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Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, &c., in the First Half-century of the Republic
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
- GenresHumor
228 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1835
2 people are currently reading
81 people want to read
About the author
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
58 books3 followersAugustus Baldwin Longstreet (September 22, 1790-July 9, 1870) was an American lawyer, minster, educator, and humorist, known for his book Georgia Scenes.
Longstreet was born in Augusta, Georgia, a son of the inventor William Longstreet. He graduated at Yale University in 1813, studied law in Litchfield, Connecticut, and was admitted to the bar in Richmond County, Georgia. He soon moved and rose to eminence as a lawyer in Greensboro, Georgia. He represented Greene County in the state legislature in 1821, and in 1822 became a district judge in Ocmulgee. After several years as a judge, he declined re-election and resumed his legal practice in Augusta, did editorial work, and established the Sentinel, which soon merged with the Chronicle (1838). In 1838, he became a Methodist minister. During this period of his ministry, the town was visited with yellow fever, but he remained at his post, ministering to the sick and dying.
Longstreet was born in Augusta, Georgia, a son of the inventor William Longstreet. He graduated at Yale University in 1813, studied law in Litchfield, Connecticut, and was admitted to the bar in Richmond County, Georgia. He soon moved and rose to eminence as a lawyer in Greensboro, Georgia. He represented Greene County in the state legislature in 1821, and in 1822 became a district judge in Ocmulgee. After several years as a judge, he declined re-election and resumed his legal practice in Augusta, did editorial work, and established the Sentinel, which soon merged with the Chronicle (1838). In 1838, he became a Methodist minister. During this period of his ministry, the town was visited with yellow fever, but he remained at his post, ministering to the sick and dying.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 20, 2022
The Georgia stories set forth by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet in his 1835 collection Georgia Scenes are raw, wild, raucous, and often violent; and while one must often read these tales with a decided sense of historical context, they can provide some useful insights to the student of 19th-century Southern literature.
Longstreet, a native of Augusta, Georgia, followed in many ways the characteristic path of an antebellum “Southern gentleman.” Educated at Yale University, he became a successful lawyer, and then a judge. He also took on leadership positions in higher education, serving as president of four different colleges and universities across the South. He established an Augusta newspaper, and became a Methodist minister. And in his (no doubt limited) spare time, he composed and published in Augusta newspapers a series of short stories that were eventually collected and published as Georgia Scenes.
Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes stories can perhaps be best understood in terms of the genre of what historians of American literature often refer to as “Southwestern humor.” While it may sound strange to a modern reader to hear Georgia referred to as “Southwestern,” it is important to remember that Georgia had its beginnings as a frontier colony; and Nancy Griffith’s study Humor of the Old Southwest (1964) chronicles how, wherever Southern culture combined with a sense of a wild and only-partially-civilized frontier – in locales that ranged, depending on the era, from the Carolinas to Texas – a form of literature grew up that depended for its humorous effect upon harsh interactions between and among rough-and-ready frontier characters.
Georgia Scenes was published near the beginning of this literary movement, and the stories in the collection exemplify well what made them popular with many 19th-century American readers. It is possible that the best-known tale in the collection is “The Fight.” The story, frequently included in anthologies of Southern literature, tells how Billy Stallings and Bob Durham, good friends who are also known to the “the very best men in the county” because “they could flog any other two men in the county”, end up battling each other in an exceedingly violent fight.
A sallow little man of the community, one Ransy Sniffle (great name, that), takes it upon himself to try to turn these two community champions against one another, as “There was nothing on this earth which delighted Ransy so much as a fight.” Eventually, Ransy manages to engineer a situation whereby Bob comes to believe that Bill has insulted Bob’s wife; and quicker than you can say “Southern honor,” the fight is arranged, and the whole community turns out to watch.
Longstreet puts great emphasis on the violence of the fight and the physical trauma that Bill and Bob inflict upon one another:
I looked, and saw that Bob had entirely lost his left ear and a large piece from his left cheek. His right eye was a little discolored, and the blood flowed profusely from his wounds.
