Travel, ritual, and national identity: planters on the European tour, 1820-1860.

LATE IN THE WINTER OF 1845 FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND A NUMBER OF friends went sightseeing at Eaton Hall, the Liverpool residence of the Marquis of Westminster. In the queue Douglass noticed several of his fellow passengers from the Cunard liner Cambria, among them southerners, who had threatened to toss him overboard during the passage. As be wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, "[O]f all the faces, expressive of chagrin, those of the Americans were preeminent. They looked as sour as vinegar, and as bitter as gall, when they found I was to be admitted on equal terms with themselves." The relative racial equality that Douglass encountered in the Old World alienated him from the United States. At the same time, the shared characteristics of white Americans, regardless of regional origins, became clear. Douglass did not distinguish the southern planters from the other Americans in the group outside Eaton Hall; he noted that they all regarded him with disdain. Indeed, in the eyes of white southerners as well, a European tour had the effect of bridging the political and cultural gaps that increasingly separated them from northerners at home. They did not, unlike Douglass, use the occasion to single out racism as a national characteristic, but touring Europe did inspire planters to reflect upon other qualities they shared with privileged folk like themselves. While European travel did not dissolve planters' loyalty to their section, it did intensify their sense of and pride in belonging to a national community. (1)

A tour of Europe provoked such introspection partly because of the ritual nature of travel. Realizing they were engaged in a special enterprise, Americans abroad struggled to find an appropriate voice with which to communicate their experiences. Charles Edward Leverett Jr. articulated this sense of wonder when he wrote his father from the "celebrated field" of Waterloo, "Did you ever think to get a line from that spot, & from your own son on that spot?" (2) Some rituals, as Steven M. Stowe observes, "[heighten] ... ordinary experience, creating a sense of being outside normal place and time." Travel to Europe was anything but ordinary, of course. Only the wealthy could afford even a brief stint abroad. Yet European travel was simultaneously "a highly conventional activity." The literary critic William W. Stowe argues that it should be understood as "a kind of secular ritual, complete with prescribed actions, promised rewards, and a set of quasi-scriptural writings." (3) Both an exceptional, highly meaningful event and a conventionalized practice, travel in Europe simultaneously allowed planters to situate themselves in the English genteel tradition of the Grand Tour, engaged them in a secular pilgrimage to quasi-sacred sites of Western culture, and empowered them selectively to differentiate themselves from this tradition in ways that affirmed their own nation's superiority.

Travel, moreover, had the potential to reshape individual and group identity. As Victor Turner has argued, rituals do not merely affirm or demonstrate cultural verities. They are also transformative, promoting critical inquiry and personal discovery. European tourism, as a quintessentially rule-governed and culturally sanctioned activity, encouraged planting women and men to reflect upon their social and individual identities. Travel often reinforced prior assumptions, such as prejudices about national superiority, but it also led to critical reflection. (4) The introspective effects of travel were less pronounced in the colonial period, when southerners generally crossed the Atlantic to make business connections or for other utilitarian reasons. But planters in the nineteenth century more often traveled for pleasure. (5) If such a tour of Europe was in itself a ritual act, so were many of its constituent elements, particularly reading and writing, sightseeing, and sociability. Though these practices were highly differentiated, together the rituals of foreign travel prompted southerners to reflect on the relationship between their region and their nation. As the Virginian John Doyle wrote just days after disembarking in Liverpool in 1840, "I cannot help making some remarks on American society." (6)

Calling to mind domestic scenes ranked among the favorite pastimes of southerners abroad. Levin S. Joynes of Accomack County, Virginia, praised one of his sister's letters because "[i]t talked so much of home, and gave so much neighbourhood gossip." But travelers did not merely pine for their domestic circles. As John Doyle's comment reveals, they engaged with Europe in order to assess America. Delineating national characters was a central concern of travel literature. Joyce E. Chaplin observes that while this genre informed readers about other lands, "it did so by reducing different countries and peoples to stereotypical images." These concepts could be banal, as when English breakfasts inspired Julia Haylander to exclaim, "I was an American and love meat." (7) Travelers often made more thoughtful assessments, however. Frances Trollope, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other popular foreign writers used their observations of America to address contentious matters in their home countries. Following their lead, literate southerners used travel to reflect on significant political and social concerns. In the 1850s, domestic travel literature became increasingly politicized as writers peddled their insights on slavery, free labor, and the sectional conflict. Some travelers sailed overseas precisely to escape such concerns. Paul Hamilton Hayne conceived of his time in Europe as a respite from "politics, slavery, & anti-slavery ad nauseam." (8)

Planters going abroad during the antebellum period almost never used their travels to comment on the growing sectional conflict, to differentiate themselves from northerners, to depict the South as a distinct zone of Anglo-Atlantic culture, or to defend slavery, though these were common themes in the writings of southerners visiting the North. European travel was different, though it need not have been so. Southerners had plenty of opportunities to make sectional observations. Day after day they came across northerners, toured factories, farms, and poorhouses, and made judgments about national character. Moreover, proslavery ideologues invited planters to compare the merits of free and slave societies. Nevertheless, touring the Old World seems to have assuaged anxieties about slavery and sectional difference that white southerners had developed in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Circulating in foreign cultures brought southerners' nationalism to the surface and gave it concrete definition. Like Americans generally, they criticized European practices and judged in favor of their own ways, which they expressed in national, not sectional, terms. A Kentuckian writing in 1851 feared that he "might be weaned from the delights of home by the luxuries and dissipations of Europe." Instead, he found that "each new country through which I pass, each new city I visit, only makes me turn with more pride and affection to the dear land of my birth." (9) Travel also strengthened upper-class bonds. Charlene M. Boyer Lewis has shown how planters from diverse parts of the South "acquired, and continuously renewed, a richer sense of regional identity" by mixing together at the Virginia Springs. (10) Travel in Europe worked in similar ways on national identity. As they met other privileged Americans, planters became more aware of the class-based qualities that transcended regional affiliations. If domestic travel underscored sectional differences in manners and morals, a European sojourn called attention to shared national traits. Travel abroad did not diminish planters' southern sensibilities, but it did deepen their identification with the nation. Privileged whites claimed membership in their regional culture, in an American community, and in the world of Anglo-American gentility. Sectional identity existed alongside a vigorous sense of nationalism and identification with the United States until the very eve of secession.

Following the practice established by British grand tourists in the seventeenth century, southerners abroad scratched out long letters for family and friends, kept journals, and supplied articles for local newspapers. Writing about travel encouraged reflection about the self and one's relation to wider social relations. In the process, the nationalism that planters rediscovered became continually reinforced. As Larzer Ziff observes, "[T]he traveler becomes radically aware of where he ends and all else begins; ... the written account of what he sees and does serves inevitably to affirm the self he has discovered in the process of moving among strangers." (11) Undertaking a trip to Europe amplified the importance of letter writing and journal keeping, rituals with strong roots in privileged southern families. Steven Stowe, for example, has documented the significance of the letters exchanged between antebellum southern parents and their children away at school. For children, "such correspondence ... prefaced a lifetime of appropriate self-expression and self-conscious mastery. For their parents, it was the occasion to shape that mastery." A European sojourn was also such an opportunity, for it was seen at least partly as an educational endeavor. Martha Richardson of Savannah urged her nephew to spend freely on his tour so long as his expenditures "contribute[d] to your enjoyment and improvement." Likewise, the North Carolina planter William S. Pettigrew supported his brother Johnston's decision to travel in Europe if it would "conduce most to your happiness and usefulness." (12)

Travelers certainly regarded correspondence and other forms of writing, particularly journal keeping, as rituals to be observed. Kate Jones of North Carolina composed her comments in "journal style" in letters to her sister Clara so that if Clara "care[d] to preserve my scrawls, they will answer as well hereafter as references for the children's benefit." Kirkwood King expected that his "letters should prove short and good for nothing," but he pledged that "[t]he journal that Mother requests shall certainly be kept in my best stile." Because a trip to Europe was such an exceptional event, it elevated the need to produce written impressions. James Proctor Screven of Georgia, who had toured Europe in the 1820s, urged his son John to "observe well and treasure up (by taking notes) of all that is curious and useful" during his 1848 excursion. This first trip to Europe would likely be his last, Screven explained. Thus he admonished his son that "what comes under your observation will furnish you subject matter in abundance," both for his letters home and, more importantly, for his life in Georgia when he returned. (13)

Parents were particularly concerned that their children's writing demonstrate the possession of refined taste, which they viewed as both a tool and a reflection of cultural authority. The acquirement of gentility was especially critical for women, since personal cultivation was essential for attracting a suitable husband, for orchestrating social affairs, and for passing away long hours alone. (14) Elizabeth Horner's 1850 journal took the form of letters to her teachers and schoolmates and displayed her refinement by demonstrating her mastery of historical contexts and aesthetic principles. The church of St. Germain d'Auxerre in France combined "Gothic and modern" architectural styles, she observed, making it "on the whole light, graceful, and uncommonly beautiful." (15) Some Americans did receive a formal education in Europe. When travelers spoke of the "improvements" to be gained by a tour, however, they usually had in mind the more abstract quality of personal cultivation. The quality and content of writing provided evidence for the acquisition of good manners. Travelers recounted their efforts to master French and Italian, evaluated works of art, and described the beautiful surroundings in which they moved. The last was particularly important since, as Richard L. Bushman writes, it was believed that "refinement was most fully realized in European palaces and mansions." In the journal she kept on her honeymoon tour of 1837-38, Charlestonian Isabella Faber praised Genoa because it "contains a larger number of fine houses & palaces than any other city through which we have passed." In Florence her party saw "every thing that was worth seeing," including the works of art in the Church of Santa Croce, "all of which are masterpieces." (16)

Like writing, reading about travel was an established custom that Americans inherited from the British. The Anglo-American literary materials that provided the background for a trip to the Old World were popular with refined readers in both sections of the republic. As Jeffrey R. Young explains, the "dynamic of this market for culture ... ensured that the content of the slaveowners' ideals would reflect many of the same 'modern' concerns permeating England and the northern United States during this period." (17) The shelves of private and public libraries and reading rooms were lined with travel narratives, and southern journals reviewed travel books from all parts of the Atlantic world. (18) These reviews routinely reflected a national perspective. In 1854 the Southern Literary Messenger chided Six Months In Italy, a popular travelogue by George Hillard, a Massachusetts author, for its Yankee parochialism. Hillard's comparisons, the Messenger complained, "are almost invariably between naughty, uncomfortable Italy and good, progressive, intellectual New England." Hillard had also failed in his duty to promote national letters. The sole American mentioned in his essay about foreign writers on Italy was James Fenimore Cooper, the Messenger huffed. (19) The absence of an American nationalist body of travel writing was a sore point with some critics, as the Messenger's review of Hillard illustrates. The absence "of rank, superstition or pedantry" should make Americans astute observers of European societies, one critic maintained. Yet this reviewer could think of just one American travel writer--Nathaniel P. Willis--who stood alongside such figures as Germaine de Stael, Lady Sydney Morgan, and Laurence Sterne. (20)

