Appomattox: One Hundred Years Later

by Stephen Z. Starr

April 1965

©2000 The Cincinnati Civil War Round Table

While the sights and sounds of the Centennial are still fresh in our minds, let us raise some awkward questions. The thousands of articles, pamphlets and books issued since 1961, the commemorations, speeches, seminars and symposia, have increased our knowledge of the facts, events and personalities of the war. But do we, in 1965, have a better understanding of the meaning of the war than we had four years ago? What has the Centennial added to our comprehension of the causes of the war, of the forces that brought it about, and determined its course and its outcome? Has the Centennial taught us anything about the Civil War, not as a dramatic event filled with romantic personalities, but as the most devastating crisis in our history? Has it made us use our knowledge of the events and trends of our own day as a key to a deeper grasp of the problems faced by the Civil War generation, and as a means to judge their efforts to deal with these problems? And conversely, has the Centennial given us the incentive to ask if what we know about the Civil War and its background may not serve as a warning and a guide in dealing with the desperately complex dilemmas of our own time?

I fear that all these questions must be answered in the negative, and I have written this paper because of my conviction that as members of a Round Table, we must at times look beyond the battles, campaigns incidents and personalities of the war; that, sharing a common interest and pleasure in the past, we have a special obligation to try to fit into a coherent framework of meaning our knowledge of the manifold events that made up the Civil War. A historical tragedy that cost 600,000 lives and left behind it problems that, one hundred years later, we are still struggling to resolve, requires something more of us than the knowledge of the brand of cigars Grant smoked, or of the color of John Morgan's horse. It requires that we try to gain an understanding of its meaning: how we came to have a Civil War in the first place, and what was the war all about? Whatever else the Centennial may have done, it has failed to inspire scholars with the ambition to add significantly to our understanding of the causes and meaning of the war. Since I cannot refer you to any new historical classic that provides you with new perspectives on the Civil War, I must ask you to make do with my home-made thoughts on this extremely complicated and controversial subject.

First, however, it will be instructive to review the changing course of historical interpretations of the Civil War. You will not be surprised to learn that in this field, there is no single, unalterable "verdict of history." Pronounced differences of historical interpretation of the war began while the fighting was still going on. The North in general, and Northern historians like John W. Draper and Henry Wilson in particular, believed that the war was the result of the selfish ambitions of evil men, that it was precipitated by a conspiracy of Southern Politicians. It was rebellion and treason pure and simple, with the sole motive of advancing the evil cause of slavery. On the Southern side, we naturally get the converse of this interpretation. Edward A. Pollard asserted that slavery was a "mere incident" in the "sectional animosity" separating two distinctive and "alien" cultures, the "coarse and materialistic" civilization of the North and the "highly refined" civilization of the South. The war was caused by a long-continued course of Northern aggression against the South; the actual outbreak of hostilities was directly attributable to the machinations of Lincoln, whom Pollard called "this Yankee monster of inhumanity and falsehoods" and the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter was explained "as purely an act of self-defense and self-preservation as is to be found in all history."

Between these extremes, we find the Copperhead interpretation, which I mention because of its curious rebirth in our own time; the Copperheads held that the quarrel between the sections had arisen "from artificial issues generated and emotionalized by zealots of both North and South, of whom the Northern Abolitionists were by far the worst.

Except for the Copperhead position, these attitudes, which persisted until about 1880, resulted from viewing the war in pure blacks and whites; one's own side was completely in the right and the opposition completely in the wrong. Nevertheless, even in these early days, historians recognized that the war had a complex causation, and one historian or another suggested most of the major contributory causes that have been the staple of historiography ever since: the breakdown of political party machinery, conflicting interpretations of the Constitution, climatic and cultural differences between the sections, irreconcilable differences on a wide range of economic issues, and of course the whole complex of emotional, economic and political antagonisms tied up with the problem of slavery, its preservation and extension.

