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Laurence Massillon Keitt: Politics as Epic Poem

In February 1857, a general melee broke out on the floor of the House of Representatives. For three days the legislators had been engaged in a heated debate over the admission of Kansas as a slave state. The Buchanan administration had rammed the bill through the Senate with relative ease, but House forces were evenly matched and perennially ill-humored. One representative captured the general mood when he suggested that each man check his sidearm at the door -- he was only half-kidding. On the third day of the debate, opposition forces gained an unexpected advantage -- an unusual number of dinners and dances had seriously depleted the Democratic ranks. Frantic, Alexander Stephens sent messengers to the likely salons to round up the wayward congressmen. Most probably, Laurence Keitt was among these reinforcements. His passion for politics was equaled only by his passion for fashionable life, and he was one of the city's most notorious gallants. Regardless, by two in the morning the "leader of the Palmetto State's young chivalry" had dragged himself into the House where he lay sprawled across two tables, half-drunk and half-asleep, one of his shoes having fallen to the floor. The Republican floor leader, Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania, was conferring with opposition-minded Democrats on that party's side of the House when John Quitman of Mississippi offered another in a long line of silly motions designed to forestall a vote. Tired, frustrated, and not a little belligerent himself, Grow objected "with considerable tartness" to such parliamentary pettiness. Apparently the objection came as an unwelcome intrusion to the napping Keitt -- with eyes still closed, he inclined his head just long enough to growl, "if you are going to object, go back to your own side of the house." "This is a free hall," Grow answered the prostrate congressman, "and I have the right to object from any part of it when I choose." At this Keitt was up in a flash, fumbling for his footwear. "Wait until I put my shoe on, you Black Republican puppy," he snarled at Grow, "and we will see about that." Slightly amused, Grow held his ground, claiming he would be damned before some "nigger driver" fresh off the plantation would crack a whip about his ears and tell him where or where not to stand in the House of Representatives. Keitt, normally adept at such verbal sparrings, was at an unusual loss for words, and instead launched himself at the defiant Republican, meaning to choke him. Accounts vary dramatically as to what happened next. Republican papers and Grow partisans claim the well-proportioned congressman caught Keitt with a hard right, knocking him to the floor. Keitt backers claim Grow's fist went wide of the mark and that Keitt had "merely tripped." Regardless, their tussle set off a general melee in front of the speaker's podium in which dozens of congressmen fell upon each other, one wielding a heavy spittoon. The older representatives were just beginning to get wheezy when Cadwallader Washburn of Wisconsin grabbed William Barksdale of Mississippi by the hair, preparing to deliver him a heavy blow to the face. Unfortunately Barksdale's wig came loose in Washburn's hand and the startled Wisconsin representative swung at nothing but air. Convulsed by laughter, the rioters attempted to regain their composure as the embarrassed Barksdale reacquired and repositioned his crumpled hair. The next day, Keitt apologized for the incident, admitted he was the aggressor, and claimed that any blame belonged to him alone. But even Keitt's friends shook their heads at his conduct, confirmed in what they had always known about the impetuous Congressman. "I like Keitt for many things," William Trescott told his friend Miles, "he is frank in his nature, honest in his politics, and I believe true to his work," but "he has sadly depreciated the old Carolina standard…and I see no hope of [his] improving." Indeed, Trescott noted, men like Keitt make me apprehensive "of some new mortification whenever I hear that a South Carolinian has been distinguishing himself."

It is for incidents like this one that Laurence Keitt has earned the sobriquet, "Harry Hotspur of the South." There is much in his career to justify the title. Born near St. Matthews, South Carolina, in 1824, Keitt seems to have had a rollicking and happy youth. Of his earliest boyhood we know only that he was "famous for foot races, the gift of gab, and for never wincing when…flogged." Still they are important details. Keitt was a child of privilege, at ease with his mind and body, self-assured enough to take punishment stoically, even proudly, self-aware enough to realize that if he wanted to be on the administrative he would have to be on the receiving end of some of life's hard knocks. (These would be important lessons for a man whose life-long philosophy was "if the world buffets you, buffet it back.") And like many of his rank and region his natural brass would be given a little polish at South Carolina College where he threw himself into the proceedings and excesses of the Euphradian debating society.