Much of the travel literature read by planters, then, was not American at all--it was British. The standard tourist guides were those published by the London house of John Murray. In 1853 Virginian Conway Robinson became so distraught after misplacing his "copy of Murray's Guide Book" that he mentioned it to two of his correspondents. Another traveler expressed his doubts about seeing a particular French church by noting that Murray's guidebook had "not taken the trouble to speak of it at all." Southerners' reading in the literature of travel went well beyond Murray's books, however. During her 1857-58 tour, Amelia Parker recommended that her family, at home in Charleston, follow her route by reading George Nugent's Lands, Classical and Sacred, John Lloyd Stephens's book on the Holy Land, and Giovanni Belzoni's account of Egyptian tomb raiding. Despite her general disdain for New Englanders, she singled out Hillard's Six Months in Italy as a "delightful book" she trusted "to tell of all the wonders we are daily seeing." (21)

Planters engaged this travel literature critically, but as participants in an upper-class Anglo-American culture, they seldom objected to its perspective. Planters wanted world travel (and genteel worldliness) to remain the domain of the privileged. After 1840, when steamship travel made the trip cheaper and easier, middling people sailed overseas with increasing frequency and turned to the same travel literature to guide their voyages. (22) As a result, elite travelers began criticizing the canon to reclaim their authority as arbiters of good taste and to distinguish themselves from the new breed of tourist. Savannah gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyman sought to separate herself from the mass when she opined that the view from her English country inn "had been like most other places much overrated by the descriptive pens of 'tourists.''' Travelers also rebelled when their guides contradicted high cultural prejudices. Virginian Richard B. Gooch believed that John Chetwode Eustace's Classical Tour through Italy was "an overrated book," exhibiting "a most remarkable prejudice in favor of the Italians and every thing Italian." To offset its faults he read Madame de Stael's Corinne, Oliver Goldsmith's The Roman History, and Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. (23) Gooch's use of Byron, an author shunned by respectable society, reflects the worldly, pleasure-seeking ethos of some elite travelers. Many planters read Byron avidly. Catching a glimpse of his lover Teresa Guiccioli at a party in Paris, Mary Anne Mason recalled her admiration for "Childe Harold, which is the most noble poem I ever read." (24) When Palmetto State planter Augustin Taveau visited St. Peter's, he remarked that "Byron was right when he said 'you are not struck with its immensity' for the soul becomes expanded on entering its sublime walls." Relics of Byron's life also ranked among Europe's leading attractions. Elizabeth Horner found the island of San Lazzaro of interest only because of "its associations with Lord Byron." (25)

As a kind of secular scripture, travel writings exerted considerable influence upon how planters interpreted what they saw and heard. Because this literature was cosmopolitan, not sectional, southerners' impressions of European nations differed only slightly from those of other privileged travelers. Guidebooks and other sources, particularly fiction and poetry, helped codify the ritual nature of European travel. Not only did they fabricate a set of prescribed actions, but they established a set of interpretations by which travelers could demonstrate their personal cultivation. (26) John Doyle simply copied "quotations" from his sources to describe what he saw in Scotland because he did not trust his own voice to record the intensity of his feelings. In 1858 South Carolinian William Parker informed his brother that his account of the journey from Naples to Rome would have to wait for his next letter, since he had already "packed up my Murray." He did not consider relating it in his own words. Other tourists allowed literature to determine the itinerary and meaning of their travels. Augustin Taveau made little effort to seek out company or conversation during his tour. He was "perfectly enchanted" with Venice, but not by Venetians, because he seems not to have met any. Rather, he saw the city mediated through Shakespeare, with whose works be would "pass whole days on her watery streets, wrapt in the dreams which Imagination chose to picture." Taveau, like other Americans, depended on literature to provide significance to his encounter with Europe. For many, a Grand Tour was a ritual of cultural legitimacy, not an opportunity for engagement with people from other lands. (27)

Literature provided Americans, northern and southern, with a common cultural framework with which to encounter Europe. For example, their impressions of Scotland depended overwhelmingly on a single literary source: the works of Sir Walter Scott. Anne Pleasants Gordon and her husband traveled there as honeymooners in 1857, where they rested in an inn near Stirling Castle to prepare for their Highland tour. Having read aloud from The Lady of the Lake on the night before their excursion, they were delighted to find that "[e]very thing is seen precisely as therein described." (28) Northerners used Scott's works in similar ways. Earlier in the century a New York gentlewoman anticipated leaving England to rush "to the famous town of Stirling that we might see its castle and proceed further North to the lakes so celebrated by Walter Scott." The employment of Scott also demonstrates how literature helped transcend regional differences, fusing privileged northerners and southerners into an American upper class. Virginia and New York found common ground when William C. Preston and Washington Irving adopted "the first canto of 'The Lady of the Lake' (the Chase) as the programme of [their] route" during their 1817 walking tour of the Highlands. Familiarity with icons like Scott functioned as a marker by which privileged Americans could recognize each other. Octavia Jones of Bolivar, Tennessee, listed Scott along with Byron, sculpture, and agriculture among the topics of the "easy conversation" in which she and a party of Americans engaged at a Liverpool hotel in 1844. (29)

The quintessential tourist ritual, sightseeing, was inextricably tied to literature since travelers' reading dictated their itineraries and strongly influenced the impressions they took away with them. The vast majority of southerners conformed to the prescriptions of leisure travel set out by the literary canon. They followed established routes and visited the conventional attractions. Sightseeing practices did not merely reflect southerners' participation in an Anglo-American literary world, however. These rituals submerged planters' sectional consciousness, intensified their nationalism, and clarified in their minds what qualities distinguished their nation from others. Sightseeing--encountering, not merely reading about, Europe--extracted southerners from their everyday worlds. As a ritual, it possessed the quality of separation that Victor Turner has described as "demarcat[ing] sacred space and time from profane or secular space and time." (30) Sightseeing represented a break in the monotony of domestic life, the fury of regional antagonism, and the parochialism of sectional identity. Yet it also heightened and gave concrete form to southerners' American nationalism. If domestic travel encouraged sectional analogies, overseas tourism made the nation the standard of comparison. Southerners were reminded of the salience of national identity--and their American citizenship--constantly as they traversed the Old World. Border crossings, languages, architectural forms, religious practices, political capitals, artworks, and the tradition of interpreting these sights, sounds, and experiences to categorize national characters all worked to reorient southerners' perspectives from section to nation.

Because travelers sought out knowledge of whole societies, sightseeing encompassed virtually anything tourists set out to see or hear. They took to heart John Murray's admonition that a proper tour entailed more "than a mere detail of certain lines of road, and an enumeration of towns, villages, mountains, &c." When an Englishman quizzed Kate Jones about why she wished to see "the crown'd heads of Europe," she replied that she had come to the Old World "to view all the curiosities." The sheer number and variety of attractions defied categorization. Thus, an understanding of how southern travelers responded to the rituals of sightseeing is best gained by examining their responses to sights, not the sights themselves. Two broad categories emerge from their writings on sightseeing: comments on modernity and progress, particularly regarding economics and culture; and the closely related issues of social class and politics. (31)

Southerners keenly observed economic practices in the regions they visited. They praised development, searched out prosperity and privation, and sought information on innovations of all kinds. (32) Behind such approbation lay a thoroughly modern worldview rooted in the ideal of progress, which the historian Carol Sheriff has identified as a distinguishing value of the northern middle class. (33) Southerners' comments on European economic life indicate that many planters shared these values. They did not use these occasions to contrast free with unfree labor systems, as proslavery theorists wished. In fact, they explained European poverty by arguing that workers there were not as free as in America. Very few planters were ideologues who traveled in Europe to intensify their regional identity or to find additional justifications for slavery. Modernity simply was not a problem for most southerners; they assumed it was perfectly compatible with their institutions. Nor were southern travelers contradicting themselves when they hailed the virtues of free labor. Slavery was appropriate for the South, they were certain, but they were also open to the merits of free labor in its proper environment, even as they were acutely sensitive to its flaws. Southern travelers did not believe that the degradation of Europe's working poor could be cured by a form of enslavement, as George Fitzhugh would have it. Rather, they made the nationalistic judgment that the adoption of free labor systems as practiced in the North would best address the Old World's ills. America's balance of freedom and slavery, each suited to its own sphere, bespoke the nation's superiority over Europe. (34)

Southerners' impressions of particular nations did not distinguish them strongly from northerners. However, southerners were certainly more critical of life in industrial societies, particularly England. (35) Julia Haylander excused Manchester workers for treating Sunday "as a day of recreation and frolick" because they were "confined in factories all the week." Yet most planters praised the productivity and efficiency of industrial establishments and even voiced restrained compliments upon their social effects. Virginian James M. Glassell visited many factories during his 1825 tour of England. In Manchester he saw "various manufactures of hard ware, truly worth seeing," and praised the English countryside for its "neat and flourishing cotton manufacturing town[s]." John T. Bowdoin, another Virginian, was "highly gratified" by the "beautiful and ingenious contrivances" he saw at a lace factory in Brussels. "It is as detailed and as striking an exemplification of the division of labour" as he had seen. Southerners appreciated not only factories but other elements of industrial economies. Kate Jones found German railroads superior to those in North Carolina because they were "so constructed as not to make too much noise. With very little effort conversation is perfectly easy." (36)

Naturally, planters were most interested in agricultural techniques. Just as a few ideologues made hay out of their visits to factories and mines, others investigated farms for sectional purposes. James Henry Hammond made such a study a goal of his 1836 sojourn, and for similar reasons his son investigated viticulture twenty years later. Such sectional tourism represented a major departure from early national times, when southerners like John Rutledge Jr. followed Thomas Jefferson's admonition to study "whatever has a near relation to" agriculture as a spur to national improvement. (37) If this nationalist ardor had cooled by the antebellum period, few travelers were fervent sectionalists, either. Like others interested in European agriculture, planters sought out modern innovations with which they might improve their own holdings. Richard Eppes, who remarked that he was "much delighted" by a model farm outside Liverpool that he visited in 1850, was typical in this respect. Keenly sensitive to the nationalist implications of everything they encountered in Europe, planters placed agriculture into a larger, value-laden social and economic scheme. "Switzerland beats all as to Rye & the general appearance of the farms," Ambrose Carlton reported in 1854. "It is a free country," the Virginian observed with an implicit nod to America, "& things look so much more cheering & prosperous than those poor devils in Italy & Austria." (38)

