ATTITUDE TOWARD HISTORY

The history of the United States is a rope of many strands, each of which was twisted into form before they were united into one cable. Each state marks the sites of its first landings, puts monuments on its battlefields, commemorates its liberty days, and teaches its children to remember the great years of the past. The South has a full share of these memories, which are both local events and foundation stones of the nation’s history. Jamestown, St. Mary’s, Charleston, Fort Moultrie, Yorktown, Mobile, belong to us all, as much as Providence, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and San Francisco.

The Southern mind likes to think of its episodes as contributions to the national history, and at the same time to claim as specifically Southern all that has taken place in the South since the foundation of the Federal Union. School histories are written and prescribed by legislatures to teach children a Southern point of view; the South of Washington and Jefferson, of Jackson and Calhoun, is looked upon as something apart from the nation. To some extent there is reason for this frame of mind; slavery, or rather the obstinate maintenance of slavery after it had disappeared in other civilized communities, put the South in a position of defiance of the world for near three quarters of a century; hence the history of the South from 1789 to 1861 can be separated from that of the Union as a whole in a manner impossible for New England and the West.

This separate history needs, like other eras of human history, to be envisaged in the light of things that actually were. Such calm and unbiased approach to the study of past times is difficult in the South because of the exaggeration of one of the fine traits of Southern character, of its respect for the past, its veneration for ancestors. In a world of progress a main influence is the conviction that things need to be improved, that the children are wiser than their fathers; but this spirit is out of accord with the Southern feeling of loyalty to section, to state, to kindred, and to ancestors. Charles Francis Adams spends years in showing up the inconsistencies of the character of his Puritan forbears; but to the Southern mind there would be something shocking in a South Carolina or Virginia writer who should set forth unfavorable views of the courage of General Moultrie or the legal skill of Patrick Henry.

For this reason, or for more occult reasons, there is a disposition in the South to hold to local traditional views of the history of the United States as a whole and of the South in particular. For instance, most North Carolinians seem addicted to the belief that Mecklenburg County drew up certain drastic resolutions of Independence, May 20, 1775; and the man who is not convinced of it had better live somewhere else than in North Carolina. In like manner many Southerners suppose it to be an established fact that the aristocracy in the South were descended from English Cavaliers, and the leaders in New England from the Puritans. Yet there is little evidence of permanent Cavalier influence in any Southern colony. The most recent historian of early Virginia, Bruce, says: “The principal figures in the history of Virginia in the seventeenth century were men of the stamp of Samuel Mathews, George Menefie, Robert Beverley, Adam Thoroughgood, Ralph Wormeley, William Fitzhugh, Edmund Scarborough, and William Byrd.” Are these names more heraldic than those of John Winthrop and John Endicott and Thomas Dudley? Aside from the titled governors who did not remain in the colonies, Lord Fairfax possessed the only Virginia title, and he may be balanced by Sir William Phipps, the Yankee knight. George Washington’s ancestors are known to have been respectable English squires, but where are the Cavalier forefathers of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis? The bone and sinew of the Colonial South, as of the North, was made up of the English middle class, yeomen and shopkeepers; and in both sections the descendants of those men chiefly came to eminence.

Another of the unfortified beliefs which have wide currency in the South is that under slavery the South was a prosperous, happy, and glorious community. Robert Toombs, of Georgia, in a lecture delivered in Boston in 1856, said of the slave states: “In surveying the whole civilized world, the eye rests not on a single spot where all classes of society are so well content with their social system, or have greater reason to be so, than in the slaveholding States of this Union.... They may safely challenge the admiration of the civilized world.” Later books of reminiscence carry you back to the delightful days when “the old black mahogany table, like a mirror, was covered with Madeira decanters standing in silver casters, and at each plate was a glass finger bowl with four pipe-stem glasses on their sides just touching the water”; when “woman’s conquests were made by the charms and graces given them by nature rather than by art of women modistes and men milliners ... and the men prided themselves, above all things, on being gentlemen. This gave tone to society.”

This system was assumed to be especially happy for the slave; witness a recent Southern writer: “Hence, to the negro, the institution of slavery, so far from being prejudicial, was actually beneficial in its effects, in that, as a strictly paternal form of government, it furnished that combination of wise control and kind compulsion which is absolutely essential to his development and well-being.” Minor, in his recent “The Real Lincoln,” urges that “the children of slaveholders may be saved from being betrayed into the error of regarding with reprobation the conduct of their parents in holding slaves”; and justifies slavery on the ground that the slaves had “a more liberal supply of the necessaries of life than was ever granted to any other laboring class in any other place, or other age.” Reed, in his “Brothers’ War,” holds that “Any and every evil of southern slavery to the negro was accidental.... Slavery, so far from being wrong morally, was righteousness, justice, and mercy to the slave.” No wonder that “Nicholas Worth” exclaims: “What I discovered was that the people did not know their own history; that they had accepted certain oft-repeated expressions about it as facts; and that the practical denial of free discussion of certain subjects had deadened research and even curiosity to know the truth.”

