First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

3. "The First Production of the Kind, in the South": A Backwoods Literary Incognito and His Attempt at the Great American Novel

3 "The First Production of the Kind, in the South" A Backwoods Literary Incognito and His Attempt at the Great American Novel One of the most remarkable stories in American literary and publishing culture of the Old Southwest can be found in a small, workmanlike volume entitled The Lost Virgin ofthe South: An Historical Novel, Founded on Facts, Connected with the Indian War in the South, in1812 to '15. Billing itself as a "SECOND EDITION, ENLARGED:' it lists its printing origins as "COURTLAND, AL:' "PUBLISHED BY,AND FOR, M. SMITH:' and its date as 1832. And, surely enough, a Florida copyright notice printed among textual preliminaries leads us to a prior version, somewhat condensed, and set in different typeface, but otherwise corresponding, published "By, and for" the same figure, a year earlier at Tallahassee.' Although the work's author is named on the title page of both editions as "Don Pedro Casender:' actual authorship has been variously attributed, and is probably, at this remove, impossible to authenticate. Within a preface to the text, identical in both versions, an "editor" identifies Casender as "the Spanish author ... of the original outline of the facts of the work:' The matter is further complicated by correspondences between this name and those of certain figures within the text of the novel itself. One minor character, a brother of the titular heroine, Calista Ward, the daughter of an English colonel and a Spanish lady, is named Pedro Ward. A more important personage, a second brother who figures heavily in the action throughout, is named Casender Ward. As to "official" at32 tribution, Library of Congress bibliographers, tracing the novel from the Florida text through the Alabama version by the phrase "Published by, and for, M. Smith:' credit it to one Rev. Michael Smith, likely an itinerant Baptist clergyman . Alabama literary historians identify the author as Wiley Conner, known to have been the publisher and printer of the Courtland Herald from 1826 to 1841, and alleged by some accounts also to have become a traveling preacher.' Thus reads the story ofthe text, beginning in the mystery of authorship, and extending forward to what the artifacts themselves tell us about the quaint, almost poignant details of producing a lavish historical-gothic-sentimentalpicaresque novel-romance in a territorial capital; and then, at a outpost of culture to the north on the Alabama frontier, of trying to reset and market anew a breathlessly enlarged version, composed in blocks of two alternating typefaces , on a press no doubt some few years earlier trundled in over the mountains or down the rivers from Tennessee; of trying, in sum, to write a new literature apace with the rise of a new culture. Then, as if all this were not sufficiently complicated, there is the story in the text: a lurid, teeming mishmash of sentiment and adventure, of actual history and outrageous fictive invention. Arising from its generic shipwreck-kidnap plot, it evolves eventually into a spectacle of early settlement in the Old Southwest-English, French, Spanish-in its tragic collision with the great native cultures-Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek. And further, as noted above, it does this through a "literary" design so concocted as to beggar the possibilities of early American genre. Indeed, to attempt a literary overview of this work is to challenge both our taxonomies and our histories of reading across a range of Anglo-European and American texts. In the vein of Cooper, whom the author explicitly inscribes, this saga of a virginal heroine, shipwrecked, captured by Indians, cast into the tumults of the great wars of the Southwest, eventually united with a faithful lover and, after a sojourn in Europe, returned to happy domesticity in the city of New York, is above all a vast historical romance.3 With a dark energy of execution that reminds one of the labyrinthine narratives of Brockden Brown-but in the present case, with its mysterious Europeans, fallen nobles, defrocked clergy, murderous pirates, lascivious seducers, and unprincipled robbers , probably derived from a variety of Anglo-European and American popular sources-it is also a complex, involuted gothic mystery and tale of terror.4 Centering on the physical and spiritual-and thereby emphaticallysexual-perils of its titular heroine, and in that connection further inscribing the popular genre of the captivity narrative, it is a sentimental novel of threatened virtue, wise perseverance, and rewarded love. With its brigands, half-breeds, rustics, and incognitos , and their sundry roughhouse adventures and peregrinations, it is an American frontier...