The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2. Alexis de Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts on the Antebellum South and New Orleans

33 2 Alexis de Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts on the Antebellum South and New Orleans Thomas Clark The scene changes so suddenly that you think yourself on the other side of the world. —Alexis de Tocqueville on crossing the Ohio into Kentucky The Mason-Dixon Line from across the Atlantic In the German author Thomas Meinecke’s 1996 novel The Church of John F. Kennedy, a feverish Pynchonesque German American pastiche set in the Deep South, one finds the following paragraph: On the trip across country roads Assmann recalled scenes from a number of movies, in which deviously planted traffic diversion signs hinted at evil chainsaws and troughs of blood. Alligator heads, which were occasionally seen rising above murky waters, dragged the travelers’ imagination into the innermost, most impenetrable of swamps, where they saw their own bodies dangling from giant cypresses. In the mudholes of Louisiana, Wenzel began to explain, behind ghostly veils of Spanish moss, Hollywood had, in a way, found its eternal Vietnam.1 In this brief passage, Meinecke manages to summarize some of the key ele- 34 Thomas Clark ments that have consistently defined European (and American) perceptions of the South. There is, first and foremost, the recurrent trope of southernness as the embodiment of the irrational, uncanny, tropically foreign, and archaically violent, a heartland of darkness so removed from other conventions of U.S. Americanness, both as space and as psychological state, that it becomes part of a different realm. There is the mediated nature of this South, where travelers’ impressions are inevitably prestructured by films, novels, and their antecedents’ accounts, which frequently serve to reinforce the southern imaginary at the cost of empirical observation. Finally, Meinecke reminds us that European perceptions and descriptions of the South are inevitably informed by and entangled with American images that evolved from the ongoing national debate on the nature and boundaries of U.S. identity, or rather identities. If we move backward past Hollywood, TV images of the civil rights struggle, Faulkner, Mitchell, and Dixon into the antebellum era, we will find that the idea of “Dixie” principally emerged as one half of a mutual identity construction process between northern Yankees and southern Cavaliers .2 As early as 1787 the Antifederalist James Winthrop had argued in the debate over the Federal Constitution that “it is impossible for one code of laws to suit Georgia and Massachusetts. . . . The inhabitants of warmer climates are more dissolute in their manners, and less industrious, than in colder countries. A degree of severity is, therefore, necessary with one which would cramp the spirit of the other.”3 This juxtaposition between a stern, rational, and sober North and a tropically lascivious, emotion-driven South, whether expressed in climatological, ethnocultural, or economic terms, became a staple of intra-U.S. discourse. As late as 2001 a Louisiana scholar could affirm that his state was representative “of everything that the New England tradition in American literature and culture and thought is not. Louisiana represents the heart over the intellect, spontaneity over calculation , instinct over reason, music over the word, forgiveness over judgment , impermanence over permanence, and community over the isolated and alienated individual.”4 An overarching southern identity congealed during the nineteenth century , as Americans became obsessed with questions of national character, and the South attempted to negotiate its internal contradictions concerning slavery, democracy, capitalism, and expansion by forging a homogenous “non-Yankee” sectional identity based more on myth than fact. Thus a patchwork of Souths—Piedmont and Tidewater, slaveholding and non- Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts 35 slaveholding, upper and lower, urban, rural, and frontier, Anglo, Franco, and Hispanic—could begin imagining itself as a nation defined by the peculiar institution, white states-rights republicanism, a genteel plantation culture, and the set of traits cataloged above.5 The North, in turn, ambivalently chastised its strange sibling for its supposed feudal backwardness while wistfully yearning for aspects of its genteel lifestyle and imagined organic cohesion in the wake of anxieties over growing into an amoral society of soulless and pragmatic materialists.6 It seems banal to point out the ubiquity of this North-South divide in American society both as a source of political conflict and as a topic of cultural discourse between 1830 and the outbreak of the Civil War. And yet studies of European perceptions of America during this era tend to focus on the well-established bipolarity between “Old...