Some Antecedents of the Dichotomous "Vanderbilt" Agrarian Movements

Some Antecedents of the Dichotomous "Vanderbilt" Agrarian Movements by John L. Grigsby In an earlier article, which appeared in the 1988 volume of Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association, I delineated the profound disagreement among the "Vanderbilt" Agrarians about the "race question," as clearly reflected in /'// Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. In fact, I noted sufficient disparity in attitudes toward blacks and the Old South to justify the conclusion that /'// Take My Stand embodies two Agrarian movements, one sentimental, elitist, racist, and regressive ; and one realistic, equalitarian, nonracist, and progressive. The existence of two such diametrically opposed sets of attitudes toward blacks and the Old South points logically toward the fundamental questions of why such disagreement . Specifically, it raises the question of whether there are historical antecedents in the South for the divisive perspectives among the Agrarians, antecedents which allow their conflict to be placed in an inclusive historical context that explains much about why the Vanderbilt Agrarians disagreed and why such disagreement about race and the Old South continues today in the southern United States. A logical starting point in a search for historical antecedents is the life and work of Thomas Jefferson, since the Vanderbilt Agrarians themselves indicate Jefferson's importance to their movement (Ransom 1977: 53, 69-70, 88-90). However, in attempting to synthesize Jefferson's ideas and lifestyle into the classic embodiment of Agrarianism , one immediately encounters problems . One problem is that Jefferson apparently never resolved the "race question " in his own mind. Although he publicly argued and voted for the abolition of slavery, including the barring of it from the West, he at the same time 52 speculated that blacks were innately inferior as a race (Peterson 1975, xxiv), and he never freed the bulk of his own slaves, apparently because he did not believe in emancipation without compensation to the owners and colonization of blacks elsewhere (Peterson 1975, xxxlx). Also, although he strongly defended states' rights in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, his specific concerns in those resolutions were the Alien and Sedition Laws, not Northern attempts to end slavery. Granted, he did argue in those resolutions that states had a right to nullify "usurpations by the national government" (Peterson 1975, xxxi), but he never advocated such nullification of antislavery laws. In fact, he hoped throughout his life that slavery could be ended peacefully, "short of the catastrophe he increasingly feared" (Peterson 1975, xxxrx). Also, he advocated generally unrestricted commerce with other countries rather than total Agrarian self-sufficiency (Peterson 1975, ???p), and he emphasized state-supported education for all Americans (Peterson 1975, xxxix), in so doing agreeing with one faction of the "Vanderbilt" Agrarians in the first instance and with the other faction in the second. Clearly, then, one important factor in the Vanderbilt Agrarians' disagreement about race and the Old South derives from the complexity and contradictions of their "model" Agrarian. As Peterson says of Jefferson, Because he never codified his thought but let stand the existential record of "man thinking" in all its shapes and hues, it has been easy for men of different persuasions to seize upon some fragment, eminently quotable, and impute to it the character of the whole. So it is that Jeffersonian political craft have sailed under many colors : Democracy, State Rights, Agrarianism, Anti-Semitism, Civil Libertarianism, Isolationism , One Worldism, Welfare Statism. None of these flags is entirely fraudulent. (1975, XiJ) Thus, each Agrarian faction could point to Jefferson as its source for very different beliefs, and even for directly contradictory ones in the case of the "race question," given Jefferson's ambivalence about it. Tracing the development of divergent Agrarian movements leads even beyond Jefferson's life and work, though, to forces which existed separate from Jefferson and influenced him. For example, the historian Eugene Genovese notes the "French revolutionary tradition of agrarian egalitarianism" (1979, 89), and it is common knowledge that Jefferson lived in France for years and was greatly affected by many aspects of French civilization . However, another strain of Agrarianism is noted by W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South, as well as the problem of precisely defining Agrarian. Says Cash, Mark Weinke and Greg Plachta...