Page 104 →Sight, Symmetry, and the Plantation Ballad

Gilman’s axis of vision, Charleston, centers her world, which is extended in a gentrified, conditioned way throughout her nonfiction and fiction. From a modern perspective, Gilman comes across as a racial apologist. Part of the stasis that she celebrates in Charleston and the surrounding area is from enslaved people remaining obedient and not disrupting the existing systems of racial servitude. In Gilman’s world, enslaved people or “servants”— a comfortable euphemism of racial hierarchies commonly used in the first half of the nineteenth century—know their place. For example, in Recollections of a Southern Matron, Jacque, the “young master’s” slave, is temporarily given rein over the plantation on the shores of the Ashley River outside of Charleston.¹² Notably, Jacque uses his moment of authority to maintain the southern racial social order. In this way, he is the opposite of Grandison in Charles Chesnutt’s titular North Carolina story and will never “ascend the hall stairs” when white visitors enter the family plantation home.¹³ Even Gilman’s poetry romanticizes and thus supports the racial social order. For example, she laments the death of white children in a heavily sentimental tone but ignores the suffering of enslaved children.¹⁴ The “order” here is suggestive of an invisible and visible social world, separated by race and class, that shapes antebellum Charleston and the South in general. Gilman Page 108 →is content as long as this social order is maintained and is part of her “symmetrical” vision of Charleston overall.

Gilman’s sense of “order” extends from southern social and labor roles into other areas, including the natural world and its spatial demarcations. A cartographic illustration may be helpful here. The center of Keenan’s 1844 Charleston map features clear spatial divisions between genteel, manicured riverside neighborhoods adjacent to a small pond (“Mill Pond”). North of this pond is a public square—perfectly shaped and partitioned—nearly adjacent to the southern border of the Cooper River and, tellingly, marshland, indicated by dark, squiggly lines. The low-country marshes and ecosystem are divided from, and separated by, ideological projections of cultural and urban planning. Gilman articulates a similarly ordered vision for waterways, predominant landscapes, and architectural markers, such as St. Michael’s Cathedral. These perspectives are taken both from miniature and panoramic perspectives, varying between daytime and by moonlight. She alternates, for instance, between poetry and prose in recreating a nighttime scene in Charleston, this time at Grace Church: “[T]here is a supernatural brightness in the stars, gemming their far and wide canopy; and the waters, tinged by moonbeams, seem like deathly upturned faces.”¹⁵ At times, Gilman almost simultaneously, through aesthetic and affective conventions, positions the stasis of Charleston and her axis of vision with some degree of changeability, adding dramatic conflict in the process.

At the same time that Gilman uses her imaginative depictions of people and places to defend the practice of slavery, she also works to define Charleston—and, by extension, South Carolina and its neighboring states—as part of a vital, patriotic, and united nation. She does so largely by looking backward through the lenses of history and cultural memory. Much of the extended Charleston section of “Notes of a Southern Excursion” centers on history, particularly through heroic stories from the War of 1812. In the poem “Mary Anna Gibbes,” Gilman introduces a female heroine who saves “Colonel Fenwick,” while another poem, “Hurrah for Sullivan’s Isle,” serves as a patriotic ode to that battle similar to Alfred Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”¹⁶ Later, Gilman references a gift vase that features a patriotic ode (“Hail, our country’s natal morn,/Hail, our spreading kindred-born!” is the first couplet) on one side, with an accompanying, patriotic inscription dedicated for the “4th of July” on the other.¹⁷ Collectively, these reminiscences of the past elide the fact that, in the 1830s, Charleston was in the middle of a moral and cultural battle that would quickly lead the nation into the Page 109 →Civil War. Recounting a time when Charlestonians helped defeat an external threat, Gilman diverts attention away from the internal forces that were dividing the nation and would soon erupt into open battle. Just as her celebratory depictions of enslaved people, such as Jacque, mask the horrors of chattel slavery, so too does her historical vision hide the gruesome realities that surround her.

