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• 1 2019-07-12T12:41:22+00:00 a region destitute of literacy 1 Cohen page 10 plain 2019-07-12T12:41:22+00:00 As Christopher Hager has observed, northerners, and especially abolitionists, often spoke of the South as a region destitute of literacy. Works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred were “fixated on the arrested literacy of slaveholders,” Hager writes, and quotes Theodore Dwight Weld’s judgment that most slaveholders “are ignorant men, thousands of them notoriously so, mere boors unable to write their names or to read the alphabet." Johnson is often at pains in his correspondence with Whitman to demonstrate his wide reading, and to differentiate himself from what he regarded as the undereducated and uncurious folks among whom he lived, with their “lack of culture and the love of the ideal in any sense other than the old and barbarous." Still, this letter’s fanciful premise and use of dialect may well have been formal choices designed to flout that Northern prejudice about Southern smarts. For starters, Johnson’s son’s persona in this letter may not be able to spell, but then, he’s eight months old. And more significantly, with its trope of the child speaker and its consistent use of eye-dialect, the letter partakes of the same kind of authority-effect that dialect writing more broadly did in the hands of nationally famous American authors.  The letter dares its famous northern, abolitionist, and literary reader to dismiss the opinions of its speaker based on inexperience, ignorance, or illiteracy.