which clearly placed the South in the position of junior partner, as a submissive woman who had been conquered by northern will. Northerners enshrined the image of their victory in this metaphor, using it to reflect the political and economic leverage they hoped to exercise over Dixie. Even as they relinquished some of their economic and political control, they continued to pay homage to this gendered metaphor of power. But while it clearly implied a relationship of power, this sentimental image of marriage and romance also provided a vehicle through which northerners could depoliticize the sectional relationship. Many apparently felt that the emotional attachment of northerners and southerners was of much greater importance than sectional politics; in this way, it became that much easier to forget the history and the lessons of the Civil War. It also became easier to overlook the South’s present-day problems, especially the poverty of many southern whites and the social and economic oppression suffered by southern blacks. These, in effect,