On 11 February 1837, Colonel Pete Whetstone introduced himself to readers of William T. Porter’s New York sporting journal, the Spirit of the Times:

Excuse my familiarity for you must know us chaps on the Devil’s Fort [sic] don’t stand on ceremony; well, week before last, daddy sent me down to the Land Office at Batesville, with a cool hundred shiners, to enter a piece of land—I tell you it took all sorts of raking and scraping to raise the hundred. ’Squire Smith let me have forty, but he wouldn’t have done it but for a monstrous hankering he has after sister Sal. (Spirit 7:2/11/37, 36)¹

Pete identifies himself as a participant in the frenzied speculation in Arkansas public lands, but, writing only months after Andrew Jackson’s Specie Circular, he complains of the government’s refusal to accept paper money in payment. Lacking hard currency ("shiners"), Pete and his Daddy apparently do not scruple to barter valued commodities, such as sister Sal, in the hopes that land values will continue their dizzying inflation. But several weeks later, such get-rich-quick schemes would be thwarted by the virtual collapse of the nation’s banking system,

Pete Whetstone’s initial "sporting" account of drinking and brawling on the Devil’s Fork simultaneously launches an uninhibited verbal assault upon the customary proprieties observed by contributors to Porter’s gentleman’s magazine, and it establishes the conditions of hard times and social eruption which inform the sequence of forty-five letters which Pete’s creator, Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, submitted to the Spirit of the Times. Southern gentlemen, such as Noland, Thomas Kirkman and Alexander Gallatin McNutt, found in the humorous sketches which they contributed to the Spirit a way of venting their frustration over social and economic forces which they could not control. Theirs was not, perhaps, the deepest economic suffering, but they were compelled to witness the takeover of the frontier economy by opportunistic speculators, who disdained the conservative virtues of temperance, thrift and hard work in their scramble to amass paper fortunes. With the abandonment of traditional economic values, these gentlemen also witnessed the supplanting of conservative politics by Jacksonian Democracy, and the eclipse of an aristocratic code of gentlemanly behavior and ideals. The sketches which such men contributed, as anonymous amateurs, to the Spirit served as an

elaborate strategy of containment,² an opportunity to manipulate and control, if only through laughter in a fictional realm, characters and forces which threatened the social order over which they presided. This essay argues, then, that the humorous sketches of the Old Southwest derived their distinctive form and their social and psychological richness from the conditions which followed the Panic of 1837.

The depression of the late 1830s weighed with peculiar force upon the plantation aristocracy of the South. Looking back upon "the flush times of Alabama and Mississippi," Joseph Glover Baldwin could trace the old planters’ hardship to an inability to adapt to a changing economic environment:

The old capitalists for a while stood out. With the Tory conservativism of cash in hand, worked for, they couldn’t reconcile their old notions to the new regime. They looked for the thing’s ending, and then their time. But the stampede still kept on. Paper fortunes still multiplied—house and lands changed hands—real estate see-sawed up as morals went down on the other end of the plank—men of straw corpulent with bank bills, strutted past them on ‘Change. They began, too, to think there might be something in this new thing. Peeping cautiously, like hedge-hogs out of their holes, they saw the stream of wealth and adventurers passing by—then, looking carefully around, they inched themselves half way out—then, sallying forth and snatching up a morsel, ran back, until, at last, grown more bold, they ran Out too with their hoarded store, in full chase with the other unclean beasts of adventure. They never got back again.³

Like the majority of Southwestern humorists, Baldwin allies himself with the planter aristocracy. And yet he condemns them both for their weakness in descending to the moral turpitude of the "unclean beasts of adventure" and for their timid inability to profit from the descent. Having invested their financial resources in property not easily liquidated, many plantation owners were forced to surrender their lands when the banks began to call in their loans in the spring of 1837. The perception of fiscal and perhaps ethical weakness among members of the planter aristocracy is critical to the emergence of backwoods characters in the humorous sketches. The too-scrupulous gentleman is often the butt of the joke in these sketches, and the frontier upstart is engaging precisely because his free spirit and pragmatism succeed where propriety fails. But gentlemen such as Kirkman, McNutt and Noland could satirize their foibles only because the writing of humorous sketches was essentially "play" for them. In Huizinga’s words:

It [was] an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit [could] be gained by it. It [proceeded] within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.⁴ These writers’ awareness of their status as gentleman-amateurs, the aspect of "play" in their fictional sketches, and the structures and conventions which

they generated all became aspects of the strategy of containment which flourished in the Spirit of the Times during the late l830s.

