The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915

by Basil L. Gildersleeve

In claiming this individuality, nothing more is claimed for Virginia and for South Carolina than would be conceded to Massachusetts and Connecticut; and we believed then that Massachusetts and Connecticut would not have behaved otherwise than we did, if the parts had been reversed. The brandished sword would have shown what manner of placida quies Massachusetts would have ensued, if demands had been made on her at all commensurate with the Federal demands on Virginia. These older Southern States were proud of their history, and they showed their pride by girding at their neighbors. South Carolina had her fling at Georgia, her fling at North Carolina; and the wish that the little State had been scuttled at an early day was a plagiarism from classical literature that might have emanated from the South as well as from the North. Virginia assumed a superiority that was resented by her Southern sisters as well as by her Northern partners. The Old North State derided the pretensions of the commonwealths that flanked her on either side, and Georgia was not slow to give South Carolina as good as she sent. All this seemed to be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old enough and strong enough to encourage the hopes of the Union leaders that the Confederacy would split along state lines. The cohesive power of the Revolutionary war was not sufficiently strong to make the States sink their contributions to the common cause in the common glory. Washington was the one national hero, and yet the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston was named, not after the illustrious George, but after his kinsman, William. The story of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill did not thrill the South Carolinian of an earlier day, and those great achievements were actually criticized. Who were Putnam and Stark that South Carolinians should worship them, when they had a Marion and a Sumter of their own? Vermont went wild, the other day, over Bennington as she did not over the centenary of the surrender at Yorktown. Take away this local patriotism and you take out all the color that is left in American life. That the local patriotism may not only consist with a wider patriotism, but may serve as a most important element in wider patriotism, is true. Witness the strong local life in the old provinces of France. No student of history, no painter of manners, can neglect it. In Gerfaut, a novel written before the Franco-Prussian war, Charles de Bernard represents an Alsatian shepherd as saying, "I am not French; I am Alsatian,"—"trait de patriotisme de clocher assez commun dans la belle province du Rhin," adds the author, little dreaming of the national significance of that "patriotisme de clocher." The Breton's love of his home is familiar to every one who has read his Renan, and Blanche Willis Howard, in Guenn, makes her priest exclaim, "Monsieur, I would fight with France against any other nation, but I would fight with Brittany against France. I love France. I am a Frenchman. But first of all I am a Breton." The Provençal speaks of France as if she were a foreign country, and fights for her as if she were his alone. What is true of France is true in a measure of England. Devonshire men are notoriously Devonshire men first and last. If this is true of what have become integral parts of kingdom or republic by centuries of incorporation, what is to be said of the States that had never renounced their sovereignty, that had only suspended it in part?

The example of state pride set by the older States was not lost on the younger Southern States, and the Alabamian and the Mississippian lived in the same faith as did the stock from which they sprang; and the community of views, of interest, of social order, soon made a larger unit and prepared the way for a true nationality, and with the nationality a great conflict. The heterogeneousness of the elements that made up the Confederacy did not prove the great source of weakness that was expected. The Border States looked on the world with different eyes from the Gulf States. The Virginia farmer and the Creole planter of Louisiana were of different strains; and yet there was a solidarity that has never failed to surprise the few Northerners who penetrated the South for study and pleasure. There was an extraordinary ramification of family and social ties throughout the Southern States, and a few minutes' conversation sufficed to place any member of the social organism from Virginia to Texas. Great schools, like the University of Virginia, within the Southern border did much to foster the community of feeling, and while there were not a few Southerners at Harvard and Yale, and while Princeton was almost a Southern college, an education in the North did not seem to nationalize the Southerner. On the contrary, as in the universities of the Middle Ages, groups were formed in accordance with nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at certain points, were strengthened at others. There may have been a certain broadening of view; there was no weakening of the home ties. West Point made fewer converts to this side and to that than did the Northern wives of Southern husbands, the Southern wives of Northern husbands.

All this is doubtless controvertible, and what has been written may serve only to amuse or to disgust those who are better versed in the facts of our history and keener analysts of its laws. All that I vouch for is the feeling; the only point that I have tried to make is the simple fact that, right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in our own minds, and that there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.

