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The South and Southern History

by Clyde Wilson

PART 4

The First South: Colonial and Revolutionary History

John R. Alden, The First South*

Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia. See also Wright's edition of Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia*, the first original work of Southern (and American) literature (1715).

Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington

Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time

Albert J. Nock, Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson's writings, which can be found in many versions in print and libraries: "Autobiography," Notes on the State of Virginia, public papers, especially the Kentucky Resolutions and the first inaugural, and letters.

Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. A magnificent South Carolina lady who founded the indigo industry and mothered two signers of the Declaration of Independence.

M.E. Bradford, A Better Guide Than Reason and Remembering Who We Are

For more serious students, Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 3 vols. Good for dipping into and the definitive proof that New England had no monopoly of "American" learning and culture.

William Gilmore Simms, The Life of Francis Marion. Consciously or not, Mel Gibson's film "The Patriot" followed the trail that was blazed by Simms in regard to the Revolutionary War in the lower South. Simms wrote a series of novels, assiduously researched, set in Revolutionary South Carolina, which give a feel for the people, place, and time that can be found nowhere else. Among the more notable of these are Woodcraft, Katherine Walton, and The Scout. And the prolific Simms wrote a similar series about the colonial South, including The Cassique of Kiowa and The Yemassee. Many readers think that Simms knew Native Americans and frontiersman better than James Fenimore Cooper.

An important aspect of the history of the South in this period is the movement across the Appalachians. For a start try Marquis James, Andrew Jackson: Border Captain* and Elizabeth Madox Roberts's wonderful novel of early Kentucky, The Great Meadow.

The Old South: Plantation and Plain Folk

Mention of the antebellum South, not too long ago, commonly brought up pleasant images of a peaceful, dignified, charming way of life. (You can still get that feeling from surviving plantations, like Mount Vernon.) Now the mention brings up lurid images of chains and whips. Both ideas of the Old South are caricatures that have been believed mainly by outsiders. The latter image, as a generalization, is as much or more untrue as the former.

I should make clear that slavery and the plantation did not make up the whole of Southern life and culture by any means. As one fine historian put it, the plantations were prominent hills in the Southern landscape but took up only a small portion of the land. Most of the topography was covered by smaller independent farms, where most of the population, including a large fraction of the black people, lived.

Louis Filler, Slavery in the United States, is a reasonably dispassionate and comprehensive survey.

Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South*. Now out of favor, Phillips was in fact a great historian who did more research about American slavery than anyone ever has and who was a progressive for his time.

Raimondo Luraghi, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South*

Robert M. Myers, ed., Children of Pride

James E. Kibler, Our Father's Fields

Duncan L. Heyward, Seed from Madagascar

Avery O. Craven, The Coming of the Civil War*

Joseph Hergesheimer, Swords and Roses*

John Taylor of Caroline, Arator, ed. M.E. Bradford

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, a classic work on slavery that manages to avoid hysteria and be sympathetic to white and black Southerners both.

Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engermann, Time on the Cross, one of a number of books on the South that have been announced to have been disproved, though they haven't really been.

William Garrott Brown, The Lower South in American History*

J. Steven Wilkins and Douglas Wilson, Southern Slavery as It Was

Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy*

Everett Dick, The Dixie Frontier*

Frederick L. Ogg, The Old Northwest, on the Southerners who founded the Midwest.

For more serious students, Lewis C. Gray, Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, a classic work of its kind; and Michael O'Brien, ed., All Clever Men*, which indicates that intellectual life in the Old South was significant and not preoccupied with slavery.

One of the most important works in Southern history is Frank L. Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South. Owsley demonstrates that the South was not, according to abolitionist propaganda, made up of slaves, haughty aristocrats, and degraded poor whites, but the bulk of the people were independent farmers and stockraisers who had economic sufficiency and a love of liberty and were not bossed by anybody. The official stance of academic historians today is that "Owsley has been disproved." They must say this, because if the Old South was not as the abolitionists fancied it to be, desire for independence cannot be discredited and its invasion and destruction cannot be justified. In fact, Owsley has not been disproved and cannot be. The literature which might seriously challenge him does not exist.

A supplement to Owsley is Grady McWhiney's Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. McWhiney does a superb job of showing the connections between British border ways of life and the plain folk of the Old South. Unfortunately, in order to do this, he must use as sources the observations of puritanical Englishmen and Yankees who were outsiders to Cracker culture, and these observers give a highly derogatory tone to the description of Southern plain folk. I am also dubious about the open-ended term "Celtic." And clearly the very real phenomena described by McWhiney do not make up all of the elements that went into the formation of Southern society. The Low Country of Virginia and the Carolinas did not orginate in Celtic parts of Britain, not to mention French Louisiana.

