Taki Magazine

July 21 marks the 146th anniversary of the beginning of the First Manassas (or First Bull Run, in Yankese). On that day, Washington citizens went out to the battlefield a-picnicking, to watch the onslaught of the Confederates under General Beauregard. While it was a victory for the South, a number of considerations (including the exhaustion of his men, and the early Confederate delusion that merely expelling all Federals from the soil of their new country would secure victory) Beauregard did not cross the Potomac and end the war.

Tactical and strategic considerations aside, however, this anniversary brings the Sunny South to my mind, in all her splendor and tragedy. To be sure, I have never lived down there; but more than a few turns in the South (to steal a phrase from V.S. Naipaul) have lost my heart to her (although her Summer weather has freed her from the spectre of my ever taking up residence within her boundaries). Just where do those boundaries lie? For the purposes of this article, she’ll take in the border states of Delaware , Maryland , West Virginia , Kentucky , and Missouri , as well as Texas and Oklahoma . Even New Mexico and Arizona were considered a territory of the CSA, for all that the Confederate hold on Santa Fe was brief, and Tucson even briefer. But Kansas just missed becoming Southern, thanks to a bloody civil war before the Civil War; even Los Angeles was carried by Breckenridge in the election of 1860, and suburban El Monte (about ten miles from where I am writing this) flew the stars and bars over their city hall every time news arrived out here of a Confederate victory. Those who have been to Wilmington , Baltimore , Kansas City, or Tulsa may dispute my assignation of those areas to Dixie , but travel a bit deeper into the countryside, and the reason for their allocation will become obvious.

Responding to a recent article of mine on New England in this venue, a number of commentators cited the masterful Albion’s Seed as an introduction to understanding the cultural differences already at play in the settling of New England , as well as the Middle and Southern Colonies. I would cite two others as well, both by renegade Republican Kevin Phillips: The Cousins’ Wars and his much earlier work, The Emerging Republican Majority. While the latter book covers a time that has come and gone, its analysis of the religious, cultural, and ethnic influence on voting was prescient, and Phillips used the same methodology in his brilliant, later tome. These all-important factors are too often left out of consideration of American history and politics, and nowhere are they more crucial to understanding an area than they are in considering the South.

For one thing, the settlement of the Southern colonies was layered, from Maryland to Georgia : English (with pockets of Scots) and their black slaves in the Tidewater; Germans in the Piedmont ; and Ulster Scots (or Scotch-Irish as they came to be called) in the mountains. As Americans pushed West and Southward after the Revolution, these patterns retained a certain amount of influence. Those who have noted the cultural similarities between the Appalachians and the Ozarks will hardly be surprised to find out that the settlement roots of the latter lie in the former.

There was another difference from the North, however. As the South expanded, it encountered pre-existent Spanish and French settlements that were as old as anything on the Atlantic Coast (in the case of St. Augustine, Florida, much older), and were far more populous than similar sites in the Old Northwest. Florida , the Mississippi-Alabama Gulf Coast, Louisiana, and Texas were all affected by the encounter between the old, Catholic, Latin cultures and the new Anglo-American one. As Appalachia settled the Ozarks, Catholic sections of Maryland seeded central Kentucky (called even today the “Holy Land,” and boasting villages with names like “Holy Cross” and “Loretto.”) The French Revolution and the slave risings in Haiti sent French refugees of both colors not only to Louisiana , but to such ports as Savannah, Charleston, and Norfolk, where they had a large effect on the local culture (Gone with the Wind readers will recall that Scarlet O’Hara’s maternal grandparents were among these). German and Irish immigrants were important locally, though not on the scale of their brethren up north. The “Irish Channel” in New Orleans earned its name honestly, and it was said that were it not for Yellow Fever, the Crescent City would have been as Irish as it was French. Even so, the urban blue-collar accent spoken there (popularly called “Yat”) which sounds so much like Brooklynese apparently owes its origins to the same Irish-German mix that produced the New York version. Immigrant Germans would play a big role as well in Texas and Missouri.