Commentaries on European soundscapes and landscapes reflected planters' attitudes toward progress, development, and modernity. Southerners were well versed in romantic notions of nature and the sublime, but they also remained grounded in eighteenth-century English theories of the picturesque. Certain sights and sounds, such as ruins or the Alps, elicited admiring comments on nature's wildness. But while the Old World was supposed to represent romance and antiquity, few thought of it solely in terms of majestic rivers and ruined castles. John Martinstein of New Orleans was unmoved by the attractions of old Germany when he visited Bremen in 1835. Instead of narrow medieval lanes, he found streets that were "regularly and well laid out" and houses that were "well and handsomely built in modern style." Southerners reveled in the sublime, but they also expected Europe to exhibit the progress of civilization over savagery. John Bowdoin articulated this sentiment when he observed that the French countryside was "not so beautifully diversified as in England, with hedges, trees, & cottages." The underdevelopment gave "to the country an air of desolation, and barrenness." Within limits, southerners identified the bustle of industry and commerce as distinctly American qualities. The "absence of the stunning noise of vehicles," first noticed at Liege, signaled to James Johnston Pettigrew that he was "truly in a strange place" for the first time since departing the United States. (39)

Comments on economic features, including their manifestation on the landscape, testify to the subtle ways that gender constructed travelers' experiences. A large body of scholarship argues that men expressed a wish to violate feminized nature in their writings on landscape, while women articulated an organic appreciation of the land. Other historians have found little evidence for gendered readings of landscapes and their uses, however. Southern women and men did not voice distinct understandings of nature or economic development while in Europe. Yet they did focus on issues that affirmed the conventional gender roles of privileged southern society. Julia Haylander limited her analysis of Manchester's working poor to the effects of industrialism upon piety, while the young South Carolinian Joseph Daniel Aiken commented authoritatively upon the "wonderful evidences of skill and workmanship" at a Sheffield cutlery factory. Moreover, while some women did inspect economic enterprises, they were generally less enthusiastic about doing so than men. When Richard Eppes visited the experimental farm outside Liverpool in 1850, his wife Josephine elected to remain behind at their hotel. Nevertheless, the views of planter-class men and women regarding Europe's modernity and development did not differ significantly. As members of an upper class who benefited from economic innovations and who were immersed in a transatlantic culture, they had as little reason to advance conflicting views toward development and the environment as they did about slavery. (40)

Planters' responses to poverty and inequality in Europe both reflected and reinforced the nationalist ideas they shared with other American travelers. These concepts enjoyed a wide currency among elites. Thus, their comments upon living standards and what they viewed as retrograde attitudes toward work and leisure on the Continent were as much constructions as observations. After all, most travelers had embarked from one of the northeastern cities, so they had seen urban squalor. Yet they chose either to ignore it or to rank Europe's as far worse. Like their northern counterparts, planters constructed a vision of American nationhood that elided poverty and inequality in favor of an idealized land of opportunity. European backwardness highlighted what southerners--like other privileged travelers--believed to be the providential role of the United States as a beacon of social and moral progress. Few southerners responded to Old World poverty with a critique of free society, but not because they accepted the antisouthern trope of nationalism developed in New England. (41) Aaron Willington's observation that, unlike their enslaved counterparts in the South, elderly Genoese peasants still suffered "from hard work and hard fare" was an indirect defense of the peculiar institution and, at any case, an exception to the rule. Travel to Europe encouraged Americans to suppress divisive issues and to articulate a generic, inclusive vision of Americanism. Planters attributed European backwardness to the absence of qualities that all Americans, northern and southern, could claim as unique national virtues. After visiting Spain in 1853, Augustin Taveau marveled at how "concentrated wealth can afford to gratify its tastes at the cost of overrunning the land with Beggars." "[T]hank God I am an American," he declared. "[O]urs is the only land of true prosperity & liberty." (42)

European social conditions inflamed travelers' patriotism, but European culture inspired more ambivalent feelings. Reform movements, particularly in Britain, provoked critical reflection on American culture. Josephine Eppes visited a host of charitable institutions in Liverpool, including an asylum for the blind and an orphanage. Both sight and sound--the "fresh healthful appearance of the children" and the "excellent time & harmony" with which they sung their hymns--marked the orphans as far superior to their American counterparts. Southerners studied educational systems particularly closely. Levin Joynes sarcastically contrasted schools in "benighted Europe" with those at home. The institutions of the "little state" of Berne, which included "a number of free schools for the poor, a deaf and dumb asylum, [and] a blind asylum," gave the lie to Americans' conceit about being "the 'most intelligent people in the world,' as we are kindly informed on the Fourth of July," he charged. Education for women also exposed the hollowness of national prejudices about women's status in American society. In 1820 Andrew Leslie urged his sister to visit him in Scotland, where she would see women "kept at school, until they acquire a great deal of suitable & useful information." Such practices contrasted with those in "our country," where women learned "to chasse [sashay] forward & backward, & to thump away on the Piano.... [and] where they appear with all the airs & consequence of women, but with the ignorance & backwardness of children." These vices were "contagious," Leslie insisted, and were bound to impair the young republic's progress. (43)

Other features of European culture, particularly morality, called attention to the common ethical foundations of American high society and reinforced prejudices about national superiority. The social habits of many wellborn Americans--late-night entertaining, alcohol consumption, dancing--seemed debauched to respectable folk. (44) Yet even pleasure-seeking travelers shuddered at Old World practices that seemed to flout propriety itself. As their society's moral guardians, women most often made observations on European manners. Savannah widow Martha Richardson accepted that her nephew would be exposed to vice on his 1820 tour, though she hoped he would "detect its deformity, and turn to virtue for the love of it." Judith Rives's reaction to French behavior on the Sabbath was typically American, though evangelicals were even more scandalized. "The universal disregard of this sacred day I regard as the greatest evil here," she coolly observed. Though they seemed dissolute to middling folk, refined women and men conformed to a pre-Victorian code. Thus they found vice everywhere in the Old World, from ballrooms to peasant cottages. As Mary H. Middleton marveled about St. Petersburg noblewomen in 1822, "as to morality, one would suppose they did not understand the term." (45)

Like their countrymen, southerners blamed Catholicism for the Continent's feeble commitment to progress. Travelers praised Catholic artworks, and church ritual awed them. However, they had only contempt for the Catholic faith and for what they perceived to be its social effects. Nativist prejudices had predisposed Gabriel Manigault "to see a great deal of misery and poverty in the South of Ireland and I was not disappointed" during his 1854 sojourn. Italy, which educated southerners anticipated visiting because of their familiarity with the classics, also suffered from southerners' religious prejudice. Combining classical education with anti-Catholicism, travelers constructed an image of contemporary Italy as poor, stagnant, and politically moribund. One southern observer charged in the Southern Literary Messenger that Italians lost "the dignity and energy of ancient Romans" when they adopted "the dreadful superstition, which has converted the simple, spiritual worship of the gospel into pompous mummery." Leisure travelers tended to be worldly, but some devout folk and even a few evangelicals also made the trip. They fulminated against Catholic Europe. Abram Pollack, a Presbyterian minister from Richmond, was one of the few to extend the sociological analysis of Catholicism beyond Ireland and Italy. The medieval cathedrals of Rouen brought to his mind "the history of the dark ages, the night of time," which "has scarcely even now begun to be dispersed from the minds of the people." Southerners blamed Catholicism for the failure, as they saw it, of most parts of Europe to conform to the progressive creed to which they and other genteel Americans subscribed. (46)

Clearly, then, travelers did not view development, poverty, and moral issues as discrete features. They integrated them into a comprehensive scheme of progress and backwardness whose foundation was national character. One critic captured the "moral condition of Spain" with a list of its qualities: "impassable roads, unskilful and unscientific agriculture, manufactures destroyed, commerce expiring, education neglected, robberies committed in midday, justice apathetic or corrupt, and bigotry and malaria spreading wider and wider over the moral and physical waste." Defining national traits in this manner encouraged planters to articulate inclusive ideals of American identity, which resonated with a broad consensus of privileged folk. In the Southern Quarterly Review, for example, Brantz Mayer criticized Italy's "poverty, her corruptions, the influence of her church, and the habit of being ruled" while complimenting "the soft verdure of our American landscape, the bright curl of our waters, [and] the freshness and freedom of our forests." In articulating these sentiments, southerners were neither suppressing their regional identity nor accommodating themselves to northern definitions of Americanness. Rather, exposure to European social conditions set planters' sectional loyalties alongside an enhanced sense of nationalism, balancing a hard-nosed awareness of sectional grievances against the benefits of the Union. No traveler could witness Irish poverty, declared Octavia Jones, "and not feel the blessings of Providence in living and moving and having been in such a land as America. Happy, proud America! Land of the free--with her ten thousand faults, I love her still, I love her still." (47)

After questions of modernity and progress, social class and political issues constituted the second broad category that provoked travelers' judgments. Even though these were integral parts of the ideal of progress, politics provoked far more ambivalence than did European morality, Catholicism, or economic development. A significant minority of planters articulated views that can only be called reactionary. They expressed admiration for monarchs, praised repressive measures, and curried favor with the great. These sentiments were shared by would-be aristocrats throughout the American republic, constituting a cultural bond that distinguished them from those people, including most wealthy folk, who celebrated democracy and egalitarianism. The latter group represented the majority of travelers. While white southerners were deeply distrustful of the political motives of northerners and wary of the federal government's potential intervention in the South's domestic affairs, exposure to European class structures and politics gave planters a new appreciation for American institutions, moderating--but by no means eliminating--sectional consciousness.

