Three Not-So-Ordinary Joes: A Plantation Newspaperman, a Printer’s Devil, an English Wit, and the Founding of Southern Literature

By Julie Hedgepeth Williams

One of the more eccentric figures in the antebellum South was Joseph Addison Turner, born to the plantation and trained to run one. All he really wanted to do, though, was to be a famous writer—and to be the founder of Southern literature. He tried and failed and tried and failed at publishing magazines, poems, books, articles, journals, all while halfheartedly running a plantation. When the Civil War broke out, he no longer had access to New York publishers, and in his frustration it dawned on him that he could throw a newspaper press into an outbuilding on his Georgia plantation. Furthermore, his newspaper would be modeled on The Spectator, the literary newspaper of the early 1700s by Joseph Addison, for whom Turner was named. The Spectator in its day, and 150 years later in Turner’s day, was considered high literature. Turner carefully copied Addison’s style and philosophy—and it worked! His newspaper, The Countryman—the only newspaper ever published on a plantation—was one of the most widely read in the Confederacy. Following Addison’s lead, Turner suggested that slaves should be treated well, lauded the contributions of women, and featured humorous copy. And, of course, his paper celebrated Southern culture and creativity. As Turner urged in The Countryman, the South could never be a great nation if all it did was fight. It needed art—it needed literature! And he, J. A. Turner himself, would lead the way.

The Civil War, however, didn’t go as Turner had hoped. Sherman’s army marched through and took Turner’s world with it. His newspaper collapsed. He died a few years after the war ended, thinking he had failed to start Southern literature.

However, he was wrong. The Countryman’s teenage printer’s devil was Joel Chandler Harris, who grew up to write the first wildly popular Southern literature, the Uncle Remus tales. Turner had taken in the illegitimate, ill-educated Harris and had turned him into a writer. And while Harris worked for the plantation newspaper, he joined Turner’s children at dusk in the slave cabins, listening to the fantastical animal stories the Negroes told. Young Harris recognized the tales’ subversive theme of the downtrodden outwitting the powerful. Years later as a newspaperman, he was asked to write a column in the Negro dialect, and he reached back to his days at The Countryman for the slaves’ narratives. The stories enthralled readers in the South—but also in the North, particularly Theodore Roosevelt. The Uncle Remus stories were hailed as the reconciler between North and South, and they directly influenced Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and Beatrix Potter. Most importantly, Uncle Remus knocked New England off its perch as the focus of American belles-lettres and made Southern literature the primary national focus.

So, ultimately, Joseph Addison Turner really did found Southern literature—with the help of two other not-so-ordinary Joes, Joseph Addison and Joel Chandler Harris. Julie Hedgepeth Williams tells their story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781603064132

Julie Hedgepeth Williams

JULIE HEDGEPETH WILLIAMS is an adjunct communication and media professor at Samford University. She is also the recipient of the 2021 Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism History. Williams is the author or coauthor of eleven books, including Wings of Opportunity: The Wright Brothers in Montgomery, Alabama.

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ALSO BY JULIE HEDGEPETH WILLIAMS

A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwells’ Story of Survival (2012)

Wings of Opportunity: The Wright Brothers in Montgomery, Alabama, 1910 (2010)

The Significance of the Printed Word in Early America:

Colonists’ Thoughts on the Role of the Press (1999)

The Early American Press, 1690–1783

(1994, WITH WILLIAM DAVID SLOAN)

The Great Reporters: An Anthology of News Writing at Its Best

(1992, WITH WILLIAM DAVID SLOAN, PATRICIA C. PLACE, AND KEVIN STOKER)

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2018 by Julie Hedgepeth Williams

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Williams, Julie Hedgepeth, author.

Title: Three not-so-ordinary Joes : a plantation newspaperman, a printer’s devil, an English wit, and the founding of Southern literature / Julie Hedgepeth Williams.

Other titles: Founding of Southern literature

Description: Montgomery, AL : NewSouth Books, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018009100 (print) | LCCN 2018001234 (ebook) | ISBN 9781603064132 (ebook) | ISBN 9781588383235 (deluxe trade paper : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Southern States—History and criticism. | Addison, Joseph, 1672-1719—Appreciation. | Authors, English—18th century—Influence. | Turner, J. A. (Joseph Addison), 1826-1868. | Newspaper publishing—United States—History—19th century. | Harris, Joel Chandler, 1848-1908. | Authors, American—19th century—History and criticism. | Georgia—Intellectual life—19th century. | Southern States—In literature.

