Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  There is an ambiguity about this new interest in the Civil War. On the one hand, it is the past recaptured, the authentic recovery of the long agony during which this nation came to be what it is. Yet there is also the temptation to yield to a historical illusion by which the past seems to gain in stature and authenticity as it recedes and the present to be discounted because it is the here and now. We sense the illusion in the words of the old-timer, “Yes, they came through here,” in which it is somehow implied that this place has existed in a long trivial aftermath after its one day of glory. Perhaps the North is in for a mild case of the same romanticism which the South recovered from over fifty years ago.

  The increased emphasis upon the fighting at the expense of ideology is probably good. One does well, anyway, not to apply ideology too closely to that war. James Truslow Adams can talk about the March of Democracy and Bruce Catton can call the Union Army a truly revolutionary army and perhaps they are right. Perhaps the War was really and truly fought over slavery. But the other case can be made, too. It is difficult to see the yeoman farmers who largely made up the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Northern Virginia as Southern Bourbons. The South had some reason to regard the fight as a continuation of the American Revolution. After all, it was her soil which was being invaded and her independence which was being denied. The South might even have the better of the constitutional argument; yet what won out seems to transcend all the arguments. For it is that extraordinary thing, the American Union,

  1957

  Red, White, and Blue-Gray

  ON IT GOES, THE second Civil War, hundreds of books, millions of words, dozens of Pickett’s charges. Yet the “war” has only just started. There are four more years of it.

  Many people are already bored with it. Some are uneasy about it. Yet it continues to be a literary Comstock lode. If a writer doesn’t want to take on the whole War, or a campaign, or even a general, he can still browse around and take his choice among an assortment of goodies, like the Cruise of the Alabama or the War in Idaho, write a book, have a good time doing it, and stand a good chance of making money, which is more than most novelists can say.

  There is a paradox about current Civil War Centennial literature. It commemorates mainly the fighting, the actual frontline killing—which was among the bloodiest and bitterest in modern history. Yet it is all very good-natured. Illinois historians say nice things about Forrest; Mississippians, if not Georgians, speak well of Sherman.

  In the popular media the War is so friendly that the fighting is made to appear as a kind of sacrament of fire by which one side expresses its affection for the other. After skirting the Civil War for years—showing a few bushwhackers or jayhawkers in Kansas or a skirmish or two in Santa Fe—television finally took the plunge and put on the War itself, taking care first to turn it into a lovematch. In The Americans the only bad blood is between good Yankees and bad Yankees, good rebels and scalawags. The fighting itself is either scanted or, when it does take place, it consists mainly of chivalric gestures toward the enemy: Yankees catch a young reb on his first patrol and slip him back through the lines so he won’t disgrace the family name. Yet the reconciliation is all to the good, even when it is reinforced by a concern for the Trendex rating in Alabama or Vermont.

  Myth requires distance, either in space or in time. The TV Western takes place Nowhere. So perhaps that War is still a bit touchy for myth-making. One hundred years may not be enough time. But someday a scriptwriter is going to show a Civil War soldier with but a single thought: he has no trouble with his girl; he is not trying to cover up for his alcoholic colonel; his men are reliable; all he wants to do is kill as many blue-bellies (or rebs) as possible—and Gunsmoke will be out of business.

  Bruce Catton treats the War as a kind of mystical experience, a national rite of passage in the course of which a lot of sweaty young men killed each other with unsurpassed dedication and skill and in so doing presided over the rebirth of the American character. No doubt, he is right. Something of the sort did happen.

  Anyhow, since the War was fought and the time has come to say something on the subject, one might as well put on it the best complexion possible. The Union was saved, and though it was by no means a self-evident axiom that the Union should be saved, it is no doubt well that it was (despite some disgruntled liberals who are beginning to wonder whether it was a good idea after all, since it meant keeping the South—like Groucho Marx who dared to wonder whether the show must go on). The slaves were freed and this was a good thing, though they would undoubtedly have been freed anyhow.

  But the fighting itself makes for some very good reading. There was a high order of courage and performance on both sides and there is now some very good writing about it.

  The South has certain tactical advantages in the present “war” (like the North’s industry and population in the first) and has accordingly won a species of literary revenge. The two great figures of the Civil War were Lincoln and Lee, and since most of the literature is about the fighting, Lee is bound to get the better of it. And what with the American preference for good guys and underdogs, and especially underdog good guys, and Lee’s very great personal qualities and the undistinguished character of his opponents, and finally the Army of Northern Virginia which was always outnumbered and nearly always won—it looks as if the next hundred years will see the South not only running the Senate but taking over the national myth along with it.

  There is an innocence about combat. For one thing, the soldiers were or anyhow seemed more admirable than the politicians. There is also a finality: somebody wins, somebody loses, and it is over.

  But what was settled? The Union was saved for good. The Negro’s place in society was supposed to be settled, but it wasn’t after all.

  The Centennial literature may be good-natured, but there is an unease among liberals about the whole business. This is understandable enough, since it derives from the concern that commemoration of that particular sectional division can only damage the current struggle for civil rights. Therefore, the less said about the whole thing, the better. But such a queasiness would seem to award by default a more ominous significance to the Civil War than it deserves.

