The South and the Fight

» Why is the South the most bellicose section of our Union? Why do Southerners feel an instinctive sympathy for Britain? A Carolinian, who is one of our most distinguished novelists, speaks his mind.

by JAMES BOYD

1

EVER since the days when the pattern of the coming world war began to take shape, the attitude of the South has consistently differed from that of the rest of the Union. There has been little of either withdrawn self-righteousness or terrified isolationism. The Southerner considers that he belongs to a military race and is something of an authority on war. The approaching struggle held his professional interest. It promised to be a fuss — to use a colloquialism — on an unprecedented scale. As the son of a fighting tradition, the Southerner felt at liberty to observe the spectacle without explanation or apology.

But this interest, free as it was from more civilized or, as he would put it, more decadent neuroses; professional and objective as it was, was not by any means impartial. As the crescendo mounted, as the action started, as France was stabbed and Britain abandoned, the Southerner grew deeply, even passionately concerned. From Dunkirk on, he was ready to fight. Not only was he ready to fight in the statistical battalions of Gallup and of Roper, but he was actually enlisting for combat in such numbers that, as long as three years ago, the Canadians, slighting perhaps other minor divisions of Dixie, were referring to the RCAF as the Royal Texas Air Force. And a Southern Congressman was declaring that the draft was necessary in order to prevent Southerners from monopolizing all the armed forces of the United States.

To Southerners, then, Pearl Harbor was no shock; it was a relief. Better still, it was, in their notion, an overdue reminder to the Yankees to cast off their stupor and gird themselves for what had long been obvious to their more astute fellow citizens below the Potomac.

The reasons for this difference of attitude toward Britain in the North and in the South are numerous. Some are complex and some are open to dispute. But it is safe to say that many of the causes of Northern antagonism to Britain either do not operate in the South or, if they do, operate in a reverse direction and actually increase Southern esteem.

At the very outset of our national life, the Revolution in the South tended to direct animosity less toward Britain than toward local tyranny. Geography and social institutions had already created conditions which gave the struggle less the character of a revolt against the parent than of a domestic class war. It was neither the first nor the last episode in the long contest between the slaveowning planters of the lowlands and the small farmers of the piedmont allied with the mountaineers. Furthermore, the number of British troops in the South was small and only two battles of any size were fought there. The action was rather between the Whig militia and the so-called “King’s loyal Americans” or Tories. Both sides were undisciplined and committed all the atrocities of intestine guerrilla warfare.

The end of the Revolution, therefore, found the animus of Southerners directed less against the British than against their own Tory neighbors. And this lack of animus against Britain remained undisturbed through the War of 1812. That dubious enterprise was, it must be admitted, described by a rebellious New England as “Mr. Madison’s War.” But in practice the South, not being a seafaring nation, was less resentful than New England of Britain’s high hand on the high seas. And the Battle of New Orleans, while a fine triumph for Old Hickory, was, after all, fought in what was then regarded as a foreign country.

Thereafter, the course of Southern development continued to stimulate an attitude toward the British even more divergent from that of the North. In the Southern economy, Britain was the customer, and was cherished as customers invariably are. The North was a customer too, but it was not as such that she presented herself to Southern emotion. For she was also the purveyor — exploiter, the South called it — and a purveyor who enjoyed an artificial and unfair advantage. The South had to sell cotton and other products in an open market. But what she needed must be bought in a market protected by a tariff wall.

There was nothing to prevent the South from developing industries of her own. Nothing, that is, except slavery. Slavery kept the Negro depressed, kept immigration from entering, and exercised a generally paralyzing influence on initiative and commercial acumen. It precluded the possibility of any sizable industrial prosperity — or, for that matter, of any widely based prosperity of any kind. However, we are discussing not logic, but attitudes. From the great planter in the hands of the New York banker to the poor white’s wife in the toils of the Yankee peddler, all that the Southerner considered was that somehow the North had got a strangle hold on life’s necessities and that the game was rigged.

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IN the end these limited contacts had tragic consequences. On the strength of them the South built up a strange delusion as to the caliber of the Northern people. The Money Power was the master of the South; yet the Yankees themselves, it seemed, were also the slaves of the Money Power. Money was their only care. They were devoid of idealism and of daring. The solid people of the North, whose sons and husbands and fathers were to form the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Potomac, lay beyond the South’s parochial vision. It was a fatal blindness.

