Travel, Ritual, and National Identity: Planters on the European Tour, 1820-1861

Travel, Ritual, and National Identity:Planters on the European

Tour, 1820-1860By DANIEL KILBRIDE

LATE LN THE WINTER OF 1845 FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND A NUMBER OF

friends went sightseeing at Eaton Hall, the Liverpool residence of theMarquis of Westminster. In the queue Douglass noticed several of hisfellow passengers from the Cunard liner Cambria, among them south-emers, who had threatened to toss him overboard during the passage.As he wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, "[0]f all the faces, expressiveof chagrin, those of the Americans were preeminent. They looked assour as vinegar, and as bitter as gall, when they found I was to beadmitted on equal terms with themselves." The relative racial equalitythat Douglass encountered in the Old World alienated him from theUnited States. At the same time, the shared characteristics of whiteAmericans, regardless of regional origins, became clear. Douglass didnot distinguish the southem planters from the other Americans in thegroup outside Eaton Hall; he noted that they all regarded him withdisdain. Indeed, in the eyes of white southemers as well, a Europeantour had the effect of bridging the political and cultural gaps thatincreasingly separated them from northemers at home. They did not,unlike Douglass, use the occasion to single out racism as a nationalcharacteristic, but touring Europe did inspire planters to reflect uponother qualities they shared with privileged folk hke themselves. WhileEuropean travel did not dissolve planters' loyalty to their section, it didintensify their sense of and pride in belonging to a national community.

^ Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), 365-73 (quotationon p. 373). On Douglass's trip see Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, 'Triumphant Exile:Fi^erick Douglass in Britain, 1845-1847," in Rice and Crawford, eds.. Liberating Sojourn:Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Atiiens, Ga., and London, 1999), 1-12. Previousversions of this essay were delivered at the 2001 meeting of the Southem Historical Associationand at the "Global Currents in Southern History, from European Colonization to the Late 20thCentur>'" conference at Georgia Southem University in October 2000.1 thank Mark M, Smith,

MR. KILBRIDE is an associate professor of history at John Carroll University

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORYVolume LXIX, No. 3, August 2003

550 THE JOURNAL OE SOUTHERN HISTORYm

A tour of Europe provoked such introspection partly because of theritual nature of travel. Realizing they were engaged in a special enter-prise, Americans abroad struggled to find an appropriate voice withwhich to communicate their experiences. Charles Edward Leverett Jr.articulated this sense of wonder when he wrote his father from the"celebrated field" of Waterloo, "Did you ever think to get a line fromthat spot, & from your own son on that spot?" Some rituals, as StevenM. Stowe observes, "[heighten]... ordinary experience, creating asense of being outside normal place and time." Travel to Europe wasanything but ordinary, of course. Only the wealthy could afford evena brief stint abroad. Yet European travel was simultaneously "a highlyconventional activity." The literary critic William W. Stowe arguesthat it should be understood as "a kind of secular ritual, complete withprescribed actions, promised rewards, and a set of quasi-scripturalwritings."^ Both an exceptional, highly meaningful event and a con-ventionalized practice, travel in Europe simultaneously allowed plant-ers to situate themselves in the English genteel tradition of the GrandTour, engaged them in a secular pilgrimage to quasi-sacred sites ofWestem culture, and empowered them selectively to differentiatethemselves fi:om this tradition in ways that affirmed their own nation'ssuperiority.

Travel, moreover, had the potential to reshape individual and groupidentity. As Victor Tumer has argued, rituals do not merely affirmor demonstrate cultural verities. They are also transformative, promot-ing critical inquiry and personal discovery. European tourism, as aquintessentially nile-govemed and culturally sanctioned activity, en-couraged planting women and men to reflect upon their social and

Michael O*Brien, Jeffrey R. Young, Christopher Olsen, Kirsten Wood, Charles Joyner, StephanieMcCurry, and the anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Southem History for many helpfulcomments and suggestions. I also acknowledge the financial assistance of the Andrew W. MellonFoundation, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, theVirginia Historical Society, and John Carroll University.

^Charles Edward Leverett Jr. to Charles E. Leverett Sr., September 30, 1857, in FrancesWallace Taylor, Catherine Taylor Matthews, and J. Tracy Power, eds.. The Leverett Letters:Correspondence of a South Carolina Family, 1851-1868 (Columbia, S.C., 2000), 51.

^ Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters(Baltimore and London, 1987), 1 (first quotation); William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: EuropeanTravel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, 1994), 18 (second quotation), 19(third quotation). Ritual—whether as everyday activity elevated to special significance or asuncommon events, like dueling or jousting tournaments—enacted in highly scripted and struc-tured forms some of the white South's most cherished values. On dueling as ritual see Stowe,Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 5-49; on jousting tournaments see Charlene M. BoyerLewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790-1860(Charlottesville and London, 2001), 200^206.

PLANTERS ON THE EUROPEAN TOUR 551

individual identities. Travel often reinforced prior assumptions, such asprejudices about national superiority, but it also led to critical reflec-tion." The introspective effects of travel were less pronounced in thecolonial period, when southemers generally crossed the Atlantic tomake business cormections or for other utilitarian reasons. But plantersin tiie nineteenth century more often traveled for pleasure.^ If such atour of Europe was in itself a ritual act, so were many of its constituentelements, particularly reading and writing, sightseeing, and sociability.Though these practices were highly differentiated, together the ritualsof foreign travel prompted southemers to reflect on the relationshipbetween their region and their nation. As the Virginian John Doylewrote just days after disembarking in Liverpool in 1840, "I cannot helpmaking some remarks on American society,"*^

Calling to mind domestic scenes ranked among the favorite pastimesof southemers abroad. Levin S. Joynes of Accomack County, Virginia,praised one of his sister's letters because "[i]t talked so much of home^and gave so much neighbourhood gossip." But travelers did not merelypine for their domestic circles. As John Doyle's comment reveals, theyengaged with Europe in order to assess America. Delineating nationalcharacters was a central concem of travel literature. Joyce E. Chaplinobserves that while this genre informed readers about other lands, "itdid so by reducing different countries and peoples to stereotypicalimages." These concepts could be banal, as when English breakfasts

•* Victor Tumer, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982),79-83; Nelson H. H. Grabum, 'Tourism: The Sacred Joumey," in Valene L. Smith, ed.. Hostsand Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (2d ed.; Philadelphia, 1989), 21-36; BenedictAnderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed.;London and New York, 1991). 53-61; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of theLeisure Class (New York, 1976); Judith Adler, "Origins of Sightseeing," Annals of TourismResearch. 16 (January 1989), 7-29. Sociologist Steven Lukes defines ritual as 'Yule-govemedactivity of a symbolic character which draws the attention of its participants to objects of thoughtand feeling which they hold to be of special significance.'* Lukes, "Political Ritual and SocialIntegration/' Sociology, 9 (May 1975), 291.

' On travel abroad in the colonial period see Julie M. Flavell, "The 'School for Modesty andHumility': Colonial American Youth in London and Their Parents, 1755-1775," HistoricalJournal, 42 (June 1999), 377-403; Susan Lindsey Lively, "Going Home: Americans in Britain,1740-1776" (Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University, 1997); and Robert A. East, BusinessEnterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York, 1938). On the growth of domestic andforeign leisure travel see Foster Rhea Dulles, A History of Recreation: America Leams to Play(2d ed.; New York, 1965); Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the UnitedStates (New York and Oxford, 1999); and Barbara G. Carson, "Early American Tourists and theCommercialization of Leisure," in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds.. OfConsuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London,1994), 373^05.

^ John Edward Doyle Diary, December 18, 1840, Section 4, Doyle Family Papers (VirginiaHistorical Society, Richmond, Va.; hereinafter cited as VHS).

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inspired Julia Haylander to exclaim, "I was an American and lovemeat." Travelers often made more thoughtful assessments, however.Frances TroUope, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other popular foreignwriters used their observations of America to address contentious mat-ters in their home countries. Following their lead, literate southemersused travel to reflect on significant political and social concems. In the1850s, domestic travel literature became increasingly politicized aswriters peddled their insights on slavery, free labor, and the sectionalconfiict. Some travelers sailed overseas precisely to escape such con-cems. Paul Hamilton Hayne conceived of his time in Europe as arespite from "politics, slavery, & anti-slavery ad nauseam."^

Planters going abroad during the antebellum period ahnost neverused their travels to comment on the growing sectional conflict, todifferentiate themselves from northemers, to depict the South as adistinct zone of Anglo-Atlantic culture, or to defend slavery, thoughthese were common themes in the writings of southerners visiting theNorth. European travel was different, though it need not have been so.Southemers had plenty of opportunities to make sectional observa-tions. Day after day they came across northemers, toured factories,farms, and poorhouses, and made judgments about national character.Moreover, proslavery ideologues invited planters to compare the mer-its of free and slave societies. Nevertheless, touring the Old Worldseems to have assuaged anxieties about slavery and sectional differ-ence that white southemers had developed in the first half of thenineteenth century.

Circulating in foreign cultures brought southemers' nationalism tothe surface and gave it concrete definition. Like Americans generally.

^ Levin Smith Joynes to Louisa Joynes, December 14, 1840, Section 7, Joynes Family Papers(VHS); Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in theLower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), 77; Julia Ann Haylander Diary, [June1833], p. 16, Series 2, Charles Dewey Papers #216 (Southem Historical Collection, WilsonLibrary, University of Nonh Carolina at Chapel Hill; hereinafter cited as SHC). On Americantravel writing and nationalism see Larzer Ziff, Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing,1780-1910 (New Haven and London, 2000).

^ Paul Hamilton Hayne to Richard Stoddard. July 23, 1855, Box 1, Paul Hamilton HaynePapers (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham,N.C.; hereinafter cited as Duke). On southemers traveling in the North see John Hope Franklin,A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North (Baton Rouge, 1976). On northemers inthe South see Howard R. Floan, The South in Northem Eyes, 1831-1861 (Austin, Tex., 1958);Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northem Nationalism and American Identity in theAntebellum Era (Lawrence, Kans., 2000), 81-110; and Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, FreeMen: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 42-43. Seealso William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character(New York. 1961).


they criticized European practices and judged in favor of their ownways, which they expressed in national, not sectional, terms. AKentuckian writing in 1851 feared that he "might be weaned from thedelights of home by the luxuries and dissipations of Europe." Instead,he found that "each new country through which I pass, each new cityI visit, only makes me tum with more pride and affection to thedear land of my birth."^ Travel also strengthened upper-class bonds,Charlene M. Boyer Lewis has shown how planters from diverse partsof the South "acquired, and continuously renewed, a richer sense ofregional identity" by mixing together at the Virginia Springs. ^ Travelin Europe worked in similar ways on national identity. As they metother privileged Americans, planters became more aware of the class-based qualities that transcended regional affiliations. If domestic travelunderscored sectional differences in manners and morals, a Europeansojourn called attention to shared national traits. Travel abroad did notdiminish planters' southem sensibilities, but it did deepen their iden-tification with the nation. Privileged whites claimed membership intheir regional culture, in an American community, and in the world ofAnglo-American gentility. Sectional identity existed alongside a vig-orous sense of nationalism and identification with the United Statesuntil the very eve of secession.

Following the practice established by British grand tourists in theseventeenth century, southemers abroad scratched out long letters forfamily and friends, liept joumals, and supplied articles for local news-papers. Writing about travel encouraged reflection about the self andone's relation to wider social relations. In the process, the nationalismthat planters rediscovered became continually reinforced. As LarzerZiff observes, "[T]he traveler becomes radically aware of where heends and all else begins;... the written account of what he sees anddoes serves inevitably to affirm the self he has discovered in theprocess of moving among strangers."^* Undertaking a trip to Europe

^ [Matthew Flournoy Ward], Letters from Three Continents. By M., The ArkansasCorrespondent of the LouisviUe Journal (New York and Philadelphia, 1851), 15-16 (quotationson p. 16).

" Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 6.' ' Ziff, Retum Passages, 1. See also Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh

to Global Tourism (New York, 1991). On the Grand Tour tradition see Jeremy Black. The BritishAbroad: The Grand Tour in ttie Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992); Geoffrey Trease, TheGrand Tour (New York, 1967); R. S. Lambert, ed.. Grand Tour: A Journey in the Tracks of theAge of Aristocracy (London, 1935); Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London, 1969);Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and "The Voyage ofItaly" in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva. 1985); John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604-1667: Their Influence in English Society and Politics (rev. ed.; New Haven and London, 1989);


amplified the importance of letter writing and joumal keeping, ritualswith strong roots in privileged southem families. Steven Stowe, forexample, has documented the significance of the letters exchangedbetween antebellum southem parents and their children away at school.For children, "such correspondence . . . prefaced a lifetime of appro-priate self-expression and self-conscious mastery. For their parents, itwas the occasion to shape that mastery." A European sojoum was alsosuch an opportunity, for it was seen at least partly as an educationalendeavor. Martha Richardson of Savannah urged her nephew to spendfreely on his tour so long as his expenditures "contribute[d] to yourenjoyment and improvement." Likewise, the North Carolina planterWilliam S. Pettigrew supported his brother Johnston's decision totravel in Europe if it would "conduce most to your happiness andusefulness."'^

Travelers certainly regarded correspondence and other forms ofwriting, particularly joumal keeping, as rituals to be observed. KateJones of North Carolina composed her corrmients in '''journal style" inletters to her sister Clara so that if Clara "care[d] to preserve myscrawls, they will answer as well hereafter as references for the chil-dren's benefit." Kirkwood King expected that his "letters should proveshort and good for nothing," but he pledged that "[t]he joumal thatMother requests shall certainly be kept in my best stile." Because a tripto Europe was such an exceptional event, it elevated the need to pro-duce written impressions. James Proctor Screven of Georgia, who hadtoured Europe in the 1820s, urged his son John to "observe well andtreasure up (by taking notes) of all that is curious and useful" during his1848 excursion. This flrst trip to Europe would likely be his last,Screven explained. Thus he admonished his son that "what comesunder your observation will fumish you subject matter in abundance,"

and John Stoye, 'The Grand Tour in the Seventeenth Century," Joumal of Anglo-Italian Studies,1 (January 1991), 62-73. On letter writing see Konstantin Dierks, "Letter Writing, Gender, andClass in America, 1750-1800" (Ph.D. dissertation. Brown University, 1999).

'^Lorri Glover, "An Education in Southem Masculinity: The Ball Family of SouthCarolina in the Early Republic," Joumal of Southern History, 69 (February 2003), 39-70; Stowe,Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 142; Martha Proctor Richardson to James Proctor Screven,December 20, 1820, Folder 32, Arnold and Screven Family Papers #3419 (SHC); William S.Pettigrew to James Johnston Pettigrew, June 7, 1849, excerpted in William S. Pettigrew to JamesC. Johnston, November 1, 1849, Series 1, Pettigrew Family Papers #592 (SHC). James JohnstonPettigrew studied civil law for a year in Berlin and then, at the urging of his cousin James LouisPetigru, he toured the Continent for a year. William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, James LouisPetigru: Southern Conservative, Southem Dissenter (Athens, Ga., and London, 1995), 124-25;Clyde N. Wilson, Carolina Cavalier: The Ufe and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew (Athens,Ga., and London, 1990), 38-63.


both for his letters home and, more importantly, for his life in Georgiawhen he returned. ^

Parents were paiticularly concemed that their children's writingdemonstrate the possession of refined taste, which they viewed as botha tool and a reflection of cultural authority. The acquirement of gen-tility was especially critical for women, since personal cultivation wasessential for attracting a suitable husband, for orchestrating social af-fairs, and for passing away long hours alone. " Elizabeth Homer's1850 joumal took the form of letters to her teachers and schoolmatesand displayed her refinement by demonstrating her mastery of histori-cal contexts and aesthetic principles. The church of St. Germaind'Auxerre in France combined "Gothic and modem" architecturalstyles, she observed, making it "on the whole light, graceful, anduncommonly beautiful."'** Some Americans did receive a formal edu-cation in Europe. When travelers spoke of the "improvements" to begained by a tour, however, they usually had in mind the more abstractquality of personal cultivation. The quality and content of writingprovided evidence for the acquisition of good manners. Travelers re-counted their efforts to master French and Italian, evaluated works ofart, and described the beautiful surroundings in which they moved. Thelast was particularly important since, as Richard L. Bushman writes, itwas believed that "refinement was most fully realized in Europeanpalaces and mansions." In the journal she kept on her honeymoon tourof 1837-38, Charlestonian Isabella Faber praised Genoa because it"contains a larger number of fine houses & palaces than any other citythrough which we have passed." In Florence her party saw "every thingthat was worth seeing," including the works of art in the Church ofSanta Croce, "all of which are masterpieces."*^

Catherine (Kate) Boykin Jones Diary #1762, June 14, 1851 (SHC); GeorgeKirkwood King to Mitchell King, June 2, 1846. Folder 18, Mitchell King Papers #400 (SHC);James Proctor Sere ven to John Scieven, February 20, 1848 (first quotation). May 2,1848 (secondquotation), Arnold and Screven Family Papers.

'" Christie Anne Famham. The Education of the Southem Belle: Higher Education andStudent Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York and London, 1994), 120-45; Joan E.Cashin, "Introduction: Culture of Resignation," in Cashin, ed.. Our Common Affairs: Texts fromWomen in the Old South (Baltimore and London, 1996), 1-41; Cynthia A. Kierner, Beyond theHousehold: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700-1835 (Ithaca, N.Y.. and London, 1998);Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display.

'•'' Elizabeth Homer to Mrs. Gardel, n.d. [letter one], Elizabeth Homer Eppes Letterbook,1850, Section 13, Eppes Family Muniments (VHS).

"^Richaid L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York,1992). Kvi; Isabella Bowen Faber Diaries #34/25, Vol. I, n.d. [1837-38], n.p. (South CarolinaHiscorical Society, Charleston, S.C.; hereinafter cited as SCHS). See also John F. Kasson,Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990); and


Like writing, reading about travel was an established custom thatAmericans inherited from the British, The Anglo-American literarymaterials that provided the background for a trip to the Old World werepopular with reñned readers in both sections of the republic. As JeffreyR. Young explains, the "dynamic of this market for culture , . , ensuredthat the content of the slaveowners' ideals would reflect many of thesame 'modem' concems permeating England and the northem UnitedStates during this period,"^^ The shelves of private and public librariesand reading rooms were lined with travel narratives, and southemjoumals reviewed travel books from all parts of the Atlantic world. *These reviews routinely reflected a national perspective. In 1854 theSouthern Literary Messenger chided Six Months In Italy, a populartravelogue by George Hillard, a Massachusetts author, for its Yankeeparochialism, Hillard's comparisons, the Messenger complained, "arealmost invariably between naughty, uncomfortable Italy and good,progressive, intellectual New England," Hillard had also failed in hisduty to promote national letters. The sole American mentioned in hisessay about foreign writers on Italy was James Fenimore Cooper, the

C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860 (NewYork and Oxford, 1999), both of which slight developments m the South. Maurie Mclnnis writes,"While books, prints, copies, and plaster casts of the most famous works of art were available inCharleston, it was only in studying the originals that one could acquire the appreciation andfamiliarity with works of art that allowed one to become knowledgeable and conversant. Thisfamiliarity thus formed an important element for polishing the edges and refining the demeanorof the Charleston aristocrat." Mclnnis's observations are certainly correct, and they can beextended to all privileged American travelers, not merely Charlestonians. Maurie Dee Mclnnis,'The Politics of Taste: Classicism in Charleston, South Carolina, 1815-1840" (Ph.D. dissertation,Yale University, 1996), 30.

'^ Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and SouthCaroUna, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill and London, 1999), 5. See also Jonathan Daniel Wells. 'TheOrigins of the Southem Middle Class: Literature, Politics, and Economy, 1820-1880" (Ph.D.dissertation. University of Michigan, 1998), 42-81. On southem reading habits see Robert F.Neville and Katherine H. Bielsky, 'The Izard Library," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 91(July 1990). 149-69; and Richaid Beale Davis, Intellectual Ufe in Jefferson's Virginia, 1790-1830 (Chapel Hill, 1964), esp. 71-118. Strangely, Davis makes no mention in his A ColonialSouthem Bookshelf: Reading in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Ga., 1979) of travel literature,save for a stray reference to the popularity of Laurence Steme's A Sentimental Journey throughFrance and Italy, first published in 1768 (p. 120).

' Larzer Ziff writes that in "the first half of the nineteenth century only religious writingsexceeded in quantity the number of travel books reviewed and the number of travel narrativespublished in American journals." Ziff, Retum Passages, 59. On travel literature in early Americanlibraries see Neville and Bielsky, "Izard Library," 157-58; and the list of travel books in ACatalogue of Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1741);and A Catalogue of the Books, Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia; ToWhich is Prefixed, a Short Account of the Institution, with the Charter, Laws, and Regulations(Philadelphia, 1789), 86-103. The 1789 guide lists over two hundred titles under the heading"Voyages and Travels." Over 11 percent of the titles listed in the Charleston Library Company'sSupplement, 1st October, 1806 (Charleston, S.C., 1806) were travel accounts, and many morewere memoirs, histories, or collections of correspondence from European figures.


Messenger huffed.*^ The absence of an American nationalist body oftravel writing was a sore point with some critics, as the Messenger'^review of Hillard illustrates. The absence "of rank, superstition orpedantry" should make Americans astute observers of European soci-eties, one critic maintained. Yet this reviewer could think of justone American travel writer—^Nathaniel P. Willis—who stood along-side such figures as Germaine de Staël, Lady Sydney Morgan, andLaurence ^

Much of the travel literature read by planters, then, was not Americanat all—it was British. The standard tourist guides were those publishedby the London house of John Murray. In 1853 Virginian ConwayRobinson became so distraught after misplacing his "copy of Murray'sGuide Book" that he mentioned it to two of his correspondents.Another traveler expressed his doubts about seeing a particular Frenchchurch by noting that Murray's guidebook had "not taken the troubleto speak of it at all." Southemers' reading in the literature of travelwent well beyond Mun'ay's books, however. During her 1857-58 tour,Amelia Parker recommended that her family, at home in Charleston,follow her route by reading George Nugent's Lands, Classical andSacred, John Lloyd Stephens's book on the Holy Land, and GiovanniBelzoni's account of Egyptian tomb raiding. Despite her general dis-dain for New Englanders, she singled out Hillard's Six Months in Italyas a "delightful book" she trusted "to tell of all the wonders we aredaily seeing."^*

' "Hillard's 'Six Months in Italy,"' Southem Literaiy Messenger, 20 (January 1854), 27-28(quotation on p. 27). Teasing New England was a common theme in American popular culture.In 1839, for example, Charleston-bom Eliza Fisher of Philadelphia reported attending a "Lecdire,at which J laughed a great deal at the Yankee twang and mispronunciations, without being in theleast edified." Almost certainly this was a lecture by George Handel "Yankee" Hill on "TheManners and Customs of the People of New England" given at the Musical Fund Hall. Eliza M.Fisher to Mary H. Middleton, December 19,1839, in Eliza Cope Harrison, ed.. Best Companions:Letters of Eliza Middleton Fisher and Her Mother, Mary Hering Middleton, from Charleston,Philadelphia, and Newport, 1839-1846 (Columbia, S.C. 2001), 81 (quotation), 83 n. 4. For anexample of the type of lecture Fisher likely heard, see George Handel Hill, Scenes from the Lifeof an Actor: Compiled from the Journals, Letters, and Memoranda of the Late Yankee Hill (NewYork, 1853), esp. 183-95. Hillard's parochialism perhaps reflected the view of some NewEnglanders that the values of their region writ large constituted American nationalism. See Grant,North Over South, for this argument.

