From Humor to History: Joseph Glover Baldwin and Party Leaders

From Humor to History: Joseph Glover Baldwin and Party Leaders ALTHOUGH ANTEBELLUM ALABAMA wasnotexactlyfertileliteraryground, it was not devoid of good writers. Scholars have devoted much attention to antebellum Southwestern humor, a genre well represented in Alabama by Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper. Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, earthy tales written in dialect that reveal the raw quality of life in the new society developing in antebellum Alabama, has drawn much scholarly interest. Historians and literary critics have examined Joseph Glover Baldwin’s 1853 book of southwestern humor, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, usually portraying it as an excellent example of the social thought of the antebellum Whig Party. In Flush Times, Baldwin expresses concern about the disorderliness of the frontier through the use of an aristocratic and moralizing tone. While he appreciates the freedom of the frontier, he calls for the excessive individualism of the Southwest to be tamed through self-control, the rule of law, and voluntary social institutions. Scholars, unfortunately, have paid much less attention to Baldwin’s second book, Party Leaders, a history of American politics.1 A D A M L . TAT E Adam L. Tate is an assistant professor of history at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia. He would like to thank Jeff Jakeman and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article. Joseph Glover Baldwin’s Party Leaders; Sketches of Thomas Jefferson, Alex’r Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, Including Notices of Many Other Distinguished American Statesmen (New York, 1855) can be read online at http://www.archive.org/details/partyleaderssket00baldrich. 1 On Baldwin, see George Frederick Mellen, “Joseph G. Baldwin and the ‘Flush Times,’” Sewanee Review 9 (April 1901): 171–84; Eugene Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin: Humorist or Moralist?” Alabama Review 5 (April 1952): 122–41; Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959); Joseph O’Beirne Milner, “The Social, Religious, Economic, and Political Implications of the Southwestern Humor of Baldwin, Longstreet, Hooper, and G. W. Harris,” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1971); T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 84 In 1994 Eugene Genovese rightly noted that Baldwin had been “forgotten as the author of a shrewd book on American politics.” In 1993 John Grammer published the only scholarly article devoted to Party Leaders, in which he placed the book within the context of Virginia republican thought. He did not deal with the Alabama context of the work, however. In a 1992 Alabama Review article, Charles Watson provided important Alabama political context for understanding Baldwin’s Flush Times. Chapter seven of Philip Beidler’s 1999 work, First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama, contextualized the work of Baldwin and Hooper. Beidler mentioned Party Leaders and suggested that the meaning of the book could be found in Baldwin’s political career as a Whig, but spent most of the chapter discussing Flush Times and Baldwin’s unwillingness to acknowledge the role of slavery in Alabama.2 This study, which places Party Leaders within the context of Baldwin’s political experiences in Alabama, will provide a clearer understanding of the book’s message and a deeper appreciation of Baldwin’s thought. Benjamin Buford Williams, A Literary History of Alabama: The Nineteenth Century (Rutherford, N.J., 1979), 88–91; William E. Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times: The Confidence Man as a Literary Convention (Columbia, Mo., 1985), 97–106; Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 63–74; James H. Justus, introduction to The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, by Joseph Glover Baldwin (Baton Rouge, 1987), xiii–l; Charles S. Watson, “Order Out of Chaos: Joseph Glover Baldwin’s The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi,” Alabama Review 45 (October 1992): 257–72; John Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1996), 128–58; Philip D. Beidler, First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 1999), 87–101; Mary Ann Wimsat, “Bench and Bar: Baldwin’s Lawyerly Humor,” in The Humor of the Old South, ed. M. Thomas...