| Ambition and love are categories fundamental to human life. The stories we like best to hear and to tell turn on one or the other, or better yet both all tangled together, creating in engaging compounds tragedy and humor, drama and romance. Ambition and love have a common spring, of course, in desire---desire for fame, fortune, and immortality, for acceptance, friendship, and affection---yet, despite this common origin, they are often at cross-purposes, both with themselves and with the desires of others. This dissertation examines the complex interplay of love and ambition in the emotional lives of the Old South's most powerful minority---elite white males.; To provide context for this investigation, the introduction focuses on the South in the 1850s, on the dramatic changes in the region's politics, culture, and economy before the war. An empire had been won, railroads were stretching out to tame it, the South's urban centers were growing, and the economy was booming again. By 1860, the South was, taken by itself, the fourth largest industrial nation in the world, and its prospects, in or out of the union, seemed heady and auspicious. With these developments, however, came a growing sense of restlessness and unease. The simplicities of the early republic were now fond memories; the words of the Founding Fathers were like the canted guideposts of an old and abandoned road---where America was going the Founders had not been, had not dreamed of going, and their counsel was sought with as much nostalgia as conviction. The country, strong enough to defend itself from without, was threatened by itself from within. The market developments which had given it that strength were also remaking the ways in which men and women conceived of themselves and their relations with each other. In their aspirations and their decadence, Americans sought their solace in romanticism, which heightened the sensation and sensationalism of everything.; Interspersed within the chapters are five portraits of antebellum men whose lives illustrate the themes of the part in which they appear. Historical themes mean little where they do not have a human face and dimension, and the stories of Laurence Keitt, Henry Craft, David Outlaw, Harry Dixon, and Nathaniel Dawson provide a nuanced understanding of the heavy psychic price men paid in their bids for greatness. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
