In working on W&M and slavery, I recently focused on an ante-bellum law professor here, Beverly Tucker, an enslaver, pro-slavery ideologue, white supremacist, and secessionist:
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/tucker-beverley-1784-1851/
And I’ve discovered something that members of the list interested in or working on Tucker might not have noticed, that Thomas Carlyle very likely based his Senator Hickory Buckskin on him.
See pp. 152-154 in Kinser, Brent E. "Fearful Symmetry: Hypocrisy and Bigotry in Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse[s] on the Negro Question”." Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 45 no. 1, 2012, p. 139-165. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/sli.2012.0005:
Of all the fictional characters in the “Discourse[s],” one added in 1853 creates a particularly interesting moment, for it demonstrates that Carlyle’s vision on the “Question” was not completely metaphorical. The entry for “Senator Hickory Buckskin” in The Carlyle Encyclopedia describes the “Honorable Hickory Buckskin” as an “imaginary correspondent,” but there can be little doubt that the primary model for the Carolinian was in fact a Virginian known to Carlyle, the William and Mary law professor Nathaniel Beverly Tucker …..
To this new apparition of Tucker, I should add another anecdote related to him, a claim that if not true should be, that the tall obelisk marking Tucker's grave at Bruton Parish Church here in Williamsburg has been struck a multitude of times by lightning — and that in the discolorations of the stone some see the face of Lincoln.
https://wydaily.com/latest-news/2021/10/29/oddities-curiosities-nathaniel-beverley-tuckers-tombstone/
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Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College of William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg 23187
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