  It is true that a lot of Confederate flags are being waved in the South. But if it weren’t the flag, it would be something else. Racism has no sectional monopoly. Nor was the Confederate flag a racist symbol. But it is apt to be now. The symbol is the same, but the referent has changed. Now when the Stars and Bars flies over a convertible or a speedboat or a citizens’ meeting, what it signifies is not a theory of government but a certain attitude toward the Negro.

  A peculiarity of civil war is the destruction not only of armies and nations but of ideologies. The words and slogans may remain the same, but they no longer mean the same thing.

  There is a great deal to be said for the traditional Southern position on states’ rights. Not being a historian, I don’t know what the cause of that War was, whether it was fought purely and simply over slavery, or over states’ rights, or, as Allen Tate once said, because the South didn’t want to be put in Arrow collars. Certainly, states’ rights once signified a healthy sense of local responsibility.

  Nowadays in the South, however, the expression signifies a lack of responsibility, plus a certain attitude toward the Negro. When a politician mentions states’ rights, it’s a better than even bet that in the next sentence it will become clear what kind of states’ rights he is talking about. It usually comes down to the right to keep the Negro in his place.

  There is another phrase: the Southern Way of Life. Now, there was and is such a thing and it had and has nothing to do either with Negroes or with a planter aristocracy. The Northerner can sneer all he wants to, but he didn’t have it and never will and doesn’t even know what it is. But I don’t like to hear the phrase now, “A Southern Way of Life,” because I know what is coming next. It usually means segregation and very little else. In New Orleans, which has a delightful way of life, t
he “Southern Way of Life” usually means “Let’s Keep McDonough No. 6 Segregated.”

  But the bitterest fruits of defeat are the latter-day defenders of the lost cause. Historians like to contrast the pre-War hotheads like Yancey and Rhett with soldiers like Lee and Grant. But our present-day hotheads are an even sorrier lot, because their heads only get hot around election time.

  When Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia laid down the Confederate flag in 1865, no flag had ever been defended by better men. But when the same flag is picked up by men like Ross Barnett and Jimmy Davis, nothing remains but to make panties and pillowcases with it.

  Still and all, there is no need to worry about the Reconciliation. It was very largely an Anglo-Saxon war, and Anglo-Saxon has been reconciled to Anglo-Saxon. But to whom is the Negro reconciled?

  It is a discouraging fact that after one hundred years there is greater unanimity on the subject of segregation in the South than there ever was on the subject of slavery. Virginia almost abolished slavery before the Civil War. There were all shades of opinion on the question. But now it is impossible to imagine a Sparkman or a Fulbright uttering a simple forthright statement against public segregation—not that I believe that such a statement from Senator Javits or Keating is motivated by a higher brand of political courage.

  Yet there is nothing left to be reconciled between North and South. The North did win and did put the South in Arrow collars. The sections are homogenized. Everybody watches the same television programs. In another hundred years, everybody will talk like Art Linkletter.

  The South has gotten rich and the North has gotten Negroes, and the Negro is treated badly in both places. The Northerners won and freed the slaves and now are fleeing to the suburbs to get away from them.

  Here is the Centennial nobody celebrates: the War was fought, to free the slaves according to the North; according to the South, to preserve the Southern way of life, which was better for both black and white; a million people were killed; a hundred years have passed; the North and the South are reconciled—and the country has still not made up its mind what to do about the Negro.

  The Centennial is worth celebrating but there is a ghost at the feast. It is true that one can point to progress in the race problem; progress has been made North and South. But this is not saying much. For it is not gainsaying the embarrassing fact that the Negro is not treated as a man in the North or the South, and if you think the North is better, ask James Baldwin. Setting aside everything else, this state of affairs is an interesting anomaly in the first and greatest of the revolutionary democracies and the largest and most Christian nation in Christendom (Meridian, Mississippi, has the largest percentage of churchgoers in the world, and Cicero, Illinois, is not far behind).

  Catton says that we still don’t understand the meaning of the Civil War and we have not calculated its impact on history. This is true, and one of the most incalculable effects has been the effect of the sectional division on the Negro.

  Sectionalism allows each section to dispense itself by using the other as a scapegoat. The North, after all, freed the slaves and afterwards the Northerner wore an aura of righteousness which he would still be wearing if only the slaves’ descendants had stayed in the South. Who would have supposed that a hundred years later Northern cities would have large, undigested, and mostly demoralized black ghettos, which Conant recently described as the most explosive element of American life?

  The South, on the other hand, has always managed to comfort itself by pointing to the hypocrisy of the North—not realizing that it is a sorry game in which the highest score is a tie: “Look, they’re as bad as we are!”

  The Northerner is apt to see nothing amiss in moving from uptown Manhattan to Scarsdale to get away from Harlem and deploring Faubus all the way. Southerners talk a great deal about freedom these days, usually freedom to retain segregation. In the South we attend “Christian anti-Communist crusades,” segregated. Many Southerners really and truly believe that the Communists are behind the movement to get rid of segregation.