By his own admission Keitt entered politics a "mere boy," elected at 24 to the Orangeburg district statehouse seat by a constituency that almost to a man disagreed with his political viewpoint. Keitt, however, believed that it was precisely this audacity that "drew the people" to him and gave him a hold upon them greater than any of his predecessors. From his very first canvass, then, Keitt learned never to "stoop to a mamby-pamby dalliance" with public opinion before making up his mind. "I assume," he claimed, "that my position is as much to teach…as to be taught.…[and] I have never stopped to inquire, when a vital principle was at stake, whether the multitude would think as I did or not." Keitt would give speeches in his district -- "even the gods of old sometimes showed themselves," he noted -- but he would not cavil or grovel with the "melodramatic flirtation" of the cringing office-seeker. "No dreamy dalliance, no sated worship, pampered by the spicy condiments of whim or fancy will do in this life," Keitt noted, "life, in the very texture of the word, means struggle, motion, purpose, object." From his first day in politics, Keitt's object was the secession of the South from the United States.

Once in Washington, however, Keitt threw himself as much into socializing as politicking. The city had an infectious energy that matched Keitt's own. Parties were "as thick as leaves in Autumn" and the ballrooms were always "full of Belles." The young congressman was a "favourite…among the ladies" and a constant companion of Buchanan's niece, Harriet Lane, who oversaw all White House social functions. "In reality," Keitt marveled of Washington, "this is a great place; I never saw any one who got tired of it." While some men of his age were on their way west, preparing to cut their own swath out of the American dream, Keitt thought the frontier held out only the scrubby alternatives of hardscrabble living or ignominious dying. For his part, Keitt would stay in Washington, where "whoever likes gaiety can have enough of it" and the "rich geniality" of the social scene could not help but fascinate a man who could "make a figure" of himself.

To be sure, Laurence Keitt cut quite a figure in Washington. As an orator, he was nearly unmatched, with a "rapid and fervent manner" that was "riveting," "irresistible." His voice was deep and powerful, and when he took up the subject of abolitionism (which he did gratuitously) he paced around his desk, scattering papers before him "like people in a panic" and pounding "the innocent mahogany" until pens, pencils, documents, and even "John Adam's extracts shuddered under the blows." Accounts of his forensic displays tend to be indulgent in their detail -- not so much from partiality as from the smug satisfaction of the writer who has bumped into a walking archetype. "[His is a] pyrotechnic style," remarked a writer for Harper's Weekly. "His speeches are melo-dramatically effective, made up of the entrances and exits of ideas that sparkle vividly while they are on the stage and go off in a tumult of applause, leaving an intoxicating sense of beauty and of daring, yet nothing distinct but a metaphor or a bold antithesis." Is the reporter describing Keitt's speeches or Keitt himself? Hasn't he conflated the two? Isn't he implying that Keitt was himself melodramatically effective, strutting his hour upon the stage, beautiful and daring, sparkling and vivid, but ultimately just a bold antithesis? This sort of thing happened regularly to Keitt. He was the fiery Southern orator perfectly essentialized in the qualities of a single man, and one suspects that if had he not existed he would have been invented by a society that had given him the uncommon license to stand as his own caricature.

The truth, though, is that Laurence Keitt was invented, first by a young man playing at politics, then by a constituency living vicariously through his frothy indignation, finally by historians who have always been content to regard him as his contemporaries regarded him -- the fire-eater essentialized. Undoubtedly, he deserves his reputation as a swashbuckling secessionist. It would be difficult to find a man of the period more dedicated to the separation of North and South and impossible to find one whose rhetorical flourishes relied so regularly on the imagery of the embattled knight. However, our stereotypes of the Southern cavalier -- the honorable warrior of a doomed civilization or the laughable dandy jousting with windmills -- all tend to sell rather short the intellectual depth and motive power of the South's unique blend of chivalric traditions. Keitt's case is an excellent one. As a student at South Carolina College, only one professor earned Keitt's lasting respect -- the barely-closeted Unionist, Francis Lieber. In Lieber's class, Keitt sat among the busts of intellectual giants and watched transfixed as the armies of darkness and light moved across Lieber's vast collection of maps. In the Euphradian debating society, where political questions dominated the discussion, Keitt held forth only on literary and historical subjects. Would Socrates have been justified in leaving prison when solicited by Crito? Was Coriolanus justified in fighting against his country? In truth, Keitt found the College's conservatism, its disunionism, one of its least compelling features, at least when compared to the study of Roman imperialism, Grecian intellect, and Shakespearean poesy. Keitt was in fact a romantic humanist searching not for a motion, purpose, or object but any motion, purpose, or object, so long as it corresponded with his (admittedly overblown) conception of what it meant to be a man. In Keitt's mind the qualifications for this last, august office were quite strict. Most of the politicians he met were milk-and-water types, confirmed imbeciles who moved like amiable mutes through the world, "decaying through inaction, rusting out through sloth." "Such a thing," Keitt noted, "whom Nature wrangled about in fixing his positive gender and compromised upon the neuter, has no attractions to me." True manhood did not dally or dicker, Keitt believed, but acted, and then decisively. In South Carolina this made him a secessionist, and certainly Keitt set about the role with his typical exuberance, but beyond the bravado and bluster one detects a literary and historical sensibility fueling his vision.

