For most of its brief three-year existence, it was edited by the young poet Paul Hamilton Hayne. Russell's would eventually be acclaimed as one of the finest literary periodicals to appear in the Antebellum South. But, simultaneously, most scholars also consider it a chauvinistic, narrowly sectional journal devoted to the defense of Southern institutions, mainly slavery, and to the expression of Southern ideas. What is not widely recognized is that Hayne significantly altered the original editorial policy, making the magazine more literary, less concerned with political and sectional matters and generally less hostile and abrasive towards Northern men and publications than was the case for most Southern periodicals at the time. Sectionalism is an important theme in the magazine. Hayne himself believed in both slavery and in secession. But most of his magazine's contents is concerned with other things, particularly the more "peaceful realms of literature" that served as an escape from what Hayne saw as the sordid and self-serving politics of his time, both North and South.
While most of the newspaper and periodical press of the South was becoming
aggressively and insolently hostile to all things Northern, he continued
to hope and call for a universal brotherhood of all practitioners and lovers
of art and literature, regardless of how impractical or unrealistic such
a hope might have been in such turbulent times.
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Last updated: March 9, 1998.
Comments to: Communication Department
