May 4, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
The “Introduction” to The Land We Love, Published by Confederate Veteran Magazine
Friends,
The
May/June issue of Confederate Veteran
Magazine contains a very slightly shortened copy of the Introduction that I
penned for my volume, The Land We Love:
The South and Its Heritage (published by The Scuppernong Press this past
November, 2018). As that Introduction is now widely available to magazine
readers (but not accessible online), I offer it as an installment in the My Corner series,
with the hope that you will find it interesting. (The same issue contains a
review of the book by James Ronald Kennedy).
Introduction to THE LAND WE LOVE: THE SOUTH AND ITS HERITAGE
Confederate
Veteran Magazine (May/June 2019), pp.16-19,
56-58
Over the past several years I have been
writing essays for several publications and media outlets regarding Southern
and Confederate history and heritage, and, in particular, about the growing
assault on the symbols of that history and heritage. None of what I wrote —
nothing I put into print — should have seemed that unusual or radical. My
thoughts and observations could have been put down on paper fifty years ago — even
thirty years ago — and I don’t think they would have caused much of a stir or
raised an eyebrow for most readers. Of course, much has changed in fifty years,
and what was admired, revered, and considered normal then, is, in large part,
considered controversial, even hateful, or subject to censorship and banning,
now.
The Southland that I grew up in has,
indeed, changed in many ways. There are millions of new residents, mostly
transplants from the more northerly climes who find our climate, our low taxes,
our more relaxed way of life, and our generally more friendly and accommodating
people, to their liking. No doubt these newcomers, along with thousands of
immigrants, legal and illegal, from south of the border, have effected changes
in the South. Yet, I believe there is still what the late Southern historian,
Francis Butler Simkins, once called “the everlasting South,” a South — a land
and a people — that subsists and continues to exist, even if at times occulted
or not easy to grasp or experience, and even if under severe stress and assault
from those who would purge it of its past and exile or extinguish its
traditions handed down as a legacy from our ancestors.
The symbols of any society, of any
culture — its flags and banners, its monuments to veterans and historical
figures, its markers, its street and city names, the names of its schools, even
its holidays, and so much more — are public manifestations not just of the
history of that society, but represent visibly the beliefs and principles that
culture has held— and holds — most dear. In a real sense as well, they offer an
aspirational guide to what the future will be, what will give it structure and
sustenance, and what the offspring of this generation will bequeath to the
next.
It is that way with any culture which
remembers its history. As Mel Bradford once wrote, it is through “remembering
who we are” that we come to comprehend how the fullness of that history, that
heritage, that legacy have shaped us and given us a richness and distinctiveness
of character that make us a people. When I was doing doctoral work in Spain at
the University of Navarra in Pamplona, I came across an observation by the
subject of my research, the Spanish traditionalist writer and philosopher, Juan
Vazquez de Mella (1862-1928), that I think is universal in its application:
Who
has ever seen ‘the individual,’ if not defined by his family, his region, his
profession, his language, his inheritance, his faith? Removed from these
defining characteristics, the individual is an abstraction, and a political
system based on an abstraction must either end in despotism or revolution.
Show me a rootless society, point to a
society where the sense of community has disappeared, a society deprived of its
heritage and the inherited legacy of its customs, its literature, its heroes,
its shared beliefs, all that lore passed down not just officially by the state,
but from father and mother to son and to daughter — and you have a social
anthill, a mass of humans as faceless cogs, reduced to the status of the
aimless and amorphous mass of grunting pigs inhabiting George Orwell’s
dystopian fantasy novel, Animal Farm —and
susceptible to the beckoning calls and tempting of the first demagogue who
appears on the scene, or to the lunacy of an ideology that promises utopia here
on earth, but ends in enslaving the inhabitants. Southerners, among all
Americans, have been the most resistant to such Siren calls. As in no other
region of the country they have been aware of and suffered the hardships and
cruelties of defeat in war, a war between the states which they understood
philosophically as a war to preserve the original Constitutional system left to
them by the Framers, many of whom were Southerners.
