INSIDE THE SOUTH
Hesseltine, William B.
Inside The South SOUTHERN LEGACY, by Hodding Carter. Louisiana State University Press. 186 pp. $3. FETTERED FREEDOM: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, by Russel B. Nye. Michigan State...
...273 pp...
...Does, for example, the right of free speech involve the right to lie and to tort...
...II From the days of the abolitionists the Southerners have been combat-ing Yankee fiction...
...3.50...
...227 pp...
...Chestnut gladly would have relieved himself of the burden of caring for his black charges...
...Owsley have presented their find-ings...
...Horn has no quarrel with the universally accepted opinion of Lee's military and personal perfection...
...Chestnut, the plain folk of the old South who watched their hogs on the hillsides and traded bacon at the country store, and all the complex characters who made the South...
...For a number of years—since, in fact, the WPA and the NYA gave him needed assistance in laborious compilations— Prof...
...Chestnut—both, clearly, from the upper echelons—supported slavery nor advocated its extension...
...A long succession of books from the Civil War to Douglas Southall Freeman's detailed 4-volumed encyclopedia have echoed the sentiment...
...Hood—omitted from earlier editions...
...There are probably "sincere Communists, interventionists, Zion ists, pacifists, isolationists, militar ists, and nudists—but does the us doubted right to die for a cause carry the right to kill for the cause...
...In part, the fictions about the South started with the development of the abolition movement and the frantic efforts of Southerners to answer abolitionist charges...
...A DIARY FROM DIXIE, by Mary Boykin Chestnut...
...But the assertions and the denials add up annually to a vast array of books...
...He knows Mrs...
...Lousiana State University Press...
...Perhaps all of this is in Hodding Carter's mind when he comes to interpret the Southern Legacy...
...Atherton's Country Store, Owsley's Plain Folk, and even the endless case histories of Eaton's volume all demonstrate that the abolitionist propaganda about the slave-holding oligarchy and its conspiracy are untenable...
...Nye contends, and rightly, that there was a nucleus of "sincere" men in the abolitionist movement...
...From the depth of his understanding, he brings the Southern background to bear on the South's present problems...
...Large planters who produced sugar, rice, or cotton on a grand scale marketed their crops and supplied their own needs, but the small farmers depended for goods and credit on the country stores...
...542 pp...
...Chestnut was witty, gay, irrepressible...
...Their stories are set forth in a new Lee Reader and in a reissue of Mrs...
...Before the Civil War, Southerners met Yankee distortions with the pro-slavery argu-' ment...
...Michigan State College Press...
...Owsley has been firing batteries of statistics at the fiction that the ante-bellum South was a land of planters, poor-whites, and slaves...
...pons of scholarship, they have challenged the abolitionists' premises...
...The new edition of the Diary contains much material—especially the diatribes on slavery and the infatuated courtship of Gen...
...Now, in a volume of Louisiana State University's Fleming Lectures, he has synthesized two decades of ¦careful and minute studies, i. Not only does Owsley dispose of the myth of a middle-classless South...
...Mac-millan...
...Like Mrs...
...Chestnut recorded the foibles of the great and revealed the failings of the Confederacy's mighty, she found no one but Wade Hampton to pass strictures on Robert E. Lee...
...Southern _ historians have long known that the Old South was a land of yeomen farmers, and that non-slaveholders made up the bulk of the population...
...She saw and recorded Confederate high society from the inside, marking the steady decline from high hopes to bleak despair...
...The South is America's No...
...III Although Mrs...
...Its multiplied details and elaborate biographical sketches, and "case histories" will commend it as a book for "outside reading" in college classes...
...Speculations beyond number might be raised by the theological implications of abolitionist zeal...
...THE SOUTHERN COUNTRY STORE, 1800-1865, by Lewis E. Atherton...
...In time, they abandoned the appeal to conscience and rested their case on the Constitution, natural rights, and revelations of a "higher law...
...No minority report creeps into this volume, but after the deadly monotony of Freeman, it's good to have a one-volume biography which can be read...
...But, he argues, they were "sincere" because they would face mobs, risk "security and property," and submit to excoriation for their cause...
...But the documenter wfcieh history-writers depend had come largely from the compara-tively small class of planters...
...The 14 gentle essays gathered in Carter's Southern Legacy are personal experiences designed as much to explain the Southern heritage to Southerners as to outsiders...
...Atherton's careful examination of these stores, based on the journals and account books of hundreds of establishments over a period of 60 years, clearly demonstrates that the familiar and often-damned merchant-planter system of the postwar South was well established before the Civil War...
...It is no part of his story to recount the way in which commercial interests, ink dustrial exploiters, and politicians seized upon the abolitionists' dogmas to destroy the political and economic power of the South and reduce the region to a colony...
