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It was Sir Walter that made every
gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge,
before the war; and it was he, also, that made those gentlemen value their
bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there,
and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.
Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and
contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making
Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great
measure responsible for the war. Mark Twain -
Life on the Mississippi.
Twain was serious, and although he was the only person
of note to accuse Sir Walter Scott directly of being responsible for the
Civil War, many others have pointed out the huge influence Scott had on
Southern character and culture.
It is difficult nowadays for anyone who has managed to
plough through a Scott novel to understand the tremendous influence he had
on the world. Not only was he regarded as the greatest writer of his age,
his influence was everywhere - everything from operas to knitting
patterns, from dog breeds to railway stations, were named after his books
and characters (he was even responsible for a minor agricultural
revolution in Poland). He had invented the historical novel, captured the
romantic imagination of the world, and nowhere more than in the United
States of America.
Scott was not the first to popularise Scottish themes;
James MacPherson’s Ossian had created a great stir, but,
particularly in America, Jane Porter’s
The Scottish Chiefs (1810) became a perennial favourite of
Southern youth, and had prepared the way for Scott’s novels. President
Andrew Jackson, who scarcely ever read a book, recommended its hero, Sir
William Wallace, to his nephew as a model upon which to build his
character.
It was however Sir Walter’s tales of chivalry - the
cult of the horse, of honour, of knights, and the glorification of
womanhood, that captured the imaginations the Southern upper classes (Ivanhoe
for instance was so popular that medieval tournaments were organised in
Southern towns), and the concept of the Southern aristocrat as a kind of
medieval knight developed during the antebellum period as a result of the
enormous influence of Scott upon the Planter class (Robert E. Lee is often
described in ‘chivalric’, even ‘Arthurian’ terms; Twain satirises this in
The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). In his book
Cavalier and Yankee, William R. Taylor suggests a less than glorious
explanation for the South’s attachment to this fanciful romantic past –
"They grasped at symbols of stability and order to stem their feelings of
drift and uncertainty and to quiet their uneasiness about the inequalities
within Southern society. Soon they would be forced to answer directly
charges concerning Negro slavery levelled at them from the North." There
was another powerful reason why Scott had struck a sympathetic response in
the Old South. In his Scottish novels, Scott had depicted gallant little
Scotland striving to express her cultural identity against the political
and military pressure of the English, and Southerners immediately seized
on this comparison between themselves and the North. This feeling of
pressure, of being the underdog, combined with their strong feelings of
honour and chivalry, became an explosive mixture.
Of course, a very significant part of the Southern
population, both in numbers and influence, was of Scottish and
Ulster-Scots (Scotch-Irish) descent. In his book A History of the Old
South, Clement Eaton calls them "the cutting edge of the frontier",
"excellent Indian fighters", and "the blue blood of the South". Many
Southerners were descendants of Scottish (and English) Cavalier and
Jacobite exiles, or the 1,000 survivors of Culloden transported there
after the ’45. This ‘Celtic’ component was a ubiquitous feature of
antebellum Southern life - Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun (Colquhoun),
James K(nox) Polk (Pollock), Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, Davy Crocket, and
Confederate President Jefferson Davis, to name but a few, were reared on
old-world stories of warrior heroism. Davis’s grandmother for instance was
Scottish, and his mother told him legends from the land of her birth, and
even taught him a few words of Gaelic that Davis later took pleasure in
teaching his own children - in 1869 he made a highly symbolic pilgrimage
to Culloden Battlefield, the site of the final Jacobite defeat.
In his book The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash
has emphasized the hold of the Scottish clan tradition in the South,
whereby the ordinary white farmer stood shoulder to shoulder with the
Planter "like a Scottish clansman to his chief", for there was a fierce
sense of belonging to a great aristocratic tradition. In this new country
this sense of ‘clan loyalty’ developed into a sharing of the Planter’s
aristocratic paraphernalia, including his culture, his standards of
honour, and even his distinguished ancestors, for, like the Highland clan,
the ordinary white was often related by ties of blood to his aristocratic
neighbour, or at the very least, shared the Highland concept of "widely
extended kinship", or in Scott’s words - "associations common to
inhabitants of a rude and wild land".
Before the war, Southerners had identified with the
manners and ideals of Scott’s novels (Professor Osterweiss of Yale
University calls the South ‘Walter Scottland’); but after the war, in
defeat, they identified even more closely their ‘Lost Cause’ with Scott’s
novels of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Jacobite
struggle for Scottish independence in 1746.
Back in Scotland, ‘The Wizard of the North’ had,
through his novels and poems, (with the help of other Lowlanders,
particularly songwriters and collectors such as Robert Burns, James Hogg
and Lady Nairne), ‘reconstructed’ the once feared Jacobites, and by the
time of his death in 1832, (and with Highland society safely destroyed),
the Highlands had become a romantic wonderland of noble savages and past
glories. In a similar way, the Southerners, who had vehemently opposed
Northern ‘Reconstruction’, slowly began to reconstruct themselves in the
American imagination. Ironically, according to Taylor, it was with the
unwitting connivance of many Northerners, who still longingly regarded the
South as having the romantic, aristocratic, and ‘Cavalier’ society that
the more democratic and acquisitive North lacked.
However, the South’s stubborn resistance to the North’s
attempt at ‘Reconstruct’ them had a much more sinister component.
According to Professor Osterweiss – "It was characteristic if not
inevitable that the institution employed to restore the Southern system
was a clandestine, quasi-military band of self-styled "knights-errant" in
the Scottish tradition, who surrounded their organisation with the symbols
of both romantic and folk myth. The Ku Klux Klan – a title and a concept
with probable debts to Scott and Goethe." The origins of ‘The Klan’ remain
a mystery; some suggest it was founded by Confederate veterans at Pulaski,
Tennessee - men who "saw themselves as persecuted Scottish ‘klansmen’
riding forth to redress the wrongs being perpetrated by . . . people in
league with the hated conquerors." Professor Macinnes of Aberdeen
University thinks their lineage is undoubtedly Scottish, their name being
an Aberdeen dialect term introduced by farm workers who belonged to the
elite and secret Society of Horsemen, which survived in Scotland well into
the 20th century. Whatever their origin, the symbolism is
obvious, the fiery cross for instance (in Gaelic the crosh-tairie),
a symbol of resistance and coercion, is straight out of Scott’s The
Lady of the Lake; a poem ‘inflicted’ on every Southern child.
Scott’s legacy in his own country and in the South,
whether we like it or not, was enormous, and today, due in no small part
to his influence, it is not the victorious Hanoverian Army of the British,
nor the Union Army of the North that stirs the majority of hearts and
imaginations, but the beaten yet un-bowed armies of the Highlands and the
Old South, and the lost romantic worlds they symbolised. The question
remains to be answered - did they both lose their wars, but with the help
of Sir Walter Scott, win, and continue to win, the final victory? |
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