The Southern South Part 3

Before the war this leading element was very distinctly marked off, because it was nearly restricted to slaveholders and their connections by blood and marriage. Very few people, except in the mountain districts, ever held important state or national office who did not come from the slaveholding families, which never numbered more than three hundred thousand; and half of those families owned less than five Negroes and could hardly claim to belong to the ruling cla.s.s. The slaveholding aristocracy included nearly all of the professional and commercial men, the ministers, the doctors, the college instructors, especially the lawyers, from whom the ranks of public service were to a great degree recruited.

These people were organized into a society of a kind unknown in the North since colonial times. In any one state the well-to-do people, perhaps two to five thousand in all, knew each other, recognized each other as belonging to a kind of gentry, intermarried, furnished nearly all the college and professional students, and were the dignitaries of their localities. In organization, if not in opportunities or in the amenities of life, they were very like the English county gentry of the period.

Those conditions are now much changed. In the first place, the old ruling families have almost all lost their wealth and their interstate position.

Deference is still paid to them; a John Rutledge is always a John Rutledge welcomed anywhere in South Carolina, and a Claibourne carries the dignity of the family that furnished the first Governor of Mississippi; but it is a mournful fact that hardly a large plantation in the South is now owned by a descendant of the man who owned it in 1860. Some of the most ambitious of the scions of these ancient houses, whose communities no longer give them sufficient opportunities, have found their way to New York and other Northern cities, and are there founding new families. Many more are upbuilders of the Southern cities; some of them are again becoming landed proprietors. Still the element dominant in society, in business, and in administration, includes a large number of people who have come up from below or have come in from without since the Civil War.

Distinctly above the traditional Poor White, though often confused with him by outsiders, is the Southern white farmer. In ante-bellum days there was in every Southern state, and particularly in the border states, a large body of independent men, working their own land without slaves, with the a.s.sistance of their sons--for white laborers for hire could not be had--and often prosperous. They were on good terms with the planters, had their share of the public honors, and probably furnished a considerable part of the Southern Whig vote. Their descendants still persist, often in debt, frequently unprogressive, but on the whole much resembling the farmer cla.s.s in the neighboring Northern states. The destruction of slavery little disturbed the status of these men, and they are an important element in the progress of the South.

The old leaders have lost preeminence, partly because the South now requires additional kinds of leaders. In the modern Southern cities may be found cla.s.ses of wholesale jobbers, attorneys of great corporations, national bank officers, manufacturers, agents of life insurance and investment companies, engineers, and promoters, who were hardly known in the old South. In the social world these people still have to take their chance, for the foundation stones of society in every Southern state are the descendants of the leaders of the old regime, including many people whose former back-country farm with its half-dozen slaves has become magnified into a tradition of an old plantation. As a Southern writer says: "Legends had already begun to build themselves, as they will in a community that entrusts its history to oral transmission. For instance, the fortunes of many of our families before the war became enormous, in our talk and in our beliefs."

Notwithstanding this presumptive right of the old families to figure in modern society many are shut out by poverty and some by moral disintegration. Of course in the South as elsewhere the newcomers have more money and set a difficult standard of social expense; but, measured by New York criterions, there are few wealthy people in the South. Leaving out the Northern men who play at being Southern gentlemen it is doubtful whether there are thirty millionaires in the whole Lower South; and it must never be forgotten that nothing in the world is so democratic within its narrow bounds as Southern society. The social leaders recognize on equal terms other Southern high-cla.s.s people, and also outsiders whom they reckon as high cla.s.s. There is a sharp difference between the poor farmer and the well-to-do proprietor or the city magnate; but there is not necessarily a social distinction between the family which has an income of three thousand a year and the family which disposes of thirty thousand a year.

Furthermore, between all the members of the white race there is an easier relation than in the North; Pullman Car conductors are on easy and respectful terms with lady pa.s.sengers who frequently use their line, the poorest White addresses the richest planter or most distinguished railroad man with an a.s.sured sense of belonging to the same cla.s.s; society is distinctly more h.o.m.ogeneous than in the North. It is also more gracious.

What is more delightful than the high-bred Southern man and woman, courteous, friendly, and interested in high things, bent on bringing to bear all the resources of intellectual training, religion, and social life for the welfare of the community? The high-cla.s.s Southerner believes in education; he has a high sense of public duty; he stands by his friends like a rock; unfortunate is the Northerner who does not count among his choicest possessions the friendship of Southern men and women!

