Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

But even more influential in feeding Southerners’ self-glorifying fantasy of the South were novels not quite so on the nose, set neither in America nor in the present day. Walter Scott’s books—such as Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Woodstock, or The Cavalier—are overwrought, sentimental historical fictions of English and Scottish knights and lords and ladies of centuries past. There had never been an author more popular. He published a new novel every eighteen months between 1814 and 1832, just as Southerners became desperate to justify and romanticize their slave-based neofeudalism. “The appearance of a new novel from his pen caused a greater sensation in the United States than did some of the battles of Napoleon,” an American publisher and contemporary of Scott’s wrote after he died. “Everybody read these works; everybody.” Everybody especially in the South, where children and steamboats and plantations and dozens of towns were named after Scott’s fictional and fictionalized characters and olden-times and imaginary places. Shortly after the Civil War, another famous novelist, a former Southerner, specifically blamed the great catastrophe of the South and of America’s nineteenth century on Scott’s novels. The region had been modernizing along with the North during the decades after the Revolution, Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, but things changed: “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments,”