The Civil War, as it progressed, was not long in altering the South’s opinion of Northern fighting power. If in that great somber drama new hatreds were engendered, at least old contempt was purged away. But in the minor field of the popular attitude toward Great Britain the differences between the two sections, rather than being composed, were further accentuated. It is true that the South was deeply disappointed at Great Britain’s failure to intervene in her behalf, at least to the extent of breaking the blockade that was strangling her. But the reasons that she had counted on to move the British were not moral reasons: they were political and commercial. She had supposed that British self-interest would insist on getting cotton through in order to keep the Lancashire textile industry going; and if, in the process, the North American continent became permanently divided, why, so much the better for British influence there. British failure to act was, therefore, a diplomatic defeat, fatal, as it turned out, but not wounding to the sense of justice.

In the North, on the other hand, certain aspects of Great Britain’s conduct provoked resentment deeper, probably, than we have ever felt for any other nation. For some little time previous, Americans had been reproached by the British for permitting slavery. The British had formerly been active enough themselves in the slave trade and had blocked the efforts of the colonies to stop it. But they had recently abolished slavery and now took very high grounds toward those who allowed it to continue.

When, therefore, the national government became engaged in a war, a declared purpose of which was to destroy slavery, Northerners expected British sympathy. Slowly it dawned on them that no such sympathy was to be extended. Indeed, the sympathy appeared, incredibly, to flow the other way. It was the South whom official and industrial Britain appeared to cherish. The Southerners, it was to be understood, were gentlemen, while Northerners wore a set of low commercial fellows.

Nor was the British attitude limited to mere social preference. Whitworth cannon and other implements of war were purchased in England by public subscription and presented to the South as tokens of esteem. Later, the Alabama, manned largely by Englishmen, was built in England and, over the protests of the American ambassador, released to prey on American commerce.

Ever since, it has seemed impossible to convince American opinion, either in the North or in the South, that this hostility was limited to a small but powerful reactionary group in the British government and in British business; a group which in every age and every country seems congenitally incapable of deviating from snobbery, obtuseness, and self-defeating selfishness. But the firm sympathy of the common people of Britain, the patient suffering of the millworkers, unemployed because of the blockade, yet standing solidly for a Northern victory and the abolition of slavery — all this bedrock staunchness of the heart of England somehow was never adequately conveyed to these shores. In consequence, there was nothing to alleviate the North’s bitter anger. It is fair to say that no Northerner who lived through those years of blood and passion ever again felt warmly toward the British Empire as an idea. Conversely, the Southerner emerged from the war firm in the illusion that the Englishman’s heart was in the right place.

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A SECOND by-product of the slave system favored, at least negatively, Southern friendliness toward the British. Once established, slavery tended strongly to restrict foreign immigration. The immigrant, arriving at Castle Garden in New York with nothing but his two hands, instinctively avoided that section of the country where manual labor was considered degrading. In consequence there are in the South almost none of those foreign-born whose factions and subfactions, by their disputation, create in the North an exasperated sense that the whole of Europe is too complicated and tendentious to be entitled to our interest.

Moreover, Jews in the South are not numerous and are for the most part of long standing in their communities, well integrated into the life around them and esteemed. There was nothing in Southern experience to lend color to the isolationist’s canard that participation in the war was being engineered by the Jews for the rescue of their coreligionists; or later, that it was engineered by Jewish communists for the rescue of Russia. Jewish communists have been unpopular in the South, in the few places where they have appeared, but rather as intruders than as Jews.

Above all, in the South the Irish, with their ageold wrongs and their radically separate church, had found little lodging. Indeed, except for Louisiana, the Catholics have until now developed small strength there. At present they are making an extensive campaign among the Negroes, but among the whites hostility to Catholicism is as deep-seated as ever. When Al Smith was a candidate for President, the South abandoned its solidity and several states went Republican. His religion was one reason. Enlightened opinion in the nation dubbed this attitude bigotry of the rankest sort. But as the South observes the activities of the hierarchy in the Spanish War and in South America, if not nearer at hand, she is not only impenitent but feels vindicated.

