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

9 Alabama's Last First Book The Example of Daniel Hundley In form and theme, not to mention chronology, one could hardly find more fit material for concluding a book on literature and cultural formation in earlyAlabama than in Alabamian Daniel Hundley's 1860 Social Relations in Our Southern States-itself a conflation of social analysis and imaginative myth speaking in strange, defiant coda and reprise on most of the cultural themes already discussed. Indeed, beyond its importance as a social document, the most salient feature of Hundley's text, from both a cultural and a literary standpoint, remains its curiously composite nature. On one hand it was an attempt to configure-and, for the most part, justify-the distinctive sociopolitical patterns of class and race (and to a minor degree gender) it saw as arising out of a world come in the brief space of five decades from the hubbub and bustle of the Old Southwest frontier to slave empire and political heart of a newly formed Confederacy; and on the other it was an endeavor to come to terms, at once in strident defense and tortured apologia, with an increasingly complex myth of Southern identity touching upon the deepest springs of the regional imagination . As a result, it seemed neither history nor literature-or rather, as noted by William J. Cooper and Fred Hobson, it could not help being something of both.' Not surprisingly, the author of this deeply complicated and even divided book was himself a deeply complicated and even divided man. As Hobson suggests , this went even to Hundley's self-image as a native Alabamian, where one 127 discerns frequently from his life and writings something of a wish that he had not been born there, with the place in the 1830S and 1840S still a precinct of frontier rapscallions and showy parvenus not sufficiently refined for "a patrician who believed one's highest calling was to be a gentleman" (63). Descended from Virginians, Hundleywas the son of a practitioner of both medicine and lawwho had emigrated southward to become a landowner in the Tennessee Valley region of upper Alabama; then, in a kind of reverse migration, Hundley's education carried him to undergraduate studies at Bacon College in Kentucky, where he took an A. B. (1850), a year's additional work at the University of Virginia (1852), and finally an LL. B. from Harvard (1853). Subsequently, he combined marriage to a well-born first cousin from Virginia with a business career in Chicago managing his wealthy father-in-Iaw's real estate interests. There in turn he combined his business pursuits with apprentice political writings on a variety of subjects: the dangers of American commercial expansion conducted at the moral expense of the national character; the "pharisaical" status of Northern denunciations of Southern slavery when compared with the human traffic in the British West Indies; the social consequences of unemployment among the urban poor.2 Although regularly accompanying his family to spend winters in Alabama, he still thought of himself as a dedicated Unionist; and he returned to take up permanent residence in the state only in 1860 when he saw the election of Lincoln as having forced the South to secession as a last-ditch response. There, on the eve of a political rupture deemed increasingly inevitable, he quickly wrote Social Relations, albeit with a timing that could not have been worse; and, as with everything else in this complex man, bad chronology was further compounded by an almost perversely maladroit conceptualizing of rhetorical occasion. For he wrote, he noted insistently, precisely as a result of his living for an extended period in the North, mainly for readers of that region, and especially for those too long exposed to writings of the "Uncle Tom school"themselves largely the work of "Englishmen, Frenchmen, Down-Eastern men, the Bloomer style of men, as well as countless numbers of female scribblers"ceaselessly attempting "to drum on the public tympanum (almost to deafness indeed) in praise or blame-generally the latter-of Southern peculiarities, social habits, manners, customs, observances, and domestic institutions."3 And if, he averred, he elected to present himself as an enthusiastic defender of Southern life and institutions, surely long personal involvement in Northern affairs allowed him to claim a uniquely reasoned perspective on issues of comparative culture. In his education and his subsequent living arrangements he had, after all, evinced "a strong desire to come in contact with the Northern people, and Northern...

Share