 

In his study, William T. Porter and the "Spirit of the Times"(1957), Norris W. Yates proposes that during the years of economic depression, beginning in 1837, financial hardship curtailed many of the sporting pastimes, such as turf racing, which were most interesting to readers of the Spirit. Porter, accordingly, set out to make up for a lack of racing news by publishing fictional humor from the frontier Southwest. In this way, he hoped to weather hard times by broadening the appeal of his journal. Yates maintains, then, that the "frontier or backwoods humor [was] supposed to be democratic, or at least democratizing in its influence."⁵ This argument, however, runs counter to the professed mission of the Spirit throughout its history. In an editorial written in February of 1837, Porter established the Spirit’s role as a journal of economic privilege which was

designed to promote the views and interests of but an infinitesimal division of those classes of society composing the great mass. . . . We are addressing ourselves to gentlemen of standing, wealth and intelligence—the very corinthian columns of the community. (Spirit 7:2/18/37, 4)

Moreover, the pages of the journal offer evidence that turf racing flourished as its devotees sought to resist economic pressures. The most notable change in the Spirit of the Times during the depression period was, in fact, the proliferation of "sporting epistles," formal narratives submitted by Porter’s readers, which reflected the tastes of the gentlemen who wrote them.

And yet, inevitably, the character of horse racing in the South changed. As gentlemen struggled to maintain their expensive stables and full-blood stock, the less well-to-do were gathering at race courses such as Pharsalia in Natchez to witness sprint races, usually of a quarter-mile. Sporting epistles describing this inferior competition multiplied. In July of 1837, "B." offers an account of "Quarter Racing in North Carolina." In 1838, a reader of the Spirit might have found "Quarter Racing in Mississippi" by "Boots," "A Quarter Race in Alabama" by "Barkeloo Dempsey," and a Pete Whetstone letter which recounted "A Race Between Worm Eater and Apple Sas." George Washington Harris’s first contribution to the Spirit in 1843 was "Quarter Racing in Tennessee" (written under the pseudonym of "Mr. Free").

"B." of North Carolina begins his account by asserting that the contest which he is about to describe is actually "unworthy the attention of the true sportsman," for "certainly no breeder would ever dream of

breeding cattle of so little stamina, so little blood and so little game. Dunghill in every way, they should be confined to the plough for which alone they are fit." He justifies his own unworthy interest by philosophizing "after the manner of the proverb touching half a loaf, that a quarter race was much better than no race at all. . ." (Spirit 7:7/29/37, 24). These accounts came to constitute a kind of sub-genre of the sporting epistle which accentuated the particular hardships of sporting gentlemen and their disgust for the drunkards and bullies who comprised the quarter-racing crowd.

The model for these epistles was Thomas Kirkman’s narrative which eventually became known as "A Quarter Race in Kentucky." It was apparently published in the Spirit as early as 1834, and reprinted in 1836, 1838, 1841 and 1843. It secured its enduring popularity as the title piece for Porter’s second anthology of humorous sketches in 1846.⁶ Thomas Kirkman (1800–1864) was in many ways a representative correspondent to the Spirit. He had accumulated a large fortune as a merchant and plantation owner in Alabama and Mississippi, and had established the most renowned stable of thoroughbreds in the South. Noted chiefly in sporting circles as the breeder to Peytona, a national four-year-old champion, Kirkman contributed only two pieces to the Spirit (the second being "Jones’ Flight" in 1840), and despite the enormous popularity of these sketches, he managed to preserve his anonymity through the multitude of reprintings.⁷

Although Kirkman’s literary motives were free from any material consideration, his entrance into the realm of "play" was anything but disinterested. Because he was a wealthy breeder of thoroughbreds, Kirkman found the quarter race narrative to be a perfect device to express his alarm at changing social and economic conditions in the South. The pages of the Spirit, devoted as they were to the cultivation of aristocratic ideals, assured Kirkman the security of a gentleman conversing with other gentlemen. Throughout "A Quarter Race in Kentucky," the cultivated voice of the narrator exerts its control over the action and is contrasted with the uncouth vernacular of the other spectators and participants in the race. The narrator assumes the sympathy and shared values of his readers, and exploits that collective consciousness to distance his readers from the inferior characters who hang around the track. Finally, Kirkman seeks a refuge in the form of the factual sporting epistle for his obviously fictional account. The sporting narrative serves as a veiling device which camouflages his treatment of social and economic issues. Our appreciation of the foregrounded sporting account depends upon a grasp of the socio-economic context; simultaneously, the laughter which the sporting

travesty generates serves as the strategy of containment for Kirkman’s more serious intent.