In business the South is developing a body of modern go-ahead men who are alive to the needs of improvement in business methods, who adopt the latest machinery, seek to economize in processes, and have built up a stable and remarkably well-knit commercial system. The South before the war had many safe banks, and no state in the Union enjoyed a better banking law than Louisiana. All that capital was swept away by the Civil War, and for twenty years was not replaced, outside the cities; now little banks are springing up at small railroad stations, and in remote little county seats; and there is a concert and understanding between the country and city bankers which is of great a.s.sistance to the material growth of the South. The Southern business system calls for prudent and courageous men, and there is no lack of good material.

In politics, however, a new type of leaders has in the last twenty years sprung up as a result of the genius of Benjamin R. Tillman in discovering that there are more voters of the lower cla.s.s than of the upper, and that he who can get the lower cla.s.s to vote together may always be reelected.

As a matter of fact Tillman comes of a respectable middle-cla.s.s family; but it is his part to show himself the coa.r.s.est and most vituperative of Poor Whites. Such men as ex-Governor Vardaman of Mississippi, and Senator Jeff Davis of Arkansas, are also evidences that the hold of the old type of political leader is weakened. Some people say that the present system of primary nominations is a sure way to bring mediocrity to the front.

On the other hand, the leaders of society and business and politics and intellectual pursuits fit together much more closely than in the North. In part this is the result of a social system in which people of various types imbibe each other's views; in greater part it is due to the influence of slavery, and the half century of contest over slavery, in which the great property owners were also the heads of the state, the pillars of the church, and the formers of opinion.

The problem of the leader in the South is also the problem of the led; shall those who concentrate and shape public opinion, who carry on the corporations, write the newspapers, teach the university students, decide law cases, and preach the sermons, shall they also set forth a lofty spirit? Will the ma.s.s, the voters, the possessors of the physical force of the community, accept their decisions? In general, the tone of the leaders in the South is sane and wholesome; commercial influences are less strong on the press and on state and munic.i.p.al governments than they are in the North. There is at least a greater sentimental and abstract respect for learning, a larger part of the community is in touch with and molded by the churches.

The lower Whites, though manifestly advancing, are still on the average far inferior to the similar cla.s.s of white farmers of kindred English stock in the North; and also to many of the foreigners that have come in and settled the West. Education is going to help their children, but can do little for the grown people who are now the source of political power in the South; and there is a turbulence and uncontrolled pa.s.sion, sometimes a ferocity, among the rural people which is to be matched in the North only in the slums.

In some ways the Northern visitor is struck by a crudeness of behavior among respectable Southern Whites such as he is accustomed in the North to experience in a much lower stratum of society. A large proportion of the Poor Whites in the South and many of the better cla.s.s go armed and justify it because they expect to have need of a weapon. Tobacco juice flows freely in hotel corridors, in railroad stations, and even in the vestibules of ladies' cars; profanity is rife, and fierce talk and unbridled denunciations, princ.i.p.ally of black people. There is doubtless just the same thing in Northern places, if you look for it, but in the South it follows you. With all the aristocratic feeling cla.s.ses are more mixed together, and it is a harder thing than in the North to sift your acquaintances. Still there is an upward movement in every stratum of society; as Murphy puts it: "The real struggle of the South from the date of Lee's surrender--through all the accidents of political and industrial revolution--was simply a struggle toward the creation of democratic conditions. The _real_ thing, in the unfolding of the later South, is the arrival of the common man." The North has always had confidence in the average man; in the South the upper and lower strata are in a more hopeful way of mutual understanding than perhaps in the North.

CHAPTER VI

SOUTHERN TEMPERAMENT

The South has not only its own division of special cla.s.ses, its own methods of influence, it has also its own way of looking at the problems of the universe, and especially that department of the universe south of Mason and Dixon's line. To discover the temperament of the South is difficult, for upon the face of things the differences of the two sections are slight. Aside from little peculiarities of dialect, probably no more startling than Bostonese English is to the Southerner when he first hears it, the people whom one meets in Southern trains and hotels appear very like their Northern kinsfolk. The Memphis drummer in the smoker tells the same stories that you heard yesterday from his Chicago brother; the members of the Charleston Club talk about their ancestors just like the habitues of the Rittenhouse Club in Philadelphia; the President of the University of Virginia asks for money for the same reasons as the President of Western Reserve University; Northern and Southern men, meeting on mutual ground and avoiding the question of the Negro, which sometimes does not get into their conversation for half an hour together, find their habits of thought much the same: the usual legal reasoning, economic discussion, and religious controversy all appeal to the same kind of minds. Northerners read Lanier with the same understanding with which Southerners read Longfellow.