This absence of foreign elements has had its effect on the technique of Southern fascism. The South, obviously, has fascists as poisonous as any in the land: its Klan, its Huey Long, and Robert Reynolds. But though the leaders may be ready to conspire with counter-revolutionaries of any kidney, t he rank and file are Anglo-American fascists, not Father Coughlinites or Bundists, and they direct their bile against the Negro, the foreigner, the Catholic himself. Indeed, one of their fundamental hallucinations is that of Protestant Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

On other levels also, other supposed bars to British-American harmony are either lacking or operate positively in a contrary sense. Much has been made of British repudiation of the war debt. The effect on the South of that ill-natured political blunder was, if anything, favorable. To begin with, in that benighted region the idea of repudiation outrages the sensibilities considerably less than it does in the more enlightened purlieus of the Money Power. The South, regarding herself as the perennial victim of the Money Power, has always looked on the possibilities of repudiation with frustrated longing — never more so than during Reconstruction, when the North, having destroyed the value of Southern currency and securities, sent a plague of carpetbaggers to destroy credit as well. Under their manipulations, bond issues were voted by obedient semi-Negro legislatures. In too many cases funds and carpetbaggers vanished, leaving a prostrate commonwealth to meet, for years thereafter, the charges on bonds from which nothing had been derived. Repudiation, attempted and carried to a properly scandalized Supreme Court, failed, but it remained far from discredited in the eyes of the late Confederates.

Now of all the ills with which the Money Power, under its self-righteous code, afflicted them, the oldest, heaviest, and most unjust was the tariff. When, therefore, the British, unable to send us goods by reason of the tariff wall, and sensibly averse to dispatching their scarce gold to a nation that was shortly to bury that commodity in a hole in the ground, repudiated their debt, the effect on the South was negligible. It was a jolt to find the Englishman, of all people, a welcher. But since he turned out to be one, there was no object against which his rascality could be more satisfyingly directed than against the Northern Money Power and Messrs. Hawley and Smoot’s devilish Yankee contraption.

In like manner another ground for Northern criticism of British policy has failed to present itself in the same light to even the more liberal Southerner. The problem of India may enlist his sympathy but cannot excite his indignation. He himself has a racial problem which he has failed to solve. And he himself has long been admonished by a neighbor in this case to the north — who likewise has so far solved it only in places where the Negro practically does not exist. The Southerner is therefore not disposed to proffer his British cousin either admonition or advice. His fault, rather, lies in a too exhilarating sense that here, in the infinite wisdom of the Lord, are some white folks tangled up in an even worse mess than his own.

So much for the minor factors in the South’s point of view toward Britain. In themselves they are chiefly negative and account, at most, for an absence of hostility. The point of view itself, however, is far from negative. It is dynamic, deeply felt, and, toward the enemy, strictly murderous. It is based on a trilogy, the great trilogy of Southern life: kinfolks, religiosity, and violence.

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To ANYBODY familiar with Southerners it is hardly necessary to describe the great importance of kinfolks in their lives. Nowhere short of China are family organizations more revered or the claims of blood more liberally interpreted or patiently endured. The land is rural; it was, until recently, somewhat lonesome; the law is feeble; economic changes are rapid; behind lies the shadow of the great defeat, and around lie the shadows of the Negro and of potential poverty. In these never wholly reassuring surroundings it is natural to turn to the simplest and most immediate of social units.

And since man tends to ornament his necessities, it is likewise natural that the South should not be averse to genealogical elaboration. In this field, what passes for research has led, especially among the women, to family trees most of which purport to go back to some British ancestor, inevitably of a certain prominence. And in sober fact the great bulk of the South does go back to British forebears of some sort. At all events, the South, especially since the defeat of the Civil War, has continued to cherish her British heritage — to cherish it and, to tell the truth, embellish it. For in that stricken land of Reconstruction there were few consolations but those of the imagination.

Besides, the catastrophe had caused a break in the continuity of history before which anything might be allowed to be true and could hardly be disproved. Indeed, to disprove claims to distinction either ante-bellum or in the distant reaches of English history was often to deprive a man of his chief remaining asset and the South, to a degree, of one of her few splendors in otherwise black adversity. Such a gratuitous spoliation of the country’s limited natural resources was therefore seldom attempted. It was anybody’s privilege to question suspicious claims to family grandeur, but it was a civic duty to keep that questioning private. By the time of the South’s partial revival this habit of genealogical glorification, originally designed by the lost leaders for their compensation, was sufficiently ingrained to make similar pretensions incumbent on the new industrial plutocracy. This practice, taken with the wide ramifications of kinship in the already extant aristocracy, eventually built up a great body of people convinced of their superior inheritance.

