fore the Revolution continued to act down to
the time of the civil war. 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 suff