Southerners were even more offended by the palaces and gentry seats, royal relics, and encounters with exalted personages that repelled most Americans, due to their ethic of honor, which compelled southern men to interpret any sign of inequality as unmanly submission. Returning to Rome in 1850, Georgian William Terrell ordered his coachman to stop when he learned the pope was approaching. "When he came opposite," he told his wife, "I touched my hat, & waved him a salute to which he inclined a brow & passed on." His friends marveled that he had not been "sabered" for failing to debase himself, but Terrell boasted that there had been "nothing cringing, nothing of fear, nothing abject in my salutation." Others made the egalitarian lessons of sightseeing explicit. Aaron Willington drew a political moral from his tour of Genoa, where "extremes of wealth and poverty are here to be seen at every step." He maintained that the juxtaposition of aristocratic luxury with destitution was "unknown to our more rational republican countrymen." Planters may have valued hierarchical class relations more than northerners, but exposure to Europe led them to restate their devotion to broad national principles. Southerners should travel overseas, another southern newspaper correspondent insisted, "to know how to love the Union and its institutions; ... he must witness the empty parade and abject misery of other nations before he can properly appreciate the happiness of his own." (48)

Planters also constructed national distinctions by commenting on European history and politics. These excited scant admiration in early national times, when the task of fashioning a national identity separate from Europe seemed pressing. As an essayist in The Portico, a Baltimore journal, maintained in 1816, "it ['the splendour of our name'] rests on our own efforts to procure an illustrious dignity of national character." (49) Hypernationalism waned with peace in 1815, when travelers grew confident enough to see merit in European societies. Like many people, Martha Richardson insisted that Scotland held special interest for Americans, "particularly so if we keep in view the history of the country. They have had many and hard struggles for liberty." Southerners drew lessons from European politics that heightened their pride in their American citizenship. Philip C. Gooch turned the Revolution of 1848 into a sightseeing occasion that abounded with patriotic sentiment. Storming the Tuilleries with the mob, the young Virginia doctor mocked monarchy by lolling about "on the throne and on the bed of his Majesty." Later, in a solemn ceremony with his countrymen, he presented a "twin-flag"--the American and French flags sewn together--"to the government in the name of the American people." Indeed, some aspects of Continental politics spoke directly to the sectional crisis and even testified to the value of the Union. The sight of foreign troops in Italy inspired one South Carolinian to reflect in 1851, just after his state's failed secession movement, "What a melancholy picture is here presented of the distracted and divided condition of the Italian States, and what an impressive lesson does it teach us Americans." (50)

Such liberal sentiments were far from universal, however. Some planters were quite pleased by inequality and authoritarianism. In 1818 Americans in Paris clamored for tickets to a ball so that they might catch a glimpse of the Duke of Wellington, provoking William C. Preston's charge that Americans "have a rapturous and romantic regard for" nobility and a "a preeminent and indecent propensity to thrust themselves upon exclusive circles." As his comment suggests, reactionary sentiments were not limited to southerners. Uneven as the growth of democracy and egalitarianism surely was, privileged people from all corners of the Union were alarmed by the liberal drift of American life in the early nineteenth century. Aspiring to a quasi-aristocratic status, they idealized Europe as a refuge from life in the States. When Harriet Aiken and her party toured the barricades in Paris in 1848, she "said very emphatically that she had not come to Paris to live under a republic. She had enough of that sort of thing at home." (51)

Authoritarian methods of social control also appealed to Americans who were repelled by their nation's unruly democracy. One Virginia lady looked on with admiration as Parisian gendarmes thrashed a "dirty-looking fellow" for cutting into a line in 1828. She was envious of such methods, for women in France were spared "rudeness [and] insult" on city streets. Despite the usefulness of such methods for controlling slaves, southerners' admiration had less to do with race than with class, at least in northern Europe. The South Carolina sportsman William Elliott complimented Napoleon III in 1855 by remarking that "[t]here never existed a more absolute government." It had advanced "national interests," he explained, and "inspired the people anew with the love of glory...." Southern observers came closest to racializing Europeans when commenting upon the people of Italy, Spain, and Greece. Repressive measures in those countries seemed justified not because of benefits for the public, as in France, but for the racial shortcomings of the people. Daniel Aiken raged that southern Italians were "worthy of all the tyranny the Pope can exercise over them. They never can be free; they are incapable to enjoy or maintain a free government." Southerners were not alone in constructing southern Europeans racially, however. It was a common and long-standing practice among Americans generally. Elliott Cresson, a Philadelphia Quaker touring southern Italy in 1825, remarked that the region "presents a population so degraded as to approach nearer to the savage state than any people I have ever seen. Their shepherds ... approach as near to the wild man as our Indians." (52)

Sightseeing inspired many reflections on domestic issues, but few on southern identity or the sectional conflict. Michael O'Brien has taken note of this "silence among Southern travelers ... upon the meaning of the American South." James Johnston Pettigrew, as an exception to the rule, illustrates this point. Encountering more sociable men and more attractive women upon crossing into Italy in 1851 brought to mind sensations he had only felt "on leaving the Yankee land on the way to the South." Yet O'Brien's suggestion that most southerners were insufficiently "alienated from American culture" to articulate sectional feeling while abroad is borne out by the experiences of those who were antagonistic to the Union. Only sectional ideologues were inspired by travel to reassess their regional identity. When James Henry Hammond saw the Stars and Stripes flying over New York harbor after spending over a year in Europe, he felt "conscience stricken for the sin of having at times heretofore wavered in affection for her." As a southern sectionalist, Hammond experienced nationalism as a revelation, but most planters possessed such sentiment as an integral part of their identities before they ever set foot in the Old World. The foreignness of Europe, together with imperatives to observe and categorize the experience of travel in national terms, heightened planters' identity with and pride in their national community. As Isaac Morse of New Orleans said of an acquaintance he saw in Europe, "she is the most patriotic creole I ever knew. She says there is nothing in Paris to compare with Broadway in New York." (53)

Like reading, writing, and sightseeing, sociability, the final category of travelers' ritual behavior, enhanced nationalist feelings by reinforcing class bonds between northerners and southerners. Americans stumbled upon each other constantly as they tramped across the Continent. While eager to meet people from their state or neighborhood, southerners did not express strong preferences for each other. Planters sought out Americans in general and rejoiced when they happened across them serendipitously, although late in the 1850s some did avoid contact with northerners. Sociability was strongly tied to social class because it required planters to make careful distinctions in selecting their company. Moreover, they had to choose whether to follow aristocratic rules of polite behavior that prevailed in Europe or the more republicanized form of gentility that dominated the States. Americans used social affairs and the manners required to shine in those settings to assess the relative quality of American versus European cultures. As with sightseeing, there was little consensus on this score. A substantial minority of travelers sought out exclusive company and aped aristocratic manners. Most recoiled at such practices, however, and used their revulsion to reinforce feelings of national superiority. Whether elitist or republican, however, participation in sociability rituals did not merely reflect southerners' national orientation; it also heightened it.

For most travelers, socializing in Europe inspired profound anxiety. Americans felt insecure about their mastery of the rituals of polite conduct, and for good reason: European writings generally portrayed Americans as vulgarians. In 1832 a writer in Blackwood's, an Edinburgh journal, charged that it was incumbent upon "all true Britons [to] hate ... the American people" because "manners are not matters of indifference, but of mighty importance to the whole moral and intellectual character." Sophisticated Americans were well aware of such attitudes and could not help but absorb some of them. James Augustus Washington of New Bern, North Carolina, in Europe to complete his medical education, objected to an illustration accompanying Frances Trollope's recently published Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). His resentment stemmed from the shock of recognition: he felt that the image, featuring a besotted, tobacco-spewing "Jonathan," actually understated American vulgarity. It anachronistically pictured a spittoon, he noted, when it "should have represented the floor befouled with tobacco spit." Such sentiments epitomized the dilemma of patriotic travelers whose ambivalence extended to their own culture, not just Europe's. (54)

Americans sought out each other partly as a refuge from Europeans' judgmental gaze. Though distinct varieties of the code of gentility emerged in the North and South, privileged people in both sections shared values and social habits, which included hierarchy, exclusivity, and pleasure seeking. Thus, they could be comfortable in each other's company. (55) A southwestern traveler rejoiced to find "how many of our countrymen" were in Paris because he would be "much less alone" than he had been in London. The aural dimension of travel underscores the camaraderie planters felt with other Americans. Josephine Eppes's spirits lifted on Christmas Eve, 1850, in Marseilles when she heard "a chorus of voices singing out in our native tongue" because "[i]t sounded so like home." Most travelers chose associates by their class rank and code of behavior, as when Gabriel Manigault praised the "American colony" in 1850s Florence as a "transatlantic fraternity who were given to worldly amusements." Nevertheless, Americans sometimes pined so strongly for each other's company that class concerns could be overlooked. Touring Egypt in 1847, Manigault met a Philadelphian named Hayes, "a coarse vulgarian." Nevertheless, the Carolinian "felt the necessity of making use of him," and by and by they "considered themselves as travelling companions." (56)

Until the 1850s, southerners did not segregate themselves from other Americans. Some planters developed strong feelings against socializing with northerners during that decade, but these sentiments seldom eclipsed national feelings. Instead, they existed alongside, and often in tension with, sectional identity. While crossing the Atlantic on the steamer Arctic in 1851, a group of southerners, including Kate Jones of Columbus, Georgia, gathered together to talk "of our beloved Southern homes" and "to tell anecdotes & incidents of our negroes." A few weeks later a northerner introduced himself, "seeing, as he remarked, that I was an American." Jones informed him, "I am not only an American, but from the South too," but she quickly added that, on foreign soil, it was "sufficient however to know that we claim one fatherland--sectional differences seem forgotten." (57) Strong sectional prejudices complicated but did not preclude such sentiments, as the experiences of the Parker family of South Carolina also illustrate. Their regional consciousness incorporated a deep antipathy toward northerners. Amelia Nott Parker wrote that the Americans they encountered in Egypt during their 1851 tour were "almost universally northerners and especially Bostonians--so that we not only do not fraternize with them but avoid them." Few planters expressed such exclusionary sentiments, however. In fact, the Parkers' regional hostility faded and nationalist feelings sharpened as they spent more time in the Old World. Several weeks later in Rome, they were happy to discover "a great many nice Americans," singling out several northern families. "I shall go back to America better satisfied on the whole," Parker reflected. "[W]hen one considers the age of America compared to Europe, we are a great and go-ahead nation." (58)

Southerners did not hesitate to raise sectional issues while traveling in the United States. (59) But exposure to European societies so intensified planters' national feelings that to raise such divisive subjects abroad was seen as a serious faux pas. Gabriel Manigault saw a young New England woman violate these rules on a Genoa-bound steamer in 1856. Accepting the arm of a Virginia gentleman, she let slip that she "utterly abhorred all of her country-people who were slaveholders, and expressed the hope that although from a slave state, he was not one of the fraternity." Quivering with indignation, he replied "without any feeling that he was guilty of anything wrong, that he owned two old people who were his slaves at his old home in Virginia." Regional insensitivity worked both ways, though. James Johnston Pettigrew launched into a tirade against abolitionists upon meeting an Alabamian in 1850 while studying in Berlin. He only later discovered the young man was the son of James G. Birney, the antislavery politician. Pettigrew was aghast--at his own boorish behavior. He was even more chagrined when subsequent acquaintance proved that Birney was "very polite." "Indeed," the North Carolinian reflected, contrasting his crassness with his new friend's refinement, "I think he is a pleasant fellow." (60)

