Southern gentleman

“ He is what we southerners, in our barbarous local vanity, are [Pg 77] accustomed to call a southern gentleman. He is on the model of the sugar-planters of St. Dominic Parish. He needs somebody to care for him. ”

“ This is certainly so; and therefore what have we to look for but everlasting hatred and strife? and that whether we be one nation or two confederacies.
A distinguished Southern gentleman came home from his visit to the North, where he had received great attentions, and he filled his hearers with his enthusiastic admiration of us for our wonderful ingenuity in all the arts of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The height of a Southern man’s ambition is to be a gentleman in every particular—in word, thought, and deed; and to be a perfect gentleman, in my opinion, is to be a Christian. And with regard to the much-talked-of hospitality of the wealthier classes in the South, I can only say that my own experience ought to make me very eloquent in their praise. ”

“ Irrational and brutal as are the ways in which the old-fashioned gentleman of the South shows that his regard for his own honor or that of his household outweighs his love of life, it must be remembered that the same condition existed in the richest ages of our race—those which gave proportionally the largest share of ability and nobility to its history. ”

“ He might have added that the young Southern gentleman, when not intended for a physician, almost invariably devotes to mere provincial politics and the arts of declamation and debate, all of those intellectual energies which the Northerner applies to business, art, commerce, literature, and other solidly useful occupations. If the Southerner has an inborn superior talent for politics, why is it that, as in the case of British or French statesmen, he never devel [Pg 125] ops the slightest talent for literature? ”

“ An idle man would be a solitary of his own sex. But it is not the material conditions that constitute the chief attraction of life in a Southern city, excellent as they are; the principal charm of the South is the character of the people themselves. There is an undefined flavour of old-world politeness and courtesy perfuming their environment The bow of a Southern gentleman does not appear to be the jerk of a string-pull ”

“ Are they going to hear a man filled with venom who will take their good name.” And a high-toned Southern gentleman, up to that time a personal friend of the Northerner, thought it necessary to print a card in a newspaper, setting forth the fact that he at least had no responsibility for the presence of the Yankee. ”

“ In part, this frame of mind is due to a feeling neatly stated by a Southern banker: “The Southern people are not a bad kind, and a kind word goes a long way with them; they have odd peculiarities; they cannot argue, and as soon as you differ with them, you arouse temper, not on the Negro question especially, but on any.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The high-class Southerner believes in education; he has a high sense of public duty; he stands by his friends like a rock; unfortunate is the Northerner who does not count among his choicest possessions the friendship of Southern men and women! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Southern Love is volcanic, chivalrous, gallant, true, tender, jealous, safe when earnest, devotional and devoted, genuine and manly. The well-bred Southerners are the true ladies and gentlemen of America! ”

“ This latter word is not too strong to use, for the Southerner has a rare genius for laying claim to your very heart by the surrender of his own. Affection blooms fast in the Southern soul, but our Northern bud needs time. Especially tardy is its ripening in Scottish hearts, but the fruit is to Eternity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Its men were "gentlemen"—grander, nobler beings than the North ever knew. Their women were "ladies"—gentle, refined, ethereal beings, passion and devotion wrapped in forms of ethereal mould, and surrounded by an impalpable effulgence which distinguished them from all others of the sex throughout the world. Whatever was of the South was superlative. To be Southern-born was to be prima facie better than other men. So the self-love of every man was enlisted in this sentiment. To praise the South was to praise himself ”

“ We begin to see that we of the South owe these people a certain duty. The best interests of the Nation, as well as those of the South, demand that as they come to make their homes among us, we meet them with kindness, with fairness, and with an appreciative understanding of their needs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We admire the splendid qualities of Southern white men, their bravery, generosity, patriotism, and chivalry. We are not blind to the tremendous difficulty in the way of their social peace. We regard with conscientious sympathy their political burden, made so much heavier than ours of the North by the negro problem. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We of the North must approach our Southern brethren in a spirit of kindness, conciliation and concession; and talk to them as brothers, and not denounce and stigmatize them as murderers, rogues, rascals, slave-catchers and kidnappers. We have mistaken Southern men and Southern character. ”