"" H. T. Tuckerman, "William Beckford and the Literature of Travel," Southem LiteraryMessenger. 16 (January 1850), 10-11 (quotation on p. 11). For the travel writers Tuckermanreferred to .see Nathaniel P. Willis, Pencillings by the Way (2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1836); Lady[Sydney] Morgan, Italy (2 vois.; London, 1821); Anne-Louise Germaine de Staël, Corinne, orItaly (2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1808); and Steme, Sentimental Joumey through France and Italy.

^' Conway Robinson to Gustavus Adolphus Myers, September 6, 1853 (first quotation), andRobinson to Mary Susan Seiden Robinson, August 29, 1853, Conway Robinson Letterbook,Section I, Robinson Family Papers (VHS); "A Bell(e) Adventure," Southem Literary Messenger.


Planters engaged this travel literature critically, but as participants inan upper-class Anglo-American culture, they seldom objected to itsperspective. Planters wanted world travel (and genteel worldliness) toremain the domain of the privileged. After 1840, when steamship travelmade the trip cheaper and easier, middling people sailed overseas withincreasing frequency and tumed to the same travel literature to guidetheir voyages. As a result, elite travelers began criticizing the canonto reclaim their authority as arbiters of good taste and to distinguishthemselves from the new breed of tourist. Savannah gentlewomanElizabeth Lyman sought to separate herself from the mass when sheopined that the view from her English country inn "had been like mostother places much overrated by the descriptive pens of ^tourists"'Travelers also rebelled when their guides contradicted high culturalprejudices. Virginian Richard B. Gooch believed that John ChetwodeEustace's Classical Tour through Italy was "an overrated book," ex-hibiting "a most remarkable prejudice in favor of the Italians and everything Italian." To offset its faults he read Madame de Staël's Corinne,Oliver Goldsmith's The Roman History, and Lord Byron's ChildeHarold's Pilgrimaged Gooch's use of Byron, an author shunned byrespectable society, reflects the worldly, pleasure-seeking ethos ofsome elite travelers. Many planters read Byron avidly. Catching aglimpse of his lover Teresa Guiccioli at a party in Paris, Mary AnneMason recalled her admiration for "Childe Harold, which is the mostnoble poem I ever read." " When Palmetto State planter Augustin

19 (January 1853), 54 (second quotation): Amelia Parker to Kay Parker, December 11, 1857,Amelia Parker to Ned Parker, February 12, 1858, and Amelia Parker to [?], n.d. (third and fourthquotations), Parker Family Papers. 1820-1884 (South Caroiiniana Library, University of SouthCarolina, Columbia, ^.C.)\ George Grenville Nugent, Lands, Classical and Sacred (2 vols.;London, 1845); [John Lloyd Stephens], Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrcea, and the HolyLand, by an American (New York, 1837); Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Narrative of the Operationsand Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt andNubia; and of a Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea, in Search of the Ancient Berenice; andAnother to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (London, 1820); George StiUman Hillard, Six Months inItaly (3d ed.; 2 vois.; Boston, 1854). William Douglas Smyth, "A Southem Odyssey: SouthCarolinians Abroad in the 185O's" (M.A. thesis. University of South Carolina, 1977), 44-46,contains an enlightening analysis of the popularity of Murray's handbooks.

^ John Malcolm Brinnin, The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the NorthAtlantic (New York, 1971), 114-15.

^ Mrs. George C. Lyman Diary (Elizabeth Gray Otis Lyman), June 14, 1822 (first quotation),Amold and Appleton Family Papers #25 (SHC); Richard Bames Gooch Diaiy, December 11,1843 (second quotation), November 25, 1843 (third quotation), Gooch Family Papers (VHS);John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy (6th ed.; London, 1821); OliverGoldsmith, The Roman History: From the Foundation of the City of Rome, to the Destruction ofthe Western Empire (London, 1786), and Dr. Goldsmith's Roman History. Abridged by Himselffor the Use of Schools (Philadelphia, 1795).

^ Anne Mason Anderson Diary (1856-58), May 16-20, 1857, Section 88, Mason


Ta veau visited St. Peter's, he remarked that "Byron was right when hesaid 'you are not stmck with its immensity' for the soul becomesexpanded on entering its sublime walls." Relics of Byron's life alsoranked among Europe's leading attractions. Elizabeth Homer found theisland of San Lazzaro of interest only because of "its associations withLord ^

As a kind of secular scripture, travel writings exerted considerableinfluence upon how planters interpreted what they saw and heard.Because this literature was cosmopolitan, not sectional, southemers'impressions of European nations differed only shghtly from those ofother privileged travelers. Guidebooks and other sources, particularlyfiction and poetry, helped codify the ritual nature of European travel.Not only did they fabricate a set of prescribed actions, but they estab-lished a set of interpretations by which travelers could demonstratetheir personal cultivation.^^ John Doyle simply copied '"'quotations''

Family Papers (VHS). On Byron's five-year affair with Guiccioh see Doucet Devin Fischer,"Countess Guiccioh's Byron," in Donald H. Reiman et al., eds., Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822 (8 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1961-1986), VII, 373-487; and Benita Eisler, Byron: Child ofPassion, Fool of Fame (New York, 1999), 623-733. Southemers, like other Americans, admiredByron's work but condemned his personal behavior. Among his defenders was Hugh SwintonLegaré. See his "Lord Byron's Character and Writings," Southem Review, 5 (May 1830), 463-522; and Michael O'Brien, A Character of Hugh Legaré (Knoxville, 1985), 82-87, 117. JamesW. Simmons, "Lord Byron and Lady Blessington," Southem Literary Joumal, 4 (February 1837),414-Í9, took the unusual tack of defending Byron's personal behavior against the "yelping curswho still seek to hunt down the moral fame of Lord Byron" (p. 419). In a college essay Hugh BlairGrigsby wrote, "That Byron was not perfect, I candidly admit; and I also think that an ennoblingintellect in what sphere soever it may expand, raises its voice for the admiration of mankind; andalthough its lustre be thinly soiled by some fleeting spot, an eclipse of its brilliancy and aforfeiture of its excellence should not be the invariable consequence." Yale College essay,January 26, 1825, Section 67, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers (VHS).

^ Augustin L. Taveau to Mrs. Thomas Waring, November 11, 1853, Augustin Louis TaveauPapers (Duke); Elizabeth Homer to "My dear Fannie," April 4, 1850, Elizabeth Homer EppesLetterbook, 1850, Section 14, Eppes Family Muniments. Taveau probably referred to these linesfrom Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which describe St. Peter's: "Enter: its grandeuroverwhelms thee not; / And why? it is not lessened; but thy mind, / Expanded by the genius ofthe spot, / Has grown colossal, and can only find / A fit abode wherein appear enshrined / Thyhopes of immortality[.]... even so this / Outshining and overwhelming edifice / Fools our fondgaze, and greatest of the great / Defies at first our Nature's littleness, / Till, growing with itsgrowth, we thus dilate / Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate," Jerome J. McGann, ed..Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Vol. n: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Oxfoni, 1980),376-77. Regarding Homer's observations, in 1816 Byron was rowed out to the Armenian mon-astery or. the island of San Lazzaro to leam the monks* language. Eisler, Byron, 551-52.

^ On the influence of travel literature on constructing impressions see Tumer, From Ritualto Theatre, 79-80; Grabum, 'Tourism," 21-36; Thorstein Veblen, Tlie Theory of the LeisureClass: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York. 1912; reprint. New York, Í934); Lewis,Ladies and Gentlemen on Di.iplay, 33-34; Bruce Robertson, "The Picturesque Traveler inAmerica." in Edward J. Nygren, ed.. Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830(Washington, D.C, 1986), 189-211; John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractionsin the Nifieteenth Century (New York and Oxford, 1989); Dona Brown, Inventing New England:Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C, and London, 1995).


from his sources to describe what he saw in Scotland because he didnot tmst his own voice to record the intensity of his feelings. In 1858South Carolinian William Parker informed his brother that his accountof the joumey from Naples to Rome would have to wait for his nextletter, since he had already "packed up my Murray." He did not con-sider relating it in his own words. Other tourists allowed literature todetermine the itinerary and meaning of their travels. Augustin Taveaumade little effort to seek out company or conversation during his tour.He was "perfecdy enchanted" with Venice, but not by Venetians,because he seems not to have met any. Rather, he saw the city mediatedthrough Shakespeare, with whose works he would "pass whole days onher watery streets, wrapt in the dreams which Imagination chose topicture." Taveau, like other Americans, depended on literature to pro-vide significance to his encounter with Europe. For many, a GrandTour was a ritual of cultural legitimacy, not an opportunity for engage-ment with people from other

Literature provided Americans, northem and southem, with a com-mon cultural framework with which to encounter Europe. For example,their impressions of Scotland depended overwhelmingly on a singleliterary source: the works of Sir Walter Scott. Anne Pleasants Gordonand her husband traveled there as honeymooners in 1857, where theyrested in an inn near Stirling Castle to prepare for their Highland tour.Having read aloud from The Lady of the Lake on the night before theirexcursion, they were delighted to find that "[e]very thing is seen pre-cisely as therein described."^^ Northemers used Scott's works in simi-

" Doyle Diary, March 30, 1840; William Parker to Ned Parker, March 26, 1858, ParkerFamily Papers; Augustin Louis Taveau to Catherine Waring, November 11,1853, Taveau Papers.Copying passages from guidebooks and other sources instead of recording one's own impressionswas apparently a common practice. Southem travelers to the Virginia Springs and even guidebookwriters did so often. See Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 35.

^ Anne Eliza Pleasants Gordon Diary, July 9, 1857 (VHS). Views of Scott's infiuence in theSouth include Grace Warren Landrum, "Sir Walter Scott and His Literary Rivals in the OldSouth," American Literature, 2 (November 1930), 256-76; G. Harrison Orians, "Walter Scott,Mark Twain, and the Civil War," South Atlantic Quarterly, 40 (October 1941), 342-59; Rollin G.Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, 1949); and W. J. Cash,Mind of the South (New York, 1941), 67-68. Michael O'Brien observes, "We do not have theresearch that will accurately tell us about the reception of Scott in the Old South," but he suggeststhat "there is reason to think that antebellum Southemers... found him congenial because hisstandpoint so matched their own situation, buckling down to modemity while shedding a tear forthe old ways. In short, Scott was resonant, not because he justified a static quasi feudalism, butbecause on balance he endorsed progress, and Southemers unquestionably felt themselves to beliving in a progressive society." O'Brien, ""The Lineaments of Antebellum Southem Romanti-cism," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore and London,1988), 53. Andrew Hook, on the other hand, points to Scott's popularity across the early republicand argues that "Scott's main effect in America was the confirming and strengthening of a seriesof ideas and attitudes which his Scottish predecessors had already set in motion in the American


lar ways. Earlier in the century a New York gentlewoman anticipatedleaving England to msh "to the famous town of Stirling that we mightsee its castle and proceed further North to the lakes so celebrated byWalter Scott." The employment of Scott also demonstrates how litera-ture helped transcend regional differences, fusing privileged northem-ers and southemers into an American upper class. Virginia and NewYork found common ground when William C. Preston and WashingtonIrving adopted "the first canto of 'The Lady of the Lake' (the Chase)as the programme of [their] route" during their 1817 walking tour ofthe Highlands. Familiarity with icons like Scott functioned as a markerby which privileged Americans could recognize each other. OctaviaJones of Bolivar, Tennessee, listed Scott along with Byron, sculpture,and agriculture among the topics of the "easy conversation" in whichshe and a party of Americans engaged at a Liverpool hotel in 1844. ^

The quintessential tourist ritual, sightseeing, was inextricably tied toliterature since travelers' reading dictated their itineraries and stronglyinfluenced the impressions they took away with them. The vast ma-jority of southemers conformed to the prescriptions of leisure travel setout by the literary canon. They followed established routes and visitedthe conventional attractions. Sightseeing practices did not merely re-flect southemers' participation in an Anglo-American literary world,however. These rituals submerged planters' sectional consciousness,intensified their nationalism, and clarified in their minds what qualitiesdistinguished their nation from others. Sightseeing—encountering, notmerely reading about, Europe—extracted southemers from theireveryday worlds. As a ritual, it possessed the quality of separation thatVictor Tumer has described as "demarcat[ing] sacred space and time

mind and imagination." Hook, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750-1835(Glasgow and London, 1975), 151.

