Introduction

Vernon L. Parrington identified Southern culture as distinctive from Northern culture, and he identified Virginia and South Carolina as "germinal centers of [a singular] southern culture" from which arose distinctive ways of thinking. Parrington saw the Virginians of the Jacksonian period as breaking ranks with their predecessors, Thomas Jefferson and Madison, and prizing romance over sentiment and exuberance over dignity—as romantics. Ritchie Watson credits Caruthers and John Esten Cooke with development of the cavalier figure, which leaves one wondering just how to account for Ned Hazard, the knight errant of Swallow Barn. John Pendleton Kennedy appeared to Watson as a developer of figures who mixed reality with the cavalier ideal in their fiction and were part of a dying way of life. The Virginian novelists of the Jacksonian period used the familial paradigm to examine schematically some of the crucial issues of their day.