Bill presented a hideous spectacle. About a third of his nose, at the lower extremity, was bit off, and his face so swelled and bruised that it was difficult to discover in it anything of the human visage, much more the fine features which he carried into the ring.
Once the fight has ended, the narrator affects to offer a moral denunciation the spectacle that he has just set forth in such elaborate detail:
Thanks to the Christian religion, to schools, colleges, and benevolent associations, such scenes of barbarism and cruelty as that which I have been just describing are now of rare occurrence, though they may still be occasionally met with in some of the new counties. Wherever they prevail, they are a disgrace to the community. The peace officers who countenance them deserve a place in the penitentiary.
Yet the narrator doth protest too much, methinks. Think about how a fight always drew a crowd on the recess ground at your school, or at the local pub or bar. Consider how, until comparably recent times, heavyweight professional boxing was a global spectacle that entranced audiences of millions. Longstreet knows that human beings are drawn to the raw, atavistic drama of a fight. It’s not a positive or appealing aspect of human nature, but we all know it’s there.
“The Ball” is one of the more artfully crafted stories in this collection. Longstreet is clearly having great fun setting forth the tale’s narrator as a fussy, puritanical sort who opens this story of a dance ball by declaring that “The waltz would have crimsoned the cheek of every young lady who attended a ball in my day” and adds that “I am happy to say that the waltz has met with very little encouragement in Georgia as yet.”
The narrator, recounting a decade-old visit to the city, provides to the reader a good deal of interesting and valuable information regarding how a dance ball would unfold in those days. The gallant young men and fair young ladies maneuver with as much calculation as one would have seen in a Florentine court of Machiavelli’s time; it is all quite amusing.
But things turn serious – and the threat of violence, a constant theme in Longstreet’s stories, emerges – when a young lady’s machinations at the dance cause a misunderstanding between two young men named Crouch and Noozle. The eventual outcome is a quite unnecessary duel between two young men who are actually good friends. “[T]he principals met; and Crouch shot Noozle, in due form and according to the latest fashion, through the knees. I went to see him after he had received his wound, and, poor fellow, he suffered dreadful tortures. So much, said I, for a young lady’s lingering from a ball an hour too long, in order to make herself conspicuous.”
One of the stories that may work best for modern readers is “The Fox Hunt” – in large part because of the astute way in which Longstreet lampoons a “sport” that has become more and more widely associated with elitism, vanity, and casual cruelty. The story’s narrator looks back ruefully on how English poet William Somerville’s pastoral poem “The Chace” (1735) filled him “with an irrepressible curiosity to experience [the] thrilling enjoyments” of a fox hunt. When he is actually invited to participate in a fox hunt, however, he quickly gains a sense that neither the hunters nor their hounds know terribly well what they are doing; and the cold of the day, combined with the refractory behavior of his horse, disabuses him of all notions regarding the “romance” of fox-hunting:
How could I have so far taken leave of my senses as to promise myself any pleasure from such a jaunt as this! It is extremely doubtful whether we shall start a fox; and if we should, what are the cries of twenty hounds to three or four hours’ exposure, without even an overcoat, upon such a piercing morning as this? And wherein will the cry differ from that of the same pack in pursuit of a rabbit on a fine, sunny day? And why seek amusement in the torture of a poor, unoffending animal? In this country, at least, I never heard of a single loss from a farmyard which could be fairly traced to the fox – not even of a goose, much less of a lamb. My rest broken, my health jeoparded, and my immediate suffering excruciating! Folly! Madness in the extreme!
Spoiler alert: the fox gets away, on this occasion at least.
Author Longstreet supported slavery, secession, and the Confederacy (his nephew was the Confederate general James Longstreet), and he lived to see the end of his Old South world. It should be no surprise, therefore, that his depictions of African American characters are, to say the least, lacking.
