pba00516 On Newfound River (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906)

When Thomas Nelson Page wrote about the antebellum South, he recalled his youth on a slaveholding Virginia Tidewater plantation. The descendant of generals, governors, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Page had come to believe that the true South was populated by noble gentlemen, pure ladies, and devoted servants.

Accustomed to aristocratic superiority over blacks and non-elite whites, Page found the postbellum struggle of his people jarring. He also believed that Northerners had presented a distorted view of the South’s history and people–meaning the people of his own class. Through an impressive bibliography of short stories, poems, novels, and essays, Page set about to correct this tarnished image. His sentimental idealizations of the Old South’s plantation culture contributed to the development of a “moonlight and magnolias” myth that other writers at the turn of the century would perpetuate and later authors such as Ellen Glasgow would spend decades trying to debunk.

pba00506 Elsket and Other Stories (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891)

Page was only eleven years old when the Civil War ended. Yet he had clear, definite ideas about the region’s history and conflict with the North. He believed Virginia’s Cavalier heritage to be infinitely superior to New England’s Puritan legacy of religious bigotry and social intolerance. He cast Northern abolitionists as the great villains, interfering with the South’s domestic tranquility and forcing the region into war.

Page subscribed to the “Lost Cause” image of the Civil War, extolling the virtues of Southern heroes’ brave fight despite inevitable doom at the hands of an industrial machine. As the honorable Confederate soldiers returned home, they faced further challenges from Northern politicians and reformers who made policies based on ignorance of the true relationship between master and slave. He praised the South’s better people for courageously counteracting Reconstruction’s abuses to restore their values. He supported organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the White Camellia for their attempts to restore the proper social order.

	pba00519 The Red Riders (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924)

These ideas simmered in Page’s mind while he pursued his education and legal career and started a family. Although he did not stay to receive a degree, Page completed a classical course at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) from 1869 to 1872, when his hero Robert E. Lee was president of the school. After spending a year at the University of Pennsylvania, Page completed his law degree at the University of Virginia in 1874. He practiced law in Richmond until 1893.

Page married Anne Seddon Bruce in 1886, but she died two years later of a throat hemorrhage. He then wed Florence Lathrop Field, the widowed sister-in-law of retailer Marshall Field, on 6 June 1893. That year, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where Page dedicated himself to writing and lecturing on Virginia’s history and old social order. Page became active in the social and political life at the Capital, and served for six years (1913-1919) as ambassador to Italy under Woodrow Wilson, a fellow Virginian. He returned to Hanover County, Virginia, for the last years of his life, and continued writing there. His last novel, The Red Riders, was not yet finished when he died on 1 November 1922.

pba00512 Marse Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892)

Page’s first publication, “Uncle Gabe’s White Folks,” appeared in Scribner's magazine in 1873. In the poem, a black narrator tells the story about his honorable white masters in the days before the war. “Uncle Gabe” marked the debut of devices Page used in many of his writings. One of them was the use of slave dialect to relay a story. Another was inclusion of blacks in a bi-racial plantation “family,” portraying the servant as dedicated to his master even after Emancipation. Other devices Page employed included inter-regional marriages and the conversion of transplanted Yankees into consensual southerners. Literary scholars label these plot devices as metaphors for the theme of the South rejoining the Union and for the North accepting the southern “family.”

These devices featured prominently in the story that first brought Page widespread attention. “Marse Chan,” published in The Century’s April 1884 issue, uses a faithful ex-slave narrator to tell the tale of a young southerner who died for the southern cause and placed duty and honor above all personal gain. “Marse Chan” also is a saga of unrequited love between its title character and “Miss Anne,” the gracious daughter of a neighboring planter. The story evoked an intense spirit of nostalgia for the plantation era. The South’s upper class embraced “Marse Chan” as the defining description of their antebellum civilization and made its reading an essential element of the rituals celebrating their class’s glory, such as meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

	pba00518 Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899)

Page’s plantation tales remained extremely popular throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s, both in magazines and when reprinted in collections such as In Ole Virginia (1887). Considered preeminent Virginia classics, the stories in In Ole Virginia rely on the dialect voice of docile slaves to relay idealized stories in the mystical plantation setting.

Page reinforces the Old South myth in what many consider to be his greatest novel, Red Rock (1898). He contrasts the agony of leading southern families who lost their plantations to predatory carpetbaggers with the ex-Confederates’ powerful memories of an exalted, pastoral past. This novel makes ample use of the inter-regional marriage device. Southerners yearning for the restoration of antebellum order seek to educate their oppressors via romantic pairings of Yankee officers with southern belles and Cavalier gentlemen with northern maidens.

pbw01372 Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897)

Page’s ultimate goal was the restoration of social order. He sought to achieve this aim not only via reminders of the idealized past but also by scolding the postbellum elite for their abuse of leisure. Page satirized high society of the New South in his novels Gordon Keith (1903) and John Marvel, Assistant (1910), showing his concern over the upper class’s neglect of its moral obligations and behavior unworthy of imitation by the community.

Although Page was best known for his fiction, he also sought to educate the public through essays on southern history and contemporary culture. These essays first appeared in popular periodicals such as Scribner’s, North American Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Harper's. Later, Page collected them into best-selling anthologies such as The Old South: Essays Social and Political (1892), Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (1897), The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners (1908), The Negro: The Southerner' s Problem (1910), and Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier (1911).

	pba00503 Among the Camps; or, Young People's Stories of the War (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892)

Page produced a number of children's books as well. Because the Civil War occured during his youth, he was able to bring a child's viewpoint to the conflict in his stories. Published first in Harper's Young People and later in collections such as Among the Camps, Page's children's stories about the war feature the same themes and devices as his adult work. For example, Two Little Confederates describes a father's heroism, a mother's courage, and the loyalty of slaves through the eyes of two young boys. Children also narrate a story portraying the courage of a noble widow in Two Prisoners. The symbolic joining of North and South occurs in stories such as "Kittykin and the Part She Played in the War," in which the war stops temporarily while both sides unite to rescue a cat from a tree, and "Nancy Pansy," in which an innocent young girl brings the two sides together.

Literary and historical scholars point out that Page’s South was finer than any real place could ever be, but he satisfied the nostalgia of his readers for what might have been. Page’s writings joined with that of several of his contemporaries to create and perpetuate a romantic image so solid, later writers such as Ellen Glasgow found it difficult–though not impossible–to counteract.

Continue to Ellen Glasgow's Feminist Approach to the Old South

Thomas Nelson Page Bibliography (hyperlinked titles available full-text)