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5. Elizabethan Dreams, Victorial Nightmares: Antebellum South Carolina's Future through an English Looking Glass
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87 5 Elizabethan Dreams, Victorian Nightmares Antebellum South Carolina’s Future through an English Looking Glass Lawrence T. McDonnell Galloping horsemen, gleaming armor, a pale moon rising over a distant castle: such symbols seemingly befit the midlands of medieval Britain better than those of antebellum South Carolina. But when “Black Hawk,” “Grey Eagle,” “Red Rover,” “Blue Ranger,” “Thundergust,” and “Wildfire” welcomed their friends to a Christmas Eve gathering of the “Nighthawks of the Congaree” at their “Hole in the Wall” haunt in 1847, this was the imagery they adopted.1 The Nighthawks promised carnival—“The first shall be last, and the last shall be first!”—but whether they were college students or rural planters’ sons, a regular club where young men might drink and carouse apart from disapproving women and clerics, or simply a small set of playful fellows out to advertise a holiday dance, we cannot say. Were they an unlucky slave patrol, comically escalating the duty to ride the roads during the season of celebration into a dream of ancient chivalry? Or did they actually play out fantasy just as their invitation depicted, donning armor, mounting thoroughbreds, and jousting under the stars? Certainly others did, across the state and further afield, during the decade and a half before secession. Myths of moonlight and magnolias flourished from such weird and twisted roots and more dangerous dreams besides. For many southerners, chivalry was pure pretend: a fashionable style, a Romantic conceit, well deserving the derision outsiders heaped upon 88 Lawrence T. McDonnell it.2 “The age of Chivalry is gone,” they admitted, and all “whin[ing] over the want of Knights, and tournaments, and of scarfs waved by ladies’ fair hands” and all other such “tomfooleries” was simply sickly sentimentality .3 To northerners, it seemed “inexplicable” that “men, grown men . . . should make such Jack Puddings of themselves” as did Arkansas’s “knights of the coonskin cap,” Virginia’s “Baron de Corncob,” and the “Champion of Skunk’s Misery,” decked out in “pasteboard bucklers and helmets of the same material,” pretending to a nobility of the most ludicrous sort.4 Jousting was just “an expensive, dangerous amusement which the masses cannot imitate, and in which they cannot participate,” the Boston Investigator charged, a symbol of the “barbaric pride, venality, and ignorance” that typified southern culture.5 Circuses mocked such exercises.6 Poets parodied them. Knightly self-portrayal became the acme of ridiculous self-importance or worse.7 “O his armour is bright, his steed is strong / And his housings are rich and rare,” sneered abolitionist Jane Swisshelm. “He sold a baby to buy him his horse / And another his trappings fair.”8 Critics found it especially easy to disparage the self-admiring “chivāl’ry (do not pronounce chiv’alry; no one here says so, and surely we must know; who else should?) of South Caarol-i-nar.”9 Yet in Charleston and across much of the low country, few questioned the sincerity of would-be Galahads . There, men believed themselves the splendid seed of a slaveholding aristocracy rooted in knightly tradition, legitimate descendants of “the Hugonot & the Cavalier.”10 To Alfred Huger, the social characteristics of this honorable offspring were unmistakable: “their granite-integrity—their fixed & Enduring friendships—their dauntless courage & the softness of their affections” presented the most “brilliant combination of Materials & of Character which have influenced mankind from their earliest history.”11 “The age of chivalry indeed is past,” Virginian Beverly Tucker declared, “but does not the spirit of chivalry still live?”12 Elite Carolinians refused to content themselves with such vague sentiments. Instead, they sought to seize their imagined birthright and improve upon it, too.13 Through such endeavors of recreation, historian Ted Ownby reminds us, “people express not only who they are, but, very often, who they are not.”14 Increasingly appalled by the brutal age of iron and steam in which they lived, disgusted by the market-driven values of Victorian culture, they embraced a different code, pursued a different future. They admired the history of noble deeds, cultivated the manners of courtliness, aspired to embody gallantry in daily life. They played out chivalry’s rituals with deep earnestness in feast and [18.207.126.53] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:39 GMT) Elizabethan Dreams, Victorian Nightmares 89 dance, race and joust. They itched to do more. At the very least, we may say, chivalry’s devotees in South Carolina partook of the same earnest fantasies that inspired Congressman Lawrence Keitt to declare in 1857 that beset...