Emerson's Southern Critics, 1838-1862

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s position in the American canon now seems assured, yet even a cursory examination of his contemporary reviews indicates that nineteenth-century readers often perceived him as a reckless iconoclast, an enemy to tradition. This animosity was nowhere more pronounced than in the South. Even as northern reviewers frequently chided Emerson for the opacity of his prose, they praised the originality of his thought; in contrast, southern reviewers were reticent with any kind of praise. The southern press tended to perceive Transcendentalism as a dangerous, alien force with Emerson as its figurehead—the preacher of an egalitarian philosophy that threatened the foundations of the South’s hierarchical slave-holding society. The rise of his national stature, coupled with the country’s mounting sectional differences, intensified the southern reaction to Emerson. A study of Emerson’s reviews in southern journals (particularly the Southern Quarterly Review and the Southern Literary Messenger) reveals the impact of his writings on southern ideology. Viewed in a progression from 1838 (Emerson’s first southern review) to 1862 (the last southern notice of the war years), these reviews demonstrate the emergence of Emerson as a nemesis in southern thought.

Jay B. Hubbell surveyed the southern response to Emerson in his landmark study The South in American Literature, 1607–1900. He notes that Emerson’s works “held particular difficulties for Southern readers” of the era because “it was difficult for any Southerner to understand the Unitarian-Transcendentalist background out of which Emerson’s writings had grown” (381, 380). Citing several contemporary reviews, Hubbell illustrates the regional tensions between a quintessential New England writer and his southern audience—particularly those concerning Emerson’s authority to speak on the issues of a general American experience and abolition (381, 379). But missing from Hubbell’s otherwise exemplary discussion is an explanation of how these issues developed through the sequence of southern reviews—how an element of southern thought was incrementally shaped by its confrontation with Emerson. I propose to chart that development through a more comprehensive survey of the southern reaction and to show Emerson’s critical reception as a microcosm of regional animosity in America’s impassioned period of internecine tension.

It is likely that Andrews Norton’s rebuttal to the Divinity School Address first brought Emerson to the attention of conservative critics in the South. Norton claimed, in his Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (which is roughly contemporaneous with the first southern reviews), that Christianity “has been grossly misrepresented” by the “zealous infidelity . . . of highly popular authors” such as Emerson (8). Norton characterized the mood of his era as one of “a revolutionary and uncertain state of religious opinion” pervaded by “the influence of the depraving literature and noxious speculations which flow in among us from Europe” (4, 8). However, while Norton’s condemnation of Emerson contains a xenophobic strain present in southern reviews, it stops short of grounding its dissent in regional or nationalistic terms and consequently provides a revealing counterpoint to the southern dissension Hubbell discusses. Certainly Norton berates Emerson for his “Germanisms,” but he ultimately bases his disapproval of Emerson on the author’s interpretation of Christian doctrine. The southern reviewers, in contrast, tended to use these “Germanisms” as the basis of a critique motivated by a perceived threat to the southern identity, a critique that evolved from religious and stylistic censure into a reactionary defense of southern culture.

What Emerson’s southern reviews demonstrate is a regional culture’s attempts to justify and defend its own precarious ideology from the outside threat that Emerson represented (what W. J. Cash generically termed “the conflict with the Yankee” [85]). These reviews buttress Cash’s claim that the South “in its secret heart always carried a powerful and uneasy sense of the essential rightness of the nineteenth century’s position on slavery” and that the Old South “was a society beset by the need to bolster its morale, to nerve its arm against waxing odds, to justify itself in its own eyes and in those of the world” (63). Emerson’s stance against tradition was especially menacing to the proponents of the...