Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Ga., February 3, 1842. His parents, Robert Sampson Lanier and Mary J. Anderson, were at that time living in a small cottage on High street, the father a struggling young lawyer, and the mother a woman of much thrift and piety. There were on both sides traditions of gentility which went back to the older States of Virginia and North Carolina, and in the case of the Laniers to southern France and England. Lanier became very much interested in the study of his genealogy. He was convinced by evidence gathered from the many widely scattered branches of the family that a single family of Laniers originally lived in France, and that the fact of the name alone might with perfect security be taken as a proof of kinship. On account of their nomadic habits, due to their continual movement from place to place during two hundred years, he found it difficult to make out a complete family history. He was not, nor have his relatives and later investigators been, able to find material for the study of the Laniers in their original home. At one time he expressed a wish that President Hayes would appoint him consul to southern France. Certainly he was at home there in imagination and spirit from the time when as a boy he felt the fascination of Froissart's "Chronicles".
One of the keenest pleasures he had in later life was to discover in the Peabody Library at Baltimore a full record of the Lanier family in England. In investigating the state of art in Elizabeth's time he came across in Walpole's "Anecdotes of Painting" references to Jerome and Nicholas Lanier, whose careers he followed with his accustomed zeal and industry through the first-hand sources which the library afforded. There is no more characteristic letter of Lanier's than that written in 1879 to Mr. J. F. D. Lanier, giving the result of this investigation. He there tells the story of ten Laniers who enjoyed the personal favor of four consecutive English monarchs. Jerome Lanier, he believed, had on account of religious persecution fled from France to England during the last quarter of the sixteenth century and "availed himself of his accomplishments in music to secure a place in Queen Elizabeth's household." His son Nicholas Lanier -- "musician, painter, engraver" -- was patronized successively by James I, Charles I, and Charles II, wrote music for the masks of Ben Jonson and Campion and for the lyrics of Herrick, and was the first marshal of a society of musicians organized by Charles I in 1626. He also wrote a cantata called "Hero and Leander". He was the friend of Van Dyck, who painted a portrait of Lanier which attracted the attention of Charles I and eventually led to that painter's accession to the court. He was sent by King Charles to Italy to make purchases for the royal gallery. He and other members of his family lived at Greenwich and were known as amateur artists as well as musicians. After the Restoration five Laniers -- Nicholas, Jerome, Clement, Andrewe, and John -- were charter members of an organization of musicians established by the king "to exert their authority for the improvement of the science and the interest of its professors." It was a great pleasure to Sidney Lanier to find in the diary of Pepys many passages telling of his associations with these music-loving Laniers. "Here the best company for musique I ever was in my life," says the quaint old annalist, "and I wish I could live and die in it. . . . I spent the night in an exstasy almost; and having invited them to my house a day or two hence, we broke up."
The study of these distant relatives enjoying the favor of successive English kings must have suggested the contrast of his own life; but he was pleased with the fancy that their musical genius had come to him through heredity, for it confirmed his opinion that "if a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants."
Another Lanier in whom he was interested was Sir John Lanier, the story of whose bravery at the battle of the Boyne, in 1690, he first read in Macaulay's "History of England". Lanier's hope and belief that the family would some day be able to fill the intervals satisfactorily connecting Sir John Lanier with the musicians of the court have not been realized, nor has any satisfactory study been made of the coming of the Laniers to America. The best evidence of the connection between the two families is found in a deed recorded in Prince County, Va., May 14, 1728, from Nicholas Lanier to Holmes Boisseau -- the name Nicholas being significant. It is certain that Thomas Lanier, along with a large number of other Huguenots, settled in Virginia in the early years of the eighteenth century at Manakin-town, some twenty miles from Richmond. Some of these Huguenots, notably the Moncures, the Maurys, the Latanes, and the Flournoys, became connected with historic families of Virginia. There was a tradition in the Lanier family as well as in the Washington family, that Thomas Lanier married an aunt of George Washington, but this has been proved to be untrue.* The Laniers were related by marriage to the Washingtons of Surry County. They established themselves in the middle of the eighteenth century in Brunswick and Lunenburg counties of Virginia, as prosperous planters; they did not, however, rank either in dignity or in wealth with the older gentry of Virginia. In a letter written in 1877 Lanier gives in full the various branches of the Lanier family as they separated from this point and went into all parts of the United States. One branch joined the pioneers who went up through Tennessee into Kentucky and thence to Indiana. The most famous of these was Mr. J. F. D. Lanier, who played a prominent part in the development of the railroad system of the West, and at the time of the Civil War had become one of the leading bankers in New York city. He was a financial adviser of President Lincoln, and represented the government abroad in some important transactions. He was of genuine help to Sidney Lanier at critical times in the latter's life. His son, Mr. Charles Lanier, now a banker of New York, was a close friend of the poet, and after his death presented busts of him to Johns Hopkins University and the public library of Macon.
