Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

Of course, those who had written before the war still tried to gain a livelihood from the pen, but they continued the manner and traditions of the Old South. John Esten Cooke,² for example, carried on in Virginia the tradition of the school of Scott and Cooper, then elsewhere becoming archaic. George William Bagby (1828-83),³ also of Virginia, renewed his newspaper productions and added the lyceum to his resources. But so intense a lover of the Old Dominion and its civilization could suffer no sea-change even in the fiery baptism of war. He tried to deliver his lecture The Virginia negro in New York, but the reception was unmistakably cool. Life ‘befoa de war’ had not yet become for the North a charming memory from a land of romance.

Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822-98）⁴ in his various writings evinces an equal devotion to the earlier times before the railroad came to central Georgia. They form a sympathetic record of the ways and characters of that humble but picturesque era. Johnston, though a slave-holder, was unwaveringly opposed to secession and the war. Nevertheless, reduced by the surrender at Appomattox from an estate of fifty thousand dollars to poverty, to him the situation seemed so hopeless that he removed, with the school he kept, to Baltimore. The autobiography, the eighty stories, and the three novels which he there produced, it is interesting to note, were written largely to assuage a sad longing for his boyhood home. These writings show him to have been, in spite of his political opinions, of the old school of Southern gentlemen.

More typical both in opinions and in fervour was Charles Colcock Jones, Jr. (1831-93). Born in Savannah, he graduated from Princeton in 1852 and the Harvard Law School in 1855. His Southern convictions, however, still intact, were intensified by his service in the artillery of the Confederate States. When the guns were stilled by the surrender of Lee, he, like Johnston, joined that numerous caravan which, seeing no hope in its own section, sought fortune in other regions. New York and the practice of law were his goals.