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Book Review
| Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860. By Michael O'Brien. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Vol. 1: xx, 587 pp. Vol. 2: xii, 764 pp. $95.00/set, ISBN 0-8078-2800-9/set.)
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| In his two-volume, thirteen-hundred-page magnum opus, Michael O'Brien has presented the first full-scale, comprehensive intellectual history of the Old South ever written. It seems destined to compare with Perry Miller's work on New England Puritanism as a scholarly landmark by which all who follow must negotiate their course, even, as is inevitable, scholars move from quibble to disagreement to paradigm reversal in their assessment of O'Brien's masterpiece. In the field of southern history, Conjectures of Order parallels C. Vann Woodward's classic, Origins of the New South (1951), as an influential synthesis written in advance of the monographic literature. This work, grounded in exhaustive primary research and careful reading of texts, original in argument, broad in scope, and written with characteristic O'Brien cleverness, will become an instant classic in the field. |
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O'Brien crafted his capacious book as a work for the ages rather than to spark debate in a brief run of graduate seminars; thus the book is not so much an argument as a journey, but he obligingly begins the journey with an overview. O'Brien holds that antebellum southerners were national, postcolonial, and imperial "all at once" (p. 2). Southerners were national because they had joined others to forge a new nation. From this, the Old South inherited a "revolutionary frame of mind" (p. 3), which reasserted itself at critical moments. Southerners were also postcolonial, that is, they had recently thrown off metropolitan authority and searched to establish another in its place. Finally, southerners were imperial; they relentlessly pushed natives to the margins and sought expanded empires for both white liberty and the black slavery on which it rested, as Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana and Andrew Jackson moved indigenous peoples out of the Old Southwest. The southern push was for expansion and mastery, an imperial drive that reflected the Old South's European heritage, revealed its sectional ambition, and anticipated its American future. |
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O'Brien divides southern thought into three somewhat indistinct phases; first, a late Enlightenment phase, characterized by the celebration of the republican freeholder, skepticism of political organization, trust in reason, and wariness of passions. By the 1830s, late Enlightenment thought yielded to a southern variant of romantic thought, one that diminished the individual in proportion to society, that recognized the value of place and the pleasures of belonging, and that saw ties of family and history as defining. Finally, the early realists who appeared during the 1850s expressed the bleaker outlooks of southern men and women who knew that order required sacrifice, that one could not have both power and morality, that wrong choices sometimes led to utter ruin, and that choices had to be made anyway. |
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O'Brien begins the journey with a discussion of travelers to and from the South. On their travels, he argues, southerners always engaged in a kind of self-measurement, judging their own world and its life of the mind against what they observed. Judgments differed widely, but patterns emerged. Southern travelers expressed their postcolonialism by preferring things Continental to things British. On the Continent, it was French entertainment and German ideas that southerners preferred. The southern intellectuals who ventured beyond Europe generally found the rest of the world exotic and alluring but inferior. |
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O'Brien rightly insists that nineteenth-century southern intellectuals shared deeply in early modernity's passion for classification, a passion that began in science but soon spread. Discerning race, ethnicity, and social hierarchy (if not developing a precise language to describe them) became southern preoccupations. Gender mattered but was easy to discern. Race could be relatively easy to discern as well, if all would agree on color as the guide. The region's "fictitious" social scale (p. 364) proved more difficult to agree on. As southern conjectures of order intensified during the chaotic age of Jackson, ideas of race and gender hardened; difference took a firmer shape and revealed a sharper edge. |
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