As a result, some Southerners came to resent the burden that the cotton system placed upon them. As early as 1818, John Taylor of Caroline warned that in the upper South, cotton was accelerating soil exhaustion: “The fertility of our country has been long declining, and… our agriculture is in a miserable state,” and only a vigorous and intelligent program of manuring, drainage, and crop rotation could save it. Thirty years later, the Virginia planter and amateur agricultural scientist Edmund Ruffin pleaded for more intelligent use of fertilizers and crop rotation, and called for state aid to agricultural societies. Governor James Henry Hammond of South Carolina plowed up strips of ground beside public roads and advertised the use of new fertilizers on them so that passersby could have an example to follow with their own lands. In 1849, Hammond harangued the South Carolina State Agricultural Society on how “a combined system of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce, are essential in promoting the prosperity and happiness of a community.” And in 1852, Southerners reorganized the Southern Commercial Convention so that the convention could become an agency for promoting railroads, steamship lines, port facilities, banks, factories, and other market enterprises. Unfortunately, few of these proposals seemed to produce results. J. B. D. DeBow, the publisher of the Southern commercial magazine DeBow’s Review, was chagrined to discover that Northern purchasers of his Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States (1853) outnumbered Southern ones six to one; he was even more chagrined by the fact that two-thirds of his meager 825 Review subscribers were in arrears for their subscriptions.39
In their effort to understand why Southerners would set aside the opportunity to diversify their economy, journalists and travelers could only guess that Southerners were in some peculiar way willing to exchange solid modern profits for the social values that came attached to traditional agriculture. They were helped to this conclusion by the unceasing Southern voices that proclaimed their preference for a way of living that (whether it was profitable or not) provided more graciousness of style, more leisure, and more sense of the past than the frantic, money-grubbing lives of modern Northern manufacturers and their armies of faceless wage-paid factory hands. Edward Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, liked to think of the Southern cotton planters as the last survival of a noble and knightly virtue where “the affections were not entirely the product of money,” a sort of American aristocracy holding its own against the onslaught of Yankee capitalism.40
They derived encouragement for this sort of thinking from new winds blowing out of Europe. The American republic had been the eldest child of the Enlightenment; when a revolution overthrew the king of France in 1789, it seemed that family of reason, liberalism, and republics was on the increase. But then the French Revolution collapsed into the Reign of Terror, which in turn was replaced by the tyranny of Bonaparte, and by 1815 the rule of reason and the viability of republics had become seriously tarnished. A backlash against the Enlightenment emerged out of the shambles of post-Napoleonic Europe, which snarled at the failures of reason and glorified the romance of authority, especially when it was rooted in knightly myth, chivalrous orders, and medieval faith. Its cultural paladins were Edmund Burke and Sir Walter Scott, Hector Berlioz and Georg Friedrich Hegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Victor Hugo, and its name was Romanticism. 41
The political theorists of the Enlightenment—not just Locke but Montesquieu, Beccaria, Mandeville, Harrington, and Hume—based their politics on the possession by all humanity of “certain inalienable rights,” which could be encoded in written (and reasonable) constitutions. Looking out over the wreckage of Napoleon’s empire, observers found that this seemed like drivel. Not rights but the ineffable experience of nationhood was what governed politics. “Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins,” Fichte proclaimed in 1806; “they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.” 42 And Hoffman von Fallersleben sang of Germany:
Union, right and freedom ever
For the German fatherland!
So with brotherly endeavour
Let us strive with heart and hand!
For a bliss that wavers never
Union, right and freedom stand—
In this glory bloom forever,
Bloom, my German fatherland!43
“There is no such thing as man in the world,” the revolutionary exile Joseph de Maistre sneered. “During my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on… but I must say, as for man, I have never come across him anywhere. …” It was each nation’s collective and organic experience that made its people what they were, not some inherent human qualities shared equally by everyone. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, who would serve in the Confederate government, agreed that civil society “is not a thing of compacts, bound together by promises and paper… It is a decree of God; the spontaneous and irresistible working of that nature, which, in all climates, through all ages, and under all circumstances, manifests itself in social organizations.” 44
Southerners found Romanticism irresistibly convenient for justifying the plantation culture—even in the older South, where plantation agriculture faced bankruptcy—because the plantation embodied the mystery of Southernness. “The South had an element in its society—a landed gentry—which the North envied, and for which its substitute was a coarse ostentatious aristocracy which smelt of the trade,” Pollard explained. He acknowledged that “the South was a vast agricultural country,” and its “waste lands, forest and swamps” featured “no thick and intricate nets of internal improvements to astonish and bewilder the traveller.” All the same, “however it [the South] might decline in the scale of gross prosperity, its people were trained in the highest civilization.” Southerners began to speak of themselves as though they were American Tories, basking in a regenerated feudalism. “All admit that a good and wise despotism is the
