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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- 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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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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