Classification: LCC PS261 (print) | LCC PS261 .W55 2018 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/975—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009100

Design by Randall Williams

Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan

To writers everywhere:

May you have the persistence of J. A. Turner

and the success of Joseph Addison and Joel Chandler Harris

And to Sarah, Kit, and Gabriel Taylor,

whose home is located roughly equidistant between

Turnwold and Wren’s Nest, and who more than once

lent me their guest room

and always their encouragement and friendship

in the course of my writing this book

. . . I consider Time as an Immense Ocean, in which many noble Authors are entirely swallowed up, many very much shattered and damaged, some quite disjointed and broken into pieces, while some have wholly escaped the Common Wreck; but the Number of the last is very small.

— JOSEPH ADDISON, The Spectator, 1711

Since the year 1847 (just ten years this summer) I have been engaged in chasing the phantom of literary fame to the exclusion of everything else. . . . At first my primary object was fame alone. . . . Latterly, I have desired fame that I might make money in order to pay my debts. . . . But it is in vain.

— JOSEPH ADDISON TURNER, PERSONAL JOURNAL, 1857

The ‘Countryman’ was published on a plantation, and it was on this and neighboring plantations that I became familiar with the curious myths and animal stories that form the basis of the volumes accredited to ‘Uncle Remus’ . . . This was the accidental beginning of a career that has been accidental throughout. It was an accident that I went to the ‘Countryman,’ an accident that I wrote ‘Uncle Remus,’ and an accident that the stories put forth under that name struck the popular fancy.

— JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS, Lippincott’s Magazine, 1886

Contents

Chapter 1Uncle Remus and the Little Girl

Atlanta, Georgia—1913

Chapter 2Joseph Addison Turner

Eatonton, Georgia—1860

Chapter 3Joseph Addison

Lichfield, England—1683

Chapter 4Joe Turner

Lane-Turner Plantation, Nine Miles from Eatonton, Georgia—1834

Chapter 5Joe Turner

Lane-Turner Plantation, Near Eatonton, Georgia—1842

Chapter 6Joe Turner, Author and Editor

Eatonton, Georgia—1846

A Selection of Photographs Appears after Page 112

Chapter 7Joseph Addison Turner, Family Man

Monk Hall Plantation, Near Eatonton, Georgia—1851

Chapter 8Joe Harris

Eatonton, Georgia, USA—1858

Chapter 9J. A. Turner

Turnwold Plantation, Georgia, USA—1857

Chapter 10Joseph Addison

London, England—1711

Chapter 11J. A. Turner

Turnwold Plantation, Georgia, Confederate States of America—1862

Chapter 12Joe Harris, Printer’s Devil

Turnwold Plantation, Georgia, CSA—1862

Chapter 13Joe Syd Turner and George Terrell

Turnwold Plantation, Georgia, CSA—1863

Chapter 14Joseph Addison Turner

Turnwold Plantation, Georgia, CSA—1864

Chapter 15J. A. Turner

Georgia, of no country—1865

Chapter 16Joel Chandler Harris

Atlanta, Georgia—1876

Chapter 17Southern Literature and Reconciliation

1881

Chapter 18Dorothy Schwab Congleton

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA—1975

Contradictions and Credits

Notes

Photo Sources

Index

CHAPTER 1

Uncle Remus and the Little Girl

Atlanta, Georgia—1913

Try as she might, little Dorothy Schwab just couldn’t make herself seem as big as her classmates. She stretched her short body to its full height, but even if you counted the big bow her mother had tied atop her head, Dolly (as she was called) looked too small for her class. And indeed she was. In Atlanta, only children who were already six years old were allowed to enroll in first grade when school started in September. If your sixth birthday was in December, as Dolly’s was, you were supposed to start with a second wave of slightly younger children in January. It was all a great plan to relieve embarrassing overcrowding in the city’s exploding school population. Superintendent W. M. Slaton wanted to bring class sizes down from sixty to forty children per teacher, and scattering the pupils by age was one way to cut the classes almost in half.¹

But Dolly’s mother, Maud, thought the age rule was so much pish-tosh. Why, Dolly was bright and ready for school! Dolly’s rambunctious three-year-old brother, Alvin, was creating toddler havoc at home, and as far as Maud was concerned, it would reduce motherly stress if Dolly were in school. Maud had been determined to get her way on this; she had marched down to the school and explained fervidly that Dolly must start school in September. Maud was indeed persuasive, because Dolly did just that.