The end of reconstruction in 1876 led to the rise of a new national spirit. The Civil War was now a thing of the past, its bitterness replaced by a mood of reconciliation. The issues on which the war had been fought were considered solved. The Union was restored, secession as a constitutional privilege was dead and buried, slavery was gone, and the Southern states were left once again to manage their own affairs and to solve their race problem in their own way. The country had new problems, national in scope and no longer sectional to think about. Sectional loyalties were replaced by a new national pride in which all could share equally as Americans. James Ford Rhodes, the last of the great amateur historians, was the first to examine the war and its genesis in this new spirit. Rising above the no longer fashionable sectional recriminations, Rhodes appraised the situation of the North and the South with equal impartiality, and while he concluded that on the central issue, namely the morality of slavery, the South was clearly in the wrong, he nevertheless held that the advocates of slavery had been caught in a dilemma not of their own making, and were entitled to understanding and sympathy. Rhodes was succeeded by the first generation of professionally trained historians, of whom the most outstanding were Frederick Jackson Turner, Edward Channing, and Woodrow Wilson. Trying to write objective, "scientific" history, these men and their followers disdained sectional bias. Avoiding personalities and moral issues, possibly because of a subconscious realization that the historian could not touch these aspects of the problem without expressing some judgment upon them, and thus explicitly or implicitly taking sides, they looked for impersonal forces and tendencies to explain the war. Thus, Channing concluded that "Two such divergent forms of society" as the North and South "could not continue indefinitely to live side by side within the walls of one government." Wilson and Turner saw the crux of the quarrel not as the antagonism between New England and the Seaboard South, but in the contest for the new lands in the West, where the expansionist drives of the Northwest and Southwest came into collision.

Channing, Wilson and Turner were historians of what came to be called the "nationalist school." Their "impersonal forces" and "unresolvable antagonisms" are a replica of Seward's "irrepressible conflict." Logically, if the conflict was irrepressible, then there was no guilt on either side; the question of "right" or "wrong" disappears; no one can be blamed for starting the war, and given their respective points of view, both sides were equally in the right. This basically, was the comforting conclusion of the nationalist school.

Charles Beard, who in a broad sense was also a member of this school, brushed aside the conflict over the moral aspects of slavery, and also dismissed as unimportant the quarrel over the meaning of the federal system as defined in the Constitution. He found the root of the Civil War in the "social groupings founded on differences in climate, soil, industries, and labor systems, in divergent social forces, rather than in varying degrees of righteousness and wisdom, or what romantic historians call 'the magnetism of great personalities.'" In other words, the basis of the conflict was economic, or, more broadly, the differing economic structures and needs of the two sections.

In the seventy years preceding the publication in 1927 of Beard's The Rise of American Civilization, interpretations of the Civil War flow in a single channel. There are, of course, differences in emphasis, and a strong sectional bias in the early days, but these are less significant than the general similarity of outlook among all the historians of a given generation. From about 1930 on, however, the picture changes. Instead of one broad channel, we have several, and the stream of historical interpretation begins to look like the Mississippi Delta.

First in point of time we have the "Angry Young Men" of the South. In the heyday of the nationalist school, Southern historians most of them trained in Northern graduate schools, were careful to maintain a balanced, impartial outlook. Wilson, Ulrich B. Phillips, and others, did not feel called upon to defend slavery or the wisdom of secession. To a much greater degree than Northern historians, they recognized the problem of racial adjustment as a major factor preventing a peaceful adjustment of the slavery issue, but they would have scorned as unscientific any attempt to saddle the North with sole responsibility for the war. But with the post-World War I generation of Southern historians, exemplified by Frank L. Owsley and Charles W. Ramsdell, we begin to get echoes of the less restrained utterances of the fireeaters. Ramsdell contends that sectional animosity was due entirely to Northern agitators and that the firing on Fort Sumter was deliberately provoked by Lincoln. Owsley believes that slavery as a moral issue was nothing but a "red herring," that the conflict was not between slavery and freedom but between two different civilizations, that the South "only asked to be let alone," and was eventually forced to sever its partnership with the North in order to preserve its individualistic, agrarian society from Northern exploitation and aggression.

More influential than Ramsdell, Owsley and their followers are the historians of the so-called "revisionist school," whose leading lights have been J. G. Randall, Avery Craven, Kenneth Stampp, and to some degree, Allan Nevins. These historians hold that a "blundering generation" permitted a variety of normal and sometimes unimportant sectiona1 differences to get out of hand; they allowed routine problems to become emotionalized and magnified to the point where they became unrecognizable. The inept political leadership of the day having failed to solve the unrea1 and artificial crisis thus created, the sections came to blows and fought a bloody war that was needless in the sense that it could have been prevented. The similarity of these views and those of the Copperheads is obvious, and it is to be noted that whereas the views of the historians of the nationalist school lead to the conclusion that both sides were right, a revisionist must necessarily conclude that both sides were wrong.

