Abstract
In this chapter, Templeton returns to one of the most important texts in the creation of the ‘Plantation Literature’ genre, Swallow Barn by John Pendleton Kennedy. This chapter pays close attention to the publication history of the novel, showing how it was revised as the century progressed, and assesses the political ramifications of the novel at different stages in the nineteenth century, and how the burgeoning genre of Plantation literature sits in relation to Jeffersonian political ideals. Borrowing the idea of the ‘double plot’ from William Empson, Templeton provides a new reading of the novel grounded in biographical and historical detail, which allows us to preserve the novel’s status as satire with the growing conservatism of the revised editions.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles H. Bohner, John Pendleton Kennedy: Gentleman from Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), vii.
- 2.
Edward M. Gwathmey, ‘Review’, American Literature 1, (1929): 225.
- 3.
Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 218; Kevin J. Hayes, ‘Swallow Barn’, in American History Through Literature 1820–1870, vol. 3, ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer, (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006), 1134.
- 4.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 89; Jan Bakker, ‘Simms on the Literary Frontier; or, So Long Miss Ravenel and Hello Captain Porgy: Woodcraft is the first “realistic” novel in America’, in William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier, ed. John Caldwell Guilds and Caroline Collins (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 73; Richard Gray, A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 5.
- 5.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 45.
- 6.
Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 10.
- 7.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 116–124; ibid., 1–8.
- 8.
J. V. Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy (New York: Twayne, 1966), 36.
- 9.
Lucinda H. MacKethan, ‘Introduction’ in John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), xi–xii.
- 10.
Jan Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 42; Scott Romine, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 77; William R. Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 183.
- 11.
Michael Kreyling, Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 12.
- 12.
Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 183; Romine, Narrative Forms, 79.
- 13.
John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion, ed. Lucinda H. MacKethan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 61. All subsequent references to this text will be given in parentheses.
- 14.
Paul C. Jones, Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 134–135.
- 15.
Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 62; Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 183.
- 16.
Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance, 45.
- 17.
Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 48.
- 18.
Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 184; MacKethan, ‘Introduction’, xxiv; Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 81.
- 19.
Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance, 48.
- 20.
Andrew R. Black, John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman & Ardent Nationalist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 59.
- 21.
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 110–111; Richard Guy Wilson, ‘Thomas Jefferson and the creation of the American architectural image’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank Shuffelton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 121.
- 22.
John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion, vol. 1, (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832), 22.
- 23.
Kennedy, Swallow Barn, Vol. 1, 23.
- 24.
Kennedy, Swallow Barn, Vol. 1, 46.
- 25.
See George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 130–164.
- 26.
Kreyling, Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative, 19.
- 27.
Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance, 46; Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 183.
- 28.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 73.
- 29.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 8–9; MacKethan, ‘Introduction’, xx.
- 30.
Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance, 46; Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 185.
- 31.
Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 47; Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 184–185.
- 32.
Rebecca C. McIntyre, ‘Promoting the Gothic South’, Southern Cultures 11, (2005): 55.
- 33.
Ian Frederick Finseth, Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 277.
- 34.
Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 43–44.
- 35.
Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 192. See also Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 173; Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 82.
- 36.
Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 40.
- 37.
Darren Staloff, ‘The politics of pedagogy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank Shuffelton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 132; Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 83.
- 38.
Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, ‘Introduction’, in Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age, ed. Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 13.
- 39.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 68.
- 40.
Williams, The Country and the City, 18.
- 41.
John Pendleton Kennedy, Defence of the Whigs (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1844), 33.
- 42.
Kennedy, Defence of the Whigs, 148–149.
- 43.
Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 99.
- 44.
John Pendleton Kennedy, ‘Address to the American Institute’, in The Philosophy of Manufactures: Early Debates Over Industrialisation in the United States, ed. Michael Brewster Folsom and Steven D. Lubar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 347.
- 45.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 56.
- 46.
Exod. 7:8–21.
- 47.
John P. Kennedy, ‘Address to the American Institute’, 346.
- 48.
Holt, American Whig Party, 85; ibid., 112.
- 49.
Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 53.
- 50.
Holt, American Whig Party, 24.
- 51.
Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 37.
- 52.
Holt, American Whig Party, 117.
- 53.
Holt, American Whig Party, 80.
- 54.
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press), 225.
- 55.
Robert Gudmestad, ‘Steamboats and Southern Economic Development’ in Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age, ed. Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 19; See also John Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan 1755–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
- 56.
John L. Hare, Will the Circle be Unbroken?: Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 24.
- 57.
W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South, ed. Bertram Wyatt-Brown (New York: Vintage, 1991), 75.
- 58.
Holt, American Whig Party, 137; Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 148.
- 59.
Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 25.
- 60.
Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA, (London: Penguin, 1999), 288.
- 61.
Delfino and Gillespie, ‘Introduction’, 6.
- 62.
Bakker, Pastoral in the Antebellum Southern Romance, 3.
- 63.
Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 149.
- 64.
Black, John Pendleton Kennedy, 93.
- 65.
Holt, American Whig Party, 272; ibid., 472–473.
- 66.
Ronald L. Lewis, ‘Antebellum Industry’, in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 11: Agriculture and Industry, ed. Melissa Walker and James C. Cobb (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 229.
- 67.
Gen. 7:6–24.
- 68.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 128.
- 69.
Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance, 48.
- 70.
Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 189.
- 71.
Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 53.
- 72.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 169–171; ibid., 187–188.
- 73.
Lewis P. Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 44; Faith Berry, From Bondage to Liberation: Writings By and About Afro-Americans (New York: Continuum, 2006), 112.
- 74.
Hanlon, America’s England, 113.
- 75.
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. David Roediger (London: Verso, 2003), 149.
- 76.
Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden, 45.
- 77.
Romine, Narrative Forms of Southern Community, 66–67.
- 78.
Romine, Narrative Forms of Southern Community, 72.
- 79.
Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 49.
- 80.
Gray, Writing the South, 43.
- 81.
Roger Sales, English Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 36.
- 82.
Romine, Narrative Forms of Southern Community, 78; Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 46–64; Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 80; Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance, 45.
- 83.
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 198.
- 84.
Romine, Narrative Forms of Southern Community. 83.
- 85.
Michael Kreyling, ‘Toward a New Southern Studies’, South Central Review 22, No. 1 (2005): 12; Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden, 44.
- 86.
Sales, Pastoral and Politics, 18.
- 87.
Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature 1607–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1954), 493.
- 88.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 93; Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, 197.
- 89.
Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 104.
- 90.
Ridgely, John Pendleton Kennedy, 107.
- 91.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 231; Holt, American Whig Party, 232–233; ibid., 171.
- 92.
Holt, American Whig Party, 368.
- 93.
Jameson, Political Unconscious, 35.
- 94.
Bohner, Gentleman from Baltimore, 31.
- 95.
Empson , Some Versions of Pastoral, 22.
- 96.
Gray, A Web of Words, 72.
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Templeton, P. (2019). The Pastoral Double-Plot of Swallow Barn. In: The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_2
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