Added to this diversity among Europeans was of course the African presence. Coming as they did from different parts of Africa, partly melted together in the crucible of slavery, and soon deprived of their native languages, these unwilling newcomers were no more uniform than their masters. Differing attitudes toward color on the part of the French and Spanish led to the rise of a mixed-race aristocracy in the Gulf States, many of whom owned plantations and slaves of their own, as well as boasting French educations (there was a similar but distinct Spanish-based group in Pensacola). In a sense, American blacks are the most American of us all (save the Indians); for the most part they have no really identifiable ties to their specific homelands, other than biology. What cultural traits they did retain have become our common property, as fans of Elvis Presley, the Blues, and the Rolling Stones must admit.

Nor may we forget the natives. The Five Civilized Tribes are well-known indeed, as is the tragic tale of their expulsion to Oklahoma . But not all left, and those that did remained loyal to the South—and seceded with her. But there were and are other, smaller, broken tribes in out-of-the-way places. Produced by remnants of these, runaway slaves, and outcast whites, here and there in the South arose such groups as the Moors of Delaware and the Melungeons of the Appaclachians, whom the anthropologists dub “Tri-Racial Isolates.”

As one might guess, despite the popular notion of all antebellum Southerners (the white ones, anyway) living in Tara-like palatial homes, the South in 1860 was extremely diverse. Nor was it uninfluenced by the North, culturally. Many wealthy Southerners sent their scions to study at Princeton (although they had their own perfectly good universities at Williamsburg, Charleston, and elsewhere). Although the Episcopal Church had been the established one in the Southern colonies prior to the Revolution, it was swiftly disestablished after that war (even though most of its Southern members had been on the revolutionary side). The spiritual vacuum in the South was filled primarily by the Methodists and Baptists, in no small part because they required little education in their ministers, and so were able to establish congregations at a prodigious rate. But the latter faith had come to the South directly from New England and Philadelphia in 1727, with the erection of Shiloh Church in Cisco, North Carolina. The area soon mushroomed with similar congregations, but they in turn generally converted to Calvinist or “Particular” Baptistry. We outsiders tend to think of the South as heavily Calvinist. She may well be, but she got it from the North.

This shared heritage did not form ties that bound, however. After 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa became illegal, thus ending to a great degree the “Triangle Trade” that had made New England seaports wealthy (although some illegal activity of this sort continued; the last Slaver put out of Portland, Maine in 1859), Abolitionism gathered strength in the New England States. Southerners then and now would claim that the Yankees “got religion” on this point when slavery was no longer profitable for them. But however that may be, tensions on both sides rose, and in turn, on this very issue of slavery, the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists split (the first two would reunite in the 20th century, but the gulf between the latter only gets wider).

So things stood at the election of Abraham Lincoln, when the split of the Democratic Party into three pieces allowed the new Republicans in—and convinced the Southern politicians that abolition was imminent. Oceans of ink have been shed over the rightness or wrongness of secession. It seems to this writer that there are two separate questions here, actually. Is (or was, since we know now that no State will ever be permitted to do so today—whatever provocation she may face) secession morally permissible in the abstract? And, was this particular act of secession, at this point in time, justified?

As regards the first question, one is reminded of the comment of a comedian-friend of Lincoln’s. When the new president asked him what he thought of the Southern States breaking the Union. “Well, Mr. President, if Secession be a valid concept, then my sympathies must lie with the South. If not, then I can only say, ‘God Bless His Majesty!’” This points up an uneasy truth for a quasi-Calvinist nation like ourselves—if one of our foundational conflicts was moral, the other cannot be. But in any case, the Southerners themselves pointed to the example of their grandfathers’ rebellion against the Crown—which is why the coat-of-arms of the Confederacy featured Washington astride a horse. Moreover, since my native State of New York only acceded to the Constitution on the proviso that it could withdraw from that contract should it prove annoying, I myself could hardly condemn the concept. It is interesting to note, however, that, in my lifetime, the attempts at secession I have seen—the unsuccessful ventures of Biafra , Rhodesia , and Katanga , and the rather more victorious efforts of Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Slovakia—were all opposed to varying degrees by Washington—a town that can’t seem to stand seeing small regions escape the grip of a central government.