Keitt was somewhat obsessed, for instance, with the notion that "white men [had] occupied South Carolina" in the tenth century and that the documents to prove his contention were rotting away in some records room in Copenhagen. He suggested to the legislature that many such "memorials of our history" were languishing in European archives and requested that "some proper person be appointed to collect [them] all." When Keitt's proposal was rejected, he had the nerve to deride the legislature for being too caught up with sectional questions to dedicate proper energy to documenting the past. Even Keitt's proslavery arguments tended not so much to rest on historical justifications as to be overwhelmed by them. In a speech to the Virginia Military Institute, he set out to prove that the South would be a perfect commingling of ancient Greek and Hebrew traditions. Any enduring civilization, he claimed, rested on moral, mental, and material pillars. While the Greeks were accomplished in mental and material pursuits, they could not construct a perfect society because they had no true knowledge of God. The Hebrews, by adhering to God's word, had constructed an incredibly strong moral society, but mental and material foundations were weak. The South was in a unique position to bring the great traditions together; from the Greeks it would borrow the "instinct for Beauty" and from the Hebrews the fear of God. Forcing blacks to perform the more onerous duties necessary to any society would give the intellectual elite the freedom to go about the business of civilization building, and a standing mudsill caste would spare the South the class conflict that plagued other nations. As a proslavery argument, the speech was no different from a thousand others and, indeed, by the 1850s positive good defenses of the institution had become so reified an orator contributed only his passion and a little window dressing. But Keitt's historical superstructure was no mere rhetoric or rationalization; it was to him as important as the defense itself, perhaps more so. To understand why requires an in-depth understanding of a subject far removed from politics or slavery -- Keitt's abiding love of poetry.

On six occasions between 1851 and 1854, William Gilmore Simms delivered a series of lectures he titled, Poetry and the Practical. It was, he admitted to audiences across the South, an odd title, a seeming oxymoron. Of what practical use was poetry? Poesy, after all, was a mere "pomp of words …wandering through eternity…a vain and empty discourse…which appeals not to the common reason." And America, Simms acknowledged, had become a very practical place. For three generations it had dedicated itself to the quest for empire. Once just a motley of "little spots along the Atlantic shores," the country had spread "with the flight of an eagle…to the far waters of the Great Pacific." "We have conquered the savage nature [of] the wild forests," Simms claimed, and "have gone fearlessly forth upon the high seas, declaring them our common." "We have achieved wondrously," and have won by dint of "iron will" and "unbending earnestness" an empire for the ages. But the country had lost something along the way, Simms told his audience, and something very like its soul. Indulging its imperial appetite, America had become monstrous and engorged, with a passion only for conquest and a taste only for blood. "The nation living thus dies out and must die out," Simms claimed, when in a gluttonous paroxysm it turns on itself for a final meal. Having won an empire, the country needed now to deserve it, to earn a dominion measured not by its extent but by its beauty. And the poet could teach them how, could give them the practical advice they needed to save the country from self-destruction. The poet's arts, Simms noted, are "superior to those by which our possessions have been won." The poet can teach us to "secure what we possess…to strengthen our bulwark with Beauty and to sharpen our spears with Love." Simms understood his audience wanted to hear nothing of such trifles, but they were going to hear it, he claimed, because they had forgotten what it meant to be Beautiful and because poetry had become the most practical subject in the world.