Nevertheless there is a subtle difference of temperament hard to catch and harder to characterize, which may perhaps be ill.u.s.trated by the difference between the Northern "Hurrah" and the "Rebel yell"; between "Yankee Doodle" and "Dixie," each stirring, each lively, yet each upon its separate key. Upon many questions, and particularly upon all issues involving the relations of the white and negro races, the Southerner takes things differently from the Northerner. He looks upon himself from an emotional standpoint. Thomas Dixon, Jr., characterizes his own section as "The South, old-fashioned, medieval, provincial, worshipping the dead, and raising men rather than making money, family-loving, home-building, tradition-ridden. The South, cruel and cunning when fighting a treacherous foe, with brief, volcanic bursts of wrath and vengeance. The South, eloquent, bombastic, romantic, chivalrous, l.u.s.tful, proud, kind and hospitable. The South, with her beautiful women and brave men."

This self-consciousness is doubtless in part a result of external conditions, such as the isolation of many parts of the South; but still more is due to an automatic sensitiveness to all phases of the race question. People in the South often speak of their "two peoples" and "two civilizations"; and at every turn, in every relation, a part of every discussion, is the fact that the population of the South is rigidly divided into two races marked off from each other by an impa.s.sable line of color. The North has race questions, but no race question: the foreign elements taken together are numerous enough, and their future is uncertain enough to cause anxiety; but they are as likely to act against each other as against the group of people of English stock; as likely to harmonize with native Anglo-Saxon people as to oppose them--they are not a combined race standing in a cohort, watchful, suspicious, and resentful. The North has twenty race problems; the South has but one, which for that very reason is twenty times as serious. In every field of Southern life, social, political, economic, intellectual, the presence of two races divides and weakens. The blacks and the Whites in the South are the two members of a pair of shears, so clumsily put together that they gnash against each other continually. Though one side be silver, and the other only bronze, neither can perform its function without the other, but there is a terrible strain upon the rivet which holds them together.

This state of tension is not due wholly to the Negroes, nor removable by improving them, as though the straightening only the bronze half of the shears you could make them cut truly. If no Negroes had ever come over from Africa, or if they were all to be expatriated to-morrow, there would still remain a Southern question of great import. One of the mistakes of the Abolition controversy was to suppose that the South was different from the North simply because it had slaves; and that the two sections would be wholly alike if only the white people felt differently toward the Negro.

The Negro does not make all the trouble, cause all the concern, or attract all the attention of thoughtful men in the South. In every part of that section, from the most remote cove in the Tennessee mountains to the stateliest quarter of New Orleans, there is a Caucasian question, or rather a series of Caucasian questions, arising out of the peculiar make-up of the white community, though alongside it is always the shadow of the African.

n.o.body can work out any of the Caucasian problems as though they stood by themselves; what now draws together most closely the elements of the white race is a sense of a race issue. The white man cannot build new schoolhouses or improve his cotton seed or open a coal mine without remembering that there is a negro race and a negro problem. This consciousness of a double existence strikes every visitor and confronts every investigator. As Du Bois says, the stranger "realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,--then they divide and flow wide apart." Henry W.

Grady a.s.serted that "The race problem casts the only shadow that rests on the South." Murphy says, "The problems of racial cleavage, like problems of labor and capital, or the problems of science and religion, yield to no precise formulae; they are problems of life, persistent and irreducible."

Various as are the opinions in the South with regard to the race problem and the modes of its solution, society is infused with a feeling of uneasiness and responsibility. Sometimes the visitor seems to catch a feeling of pervading gloom; sometimes he hears the furious and cruel words of those who would end the problem by putting the Negro out of the question; sometimes he listens to the hopeful voice of those who expect a peaceful and a just solution; but all thinking men in the South agree that their section has a special, a peculiar, a difficult and almost insoluble problem in which the North has little or no share.

Here comes in the first of many difficulties in dealing with the Southern question, a diversity of voices such that it is hard to know which speaks for the South, or where the average sentiment is to be found. Public opinion on some moral and social questions is less easily concentrated than in the North; though the prohibitionists have recently made a very successful campaign through a general league, all efforts to focus public opinion on the negro question through general societies and public meetings have so far failed.