That Southern character and sense of
community, if you will, was already in formation long before the bloody
conflict of 1861-1865, as I discuss later on in this volume in examining the
work of Professors Mel Bradford, Richard Weaver and Richard Beale Davis (see
chapters “The Land We Love: Southern Tradition and the Future” and “How the
Neoconservatives Destroyed Southern Conservatism”). It manifested itself in the
early colonial settlements and the creation of colonial communities of
like-minded peoples. It derived much of its integrity and nourishment from the
Old World, from Europe, and, in particular, from the British Isles, from
settlers who brought with them their customs, their mores and religion, their
songs and ballads, their legends, and their beliefs, to these shores. As David
Hackett Fisher has indicated in his volume, Albion’s
Seed (1989), tracing transatlantic
migrations from the British Isles, the early inhabitants of the South country
came mostly from southern England, colonists who were more apt to have been
Cavalier and Royalist supporters in the seventeenth century (and thus favorable
to plantation culture), or from the borderlands, from Scotland and the far
north of England or Ulster, fiercely independent, but also dedicated to
agriculture and a rural way of life.
These cultures gave rise to a uniquely
Southern society, a culture that while it would differ over the years about
such political issues as representation (e.g., the Virginia Constitutional
Convention of 1829, and the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835)
or internal improvements, still found much more in common than not. Southern
Whiggery may have supported Henry Clay’s “American (or national) system,” but
regional and, especially, communal and state identification were never far from
the surface.
As Professor Bradford illustrates in
his illuminating study, Original Intentions: On the
Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution (1993),
discussed later in several essays included in this volume, at the debates over
the framing of the Constitution the Framers basically created a document and a
resulting new nation which reflected Southern states’ rights views, a national
executive which was in no way like the increasingly centralizing power that
emerged in 1865 after four years of war. And, in fact, that regionalist view
was generally held by many national political and intellectual leaders, not
just by those from below the Mason-Dixon Line.
It was not so much a radical
transformation of Southern thinking and views which propelled the nation on a
course to eventual conflict. While it is certainly true Southerners and their
perspectives on what was occurring in the Union hardened and sharpened in
intensity in the years leading up to the outbreak of the War Between the
States, it must be argued that intensity was occasioned as a response to
increasing assaults, both political and, finally, violent, by their brethren
north of the Mason-Dixon, and in particular, from the descendants of those
largely Puritan New Englanders. As such historians as Paul Conkin (Puritans
and Pragmatists) and Perry Miller (The
Life of the Mind in America and The
New England Mind) have documented, the intellectual and
eventually political influence on America, at least the northern portion of it,
by the latter-day inheritors of Puritanism was immense and wide-ranging. And it
ran up against a South that, for its part, would undergo what liberal
historian, Louis Hartz in his classic volume, The
Liberal Tradition in America (1955),
called somewhat despectively, a “reactionary enlightenment,” a time of doubling
down on those “original intentions” and beliefs that increasingly Southerners
felt to be under attack.
It is impossible, of course, to ignore
slavery and its effects in the Southern states. The coming of the African slave
to American shores would become an important factor both culturally and
socially, and eventually, politically in the life of the American republic.
Yet, the modern concentration on race and slavery, to the exclusion of all
other factors, as the all-important — and often only — determinant in Southern
history, both misreads the fullness of that history and turns it, too
frequently, into an ideological cudgel with which to damn all of Southern
heritage and culture. As Professor Davis has detailed in his massively-documented
three-volume work, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South,
1585-1763 (1978), a Southern character — a distinctive Southern personality —
was already maturing before the presence African slavery figured as a
disquieting note in Southern history and long before it became an issue debated
widely on the national level.
Certainly, the questions surrounding
slavery and the existence of a growing mostly servile black population in a
dominant white society would become more visible in the first half of the nineteenth
century. The rise of abolitionist sentiment in the northern states, brought on
as a kind of zealous evangelical afterbirth of the Puritan tradition, and the
pressure to end the slave trade and attempts by Christian reformers either to
ameliorate the condition of slaves or advocate for their emancipation, had
their effects. Indeed, Southerners, themselves, grappled with the issues, as
Professor Eugene Genovese has shown in his various studies, including The
World the Slaveholders Made, and more significantly,
The Mind of the Master Class.
And none more deeply and profoundly than perhaps the greatest of the antebellum
theologians of the South, James Henley Thornwell. (See later in this volume, “A
Partisan Conversation: Interview with Eugene Genovese”).
Slavery in the antebellum South was not
an earlier version of Auschwitz or the Gulag, which is clear and evident from a
close examination of the abundant historical record. As Robert Fogel and
Stanley Engerman in their path breaking study Time on
the Cross (1974) have demonstrated, employing
extensive research and careful statistical and economic analysis, “many slaves
were encouraged to marry and maintain households, they were given garden plots,
the dehumanizing practice of slave breeding was virtually non-existent, the
quality of their daily diets and medical care were comparable to the white
population, and many trusted slaves were given great responsibility in managing
plantations.” In short, the antebellum South was much more akin to a traditional
patriarchal society than to a modern totalitarian state.
