The rediscovery of the South was not so much an exploration of fresh or forgotten geographical territory, as it was a new perception of the romantic human material offered by a peculiar civilization. Political and social causes had long kept the South in isolation. A few writers like Wirt, Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described various aspects of its life with grace or vivacity, but the best picture of colonial Virginia had been drawn, after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about it in books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and Frederick Law Olmsted sketched the South of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did the sons of the soil. There was no real literary public in the South for a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent upon New York and the Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon London. But within a dozen years after the close of the War and culminating in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest of Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public for these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and West, and it was the magazines and publishing-houses of New York and Boston that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus and support. It was one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of the new nation.
The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New Orleans, as revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating Old Creole Days, was recognized, not as something merely provincial in its significance, but as contributing to the infinitely variegated pattern of our national life. Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a type hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today. Miss Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed city-dwellers and country-folk alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the talent of Southern writers.