A Place Apart: British Travelers on the Antebellum American South

Through the examination of travel texts written by British travelers to the antebellum American South, this dissertation explores the complex relationship between the British traveler and the region with a view to discovering how the South functioned as a uniquely transatlantic place. It argues that British travelers to the United States in the years before the American Civil War consistently create the South in their travelogues as a place apart from the rest of North America. Their reactions to Southern places and people clearly distinguish it as not so much a region of the young republic across the Atlantic as an entity unto itself, one which in many respects sits between Britain and the United States and which in others appears wholly apart from both. In doing so, these writers create the American South as a truly transatlantic place, one situated at the nexus of transatlantic routes of economic, cultural, and political exchange and which, as a result, reflects the complex history of the Atlantic world. But the travel narratives of British visitors to the South do more than situate the region geopolitically. They reveal the South as a manifestation of a transatlantic moment centuries in the making, one which acts as a locus for British anxieties about such weighty issues as racial and national purity, moral and physical disease, the fixity of gender roles, and the security of class position.;In summary, this research addresses the question: how did British travelers through their travel narratives create the American South as a transatlantic place, and what does this reveal about British cultural concerns and priorities of the period?...