Dolly was thrilled when at last her birthday approached—finally she’d catch up and be six like everyone else! She was delighted when school shut down on December 9 in honor of her birthday. It made her feel especially important. All the kids, Dolly included, were invited to a big house with a sweeping porch for a big birthday party the Atlanta school system was throwing just for her. A man named Uncle Remus told a funny story about creatures named Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and the Tar Baby. The name Brer was confusing at first, but a grown-up explained that Brer meant Brother. How funny that animals called each other Brother, like silly little Alvin! And what a great birthday!

A year later, school shut down for Dolly’s birthday again, once more sending the students to hear another story from Uncle Remus. It was quite some time before it dawned on Dolly that school didn’t shut down for anyone else’s birthday. It took her even longer to figure out that the event wasn’t honoring her but this Uncle Remus fellow. It took her even longer still to figure out that the Uncle Remus she saw was nothing more than a storyteller. The actual birthday honoree was an author who had written the Uncle Remus stories. And oddly enough, the birthday boy was dead. No wonder Dolly was puzzled!

Although he was now in his grave, that author, Joel Chandler Harris (called Joe during his childhood), was also born on December 9, and it was his home, called the Wren’s Nest, where the big birthday bash was held every year. Dolly and her fellow first-graders of 1913 were the fourth bunch of Atlanta’s first-graders to celebrate Harris’s birthday on the lawn at the Harris home. Professor Slaton, as the superintendent of Atlanta schools, in 1910 had leaped on the chance to honor Harris’s memory by shutting down all Atlanta schools on December 9. Soon every school in Georgia, from elementary to college, closed for the day, as did women’s and children’s clubs and public libraries. The author was world-famous, a favorite of former President Theodore Roosevelt and the celebrated Mark Twain—and since Harris’s Uncle Remus was meant for children, it was clearly worth a day off school to celebrate Uncle Remus’s birthday.²

BUT THERE WAS SOMETHING darker about the fourth annual schoolchildren’s celebration of Uncle Remus that Dolly Schwab mistook for her own birthday party in 1913. Harris had been in his grave almost as long as the first-graders in her class had been alive, and deep down older people seemed to worry that Harris, this favorite son of Atlanta, might be forgotten over time. On the surface, it seemed unthinkable. He had been one of the most popular writers in the world, and a lot of people predicted his name would live forever, as would his Uncle Remus stories. But there was a nervous aura surrounding his memory from the very week of his untimely death. Harris had died fairly young—fifty-eight was the age given on his tombstone—and Atlantans rallied to create a memorial to him, to help immortalize him, as if to keep his name from decaying along with his body in the grave. The decision was quickly made to buy his house as a memorial—even while his wife still lived there—and that surprisingly swift and somewhat inconvenient (for his wife) plan to buy the house smacked of worry that Joel Chandler Harris’s immortal name would need help to stay immortal.³

Perhaps the nervousness was tied to the fact that the Old South, of which Harris had so eloquently written, was now long gone. To Dolly and her classmates, the Old South bordered the ancient history old wrinkled people told you about. Even Dolly’s parents were too young to recall the plantation system and Negro slavery, which were front and center in Harris’s books. You had to go back to the grandparents or even the great-grandparents before you found people who had been through the Civil War and had lived during the slavery times. Consequently, there was a nagging if vaguely stated fear that the old times in the Old South would soon be forgotten, in contrast to the promise made in the song Dixie. In some mystical way, Joel Chandler Harris’s death emphasized that worry.

One way to keep the Old South alive in memory was through its literature, and Dolly’s sixth birthday at Uncle Remus’s house helped not only to emphasize the immortality of Joel Chandler Harris but also to celebrate the great writer’s works for their own sake. Harris had captured a South now vanished, preserving it as real and even, well, pleasant. Southern literature had come into wild popular focus with Uncle Remus, helping soften the cruel image of slavery and the Old South and putting the South in the forefront of American belles-lettres. The fact that Harris’s tales were adapted from old slaves themselves, featuring affectionate interactions between excited little white children and gentle old black folk, made the South’s peculiar institution seem more benign than it had been. Such Southern literature was something of a relief to readers, a place where the evil of slavery was smoothed over in the genuine cleverness of the slaves’ tales and the loving admiration of the young master for the elderly enslaved storyteller. Depending on which expert you picked, in fact, Harris was the first great writer of Southern literature. Atlanta certainly claimed so, anyway.

NOT EVERYONE AGREED. BY Dolly Schwab’s birthday in 1913, there had been hand-wringing for decades over Southern literature, and the attempt to define the genre would extend many more decades into the future. Was Southern literature written about the South? Written by a Southerner? Must it be popular with Southerners and Northerners alike? Should it address race? Must it address race?