As the sketch begins, the narrator is on the edge of the action, marking himself by his disdain for a much-touted but inferior four-mile race. Gazing at the universal drunkenness of the crowd, he describes the event as an "extremely dry affair." The best feature of the race, for him, was that "like all things [it] had an end." He contemplates heading home to eat, drink and be merry," but the rumor of a "bursting" quarter race causes his sporting blood to rise. He professes a detached curiosity about the "mystery of quarter racing"; above all, he hopes he can "make expenses" by betting on the race.

For a backwoods meet, the stakes are impressively high and several thousand dollars are wagered. The wagering thus becomes a sporting analogue to the feverish land speculation of the times. And in the betting, perhaps as in the spirit of speculative capitalism, the gentleman narrator is lost. The link between such gambling and contemporary economic conditions is established when the currency produced consists of "Senator Benton’s abominations, $100 U. States Bills." The narrator abhors this paper currency as an instrument of inflation and fiscal instability, but "thinking [he] should run in while [he] was hot," he hazards the grandiose sum often dollars on a bay horse named Popcorn. As if this were not a sufficient show of timidity, when he learns that Popcorn’s foe is the notorious sorrel Old Grapevine, he "hedges" by making two five-dollar bets on the second horse. A tough way indeed to "make expenses." Undaunted, the narrator rationalizes: "I had all the pleasurable excitement of wagering, and nothing at risqué."

As in other sketches of the quarter race genre, the most space is devoted to coin tosses, disputes over lanes and the direction the race will be run, and, above all, the selection and suborning of the judges. In response to the dispute over the cross-eyed judge who couldn’t see straight, the narrator observes that "a good judge does not mean exactly the same thing here as on the bench. . . it means one who is obstinate in going for his own friends." The race, which begins with derisive shouts of "Go it you cripples . . ." occupies a single sentence. Who won? When the disputes are concluded, the race is declared "even," since the judges had become bored and had gone to get drunk. Since the narrator has hedged his bets, the outcome makes no difference to him; all he has to do is retrieve his money from Mr. Wash, the man who is holding the stakes.

Wash, however, has taken all the money bet on Grapevine and turned around and bet it on Popcorn. In the terminology of a stock speculation he has been "caught short"; in his own terms, he is "on the leetle end of the horn." When the narrator indignantly calls such behavior "ungentle-

manly," Wash responds with a spring-back dirk knife. And in the verbal masterstroke of the sketch, instead of cash, Wash offers the narrator his dubisary: "I don’t know whether I can pay it this year unless the crap of hemp turns out well. . . . If a man waits with me like a gentleman, I’m sure to pay him when I’m ready." The narrator is defeated in several ways. His money has vanished, while his respect for Wash’s knife remains; so he must accept the terms. But more humiliating, Wash has been able to fling the challenge to behave "like a gentleman" back in the narrator’s face.

The narrator has been gulled and he can laugh at himself within the "play" conditions of the sketch. But Kirkman’s larger point is clear. The economic conditions of the backwoods have corrupted the sporting life, and instead of gentlemen of honor, one finds at the southern race courses low-life characters, gamblers, cheats, and frauds. The events surrounding the quarter race illuminate the broader social context. It is a world of chance and speculation, which mocks fiscal conservativism and commercial integrity. It is a world of inflated paper currency, dubisaries and other worthless commercial paper, in which bad debts accumulate and become payable or not as the borrower is inclined. Because Kirkman’s narrator confines his scene to sporting events, such economic threats remain veiled and contained. The narrator’s voice dominates the action, relegating the backwoods vernacular of the touts and swindlers to comic backdrop. One of the most characteristic developments in contributions to the Spirit of the Times is the movement from the sporting realm onto dangerous, even forbidden terrain, and the emergence of the very voices which Kirkman’s narrator as able to suppress. At each stage in this development, we may witness the elaboration of laughter as a strategy of containment in Southwestern humor.

On the eve of Andrew Jackson’s election to a second term as President in 1832, the Spirit of the Times righteously asserted: "We have abjured politics," the "railing spirit of party" and the "exhibitions of rancorous hatred" which characterized other journals of the day (Spirit 1:11/3/32). Throughout its history the Spirit avoided partisanship and political controversy. Porter hoped that the love of sport and a respect for gentlemanly ideals would bind his readers together, even as sectional tensions threatened to separate them. Occasionally, the journal’s readers reproved the editor when he spied "a little squinting toward politics," and in 1843, Porter reiterated his stand on sensitive issues: "No

Smoking (Nor Politics) Allowed Here!"

But if the Spirit managed to avoid open hostility on sensitive political issues, it was probably because there existed among its readers a tacit consensus about a core of conservative beliefs. And if the Spirit avoided politics, political men surely embraced the Spirit, with a host of public figures, governors, congressmen, and a secretary of state submitting materials throughout the journal’s history. Frequently their contributions were strategic ones, calculated to place within the parentheses of the sporting epistle and the comic sketch forces which they may have been unable to control during their political careers.