" "A Journal of Occurrences while in Europe," Harriet Balch Wilson Diary, October 16,1815(first quotation), Balch Family Papers (Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, Pa.;hereinafter cited as HSP); Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed.. The Reminiscences of William C.Preston (Chapel Hill, 1933), 43-49 (second quotation on p. 45); Octavia Jones Diary, September16, Í844 (third quotation). Series 2, Calvin Jones Papers #921 (SHC). On Preston's tour see alsoWalter A. Reichart and Lillian Schlisset, eds., Washington Irving: Joumals and Notebooks. Vol.IÎ: 1807-1822 (Boston, 1981), 92-162. The practice of planning one's tour according to a literarywork was neither limited to Scott and Byron nor to Great Britain. In 1805 Nicholas Biddlepondered taking the usual route to Paris from Lyons via Dijon, or another route through Moulinsand Nemours, whose "attraction consisted in its being short, but particularly, on its being Steme'sroute." Nicholas Biddle Diary (September-December 1805), n.d. [September 1805], Box 15,Biddle Family Papers (HSP). On the influence of literary sources see also Nancy E. Packer,''Geographies of Gentility: American Travelers in Britain, 1760-1810," paper delivered to theannual meeting of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Glasgow,Scotland, Julv 12,2001.


from profane or secular space and time."^° Sightseeing represented abreak in the monotony of domestic life, the fury of regional antago-nism, and the parochialism of sectional identity. Yet it also heightenedand gave concrete form to southemers' American nationalism. If do-mestic travel encouraged sectional analogies, overseas tourism madethe nation the standard of comparison. Southemers were reminded ofthe salience of national identity—and their American citizenship—constantly as they traversed the Old World. Border crossings, lan-guages, architectural forms, religious practices, political capitals,artworks, and the tradition of interpreting these sights, sounds, andexperiences to categorize national characters all worked to reorientsouthemers' perspectives from section to nation.

Because travelers sought out knowledge of whole societies, sight-seeing encompassed virtually anything tourists set out to see or hear.They took to heart John Murray's admonition that a proper tour en-tailed more "than a mere detail of certain lines of road, and an enu-meration of towns, villages, mountains, &c." When an Englishmanquizzed Kate Jones about why she wished to see "the crown'd heads ofEurope," she replied that she had come to the Old World "to view allthe curiosities." The sheer number and variety of attractions defiedcategorization. Thus, an understanding of how southem travelers re-sponded to the rituals of sightseeing is best gained by examining theirresponses to sights, not the sights themselves. Two broad categoriesemerge from their writings on sightseeing: comments on modernityand progress, particularly regarding economics and culture; and theclosely related issues of social class and politics.^

Southemers keenly observed economic practices in the regions theyvisited. They praised development, searched out prosperity and priva-tion, and sought information on innovations of all kinds.''^ Behind such

Tumer, From Ritual to Theatre, 24.^' [John Murray], A Hand-Bookfor Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and

Piedmont, Including the Protestant Valleys of the Waldenses (London, 1838), xxv-xxvi; AnneCatherine (Kate) Boykin Jones Diary, May 30, 1851.

^^ An extensive, though dated, literature argues that planters were hostile to innovation andindustrial pursuits. See, for example, Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery:Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1963); Raimondo Luraghi, TheRise and Fall of the Plantation South (New York and London, 1978); and Fred Bateman andThomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy(Chapel Hill, 1981). Major critics of this point of view include Gavin Wright, The PoliticalEconomy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (NewYork, 1978); Laurence Shore, Southem Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership qf an Elite,1832-1885 (Chapel Hill and London, 1986); Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemmaof the Intellectual in the Old South (Baltimore and London, 1977), 99-102; and Peter A. Coclanis,The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-


approbation lay a thoroughly modem worldview rooted in the ideal ofprogress, which the historian Carol Sheriff has identified as a distin-guishing value of the northem middle class." " Southemers' conamentson European economic life indicate that many planters shared thesevalues. They did not use these occasions to contrast free with unfreelabor systems, as prosiavery theorists wished. In fact, they explainedEuropean poverty by arguing that workers there were not as free as inAmerica. Very few planters were ideologues who traveled in Europe tointensify their regional identity or to find additional justifications forslavery. Modemity simply was not a problem for most southemers;they assumed it was perfectly compatible with their institutions. Norwere southem travelers contradicting themselves when they hailed thevirtues of free labor. Slavery was appropriate for the South, they werecertain, but they were also open to the merits of free labor in its properenvironment, even as they were acutely sensitive to its flaws. Southemtravelers did not believe that the degradation of Europe's working poorcould be cured by a form of enslavement, as George Fitzhugh wouldhave it. Rather, they made the nationalistic judgment that the adoptionof free labor systems as practiced in the North would best address theOld World's ills. America's balance of freedom and slavery, eachsuited to its own sphere, bespoke the nation's superiority over

Southemers' impressions of particular nations did not distinguishthem strongly from northemers. However, southemers were certainly

1920 (New York and Oxford, 1989). See also the useful summary of this literature in Drew GilpinFaust, 'The Peculiar South Revisited: White Society, Culture, and Politics in tiie AntebellumPeriod. 18(Kï-I860," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting SouthernHistory: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge andLondon, 1987). 86-92.

•" Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York, J996), 25.

^^ George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 155. On the South, slavery, and modemitj' see Bertram Wyatt-Brown,"Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Prosiavery Argument Reinterpreted," in J. Morgan Kousserand James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. VannWoodward (New York and Oxford, 1982), 27-49; Michael O'Brien, "Modernization and theNineteenth-Century South," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 112-28; Mark M. Smith, Masteredby the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill and London,1997); Joyce E. Chaplin, "Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modem Idea in the EarlyLower South," Journal of Social History, 24 (Winter 1990), 299-315; Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit;Young, Domesticating Slavery^, and Daniel Kilbride, "Slavery and Utilitarianism: Thomas Cooperand the Mind of the Old South," Journal of Southern History, 59 (August 1993), 469-86. J. MillsThornton III and Lacy K. Ford Jr. suggest that southerners' admiration or hostility towardmodernizing elements was deeply rooted in social class. Thornton, Politics and Power in a SlaveSociety- Alabama. 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978); Ford. Origins of Southem Radicalism: TheSouth Carolina Opcountry, 1800-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1988).


more critical of life in industrial societies, particularly England." ^ JuliaHaylander excused Manchester workers for treating Sunday "as a dayof recreation and frolick" because they were "conflned in factories allthe week." Yet most planters praised the productivity and efflciency ofindustrial establishments and even voiced restrained compliments upontheir social effects. Virginian James M. Glassell visited many factoriesduring his 1825 tour of England. In Manchester he saw 'Various manu-factures of hard ware, tmly worth seeing," and praised the Englishcountryside for its "neat and flourishing cotton manufacturingtown[s]." John T. Bowdoin, another Virginian, was "highly gratifled"by the "beautiful and ingenious contrivances" he saw at a lace factoryin Bmssels. "It is as detailed and as striking an exemplification of thedivision of labour" as he had seen. Southemers appreciated not onlyfactories but other elements of industrial economies. Kate Jones foundGerman railroads superior to those in North Carolina because theywere "so constructed as not to make too much noise. With very littleeffort conversation is perfectly

Naturally, planters were most interested in agricultural techniques.Just as a few ideologues made hay out of their visits to factories andmines, others investigated farms for sectional purposes. James HenryHammond made such a study a goal of his 1836 sojoum, and forsimilar reasons his son investigated viticulture twenty years later. Suchsectional tourism represented a major departure from early nationaltimes, when southemers like John Rutledge Jr. followed ThomasJefferson's admonition to study "whatever has a near relation to" ag-riculture as a spur to national improvement.^^ If this nationalist ardorhad cooled by the antebellum period, few travelers were fervent sec-

^ For examples of southemers' criticism of industrial societies see Franklin, SouthemOdyssey: and Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill and London,2001 ). For other ways in which Charlestonians* interpretations of Europe may have distinguishedthem, see Mclnnis, "Politics of Taste," 15-54.

* Haylander Diary, n.d., p. 35; James Minor Glassell Diary, September 17, 1825 (thirdquotation), September 23, 1825 (fourth quotation). Folder 1, Section 12, Grinnan Family Papers(VHS); John Tucker Bowdoin Diary, October 27, 1818 (VHS): Anne Catherine (Kate)' BoykinJones Diary, July 15, 1851.

^' "Jefferson's Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe," in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds.. ThePapers of Thomas Jefferson (29 vols, to date; Princeton, 1950-), XHl, 269. On Rutledge seeChaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 151. On the elder Hammond's trip see Drew Gilpin Faust, James HenryHammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 186-203 ;and Faust, Sacred Circle, 95-99. On the younger Hammond's üip see "European Correspon-dence," Russell's Magazine, 1 (September 1857), 510-20. Southemers also stayed up-to-date onEuropean thought on agriculture, even if they never sailed overseas. William M. Mathew,Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The Failure of Agricultural Reform(Athens, Ga., and London, 1988), 201-2.


tionalists, either. Like others interested in European agriculture, plant-ers sought out modem innovations with which they might improvetheir own holdings. Richetrd Eppes, who remarked that he was "muchdelighted" by a model farm outside Liverpool that he visited in 1850,was typical in this respect. Keenly sensitive to the nationalist impli-cations of everything they encountered in Europe, planters placed ag-riculture into a larger, value-laden social and economic scheme."Switzerland heats al! as to Rye & the general appearance of thefarms," Ambrose Carlton reported in 1854. "It is ^free country,'' theVirginian observed with an implicit nod to America, "& things look somuch more cheering & prosperous than those poor devils in Italy &

Commentaries on European soundscapes and landscapes refiectedplanters' attitudes toward progress, development, and modernity.Southemers were well versed in romantic notions of nature and thesublime, but they also remained grounded in eighteenth-centuryEnglish theories of the picturesque. Certain sights and sounds, such asmins or the Alps, elicited admiring comments on nature's wildness.But while the Old World was supposed to represent romance andantiquity, few thought of it solely in temis of majestic rivers and ruinedcastles, John Martinstein of New Orleans was unmoved by the attrac-tions of old Germany when he visited Bremen in 1835. Instead ofnarrow medieval lanes, he found streets that were "regularly and welllaid out" and houses that were "well and handsomely built in modemstyle." Southemers reveled in the sublime, but they also expectedEurope to exhibit the progress of civilization over savagery. JohnBowdoin articulated this sentiment when he observed that the Frenchcountryside was "not so beautifully diversified as in England, withhedges, trees, 8L cottages." The underdevelopment gave "to the countryan air of desolation, and barrenness." Within limits, southemers iden-tified the bustle of industry and commerce as distinctly Americanqualities. The "absence of the stunning noise of vehicles," first noticedat Liège, signaled to James Johnston Pettigrew that he was "truly in astrange place" for the first time since departing the United

-** Josephine Dulles Homer Eppes Joumal, May 14, 1850, Section 5, Hppes Family Muniments:Ambrose Carlton to James H. Gardner, June 28, 1854. Section 2, Ambrose Carlton Papers {VHS).

