The Rise and Fall of the Old Southern Illusion

Editor’s note: This story from 1927 contains dated language that is no longer used today. In the interest of keeping a historical record, it appears here as it was originally published.

James Boyd (1910) is the author of Drums and Marching On. This is reprinted, with permission, from Brentano’s Book Chat.

The real nature of the Civil War has been obscured to most Southerners and to many Northerners by failure to recognize that in essence it was a struggle between a high type of primitive civilization and a low type of more advanced civilization. A contrast such as this is always superficially in favor of the civilization that is most developed within its type, however behind the other it may be in fundamentals.

           Thus the South, the last and in some respects the best, of the slave civilizations, presented in its flower an aspect immediately and strikingly alluring. And the North, the newest and in most respects the best, of the free industrial civilizations, was marked by a surface crudity in manners, amusements, and other decorations of organized society that confirmed all Southerners then and ever since in their passionate preference for their own régime. Nor were Southerners alone; at the time many neutral observers held the same view and, since the war, by means of fiction many Northerners have come to believe not, to be sure, that the North was vulgar, but at least that the South was a land of infinitely superior gayety, graciousness and charm.

           That there was a real basis for this belief goes without saying. No one can question that among a certain group in the Old South courtesy founded on genuine kindliness, a notion of how to live with comfort, content and leisurely gusto and a sense of respect for the dignity and honor of the individual had reached a plane which was not equalled by any general class in the North.

           But this group, if the word group can be applied to families living, except for the few small Southern cities, isolated even from each other, was never either so large or so widely diffused as it has been pictured. And the fact that during the slave régime the South had, save in matters of social intercourse and statecraft, remained sterile, contributing almost nothing to letters, religion, philosophy, invention or science, suggests that in itself this class also suffered defects no less serious for being less immediately apparent.

Economic System Handicaps Majority

To find out how great or how small was the diffusion of Southern culture it is necessary first to recognize that this culture, like all culture, had to be based on a degree of economic well-being sufficient to give leisure. How large a proportion of the Southern white population enjoyed this happy state? We know by the United States census of 1858 that there were over six million whites in the States which two years later set up the Confederacy. Of these only five thousand owned over fifty slave apiece, and five million nine hundred thousand owned no slaves whatever.

           From among these five million came “poor whites,” “white-trash” or “crackers.” They constituted a phenomenon of agricultural pauperism which in extent and degree had not been seen in the so-called civilized world since the serfdom of the middle ages and which was an unmistakably the by-product of the slave régime as serfdom was of the feudal system. 

           Now the scattered five thousand were far too few and too insecure to better the lot of the five million, even had they been so disposed. But they were not so disposed, for the reason that their own status was based on the assumption that the white was destined by the natural law to enslave the black. To this theory the poor white presented a contradiction which annoyed the planters and demoralized the negro, or would have done so if the planters had not succeeded in setting up in the negroes’ mind and in their own, a distinction between the two kinds of white men. There were themselves and their families, worthy to be masters, worthy of all respect and service from the slave, as indeed by far the most of them truly were; then there was the poor white, a thing apart, worthless, hopeless, an outcast from the natural order, a shameful blot on the perfection of God’s intention in the slave régime. Thus the planters thought of him and, thinking so, they withheld as tightly as they could the benefits of their own civilization, roads, schools, churches, corn mills, cotton gins. And not being able to teach the negro to look up to the poor white, with an ingenuity no less effective for being unconscious, they taught the negro to look down on him. They entrenched their own small caste at the expense of the manhood of the country.

           And the manhood of the country, crushed under an economic system that excluded it from chance of betterment, deprived of knowledge, of pleasure and of hope, and exposed to the contumely of planters and slaves alike, found the impost more than it could bear. It sank to a sullen, listless and half-barbarous state.

