The old South

by H. M. Hamill

Was it not in the Old South, for instance, that the first word was spoken that fired the colonial heart and pointed the way to freedom from the tyranny of Britain? Later, when all hearts along the Atlantic seaboard were burning with hope of liberty, was it not one from the Old South who presided over the fateful Congress that finally broke with the mother country? And did not another from the Old South frame the immortal declaration of national independence? And when the hard struggle for liberty was begun, it was from the Old South that a general was called to lead the ragged Continentals to victory. Follow the progress of that war of the Revolution, and it will be seen how in its darkest days the light of hope and courage burned nowhere so bravely as in the Old South.

Seventy-two years and fifteen Presidents succeeded between the last gun of the Revolution and the first gun fired upon Sumter in 1861. Nine out of fifteen Presidents, and fifty of the seventy-two years, are to be credited to the statesmanship of the Old South. What Washington did with the sword for the young republic, Chief Justice Marshall, of Virginia, made permanently secure by the wisdom of the great jurist. After him came a long line of worthy successors from the Old South, in the persons of judges, vice presidents, cabinet officers, officers of the army and navy, who were called to serve in the high places of the government. The fact is that whatever unique quality of greatness and fame came to the republic for more than a half century after it was begun was largely due to the wisdom of Southern statesmanship. It is hard, I know, to credit such a statement as to the dominating influence in our early national history, now that nearly fifty years have passed since a genuine son of the South has stood by the helm of the ship of State.

As with the statesmanship, so with the military leadership of the Old South. The genius for war has been one of the gifts of the sons of the South from the beginning, not only as fighters with a dash that would have charmed the heart of Ney, but as born commanders, tacticians, and strategists. In the two great wars of the republic, Great Britain and Mexico were made to feel the skill and courage of Southern general and rifleman. In the Civil War—greatest of modern times, and in some respects greatest of all time—the greater generals who commanded, as well as the Presidents who commissioned them, were born on Southern soil, and carried into their high places the spirit of the Old South. In the extension of the republic from the seaboard to the great central valley, and beyond to the mountains and the Pacific, Southern generalship and statesmanship led the way. The purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas and the Southwest, were conceived and executed chiefly by Southern men.

So for more than fifty formative years of our history the Old South was the dominating power in the nation, as it had been in the foundation of the colonies out of which came the republic, and later in fighting its battles of independence and in framing its policies of government. And I make bold to reaffirm that whatever strength or symmetry the republic had acquired at home, or reputation it had achieved abroad, in those earlier crucial years of its history were largely due to the patriotism and ability of Southern statesmanship. Why that scepter of leadership has passed from its keeping, or why the New South is no longer at the front of national leadership, is a question that might well give pause to one who recalls the brave days when the Old South sat at the head of the table and directed the affairs of the nation.

Socially, the Old South, like “all Gaul,” was divided into three parts—the slaveholding planters, the aristocrats of the social system, few relatively in numbers but mighty in wealth and authority; the negro slaves, who by the millions plowed and sowed its fields and reaped its harvests, and who for hundreds of years, both in slavery and freedom, have found contented homes in the South; and lastly the nonslaveholding whites, a distinctly third estate.

The nonslaveholding white of the Old South was essentially sui generis. He was really a vital part of a singular semifeudal system, yet, as far as he could, he maintained his independence of it. He was between two social fires. His lack of culture and breeding, his rude speech and dress, barred him from the big house of the planter, except as a sort of political dependent or henchman. On the other hand, to the negro he was variously known as “poor folks,” “poor white trash,” and at best as “half-strainers.” While there was not a little in common between him and the master of slaves, he had literally no dealings with the negro. Here and there, if one rose to ownership of land or slaves by dint of extraordinary industry or good fortune, his social position was scarcely improved. He became like the shoddy “New Riches” of our own time, in a class to himself.

There are not a few illusions as to these “cracker” whites, which fanciful magazine and dialect writers have helped to spread. A benevolently intended effort has been in progress for a generation on the part of certain sentimentalists, with more money than wisdom, to civilize and Christianize what they are pleased to call the “mountain whites.” One would gather from the pleas made before religious conventions, and from the facile writers who have made these whites their special care, that they have dwelt continually in religious darkness and destitution, and greatly needed the alien missionary to shed the effulgence of his superior civilization and Christianity upon him. I think I am in a position to say that this forlorn and destitute Southern mountaineer, true to his ancient characteristics, has received these effusive visitors and their benevolences with one eye partly closed and with continued cheerful expectoration at knot holes in the neighboring fence. I am reminded of one of Bishop Hoss’s repertoire of anecdotes, all of which have pith and point. Of such a mountaineer as I am depicting, tall, lank, sinewy, frowzy, “a bunch of steel springs and chicken hawk,” a tourist satirically inquired: “May I ask, my friend, if you are a member of the human species?” “No, by gum,” said the mountaineer; “I’m an East Tennesseean.”

As a matter of fact there are few people so thoroughly imbued with the religious spirit as these same “cracker” mountain whites, though it is a religion of the Old rather than of the New Testament, in the crude ethics and doctrines which they commonly hold. Even the Kentucky feudist is after a sort an Old Testament religionist, who has not gone beyond the idea of the “blood avenger” of Mosaic permission. Rude, uncouth, ignorant of books as the poor whites of the Old South were and continue largely to be, I pay them the sincere personal tribute of admiration for the homespun virtues that have marked them as a peculiar people. For two years I lived in their wildest mountain fastnesses, went in and out of their rude cabins, taught their youth, broke bread at their tables, and worshiped God with them in their log meetinghouses. I have earned a right, therefore, by personal contact and knowledge to resent with warmth the imputations under which the cracker white, highland or lowland, is too often made to suffer. Even so distinguished an authority as the New York Advocate, in a recent article devoted to this class, permitted the usual distortion of fact in all things pertaining to Southern problems.

Of this rude figure of the Old South, it is enough to say that no hospitality of the plantation mansion ever eclipsed that of his humble home to the man who sought shelter beneath it. If he never forgave a wrong, he never forgot to repay a kindness. His honesty was such that a man’s pocketbook was commonly as safe in the trail of a mountaineer or lowlander as in the vault of a bank. If he had not books or learning, there was something quite as good for his uses which he had the knack of inheriting or acquiring—a home-grown wit and shrewdness of judgment of men and things. Religiously, he took his code and doctrines directly from the Bible, and too often patterned after both good and evil in that book. He saw no incongruity in dispensing homemade whisky and helping on a protracted meeting at the call of his circuit rider. As to his politics, he followed leaders only as he respected them, and was always a thorn in the flesh of the political trickster. If the master of slaves was an aspirant for office, and was possessor of both manhood and money, the cracker white easily became his supporter. Usually holding the balance of power, he taught many a sharp lesson to unworthy men who sought his political favor. Generally the poor white was hostile to slavery; yet singularly enough, true to the patriotism and loyalty strangely formed in him for centuries in his isolated condition, when the armies of the North began their invasions of the South, these same whites by the tens and hundreds of thousands put on the gray, and fell into line under the generalship of the owners of plantation and slave. If there was ever such a proverb current among them as “the rich man’s war, but the poor man’s fight,” I did not hear it from the lips of the brave fellows from the log cabins who became the famous fighters of the Confederacy. Over their lowly and sometimes lonely and unkept graves I would lovingly inscribe that exquisitely pathetic epitaph which one may read upon a Confederate monument in South Carolina, dedicated especially to the men who had nothing to fight for or die for but patriotism and honor: