| Popis: |
By 1843 William Cullen Bryant had acquired the reputation he would enjoy for the remainder of his life, of being America's most eminent man of letters.1 There was general agreement that he was, as a reviewer had called him the year before, "the first of American poets,"'2 and his leading editorials in the New York Evening Post had made him an important voice in American politics. At the end of February 1843, he began a six-week trip through the South. He spent about three weeks on the South Carolina plantation of his friend, the novelist William Gilmore Simms, and Simms gave him letters to planters in the Orangeburg and Barnwell districts. From the Barnwell district he wrote a public letter to the Evening Post to describe a corn-shucking, which had been given, as Bryant told his readers, "on purpose that I might witness the humors of the Carolina Negroes." They danced for him. They put on "a mock military parade, a sort of burlesque of our militia trainings, in which the words of command and the evolutions were extremely ludicrous." One of them gave a mock stump speech, in which Bryant recognized several of the conventional phrases of political oratory but noted that "these phrases he connected by various expletives, and sounds of which we could make nothing." During the shucking of the corn, they sang, and Bryant mentions four of the songs. Three were new to him, and he describes them in some detail. With the fourth he was apparently well acquainted. More important, he seems to have expected that the readers of the New York Evening Post would be well acquainted with it also, because he says of it only that "the song of |