One such public figure was Alexander Gallatin McNutt, who served as the governor of Mississippi from 1838 to 1842. Writing under the pseudonym "The Turkey Runner," he contributed eight sketches of frontier life to the Spirit, beginning in the year after he left office. Although they are mentioned in the sketches only in the most veiled fashion, his unsuccessful attempts to restore fiscal stability to a collapsed economy during the depression form the backdrop for his depiction of the outrageous escapades of his backwoods protagonists, Jim and Chunkey. These are not simply comic characters; they represent a threat to the social and economic ideals for which McNutt crusaded while he was in office. And if McNutt was frustrated in his attempts to curb speculation, paper currency and the wildcat banks during the administration, the characterizations and narrative techniques in his comic sketches enable him to exact a subtle measure of revenge upon those who opposed his policies.

Historical accounts of the life of Alexander G. McNutt merge with the tall tales which sprang up around the man. We do know that he was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in 1802. After obtaining his law education, he immigrated to Mississippi and established a successful practice in Vicksburg. There, he amassed a large fortune and plantation holdings of over 10,000 acres. This success was tainted by the allegation that he had murdered his business partner, Joel Cameron. Indeed, the fact that McNutt married Cameron’s widow and thus gained control of his estate only eight months later adds a certain spice to the tale. As a political candidate and as a governor, McNutt became fabled for his cowardice, his prodigious capacity as a drinker, and a campaign trail delineated by illegitimate offspring. Once elected governor, his legislation aided in the founding of the University of Mississippi, the construction of a new penitentiary, "free schools" for the poor, and improvements in waterways and roads.

But McNutt earned his lasting reputation as the enemy of the wildcat banks, chartered by legislative fiat to fuel the flush times, churning shin

plasters off of their printing presses with no specie to back them up. The crisis of McNutt’s administration arose over one such wildcat, The Union Bank. The state legislature not only chartered the bank in 1836 to be capitalized at 15.5 million dollars, it pledged to raise the capital through the sale of bonds. In 1841, with the Union Bank insolvent and the state itself near bankruptcy, McNutt determined simply to repudiate any legal responsibility for the bonds. The move only exacerbated the fiscal chaos in the state, even though his role as "The Great Repudiator" had been founded upon a desire for stable, hard currency and conservative, responsible administering of the banks.

Opposition to McNutt’s policies came from all quarters. Wealthy plantation owners, who had become dangerously overextended as they attempted to expand their land holdings, feared that the demand that the banks operate on a hard currency basis could lead to the calling in of their own loans. A less influential but much larger group failed to perceive that the depression would be so lengthy or so severe. They looked back on the flush times when the purchases of land or liquor could be made on credit and paper currency of uncertain value and origin was blithely exchanged. The conditions of easy credit and inflated values held out the prospect that they too might someday make fortunes through land speculation. Jim and Chunkey, the backwoods protagonists of McNutt’s fictional sketches, are depicted as members of this deluded group.

A complex fictional sociology emerges with unusual definition from "The Turkey Runner’s" earliest piece. And although the decorum expected of correspondents to the Spirit inhibited the broaching of controversial issues, the narrative structure of McNutt’s sketches amply reflects the tensions of his political career. In his best sketches, the frontiersmen, Jim and Chunkey, are allowed to tell the tales, and yet they are seldom in control of the telling, whatever they may fancy. It is the Captain as gentlemanly listener, and the Governor as looming absence, who dominate the narratives.

Chunkey and Jim are never granted any social or economic autonomy as characters; they are explicitly the Governor’s men, in his hire to clear his lands, rather than to make new opportunities for themselves. Lacking in financial ambition, they are satisfied with enough money to get drunk and to hunt when the season is ripe. When their tongues are well lubricated, Jim and Chunkey criticize the Governor’s economic policies and fondly tell jokes about his prowess as a drinker and a womanizer. McNutt allows them this liberty, partially because he fancied this image of his own prodigality, and also to demonstrate that the threat of social eruption which such characters pose is quite limited.