Laurence Keitt may or may not have attended these lectures, but he undoubtedly read them. Keitt and Simms corresponded occasionally, met regularly, and shared a passion for poetry generally and Simms's work specifically. With most of South Carolina, Simms found Keitt a somewhat volatile character. "He is a good fellow," Simms noted, "but likely to flounder his Batteau in smooth waters." Keitt, on the other hand, viewed Simms with wonder, almost as a student does a stern but brilliant schoolmaster. "He is a remarkable man," Keitt wrote typically, "He has the most varied talents [and] the fullest information of any man in the state…with a generosity of spirit and a guilelessness of heart which hook him to those who know him most staunchly." Keitt, moreover, believed, and that with everything he had, that he not only understood Poetry and the Practical but lived it.

Like Simms, Keitt believed that poetry was the divine in man struggling to sing. Much of the time, of course, it did not sing very well. Most poets were mere "sonnatteers of the hour," Simms noted, "possessing but a moderate command of language…manufactur[ing] verses upon the ordinary emotions and the received commonplaces of society." Keitt concurred. "Modern poets," he claimed, "seem to me to be like David, not like Solomon. They gather and accumulate and heap up, but they cannot construct and proportion." Their problem was not a lack of talent per se, but a chronic self-involvement, a mental pettiness. "Continual introspection," Keitt noted, "is dangerous; it is what Bacon calls the merest cannibalism -- the heart eating itself up." By writing from the self alone these modern poets consumed their own humanity and their poetry became the "nightmares" and "hysterics" of the soulless. What they did not understand was that "one may learn from everything, from the mountain and the valley, from the flower and the shrub, from the bird and the insect, from any living and creeping thing in physical nature." The Greeks had understood this. By peopling the woods with divinities and the waters with nymphs, the inherent Beauty of nature had been given a form and face and substance men could touch and be touched by. Certainly this made the Greek gods more human, but it also made humans more godly, made them dream more broadly, imagine more grandly. For Keitt the Iliad and Odyssey were the "Genesis and Deuteronomy of the…indestructible Bible of Art," and provided a model for a poetry of divine and titanic majesty. The true poet, for Keitt, was not some scribbler "twist[ing] and twin[ing] arabesques of metaphysical subtlety" and was not some exorcist, chasing the ghosts and goblins that haunt men's minds. The true poet was vatic, bardic, practical, himself a living poem, a man grasping at the essence of Beauty primeval and thrusting it before his fellows.

Keitt did not muse on the subject of poetry, he did not dabble. Though he never wrote a line, Laurence Keitt is best understood as a practicing poet. His politicking was never about the campaign or the canvass, this bill or that legislation -- it was not even particularly about democracy or even secession. Rather it was about giving birth to Beauty, conceived in the solitude of the poet's mind, brought to "life and vigor and passion amid the shock and hum of men." For Keitt, America was no republican experiment, a Britain with a better constitution. America was a promise God had made to man, an epic that began in 1776 and ended when the country took its rightful place not merely among nations, but among civilizations. In other eras the poet had helped to build such civilizations through literature or history; in Keitt's era the practical poet exercised his muse in the arena of politics. "Public life…in a country like ours," he said, "is a grand and glorious field. Two hundred years ago Milton said he who would write an heroic poem must make his whole life heroic. This is equally true of our own time, and true of politics too, for politics now is our epic poem."

History, Keitt believed, was punctuated by events, by Promethean moments when the world was returned to the potter's wheel to be remolded, remade, and fired again. By 1855 the entire Atlantic community was on the brink of just such momentous change, "rocking with the throes of…august developments" that could "no more be stifled than the spirit of the earthquake." In the coming storm, lesser men would be overwhelmed. They would miss the opportunity to shape the world and, as suddenly as it had come, the drama would be over, "its agencies, like waves, rocking and rolling themselves heavily to sleep." This was the poet's moment, Keitt's moment, to marry his name "to mighty events, to mighty measures, and to an immortal future." "He who cannot stand with steady eye and…steel nerve upon the glacier of power," Keitt noted, and "lift the banner of truth and humanity above the mist and vapors and clouds of prejudice and popular passion…is not and cannot be a statesman."