Planters did not socialize exclusively with other Americans, however. They moved among Europeans at dinner parties, balls, and the like, though these encounters often exacerbated their sense of inferiority to their Old World peers. Social affairs also exposed the breach between conservatives who admired court manners and those who believed that American gentility should repudiate its aristocratic roots. Travelers were acutely sensitive to the connection between gentility and nationhood. Fannie Knight of Natchez cringed upon noticing the signature of Charles Sumner in the guest register of the Hospice of St. Bernard in 1857, but not on account of his abolitionist principles. As she told her Baltimore cousin, "I never justified Mr. Brooks in his conduct." Rather, she objected to Sumner's appellation, which read, "Hon. Charles Sumner, Senator of the United States of America." Knight believed it was "in very bad taste for an American in particular to be his "own trumpeter."' Sumner had bestowed a title upon himself, unmistakably drawing attention to the inferiority that he, and by extension other Americans, felt vis-a-vis cultivated Europeans. Knight had only disdain for Sumner's antislavery convictions, but she deplored his vulgarity even more. (61)

Knight was typical of most Americans in insisting on the necessity of behaving according to republican rules of behavior. Those who comported themselves aristocratically became negative evidence of the need for a more respectable code. John Doyle diagnosed that the "republican sensitiveness" of the wellborn Americans he met in Paris in 1840 had been "blunted by the contagion of Royalty & aristocracy around them." As his metaphor suggests, the danger was that these travelers might infect the young republic with their infatuation upon their return. They also offended and embarrassed nationalists by suggesting that American culture was inferior to that of aristocratic Europe. Josephine Eppes felt both of these emotions at a London dinner party in 1850. She judged her American hostess "unfit for the place she occupies." She "seem[ed] conceited, proud, and silly," pathetically associating herself with nobility by boasting about "the attentions of Lord This and Lady That." Not only was her behavior boorish and unrepublican, though those sins were serious enough. Worse, she put American insecurity on display--in front of an English audience, no less. (62)

Southerners further demonstrated the links between republican manners and nationalism by attending social affairs on American holidays such as Washington's Birthday or Independence Day. In 1857 Mary Anne Mason, the daughter of John Young Mason, the American minister in Paris, marked the "4th by going out in a large party to R[obert] Walsh's," where they enjoyed dinner, dancing, and fireworks with a select French and American company. Nowhere was the connection between republican manners and national identity more clear, however, than in affairs involving the Marquis de Lafayette. Medical student James Washington helped arrange a banquet for the Revolutionary hero in 1830, presided over by James Fenimore Cooper. France's recent revolution, Washington said, rendered the nation "the only true shield and bulwark of liberal principles in Europe." Though the women and men who conducted these affairs believed they were celebrating republican values against retrograde European practices, they were quite conservative by American standards. Even the most open of these occasions was far more exclusive than patriotic celebrations and other ceremonies held in southern communities. In Europe these rituals, while sanctifying American institutions or the progress of republicanism in the Old World, exalted the talents of a self-styled republicanized aristocracy. Lafayette himself cultivated this kind of image by entertaining in a style that combined gentility and exclusivity with republican values. At a party at his Paris home in 1829, for example, the servants doled out "tea and cake ... in the American fashion." (63)

While some travelers sought, however imperfectly, to comport themselves according to a republican code of politeness, others made no pretense of doing so. They reveled in exclusive company and practiced aristocratic manners. An illness forced Kentuckian Nancy Hart Brown's withdrawal from Parisian society for over a year in 1828-29. Upon recovering she wasted little time in meeting with "the King, the duchess of Berry, and the Duke of Orleans" and attending "several large and brilliant parties." Her return to the society of "distinguished individuals ... has had the most happy effect on her," reported her husband, the American minister in France. Abigail de Hart Mayo extolled the exclusive circles in which she circulated in Paris in 1828-29. As she gloated upon securing admission to a royal address for which there was limited seating, "it was as splendid a scene as ever I witnessed. None were admitted but persons of the first fashion." Few believed that European manners ought to be adopted wholesale. Yet reactionaries, unlike their more republican counterparts, believed that their nation needed the infusion of aristocratic qualities. The "underbred habits and vulgar tone" of Americans in Paris embarrassed Henry Middleton Jr. in 1836. This "evil" could be alleviated by limiting travel abroad to "gentlemen and men of education," he believed. Like most reactionaries, Middleton still saw himself as a nationalist. "Do not suppose me wanting in patriotism for speaking thus of some of our countrymen," he implored his sister. "It is in fact that very feeling of patriotism which suggests what I say. It is because I feel proud of America that I wish to see her well represented." (64)

A primary reason that sociability enhanced southerners' nationalistic feelings was that the Americans whom they met in Europe were likely to be much like themselves--conservative folk with little sympathy for antislavery agitation or other radical reform movements. When Levin Joynes crossed the sea aboard the Columbus in 1840, he found among the passengers William Lloyd Garrison and several black abolitionists. Joynes looked on with pleasure as the ship's "republican community," led by a northerner, reprimanded Garrison for "his malicious conversation, his revolting principles, and his mean character." Europeans, moreover, seldom harassed slave owners, much to the visitors' surprise. During his 1853-54 tour, proslavery Philadelphian Henry D. Gilpin "never--on a single occasion--heard America, or her institutions--even slavery--alluded to in a sneering or illiberal spirit." As Gilpin suggested, the subject of slavery did come up. But exchanges between Americans, or between Americans and their European hosts, seldom escalated into clashes of ideologies like those that marred domestic travel. In 1857 Edward Leverett and his Paris landlady engaged in "some long & hot arguments on slavery," which were "amicably & peacefully settled always." Social rituals established some distance between planters and the divisive issues that fostered sectional feelings. They did so literally, by providing a milieu that discouraged attention to the exhausting subjects of slavery and regional strife. They also reminded southerners of the common culture they shared with other socially elite Americans. (65)

The suspension of sectionalism and enhancement of national feelings that planters experienced is not altogether surprising, given the relaxed atmosphere of a European tour and their understandable wish to escape enervating domestic problems. Yet their relative silence on slavery and the sectional conflict ran afoul of proslavery writers' admonition to contrast the conditions of free laborers with those of southern slaves. Proslavery literature literally invited travelers to make this assessment. In 1851 an anti-abolitionist columnist urged Americans in England to visit factories and coal pits, to contrast the conditions of the "white images of God" who worked there with "the sleek, oily appearance of the comfortably clothed, well-fed, fat and saucy southern slaves[.]" While planters often took note of the poor conditions of European laborers, they refused to interpret these observations in exclusionary, sectional terms. Rather, planters read Old World oppression as evidence of the superiority of broader, American qualities. As James H. Gardner wrote his wife in 1853, "Italy is a poor degraded nation, a nation of beggars.... [T]his alone is sufficient to cause an American to bless his own country and cast a benevolent sigh of sympathy upon the degraded population of Europe." (66)

Neither their failure to discuss slavery nor their articulation of nationalist sentiments meant that southerners embraced northern concepts of American identity. However, the situation does suggest that, in defining white southern culture, historians have been more comfortable in assigning pride of place to those qualities that distinguished North from South than to those that the sections shared in common, perhaps because it is harder to integrate the prevalence of similarities into a narrative that ends in the Civil War. (67) The nationalism that southerners articulated during their time in Europe does not contradict the presence of a powerful regional sensibility. But it does seem inconsistent with the contention that the exclusionist ideology of proslavery thought should be seen as "the South's particular perspective on those philosophical, moral, and social dilemmas confronting the nation as a whole." (68)

Planters' experiences in Europe highlight the connections that bound them to other privileged Americans. However, this emphasis on cosmopolitanism contrasts with a large body of scholarship that documents the community-centered nature of life in the Old South. This difference underscores the depth of social class and intraregional divisions within the South. Planters' elitism, wealth, and sophistication distinguished them from all but a small number of whites in their region. Moreover, while some planters from the Old Southwest traveled overseas late in the antebellum period, the greater number of travelers from the seaboard states calls attention to the cultural gap that divided older regions along the Atlantic from more recently established areas. The privileged women and men who made a leisure tour of Europe were thus markedly different, in their lifestyles and cultural attitudes, from both the mass of whites in their region and from most planters in less developed states like Mississippi and Arkansas. These sharp class distinctions indicate another bond that elite planters shared with the northerners with whom they circulated in Europe. They had much more in common with each other than they did with ordinary people in their respective sections. (69)

Experiencing the Old World and socializing together did not indicate that northerners and southerners meant the same things when they praised the merits of the national union. As Mitchell Snay has shown, sectional differences could branch out from common cultural roots. (70) Moreover, while a heightened sense of nationalism was a common experience for planters who traveled to the Old World, the lasting effects of those feelings differed from individual to individual. A tour did not preclude the development of regional partisanship. Williams Middleton, the Lowcountry patriarch, spent years on the Continent during his youth. Yet he was a staunch advocate of secession throughout the 1850s and felt little connection with northerners except those within his family circle. For others, the effect of a European tour seems to have been more subtle. James Henry Hammond cursed his secessionist sentiments when he saw the flag upon his return to American shores, but he remained an avid sectional partisan. Yet as secession loomed, Hammond sought to recruit aristocrats in both sections into a North-South alliance to keep the Union together, a product, perhaps, of the nationalism stirred by his trip to Europe. Other planters had little difficulty holding sectional and national pride in balance. The Savannah gentlewoman Mary Telfair noted that her "habits, views, tastes, feelings have all been changed" by travel, while her neighbors were "so local in all their feelings." She had many friends in the North and retained a strong sense of nationalism, neither of which impeded her sectional loyalty nor her support for Georgia's secession in 1861. (71)

Yet there can be little doubt that among other planters, travel not only enhanced national attachments and helped define what was worthy to be preserved, but also established a cultural foundation that transcended local differences. Like her brother Williams, Eliza Middleton spent her youth in Europe. But she used her experience to make connections beyond her South Carolina family. Her travels provided the foundation for her long, happy marriage to Philadelphia gentleman Joshua Francis Fisher, who had made a grand tour of his own in the early 1830s. Her experience abroad also provided her with the resources to assume a leading role in that city's highest social circles. When Emily Wharton married Charles Sinkler in 1842, she moved in the other direction, from the urban whirl of Philadelphia to Eutaw Plantation, in Upper St. John's Parish in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Emily credited Charles's brother Seaman, who had spent three years in Paris completing his medical studies, with helping her make the transition. Seaman supplied her with French novels and operas, bought her a pearl-inlaid guitar and a piano, and conversed with her in French and Italian. Travel, like other ways of engaging in the transatlantic cultural community, bridged profound differences in experience. It intensified planters' sense of belonging to a republicanized aristocracy and deepened their identification with America. "[T]he tendency of a trip to Europe," Conway Robinson testified in 1853, "is to make any reflecting American more and more pleased with the republican institutions of his country, and more and more convinced of the manifold advantages resulting from our glorious Union." (72)

(1) Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), 365-73 (quotation on p. 373). On Douglass's trip see Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, "Triumphant Exile: Frederick Douglass in Britain, 1845-1847," in Rice and Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, Ga., and London, 1999), 1-12. Previous versions of this essay were delivered at the 2001 meeting of the Southern Historical Association and at the "Global Currents in Southern History, from European Colonization to the Late 20th Century" conference at Georgia Southern University in October 2000. I thank Mark M. Smith, Michael O'Brien, Jeffrey R. Young, Christopher Olsen, Kirsten Wood, Charles Joyner, Stephanie McCurry, and the anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Southern History for many helpful comments and suggestions. I also acknowledge the financial assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Virginia Historical Society, and John Carroll University.

