Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology by Rebecca Cawood McIntyre (review)

Much has been written on the construction of southern identity and culture during the Civil War and postbellum periods. However, the reconstitution of the South for white northern middle-class tourists by northern promoters and travel writers has received less attention. Souvenirs of the Old South, an insightful contribution to this growing field, examines how tourism shaped the transformation of the South from a typically American to distinctly regional place during the post-Civil War era. As Rebecca Cawood McIntyre contends, “the book explores that shift in tourism and focuses on how the South was imagined by Yankees for Yankees in the critical half-century after the Civil War, a process that influenced how northerners saw the South more than any other southern booster could” (4). McIntyre attributes this success to northern tourist promoters’ mass-produced print culture—national magazines, travel books, guidebooks, advertisements, and pamphlets—which constitute an array of primary sources that illuminate some of her larger themes about the evolution of the South in promotional literature.

The first section of the book, “The South as American—1840–1860,” focuses on the earliest developed tourism in the state of New York while looking at how antebellum guidebooks described the South as characteristically American. McIntyre’s discussion of The North American Tourist, the first comprehensive guidebook of the U.S., highlights the attributes of New York’s fine resorts like Saratoga Springs alongside its beautiful hotels and fashionable society, the latter being its most alluring attraction. She points out that even though the South lacked a real tourist market at this time because of poor transportation, national writers publicized the medicinal qualities of Virginia Springs and often used Saratoga as a measuring stick to demonstrate the advantages of southern spas. The author explains that antebellum promoters also relied heavily upon sublime mountains, pastoral valleys, and crashing waterfalls to lure tourists from the North (39). Generally speaking, however, writers minimized sectional animosities and emphasized uniformity.

In the second section, “Reconstructing A Southern Landscape—1870–1890,” McIntyre looks at postbellum northern promoters shift toward reimaging the South as an aberration, a region vastly different from the North. For example, they employed a nostalgic and exploitative representation of poor white mountaineers to satisfy northern tourists’ desire for an escape from the rigors of the modern world. Charles Lanman’s “The Novelties of Southern Scenery” and Bostonian Anna Marie Wells’s “The Poetry of Traveling” lauded the mountainous regions of Tennessee and North Carolina while portraying the people as ignorant and uncivilized. “Southernizing” the landscape by presenting a quiet frontier with simple and old-fashioned poor white southerners appealed to northern tourists longing for a respite from the industrial North. At the same time, McIntyre argues that it also “offered a model of how a white elite believed the lower classes should behave” (65). Moreover, the postwar transformation of the region is illustrated in her analysis of the newly gothicized south in promotional travel pieces. The swamps and ruined landscapes of a mythic Old South evoked “medieval, melancholy, and slightly grotesque” images of the South that allowed a northern audience to enjoy its peculiarity while marginalizing the region to reinforce the superiority of the North (68).

The third section entitled “African Americans in the Tourist Landscape—1870–1920” is the most interesting part of the book, especially for scholars interested in examining the interplay between tourism and socially constructed racial identities. McIntyre asserts that black stereotypes became the premier symbol of southern promotional imagery, as portrayed in Picturesque America, edited by journalist William Cullen Bryant. This two-volume set of books often cast freedmen as lazy or sleeping to promote a picturesque peasantry that would entice an American audience obsessed with European culture. But McIntyre ultimately accredits the emerging racist depictions of African Americans in travel literature to a new breed of northern travel writers. These men and women made antebellum Mammies, Sambos and Pickaninnies the official markers...