Agitation or even discussion of the race problem is not much aided by the press, though in some ways journalism is on a higher plane than in the North. Most cities, even small ones, have a newspaper which is edited with real literary skill, and which does not seem to be the servant of any commercial interest. There is a type of Southern paper of which the _Charleston News and Courier_ is the best example, which has for its stock-in-trade, ultra and Bourbon sentiments. No paper in the South is more interesting than the _News and Courier_, but it represents an age that is past. The conservative, readable, and on the whole, high-toned Southern newspapers, do not in general seem to lead public sentiment, and the yellow journal has begun to compete with them. Still the paper which by its lurid statement of facts, large admixture of lies, and use of ferocious headlines, was one of the chief agents in bringing about the Atlanta riots of 1907 afterwards went into the hands of a receiver; and journals of that type have less influence than in the North.

A temperamental Southern characteristic is an impatience of dissent, a characteristic which has recently been summed up as follows by a foreigner who has lived twelve years in the South and is identified with it. "There are three phases of public sentiment that I must regard as weaknesses, ...

The public att.i.tude of Southern temper is over-sensitive and too easily resents criticism.... Then, I think the Southern people are too easily swayed by an apparent public sentiment, the broader and higher conscience of the people gives way too readily to a tin-pan clamor, the depth and real force of which they are not disposed to question.... Again, ... the South as a section, does not seem fully to appreciate the importance of the inevitables in civilization--the fixed and unalterable laws of progress." Ill.u.s.trations of this sensitiveness to criticism are abundant.

For instance, the affectionate girl in the Southern school when a Yankee teacher gives her a low mark, bursts into tears, and wants to know why the teacher does not love her.

From slavery days down, there has been a disposition to look upon Northern writers and visitors with suspicion. Still inquirers are in all parts of the South received with courtesy by those whose character and interest in the things that make for the uplift of both the white and the black race furnish the most convincing argument that there is an enlightened public sentiment which will work out the Southern problem. In any case there is no public objection to criticism of Southerners by other Southerners; nothing, for instance, could be more explicit and mutually unfavorable than the opinions exchanged between Hoke Smith and Clark Howells in 1907, when rival candidates for the governorship of Georgia. In politics one may say what he likes, subject to an occasional rebuke from the revolver's mouth.

It is not the same in the discussion of the race question. In half a dozen instances in the last few years, attempts have been made to drive out professors from Southern colleges and universities, on the ground that they were not sufficiently Southern. In one such case, that of Professor Ba.s.sett, at Trinity College, North Carolina, who said in print that Booker Washington was the greatest man except Lee, born in the South in a hundred years, it stood by him manfully, and his retention was felt to be a triumph for free speech. Other boards of trustees have rallied in like manner, and there is a fine spirit of fearless truth among professors of colleges, ministers, lawyers, and public men. It is no small triumph for the cause of fair play that John Sharp Williams, of Mississippi, in 1907 came out in opposition to Governor Vardaman's violent abuse of the Negro, on that issue triumphed over him in the canva.s.s for the United States Senate; and then in a public address committed himself to a friendly and hopeful policy toward the Negro.

In part, this frame of mind is due to a feeling neatly stated by a Southern banker: "The Southern people are not a bad kind, and a kind word goes a long way with them; they have odd peculiarities; they cannot argue, and as soon as you differ with them, you arouse temper, not on the Negro question especially, but on any." This diagnosis is confirmed by "Nicholas Worth": "Few men cared what opinion you held about any subject.... I could talk in private as I pleased with Colonel Stover himself about Jefferson Davis or about educating the negro. He was tolerant of all private opinions, privately expressed among men only. But the moment that an objectionable opinion was publicly expressed, or expressed to women or to negroes, that was another matter. Then it touched our sacred dead, our hearthstones, etc." This state of feeling has much affected politics in the South and is in part responsible for the phenomenon called the Solid South, under which, whatever be its causes, the South is deprived of influence either in nominating or supplying candidates for national office, because its vote may be relied upon in any case for one party and one only.

