The South's Mystique

...Dabbs himself actually realizes or is willing to assume...

...The ultimate value of his book—and that value is great—is the clarity with which it shows a cultured, learned, and thoughtful Southerner wrestling with the great moral and ethical issues which the history and the present stance of his deeply beloved South create...

...Indeed, one of Dabbs' weaknesses is that he who lamented the absence of the poet's voice in the Nineteenth Century South pays so little attention to that voice in the Twentieth Century when it is there to be heard...

...The largest is that the South which he describes is the South of the Atlantic Coast...

...The Southern literary renaissance is a crucial fact for the modem South and one that should not be unheeded or unheard...

...The failure here, Dabbs feels, is essentially religious...

...Because of this default, history has forced upon the Ne-go Southerner his role of poet-saint, and he becomes the region's hope and its spokesman—perhaps to a greater degree than Mr...

...William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom], in which Thomas Sutpen tries to create in Mississippi the order which he worshiped but was excluded from in Virginia, speaks with greater pertinence and with the authority of art on this subject...

...Much of Dabbs' thesis has already been developed by others, as he knows...

...For both showed the dangers of a personal religion that can separate itself from the social conscience and from action...

...He senses but does not define the extent to which the ideals of this region—which were expressed in Virginia and South Carolina, which were shaped by the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, and which helped to make the democratic nation—underwent major change in being transported to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana...

...Rarely has a region had its past viewed with a more deep-seated love and compassion wedded to a stronger sense of the weaknesses of its past and present than Dabbs here employs...

...W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South states essentially the same case more astringently, and Harry Ashmore has commented pertinently on the emergence of the urban South...

...The Southerner has responded to the difficult or the intolerable with Stoic acceptance rather than Christian conscience, and he has produced neither poets nor saints, and, therefore, failed to judge himself against standards that would make him uncomfortable with his assumptions and attitudes...

...The problem of the South, as Dabbs sees it, is essentially the problem of a section seeking to establish community on a basis which excludes a significant portion of its people because their skin is black, whether they are slaves, freed-men, or citizens...

...Thus his historical examination of the problem is less complete than one might wish, for it omits a major historical change...

...What Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner have portrayed of their region is fully as valuable as what the Southern historian has said...

...Dabbs' major contribution is in his addition of a religious element as a major part of the structure of Southern life...

...Once more the literary artist has anticipated him, for this is the major theme in the work of Flannery O'Connor, and even in poetry like John C. Ransom's "Antique Harvesters" and Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead...

...There are weaknesses in Dabbs' approach, of most of which he is plainly aware...

...He feels that the Southerners fell into a Scotch-Irish "puritanism" which was essentially personal, subjective, non-communal, and that it has betrayed the essential sense of unity of man with God, with nature, and with his fellow men which must undergird a strong and free society...

...Dabbs argues that the South has always had a regional identity through its love of the land, its concentration on practical issues, and its deep respect for concreteness...

...Dabbs writes beautifully and convincingly as a philosopher of history, but his work—as historical philosophy often is—is remarkably abstract and generalized...

...Finally, Dabbs' religious solution, with its value on a religious perception of man and society in a total sense, is remarkably close to that which Harriet Beecher Stowe advanced in Uncle Tom's Cabin and which Mark Twain illustrated in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...

...James McBride Dabbs seeks in the religious, historical, and cultural roots of the southeastern United States the qualities of mind and attitude that merged with the accidents of history to place the Negro in the center of the problem of the South from before the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the racial violence of the 1960's...

...Essentially his Southerner differs little from Robert Penn Warren's picture of a man who is primarily characterized by his fear of abstraction and his devotion to the actual, the literal, and the immediate...

...C. Vann Woodward in his several studies of the post-Civil War South has defined many of the same issues...