A Handbook for Rebellion

Borrowing a term from C. Hugh Holman, Jan Norby Gretlund describes the year 1835 as "the first annus mirabilis of Southern fiction." In that year Kennedy's Horse-Shoe Robinson and the second volume of Caruthers' The Cavaliers of Virginia were published as well as Simms's The Partisan and The Yemassee, Longstreet's Georgia Scenes and Ingraham's description of The South-West. As Gretlund claims, 1835 is remarkable not only for witnessing a short "first flowering of Southern writing" but also for constituting a dead point of ideological development, "a rare moment" of "internal dialogue," before the South began its "self-destructive" descent into radical sectionalism." ¹ Gretlund singles out a specific novel as marker of the ending of the

"annus mirabilis": The Partisan Leader, which the Virginian Nathaniel Beverley Tucker–

–a relative of George Tucker––published in 1836 under the pseudonym Edward William Sidney. According to Gretlund, the novel was the first clear indication in literature of a "self-destructive preoccupation" that was to take possession of the South:

"From now on southern literature would be 'hag-ridden' by politics and political rhetoric."²

While the assumption of a general collapse of antebellum southern fiction into pure propaganda is probably not entirely correct (see below, chapters 9-11), The Partisan Leader certainly does confirm Tucker's reputation as "one of the earliest Southern secessionists."³ With unrestrained enthusiasm, the narrative invents a future in which Virginia joins a "Southern Confederacy" and eventually achieves independence from the Union in a guerilla war against the Federal Army. Indeed, the novel was so significant as a foreshadowing of secession that during the Civil War it

1 Jan Norby Gretlund, "1835: The First Annus Mirabilis of Southern Fiction," Rewriting the South: History and Fiction, ed. Lothar Hönnighausen and Valeria Gennaro Lerda (Tübingen:

Francke, 1993) 121–130; quotes: 122. Cf. C. Hugh Holman, "William Gilmore Simms and the 'American Renaissance'" (1962); rpt in The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Literature of the Americana South (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1972) 76. Besides the publication of novels by southern authors, the emergence of a number of literary magazines is another indication that the first half of the thirties saw a flowering of southern literature which culminated in 1835: two periodicals, the Southern Review and the Southern Literary Gazette, had been founded already in 1828; the Southern Literary Messenger, probably the most significant Southern periodical, started to appear in 1834 and the Southern Literary Journal commenced publication in 1835.

2 Gretlund 130.

3 Hubbell 424. On Tucker's life and work, see: Arthur Wrobel, "Nathaniel Beverley Tucker,"

Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1979) 345–347, vol. 3 of Dictionary of Literary Biography; Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978);

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was reprinted in New York under the title A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy. This reissue was prefaced by an "Explanatory Introduction" which presented the text as evidence that the South had been plotting secession for a long time and had worked to bring about disunion and war by systematically undermining the political system.⁴

Besides the almost uncanny similarity of their titles, The Partisan and The Partisan Leader share a lot of characteristics as to their ideological sentiment and the mode of its representation: both narratives revel in the "romance" of guerilla warfare and show it as superior to the pomp and inflexibility of the regular military; both have splendid young heroes who use their aristocratic authority for achieving union with the common men; in both novels, this union is the backbone of a conservative revolution that has the immediate objective of repelling an invasion (in Tucker's novel that of the Federal Army); and both show a conflict between a degenerate civilization and an apparently sound order that is closer to nature.

At the same time, The Partisan Leader reads like a radicalization of The Partisan in that it seems to spell out the secessionist subtext of Simms's novel. If it is possible to discover in the earlier novel traces of Simms's emergent belief in the necessity of a second––i.e. a reactionary––revolution, Tucker uses fiction to provide the handbook for such a rebellion. This translation of "romance" into propaganda is achieved by a skillful manipulation of the genre of historical fiction. For The Partisan Leader is a futuristic tale told as history, a "historical romance of the future."⁵ In fact, the radicalism of the novel is in its substitution of the future for the past even more than in its substitution of Van Buren for the British King and of the Federal Army for the British or the Tories.

As a feigned date of publication, the novel gives the year 1856, and an introductory "Dedication" (xii–xv) informs the reader of the author's intention to commemorate the contribution of the Virginian people to the struggle in which independent statehood was won. This prefatory text achieves a dual representational

4 The edition of The Partisan Leader here referred to is a facsimile rpt of the Civil War New York edition: Nathaniel Beverl[e]y Tucker [as Edward William Sydney], The Partisan Leader:

A Tale of the Future (1836; alleged date of publication: 1856), with an additional introduction;

rpt. as The Partisan Leader: A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy: Secretly Printed in Washington (in the year 1836) by Duff Green, for Circulation in the Southern States: But afterwards Suppressed, 2 vols. (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1861); facsimile rpt, The Muckrakers: American Novels of Muckracking, Propaganda, and Social Protest (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg, 1968). Subsequent page references will occur parenthetically in the text. During the war, the novel was reprinted also in Richmond by West & Johnston, who advertised it in the Southern Literary Messenger as "A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy" (qtd in Hubbell 430). The first modern reprint of the novel, ed. and introd. Carl Bridenbaugh, appeared in the Americana Deserta series (New York, 1933).

