The conservatism that is identified with the South, as W. J. Cash remarked in his great work, The Mind of the South, runs continuously with the past. It embraces also a strong sense of community, of place, of local institutions and families and classes. Primogeniture vanished with the American Revolution, but its vestigial spirit may be observed at every hand; whole generations of Randolphs have been lawyers, and whole generations of Tuckers have been doctors and ministers. The South is a land not only of “Juniors,” but of “IIIs” and even “IVs.”
Because of this intense spirit of local as well as State identification, an almost universal dedication to “strong local government” is apparent. There is more to this than local sentiment. If there is one aspect of Southern conservatism more pronounced than the others, it is the instinctive suspicion of all government that forever stirs uneasily in the Southern mind. Cash has described as “the ruling element” of Southern tradition, this “intense distrust of, and, indeed, downright aversion to, any actual exercise of authority beyond the barest minimum essential to the existence of the social organism.” We do not like authority, especially needless, lint-picking, petty authority, and a broody pessimism constantly evokes the apprehension that government, if given half a chance, will put a fast one over on the people. In the eternal conflict of man and the state, the South stands in spirit, at least, firmly on man’s side. From the very beginning of the American Republic, our ruling doctrines have been based upon strict limitation of the powers of government. The people of Virginia came warily into the Union, in 1788, on the explicit understanding that the political powers they were lending the central government “may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression,” and the Virginians wanted it known that “every power not granted [to the central government] under the Constitution remains with them and at their will.” Ten years later, when this promise of pessimism was abundantly fulfilled in the Sedition Act, Kentucky and Virginia were beside themselves. What could be done to restrain officials who usurped power? “Bind them down,” thundered Jefferson, “with the chains of the Constitution!”
Still another aspect of Southern conservatism, deeply rooted in the agrarian tradition, is the respect for property that dwells inherently in the Southern mind to this day. George Mason, composing the Virginia Declaration of Rights, did not hesitate to use the word itself; man’s inalienable rights, he declared, embraced not only the enjoyment of life and liberty, but also the means of acquiring and possessing property. Part of this feeling may stem from the Englishman’s tradition of his home as his castle, and part from the farmer’s conviction that, though the bottom fall out of the market on corn or pigs or cotton or tobacco, in the end his land will sustain him.
Whatever the root sources, the tendency has carried over even to the expanding cities of the urbanized South. It has not been a fear of integrated housing (this specter is a late arrival on the scene) that has made the South relatively so slow to embrace Federal grants for slum clearance, public housing, and urban renewal. Much of the public resistance, sometimes made manifest and sometimes merely sensed, is a consequence of this inbred feeling for property; it is a feeling that responsibility for housing rests with the individual first of all, and that no man’s property should be taken under eminent domain except for literal public use. When Southern cities experienced their first wave of dime-store “sit-ins,” early in 1960, the startled reaction sped at once to the rights of the store owner: This lunch counter was his property. Did he not have a right to control its use?
Finally, I would suggest that the Southerner as Conservative is affected, perhaps more strongly than he himself would acknowledge, by a respect for divine power. Again, the agrarian inheritance plays a part in this legacy. The miracle of the seed, the continuum of the forest, the closeness of animal birth and life—these work a profound influence on men whose existence is tied umbilically to nature. In the loneliness of field or prairie, the smallness of man and the largeness of God strike to the heart’s core. The blessing of the harvest, the wrath of the storm, and the benediction of a slow and mizzling rain on freshly seeded land speak to the Southerner of God’s handiwork.
Perhaps by reason of these influences, organized religion, predominantly among low-church Protestant denominations, continues to play a pervasive role in Southern life. To be sure, the parent Protestantism gives off some notable sports—the Faith Healers, snake-handlers, and the Holy Rollers—and the abiding fundamentalism of the region continues to manifest itself in pockets of strict Prohibition and in contemporary versions of the Tennessee Monkey Trial. But religion crops up in other ways, in the grace before meals expected at every public function, in the phenomenal sales of religious books, and in the incredible proliferation of choirs, sodalities, ladies’ auxiliaries, young peoples’ groups, vestries, boards of deacons, church suppers, and building-committee meetings that characterize life from Brownsville to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. A Southerner who does not belong to some church is not regarded as suspect, exactly, but he is just a little odd. And if the low-tax Southerner traditionally is penurious in rendering unto his Caesars the things that are Caesar’s, he is often sacrificial in rendering unto God the things that are God’s.
The deference that is paid to Holy Writ and to evidences of divine intervention doubtless contributes to the character of the Southerner as Romantic. Faith and superstition and myth are cousins, hardly even once removed, and whatever else it may be, the South is first of all a land of legends. This is a terrible annoyance to historians; they look upon our pretty myths, and know they are not so, and expose their fallacies in a thousand footnotes, but like the South, the legends rise again. “Few groups in the New World have had their myths subjected to such destructive analysis as those of the South have undergone in recent years,” C. Vann Woodward once observed.
Yet the myths persist. There is the Old South legend of the white-columned plantation, the hoop-skirted belles, the hot-blooded men. In the foreground, beneath the magnolia trees, the darkies are plucking banjos; in the background, rows upon rows of cotton, and off to one side, a steamboat coming around the bend. Master loves the Negroes, and the Negroes love old Master. The words and music are by Stephen Foster. This, we like to say, was how things were in the ante-bellum South. The exasperated scholar, emerging from his Will Books, cries out his anguish in the quarterly reviews: The records prove it was not so; they prove that slave ownership was limited; the records prove that Southern Negroes—as many as 100,000 or 200,000 of them—deserted to the Union cause in the War; the records probably prove there weren’t but thirty-two banjos in all of Carolina.
These labors of genealogy go utterly unrewarded. With what Cash has described as the South’s “naive capacity for unreality,” our people pat the historians on their fevered brows, thank them kindly just the same, and return untroubled to an intuitive devotion to the things that never were.