J. G. Randall, the father of the revisionists, died a few years ago but his followers are still very much with us. But their ideas have not gone unchallenged. Especially within the past ten or fifteen years, under the influence of the new sectional cleavage over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the revisionist position has been attacked by a group of historians nicknamed "The Young Abolitionists" with a heat and bitterness reminiscent of the debates of the 1850's.

Thus I come to the end of this brief summary of the successive or conflicting schools of interpretation of the Civil Wax. It remains only to suggest that the violence of the quarrel between the revisionists and their opponents indicates the main reason why the Centennial has failed to produce a new synthesis of the many divergent views, old and new, on the war. The reason I believe, is this: of the fundamental problems involved in the war, at least four are just as controversial today as they were 105 years ago. These are the place of the Negro in America; the conflict between the will of the majority as expressed by the national government, and the rights of a sectional minority; the extent to which any society can claim the privilege of retaining a traditional way of life that is repugnant to the moral sense of the contemporary world; and finally, how best can a settlement by consent of sectional disputes be achieved. Historians feel just as strongly about these questions as do the rest of us, and their convictions on, for example, the issue of States' Rights today are bound to color their appraisal of the States' Rights controversy of 1850 or 1860. The past few years have not been a good time to view the issues that led to the Civil War with the objectivity and detachment that are needed for a new historical synthesis.

With this preface, I will now state my own views, but I must begin with two preliminary remarks. To start with, a brief paper cannot cover all the problems on which the two sections occupied antagonistic positions, and I will therefore concentrate on the three key questions: slavery, the struggle for control of the Federal Government, and the cultural divergence between North and South. Secondly, in dealing with these questions, I must advance views with which some of you will disagree. I believe that without Southern arrogance stemming from or coupled with an inconceivable degree of self-delusion and a pathological unwillingness to deal with reality in realistic terms, there would have been no Civil War. I am convinced that responsibility for the Civil War rests squarely upon the South. By "the South" I mean the Southern people as a whole, and not merely the so-called "extremist politicians." And finally, I do not admit that the South "blundered" into secession and war. Caught in a trap of its own making, the South wanted secession, and a large minority was not at all averse to a little bloodletting. As early as 1851, a favorite toast in South Carolina went as follows: "The sword! The arbiter of national dispute. The sooner it is unsheathed in maintaining Southern rights, the better!" We are told that a majority in the South opposed secession. The result in the few states where the issue was settled by popular vote proves just the opposite, but even if the statement were true, the so-called peaceful, pro-Union South cannot escape its share of responsibility for the emotional climate that made secession possible, nor for the acts of the political leaders whom it placed in power.

I have not come to these views lightly. I do not believe that a historian's duty to be objective in his analysis of the facts, relieves him of the obligation to form judgments. I share fully Samuel Eliot Morison's belief that "a historian who knows, or thinks he knows, an unmistakable lesson of the past, has the right and duty to point it out.." To the best of my ability, I have based my judgments on the facts. I hope that those of you who disagree with my point of view, will be impelled to reexamine the question, if for no better reason than to prove me wrong. All of us - you, I, and the country as a whole - stand to benefit from such a dialogue.

Long before William Lloyd Garrison published the first number of the Liberator, slavery was seen to be a moral problem. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, it was generally expected that slavery would disappear within a generation or two. Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina and Thomas Jefferson pronounced slavery an intolerable crime. Twice the Virginia legislature came close to abolishing slavery within the state. But Whitney's invention of the cotton gin stimulated a vast expansion of cotton culture. Cotton was not only an ideal crop for the climate and soil of the South, but it also permitted the use of unskilled labor, including the labor of women and children. Cotton made slaves an increasingly valuable commodity; the price of a prime field hand tripled between 1800 and 1830, and tripled again between 1830 and 1860. The value of the cotton crop quadrupled in the decade between 1850 and 1860. In 1827, Benjamin Lundy, from whom Garrison derived his inspiration, reported that there were in the South 106 antislavery societies with more than 5,000 members. By 1837, all 106 societies had disappeared, put out of business by coercion, intimidation and mob action. Southern respect for the Bill of Rights was similarly exhibited in 1832, when the Vigilance Committee of Columbia, South Carolina, offered a $1,500 reward for the arrest and conviction of anyone distributing the Liberator. The Georgia legislature placed a price of $5,000 on Garrison's head, and in 1835, Calhoun demanded in the United States Senate that the Northern states suppress the abolition societies, that the Federal Government allow the Southern states to censor the mails, and that freedom of petition on the subject of slavery be denied.