This theory that slavery was harmful, if harmful at all, only to the white race, has gone to the extent of insisting that slavery was educational; thus Thomas Nelson Page says that at the end of the War, among the able-bodied Negroes there was “scarcely an adult who was not a trained laborer or a skilled artisan. In the cotton section they knew how to raise and prepare cotton; in the sugar belt they knew how to grow and grind sugar; in the tobacco, corn, wheat, and hay belts they knew how to raise and prepare for market those crops. They were the shepherds, cattle-men, horse-trainers and raisers. The entire industrial work of the South was performed by them.... Nearly all the houses in the South were built by them. They manufactured most of the articles that were manufactured in the South.” And Mrs. Avary, in her “Dixie After the War,” thinks that “the typical Southern plantation was, in effect, a great social settlement for the uplift of Africans.” These arguments are perhaps not intended to suggest that the present free laboring population would be better off if reduced to slavery; but they fix upon the present generation the unhappy task of justifying all the mistakes of previous generations.

The natural and wholly justifiable pride in the military spirit of the South during the Civil War extends over to the constitutional, or rather psychical, question of Secession. No issue in the world is deader than the question whether states have a right to secede, for the simple reason that the experience of forty years ago shows that in case any state or group of states hereafter may wish to secede, the other states will infallibly combine to resist by military force: no state or section can ever again assert that it has reason to suppose that secession is a peaceful and constitutional remedy, which should be accepted quietly by the sister states. To justify the doctrine of secession now would mean to pull out the bracing of the Union, no part of which is more determined to be a portion of one great and powerful American nation than the Southern States. It can hardly be expected that the North, after sacrificing five hundred thousand lives and four billions of treasure, will, half a century later, come round to the point of view of the defeated section.

It is equally idle at this period of the world’s history to deny to the Southern leaders in the Civil War sincerity and courage, or to withhold from the nation the credit of such lofty characters as Lee and Stonewall Jackson; but if they are to become world heroes alongside of Cromwell and Iredell, consistency demands that the corresponding Northern leaders shall likewise be accepted as sincere and courageous, and in addition as standing for those permanent national principles to which the children of their adversaries have now given allegiance. It is discouraging to discover such a book as Charles L. C. Minor’s “The Real Lincoln; from the Testimony of his Contemporaries,” which has gone to a second edition and the purpose of which is, by quoting the harsh and cruel things said of Lincoln in the North during his lifetime, to show that he was weak, bad, and demoralized. Far more modern the testimony of Grady in his New York speech of 1886, when he referred to him “who stands as the first typical American, the first who comprehended within himself all the strength and gentleness, all the majesty and grace of this republic—Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of Puritan and Cavalier; for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than Puritan, greater than Cavalier, in that he was American.”

If the South looks on the Civil War through some favorable haze, it is chiefly in the direction of magnifying genuinely great men, and few of the Confederate soldiers retain any bitterness toward the other side. This is not the case with Reconstruction—toward which, for a variety of reasons, the South feels the bitterest resentment. Only a few months ago a flowery speaker in Baltimore, addressing an audience composed chiefly of Northern people, declared that “all the ignominy, shame, bloodshed, moral debasement that followed the crowning infamy of the Fifteenth Amendment must be laid at the door of the North alone.... The whole movement was thoroughly revolutionary—anarchy, chaos, ruin was the inevitable result.” Thomas Dixon, Jr., rings all the changes and more on this theme. He makes Thaddeus Stevens, in the intervals that he can spare from his negro paramour, set out to confiscate the property of all the Southern Whites; and he supposes that the North sends down as its agents in the South “Army cooks, teamsters, fakirs, and broken-down preachers who had turned insurance agents.” He charges that by the North the attempt was “deliberately made to blot out Anglo-Saxon society and substitute African barbarism.”

The years from 1865 to 1871 were indeed sorrowful for the Southern States, and have planted seeds of hostility between North and South and also between the races in the South; but declamation and exaggeration add nothing to the real hardships of the process. Many Southerners still believe that their section was impoverished only by emancipation, which they say swept away two thousand million dollars’ worth of property; they overlook that the South was politically and economically ruined by the losses of four years of a war which, besides the actual destruction in the track of armies, by its terrible drain took all the accumulated capital of the section. After the war the South still retained the land and the Negroes to work it. The community as a whole lost nothing except from the dislocation of industry. Inasmuch as the South has recovered its productive capacity, and there is not a man of any standing in the South who, from the point of view of the white man’s interest, would go back to slavery if he could, it is time that the charges of spoliation by emancipation were withdrawn.

