Southerner

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Southerners are people who live in the South. You are a Southerner. You live in the South....
God put the white people off by themselves. He put the yellow, red and black people by themselves. God wanted the white people to live alone.... ”

“ The Southerner is not a cold-blooded villain. Those of us who have studied the genus in its native habitat can testify that his impulses are generous and kindly, and that while the South presents a solid phalanx of iron resistance to the Negro’s advancement, still as individuals to individuals they are warm-hearted and often even tender. ”

“ A Southerner may be a high-minded and philanthropic gentleman, whose views would be sought and whose word would be taken on every other subject; he may be carrying his old slaves as pensioners; he may treat the weakest and worst of them with that mingled consideration and indulgence which is so commonly to be found in the South; but if he expresses the results of a lifetime of knowledge of the Negro’s character, it counts for nothing with a [Pg xi] large class who fancy themselves the only friends of the Negro. ”

“ We of the North poke fun at the South for its fondness of titles—a fondness for titles pure and simple, regardless of whether they are genuine or pinchbeck. We forget that whatever a Southerner likes the rest of the human race likes, and that there is no law of predilection lodged in one people that is absent from another people. There is no variety in the human race. We are all children, all children of the one Adam, and we love toys. ”

“ No patriotic Southerner can become conversant with the facts without experiencing a feeling of alarm and indignation. Until the North abolished slavery, she had no advantage of us whatever; the South was more than her equal in every respect. But no sooner had she got rid of that hampering and pernicious institution than she began to absorb our wealth, and now it is confidently believed that the merchants and negro-driving pleasure-seekers of the South annually pour one hundred and twenty million of dollars into her coffers! ”

“ There is one other characteristic of the Southerner, which is far more decided than the difference of climate merely would warrant, and which is to be attributed not only to the absence of the ordinary restraints and means of discipline of more compact communities in his education, but unquestionably also to the readiness and safety with which, by reason of slavery, certain passions and impulses may be indulged. Every white Southerner is a person of importance ”

“ 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. ”

“ What all the South had in common, what made a man a Southerner in the general sense—in 31 distinction from a Northerner on the one hand, or a Virginian, Carolinian, Georgian, on the other—could have been observed with clearness in Mississippi, just before the war, as nowhere else. ”

“ He who would know the American, must also know the cities of the interior.
"If, in addition to these characteristics, we should describe the personal and distinctive appearance of the Northerner and Southerner, we would say that the first are, generally speaking, large, tall, and spare—their ladies beautiful and of delicate complexion; while the Southerners are broad-shouldered and powerful—the female sex being voluptuously formed and beautiful, but when not subject to the influence of exercise and fresh air of a sallow complexion. ”

“ The great difference in character between the third class of the South and that of the North, as indicated by their respective manners, is found in the much less curiosity and ready intelligent interest in matters which have not an immediate personal bearing in that of the South. Apathetic carelessness rather than simple indifference, or reckless incivility as to your comfort, is what makes the low Southerner a disagreeable companion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a fiery disposition in the Southerners which is very remarkable; they are much more easily excited than even the Spaniard or Italian, and their feelings are more violent and unrestrainable, as I shall hereafter show. That this is the effect of climate I shall now attempt to prove by one or two circumstances, out of the many which fell under my observation. It is impossible to imagine a greater difference in character than exists between the hot-blooded Southerner, and the cold calculating Yankee of the eastern States. ”

“ They dress well and richly, but seldom fashionably. Their garments hang upon them loosely, as though made for larger men; and they wear them with a sort of free and easy air, enviable but inimitable by the stiffer and more formal northerner. The southerner, particularly the planter, would wear with a native and matchless grace the flowing toga of imperial Rome. ”

“ Is it prejudice against a low race, or a black race? To say that the white Southerner looks down upon and despises every black Southerner would not be fair, for there is still much personal [Pg 162] liking between members of the two races, and the South is right in claiming that it has a warmer feeling for individual Negroes than Northern people. ”

“ In striking contrast with the conservative Southerner has been the progressive Southerner, a type ranging all the way from the unwise and unreasonable reformer to the well-balanced and sympathetic worker, who has endeavored to make the transition from the old order to the new a normal and healthy one. ”

“ Partly owing to the efficacy of the waters and partly to the absence of other Southern watering-places, the springs became very early the resort of every Southerner who could afford to leave home in the summer, and they grew in favor owing to the peculiarities of Southern society and the delicate state of Southern relations with the North. In the first place, at the South people know each other, and know about each other, in a way of which the inhabitants of a denser and busier community have little idea. ”

“ The Southerner was more truly religious—that is to say, he felt the mystery of the unseen and the thrills of devotion; the natural world that appealed to him so strongly showed itself to his mind under the forms of mysticism. The Northerner was far too much of a moralist and theologian to be an ecstatic devotee. ”

