Old South

“ Shall the blood of the old South—the best strain that ever uplifted human endeavor—that ran like water at duty’s call and never stained where it touched—shall this blood that pours into our veins through 117a century luminous with achievement, for the first time falter and be driven back from irresolute heat, when the old South, that left us a better heritage in manliness and courage than in broad and rich acres, calls us to settle problems? ”

“ Of old Kentucky Home.
The New South wakes! the New South shakes
The dew-drops from her mane,
For idle grief brings no relief,
The past comes not again;
To manly hearts and patient souls
Heaven sanctifies each loss;
Two angels, Toil and Patience, bear
To Heaven the Southern Cross.
New South! New South! unseal thy mouth,
Thy golden age is come—
Invention’s soaring harmony
And labor’s busy hum.
The Old South dies; with beaming eyes
The New South hastens in;
So boyhood’s toys are cast aside
When manhood’s deeds begin. ”

“ Socially, the Old South, like “all Gaul,” was divided into three parts—the slaveholding planters, the aristocrats of the social system, few relatively in numbers but mighty in wealth and authority; the negro slaves, who by the millions plowed and sowed its fields and reaped its harvests, and who for hundreds of years, both in slavery and freedom, have found contented homes in the South; and lastly the nonslaveholding whites, a distinctly third estate. ”

“ Today a New South may be said to be everywhere apparent. The Old South still exists in nooks and corners of many States, it is true: there are communities, counties, groups of counties, which cling to the old ideas. In the hearts of thousands of men and women the Old South is enshrined, and there is no room for the new; but the South as a whole is a New South, marked by a spirit of hopefulness, a belief in the future, and a desire to take a fuller part in the life of the nation. To trace the development of the new spirit and to discuss its manifestations is the purpose of this book. ”

“ I am handicapped in beginning by memories of other writers and speakers who have dealt more worthily than I can hope to do with my subject. The Old South has not been wanting in men to speak and write upon it. Friend and foe alike have exploited it. It has been the burden of poetry not always inspired, and of oratory not always inspiring. Not a few have been its critics who knew it only by hearsay. Indeed, much of current literature upon the Old South is from those who were born after it had passed away. ”

“ So for more than fifty formative years of our history the Old South was the dominating power in the nation, as it had been in the foundation of the colonies out of which came the republic, and later in fighting its battles of independence and in framing its policies of government. ”

“ The Old South was soon a great camp of shifting, drilling soldiery. Every departing train bore to the front the raw and ungainly troops of the country, the trim city companies of State guards, and the gayly dressed cadets of the military schools. ”

“ I have paid tribute to the great political orators of the Old South. Let me pay higher tribute to its great preachers and pulpit orators, to whom, under God, more than to any other class or leadership, is due what the South has ever cherished as its best. There were giants in those days. If Yancey or Stephens could cast a spell upon a great political gathering, and play upon its [Pg 72] emotions as the harper plays upon the harp, George F. Pierce in his prime could stir men’s hearts in a way that put to shame even the eloquence of the political rostrum. ”

“ I am glad that the philanthropists found out that the Old South had trained its slaves so carefully for these high and responsible duties. No other masters in the world's history ever gave such training to their slaves. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States are the grandest possible eulogies to the Old South. ”

“ With such political leaders as these men, and with the finest intellect and character of the Old South devoted for generations to the study and exposition of the purest party politics, I am not surprised at the higher level of parties and platforms of the Old South. Politics was not a “graft,” as the present-day political ringster defines it. The political and personal conscience were one and the same, and a man’s politics was no small part of his religion. ”

“ You can only know the New South, but there is a generation, now passing away, which holds in loving memory the South as it used to be. 10 Those memories are a legacy to the new generation from the old, and it behooves the old to hand them down to the new.
"The days that are no more" come crowding around me, insistent that I interpret them as I knew them; there are the happy plantation days, the recollection of which causes my heart to throb again with youthful pleasure, and near them are the days, the dreadful days, of war and fire and famine. ”

“ These settlers of the Valley of Virginia and the North Carolina piedmont region—English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, and a few French—were the first pioneers of the Old Southwest. From the joint efforts of two strata of population, geographically, 6 socially, and economically distinct—tidewater and piedmont, Old South and New South—originated and flowered the third and greatest movement of westward expansion, opening with the surmounting of the mountain barrier and ending in the occupation and assumption of the vast medial valley of the continent. ”

“ Nowadays the Old South does not come publicly into the streets of Richmond—save on that memorable occasion in the spring of 1907 when a feeble trail of aging men—all that remained of a great gray army—limped down a triumphant path through the heart of the town. The Old South sits in her dead cities, and perhaps that is the reason why the Southerner so quickly takes the stranger within his gates to the cemetery. ”

“ Here, in Richmond, those names are household words, and every day we hear fresh anecdotes of their lives and deaths. But the South does not waste its time in lamenting over their graves; there is no greater mistake than to imagine that it is frittering away its energies in vain regrets. The past is past, the dead are buried; and on the ruins of the old life the South is building up a new—in fact, it is recreating itself. New railways opening, great factories arising on every side, bear witness to the energy with which the South is throwing itself into the work of restoration. ”

“ The charge has often been made against it that it produced few if any great writers and left no lasting impress upon the literature of the times. If this were true, it could be answered that the Old South was true to its distinctive mission. It needed to produce great thinkers, and it produced them, as the half-century of its dominating leadership attests. An Elizabethan age, with its coterie of great writers, comes to any nation only at long intervals, and under conditions which are of providential rather than of human ordering. ”