•" ^ John H. Maninstein to Emily Martinstein, June 27, 1835, Martinstein-Durrive Papers(Manuscripts Deptutment, Special Collections Division, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library,Tulane University, New Orleans, La.; hereinafter cited as Tulane); Bowdoin Diary, n.d., p. 75;James J. Pettigrew Diary, January 22-26, 1850. Folder 525, Series 3, Pettigrew Family Papers.Not all southemers were so sanguine about noise and bustle. See Smith, Listening to Nine-teenth-Century America. 3-5. On American attitudes toward landscape, romanticism, and the


Comments on economic features, including their manifestation onthe landscape, testify to the subtle ways that gender constructed trav-elers' experiences. A large body of scholarship argues that men ex-pressed a wish to violate feminized nature in their writings onlandscape, while women articulated an organic appreciation of theland. Other historians have found little evidence for gendered readingsof landscapes and their uses, however. Southem women and men didnot voice distinct understandings of nature or economic developmentwhile in Europe. Yet they did focus on issues that affirmed the con-ventional gender roles of privileged southem society, Julia Haylanderlimited her analysis of Manchester's working poor to the effects ofindustrialism upon piety, while the young South Carolinian JosephDaniel Aiken commented authoritatively upon the "wonderful evi-dences of skill and workmanship" at a Sheffield cutlery factory. More-over, while some women did inspect economic enterprises, they weregenerally less enthusiastic about doing so than men. When RichardEppes visited the experimental farm outside Liverpool in 1850, hiswife Josephine elected to remain behind at their hotel. Nevertheless,the views of planter-class men and women regarding Europe's moder-nity and development did not differ significantly. As members of anupper class v ho benefited from economic innovations and who wereimmersed in a transatlantic culture, they had as little reason to advanceconflicting views toward development and the environment as they didabout slavery ." ^

Planters' responses to poverty and inequality in Europe both re-flected and reinforced the nationalist ideas they shared with otherAmerican travelers. These concepts enjoyed a wide currency amongelites. Thus, their comments upon living standards and what theyviewed as retrograde attitudes toward work and leisure on theContinent were as much constructions as observations. After all, most

picturesque see Sheriff, Artificial River, chap. 2; Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display,31-36; Kenneth John Myers, "On the Cultural Construction of Landscape Experience: Contact to1830," in David C. Miller, ed., American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-CenturyArt and Literature (New Haven and London, 1993). 58-79; and Hans Huth, Nature and theAmerican: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1957; reprint,Lincoln, Nebr., 1972).

"^ Haylander Diary, n.d., p. 35; Joseph Daniel Aiken Travel Joumals, Vol. I, n.d. [1849](SCHS); Josephine Eppes Joumal, May 14, 1850, Section 5, Eppes Family Muniments. Forscholars who argue for the gendered experience of landscape see Lorraine Anderson, ed.. Sistersof the Earth: Women-s Prose and Poetry about Nature (New York, 1991); and Vera Norwood,Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill and London, 1993). Forviews that downplay the influence of gender see Joan E. Cashin, "Landscape and Memory inAntebellum Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 102 (October 1994), 477-500; Sears, Sacred Places, esp. p. 8; and Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 35-36.


travelers had embarked from one of the northeastem cities, so they hadseen urban squalor. Yet they chose either to ignore it or to rankEurope's as far worse. Like their northem counterparts, planters con-stmcted a vision of American nationhood that elided poverty and in-equality in favor of an idealized land of opportunity. Europeanbackwardness highlighted what southemers—like other privilegedtravelers—believed to be the providential role of the United States asa beacon of social and moral progress. Few southemers responded toOld World poverty with a critique of free society, but not because theyaccepted the antisouthern trope of nationalism developed in NewEngland."^* Aaron Willington's observation that, unlike their enslavedcounterparts in the South, elderly Genoese peasants still suffered "fromhard work and hard fare" was an indirect defense of the peculiarinstitution and, at any case, an exception to the mle. Travel to Europeencouraged Americans to suppress divisive issues and to articulate ageneric, inclusive vision of Americanism. Planters attributed Europeanbackwardness to the absence of qualities that all Americans, northemand southem, could claim as unique national virtues. After visitingSpain in 1853, Augustin Taveau marveled at how "concentrated wealthcan afford to gratify its tastes at the cost of overmnning the land withBeggars." "[TJhank God I am an American," he declared. "[O]urs isthe only land of true prosperity & liberty."

European social conditions inflamed travelers ' patriotism, butEuropean culture inspired more ambivalent feelings. Reform move-ments, particularly in Britain, provoked critical reflection on Americanculture. Josephine Eppes visited a host of charitable institutions inLiverpool, including an asylum for the blind and an orphanage. Bothsight and sound—the "fresh healthful appearance of the children" andthe "excellent time & harmony" with which they sung their hymns—marked the orphans as far superior to their American counterparts.Southemers studied educational systems particularly closely. LevinJoynes sarcastically contrasted schools in "benighted Europe" with

•*' See Grant, North Over South, which, while claiming to assess northem nationalism as awhole, actually describes only New England Whig and Republican nationalism. See the percep-tive review by Jean H. Baker in the Joumal of Southem History, 68 (February 2002), 172-73,

'*" Aaron Smith Willington. A Summer's Tour in Europe, in 1851: In a Series of LettersAddressed to the Editors of the Charleston Courier by "A Traveller" (Charleston, S.C, 1852), 41;Augustin L. Taveau to Catherine Waring, March 1853, Taveau Papers. Francis Kinloch observed,'The labouring people, both in Piedmont and in the Milanese, make a more miserable appearancethan our negroes; they are as badly clothed, and scarcely eat meat from one year's end to another."Kinloch, Letters from Geneva and France, Written During a Residence of Between Two andThree Years, in Different Parts of Those Countries, and Addressed to a Lady in Virginia by herFarher (2 vols.; Boston, 1819). I, 310.


those at home. The institutions of the "little state" of Beme, whichincluded "a number of free schools for the poor, a deaf and dumbasylum, [and] a blind asylum," gave the lie to Americans' conceitabout being "the 'most intelligent people in the world,' as we arekindly informed on the Fourth of July," he charged. Education forwomen also exposed the hollowness of national prejudices about wom-en's status in American society. In 1820 Andrew Leslie urged his sisterto visit him in Scotland, where she would see women "kept at school,until they acquire a great deal of suitable & useful information." Suchpractices contrasted with those in "owr country,'' where women leamed"to chassé [sashay] forward & backward, & to thump away on thePiano . . . . [and] where they appear with all the airs & consequence ofwomen, but with the ignorance & backwardness of children." Thesevices were "contagious," Leslie insisted, and were bound to impair theyoung republic's

Other features of European culture, particularly morality, called at-tention to the common ethical foundations of American high societyand reinforced prejudices about national superiority. The social habitsof many weUborn Americans—late-night entertaining, alcohol con-sumption, dancing—seemed debauched to respectable folk."* Yet evenpleasure-seeking travelers shuddered at Old World practices thatseemed to flout propriety itself. As their society's moral guardians,women most often made observations on European manners. Savannahwidow Martha Richardson accepted that her nephew would be exposedto vice on his 1820 tour, though she hoped he would "detect its de-formity, and tum to virtue for the love of it." Judith Rives's reaction toFrench behavior on the Sabbath was typically American, though evan-gelicals were even more scandalized. "The universal disregard of thissacred day I regard as the greatest evil here," she coolly observed.Though they seemed dissolute to middling folk, refined women andmen conformed to a pre-Victorian code. Thus they found vice every-where in the Old World, from ballrooms to peasant cottages. As Mary

' ^ Josephine Eppes Journal, May 12,1850, Section 5, Eppes Family Muniments; Levin SmithJoynes to William T. Joynes, January 9, 1842, Section 7, Joynes Family Papers; Andrew Leslieto Jane I. Leslie, December 28, 1820, Gordon Blair Papers (VHS).

^ See Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in theAmerican City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, Eng., and New York, 1989), 234-37; and especiallyLewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 83-84.


H. Middleton marveled about St. Petersburg noblewomen in 1822, "asto morality, one would suppose they did not understand the

Like their countrymen, southemers blamed Catholicism for theContinent's feeble commitment to progress. Travelers praised Catholicartworks, and church ritual awed them. However, they had only con-tempt for the Catholic faith and for what they perceived to he its socialeffects. Nativist prejudices had predisposed Gabriel Manigault "to seea great deal of misery and poverty in the South of Ireland and I was notdisappointed" during his 1854 sojoum. Italy, which educated south-erners anticipated visiting because of their familiarity with the classics,also suffered from southemers' religious prejudice. Combining classi-cal education with anti-Catholicism, travelers constmcted an image ofcontemporary Italy as poor, stagnant, and politically moribund. Onesouthem observer charged in the Southern Literary Messenger thatItalians lost "the dignity and energy of ancient Romans" when theyadopted "the dreadful superstition, which has converted the simple,spiritual worship of the gospel into pompous mummery." Leisure trav-elers tended to be worldly, but some devout folk and even a fewevangelicals also made the trip. They fulminated against CatholicEurope. Ahram Pollack, a Presbyterian minister from Richmond, wasone of the few to extend the sociological analysis of Catholicismbeyond Ireland and Italy. The medieval cathedrals of Rouen brought tohis mind "the history of the dark ages, the night of time," which "hasscarcely even now begun to be dispersed from the minds of thepeople." Southemers blamed Cathohcism for the failure, as they saw it,of most parts of Europe to conform to the progressive creed to whichthey and other genteel Americans

Clearly, then, travelers did not view development, poverty, and

*"'* Martha Richardson to James Proctor Screven. January 21, 182L Folder 33, Arnold andScreven Family Papers; Judith Page Walker Rives Diary, Vol. I, May 29, 1830, Alfred LandonRives Papers (Duke); Mary Helen Hering Middleton to Séptima Rutledge, October 12, 1821,Folder 9, Box 5, J. Francis Fisher Section, Cadwalader Collection (HSP).

'^ Gabriel Edward Manigault Autobiography, p. 104, Series 2, Manigault Family Papers #484(SHC): Senex, "The Corinne, or Italy, of Madame de Staël," Southem Literary Messenger, 15(July 1849), 382; Abram Pollack Diar>', n.d. [1841], A. D. Pollack Papers #865 (SHC). Onanti-Catholicism in the South see Randall M. Miller, "A Church in Cultural Captivity: SomeSpeculations on Catholic Identity in the Old South," in Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds.. Catholicsin the Old South: Essays on Church and Culture (Macon, Ga., 1983), 17-18. The dichotomousresponse of Americans to Catholic faith and art is explored in John Davis, "Catholic Envy: TheVisual Culture of Protestant Desire," in David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds.. The VisualCulture of American Religions (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2001), 105-28. On south-emers" commitment to classical education see Wayne K. Durrill, 'The Power of Ancient Words:Classical Teaching and Social Change at South Carolina College, 1804-1860," Joumal ofSouthem History. 65 (August 1999), 469-98.

