The South Was Right

by James Ronald Kennedy

  Imperialist powers attempt to force the conquered population to accept the imperial myth.3 Once this has been accomplished, the population becomes pacified within a few short generations. Then the danger of an insurrection or challenge to the empire is reduced to almost zero. In spite of this diminished threat, truth has a mystical power of its own. Though crushed, like the conquered nation, truth still resides in the public memory and will inevitably re-assert itself with a vengeance.

  Southern history, as taught in our public and private schools today, is nothing more than a recitation of the North’s justification for invasion, conquest, and oppression of the Southern people. A Southerner who is never made aware of any writings other than those accepted histories taught in Southern classrooms will come away convinced of the righteousness of the Northern cause and with a feeling that the South is “better off because we lost the war”! What a masterpiece of effective propaganda—to have the children of the conquered nation call the invaders “blessed”!

  President Jefferson Davis predicted that if the South lost the war, the North would write its history.4 He knew that the Yankee invaders would attempt to crush the truth to hide their my crimes against the Southern people. He was afraid that future generations would never understand the righteousness of the South’s call for independence. His prediction has sadly become reality in classrooms all across the South.

  Many of the former leaders of the Confederacy warned against the domination of Yankee history. Varina Davis decried the “startling absence of truth and fact in many of the tales that stand forth as history.”5 In 1889, when the Sons of Confederate Veterans was formed, Gen. Stephen D. Lee gave as part of the commission to the Sons, “It is your duty to see that the true history of the South is presented to future generations.”6 Already those remaining and aging gray troopers could see their honor and loyalty to principles of constitutional liberties being sacrificed to the gods of the Yankee empire. For almost thirty years after the war, many of these men dedicated themselves to writing the Southern Apologia. These men wrote with passionate intensity. They did not write for profit. They knew that few in the South could afford the money or the time for leisurely reading. They wrote in the hope that others yet to come would read and understand. They wrote in defiance of their conquerors who were flushed with victory and full of self-righteousness. Admiral Raphael Semmes, CSS Alabama, wrote in his book, Memoirs of Service Afloat, that he did not anticipate that Northerners would read his book because “men do not willingly read unpalatable truths of themselves. The people … like those best who fool them most, by pandering to their vices and flattering their foibles.”7

  In 1894, J. L. M. Curry, an Alabama educator, became so alarmed at the universal portrayal of the South in the role of a criminal in United States history that he wrote The Southern States of the American Union. He complained that “History as written if accepted in future years will consign the South to infamy.”8 Again and again the post-war Confederates sounded this alarm concerning the lack of objectivity in the official and gradually accepted history of the Southern people. If the Northern propagandists could maintain their control and wait for these deposed leaders to die, they could stamp out forever the cries of Southern patriots. Fortunately for us, a few unreconstructed Southerners remained in each succeeding generation. Shortly after World War I, the Sons of Confederate Veterans felt compelled to issue a defense of the Southern cause. It was a bitter shock to these men, after great effort to demonstrate their loyalty to the “reunited nation” (especially by the shedding of Southern blood in the Spanish-American War and World War I), to find themselves compelled yet again to defend the South from Northern slander. In the introduction to The Gray Book, A. H. Jennings, chairman of The Gray Book committee, complained of the continuing attacks upon the South and described The Gray Book as an attempt to defend “the truth of history.”9 Implicit in his statement is the fact that the South was being slandered by the Northern myth of history (i.e., that the accepted national history was neither accurate nor fair in its representation of the South).

  Jennings continued his defense of the South by declaring that:

  These attacks and untruthful presentations of so-called history demand refutation, for the South cannot surrender its birthright and we pray the day may never dawn when it will be willing to abandon the truth in a cowardly or sluggish spirit of pacifism. During the Great War [World War I], when the South and all other parts of our country were straining every nerve to defeat a common foe, strange and unbelievable as it may seem at such a time of crisis, there was a most remarkable flood of misrepresentations, false analogy, and distorted historical statements concerning our American history as it particularly relates to the Southern people. Ignorance, as well as deliberate distortion of facts, contributed to this. Innumerable examples are on file and could be quoted but no one who reads at all could have failed to note this mass of unfair and untruthful statements which for years has filled newspapers, magazines and periodicals of the North. Nor has this defamation ceased—it still goes on, unabated, and there is a constant and strong stream of misrepresentation and false historical statement flowing from the North … false history almost overwhelms us.10

  In The Gray Book we see an example of Southerners two or three generations removed from the War for Southern Independence still complaining against the evil of the North writing Southern history, just as President Davis had warned us. Perhaps some of our opponents would claim that the post-war Confederates were only suffering from “sour grapes” or were “poor losers.” But how would they explain away the fact that the Sons of Confederate Veterans felt compelled to issue this defense of the Southern people? If the North were so righteous in its defense of the Union, why has it continued to issue slanderous lies about our history? Why has it continued its slander long after the generations who could remember the sting of battle have passed? Could it be that the North has a political agenda that requires the existence of a myth to justify its continued oppression of the Southern people? The lies and slander must continue; if they ceased, the legitimacy of Northern domination of the Southern people would come under close scrutiny.

