Southern Spaces

Two of the best works of Southwest humor, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes and Johnson Jones Hooper's Some Adventurers of Captain Simon Suggs, provide a revealing glimpse into the dynamics connecting American regionalism, antebellum politics, and southern intellectual life.

Adam Tate looks at ways in which the regionalism of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Johnson Jones Hooper "embodied not only spatial categories but also specific cultural and social characteristics." Yet Tate also applies the argument of historians Peter Onuf and Edward Ayers to the case of these two well-known antebellum southwestern humorists in order to demonstrate that they shaped their ideal of regionalism within nationalistic contexts. While their humor incorporated "different social visions," they finally formulated a similar southern regionalism "conceived, at least in part, on racial terms" and predicated on a need for social order that grew out of their participation in a "national public sphere."

The self-conscious sectional perspectives of antebellum writers make the literature of the antebellum South a rich source for the study of southern regionalism. The genre of Southwest humor has received well-deserved attention in the past thirty years for its revealing look at life in the antebellum South. Two of the best works of Southwest humor, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes and Johnson Jones Hooper's Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, provide a glimpse into the interplay among American regionalism, antebellum politics, and southern intellectual life. Their uses of regionalism reveal their politics: Longstreet's states' rights conservatism and Hooper's southern Whiggery. Even though their political allegiances differed, both men ended up as secessionists in the late 1850s. Political issues certainly played roles in their decisions, but their specific views of region and society, apparent in their literary works, led them to support the cause of southern nationalism in the winter of 1860-1861.

Historians Peter Onuf and Edward Ayers argued recently that southern independence did not occur because of the weakness of American nationalism, as is often assumed by scholars. Rather, southerners learned their regionalism because of their participation in American nationalism. A region, after all, is part of a greater whole. American nationalism and the creation of a national public sphere made southerners aware of their regional particularities. Southerners constructed a regional identity to define themselves against perceived "foreign" adversaries.

Both Longstreet and Hooper participated in national platforms. As a young man, Longstreet studied at Yale where he apparently loved to "play the southerner," indulging the curiosity of his Yankee classmates by telling stories of home in his Georgia drawl. Longstreet scholar James Scafidel has shown that Longstreet's political awakening occurred in 1813 while he studied law in Connecticut. He became appalled at New England's opposition to the War of 1812 and developed a lifelong prejudice against Yankees. Longstreet, then, became aware of his regional identity as a southerner in a national context. By the time he wrote the sketches published in 1835 as Georgia Scenes, Longstreet strongly supported John C. Calhoun and the nullification movement in South Carolina. Hooper's regional identity was more complicated. He was a southerner in a national context and a southwesterner in a southern context. Hooper moved from North Carolina to the Alabama frontier in 1835. The experience of the frontier led him to consider American identity in spatial terms. Hooper's southern identity hardened during his participation in Whig Party politics, especially as a newspaper editor, a task that combined both national and regional interests. Hooper and Longstreet both gained national reputations after New York publishers ran their southern stories in national papers. The national public sphere, therefore, reinforced their southern regional identities.

For Longstreet and Hooper regionalism embodied not only spatial categories but also specific cultural and social characteristics. The most important element of antebellum southern intellectual life, as Longstreet's and Hooper's writings witness, concerned determining the best southern social order. Southern intellectuals wrote continuously about the subject and literature allowed them to animate their theories. Longstreet and Hooper had different social visions, as evidenced by brief perusals of their works.