570 THE JOURNAL OE SOUTHERN HISTORY

moral issues as discrete features. They integrated them into a compre-hensive scheme of progress and backwardness whose foundation wasnational character. One critic captured the "moral condition of Spain"with a list of its qualities: "impassable roads, unskilful and unscientificagriculture, manufactures destroyed, commerce expiring, education ne-glected, robberies committed in midday, justice apathetic or cormpt,and bigotry and malaria spreading wider and wider over the moral andphysical waste." Defining national traits in this manner encouragedplanters to articulate inclusive ideals of American identity, whichresonated with a broad consensus of privileged folk. In the SouthemQuarterly Review, for example, Brantz Mayer criticized Italy's "pov-erty, her cormpdons, the influence of her church, and the habit of beingruled' while complimenting "the soft verdure of our American land-scape, the bright curl of our waters, [and] the freshness and freedom ofour forests." In articulating these sentiments, southemers were neithersuppressing their regional identity nor accommodating themselves tonorthem definitions of Americanness. Rather, exposure to Europeansocial conditions set planters' sectional loyalties alongside an enhancedsense of nationalism, balancing a hard-nosed awareness of sectionalgrievances against the benefits of the Union. No traveler could witnessIrish poverty, declared Octavia Jones, "and not feel the blessings ofProvidence in living and moving and having been in such a land asAmerica. Happy, proud America! Land of the free—with her ten thou-sand faults, I love her still, I love her still."" ^

After questions of modemity and progress, social class and politicalissues constituted the second broad category that provoked travelers'judgments. Even though these were integral parts of the ideal of prog-ress, politics provoked far more ambivalence than did European mo-rality, Catholicism, or economic development. A significant minorityof planters articulated views that can only be called reactionary. Theyexpressed admiration for monarchs, praised repressive measures, andcurried favor with the great. These sentiments were shared by would-be aristocrats throughout the American republic, constituting a culturalbond that distinguished them from those people, including mostwealthy folk, who celebrated democracy and egalitarianism. The lattergroup represented the majority of travelers. While white southemerswere deeply distmstful of the political motives of northemers and wary

"^^ "A Year in Spain," Southem Review, 8 (November 1831), 166 (first and second quota-tions); [Brantz Mayer], "Italy," Southem Quarterly Review, 10 (July 1846), 99 (third quotation),126 (fourth quotation); Octavia Jones Diary, September I, 1844 (fifth quotation).


of the federal govemment's potential intervention in the South's do-mestic affairs, exposure to European class stmctures and politics gaveplanters a new appreciation for American institutions, moderating—but by no means eliminating—sectional consciousness,

Southemers were even more offended by the palaces and gentryseats, royal relics, and encounters with exalted personages that repelledmost Americans, due to their ethic of honor, which compelled southemmen to interpret any sign of inequality as unmanly submission. Re-tuming to Rome in 1850, Georgian William Terrell ordered his coach-man to stop when he leamed the pope was approaching. "When hecame opposite," he told his wife, "I touched my hat, & waved him asalute to which he inclined a brow & passed on." His friends marveledthat he had not been "sabered" for failing to debase himself, but Terrellboasted that there had been "nothing cringing, nothing of fear, nothingabject in my salutation." Others made the egalitarian lessons of sight-seeing explicit. Aaron Willington drew a political moral from his tourof Genoa, where "extremes of wealth and poverty are here to be seenat every step." He maintained that the juxtaposition of aristocraticluxury with destitution was "unknown to our more rational republicancountrymen." Planters may have valued hierarchical class relationsmore than northemers, but exposure to Europe led them to restate theirdevotion to broad national principles. Southemers should travel over-seas, another southem newspaper correspondent insisted, "to knowhow to love the Union and its institutions;... he must witness theempty parade and abject misery of other nations before he can properlyappreciate the happiness of his own."" ®

Planters also constructed national distinctions by commenting onEuropean history and politics. These excited scant admiration in earlynational times, when the task of fashioning a national identity sepa-rate from Europe seemed pressing. As an essayist in The Portico, aBaltimore joumal, maintained in 1816, "it ['the splendour of ourname'] rests on our own efforts to procure an illustrious dignity ofnational character.""^^ Hypernationalism waned with peace in 1815,

William Terrell to William Eliza Terrell. July 8, 1850. William Eliza Rhodes Terrell Papers(Duke); Willington, Summer's Tour in Europe, 43; [Ward], Letters from Three Continents, 17(last quotation).

*^ "National Delusion/' The Portico: A Repo.sitory of Science and Literature, 1 (March 1816),255. Two recent works document the intensely contested process of national identity formationin t'ne post-Revolutionary decades: Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street:Festive Culture in the Early Atnerican Republic (Philadelphia, 1997); and David Waldstreicher,In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hilland London, 1997).


when travelers grew confident enough to see merit in European soci-eties. Like many people, Martha Richardson insisted that Scotland heldspecial interest for Americans, "particularly so if we keep in view thehistory of the country. They have had many and hard stmggles forliberty." Southemers drew lessons from European politics that height-ened their pride in their American citizenship. Philip C. Gooch tumedthe Revolution of 1848 into a sightseeing occasion that abounded withpatriotic sentiment. Storming the Tuilleries with the mob, the youngVirginia doctor mocked monarchy by lolling about "on the throne andon the bed of his Majesty." Later, in a solemn ceremony with hiscountrymen, he presented a "twin-flag"—the American and Frenchflags sewn together—"to the government in the name of the Americanpeople." Indeed, some aspects of Continental politics spoke directly tothe sectional crisis and even testified to the value of the Union. Thesight of foreign troops in Italy inspired one South Carolinian to reflectin 1851, just after his state's failed secession movement, "What amelancholy picture is here presented of the distracted and dividedcondition of the Italian States, and what an impressive lesson does itteach us Americans."^^

Such liberal sentiments were far from universal, however. Someplanters were quite pleased by inequality and authoritarianism. In 1818Americans in Paris clamored for tickets to a ball so that they mightcatch a glimpse of the Duke of Wellington, provoking William C.Preston's charge that Americans "have a rapturous and romantic regardfor" nobility and a "a preeminent and indecent propensity to thmstthemselves upon exclusive circles." As his comment suggests, reac-tionary sentiments were not limited to southemers. Uneven as thegrowth of democracy and egalitarianism surely was, privileged peoplefrom all comers of the Union were alarmed by the liberal drift ofAmerican life in the early nineteenth century. Aspiring to a quasi-aristocratic status, they idealized Europe as a refuge from life in theStates. When Harriet Aiken and her party toured the barricades in Parisin 1848, she "said very emphatically that she had not come to Paris tolive under a republic. She had enough of that sort of thing at

^^ Martha Richardson to James Proctor Screven, September 16, 1820, Arnold and ScrevenFamily Papers (first quotation); Philip Claibome Gooch Diary, Vol. I, February 24,1848 (secondquotation), March 6, 1848 (thiid and fourth quotations) (VHS); Willington, Summer's Tour inEurope, 47-48 (fifth quotation).

^' Yarborough, ed.. Reminiscences of William C. Preston, 59-60 (first and second quotationson p. 60); Manigault Autobiography, p. 57 (third quotation). Harvey Levenstein, SeductiveJoumey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago and London,1998), 50, argues that white southemers were more sympathetic to hierarehy than other


Authoritarian methods of social control also appealed to Americanswho were repelled by their nation's urmily democracy. One Virginialady looked on with admiration as Parisian gendarmes thrashed a"dirty-looking fellow" for cutting into a line in 1828. She was enviousof such methods, for women in France were spared "mdeness [and]insult" on city streets. Despite the usefulness of such methods forcontrolling slaves, southemers' admiration had less to do with racethan with class, at least in northem Europe. The South Carolina sports-man William Elliott comphmented Napoleon III in 1855 by remarkingthat "[tjhere never existed a more absolute govemment." It had ad-vanced "national interests," he explained, and "inspired the peopleanew with the love of glory . . . . " Southem observers came closest toracializing Europeans when commenting upon the people of Italy,Spain, and Greece. Repressive measures in those countries seemedjustified not because of benefits for the public, as in France, but for theracial shortcomings of the people. Daniel Aiken raged that southemItalians were "worthy of all the tyranny the Pope can exercise overthem. They never can be free; they are incapable to enjoy or maintaina free govemment." Southemers were not alone in constmcting south-em Europeans racially, however. It was a common and long-standingpractice among Americans generally. Elliott Cresson, a PhiladelphiaQuaker touring southem Italy in 1825, remarked that the region "pre-sents a population so degraded as to approach nearer to the savage statethan any people I have ever seen. Their shepherds . . . approach as nearto the wild man as our Indians."^^

Sightseeing inspired many reflections on domestic issues, but few

Americans. Many northemers articulated similar sentiments, however, just as many plantersobjected to such practices. See, for example, Peter A. Ford, "An American in Paris: Charles S.Storrow and the 1830 Revolution," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 104(1992), 21-41; and Alice P. Kenney, ''Kate Gansevoort's Grand Tour," New York History, 47(October 1966), 343-61. See also John C. Horgan, 'The South and the European Revolutions of1848," The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850: Proceedings, 1992, 22 (1993),604—25; Jean G. Bryant, 'The Revolution of 1848 and the Crisis of American Nationalism," TheConsoitium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850: Proceedings, ¡993, 23 (1994), 514-22; andRichard C. Rohrs, "American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848," Journal of the EarlyRepublic, 14 (Fall 1994), 359-77.

" Mary Mayo Crenshaw. ed., An American Lady in Paris, 1828-1829: The Diary of Mrs.John Mayo (Boston and New York, 1927), 18; William Elliott to Ann Elliott, September 20,1855,Folder 5Ó. Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers #1009 (SHC); Aiken Travel Joumals, Vol. II, n.d.;Elliott Cresson Joumal, January 18, 1826 (Library Company of Philadelphia). I wish to thankJames Green of the Library Company for bringing this last source to my attention. See also R. A.McNeal. ed., Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters of 1806 (University Park, Pa.,1993), 225-27; and Joyce E. Chaplin, "Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in NorthAmerica: Comparing English and Indian Bodies," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54íJanuao' 1997), 229-52.


on southem identity or the sectional conflict. Michael O'Brien hastaken note of this "silence among Southern travelers... upon themeaning of the American South." James Johnston Pettigrew, as anexception to the rule, illustrates this point. Encountering more sociablemen and more attractive women upon crossing into Italy in 1851brought to mind sensations he had only felt "on leaving the Yankeeland on the way to the South." Yet O'Brien's suggestion that mostsoutherners were insufficiently "alienated from American culture" toarticulate sectional feeling while abroad is home out by the experiencesof those who were antagonistic to the Union. Only sectional ideologueswere inspired by travel to reassess their regional identity. When JamesHenry Hammond saw the Stars and Stripes flying over New Yorkharbor after spending over a year in Europe, he felt "consciencestricken for the sin of having at times heretofore wavered in affectionfor her." As a southem sectionalist, Hammond experienced nationalismas a revelation, but most planters possessed such sentiment as an in-tegral part of their identities before they ever set foot in the Old World.The foreignness of Europe, together with imperatives to observe andcategorize the experience of travel in national terms, heightened plant-ers' identity with and pride in their national community. As IsaacMorse of New Orleans said of an acquaintance he saw in Europe, "sheis the most patriotic creóle I ever knew. She says there is nothing inParis to compare with Broadway in New York." "*

Like reading, writing, and sightseeing, sociability, the flnal categoryof travelers' ritual behavior, enhanced nationalist feelings by reinforc-ing class bonds between northerners and southerners. Americansstumbled upon each other constantly as they tramped across theContinent. While eager to meet people from their state or neighbor-hood, southemers did not express strong preferences for each other.Planters sought out Americans in general and rejoiced when they hap-pened across them serendipitously, although late in the 1850s some didavoid contact with northemers. Sociability was strongly tied to socialclass because it required planters to make careful distinctions in se-lecting their company. Moreover, they had to choose whether to followaristocratic rules of polite behavior that prevailed in Europe or themore republicanized form of gentility that dominated the States.

^ Michael O'Brien, "Italy and the Southem Romantics," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South,109; James Johnston Pettigrew to James C. Johnston, March 1, 1851, Series 1, Pettigrew FamilyPapers; Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South, 202; Isaac E. Morse to Nathan Morse,August 15, 1833, Folder 107-1-5, Morse-Wederstrandt Family Papers (Tulane).