A realistic view of the life of the Old South, neither defensive nor citical, appears in the literature it produced. The writers of the Old South, in fact, were creating a real American literature while New Englanders were turning out milksop verses and egomaniacal essays.

Johnson J. Hooper, The Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (Alabama)

George W. Harris, "Sut Lovingood" stories (Tennessee)

A.B. Longstreet, Georgia Scenes

William Elliott, Carolina Sports by Land and Water (ignore the PC introductiuon in the most recent edition)

William Gilmore Simms, Paddy M'Gann

Outstanding modern novels about the Old South:

William Faulkner, Go Down Moses. (By the way, Faulkner does not regard his protagonist, Ike McCaslin, as a hero for refusing his bequest of slaves. He regards him as a failure for not accepting his responsibilities.)

Caroline Gordon, Penhally (Kentucky)

Caroline Miller, Lamb in His Bosom (South Georgia)

Andrew Lytle, The Long Night (Alabama)

Perhaps the most outstanding cultural production of the Old South was Birds of North America by John J. Audubon of Louisiana. Audubon's interesting journals, which give a view of American society, have also been published. The painter George Caleb Bingham and the artist and architect Benjamin H. Latrobe have left vivd pictures of the Old South.

See also Jesse Poesch, Art in the Old South

Most Southern history is written as if the South is a peculiar sport of nature that needs explaining. The implicit unexamined assumption of the historian is that the North, or the mainstream United States, is the universal norm against which all else is to be measured. But what about that assumption? Maybe the South is just what it is and does not so much need explaining as it critics. Why have they been so preoccupied with slandering and reforming it?

In fact, you cannot understand the conflict that led to the War of Southern Independence unless you know something about the Old North. It was the North that suffered a revolution in its ways of thinking and doing. The historical path taken by the Old South is only explained by the economic, demographic, political, and religious changes in the North in the 19th century. It was these changes that brought to power the elements that demanded the destruction of the South and that reinterpreted the Constitution and the meaning of the Union. Only recently have historians begun to look carefully at the Old North, and some good books have appeared. If there is one certain indisputable generalization we can make about the North in the War and the periods before and after, it is this: The Union side NEVER did anything with a primary motive of benevolence toward the black population of America.

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men

Anne Norton, Alternative Americas*

Harlow W. Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America

Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity

Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America

Ernest L. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation

Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery*

V. Jacques Voegli, Free but Not Equal*

Howard Floan, The South in Northern Eyes*

Edgar Allan Poe, the South's greatest 19th century writer, despised New Englanders, their pretensions, and their baneful influence on American culture. In his collected essays and criticism, which can be found in many libraries, take a look at "Boston and the Bostonians," "Brook Farm," and "The Literati of New York City." If you want to know what the people who settled Boston were really like, watch Vincent Price's Puritan witchhunter in the film "The Conqueror Worm," which is based on a Poe story.

State and Local History

Southerners have historically been the most loyal to the Unitted States and ready to fight in its defense of all Americans. They are also the Americans most loyal to their own region and their own states, and the most likely to remain in their native territory. This is not paradoxical because loyalty is an indivisible quality of character. Their loyalty makes Southerners natural enemies of those powerful Americans who are not loyal to their people or country but to the government and the "propositions" it allegedly represents.

State histories, histories of regions within Southern states, and even county histories are abundant and many are quite good. The older state histories, which were used as textbooks in better days, are superior to the current ones drawn up to federal regulations. I can cite only a few outstanding examples.

John Gould Fletcher, Arkansas. Fletcher was a poet and one of the Twelve Agrarians.

Grace King, New Orleans: The Place and the People*. Grace King was a Louisiana writer whose novels and stories are better than her contemporary and currently celebrated feminist Kate Chopin. See also King's fiction Balcony Stories.*

T.R. Fehrenbacher, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans.

J. Evetts Haley is best known as the author of A Texan Looks at Lyndon. He was also a very fine historian of the Texas cattle kingdom in Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman, Jeff Milton: A Good Man with a Gun, and a number of other works.

In a few earlier listings and those that follow, states and subregions that the work reflects will be mentioned in parens.

July 9, 2001

Dr. Wilson is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.