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

4. "In the Days of Her Power and Glory": Visions of Venice in Antebellum Charleston

73 4 “In the Days of Her Power and Glory” Visions of Venice in Antebellum Charleston Kathleen Hilliard On the last morning of his visit to Venice in 1837, James Hammond climbed the steps of the campanile in Piazza San Marco. Looking over the “ancient” city, the South Carolina politician and slaveholder recalled all he had seen over the past four days—the Rialto Bridge, the Ducal Place, the Arsenal, the Bridge of Sighs, the tombs of Canova and Titian, splendid St. Mark’s itself. He found the city “unique and interesting,” “old and cultured.” Yet the arresting vista vexed him. Venice’s “fall,” he noted, “like that of Tyre does indeed stain the pride of glory and bring into contempt the honorable of the earth.” In Venice, Hammond, true Carolinian that he was, found a cautionary tale.1 Politically, economically, culturally, Hammond, his class, and his state rarely heeded such warnings. When in 1861 the richest, most powerful ruling class the United States had ever seen leaped to its doom, few should have been surprised. A good bit of the brooding—and scheming— Carolinians had done in the lead-up to the self-destruction of secession had focused on the rise and collapse of a “sea-drinking”2 city much like their own. Comparing Charleston—the “Queen City of the South,” their “Holy City”—to the “Queen City of the Adriatic” aimed to rally citizens to the cause of southern political and economic independence. But to Carolinians who traveled Venice’s canals, stealing “along noiselessly through the silent streets—and gloomy watery alleys,” the metaphor was more trou- 74 Kathleen Hilliard bling. Nineteenth-century Carolinians could not but wonder: Did Venice’s decrepit condition augur Charleston’s own precipitous decline?3 Carolina travelers and writers—among them Charleston lawyer Henry Cruger—sought to answer that question. He did so with some wariness, however. There was vanity, he recognized, in “seek[ing] analogies between our institutions and those of Europe.” Still, he explained in an 1832 review of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Bravo, “there are causes, political, commercial, and physical that must produce like results, though in different hemispheres, and under various influences; and local similitudes, however slight, readily bring about an association.” In reading Cooper’s tale of power and corruption in fifteenth-century Venice, Cruger could not help but think of Charleston.4 The “similitudes” found in examining American and European politics , economy, and culture have proven intellectually and analytically profitable for historians of the American South. Along with Peter Kolchin’s work on southern slavery and Russian serfdom, Shearer Davis Bowman’s assessment of southern landed elites and Prussian Junkers, and the wealth of scholarship on slave systems throughout the Atlantic, a vibrant literature comparing southern economic and political development to that of Italy has emerged in recent years.5 Raimondo Luraghi and Susanna Delfino have employed the comparison to understand and gauge modernity or premodernity in southern Italy and the southern United States. More recently, Enrico dal Lago has deepened this analysis, weighing not just elite agrarian economies but the worldviews of antebellum southern plantation holders and preunification Italian landowners more broadly. Finally, Don Doyle has spearheaded consideration of comparative nationalism movements, and his work on the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno is among the most important in the field.6 But if historians have been eager to make the connection, “very few antebellum southerners,” Michael O’Brien argues, drew the parallel.7 In his comprehensive set of volumes on southern intellectual life, he notes Cruger ’s analogy but explains it away as the grumbling complaint of a Yankeebound critic of southern industrial ineptitude. As one Virginia poet wrote, southerners found Italy “uselessly delightful,” and O’Brien argues that they looked to it as a “refuge from vulgar America.” They found no semblance of themselves, he suggests, in the faces of their Italian brothers.8 Broadly speaking, O’Brien may be right, but with regard to the Cruger review in particular, he errs in using proud Venice as a stand-in for “In the Days of Her Power and Glory” 75 Italy and self-referring Charleston as a proxy for the antebellum South. Indeed, denizens of both cities would scorn such sweeping generalizations, pointing to the uniqueness of their respective histories, cultures, peoples, and locales. This essay, then, begins where O’Brien leaves off, probing the Venetian metaphor specifically and exploring...