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* `William and Mary Quarterly', iii, 71-74, 1895 (article by Horace Edwin Hayden); iii, 137-139, October, 1894 (by Moncure D. Conway, with editorial comment); iv, 35-36, July, 1895 (by the editor, Lyon G. Tyler).
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The branch of the Lanier family with which Sidney was connected, moved from Virginia into Rockingham County, N.C. Sampson Lanier was a well-to-do farmer -- a country gentleman, "fond of good horses and fox hounds." Several of his sons went to the newer States of Georgia and Alabama. Of these was Sterling Lanier, the grandfather of the poet, who lived for a while in Athens, Ga., and was afterwards a hotel-keeper in Macon and Montgomery. By the time of the Civil War he had amassed a considerable fortune. In a letter written in 1844 from Macon we learn that he was an ardent Methodist. His daughters were being educated in the Wesleyan Female College in that city, his son Sidney had sailed recently from Charleston to France, and expected to travel through Sicily, Italy, and other parts of Europe on account of his health. He was giving his younger sons the best education then attainable in Georgia.
His son Robert Sampson Lanier had four years before returned from Randolph-Macon College, Virginia, and was at the time the letter was written beginning the practice of law. He never became a lawyer of the first rank, but he was universally esteemed for his "fine presence", his "social gentleness", and his "persistent habit of methodical industry". "During all of his long and active professional life," says the late Washington Dessau, "he never allowed anything to interfere with his devotion to his calling as a lawyer. No desire for office attracted him; no other business of profit or honor ever diminished for a moment his devotion for his professional duties. In the year 1850 he was admitted to the bar by the Supreme Court of Georgia, and from that period down to the time of his death the name of his firm appears in nearly every volume of the reports, indicating the wide extent of his business. . . . As a lawyer, while not aspiring to be a brilliant advocate, he was a most profound and able reasoner, thoroughly versed and grounded in the knowledge of the common law, well prepared with a knowledge of current decisions and in the learning that grows out of them. . . . In his social intercourse he was a gentleman of the purest and most refined type. . . . At his own home, at the homes of others, in casual meetings, in travel, everywhere, he always exhibited toward those who met him an unbroken front of courtesy, gentleness, and refinement."*
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* `Report of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Georgia Bar Association', Atlanta, 1894.
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He was just such a lawyer as Lanier would have become had he remained in that profession; indeed, son and father were very much alike. The father was a man of "considerable literary acquirements and exquisite taste." He was fond of Shakspere, Addison, and Sir Walter Scott, having the literary taste of the gentlemen of the old South. The letters written to his son show decided cultivation. They show also that he was in thorough sympathy with his son's intellectual life. The letter written by Lanier to his father from Baltimore in 1873 may lead one to think otherwise. Mr. Lanier was opposed, as were most of the men of his section, to a young man's entering upon a musical or poetic career, but more than two hundred letters written by son to father and many from father to son prove that their relations during the entire career of the poet were unusually close and sympathetic. In the earlier years, Lanier sent his poems to his father, and valued highly his criticism, and in later years he received from him financial aid and counsel.
While Robert Sampson Lanier was at college in Virginia he met Mary Jane Anderson, the daughter of Hezekiah Anderson, a Virginia planter who attained success in the political life of that State. They were married in 1840, and Sidney was their first-born. The poet thus inherited on his mother's side Scotch-Irish blood, an element in Southern life which has been often underestimated. She proved to be a hard-working woman, caring little for social life, but thoroughly interested in the religious training of her children. Her husband, although nominally a Methodist, was not actively identified with the church, but willingly acquiesced in the somewhat rigid Presbyterian discipline that prevailed in the home. The children -- Sidney, Clifford, and Gertrude -- were taught the strictest tenets of the Calvinistic creed. When Lanier afterwards, in Baltimore, lived a somewhat more liberal life -- both as to creed and conduct -- he wrote: "If the constituents and guardians of my childhood -- those good Presbyterians who believed me a model for the Sundayschool children of all times -- could have witnessed my acts and doings this day, I know not what groans of sorrowful regret would arise in my behalf."