White Southerners understood that
slavery and the presence of a large black population were part of their
culture. With that understanding and the historical reality of natural
inequality and a “master class,” Southerners dealt with that fact generally
honestly according to the best of their comprehension and abilities within the
context of the age, as Professor Genovese explains. That the response was not
of the moralizing kind of our modern age should not be a surprise to anyone.
Southerners — those who thought deeply
about the question —understood that although Almighty God had created all human
beings and therefore endowed them with a certain spark of divinity and a
certain dignity, human equality of status and opportunity on this earth was
chimerical and non-existent. Even the famous words of the Declaration of
Independence that “all men are created equal” were never intended by the
Founders for literal domestic consumption, but rather directed at the
parliament in England. The Founders intended that document as a statement of
grievances against the Mother Country, and not a charter of natural rights
which could and would entail the future aims of egalitarians.
All through the eighteenth century
thousands of white folks were brought to the new world as indentured servants,
as well. In many cases, that servitude was entered into involuntarily, as a
forced arrangement, and one can argue that in some ways its parameters, like
other systems of servitude, resembled slavery. Indeed, slavery, and not just of
the African kind, existed throughout the world in colonial times. Historic
Christianity, as Thornwell and others pointed out, countenanced its existence,
but also with the strict admonition for humane treatment by slaveholders that
mirrored the immemorial traditions and teachings of the church, and with the
goal of possible future manumission.
In the more than two centuries during
which slavery existed not only in what became the Confederate States of
America, but in other parts of the nation, slaves were acculturated and made
contributions to the country. They were absorbed by that country, as they, in
turn, absorbed the European culture and traditions on which it was founded. No
longer were they Africans, but Americans — and Southerners. Thousands were
eventually manumitted and became “free persons of color,” sometimes landholders
(according to census statistics) and even electors in some instances if they
held property, as I documented in a thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of
the University of Virginia in June 1971 (“Race, Representation, and Religion:
The North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835”; see:
https://libra2.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/zs25x853s ) — And all of this
before the War Between the States.
In a hierarchical society, as the old
South was, both black and white inhabitants lived and existed on various
levels, some politically and culturally powerful, others not; some exercising
the franchise, but most (blacks and whites), not. And some as slaves, and
others not. Yet, even among the servile population there had developed a love
and appreciation for the land they lived and worked on, and for their white
masters and neighbors. And when war finally came, the overwhelming majority of
blacks, freeman and slave alike, resisted the opportunity to take advantage of
the situation, and engage in civil insurrection. I can cite here, as personal
examples of this, several letters from my great-great grandfather, Captain
Marquis LaFayette Redd, stationed at Aquia Creek, Virginia, along the Potomac
in 1861, to his wife, Emily Ann Sidbury Redd, in Onslow County, North Carolina.
She was there alone with her young children, surrounded by slaves — but completely
trusting and, indeed, secure. Captain Redd, in his correspondence, always
finishes his missives declaring: “My love to all my family, both white and
black.” The meaning and sincerity — and the bond he felt — are palpable and
real, and they were repaid by the entirety of his household. (See: Marquis
LaFayette Redd Papers, 1798-1895, PC.1635, North Carolina State Archives,
Raleigh, North Carolina)
Indeed, thousands, perhaps as many as
30,000 black men, and probably many more, enlisted in Confederate ranks during
the war, and not just as auxiliaries but fully integrated into regiments, often
times voted in, as I touch on in the first essay in this volume, and as is
examined in detail by such authors as Ervin Jordan, Jr. in Black
Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (1995),
and Charles Kelly Barrow, J. H. Segars, and R. B. Rosenburg in Black
Confederates (2001), and more recently researched by
North Carolina Museum of History historian and curator, Earl Ijames (See, for
example, information on his in depth investigations, “NC history museum curator
to speak at Civil War Roundtable,” The Kinston Free
Press, March 18, 2016, link:
www.kinston.com/news/20160318/nc-history-museum-curator-earlijames-to-speak-at-civil-war-roundtable)
Without the war, would slavery have
eventually disappeared, succumbing to the great economic currents and pressures
of the later nineteenth century? I think so, and I believe the former slaves,
given that evolution and natural development economically and internationally,
would have found their way into a welcoming Southern society, not due to the
abrupt results of an incredibly disastrous war or well-intentioned but largely
misguided Federal legislation, but rather because of the natural bonds of
affection which were already existent and the Christian charity that
characterized Southern folk.
