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Introduction
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Introduction The southern urge to explain, interpret, and defend the South has long been observed and analyzed by both historians and literary critics. Fred Hobson traces the origin of this impulse in southern writers to the antebellum period, “when the region first became acutely self-conscious” (3). Although to some extent the South had always believed in its uniqueness, the region’s commitment to the nation’s values and ideals tempered any notion of separate identity until congressional debates and legislation over the issue of slavery created sectional conflicts, forcing the South increasingly into a defensive posture in responding to the nation’s dilemma. Even as these defenses proliferated, however, “very few Southerners before 1848 actually thought of the South as a potentially new nation , and very few, before the Nashville Convention of 1850, spoke openly and seriously about secession” (22). The 1851–1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin exacerbated the tensions between North and South.2 In his analysis of literary magazines in the Old South, Richard J. Calhoun observes that practically all southern reviewers decried Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “an example of propaganda, the misuse of literature for practical purposes” (162). Nevertheless, such sentiments did not stop southern writers such as Caroline Hentz, William Gilmore Simms, and Maria Jane McIntosh from responding in kind with “Anti-Tom” novels that exhibited, at the same time they sought to contain, anxiety about the stability of the antebellum plantation system. Raised in the South but residing in the North for much of her adult life, novelist McIntosh felt ties to both regions. Nevertheless, she was particularly vocal in responding to Stowe’s depiction of the South in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Parodying Stowe’s subtitle, “Life Among the Lowly,” McIntosh published The Lofty and the Lowly; or, Good in All and None All-Good in 1853. In this novel, she depicts northern capitalism as an exploitive system of wage slavery that she contrasts with the southern plantation system of slavery, which she presents as a family-centered, benevolent enterprise guided by Christian principles. Although it was not published until 1863, the proslavery message of Two Pictures; or, What We Think of Ourselves, and What the World Thinks of Us was similarly 4 Novels from the Civil War Period motivated, as McIntosh makes clear in her explicit critique of Stowe’s novel in the concluding paragraphs of her own. Set in a vague, prewar past but still imbued with a nostalgic tint of loss, Two Pictures, as McIntosh explains in her preface, “was not only planned, but nearly completed, while there was peace in the land. . . . The delay in its publication has been the result of circumstances of no interest to any but the author” (4). Part of the delay to which McIntosh obliquely refers may have been due to her difficulty in finding a publisher. Although the antebellum South had many publishers, “no Southern publishing house had the professional expertise to edit, advertise, and market serious literature effectively. Thus, a writer who wished to be read published in the North where he [or she] frequently found his [or her] work discredited as the product of a slave society” (Muhlenfeld 179). With the onset of war, and the disruption of the literary marketplace in the South, the North developed a virtual monopoly on publishing, with obvious, negative repercussions for southern authors unable to permeate the hostile lines that separated the two regions. During the war, as Melissa J. Homestead argues, northern publishers were “driven by messy and conflicting commercial and political interests.” Nevertheless , “[m]any Northern readers were willing to buy and read Southernauthored works, and Northern publishers were happy to accommodate readers by producing Northern editions of these works” (“Publishing History” 669). The publishing history of Augusta Jane Evans’s Civil War novel, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, suggests that she understood the complex conditions of the war-time press and was able to maneuver and negotiate with both northern and southern publishers to ensure that she “maintained a continuous (and remunerated ) presence in the Northern literary market despite her ardent support for the Confederacy’s separation from the North” (669).3 Chronicling the events in the lives of two strong-minded southern women, Macaria culminates with a depiction of their selfless service and fervent devotion to the Confederacy after war breaks out. Evans clearly wrote the novel to promote the national cause and values of the Confederacy, and in selecting the Richmond firm of...