But the South did more than to try to suppress antislavery agitation and to exclude it from its borders. It began to discover positive virtues in the institution of slavery. Southern preachers proved out of the Bible that slavery enjoyed divine sanction. In the three years following the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, fourteen novels were published in the South, picturing in the rosiest of colors the relations between masters and slaves. Unfortunately, none of these novels was written by a slave, possibly because by the 1850's, it was a criminal offense in most Southern states to teach a Negro to read and write. But Southern novelists were not alone in glorifying slavery as a beneficent institution. Slavery, it was said, was "the most safe and stable basis for free institutions." Such ideas were an article of faith, shared by the 10,600 planters who owned 50 or more slaves, the 374,000 small planters and farmers who owned from one to 49 slaves, and 7,000,000 white Southerners who owned no slaves at all, and whose economic and cultural existence was in many cases blighted by slavery. They believed, as many in the South still do, that the Negro belonged to a lower order of creation, and since two races could not live side by side on terms of equality, it was "in the order of nature" that the blacks should be the slaves of the whites.

It was claimed, however, that the slave owners were in reality fulfilling a cultural mission, in that, through slavery, black savages were being educated in the ways of Christianity and civilization. The Reverend Thornton Stringfellow proclaimed that God had confined slavery to the South, because of the superior qualities of its people for lifting the ignorant Negroes to culture. Neither he nor any other Southern spokesman said anything about the duration of the course, and no date was ever set for graduation. It is interesting to note that the life of the free Negro - the alumnus of this University of Christianity and Civilization - was miserably abject. In most states, he had to leave the state when he was emancipated. He had no right to vote, and could not even preach the Gospel to other Negroes unless a white man was present. No mention was made of the fact that between 1808 and 1860, about 300,000 new savages were smuggled illegally into the country, presumably to keep the schoolrooms of civilization filled and the teachers busy. And no one bothered to reconcile the "civilizing of savages" argument with the agitation, begun in 1856, and continued with increasing clamor until 1860, for legalizing the renewed importation of slaves from Africa. That this extension of the civilizing mission of the South was in conflict with the conscience of the civilized world did not seem to bother the proponents of this vicious scheme.

The oft-repeated argument that only Southerners have a correct understanding of the race problem is not a new one. It was advanced time and time again in the decades before 1861. As proof positive, the South pointed to its population of 4,000,000 affectionate and peaceable slaves, who were - and I am quoting - not merely happy, but happier than any other group of people in the United States. Edward A. Pollard insisted that the odious term slavery could not properly be "applied to that system of servitude in the South which was really the mildest in the world; which...elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement; and...bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment." One may assume that it was because of this that the South lived in deadly fear of a slave insurrection, and was thrown into a frenzy of panic by John Brown's crazy Harper's Ferry Raid. It is easy enough to ridicule such absurdities, but it is tragic to think that for two generations, the mental energies of the South were devoted to elaborating justifications of slavery - perhaps to appease its own feelings of guilt - to the exclusion of every other form of cultural activity.

