Southern Spaces

The predominant regional awareness in Georgia Scenes is southern. As certain critics have argued, Georgia Scenes is not primarily a work of Southwest humor because the Georgia about which Longstreet wrote was simply neither the west of its day nor the frontier. Georgia Scenes, through humor, "realism," and satire, presented Longstreet's vision of the good southern society. His ideal southern society recognizes a natural hierarchy, practices a healthy deference, rewards merit, and protects itself through vigilant awareness of the social decline introduced by alien cultural forms. Two of the sketches in Georgia Scenes especially reveal Longstreet's views, "The Mother and Her Child" and "The Shooting Match."

In "The Mother and Her Child" Longstreet, through the narrator Baldwin, argued for a patriarchal household in which women and blacks know their place. The story begins with Baldwin's visit to the house of Mr. Slang. Slang's eight-month-old child is crying inconsolably. Mrs. Slang orders her slave Rose to quiet the child. Rose is unable to do so, which brings a torrent of verbal abuse from her mistress. Mrs. Slang then takes the baby in her arms and despite speaking gibberish — which resembles the black vernacular of Rose — to the infant cannot quiet the child. After further failed attempts to stop the wailing, Mr. Slang asserts his authority. Instead of speaking gibberish, Slang takes the child, examines it carefully, removes "a small feather" from its ear, and thus transforms the child's "tears to smiles." The patriarch has saved the day. The hierarchy of the home is re-established. The white male father leads his wife, child, and slave to peace.

"The Shooting Match" concerns political deference and the possibility for unity among cultured gentlemen and Georgia crackers. In the first two lines of the story, Longstreet indicated that the sketch is a regional tale concerning the South, not the frontier:

Shooting matches are probably nearly coeval with the colonization of Georgia. They are still common throughout the southern states though they are not as common as they were twenty-five or thirty years ago.

The scene is distinctly southern. The narrator of the tale, Lyman Hall, is a gentleman who has in previous sketches observed and described various elements of cracker culture, including a horrific fight and the blood sport of gander pulling. In "The Shooting Match," Hall participates in the cracker contest. The humor of the sketch relies on the ambiguity of Hall's skills. Hall shoots well, winning second place to the amazement of his new cracker compatriots. Although Hall as narrator claims that he was lucky, the fact that he had "won beef" as a boy at another cracker shooting match makes his claim suspicious. The Georgia crackers, duly impressed with Hall, whom they had earlier scorned as an outsider, gentleman, and dandy, ask him if he is running for office and pledge their support if by chance he is. Hall's cracker companion Billy Curlew even calls him by his first name, "If ever you come out for any thing, Lyman, jist let the boys of Upper Hogthief know it, and they'll go for you . . . ." The crackers promise deference to their social betters, not because of any faith in aristocracy, but out of a healthy Jeffersonian respect for individual ability. Hall merits their respect and deference. The fact that he is a gentleman makes their deference all the sweeter in Longstreet's mind.

A third major theme of Georgia Scenes, one that explicitly invokes regionalism, is Longstreet's concern that Georgia culture be protected from alien influences. Hostility to European cultural fashions runs throughout the sketches. The trickster and confidence man Ned Brace needles a bewildered Frenchman in "The Character of a Native Georgian." The narrator Baldwin cringes through the performances of "the instrumental music of France and Italy" by Miss Amelia Emma Theodosia Augusta Crump. Not only did Miss Crump perform foreign music poorly but she also learned her repertoire from Madam Piggisqueake in Philadelphia. Baldwin hates the European and northern influences brought to the South by Miss Crump and her ilk. Southern culture, which in "The Song" Longstreet linked to Scotland and Ireland, must be preserved from the cultures of the North and continental Europe. Faced with the diversity of cultural influences in the South, Longstreet opted for unity. The conservative message of Georgia Scenes was the same one Longstreet preached in the late 1850s. The South had to secede — culturally in the 1830s and politically in the 1850s — to preserve a unified social order. Longstreet's regionalism became southern nationalism.