  The Centennial should be celebrated and it is well that the War is over and a hundred years have passed and the country is stronger than ever. But there could be an even happier issue: perhaps the country will be sufficiently reconciled so that it may one day wake up and face the one intractable problem with which it has been beset from the very beginning. With the country reconciled and with Negroes living in Tucson and Newburgh, it could even happen that the white man will decide what to do about the black man.

  1961

  Stoicism in the South

  IT IS ALWAYS HARD to generalize about the South, harder perhaps for the Southerner, for whom the subject is living men, himself among them, than for the Northerner who, in proportion to his detachment, can the more easily deal with ideas. Yet I think it is possible to record at firsthand a momentous change which has taken place in a single generation—and I do not mean the obvious changes, the New South of the magazines, the Negro emigration, or the Supreme Court decision. The change is this: until a few years ago, the champion of Negro rights in the South, and of fair-mindedness and toleration in general, was the upper-class white Southerner. He is their champion no longer. He has, by and large, unshouldered his burden for someone else to pick up. What has happened to him? With a few courageous exceptions, he is either silent or he is leading the Citizens’ Councils.

  He will not deny the charge but will reply that it is not he who has changed but the Supreme Court, that he is still fighting to preserve the same way of life he defended when he opposed the Klan thirty years ago. Has not pressure from the North rendered the moderate position untenable? Is he not now fighting the same good fight as his fathers, who kicked out the scalawags and carpetbaggers and rescued the South from one of the most shameful occupations in history?

  But it is not the same fight and he has changed. (Again let me say I only feel free to say this because no white Southerner can write a j’accuse without making a mea culpa; no more is the average Northerner, either by the accident of his historical position or by his present performance, entitled to a feeling of moral superiority.)

  The fact is that neither the ethos nor the traditional worldview of the upper-class white Southerner is any longer adequate to the situation. No longer able to maintain a steadfast and temperate position, he finds himself caught up in violent and even contradictory cross-movements. There is nothing atypical about Faulkner’s crying the South’s guilt to the high heavens one moment and the next condoning street fighting to perpetuate it. The old alliance of Negro and white gentry has broken up. During the last gubernatorial primary in Louisiana an extraordinary thing happened, the significance of which has been largely missed. The considerable Negro vote went en bloc to its traditional enemy, the poor-white candidate.

  What is the reason for this dissolution of the old alliance? Is it simply a result of the Decision, or does the cause lie much deeper? Does it not, in fact, reflect a profound cultural change which, as it has turned out, cannot be accommodated within the ethos of the upper-class white?

  The greatness of the South, like the greatness of the English squirearchy, had always a stronger Greek flavor than it ever had a Christian. Its nobility and graciousness was the nobility and graciousness of the Old Stoa. How immediately we recognize the best of the South in the words of the Emperor: “Every moment think steadily, as a Roman and a man, to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and a feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice.” And how curiously foreign to the South sound the Decalogue, the Beatitudes, the doctrine of the Mystical Body. The South’s virtues were the broadsword virtues of the clan, as were her vices, too—the hubris of noblesse gone arrogant. The Southern gentleman did live in a Christian edifice, but he lived there in the strange fashion Chesterton spoke of, that of a man who will neither go inside nor put it entirely behind him but stands forever grumbling on the porch. From this vantage point he caught sight of Pericles and Hector and the Emperor, a
nd recognized them as his heart’s elect. Where was to be found their like? In Abraham? In Paul? He thought not. When he named a city Corinth, he did not mean Paul’s community. How like him to go into Chancellorsville or the Argonne with Epictetus in his pocket; how unlike him to have had the Psalms.

  It is true that he was raised on the Christian chivalry of Walter Scott, but it was a Christianity which was aestheticized by medieval trappings and a chivalry which was abstracted from its sacramental setting. If Ivanhoe and The Talisman were his favorite novels, Richard Coeur de Lion and Saladin were his favorite characters, just because in them great heartedness and soldierly generosity transcended everything, even religious differences.

  If the Stoic way was remarkably suited to the Empire of the first century, it was quite as remarkably suited to the agrarian South of the last century. The Colonel Sartoris who made himself responsible for his helpless “freedmen,” and the Lucas Beauchamps who accepted his leadership, formed between them a bond such as can only exist between one man in his dignity and another. It was a far nobler relationship than what usually passes under the name of paternalism. The nobility of Sartoris—and there were a great many Sartorises—was the nobility of the natural perfection of the Stoics, the stern inner summons to man’s full estate, to duty, to honor, to generosity toward his fellow men and above all to his inferiors—not because they were made in the image of God and were therefore lovable in themselves, but because to do them an injustice would be to defile the inner fortress which was oneself. Whatever its abuses, whatever its final sentimental decay, there was such a thing as noblesse oblige on the one side and an extraordinary native courtesy and dignity on the other, by which there occurred, under almost impossible conditions, a flowering of human individuality such as this hemisphere has rarely seen.