2 - “Our sacred Union,” “our beloved Apalachia”: nation and genius loci in Hawthorne and Simms

Summary

People have always had a strong sense of place. The Romans spoke of the genius loci, the “spirit of a place,” and we can understand their meaning readily today, even if the spirit for us is a feeling rather than a deity.

– American Places: Encounters with History

Just five years after Walter Scott vowed to “keep sight of both” Scottish national identity and the British Union's integrity, William Gilmore Simms found himself engaged in a similar controversy over Union jurisdiction – in Simms's case, the jurisdiction of the US federal Union over his home town of Charleston, South Carolina. As Editor of the Charleston City Gazette in 1831, Simms published a July 4 paper featuring his poem “Union and Freedom,” a work that aligns the revolutionary liberation from British colonial rule with the continued sovereignty of the American Union:

And dear be the freedom they won for our nation,

And firm be the Union that freedom secures;

Let no parricide hand seek to pluck from its station,

The flag that streams forth in its pride from our shores;

May no son of our soil,

In inglorious toil,

Assail the bright emblem that floats on our view;

Let not that standard quail,

Let not those stripes grow pale,

Take not one star from our banner of blue.