First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

5. Antebellum Alabama History in the Planter Style: The Example of Albert J. Pickett

5 Antebellum Alabama History in the Planter Style The Example of Albert J. Pickett The title chosen by David Levin for his groundbreaking study of the great nineteenth-century American historians Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman aptly imaged his sense of a new national genre they had helped to create : History as Romantic Art.' In each case, Levin proposed, as with the American romantic fiction of the era by Brown, Cooper, Simms, Irving, Hawthorne, and others, the style of history had been a distinct function of the heightened literary atmospherics of the age, with the historian as exemplar of the romantic man of letters. Had he addressed a contemporary production-grandly entitled History ofAlabama, and Incidentally ofGeorgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period-by the first epic historian of Alabama, a gifted literary amateur by the name of Albert J. Pickett, the thesis would still have worked. Further, as with the standard "literary" historians, it would have worked concerning American nineteenth-century romantic historiography as a movement away from seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Anglo-European rational models, with romantic inspiration frequently prompted further by new access to the vivid documents of New World empire serving as a direct source. In Pickett and his contemporaries North and South, that is, the school of "philosophical" or classicist historiography of such enlightenment figures as Bolingbroke, Hume, and Voltaire could be seen gradually giving way to new romantic conceptions of "narrative" history laying far much less emphasis on fact and reason-the idea of what Bolingbroke had described as "philosophy teaching by example"-and much more, to use William Hedges's terms, "upon structural and stylistic devices which would induce in the reader more vivid impressions of the flavor and color of a certain period in history" (1ll-12)! But for Pickett's addiction to orotund narrative exposition and gaudy dramatic spectacle; his undisguised regional patriotism and fondness for ripsnorting adventure; and his equally Southern predilections for the political excursus, the interminable genealogy, and the anecdote of dubious origin: the modern interpreter would surely have had to come up with something more lurid byway of entitling. And for some of the more specific layerings of inheritance both literary and historical, he would also have had to delve further into the set of complex cultural archaeologies peculiar to the region of the lower South-now encompassing the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, but at the time known as the Old Southwest. To put this into the form of explicit argument, the style of Pickett's History-with a force of authority attested to, as will be shown, both byhis own contemporaries and by generations of writers to come-may now be seen as the direct function of a distinctly literary historiography; and if that historiography clearly partook of general nineteenth-century romantic currents,3 it also bore equally the discrete signature of the author's active political participation in power, class, and race relationships of a very particular time and place. As romantic art, that is, it also carried the stamp of Pickett's conscious, albeit in many ways ambivalent, identification of himself as a member of the planter class in antebellum Alabama in the years when the great removals of native inhabitants coincided exactly with the accelerated introduction of mass chattel slavery. In just these terms of time, place, and individual positioning as determinants of shaping his own historiographic perspective, Pickett rightly saw his own formative experiences as an Alabamian as living history, a kind of personalized abstract or epitome of the region's overnight journey from territory to statehood, particularly as it related to the planter and professional classes. To begin with, like many early Alabamians of his background and station, he had made the customary journey in the literal sense. Born in Anson County, North Carolina, on 13 August 18lO, the son of Colonel William Raiford Pickett and Frances Dickinson Pickett, he arrived with his family in Autauga County, near Montgomery, on the eve of statehood in 1818. His father, acquiring a large plantation and many slaves, became wealthy and influential and served thirteen years in the Alabama legislature and three times as a Democratic presidential elector. In his turn, the younger Pickett eventually worked out his own admixture of the planter life with involvement in local politics. Although educated in the law, he never practiced, instead in 1832 marrying Sarah Smith Harris, herself FIRST BOOKS the daughter...