Americans used social affairs and the manners required to shine inthose settings to assess the relative quality of American versusEuropean cultures. As with sightseeing, there was little consensus onthis score. A substantial minority of travelers sought out exclusivecompany and aped aristocratic manners. Most recoiled at such prac-tices, however, and used their revulsion to reinforce feelings of na-tional superiority. Whether elitist or republican, however, participationin sociability rituals did not merely reflect southemers' national ori-entation; it also heightened it.

For most travelers, socializing in Europe inspired profound anxiety.Americans felt insecure about their mastery of the rituals of politeconduct, and for good reason: European writings generally por-trayed Americans as vulgarians. In 1832 a writer in Blackwood's, anEdinburgh joumal charged that it was incumbent upon "all tmeBritons [to] hate . . . the American people" because "manners are notmatters of indifference, but of mighty importance to the whole moraland intellectual character." Sophisticated Americans were well awareof such attitudes and could not help but absorb some of them. JamesAugustus Washington of New Bem, North Carolina, in Europe tocomplete his medical education, objected to an illustration accompa-nying Frances Trollope's recently published Domestic Manners of theAmericans (1832). His resentment stemmed from the shock of recog-nition: he felt that the image, featuring a besotted, tobacco-spewing"Jonathan," actually understated American vulgarity. It anachronisti-caily pictured a spittoon, he noted, when it "should have representedthe floor befouled with tobacco spit." Such sentiments epitomized thedilemma of patriotic travelers whose ambivalence extended to theirown culture, not just Europe's. "*

Americans sought out each other partly as a refuge from Europeans'judgmental gaze. Though distinct varieties of the code of gentilityemerged in the North and South, privileged people in both sectionsshared values and social habits, which included hierarchy, exclusivity,and pleasure seeking. Thus, they could be comfortable in each other's

^ A southwestem traveler rejoiced to find "how many of our

-*'•* "Griffin's Remains;' Blackvi'ood's Edinburgh Magazine, 32 (July 1832), 93; James A.V^ashington to Elizabeth Grist, April 20,1832. Folder 9. Elizabeth Washington Grist Knox Papers#4269 (SHC).

^^ On southern refinement see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southem Honor: Ethics attd Behaviorin the Old South (New York and Oxford, 1982), 88-114; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and5/flvery (Princeton, 1996); Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: CulturalLegitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville and London, 1998), esp. chap. 2; Cynthia A.


countrymen" were in Pads because he would be "much less alone"than he had been in London. The aural dimension of travel underscoresthe camaraderie planters felt with other Americans. Josephine Eppes'sspirits lifted on Christmas Eve, 1850, in Marseilles when she heard "achorus of voices singing out in our native tongue" because "[i]tsounded so like home." Most travelers chose associates by their classrank and code of behavior, as when Gabriel Manigault praised the"American colony" in 1850s Florence as a "transatiantic fratemity whowere given to worldly amusements." Nevertheless, Americans some-times pined so strongly for each other's company that class con-cems could be overlooked. Touring Egypt in 1847, Manigault met aPhiladelphian named Hayes, "a coarse vulgarian." Nevertheless, theCarolinian "felt the necessity of making use of him," and by and bythey "considered themselves as travelling companions."^^

Until the 1850s, southemers did not segregate themselves fromother Americans, Some planters developed strong feelings against so-cializing with northemers during that decade, but these sentimentsseldom eclipsed national feelings. Instead, they existed alongside, andoften in tension with, sectional identity. While crossing the Atlantic onthe steamer Arctic in 1851, a group of southemers, including KateJones of Columbus, Georgia, gathered together to talk "of our belovedSouthem homes" and "to tell anecdotes & incidents of our negroes," Afew weeks later a northemer introduced himself, "seeing, as he re-marked, that I was an American." Jones informed him, "I am not onlyan American, but from the South too,'' but she quickly added that, onforeign soil, it was "sufficient however to know that we claim onefatherland—sectional differences seem forgotten."^^ Strong sectionalprejudices complicated but did not preclude such sentiments, as theexperiences of the Parker family of South Carolina also illustrate. Theirregional consciousness incorporated a deep antipathy toward northem-ers, Amelia Nott Parker wrote that the Americans they encountered inEgypt during their 1851 tour were "almost universally northemers andespecially Bostonians—so that we not only do nol fraternize with thembut avoid them." Few planters expressed such exclusionary sentiments,however. In fact, the Parkers' regional hostility faded and nationalist

Kiemer, "Hospitality, Sociability, and Gender in the Southem Colonies," Joumal of SouthemHistory, 62 (August 1996), 449-80; and Lewis. Ladies and Gentlemen on Display.

^^ [Ward], Letters from Three Continents, 15 (first and second quotations); Josephine EppesJoumal. December 24, 1850 (third and fourth quotations). Section 8, Eppes Family Muniments;Manigault Autobiography, p. 236 (fiñh and sixth quotations), p. 190 (remaining quotations).

" Anne Catherine (Kate) Boykin Jones Diary, May 30, 1851, June 29, 1851.


feelings sharpened as they spent more time in the Old World. Severalweeks later in Rome, they were happy to discover "a great many niceAmericans," singling out several northem families. "I shall go back toAmerica better satisfied on the whole," Parker reflected. "[WJhen oneconsiders the age of America compared to Europe, we are a great andgo-ahead nation."^^

Southemers did not hesitate to raise sectional issues while travelingin the United States.^^ But exposure to European societies so intensi-fied planters' national feelings that to raise such divisive subjectsabroad was seen as a serious faux pas. Gabriel Manigault saw a youngNew England woman violate these mies on a Genoa-bound steamer in1856. Accepting the arm of a Virginia gentleman, she let slip that she"utterly abhorred all of her country-people who were slaveholders, andexpressed the hope that although from a slave state, he was not one ofthe fraternity." Quivering with indignation, he replied "without anyfeeling that he was guilty of anything wrong, that he owned two oldpeople who were his slaves at his old home in Virginia." Regionalinsensitivity worked both ways, though. James Johnston Pettigrewlaunched into a tirade against abolitionists upon meeting an Alabamianin 1850 while studying in Berlin. He only later discovered theyoung man was the son of James G. Bimey, the antislavery politician.Pettigrew was aghast— at his own boorish behavior. He was even morechagrined when subsequent acquaintance proved that Bimey was "verypolite." "Indeed," the North Carolinian reflected, contrasting hisrassness with his new friend's refinement, "I think he is a pleasantc

Planters did not socialize exclusively with other Americans, how-ever. They moved among Europeans at dinner parties, balls, and thelike, though these encounters often exacerbated their sense of inferi-ority to their Old World peers. Social affairs also exposed the breachbetween conservatives who admired court manners and those whobelieved that American gentility should repudiate its aristocratic roots.Travelers were acutely sensitive to the connection between gentilityand nationhood, Fannie Knight of Natchez cringed upon noticing thesignature of Charles Sumner in the guest register of the Hospice ofSt. Bemard in 1857, but not on account of his abolitionist principles.

^^ Amelia Parker to Ned Parker, February 12, 1858 (first quotation). Amelia Parker to [?], n.d.(second quotation), and Amelia Parker to Ned Parker, August 30, ] 857 (third and fourth quota-tions), Parker Family Papers.

" Franklin, Southern Odyssey; Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 140-41.^" Autobiography, p. 239; James Johnston Pettigrew Diary, Febmary 13, 1850.


As she told her Baltimore cousin, "I never justified Mr. Brooks in hisconduct." Rather, she objected to Sumner's appellation, which read,"Hon. Charles Sumner, Senator of the United States of America."Knight believed it was "in very bad taste for an American in particularto be his 'own trumpeter'" Sumner had bestowed a title upon himself,unmistakably drawing attention to the inferiority that he, and by ex-tension other Americans, felt vis-à-vis cultivated Europeans. Knighthad only disdain for Sumner's antislavery convictions, but she de-plored his vulgarity even more.^'

Knight was typical of most Americans in insisting on the necessityof behaving according to republican mies of behavior. Those whocomported themselves aristocratically became negative evidence of theneed for a more respectable code. John Doyle diagnosed that the "re-publican sensitiveness" of the wellbom Americans he met in Paris in1840 had been "blunted by the contagion of Royalty & aristocracyaround them." As his metaphor suggests, the danger was that thesetravelers might infect the young republic with their infatuation upontheir retum. They also offended and embarrassed nationalists by sug-gesting that American culture was inferior to that of aristocraticEurope. Josephine Eppes felt both of these emotions at a Londondinner party in 1850. She judged her American hostess "unfit for theplace she occupies." She "seem[ed] conceited, proud, and silly," pa-thetically associating herself with nobility by boasting about "the at-tentions of Lord This and Lady That." Not only was her behaviorboorish and unrepublican, though those sins were serious enough.Worse, she put American insecurity on display— in front of an Englishaudience, no

Southemers further demonstrated the links between republican man-ners and nationalism by attending social affairs on American holidayssuch as Washington's Birthday or Independence Day. In 1857 MaryAnne Mason, the daughter of John Young Mason, the American min-ister in Paris, marked the "4th by going out in a large party to R[obert]Walsh's," where they enjoyed dinner, dancing, and fireworks with aselect French and American company. Nowhere was the connection

^' Frances Beall Knight to Annie Beall, September 10, [1857], Box 3, John Knight Papers(Duke). Sumner toured Europe to convalesce from the wounds he received at the hands of PrestonBrooks on May 22, 1856. It was his second tour of Europe. David Donald, Charles Sumner andthe Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 327-28.

^ Doyle Diary, March 14, 1840; Josephine Eppes Joumal, June 14, 1850, Section 5, EppesFamily Muniments. See Bushman, Refinement of America, 207-447, for an in-depth treatment of"respectability."


between republican manners and national identity more clear, however,than in affairs involving the Marquis de Lafayette. Medical studentJames Washington helped arrange a banquet for the Revolutionaryhero in 1830, presided over by James Eenimore Cooper. France'srecent revolution, Washington said, rendered the nation "the only trueshield and bulwark of liberal principles in Europe." Though the womenand men who conducted these affairs believed they were celebratingrepublican values against retrograde European practices, they werequite conservative by American standards. Even the most open of theseoccasions was far more exclusive than patriotic celebrations and otherceremonies held in southem communities. In Europe these rituals,while sanctifying American institutions or the progress of republican-ism in the Old World, exalted the talents of a self-styled republicanizedaristocracy, Lafayette himself cultivated this kind of image by enter-taining in a style that combined gentility and exclusivity with repub-lican values. At a party at his Paris home in 1829, for example, theservants doled out "tea and cake . . . in the American fashion."^^

While some travelers sought, however imperfectly, to comportthemselves according to a republican code of politeness, others madeno pretense of doing so. They reveled in exclusive company and prac-ticed aristocratic manners. An illness forced Kentuckian Nancy HartBrown's withdrawal from Parisian society for over a year in 1828-29.Upon recovering she wasted little time in meeting with "the King, theduchess of Berry, and the Duke of Orleans" and attending "severallarge and brilliant parties." Her retum to the society of "distinguishedindividuals... has had the most happy effect on her," reported herhusband, the American minister in France. Abigail de Hart Mayo ex-tolled the exclusive circles in which she circulated in Paris in 1828-29.As she gloated upon securing admission to a royal address for whichthere was limited seating, "it was as splendid a scene as ever I wit-nessed. None were admitted but persons of the first fashion." Fewbelieved that European manners ought to he adopted wholesale. Yet

