Reconstruction Georgic and Vernacular Voice Poetry

A literary account of Reconstruction’s landscape aesthetic might look something like this: an improving Northern georgic intervening in a ruined Southern pastoral—that is, a reorganization of labor under the aegis of nation-building that would reshape the plantation landscape and all it stood for. Consider, for example, the efforts of Comfort Servosse in Albion Tourgée’s novel A Fool’s Errand (1879) or the “energetic Maine m[a]n” (41) who buys the De Rossett plantation in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short story “Rodman the Keeper” (Atlantic Monthly 1877). Such stories explored the application of the program laid out in projecting economic surveys such as Edward King’s The Great South (Scribner’s Monthly 1873–74; book 1875) against the resurgent pastoral nostalgia that would culminate in the plantation fictions of Thomas Nelson Page.¹ By the turn of the century, this landscape model would come under scrutiny. Paul Laurence Dunbar, for example, reflected on the racial constraints of Southern rural labor in Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896) (Ronda). Charles Chesnutt traced ironic continuities between postbellum georgic and antebellum slaveholding attitudes in his conjure stories (The Conjure Woman, 1899).²

While the georgic/pastoral binary seems to fit the logic of Reconstruction—not only because georgic focuses on labor but also because it had long been a key genre in nation- and empire-building—none of the authors in this literary-historical sketch, whether projecting or critical, wrote in a recognizably Virgilian voice. A mix of didactic address and apostrophe borne by a pentameter line that served as the conventional English analogue of Virgil’s Latin hexameter, this voice became associated with the georgic following John Dryden’s 1697 translation of the Georgics and Joseph Addison’s prescriptive preface. If during the seventeenth century a georgic revolution encompassing the New Science and religious reform opened poetry to various possibilities for cultural work, during the eighteenth century following Dryden and Addison, georgic poetry’s social vision came to center on the rural.³ The Virgilian voice authorized the reorganization of England’s countryside and more drastic environmental transformations in British North America and the Caribbean, while linking all these landscapes within an imperial network.⁴ Patriotic British georgics such as John Philips’s Cyder (1708), Christopher Smart’s The Hop-Garden (1752), or John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) could assume without close scrutiny a traditional order of labor, even though that order was changing, as they addressed both macrolevel political questions (Whigs versus Tories; empire and trade versus insularity) and micro-level agricultural and industrial techniques. Yet the Virgilian voice diminished even as these environmental transformations became solidified during the nineteenth century. Karen O’Brien has argued that this was because a confrontation with the problem of slavery broke the “association between productive labor and civic virtue central to the tradition of imperial georgic” (173).⁵

While an Anglocentric imperial georgic such as Dyer’s The Fleece asserted the moral authority of the production and trade of woolens in sustaining the British empire, such assertion became problematic in staple-colony georgics like James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane (1764).⁶ Here, Whig values of liberty and equality confronted the tyranny of slavery. Issues of value are reflected in issues of voice. As Cristobal Silva observes, Grainger’s direct addresses to enslaved laborers—for example asserting that their lot is better than that of Scottish miners or exhorting, “your pleasing task pursue; / And, by your toil, deserve your master’s care” (Grainger 135, lines 4: 204–5)—could not have been read by the purported addressees. Instead, they function as apostrophes, claiming observational authority from the imagined proximity of the object of address, as the georgic’s account of crops, soils, and the like had traditionally done (Silva 146). When Grainger turned to his actual readers, the planter class and those who shared their interests, he acknowledged a crisis of moral authority: “Yet, planter, let humanity prevail.—” (136, line 4: 211). However, he positioned his own medium of address as impotent to resolve this crisis:

Oh, did the tender muse possess the power;Which monarchs have...