Dreaming of Dixie by Karen L. Cox

Author:Karen L. Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Southern writers, too, helped to shape an image of the South for popular consumption. Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, for example, wrote novels that revived a mythological South. Dixon was successful, in fact, in helping the nation reconstruct its views about race and the region’s “Negro problem.” Page’s books were also profitable releases. In Ole Virginia (1887) and Social Life in Old Virginia (1897), both published and marketed by New York’s Charles Scribner’s Sons, offered readers an idyllic image of the plantation South. Dixon, a popular evangelist in Boston and New York well before Doubleday Press published The Leopard’s Spots (1902), was already considered by northerners and the northern press to be an expert on all things southern prior to the release of his Reconstruction trilogy, which assured its success in the marketplace. Even though Dixon’s work was intended to highlight the perceived threat of black men, which northern and southern whites shared, what his writing made clear was that the South had control of its “Negro problem” and thus was a safe place for the northern tourist to observe the black man in his exotic and “natural” environment.21

Savannah was a frequent stop for tourists on their way to Florida. As early as 1874, Sidney Lanier noted that the city was “much frequented by Northern and Western people during the winter and spring.”22 Bonaventure Cemetery was already a tourist attraction, as was Forsyth Park. In 1878, Philadelphia publisher J. B. Lippincott produced Georgia: A Guide to Its Cities, Towns, Scenery, and Resources, which claimed that Savannah was “well calculated to charm the stranger” and that it had become a favorite destination for northern tourists because it offered them the chance to “retreat from the din and confusion of larger and more bustling cities.”23 Indeed, escaping the modern city for one that was less congested was one of the appeals for tourists traveling south.

Lady Duffus Hardy, who was struck by the way in which Richmond lived and breathed its Confederate past, liked Savannah well enough but found “little architectural beauty in the city or its surroundings.” And although she complained that Forsyth Park was so diminutive that it would fit into a small corner of Kensington Gardens, it was balanced by the “warm southern breeze, and the oleander, orange, lemon, and magnolia.”24 The Reverend Timothy Harley, who toured Savannah a few years later, in 1886, sought to describe the city’s residents, whom he found to be representative of the heterogeneous nature of the United States. Harley noted that northerners had adopted the city as home for purposes of trade and observed that “the Hebrews are a numerous and wealthy class of residents.” He did not observe African Americans as exotic creatures; rather, he offered insight on the city’s race relations, commenting that “the coloured people are not treated there [Savannah] as equals.” Significantly, he noted that neither were they treated as such in the North.25

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