Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

6. Notes from the Underground

6 Notes from the Underground the southern man of honor may have been pitifully equipped for dealing with the changing marketplace, but he was a powerful ally in the coming war over who would control the expansion of slavery. The gentleman’s paternalistic benevolence and his domestic values of family and home-centered responsibility were far more effective apologies for slavery than the savvy negotiations of the businessman, even though the plantation was as firmly a part of the south’s market economy as a textile mill was to Massachusetts—a fact which abolitionists were particularly fond of pointing out.as the conflict worsened,even this paternalistic image began to pale beside that of its warrior twin. Manly images were all variations of a battlefield code of fearlessness and éclat, and as the crisis worsened the masculine ideal channeled itself into the southern cavalier, the impulsive and glibly violent gallant.This was masquerade culture run amok. Probably the most rarefied masculine image of the 1850s was the filibuster, the self-selected conqueror like William Walker, who recruited his own army, set himself up for a time as president of nicaragua, tried to appropriate Honduras, and was shot for his efforts. filibustering and 105 106 Counterfeit Gentlemen cavaliering were great fun, if one overlooked the consequences, but their sheer boisterousness oddly did not generate much humor. attitudes had hardened, postures had become deadly serious, and when Preston Brooks caned Charles sumner on the senate floor in 1856 he drew the outline of what every southern man/boy knew was ideal. He acted out of honor, with a flourish and without reflection—no market dithering or negotiating here. Man-making, it seemed, had settled on the most traditional, most Homeric, and—in the face of what was to come—most suicidal ideal of all. an era was ending, in more ways than one. Joseph Baldwin’s Flush Times was among the last really creative attempts by a humorist to satirize the gentleman gently and point out the incongruities of southern manly ideals,and it was published in 1854—the very year stephen douglas introduced the Kansas-nebraska act and the republican Party began to form. Humorists continued to write, of course, but even the Spirit of the Times began to hemorrhage subscribers and lose its punch. local colorists like Hardin e.taliaferro, a very gifted humorist in his own right, wrote good stories about odd characters, but his were more nostalgic than ironic.1 even Baldwin’s masterpiece, it must be pointed out, was set in the past. still, there was one more attempt to push past the self-flatteries and come to grips with the incongruities of being a southern male. in 1854, that critical year,an obscure tennessee businessman,George Washington Harris, began recording the voice of sut lovingood, coward and fool, a task which took him through the war to come and which he assembled into a book in 1867.2 sut was the antithesis of the gentleman. in Harris ’s hands, sut describes himself as a “nat’ral born durn’d fool,” without “nara a soul, nuffin but a whisky proof gizzard,” with “the longes’ par ove laigs ever hung tu eny cackus.” His sole purpose in life is to drink, romp with the girls, and get “intu more durn’d misfortnit skeery scrapes, than enybody, an’ then run outen them faster, by golly, nor enybody.” When challenged, he runs; when asked to explain himself, his answer is direct: “‘yu go tu hell, mistofer; yu bothers me.’” anything, human or animal, is fair game, although he has a special fondness for preachers, sheriffs, and women of virtue. in one of the funniest stories in southern humor, sut slips two live lizards up a circuit preacher’s pant leg just to watch the old windbag strip and run naked through a mostly female crowd, screaming “‘Brethren,brethren....the Hell-sarpints hes got me!’”in another tale,sut breaks up Mrs. yardley’s quilting bee by tying a clothesline row of quilts to a horse’s saddle horn, then splintering a fence rail over the poor ani- mal “’bout nine inches ahead ove the root ove his tail.”The horse knocks down just about everything in sight, including Mrs. yardley, who dies either from being run over or from the shock of losing a nine-diamond quilt, depending on who tells the story. often Harris made sut the...