The dislike of the critic is specially strong when criticism comes from foreigners, and aggravated when it comes from Northerners. A recent Southern speaker says: "Now, as since the day the first flagship was legalized in its trade in Ma.s.sachusetts, ... the trouble in the race question is due to the persistent a.s.sertion on the part of northern friends and philanthropists that they understand the problem and can devise the means for its solution." That Northerners do not all lay claim to such understanding, or hold themselves responsible for race troubles, is admitted by a Southerner of much greater weight, Edgar Gardner Murphy, who has recently said: "Beneath the North's serious and rightful sense of obligation the South saw only an intolerant 'interference.' Beneath the South's natural suspicion and solicitude the North saw only an indiscriminating enmity to herself and to the negro."

To these characteristics another is added by "Nicholas Worth," in his discussion of the "oratorical habit of mind" of a generation ago--"Rousing speech was more to be desired than accuracy of statement. An exaggerated manner and a tendency to sweeping generalizations were the results. You can now trace this quality in the mind and in the speech of the great majority of Southern men, especially men in public life. We call it the undue development of their emotional nature. It is also the result of a lack of any exact training,--of a system that was mediaeval." Another form of this habit of mind is the love of round numbers, a fondness for stating a thing in the largest terms; thus the clever but no-wise distinguished professor of Latin is "Probably the greatest cla.s.sical scholar in the United States," the siege of Vicksburg was "the most terrific contest in the annals of warfare"; the material progress of the South is "the most marvelous thing in human history."

This difference of temperament between North and South is not confined to members of the white race. The mental processes of the Southern Negro differ not only from those of the Southern White, but to a considerable degree from those of the Northern Negro; and the African temperament has, in the course of centuries, in some ways reacted upon the minds of the a.s.sociated white race. The real standards and aspirations of the Negroes are crudely defined and little known outside themselves, and if they were better understood they would still have scant influence upon the white point of view. The "Southern temperament," therefore means the temperament of the Southern Whites, of the people who control society, forum, and legislature. It is always more important to know what people think than what they do, and every phase of the race question in the South is affected by the habits of thought of thinking white people.

Both sections need to understand each other; and that good result is impeded by the belief of a large number of people in the South that the North as a section feels a personal hostility to the South; that in Reconstruction it sought to humiliate the Southern Whites, and to despoil them of their property; that it planted schools in the South with the express purpose of bringing about a social equality hateful to the Whites; that it arouses in the Negro a frame of mind which leads to the most hideous of crimes; and that Northern observers and critics of the South are little better than spies.

The North is doubtless blamable for some past ill feeling and some ill judgment, but it cannot be charged now with prejudice against the South.

It is not too much to say that the North as a section is weary of the negro question; that it is disappointed in the progress of the race both in the South and in the North; that it is overwhelmed with a variety of other questions, and less inclined than at any time during forty years to any active interference in Southern relations. An annual floodtide carries many Northern people into Florida and other pleasure resorts, where they see the surface of the negro question and accept without verification the conventional statements that they hear; the same tide on its ebb brings them North with a tone of discouragement and irritation toward the Negro, which much affects Northern public sentiment.

This apathy or disappointment is unfortunate, for from many points of view, the North has both an interest and a responsibility for what goes on in the South. First of all, from its considerable part in bringing about present conditions. Besides an original share in drawing slavery upon the colonies, the North by the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves disturbed the preexisting balance of race relations, such as it was. Then in Reconstruction the North attempted to bring about a new political system with the honest expectation that it would solve the race question. Surely it has a right to examine the results of its action, with a view either to justify its att.i.tude, or to accept censure for it.

If either through want of patience or skill or by sheer force of adverse circ.u.mstance a dangerous condition has come about in the South for which the dominant white Southerners are not responsible, they are ent.i.tled to an understanding of their case and to sympathy, encouragement and aid in overcoming their troubles. No thinking person in the North desires anything but the peaceful removal of the evils which undeniably weigh upon the South. To that end the North might offer something out of its own experience, for it has expert knowledge of race troubles and of ways to solve them. The Indian question ever since the Civil War has been chiefly in the hands of Northern men; and if it has been a botchy piece of work, at least a way out has been found in the present land-in-severalty plan; and from the North in considerable part has proceeded the government of the Filipinos. The North carries almost alone a ma.s.s of foreigners who contribute difficulties which in diversity much exceed the negro problem, and which so far have been so handled that in few places is there a crisis, acute or threatening. The North has further its own experiences with Negroes, beginning in Colonial times; it now harbors a million of them; and it has in most places found a peaceful living basis for the two races, side by side.