It would be a gross misrepresentation of the facts to claims as the extreme abolitionists were in the habit of doing, that every slave owner was inhuman, the master of a slave harem, and a trafficker in the bodies of his own children. Slaves were too valuable to be habitually mistreated and even aside from their value as farm animals, they were generally well looked after, treated with kindness, and often with affection. But they were slaves. We need not believe the literal accuracy of Harriet Beecher Stowe; but we should not be taken in by the moonlight and magnolia school of Southern historians. Nothing can change the essential viciousness of a system that turned Virginia and Kentucky into brood-farms with annual exports of 9,400 and 4,000 slaves respectively. Only Louisiana, and Alabama after 1852, prohibited the sale of a child under 10 years old, away from its mother. The statutes and court records of Southern states are a contemporary and certainly objective testimony to other realities of slavery. The South Carolina "Black Code" permitted as punishments, branding on the face or body, the cutting off of ears, slitting of noses, and castration. If a slave died under punishment, his master was not guilty of any crime. In 1821, one James Vernor was fined $30 and given a five-month prison sentence for "whipping a slave to death 'in sudden heat and passion.'" You can see the similarity between this sentence and the punishments currently handed out in Mississippi and Alabama for such trifles as the bombing of colored Sunday Schools; the only noticeable difference being that 130 years ago it was apparently still possible in such cases to obtain a guilty verdict from a Southern white jury. A few years after Vernor was slapped on the wrist for torturing a slave to death, one Negro was sentenced to be hanged for stealing a few pounds of bacon; another for breaking into a smokehouse; and a Negro woman for giving a child the wrong medicine. This woman was pregnant. Her execution was therefore delayed until she had given birth to her child. Then she was hanged, and became a dropout from the school of Christianity and Civilization. And those of you who have read Mary Boykin Chesnut's Diary know that the slave harem was a nearly universal reality in the South, and no mere product of the overheated imaginations of New England abolitionists.

This is the institution the South wanted at all costs to preserve and to extend to the Territories. Granted that the abolitionists saw only the evils of slavery, and that they refused to see that emancipation alone would not solve the underlying race problem. They were, in fact, single-minded fanatics. But for every antislavery fanatic in the North, there were dozens of proslavery fanatics in the South. And if we must make the choice between fanatics for freedom and fanatics for slavery, the choice, I think, is simple. The abolitionist fanatics, never more than a tiny minority, did not control the politics or even the public opinion of the North. The proslavery fanatics, on the other hand,, did control both public opinion and politics in the South, and went to war for the sake of an institution condemned not merely by the abolitionists but by the moral judgment of the entire civilized world. The South attempted to secede for the sake of slavery not just from the United States, but also from the nineteenth century, and one of the object lessons of the Civil War, with a special significance for our own day, is that you cannot escape from your own place and time in the stream of history by taking refuge in the past or in some romantic world of make-believe.

The second basic issue between the sections lay in the area of politics; necessarily so, for it was in the political arena that the problems between the sections were fought out until the South decided that political solutions, reached by a process of give and take, were no longer adequate to protect its "honor and self-respect." Bear in mind that middle and upper class Southerners were politicians by birthright. Active participation in politics was, in the South, a way of life. One would expect, therefore, to find a much greater degree of political skill and acumen there than in the North. What one finds there instead is demagogy, bombast, irresponsibility, incompetence, a childish refusal to come to grips with realities, and a habitual substitution of slogans, symbols and bogeymen for facts. These are strong statements, but hardly strong enough to fit the situation.

The South had an almost unbroken control of the Federal Government from 1789 until secession. The presidents were either Southerners., or Northerners like Pierce and Buchanan, who were mere puppets in the hands of Southern senators and cabinet members. For seventy years, the Supreme Court had a majority of Southern justices. With the aid of its Northern allies and the three-fifths rule, the South controlled one or both houses of Congress. The fifteen Slave States, with a white population of not quite eight million, had 30 senators, 90 representatives, and 120 electoral votes, whereas the State of New York, with a population of four million had two senators, 33 representatives, and 35 electoral votes. Even the election of 1860 left the South in control of both houses of Congress, and until at least 1863, Lincoln and the Republicans would have been powerless to pass legislation hostile to the South, and through its control of the Senate, the South could have blocked the confirmation of every Lincoln appointee whom it considered unfriendly. In spite of this, and notwithstanding Lincoln's repeated assurances that he would not, directly or indirectly, interfere with slavery where it already existed, the South chose to secede. Was this politically rational behavior?

