Among the Pines; or, South in Secession Time — Background and Themes

A Northern Observer in a Secessionist Household

The excerpts center on the Colonel’s plantation, where the narrator witnesses a conflict over punishment. When the driver Sam is ordered to whip the runaway Moye, the Colonel commands a hundred lashes, but Madam P—— intervenes, reducing it to twenty and later countermanding a second flogging. The narrator notes that Jim, the enslaved coachman, “had never been whipped” and that the enslaved “obeyed the lady when, which was seldom, her orders came in conflict with their master’s.” This dynamic—where the mistress’s kindness creates loyalty—is explicitly contrasted with the Colonel’s reliance on violence. The narrator’s own stance is ambiguous: he remarks that he “should have given that fellow a hundred lashes,” aligning momentarily with the Colonel, yet he also records the lady’s quiet resistance. The scene reveals a household where authority is negotiated, not absolute, and where the enslaved exercise a degree of practical agency by choosing whom to obey.

Dialogue as a Window into Racial Ideology

The Colonel’s conversations with the narrator are laced with the racial assumptions of the period. When the narrator suggests that enslaved people might benefit from attending a preacher, the Colonel replies, “You can’t make a whistle out of a pig’s tail; you can’t make a nigger into a white man.” This aphorism, delivered during a carriage ride, encapsulates a deterministic view of racial hierarchy. Yet the excerpts also show the Colonel allowing enslaved people to work on Sundays for their own profit, “as I would a white man,” a practice that complicates his stated beliefs. The narrator, for his part, does not directly challenge these statements; instead, he records them without editorializing, leaving the reader to weigh the contradictions. The dialogue thus serves as a primary vehicle for the book’s exploration of secessionist ideology, showing how it operated in everyday speech rather than in formal political debate.

The Landscape as a Stage for Conflict

The physical setting of the pine forest is more than backdrop; it shapes the narrative’s action and mood. The road to the plantation is described as “a mere opening through the pines,” with “tall trees” narrowing the passage until “scarcely width enough for a single carriage” remains. This cramped, enclosed landscape mirrors the social constraints of the plantation system. The runaway Moye uses the forest as cover, and the pursuit of him—referenced in chapter titles like “The Pursuit” and “The Negro Hunter”—turns the woods into a contested space. The narrator’s journey is repeatedly interrupted by natural obstacles: a thunderstorm, a swollen run that must be swum, and a tornado that has felled pines. These events are not merely atmospheric; they force encounters with enslaved people and poor whites, revealing a society in motion. The landscape, in Gilmore’s hands, becomes a narrative engine, propelling the observer into situations that expose the fractures of the secessionist South.

Readers approaching Among the Pines should attend to the tension between the narrator’s professed neutrality and the details he chooses to record. The book is not a straightforward novel nor a pure memoir; it is a hybrid that uses the conventions of travel writing to stage political arguments. The excerpts offer no resolution to the story of Moye or the fate of the plantation, leaving the narrative open-ended. This incompleteness is itself instructive, suggesting that Gilmore’s primary interest lay not in plot but in documenting the contradictions he observed.