Swallow barn, or, A soujourn in the Old Dominion

Swallow Barn is a novel of antebellum life on a tidewater Virginia plantation, described by the author as "variously and interchangeably partaking of the complexion of a book of travels, a diary, a collection of letters, a drama, and a history." The collection of sketches purports to be an account of the "seeings and thinkings" of Mark Littleton on his first visit to the South. Addressed to a fellow Northerner, Littleton's descriptions of Frank Merriwether and his estate bathe the plantation in a kind of nostalgic glow that nonetheless does political work in the present. The first edition was published on the eve of the Nullification Controversy. Kennedy decided to republish it in the early 1850s, he wrote to a fellow Southerner, as "an antidote to the abolition mischief."