Charleston is the center of Gilman’s imagined South, but it is not her only point of focus. She extends her exploration of geographic and cultural stasis outward to the southern plantation, which becomes, unsurprisingly, a place of domestic harmony, not brutal oppression. Michael O’Brien, writing on intellectual life in antebellum southern culture, contends that Gilman, “writing very much as a mother,” uses the plantation trope as a didactic, learning device.¹⁸ In making his argument, O’Brien references Gilman’s seven children and her background in children’s periodicals. He also cites Recollections of a Southern Matron, where Gilman’s narrator imagines a plantation working as a school.¹⁹ The lessons of that school, one discovers, reinforced the rigid social structures Gilman consistently defends. At the beginning of Recollections of a Southern Matron, for example, she offers a vivid description of wholesome childhood memories that effectively erase the exploitation of enslaved African Americans. Speaking through an imagined character, Gilman states:

I write in my paternal mansion. The Ashley, with a graceful sweep, glitters like a lake before me, reflecting the sky and the bending foliage. Occasionally a flat, with its sluggish motion, or a boat, with its urging sail, passes along, and the woods echo to the song or the horn of the negro, waking up life in the solitude. The avenue of noble oaks, under which I sported in childhood, still spread their strong arms, and rustle in the passing breeze. My children are frolicking on the lawn where my first footsteps were watched by tender parents, and one of those parents rests beneath yonder circling cedars. Change! Sameness! What a perpetual chime those words ring on the ear of memory!²⁰

The quasi-fictitious narrator composes this family drama as if the central vision begins at the “paternal mansion” and extends outward. Social order is referenced with “the negro” who lives on the outskirts of the antebellum mansion, whereas natural order is suggested by the oak alley, providing aesthetic effect and practical shade, in front of the plantation home. These Page 110 →spatial partitions separate the “paternal mansion” from the surrounding marshlands and undeveloped plots of land. The idyllic scene also reinforces and normalizes the rigid gender and racial hierarchies of southern culture. We notice, for example, that the “negro” becomes a part of the natural world, his song announcing daybreak and “waking up” the world around him. The reader experiences him through his song and his horn, not his forced labor, suggesting that he, like Jacque, joyfully participates in the social order that deprives him of liberty. Social order and aesthetic symmetry seem to be intertwined in Gilman’s gaze. Similarly, the female narrator focuses her attention, again willingly and without question, on the domestic concerns of child raising. For her, the boats along the Ashley River serve as aesthetic decorations rather than instruments of trade. The historian Steven M. Stowe contends that separate spheres existed by sex in the antebellum South: “Culture appeared as Nature; thus the social arrangements based on the belief in separate spheres—the division of labor, intense same-sex friendships, political activity for men, domestic authority for women—seemed not only orderly and rich but also unlikely to be altered.”²¹Gilman showcases “domestic authority” through identification with the paternal mansion as an avatar for the genteel South, the space where parlor entertainment and other bourgeoisie “social arrangements,” as portrayed in her fiction and nonfiction, occur and are celebrated. Stowe’s point here, though, emphasizes the separate spheres for the sexes and, later, visible social orders, “hierarchical” in their nature, that counter invisible ones.²² The patrilineal plantation estate, a site that serves as the starting point for Gilman’s angle of vision, extending outward, portrays such an invisible social order and visible natural order.

Elsewhere in “Notes on a Southern Excursion,” Gilman composes a ballad, “The Plantation on Ashley River.”²³ The piece alludes to a genre of antebellum southern writing that I would term the “plantation tradition” in ballad poetry. In its uncritical celebration of social stratification, plantation ballad poetry hearkens to depictions of a reconstructed South in both postbellum writings and the midcentury works of Joel Chandler Harris, John Pendleton Kennedy, and others.²⁴ The well-read Gilman, part of both northern and southern literati, seems aware of these southern traditions or is at least hearkening toward them, albeit not fully in the way that southern historical reconstructionists significantly and anachronistically posit antebellum southern memory. Gilman’s ideology here, centered on the War of 1812, suggests that postbellum notions of a romanticized pre–Civil War Southern past had earlier precursors. Gilman’s ballad begins with a welcoming quatrain that contrasts urban hurriedness with rural tranquility:

Page 111 →Farewell, awhile, the city’s hum,

Where busy footsteps fall,

And welcome to my weary eye

The Planter’s friendly Hall.²⁵

The subsequent stanzas include rich, emblazoned lists, similar to those in Walt Whitman’s poetry, of peoples and forms of labor throughout the greater Charleston area. Her poetic eye scans the city and perceives “the dairy on the stream,” “the poulterer” watching over his “charge,” “the nurse” practicing her “skill,” and the “Negro labourer” outside his “humble hut.”²⁶ Juxtaposing the social and ecological, Gilman’s gaze normalizes as part of the natural order the division of labor and even the economic exploitation of the Black laborer, who lives in a “humble hut” rather than a proper house. In some ways, her treatment of nature and society connects her to earlier writers, such as William Bartram, J. Hector St. John de Crėvecoeur, and Thomas Jefferson. Pamela Regis argues that these “eighteenth-century thinker[s]” understood “science” as one, large conglomerate, not separate epistemologies for differing phenomena studies.”²⁷ Like Gilman, they found that the social reflected the natural and that natural order, in turn, justified the social order. A twenty-first-century perspective would surely separate the two realms: Only the most strident racist would defend racial injustice as a “natural” phenomenon. Gilman, however, gleefully conflates them. In both her study of Charlestonian labor and her systematizing of southern ecologies, the reader finds that one and the same idea is in play.

Although Gilman envisions herself as a cataloguer of nature, eighteenth-century notions of natural history only go so far for contextualizing Gilman’s early nineteenth-century nonfiction sketches, poetry, and fiction writings. “Order” could also be considered in terms of aesthetics and design principles, and the categories of thinking that inform literary portrayals of naturescapes, countrysides, and the celestial bodies. Order is invariably conceptual in its schema, as with the extended domestic world that Gilman envisions spreading from Charleston outward or the blend of social relations, both visibly and invisibly hierarchical in makeup, that her poetic eye scans and catalogues. Both her prose and poetic renderings of Charleston and, more broadly speaking, southern locales, naturalistic or otherwise, are done within the genre of travel writing. Markus Heidde argues that, despite the Page 112 →“supposedly descriptive quality of travel writing and its documentary style,” the genre is marked by “imaginary elements [that] … involve the invention of other cultures, societies, peoples, communities, and landscapes.”²⁸ These “imaginary elements” for Gilman include an intermingling of the documentary style of the travel genre within Romantic aesthetic conventions. Literary portrayals of the natural world in antebellum thinking, whether on northern or southern locales, were often marked with the same tension that Heidde identifies between ideological poles: “the dichotomy of civilization and wilderness merged into American pre-national mythology.”²⁹ Gilman sought such a division conceptually, though the slippage between genteel Charleston culture and the natural persists in her writings.

In her antebellum travel writings, Gilman emphasizes entertaining scenes and quick visits within her city. Like other southern travel writers, except perhaps William Bartram, she does not fastidiously catalog the local ecology. Moreover, Gilman wrote during the interlude of Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism; her portrayal of the natural world synonymously reveals orderly conventions reminiscent of Jefferson’s grid design in mapmaking and the solitary figure immersed in a general, imaginative naturescape usually associated with the Romantic ego. In general, Romantic poetry rarely documents particular ecologies. William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” for example, teaches us little about the flora and fauna of the English Lake District.³⁰ The same could be said of William Cullen Bryant’s poetry and the Boston countryside. In each case, the natural world provided inspiration and metaphor, not a subject to be studied for its own sake. Nature poetry was not really about nature qua the natural world. Southern antebellum poets, as Joesph M. Flora demonstrates, seemed even less interested in the natural world than their New England counterparts.³¹ For these writers, nature became a commodity, something to be developed through labor and capital or consumed for sporting pleasure. Strangely, in her poetry, though, Gilman does document the natural world of coastal South Carolina without much affectation or allegorizing. If northern poets, such as Philip Freneau, discovered beauty in nature, southern poets found opportunity.

Unlike her southern peers, Gilman focuses her nature poetry on the aesthetics shaped by British Romanticism. In this way, her poetry is the-matically similar to that of her northern contemporaries, as we see in “A Southern Scene,” “The Crow-Minder,” and the aforementioned “Ashley River,” all of which appeared within “Notes of a Southern Excursion.”³² Here, the reader finds Romantic tropes, such as the solitary figure in nature Page 113 →(“The Crow-Minder”) and Wordsworthian childhood recollections occasioned by a specific locale (“A Southern Scene”). Even in urban poems, such as “She sleeps,” which apostrophizes Charleston, Gilman offers a nocturnal catalogue envisioning everything from a “fond mother” sleeping “o’er her infant child” to an “old man” sleeping “through dreamless hours,” all of which evoke the powerful sentimental feelings of Romantic poetry.³³

Still, Gilman’s poetic southern tableaus have a distinctly naturalist tendency that is not often found in Romantic poetry. For example, in the Ashley River plantation poem, after the initial garden lane opening scene, Gilman provides a brief compendia of southern flora and fauna, beginning with the “Cedar’s gloom” and shifting into other tree species: the “rich Magnolia,” the “Hickory bough,” the “Holly, with its polish’d leaves,” and the “broad oak’s shade.”³⁴ Similarly, “The Crow-Minder of the South,” which is ostensibly about a Romantic, solitary figure watching over the fields, also reads like a veritable natural history of low-country, Southern ecology. Once again, a natural compendium of plants and animals is listed, from nearly half a dozen bird species (the “Mocking bird,” the “Oriole,” the “Goldfinch, Waxbird,” the Turtle Dove, the “Blue Jay,” and the Woodpecker,” among others).³⁵ Other animal species, from the “Lizard” to the “Butterfly” to the “Frog,” are included in sustained re-creations of landscape types, including “forest trees” and “damp brakes,” perhaps of the Laurel variety.³⁶ This naturalist bent belies the Romantic ethos that frames the poem. Nature is not nondescript but instead catalogued with relative fastidiousness. On the level of aesthetic principle, Gilman consciously orders her poetry around Romantic conventions, only for a classificatory system more befitting a naturalist to emerge.

Gilman’s primary focus, however, remains on her characters and how they respond to the natural world. In “The Crow-Minder of the South,” Gilman utilizes a Romantic ordering device, one where the solitary figure in nature “feels a present Deity” within the natural surroundings, in this case, among the South Carolina fields.³⁷ Although she is ostensibly cataloguing a solitary figure in nature, Gilman simultaneously reinscribes social hierarchy. The farm laborer does not toil to earn his pay but rather remains “idly busy.”³⁸ Reducing the hard work of agriculture to something closer to a hobby, Gilman suggests that worker is as happy in his occupation as she is in hers. The social structures that force him to work and allow her to write become normalized. Each reflects natural design, and each serves individuals equally well. In more subtle ways, Gilman also reinforces racial hierarchies that, she suggests, are not only natural but also benevolent. The Page 114 →poem’s protagonist, referred to pejoratively as the “boy,” passes by and may even “share” some “plain food” with the “dark laborer” with whom he briefly socializes.³⁹ With this pastoral description, Gilman effectively erases the violence of enslavement, as the two figures become companions rather than adversaries. She also ascribes generosity to the white laborer who, in sharing his food, becomes a provider rather than an oppressor.

Natural “order,” in Gilman’s writing is tinged both with Romantic aesthetics and Enlightenment philosophy, both imaginatively recreated within southern ecological and social systems. Gilman recreates her northern identity into a distinctly southern one throughout The Poetry of Travelling the United States. She was clearly conversant in antebellum southern letters and its literary preoccupations, and she wanted to participate in a conversation initiated by other writers. More important, Gilman’s desire for literary and conceptual order, with Charleston serving as the nexus for an extended, domestic worldview, is linked to larger sociopolitical upheaval in the antebellum South. In addition to the intractable issue of slavery, the nineteenth-century South was, as historian Peter W. Bardaglio argues, going through “profound social change” linked to “the rise of the cotton kingdom” and “the first stirrings of industrialization and urbanization.”⁴⁰ Bardaglio argues that such cultural upheaval led to “new channels of legal control over family norms and behaviors,” so much so that they “severely disrupted the traditional structure of power in the households and larger society of the South.”⁴¹ Gilman envisioned herself as more than a cataloguer of the South. She was immersed in Charleston culture and the southern economy through her husband and surely was aware of such nascent cultural upheaval. Her desire to discover (in actuality, create) social and natural order, or the surety of particular aesthetic designs, is assuredly a reaction to such economic and cultural changes. She tries to ground herself within such a shifting world by making recourse to historical dimensions that define and illustrate the South. Her imagined southern plantation, with its picturesque oak alleys, orderly gardens, and content slaves might be a natural reaction to such external “stirrings.”

