The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

1. Southerners Abroad: Europe and the Cultural Encounter, 1830-1895

15 1 Southerners Abroad Europe and the Cultural Encounter, 1830–1895 William A. Link Old England! old England! thrice blessed and free, The poor hunted slave finds a shelter in thee; Where no blood-thirsty hound ever dares on his track: At thy voice, old England, the monster falls back. Go back, then, ye blood-hounds, that howl in my path; In the land of old England I’m free from your wrath. And the sons of Great Britain my deep scars shall see. Till they cry, with one voice, “Let the bondman be free!”1 With the transportation revolution rendering world travel a more common experience, during the last half of the nineteenth century greater numbers of Americans, southerners among them, visited Europe. Tourism by southerners was not new, but by the late 1840s, the economics and technology of travel had changed significantly. Steam-powered paddleboats, which also relied on sail power, were followed by the advent of screw propulsion after the Civil War, offering relatively cheap, safe, and fast service across the Atlantic. The Grand Tour became no longer the exclusive domain of southern white males. As travel became faster and more accessible, a greater diversity of people—women and African Americans, as well as wealthier whites—participated in the cultural experience of tourism . The Civil War offered only a brief interruption in the transatlantic 16 William A. Link currents of humanity and emancipation. With the end of the Civil War, the South became more consciously globally oriented toward a new emphasis on industrialization and the development of overseas materials for a variety of southern goods. Whether the increased levels of travel shaped southerners’ sense of self, their cultural and political identities, and their awareness of their region in a global context remain important matters for historians to consider.2 During the first half of the nineteenth century, Romanticism at various levels emphasized individual self-realization through travel. Leaving home forced white and black southerners to think about themselves in a new light. “That something can be learned from those who leave home,” writes Michael O’Brien, “is a truism of cultural criticism, the more so when one considers the early nineteenth century, because then Romanticism was redefining the meaning of home.”3 Despite a growing call among historians to understand the South globally , few scholars have examined transnational experiences, how travel shaped southerners’ cultural and political identities. Michael O’Brien’s magisterial Conjectures of Order portrays a robust cosmopolitanism among southern intellectuals, but little scholarship has explored how travel and tourism more generally shaped southerners.4 Other scholars have ignored the subject from essential critical perspectives. Although we know a great deal generally about southerners’ consciousness of race and gender, we know less about these as globalized phenomena. More generally, there is an abundant literature about the self and the fashioning of identity, but little of it explores how the self emerged out of the experience of travel. Travel provided an idiom for self-discovery, and Europe became a place where the conditions of the South could be refracted and interpreted. Southerners’ cultural encounter with Europe, and the world at large, had roots in the nineteenth century and reached a fuller fruition after 1900.5 Overseas travel increasingly became a way for southerners to understand themselves and to sharpen their regional identity. This essay explores how southerners encountered Europe during the nineteenth century by examining the different ways in which whites and blacks, men and women, learned more about themselves abroad.6 Those experiences were fundamentally different. Travel for white males enabled them to recreate their home, if often to fantasize about it. Some white women experienced travel as offering some escape from the constraints of patriarchy. African Americans , confronting harsher realities, found that travel usually represented Southerners Abroad 17 freedom from slavery and racial oppression at home. Race, along with gender , thus offers an interesting prism to examine how southerners perceived themselves in a global context. Before the Civil War, it was not uncommon for southern white males from the planter class to travel to Europe. No “young American of large intellect,” wrote South Carolinian William Henry Trescot—who was undoubtedly referring to young planters—“could have been properly educated without some experience of the old world.” Even superficial foreign travel had a refining effect. Those southerners who actually lived abroad found it transformative . Primarily, overseas travel made Americans understand, Trescot observed, “what history...