  I’ll Take My Stand was published in 1930. In this book, twelve Southerners defended the South and its agrarian tradition. Frank L. Owsley contributed a section titled “The Irrepressible Conflict.”11 Owsley pointed out that, after the South had been conquered by armed aggression and humiliated and impoverished by peace (Reconstruction), there began a second war in which the North attempted to destroy the spirit of the Southern people. It was a deliberate attempt to reshape the thoughts of the Southern people so that they would conform to Northern standards. Northerners attempted to recast every opinion opposed to the North’s myths, to impose Northern ways upon the Southern people, to

  … write error across the pages of Southern history which were out of keeping with the Northern legend, and set the rising and unborn generations upon stools of everlasting repentance … the rising generations were to receive the proper education in Northern tradition. … The rising generations read Northern literature, shot through with the New England tradition. Northern textbooks were used in Southern schools; Northern histories, despite the frantic protests of local patriotic organizations, were almost universally taught in Southern high schools and colleges,—books that were built around the Northern legend and either completely ignored the South or insisted upon the unrighteousness of most of its history. … There was for the Southern child very little choice. They had to accept the Northern version of history with all its condemnations and carping criticisms of Southern institutions and life. … Lincoln was the real Southern hero because Lincoln had saved the Union. So they were told!12

  Notice how Owsley complained about the insistence of the North that Southerners accept what he called “the Northern legend.”13 Owsley recognized that this Northern legend or myth was the vehicle that the North used to condition each generation of Southerners so that we would dutifully occupy our assigned
position upon what he referred to as the “stools of everlasting repentance.”14 Owsley recognized what Jennings, et al., in The Gray Book failed to see. Regardless of how loyal the South remained to what Jennings called “our reunited country,” no matter how much Southern blood was spilled in foreign wars while fighting under the flag of our “reunited country,” the North had no intention of ever allowing Southerners to climb down from their assigned place upon the “stools of everlasting repentance”!

  In 1949 the Louisiana State University Press published Plain Folk of the Old South by Frank L. Owsley. Here Owsley demonstrated the error in the accepted history of the Southern people. The official history of our people (the history adopted by the Northern publishers who supply our textbooks) claimed that the pre-war South was populated by rich plantation owners, poor whites, and slaves. A Yankee, Frederick Law Olmsted, was the primary proponent of this view of Southern society. Frank Owsley noted that the Yankee Olmsted had the “unusual skill in the art of reporting detail and of completely wiping out the validity of such detail by subjective comments and generalizations.”15 Olmsted’s view of the South is important because he went on to identify slavery as the primary source of the miserable condition of the poor whites. He even claimed that Negroes in the North lived better than the average Southerner. Owsley pointed out that other Northern writers had little or no first-hand knowledge of the South and relied instead on the writings of the Yankee Olmsted. An example of the error in Olmsted’s assessment of the pre-war South is evidenced when one of the farmers he described as living in poverty actually owned a thousand acres of land and more hogs and cattle than he could count! As a traveler through the area, Olmsted had no idea of property boundaries and did not realize that the farmer’s livestock were tending themselves on the open range and were hidden from a casual observer.16

  The main difference between these two men’s views of the South arises from the Yankee Olmsted’s analysis of Southern society from the vantage point of Yankee commercialism (i.e., his was an economic view of society). Those who have read pre-war Southern accounts of Northerners are aware that our people often complained of the Yankee mindset as being one of materialistic “money-grubbing.” As a Southerner, Owsley was able to evaluate our society using our own standards. He analyzed the pre-war South not from the point of view of economics but from the vantage point of culture. He discovered that the larger part of the “plain folk” (those white Southerners who were not a part of the plantation system) were not class conscious, and they were not in open competition with the larger planters for land or resources. The plain folk enjoyed political, social, and economic independence. But note the difference in his view of “money-grubbing.” “Relatively few of the plain folk, however, seem to have had a desire to become wealthy.”17 Their contempt for materialism was a natural part of the cultural heritage of the Celtic people from which the majority of them sprang. This contempt of wealth was a major factor in the true assessment of Southern society, a factor that the Yankee mind refused to understand and therefore would not include in its narrow, self-serving evaluation of Southern society.

  Owsley noted further that very few of the plain folk were wealthy, and even fewer were poor enough to suffer want. They were a cordial and hospitable people who enjoyed life. They even had a system of social security whereby they shared work when a member of society became ill or injured. The conditional granting of land was one method used by Southern folk to provide for social security.18

  The Yankee myth-makers would have us believe that the South was a poor and backward area prior to the war. The facts tell a different story. For example, in 1860, if the South had been an independent nation her economy would have ranked as the third largest on the European and American continents.19 The purchase of advanced farming implements in the South was twenty-five percent higher than in the North.20 The South had thirty-three percent of the nation’s railroad mileage plus navigable streams that did not freeze, and direct coastal access to the ocean in most of the Southern states.21 The South was behind the North in per capita railroad mileage but still ahead of every other nation in the world.22 According to the 1860 census, the South had a per capita income ten percent higher than all states west of New York and Pennsylvania.23 (Could it be that the New England states were rich as a result of their illicit trade in human flesh—the slave trade?)