In the sketches, the Governor seldom emerges from the big house. He will occasionally trek out into the wilderness to check up on Jim and Chunkey and arrive "perfectly wolfish arter some har of the dog." Clearly, the Governor enjoys the liquor and the fellowship of these boisterous souls, so different from the decorous ladies and gentlemen he met in his parlor world. In return for this escape from propriety, the Governor is willing to engage Chunkey in the only kind of political debate that is meaningful to him:

‘dam the specie kurrency,’ says Chunkey, ‘it aint no account, and I’m agin it. When we had good times, I drunk five-dollar-a-gallon brandy and had pockets full of money.’ ‘But,’ says the Governor, ‘you bought the brandy on a credit and never paid for it!’ ‘What’s the difference?’ asks Chunkey! ‘Them what I bought it from never paid for it; they bought it on a credit from them fureigners, and never paid for it, and them fureigners, you say, are a pack of scoundrels, and I go in fur ruinin’ ’em, so far as good licker is concarned.’ ("A Swim for a Deer: Scenes on Deer Creek and the Sunflower," Spirit 14:4/20/44, 91)

Chunkey’s political consciousness never extends much past a dry throat, and the Governor is willing to accord Chunkey the satisfaction of talking him down, because he represents a limited threat and because both men are drunk anyway. But the exchange establishes the general hard times, the governor’s ineffectual attempt to restore a stable currency to the state, and the passion for paper and credit on the part of the backwoods roisterers. The passage also sets up Chunkey and the Governor as antagonists in the economic debate. A closer look at "The Turkey Runner’s" first sketch revels the intricate strategies of balancing and framing which allow McNutt to contain, at least in fiction, his ideological foes.

McNutt has been praised for his creation of two frontier protagonists.⁸ But while Jim and Chunkey are minimally distinguishable by certain traits (Chunkey, the ring-tailed roarer, will fight panthers with his bare hands, while Jim is petrified of snakes), they both share a love for "a little jaw exercise. "This is their generic term for "lickering," eating "bar sassage," cussing, and telling wild tales of the hunt and of their treacheries against each other. But McNutt doubles his protagonists chiefly so that he can set them against each other. Sharing and taking turns are things which Jim and Chunkey do poorly, and McNutt deliberately sets the pair to sharing the story-telling so that they will dispute the honor and eventually cancel each other out in a narrative sense. Moreover, their narrative efforts are framed by the words or the silent presence of the two gentlemen, the Captain and the Governor. Jim and Chunkey, who are so proud of their expertise in cheating at cards, never perceive how thoroughly the narrative deck has been stacked against them.

Walter Blair’s analysis, in Native American Humor, of the frame or "box-like structure" highlights the effectiveness of the device to characterize the backwoods narrator and to underline the prevalent incongruities of the frontier narrative: 1) between the rhetorical language of the frame and the ungrammatical dialect of the narrator; 2) between the situation at the time of the telling and at the time of the action recounted; 3) between the realism of the frame and the fantastic elements of the narrative itself.⁹ These incongruities are, for Blair, the basis of the Southwestern humor’s appeal. More cogent to me is Kenneth S. Lynn’s emendation to the thesis, that the "frame was (for the humorists) a convenient way of keeping their first-person narrators outside and above the comic action, thereby drawing a cordon sanitaire, so to speak, between the morally irreproachable Gentleman and the tainted life he describes."¹⁰ In McNutt’s "A Swim for a Deer," however, the links between frame and narrative are more dynamic still. The frame provides not simply a defensive kind of separation, but a strategy of containment, defensive and yet subtly aggressive at the same time.

This account of bear hunting and the unorthodox pursuit of an old buck begins as a conversation; that is, the two parties, Jim and the Captain, take turns in an exchange where neither one is allowed to secure the floor for himself alone.¹¹ It is the Captain who sets Jim off on his rambling tale: "Let the creek run, Jim; tell us about the bear!" We can’t be certain whether the Captain’s interest lies in the tale itself, or in the amusement he is about to derive from the way Jim is going to mis-tell it. The Captain knows, of course, that Jim is a mis-teller of tales, and his role as a listener fluctuates between his effort to contain the impending narrative chaos and a sly desire to encourage it. As a listener, his ability to control the telling is a delicate and varied one, but he is no "captive" audience. Rather, Jim becomes a captive teller; the Captain spurs him on and Jim is quite helpless to stop himself. Jim’s listener interrupts to ask clarifying questions which only expose Jim’s lies, to remind his teller that he has strayed off the path—"Stop, Jim, you have forgot the bear"; or, to urge his teller to get to the point—"Jim, you have left yourself and Chunkey on the bank of the creek ‘a waterin’. Are you going to stay there?" In this way, the Captain keeps the story moving, only so that Jim can commit further breaches of the story-teller’s art. The Captain forces Jim around in circles only to admonish him: "But, Jim, you have told that once, and I don’t want to hear it again." Jim may dimly perceive that he has lost the Captain’s interest and he attempts to re-engage it by asking him to guess the weight of the bear he and Chunkey have killed. The Captain, however, foils the attempt with ignorance and an unwillingness to play along: "I have no idea, Jim." Jim is trapped in his

tale with no exit. He suggests "lickering," but the Captain says he is not thirsty; he suggests sleep, but the Captain is not tired. He has no recourse but to surrender and leave his account of "Chunkey’s Fight With the Panthers" untold. When the tale finally appears in a later sketch (Spirit 14: 5/18/44, 137), the teller is not Jim at all, but Chunkey. McNutt’s strategies of balancing and framing have not only defeated Jim; they have effaced him as a teller completely.