Georgia Scenes may be of greatest interest to the student of Southern U.S. literature – particularly in terms of the way Longstreet’s pioneering work in the then-new genre of Southwestern humor looks ahead to the work of later and more important Southern writers. The broad, sensual, often-violent physical comedy of works like Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) or William Faulkner’s The Reivers (1962) has some of its literary antecedents in Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes.
Longstreet, a native of Augusta, Georgia, followed in many ways the characteristic path of an antebellum “Southern gentleman.” Educated at Yale University, he became a successful lawyer, and then a judge. He also took on leadership positions in higher education, serving as president of four different colleges and universities across the South. He established an Augusta newspaper, and became a Methodist minister. And in his (no doubt limited) spare time, he composed and published in Augusta newspapers a series of short stories that were eventually collected and published as Georgia Scenes.
Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes stories can perhaps be best understood in terms of the genre of what historians of American literature often refer to as “Southwestern humor.” While it may sound strange to a modern reader to hear Georgia referred to as “Southwestern,” it is important to remember that Georgia had its beginnings as a frontier colony; and Nancy Griffith’s study Humor of the Old Southwest (1964) chronicles how, wherever Southern culture combined with a sense of a wild and only-partially-civilized frontier – in locales that ranged, depending on the era, from the Carolinas to Texas – a form of literature grew up that depended for its humorous effect upon harsh interactions between and among rough-and-ready frontier characters.
Georgia Scenes was published near the beginning of this literary movement, and the stories in the collection exemplify well what made them popular with many 19th-century American readers. It is possible that the best-known tale in the collection is “The Fight.” The story, frequently included in anthologies of Southern literature, tells how Billy Stallings and Bob Durham, good friends who are also known to the “the very best men in the county” because “they could flog any other two men in the county”, end up battling each other in an exceedingly violent fight.
A sallow little man of the community, one Ransy Sniffle (great name, that), takes it upon himself to try to turn these two community champions against one another, as “There was nothing on this earth which delighted Ransy so much as a fight.” Eventually, Ransy manages to engineer a situation whereby Bob comes to believe that Bill has insulted Bob’s wife; and quicker than you can say “Southern honor,” the fight is arranged, and the whole community turns out to watch.
Longstreet puts great emphasis on the violence of the fight and the physical trauma that Bill and Bob inflict upon one another:
I looked, and saw that Bob had entirely lost his left ear and a large piece from his left cheek. His right eye was a little discolored, and the blood flowed profusely from his wounds.
Bill presented a hideous spectacle. About a third of his nose, at the lower extremity, was bit off, and his face so swelled and bruised that it was difficult to discover in it anything of the human visage, much more the fine features which he carried into the ring.
Once the fight has ended, the narrator affects to offer a moral denunciation the spectacle that he has just set forth in such elaborate detail:
Thanks to the Christian religion, to schools, colleges, and benevolent associations, such scenes of barbarism and cruelty as that which I have been just describing are now of rare occurrence, though they may still be occasionally met with in some of the new counties. Wherever they prevail, they are a disgrace to the community. The peace officers who countenance them deserve a place in the penitentiary.
Yet the narrator doth protest too much, methinks. Think about how a fight always drew a crowd on the recess ground at your school, or at the local pub or bar. Consider how, until comparably recent times, heavyweight professional boxing was a global spectacle that entranced audiences of millions. Longstreet knows that human beings are drawn to the raw, atavistic drama of a fight. It’s not a positive or appealing aspect of human nature, but we all know it’s there.
“The Ball” is one of the more artfully crafted stories in this collection. Longstreet is clearly having great fun setting forth the tale’s narrator as a fussy, puritanical sort who opens this story of a dance ball by declaring that “The waltz would have crimsoned the cheek of every young lady who attended a ball in my day” and adds that “I am happy to say that the waltz has met with very little encouragement in Georgia as yet.”
The narrator, recounting a decade-old visit to the city, provides to the reader a good deal of interesting and valuable information regarding how a dance ball would unfold in those days. The gallant young men and fair young ladies maneuver with as much calculation as one would have seen in a Florentine court of Machiavelli’s time; it is all quite amusing.