5 Grammer, "Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and the Historical Romance of the Future," Pastoral and Politics in the Old South 68–97.

trick. On the one hand, Virginia's independence is represented as an established and well-known historical fact; on the other, the rhetoric of American Republicanism is transferred to the cause of secessionism. The Partisan Leader can be regarded as a travesty of the genre of the Revolutionary novel, or generally of the way in which Americans memorialized the origin of their independent nationhood. By projecting the conventional paradigms and rhetoric of remembering the Revolution into the future, Tucker demonstrated how fractured the basic referents of a collective American identity had become and released the ideological forces that had been shored up in the contemplation of its fragments.

The time scheme of The Partisan Leader is unusually sophisticated not only on the extradiegetic level––telling the future as past––but also on the diegetic level.

Considering the time when the novel was written, it is rather surprising that it should have an open beginning. Yet, at the onset of the first chapter the reader suddenly finds himself in the year 1849 and in the middle of the story. The actual exposition, which provides information on the political situation and on the former history of the principal characters, is deferred until chapters four and five. After the artistically rather effective opening, the expository matter, cast in the style of politically charged historiography, comes as a sort of let-down. It is the first indication of the novel's general tendency to subordinate the story to an obtrusive political purpose. The exposition reaches back to Jackson's Proclamation and Force Bill of 1832 and interprets these legal measures as affronts which were apt to provoke even moderate Virginians. These, it is explained, fell to supporting Martin Van Buren. The new president, however, eventually turned out an even more radical centralist than Jackson. Imperceptibly, Tucker transforms his account of recent or imminent political events into a fictional historiography of the future. He has Van Buren go for a third term of office; and when this comes to an end, the President manipulates the vote and creates a kind of dictatorship. This coup d'état leads to the foundation of a "Southern Confederacy," which Virginia initially does not join. When federal troops are moved into the Old Dominion, however, secessionist sentiment eventually runs high. Beginning with chapter six, the novel embarks on a detailed account of the diegetic past, and it is only with chapter thirty, far into the second volume, that the narrative eventually arrives at the time of its opening.

According to the story, the secessionist revolution eventually sets off when the military tries to interfere in the election to the state legislature of Virginia. The young Virginian Douglass Trevor, an officer of the Federal Army who has been moved to resign for personal and for political reasons, becomes the leader of a highly successful

"partisan corps" (240) that operates in the region of the Blue Ridge. In an act of foul

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play, however, the guerilla captain is kidnapped and incarcerated in Washington.

Surprisingly, the narrative does not end with a triumphant description of Virginia's victory over the Federal Army but breaks off suddenly when the fate of the principal hero is at its nadir: he is in the hands of the tyrant Van Buren and the plans for his rescue appear to be endangered. While the reader learns that the southern revolution eventually turned out successfully, it remains a mystery how the overwhelming difficulties described in the actual narrative should have been overcome.⁶

Beverley Tucker's political faction, initially known as the Opposition Party, would latter be called the "Whigs" in allusion to the anti-monarchist rhetoric that they directed against Jackson's successor. They depicted Andrew Van Buren as an enemy of American Republicanism who had ambitions to transform into "King Andrew." This demagoguery is very pronounced in Tucker's novel, which had the immediate political purpose of influencing the outcome of the election of 1836, in which Van Buren ran against four Whig candidates. The narrator sneeringly reports that by the late forties the president's residence has come to be designated as a "palace" (132). Here Van Buren is shown to hold court as the embodiment of a culture that adores luxury and dotes on appearances:

The place of hair was supplied by powder, which his illustrious example had again made fashionable. The revolution in public sentiment, commencing sixty years ago, had abolished all the privileges of rank and age ; which trained up the young to mock at the infirmities of their fathers, and encouraged the unwashed artificer to elbow the duke from his place of precedence ; this revolution had now completed its circle.

(133–134)

In a similar manner as George Tucker in The Valley of Shenandoah, Beverley Tucker represents the North and the South as irreconcilable social systems. The North as a capitalist society that is set on a cult of surfaces is opposed to the South as a heroic society in which the permanence of significations is ensured through the observation of

6 The time and plot structure of The Partisan Leader are astonishingly similar to a later propaganda novel: Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908). Like Tucker's, London's narrative is told from the point of view of a future in which a revolutionary reorganization of society has finally been achieved (even though this future is far more distant in The Iron Heel) and looks back into a near future when the struggle for change will be waged. The novels agree also in offering a fictional introduction which establishes the enlightened perspective of a post-revolutionary future. Furthermore, both texts break off at a point when the cause of the revolution seems to be vanquished and withhold the details of its eventual success. The comparison with London's novel reveals that The Partisan Leader foreshadows the political and representational strategies of a new era by substituting an absolute future for the absolute history provided by Kennedy and Caruthers. Another fiction that might be compared to The Partisan Leader is George Tucker's A Century Hence: Or, A Romance of 1941 (presumably written in 1841 but published only in 1977). The similarities of Beverley Tucker's novel with Edward Bellamy's utopian "romance" Looking Backward (1888) likewise are striking. Yet, Bellamy concentrates on the description of the new society, and not on the process of dissolving the old; furthermore, Looking Backward supposes that utopia would be realized by evolution and not by revolution.

social hierarchy and tradition. From this perspective, Beverley Tucker conceived secession as liberation from what he saw as a vicious circle of self-defeating revolutions inaugurated by the French Revolution. Secession would be a revolution to end the permanent revolving of modern history from monarchical absolutism to democratic radicalism and back again. With The Partisan Leader Beverley Tucker not only attempted to lay the ideological foundations for such a revolution. Taking the step from “romance” to real politics, the narrative is actually more than mere propaganda fiction: it seeks to provide a practical handbook for secessionist rebellion.