It may be argued that so great a structure of conscious hereditary merit could not possibly develop from the known facts. It may be pointed out that few persons who found themselves eminent and successful were likely to leave their homes in England, or anywhere else, to seek a superfluous fortune in a wilderness. Moving to more recent backgrounds, it may be recalled that the United States Census of 1858 shows that, of the eleven million whites in the South, only five thousand owned over fifty slaves apiece, and only two hundred thousand owned any slaves at all. To any such attempted logic it is enough to observe that the South is still in spirit a free and independent nation and cannot be made to creep at the heels of any man’s statistics.

But as sometimes happens, this dubious assumption, persisted in, did create a certain validity of its own. It carried with it, even at its lowest level, a degree of manners which, if they were not precisely good manners, were at least sufficiently elaborate to give the possessors a sense of superiority over those who had no manners at all. At its best it engendered a sense of obligation to be charming, not only in manner but in spirit; to be considerate, loyal, honorable, and protective toward the weak of either color.

And this best may be found extending wide and deep in all classes of Southern society, white and Negro. So much so, that many who are accustomed to its amenities find transportation to another social climate almost an ordeal. True, it was in its beginnings the code not only of a dominant class, but of a class dominant by virtue of an indefensible institution. But among history’s minor and more limited codes it holds a respected place. Its practitioners created a symbol: the Southern gentleman and his lady — a symbol idealized and oversimplified, as symbols commonly are, but distinctive and widely recognized; a symbol at which the world may smile but has never quite cared to laugh.

Unhappily there is no reason to suppose that Southerners’ inherent merits surpass those of all other races. But their sense of origin and the code which that origin imposes have given them an acute consciousness of obligation and a perfect readiness both to proclaim it and to try to live up to it. A minor curiosity of the Civil War is the anecdote of General Gordon’s inspection of his outposts. On approaching one, he heard convivial sounds and found, around the fire, the small detachment entertaining a Northern soldier in uniform. The general ordered the Yankee to be arrested as a prisoner of war — and at once, though he was both a stern and a popular commander, had a mutiny on his hands. The men refused. “General,” they said, “this man came here by our invitation. You cannot make him a prisoner because that would ruin our honor.” General Gordon was obliged to give in, and the Federal soldier went back to his lines in peace.

But whatever the value of such a code, and certainly it has much, under its influence some Southerners, well fortified by readings from Scott and the Victorian romantics, began at an early date to expand their conception of themselves. The necessity to do so was compelling. Slavery was not a subject for discussion, and yet they could not still the inner urge to justify it by implication. No better way presented itself than to establish the white man’s peculiar and unique nobility. Once accepted, that made his overlordship logical enough.

Extensive as was the body of Southern aristocrats, there were white people in the region somewhat less distinguished: mountain folks who had fled from the hated plantation system, one-gallus farmers scraping a living in the interstices of the great estates, and between these two, the independent farmers of the foothills, never quite socially or economically secure. The lot of all these people, actually the vast majority of Southerners, was bitter. It was they, not the Negroes, who were the outcastes of the system. The planter was under compulsion to assume — and incidentally to make the Negro assume — that it was a law of nature that the white man should be the master and the Negro the slave. But here were white men without slaves, who hated slaves, hated slaveowners, and who in some cases were clearly not designed by nature to be masters even of themselves.

How were they to be explained? Only by the theory that there were two classes of whites. The master class and the “poor white,” the “poor buckra,” the “tackies,” the “crackers,” the “mean whites,” the “white trash.” The names varied but the implication was the same. Since it would not do to have the Negro look up to white men without slaves, he was to look down on them. And in truth, as the creeping paralysis of slavery overspread the land, as the slaveless man sank deeper in this strange country without industry, roads, or schools, he became through hopelessness an ever more plausible object of contempt. Outstanding byproduct of the slave system, it was the poor white, almost as much as the Negro, who was freed by the Civil War. It is he who at his worst still forms the fertile field for the Southern demagogue. At his best, it is his brains and character, now released, which are building the new South.

