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.............................................................................................................................................................. 4 To “Venerate the Spot” of “Airy Visions” Slavery and the Romantic Conception of Place in Mary Telfair’s Savannah Jeffrey Robert Young In the summer of 1828, Mary Telfair experienced “a circumstance of a most unpleasant nature.” Heading homeward by carriage through the streets of Savannah after a visit with friends, Telfair and her brother Alexander looked into the evening’s “fine moonlight” and saw, to their horror, that their coachman was no longer in his seat. “In a state of intoxication ,” the aged slave had toppled out of the carriage, leaving the Telfairs helplessly trapped inside the moving vehicle. No one was holding the reins of the horses, and these elite slaveholders were careering out of control through the city streets. While Alexander ineffectually attempted to bring the horses to a halt through vocal commands, Mary— as she would later relate with discernible pride—“had (though dreadfully alarmed) presence of mind enough to order our footman to run & stop them.” Imagining that she had only narrowly avoided being “dashed to pieces,” she was upset enough to delay for a week her scheduled trip to the North. Reporting that she “knew nothing that could have depressed me so much but the death of an intimate acquaintance,” Telfair revealed outraged disappointment at the coachman’s conduct. The inebriated driver had been, according to Telfair, a particularly favored slave whom Alexander had purchased “to gratify” Mary and her sister Margaret. They placed “so much confidence in him that it was a terrible shock to find him unworthy of it.” “Every indulgence was granted him,” noted Mary, and yet, she concluded, “our best intentions often are productive of evil consequences.” The moral of the story, which she told with literary flair, was simple: “if he had been kept constantly employed” with more taxing work, “he would not have had time enough to indulge” in his vices.1 In the early nineteenth century, Mary Telfair was one of an increasing number of slaveholders who believed that their mastery actively benefitted their slaves, who would be otherwise lost without concerned white guidance.2 In Savannah and across the j e f f r e y r o b e r t y o u n g 70 slaveholding South, slaveholders were acutely aware that the modern world was beginning to look askance at slavery, so in response they developed a culture that allowed them to sidestep mounting charges that their ownership of slaves constituted a terrible crime. Although the American Revolution had raised unavoidable questions about a natural right to liberty, elite residents of Savannah hastened to rebuild the region’s plantation economy following the war. Slavery played a defining role in these plans. As the prominent Savannah merchant Joseph Clay observed in 1785, “The Negroe business is a great object with us. . . . It is to the Trade of the Country, as the Soul [is] to the Body.” Georgia politicians such as the Savannah lawyer James Jackson defended human bondage in the U.S. Congress against the antislavery movement, which he derisively dismissed as “the fashion of the day.” In the face of accusations that they were “destitute of Humanity,” Savannah slaveholders deflected moral criticism by claiming that their mastery benefitted their slaves. Though self-serving in the extreme, the proslavery rationale purported, with cruel irony, to celebrate a vision of the slaveholding household as one defined by lasting human connections rather than by short-term economic relationships between employers and wageworkers. Instead of exploiting their slaves, wealthy slaveholders claimed to regard them with paternalistic concern.3 Prominent Savannah slaveholders such as Mary Telfair did not simply justify slavery out of misplaced confidence in the sanctity and permanence of their own racist social order. Nor did they turn a blind eye toward the ways in which their city compared unfavorably to locales in the North on matters of health, economy, and landscape. In a weird ideological twist, slaveholders such as Mary Telfair drew upon assumptions established by the culture of romanticism to embrace rather than to deny the impermanence of all human endeavors. By acknowledging with morbid enthusiasm the inevitability of decay and ruin, powerful slaveholders such as the Telfairs counterintuitively constructed a coherent sense of purpose as self-appointed guardians of social virtue. Their defense of slavery was embedded in a heroic ideal defined by their assumption that only they were soldiering on as the world was falling to pieces around them. Of course, these cultural...

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