...The latest echo is the Lee Reader, edited by Stanley F. Horn, an obvious imitation of Angle's Lincoln Reader—and as good...
...Yet, simply because he understands the forces that fashioned the men of the South, he can call with a clear voice for the South to cleanse itself of evil...
...Historians have surmised that an expanding plantation system pushed non-slaveholding whites into the marginal lands of the black belts...
...Lewis E. Atherton's study, The Southern Country Store, furnishes additional proof that the old South was a land of small, middle-class farmers...
...It contains, however, no uni*' fying thesis...
...In the hands of a skillful compiler, this kind of scrapbook biography gives a sort of digest of the literature of the subject—though, of course, it clearly offers no opportunity for presenting new material and is but a slight medium of new interpretations...
...Even the evidence from the upper classes of the South shows the fictitious character of the Yankee concepts...
...The South Carolinian met rebuke from the Virginian and sulked—but all others regarded Lee as semi-divine...
...came fixed as one of the "truths" of history...
...3.50...
...Early last year, Dr...
...They identified their cause with academic freedom, free press, jury trial, and the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...It remains, however, a great pity that adoration always supplants analysis in writings about Marse Robert...
...THE ROBERT E. LEE READER...
...Nye, of course, is concerned only with the abolitionists' success ful effort to cover their cause with the aura of civil liberties...
...572 pp...
...If they would understand what they see, they would read Eaton and Owsley and Atherton and Horn and the chatty lady from—believe it or not— "Magnolia" Plantation...
...Russel Nye, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian at Michigan State, turned a penetrating eye on one phase of the abolition movement and issued a scholarly report (Fettered Freedom) on the manner in which the anti-slavery propagandists used the issue of civil liberties to further their cause...
...A HISTORY OF THE OLD SOUTH, by Clement Eaton...
...Immediately after, they argued the righteousness of the Lost Causey More recently, armed with the wea...
...Houghton Mifflin...
...The plain folk" wrote little and kept few records...
...Chestnut's Diary has long been a rich introduction to the wartime gossip, parties, and emotions of Richmond and Columbia...
...and Mrs...
...1 Enigma, whose past and present are mysteries both to Southerners and to Yankees...
...If he suspects that present-day descendants of the "sincere" abolitionists are "not above using civil rights as a stalking horse," it is because he understands the monstrous fictions which have been perpetrated about the South...
...They were, he admits, "not above using civil rights as a stalking horse," or "playing on public sympathies," or "making the most of opportunities...
...Unlike many a wartime reputation, this opinion of Lee has remained unchanged and un-dimmed through the years...
...PLAIN FOLK OF THE OLD SOUTH, by Frank Lawrence Owsley...
...Mrs...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine THE publication of a new book by Hodding Carter, Mississippi editor and a leading Southern liberal, serves as a reminder that year after year more books—fiction and non-fiction, polemic and apologetic —deal with the South than with any other section...
...Much of this recent scholarship' is summarized in Clement Eaton's History of the Old South, which furnishes a composite digest of writing and research on • Southern themes...
...Eventually the abolitionists evolved the argument of the plot—the "Great Slave Conspiracy"—of the vicious slave-holding Southern oligarchy to spread slavery over the land and to enslave white men as well as black...
...Southerners and Northerners alike would do well to read his book if they would see the problem...
...Owsley's detailed land maps show slaveholders and non-slaveholders scattered equally over the landscape, Confirmation of these contentions comes from still another angle...
...Neither Virginia's Robert E. Lee not South Carolina's Sen...
...Chestnut's long-famed Diary From Dixie...
...She hated slavery and feared slaves...
...235 pp...
...he dispels some other misapprehensions...
...Owsley undertook to investigate the manuscript census returns, county tax rolls, deeds, wills, and grand Jury reports of the South...
...Lee freed his own slaves, and Gen...
...Bobbs-Merrill...
...In the beginning, the abolitionists were a little handful of decent humanitarians, appalled by the sin of slavery, appealing to moral and Christian men to end the evil...
...More specifically directed to meeting the fictional assertions about the South is Frank Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South...
...Edited by Stanley F. Horn...
...636 pp...
...In articles In the learned journals...
...With the facilities of the WPA land modern statistical machines, Dr...
...But, once the predatory interests had achieved their object, the abolitionist fiction of the "Slaveholding Oligarchy" be...
...Edited By Ben Ames Williams...
...Chestnut, the Diary is both verbose and superficial, gossipy and gushing, but in the end its emotional impact is greater than any simulated frenzies of Civil War novels...
...The South is a land of fictions, some believed by Southerners, some by Northerners, and none true...
Vol. 14 • May 1950 • No. 5
