Kittrell J. Warren's The Life and Public Services of an Army Straggler

Warren's 1865 Life and Public Services of an Army Straggler is one of the very few examples of realistic Civil War fiction incorporating humor. Most fiction of the Civil War was, understandably, quite serious and often celebratory. Not so Warren's work. Billy Fishback, the hero of the Life is, as we say, a low-down, rotten, dirty little sneak with no redeeming whisper of conscience, who roams about the South taking advantage of the poverty-stricken inhabitants. Billy is a "straggler," by which of course is meant a deserter, of the Confederate Army and is about as cowardly as it is humanly possible to be. So it is with great wit that Warren names Billy "his own and his country's hero."

Warren himself was a Confederate soldier, and "straggling" was by no means an unpopular choice for soldiers in the long-suffering Confederate forces. Jefferson Davis reported in September 1864 that over one third of the Confederate Army was absent without leave. Billy's demented picaresque--which includes but is not limited to horse-stealing, widow-conning, and impersonating an officer--definitely fits the bill of a con man, but Billy, unlike so many other characters of this type, does not delight. He is too vicious and without charm. The audience rejoices, not in Billy's successes, but in his defeats. He is the "biter bit," to borrow Richard Boyd Hauck's term for the con-man out-conned. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes at the close of the work. Having conned a seat for himself on a crowded train by telling the riders that he is tending to a wretched-looking fellow sick with small pox--and thus clearing the car entirely--Billy is aghast to find the man really does have the deadly disease. Billy contracts it and dies.

It is in some ways a satisfying close to a dark vision of Civil War culture. A somewhat lighter take on a very similar character would appear years later in Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Billy and his more clever, and perhaps even less principled, frenemy Captain Slaughter, prefigure the Duke and the Dauphin, whose ability to deceive is matched by their ability to delight their reading audience. Though we rejoice thoroughly in the fall of the Duke and the Dauphin in much the same way that we are pleased to see Billy defeated, we are significantly less appalled by their manners. Which raises a question: to what extent do modern, and for that matter contemporary, notions of class dictate the reading of these texts?

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes is as good a place as any to begin considering the specifics of Southwestern Humor. In fact, Longstreet's narrators provide one of the clearest examples of the dilemma of what I have started calling the "intimate outsider" (doubtless there's a better term, but I don't know it). Though born in the South, both Baldwin and Hall are separated from those they observe by their education in the North, by their manners, language, and knowledge of the world. Baldwin is the more game of the two, attempting to participate in the country life of those around him. He shoots (badly), dances (worse), and rides (humiliatingly), all with a cheerful spirit that earns him the grudging respect of the locals. Hall is another story; effete, withdrawn, sentimental, Hall lacks Baldwin's zest for life and local color, and, as a result, has even more trouble fitting in. However, neither narrator can be said to truly fit in to Georgia life. Longstreet seems to favor Baldwin's approach (perhaps their shared name is a clue?)

The short and essentially unconnected stories that make up Georgia Scenes appeared separately in the Southern Recorder and the States Rights' Sentinel between 1833 and 1835, when they were collected and published in book form. When taken together as a unit it is easy to recognize Longstreet's chief accomplishment, his startling grasp of realism. Longstreet paints southern life in all its gruesome glory, but unlike some authors he also celebrates its beauty and the power of human goodness. The disgust the modern reader almost certainly experiences while reading about the "gander pull" (a fairly horrible competition in which riders on horseback attempt to pull the greased head off a living goose) is tempered by Longstreet's celebration of the genuine feminine virtues of country girls. Dark and light mingle here in tales Edgar Allan Poe praised for their "verisimilitude."

The Southwestern Humorists

In days of yore, or so I'm told, critics had an unfortunate tendency to dismiss the 19th century southwestern frontier as something of a literary wasteland. In doing so they merely followed the popular sentiment, alas still alive and well today, that those states that had aligned themselves with slaveholders in the Civil War could only be untutored racist barbarians, too morally and spiritually impoverished to be capable of great literature on the same level with their genteel and cultured brethren to the North. However, the rising tide of a rapidly opening canon over the last half century has brought to light many texts otherwise ignored, and it is no longer acceptable to assume that Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example, sprung up unassisted from the scorched earth of the American South. Reading the Southwestern Humorists, we discover their roots grown long in the rich soil of a significant frontier literary tradition.

Southwestern Humor was in its heyday in the decades leading up to the Civil War, 1830-1861 when William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a weekly New York sporting paper, was known for its humorous sketches. The authors of these sketches often hailed from the southwestern frontier territories, from Georgia and Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri. Their gentlemen narrators sought to record for public consumption the way of life in these wild proto-states, the dialect of their people, and the unique humor of the rugged frontiersman. Widely read outside of New England (still under the thumb of the literary giants in Boston), the Spirit of the Times was a success due in large part to the anti-romantic, realistic writings of the southwest.

The authors who penned these tales were not professional "men of letters" (like New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau) but doctors and lawyers deeply engaged in the lives of the communities about which they wrote. Men like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, Kittrell J. Warren, and George Washington Harris lived and worked, for the most part, in the communities that appear in their stories, and the narrators they created were similar to themselves. Intimate outsiders, the authors and their narrators were too educated to truly fit into the worlds they wrote about, but ideally situated to describe them.

Reading what they describe is always a curious experience and occasionally rather hard to take since much of what must have been considered humorous in the 19th century is rather appalling now. The description of the casual abuse of slaves and animals and the brutal violence of everyday relationships would scarcely be tolerated in today's strangely moral publishing world, unless their depiction was accompanied by a multitude of disclaimers and a healthy moral at the close. But these authors give it to us raw; while evil is often punished and good rewarded, it seems more accidental than anything else. Universal justice is by no means to be relied upon. As Richard Boyd Hauck argues in A Cheerful Nihilism (1971) readers will find in the protagonists of this literary tradition a nihilism that renders them incapable of making meaning in an absurd world. Though they are often adept at pulling a confidence trick, these protagonists lack the ability to create and maintain confidence, both in themselves and in the world around them.