Page 115 →

Page 116 →Michael S. Martin is associate professor of English at Nicholls State University. Martin specializes in nineteenth-century American literature. He has recently published Appalachian Pastoral: Mountain Excursions, Aesthetic Visions, and the Antebellum Travel Narrative (Clemson University Press). His essays have appeared in A Journal of Melville Criticism, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Postmodern Culture, and Studies in American Indian Literature.

1. 1. See Figure 5.1, William Faden, A plan of the town, bar, harbor, and environs of Charleston in South Carolina.
2. 2. See Figure 5.2, William Keenan, Plan of the City and Neck of Charleston, SC.
3. 3. See, for example, Jan Bakker, “Another Dilemma of an Intellectual in the Old South: Caroline Gilman, the Peculiar Institution, and Greater Rights for Women in the Rose Magazines,” The Southern Literary Journal 17, no. 1 (1984): 12–25; and Calvin Schermerhorn, “Arguing Slavery’s Narrative: Southern Regionalists, Ex-Slave Autobiographers, and the Contested Literary Representations of the Peculiar Institution, 1824–1849,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (2012): 1009–33.
4. 4. See my chapter “‘The beautiful of the awe and sublime’: Appalachia’s New Testing Ground for Burke’s Conceit” in Michael S. Martin, Appalachian Pastoral: Mountain Excursions, Aesthetic Visions, and the Antebellum Travel Narrative (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2022), 105–30.
5. 5. Bakker, “Another Dilemma,” 12.
6. 6. Caroline Howard Gilman, “Preface,” in Poetry of Travelling in the United States (New York: Scatcherd and Adams, 1838; reprint, London: Forgotten Books, 2018), v.
7. 7. Gilman, “Notes of a Northern Excursion,” in Poetry of Travelling, 206.
8. 8. Page 117 →Gilman, “Notes of a Northern Excursion,”207, lines 37–40.
9. 9. Gilman, “Notes of a Northern Excursion,” 206, lines 13–16; emphasis added.
10. 10. Gilman, “Notes of a Northern Excursion,” 206, lines 1–4.
11. 11. Gilman, “Notes of a Northern Excursion,” 327.
12. 12. Caroline Howard Gilman, Recollections of a Southern Matron (New York: Harber, 1838; transcribed 1998, Archive.org; https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/gilman/gilman.html), 11, 9.
13. 13. Gilman, Recollections, 11. Charles W. Chesnutt’s satirical short story “The Passing of Grandison” was published in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), 168–202. For a helpful discussion of the story and its depictions of race, see Delmar, “Mask.”
14. 14. See, for example, lines such as “I kissed his pale and suffering brow” in Gilman, “The Overseer’s Children,” in Poetry of Travelling, 231.
15. 15. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 248.
16. 16. Tennyson’s famous 1854 poem recounts an encounter of British light cavalry and Russian military forces in the Crimean War. See Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems, edited by Hallam Lord Tennyson, 2nd ed., Vol. 2, 225–226 (London: Macmillan Publishing, 1908), 369.
17. 17. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 216–17.
18. 18. Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 766.
19. 19. O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 766. See especially Chapter VI, “Parental Teaching,” of Recollections of a Southern Matron: “One would suppose that the retirement of a plantation was the most appropriate spot for a mother and her children to give and receive instruction,” 47.
20. 20. Gilman, Recollections, 10, 11.
21. 21. Stephen C. Stowe, “City, Country and the Feminine Voice.” In Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, edited by Michael O’Brien, et al. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998) 296.
22. 22. Stowe, “City, Country,” 296–97.
23. 23. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 222.
24. 24. See, for example, Joel Chandler Harris’s infamous Tar Baby plotline in his Uncle Remus stories (1881). For a secondary source study of this Southern literature, see Nicholas Cords and Patrick Gerster, Myth and Southern History, Vol. 5: The New South (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
25. 25. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 223, lines 1–4.
26. 26. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 225–26, lines 42, 50, 58, 54.
27. 27. Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur and The Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), xi.
28. 28. Marcus Heide, Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere: Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830), Vol. 4: Stockholm English Series (Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University Press, 2022), 36, emphasis added.
29. 29. Heide, Framing the Nation, 37.
30. 30. Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/.
31. 31. Page 118 →See Joseph F. Flora, “Nature,” in The Companion to Southern Literature, edited by Joseph F. Flora et al., 530–35 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2002), 530–35.
32. 32. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 217–219, 232.
33. 33. Gilman, “She Sleeps,” in Poetry of Travelling, 248, lines 3, 20.
34. 34. Gilman, “The Plantation on the Ashley River,” in Poetry of Travelling, 225, lines 16, 18, 26, 30.
35. 35. Gilman, “The Crow Minder of the South,” in Poetry of Travelling, 218, lines 7, 19, 24, 30, and 31. Gilman includes vivid descriptions of birds elsewhere as well. In multiple instances, throughout “Notes of a Southern Excursion,” she recalls the sound of the “merry mock-bird” echoing through the “winding lane,” or perhaps oak alley, that surrounds her Ashley River plantation. See Gilman, “Southern Scene,” in Poetry of Travelling, 233, line 38. In “The Crow-Minder,” the poet recounts that “The Mocking bird” serves as a “partner of [the laborer’s] walk,” leaving a brief “orchestral tone” in Romantic cadences at “the midnight hour” See Gilman, “The Crow-Minder,” in Poetry of Travelling, 218, lines 7, 11, and 12. These references not only capture the richness of her ecosystem but also connect her to other Southern writers. Flora notes, “In place of the English nightingale, Southern poets specialized in descriptions of the mockingbird.” See Gilman, “Nature” in Poetry of Travelling, 532.
36. 36. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 218, lines 29, 39.
37. 37. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 66.
38. 38. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 55.
39. 39. Gilman, Poetry of Travelling, 58, 67.
40. 40. Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), xv.
41. 41. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, xv.