To prepare himself for this glacial moment, Keitt spent the summer of 1855 at a secluded mountain resort near Greenville, South Carolina. For six weeks he received no mail or newspapers and gave no thought to politics. Instead he read six thousand pages of literature, history, metaphysics, and philosophy, comprehending them not as the student but as the "master." Keitt believed the "intellectual gladiator" needed these moments of study to exercise the bulging muscles of his mind. But Keitt was no sword-for-hire. He was, he claimed, not so much ambitious as questing; his energy was not self-serving merely but "of kin to divinity and to a higher purpose." Time was quickening, becoming elastic, the "tone of the world was changing" and Keitt would be damned if he would sit around slackjawed and let the "milk-and-water" men control the nation's destiny. "The materials of heroic life," he claimed, "were scattered all over the field of public life." Some men saw only "grass and stubble and straw, or in office only gewgaws." But the "soaring intellect" felt a "quickened pulse [and] throb of quenchless energy" at the thought that "his country [might] treasure him up as a portion of her precious heritage and remember him proudly when with jeweled brow…conquering tread and imperial stature she join[ed] the great Panthenaic procession of the nations." Near the end of his stay in Greenville, Keitt rose early to catch the sunrise. The view, he said, was magnificent. He stood "on a cliff 1100 feet perpendicular," a mountain chain surrounding him on three sides. A sea of clouds had settled in the valley and, agitated by winds, they lapped up against his precipice like waves. It was a sight Nature presented to Keitt alone, an ocean in the sky, stretching out like the unmapped waters of a great Civilization.

Laurence Keitt was, by his own admission, a "visionary and a theorist." Secession was to him but a blip in the grander becoming of the world; his ambition was epic, his aspirations colossal and grandiose. But every urge to dismiss his vision as the messianic exuberance of youth should be quelled; this man was elected to office, then re-elected, then elected again. He insulted the people, brawled on the floor of Congress, and postured himself a god -- and he usually left his audience hungry for more. Far from being held accountable to his audacity, he was elected for it. In the wake of the Sumner caning, Keitt hoped the northern men would rise en masse. If they did, he promised "the city would…float with blood." Sick of "stagnation," the prospect of a general bloodletting in the capital offered a tantalizing release. The tidy, modest revolution that had birthed the republic would not do this time; Keitt was looking for something more cathartic, wrenching. In the summer of 1856, he found it.

Susanna Sparks was, by every account, a stunning woman. One breathless newspaper editor, utterly overwhelmed by their first encounter, pronounced her "magnificent…[with] fair brow and lovely arms, a sweet glow mantles upon her cheek…a bewildering beauty flashes from her eye and encircles her" like a dream. Even the curmudgeonly editor of the Charleston Patriot seemed susceptible to her "necromancy," gazetting her every ball movement and indulging himself in paeans to her face and form. Uncommonly attractive on the outside, Sue was nevertheless an emotional wreck. She had been engaged to the son of a wealthy and prominent South Carolina family when without warning or explanation the young man had married someone else. The humiliating episode left Sparks darkly depressed and deeply distrusting of men, and she resolved thereafter to be "strong, hard, and cold." Whether Keitt was first attracted to her uncommon beauty, or biting intellect, or studied coolness, we do not know; their earliest courtship remains something of a mystery. But by December, 1854, Keitt was thinking he might be in love. He had been fond of many women, but for Sue he felt an odd sort of "electric sympathy," a spark of something divine. He resolved, however, not to confess his feelings until he could test them in "the most terrible of all trials -- the flatteries of the brilliant and the éclat of triumph." That winter he threw himself into the Washington social whirl, searching his heart thoroughly, determined to see if Sue's image faded amid the honeyed compliments of beautiful belles and the high praise of men known round the world. But whatever Washington had to offer, it did not throw even a shadow over his feelings. On March 9, 1855, "doubtingly…tremblingly," Keitt proposed.

Sparks did not accept his proposal -- nor did she reject it. Instead, she began a period of dissembling and recrimination that would last for two months. Keitt, she claimed, was a man of roving fancy, indiscreet in politics, notorious in the drawing room. If he loved her at all, it was for her beauty, and his fascination would fade so soon as he found some shiny, new bauble to pursue. She had been betrayed before, by friends and by a lover who gave her all manner of assurances. She had recovered from that heartbreak, had even grown stronger by it, but would never again surrender to mere "sentiment whipped into froth." Having studied music and painting for a year at Barhamville Academy in Columbia, Sparks was determined to give up the flighty life of the belle and continue her studies in Europe.

