Thomas Nelson Page

Page's most notable works include The Burial of the Guns and In Ole Virginia.

• Born — 23 April 1853 • Birthplace — Oakland, Montpelier, Virginia, U.S. • Died — 1 November 1922 • Place of death — Oakland, Montpelier, Virginia, U.S. • Resting Place — Rock Creek Cemetery Washington, D.C., U.S. • Spouse — Florence Lathrop Field • Relatives — Anne Elizabeth Wilson

Page was born on one of the Nelson family's plantations, Oakland, near the village of Beaverdam in Hanover County, Virginia. He was the son to John Page, a lawyer and a plantation owner, and Elizabeth Burwell (Nelson). He was a scion of the prominent Nelson and Page families, each First Families of Virginia. Although he was from once-wealthy lineage, after the American Civil War, which began when he was only 8 years old, his parents and their relatives were largely impoverished during Reconstruction and his teenage years. In 1869, he entered Washington College, known now as Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia when Robert E. Lee was president of the college. In Page's later literary works, Robert E. Lee would come to serve as the model figure of Southern Heroism. Page left Washington College before graduation for financial reasons after three years, but continued to desire an education specifically in law. To earn money to pay for his degree, Page tutored the children of his cousins in Kentucky. From 1873 to 1874, he was enrolled in the law school of the University of Virginia. At Washington College and thereafter at UVA, Nelson was a member of the fraternity of Delta Psi, (St. Anthony Hall). In 1890, Page participated in the organizational meetings that led to the creation of the Virginia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution (Virginia SAR). At the February 28 conference in Washington, D.C., he was elected the Society’s first Secretary, and he was present when the Virginia Society was formally chartered in Richmond on July 7, 1890.

Admitted to the Virginia Bar Association, he practiced as a lawyer in Richmond between 1876 and 1893, and also began his writing career. In 1893, Page, who had become disillusioned with the Southern legal system, gave up his practice entirely and moved with his wife to Washington, D.C. There, he wrote eighteen books that were compiled and published in 1912. Page popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing, which told of an idealized version of life before the Civil War, with contented slaves working for beloved masters and their families. Page viewed the Antebellum South as a representation of moral purity, and often vilified the reforms of the Gilded Age as a sign of moral decline. His 1887 collection of short stories, In Ole Virginia, is Page's quintessential work, providing a depiction of the Antebellum South. His most well-known short-story from that collection was "Marse Chan". "Marse Chan" was popularized because of Page's ability to capture southern dialect. Another short-story collection of his is entitled The Burial of the Guns (1894). As a result of his literary success, Page was popular amongst the Capital elite, and was regularly invited to socialize with politicians from around the country. During the first quarter of the 20th century, he founded a library in the Sycamore Tavern structure near Montpelier, Virginia, in memory of his wife, Florence Lathrop Page. Under President Woodrow Wilson, Page was appointed as U.S. ambassador to Italy for six years between 1913 and 1919. There he supported the Czechoslovak Legion in Italy. Despite being untrained in Italian and having little experience in governmental affairs, Page was determined to do a good job. He eventually learned Italian, formed beneficial relationships with Italian government officials, and accurately reported on the Italian state during World War I. Page managed to maintain and improve American-Italian relations during World War I, and provided a sympathetic ear to the Italian and Triple Entente cause in the U.S. government. After a disagreement with President Wilson over the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, in which he argued for increased Italian benefits, Page resigned his post in 1919. His book entitled Italy and the World War (1920) is a memoir of his service there. After returning to his home in Oakland, Virginia, Page continued to write for the remainder of his years.

• Illustration — Illustration from Marse Chan: The slave boy Sam, the narrator of the story, "is allowed to hold his newborn “master” while his owner and a dozen other faithful slaves look on in admiration." • Illustration — Thomas Nelson Page • Illustration — Thomas Nelson Page in 1916. Page's postbellum fiction featured a nostalgic view of the South in step with what is termed Lost Cause ideology. Emphasizing the element of noblesse oblige within the historical reality of slavery, enslaved people are depicted as faithful, happy and simple, slotted into a paternalistic society. For example, the formerly enslaved person in "Marse Chan" is uneducated, speaks phonetically, and has unrelenting admiration for his former master. The gentry are noble and principled, with fealty to country and to chivalry—they seem like knights of a different age. The strain epitomized by Page would carry through the postwar era, cropping up again in art with films like The Birth of a Nation. The ideology and thoughts that appear in Page's writing and in Southern ideology are no mere simplistic, archaic world-view; they are part of a complex history that has informed, for worse and for better, the evolution of the Southern mind to 1940. Thomas Nelson Page lamented that the slavery-era "good old darkies" had been replaced by the "new issue" (Blacks born after slavery) whom he described as "lazy, thriftless, intemperate, insolent, dishonest, and without the most rudimentary elements of morality" (pp. 80, 163). Page, who helped popularize the images of cheerful and devoted Mammies and Sambos in his early books, became one of the first writers to introduce a literary black brute. In 1898 he published Red Rock, a Reconstruction novel, with the heinous figure of Moses, a loathsome and sinister Black politician. Moses tried to rape a white woman: "He gave a snarl of rage and sprang at her like a wild beast" (pp. 356–358). The depiction of rape using animal metaphors was a common feature of American sentimental literature. He was later lynched for "a terrible crime". Page dealt with the morality of lynching by acquitting the mob from any guilt, holding, instead, the supposedly debased Blacks responsible for their own violent executions. In his 1904 essay, The Negro: The Southerner's Problem, he advocated for the white man's right to lynch: Likewise, Thomas Nelson Page complained that African American leaders should cease "talk of social equality that inflames the ignorant Negro," and instead, work to stop "the crime of ravishing and murdering women and children."

He was married to Anne Seddon Bruce on July 28, 1886. She died on December 21, 1888, of a throat hemorrhage. He remarried on June 6, 1893, to Florence Lathrop Field, a daughter of Jedediah Hyde Lathrop and the widowed sister-in-law of retailer Marshall Field (her husband Henry Field had died less than three years earlier). Page's second wife Florence was a member of the prestigious Barbour family, making Page a member by marriage. Their wedding was held at the Elmhurst, Illinois Byrd's Nest estate of Thomas Barbour Bryan and his wife Jennie Byrd Bryan (Page). Thomas Barbour Bryan was Florence's maternal uncle, while Jennie Byrd Bryan was distant cousins with Mr. Page (meaning that the Bryans' children –Jennie and Thomas– were both distant relatives of both Nelson Page, and first cousins of his second wife). Page was an activist in stimulating the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities to mobilize to save historical sites at Yorktown and elsewhere, especially in the Historic Triangle of Virginia, from loss to development. He was involved in gaining Federal funding to build a seawall at Jamestown in 1900, protecting a site where the remains of James Fort were later discovered by archaeologists working on the Jamestown Rediscovery project. He died in 1922 at the age of 69 at Oakland, Virginia in Hanover County, Virginia.