Mark Twain famously associates Scott’s influence with the reactionary
politics of White Southerners, particularly in relation to slavery and the Civil War. Laura Doyle has examined the role of Ivanhoe as part of the relationship of British Romanticism to the racial categories of empire through the novel’s
explorations of medieval anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic discourses, as well as the tensions between the Normans and the Saxons, ‘What one may call
“domestic” race distinctions – between Gaul and Franck, Celt and Norman, Norman and Franck – not only shape Romantic thought but also form the seedbed for colonial racial thought.’7 The issue of the appropriation of the
narrative and imagery of chivalry, along with the racial politics of a text such as Ivanhoe,has perhaps its most disturbing expression in Thomas Dixon’s ‘Reconstruction Trilogy’, which includes The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden 1865-1900 (1902), The Clansmen: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire(1907). For Dixon, the Clansmen represented ‘the
reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland’, arrived to protect White
America from equality with African Americans.8 The notion of Scottish
7 Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.36.
8 Will Kaufman, ‘Literature and the Civil War’, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature
Highland culture as a noble tradition pushed to the margins, sometimes evident in texts such as Waverley and Rob Roy, reappears in this trilogy as attached to Postbellum white Southerners and narratives of the ‘Lost Cause', a
connection to which William Faulkner would later allude, as I will
demonstrate in chapter five. This trilogy clearly ties Scottish Romanticism to narratives of neo-medievalism, chauvinism and white supremacy in Southern culture.
The use of the fiery cross as the symbol of the twentieth century Klan originated in the Scottish Highlands as a device for gathering the clans in a time of emergency or preparation for war. Scott depicts this practice in The Lady of the Lake (1810), when Roderick Dhu orders the fiery cross to be lit to gather the Clan Alpine in an uprising against King James the Fifth. Through its appearance in Dixon’s trilogy, the fiery cross became a feature of the activities of the twentieth century incarnation of the Klan.9 Yet the lighting of
the cross is treated with great ambivalence in Scott’s poem, as it is attended
both by Roderick’s destructive jealousy over being rejected by Ellen Douglas and by the sinister pagan incantations of Brian the Hermit. Even so, the fiery cross is associated with an authentic Highland heritage as a rallying cry for clan loyalty, and as a symbol it is highly aestheticized by Scott, ‘While
clamorous war-pipes yelled the gathering sound, /And while the Fiery Cross
glanced like a meteor, round.’10
9 Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987), p.146.
Yet white Southerners were not alone in seeking to appropriate aspects of the Scottish Romantic tradition and in fact there is no evidence for a wider
or more enthusiastic readership of Scott’s work in the South than in the
North.11Frederick Douglass’s enthusiasm for Scottish Romantic writers began
with his taking his surname from the character of James Douglas in The Lady of the Lake. He did so at the behest of the abolitionist Nathan Johnson, who hosted him after his escape to the North, and Douglass recounts their
conversation in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855):
He had been reading ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ and was pleased to regard me as a suitable person to wear this, one of Scotland’s many famous
names. Considering the noble hospitality and manly character of
Nathan Johnson, I have felt that he, better than I, illustrated the virtues of the great Scottish chief.12
This choice of name can be interpreted as a deliberate attempt by Douglass to boldly install himself within the domains of white Southern cultural taste. His fictional claim to Scottish ancestry may very well have had a factual basis given how many slaves in the South could trace their ancestry back to a Scottish forbear, including Faulkner’s Lucas Beauchamp who can chart his lineage back
to the very beginnings of the McCaslin dynasty in Yoknapatowpha as I will discuss in chapter four. As Alastair Pettinger argues, Douglass’s choice of last
11 See Susan Manning, ‘Did Mark Twain Bring Down the Temple on Scott’s Shoulders?’,
Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms 1854-1936, ed. by Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) pp.8-27.
12 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Radford: Wilder Publications 2008),
name allowed him to ‘write himself, playfully, provocatively, into Scottish and Southern “families” that might normally consider him “out of place”.’13
Douglass also expressed his fondness for Burns’s Enlightenment
universalism and for the poems of Byron, along with ‘the works of Sir Walter Scott, especially “Ivanhoe”’.14 He quotes Burns in various specifically
American contexts, particularly the refrain ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’, from the song ‘Is there for Honest Poverty’ (1795), as an expression of his
egalitarianism and also in relation to his sense of the innate tendency of the
American people to integrate and unify, ‘They easily adapt themselves to
inevitable conditions, and all their tendency is to progress, enlightenment and
to the universal.’15Douglass also turns Burns’s rhetoric specifically to the issue
of slavery, arguing from nature and reason for the essential freedom and independence of men.16 In 1846 Douglass visited Scotland accompanying
white American abolitionists and lectured across the country. Central to this tour was his campaign to urge the Scottish Free Church to divest from plantation profits in the South, since it had accepted funds from Southern slaveholders to establish its new Church. Calls of ‘Send the Money Back’ were
heard throughout Scotland and made the subject of antislavery songs during the campaign. As Douglass recalls in a speech given in Washington D.C. in 1887:
13 Alastair Pettinger, ‘Frederick Douglass, Scotland and the South’, STAR (Scotland’s
Transatlantic Relations) Project Archive, (2004),
http://www.bulldozia.com/resources/pdf/Pettinger_DouglassScotlandSouth.pdf> [accessed: 19/07/2018].
14 Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One, Speeches, Debates and
Interviews, 8 vols., 1881-95, eds. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), vol. v, p.499.
15 Ibid, p.80. 16 Ibid, p.621.
The debate was sharp and long – the excitement was great. Nearly everybody in Scotland, outside the Free Church, were on the side of freedom, and were sending back the money. This sentiment was written on the pavements and walks and sung in the streets by minstrels.17
Douglass’s Scott-inspired term ‘minstrels’ portrays a romantic view of his visit
to Scotland, even though the Free Church never returned the money despite his efforts. He can also be seen to employ Scott and Burns as a way to
legitimize and strengthen his persona as a lecturer and campaigner, and he
also appropriated the masculine force of Byron’s language, particularly in Don Juan (1819) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), frequently
paraphrasing the latter text, ‘Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow […] You know that liberty given is never so precious as liberty sought for
and fought for.’18
Douglass’ appropriations demonstrate that the high rhetoric,
Enlightenment universalism and complex masculinities present in Scottish Romantic work can be appropriated politically beyond a narrow white cultural narrative, and in such a way that they intersect with the language of American democratic values in the mid-nineteenth-century. His rhetorical appropriation of a Scottish Romantic lineage through his use of Scott and Burns in this way
again anticipates Faulkner’s Lucas Beauchamp, who strategically performs his Scottish heritage making him a thorn in the side of his white McCaslin
relatives, as I will demonstrate in chapter four.
17 Frederick Douglass, ‘A Sentimental Visit to England: An Address Delivered in Washington
D.C., On 22 September 1887’, The Frederick Douglass Papers, pp.271-2.