Keitt was crushed, but defensive, and set about his courtship with the same zeal (and many of the same tactics) he employed in politics. He sent Sparks long letters countering her every objection, drawing deeper from philosophy and literature than his own feelings. Sue was like a "mannikin boy" with "hair erect, eyeballs staring, and tickled nerves" whistling bravely by the graveyard at midnight. As soon as she conquered her fears and threw off her torpor, she would learn, as Keitt had, to shine, not "in an untutored and rough society but in the circle of the Muses and Apollo where power and fashion are constellated." He understood that she was crushed, weary, spent, and hurting, but whose fault was that? She was selling herself short to blame others for her heartache. The struggles of life were life itself; those who did not learn from them were not living but dying, slow as a tree. Keitt recognized that he was being forward to offer these observations, but believed it was exactly what she needed to hear. "Verily, Miss Sue," he told her, "I have read your nature -- may I say so? -- better than you have yourself." As for her rendering of his nature, Sue had been taunting and unfair. He did not "look upon all life as a dancing school" and was not "one of those whose life begins at 10 at night and closes in the morning at 4." Whatever he may have done or been in the past, he had given Sue "no reason for such treatment" and could not understand why she would trifle with his emotions. "I have thought, I have thought again. Again I have thought," Keitt told her -- his love was no "galvanized sentiment," he was prepared to share with her "everything that constitutes my manhood and my nature."

After two months of such importunings, the beleaguered girl reluctantly accepted Keitt's proposal, but she promised him only her presentiments of disaster and feelings of hopelessness. This was enough for Keitt. "Your letter," he claimed, "has poured upon me a brightness as gladsome to my little worth as that which streamed upon the universe when the morning stars first sang together." He understood she was still soulsick and that the "spectre" of her earlier experience would occasionally rise before them, but he promised to treat her with "patience, gentleness, forebearance, and unselfish and unmixed devotion." "That [morbid thoughts] should rise up now and then, I cannot complain of," he noted, "for the waves of the ocean still roll for a time after the storm has passed away and calmness has breathed upon its surface." "And now, dear Sue, as the flower under rude influences closes in upon its heart, enfolding there its fragrance, so would I, content with you alone, enclose you in my inner heart."

For the next year, Susanna Sparks chafed within her new confines. She postponed the wedding date twice, forgot to answer Keitt's letters, and spurned his friends and family whenever the occasion presented itself. Confronted by this barrage of insults, in the face of all her cruelties, Keitt appears to have done what he had never quite managed to do before -- he fell in love with her. His affections, he claimed, were not based on her physical beauty but on her superiority as a human being. When her eye had lost its brightness, when her hand had lost its roundness and fortune had done its worst, then he would take her all over again, as joyously and as tenderly as he had when young, as the culmination of all his life's earthly blessings. He admitted he had been presumptuous in their early courtship. He had so ably learned to read men's hearts in the political world he had thought he would be able to read hers and direct it to his will. But what he had not realized was that she was better than he was, purer and more holy. Her love was not something to win, but to be worthy of, and he dropped the speechifying and sophistry, and threw himself on her mercy. His allegiance, he said, was bound to her unalterably, as to a superior being, and though she might stab him through the heart he could never reproach her -- his love for her had become his religion, it had made him a better man.

On his way to the capitol one morning, Keitt stopped at the burned out wreck of a fellow House member's home. The owner, Colonel Benton was shuffling through some of the things, and Keitt expressed his condolences. "I care not for brick and mortar," the Colonel replied, "for earthly things; my manuscripts, which have almost become my children, I could lose too. Yes I could have lost all these if the dresses of my wife had been saved. They hung by each side of my bed, and they were the last thing I saw at night and the first at morning." It was a simple gesture, but Keitt was moved almost to tears, claiming the incident would never pass from his memory. "In him the curse and crime of selfish ambition has been mitigated and brightened" by the love of a noble woman. "Dear Sue," he wrote her after the incident, "you much mistake me if you think, even for a moment, that I am not submissive to your lightest request.…I would give my proudest hopes and my starriest ambition to win back freshness to your heart."

