Eron Rowland's writes court poetry for the Sacred South. She has only the nicest, 
most exalting worship to offer Varina Howell, the wife of Jefferson Davis and the subject of her book. Mrs. Rowland herself is a fine Southern lady, a proud member of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, the wife of Dr. Dunbar Rowland, State Historian of Mississippi. She also assisted in the State's Department of Archives and History. Apparently, Mrs. Rowland was progressive (surely the eugenics appealed to her) enough to publish poetry in The Nation.
Mrs. Rowland's book is a love story-- the story of her love and admiration for Varina Howell and how she appeared in the moonlight and magnolias at a time when social critics of the South began to point out the kudzu. In her foreward, she writes:
I wrote this early life of Varina Howell because I love her; because I am in love with her joyous, fearless and earnest youth; because I am in love with the gladness, sincerity, and all the robust, divine purposes of her womanhood; because I am in love with her strong, unflinching pride, her enduring strength, her depth and power of love, her loyalties, her infinite tenderness, her sound good sense, her salty, gay, good humor, her laughter and her tears; because I am in love with her transcendent and man-like fortitude in later years.
This book offers insight into the worldview and ideals of the Southern elite women of the early twentieth century. In her glorification of certain characteristics and scenes of Varina Howell's life, Mrs. Rowland shows us what is valuable and worthy of glorification. Varina Howell's southern aristocratic roots are remarked upon constantly, often as an explanation for her political Whiggism or her "strong moral fibre".
She also exalts racial theories quite consistently throughout the book. Anglo-Saxons are brutish and miserly-- "when was it that the Anglo-Saxon did not win his victories with a bludgeon?" Varina Howell, herself, "had come of a race and time noted for much prayer". It is the Scottish and the Irish who are superior.
In a "dilapidated condition", Varina's childhood home, known as "The Briers", still stands on a high, red bluff on the Mississippi River in Natchez. Mrs. Rowland paints a picture of perfect social harmony, complete with the requisite black nanny, as Varina's birthright:
The child, held in the arms of its devoted black nurse and clad in a long embroidered white robe which barely escaped the floor, was christened at the Old Trinity Episcopal Church amid an admiring crowd of sponsors and friends.
Mrs. Rowland's respect for the southern social hierarchy is conveyed in her extensive quotations from other sources that dare to put into words what she prefers only to acknowledge with a knowing smile:
"The female slaves very generally attend church in this country, but whether to display their tawdry finery, of which they are fond, or for a better purpose, I will not undertake to determine. The males prefer collecting in little knots in the streets, where, imitating the manners, bearing, and language of their masters, they converse with grave faces and in pompous language, selecting hard, high-sounding words, which are almost universally misapplied, and distorted, from their original sound as well as sense to a most ridiculous degree-- astounding their gaping auditors 'ob de field nigger class', who cannot boast of such enviable accomplishments."
The parody of imitation in a culture in which the color of skin and size of estate determined who could legitimately imitate what is lost on Mrs. Rowland. She can giggle about slaves imitating masters without finding humor in the southern belles' imitation of her peers. She remarks upon the "deep insight" of an author who "continues to warn his Northern readers of the danger of interfering with the institution (of slavery) in the first stages of the Negro's civilization". Clearly, Mrs. Rowland believes that the civilizing mission of the white man included slavery for the black man. Was she an early Marxist of sorts?
Blacks needed the plantation to become a productive, proper part of humanity. Those who thought otherwise did not have the opportunity to witness firsthand the wholesome happiness of plantation life with its established hierarchies and parades.
That master, mistress, and slave at Brierfield were happy in each others' company could not be questioned, neither could the fact that the slave was receiving a care, protection and training not often the lot of the uncivilized. That at this stage of their progress up from savagery their lines had fallen, for the present in pleasant places cannot be disputed. The true historian must admit, however detrimental slavery might become for him at a later stage of development, that the close contact with the best element of a superior race hastened the negroes civilization immeasurably.
Slaves, like children, needed guidance and discipline in the ways of civilized humanity.
People punished their own children at that day, and it may be set down for a fact that Varina endeavored, also, to make her various young servants conduct themselves properly. One must not forget that these young creatures were little more than half savages at that time. Instead of censure a monument should be raised to the South as their savior as a race.
And slavery would have ended anyway:
It could very well be set down as a fact that in the next century slavery would have been peacefully abolished in the South by State legislation and with common consent of the majority of the people.
Mrs. Rowland believe that the power-hungry Republicans and the violent abolitionists forced the end of slavery before it was due. She channels the Southern fears of abolitionists quite effectively. For many, the Christian or moral grounding for abolitionist beliefs was a thorny matter, excused away by the promise that life on a plantation was better for slaves and would "civilize" them.
"(The abolitionists) felt that they had a sacred mission to perform-- owed a sacred obligation to society-- and reformers have always stressed the word sacred in their propaganda, and could not wait for God's time or any time except their own. So they labored with something of a philosophy that if your shanks will not fit the Promethean bed, which is generously offered you, off with them though you bleed to death. Their larger purpose was a righteous enough one, but as is the case with most reforms they lost sight of the broader meaning of their creed in dealing with those applying them. Among other things Israel's God of vengeance had been brought to America."
It is difficult to read Mrs. Rowland's emotive, effusive racial gushings and spiritualization of the Confederate South. But the historical value in reading these arguments by those who so sweetly attempted to make them cannot be questioned. Hard, depressing, but worthwhile reading.
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