Even yet, he remains one of the most isolated of men. That isolation has preserved his way of life untouched. Since that way was brought with him from the British Isles, he remains a Briton of the eighteenth century. His speech is archaic and often quaintly beautiful. He still calls gypsies “Egyptians,” a stake a “stub”; he describes somebody who is overrefined and fastidious as “nice.” His tales and songs are those brought here by his forebears, and more than one continues to be current in the South long after it has been lost in the land of its origin.

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So, though it might be supposed that whatever the planter was for, the poor white would be against, as far as the attitude toward Britain goes, that is not so. In general, the poor white is not a person who takes a vivid interest in foreign affairs or in any affairs whatever, sometimes including his own. But if he ever thinks of Britain at all, he thinks of her as his ancient homeland.

For all other Southerners, the romanticizing of themselves and their origins, coupled with a genuine position of greater or less authority as members of the dominant race, gave them a sense not only of kinship with the English but also of equal status. True, the Southerners knew little of the English, and the English less of them. But in their thoughts there was no uneasy sense of inferiority such as was supposed to afflict Northerners and other races when they contemplated the British lords of the earth.

Thus, when Southerners occasionally met Britons, there was neither that obsequiousness nor that truculence which, as between the British and lessfavored nationalities, has been known to cause reciprocal dislike. Not long since, the products of ultra-fashionable Mayfair were brought by chance into contact with the leading citizens of a small Southern community. They were quite unable to understand each other’s speech an interpreter was necessary; but they understood each other in a way impossible for the corresponding members of a small Northern town. Obviously no particular merit attaches to this sort of recognition. It is cited only for the light it throws on the South’s peculiar attitude toward the war.

It is probable that closer acquaintance would produce disillusion on both sides, but disillusion up to now has not been easy. The Southern man has not been able to afford foreign travel to the same extent as his Northern brother, and the Southern woman has neither the wage scale nor the business openings which have enabled her Northern sisters to finance a trip abroad. Local Kiwanians do not return with tales of rebuff by retired majors in the smoking lounge of the Paddleditch Arms. Flying squadrons of schoolteachers are not broken against the iron bosoms of decayed gentlewomen convinced that in a properly ordered world all such persons should be compelled by lack of economic opportunity to remain where it has pleased God to place them. In the South there is nothing to prevent these good American folks from remaining convinced that they would be recognized as cousins of the leading families in Britain, and cousins who have done quite as well by themselves as the branch who stayed home.

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BUT the Southerner is not only a cousin of the British: he is a co-religionist, a fellow Protestant. Indeed, by British standards he is a Protestant of a startlingly rugged sort. The belief he holds, however betrayed in practice, and however diminished from the standards of its originators, is firm and clear. It has expressed itself in the acceptance of the Christian gentleman in a distinctive local version as its unique ideal.

So primitive, indeed, does the late Confederacy remain even to this day that it is not held out of place so to refer to a man, if he is deemed worthy, and indeed so to introduce him to others. It is the highest praise that can be conferred on a man living, and, next to a statement of services to the Army of the Confederacy, the highest praise that can be conferred on a man dead. “Yes, sir, he is a fine Christian gentleman”; or, “I want you all to meet my friend here; a fine Christian gentleman.” These phrases, however archaic they sound to Northern ears, are still an accepted part of the South’s social currency and of her faith.

The belief to which the Christian gentleman subscribes gives, no doubt, too literal credence to every word of the Bible and too great weight to the edicts and threats of the Old Testament Jehovah. But it gives great weight also to the teachings of Jesus. And while His injunction of humility has been perhaps less observed than others, there remains a vivid sense that here stands the Word. It is the Word by which we shall obtain salvation in the next world and honor and happiness in this. Between a man and this Word no clergy can mediate. At best the preacher can only exhort and expound. Actual salvation is a direct affair between man and God Himself. But once a man has found It he knows that It is indeed the Word, and that no other Word ever given on earth can equal It in truth and in beauty; that if followed and defended It will some day bring the reign of peace and justice to the world. That is the faith of the South; and whatever inconsistencies and inadequacies may flaw it, there are millions of Southerners, not only white but in truth Negro, too, who are willing to die for it.

