Writing Region from the Hub: Sherwood Bonner's Travel Letters and Questions of Postbellum U.S. Southern Identity

Recent scholarship about the U.S. South suggests that we are just beginning to grasp both its liminality and its centrality, not to American exceptionalism, but to a New World studies that can situate it as "a space simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and southern (both in the global sense)" (Smith and Cohn 9). As the New Southern Studies goes about such remapping and demapping, scholarly attention necessarily comes to rest on the postbellum era when the United States was simultaneously reinventing itself in the wake of the Civil War and flexing its colonial muscle abroad. George B. Handley observes in Postslavery Literatures in the Americas that

despite its domestic attempt to move beyond the legacies of slavery after the Civil War, the United States manifested the symptoms of the plantation discourse by exploiting land and slave labor beyond U.S. boundaries while attempting to keep at bay the Africanized Creole cultures that it had helped to forge.

"The South," he continues, "essentially was the first colony of U.S. imperial expansion" (20). Rich in resources but underdeveloped in infrastructure, the former Confederacy linked its economic future to the national whole, yet retrenched the very hierarchies of plantation power in order to do so. All this occurred during a new era that saw the further consolidation of cultural and political might around the Northeast, the mythologizing of American individualism around the increasingly less open spaces of the West, and the cordoning off of racism and race-mixing into a Southern phenomenon. White U.S. Southerners both resented these implications of economic and moral inferiority and embraced an implicit sense of difference from the national whole such characterizations lent them.

Travel into and out of the post-Civil War South yielded a considerable body of narratives that reveals much about the tensions at work in the shaping of postbellum regional—and national—identities. Historian Natalie J. Ring demonstrates, for instance, that the U.S. South was exoticized via a branch of disease study called tropical pathology that climatically linked the U.S. South to deeper hemispheric Souths and the region's white bodies, by extension, either to a kind of physiological weakness or to blackness itself. "The U.S. South, it turns out, was as equally primordial and treacherous as any distant foreign nation," Ring observes (619). Alternately, travel accounts from northern visitors tend to emphasize the South's moral bankruptcy at the same time that they tout the region's potential for economic rehabilitation by way of investment from external sources. Much less readily available are travel accounts that reverse this entrepreneurial eye and autoethnographically lock gazes with such accounts of regional difference. In the newspaper columns of Mississippian Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–1883), however, readers encounter competing visions of the U.S. South and the national reunification project then underway. Later known simply as "Sherwood Bonner," she was employed from 1874 to 1875 as a correspondent for the Daily Memphis Avalanche. Although her letters generally appeared on the second page of the Avalanche, her May 4, 1875, communication received front-page billing in a box that announced her article: "Sherwood Bonner furnishes a racy description of the Centennial exercises at Lexington and Concord, which will be read with no little interest." Thus at the same time that local color writing began to define pockets of regional culture within the national whole, Bonner executed a most unusual feat: she deftly reversed the colonial eye, traveling to the metropolitan centers of the Northeast in order to entertain her Southern readers with accounts of life as it was lived on the peripheries of their known experience. Bonner called her column "From the 'Hub.' A Southern Girl's Experience of Life in New England. What a Bright, Educated, Witty, Lively, Snappy Young Woman Can Say on a Variety of Topics"; by placing "Hub" in quotation marks, she both mocked Oliver Wendell Holmes's designation of Boston as such and called into question New England's metonymic relationship to...