Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

1. The Conception and Estimate of a Gentleman

1The Conception and Estimate of a Gentleman Before there was sut lovingood or ransy sniffle or simon suggs or the Big Bear of arkansas, there was the virginia gentleman. all models of southern manhood and masculinity had their reference point, their high ground,in this single figure,which went by several names: squire,the quality, country republican, aristocrat, Washington, lee. even his more impulsive kinsman, the Carolina cavalier, stood in his shadow. Why that was the case had roots deep in the colonial era and the peculiar authority that came with possession of slaves and profits from an international crop. tobacco culture had merged seamlessly with plantation life, which in turn had joined to itself the ideal of the english squire, all of which had allowed the planter to evolve gloriously into a defender of the people and a protector of their rights. He became an icon, the general contours of which were known to any schoolboy. all agreed that the gentleman was republican—which meant that he was independent, served his people selflessly but with authority,and wore power like a familiar coat—that he was solid, civic-minded, related by blood to the whole county and half 2 Counterfeit Gentlemen the state, that his generosity and sociability were as vast as his sense of pride and honor, that he was learned and pious but not to the point of being a twit or a prig, and—most visibly—that he did not actually work for a living, no matter how thin his margins were shaved.1 a sturdy icon, but a flawed one. There was always something slightly pretentious about the virginia gentleman. His was a homegrown breed with often shallow family roots, and he had an unsettling habit of socializing with common folk and talking legalese rather than philosophy. There is considerable evidence that the virginia planter worked hard despite his claim to leisure; he measured himself more by his tobacco output than he was willing to admit—indeed, he was obsessed with it.2 He was materialistic, market-oriented, and extremely competitive, and his chief interest in land was acquisitive and exploitative. even Washington —maybe even especially Washington—had devoted much of his life to surveying western lands, picking out choice bits, and speculating away. There was little time for creative writing in all this; during his heyday, the eighteenth-century gentleman’s literary output was chiefly directed to legal parsing and reflections on politics—a good thing, considering the revolution,but not particularly productive of the kind of imaginative self-study that literature and humor might have provided. in fact, humor seems to have been in short supply, especially self-mocking satire. outside the racetrack, they were a fairly serious lot. This situation began to change with the onset of postcolonialism, but with two ironic twists. left to himself, no longer in direct competition with the english country squire, the virginia gentleman might reasonably have expected in, say, 1820, to have settled in to unchallenged mastery —over slaves, women, lessers, anybody not of “the quality.” With a near-perfect succession of presidents from Washington through Monroe, there was some political justification for this conceit. But the ground was moving under him, a fact early perceived by John taylor of Caroline and John randolph of roanoke, who pinned the blame on outside forces of modernization and a general collapse of good taste.(taylor retreated into long treatises on arcadian insularity while randolph adopted the role of eccentric.) The real trouble lay within: cotton displaced tobacco, money moved west, and the population went with it. importantly, it was not just the hoi polloi who were moving. from virginia on down the coast to south Carolina, planters themselves were catching the alabama fever, packing up, slaves and all, and heading west.3 at the very moment of his triumph,so to speak,the virginia gentleman found himself on the defen- The Conception and Estimate of a Gentleman 3 sive, abandoned and driven to make a hard choice: join the postcolonial market revolution with gusto, or retreat into decay and marginalization. This was a “master class” in terms of its relation to slaves alone. among the white population, the gentleman increasingly lacked either mastery or a stable class system, and so depended for his authority on tradition and appearances. That proved a fragile platform at best, and here is the first of the ironic twists: before the...