“ Nothing so gravely offends the characteristic southern man as the incapacity of his brethren of northern societies to perceive that such action is natural and consistent with the rules of gentlemanly behavior. ”

“ Only a few years of non-tillage would be needed to give the sunny and fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate wilderness. From this condition, shocking for a southern man to contemplate, it is now seen that nothing less powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro can save her. For him, as a Southern laborer there is no competitor or substitute. The thought of filling his place by any other variety of the human family, will be found delusive and utterly impracticable. ”

“ A possible step in reaching the solution of the question might be for a reasonably limited number of representative Southern men to meet in conference a reasonable number of those colored men of the South who are more familiar with actual conditions there, and thus are representative of the most enlightened and experienced portion of that race. ”

“ The Southerner may dwell more than others upon the past and brood more intently on the distant future, but in his daily life he has to be concerned with the here and now—in brief, he has to be concerned with reality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After all, the greatest benefactors of the American [Pg 26] people were Southerners, from the great father of the country, down to its last chivalrous defender. Southern orators are yet the most eloquent; Southern statesmen the most disinterested in their views of national politics. Genius requires a heart as well as a head, or the seed lacks the warmth necessary for its germination. Give me the man whose blood flows quickly through his veins, with his ready perception and his high sense of honour! ”

“ Southern people are proverbially liberal and hospitable. No Southerner can fail, after a short residence in the North, to observe opposite traits of character in Northern people; and the Southerner, after emigrating to the North, is soon forced, in self defence, or rather prompted by the laws of self preservation, to close up the avenues of his liberality, and assume an attitude, or rather take a position in society, unknown to him while a resident of a Southern clime. ”

“ If she were fair and bright, and brave, she would delight to entertain her; for that was a part of the hospitality of which the South boasted. There was something enjoyable, too, in parading the riches of a well-stocked wardrobe and the lavish splendors of an old Southern home to one who, she believed, had never seen such magnificence before; for the belief that poverty and poor fare are the common lot of the country folks at the North is one of the fallacies commonly held by all classes at the South. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a class of colored men in the South who are laying the foundations of a better state of things than now prevails, by sheer industry and devotion to money-making. I found a conspicuous illustration of this type in the person and work of a negro in one of the old Southern States. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nay, instead of repelling with barbarous fierceness what they really need, let the Southern people welcome every man who comes to them to identify his interest with theirs. Let them welcome him the more heartily if he brings new ideas and new energies to supply their deplorable deficiencies. Let them not complain that among the first comers there are many adventurers, for it is always the adventurer who has to blaze the track where men are called upon to launch into uncertainties. ”

“ Southern man or woman to maintain the traditional courtesy and hospitality of the South toward the stranger within its gates. It is only semi-occasionally that one finds in some sour-natured relic of other days any other attitude than that of smiling welcome, and even with the thermometer ranging close to the zero mark I have learned why the Southland is in spirit anyhow the "Land of Roses." ”

“ Of the numerous northern men we met and talked with, who had come south, but one spoke of encountering prejudice—and we strongly suspect he had given good cause. Many northern men, like the writer, have married southern girls, and thus the lines of separation between the sections are becoming confused and indistinct. ”

“ I remember cases in which a large and controlling majority of the Southern whites made grievous mistakes as to the true interests of the South—cases in which they would have acted most wisely had they accepted the advice of well-meaning outsiders, whom, in the excitement of the moment, they repelled as impudently intrusive critics, and whom they even put down as their enemies. ”

“ And yet in this respect how perplexing is Southern character; for, in opposition to the above, it may be said that the claim of the Southern whites that they love the Negro better than the Northern whites do is in a manner true. Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation. ”

“ This difference of temperament between North and South is not confined to members of the white race. The mental processes of the Southern Negro differ not only from those of the Southern White, but to a considerable degree from those of the Northern Negro; and the African temperament has, in the course of centuries, in some ways reacted upon the minds of the associated white race. ”