Strange Temporality of Pastoral in The Partisan Leader

Templeton, Peter

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_4

Strange Temporality of Pastoral in The Partisan Leader

Peter Templeton²

Chapter
First Online: 27 December 2018

71 Accesses

Abstract

Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’s The Partisan Leader is an explicit political statement, one that posits a future in which the South successfully secedes from the North. In this chapter, Templeton explores this vision in the light both of Tucker’s legal philosophies and of a pastoral millenarianism, analysing the ways in which Tucker’s political vision is shaped by the forms of both pastoral and romance, and in turn how those views inform his understanding of a ‘New Jerusalem’: a perfect pastoral society in a South freed from Northern exploitation.

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Notes

1.
Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart Over Head in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 7.
2.
John M. Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in The Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 51.
3.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 28–29.
4.
Carl Bridenbaugh, ‘Introduction’ to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), xiii.
5.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘Lecture to Law Students by Professor B. Tucker’, Southern Literary Messenger 1, No. 4 (1834): 146.
6.
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), 114.
7.
Tucker, ‘Lecture to Law Students by Professor B. Tucker’, 148.
8.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 56.
9.
Michael 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), 128; see also Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 80–81.
10.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 140.
11.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 100.
12.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 111.
13.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 58.
14.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 59.
15.
Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature 1607–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1953), 424. See also Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 70.
16.
John Francis McDermott, ‘Nathaniel Beverley Tucker in Missouri’, The William and Mary Quarterly 20, No. 4 (1940): 507. See also Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 424.
17.
Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 425. See also Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 186.
18.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 84.
19.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘Prof. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker’, The William and Mary Quarterly 18, No. 1 (1909): 44–46. See also Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 85.
20.
William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 63.
21.
See David Moltke-Hansen, ‘Southern literary horizons in young America: imaginative development of a regional geography’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 42, No. 1 (2009): 1–31, 181–182.
22.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 124.
23.
See Arthur Wrobel, ‘“Romantic Realism”: Nathaniel Beverley Tucker’, American Literature 42, No. 3 (1970): 325–335 and Fred Hobson, ‘“Anticipations of the Future”; or The Wish-Fulfillment of Edmund Ruffin’, The Southern Literary Journal 10 No.1 (1977): 84–91.
24.
Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 429. See also Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 132, Hare, Will the Circle be Unbroken, 112.
25.
Abel Parker Upshur, ‘The Partisan Leader (Review)’, Southern Literary Messenger 3, No. 1, (1837): 74.
26.
Anonymous, ‘The Partisan Leader’, United States’ Telegraph, November 9th, 1836. 19th Century US Newspapers. Accessed 11 Dec. 2017.
27.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 77.
28.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 123.
29.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 75.
30.
Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), 37.
31.
Eric H. Walther, The Fire Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 42.
32.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 116.
33.
Michael Kreyling, Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 22. See also Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 122.
34.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘Lecture’, Southern Literary Messenger: devoted to every department of literature and the fine arts 5, No. 9 (1839): 589.
35.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 82.
36.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 87.
37.
Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 430.
38.
Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 237.
39.
James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39.
40.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 197.
41.
Anthony Trollope, North America, ed. Robert Mason (London: Penguin, 1992), 48.
42.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 17.
43.
J.D.B. Debow, ‘The Progress of American Commerce’, Debow’s Review, Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress and Resources 2, No. 6, (1846): 378–379.
44.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 35.
45.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, The Partisan Leader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 49. All subsequent references to this text will be given in parentheses.
46.
Gifford, Pastoral, 2.
47.
Anonymous, ‘The State of Georgia—Its Duties and Its Destiny’, The Southern Quarterly Review 8, No. 16 (1845): 457.
48.
Susan E. O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16.
49.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 145.
50.
Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1.
51.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 29.
52.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 40.
53.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 83.
54.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 86.
55.
Kreyling, Figures of the Hero, 24.
56.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 124.
57.
Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 319.
58.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 147.
59.
Kreyling, Figures of the Hero, 21.
60.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 81.
61.
Kreyling, Figures of the Hero, 22.
62.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 125.
63.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave, Part II’, Southern Literary Messenger 10, No. 8 (1844): 474.
64.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 5.
65.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 55.
66.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, ‘An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave, Part I’, Southern Literary Messenger 10, No. 6 (1844): 332.
67.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 108.
68.
Terence Whalen, ‘Average Racism’, in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Veissberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9.
69.
Tucker, ‘Essay on the Moral and Political Effect, Part I’, 335.
70.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 88.
71.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 53.
72.
Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19.
73.
Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA (London: Penguin, 1999), 289.
74.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 77–78.
75.
Stephanie McCurry, ‘The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina’, The Journal of American History 78, No. 4 (1992): 1255.
76.
Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA, 294.
77.
Gifford, Pastoral, 30.
78.
Mark M. Smith, Debating Slavery Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.
79.
Gifford, Pastoral, 7.
80.
Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 34.
81.
Jan Bakker, Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 2.
82.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 56.
83.
Roger Sales, English Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 76.
84.
For further discussion of the political shift between the original and revised editions of Swallow Barn, see Ken Egan, Jr., The Riven Home: Narrative Rivalry in the American Renaissance (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997), 81.
85.
Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 35.
86.
Brugger, Beverley Tucker, 123.
87.
Sales, English Literature in History 1780–1830, 17.
88.
W.H. Auden, ‘Arcadia and Utopia’, in The Pastoral Mode, ed. Bryan Loughrey (London: Macmillan, 1984), 91.
89.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 86.
90.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 91.
91.
Everett F. Bleiler, Science-fiction, the Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930: with Author, Title, and Motif Indexes (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 684–685.
92.
Grammer, Pastoral and Politics, 93.
93.
John Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan 1755–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 189.

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Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
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Templeton, P. (2019). Strange Temporality of Pastoral in The Partisan Leader. In: The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_4
Published: 27 December 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04887-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04888-4
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