In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, and Ardent Nationalist by Andrew R. Black
  • John F. Kvach
John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, and Ardent Nationalist. By Andrew R. Black. Southern Biography. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 343. $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6294-1.)

In John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, and Ardent Nationalist, Andrew R. Black explores the connections between the fictional writings and political leanings of one of nineteenth-century America's most popular authors. John Pendleton Kennedy emerged from Baltimore's busy streets worldlier than most southern boys his age. Born in 1795, at a time when British interference, economic uncertainty, and a growing sense of individualism pervaded American culture in the years before the War of 1812, Kennedy channeled his family struggles, strict moral code, and creativity into becoming a strident nationalist who wanted to aid his nation. The pen became Kennedy's primary tool, and he used it to further his literary career and become a vocal booster of the Whig Party.

Kennedy's novel Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832) pushed him into a literary world with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe. Few southern writers could rival Kennedy's antebellum book sales. Yet, unlike Poe's geographically ambiguous stories, Kennedy specifically used the plantations and farms of rural Virginia to highlight the challenges and ambiguities of race and slavery in southern culture. His belief in a proactive government that supported enterprise did not mesh with the more negative elements of the South's plantation culture. Kennedy could not reconcile his views with slavery's place in Swallow Barn, and his Whig Party was unable to deal effectively with slavery as a national issue. The death of the Whig Party and, ultimately, the antebellum South lay in Kennedy's stories. According to Black, Kennedy's literary legacy mirrored a confused and fractious nation destined for civil war because it could not reconcile slavery with its growing aspirations.

Black does an excellent job of highlighting how Kennedy's personal life and early professional experiences shaped his feelings about American culture, economics, and politics. Black's approach allows modern readers to compare and analyze the duality of Kennedy's literary career and political achievements. This element of the book is important because Kennedy alone is not a major political force whom many care about or a lasting literary figure who matters much today. Altogether Black's tapestry allows readers to see why words mattered and how they shaped the growing debates over southern institutions. Black rightly notes that Kennedy's "ambivalence" toward slavery and race—"he refused to own slaves and either sold or manumitted those that came into his possession"—and his lack of support for the Democrats, the South's dominant political party, made him a unique, oppositional character in antebellum southern [End Page 967] history (p. 254). Kennedy's true value for modern readers is that he defied the procrustean narrative of a solid South.

Overall, Black's work provides what it promises. The author sets out to answer basic questions about the rise and rapid fall of the Whig Party and to bring focus to the importance of John Pendleton Kennedy's literary and political career. Black accomplishes these goals by blending the cultural markers of nineteenth-century American literature with the starker political economy of the antebellum South. Readers will find that Black's clear analysis and fluid narrative are easy to follow. Perhaps it would be interesting to either blend and contextualize Kennedy's accomplishments with other American authors of his time or focus more on Kennedy's postwar career to highlight the whiggish elements that became the foundation of the postbellum New South movement. Ultimately, however, Andrew R. Black has deftly taken the memory of a man who has lain dormant in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery since 1870 and has breathed new life into Kennedy's legacy as an important American literary and political figure.

John F. Kvach
University of Alabama in Huntsville
...

pdf

Share