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The South and Southern History

by Clyde Wilson

PART 5

After Reconstruction

For the period of Southern history from the end of Reconstruction until World War I, the works of C. Vann Woodward cannot be avoided, particularly Origins of the New South, American Counterpoint, and Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel. Woodward was a native Southerner who was negative about nearly everything that Southerners hold dear and highly successful at it. But the works mentioned remain interesting because Woodward, while he criticized the South, did not accept the moral pretensions of the North. He was a good writer who was capable of an ironic detachment from American as well as Southern mythology.

Other Woodward works, Reunion and Reaction, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and The Burden of Southern History need no longer be read. They are exercises tailored perfectly to appeal to the leftist mentality at a particular point in time, and their ideas have been shown to be of doubtful validity. Woodward, alas, left a large company of talented PhD students, most of them renegade Southerners from well-to-do families, who have managed to take over and distort many of the areas of major interest to students of the South.

For a pre-Woodward view, see Holland M. Thompson, The New South*.

Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery

Elizabeth Alston Pringle, A Woman Rice Planter

As always, the best view of this period is given by the South's creative writers:

Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia and The Burial of the Guns

William Faulkner, The Reivers and Intruder in the Dust (Mississippi)

Owen Wister, Lady Baltimore (Charleston)

Charles Henry Smith, "Bill Arp" Stories and Sketches* which have appeared in several editions (North Georgia)

Joel Chandler Harris's stories of "Uncle Remus." These stories are of course no longer in favor. Uncle Remus was as wise, kind, and honorable as anyone in literature and therefore not a good role model. (Middle Georgia)

The South: Twentieth Century and Beyond

Historical writing about the 20th century South suffers from the general characteristics of such writing in the second half of that century: leftism masquerading as professional objectivity, and the blindness of over-specialization. There is a vast literature, some of it good within its own terms, some not. But we want works for the reader in search of real, humane knowledge and understanding. The writings cited in the first section above, "General Works," make for a good start.

July 9, 2001

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