The South and Southern History - Part 2
The War
For understanding the War of Southern Independence (still the most deadly and revolutionary event in American history) two works are indispensable: Charles Adams's instant classic, When in the Course of Human Events, and Ludwell H. Johnson's North over South. The best general history of the war that has ever been or ever will be written is by a Southerner, Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative (3 vols.), a true masterpiece yhat is just as sympathetic and profound in regard to the Northern side as the Southern.
There are said to be more books on the War than on any other subject except Christianity. We can only touch the surface of this vast material by pointing to a few worthy titles:
Rod Gragg, The Illustrated Confederate Reader
Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War
Robert Selph Henry, The Story of the Confederacy
Thomas di Lorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Forum Books/Random House, 2002), forthcoming.
Marshall DeRosa, ed. The Politics of Dissolution
Walter Sullivan, ed., The War the Women Lived
Bart R. Talbert, Maryland:The South's First Casualty
Felicity Allen, Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart
Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government
Douglas Southall Freeman, R.E. Lee; and for the young, Stanley F. Horn, Boy's Book of Robert E. Lee*. Ignore the ludicrous biographies by Connelly and Noland. For Lee see also Richard Adams, Traveller and J. Steven Wilkins, The Call of Duty.
John S. Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command
Charles C. Minor, The Real Lincoln
William Gilmore Simms, The Sack and Destruction of Columbia, South Carolina (eyewitness account by the South's greatest writer at the time)
Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee
Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction
Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Ashore and Afloat
Robert S. Henry, "First with the Most" Forrest. The more recent Forrest biography by Jack W. Hurst is not bad, but avoid the PC version by Brian Wills.
John W. Thomason, Jeb Stuart
James I. Robertson, Stonewall Jackson
Raimondo Luraghi, History of the Confederate Navy
Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates
Kelly J. O'Grady, Clear the Confederate Way: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia
Charles K. Barrow, et al., Black Confederates
Arthur J.L. Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States
Much the best way to grasp the Southern spirit and experience in the war is through music and literature. One of the countless deceptions perpetrated by the notorious Ken Burns TV "documentary" on the war was the omission of most white Southern music – which is certainly as interesting as the Northern and black music that was used. Five volumes of "Songs of the C.S.A." recorded by Bobby Horton of Birmingham, Alabama, give a complete range of Confederate experience – patriotism, battle, loss, hardship, humor.
The South's novelists have been much greater than its historians. The Southern experience of the war is truly and movingly portrayed in such works as William Faulkner's The Unvanquished, Caroline Gordon's None Shall Look Back, Mary Johnston's The Long Roll, Madison Jones's Nashville: 1864; John W. Thomason's Lone Star Preacher, James Warner Bellah's The Valiant Virginians*, and many others. Don't forget the Confederate poets Henry Timrod and Father Abram J. Ryan as well as Donald Davidson's Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems. The recent films "Pharoah's Army" and "Ride With the Devil" are good in the same way, as is at least the early part of Clint Eastwood's "Outlaw Josey Wales."
Reconstruction
No period of Southern history has been covered by more distortions in recent times than has 1865-1876. Not too long ago, nearly everybody, including Northerners, regarded this period as a shameful unAmerican exercise in military rule and limitless corruption. Now, it is established academic "truth" that the only thing wrong with Reconstruction was that it was not ruthless enough. The South should have been subjected to a complete Marxist, egalitarian revolution.
It seems irrelevant to the current "experts" on Reconstruction that such would have required Northerners to have had ideas and purposes rather different from what they could imagine at the time, and that it would have required totalitarianism and mass executions, not to mention violation of the terms of surrender, none of which would have bothered Radical Republicans if they could have gotten away with it.
The books by Ludwell Johnson, Thomas Di Lorenzo, and Richard Taylor cited above are essential for Reconstruction. I suggest also the following:
E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction and Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky
John N. Edwards, Noted Guerillas, or the Warfare of the Border, definitive on the era of Jesse James.
Robert Selph Henry, The Story of Reconstruction
Stanley F. Horn, The Invisible Empire
John Chodes, "The Union League: Washington's Klan" (League of the South Paper)
Walter L. Fleming, Sequel of Appomattox
Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year
I prefer the above works to the often-cited Claude G. Bowers's The Tragic Era which is good on the evils of Reconstruction, but written from the viewpoint of Northerners who turned against it rather than Southerners who suffered through it.
For serious students there is Walter L. Fleming, A Documentary History of Reconstruction, assuming it has not yet been purged from libraries. While we are at it, there is still a lot to be learned from films such as "The Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind." The main thing wrong with "Birth" is too favorable a view of Lincoln. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Southerners like D.W. Griffith, the director, and Thomas Dixon, who wrote the novel that was used as a base, went out of their way to be good Americans and give some respect to the prevailing Northern sentiments. Besides, after Reconstruction, Lincoln and the war looked less bad.
State Rights and the Real Constitution
The works of John Taylor of Caroline. New Views of the Constitution, in a recent edition edited by James McClellan, provides an excellent entry into Taylor's sometimes difficult works. Taylor's Tyranny Unmasked also has a recent edition.
M.E. Bradford, A Better Guide than Reason, Founding Fathers, and Original Intentions
Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States
Marshall L. DeRosa, The Confederate Constitution of 1861
Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke
John C. Calhoun. The Essential Calhoun, ed. by Clyde N. Wilson, is a good place to start. See also H. Lee Cheek, Jr., Calhoun and Popular Rule, and Margaret Coit, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Is Jefferson Davis a Traitor?
Robert L. Dabney, A Defense of Virginia and the South
See also "The Great Civil War Debate," a video from American Vision with J. Steven Wilkins and Peter Marshall.
Donald Livingston,"Secession and the Modern State," and Clyde N. Wilson, "From Union to Empire," are numbers in the League of the South Papers series. LOS also has available many video and audiotape lectures about Constitutional and other questions. This is only to scratch the surface of a wealth of literature, but it will get anyone started.
A good basic treatment of American government is James McClellan: Liberty, Order, and Justice.