(2) Charles Edward Leverett Jr. to Charles E. Leverett Sr., September 30, 1857, in Frances Wallace Taylor, Catherine Taylor Matthews, and J. Tracy Power, eds., The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family, 1851-1868 (Columbia, S.C., 2000), 51.

(3) Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore and London, 1987), 1 (first quotation); William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, 1994), 18 (second quotation), 19 (third quotation). Ritual--whether as everyday activity elevated to special significance or as uncommon events, like dueling or jousting tournaments--enacted in highly scripted and structured forms some of the white South's most cherished values. On dueling as ritual see Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 5-49; on jousting tournaments see Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790-1860 (Charlottesville and London, 2001), 200-206.

(4) Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982), 79-83; Nelson H. H. Graburn, "Tourism: The Sacred Journey," in Valene L. Smith, ed., Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (2d ed.; Philadelphia, 1989), 21-36; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed.; London and New York, 1991), 53-61; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1976); Judith Adler, "Origins of Sightseeing," Annals of Tourism Research, 16 (January 1989), 7-29. Sociologist Steven Lukes defines ritual as "rule-governed activity of a symbolic character which draws the attention of its participants to objects of thought and feeling which they hold to be of special significance." Lukes, "Political Ritual and Social Integration," Sociology, 9 (May 1975), 291.

(5) On travel abroad in the colonial period see Julie M. Flavell, "The 'School for Modesty and Humility': Colonial American Youth in London and Their Parents, 1755-1775," Historical Journal, 42 (June 1999), 377-403; Susan Lindsey Lively, "Going Home: Americans in Britain, 1740-1776" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1997); and Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York, 1938). On the growth of domestic and foreign leisure travel see Foster Rhea Dulles, A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play (2d ed.; New York, 1965); Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York and Oxford, 1999); and Barbara G. Carson, "Early American Tourists and the Commercialization of Leisure," in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London, 1994), 373-405.

(6) John Edward Doyle Diary, December 18, 1840, Section 4, Doyle Family Papers (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; hereinafter cited as VHS).

(7) Levin Smith Joynes to Louisa Joynes, December 14, 1840, Section 7, Joynes Family Papers (VHS); Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), 77; Julia Ann Haylander Diary, [June 1833], p. 16, Series 2, Charles Dewey Papers #216 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; hereinafter cited as SHC). On American travel writing and nationalism see Larzer Ziff. Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780-1910 (New Haven and London, 2000).

(8) Paul Hamilton Hayne to Richard Stoddard, July 23, 1855, Box 1, Paul Hamilton Hayne Papers (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; hereinafter cited as Duke). On southerners traveling in the North see John Hope Franklin, A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North (Baton Rouge, 1976). On northerners in the South see Howard R. Floan, The South in Northern Eves, 1831-1861 (Austin, Tex., 1958); Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American ldentity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, Kans., 2000), 81-110; and Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 42-43. See also William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961).

(9) [Matthew Flournoy Ward], Letters from Three Continents, By M., The Arkansas Correspondent of the Louisville Journal (New York and Philadelphia, 1851), 15-16 (quotations on p. 16).

(10) Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 6.

(11) Ziff, Return Passages, 7. See also Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York, 1991). On the Grand Tour tradition see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century. (New York, 1992); Geoffrey Trease, The Grand Tour (New York, 1967); R. S. Lambert, ed., Grand Tour: A Journey in the Tracks of the Age of Aristocracy (London, 1935); Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London, 1969); Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and "The Voyage of Italy" in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva, 1985); John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604-1667: Their Influence in English Society and Politics (rev. ed.; New Haven and London, 1989); and John Stoye, "The Grand Tour in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 1 (January 1991), 62-73. On letter writing see Konstantin Dierks, "Letter Writing, Gender, and Class in America, 1750-1800" (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1999).

(12) Lorri Glover, "An Education in Southern Masculinity: The Ball Family of South Carolina in the Early Republic," Journal of Southern History, 69 (February 2003), 39-70; Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 142; Martha Proctor Richardson to James Proctor Screven, December 20, 1820, Folder 32, Arnold and Screven Family Papers #3419 (SHC); William S. Pettigrew to James Johnston Pettigrew, June 7, 1849, excerpted in William S. Pettigrew to James C. Johnston, November 1, 1849, Series 1, Pettigrew Family Papers #592 (SHC). James Johnston Pettigrew studied civil law for a year in Berlin and then, at the urging of his cousin James Louis Petigru, he toured the Continent for a year. William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter (Athens, Ga., and London, 1995), 124-25; Clyde N. Wilson, Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew (Athens, Ga., and London, 1990), 38-63.

(13) Anne Catherine (Kate) Boykin Jones Diary #1762, June 14, 1851 (SHC); George Kirkwood King to Mitchell King, June 2, 1846, Folder 18, Mitchell King Papers #400 (SHC); James Proctor Screven to John Screven, February 20, 1848 (first quotation), May 2, 1848 (second quotation), Arnold and Screven Family Papers.

(14) Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York and London, 1994), 120-45; Joan E. Cashin, "Introduction: Culture of Resignation," in Cashin, ed., Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South (Baltimore and London, 1996), 1-41; Cynthia A. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700-1835 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1998); Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display.

(15) Elizabeth Horner to Mrs. Gardel, n.d. [letter one], Elizabeth Horner Eppes Letterbook, 1850, Section 13, Eppes Family Muniments (VHS).

(16) Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), xvi; Isabella Bowen Faber Diaries #34/25, Vol. I, n.d. [1837-38], n.p. (South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, S.C.; hereinafter cited as SCHS). See also John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990); and C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1999), both of which slight developments in the South. Maurie McInnis writes, "While books, prints, copies, and plaster casts of the most famous works of art were available in Charleston, it was only in studying the originals that one could acquire the appreciation and familiarity with works of art that allowed one to become knowledgeable and conversant. This familiarity thus formed an important element for polishing the edges and refining the demeanor of the Charleston aristocrat." McInnis's observations are certainly correct, and they can be extended to all privileged American travelers, not merely Charlestonians. Maurie Dee McInnis, "The Politics of Taste: Classicism in Charleston, South Carolina, 1815-1840" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1996), 30.

(17) Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill and London, 1999), 5. See also Jonathan Daniel Wells, "The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: Literature, Politics, and Economy, 1820-1880" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1998), 42-81. On southern reading habits see Robert F. Neville and Katherine H. Bielsky, "The Izard Library," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 91 (July 1990), 149-69; and Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson's Virginia, 1790-1830 (Chapel Hill, 1964), esp. 71-118. Strangely, Davis makes no mention in his A Colonial Southern Bookshelf: Reading in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Ga., 1979) of travel literature, save for a stray reference to the popularity of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, first published in 1768 (p. 120).

(18) Larzer Ziff writes that in "the first half of the nineteenth ceentury only religious writing exceeded in quantity the number of travel books reviewed and the number of travel narratives published in American journals." Ziff, Return Passages, 59. On travel literature in early American libraries see Neville and Bielsky, "Izard Library," 157-58; and the list of travel books in A Catalogue of Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1741); and A Catalogue of the Books, Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia; To Which is Prefixed, a Short Account of the Institution, with the Charter, Laws, and Regulations (Philadelphia, 1789), 86-103. The 1789 guide lists over two hundred titles under the heading "Voyages and Travels." Over 11 percent of the titles listed in the Charleston Library Company's Supplement, 1st October, 1806 (Charleston, S.C., 1806) were travel accounts, and many more were memoirs, histories, or collections of correspondence from European figures.

(19) "Hillard's 'Six Months in Italy,"' Southern Literary Messennger, 20 (January 1854), 27-28 (quotation on p. 27). Teasing New England was a common theme in American popular culture. In 1839, for example, Charleston-born Eliza Fisher of Philadelphia reported attending a "Lecture, at which I laughed a great deal at the Yankee twang and mispronunciations, without being in the least edified." Almost certainly this was a lecture by George Handel "Yankee" Hill on "The Manners and Customs of the People of New England" given at the Musical Fund Hall. Eliza M. Fisher to Mary H. Middleton, December 19, 1839, in Eliza Cope Harrison, ed., Best Companions: Letters of Eliza Middleton Fisher and Her Mother, Mary Hering Middleton, from Charleston, Philadelphia, and Newport, 1839-1846 (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 81 (quotation), 83 n. 4. For an example of the type of lecture Fisher likely heard, see George Handel Hill, Scenes from the Life of an Actor: Compiled from the Journals, Letters, and Memoranda of the Late Yankee Hill (New York, 1853), esp. 183-95. Hillard's parochialism perhaps reflected the view of some New Englanders that the values of their region writ large constituted American nationalism. See Grant, North Over South, for this argument.

(20) H. T. Tuckerman, "'William Beckford and the Literature of Travel," Southern Literary Messenger, 16 (January 1850), 10-11 (quotation on p. 11). For the travel writers Tuckerman referred to see Nathaniel P. Willis, Pencillings by the Way (2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1836); Lady [Sydney] Morgan, Italy (2 vols.; London, 1821); Anne-Louise Germaine de Stael, Corinne, or Italy (2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1808); and Sterne, Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.

(21) Conway Robinson to Gustavus Adolphus Myers, September 6, 1853 (first quotation), and Robinson to Mary Susan Selden Robinson, August 29, 1853, Conway Robinson Letterbook, Section 1, Robinson Family Papers (VHS); "A Bell(e) Adventure." Southern Literary Messenger, 19 (January 1853), 54 (second quotation); Amelia Parker to Kay Parker, December 11, 1857, Amelia Parker to Ned Parker, February 12, 1858, and Amelia Parker to [?], n.d. (third and fourth quotations), Parker Family Papers, 1820-1884 (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.); George Grenville Nugent, Lands, Classical and Sacred (2 vols.; London, 1845); [John Lloyd Stephens], Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, by an American (New York, 1837); Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia; and of a Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea, in Search of the Ancient Berenice; and Another to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (London, 1820); George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy (3d ed.; 2 vols.; Boston, 1854). William Douglas Smyth, "A Southern Odyssey: South Carolinians Abroad in the 1850's" (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1977), 44-46, contains an enlightening analysis of the popularity of Murray's handbooks.

(22) John Malcolm Brinnin, The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic (New York, 1971), 114-15.