It is reasonable to suppose that, having control of the presidency and Congress for many years, the South got the kind of legislation it wanted, and in fact it did. The South was in the habit of blaming all its economic ills on the North, and the tariff was usually pointed out as an example of Northern selfishness and exploitation. And yet the tariff of 1857, in force in 1860, was largely Southern-made and was one of the lowest in our history. It is worthwhile to point out that whereas the cotton planters were all for free trade, the Louisiana sugar producers and the Kentucky hemp growers were as hot for protection as were the Pennsylvania ironmongers. The South wrote the Fugitive Slave Law that was passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. Typical of the whole tenor of the law was the provision that the commissioner who decided the fate of an alleged fugitive was to receive a fee of $10 if he ruled that the Negro was an escaped slave, and only $5 if he declared the Negro legally free. The number of slaves who escaped North was never large - the highest estimate is 1,000 per year - and it was generally understood in the South that the purpose of the Fugitive Slave Law was not so much to recover runaways as it was to "crack the whip over the heads of Northern men." This is a dangerous game to play.

In a negative sense also the South generally managed to prevail. Thus, it was able for twenty years to block the passage of homestead legislation, and in doing so, it succeeded in alienating its natural allies, the people of the Northwest, who needed the Mississippi as a channel of commerce with the world, and whose economic grievances against the Northeast created a strong bond of sympathy between it and the South.

It is instructive too to glance at a political issue on which the South failed to get its way. This was the demand, first advanced in 1858, for Congressional protection of slavery in all the Territories. To insist on legislation of doubtful constitutionality, knowing it to be absolute anathema to the entire North, in order to protect slavery where it neither did nor could exist, was the height of irresponsibility. It is difficult to believe that the demand was made in earnest, but it was. Even the generally charitable Nevins calls it wanton and provocative, as well he might, for it could have had only one objective: to make the North eat crow by forcing it to concede an abstract right that for the South, had no practical value whatever. When in 1860, the Northern delegates to the Democratic National Convention refused to agree to this demand, the Cotton State delegates walked out - walking out of political conventions when you cannot get your own way is an Old Southern Custom - and thereby wrecked the Democratic Party. Thus, the South practically assured the election of a minority, sectional president, the very thing that caused it to announce a few months later that it was no longer safe in the Union. Is it any wonder that Northern historians saw in this a deeply laid plot to make secession inevitable? Their only alternative would have been to assume the Southern leadership had taken leave of its senses. To a great degree, the latter is the explanation I favor.

This tale of political ineptitude, the habitual misreading of the minds of opponents, the misjudging of the practical possibilities of a given situation, the purposeless striving for effect, the substitution of arrogance and threats for rational discussion, could be expanded many fold. A long chapter could be written about the lawlessness and stupidity of the South's handling of the Kansas problem, and another on the insane demands for the annexation of Cuba, of Mexico, of Central America. The conspiracy thesis assumes the existence of a rational design in all this; I can't accept the conspiracy thesis because I find it impossible to discover any thread of rationality running through these frenzied maneuvers. There is, however, one common denominator that may hold them together. Energy, hard work and ingenuity were causing the North to grow by leaps and bounds, in wealth, population material resources and political power. On the other hand, as a Southerner wrote after the war, "in government, in society, in employments, in labor, the States of the South, in 1860, were substantially what they had been in 1810." In relative terms, the South had steadily lost ground, and it was obvious that it would continue to do so. Inevitably, a corresponding shift in political power would follow. Southern political leadership decided that this had to be prevented at all costs. Having hypnotized itself into the belief that it was hated by every Northerner, the South was determined not to lose the grip on the Federal Government that it had held for seventy years. Better to wreck the government altogether than to surrender a control which, in a democratic framework, could no longer be maintained or justified. And so the South, as one historian aptly remarked, went to war to fight the census returns, or, as Jefferson Davis phrased it in a moment of candor, to rid itself of the rule of the majority.

I come, finally, to the cultural differences between the sections. The notion that the North had been settled by commoners and the South by "cavaliers," was dear to the hearts of Southerners, and like most such ideas, had very little basis in fact. It is true, however, that in the course of time, the South and the North had evolved somewhat different folkways. There has been a tendency, even among historians, to exaggerate the degree of this difference. It would be well to keep in mind, as a corrective, that not every Southerner was a Wade Hampton, and not every Northerner an Amos Lawrence. The vast majority of Southerners, just as the vast majority of Northerners, were small yeoman farmers, artisans and tradesmen, and their lives were not at all dissimilar. The 1860 Census shows that the "plantation aristocracy" amounted to less than one half of one-percent of the white population of the South, and it is nonsense to assume that the way of life of this tiny minority was typical of the whole. It is also nonsense to attribute to the North an "industrial and commercial" civilization, for nearly 85% of Northerners of working age were, in 1860, engaged in agriculture.

