Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton-gin in the closing years of the last century gave extension to slavery, making it profitable to cultivate the now staple by enormous gangs of field-hands working under the whip of the overseer in large plantations.  Slavery became henceforth a business speculation in the States furthest south, and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a comparatively mild domestic system.  The necessity of defending its peculiar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in the North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual strength into politics, which, for that matter, is the natural occupation and excitement of a social aristocracy.  Meanwhile immigration sought the free States, and there was no middle class at the South.  The “poor whites” were ignorant and degraded.  There were people of education in the cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great educated class from which a literature could proceed.  And the culture of the South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as the section was isolated more and more from the rest of the Union and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery.  Nothing can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical editorials in the Southern press just before the outbreak of the war, or than the backward and ill-informed articles which passed for reviews in the poorly supported periodicals of the South.

In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, one or two Southern authors may be mentioned whose writings have at least done something to illustrate the life and scenery of their section.  When in 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visitor offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the best prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the prize to Poe’s first story, the MS. Found in a Bottle, was John P. Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward became secretary of the navy in Fillmore’s administration.  The year before he had published Swallow Barn, a series of agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia.  In 1835 and 1838 he published his two novels, Horse-Shoe Robinson and Rob of the Bowl, the former a story of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of colonial Maryland.  These had sufficient success to warrant reprinting as late as 1852.  But the most popular and voluminous of all Southern writers of fiction was William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolinian, who died in 1870.  He wrote over thirty novels, mostly romances of Revolutionary history, Southern life, and wild adventure, among the best of which were the Partisan, 1835, and the Yemassee.  Simms was an inferior Cooper, with a difference.  His novels are good boys’ books, but are crude and hasty in composition.  He was strongly Southern in his sympathies, though his newspaper, the Charleston City Gazette,