Still Separate and Distinctive

...The Federal government largely ignored these injustices...

...It is a history they bring brilliantly to life in their compelling new book...

...Itis a region bound together by common myths and values, by gothic politics and ghosts of lost causes, by slavery, Jim Crow and matters of race—always race...

...The South did everything it could to keep the Abolitionist message from reaching its borders...

...Most Southern blacks suffered in silence.Others protested bymovingNorth, where industrial jobs were waiting and where race prejudice threatened their dignity but rarely their lives...

...Its three most prominent features—cotton, one-party politics, and Jim Crow— were practically gone.Cottonno longer was king...

...The big winners were those with the largest plots of land...

...The GOP now dominated much of the South, with Lincoln's portrait turned discreetly to the wall...

...But states like Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas remained at the bottom in every social category from health care to schooling, from the size of one's paycheck to the length of one's life...

...The South never quite recovered from its defeat...

...In response, the long dormant Republican Party started to attract white voters with promises to slow down desegregation and to honor "states' rights...

...Most of them came to seek their fortunes or to escape the poverty and punishment that had marked their lives backhome...

...Threequarters of all American farmers producing less than a thousand dollars a yearincashcropslivedinDixie, and over half of the nearly 2 million tenant farm families in the cotton belt were white...

...Some of them voted and actually held office in the years before 1890, but politics remained a white man's game, dominated by a Democratic Party that preached racial division while reminding voters of Lincoln's Republican roots...

...What made the South truly unusual among slave societies, though, was the way this increase occurred...

...Don't wait until the burr-heads are forced into your schools...

...Indeed, the enslavement of blacks seemed to unify the South as never before...

...Still the poorest part of the nation, it was attracting new industry from the North and from abroad...

...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" The American South is a land of paradoxes...

...Planters in the Caribbean and Brazil were using them with great success...

...And unlike the "fragile" Native American, he seemed well-suited to gang labor, more resistant to certain illnesses, and less apt to escape...

...Cooper and Terrill focus on the economic upheaval in seeking the source of the severe racial tension and violence that marked the decade...

...Worse, they insulted the honor of slaveholders —a cardinal sin—by portraying them as brutal, immoral and corrupt...

...They have done a superb job of emphasizing the distinctiveness of their region without divorcing it from the larger history of the United States...

...Its first white settlements had little in common with those of New England, aside from their British base...

...a disdain for every abridgement of personal independence...

...In 1933, for example, Mississippi's Delta and Pine Land Company, an employer of hundreds of sharecroppers on its huge plantations, received almost $115,000 from Washington for not planting certain crops...

...The American South tells this story in solid prose and remarkable detail...

...This worried the white community...

...The people who survived the early hardships—Indian raids, starvation, disease—were those who best adapted to the merciless frontier...

...It is a safe bet that none of that money was distributed to the sharecroppers who worked for the company...

...The South that emerges here is genuinely and enduringly unique...

...wheat, corn, fruit, and soybeans had become the staples...

...Compromise was out of the question...

...During World War I, almost a million blacks left the cotton fields of Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi for the ghettos of Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit...

...Quite naturally, "a calculus of racial debasement...

...To rid ourselves...

...Both authors were born in the South and currently teach history there— William J. Cooper Jr...

...The South's distinctiveness has deep historical roots...

...The South was serious about protecting its distinctive way of life...

...Unlike the North, it had few banks, factories or cities of any size...

...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of History, Rutgers...

...The early Virginians did not cross the Atlantic to build a "city on the hill...

...As the authors make clear, blackness already represented sin and evil in the Elizabethan mind...

...By war's end, Confederate casualties totaled almost 10 per cent of the Southern white population—260,000 killed and an equal number wounded...

...Thisisourposition," saidaflyer published by the Indianola, Mississippi, Chamber of Commerce...

...By 1770, that figure had increased to40 per cent, with South Carolina having more blacks than whites...

...Jim Crow laws cropped up everywhere in the South, replacing the previous informal codes (or laissez-faire segregation...

...Some Delta towns mailed brochures to Northern post offices, hoping to lure white families in search of work and cheap land...

...Roosevelt's New Deal bypassed many of the small farmers and tenants through its programs of crop reductions...

...He was considered to be the master's personal property...