But things turn serious – and the threat of violence, a constant theme in Longstreet’s stories, emerges – when a young lady’s machinations at the dance cause a misunderstanding between two young men named Crouch and Noozle. The eventual outcome is a quite unnecessary duel between two young men who are actually good friends. “[T]he principals met; and Crouch shot Noozle, in due form and according to the latest fashion, through the knees. I went to see him after he had received his wound, and, poor fellow, he suffered dreadful tortures. So much, said I, for a young lady’s lingering from a ball an hour too long, in order to make herself conspicuous.”
One of the stories that may work best for modern readers is “The Fox Hunt” – in large part because of the astute way in which Longstreet lampoons a “sport” that has become more and more widely associated with elitism, vanity, and casual cruelty. The story’s narrator looks back ruefully on how English poet William Somerville’s pastoral poem “The Chace” (1735) filled him “with an irrepressible curiosity to experience [the] thrilling enjoyments” of a fox hunt. When he is actually invited to participate in a fox hunt, however, he quickly gains a sense that neither the hunters nor their hounds know terribly well what they are doing; and the cold of the day, combined with the refractory behavior of his horse, disabuses him of all notions regarding the “romance” of fox-hunting:
How could I have so far taken leave of my senses as to promise myself any pleasure from such a jaunt as this! It is extremely doubtful whether we shall start a fox; and if we should, what are the cries of twenty hounds to three or four hours’ exposure, without even an overcoat, upon such a piercing morning as this? And wherein will the cry differ from that of the same pack in pursuit of a rabbit on a fine, sunny day? And why seek amusement in the torture of a poor, unoffending animal? In this country, at least, I never heard of a single loss from a farmyard which could be fairly traced to the fox – not even of a goose, much less of a lamb. My rest broken, my health jeoparded, and my immediate suffering excruciating! Folly! Madness in the extreme!
Spoiler alert: the fox gets away, on this occasion at least.
Author Longstreet supported slavery, secession, and the Confederacy (his nephew was the Confederate general James Longstreet), and he lived to see the end of his Old South world. It should be no surprise, therefore, that his depictions of African American characters are, to say the least, lacking.
Georgia Scenes may be of greatest interest to the student of Southern U.S. literature – particularly in terms of the way Longstreet’s pioneering work in the then-new genre of Southwestern humor looks ahead to the work of later and more important Southern writers. The broad, sensual, often-violent physical comedy of works like Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) or William Faulkner’s The Reivers (1962) has some of its literary antecedents in Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes.
April 8, 2008
If you don't give your own book five stars, who will?
May 5, 2011
This is a wonderful edition and has been a great resource for my research in language variation, linguistic applications to literature, 19th-century American literature and culture, and language and masculinity. Bonus: The /Georgia Scenes/ publication history included in this volume opened lines of inquiry I had not previously thought about. Used it in researching an article a few years ago and just returned to it for a new project. Love this book.
September 18, 2017
This collection of stories, ostensibly gleaned from the author's time in rural Georgia from the 1810s to the 1830s, perfect captures the rough-and-ready joys and the down-to-earth foibles which defined the common folk of Georgia in that's states earliest history. With remarkable wit, heart, and verisimilitude, Augustus B. Longstreet has captured the spirit of an age in Georgia Scenes.
Originally published as short stories in local newspapers, Georgia Scenes consists of 19 tales of life on the Georgia frontier, firmly nestled in the genre of "Old Southwest" humor. Ribald and riveting, folksy and fascinating, these stories encompass a county dance to a fox hunt and deal with everything from marital bliss to early public schooling. Longstreet perfectly captures the eccentricity and local color which defined frontier Georgia, and the legacy of his book will be the legacy of a lost era.
This particular edition, by the Beehive Foundation press of Savannah, is beautifully bound and features illustrations from the 1840 edition. While the introduction is enlightening and very well-written, one wishes only that this work were annotated, preferably on the scale of a critical edition. Further information about historical allusions, literary references, and biographical details would have helped to situate both Longstreet and his stories in a more concrete historical context.