Colonel Pete Whetstone is a more engaging fictional protagonist than Jim and Chunkey, and the social threat which he represented for his creator, C. F. M. Noland, was a substantial one indeed. Although Pete’s vernacular dialect and his rude behavior mark him as a backwoods bumpkin, he aspires to and, in fact, has achieved the status of a gentleman. He is a creation of the "flush times," when successful land speculation and the political participation afforded by the Jacksonian Democracy fueled the social and economic delusion of many men. But the times were flush for Noland as well, and he was initially able to treat the pretension of his backwoods upstart with amused tolerance. The cords which contain Pete’s narratives are subtle and all but invisible (so much so that even the best recent commentators have asserted that Noland makes only limited use of the conventional framing device).¹²

However, Pete will not be contained. When the economic depression set in only months after his first letter to the Spirit, his and his creator’s optimism vanished. Throughout his correspondence, Pete is the most intrepid violator of the Spirit’s editorial rules about avoiding sensitive political and economic issues. Moreover, Pete’s criticism of political corruption, hard times, and the men who are responsible for both reflects Noland’s own response to social conditions. The fictional sketches, begun as a strategy to contain the social pretensions of the pseudo-gentleman, become for Noland a strategy of liberation. By blaming all breaches of decorum on the irrepressible Pete, under the guise of "play," Noland was able to find an outlet through which to express his own disillusionment.

Noland’s first offering to the Spirit in March 1836, a sporting epistle entitled "A Glance at the Southern Racing Stables etc.," established the pattern for the nearly two-hundred sketches he would contribute under the pseudonym, "N. of Arkansas." "N." secured his popularity not merely as a peerless reporter of turf news but as a writer who avoided "gross errors," "vulgarisms," "improprieties," or "inelegancies of expression" as befit "gentlemen of the very highest character in society"

(Spirit 13: 10/28/43). In short, "N. of Arkansas" realized that to be a correspondent of the Spirit was not merely a literary, but a social distinction.

An essential aspect of "N.’s" correspondence is his desire to participate in the myth-making process of creating the ideal Southern gentleman. He speaks warmly of the hospitality of the most eminent plantation owners and breeders, and praises their courtesy, refined manners and generosity. The topics of his epistles range far beyond the sporting life to embrace books, the theatre, opera and other interests appropriate to gentlemanly cultivation. In part, "N.’s" urge to digress and to recount spicy anecdotes of the frontier led to Noland’s creation of a second persona, one who was fully engaged in backwoods life. But Colonel Pete Whetstone also plays his part in the elucidation of Noland’s social ideal.

To an extent, the cultivated reader’s enjoyment of Pete’s letters will derive from the faulty orthography and grammar of the rustic epistolarian, seemingly set free from the strategies of containment imposed upon him by a cultivated narrative voice. But the character of Pete Whetstone, his beliefs, and the events he describes are, in fact, inseparable from the character and letters of "N. of Arkansas." They frequently appeared on the same pages of issues of the Spirit, describing events which they had experienced together. The journal’s readers knew that the letters, for all their stylistic differences, derived from the same pen. "N. ‘s" letters consistently serve as the invisible frame, or at least the point of reference which allows the reader to perceive Pete Whetstone’s letters not merely as the comic meanderings of a backwoods bumpkin, as a parody of the style and beliefs of the gentlemen who comprised the readership of the Spirit.¹³

Pete’s sporting correspondence does feature sketches on bear hunts and quarter racing, but, as we might expect of a frontier clown, his urge to digress is incurable. A hunting account is peppered with family gossip about the impending marriage of sister Sal; the account of the race between Worm Eater and Apple Sas ends with the drunken brawl between Jim Cole and Dan Looney. Surely, the more decorous "N." would struggle to avoid such journalistic improprieties.