But if we admit that secession can be a valid concept, what about this particular case? The immediate issue, of course, Lincoln ’s election, would perhaps seem a little flimsy, given that he had not actually done anything against the South. But its residents were sure he would. The underlying issues were, of course, slavery and States’ Rights. Since 1865, Southern apologists have maintained that slavery was tangential to the issue. But of course, this is belied by the actual declarations of independence of the individual Confederate States. Reading these texts would seem to make an open and shut case. However, there is more to the story. Each of these documents invoke 1776, of course, and as with the conflict that was in progress then, there were divisions of opinion. In the South large areas opposed Secession, to include what became West Virginia, eastern Tennessee (which almost seceded from her home State as well), and smaller areas, like Huey Long’s native place, Winn Parish, Louisiana. But much as these enclaves opposed secession, they did not embrace abolition (although the immigrant Germans of Texas and Missouri did, for the most part). The pro-Southern Copperheads of the North, for the most part, did not support the “Peculiar Institution” either—certainly not ex-President Franklin Pierce, who vocally supported the Confederacy from his New Hampshire home, or Catholic convert James McMaster, whose paper, The Freeman’s Journal, was shut down and himself imprisoned when he accused Lincoln in print of being an enemy of free speech. Indeed, in the prosecution of the War, the president introduced the draft, income tax, and suppression of habeus corpus. He also unwittingly did damage to the English language in this country, since after his victory, the grammatically correct usage “the United States are…” was replaced in most people’s mouths with the illiterate “the United States is….”

One may argue forever (and doubtless people will) over the rights and wrongs of the War Between the States. What cannot be argued is that the War whose tactical commencement we are remembering today in large part created the Southern mystique. The wide vein of Walter Scott-derived Romanticism that flowed through the Southern psyche before the War (giving birth to such as Edgar Allan Poe) poured into the endless tragedy of a battered, defeated, and occupied land. While one may or may not share the politics of the Confederate leadership, one cannot but admit the powerful emotions evoked by the “Lost Cause.” To visit any of the many Confederate memorials around the South—such as the Confederate Memorial Chapels in Richmond and Blandford (Petersburg) Virginia and in Higginsville, Missouri; the Confederate Museum in New Orleans; Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’ last home in Biloxi, Mississippi (the house, heavily damaged in Katrina, will reopen in 2008, while the cemetery, with the tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier, is open now); the “White Houses” and Capitols in Richmond and Montgomery; and the Episcopal Churches in those cities where the President and his family worshipped, to name a very few locations—well, whether one considers oneself Blue or Gray, he cannot come away unaffected by the horror that rained down upon the South.

The sadness left behind by that conflict, the feeling of exile in one’s own land, certainly affected Southern writers as different as William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner, and those “Fugitive” poets of Vanderbilt University who morphed into the Southern Agrarians of I’ll Take My Stand. This latter group’s dream that the innate nature of the South could somehow regenerate itself, and perhaps even the nation at large, remained a dream. But they did leave behind a powerful legacy, as fans of Richard Weaver and his confreres will know—and other writers left us that literary mood called “Southern Gothic.”

But all was and is not sadness in Dixie—although its most jovial elements retain a touch of melancholy. This emotion is certainly present in the folk music, which beguiled outsiders even before the Civil War. Stephen Foster, for example, although born in Pittsburgh (he would die in New York City) and a decided opponent of Secession, is widely remembered as a Southerner—and much of his music is now an indissoluble part of the Southern tradition. Even more remarkable, Al Jolson (born Asa Yoelson in Seredzius, Lithuania ) carved out quite a career in the early 20th century singing truly maudlin tunes about Dixie and Mammy. While he had no real connection with the area, he transmogrified his yearning for the homeland he could barely remember into a metaphor an American audience could understand.