Both the duration and the intensity of the Reconstruction process have been overestimated. It was a period of general disorganization; the time of the Credit Mobilier scandals; the exact decade when the people of New York City were paying eighty million dollars for the privilege of being plundered by Boss Tweed. The Southern state governments had previously been economically administered, and the people keenly felt the degradation of corruption from which Northern States were also suffering; but the actual period of Reconstruction was much shorter than has usually been supposed. After the first attempts to reorganize the governments in 1865, they went back into the hands of the military, and the consensus of testimony is that the military government if harsh was honest. There they remained in all cases until 1868 and in Georgia until 1871. Within little more than a year after 1868 the Conservatives of Virginia regained control; in Alabama Reconstruction lasted only twenty-eight months; in the tidal wave of 1874 the carpetbag and scalawag power was broken in all the Southern States except South Carolina and Louisiana.

One year or five years of bad government was too much, but Southern lawlessness was not the monopoly of the Reconstruction governments. One of the greatest evils of the period was the Ku Klux Klan which Reed says “becomes dearer in memory every year.” There was reason for recovering white supremacy in the South, even though the conditions of the Reconstruction government have been somewhat exaggerated; but the Ku Klux aroused a spirit of disorder, a defiance of the vested rights of white men as well as of Negroes, which has been a malign influence for forty years. The night-riders in Kentucky are almost a conscious imitation of the Ku Klux, and only a few months ago it was suggested that it be reorganized in Georgia to deal with negro crime. It is one thing to read of the gallant struggle of the Ku Klux to protect womanhood and to asert the nobility of the white race; it is quite another to be told, incidentally, that in a certain county of Mississippi the Ku Klux “put a hundred and nineteen niggers into the river.” That is what some people call a massacre.

The attitude of some Southerners toward the Civil War and Reconstruction suggests the story of the Georgia captain who, after three years of honest fighting, reappeared on his farm and was welcomed home by his faithful Penelope. “The war is over,” said he; “I have come home to stay forever.” “Is that true, Jim? Have you licked the Yankees at last?” “Yes, I have licked them at last, but if they don’t stay licked, I don’t know but I may have to go up North and lick ’em again.”

Is the North to be “licked again” indefinitely? The suffering, the sacrifice, and the heroism of the Civil War were as great on its side of Mason and Dixon’s line as on the other side; and the historical perspective of that period of conflict covers some incidents which the North forgets with difficulty. For instance, the prison of Andersonville was hateful to the whole North. After forty years it is easier than at the time to understand the difficulties of an impoverished government guarding thousands of prisoners with a scanty force in a region lacking in food. Nevertheless, it is a deep conviction of the survivors among the prisoners and in the minds of many thousand other persons that these inherent difficulties were aggravated by the incompetency and heartlessness of Captain Wirz, who by accepting command assumed the responsibility for the condition of things. By the best showing of his friends he was an incompetent man, who had the power of life and death over thousands of his fellow-men, and let many of them die for want of humanity and common sense. The only reason for remembering Wirz is that he was obnoxious to the Northern soldiers in a time of great excitement. Yet the South of Lee and Jackson and Sidney Johnston has erected a monument to that man who performed no service to the Confederacy except to be executed, who led in no heroic action, represents no chivalry, and who did not so much as capture a color or an army wagon. It is an example of what in other parts of the world is thought an emotional disinclination to look facts in the face.

As to the period since Reconstruction—that is, the last thirty years—the acute sensibility of the South no longer takes the form of accusing the North of an attempt to submerge the white race, but rather is turned toward enlarged news of Southern wealth and prestige, which will be examined later in this book. It has been the service of Southern writers, teachers, and public men to look facts more squarely in the face. Still, one finds now and then an old man of the old Benton spirit. About two years ago a Mississippi newspaper greeted a visitor who had previously expressed some opinions on the South, as “an object of distaste to all decent people of Mississippi.... This blue-abdomened miscreant ... would have the world believe that the South has burnings, lynchings, and such horrors, with special trains, and the children of the public schools to witness. Are the people of Jackson going to hear this traducer of them; this man who prints broadcast over the country baseless slanders against the people who misguidedly invited him down here? Are they going to hear a man filled with venom who will take their good name.” And a high-toned Southern gentleman, up to that time a personal friend of the Northerner, thought it necessary to print a card in a newspaper, setting forth the fact that he at least had no responsibility for the presence of the Yankee.