• Bakker, Jan. “Another Dilemma of an Intellectual in the Old South: Caroline Gilman, the Peculiar Institution, and Greater Rights for Women in the Rose Magazines.” The Southern Literary Journal 17, no. 1 (1984): 12–25.
• Bardaglio, Peter. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
• Chesnutt, Charles W. “The Passing of Grandison.” In The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, 168–202. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899.
• Cords, Nicholas, and Patrick Gerster. Myth and Southern History. Vol. 5: The New South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
• Delmar, Jay P. “The Mask as Theme and Structure: Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘The Sheriff’s Children’ and ‘The Passing of Grandison.” American Literature 51, no. 3 (1979): 364–75.
• Flora, Joseph F. “Nature.” In The Companion to Southern Literature, edited by Joseph F. Flora, et al., 530–35. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2002.
• Page 119 →Gilman, Caroline Howard. The Poetry of Travelling in the United States. New York: Scatcherd and Adams, 1838. Reprint. London: Forgotten Books, 2018.
• Gilman, Caroline Howard. Recollections of a Southern Matron. New York: Harber, 1838. Transcribed 1998. Archive.org. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/gilman/gilman.html.
• Heide, Marcus. Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere: Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830). Vol. 4: Stockholm English Series. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University Press, 2022.
• Martin, Michael S. Appalachian Pastoral: Mountain Excursions, Aesthetic Visions, and the Antebellum Travel Narrative. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2022.
• O’Brien, Michael. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
• Regis, Pamela. Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur and The Rhetoric of Natural History. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992.
• Schermerhorn, Calvin. “Arguing Slavery’s Narrative: Southern Regionalists, Ex-Slave Autobiographers, and the Contested Literary Representations of the Peculiar Institution, 1824–1849.” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (2012): 1009–33.
• Stowe, Steven C. “City, Country and the Feminine Voice.” In Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, edited by Michael O’Brien, et al., 295–324. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.
• Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” In Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems, edited by Hallam, Lord Tennyson, 2nd ed., Vol. 2, 225–226. London: Macmillan Publishing, 1908.
• Wordsworth, William. “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/.