The seriousness of this life was broken, however, on week days. Southern Puritanism differed from the early New England Puritanism in a certain affectionateness and sociability. The mother could play well on the piano, and frequently sang with the children hymns and popular melodies. Between the two brothers there was from the first the most beautiful relation, as throughout the rest of their lives: comrades in boyhood, comrades during the War, comrades in their first literary work, and to the end. On Saturdays they went to "the boys' hunting fields -- happy hunting grounds, redolent of hickory nuts, scaly barks, and rose-blushing, luscious, haw apples. . . . Into these woods, across yon marsh, we plunged every permissible Saturday for a day among doves, blackbirds, robins, plovers, snipes, or rabbits."* Sometimes they enjoyed fishing in the near-by brook or the larger river. The two brothers were devoted to their sister Gertrude, to whom Sidney referred in later years as his "vestal sister, who had, more perfectly than all the men or women of the earth, nay, more perfectly than any star or any dream," represented to him "the simple majesty and the serene purity of the Winged Folk up Yonder."
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* Clifford Lanier, `The Chautauquan', July, 1895.
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The beauty of this simple home life cannot well be overestimated in its influence on Lanier's later life. He had nothing of the Bohemian in his nature. He was throughout his life fully alive to all human ties, fulfilling every relationship, whether of son, brother, father, husband, or friend. His other relatives -- uncles, aunts, and cousins, -- filled a large place in his early life, especially his mother's brother, Judge Clifford Anderson, who was the law partner of Lanier's father and afterwards Attorney-General of Georgia; and his father's sister, Mrs. Watt, who from much travel and by association with leading men and women of the South brought into Lanier's life the atmosphere of a larger social world than that in which he was born.
Nor did Lanier live apart from the life in Macon. Although in later years he felt strongly the contrast between himself and his environment, he always spoke of his native place with the greatest affection, and it was among Macon people that he found some of his best friends in his adopted city. Its natural beauty appealed to him from the beginning -- the river Ocmulgee, the large forests of oak-trees stretching in every direction, the hills above the city, for which he often yearned, from the plains of Texas, or the flats of Florida, or the crowded streets of Baltimore. The climate was agreeable. Describing this section, Lanier said: "Surely, along that ample stretch of generous soil, where the Appalachian ruggednesses calm themselves into pleasant hills before dying quite away in the seaboard levels, a man can find such temperances of heaven and earth -- enough of struggle with nature to draw out manhood, with enough of bounty to sanction the struggle -- that a more exquisite co-adaptation of all blessed circumstances for man's life need not be sought."*
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* `Music and Poetry', p. 134.
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Macon was the capital of Middle Georgia, the centre of trade for sixty miles around. There was among the citizens an aggressive public spirit, which made it the rival in commercial life of the older cities, Savannah and Augusta; before the War it was a more important city than Atlanta. It was one of the first towns to push the building of railroads; it became "the keystone of the roads grappling with the ocean at the east and with the waters beyond the mountains at the west." The richer planters and merchants lived on the hills above the city -- in their costly mansions with luxuriant flower gardens -- while the professional men and the middle classes lived in the lower part of the city. Social lines were not, however, so sharply drawn here as in cities like Richmond or Charleston. Middle Georgia was perhaps the most democratic section of the South. It was a democracy, it is true, working within the limitations of slavery,* and greatly tempered with the feudal ideas of the older States, but it was a life which gave room for the development of well-marked individual types. There were many Georgia "Crackers" in the surrounding country; they were even recognized more than in other States as part of the social structure. While still a young boy Lanier was delivery clerk in the Macon postoffice, and entertained the family at nights by "mimicry of their funny speech." In later life he wrote dialect poems, setting forth the humor of these people, and drew upon their speech for illustrations of philological changes in language.
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* In Macon a great many citizens had no slaves at all, and even those who had them had only a few. In 1850 the white population was 3323, while there were only 2352 slaves. In 1859, when the population had grown to 8000, the proportion was maintained. [Despite this statement by Mr. Mims, if these numbers are correct, it would appear that Macon had a significantly higher percentage of slaves than most areas of the South. -- A. L., 1998.]
