Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (review)

Conjectures of Order provides the most ambitious, sophisticated, and detailed intellectual history of the Old South yet written. Its scale and scope are astonishing, its analysis illuminating, and its prose graceful. Experts who persevere through its 1,200 pages of text will be richly rewarded. Those with less patience or time and simply looking to reference particular issues or people will gain fresh and valuable insights. Embedded in this book—to which no short review can do justice—is a powerful, if sometimes subtly expressed, challenge to past approaches to the intellectual history of the Old South.

Historians of the subject have struggled to identify its pantheon or characterize its tenants. For decades, assumptions of an organic southern society guided (or rather misled) scholars toward a southern mind that, much like Perry Miller's Puritan one, could be internally explored and understood, but not easily connected to modern thought or even other nineteenth-century "minds." Whether guided by Wilbur Cash's "savage ideal" or Clement Eaton's "noblesse oblige" there seemed to be a "Mind of the Old South"—always perversely distinctive, predominately backwards-looking, and generally defensive (W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South [1941], 61; Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South [1964], vii–viii, 23). Drew Faust's important work recognized diversity and change but the metaphor remained that of an enclosed space or A Sacred Circle (1977). Alienated, immobile, or even delusional southern intellectuals appeared stuck in the past, unable to cope with a modern world quickly passing them by. Even historians more sympathetic to southern thought, including most recently Elizabeth Fox and Eugene D. Genovese, emphasize that slaveholders' affinity for ancient traditions, classical and Christian, left them struggling mightily with modern changes that threatened to throw their world into chaos (The Mind of the Master Class, 2005). Though accepting some of these conclusions, in particular that deep anxieties pervaded southern intellectual life, Michael O'Brien provides a markedly different account of diverse southern minds.

The first volume places readers within the vibrant milieu of southern intellectual life, which O'Brien broadly defines to include intimate private letters and dinner conversations, in addition to traditional printed forms found in libraries and book stores (also systematically studied). Movement and diversity prevail in this part social, part cultural, part intellectual history. Southern diplomats, specialists, and vacationers traveled to Europe and beyond. European professors arrived in the South to teach; southern students and travelers left for the North to learn or to escape the heat. "Strolling foreigners" visited, some staying, others returning through their letters or writings, all of whom provided "in-migrations" that created "ambivalence" but who "greatly enlarged the stock of knowledge and analysis available to Southern culture" (87). This, along with the possibility that "only a bare majority of the . . . southeastern United States spoke English as a first language," make O'Brien's South "a polyglot culture" (286–87). Heterogeneity within this culture and a genuine desire to understand the world abroad led southerners to share the "modern passion for classification" (8). Though uniquely informed by their commitment to slavery, individuals like Stephen Elliot and Josiah Nott joined the rest of the western world in transitioning from a generally optimistic Enlightenment universalism to Romanticism, which "told a person that he or she was alone and alienated, but . . . also claimed that the world was filled with cultural shapes" that gave the individual a "social identity" (8). British ideologues often take center stage, but O'Brien also expands on his earlier work to show how German romanticists increasingly informed southern thinking. Race, sex, place, and to a lesser degree ethnicity and class provided categories that Louisa McCord, Charles Gayarré, the Grimké sisters, and others could use to understand their universe and themselves.

The chapters of the second volume, though heavily peppered with interesting biographical anecdotes and beautifully crafted, are more traditional...