^"^ Mary Anne Mason Anderson Diary, July 4, 1857; James Washington to Elizabeth Grist,December 7, 1830, Folder 8, Knox Papers; Crenshaw, ed., American Lady in Paris, 86 (lastquotation). On Lafayette and American travelers abroad see Russell M. Jones, "The Flowering ofa Legend: Lafayette and the Americans, 1825-1834," French Historical Studies, 4 (Fall 1966).384-410, esp. 388-96; and Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Per-sonal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), esp. chap. 4. On civiccelebrations and symbolic political conflict see Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes:Newman. Parades and the Politics of the Street: Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which theLadies of Washington Help Build a City and a Govemment (Charlottesville and London, 2000);and Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, andihe Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (New York and Oxfoid, 2000), 121-47.


reactionaries, unlike their more republican counterparts, believed thattheir nation needed the infusion of aristocratic qualities. The "under-bred habits and vulgar tone" of Americans in Paris embarrassed HenryMiddleton Jr. in 1836. This "evil" could be alleviated by limiting travelabroad to ''gentlemen and men of education," he believed. Like mostreactionaries, Middleton still saw himself as a nationalist. "Do notsuppose me wanting in patriotism for speaking thus of some of ourcountrymen," he implored his sister. "It is in fact that very feeling ofpatriotism which suggests what I say. It is because I feel proud ofAmerica that I wish to see her well represented."^

A primary reason that sociability enhanced southemers' nationalis-tic feelings was that the Americans whom they met in Europe werelikely to be much like themselves—conservative folk with little sym-pathy for antislavery agitation or other radical reform movements.When Levin Joynes crossed the sea aboard the Columbus in 1840, hefound among the passengers William Lloyd Garrison and several blackabolitionists. Joynes looked on with pleasure as the ship's "republicancommunity," led by a northemer, reprimanded Garrison for "his ma-licious conversation, his revolting principles, and his mean character."Europeans, moreover, seldom harassed slave owners, much to the visi-tors' surprise. During his 1853-54 tour, proslavery PhiladelphianHenry D. Gilpin "never—on a single occasion—^heard America, or herinstitutions—even slavery—alluded to in a sneering or illiberal spirit."As Gilpin suggested, the subject of slavery did come up. But exchangesbetween Americans, or between Americans and their European hosts,seldom escalated into clashes of ideologies like those that marreddomestic travel. In 1857 Edward Leverett and his Paris landlady en-gaged in "some long & hot arguments on slavery," which were "ami-cably & peacefully settled always." Social rituals established somedistance between planters and the divisive issues that fostered sectionalfeelings. They did so literally, by providing a milieu that discouragedattention to the exhausting subjects of slavery and regional strife. Theyalso reminded southemers of the common culture they shared withother socially elite Americans.^^

James Brown to Susannah Price, February 10, 1829, Susannah Hart Price Papers (SpecialCollections, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.); Crenshaw, ed., American Lady in Paris,82-83 (quotation on p. 83); Henry Middleton Jr. to Elizabeth Middleton, November 10, 1836,Box 7, J. Francis Fishex Section, Cadwalader Collection.

* Levin Smith Joynes Diary, May 31, 1840, Section 9, Joynes Family Papers; Henry D.Gilpin to George M. Dallas, June 22, 1853, Vol. XLI, Gilpin Family Papers (HSP); CharlesEdward Leverett Jr. to Mary Maxcy Leverett, September 24, 1857, in Taylor et al., eds., LeverettLetters, 47. Joynes*s account of the crossing of the Columbus appears to be largely accurate.


The suspension of sectionalism and enhancement of national feel-ings that planters experienced is not altogether surprising, given tlierelaxed atmosphere of a European tour and their understandable wishto escape enervating domestic problems. Yet their relative silence onslavery and the sectional confiict ran afoul of proslavery writers' ad-monition to contrast the conditions of free laborers with those of south-ern slaves. Proslavery literature literally invited travelers to make thisassessment. In 1851 an anti-abolitionist columnist urged Americans inEngland to visit factories and coal pits, to contrast the conditions of the"white images of God" v ho worked there with "the sleek, oily appear-ance of the comfortably clothed, well-fed, fat and saucy southemslaves[,]" While planters often took note of the poor conditions ofEuropean laborers, they refused to interpret these observations in ex-clusionary, sectional terms. Rather, planters read Old World oppres-sion as evidence of the superiority of broader, American qualities. AsJames H. Gardner wrote his wife in 1853, "Italy is a poor degradednation, a nation of beggars..,. [T]his alone is sufficient to cause anAmerican to bless his own country and cast a benevolent sigh ofsympathy upon the degraded population of Europe." '

Neither their failure to discuss slavery nor their articulation of na-tionalist sentiments meant that southemers embraced northem conceptsof American identity. However, the situation does suggest that, indefining white southern culture, historians have been more comfortablein assigning pride of place to those qualities that distinguished Northfrom South than to those that the sections shared in common, perhapsbecause it is harder to integrate the prevalence of similarities into anarrative that ends in the Civil War, The nationalism that southemersarticulated during their time in Europe does not contradict the presenceof a powerful regional sensibility. But it does seem inconsistent withthe contention that the exclusionist ideology of proslavery thoughtshould be seen as "the South's particular perspective on those

Garrison described the passengers as a "profane, lewd, gambling, brandy-loving company" who"despise[d] the Niggars and the Abolitionists, and all such fanatics.'* To another correspondent hecharacterized the group as "all pro-slavery, to the back-bone." Garrison to Edmund Quincy. June13, Í84O, in Louis Ruchames, ed.. The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Vol. ÏI: A HouseDividing Against Itself, 1836-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). 640; Garrison to unnamed corre-spondent, June 12, 1840, ibid., 637.

^*'"An Abolition Delegate on His Traveis." New York Sunday Times and Noah's WeeklyMessenger, February 16, 1851, p. 2, c. 5; James H. Gardner to Phebe P. Gardner. November 12,1853, Folder 3, Section 8, Gardner Family Papers (VHS).

*" On this theme see also Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida'sPlantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill and London, 2002), 4-5.


philosophical, moral, and social dilemmas confronting the nation as a

Planters' experiences in Europe highlight the connections thatbound them to other privileged Americans. However, this emphasis oncosmopolitanism contrasts with a large body of scholarship that docu-ments the community-centered nature of life in the Old South. Thisdifference underscores the depth of social class and intraregional di-visions within the South. Planters' elitism, wealth, and sophisticationdistinguished them from all but a small number of whites in theirregion. Moreover, while some planters from the Old Southwest trav-eled overseas late in the antebellum period, the greater number oftravelers from the seaboard states calls attention to the cultural gap thatdivided older regions along the Atlantic from more recently establishedareas. The privileged women and men who made a leisure tour ofEurope were thus markedly different, in their lifestyles and culturalattitudes, from both the mass of whites in their region and from mostplanters in less developed states like Mississippi and Arkansas. Thesesharp class distinctions indicate another bond that elite planters sharedwith the northemers with whom they circulated in Europe. They hadmuch more in common with each other than they did with ordinarypeople in their respective sections.^

Experiencing the Old World and socializing together did not indi-cate that northemers and southemers meant the same things when theypraised the merits of the national union. As Mitchell Snay has shown,sectional differences could branch out from common cultural ^°

Drew Gilpin Faust, *The Proslavery Argument in History," in Faust, ed.. The Ideology ofSlavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge and London,1981), 2. In The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum SouthCarolina (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), Manisha Sinha, whose interpretation of southemidentity foregrounds proslavery ideology, leaves little room for nationalism. Stephanie McCurryhas also argued for the ideological centrality of the proslavery argument to southem identity,though she suggests planters used the rhetoric in instrumental terms, as a way to secure the loyaltyof nonslaveholding whites to the slave regime. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: YeomanHouseholds, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina LowCountry (New York and Oxford, 1995).

^ See, for example, J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: WhiteLiberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1985), 64—93;Christopher Morris, Becoming Southem: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County andVicksburg, Mississippi. 1770-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1995), 132-55; Wyatt-Brown,Southem Honor, esp. 88-114; and Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi, 17-37.Daniel E. Sutherland's Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865(New York and other cities, 1995), 3-28, describes the kinds of developments that distinguishedthe Southeast from the Southwest. On class similarities across regions, Edward Pessen*swell-known essay, "How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?"American Historical Review, 85 (December 1980), 1119-49. is still well worth consulting.

'** Mitchell Snay, "American Thought and Southem Distinctiveness: The Southem Clergy and


Moreover, while a heightened sense of nationalism was a commonexperience for planters who traveled to the Old World, the lastingeffects of those feelings differed from individual to individual. A tourdid not preclude the development of regional partisanship. WilliamsMiddleton, the Lowcountry patriarch, spent years on the Continentduring his youth. Yet he was a staunch advocate of secession through-out the 1850s and felt little connection with northemers except thosewithin his family circle. For others, the effect of a European tour seemsto have been more subtie. James Henry Hammond cursed his seces-sionist sentiments when he saw the flag upon his retum to Americanshores, but he remained an avid sectional partisan. Yet as secessionloomed, Hammond sought to recruit aristocrats in both sections intoa North-South alliance to keep the Union together, a product, perhaps,of the nationalism stirred by his trip to Europe. Other planters hadlittie difficulty holding sectional and national pride in balance. TheSavannah gentlewoman Mary Telfair noted that her "habits, views, tastes,feelings have all been changed" by travel, while her neighbors were"so local in all their feelings." She had many friends in the North andretained a strong sense of nationalism, neither of which impeded hersectional loyalty nor her support for Georgia's secession in

Yet there can be little doubt that among other planters, travel notonly enhanced national attachments and helped define what wasworthy to be preserved, but also established a cultural foundationthat transcended local differences. Like her brother Williams, ElizaMiddleton spent her youth in Europe. But she used her experience tomake connections beyond her South Carolina family. Her travels pro-vided the foundation for her long, happy marriage to Philadelphiagentleman Joshua Francis Fisher, who had made a grand tour of hisown in the early 1830s. Her experience abroad also provided her withthe resources to assume a leading role in that city's highest socialcircles. When Emily Wharton married Charles Sinkler in 1842, shemoved in the other direction, from the urban whirl of Philadelphia toEutaw Plantation, in Upper St. John's Parish in the South CarolinaLowcountry. Emily credited Charles's brother Seaman, who had spent

the Sarxtification of Slavery," Civil War History, 35 (December 1989), 311-28. On the distinc-tive nationalist tropes developed in New England see Grant, North Over South.

^' Williams Middleton to J. Francis Fisher, August 3, 1851, Folder 5, Box 5, Middleton PlaceCollection (Middleton Place. Charleston, S.C); Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South,202, 331-59; Lawrence T. McDonnell, "Struggle Against Suicide: James Henry Hammond andthe Secession of South Carolina," Southem Studies, 22 (Summer 1983), 109-37; Mary Telfair toMary Few, November 12, n.d., William Few Collection (Georgia Department of Archives andHistory, Atlanta, Ga.).


three years in Paris completing his medical studies, with helping hermake the transition. Seaman supplied her with French novels and op-eras, bought her a pearl-inlaid guitar and a piano, and conversed withher in French and Italian. Travel, like other ways of engaging in thetransatlantic cultural community, bridged profound differences in ex-perience. It intensified planters' sense of belonging to a republicanizedaristocracy and deepened their identification with America. "[T]hetendency of a trip to Europe," Conway Robinson testified in 1853, "isto make any reflecting American more and more pleased with therepublican institutions of his country, and more and more convinced ofthe manifold advantages resulting from our glorious Union."

^ Harrison, ed.. Best Companions, 8-10, 17; Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClerq, ed.. BetweenNorth and South: The Letters of Emily Wharton Sinkler, 1842-1865 (Columbia, S.C, 2001),8-10, 62; Conway Robinson to James Alfred Jones, September 11, 1853, Robinson Letterbook.

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Travel, Ritual, and National Identity: Planters on the European Tour, 1820-1861

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