But the mingling of Pete’s voice with "N.’s" produces an unusual antiphony. Although he associates with Jim and Dan, the scum of Southern society, Pete’s first letter from the Devil’s Fork indicates that he considers "N." of Arkansas" to be his "best friend." Their parallel letter sequences reveal that they are constant companions on jaunts to Virginia, New York and New Orleans, and Pete, like "N.," is entertained by the finest Southern gentlemen and eventually by President Van Buren himself. They are both keen observers of thoroughbred racing;

they read the same books and attend the theatre and the opera together (although Pete can generally be counted upon to view the arts with disdain). But the most signal badge of the "Colonel’s" elevated status is the fact that, like "N.," he is a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Times. Pete emerges in his letters as a social upstart and as a political foe, and Noland contains the threat which he represents by having him ironically expose his own inadequacies as he writes. But in Pete’s digressions on politics and declining economic conditions, terrain forbidden by the Spirit’s editorial policy, we witness the alternation between Pete’s role as Noland’s social antagonist and his more compelling role as Noland’s alter ego. Pete sets himself up as a gentleman and an actual correspondent to the Spirit. Our recognition of Noland’s parodic intent depends, then, upon our perception of the discrepancy between his letter and the decorum expected of the Spirit’s contributors. But once Noland has secured for Pete both the privileges of a gentleman speaking to gentlemen and the license of a fictional creation, he may use Pete’s letters to violate the journal’s editorial policy with impunity. The economic and political commentary which "N. of Arkansas" must avoid, Pete can launch, because his world is, after all, only "play."

Beginning in 1836, Noland, a Whig, served four terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives. And so, when Pete’s third letter announces that he too will be a candidate for the state legislature, Noland has launched a satire of the backwoods democracy. There isn’t a Whig supporter to be found in the whole of Van Buren county, and the two candidates, Pete and Lawyer McCampbell, scurry to line up behind Andrew Jackson, the "Hero of Orleans, and the savior of his country" (Spirit 7:6/10/37, 132). Lawyer McCampbell, the more aggressive of the two candidates, runs on a prosperity platform, boasting of the free circulation of paper currency in New Orleans and New York (even as banks collapsed daily in those centers). He boasts that "it took the democracy to learn the people to bank without specie capital." Pete ruefully admits that the tactic would have worked had the financial panic not come to the Devil’s Fork only days before the election. He reports that Tom Jones and Bill Hightower, "real ranting roaring democrats," have willingly taken paper currency from the Planter’s Bank of Mississippi in exchange for their livestock, only to discover days later that the bank had gone bankrupt. McCampbell’s good times campaign is discredited and Pete is off to Little Rock to "make laws."

This unseemly political reportage does not escape editor Porter’s censure. He laments in his weekly column that "Pete is getting regularly wolfish in his politics, and we, early detecting the premonitory

symptoms, thought it worth while to drop him a line hinting at various remedies which we thought might mitigate them. But really Pete’s late letters seem to indicate a hopeless state" (Spirit 7: 11/18/37, 316). Hopeless indeed, since the admonition is shortly followed by a series of letters which Pete writes from the legislature.

Although Pete goes to Little Rock as a member of the Democratic majority and his creator’s political foe, he is simultaneously the but of Noland’s political satire and also Noland’s commentator on the inadequacies of the best men of the state, whatever their party affiliation. The backwoods representative never reveals what goes on inside the legislative chambers, but his acid observation, "I have seen more villains here than would hang a regiment in a civilized country" (Spirit 7: 12/20/27, 368), accentuates his creator’s dismay at his own political experiences. In Pete’s description of the social occasions that add only a thin veneer of refinement to the legislative session, the ambiguity of Pete’s role is again apparent. The social neophyte derives absurd pleasure from the various champagne parties, balls and theatre engagements, but he prefers a third-rate traveling circus. Finally, Pete gives thanks for the outbreak of small pox which adjourns the session and spares him both legislating and "kertillions" [cotillions] : "Well, I am mighty sick of this place; I want to be in the woods—this here sort of life they live here, is killing Pete"(Spirit 7: 12/16/37, 348). Whetstone is exposed as a political failure, but his longing to retreat may well have been Noland’s own.

Pete’s premature retirement from the political arena does not silence his political tongue. But his attacks upon the administrations, both in Washington and Little Rock, make him more explicitly the ally of the Whiggish Noland than a representative of Jacksonian Democracy. In the fall of 1837, as banks went bankrupt throughout the country, Pete mocked the blindness of the Arkansas legislators who attempted to charter both the Arkansas State Bank and the Real Estate Bank, and then could not find any honest men to run them. At the same time, Pete’s calls for fiscal integrity and stability are undercut by his report that he is still busy speculating in land (Spirit 7: 10/7/37, 265). The persistence of the mania for speculation and gambling is underscored by a letter in which the fascinated Pete describes the wagering at a Fargo Bank, perhaps the only financial institution in Arkansas still doing brisk business (Spirit 8: 2/17/38, 6). In the early months of the depression, then, Pete speaks for Noland in condemnation of paper currency and corrupt banking practices, and yet he does not perceive that his own land speculations are a part of the conditions he deplores. But the hard times persisted and by the fall of 1841, Pete was looking for economic

