Southern culture

“ If life in the Northern States is a grand epic, a poem full of great teaching, then is that of the Southern States a romance of infinitely-picturesque beauty—yes, even though slavery and sandy deserts exist there. ”

“ So queried 'the South;' and, if any answer were possible, that answer would not be heard. 'Love slavery or quit the South,' was the inexorable rule; and the resulting hypocrisy has wrought deep injury to the Northern character. As manufacturers, as traders, as teachers, as clerks, as political aspirants, most of our active, enterprising, leading classes have been suitors in some form for Southern favor, and the consequence has been a prevalent deference to Southern ideas and a constant sacrifice of moral convictions to hopes of material advantage. ”

“ Borne down by colonial subjugation, monopoly, and bigotry, these vast regions of the South were hardly visible above the horizon. But in our day there has been, as it were, a new creation. The southern hemisphere emerges from the sea. Its lofty mountains begin to lift themselves into the light of heaven; its broad and fertile plains stretch out, in beauty, to the eye of civilized man, and at the mighty bidding of the voice of political liberty the waters of darkness retire. ”

“ I dined with a litterateur well known in England to many people a year or two ago—sprightly, loquacious, and well-informed, if neither witty nor profound—now a Southern man with Southern proclivities, as Americans say; once a Southern man with such strong anti-slavery convictions, that his expression of them in an English quarterly had secured him the hostility of his own people—one of the emanations of American literary life for which their own country finds no fitting receiver. ”

“ The leisure for thought and study which ante-bellum ease allowed to many molded a high-thinking type that was true to the best intellectual and Christian models, as the character of Southern public men has evidenced. The simple integrity of the Southern ideal has had no match in national life except in the rigid standard of New England. ”

“ Believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety ”

“ The promise of this bright, heroic beginning in poetry was not realized; and scarcely another voice was heard in verse in the South before the Revolution. The type of civilization developed in the South prior to the Civil War, admirable as it was in many other particulars, was hardly favorable to literature. The energies of the most intelligent portion of the population were directed to agriculture or to politics; and many of the foremost statesmen of our country—men like Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Calhoun, Benton—were from the Southern states. ”

“ The South has already forgiven his historical frankness in its pride in the artist who has preserved for the future the romance, and color, and beauty of a race that, like so much else lovable and poetic and inspiring in our early history, by the end of another century will be blended indistinguishably with the less picturesque but all-prevailing type that is determining an American people. ”

“ The Southern character is more impulsive, but also more open and genial than our own. If it shows a hasty spark, it is also soon cold and rational again. It is not brooding and intolerant, nor easily led away into excesses, such as too often befall us of a more Northern clime. ”

“ In the broken and all but disheartened condition of the South after enduring the war, radical rule and defeat of political hopes, this conception of another economic future, once it burst upon the consciousness of the Southern people, amounted to nothing less than a religion. ”

“ If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern men—fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and invention—the polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of semi-barbarians. But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the part of the South. True, a few men since the war have placed the South in a better light ”

“ But these men are but a most inconsiderable portion of the slaveholding population of the South,—a nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose organisation and temperament is that of the southern European; living under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting; scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential swamp ”

“ Lest some one who has not seen the slave and the poor white man of the South, as he actually is, should deem my picture overdrawn, I will say that 'the half has not been told!' If the whole were related—if the Southern system, in all its naked ugliness, were fully exposed—the truth would read like fiction, and the baldest relation of fact like the wildest dream of romance. ”

“ But it takes the North a long time to come to any true understanding of the Southern people. Certain transient, exterior features—which are as impermanent as the conditions that created them—have been mistaken for their real character, which depends upon indwelling ideals—and these have always been thoroughly American. ”

“ These five books are proof not only that there is wide divergence of views, but also that genuine Southern men, strongly loyal to their own section, can set an example of moderation of speech, breadth of view, and willingness to accept and to promote a settlement of the Southern question through the elevation of the people, white and black, who have ultimate power over that question. ”

“ As matters stand at present in the United States, there appears to be only one contingency which would again rouse into a fierce flame the glowing embers of pro-Southern sentiment among Englishmen, and restore Southerners to the position of angels of light, and Northerners to that of angels of darkness, in British imaginations. ”

“ The plain people of the South, the sturdy common folk who made no pretensions to aristocratic grandeur but who in self-respect, prosperity and character, formed in this section, as elsewhere, the backbone of civilization and society, have not received their due representation in Southern fiction, generally speaking. ”

“ And in America one has to reckon, not only with the Puritan fervor of New England, but with the determination and turbulence and group instinct of the more cavalier spirit of the South. Though heat makes the Southern women languid and the Southern men fiery and quick of temper, it does not seem to make them weaker. On the whole, the Southerner seems to have a stronger will than the Northerner, and despite the exuberance of North and West, and a flood of contrary ideas and sentiments, the Southerner remains, as it were, eternally incapable of being suppressed. ”

“ Stories of Southern life are just now much in evidence. Many of them contain the best indication of the birth and growth of a genuine literature, because they are written by Southerners who know whereof they write, and show that they recognize the value of materials that lie close to their hands. ”