Perhaps Southern people do not make sufficient allowance for the scientific love of inquiry of the North. It is a region where Va.s.sar students of sociology visit the probation courts; where Yale men descend upon New York and investigate Tammany Hall; where race relations are thought a fit subject for intercollegiate debate and scientific monographs, on the same footing with the distribution of immigrants, or the career of discharged convicts. In Ma.s.sachusetts, people are ready to attack any insoluble problem, from the proper authority of the Russian Douma to the reason why cooks give notice without previous notice. As a study of human nature, as an exercise in practical sociology, the Southern race problem has for the North much the same fascination as the preceding slavery question.

Doubtless the zeal for investigation, and the disposition to give unasked advice, would both be lessened if the Southern problem were already solved or on the road to solution by the people nearest to it. The Southern Whites have had control of every Southern state government since 1876 and some of them longer; they are dominant in legislature, court and plantation; yet they have not yet succeeded in putting an end to their own perplexities. Some of them still defiantly a.s.sert themselves against mankind; thus Professor Smith, of New Orleans, says apropos of the controversy over race relations: "The att.i.tude of the South presents an element of the pathetic. The great world is apparently hopelessly against her. Three-fourths of the virtue, culture, and intelligence of the United States seems to view her with pitying scorn; the old mother, England, has no word of sympathy, but applauds the conduct that her daughter reprehends; the continent of Europe looks on with amused perplexity, as unable even to comprehend her position, so childish and absurd." Professor Smith's answer to his own question is: "The South cares nothing, in themselves, for the personal friendships or appreciations of high-placed dignitaries and men of light and leading." He does not speak for his section; for most intelligent Southern people, however extreme their views, desire to be understood; they want their position to seem humane and logical to their neighbors; they are sure that they are the only people who can be on the right road; but they do not feel that they are approaching a permanent adjustment of race relations.

How could such an adjustment be expected now? The negro question has existed ever since the first landing of negro slaves in 1619, became serious in some colonies before 1700, gave rise to many difficulties and complications during the Revolution, was reflected in the Const.i.tutional Convention of 1787, later proved to be the rock of offense upon which the Union split, and has during the forty years since the Civil War been the most absorbing subject of discussion in the South. It hardly seems likely that it will be put to rest in our day and generation.

Yet some settlement is necessary for the peace and the prosperity of both races; and one of the means to that end is a frank, free and open discussion in all parts of the Union. Nothing was so prejudicial to slavery as the attempt to silence the Northern abolitionists; for a social system that was too fragile to be discussed was doomed to be broken. One of the most encouraging things at present is the willingness of the South to discuss its problems on its own ground, and to admit that there can be a variety of opinions; and to meet rather than to defy the criticisms of observers.

If the thinking people of the South were less willing to share the discussion with the North, it would still be a Northern concern; for the Southern race problem, like the labor unions of the manufacturing North, the distribution of lands in the far West, and the treatment of Mongolians on the Pacific Coast, is n.o.body's exclusive property. There must be freedom for the men of every section to discuss every such question; it is the opportunity for mutual helpfulness. For instance, how much might be contributed to an understanding of the decay of the New England hill towns by a Southern visitor who should visit them and then report upon them from his point of view. Violent, ignorant, and prejudiced discussion of any section of the Union by any other section is, of course, destructive of national harmony; but the days have gone by when it could be thought unfriendly, hostile, or condemnatory for Northern men to strive to make themselves familiar with the race questions of the South. "We are everyone members of another," and the whole body politic suffers from the disease of any member. The immigrant in the North is the concern of the Southerner for he is to become part of America. The status of the plantation hand in Alabama is likewise a Northern problem; as Murphy has recently said: "The Nation, including the South as well as the North, and the West as well as the South and the North, has to do with every issue in the South that touches any national right of the humblest of its citizens. Too long it has been a.s.sumed, both at the North and at the South, that the North is the Nation. The North is not the Nation. The Nation is the life, the thought, the conscience, the authority, of all the land."

CHAPTER VII

ATt.i.tUDE TOWARD HISTORY

The history of the United States is a rope of many strands, each of which was twisted into form before they were united into one cable. Each state marks the sites of its first landings, puts monuments on its battlefields, commemorates its liberty days, and teaches its children to remember the great years of the past. The South has a full share of these memories, which are both local events and foundation stones of the nation's history.

Jamestown, St. Mary's, Charleston, Fort Moultrie, Yorktown, Mobile, belong to us all, as much as Providence, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and San Francisco.