“A New and More Vigorous Growth”: Resilience and Southern Ecologies in Antebellum Literature

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, descriptions of bleak southern landscapes were routine in abolitionist and antislavery writing, linking withered crops and the South’s soil crisis to the region’s moral and agroeconomic collapse.1 As Harriet Beecher Stowe’s description of Simon Legree’s plantation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) depicts, this decline was sometimes connoted through other kinds of environmental imagery: the voids of pine-barrens, swamps, and other places whose soil quality and terrain made agriculture difficult, if not impossible. In an era of Southern boosterism by western investors and proto-secessionists, abolitionists and antislavery activists invoked a wide variety of outwardly impoverished, wilted landscapes; from Tidewater plantation to Mississippi Valley swamp, these settings were supposed to represent slavery’s many evils and the institution’s fated end.2 Located in Red River country in Louisiana, Legree’s estate seemingly reaffirms such familiar deterministic portrayals of the South: The landscape is “broken,” “shattered,” and “rotting,” and his house, once well-tended, is in “utter decay,” next to a garden “all grown over with weeds” (290, 292). Nearly every aspect of the plantation is affected by slavery’s rot. But as much as Legree’s plantation typifies the corrosive effects of “the peculiar institution,” just as significant are the things that seemingly flourish despite—and sometimes because of—such decay. What was once a smooth-shaven lawn before the house, dotted here and there with ornamental shrubs, was now covered with frowsy tangled grass, with horse-posts set up, here and there, in it, where the turf was stamped away, and the ground littered with broken pails, cobs of corn, and other slovenly remains. Here and there, a mildewed jessamine or honeysuckle hung raggedly from some ornamental support, which had been pushed to one side by being used as a horse-post. What once was a large garden was now all grown over with weeds, through which, here and there, some solitary exotic reared its forsaken head. (292)