But if we grant, for the sake of argument, that all Southerners led the kind of life depicted in Gone with the Wind, it behooves us to inquire what use they made of their wealth and leisure. In a material sense, their lives were enviable indeed; there is much to be said for an arrangement that provides every gentleman with a body-servant, every ladv with at least one maid, the children with tutors, and the household with a dozen servants to do the work of three or four. But even in 1850 there was more to life than being waited upon hand and foot and having the means to practice a lavish hospitality. Travelers in the last decade before the war noticed that a new, materialistic spirit was abroad in the South, that the price of cotton and slaves had become "an obsession that monopolized conversation and occupied all minds"; where, in all this, was the "highly refined and sentimental" civilization of the South, and in what way did it differ from the "coarse and materialistic" civilization of the North? Where will we find the cultural life of the South? Aside from a few centers like Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the South made a very poor show, culturally speaking, Every Southerner with any pretensions to an education was a diligent student of history and politics, but even in this favored area, their interests were exceedingly narrow. George Cary Eggleston, surely a friendly witness, tells us that in well-furnished Virginia libraries there were hardly any books published after 1820. William Gilmore Simms, the Charleston novelist, complained that "the South don't care a damn for literature or art." Southern colleges were second-rate even by the standards of the time, their professors hounded by vigilance committees. From about 1850 on, as part of its defense mechanism, the South, with little enough to fall back on at home, made a deliberate effort to cut loose from its cultural and educational ties with the North, by excluding Northern teachers, textbooks and magazines. And significantly, in 1850, 20.3% of white Southerners over the age of twenty were illiterate, as against less than one-half of one percent of New Englanders.

It is hardly necessary for me to labor the point, or to contrast the stagnant, sterile existence of the South with the outburst of creative energy spawned by the North in the 1840s and 1850's. Where are the Southern Bancrofts, Motleys, Prescotts, Emersons, Bryants, Hawthornes, Lowells? But it is important to point out that lack of educational opportunities was a significant factor in preventing the rise of a class of intelligent, educated farmers and artisans in the South. Only two Southern states, North Carolina and Kentucky, had respectable public school systems before 1860, and this had much to do with the failure of Southern whites to understand that their "peculiar institution" was out of tune with the moral, social, and even economic sentiment of the times, and with their readiness to follow the Pied Pipers who thought that a nation and a state could be founded on the enslavement of four million human beings. These are among the dangers of a closed society and of an iron curtain.

Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason. And this was the refuge of the South. For ten years before secession, Northerners were commonly referred to as "mongrels and hirelings." The North was described as "a conglomeration of greasy mechanics filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists ... hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman's body servant." And, most fatal delusion of all, Southerners began to credit themselves with fighting ability equal to that of nine, five, or more conservatively, three Northerners. Once a nation or a section begins to speak and think in such terms, reason has gone out the window and emotion has taken over. This is precisely what happened in the South, and this is why the Cotton States seceded before Lincoln was even inaugurated and before his administration had committed, or had a chance to commit, any act of egression against them. Such behavior is fundamentally irrational, and cannot be explained in rational terms.

I have now stated my case, and in the process, have said enough to let you deduce certain striking similarities between the state of mind of the Deep South in 1860 and today. I do not wish to imply, however, that we have a second irrepressible conflict on our hands. In spite of many evidences of pathological fanaticism on the race issue, the brutalities that are a commonplace of daily life in Alabama, the vicious police state that Mississippians manage to equate with freedom, democracy and decency I see signs of hope. In Lincoln's words, "On the side of the Union (the Civil War was) a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men - to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life." I say tonight, one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, that the issue so nobly stated by Lincoln was settled, and settled forever at Appomattox. There are still many pieces to be picked up, and as we well know, the problems we face are neither few nor simple. There are days, when we read of another Negro church burned down, of another midnight bombing committed by the heroic descendants of the Confederacy, when one is tempted to think that Lincoln's vision of a truly free America is as distant today as it seemed in the summer of 1861. But let us take comfort in the thought that whereas William Lowndes Yancey spoke for the entire South in 1860, neither the sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi, nor His Honor, Governor Wallace of Alabama, speak for the entire South in 1965.

February 19, 1965

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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