The rest of this country, and England herself before this war, passed through an age of disbelief. To many young people of those regions, nothing was worth dying for. Since that was so, not dying became naturally of some concern. It was that impulse, rather than philosophic pacifism, which, in the face of the mounting storm, so paralyzed the young intellectuals, the very people otherwise best equipped to read the portents.

Not only was the Southerner immune to the epidemic sleeping sickness of unfaith: he had a positive and vigorous attitude, irrespective of either belief or doubt, toward the whole business of dying, of killing or being killed. How he arrived at the attitude is variously explained. The original colonists were, perhaps, a rougher and wilder lot than those to the north. A hot climate usually fosters hot tempers. Among the planters, isolation, power Over human beings, and responsibility for them produced a type accustomed to settle his own affairs with his own hand.

It was this type that perpetuated the duel. And then the duel, among those who aped the gentry, became degraded to little more than assassination. When, during Reconstruction, violence was the means by which the Negro was disfranchised, the North thwarted, and the white man returned to power, it received its final justification. The tradition is dying, but it dies hard; and even today in the South, death by violence, either given or received, is not viewed w ith the scandalized dismay of more sophisticated communities.

As a consequence it is customary in the South to maintain a high state of preparedness both physical and spiritual. Manners tend to veil the reality, but even a minor emergency is likely to reveal it. It was just a few years ago that a lady new to the South encountered a snake on the road. At that moment, from opposite directions, a delivery truck and a sedan happened to approach. Both stopped at sight of the snake, and from each, in the most natural manner, a boy emerged with a pistol in his hand and proceeded to open fire on the varmint. The fact that it was a harmless pine snake and that they failed to hit it does not detract from the spirit which animated the occasion.

This acceptance of violence as an immutable element of life receives its formal expression in the South’s military tradition. For better or worse, that tradition still holds much of its historic luster; V.M.I. and the Citadel are still logical places for young men with no professional military intentions to receive their higher education; from Clemson to Texas Tech the land is dotted with institutions where military discipline ranks as equal to any other discipline of the mind and outranks all others in campus esteem. Among preparatory schools, those of a non-military character are almost unknown. War, in short, is regarded as an inevitable recurrent fact of life; the profession of arms is considered supremely distinguished, and the training for arms is considered a good foundation for a career of any sort.

We therefore face the anomaly that, during the years when liberals displayed an almost pathological aversion to military training of any sort, thousands of young Southerners, who would have regarded, say, the Nation as subversively communistic, were fitting themselves for a war behind which the liberals now stand united.

With such a martial background and with pacifism confined to minute, if often able and original, groups in a few universities, there was nothing to obscure the Southerner’s view of the military policy of this country. Wars had to be fought from time to time, and the point was to be on the winning side. This last conviction had great weight. The South is the only section of the United States that has suffered military defeat. She knows what it means to lose. She will continue to remember to a degree the North can never understand.

This acceptance of violence, then, is the final element in all the elements that go to make up the South’s attitude toward Britain and the war. As we have seen, the elements are diverse and some are complex. But the resultant attitude is simple, even rudimentary. As the clouds gathered, the South, almost as naturally as breathing, felt roughly this: that the military defense of the country was indicated — was indeed peculiarly imperative since the proposed conqueror of ourselves and, incidentally, of the world was as far from a Christian gentleman as any specimen history had as yet produced. This being so, and death by violence being no more than a normal occupational risk in the life of man, the course to be followed was plain: namely, to destroy at whatever cost this Hitler and all his works.

But pointing up this general reaction, and giving it personal tone and color, was the South’s special relationship to Great Britain. The Christian gentlemen of that country, our ancient kinfolks, were battling against a horde of savage pagans for their own survival, for ours as well, and for the great faith of our fathers. Could we, on any ground from the meanest to the noblest, stand by and see them go under?

The South is not the unit that outsiders imagine, but on this issue it has been as united as on any since Reconstruction. It is dangerous to anticipate the judgment of history. But it seems probable that the verdict will hold, somewhat wryly perhaps, that this period is notable chiefly for its contradictions. Certainly in it neither the business leaders’ “realism,” nor the politicians’ astuteness, nor the intellectuals’ ideological dexterity prevented the North and West, until almost too late, from reaching a wrong conclusion. Nor likewise, it seems, did the Southerner’s feudalism, romanticism, militarism, and primitive religion prevent him from reaching the right one.