The stories themselves, however, shine with the same timeless wit and warmth which made them a smash hit at their publication. I would recommend Georgia Scenes to any fans of Southern folk literature and aficionados of Georgia literature in particular.
Originally published as short stories in local newspapers, Georgia Scenes consists of 19 tales of life on the Georgia frontier, firmly nestled in the genre of "Old Southwest" humor. Ribald and riveting, folksy and fascinating, these stories encompass a county dance to a fox hunt and deal with everything from marital bliss to early public schooling. Longstreet perfectly captures the eccentricity and local color which defined frontier Georgia, and the legacy of his book will be the legacy of a lost era.
This particular edition, by the Beehive Foundation press of Savannah, is beautifully bound and features illustrations from the 1840 edition. While the introduction is enlightening and very well-written, one wishes only that this work were annotated, preferably on the scale of a critical edition. Further information about historical allusions, literary references, and biographical details would have helped to situate both Longstreet and his stories in a more concrete historical context.
The stories themselves, however, shine with the same timeless wit and warmth which made them a smash hit at their publication. I would recommend Georgia Scenes to any fans of Southern folk literature and aficionados of Georgia literature in particular.
February 2, 2017
All of these tales have great moments of humor, though some on the whole miss as much as they hit (for modern readers). "The Dance," "The Ball," "The Gander Pulling," and "The Debating Society" are my favorites, great from start to finish.
October 15, 2022
3.5⭐
Longstreet's Georgia Scenes serves as an historical glimpse into the manners and morals practiced throughout all levels of Georgian society in the early 1800s. Not all of Longstreet's stories were based on true events, he claimed that it would be difficult to a find a word in his book that was not 'strictly Georgian.' Though Longstreet would later be ordained a Methodist minister and serve as president of several southern colleges, he is best known for documenting rural Georgian life and inaugurating the literary style of old Southwest humor that Mark Twain would later make famous. https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/lon....
Introduction by B. R. McElderry, Jr. ✔
Preface to the First Edition ✔
Georgia Theatrics ✔
The Dance ✔
The Horse-Swap ✔
A Native Georgian ✔
The Fight ✔
The Song ✔
The Turn Out ✔
The "Charming Creature" as a Wife ✔
The Gander Pulling ✔
The Ball ✔
The Mother and her Child ✔
The Debating Society ✔
The Militia Drill ✔
The Turf ✔
An Interesting Interview ✔
The Fox Hunt ✔
The Wax- Works ✔
Sage Conversation ✔
The Shooting-Match ✔
Longstreet's Georgia Scenes serves as an historical glimpse into the manners and morals practiced throughout all levels of Georgian society in the early 1800s. Not all of Longstreet's stories were based on true events, he claimed that it would be difficult to a find a word in his book that was not 'strictly Georgian.' Though Longstreet would later be ordained a Methodist minister and serve as president of several southern colleges, he is best known for documenting rural Georgian life and inaugurating the literary style of old Southwest humor that Mark Twain would later make famous. https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/lon....
Introduction by B. R. McElderry, Jr. ✔
Preface to the First Edition ✔
Georgia Theatrics ✔
The Dance ✔
The Horse-Swap ✔
A Native Georgian ✔
The Fight ✔
The Song ✔
The Turn Out ✔
The "Charming Creature" as a Wife ✔
The Gander Pulling ✔
The Ball ✔
The Mother and her Child ✔
The Debating Society ✔
The Militia Drill ✔
The Turf ✔
An Interesting Interview ✔
The Fox Hunt ✔
The Wax- Works ✔
Sage Conversation ✔
The Shooting-Match ✔
September 8, 2023
Picked this up at the public library and had fun reading through the short stories- I sat on my porch imagining most of them taking place in Folkston haha. It was cool getting a little glimpse into what life on the Georgia Frontier was like and proved to me that Georgians have forever been weird.
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January 25, 2024another book for southern studies 😛
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August 26, 2024In particular, the short story “The Horse Swap”
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews