September 19, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Essay Defending
Southern History Published by Abbeville
and Reckonin’
Friends,
Back on Sunday, September 8, I offered an installment in the
MY CORNER series titled: “The
Southern Partisan, Eugene Genovese,
and the Defense of Southern History.”
I am honored that that particular
essay has now been picked up and published by two online journals: The
Abbeville Institute and Reckonin.com. Both Abbeville, edited by Dr. Brion
McClanahan, and Reckonin', edited by Dr.
Clyde Wilson’s daughter Anne, publish informed and well-written articles about
the South and Southern history. I urge you to access them on a regular basis,
as they provide a superb antidote to much of the feckless, ideologically-driven
and intellectually dishonest rubbish that is spewed forth about the South. What
we see in the historical profession these days, and in particular in the field
of Southern history is, as the old saying goes, feculence and dross “piled
higher and deeper,” as if repeating the same canards and “fake history” will
somehow make the false narrative true.
Several
years ago a son of a friend of mine approached me with a question: “‘Mr. Boyd,’
my history teacher told us that Lincoln freed the slaves when he issued the
Emancipation Proclamation. I wondered about that, so I’m asking you.” I responded that, no, Lincoln’s war measure—that’s
what it was, a calculated war measure—did not actually free slaves, as the
proclamation only applied to Southern
states not under Federal occupation (thus,
where slaves could not be freed), but
did not apply to states which were under
Federal control which did permit
slavery (where slaves could have been
freed). The student reported back to his teacher who thereupon threatened to fail
him on his work assignment if he used the correct information….
Examples
from our colleges—and each of us can probably name several we know of—are far,
far worse, as a college education these days is basically a parentally-paid and
financially painful exercise in our children’s ideological indoctrination in
revolutionary theory, brainwashing, and fanatical “woke” radicalism.
Would you,
at your own expense, send your son or daughter off for four years to be under
the supervision of a notorious predator? That’s what you’re doing when you send
them to most state-run colleges these days.
Some few
months ago I wrote a piece on privatizing our public educational system and
higher education…a major reform that MUST be accomplished if this country in
any recognizable form shall survive. My friend Professor Wilson declared that
the optimum solution would be to “napalm them.” Given the horror stories, the
rampant post-Marxist lunacy now dominating and strangling almost any true and
legitimate intellectual inquiry on our campuses, I think Clyde is correct.
But
perhaps a more attainable goal would be to convince our so-called “elected conservative
leaders”—to wean them off, as it were, the panacea of publicly-supported
education as somehow the “key” to a fruitful and successful future. No, public
education is not the solution; not in today’s environment when social justice
lunatics control our schools and run most colleges and college faculties with
an iron hand and totalitarian mindset that would have made Joseph Stalin
envious.
Far more
charter schools and vouchers are required, plus radical reform of our higher
education system. Let the Progressivists and teacher lobbies, the condescending
academic plutocrats and hysterical media, scream and gnash their teeth all the
wish. If this is not done, then we have already lost our culture…and our history. And Abraham Lincoln, as we all know, is the
Fourth Member of the Trinity…you doubt it and you’re excommunicated.
Here is
the essay: “The Defense of Southern History: The Southern Partisan, Eugene
Genovese”:
The Defense of Southern History: The Southern Partisan and
Eugene Genovese
By Boyd
D. Cathey (September 15 and September 18,
2019)
From
late 1983 until its fitful demise in the early 2000s, I served as a
contributing editor, adviser, or just simply a contributor to the old Southern Partisan magazine.
Although a last issue came out in 2009, the quarterly had pretty much ceased
regular publication a few years before that, largely due to internecine South
Carolina politics and personalities. The valiant efforts of former Sons of
Confederate Veterans Commander-in-Chief Chris Sullivan, as editor, to keep it
alive were, alas, to no avail.
Yet
during its nearly three decades of existence the Southern Partisan published
some of the finest writing about the South, Southern history, and Southern
culture since the Agrarians of Nashville back prior to World War II. Begun
originally in 1979 under the aegis of Thomas Fleming and Clyde Wilson, it
featured in its pages essays by such luminaries as Mel Bradford, Cleanth
Brooks, Eugene Genovese (not a Southerner, but an internationally-recognized
historian who developed a sympathetic fascination about the South), Tom
Landess, Russell Kirk, Reid Buckley (brother of William), Andrew Lytle, Don
Livingston, and many others.
I was
privileged and very fortunate to be associated with those giants in a small
way; over the years I had around fifteen essays and reviews published by
the Partisan on
subjects that have continued to interest and fascinate me: historical Southern
figures such as Nathaniel Macon and Robert Lewis Dabney, several reviews of
books by the late Dr. Russell Kirk (for whom I had served as assistant back in
the early 1970s), an appreciation of the Southern-born actor and star of
Westerns Randolph Scott, and lastly, reviews of books of Patrick Buchanan (a
larger-than-life political figure with deep roots in the Old South and with a
rambunctious mixture of Confederate and Irish Catholic ancestry!).
There’s
an old maxim that states “you’re known by the enemies you have”; and the Partisan had its share…and
for many of us associated with it, that indicated we were having some effect.
For much of its existence, it was a veritable bete noire for Morris Dees
and his radical Leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). In addition to
seeing Klansmen under the bed of every “conservative” Southern politician and
ferreting out every stench of Southern “racism,” the SPLC simply went
apoplectic when the topic of the Partisan came
up. They termed it “arguably the most important neo-Confederate periodical”, and thus the most dangerous
to their fanatical totalitarian Marxist social justice agenda. The views it
reflected were reactionary and anchored in a hateful past, not worthy of
serious consideration in modern America.
But
the Southern Partisan could
not be dismissed so cavalierly. Even The
New York Times, the national journalistic flagship for frenzied and
inflamed Progressivism, while denouncing the magazine “as one of region’s most
right-wing magazines,” also begrudgingly admitted that “Many of [its] articles, however, are
more high-minded historical reviews in the tradition of the Southern agrarian
movement, which glorified the South’s slow-paced traditions of farms and small
towns.”
Although
the Southern Partisan ceased
to exist a decade ago, other voices have arisen to fill that void, most
notably The
Abbeville Institute, its superb summer schools and seminars, and its online review
and blog. Clyde Wilson’s daughter Anne has also established a fine site, Reckonin.com, and it offers excellent
commentary and reviews. And there are other venues where good writing and
essays from a traditional Southern viewpoint appear.
In
1985 I had the opportunity to interview the late historian Eugene Genovese for
the Partisan (Fall
1985, volume V, no. 4), and it was the beginning of a close friendship that
lasted until his untimely death in 2012. And it was a friendship that forever
influenced me and my conception of Southern history and culture. For, beginning
as a Vietcong supporter back in the 1960s, through a long and at times
difficult evolution into the 1980s, Genovese had subjected the history of the South,
the issue of slavery, and the “Southern mind” to the most severe and close
examination. And, after it all, he became a stouthearted and brilliant defender
of the South and its traditions (his friendship with the late Mel Bradford had
undoubtedly assisted in that process).
For
Genovese the key to Southern history had been and was its firm foundation in
traditional Christianity. It was a form of mostly Calvinist Protestantism, but
also in a wider sense which warmly incorporated Catholics and Jews in its
midst, but united in an broad consensus on the idea of a Christian society,
which he found best expressed in the writings of the brilliant South Carolina
Presbyterian theologian, James Henley Thornwell (d. 1862).
Here
he is in a passage on the South
Carolinian, demonstrating a view that found resonance throughout the South:
Shortly before his death
Thornwell…in a “Sermon on National Sins,” preached on the eve of the War, and
boldly in a remarkable paper on “Relation of the State to Christ,” prepared for
the Presbyterian Church as a memorial to be sent to the Confederate Congress,
he called upon the South to dedicate itself to Christ. He criticized the American
Founding Fathers for having forgotten God and for having opened the Republic
to the will of the majority. “A foundation was thus laid for the worst of all
possible forms of government—a democratic absolutism.” To the extent that the
state is a moral person, he insisted, “it must needs be under moral obligation,
and moral obligation without reference to a superior will is a flat
contradiction in terms.” Thornwell demanded that the new Constitution be
amended to declare the Confederacy in submission to Jesus, for “to Jesus Christ
all power in heaven and earth is committed.” Vague recognition of God would
not do. The state must recognize the God of the Bible—the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost.