There was, however, one group, for whom the South was not so appealing in those days—American blacks. The issue of race certainly does cut through Southern history like a knife. Nevertheless, in addition to lynchings and segregation, we should remember a few other things about its history down South. The interrelationship of two very different groups, one subject to the other but in very close quarters, is extremely complex, to say the least. As we know, slavery was on the wane—until the invention of the cotton gin made it profitable once more. Stories of Haiti, and such outbreaks as the Nat Turner revolt in 1831 Virginia made the prospect of slave revolt quite fearsome to Southern whites. But here is where the story gets interesting. When most of the white male population marched of to fight the Yankees, those who had them necessarily left their women, children, and property in the care of their slaves. Although there are numerous stories of these bondsmen being tortured and killed by Union troops for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of the family silver, there are none that I can find of slaves taking advantage of the situation to murder their charges or rob their masters’ kin. As in most periods of history, the situation was rather more complex than we of the 21st century are taught to think.

When what was left of the “Boys in Gray” came home, it was to a country where they had no civil rights. Under Reconstruction, Confederate veterans or government workers (most of the white male population) could neither vote nor bear witness in court. This left them completely vulnerable before the Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and emancipated blacks who now ran their stricken region. It does not take a genius to see that unscrupulous folk would take advantage of the situation. Bereft of legal redress, a group of Confederate veterans founded the Ku-Klux-Klan in 1866. The following year, General Nathan Bedford Forrest became its leader. Forrest, however, saw the main foes of the Klan as the Carpetbaggers and Scalawags. Disgusted by the Klan’s increasingly violent tactics and its targeting of Blacks (the latter annoying because he had commanded Black troops in battle), he soon resigned.

Reconstruction ended by 1877, when the traditional leadership of the South (or what remained of it) made a deal with the Federal government. They would be allowed back into politics, in return for guaranteeing the civil rights of the Blacks. This gentlemen’s agreement lasted until the 1890s, when the generation that remembered the Antebellum period shuffled off or died out, and were replaced by the young Fire-eaters whose memories began with Reconstruction. They would have their revenge, and his name was Jim Crow, the bastard son of the Carpetbaggers.
Another group who aroused the ire of the renascent Klan, during and after World War I, were the Catholics. As indicated earlier, in antebellum times, Catholics were a presence, if a small one, in various parts of the South.

Because of their relatively high social standing, members of that Faith wielded an influence all out of proportion to their numbers—there was a Catholic in Davis ’s cabinet, as well as a Jew who later converted. The three arguably best known Southern war songs were all written by Catholics—“Dixie” by Daniel Decatur Emmet, “Maryland, My Maryland” by James Ryder Randall, and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” by Harry McCarthy (beautifully performed by Damon Kirsche in the extraordinary 2003 film Gods and Generals). Such verses as “The Conquered Banner” and “The Sword of Robert Lee” were written by Confederate Army chaplain, Rev. Abram Ryan, the “poet-priest of the Confederacy.” The soon to be canonized Pope Pius IX was the only foreign ruler to recognize Davis ’ presidency. After the war, while Davis languished in Fortress Monroe,  Pope Pius sent Davis his portrait and a crown of thorns he had made with his own hands (this second class relic may be viewed at the Confederate Museum in New Orleans). Davis had himself attempted to convert to Catholicism at 14, but the Dominicans who taught him demurred on account of his age; nonetheless, his rosary and scapular were on display at Beauvoir.

But this alliance proved a somewhat costly one for the Church. The Catholic elites in the South were as damaged any of their confreres—and this included those of color, who found their position eroded after Reconstruction and destroyed by Jim Crow. Moreover, Catholics had to contend with direct enmity from the occupiers, in the form of Freedmen’s Bureau, an office erected by the Federal government, ostensibly to guide the newly-liberated slaves onto the path of freedom. In Louisiana, at any rate, that mandate was interpreted by the local Bureau leadership as entailing getting as many of their charges to abandon Catholicism as possible (during the same period the Bureau of Indian Affairs replaced Catholic with Protestant missionaries on many Indian reservations). One of the Bureau’s most notable successes was with a black couple in Franklin, Louisiana, named Seymour. Although they had baptized their son William Catholic, under the influence of their northern mentors they raised him Baptist. He would go on to lead the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles , generally recognized as the birth of Pentecostalism.