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In Macon hospitality was regarded as an indispensable, even sacred duty. Cordiality and kindness in all the ordinary relations of men and women made up for whatever deficiencies there were in art and literature. Professor Le Conte, who lived in Macon during the boyhood of Lanier, speaking of some weeks he spent there during a college vacation, says, "Oh, the boundless hospitality of those times -- a continual round of entertainments, musicales, and evening parties, . . . horseback rides and boat rides during the day and piano-playing, singing, fluting, and impromptu cotillions and Virginia reels in the evening!"* The Lanier House, a hotel owned by Sterling Lanier from 1844 to 1854, was the centre of this social life. Here many distinguished men were entertained and many receptions were held. The proprietor was a typical "mine host", endeavoring to throw around his guests some of the atmosphere of the finer Southern homes. In 1851 President Fillmore and his Secretary of the Navy, John P. Kennedy, visited Macon and were entertained at this hotel. Macon was not without its cultivated people. Young ladies studied music in New York and brought into the private life of the city an atmosphere of musical culture. Now and then students were sent to the universities of the East. A group of professional and business men -- E. A. Nisbet, Washington Poe, Charles Day, Colonel Whittle, L. Q. C. Lamar (in his earlier days) -- had the refinement and cordiality characteristic of the old regime.
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* `The Autobiography of Joseph Le Conte'.
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The religious spirit ran high in Macon. While the Presbyterian church had a better educated clergy and proportionately a greater number of educated personages among the laity, the Methodist and Baptist churches dominated the life of the community. Revivals that recall the Great Awakening in New England in the time of Jonathan Edwards were frequent. The most popular preacher in Macon -- George F. Pierce, afterwards bishop in the Southern Methodist church -- is said to have preached the terrors of the law so plainly that the editor of a long extinct Universalist paper said he could smell fire and brimstone half a mile from the church. The type of religion that prevailed was emotional, but in an earlier stage of society it was a great barrier against immorality. The clergy did not raise the question of the ethics of slavery, -- on the other hand they defended it on biblical grounds, -- but they did enjoin upon masters the duty of kindness to slaves. Many of them were not cultivated men, but they laid the foundation for a better civilization in a stern and righteous social life which flowered in the next generation. "The only burning issues were sprinkling versus immersion, freewill versus predestination," and over these questions the churches fought with energy. Divided though they were on many points, they agreed in resisting the forces of modern thought that were making for a more liberal theology.
Although the people of Macon were thoroughly alive to the commercial, social, and religious welfare of the community, they provided no adequate school system. Lanier was schooled "in small private one-roomed establishments, taught by a Mrs. Anderson, a Mr. Hancock, or by that dear old eccentric dominie, `Jake' Danforth. One of these schools stood in a grove of oak and hickory-nut trees and was called the 'Cademy. Sidney was bright in studies, but while parsing, reading, writing, and figuring, he was also chucking nuts from the tops of the tall trees, sympathizing with the dainty half-angel, half-animal flying squirrels, and drinking deep draughts of the love of nature from the cool, solacing oaks."*
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* Article by Clifford Lanier, in `Gulf States Historical Magazine', July, 1903.
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Lanier was undoubtedly influenced by the life in Macon; positively influenced in that much of this life became a part of his own, and negatively in that he reacted against many conditions and ideals that prevailed there. All the time there was developing in him his own genius. He did not remember a time when he could not play upon almost any musical instrument. "When he was seven years old he made his first effort at music upon an improvised reed cut from the neighboring river bank, with cork stopping the ends and a mouth hole and six finger holes extemporized at the side. With this he sought the woods to emulate the trills and cadences of the song birds." Santa Claus's gift one year took the form of a small, yellow, one-keyed flute, on which simple instrument he would "practice with the passion of a virtuoso." Like Schumann, he organized an orchestra among his friends and young playmates. Simultaneously he was receiving his first initiation into the joy of literature. He would frequently retire from playing with his brother and other companions to the library of his father, where he followed with absorbing interest the stories of Sir Walter Scott, the romances of Froissart, the adventures of Gil Blas, and other stories that his boyish mind delighted in. He was already producing among his playmates a sense of the distinction of his personality, that caused them to reverence him as one above them.