Thornwell
made clear that he wanted neither an established Church nor religious tests.
The state must guarantee liberty of conscience for all: “He may be Atheist,
Deist, infidel, Turk, or Pagan: it is no concern of the State so long as he
walks orderly.” Could a Jew become Chief Magistrate? Certainly, so long as he
does nothing in office “inconsistent with the Christian religion.” By all
means separate Church and state, but do not delude yourself that you can
separate the state from religion. At issue lay the moral basis of society,
which, Thornwell argued, had to be informed by one religious system and,
therefore, in the Protestant South, by Christianity. (I cannot prove that T.S.
Eliot read Thornwell’s essay, although I suspect as much, but I would invite a
comparison of “Relation of the State to Christ” with Eliot’s celebrated essay
“The Idea of a Christian Society.”)
After
the war—after Southern military defeat and the destruction of much of Southern
society and eventually its culture—Thornwell’s clarion calls were picked up by
another Presbyterian divine, Robert Lewis Dabney, who turned his Biblical ire
and critical (and prophetic) intellect to the developing “Yankee empire,”
religious indifferentism, and to the triumph of globalist capitalism and an
imperialist and plutocratic “democratic despotism” (something that the Northern
writer Henry Adams, scion of the Adams’ of New England, also recognized).
In
his magnum opus, The Mind of the
Master Class (2005), co-authored with his wife Professor Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese offered the finest and fullest—certainly the most
documented—account and evaluation of a “Southern mind and intellect” that had
conserved and illuminated the original, but oh-so-fragile vision of the Framers
of the Constitution. Despite, or perhaps because of his earlier interest
in Marxist theory, Genovese came to understand well, better than almost all his
contemporaries, the extreme dangers inherent in post-War Between the States
America.
And that
was why my interview with him nearly thirty-five years ago was so eye-opening.
(The full lengthy interview published in the Southern Partisan is now reprinted in my
recently published book, The
Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage [2018], chapter 29: “A
Partisan Conversation: Interview with Eugene Genovese.”)
I
quote below some extensive passages from that interview. Eugene Genovese and
the Southern Partisan were
incredibly productive and profound in their contribution to the defense,
survival, and, even just maybe the reflorescence of Southern heritage. In our
perilous times, when our traditions and heritage often seem hanging on by a
mere thread, we can do no better than refer to their sturdy intellectual armament.
Here
is Genovese from 1985:
…what I have argued from the
beginning is that Southern society existed within, inexplicably, the modern
capitalist world and that internally it had many of the attributes of a
bourgeois society. But the master-slave relation carried it psychologically,
materially, politically in quite a different direction, and this is the
formulation that I have used and that my wife and I tried to develop in our
book Fruits of Merchant
Capital — that the South was in but not of the modern
capitalist world. That has gone down very hard with many people on the Left.
For me, the essential
question comes to this: Did the South and North diverge in a deep cultural
sense, as well as politically and institutionally, to a degree that made secession
and war understandable, not as a historical tragedy but as the outcome of a
historical process? Under any circumstances the War would have had tragic
dimensions, the mere fact that members of families fought on both sides, and so
on.
Now, here I don‘t see the
point of merging the South and the North at all, and I say that with full
awareness that Louisiana was not South Carolina and Mississippi was not
Virginia. Nonetheless, because the South developed as a slave labor society
whereas the North developed as an essentially bourgeois society, these people
became separate in sensibility as well as interests.
That does not preclude
enormous regional variations on either side. It suggests a common range of
behavior and much overlapping, but with a very different locus. And in this
sense, I think that those Southerners who perceived themselves by the 1850s as
being in the process of forging a separate nationality and as being a people
apart were right. I think this was one of the great difficulties in the way of
any kind of a compromise. Northerners from their perspective had to see the
country as one; Southerners had to see themselves increasingly as a separate
people who were trying to negotiate a coexistence.
