The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 Read Online Free PDF Page A

and
American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue
(Boston, 1971).
    11 The most common elaboration of the legend is Margaret Mitchell,
Gone with the Wind
(New York, 1936).
    12 See Clement Eaton,
The Waning of the Old South Civilization, 1860–1880
(Athens, Ga., 1968), and
The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790–1860
(New York, 1961), for a summary statement in chapters 1 and 7 respectively; and Frank L. Owsley,
Plain Folk of the Old South
(Baton Rouge, La., 1949), for the pioneer statistical analysis. William E. Dodd,
The Cotton Kingdom
(New Haven, Conn., 1917), speaks to the same point and offers statistical support.
    13 This is the implication of Owsley’s research in
Plain Folk,
pp. 133–149.
    14 This view is essentially that of W. J. Cash in
Mind of the South
(New York, 1941), pp. 3–102.
    15 This analysis, very subtly expressed, is from Eaton,
Growth of Southern Civilization
and
The Freedom of Thought Struggle in the Old South,
revised and enlarged edition (New York, 1964).
    16 This point is well made in C. Vann Woodward’s masterful critique of Cash’s
Mind of the South,
“The Elusive Mind of the South,” published first in the
New York Review of Books
(December 4, 1969) and later slightly altered in Woodward,
American Counterpoint,
pp. 261–283.
    17 See Genovese, “The Slave South,”
Political Economy,
pp. 13–39.
    18 “It was an aspect of this culture that the relation between the land and the people remained more direct and more primal in the South than in other parts of the country…. Even in the most exploitative economic situations, this culture retained a personalism in the relations of man to man which the industrial culture lacks. Even for those whose lives were the narrowest, it offered a relationship of man to nature in which there was a certain fulfillment of personality.” David M. Potter, “The Enigma of the South,”
Yale Review,
LI (1961), 142–151, republished in
South and Sectional Conflict,
pp. 3–16.
    19 Although Potter’s article
(ibid.)
remains in good repute, few historians have attempted to expand the folk culture theme and to offer examples of folk culture in action. An exception is Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian South: A Study in Regional Folk Culture,”
Journal of Southern History,
XXXVI (1970), 501–529. An earlier treatment of Southern personalism in action is Charles S. Sydnor, “The Southerner and the Laws,”
Journal of Southern History,
VI (1940), 1–23.
    20 As Ralph Ellison (quoted in William Styron, “This Quiet Dust,”
Harpers,
April 1965, 136) observed a century later, “Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family, or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes.”
    21 After stating that the “Old” Union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” Stephens explained, “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” The full text of the speech, delivered in March 1861, is in Frank Moore (ed.),
The Rebellion Record,
I, (New York, 1861–1864), 44–49.
    22 See especially William W. Freehling,
Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836
(New York, 1965); and Steven A. Channing,
Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina
(New York, 1970), for full expositions of this view. William L. Barney in
The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860
(Princeton, N.J., 1974) speaks to the same point in a broader context
    23 See Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,
103
–
148.
    24 Jack J. Carduso, “Southern Reaction to
The Impending Crisis, “ Civil War History,
XVI (1970), 5
–
17
    25 For a realistic portrayal of the physical rigors of the slave system,