...It was no secret that daily life for most whites in the Southwasalsoa grinding struggle...

...took hold...

...Others came as indentured servants, trading seven years of their labor for the price of passage and the dream of some land...

...The labor he provided was both essential and neverending...

...Why did this happen...

...It is a place where political conflict (from Reconstruction to Ronald Reagan) was funneled through a one-party system that smothered diversity as well as change...

...During World War II, more than 40 per cent of the Southern population farmed for a living...

...lynching was another...

...The authors contend that Southern planters had a more humane philosophy than slaveholders elsewhere in the New World...

...unfair treatment of sharecroppers and tenants...insecurity of life...

...Writing to a friend in 1773, Henry said: "Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase...

...the South could do none of those things...

...What set the African apart—what made him so vulnerable—was the color of his skin...

...There were bombings of black children in Birmingham churches and shootings of civil rights workers on unpaved Mississippi roads...

...The great prosperity of the 1850s, brought about by high cotton yields and spiraling prices, would not return until World War I, and then only fleetingly...

...As the authors remind us, this segregationist violence was largely responsible for the Federal government's intervention in the 1960s...

...it included his children, his grandchildren and more...

...A lot of farmers lost their land and fled to the cities, where whites and blacks competed with one another for dangerous, low-paying jobs...

...The Lincoln-led Republicans had no Southern members, no Southern platform, no Southern interests at all...

...Thefreedman'sdreamof40acres and a mule rarely became a reality...

...poor school facilities...

...White planters in hard-hit areas like the Mississippi Delta actually pulled blacks from the trains heading North...

...Like their black counterparts, poor Southern whites received little Federal aid...

...This prejudice meshed perfectly with the white man's personal and economic needs...

...of working slaves to death and then replacing them [through the slave trade with Africa...

...they also retained their rights as Englishmen (making them harder to discipline) and worked only for a fixed number of years...

...Furthermore, skin color offered whites no special immunity from the local diseases that ravaged the South—malaria, hookworm and pellagra, a nutritional deficiency caused by the monotonous diet of cornmeal, fat-back and molasses...

...Do something now...

...Nor didany President priorto HarryS...

...It seems that on the whole, slaves in the Southern colonies and states received better physical care than those in bondage in the Caribbean and South America...

...The civil rights struggle ended both Jim Crow and the one-party South...

...in the historical profession today...

...It produced few writers, educators or clergymen of any note...

...For the first time since Reconstruction, more people were moving into the region than moving out...

...It is the home soil of our most honored and articulate defenders of liberty—all of whom held slaves...

...As Cooper and Terrill demonstrate, the South was not linked closely to the slave trade after the mid-1700s...

...The authors believe that the region's involvement with black slavery led to "a more highly developed sense of [white] liberty...

...And the few English visitors to Africa reinforced that perception by describing the people they encountered as naked savages who worshiped a heathen god...

...Racial violence flared across the South...

...Blacks were inferior...

...Whatever the case, slavery became the cornerstone of Southern prosperity, to be protected at all costs...

...In addition, Southern whites who did not own slaves seemed to reap psychological benefits from the system...

...Their combined forces were two-thirds the size of the Union forces, despite the fact that the Southern white population was one-quarter the size of the Northern white population...

...When those facilities proved wildly unequal, the courts did nothing...

...They argue that Southern distinctiveness is not merely a matter of climate or accent or food...

...How, then, could the white colonists demand liberty for themselves while keeping almost a million men, women and children in bondage...

...This trend included black Americans fed up with the violence, poor housing and racial hypocrisy of Northern life...

...What shames is the hateful resistance of so many whites...

...The physical damage—the gutted towns, slaughtered animals, scorched plantations, torn-up railroad tracks—could not easily be repaired...

...The South went to war because it felt it had no choice...

...Cooper and Terrill demonstrate this by following two groups of activists: theelitecorps of NAACP lawyers, who broke down the legal barriers of segregation...

...There was another reason too...

...By 1980, the face of the post-Civil War South was very different indeed...

...Post offices were stormed, Abolitionist speakers were lynched, and codes were implemented to prevent slaves from learning to read or from congregating without white supervision...

...Its cities were growing, as was its middle class...

...Their relief at the departure of young black "troublemakers" was tempered by concerns about labor shortages in the fields...

