“Literature to him was a recreation”: A Life of Writing on the Southwestern Frontier

On december 7, 1839, alexander beaufort meek appeared before the Erosophic Society of the University of Alabama offering an oration entitled “The Southwest: Its History, Character and Prospects.” A “bright-eyed, fair-headed […] and lean” young man, Meek had returned to the “intellectual home of [his] boyhood,” to speak to fellow “Lovers of Wisdom.” Meek’s message examined the audience’s support of “intellectual and moral improvement […] which are to be the bones and sinews of mental manhood.” His concept of manhood enveloped subjects such as agriculture, climate, and health; topics that filled Meek’s address. Its central theme, however, was the inadequate attention paid to southern history by contemporary writers. Questioning how Spanish, French, and English colonial interactions gave way to Americans’ encounters with “a race so diverse from their own, in manners, customs, and institutions,” Meek thundered: “the people of the United States have silently assented to the behests of their historians, and have permitted these things to be forgotten.” Meek pinned the South’s historical uncertainty on these historians’ inaction: “The whole history of the Southwest remains to be written.”¹

Image 1.

Portrait of Alexander B. Meek, circa 1840. Courtesy of W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama.

This essay takes seriously Meek’s challenge as one that still possesses great relevance. Herein, “on the southwestern frontier” possesses dual meaning. The first is intended to conjure up the frontier as literary obsession for whites during America’s early nineteenth century. The second is meant to suggest the actual geographic space where writing about intermingled with living on the frontier. Understanding this duality and Meek’s negotiation of the two is key to understanding the genre of southern literature he influenced, cherished, and defended through a lifetime of writing. By exploring the very complexities of writing on the southwestern frontier that affected the life of Alexander Meek, we are able to access the literal rewriting that his publications inspired as well as how the frontier he intimately embraced shaped his perceptions of the South’s distinctiveness as well as how the notion of the American frontier was created, in part, by the efforts of men like this little-known southerner.

Alexander Beaufort Meek, or A. B. Meek as he was known to his friends, was among the cadre of literary personalities who began their careers in early Tuscaloosa, Alabama.² Throughout his life, Meek interacted with a wide variety of people: fellow university students, writers, editors, politicians, and professors. Through their relationships, we can peer into the rich literary variations that thrived as Tuscaloosans formed representations of themselves as southern intellectuals while championing their region’s reputation in the young American republic. The expressions proffered by these Tuscaloosans relied heavily on situating their new southern space in an evolving American landscape—in doing so, many of them relied on the themes of nature, Native American life, male-female courtships, frontier exploration, and history.³ Though these themes mirrored those of their transcendentalist cousins, Meek and other southern writers’ direct interactions with slavery, Native Americans, and life in evolving frontier settlements gave their interpretation of the American frontier scenario a uniquely southern flavor. As we will see, for the most prolific of his Tuscaloosa peers, A. B. Meek sought to establish the South as a destination of rich literary potential. For his accomplishments, he would be admired across the antebellum South but fade from memory after the Civil War.⁴ What survived was the South that his writings on the frontier helped create.

That Tuscaloosan writers labored so doggedly to present their interpretations of the nineteenth-century southern frontier demonstrates several key points. First, though separated by several hundred miles from the intellectual hub of New England, southern writers like Meek wanted to participate in the burgeoning American literary culture. Second, the publishing careers explored here illustrate the processes that literally permitted white frontier peoples to write their existence into the annals of American frontier experiences. Third, part of the...