At any rate, after the War, the same generation that brought in Jim Crow began to identify Catholics as both “foreign” and Yankee. This would hamper the work of the Church in the South for generations. Moreover, it produced a mindset among Catholics not unlike that of the old Recusant in England. As a suspect minority, each had to choose for himself how far he could accept the prevailing ethos—racially and otherwise. Typical of these folk were the writers Margaret Mitchell and Flannery O’Connor. The latter, in particular, explored the odd position she and her co-religionists occupied in a region that, despite its suspicion of her creed, had more in common with it in many ways than did the more tolerant (and Catholic-filled) North. Her clearest statement on the topic was her brilliant essay, “The Catholic Writer in the Protestant South,” where famously referred to her native region as “Christ-haunted.”

In recent decades, however, much of this has changed. The invention and propagation of air conditioning after World War II allowed many Northerners, tired of the winters and urban blight of their homes, to flock south. Not merely to Florida, either: Northern Virginia; Fayetteville and Charlotte, North Carolina; Dallas, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; and many other places are becoming quite Yankee. In very recent decades, Mexican migrant workers have appeared in many places (I know one Catholic Church in rural North Carolina where, due to the high infant mortality rate among that segment of his flock, the priest has taken to burying their children for free as a special apostolate). Moreover, thanks to the end of segregation and the same unpleasant conditions in the North and West that white folks notice, many Blacks have begun returning to the land they or their families left. Adding a bizarre element to the mix, many Californians are heading to North Carolina, as their own state decays.

But not unlike the unfortunate results when hipsters discover an old tavern, love the atmosphere, and then begin pushing to turn it into the kind of fern-bar they fled, so too with many newcomers to the South. Raised on a strictly Northern view of the Civil War, they unite with local Blacks (whose motives are far more legitimate) and agitate for removal of the remnants of Confederate memory. Thanks to pressure of various kinds, the University of Mississippi rarely plays Dixie any more. Due to “massive litigation,” in 1997, the Confederate Memorial Hall in Washington, D.C. , owned by its sponsoring association since the late 19th century, had to be sold. Richmond’s “Battle Abbey of the South” has been swallowed up by the Virginia Historical Association. But the most memorable fight has certainly been the “ Battle of the Flags,” as state house after state house has been forced to bring down the Confederate flag. One may understand why that flag would annoy many blacks (although perhaps not those whose ancestors fought for the South). But I would like to suggest that they should be equally annoyed at the Stars and Stripes—which flew for much longer over legal slavery, and later became the symbol of Reconstruction-era oppression.

Despite all of this, however, the South today remains a pleasant place to visit, indeed. Without a doubt, my favorite part is New Orleans , as well as the Cajun country, about which I have written elsewhere. But the old coastal and river towns, each with their own identity and culture—ah, what can compare, this side of the water? San Antonio and Houston , St. Louis and Natchez and Louisville , Mobile and Pensacola , St. Augustine and Savannah and Charleston, New Bern and Edenton, Richmond and Williamsburg, and so many other beside! The old plantations, the forts, the homes of famous writers, the small museums, the battlefields! For a writer of antiquary bent, there is quite simply nothing like it.

The tradition of liberal education, practically banished from the Ivy League continues with some vigor in small colleges and universities dotted around the former Confederacy. Certainly, religion plays a much bigger part in public life there than it does in the rest of the country—including, deplorably, heavily Catholic regions such as Boston and New York City. It would be hard to imagine a man like Chief Justice Moore defending the Ten Commandments so heroically in any other part of America.