...Perhaps most important, Southern planters never adopted the [idea] prevalent in some other slave societies...

...The experiment with indentured servants did not survive the 17th century...

...There was little money for roads, prisons or schools...

...These servants were expensive to import...

...It attracted few visitors, and fewer immigrants from abroad...

...It is a place where too many people— black and white—have suffered needlessly from hunger, ignorance, discrimination, and disease...

...By 1740, Africans accounted for 25 per cent of the population below the Mason-Dixon line...

...Any white man can certainly make good in rich soil like this...

...They argued that it had been practiced for centuries in other civilizations...

...Southern leaders also began to portray slavery in much more positive terms...

...The real paradox of the South, wrote a blue-ribbon Presidentialcommissioninthel930s, "isthat while it is blessed with immense wealth, its people as a whole are the poorest in the country...

...In their conclusion, Cooper and Terrill disagree with those who claim the South "is just about over as a separate and distinct place...

...So the South now celebrated liberty and slavery in one breath...

...But the authors further point out, as do others, that a new generation of Negroes had come of age in the 1890s—the first generation born and raised in "freedom...

...Separation became the rule in all public places, from theaters to hospitals, from streetcars to schools...

...One could always dream of owning a big white-pillared mansion, and just enough upward mobility existed to keep such dreams alive...

...When Lincoln finally found a general, Ulysses S. Grant, with the will to use the North's assets, the South was doomed...

...In 1980, that figure was less than 4 per cent...

...The Indians either died too quickly (from European diseases), or escaped too easily into the familiar countryside...

...The "inferior" African seemed ideally suited for slavery...

...As the authors observe, the 19thcentury South was already an anachronism, at odds with a central theme of the new capitalist order: free labor...

...With each passing year, the South grew more isolated from national opinion and more dependent on staple crops and slave labor...

...they would degrade white society, dilute the blood lines, and bring about a war of the races...

...Southerners accepted the notion of slave families...

...As mechanization was introduced in the fields, tenants and small farmers left the land for cities North and South...

...This is no minor accomplishment —trust me...

...The Union casualties of 700,000 amounted to less than 3 per cent of the North's population...

...Slavery spread like wildfire across the South...

...There was an alternative, however: African slaves...

...Though such attacks were rare, to say the least, the white anxiety was very real...

...Most state treasuries were empty...

...Moreover, for the first time in the nation's history, the new party in power owed nothing to the South...

...Prodded by world opinion, by endless demonstrations, by the memory of John F. Kennedy, and by the leadership of a new Southern President, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which effectively ended racial segregation in public facilities and accommodations...

...By the summer of 1861, the Southern states had hundreds of thousands of men in uniform...

...In the political lexicon of Southern patriots like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, slavery was the opposite of liberty...

...The end result was a racial belief, common to all classes, that every white person was by definition superior to every black...

...Slaves, of course, were the most valuable property they owned...

...Patrick Henry spoke for many of Virginia's leaders when he admitted, privately, that he had no good answer to this question...

...Truman show the slightest interest in pressing the cause of civil rights...

...That was not the worst of it...

...What shines in these chapters is the extraordinary courage and tenacity of so many ordinary people—the ones who boycotted buses, sat in at lunch counters, faced down attack dogs, and filled the local jails...

...What makes the South different, they believe, is its special history of slavery and Jim Crow, of war and occupation, of honor and guilt...

...The North could replace its casualties, generate great revenues and produce the needed supplies...

...Rigid segregation was one way of dealing with the problem...

...Along the way, the authors make use of the latest scholarship on class and gender without allowing these subjects to dominate the narrative or slow it to a crawl...

...Some were the younger sons of England's landed gentry, who saw the New World as their best hope for acquiring the status and property that had eluded them in the old...

...At the start of the 1980s, black Southern voters found themselves in the odd position of being the majority bloc within the minority party...

...Before long, the Southern colonies were starved for labor...

...Their reasons for migrating—as told to investigators who met them at the train stations—spoke volumes about black life in the South: "Economic exploitation .. 'Jim Crow...

...Having always viewed slavery as a civilizing influence, it was convinced that young black men in particular were reverting to "savagery," to violent and lawless behavior, including attacks upon white women...

...Unlike the white indentured servant, the slave had no legal protection...