“ The Old South was never quite so aristocratic as the North believed, and today the white South is much more nearly a democracy than New England. Even in 1860 this was true of some parts of the South, as compared with some parts of New England. The rural South was always democratic except in comparatively limited areas, and it is so everywhere today. In those communities which have felt the new industrial spirit the question of birth plays little part. Any presentable young man can go where he chooses. ”

“ That the social life of the Old South had its faults I am far from denying. What civilization has not? But its virtues far outweighed them; its graces were never equalled. For all its faults, it was, I believe, the purest, sweetest life ever lived. It has been claimed that it was non-productive, that it fostered sterility. Only ignorance or folly could make the assertion. It largely contributed to produce this nation ”

“ The towns and villages at the South were shackly, mostly with unpaved and unlighted streets. The rural mansions were spacious and comfortable, seldom grand or elegant. An agricultural people are seldom rich and the profuse hospitality of the Southern planter kept him generally straitened in his means. The Old South labored under a more serious disadvantage; there were few literary and scientific men among them. History shows that the great men of the world have been born chiefly in the country, and that they gained distinction, not there, but in cities and towns. ”

“ One feature of scholarship that was peculiar to the Old South was the general and thorough devotion to, and mastery of, the classics. I doubt if ever the youth of any country were so well grounded in the literature of Greek and Latin poet and historian, or caught so fully and finely the beauty of the old philosophies and mythologies. ”

“ I’ll help you build here a new South on all that’s good and noble in the old, until its dead fields blossom again, its harbours bristle with ships, and the hum of a thousand industries make music in every valley. ”

“ Nothing could be more untrue. Peoples do not in one generation or in two rid themselves entirely of characteristics which have been developing for centuries.
There is a New South, but it is a logical development from the Old South. The civilization of the South today has not been imposed from without 2 but has been an evolution from within, though influenced by the policy of the National Government. The Civil War changed the whole organization of Southern society, it is true, but it did not modify its essential attributes, to quote the ablest of the carpetbaggers, Albion W. Tourgée. ”

“ In the modern Southern cities may be found classes of wholesale jobbers, attorneys of great corporations, national bank officers, manufacturers, agents of life insurance and investment companies, engineers, and promoters, who were hardly known in the old South. In the social world these people still have to take their chance, for the foundation stones of society in every Southern state are the descendants of the leaders of the old régime, including many people whose former back-country farm with its half-dozen slaves has become magnified into a tradition of an old plantation. ”

“ The Old South had qualities of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently survived; or at any rate have not [Pg 250] sufficiently spread. It is true that the decline of the agricultural South has been considerably balanced by the growth of the agricultural West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise in another place, that the West does give the New America something that is nearly a normal peasantry, as a pendant to the industrial towns. ”

“ In the North all was life, enterprise, industry, mechanical skill. In the South there was dependence on black labour, and an idle extravagance which was mistaken for elegant luxury—tumble-down old hackney-coaches, such as had not been seen north of the Potomac for half a century, harness never cleaned, ungroomed horses, worked at the mill one day and sent to town the next, badly furnished houses, bad cookery, imperfect education. No parallel could be drawn between them and the Northern States at all. ”

“ Who has forgotten the late doleful convictions of the dough-faces that the South would hold together to the last in spite of wind or weather, concluding invariably with the old refrain,—'Suppose we conquer them—what then?' Had the country at large known in detail, as it should have known from a common-school education, what the South really is,—or from experience of life what human nature really is,—it would never have believed that this boasted unanimity was based on aught save ignorance or falsehood. ”

“ The professional poet, historian, and maker of fiction, and publisher and seller of books, were scarcely known. A rural people, a relatively sparse population of readers, the absence of great cities, the concentration of [Pg 43] thought and learning upon politics and plans of government, the entire lack of commercialism as a motive to literary production, were reasons why the Old South contributed comparatively little per se to the stock of permanent literature. ”

“ MEN OF AFFAIRS With the commercial awakening of the South and the increased importance of the section as a factor in the national life, has developed a new citizenship—a sub-structure of the Old South with a modernized superstructure—in which with the sterling and standard traits of the old regime is strongly blended the nervous activity of the new. ”

“ Every region in the country has its contrasts, its extremes, its anomalies, its measurable differences. An essential point can be missed in overconcentration on the Rural South, the Urban South, the New South, the Old South, the Liberal South, the Conservative South. There remains a great and well-understood meaning simply in the South; there is, in fact, a sense of oneness here, an identity, a sharing, and this quality makes the South unique in ways that New England, and the Midwest, and the West do not approach. The Confederacy was, as a matter of law, a state in being ”

“ And yet, the north prospers in every sense, while the south,—what is the future of the South? The west, noble, generous, and free from the traits which mark a nation of mere traffickers, is just what the south would be, were it free from the Black Race. Think of that, friend Randolph! You may glean a bit of solid truth from the disconnected remarks of an old traveler. ”

“ Speaking of the women of the South a writer aptly said: "They dwell in a land goodly and pleasant to the eye; a land of fine resources, both agricultural and mineral; where may be found fertile cotton fields, vast rice tracts, large sugar plantations, bright skies and balmy breezes. The whole land is plowed by mighty rivers, is ribbed by long mountain chains, and washed by the sea."
Fitting environment, we add, for the gorgeous residences, notably in Georgia and South Carolina, built by the nobility and gentry of the republic, and inherited by the descendants of the old colonial aristocracy. ”