“I am an aristocrat,” cried Randolph of Roanoke. And the Southerner regards him with an affection not extended to Clay or Calhoun or Jefferson. So, we imagine, were they all—all aristocrats, men of ease, and grace, and elegance, and high birth; men who lived by a code of honor, and died beneath the dueling oaks; men who gambled with skill, and loved with passion; men who fought with a royal disdain for risk. Well, Cash and Woodward and a dozen others have had a hand in exploding this Cavalier myth. Tediously, with infinite pains, they have dredged up the pedestrian facts. The Southerner will have none of them; he knows better than to let a few facts interfere with a good story. His colonists all wear ruffled collars; his ladies, blue-veined, are pale and pure as talisman roses. “I am an aristocrat: I love freedom; I hate equality!” Who in the South could disclaim the Randolph inheritance?
It is not only the myths of the pre-Revolutionary South and the ante-bellum South that have been so sharply assailed. The Southwest’s legends of the cowboy have been worked over too. The frontiersmen of Tennessee and Kentucky, on examination, prove to be something less than godlike men. The Creole stories of New Orleans, the richly embroidered legends of the War of ’61-’65, the tales of Reconstruction hardships, even the twentieth-century chronicle of Jim Crow, have been cracked by the academic refineries—but no catalyst ever seems wholly effective. As soft as Spanish moss, and almost as insubstantial, legends subtly dominate the Southern mind.
And it is not a bad thing. Legend is born of truth, however remote and obscure the fatherhood may be, and legend has a way of siring truths stamped in ancestral molds. The hospitality of the plantation, as a universal pastime, may not bear too strong a light; but “Southern hospitality,” its descendant, is a working truth today. Not all the colonists were Cavaliers, and not all the Cavaliers, we may reasonably assume, were mannered men; but a Southern manner, born of the Cavalier myth, persists in our own time. It is the Virginian’s “Sir,” the Texan’s “Ma’am.” To the Southerner, in Burke’s phrase, manners are always more important than law. Deference to women, principles of personal honor, the payment of a gentleman’s debts—these are operative aspects of the “Southern Way of Life.” Objections of “unreality” are put to one side.
But, may it please the court, there is the Southerner as Realist too. It is the weight that balances. Cash wrote of the tendency in New England, in the Reconstruction period, for men to turn increasingly to science and technology, and increasingly away from the customary forms of religion. “But in the South,” he said, “the movement was to the opposite quarter. For invariably when men anywhere have come upon times of great stress, when they have labored under the sense of suffering unbearable and unjust ill and there was doubt of deliverance through their own unaided effort, they have clung more closely to God and ardently reaffirmed their belief. Invariably they have tended to repudiate innovation, to cast off accretion, to return upon the more primitive faith of the past as representing a purer dispensation and a safer fortress. And if I have represented our Southerners as determined to have the mastery, yet it must be said that terror was continually threatening to seize the ascendancy, that there was in their thought a huge vein of gloomy foreboding, which trembled constantly on the verge of despair.”
The student of our affairs who does not understand this much about the South does not understand the South at all. I do not know who it was who made the observation first—Donald Davidson, or Richard Weaver, or Louis Rubin, or Arthur Schlesinger, or Vann Woodward, or some forgotten historian of eighty years ago; it does not really matter; untutored, I wrote it myself in high school—that alone among all the regions of the Union, the South has known defeat. To know defeat is to know sin; it is the ultimate blasphemy against the American theology. As a nation, we are geared to instant success: Listerine will vanish bad breath, and Bufferin will cure a headache; a touch of Wildroot will clear up one’s dandruff; any boy may aspire to be President, or to make a million dollars, or to play center field for the Yankees. Failure—permanent, total, unqualified failure—is unknown. It is intolerable. It shatters the grand American illusion.
But the South has known failure. It has known what it is to do one’s best, to fight to exhaustion, and to lose. This huge vein of gloomy foreboding, this constant trembling on the verge of despair, was not an isolated phenomenon of the Reconstruction period. In Cash’s phrase, it is part of the collective experience of the Southern people. We have known defeat.
And not in war only. Long before the War, as the industrial North leaped to surpass the agrarian South, the thin, serrated edge of poverty began to cut across the South. The Tariff of Abominations was a beginning of it, and Calhoun and the South cried out in anger against its unfairness. The terrible institution of slavery contributed to it, but slavery was a tiger by the tail, and men could not cling to it successfully or safely let it go. There was the War, and the westward expansion, and the lines of commerce that flowed east and west but seldom north and south. The bitter years of Reconstruction resulted in a lean and grinding poverty, a poorness the more pitiful for its stoic acceptance by a proud people. And we know that poorness yet: Look at the Statistical Abstract.
Defeat. Poverty. And Woodward adds to these two grim horsemen still a third: a sense of guilt. While the rest of the Republic has basked complacently in its own virtue, the South’s preoccupation has been with guilt, not with innocence, “with the reality of evil, not with the dream of perfection.” To Woodward’s shrewd insight, I would add a few reflections of my own. This preoccupation with guilt and this reality of evil have not been burdens the South has felt it could regard honestly as entirely its own responsibility. The “peculiar institutions” of slavery and segregation have descended upon the South like pregnancy upon a woman whose lover has ridden away. The New England slavemasters had their fun, and made their dreadful profits, and sailed off to Maine; and they left the South to raise the alien child. Oh, it was a willing union. It was not rape, not seduction. The Southerners who bought the frightened blacks lived for a hundred years in agreeable sin with the European and New England slavers who sold them. But when the assignation ended, the South had all the problems, and the North had all the answers. Thus the preoccupation with guilt is mixed with a resentment for hypocrisy; and when the North speaks loftily to the South, and asserts that we of the North are holier than thou, three hundred years of skepticism seek an outlet: Pray, sirs, since when?
This should be said, too, about Woodward’s “reality of evil.” Surely there have been evils in the South’s policies of racial separation. Poor as the South was, in the sixty years after Reconstruction that preceded World War II, much more could have been done, and should have been done, to encourage the Negro people closer to a cultural and economic equality. I have said it countless times, and say it willingly here: If the South had devoted one tenth of the effort toward keeping schools equal that it devoted to keeping them separate, Brown v. Board of Education would not have created so dramatic a crisis. Yes, there have been evils, and very real and poignant and tragic evils, in the South’s treatment of its Negro people.