“ The broad and beautiful Southland is peopled by about thirty million human beings (26,000,000 in 1900) , who constitute the “South” as a community conscious of a life separate in many respects from that of the North. What is there in these thirty millions which sets them apart? First of all is the sharp division into two races—two thirds of the people Whites and one third Negroes, which in uncounted open and obscure ways makes the South unlike any other country in the world. ”

“ The South will work out the problem for herself, with the help of that God who has evidently appointed her to do a great work for the African race, and all the more perfectly and speedily as our Northern people let her entirely alone as to the moral relations of the subject. ”

“ Prim, why it is that almost all Northern people who come South to live become more Southern than the Southerners themselves; and that almost all Southern people who go North to live remain just as Southern as ever? ”

“ The conditions of Southern life naturally tended to produce and foster individuality, and perhaps the most marked trait in Southern character was an almost fierce independence and a hot resentment of any semblance of control. ”

“ It is with that view, even, that the South has labored for so long a time to prepare them for a higher civilization.
'In no part, perhaps, of the continent, regard being had to the population, do there exist men more eminent and gifted, with nobler or more generous sentiments, than in the Southern States. No country possesses lovelier, kinder hearted, and more distinguished women. ”

“ I do not find that the cuticular aristocracy of the South has added anything to the refinements of civilization except the carrying of bowie-knives and the chewing of tobacco,—a high-toned Southern gentleman being commonly not only quadrumanous, but quidruminant. ”

“ Yet New England is reproached with cowardice and ingratitude to her Southern benefactors! If one man were to knock another down with a broad axe, in the attempt to brush a fly from his face, and then blame him for not being sufficiently thankful, it would exactly illustrate the relation between the North and the South on this subject. ”

“ The well-to-do part of the community, and it does it uncomplainingly, with its eyes open, gladly. The South likewise is educating the Negroes principally for the advantage of the white race, for the efficiency of the whole region in which the Whites have the greatest stake, and from which they derive the greater benefit, material and moral. ”

“ The conservatism of the Southern life was so strong that the students at Northern colleges returned unchanged by contact with a different civilization. The South met the North in business and in politics, and in a limited social intercourse, but from one cause and another for three-quarters of a century it was practically isolated, and consequently developed a peculiar social life. ”

“ When philanthropy with regard to the colored race among us falls into its natural channel, we shall see the South and the North opening wide the doors of usefulness in every department for which the colored people shall, any of them, manifest an aptitude. The idea that this race is to be debarred from any and every development of which it is capable, is not entertained by any respectable people at the South. The negro at the South is not doomed, by the Christian people, to an inexorable fate. ”

“ The poverty of Southern literature is legitimately shown, therefore, in the paucity of Southern publishers. We do not deny a high degree of cultivated talent to the South; we are familiar with the names of her sons whose genius has made them eminent; all that we insist upon is, that the same accursed influence which has smitten her industrial enterprises with paralysis, and retarded indefinitely her material advancement, has exerted a corresponding influence upon her literature. ”

“ The white man, South and North, needs it quite as much as the coloured man. And this is exactly the programme of the new Southern statesmanship of which I spoke in a former chapter. These wise Southerners have resolved to forget the discouragements and complexities of the Negro problem, forget even their disagreements, and go to work on present problems: the development of education and industry. ”

“ Change and grow more marked in their peculiarities with every generation, they certainly do, very obviously. “The South” has a traditional reputation for qualities and habits in [Pg 231] which I think the Southern people, as a whole, are to-day more deficient than any other nation in the world. The Southern gentleman, as we ordinarily conceive him to be, is as rare a phenomenon in the South at the present day as is the old squire of Geoffry Crayon in modern England. ”

“ It is no exaggeration to say, and not a derogation for the purpose of argument to admit, that in the final analysis most of those who have essayed the task of depicting provincial conditions in the South, involving the essentially differing peculiarities of minor Southern localities where the plantation, industrialism, the negro, and the Mountain White are all factors—it is we repeat, no derogation to say that for the most part those who have attempted to handle these themes in a major literary way have fallen short of the mark. ”

“ The Southern slaves are, as a whole, a religious people; their religion, indeed, is of a type corresponding to their condition. But still, if the South were one festering pool of iniquity, as many at the North fancy, would the colored people show such evidences as they do of moral and spiritual improvement? ”

“ Upon many questions, and particularly upon all issues involving the relations of the white and negro races, the Southerner takes things differently from the Northerner. He looks upon himself from an emotional standpoint. Thomas Dixon, Jr., characterizes his own section as “The South, old-fashioned, medieval, provincial, worshipping the dead, and raising men rather than making money, family-loving, home-building, tradition-ridden. ”

“ It is not so diversified, but the vast areas of cotton on the one hand and of sugar and corn and rice on the other, and the forests, present well-marked features and give the South a handsome natural aspect. It is true that the Southern point of view as regards the Negro does not change very much, and that all vote one way, but it does not follow that the Southern point of view as regards the whole future of the [98] United States has not been modified and will not change. The South has been very poor and is becoming rich, will perhaps become very rich and prosperous. ”

“ There is less solicitation at the South; here it is a nightly trade, without disguise. At the South the young must go in search of opportunity; here it confronts them. The small number of yellow children in the interior of the Cotton States, on 'lone plantations,' is positive proof against the ready suspicions and accusations of Northern people. ”