Taking him at his word, Sue exacted one final, staggering price -- if he were serious he would give up politics forever and move with her to Europe for as long a period as she desired. Keitt reeled, but only for a moment. Politics, he said, had always held a strong attraction for him. The trappings of office might be contemptible, but the exercise of "power, raised by the scaffolding of thought and will and suspended like [a] mighty dome in…Heaven" was the work of his very soul. "I once thought nothing on earth could tempt me from" such a life, he wrote his beloved, but "for you I will give it up wholly, completely, and forever. [For you] I will snap now, as soon as you wish it -- tomorrow -- the wand of office, carry you to Europe, and linger with you around Tumuli -- its mounds, its columns, and its ruins.…for you I will make any sacrifice, and deem it no sacrifice" whatever. Keitt was not bluffing. He told friends and colleagues he would not be returning to Washington the next term and even met with the president to determine whether there might be a diplomatic post vacant in Italy. Forced to "choose between private and public life," Keitt flung the latter aside -- "the former will be perpetual, and to me it is a safety." Soon, he promised Sue, he would transport her to Europe, plant her in any soil and in any clime she might choose, and preside over the recuperation of her heart. If, once there, "any rude blast visits you roughly, it shall be only because I cannot shield you from it. If the hand of sorrow presses heavily upon you, I shall feel its weight as painfully" because our lives will be joined together.

Everything had come easily for Laurence Keitt -- his material comfort, his charismatic good looks, his intellect and education, his career and uncompromising politics -- everything was his for the taking -- except Susanna Sparks. In her he had met a will as titanic and as immovable as his own, and what options did he have but to love her for it? He could not debate her, he could not challenge her to a duel, he could not cane her or race her for the privilege of her hand -- he could only submit. It is critical to note, however, that this submission, when it finally came, was not begrudging or bitter; rather Keitt seems to have been relieved, thankful, finally to surrender to something or someone without it costing him his manhood. "You are so much better, so much purer, so entirely holy to me," Keitt noted, "that I can scarcely bind to my soul the sacred belief that you have mingled hopes and aims with one so much inferior.…Oh Sue, how much more do I owe you than I can ever pay." But did he really owe her? The bombast and bullying of his early courting certainly warranted an apology, but did it amount to a debt? Did he owe her for ignoring his letters, for snubbing his friends, for requiring that he quit politics? No, he owed her for the opportunity she gave him to be whole, for the chance to stretch his love, exercise his weakness, and indulge his very human sympathy for surrender. "Hard struggles since I have been a boy," Keitt admitted, "in a field where rough blows are dealt, have indurated me all over save in this one point….my inner affections have become [as] preternaturally keen as my nature otherwise has become cold and self-collected." This is a remarkable insight for a man who considered self-reflection a kind of cannibalism. His love for Sue, his pursuit of her, was, by his own admission, directly related to politics. Every brutal beating he took in the political arena, every enemy he made or criticism he withstood, fed his need for the woman that might minister to that inner core, who might make him feel, by some whisper or touch, that he withstood the blows for reasons beyond his own ambition.

But does this adequately explain Keitt's willingness to give up politics forever? Not if Keitt is understood first as a fire-eater, or a politician -- not if one reads only his encomia to slavery and state's rights. But if he is understood as a man, and a man of poetic sensibility at that, the decision becomes explicable. Susan's demand did not rankle or chafe; she had given Keitt something politics had not, an opportunity to make a grand and sweeping gesture -- a moment in which time stood still and waited on his answer. Keitt was not surrendering his epic poem to Susanna, he was folding her up within it, transferring his poetic purpose from politics to romance, a distance perhaps not so very great. Granted he would never save mankind, but he might save this woman, and he had the sense he would save himself in the bargain. "You have given me an object," Keitt admitted to Sue. "My struggles were becoming aimless. I had won a crown here and a chaplet there. I had broken a sword in this fight and beaten down a castle wall in another contest, and I was becoming somewhat indifferent both to feast and fray. You have been a promethean spark and I have relumed a spirit which was slightly waning and given a brighter blaze to fires which were somewhat fitfully burning."

On July 7, 1856, the relumed Keitt received a letter from his fiancée -- she wanted to discontinue their courtship, this time indefinitely. Keitt drafted two replies, both drained of emotion. "Justice requires me to say that I trust we have met for the last time," he noted in both, "and should we ever meet again, it must be as strangers." Laurence Keitt returned to politics the following term, rededicated to the separation of North and South.