It was hard to tell if any one or all of those questions would really define Southern literature. If Southern literature was about the South, explored the issue of race, and was wildly popular across the nation, then John Smith’s account of being saved by the Indian princess Pocahontas in early Virginia should be called Southern literature. But John Smith wasn’t from the South, and the ancient colonization story didn’t seem, well, Southern. The South had grown distinctly as a place apart after Smith faced his struggles with Pocahontas’s father. Maybe, then, Southern literature had to discuss what had come to define the South as distinct and apart—slavery. But Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote of plantation slaves, was from New England, and furthermore, her work was rejected in the South in her day for its abolitionist theme. If a book was not welcome in the South, was it truly Southern literature? If writers of Southern literature must be from the South and be widely popular in the South, then Southerner Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous works, his macabre tales, should be Southern literature. But Poe’s creepiest tales weren’t really about the South, and thus they seemed disqualified. So maybe Southern literature had to be specifically about the South.

As time wore on, some experts came to define Southern literature as written by a Southerner, as being about the South, as being accepted in the South—and from one more critical angle: Southern literature also had to spring from the shared common defeat of the South.⁴ That common defeat originally meant the Civil War, and in the future it would come to encompass Jim Crow and racial inequality and civil rights—always race—always that question. If you included the South’s defeat as a key factor in defining Southern literature, the genre could not have existed until after the war. In that case, the first widely loved and critically acclaimed writer of Southern literature was Joel Chandler Harris, publishing his Uncle Remus stories some fifteen years after the war ended. The Uncle Remus tales sprang from slave tales told on the plantation, explored the relationship of whites and blacks, were written by a Southerner, were written about the South, and were popular in the South (though, indeed, around the world). And they sprang from the defeated South. Harris’s Uncle Remus checked all the boxes on the Southern literature list.

BUT JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS could never have become the father of Southern literature if not for two other writers also named Joe whom no one mentioned on that terrific birthday party in 1913. The other not-so-ordinary Joes were Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and his namesake, Joseph Addison Turner (1826–1868). Addison was the famous British journalist associated with the equally famous Tatler and Spectator newspapers, and who had inspired the American Revolutionary generation with his play Cato. Addison had also inspired Joseph Addison Turner. The latter was an eccentric Georgia planter, lawyer, and politician who desperately wanted to achieve fame and fortune as a writer. At one point during that long and frustrating attempt, he opened and operated a weekly newspaper from his own plantation in middle Georgia—the only newspaper known to have been published on a plantation. He was called Joe but as a writer often went by his initials, J. A.

Turner kindly took in as his protégé Joe Chandler Harris (1845(?)–1908),⁵ an otherwise destitute boy going nowhere. Turner used the example of Joseph Addison to teach Harris how to write and what to write about.

As if this widespread sprinkling of Joes weren’t confusing enough, Harris’s great work of Southern literature was sparked by a fourth Joe, Joseph Sydney Turner, called Joe Syd (1859–1909), the son of J. A. Turner.⁶ Although Joe Syd was not one of the writers in the Joe triumvirate, it was his interaction with slaves on his father’s plantation that profoundly inspired Harris as he turned the highly fantastical animal stories told by the slaves into very human stories loved by millions as the first truly successful Southern literature.

Poignantly, J. A. Turner had longed to be the founder of Southern literature himself. He had invoked the spirit of Joseph Addison to figure out how to do just that and had bet his last and greatest life’s work on recreating the works of Addison in the form of Southern literature. But the South had failed to cooperate, losing the Civil War and breaking J. A.’s fortune and spirit. J. A. didn’t live long enough to see his teenage printer’s devil, Joel Chandler Harris, overcome illegitimacy and poverty, take the stories he heard on J. A.’s plantation, and follow Addison’s guidelines to create the first Southern literature—the Uncle Remus stories.

Thus, three white guys named Joe who lived across four different centuries on two different continents somehow came together to assure that tales told by African slaves would come to define Southern literature. This is the story of how they figured it all out.