So too with the innumerable small groups of people, like St. Augustine’s Minorcans, Key West’s Conchs (although these Tory descendants are being pushed out), the Gullahs of the Sea Islands! Folklore and folk music yes, but above all, hospitality and gentility. And the food they serve…. There are regional specialties of all types (she-crab soup and turtle steak come to mind, but there are many others), but even more generally cooked specialties are mouth-watering Bring me collard, turnip or dandelion greens, rich with pork-filled pot-likker, and corn bread to sop it up with! Hush puppies and fried chicken, or biscuits and red-eye gravy! The list goes on and on, and even chain cafeterias like Piccadilly routinely turn out meals to die for. Taken all together, even a born-Yankee like me can feel why Southerners should love their land so, and once have been willing to die for it.

But outside of pleasure, the problems of the South remain. She too is slowly being absorbed by the Hideous Strength that seems ever more dominant throughout the land. What can be done to unify her, to make her able to play a part in the battle that looms around us?

Two things come to mind. One is that, in many ways, as Walker Percy, Margaret Mitchell and Flannery O’Connor perceived, in the current struggle between the “Modernity” foisted on us by our elites and those who hold to the traditions they brought to this country—religious and cultural—Protestant Southerners and Catholic Midwesterners and Yankees are natural allies. Both sides must realize this.

On the other, the race issue must somehow be laid to rest. It seems to me that the best way to begin with this is an honest reevaluation of the historical relationship between the races, freed from current political agendas. One thing that I have noticed in candid conversations with white Southerners is that while they have often expressed to me disdain for blacks as a group or (more often) as a political force, when asked if they know any personally, the answer is generally “yes.” When pressed as to whether they dislike any of these acquaintances, the answer is just as often “no.” In the North and West, when folk are asked how they feel about blacks, the response is usually some variation on “they’re wonderful.” But when asked if they know any, these same people will usually say “no.” The Southern attitude would appear to be something to build on.

Beyond that, Southern whites really need to look at Black history. Some of it is propaganda, some of it is not. The Jim Crow-era led to many evils (not least of which were spoiling literacy tests for voting by making them racially based) from which the country still suffers. But blacks too must look at their history, and realize that all is (if you’ll pardon the pun) black and white. There were black Confederate troops, such as the Louisiana Native Guards, and the steadfastness of Slaves under Yankee occupation we have referred to. The South as it is, and as it was, is as much the creation of blacks as whites, and Southerners of both races have more in common with each other than they do with their fellows in the rest of the country. I personally would make the 1942 autobiography of Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, required reading in every high school in the South—or the North, for that matter. A more realistic—and mutually sympathetic—commentary on the relationship between the races would be hard to find; of course, in one of her novels, the protagonists are all white, a feat that few black authors would be able to get away with today. The epitaph on Miss Hurston’s grave is particularly fitting—“A Genius of the South.” When Confederate-descended Blacks can happily and proudly join the SCV, and when Southerners of both races can together defend their beliefs against those who would impose an alien and materialistic set of values upon them, and deprive them of the traditions that give them their identity, then the South will truly be healed—to the great advantage of us all. For the forces that are dominant in this land today mean to end all that our fathers held dear: in religion, in customs, in law. They would replace these with a manner of life, conceived in New York and hatched in Hollywood, which is as immoral as it is oppressive—far worse than anything either Whig or Tory, or Rebel or Yank, could conceive of either imposing upon or receiving from the other.

Of course, I am an outsider, and my views may well be inaccurate, irrelevant, woefully naïve—or worse, simply annoying to the actual denizens of that enchanted corner of this country. If such be the case, however, perhaps they will not object to my closing with the words of the first verse of the Confederate national anthem, “God Save the South”:

God save the South, God save the South,
Her altars and firesides, God save the South!
Now that the war is nigh, now that we arm to die,
Chanting our battle cry, “Freedom or death!”
Chanting our battle cry, “Freedom or death!”

Charles A. Coulombe is a writer descended from Jacobite, Tory and Confederate veterans.