The Poor White Gains Validity

With the two classes so related and in such proportion it should not be hard to imagine what the general tone of the old South must have been. Not that the tales of visitors, enchanted by the festive charm of Charleston or New Orleans and their outlying plantations, or that the flowered romances of cavaliers, old rosewood, faithful servitors, were by any means untrue. They were merely a fraction of the truth. And if we study the reports of travellers through the whole South, or the back country, we will find that fraction small beyond belief. We will find that the shining plantations of our dreams were the merest, the tiniest oases in a lifeless desert of the human spirit, a mournful, dreary land through which a man could travel days on end, seeing only men and women sunk in lethargy, clothed like savages, housed like swine.

           The Civil War galvanized this inert mass. The despised poor white turned out to be as good a fighting man as any the world had seen. And more important, opportunity forced by the iron necessity of war, was given him to show resource, initiative, and, in many cases, power to command. In a word, the war gave back to the poor white a proper, indispensable self-esteem; it gave him back, in his own eyes and the eyes of his folks, a validity so long denied him by the planters that he had ceased to believe in it himself. 

           Why then was not this result immediately apparent? Why for fifty years did the poor white remain much as he was and the South proclaim only that the Civil War had wrecked the golden age? Northern policy, I think, was largely to blame for that. At the end of the war Confederate currency was of course worthless and the North, in addition, compelled the repudiation of Confederate and Southern State bonds. This wiped out savings, penalized thrift, destroyed working capital and reduced the poor man quite as much as the planter to an attitude of passive despair. Then the vote was taken away from the white man and given to the negro, and the negro-carpet-bag governments thus formed proceeded by robbery to wreck what equity the Southern states still possessed. Economically that completed the ruin, politically it first taught the poor white to look on his own — if it could be called his own — government with contempt, with no sense of responsibility. All things combined to plunge him back into his old estate.

Ideal of Courtesy Established

I am not one who believes that the South could have expected, as some Southerners did expect, to be restored to the Union with immediate and complete forgiveness. There were too many Northern graves for that. I am merely discussing the effects that Reconstruction had on Southern development. Among them the greatest and most lasting was the effect on the Southern state of mind.

           The end of the war had been greeted in the South with something like relief. For many months before Appomatox feeling had swelled and grown that the war should come to an end. Many men looked forward to a new and better era. But it does not take much to change the state of mind of an exhausted nation. Reconstruction was enough to make the South feel that between the malignity of Northern politicians and the cold acquiescence of the Northern people they were doomed to utter desolation. Unable to see hope in the future, their minds fled to the past and glorified the land for which their brave had fought, glorified it till its fabled brilliance blinded them to its shadows and to the silent and unfulfilled but mighty change that had occurred in the status of the plain man of the South.

           The fabled brilliance shone unchallenged even by the North as long as the South was sunk in poverty, and it had one effect on Southern life which has, so far as I know, not been noted. It disseminated a tradition and ideal of courtesy among all classes. I do not think one needs to be a Southerner to feel that in the South today the contacts between man and man and the attitude toward women are marked by a degree of consideration and good taste not exceeded by any country this side of China. But if travellers through the slave states are to be believed, this important merit was then confined largely to the upper classes and to the house slaves. Only since they were liberated have plain men made themselves free with that most distinguished and most genuine of the planter’s possessions. It was indeed the only possession which they could hope to obtain, for already the planter’s supposed magnificence had grown with distance until no Croesus might rival the imaginary splendor in which the humblest antebellum Southern gentleman had lived. 

           Today some but not very much of that courtesy may have been lost by the Southerner in the slow climb from prostration to sound economic development. But if some has been lost the scale is more than balanced by the power which his new confidence, prosperity and knowledge have given him to see the truth. That, and the perspective of the years, have worked vast changes in all but the bitterest of the old Unreconstructed Rebels, so that I venture to say that today few citizens of this now brave and stirring ex-Confederacy would wish ever to see the sorrowful land of slaves and outcaste whites again.

This was originally published in the October 4, 1927 issue of PAW.