TY - JOUR AB - <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 6pt -2.3pt 6pt 0cm; line-height: 22px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif;">Southwestern humour is an exuberant body of writing which emerged in the literature of the American South in the early 1830s and fell a casualty to the Civil War.&nbsp;&nbsp;Its emergence was generated by a multiplicity of social and political changes, mainly the westward movement of the Southern frontier and the fact that the South, as a collective entity, was becoming increasingly conscious of itself and its social institutions, particularly slavery.&nbsp;&nbsp;Following the establishment of the Democratic party by Andrew Jackson in the second half of the 1820s, the South started to be under increasing pressure regarding slavery.&nbsp;&nbsp;Trying to avenge himself against an alleged “dirty bargain” which saw him lose the 1824 presidential elections, Jackson, a Tennessee slaveholder and national hero who had successfully fought the British, the Indians and the Spanish, shrewdly promoted himself as a supporter of the common man.&nbsp;&nbsp;He led Jacksonian Democracy, which won him the following race for the White House.&nbsp;&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 6pt -2.3pt 6pt 0cm; line-height: 22px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif;">With the help of his “Kitchen Cabinet,” Jackson devised a plan to democratise capital. By doing so, he wanted to respond to the “aristocratic parasites” who accused him and his wife of lechery.&nbsp;&nbsp;He replaced gold and silver currencies with rags (paper money), withdrew the federal funds from the Central Bank of the United States and deposited them in various state banks, mainly under the direction of supporting Democratic bankers.&nbsp;&nbsp;His controversial financial actions destabilised the national economy and disrupted the harmony of traditional social values all over America after raw inflation had taken hold and furnished a fertile ground for speculation, larceny and a full tide of litigation.&nbsp;&nbsp;Consequently, Southern aristocrats and planters supported Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, who decided to form an opposition and organised the Whig party in 1834 in order to fight what they called the “tyranny” of “King Andrew I” and his “unconstitutional behavior.”&nbsp;&nbsp;The conflict between the Whigs and Democrats, which sharply escalated in 1837 as the country started to suffer a severe economic depression, reached fever pitch in the early 1850s and culminated in the Civil War.&nbsp;&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 6pt -2.3pt 6pt 0cm; line-height: 22px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Sylfaen, serif;">This essay examines the work of one Southwestern humorist who embraced Southern Whiggery, Joseph G. Baldwin. An old-fashioned Virginian lawyer, Baldwin migrated to the Old Southwest in pursuit of fortune and became an Alabama planter by marriage and proslavery Whig.&nbsp;&nbsp;He wrote his books in the early 1850s in an attempt to exert influence on public matters and shout for his disintegrating party’s defence of slavery and obsession with order.&nbsp;&nbsp;His gentlemanly writing style, content and arrangement of sketches can be seen as Whiggish devices employed to fictively impose order on the 1830s and ’40s lawless Mississippi and Alabama frontiers.&nbsp;&nbsp;However, on a deeper level, they constitute the waning politician’s last plea for striking a national compromise between the conflicting parties one decade before the Civil War.<o:p></o:p></span></p> AU - Hamada Kassam DA - 2010/5// DO - 10.5526/esj132 IS - 2 VL - 2 PB - University of Essex Library Services PY - 2010 TI - Order versus Nihilism: Joseph Glover Baldwin and the Projection of Whig Sympathies into the Body of Southwestern Humour T2 - Essex Student Journal UR - http://publications.essex.ac.uk/esj/article/id/186/ ER -