This is reflected, it seems
to me, in the difference in Constitutional perception. For Southerners, the
Union was a compact; they put it in States’ Rights terms and that meant
something very real to them. I don’t underestimate it. But at the bottom of
that (and I think this can be demonstrated in their own testimony) was the
notion that the Constitution made possible the political co-existence of two
radically different social systems. And that therefore from their point of
view, the Constitution was a way to live and let live. From the Northern point
of view it was much closer to being a national document. They never accepted
the notion this was a solemn compact between two equal social systems. They may
have been willing to tolerate slavery in the states as a States’ Rights
phenomenon, but they never acknowledged that therefore the Constitution
sanctioned slavery and put that social system on an equal footing with their
own.
….On another aspect of
culture, my wife Betsey and I are doing a book on the master class [i.e., The Mind of the Master Class].
Central to that book is a thesis which we have taken up from Southern
conservatives that the Old South should be understood fundamentally as a
religious society. We take that very seriously. We are enormously impressed and
moved by our work on the slaveholder, family by family, person by person. We’ve
been digging into family papers for many, many years to do this project in a
very specific way, and we’re discovering in our study the efforts to develop
not only the churches per
se but the schools, the old-field schools, the academies, the
female institutes, the colleges — all of which were permeated by religious
values and largely either directly sponsored by religious institutions or by
people who very much saw education as religiously grounded.
In our study, we say the
intense religious quality of Southern life sets it apart from the North in two
ways: First, and less firmly, we strongly suspect Southern culture was more
deeply religious than Northern. But that’s awfully hard to establish,
especially since there are different qualities of religious experience. But
second, and this is more important and easier to nail down, the religious
quality of Southern society carried with it very specific social and political
consequences.
Incidentally, while we are
not Biblical scholars, we’ll go out on a limb and say the Southerners won the
argument against the abolitionists. These were people who were very close to
the Book…that was true of the Presbyterians, even of the Episcopalians and
certainly of the Baptists and Methodists and the smaller sects.
….the fundamental political
and social thought of Southern society was religiously grounded. Where I think
we can demonstrate the divergence from the North is that, over time in the
North, religion was weakening even in the bastions of Old Puritanism in New
England. It was increasingly being watered down by liberal religion and
increasingly losing its hold on the discourse. In the South, it was being
strengthened. In the North, politicians could appeal to God and the Bible in some
fashion; after all, they still do. In the South, it was impossible to make any
kind of a political or social statement without grounding your arguments firmly
in a religious discourse and knowing full well that you were speaking to people
who knew exactly what the touchstones were.
Look at James Hammond of
South Carolina, a brilliant man but hardly the epitome of a good Christian, or
Henry Wise of Virginia. Take the most opportunistic of people, the depths of
whose religion one could suspect, yet these guys, in speaking about great
social questions and political principles, knew they had to begin in the same
way their deeply religious colleagues did. That was the discourse. Now that was
no longer true of the North. The discourse in the North was increasingly
secular with God thrown in occasionally in a somewhat deeper way. But in the
South I don’t think you could find serious social and political arguments
beyond the level of stump tactics that were not religiously grounded and didn’t
operate within a discourse that was steadily disappearing in the North.
….we formulated the
hypothesis primarily by reading conservative defenses of Southern tradition:
Allen Tate, for all of his feelings that the South wasn’t a good Roman Catholic
society as it should have been, the people from I’ll Take My Stand, Richard
Weaver, M. E. Bradford, and others who formulate it very sharply. One of the
things which has amazed me is that I’ve worked on these Antebellum Southerners
now for a long, long time, but it wasn’t until I started to go back and reread
the conservative interpretations and defenses of Southern tradition that the
full force of that hit me, the force of what it might mean.
And also ironically I was led
in writing Roll, Jordan,
Roll to place great emphasis on the centrality of black
religion. Given my own biases, I was dragged kicking and screaming to that
vantage point. But that’s where my evidence led me and when I started to
reflect on it I finally said, “You know this is absurd.” You could not have
this kind of a deeply religious black community without its white counterpart
or vice-versa.
For
Betsey [my wife] this was a lot easier because she came in to Southern history
late, without my prejudice and she saw it right away. She said, “My God, you
cannot read the family letters of these people, what they write to the public,
what they say to themselves privately, without being struck by the centrality
of religion to Southern life.”
About
Boyd Cathey
Boyd D.
Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of
Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in
intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow).
He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk.
In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina
Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and
English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is
active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival,
and genealogical organizations.
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