...When the Confederacy issued a call to arms, the response was overwhelming...

...By the 1760s, as the colonies moved haltingly toward independence from England, the moral questions surrounding slavery as an institution could no longer be ignored...

...In fact, it was the one place where slaves naturally increased their own population—from 1 million in 1800 to more than 4 million by the Civil War...

...Lincoln's election to the White House in 1860, although not an immediate threat to slavery in the Southern States, was a dangerous obstacle to its westward expansion...

...The chapters on secession and the Civil War, on the Confederacy and its defeat, on Reconstruction and its aftermath, are elegantly done...

...They imported African men and women in roughly equal numbers, thereby encouraging natural reproduction...

...This was hardly surprising, given the party's liberal base and its support for civil rights at the national level...

...The civil rights movement also was given next to no Federal support...

...Honor demanded a stronger stand...

...Louisiana's Little Mussolini, Leander Perez, told a gathering of 5,000 segregationists near New Orleans: "Don't wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese...

...This meant that there must be no outside interference with slavery in the states, and no barriers to its expansion into newly acquired territories...

...Some planters experimented with Native Americans, but the efforts went for nil...

...In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate" facilities for the races did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were "equal...

...at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and Thomas E. Terrill at the University of SouthCarolina in Columbia...

...that it could not be abolished without disastrous consequences for both races of the South...

...To free them, the slaveholders would need financial compensation, something the struggling new American government could not possibly afford...

...Four million black Southerners were now free, but far from equal...

...The national depression of the 1890s hit the South especially hard...

...White Southerners who wished slavery gone, like the compassionate and open-minded Jefferson, nevertheless agreed that whites and blacks could not live together in freedom because of the insurmountable racial differences...

...I will not, I cannot justify it...

...They argued instead that the right to hold property was an integral part of liberty...

...Yet when the Revolution ended, very few Southerners—or Founding Fathers —freed their slaves...

...It hardly appeared to matter that the vast majority of its soldiers were proud yeomen farmers who did not own slaves...

...I am drawn along by ye general inconvenience of living without them...

...Lynchings rose at a frightening pace, and white novelists produced a romantic vision of the Old South in which plain freeholders, noble planters, and "loyal darkies" lived together in prosperity and in peace...

...and the common black southerners, who won their victories in the streets...

...To the east, white women and children toiled from dawn to dusk in filthy textile mills for under 10 cents an hour...

...There was more to the Republican revival, however, than appeals to race...

...Southern whites were ambivalent about the "Great Migration...

...Many Southern blacks settled on (or near) the land of their former masters, working as sharecroppers in the same fields where they had once toiled as slaves...

...For much of the 20th century, Congress failed to pass any legislation protecting the voting rights of black Americans or making lynching a Federal crime...

...The crops they produced were staples such as rice, tobacco and cotton, which were popular in Europe and drew a good price...

...The South was changing in many ways...

...The South's defeat, like the coming of the Civil War itself, seemed inevitable...

...Itisaplace where planter aristocrats and simple frontiersmen were idolized simultaneously, where paternalism and individualism went hand-in-hand...

...This open, mostly unregulated environment," note the authors, "gave hard-driving men the chance to make their mark...

...Once blacks started voting, they pulled the Democratic lever...

...of the lazy, lying, crapshooting, thieving Negroes .. by bringing here a desirable white citizenship...

...In the 1830s, the rise of Northern abolitionism—exemplified by William Lloyd Garrison and his publication, the Liberator—set off a firestorm in Dixie...

...EvenFranklinD...

...It was quickly followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the authors rightly describe as "the most powerful weapon for civil rights since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment...

...and that it really was beneficial to the Africans, who had been elevated from a savage to a civilized culture by their kindly Anglo-Saxon masters...

...States like Texas, Florida and North Carolina were ranked among the best places to live in America...

...Garrison's supporters demanded immediate, uncompensated emancipation...

...The land they worked, in contrast to New England's, was plentiful and rich...

...Almost everything is included in its 835 pages—from the settling of Jamestown to the Sunbelt migration, from the ideas of George Fitzhugh to the novels of William Faulkner, from the tragedy of Dred Scott to the courage of Rosa Parks...

...There were few takers...

...There are no obvious answers...