It is perfectly possible to be fully persuaded in one's own mind without the passionate desire to make converts that animates the born preacher, and any one may be excused from preaching when he recognizes the existence of a mental or moral color-blindness with which it is not worth while to argue. There is no umpire to decide which of the disputants is color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degenerate into a wearisome reiteration of points which neither party will concede. Now this matter of allegiance is just such a question. Open the October number of The Atlantic and read the sketch of General Thomas, whom many military men on the Southern side consider to have been the ablest of all the Federal generals. He was, as every one knows, a Virginian, and it seemed to us that his being a Virginian was remembered against him in the Federal councils. "His severance," says the writer in The Atlantic, "from family and State was a keen trial, but 'his duty was clear from the beginning.' To his vision there was but one country,—the United States of America. He had few or no friends at the North. Its political policy had not seemed to him to be wise. But he could serve under no flag except that which he had pledged his honor to uphold." Passing over the quiet assumption that the North was the United States of America, which sufficiently characterizes the view of the writer, let us turn to the contrast which would at once have suggested itself even if it had not been brought forward by the eulogist of Thomas. A greater than Thomas decided the question at the same time, and decided it the other way. To Lee's vision there was but one course open to a Virginian, and the pledge that he had given when Virginia was one of the United States of America had ceased to bind him when Virginia withdrew from the compact. His duty was clear from the hour when to remain in the army would have been to draw his sword against a people to whom he was "indissolubly bound."

"I think it is not unsafe to assert that nowhere did the original spirit of State Sovereignty and allegiance to the State then survive in greater intensity and more unquestioning form than in Virginia—the 'Old Dominion'—the mother of States and of Presidents.

"State pride, a sense of individuality, has immemorially entered more largely and more intensely into Virginia and Virginians than into any other section or community of the United States. Only in South Carolina and among Carolinians, on the trans-Atlantic continent, was a somewhat similar sense of locality and obligation of descent to be found. There was in it a flavour of the Hidalgo, or of the pride which the MacGregors and Campbells took in their clan and country. In other words, the Virginian and Carolinian had in the middle of the last century, not to any appreciable extent, undergone nationalization."—Chas. Francis Adams, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity p. 137.

I have referred to Mr. Adams repeatedly because as a man of my time and nearly of my age he understood the difficulty of moving the point of view fifty years backward.

These contrasted cases are indeed convenient tests for color-blindness. There may "arise a generation in Virginia," or even a generation of Virginians, "who will learn and confess" that "Thomas loved Virginia as well as the sons she has preferred to honor, and served her better." But no representative Virginian shares that prophetic vision; the color-blindness, on whichever side it is, has not yielded to treatment during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the close of the war, and may as well be accepted for an indefinite period. When social relations were resumed between the North and the South,—they followed slowly the resumption of business relations,—what we should call the color-blindness of the other side often manifested itself in a delicate reticence on the part of our Northern friends; and as the war had by no means constituted their lives as it had constituted ours for four long years, the success in avoiding the disagreeable topic would have been considerable, if it had not been for awkward allusions on the part of the Southerners, who, having been shut out for all that time from the study of literature and art and other elegant and uncompromising subjects, could hardly keep from speaking of this and that incident of the war. Whereupon a discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as if a pardoned convict had playfully referred to the arson or burglary, not to say worse, that had been the cause of his seclusion.

In these days of mutual understanding and mutual forgiveness, I shall hardly be believed when I say that as late as 1885, twenty years after the close of the war, some of my Northern friends who had been taught the duty of "making treason odious" advised me to suppress or modify the following passage in my Introduction to Pindar (p. xii) as savoring of disloyalty:

The man whose love for his country knows no local root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor abstraction; and it is no discredit to Pindar that he went honestly with his state in the struggle. It was no treason to Medize before there was a Greece, and the Greece that came out of the Persian war was a very different thing from the cantons that ranged themselves on this side and on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in the eyes of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic patriots. A little experience of a losing side might aid historical vision. That Pindar should have had an intense admiration of the New Greece, should have felt the impulse of the grand period that followed Salamis and Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would have come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and should have seen the finger of God in the new evolution of Hellas—all this is not incompatible with an attitude during the Persian war that those who see the end and do not understand the beginning may not consider respectable.