‘A Newly Discovered Country’: The Post-Bellum South and the Picturesque Ruin

Abstract

Traces the shifting responses to the ruins that haunted the American South in the wake of the Civil War. Examines how ruins were presented in the early accounts of post-war journalists such as Sidney Andrews, John Trowbridge, and Whitelaw Reid, who often figured the South’s widespread ruination as evidence of just punishment for its sins. Notes that as tensions lessened, representations of the Southern ruin appearing in popular illustrated newspapers were more often accompanied by an invocation of a picturesque aesthetic, thereby transforming the ruined landscape into a place redolent of history and pathos and worthy of tourists’ attention. Believes the rhetoric of the picturesque provided a way of integrating a version of the South sanctioned for its antiquity, relics, and romance, back into an affiliation with the rest of the country. Concludes with Constance Fenimore Woolson’s account of picturesque travel in South Carolina in the early 1870s and an examination of how Southern writers Henry Grady and Thomas Nelson Page also deploy the picturesque ruin in the post-bellum era.