CHAPTER 2

Joseph Addison Turner

Eatonton, Georgia—1860

Joseph Addison Turner crumpled his newspaper closed in disgust. There it was, the rumors confirmed in print—South Carolina had formally declared that she was expecting to secede from the United States of America. The would-be runaway daughter, rebellious like a foolhardy hothead, was going to bring nothing but ruinous war and untold grief to herself and to the South, like any family who suffered ruination due to a daughter’s indiscreet behavior. Not that Turner was entirely surprised or unsympathetic. But as he huffed with annoyance into his thick, dark beard, he had hoped that cooler heads would prevail, that the Union would have been dissolved amicably, by some sort of universal acclamation or diplomatic agreement. He pulled himself up out of the old broken green couch in the post office and limped past the red-headed boy who had been craning his neck to read what was in the paper. The boy had no money but plenty of curiosity, and he was always trying to read everyone else’s newspapers¹—the ones his destitute mother couldn’t afford to subscribe to. But Joe Turner didn’t share his newspaper this time. He had other things on his mind. He limped toward his wagon with its Negro driver idling outside on the main street of Eatonton, Georgia. He knew the legislature would be called to Milledgeville over this latest crisis, and he had to prepare a speech for the Senate.

Joe was right about the pending legislative session, as he had so confidently known. If there was one thing Joseph Addison Turner had enough of—even too much of—it was self-confidence. He had to, as his physical presence was not very commanding. He was slight of build at age thirty-four, not distinctively tall or noticeably short. A heavy beard and dense mustache drew attention away from his dark and deep-set eyes. He was dark of complexion and dark of health, too, with a ghastly incurable limp due to a thighbone deformed by disease. His father, William Turner (whom everyone had called Honest Billy), had impressively been the state treasurer and had stood a striking six feet. Billy’s son Joe, though, was not as imposing in his physical presence nor in his political power. Governor Joe Brown called the Georgia legislature into session that November of 1860 to consider secession,² but grumpily, Senator Joe Turner realized that he personally didn’t have enough clout in the legislature to do anything about this mess South Carolina was dragging the South into.

All the same, though, Joe Turner did impress people. He crusaded to do what was right as a state senator. One newspaper described him loftily as honorable, moral, pure, refined, dignified, courteous, attentive, a gentleman, scholar, lawyer, family man, and farmer. And punctual. He was always punctual.¹⁹ Aside from sounding like a good man of Biblical design, Joe was not religious—he believed in God, yes, but not particularly in the church as an institution.³

Despite sounding like a dream of an honest and upright senator, he hadn’t been particularly effective as a lawmaker. By far his best contributions had instead come through the pen—and even cocky Joe had to admit it. As the Federal Union newspaper of Milledgeville, Georgia, noted, In the field of letters, he has made some reputation. A few years ago he was the editor of a paper in Eatonton, which gave ample evidence of his ability as a political, as well as literary writer. The Federal Union praised Turner’s humorous political barbs, even though those barbs had had deep consequences—a jibe he had flung at one party had assured his defeat for political office later when that party was in power, even though, as the reporter explained, Mr. T was the choice of two-thirds of his party.⁴

The Federal Union took this defeat as an illustration of the fact that Joe was no liar. He was forthrightly honest at all times, even to his own detriment. We have admired Mr. Turner’s writing for its chasteness and sincerity, the Federal Union said. What he writes is, as he talks, truthful. . . . He writes with great ease and fluency. The Federal Union finished its assessment of Joe flatteringly, He is a ‘home’ man . . . who had rather drink from the ‘old oaken bucket’ . . . than sip from the chalice of the gods. What the writer of the article didn’t know was that Joe Turner most desperately did wish to sip from the godly chalice of literary fame.

The Georgia legislature that November of 1860 was teeming on one hand with political firebrands who craved dramatic secession, and defeated, slumped-over, somber union men on the other. Joe gimped his way into the legislature, arguing among his fellows to vote to preserve the union, flawed and wrong though it was, so that it might be dissolved diplomatically—and to the South’s advantage. That had long been his position. I am not a man for war, nor strife, but emphatically a peace man. I wrote an article for the Federal Union, urging the appointment of Northern and Southern commissioners, to arrange for a peaceable dissolution of the Union, he recalled after the war had done just what he had predicted—it had ruined him, and most of his fellow legislators, too, who had shared the debate about secession on that fateful day in 1860.⁵

However, an untimely attack of bronchitis kept Joe Turner from delivering the resolution he had penned about forming a North-South commission to split up the badly teetering union. A colleague had to introduce it for him instead—and once again, as with so much in his life, that was not nearly as effective as Joe had imagined it would be. Renegade South Carolina was right; the utterly necessary system of slavery was under attack by the government in Washington, but Joe perceived secession could not possibly go well. Indeed it did not. Georgia voted against holding a secession convention, but Governor Brown deviously reported the opposite outcome.⁶

On January 19, 1861, Georgia tumbled out of the union, following South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, and then Alabama and crashing, Joe (and everybody else) was sure, toward inevitable war. Louisiana and Texas were right on Georgia’s heels in the race to secede. For a