When war finally came it not only
molded Southern volunteers into an exceptionally fine fighting force — they
were, after all, fighting for home and hearth — but brought together Whigs and
Democrats, plantation slave owners in the Tidewater and around Natchez and
Charleston with small yeoman Scotch-Irish farmers from the Piedmont, most
without slaves, but all dedicated to state sovereignty — a concept even an
uneducated backwoodsman could fathom. As even historian James McPherson, not
necessarily a partisan of the Confederacy, revealed in his extensive survey of
war time letters and diaries of nearly a thousand Union and Confederate
soldiers, What They Fought For, 1861-1865.
The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History (1994;
and later, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought the
Civil War, 1997), most soldiers felt a keen
sense of patriotic and ideological commitment and attachment to a cause. And
for Southerners it was the cause of protecting their rights under the old
Constitution, the rights of their states and of their communities and families,
which they believed to be imperiled by an aggressive executive, mad with power
and a desire to destroy that Constitution.
Much has been written, probably far too
much, about the War Between the States. Needless to say, what has been
occurring in recent years has as its antecedent that conflict and subsequent
history since then. Through it all, through “Reconstruction and Reunion,”
through the period during the middle of the twentieth century when it appeared
the South was finally “back in the Union” and its traditions appreciated by all
Americans, and later, during the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s and
beyond when the South became the object, again, of scorn and disapprobation, of
Federal authorities once more enacting a “new Reconstruction,” and with new
immigration and social changes, and the effects of national television and such
items as the automobile that increased mobility and eliminated distances and,
to some degree, differences between communities — through it all there remained
the South of our memory and our childhood, on the defensive but still there,
still visible, yet capable of sustaining its citizens if they would only seek
it and accept its legacy and its inheritance … and defend it against those who
wish to extinguish it.
I am reminded of another great Spanish
writer and traditionalist, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo (1856-1912), who warned
Spain at the end of the nineteenth century that it was in danger of forfeiting
its very credal identity. At that time, in the midst of dissolution that seemed
to be affecting his country, he wrote:
Spain,
evangelizer of half the world; Spain, hammer of heretics, light of Trent, sword
of Rome, cradle of St. Ignatius — this is our greatness and our unity; we have
no other. The day it is lost, Spain will return to the anarchy of the tribes
and barbarians or the satraps of the Caliphs. To this end we are traveling more
or less rapidly, and blind is he who will not see it.
Menendez y Pelayo’s words could apply
analogously to the contemporary South. We have only one enduring body of
tradition which has characterized us and sustained us, and it seems to be
disappearing before our eyes, almost daily. Yet, there remains a South to love,
a South to defend. There is still an incredibly rich wellspring of history, of
literature, in the arts and music and folklore, in regional cuisine, in
language, in customs, in so much that binds us and has held us together since
colonial times: it is worth our best efforts and our undying commitment.
There is a wonderfully evocative
passage by the novelist William Faulkner which encapsulates the vision the
contemporary son of the South must possess:
For
every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there
is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in
1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and
ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and
Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably
and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give
the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even
begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to
begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than
Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave — yet it’s going to
begin, we all knowthat, we have come too far with too much at stake and that
moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this
time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania,
Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with
desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble…. (from
Intruder in the Dust, 1948).
It is that same spirit — that same
dedication — that same inextinguishable hope — that fuels our commitment, and
through all the turmoil and sense of loss and anguish, allows us to smile and
even relate a funny tale to a friend and still enjoy a fine plate of barbeque
and fried chicken, grits and country ham, and greet our neighbors and help them
cut down that low-hanging white oak which endangers their work shed.
It is the same spirit that motivated
the once-reviled president of the Confederacy to declare after the end of the
War to a visitor who remarked the cause of the Southland was lost and history had
passed us by, that, despite defeat on the field of battle, “the principle for
which we contended is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another
time and in another form.”
[And, I trust, it is the same spirit
and commitment that informs these meditations, these essays written concerning
the challenges we now face and of how some of our ancestors met them, and their
legacy and beliefs, and what they mean and should mean for us.]
[The Land We Love is available via
Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, and also directly from the publisher The
Scuppernong Press: http://www.scuppernongpress.com/Scuppernong_Press/NEW.html]
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