“ Though destitute of that fashionable exterior which the tailor supplies, and for which, in general, they have a most sovereign indifference and contempt, they possess—I mean the genuine, native-born, well-educated southerner—an "air distingué," and in the highest degree aristocratic, which is every where the most striking feature of their appearance. ”

“ Thus his next remark was addressed to his own thoughts as well as to the lad:{39}
"And so you are a Southerner!" he reflected audibly, looking down at the Southern plague in small form.
"Why, yes, Mister, we are Southerners," replied the lad, with a gay and careless patriotism; and as giving the handy pepper-box a shake, he began to dust the air with its contents: "I was born on an old Southern battle-field. When Granny was born there, it had hardly stopped smoking; it was still piled with wounded and dead Northerners. Why, one of the worst batteries was planted in our front porch." ”

“ A man, in fine, who with unbending courage bears the blow of destiny, and is thereby only stimulated to new exertions. The Southerner, on the contrary, is more chivalresque—he lives to live. The climate in which he is born has also a material influence upon his manners, customs, and character: effecting, in reality, the same difference which we observe between the cool, reflective, tough North German, and the jovial, genial, easily excited South German, or Frenchman. ”

“ Hence, with men who are otherwise on a par, in respect of natural advantages and education, the Southerner will have a higher standard of manners than the Northerner, because, with him, social intercourse [Pg 329] is the grand resource to which all other possible occupations of his mind become subordinate. ”

“ All our sympathies are for the North, but they in no way diminish our admiration for the South.... How not to admire the Southerners, while regretting that such rare and high qualities had not been dedicated to an irreproachable cause! What men, and also, and especially, what women! Daughters, wives, mothers, those women of the South have revived, in the midst of the nineteenth century, the patriotism, devotion, abnegation of the Roman ones in the heyday of the republic. ”

“ I am often made to wish that the Southerners could be relieved of our Northern hostility and its effects upon them, just to see them laboring, as they then would, to correct certain evils which ought to be redressed. ”

“ It aroused and crystallized feeling against the South throughout the world. For the first time, the world had the imaginable horrors of slavery presented in a manner that appealed alike to old and young, the learned and the ignorant, the high-born and the lowly. It blackened the fame of the Southern people in the eyes of the North and fixed in the mind of the North a concept not only of the institution of slavery, but of the Southern people, which lasted for more than a generation, and has only begun of late, in the light of a fuller knowledge, to be dislodged. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It is true that reorganization for the South was the most national thing Southerners could turn themselves to at that time, and in the judgment of many still is, but speakers and writers often failed of just the most fortunate expression of their purpose in that they did not strike the national note very consciously. ”

“ These Northern men know nothing of the South, and with them it is omne ignotum pro minimo. The West Point professor listened to them with a quiet smile, and exchanged glances with me now and then, as much as to say, “Did you ever hear such fools in your life?”
But the conviction of ultimate success is not less strong here than it is in the South. The difference between these gentlemen and the Southerners is, [141] that in the South the leaders of the people, soldiers and civilians, are all actually under arms, and are ready to make good their words by exposing their bodies in battle. ”

“ The Southerners, and indeed Americans generally, have developed of late an astounding passion for ancestry. There is more patter, and upon the flimsiest grounds, about ‘blue blood,’ ‘high breeding,’ ‘patrician bearing,’ ‘cavalier stock,’ and suchlike stuff, in some modern American novels, good and bad, about modern American life, than in a whole year’s output of fiction in Old England. ”

“ Our plan should be, by some artifice, to provoke them to seem to strike the first blow. Then we shall have a pretext with which to unite the now divided North, and make them fly to arms. The Southerners are a braggart, but a cowardly and effeminate set of bullies ”

“ In the South many people think they have said a severe thing when they say that a person or manner is thoroughly Yankee; and many New Englanders intend to express a considerable lack in what is essential when they say of men and women that they are very Southern. When the Yankee is produced he may turn out a cosmopolitan person of the most interesting and agreeable sort; and the Southerner may have traits and peculiarities, growing out of climate and social life unlike the New England, which are altogether charming. ”

“ The idea so prevalent in other sections that the people of the South are convivial and mercurial in temperament is erroneous. It would be more nearly correct to say that gravity, amounting almost to austerity, is a distinguishing mark of Southerners. In any Southern gathering representing the people as a whole there is little mirth. ”

“ The Southerners are firmly convinced that they have “kept the North going” by the prices they have paid for the protected articles of their manufacture, and they hold out to Sheffield, to Manchester, to Leeds, to Wolverhampton, to Dudley, to Paris, to Lyons, to Bordeaux, to all the centres of English manufacturing life, as of French taste and luxury, the tempting baits of new and eager and hungry markets. ”

“ When they have conquered their prejudices, they become thorough, driving planters, generally giving themselves up to the pursuit more devotedly than the regular-bred planter. Their treatment of their slaves is also far more rigid. Northerners are entirely unaccustomed to their habits, which are perfectly understood and appreciated by southerners, who have been familiar with Africans from childhood ”