(23) Mrs. George C. Lyman Diary (Elizabeth Gray Otis Lyman), June 14, 1822 (first quotation), Arnold and Appleton Family Papers #25 (SHC); Richard Barnes Gooch Diary, December 11, 1843 (second quotation). November 25, 1843 (third quotation), Gooch Family Papers (VHS); John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy (6th ed.; London, 1821); Oliver Goldsmith, The Roman History: From the Foundation of the City of Rome, to the Destruction of the Western Empire (London, 1786), and Dr. Goldsmith's Roman History. Abridged by Himself for the Use of Schools (Philadelphia, 1795).

(24) Mary Anne Mason Anderson Diary (1856-58), May 16-20, 1857, Section 88, Mason Family Papers (VHS). On Byron's five-year affair with Guiccioli see Doucet Devin Fischer, "Countess Guiccioli's Byron," in Donald H. Reiman et al., eds., Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822 (8 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1961-1986), VII, 373-487; and Benita Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (New York, 1999), 623-733. Southerners, like other Americans, admired Byron's work but condemned his personal behavior. Among his defenders was Hugh Swinton Legare. See his "Lord Byron's Character and Writings," Southern Review, 5 (May 1830), 463-522; and Michael O'Brien, A Character of Hugh Legare (Knoxville, 1985), 82-87, 117. James W. Simmons, "Lord Byron and Lady Blessington," Southern Literary Journal, 4 (February 1837), 414-19, took the unusual tack of defending Byron's personal behavior against the "yelping curs who still seek to hunt down the moral fame of Lord Byron" (p. 419). In a college essay Hugh Blair Grigsby wrote, "That Byron was not perfect, I candidly admit; and I also think that an ennobling intellect in what sphere soever it may expand, raises its voice for the admiration of mankind; and although its lustre be thinly soiled by some fleeting spot, an eclipse of its brilliancy and a forfeiture of its excellence should not be the invariable consequence." Yale College essay, January 26, 1825, Section 67, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers (VHS).

(25) Augustin L. Taveau to Mrs. Thomas Waring, November 11, 1853, Augustin Louis Taveau Papers (Duke); Elizabeth Horner to "My dear Fannie," April 4, 1850, Elizabeth Horner Eppes Letterbook, 1850, Section 14. Eppes Family Muniments. Taveau probably referred to these lines from Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which describe St. Peter's: "Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; / And why? it is not lessened; but thy mind, / Expanded by the genius of the spot, / Has grown colossal, and can only find / A fit abode wherein appear enshrined / Thy hopes of immortality[.] ... even so this / Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice / Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great / Defies at first our Nature's littleness, / Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate / Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate." Jerome J. McGann, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Vol. II: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Oxford, 1980), 176-77. Regarding Horner's observations, in 1816 Byron was rowed out to the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro to learn the monks' language. Eisler, Byron, 551-52.

(26) On the influence of travel literature on constructing impressions see Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 79-80; Graburn, "Tourism," 21-36; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1912; reprint, New York, 1934); Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 33-34; Bruce Robertson, "The Picturesque Traveler in America," in Edward J. Nygren, ed., Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1986), 189-211; John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York and Oxford, 1989); Dona Brown, Inventing New England." Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C., and London, 1995).

(27) Doyle Diary, March 30, 1840; William Parker to Ned Parker, March 26, 1858, Parker Family Papers; Augustin Louis Taveau to Catherine Waring, November 11, 1853, Taveau Papers. Copying passages from guidebooks and other sources instead of recording one's own impressions was apparently a common practice. Southern travelers to the Virginia Springs and even guidebook writers did so often. See Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 35.

(28) Anne Eliza Pleasants Gordon Diary, July 9, 1857 (VHS). Views of Scott's influence in the South include Grace Warren Landrum, "Sir Walter Scott and His Literary Rivals in the Old South," American Literature, 2 (November 1930), 256-76; G. Harrison Orians, "Walter Scott, Mark Twain, and the Civil War," South Atlantic Quarterly, 40 (October 1941), 342-59; Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, 1949); and W. J, Cash, Mind of the South (New York, 1941), 67-68. Michael O'Brien observes, "We do not have the research that will accurately tell us about the reception of Scott in the Old South," but he suggests that "there is reason to think that antebellum Southerners ... found him congenial because his standpoint so matched their own situation, buckling down to modernity while shedding a tear for the old ways. In short, Scott was resonant, not because he justified a static quasi feudalism, but because on balance he endorsed progress, and Southerners unquestionably felt themselves to be living in a progressive society." O'Brien, "The Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore and London, 1988), 53. Andrew Hook, on the other hand, points to Scott's popularity across the early republic and argues that "Scott's main effect in America was the confirming and strengthening of a series of ideas and attitudes which his Scottish predecessors had already set in motion in the American mind and imagination." Hook, Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750-1835 (Glasgow and London, 1975), 151.

(29) "A Journal of Occurrences while in Europe," Harriet Balch Wilson Diary, October 16, 1815 (first quotation), Balch Family Papers (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.; hereinafter cited as HSP); Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston (Chapel Hill, 1933), 43-49 (second quotation on p. 45); Octavia Jones Diary, September 16, 1844 (third quotation), Series 2, Calvin Jones Papers #921 (SHC). On Preston's tour see also Walter A. Reichart and Lillian Schlissel, eds., Washington Irving: Journals and Notebooks. Vol. II: 1807-1822 (Boston, 1981), 92-162. The practice of planning one's tour according to a literary work was neither limited to Scott and Byron nor to Great Britain. In 1805 Nicholas Biddle pondered taking the usual route to Paris from Lyons via Dijon, or another route through Moulins and Nemours, whose "'attraction consisted in its being short, but particularly, on its being Sterne's route." Nicholas Biddle Diary (September-December 1805), n.d. [September 1805], Box 15, Biddle Family Papers (HSP). On the influence of literary sources see also Nancy E. Packer, "Geographies of Gentility: American Travelers in Britain, 1760-1810," paper delivered to the annual meeting of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Glasgow, Scotland, July 12, 2001.

(30) Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 24.

(31) [John Murray], A Hand-Book for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont, Including the Protestant Valleys of the Waldenses (London, 1838), xxv-xxvi; Anne Catherine (Kate) Boykin Jones Diary, May 30, 1851.

(32) An extensive, though dated, literature argues that planters were hostile to innovation and industrial pursuits. See, for example, Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1963); Raimondo Luraghi, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South (New York and London, 1978); and Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill, 1981). Major critics of this point of view include Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978); Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885 (Chapel Hill and London, 1986); Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South (Baltimore and London, 1977), 99-102; and Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (New York and Oxford, 1989). See also the useful summary of this literature in Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Peculiar South Revisited: White Society, Culture, and Politics in the Antebellum Period, 1800-1860," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge and London, 1987), 86-92.

(33) Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York, 1996), 25.

(34) George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 155. On the South, slavery, and modernity see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Proslavery Argument Reinterpreted," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford, 1982), 27-49; Michael O'Brien, "Modernization and the Nineteenth-Century South," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 112-28; Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill and London, 1997); Joyce E. Chaplin, "Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower South," Journal of Social History, 24 (Winter 1990), 299-315; Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit; Young, Domesticating Slavery; and Daniel Kilbride, "Slavery and Utilitarianism: Thomas Cooper and the Mind of the Old South," Journal of Southern History, 59 (August 1993), 469-86. J. Mills Thornton III and Lacy K. Ford Jr. suggest that southerners' admiration or hostility toward modernizing elements was deeply rooted in social class. Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978); Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1988).

(35) For examples of southerners' criticism of industrial societies see Franklin, Southern Odyssey; and Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill and London, 2001). For other ways in which Charlestonians' interpretations of Europe may have distinguished them, see McInnis, "Politics of Taste," 15-54.

(36) Haylander Diary, n.d., p. 35; James Minor Glassell Diary, September 17, 1825 (third quotation), September 23, 1825 (fourth quotation), Folder 1, Section 12, Grinnan Family Papers (VHS); John Tucker Bowdoin Diary, October 27, 1818 (VHS); Anne Catherine (Kate) Boykin Jones Diary, July 15, 1851.

(37) "Jefferson's Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe," in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (29 vols. to date; Princeton, 1950-), XIII, 269. On Rutledge see Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 151. On the elder Hammond's trip see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 186-203; and Faust, Sacred Circle, 95-99. On the younger Hammond's trip see "European Correspondence," Russell's Magazine, 1 (September 1857), 510-20. Southerners also stayed up-to-date on European thought on agriculture, even if they never sailed overseas. William M. Mathew, Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The Failure of Agricultural Reform (Athens, Ga., and London, 1988), 201-2.

(38) Josephine Dulles Horner Eppes Journal, May 14, 1850, Section 5, Eppes Family Muniments; Ambrose Carlton to James H. Gardner, June 28, 1854, Section 2, Ambrose Carlton Papers (VHS).

(39) John H. Martinstein to Emily Martinstein, June 27, 1835, Martinstein-Durrive Papers (Manuscripts Department, Special Collections Division, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, La.; hereinafter cited as Tulane); Bowdoin Diary, n.d., p. 75; James J. Pettigrew Diary, January 22-26, 1850, Folder 525, Series 3, Pettigrew Family Papers. Not all southerners were so sanguine about noise and bustle. See Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, 3-5. On American attitudes toward landscape, romanticism, and the picturesque see Sheriff, Artificial River, chap. 2; Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 31-36; Kenneth John Myers, "On the Cultural Construction of Landscape Experience: Contact to 1830," in David C. Miller, ed., American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (New Haven and London, 1993), 58-79; and Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957; reprint, Lincoln, Nebr., 1972).

(40) Haylander Diary, n.d., p. 35; Joseph Daniel Aiken Travel Journals, Vol. I, n.d. [1849] (SCHS); Josephine Eppes Journal, May 14, 1850, Section 5, Eppes Family Muniments. For scholars who argue for the gendered experience of landscape see Lorraine Anderson, ed., Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry about Nature (New York, 1991); and Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill and London, 1993). For views that downplay the influence of gender see Joan E. Cashin, "Landscape and Memory in Antebellum Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 102 (October 1994), 477-500; Sears, Sacred Places, esp. p. 8; and Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 35-36.

(41) See Grant, North Over South, which, while claiming to assess northern nationalism as a whole, actually describes only New England Whig and Republican nationalism. See the perceptive review by Jean H. Baker in the Journal of Southern History, 68 (February 2002), 172-73.

(42) Aaron Smith Willington, A Summer's Tour in Europe, in 1851: In a Series of Letters Addressed to the Editors of the Charleston Courier by "A Traveller" (Charleston, S.C., 1852), 41 ; Augustin L. Taveau to Catherine Waring, March 1853, Taveau Papers. Francis Kinloch observed, "The labouring people, both in Piedmont and in the Milanese, make a more miserable appearance than our negroes; they are as badly clothed, and scarcely eat meat from one year's end to another." Kinloch, Letters from Geneva and France, Written During a Residence of Between Two and Three Years, in Different Parts of Those Countries, and Addressed to a Lady in Virginia by her Father (2 vols.; Boston, 1819), I, 310.

