ALH Online Review, Series X 1. Andrew R. Black, John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, &.
ALH Online Review, Series X 1 Andrew R. Black, John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, & Ardent Nationalist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 343 pp. Reviewed by J. Gerald Kennedy, Louisiana State University In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson declared: “All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.” Despite recent efforts to interpret history through the lives of common folk, the tendency to foreground a few remarkable individuals remains seductive. Studies of antebellum US history typically focus on presidents, such as Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, whose actions most altered national life. Yet many other personalities—the near-famous, infamous, and forgotten—shaped the events that defined antebellum history. Curiously, John Pendleton Kennedy, the subject of Andrew R. Black’s recent book, figures not at all in Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought (2007), and only once, briefly, in Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy (2005). Yet if Kennedy receives little attention in sweeping historical studies, he deserves greater attention in literary histories of the era, for his career in letters and politics mirrored the inexorable arc toward national disunion. Chiefly known as the author of Swallow Barn (1832), a romanticized view of plantation life and slavery, Kennedy became involved in national politics and served several terms in Congress, becoming in the early 1840s an ideologue for the Whig party. In Black’s wellinformed and solidly interesting account, Kennedy personifies the good intentions but muddled objectives of the Whigs. Kennedy revised his most popular book in 1851, and Black makes Swallow Barn the “central focus” (2) of his biography, productively comparing the two editions. Another chapter discusses the novels Kennedy published between 1835 and 1840, as well as his growing political involvement. That decade marked his rise to national prominence, not as a defender of slavery but as a literary Whig aligned with Henry Clay and a Unionist advocate of nationalism. Kennedy was a moderate caught between intensifying extremes and diverging factions. Inhabiting a border state split over slavery, Kennedy hailed from Baltimore, the Southern city most dependent on the industrial, wage economy that threatened the economics of slavery. Having fought in the War of 1812, Kennedy championed American freedom and felt residual disdain for England. Yet childhood summers on the Virginia estate of his mother’s family let him grasp both the anglophile Cavalier tradition as well as the South’s dependence on slave labor. The reform-minded Kennedy prized Scottish common sense philosophy, translating ideas of moral self-improvement into support for internal improvement, sound currency, and protective tariffs. Initially a supporter of Jackson, Kennedy felt betrayed by the president’s opposition to internal improvement and the © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected]
2 ALH Online Review, Series X national bank. As a Whig, he steered a middle course, accepting slavery as an economic necessity but also insisting that federal authority superseded states’ rights. As Black notes, the tension between reformism and uncertainty about slavery finally derailed Kennedy’s political career just as it doomed the Whigs. The chapter on the composition of Swallow Barn adds new insights to critical understanding of this often-perplexing volume. As a historian, Black explains the biographical and cultural underpinnings of Kennedy’s ambivalent portrayal of tidewater life. He notes the shaping influence of Irving’s Bracebridge Hall and sketches the nostalgic account Kennedy first projected. But three unsettling events darkened Kennedy’s depiction of the planter’s world: Southern backlash to the Tariff of 1828, which led South Carolina to assert the right to nullify federal law; Jackson’s 1830 sabotage of the Maysville Road project, which thwarted interstate transportation; and the Nat Turner rebellion, which rocked southeastern Virginia in August 1831, four months before Kennedy completed the novel. The owner of Swallow Barn, Frank Meriweather, seems a genial lord of the manor, but he also represents, Black says, Virginia’s “debilitating provinciality and stubborn resistance to change” (77). Kennedy’s feudal tropes betray this reactionary mentality. In a chapter called “The National Anniversary,” he lampoons the state’s backwardness when locals debate whether they can “nullify” (80) construction of government roads and canals. A late, much-cited chapter, “The Quarter,” let Kennedy address the realities of slavery he had ignored for 500 pages. Here, forced by slave revolt to confront the ethics of bondage, Kennedy has Meriwether admit its evils and pronounce it “theoretically and morally wrong” (113). But Meriwether also rationalizes slaveholding as the charitable protection of a population entailed on the state, an argument Black characterizes as “strained” (114). The most objectionable aspect of Swallow Barn, for modern readers, lies in Kennedy’s ridicule of slave physiognomy and dress. His depiction of slaves owed much to the minstrel show but also reveals a fascination with phrenology. Black speculates that Kennedy attended lectures at the University of Maryland around 1830 in which Professor George Calvert used actual skull casts to differentiate races, thus anticipating the pseudoscience of craniology. Kennedy’s depiction of Carey, Meriwether’s principal servant, exhibits both “rebelliousness and obsequiousness” (105), hinting at a devious performance of subservience. Elsewhere, Kennedy (who shunned slaveholding) casually compares young blacks to monkeys, apparently assuming that in 1832 such disparagement would entertain readers. Yet Kennedy also balanced his mockery with an