relief. Each letter that autumn begins with comments on the government’s failure to reestablish a national bank, on the crop failure and on the scarcity of money. The humor of Pete’s letters gradually gives way to complaint. Where the framing letters of "N. of Arkansas" and the editorial warnings of William T. Porter had failed to contain the exuberant Pete, the hard times themselves threaten to silence him. He writes early in 1842: "Well! aint writ you as much as I ought—but I tell you when corn git to 20 cents, and big steers to 8 dollars, and Arkansas money shaved till there is none left, a man don’t feel like shedding ink—. . . (Spirit 9: 2/26/42, 615). And indeed only a handful of Pete Whetstone letters ever appeared again in the Spirit of the Times.

The first great flourishing of humorous sketches from the old Southwest coincided with the collapse of the frontier boom economy in the late 1830s. For several humorists whose sketches were featured in the Spirit of the Times, the creation of frontier characters and incidents may have served as a means of controlling in fiction social and economic forces which they were unable to control in real life. Kirkman’s Mr. Wash and McNutt’s Jim and Chunkey can be viewed with a condescending good humor, because their creators ultimately remain confident of their own values and their social mission. When the depression ended, as they believed it must, the speculators and social pretenders would vanish as well, and the plantation aristocrat would resume his role as the shaper of Southern society.

C. F. M. Noland’s is a darker vision. Colonel Pete Whetstone can pretend to the status of a gentleman, which Jim and Chunkey can never attain. But Pete finally becomes not a parody of the Southern gentleman, but a genuine expression of his discontent with economic conditions and with the ultimate decline of a social ideal. In Noland’s sketches we may witness the failure of containment, both as a social and as a narrative strategy. There would be no return, after the depression, to the old South of the plantation aristocracy, but the threat would come not from the frontier opportunism or social eruption of the Pete Whetstones. Rather, the planter aristocrat himself would stubbornly lead the South towards a conflict whose purpose was the defense of a value system which was no longer socially, ethically or economically defensible.

^lAll references to the works of Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, Thomas Kirkman and Alexander Gallatin McNutt are taken from the titles of the Spirit of the Times which are available on University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Because the pagination of the Spirit is occasionally erratic, particularly in the early issues, I have endeavored to provide dates for each issue cited.
²The phrase "strategy of containment" has its origin in a 1947 diplomatic communiqué by George F. Kennan, entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." As a guideline for U. S. foreign relations, the phrase suggests a response to the global influence of the Soviets which is neither defensive nor aggressive. Rather, Kennan called for "the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce," a strategy which merges aggressive and defensive postures. Although literary analysis has been much enamored of "strategies" of all kinds, this is, to my knowledge, the first application of this particular strategy in a literary context. It is an appropriate context, since so much of the theory of humor has been devoted to distinguishing aggressive from defensive modes. See, for example, Norman N. Holland, Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
³Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (New York: Sagamore Press,
1957), 63–4.
⁴Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press. 1955), 13.
⁵Norris W. Yates, William T. Porter and the "Spirit of the Times": A Study of the Big Bear School of Humor (Baton Rouge: L.S.U. Press, 1957), 1.
⁶The issue which featured the initial printing has not survived and we can only surmise the original date from comments made by Porter upon subsequent appearances.
⁷The sketch was reprinted under the pseudonym, "Mr. Snooks." Kirkman’s identity can finally be ascertained only through Porter’s confidential correspondence with Carey and Hart, the publishers of his anthology A Quarter Race in Kentucky. The letter is quoted in Yates, p. 80.
⁸Cf. Mark A. Keller, "‘The Guv’ner Wuz a Writer’—Alexander G. McNutt of Mississippi," Southern Studies 20 (Winter 1981), 399.
⁹Walter Blair, Native American Humor (New York: American Book Company, 1937), 91.
¹⁰Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1959), 64.
¹¹My notions about the speaker/audience relationship in conversation and story-telling situations are derived from Mary Louis Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977), 110–16.
¹²See, for example Yates, p. 66 and Leonard Williams, ed., Cavorting on the Devil’s Fork: The Pete Whetstone Letters of C. F. M. Noland (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1979), 43.
¹³The Layering of Noland’s personae became more complex with the addition in 1842 of a third series of letters from Pete’s brother-in-law, Jim Cole. For a more detailed discussion of the links between the various sequences, see my article: "Colonel Noland of the Spirit: The Voices of a Gentleman in Southwestern Humor," American Literature, 53, No. 2 (May 1981), 232–45

122