(43) Josephine Eppes Journal, May 12, 1850, Section 5, Eppes Family Muniments; Levin Smith Joynes to William T. Joynes, January 9, 1842, Section 7, Joynes Family Papers; Andrew Leslie to Jane I. Leslie, December 28, 1820, Gordon Blair Papers (VHS).

(44) See Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, Eng., and New York, 1989), 234-37; and especially Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 83-84.

(45) Martha Richardson to James Proctor Screven, January 21, 1821, Folder 33, Arnold and Screven Family Papers; Judith Page Walker Rives Diary, Vol. I, May 29, 1830, Alfred Landon Rives Papers (Duke); Mary Helen Hering Middleton to Septima Rutledge, October 12, 1821, Folder 9, Box 5, J. Francis Fisher Section, Cadwalader Collection (HSP).

(46) Gabriel Edward Manigault Autobiography, p. 104, Series 2, Manigault Family Papers #484 (SHC); Senex, "The Corinne, or Italy, of Madame de Stael," Southern Literary Messenger, 15 (July 1849), 382; Abram Pollack Diary, n.d. [1841], A. D. Pollack Papers #865 (SHC). On anti-Catholicism in the South see Randall M. Miller, "A Church in Cultural Captivity: Some Speculations on Catholic Identity in the Old South," in Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., Catholics in the Old South: Essays on Church and Culture (Macon, Ga., 1983), 17-18. The dichotomous response of Americans to Catholic faith and art is explored in John Davis, "Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire," in David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds., The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2001), 105-28. On southerners' commitment to classical education see Wayne K. Durrill, "The Power of Ancient Words: Classical Teaching and Social Change at South Carolina College, 1804-1860," Journal of Southern History, 65 (August 1999), 469-98.

(47) "A Year in Spain," Southern Review, 8 (November 1831), 166 (first and second quotations); [Brantz Mayer], "Italy," Southern Quarterly Review, 10 (July 1846), 99 (third quotation), 126 (fourth quotation); Octavia Jones Diary, September 1, 1844 (fifth quotation).

(48) William Terrell to William Eliza Terrell, July 8, 1850, William Eliza Rhodes Terrell Papers (Duke); Willington, Summer's Tour in Europe, 43; [Ward], Letters from Three Continents, 17 (last quotation).

(49) "National Delusion," The Portico: A Repository of Science and Literature, 1 (March 1816), 255. Two recent works document the intensely contested process of national identity formation in the post-Revolutionary decades: Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997); and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997).

(50) Martha Richardson to James Proctor Screven, September 16, 1820, Arnold and Screven Family Papers (first quotation); Philip Claiborne Gooch Diary, Vol. I, February 24, 1848 (second quotation), March 6, 1848 (third and fourth quotations) (VHS); Willington, Summer's Tour in Europe, 47-48 (fifth quotation).

(51) Yarborough, ed., Reminiscences of William C. Preston, 59-60 (first and second quotations on p. 60); Manigault Autobiography, p. 57 (third quotation). Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago and London, 1998), 50, argues that white southerners were more sympathetic to hierarchy than other Americans. Many northerners articulated similar sentiments, however, just as many planters objected to such practices. See, for example, Peter A. Ford, "An American in Paris: Charles S. Storrow and the 1830 Revolution," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 104 (1992), 21-41; and Alice P. Kenney, "Kate Gansevoort's Grand Tour," New York History, 47 (October 1966), 343-61. See also John C. Horgan, "The South and the European Revolutions of 1848," The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850: Proceedings, 1992, 22 (1993), 604-25; Jean G. Bryant, "The Revolution of 1848 and the Crisis of American Nationalism," The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850: Proceedings, 1993, 23 (1994), 514-22; and Richard C. Rohrs, "American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848," Journal of the Early Republic, 14 (Fall 1994), 359-77.

(52) Mary Mayo Crenshaw, ed., An American Lady in Paris, 1828-1829: The Diary of Mrs. John Mayo (Boston and New York, 1927), 18; William Elliott to Ann Elliott, September 20, 1855, Folder 50, Elliott and Gonzales Family Papers #1009 (SHC); Aiken Travel Journals, Vol. II, n.d.; Elliott Cresson Journal, January 18, 1826 (Library Company of Philadelphia). I wish to thank James Green of the Library Company for bringing this last source to my attention. See also R. A. McNeal, ed., Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters of 1806 (University Park, Pa., 1993), 225-27; and Joyce E. Chaplin, "Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (January 1997), 229-52.

(53) Michael O'Brien, "Italy and the Southern Romantics," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 109; James Johnston Pettigrew to James C. Johnston, March 1, 1851, Series 1, Pettigrew Family Papers; Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South. 202; Isaac E. Morse to Nathan Morse. August 15, 1833, Folder 107-1-5, Morse-Wederstrandt Family Papers (Tulane).

(54) "Griffin's Remains," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 32 (July 1832), 93; James A. Washington to Elizabeth Grist, April 20, 1832, Folder 9, Elizabeth Washington Grist Knox Papers #4269 (SHC).

(55) On southern refinement see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York and Oxford, 1982), 88-114; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton, 1996); Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville and London, 1998), esp. chap. 2; Cynthia A. Kierner, "Hospitality, Sociability, and Gender in the Southern Colonies," Journal of Southern History, 62 (August 1996), 449-80; and Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display.

(56) [Ward], Letters from Three Continents, 15 (first and second quotations); Josephine Eppes Journal, December 24, 1850 (third and fourth quotations), Section 8, Eppes Family Muniments; Manigault Autobiography, p. 236 (fifth and sixth quotations), p. 190 (remaining quotations).

(57) Anne Catherine (Kate) Boykin Jones Diary, May 30, 1851, June 29, 1851.

(58) Amelia Parker to Ned Parker, February 12, 1858 (first quotation), Amelia Parker to [?], n.d. (second quotation), and Amelia Parker to Ned Parker, August 30, 1857 (third and fourth quotations), Parker Family Papers.

(59) Franklin, Southern Odyssey; Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, 140-41.

(60) Manigault Autobiography, p. 239; James Johnston Pettigrew Diary, February 13, 1850.

(61) Frances Beall Knight to Annie Beall, September 10, [1857], Box 3, John Knight Papers (Duke). Sumner toured Europe to convalesce from the wounds he received at the hands of Preston Brooks on May 22, 1856. It was his second tour of Europe. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 327-28.

(62) Doyle Diary, March 14, 1840; Josephine Eppes Journal. June 14, 1850, Section 5, Eppes Family Muniments. See Bushman, Refinement of America, 207-447, for an in-depth treatment of "respectability."

(63) Mary Anne Mason Anderson Diary, July 4, 1857; James Washington to Elizabeth Grist, December 7, 1830, Folder 8, Knox Papers; Crenshaw, ed., American Lady in Paris, 86 (last quotation). On Lafayette and American travelers abroad see Russell M. Jones, "The Flowering of a Legend: Lafayette and the Americans, 1825-1834," French Historical Studies, 4 (Fall 1966), 384-410, esp. 388-96; and Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), esp. chap. 4. On civic celebrations and symbolic political conflict see Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes; Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street; Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville and London, 2000); and Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (New York and Oxford, 2000), 121-47.

(64) James Brown to Susannah Price, February 10, 1829, Susannah Hart Price Papers (Special Collections, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.); Crenshaw, ed., American Lady in Paris, 82-83 (quotation on p. 83); Henry Middleton Jr. to Elizabeth Middleton, November 10, 1836, Box 7, J. Francis Fisher Section, Cadwalader Collection.

(65) Levin Smith Joynes Diary, May 31, 1840, Section 9, Joynes Family Papers; Henry D. Gilpin to George M. Dallas, June 22, 1853, Vol. XLI, Gilpin Family Papers (HSP); Charles Edward Leverett Jr. to Mary Maxcy Leverett, September 24, 1857, in Taylor et al., eds., Leverett Letters, 47. Joynes's account of the crossing of the Columbus appears to be largely accurate. Garrison described the passengers as a "profane, lewd, gambling, brandy-loving company" who "despise[d] the Niggars and the Abolitionists, and all such fanatics." To another correspondent he characterized the group as "all pro-slavery, to the back-bone." Garrison to Edmund Quincy, June 13, 1840, in Louis Ruchames, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison. Vol. II: A House Dividing Against Itself 1836-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 640; Garrison to unnamed correspondent, June 12, 1840, ibid., 637.

(66) "An Abolition Delegate on His Travels," New York Sunday Times and Noah's Weekly Messenger, February 16, 1851, p. 2, c. 5; James H. Gardner to Phebe P. Gardner, November 12, 1853, Folder 3, Section 8, Gardner Family Papers (VHS).

(67) On this theme see also Edward E. Baptist, Creating an OM South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill and London, 2002), 4-5.

(68) Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Proslavery Argument in History," in Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge and London, 1981), 2. In The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), Manisha Sinha, whose interpretation of southern identity foregrounds proslavery ideology, leaves little room for nationalism. Stephanie McCurry has also argued for the ideological centrality of the proslavery argument to southern identity, though she suggests planters used the rhetoric in instrumental terms, as a way to secure the loyalty of nonslaveholding whites to the slave regime. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York and Oxford, 1995).

(69) See, for example, J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1985), 64-93; Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1995), 132-55; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, esp. 88-114; and Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi, 17-37. Daniel E. Sutherland's Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (New York and other cities, 1995), 3-28, describes the kinds of developments that distinguished the Southeast from the Southwest. On class similarities across regions, Edward Pessen's well-known essay, "How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?" American Historical Review, 85 (December 1980), 1119-49, is still well worth consulting.

(70) Mitchell Snay, "American Thought and Southern Distinctiveness: The Southern Clergy and the Sanctification of Slavery," Civil War History, 35 (December 1989), 311-28. On the distinctive nationalist tropes developed in New England see Grant, North Over South.

(71) Williams Middleton to J. Francis Fisher, August 3, 1851, Folder 5, Box 5, Middleton Place Collection (Middleton Place, Charleston, S.C.); Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South, 202, 331-59; Lawrence T. McDonnell, "Struggle Against Suicide: James Henry Hammond and the Secession of South Carolina," Southern Studies, 22 (Summer 1983), 109-37; Mary Telfair to Mary Few, November 12, n.d., William Few Collection (Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta, Ga.).

(72) Harrison, ed., Best Companions, 8-10, 17; Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClerq, ed., Between North and South: The Letters of Emily Wharton Sinkler, 1842-1865 (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 8-10, 62; Conway Robinson to James Alfred Jones, September 11, 1853, Robinson Letterbook.

MR. KILBRIDE is an associate professor of history at John Carroll University.