ALH Online Review, Series X 3 interpolated tale about a once-wayward slave named Abe, who drowns while saving shipwreck victims. Observing that Kennedy conceived Abe as a “counterpoint to Nat Turner,” Black nevertheless calls the author’s praise “reluctant, [disingenuous], and, at times, back-handed” (117). He adds that “Swallow Barn’s inconclusiveness regarding the problems of race and slavery haunts the novel” (121). Kennedy largely escaped that controversy in Horseshoe Robinson (1835), a Revolutionary War novel set in the Carolinas. The titular hero, a resourceful backwoodsman, represents the common man Kennedy believed the Whig party needed to recruit, and the novel selfconsciously identifies patriots of the back country as “Whigs” (148). Paralleling a Whig outreach to women in the mid-1830s, the novel also features many strong females, such as dauntless Mildred Lindsay, who strives to free her captive husband, Major Butler. Kennedy’s subsequent novel, Rob of the Bowl (1838) reimagined seventeenth-century St. Mary’s, constructing a nostalgic portrait of an Eastern Shore community, perhaps (Black conjectures) “to suggest how such a society could be created out of the social discord of his own time.” He quips, “St. Mary’s could be renamed ‘Whigville’” (117). A contrary logic drove the composition of Quodlibet (1840), which Kennedy completed during the presidential race that pitted Martin Van Buren against William Henry Harrison. This novel satirizes a town corrupted by Jacksonian ideology, and the comically named leading citizens represent recognizable contemporaries. However obscure its topicality, Quodlibet nonetheless offers what Black calls an “on-the-ground look” (177) at issues driving the 1840 election. The biography incisively recounts Kennedy’s involvement in ensuing controversies. President Harrison’s unexpected death revealed Vice President John Tyler’s shocking opposition to the Whig agenda. In May 1841, as Kennedy began his longest stint in Congress (serving until October 1845), he drafted the “Whig Manifesto” that severed the party’s “unnatural relation” to Tyler (who rejected Clay’s national bank plan) and clarified its abiding principles. Whig setbacks in 1842 inspired a second Kennedy pamphlet, “The Defense of the Whigs,” which blamed Tyler for government failures and likened the party to the British Whigs who fought for liberty in 1688. Kennedy opposed Texas annexation because the gambit jeopardized the Union, but Polk’s victory over Clay in 1844 made annexation and war both inevitable. Defeated for reelection in 1845 for opposing the war, Kennedy undertook a memoir of William Wirt. He campaigned for Zachary Taylor in 1848 but recognized by 1850 that both the parties were dividing along sectional lines. Kennedy supported the Compromise of 1850 but also felt impelled to revise Swallow Barn, making an emphatic plea for northern acceptance of the South’s controversial institution. In Black’s view, Kennedy offered “vague palliatives and half-
4 ALH Online Review, Series X hopes to calm . . . antislavery forces in the North, while defending the prerogatives of slave owners in the South” (213). With Winfield Scott’s defeat in 1852, the Whig party largely disintegrated. Kennedy briefly affiliated himself with the Know-Nothings before he recognized their nativist extremism; he then joined forces with the short-lived Constitutional Union party. When Lincoln’s election prompted several southern states to move toward secession, Kennedy worked to organize a Washington Peace Conference; his essay “The Border States” proposed a neutral zone between sections and blamed the crisis on northern reformist zeal as well as grandiose ambitions by South Carolinians and Virginians. In a series of newspaper letters in 1864, Kennedy denied that slavery was the principal cause of the war, but an 1865 trip to Cuba afforded a fresh glimpse of its brutalities and inspired a revised judgment: “this wretched rebellion . . . originated in no better aspiration than the permanent defense of the great crime of slavery” (251-52). Black’s biography represents his first scholarly work, but it reflects the maturity gained in a long prior career in international business. The rich historical information gives new coherence to Kennedy’s literary career, which included his mentorship of Poe in the early 1830s. Some readers will notice occasional repetition and detect slight inaccuracies, such as the claim that Irving’s Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall are “novels” (67). And the comparison of Swallow Barn with plantation novels by Simms would have profited from a glance at Beverley Tucker’s Partisan Leader. But Black turns Kennedy into a very human character, betrayed by his own complaisance into romanticizing, for the sake of national unity, a practice he finally deplored as a “great crime.”
