Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

3. Counterfeit Presentments

3 Counterfeit Presentments in 1833 Johnson Jones Hooper informed his mother that he was tired of working menial jobs “without any hope of going to college.”1 He left Charleston to join an older brother in alabama.four years later,up in the shenandoah valley, Joseph Glover Baldwin threw a few law books into his saddlebags and headed off in the same direction.They probably never met, but they were in some ways very much alike. Both had been born in 1815 to old but not necessarily prosperous families; both had fathers who started out prosperous but somehow dribbled away the family fortune. each had older, more successful brothers who tried to get them started in a useful trade. Baldwin had tried journalism, but wound up embracing law; Hooper tried practicing law but put his heart into newspaper work. Coincidentally, both Hooper and Baldwin were episcopalian and Whig, largely self-educated, supremely ambitious, and given to fits of moodiness . Mostly they were just restless, and going to alabama seemed like a good idea.2 They might as well have traveled to another continent.The new states of the frontier south were so unlike virginia or even eastern Georgia 48 that men such as Hooper or Baldwin moved like Marco Polo among the Chinese. it is tempting to view the cotton south as an exuberant extrapolation of the old dominion, divided into a tripartite structure of planters, slaves, and common whites. The reality was more complex. in contrast to the rather homey world of the shenandoah valley or the Carolinas , the frontier states were lands of constant motion where tradition had been supplanted by speculation and speculation had gone wild. The phenomenon was directly connected to the availability of cheap land. in the early 1830s andrew Jackson expelled Cherokees and Choctaws from their ancestral homes, threw the emptied lands onto the market at $1.50 an acre, and then promptly rearranged the money supply so that hundreds of banks sprang up overnight, printing bills and issuing credit based on little more than a promise and a prayer.“Under this stimulating process,” Baldwin observed drily, “prices rose like smoke. lots in obscure villages were held at city prices; lands,bought at the minimum cost of the government, were sold at from thirty to forty dollars an acre, and considered dirt cheap at that.”3 “it seemed,” he added, “as if a new chapter had opened in history, and that the world had been let out of the school of common sense for a holiday of commercial insanity.”4 it was, in short, a speculator’s nirvana—a condition that played havoc with manly expectations. Those who moved there under the pretense of becoming planters were in reality venture capitalists starting up risky and volatile businesses, and they experienced all the competitive pressures and insecurities such men must endure, as well as all the attendant consequences. virtually none of the traditional agents of social control moved west without mutation. The virginia gentleman’s domestic empire ,his sense of command,the deference paid him by common folk,even his sporting instincts, were all rearranged. all of which posed particular threats to social order.“society was wholly unorganized,”Baldwin sighed, “there was no restraining public opinion: the law was well-nigh powerless —and religion was scarcely heard of except as furnishing the oaths and technics of profanity.” Baldwin’s assessment was not fundamentally different from the kind of morally anxious opinions that longstreet had voiced in the market towns of eastern Georgia; it had simply taken on urgency and lacked an evangelical overtone. virtually alone, without an extended family, creating plantations out of wiregrass and towns out of wide spots in the road, the southern male was left to fend for himself. His code of honor theoretically should have sustained him and given him the tools to forge Counterfeit Presentments 49 50 Counterfeit Gentlemen through. instead, it left him vulnerable and prone to extremes of behavior . “Honor” was hardly a workable ethic in the cardsharp atmosphere of the new states, but southern male behavior was unthinkable without it, and so odd extrapolations of masquerade culture took form. Those who succeeded seemed given over to conspicuous consumption and exaggerations of the virginia gentleman’s sporting life—all hammered out through a slave system that grew more exploitative the farther west one traveled. at the low end of the social scale, the unattached white male...