ebook img

Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860: An Abridged Edition of Conjectures of Order PDF

398 Pages·2010·3.25 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860: An Abridged Edition of Conjectures of Order

Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 Michael O’Brien foreword by daniel walker howe The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 an abridged edition of Conjectures of Order ∫ 2010 Michael O’Brien All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Whitman and Clarendon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Brien, Michael, 1948 Apr. 13– Intellectual life and the American South, 1810–1860 : an abridged edition of Conjectures of order / Michael O’Brien ; foreword by Daniel Walker Howe. — [Abridged ed.] p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8078-3400-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Southern States—Intellectual life. 2. Intellectuals—Southern States—History—19th century. 3. Southern States—Social conditions—19th century. 4. Southern States— Relations—Europe. 5. Europe—Relations—Southern States. I. O’Brien, Michael, 1948 Apr. 13– Conjectures of order. II. Title. f213.o27 2010 975%.03—dc22 2009046322 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword vii Preface ix Introduction The Position and Course of the South 1 1 The Softened Echo of the World 19 2 All the Tribes, All the Productions of Nature 53 3 A Volley of Words 97 4 The Shape of a History 141 5 Pride and Power 191 6 Philosophy and Faith 259 Epilogue Cool Brains 315 Notes 337 Index 361 This page intentionally left blank Foreword Michael O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order, his comprehensive intellectual history of the Old South, is a triumph of humane letters. The University of North Carolina Press originally published it in two large volumes. The present abridgment makes this distinguished work available to students and the general literate curious public. In this edition, Michael O’Brien still displays the wide learning, acute intelligence, and refined sensibility that so impressed his fellow scholars. Professor O’Brien is a British academic (at Jesus College of Cambridge Uni- versity) who has spent twenty-five years in the United States and obtained a secure familiarity with American history and habits, particularly those of the Southern states. Here he sets the finest thinkers of the antebellum South into a broad context. He writes with assurance, subtlety, and grace. Over and over again, he goes back to the original primary sources and reconceives his subjects with originality. A reader will find O’Brien’s presentations fresh and imaginative. Professor O’Brien shows us the Old South as an intellectually vibrant and modern society. He succeeds completely in redeeming the antebellum South from hostile accusations that it was a philistine cultural desert. He demon- strates that, on the contrary, its intellectual life was cosmopolitan and sensi- tive. And he accomplishes this feat without for a minute trying to defend the cavalier or proslavery legends. Instead he reveals a Southern culture that was lively, diverse, and in touch with the rest of the modern world. O’Brien grounds his examination of Southern intellectual history in social reality, including an unshrinking recognition of the pervasive consequences of slavery. He is interested in the particular as much as the general, in the lived biographical experiences of individuals. The variety of characters and ideas in the book is truly remarkable. Thomas Je√erson and Edgar Allen Poe; expatriate radicals like Frederick Douglass and the Grimké sisters; brilliant, staunch conservatives like George Fitzhugh and Louisa McCord—all are treated with respect and insight. Thomas Dew, leading social scientist and historian, gets careful attention; so do the profound political reflections of John Taylor and John C. Calhoun; so do the autobiographical narratives of escaped slaves. O’Brien is as interested in the forms of Southern cultural life as he is in describing its intellectual content. Accordingly, he discusses con- versation, correspondence, diaries, bookselling, libraries, and periodicals. Michael O’Brien is leading a rebirth of American intellectual history after several decades in which few historians addressed the subject. His work bears on many aspects of American and Southern Studies, including literature, reli- gion, politics, philosophy, society, gender, and race. He writes in a style com- plex and elegant yet lucid. It may take some getting used to, but readers will find it well worth the e√ort. O’Brien provides reflective Southerners of the present day—women as well as men, black as well as white—with an intellec- tual heritage they can look upon not only with sympathy but also with pride. daniel walker howe October 2009 viii foreword Preface In 2004 the University of North Carolina Press published Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860. It was in two volumes, divided into an introduction, six books, and an epilogue, and fur- ther subdivided into twenty-one chapters; there was a long bibliography of manuscript and printed sources; and in total, with the index, there were 1,382 pages. I was persuaded such voluminousness was necessary because of the breadth of the subject matter. Even critics agreed and gave evidence of having waded through everything, or almost everything. How readers coped is hard to say, though one presumes most browsed as their interests dictated. By Victorian standards, the book was laconically brief; by contemporary ones, inexcusably discursive. Even in 2004, it was gently suggested that a shorter version might be advisable. If the book was to have a wider reader- ship, an abridgment was necessary. To accomplish this task, I adopted a few elementary guidelines. First, it seemed undesirable to revisit the book’s arguments and update them, partly because I have not kept up with recent Southern scholarship, and instead I ought to content myself with making the original text more succinct. Second, the structure would remain intact and its elements would, as it were, be miniaturized: books would be turned into chapters, chapters into sections, sections into paragraphs. Third, the scholarly apparatus would be drastically reduced, upon the reasoning that the retention of the old structure would make it easy for curious readers to refer to the original, if they wished to. So the bibliography has disappeared and the annotation now only cites direct quotations. Fourth, errors would be corrected and passages, if too long or too opaque, rewritten. I cannot recommend the experience of abridging one’s own work. An author is forced to reexamine prose with minute care and I, at least, ended up with the bleak conviction that I was once incapable of writing a competent sentence, fashioning an adequate footnote, or making a clear argument. On the other hand, there is an interest in observing how abridgment changes a book. In this instance, subplots had to be eliminated, swathes of evidence abandoned, quotations deleted or abridged, minor characters omitted, and

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.