  The important point for Southerners to remember is that our history has been distorted by our enemies. Whether this was done deliberately (as claimed by Davis, Jennings, et al.) or as a natural result of strangers using their own standards to evaluate a different society, the point is made that Southern history has been perverted to injure us regardless of the motive or causative factors.

  An example of how the Yankee myth of history is used consciously or unconsciously to degrade our opinions about the South is in order here. Let us examine a very well-known and popular book on the “Civil War” entitled Picture History of the Civil War by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton. Naturally any book that treats the subject of the “Civil War” is obliged to give some background to that epic struggle. On page 25 we find the author’s background information on the South. The page is cap-tioned “A Static South Lags Behind.” On page 20 of Catton’s book, we find his glowing caption, “The Growing West Adds New Strength to the North.” In his description of the South, Catton quotes from none other than the Yankee Olmsted. Catton tells his readers—true to the Olmsted model—that the plantation South was a “facade” which concealed another South of poor whites, and he goes on to state that “the citizens of the cotton states, as a whole, are poor.”24 The average Southerner will not have the opportunity to read the Apologia or any other pro-Southern books. When a Southerner picks up a book like the one Catton wrote and reads his view of Southern society, what will be the result? The result will be an acceptance of the Yankee myth of history—to the detriment of any hope for the Southern people to regain our lost rights and dignity.

  As might be expected, the works of the Southerner Owsley (unlike those of the Yankee Olmsted) have been largely ignored by the Yankee myth-makers. Dr. Grady McWhiney, professor of history at Texas Christian University, noted that Owsley’s “defense of southern and agrarian ways combined with his attempt to protect the South’s history from distortion brought down upon him the full wrath of many nationalistic historians.” He added, “But none of his critics has been able to refute Owsley’s basic theme of an Old South culturally dominated by plain folk whose ways were quite distinctive from those of Northerners.”25

  John Gould Fletcher was also one of the twelve Southerners who contributed to I’ll Take My Stand. He noted the attempt of the conquerors to imprint their view of history on the minds of Southern youth. He noted that, at a national convention of teachers in Pennsylvania in August 1865, they declared that the late conflict had been “a war of education and patriotism against ignorance and barbarism.”26

  In the mid 1950s the Sons of Confederate Veterans found it necessary to re-issue The Gray Book, “in the interest of truth.” The preface notes:

  Falsehood is still spewed forth in the United States. … It is hoped that this re-published book may serve to inform those who wish to know the facts and to shame those who still wish to spread falsehood and engage in the defamation.27

  In 1988, The University of Alabama Press published Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South by Dr. Grady McWhiney. Professor McWhiney again challenged the accepted Northern history of the Southern people. He demonstrated the importance of Celtic culture in Southern society. He noted that Southerners were different from their Yankee counterparts in that our society was leisure-oriented and dominated by a system of open-range grazing with support from low-intensity crop cultivation. This stood in contrast to the money-grubbing Yankee culture that patterned its culture after the English (Anglo-Saxon) culture which insisted upon highintensity cultivation and valued hard work and economic profit.

  Dr. McWhiney wrote that the W
ar for Southern Independence was not so much a war of brother against brother as it was a war of culture against culture. Dramatic as this observation is, it is not a new one. Anthony Trollope, a British citizen who traveled extensively in the North and South during the first part of the war, made a similar observation:

  The South is seceding from the North because the two are not homogeneous. They have different instincts, different appetites, different morals, and a different culture.28

  Trollope observed that, other than language, there was very little that the two sections held in common:

  They [the South] had become a separate people, dissevered from the North by habits, morals, institutions, pursuits, and every conceivable differences in their modes of thought and action. They still spoke the same language, as do Austria and Prussia; but beyond that tie of language they had no bond but that of a meagre political union. … 29

  The influence of the various cultures that populated Colonial America has been documented by David Hacket Fisher in his book Albion’s Seed. Fisher, a Northerner, demonstrates the four primary emigration patterns originating in the British Isles. The various cultural distinctions of these peoples which he documents influenced such social behavior as dietary preferences, mode of dress, and religious attitudes.30 The early emigration patterns to the South came principally from North Britain (Northern England and Scotland), Northern Ireland, and the Saxon areas of South England.31 The New England colonies received more emigrants from the traditionally English, East Anglia (Puritans),32 and the middle colonies received the bulk of Quakers from the North Midlands of England.33 Thus the cultural differences between the North and the South originated in the British Isles. The people who came to this continent did not forsake their ancient folkways, attitudes, and grudges, but adapted them to the new environment.